Free Alien Worlds by Roxanne Smolen Page B

head and splashed his face. “That’s better.”
    Impani cupped her hands beneath the persistent trickle then scrubbed the remaining salt from her eyes and nose. She removed her flask from her belt, drank it down, filled it from the basin, and drank again. It tasted vaguely sweet. Her empty stomach swelled. Refilling her flask, she sat beside Trace.
    “Real Scouts carry a canteen that replenishes itself from humidity,” she said. “Add that to our list of complaints.”
    “Yeah.” He motioned at her wrist lamp. “You should save the batteries.”
    “Right.” She switched it off. In the darkness, the gushing geyser looked bright. “Why do you know so much about nonpoisonous melons and carnivorous vines?”
    He gulped some water then pulled his mask in place. “I grew up on Andromeda Four.”
    “You’re a farmer?” But farmers were rich.
    “My father’s a farmer. I… left.”
    “How did you end up in a penal colony?”
    He leaned away and stared.
    Impani shrugged. “Everyone knows.”
    Silence fell between them, and she thought she’d pushed too far. She leaned against the wall and latched her mask.
    He gave a heavy sigh. “I wanted to travel, so I took a job as an off-loader on a freighter. Boring work, but I hoped to see a lot of worlds. That’s what the poster promised, anyway. So on my first night in port, my friends and I were sightseeing. I headed back early. I stumbled across a man assaulting a woman in an alley, and I jumped in to save her. It turned out that the woman was an underage girl and her assailant was a prominent government official. The local authorities needed to hush it up, so they twisted the facts and made it look like I was a vagrant trying to rob him.”
    “But the girl was a witness.”
    “She refused to testify. Scared, I guess, or maybe they bought her off. So, I was sentenced to hard labor. Then they found out that I’d lied about my age on my application with the freighter. I was sixteen at the time.”
    Impani stared at Trace Hanson. She couldn’t have been more wrong about him. “So, the judicial system cut a deal with the colonization program?”
    “They couldn’t leave me in the mines. I was too young. Even so, my father had to call in some favors.” He shook his head. “What about you? Where are you from?”
    “Nowhere near a farm.” She laughed a little too loudly. “I never even saw a tree until the program.”
    “City girl, eh?”
    “Something like that.” She looked at her hands. A farmer’s son. They weren’t alike at all. What would he think if he knew she grew up on the streets—homeless and uneducated? A fiery blush crossed her cheeks.
    At least, I was never in a penal colony.
    But she had done far worse than rescue a girl in an alley.
    “I wonder where we’ll jump next,” he murmured.
    “It isn’t where that’s important but why. We have to figure out what caused the malfunction. How well do you understand Impellics?”
    “Well enough, I guess. But they didn’t cover malfunctions in class.”
    “I have a theory. We know that a drop consists of a sequence of rings. I think the final ring in our session fractured and is wobbling, trying to break free. The instability pulled the other rings out of sync.”
    “No, it can’t be the final ring or it wouldn’t keep latching onto us.” He massaged his neck. “It must be a middle ring. The last ring picks us up, trying to send us home, but we hit the fractured ring and the wobble spits us out somewhere else.”
    “That makes sense. So, how do we bypass the middle ring?”
    “We don’t.” He glared as if he doubted her sanity.
    “So we just give up?”
    He stretched out on the cave floor, hands behind his head. “Wake me at daybreak.”
    She drew in her knees and hugged her chest. There had to be a way to stabilize the ring. She watched the flowing geyser and let her mind drift, willing it to land on inspiration. The steamy curtain brightened. She crawled to the cave mouth and gazed