Free Future Winds by Kevin Laymon Page B

a rag doll, until ultimately reaching his bloody sibling so that he might carry him the rest of the way to safety.
    Ness stayed up all night because he couldn’t help but indulge in the mass conjectured chatter. Even the guards assigned to their block had no answers, no insight, nothing but looks of concern about their own faces as they talked amongst themselves.
    Lucas, doped up on high grade painkillers, slept soundly despite his broken face. A puffy purple eye, a broken nose, two missing teeth, and fourteen stitches across the back of his skull were the injuries he had accumulated. A doctor had to shave his head in order to stitch him up adequately.  
    Ness felt incredibly bad for his brother but Lucas, through it all, was strangely positive. He had joked earlier that he had never had pain killers before and he wasn’t sure if he was drooling all down his own face or not. Clearly Lucas had not actually witnessed the massacre with his own eyes, something Ness was truly grateful for.
     
    ***
     
    Tyler sat on the austral ledge of the canyon. The area was lit up by the large moon to the west in the welkin. It cast an eerie color to the fires that fell from the sky to the south. The moon vastly trumped earth’s own. It was so big, bright and visible, Tyler almost felt as though he could reach out and touch it. Aires perched by his side like an obedient dog, looked with him up to the clear night sky.
    That evening the crew were instructed to keep watch and guard the warp gate, whose magnetic field of defense would be useless if the creatures attacked again from the ground.
    For the first time since their arrival, the sky was mostly clear. There were no dust storms, no lightning, and no fire. All the chaos was far off to the south west. Above was simply a calm galaxy of stars with very few clouds to obscure the view. The night sky revealed the most amazing view of space Tyler had ever seen. He could see large clusters of stars, trails of space gasses, some purple, some green, and dark collections of matter only a few light years away.
    Two hellcats, small single manned aircrafts, screeched through the sky as they left New Horizon--most likely on a recon mission. Tyler couldn’t help but think he had climbed the wrong ranks within the military.
    “Guess I should have been a pilot, huh Aries?” he said out loud to the bot.
    “You would have never gotten in with your less than perfect eyesight,” she logically fired back.
    She was heartlessly correct, but nonetheless he wanted to be one of the first to lead humanity into a better future. He wanted to explore distant lands and discover the marvelous wonders this planet potentially harbored. He wanted to be the leader he always thought he was born to be. But he was none of these. He was just some midnight security guard standing watch over a hunk of expensive tech.
    He felt directly responsible for the lives lost that night. It was his ignorance that murdered hundreds of people --massacred in a single afternoon. The team should have scouted the planet better before warping in a carrier with innocent lives aboard.
    Leon appeared behind him. He was wrapping his burnt hands in a fresh set of gauze as he approached back from a meeting aboard New Horizon.
    “So, how is Aisha?” Tyler questioned.
    “She will be alright. They stabilized her then put her under. They are going to open that wound up and fit her with some advanced prosthetics.”
    “Girl could have dropped every last one of them if her cloak didn’t drop,” Tyler pointed out.
    “I know. Only piece of stealth tech we had and it’s gone until more carriers arrive with whatever they have. But maybe those crazy tech guys can salvage something from the portion of Pisces you found,” Leon suggested.
    “What do you think happened to Abram?” Tyler continued.
    Leon looked off into the distance with a pause, “I don’t know. If they were going to kill him they would have done it before dragging him off kicking and