One day, when I was fourteen and Rosita was fifteen, a girl named Isla had called her Ajo, and Rosita just lost it, beating the ever-loving crap out of her right in front of everybody at the square. Nobody called her Ajo after that.
Now, a little more than ten years later, with her grandparents gone and her cousins and ailing great-aunt here in Burnt Ends, she worked her small ranch all by herself. She’d sold most of the land on either side of her property to her neighbors. She spent her days working a pair of multilevel greenhouses, cultivating spices and a few other crops, including carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes. Most everything she grew was used to feed the local population, but her spices were well-known across the planet.
Her grandmother had perfected a type of gigantic garlic bulb thatIthought way overpowered any dish it was in. But chefs all over the world loved it, paying a premium for a single cannon-ball-sized bulb. When the Earth delegation had first come after the gate opened, the ambassador’s husband had specifically asked about the garlic and was gifted a bulb to take home.
Rosita shipped a truckload of the bulbs along with a few barrelsof dried flakes to Fat Landing just once a year, and she earned more than enough money to survive, even with the outrageous transport and brokerage fees.
And she did it all on her own. She refused my help other than a single drone now and then to help pick her tomatoes.
And then there was her desire to make movies, documentaries. She’d been filming for as long as I could remember. No matter how busy she was, she always seemed to have time to dedicate to that. She never uploaded anything, despite all of us encouraging her to do so. She never felt anything was ever “ready.” But she still spent all this time working on her movies. I had no idea how she did it.
Sometimes, I’d look at her and marvel at how smart she was, how determined. And I’d wonder what she was doing with me. I’d worry that it was because she didn’t have any other options.
I rubbed my hand against the spray-painted words on the crate. Dust swirled.
“Hey, listen,” I began. “About last night—”
She interrupted me. “My grandmother used to think it was the nutrient milk powder that had come with them from Earth, not the planet’s electromagnetic field, that caused the Sickness—the stuff that was set aside specifically for those born after planetfall. She’d say it all the time. A lot of people thought that at first. I think some of them never stopped thinking it.”
I turned my attention back to the crate. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said after thinking on it for a moment. Grandpa Lewis had never said anything like that, and he’d had a healthy distaste for all things Earth. “I thought that was just a rumor, that the supplies for the babies born on planet were different than those for the babies born on the ship. They did tests.”
“The ones for planetfall were in a different packaging than the baby supplies on the generation ships, and that was enough to make my grandmother and a lot of others suspicious.”
“Guys,” Axel said, interrupting, “check it out.”
He’d moved to a large metal door I hadn’t noticed in the back of the room. The door had a dull red light over the handle.
“One moment,” Roger said through Trixie 2. “The door is magnetically locked, and I am opening it now.”
The light turned green. Axel pulled it open, and the door opened with a whoosh of air. A light flickered on in the room, and the six of us moved to peer inside.
“Wow,” Sam said. “That’s a lot of guns.”
“Are those grenades?” Axel asked. Tito was now beside him, pointing at what looked like a rocket launcher.
“Bring everything,” Roger said. “Make certain you collect the charging stations.”
The room contained about three or four dozen long, sleek black rifles sitting in charging bays. The guns appeared to be dry-sealed in plastic, not unlike the turkey and mashed potato never-expire food rations we opened every Christmas.
But there were other types of guns, too, ranging from pistols to what looked like shoulder-mounted missile launchers.
The flurry of activity in the room stopped all at once. All the drones paused. The lights in the warehouse dimmed.
“Roger, what’s…” I started to say. The sound of a distant explosion echoed.
“Everyone open the crate labeled ‘Body Armor,’ don the chest armor and helmets, grab a pulse rifle and two grenades each, and proceed to the elevator,” came Roger’s voice over our earpieces. “Fleur-de-lys, also known as drone number 143, has been destroyed. All four of the remaining mechs have activated, and they appear to be aware of our presence. They are currently coming in this direction. We must protect the transports. Please make haste.”
Chapter 12
The same rhino bot that had greeted us on the elevator rode with us into the top part of the warehouse. Drones had removed the original Conquistador gun and replaced it with a smaller gun similar in size to the ones we now carried.
“It’s a lot lighter than I thought it would be,” Sam said, his voice clearly nervous as we rushed to the wall of the warehouse, looking out toward the hill that still contained the smoking remains of the mayor’s manor. “The body armor and the gun. It feels fake.”
We saw no sign yet of the enemy mechs and skittered forward to the waist-high concrete barrier designed to force the grain trucks into a single file before they turned into the warehouse. Axel and Tito closed the large barn doors behind us. We’d leave them open only a crack. We didn’t want the bad guys to see the transports inside the warehouse and target them. The drones were still loading the trucks as quickly as they could.
All six of us now wore the protective vests, but Lulu refused to wear the helmet. The bulky helmets were made of some impact-resistant polymer. Sam was right. All this stuff was so light, they felt like toys. Despite this, the helmets had all been much too big for mysister’s tiny head, and we hadn’t had time to mess around with the strap.
We all looked ridiculous, like we were wearing costumes. We were playing pretend, like Lulu’s Farm Girl Gigi persona.
