There was a lot of bizarre slang I still couldn’t figure out, even though I regularly watched a lot of Earth media. The music was different, too, and I was pretty sure I’d never understand that. But even though the slang wasa lotdifferent, we still understood one another. English and Mandarin were the dominant languages on Earth. Spanish had faded, but it was still spoken. It was just English here on the peninsula, though I knew some of the more remote communities were only Spanish speaking. I could speak a few Spanish phrases here and there. Grandpa Lewis had turned off Roger’s Spanish lessons after Grandmother Yolanda died. He said it hurt his heart too much to hear it.
Last year, when the actual transfer gate had opened, it was supposed to have been this big, momentous thing. But other than a shortvisit from a Republic ambassador, not much else had happened since the gate opened. Transfer wasn’t yet open to civilians and settlers, and it wouldn’t be until the quarantine was over in eight more years. No food or trade goods or luxury items from distant planets had made their way to us through the instant transfer gate.
For us on New Sonora, it had been a huge deal. But for those on Earth, it was just another day. They were reconnecting with distant colonies every week, and they had been for years now. They’d developed faster gate-building technology and space drives in the interim, and new colonies were building their gates in ten years or less. Many of the reconnected colonies were newer and farther out, making New Sonora uninteresting to Earth’s population, except as a convenient target for their casual xenophobia.
Voom!I jumped as the cannon on the right side of the mech fired, and a hill a half kilometer to my left exploded in a geyser of dirt and rock and trees. The ground underneath me rocked.
I just stared at the destruction in shock. It was so sudden, so violent.
The kid was still screeching. I was pretty sure he hadn’t fired at anything in particular.
I was trying to figure out what was going on, why he was here. Were they using the hills to test some sort of new technology? It didn’t make sense. There was a quarantine. Nothing in or out except on government business. I remembered what the kid had said.You told me I was going to the city. Why would they send an armed mech to the city? And more important, why would they send one piloted by a child?
A sudden terrible thought occurred to me.
You’re so naïve,Rosita had said to me last night. Everyone had been talking about it.
It’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense,I’d said.Why is everyone always so worried about this stuff?And then I’d waved the camera bug away from her bracelet, accidentally smacking it to the ground, which had made herreallymad.
Earth wants to evict us,she’d said as she collected the camera, making sure it wasn’t broken. They just want us on record being defiant.
Why?I’d asked. We haven’t done anything to them. The planet is huge and barely settled. There’s enough room for everybody. We’re not stopping them from coming and starting their own farms.
I never paid too much attention to news outside of the peninsula, unlike Rosita and most of the village, who’d found themselves glued to the intercolonial feeds the moment they had opened up. It didn’t mean I was naïve about everything. At least I hadn’t thought so. My friends were always talking about this or that, about things so far away that they had no impact on us at all.
Even politics local to our own planet seemed so stupid, so unimportant. The prime minister lived in Fat Landing, a city none of us had ever or would ever see. He was always making proclamations, giving us orders, telling us what we could and couldn’t do. Nobody ever paid attention. There were never consequences. We were literally on the other side of the planet from them, with a large ocean between us if we went one way and a mountain range and desert if we went the other. There was no reliable transportation between the major settlements. We had the unmanned grain train, but that ran only twice a year.
A few months back, we’d received word that everyone had to submit a DNA sample for some genealogy mapping program for the Earth government. Nobody had done it. They hadn’t given us a means to submit the samples, for one thing. And second, according to the original charter, we didn’t have to follow the orders of the Earth government anymore anyway. We were an independent system. The settlers gave up their lives and traveled to a new planet, and their children—or their grandchildren—would inherit the planet. No taxes. No controlling interest. We’d be completely independent. They could take the generation ships back once we opened up the gate, but that was it. That was the deal, something my grandfather had been very proud of.
Then last month, it’d been decreed that anyone under the age of twenty-eight had to travel to Fat Landing to be counted and submit to a health screening. The order had come out of nowhere. It was mandatory. If one didn’t comply, they’d be jailed. The order hadn’t even been signed, so it was unclear if it’d come from the New Sonoran or the Earth government.
Again, they hadn’t given us any direction onhowto comply. It was a joke. We had maybe three or four air transports in the whole area, and each could handle maybe ten passengers. The population of the Baja peninsula, including the villages and the hub town of Burnt Ends, was close to fifty thousand people. Plus, harvest season was about to start. It was just ridiculous.
“Wait, what’s that?” the kid asked, the robot turning. “I see you, fucker!”
The gun fired again, this time into the air. I caught sight of Roger zipping past, buzzing by the creature before disappearing in the opposite direction.
My heart thrashed.No, no, no.
“I’m gonna get you! I’m gonna fuck your mom!” the mech screeched.
Roger beeped a response I couldn’t hear as he continued to zip around the robot’s head.What the hell is he doing?
“That’s not what she said last night!” the mech squealed. “Ahhh!”
The robot fell over on its side as the already broken leg snapped off in a hiss of steam and fluid. It crashed to the ground and then started to noisily tumble forward down the hill. At the same moment, the final rocket in the bot’s missile tube launched, corkscrewing into the air. It did a wide, hissing circle in the mist and then suddenly veered toward me and my hiding place.
Oh, shit!
I scrambled as it flew in my direction. I jumped to my feet and dove off the top of the hill, rolling forward and tumbling just as the missile overshot me and slammed into the ground right where I’dbeen hiding. An explosion echoed as loud as a lightning strike, showering me with dirt, rocks, and foliage as I rolled down the hill. My head smacked something hard as I came to a rest at the bottom of the hill, dirt still raining onto me. My ears rang. The world spun. I splotched heavily into mud.
I need to get up. I need to run.
My body wasn’t complying.
The mech and I had fallen off our respective hills, both in the same direction. It couldn’t have been far away. The machine itself wasn’t as loud as before, but I could still hear the kid, and he was wailing. Maybe fifty meters away now, though I couldn’t see the mech from my position. The ground between the hills was muddy and full of reeds.
I sat up, peeling myself from the ground. I tasted blood. I touched the side of my head, and it came back red. I’d cut my scalp in the fall.
