Chapter 1:
Margie stood in a greenery house, her hands lightly touching the silky stalks and leaves of some plant she had never seen before but which those who knew plants swore would be a great food source for humans.
Her eyes went around the large and echoing space surrounding her. Things grew everywhere. In pots hanging from ceilings and walls. In neat little rows inside the boxes filled with rich soil. In standing pots. Bushes shrubs, flowering things—all of it green and growing and beautiful in its own way.
From a nearby spot, she heard a woman say, “It’s pretty horrid. I mean, it is so primitive. I am half-tempted to demand to be returned to Old Earth. After all, The Federation will have to fix it right? The people who’re here from below have quite forgotten their place and I know it’s just as bad back home, but this…I just don’t know how much of this I can stand.”
Contempt rolled through Margie. In the last months since Talon, Jessica, Marik, and Jenny had returned to Revant Two with ships filled with Old Earth refugees, tensions between those from Above who longed for a return to the old system and those who had never known it or who had, and refused to be a part of such an oppressive situation ever again, had been really high.
The refugees had all fled the war and terrible conditions there that had come not just from the rebellion by the ones who lived Below against those who lived Above, but from the Gorlites invasion—and that invasion had been aided by The Federation in some part—but not all of them were happy with their decision to flee.
Revant Two was an isolated planet in a system made up of exactly two planets and a few stars. It was in the far reaches of the known universe, and the sister planet was occupied by the Revants who’d also lost their home in the Warp Wars between The Federation and any system that had a wormhole that The Federation wanted to use for a trade route. These wormholes collapsed and destroyed planets and systems in the subsequent implosion.
The other planet was held by a religious order that didn’t want refugees because their bloodline was still pure Revant, and they were vicious in their dislike of the other species currently populating Revant Two, which meant that it was the planet they were on or nowhere for those who were dissatisfied with where they had ended up. Another voice, that one male, put in, “Back home, I was an official. I had a vast house and servants from Below. I was allowed special privileges, and I had full use of the parks and green spaces and I could go to them knowing I would only meet people there who were my peers. Now the ones we use are all overrun by those who think us their peers, and they should know they are not our peers at all! You would think the people that run this place would cede to Federation rule and allow us to have some sort of structure.”
You asshole, Margie thought. Her body went taut. What the hell did these people know about the real issues that faced those who lived Below on Old Earth?
The woman who’d spoken first said, “My husband was an official as well. His place deserves more than what I have been given as his widow. I have been given a hut! A hut!”
Margie’s temper snapped. She walked out of the row she stood in and faced down the two. The woman had a pinched haughty face, and the man she had been speaking to was tall and thin, his face bearing obvious cosmetic marks that had been meant to make him look younger, and had—back on Old Earth where there were surgeries that could still keep up his youthful appearance.
Her voice was thin with her rage. “You want to go back to Old Earth? I’ll tell the leaders. Give me your names. You can go back there and starve to death, or die from a laser blast. Or be killed by the ones from Below who were left behind while you ran onto a ship to escape the rovers and the bandits and the thugs and the climate changes that are killing so many. I am sure that when you return, the families of those who stayed behind and died so you could go, will be happy to hear you have returned.”
Her jaw was taut with rage. Her whole body shook with it. She hated the ones from Above as a matter of course having been raised Below, but she had found that many of the ones who had fled to the safety of this planet were actually relieved that the old system didn’t exist anymore.
These two ungrateful assholes were not ones who were.
The woman sneered, “Mind your own business.”
“You don’t have the power to order me.” Margie’s words cut through the air. A small crowd began to gather. Muttering started. Those who sided with the two Abovers, who were unhappy, sidled toward them. More of them ranged out behind Margie.
Tension simmered in the air. The things that stood between the two camps had always been a source of tension but the fact that the ones who were from Above and couldn’t stop mourning the loss of the cushy life they had had once lived at the expense of those from Below had tightened that tension to a boiling point.
“Stop now.”
Margie’s shoulders went so tense her neck ached as Jeval strode into the row, his handsome face alight with irritation.
Margie said, “I was just—”
“I know.” His voice, low and deadly, snaked toward her. “Be quiet. You two. You aren’t happy here? We haven’t given you reason to stay? Fine. Come with me. Now.”
The two stiffened. The woman spoke, her words tumbling over each other in her haste to get them out. “I was just saying that here we do not have the things we are entitled to.”
Jeval said, “Then let’s fix that.”
The tension in the room went dark, simmered, and shifted toward violence. Margie felt that shift, and she knew that Jeval must have as well, but his face gave nothing away. He simply said, “Now. Move.”
They all moved. Those who had been watching followed as the two complainers followed Jeval out of the building. Margie brought up the rear.
They stepped out into a blaze of sunlight and sweet air. As always, those things lifted her mood. Before, on Old Earth, she would never have been privy to those things.
Those things were reserved for those who lived Above.
Her mood soured yet again. Jeval stopped at the edge of a field and said, “You two, stand here.”
They gave each other looks.
Margie saw Marik, Renall, and Talon—Jeval’s siblings, co-owners and leaders of the planet—approaching.
