Scout Shannon sat forward in the driver's seat as the ancient rover rolled over the crest of the last hill and the town of Prairie Springs came into view. If she had been on her bike she would have stopped just here for a rest and a quick sip of water, perhaps pushing back the brim of her battered bush hat to peer down at the squat buildings just visible beyond the sunlight reflecting off the metal panels of the ring of the town's low wall. It all looked so small, surrounded in a sea of reddish gold prairie grasses.
After the last four days, she had half expected to emerge to find the whole world changed. Such a humble sight, a little town all but lost in the rolling hills of tall grass, but it nearly brought a tear to her eye. Apparently she had come out of the recent coronal mass ejection event with a newfound love of town life.
Scout herself didn't really belong to any particular place. She had been born under the dome of a city, but that city was gone now. There was nothing there but a crater the prairie grass had not yet reclaimed. She had been just a kid at the time but she still remembered the gleaming whiteness of it, the prefabricated buildings dropped from space and assembled on the surface. Like a child's building blocks they had only come in a few basic shapes but could be combined in infinite varieties. Cities had wide boulevards with fountains and monuments, long straight roads lined with businesses grouped into districts, and endless twisting alleyways full of surprises both wonderful and otherwise.
But Scout hadn't spent much time in cities lately. Her messenger and delivery work kept her busy in the more remote, less civilized parts of her planet. Towns weren't just like cities only smaller. Everything about them was different, starting with being open to the world around them. Cities were under domes and behind a small number of highly controlled gates. Towns, on the other hand, usually had a wall like Prairie Springs had to separate farm land from town land and to keep the wind from filling the town with clouds of dust and wheat chaff, but rather than a gate there was a gateway, nothing more than an opening in the wall with no door and no guard.
The navigation panel beeped to alert her they were approaching the destination she had selected. She silenced it with a tap of a finger. She could get used to traveling by rover, where the long grind up a hill was no more effort than the trip back down the other side.
She did miss the wind in her hair, though.
She ran a comforting hand over her rat terrier Shadow's back as he fussed in his sleep. Poor dog. The other dog laying at her feet lifted her head to touch her nose to Shadow's then returned to her own nap.
Scout had named her Gertrude, although she usually just called her "Gert". The dog had been just "Girl" for so long the full name just confused her. Scout was pretty sure the dog's namesake wouldn't mind sharing her name with a dog, especially not one so recently heroic as this one.
Shadow gave another little moan and she put her hand on his little head until he quieted. He had been through hell during the solar storm. But then, so had she. And she knew she was not completely recovered physically from everything she'd gone through over the last few days. The bright light stabbed past her eyes, birthing splitting headaches if she didn't look away often enough, and she got tired far sooner than usual. A few more days of rest would sort her aches and pains, she was sure.
Her mind, plagued by nightmares, that was going to take longer. She had been trapped underground with a group of strangers who had been murdered, one after the other, some by each other but others by a trio of assassins not even in their teens yet. Scout had escaped, with her dogs and the station owner's cat, but just barely. And she still didn't understand what had happened, or how she had managed to hold on to her life when the others had fallen.
It might have been luck, but it hadn't been fate. Scout knew that for a certainty. There was no fate. She had no destiny. But she did have choices.
She touched the belt that hugged her waist, covered in devices and yet it didn't weigh her down. She had nearly made a friend in that hellhole, nearly had found a mentor willing to take her away from this tiny world and show her an entire galaxy. Gertrude Bauer, a galactic marshal on a personal mission, it was a complete coincidence that her path had even crossed Scout's.
But it had, then she died, and now Scout carried her equipment. Most of it she didn't know how to use. All of it she was sure she was going to have to surrender in three days when Gertrude's partner Liam McGillicudy came to pick her up. In the meantime, Scout had one last thing to do before she left the only home she had ever known.
She was going to find the man who had ripped off Gertrude's grandmother, had taken her life savings and disappeared with it on this, the most remote of all planets from a galactic point of view. She had three days and all of Gertrude's equipment to do it with. That, plus her natural knack to get things done.
The gate into the town was too narrow for the rover so she pulled off the road to park. Gert sleeping at her feet made it difficult to work the pedals, but she managed a respectably neat stop before killing the engine. The sudden loss of the engine's hum was almost deafening and woke both the dogs.
Shadow yawned with a squeak then hopped off her lap to stretch himself out. He had gotten a bit thinner over the last few days, but the muscles under his white fur were as tight as ever. He looked up at her, his dark eyes all but lost in the bandit mask pattern of the black spot covering his head. Then he ran down the stairs to the back of the rover. Gert - a pit bull nearly twice his size - followed, the white tip at the very end of her tail a blur, the entire back half of her sleek black body wiggling back and forth as it powered that thumping wag.
"You guys are going to stay here," she said to the dogs, who both started jumping excitedly the moment she put on her old bush hat. Shadow sat down, his posture straight and formal. He knew what she meant. Gert just kept wagging her tail. It thumped painfully loudly against the leg of the kitchen table, but she didn't seem to mind. She looked up at Scout as if she really wished she knew what Scout meant.
Scout sighed. She needed to make training this dog a priority. "Sit, Gert," she said. Shadow stiffened his posture, but Gert missed the hint. "Never mind," Scout said. "I'll just be a minute." She went over to the stack of beds built into the back of the rover and leaned into the bottom bunk.
"Hello, Tubbins," Scout said. The cat gave a soft mew. Scout gathered him up, pillow and all, and put him gently inside an empty plastic crate. She tapped the opening mechanism on the door with her elbow, keeping Gert back with her knee as the dog tried to get a better look at the cat in the crate in her arms. The cat hissed his displeasure. The two were most decidedly not friends.
"Down, Gert," Scout said. As soon as the door was open wide enough she stepped out, dropping to the ground nearly a meter below. She turned back to the rover. "Stay, dogs," she commanded, then jabbed the mechanism to shut the door. Shadow remained as he was at stiff attention, but Gert stood at the edge of the rover with her head out the door until the closing metal hatch finally forced her to step back.
Her eyes on Scout's were full of abandoned hurt, then the hatch clicked shut.
Crate in arms, Scout walked through the gate into the town proper. Prairie Springs had grown since she had been here last, new homes built from prefabricated panels crowding into the spaces between the older homes built from repurposed storage containers. The Space Farer logo that had once adorned the containers had mostly been scrubbed away, but a few faded stylized rockets remained.
If things kept going like they had been, there would be a renewed zest for removing those soon. Scout hoped to be gone long before that point. She had seen enough Planet Dweller versus Space Farer conflict in the last four days to last her a lifetime.
When she reached the public house in the center of town she saw the massive doors angled into the ground on both sides of the base of the building had been thrown open wide to let air pass through. Scout could imagine after all of the townspeople had huddled together down there, waiting out the solar storm, it needed a good airing out.
A group of children were streaming in and out of the open doors, carrying out old laundry and empty containers and bringing in canisters filled with water and food from the back of the public house. It used to be that the coronal ejection events only reached the surface during rare, powerful storms, every year or so. Now they were happening more and more often. They lasted longer and were more powerful, too intense to risk being caught out of doors as Scout so nearly had.
She couldn't wait to leave this place behind.
Scout climbed the steps to the public house, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the dark interior. The public house was a common feature in prairie towns. They were the oldest part of the establishments, station components dropped from orbit to house explorers in the early days before the satellites were in place to create the protective shield against radiation. Once upon a time they had housed everyone. Now they were part meeting place, part general store, and part bar. Scout's work delivering packages on her bike had largely been from one such public house to another in a different town.
"Can I help you?" a woman asked. Scout's still sun-dazzled eyes took a moment to pick out the speaker, a woman with massive arms and red hair pulled into something between a ponytail and a bun. She was the proprietor, Ruby Collins. She had also once been one of Scout's mother's closest friends, back before she had died.
"Hey," Scout said, stepping up to set the crate on the counter. Ruby peered at her suspiciously for a moment before her eyes lit up with recognition.
"As I live and breathe, Scout Shannon!" she exclaimed. "I almost didn't recognize you. I thought someone had stolen your father's hat!"
"It's been a few years," Scout admitted.
"More than that," Ruby said, coming around the counter to gather Scout up in a stiflingly tight hug. "You're shooting up like a weed." She released Scout from the hug but grasped both of Scout's arms to hold her still as she looked right into Scout's eyes. "You're older in lots of ways, I reckon."
To Scout's relief, Ruby turned away to go back behind the counter before Scout lost what little control she had over her tear ducts. Scout blinked hard until the urge to cry passed.
"You weather this last storm okay?" Ruby asked.
"Well enough," Scout said. "I sheltered with some strangers with political issues they took out on each other."
"Sounds miserable," Ruby said, then tapped the crate. "What's this?"
"Where I was, the station owner died. I didn't want to leave this cat all alone so I took him with me when I left. I can't keep him, of course. I was hoping you might know someone who'd take him? He's old, but healthy. Goes by the name Tubbins."
"Hello, Tubbins," Ruby said, reaching into the crate to pull out the large orange cat. Tubbins was purring loudly. She turned him around in her hands to look into his yellow eyes. "I reckon I can take him. Could stand with the company. It gets too quiet here at night now that the kids have grown."
"Thanks," Scout said. That was one responsibility she could scratch off her list.
"How much you want for him?" Ruby asked.
"He's not mine to sell," Scout said. "But I was hoping you could help me with another thing?"
"Surely," Ruby said, cradling the cat in her arms and scratching all around his ears. Tubbins purred in perfect bliss.
Scout took the tablet-shaped device off her belt and set it on the counter, then pulled a single round reflective lens out of her pocket and placed it over her right eye. She closed her left eye as she tapped her way through the tablet's menus. Ruby was frowning slightly as she watched. To her eyes, Scout was tapping away at a blank gray slab.
Scout found the photograph she was searching for and turned the tablet to face Ruby. She plucked the lens from where it had adhered to her face and held it out for Ruby.
"You have to look with this," she explained. Ruby looked skeptical, but took the lens and copied Scout's gestures.
"Where did you get this?" Ruby asked, fascinated. Scout knew the feeling. This technology was far beyond anything they had on their back water planet.
"It was sort of a gift from one of the strangers I waited out the storm with," Scout said, not entirely truthfully. But surely Gertrude would have wanted her to have her things rather than be uselessly buried with her body. "Have you seen that man?"
Ruby was looking around the room, watching the display inside the lens feed her impossible amounts of information about the world around her, how far away everything was, the temperature and humidity of the air, the time of day to the nanosecond. Scout nudged the tablet a little closer and Ruby finally looked down at it. It looked like a featureless stone tablet to Scout now, but Ruby with the lens on her face could see the image of a man staring up at her.
"Can't say that I have," Ruby said after a moment's consideration. "He's distinctive-looking, isn't he, though? With that twist to the end of his nose, and the tattoo under his ear. What is it of?"
"Baby tiger," Scout said, who had memorized all the information the tablet held on this man, her prey.
"Let me ping the network," Ruby said, and disappeared into her office behind the counter, the cat still nestled contentedly in her arms.
Scout put the tablet and lens away, looking back over her shoulder as something momentarily blocked out the sun streaming through the doorway. Someone must have just walked past; there was no one behind her now. Scout pushed back her battered bush hat to run a hand through her short blond curls, already molded down with sweat. She had only been out of the controlled environment of the rover interior for a few moments and already she was a stinky mess.
"You got a hit," Ruby said, emerging from the back room and poring the cat back into the pillow-lined crate. She found an empty ration package behind the counter and smoothed it out with her hands then began to draw lines on its shiny surface with a thick black markers. "You know Flat Valley, just north of here?"
"I think so," Scout said, although she wasn't sure. It didn't matter; she wasn't alone on her bike now. The rover's navigation system would tell her the way.
"Yolanda in Flat Valley knows your fellow. He's not what you call a regular, but she's seen him more than once. I'm drawing you a map," Ruby said, looking up at Scout to be sure she was listening. Scout nodded. "No one in Flat Valley knows who he is or what he's doing out there all alone. He just comes into town for supplies now and again. Just food, nothing suspicious, but they don't like strangers in those parts."
"Thanks," Scout said, taking the completed map and blowing over it to be sure the ink was set before folding it and tucking it away in her back pocket.
"Carrying a message?" Ruby asked.
"Something like that," Scout said vaguely. "I hate to just take this and run, but I'm racing a deadline."
"No worries," Ruby said. "Take care. That man looks like he might be dangerous."
"I will," Scout said. "It was good seeing you." She didn't add, "one last time."
Scout settled her hat back on her head before stepping outside, hands in her pockets as she walked back to the town gate.
Beyond the town walls the villagers were running farm machinery, harvesting the overripe grain. The constant whir of the motors was punctuated by bursts of thrashing sounds as the grain was pulled through filled the air.
Then Scout heard something else, something not quite drowned out by the roar of the machines.
Something was wrong. Her dogs were barking. Not happy barks or even warning barks. These were barks of raw panic.
She pulled her hands from her pockets and broke into a run.