…Previously, in The Odin Chronicles…
Jonas Gruber wished he were driving into the wasteland of Odin III alone, but he was stuck bringing Duncan Strasser with him to help fix the plasma barrier.
“Mind if I smoke?” Duncan Strasser asked. The senior mining engineer didn’t wait for a response. He lit up a cigar and blew rings into the cramped cab.
Jonas coughed pointedly, but the pudgy German didn’t notice. They couldn’t open the window because the waning storm that had damaged the barrier still kicked up sand and dust. Even the Jeep’s state-of-the-art filtration system didn’t block all the particles.
Jonas took one hand off the steering wheel and used his scarf to cover his nose and mouth.
He kept an eye on the barren landscape. You never knew when some rock or some uncatalogued wildlife of Odin III might damage a vehicle. Some claimed that predators roamed these wastelands. Jonas didn’t care to find out.
“You know, kumpel,” Strasser said. “Many think it is easy to blow smoke rings. Not so, kumpel. Not so.”
“Um, really,” Jonas muttered. He saw the same desolate sameness for miles. No wonder he’d drawn the short straw. That was the price he kept paying for being the new guy. Graveyard shifts, holiday hours. He had asked for time off for his nephew’s birthday weeks ago and instead of eating cake and gifting Kurt a kitten, he had to spend the day with the most boring man on Odin III.
Expeditions supposedly could be fun if you had the right companion. The older miners knew what they faced with Strasser. So they’d stuck Jonas with the human faucet that dripped words.
“Ah, some think the rings form themselves. No, not so. First you must…” Strasser droned on for an eternity.
An hour later—really five minutes—Strasser paused.
Jonas seized the opportunity. “I grew up here. I joined the interstellar merchant marine. I—”
Strasser interrupted. “You missed a lot of Christmases, yes?”
“I—”
“Dickens plagiarized A Christmas Carol. He stole his stories from greater writers. Fielding. Flaubert. Scrooge is essentially Madame Bovary. Her motivations.”
Jonas ground his teeth.
§
Jonas slammed on the brakes twenty yards from the shimmering plasma barrier and jumped out of the Jeep. He did not wait for Strasser.
He took a quick look at his surroundings. Barren desert behind him. Nothing broke up the monotony other than the ruts in the sand left by the Jeep.
He tried not to think of Kurt’s party. He’d had to drop off the kitten earlier, for you couldn’t exactly store a kitten and he doubted that Ingrid, the owner of the best bar on the planet, would take it back for a couple of days. She’d had enough trouble unloading the litter from the stray that slept in her storeroom. So, he’d missed seeing Kurt hold his new pet for the first time. Because he was always the damned new guy.
The pulsating barrier stretched to the right and left until it hit the canyon walls, so distant he couldn’t spot them. The barrier extended for miles in the sky until it finally petered out when the atmosphere thinned. To the right, a bamboo-like stand, about fifteen or twenty yards back from the barrier. A man could get lost in the dozens of square miles of forest.
He opened the back hatch and grabbed the plasma meter while Strasser started moving toward the equipment a bit slower. Jonas unbuckled a half dozen drones and sent them skyward to explore the upper reaches of the barrier. The drones could do a survey, though complicated repair jobs required dangling a worker out of a copter at a thousand feet. He hoped they didn’t have to return.
He double-timed it to the barrier before Strasser could suck him into another soliloquy.
Thank God Jonas didn’t have to detail the entirety of the barrier. Galactic had pinpointed the roughly one hundred yards where the breach had happened.
The wind whipped against his face. He wrapped the scarf tighter. Jonas walked to his left fifty yards. He’d go over the barrier inch by inch until he and Strasser met in the middle.
“This is like Hadrian’s Wall, yes?” Strasser called out. “Why there is so much myth about the actual construction.”
Jonas pretended not to hear. Strasser yelled a couple more times and, miracle of miracles, gave up and got to work.
An hour later Jonas had covered twenty-five yards and repaired a half-dozen breaches. Nothing found by the drones so far.
Nothing to hear but the whistling of the wind.
Not for long.
“I’m going into the bamboo,” Strasser yelled.
Jonas would have liked nothing better than to lose Strasser in a forest, but he could think of no reason to enter the stand. The barrier ended a good distance away. Strasser risked getting lost or something worse.
“It’s not a good idea to go in there,” Jonas called out. “It’s not bamboo. We don’t know what it is.”
“The barrier’s signature extends for a hundred or two hundred yards into the forest,” Strasser yelled, once again stating the obvious. “I’m going in. I’ll tell you about it on the ride back.” Strasser waddled and wheezed into the stand.
Even if the microwaves extended that far, which Jonas doubted, a technician couldn’t do anything about it from the bamboo-ish trees. Any repairs had to be made on the barrier itself.
Strasser’s voice became muffled. He kept talking, but soon Jonas could hear nothing.
Jonas sighed and resumed checking the fence. He’d probably have to do Strasser’s part. They’d be here past sundown.
Twenty minutes later, he heard Strasser’s voice. “Hey, could you come in here and give me a hand? There’s something I can’t figure out.”
Jonas unleashed some choice profanity and marched towards the forest. Then he stopped. It made no sense, but he wondered what was wrong with Strasser.
The entire day Strasser had never requested his help or admitted he didn’t know something. Why would he start now?
Jonas walked to the edge of the bamboo. “Are you saying there’s something unexpected you’ve encountered and that you need my advice?”
“Yeah!”
“It’s outside your area of expertise?”
“Yes!”
Since when did Strasser give one-word responses to questions?
Jonas recalled the drones and reconfigured them. They swooped into the forest.
Three drones did not return.
One sent a grainy video of Strasser laying in the dirt. Gash marks maybe on his arm.
Jonas radioed Galactic. He climbed into the Jeep, grabbed the photon gun from the back, and locked the doors.
§
Three hours later, Galactic’s search copters located Strasser. Very much alive, but dehydrated and badly scratched.
Galactic airlifted Strasser back but didn’t offer Jonas a ride. Just a warning to return the Jeep without delay.
He set off for the long ride back. He didn’t mind. He’d enjoy the solitude. He couldn’t wait to see Kurt play with Huckleberry—his nephew had named the cat after an ancient book the boy’s teacher had assigned.
One thought did puzzle him, though. Did some creature attack Strasser out of bloodlust? Or did it just want the asshole to shut up?
For the past few years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles. Along the way he’s introduced us to the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Kimberly Ann Smiley, Kai Holmwood, Brandon Case, Jason Burnham, and many, many more. We suspect Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.
Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker.
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