Desperado (Murphy's Lawless: Watch the Skies Book 2), Kevin Ikenberry [reading the story of the txt] 📗

quickly finished her preparations as to not have them waiting for her. Dressed and carrying their woven packs, the women exited into the small thoroughfare near the artificial canal running west to east through the Inner City. The group emerged into a festive atmosphere. There was music from an otherworldly instrument. Its screechy chords and earsplitting crescendos intermixed with a constant warbling sound, but it sounded joyous rather than morose. They joined several women along with more than a few young boys decorating their hair with blossoms of the extravagant indigo donmaar flowers that grew near the river. The Festival of the Kr’it seemed quite the affair.

Along the primary thoroughfare, everyone danced. It was celebration and camaraderie Aliza hadn’t seen on the planet since her arrival, and, frankly, it gave her more than a measure of hope for what they were doing. These people had survived for hundreds of years in this hellish environment. The entire town of Imsurmik had once been built entirely into the rock face of the plateau. Over time, its promise drew thousands of others to the mid-latitude city, and it grew outward. Walls were built and defenses prepared. Farmlands were laid, plowed, and irrigated. As Imsurmik expanded, though, so did their social order.

Carved into the side of the plateau, in a cavity etched into the rock over millions of years, lay the dwellings. Beneath the cover of the overhang, elevated ten meters above the city, were at least two rows of richly appointed homes, with the wealthiest citizens occupying those furthest under the cavern’s lip for protection.

Below the dwellings, atop a hill overlooking the farmlands, lay the Inner City. Protected by a rough stone and wood glacis around ten meters high, the Inner City comprised the trade and commerce center of the city. The Inner City itself was further delineated. Around the bazaar and thoroughfares were houses and small businesses built around the seasonal trades. It differed from anything Aliza could remember seeing on Earth, but, having spent most of her childhood inside Dachau, she’d barely known the outside world at all.

Outside the walls and down the slope from the Inner City was the Outer City. She’d been there a few times visiting the farmers’ market, where they sold the fresh produce from the lush, irrigated fields south of Imsurmik. The Outer City was an entirely different sort of place. Agriculturally focused, the city itself in those outer areas was, in some places, in little more than squalor. Every day, migrant parties collapsed their shanties, gathered their belongings, and resumed moving north. Aliza wondered why they would bother coming back.

The surrounding festival was the first time she’d seen happiness on R’Bak. No one wore the traditional face paint to cover themselves from the intense light of day. Fire-lit faces shone in the darkness far beyond their smiles.

As they reached the bazaar, the women turned north, pushing toward the cavern and the central bazaar. On the north edge of the squared market, an underground aquifer sprang from the precincts of the cavern dwellings into a man-made canal roughly three meters wide and a meter deep. The water was crystal clear and delightfully cool. The artificial canal directed the water from the center of the Inner City along the cavern wall to the far eastern edge, where it dropped through a spillway in the glacis, creating a fifteen-meter waterfall. Below, the reservoir was easily an acre in size. She did not know how deep it was. The locals said there was no bottom to the pond itself because it was a natural hot spring. The unused water from the city’s aquifer drained there via the artificial canal and mixed with water coming up from the geothermal spring. Without the aquifer’s water, the pool would have been frightfully hot. The engineering feat of joining the water supplies enabled the growth of certain organisms and food sources for the town and contributed mineral-laden water to the fields. With the approach of the Sear, the kr’it rose nightly from the depths to feed upon an abundance of smaller organisms near the surface and along the bank. Kr’it were a delicacy, and the harvest was undeniably special to Imsurmik’s citizens.

The unexpected joy of the entire town overwhelmed her. More than once on the path toward the waterfall, Aliza found herself swept up in the dancing. The movement, the music, and the atmosphere did more to raise her spirits than she realized. Bo would have enjoyed it, too, and Aliza regretted he couldn’t be there with her. While she doubted he was the party type, he might have enjoyed seeing her as happy as she was.

As time dragged on, and their prearranged time for radio communications slid past, Aliza knew Bo would be sitting out there in the darkness on the bluff across the narrow valley, trying not to worry. It couldn’t be helped. No one else in the procession seemed all that intent on getting out to the pond itself. Apparently, there would be ample opportunities to harvest the kr’it.

From what she understood, the organisms were something between a shrimp and an iguana. They possessed four tiny legs, which allowed them to crawl around the edge of the warm pit, and a long, thick tail for swimming. Each was pale and sensitive to light. She hadn’t seen one yet, and when she did, she wasn’t certain whether she would be revolted or intrigued. But all that mattered, at least to the citizens of the town, was that they were apparently good eating.

After dark, when the heat waned, the typical activities of the day returned, culminating with the feast of the harvest. The procession of women and children would go outside the walls, wade in the waters around the edge of the pond, and collect the kr’it. As they filled their woven baskets to the brim with the precious creatures, Aliza would use the PRC-77 radio hidden in her basket to report