The old man stood on top of a big outcropping overlooking the waste ground. The city loomed high in the distance, but his squinting eye was not focussed on that but rather the wooden cart that rattled towards him, kicking up a high cloud of dreary dust. He gestured to the younger man who was lying flat on the rock basking in the sun.
“Look,” he muttered. “They’re dropping off a new crop.” He sat down cross-legged and watched philosophically as the cart drew to a halt, and its driver stood up and kicked a body out of the back of it.
The young man sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Looks like a rich girl. They don’t exile them often. Wonder what she did?”
fiction
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Ten
Luna felt an immediate sting of sickening anticipation as the doors opened. The Alien. Vo-Vakis’ arm looped in hers was suddenly no longer a reassurance but a trap closed tight, one she had walked into with open eyes and told herself was the lesser evil. She pulled – tried to pull – away, but he held onto her.
“I know you’re nervous,” he whispered, continuing their inexorable procession towards the ballroom. “It’ll be alright.”
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Nine
“Pek-Tchat, on the council?” said Vo-Vakis as if the thought itself was amusing. “He’d rather die. He’s no friend of the council. Says they’re too…” he struggled for a word Luna would understand. “Too nice, I suppose. Too… forgiving of the underclass. If he had his way, I think he’d stamp them out.” Vo-Vakis related this as if it was as normal as talking about the weather.
“And you work for him?” said Luna. “That doesn’t sound very nice.”
Vo-Vakis shrugged. “Got to work for someone,” he said.
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Eight
”Is it true, then? That you fell from the stars?”
When Luna had come to she seemed, against all probability, to be at a garden party. She had slapped herself a couple of times, and the sunny terrace on which she rested had stayed resolutely, irritatingly solid. She had been at these kinds of parties before, as a server, and she had hated them then. After the first slap, one of them came and hovered at her elbow and caught her hand when she tried to stab herself in the leg with a fork.
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Seven
There was the sound of thunder coming down the stairs, and the door of the room burst open as Luna put her hands behind her head. She knew cops. In their gold-edged, fitted uniforms, they looked out of another time than the farm people that Luna and Asta had come to know.
“Get them!” said one of the magistrates, who must have been the leader.
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Six
A hand on her shoulder pulled her away, and Scar spat a few words. Somehow, Luna knew that he was trying to see if she spoke any of the language. She scowled and said nothing. She would be damned if she was going to let him break her. A ringing slap from the back of his hand made her cheek burn, but still she said nothing. He threw her aside with what must have been an exclamation of disgust and she hit the dusty floor of the barn hard.
In her own way, Luna began to learn the language herself then. What else could he have been shouting at her but “get up”?
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Five
The farmer shouldered his rifle, and two of his friends stepped forward and dragged Luna out of the tent by her shoulders.
“Hey!” Asta shouted, scrambling towards her, but Luna held out a hand.
“Don’t provoke them!” she said. The farmer was now talking animatedly, gesticulating towards a field on the plain below them which was filled with livestock – giant boars, rumbling around the pasture and butting each other gently. “I think he thinks we poached our meat from his farm.”
“But-” Asta began, and then stopped herself. She tried to remember what little she had learned about uncontacted peoples in history.
The fact she kept coming back to was how badly it usually went for the civilised folks in those stories.
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Four
The dry, hardy grass that seemed to clump up everywhere notwithstanding, there was no sign of life in the broad valley they found themselves in. They left their pods down in the dip and set off along the shortest axis, up the side of one of the hills that surrounded them. Luna looked back down at the escape pods, twinkling silver in the light. That was the last she’d see of the life she knew for a long while. She could feel it, even then.
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Three
It took about another week to get up to orbit of the planet that the councillor had suggested in his hurried, dashed-off text message. In official records it was known as Moss k18h79n8764gd790, a snappy designation that encapsulated every relevant factor about the planet’s atmosphere, gravitic-magnetic signature and geo-resources in a code that was understood by absolutely nobody alive in the Empire today.
Planet of the Sorcerer: Chapter Two
The operator waited a fraction of a second until the woman was away from the building, suspended in time for the brief moment before gravity took hold, and then pressed the trigger of the Matter Scoop. Instantly, a shimmering, sky-blue sphere formed in the air, encompassing the woman in mid-air for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Then sphere and woman alike vanished as easily as if they had never been there in the first place.
She was running before the computer dinged its customary notification: Warning: Organic Material Detected in Scoop Sphere.
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