Starpiercer: Sunlight's Edge

CHAPTER XVII: LIEM IV

CHAPTER XVII
LIEM IV

It was late afternoon by the time they arrived at Marrow Ridge. For most of the ride, they were shielded from the punishing, semi-lethal sunlight in the cool, if small cabin of the Caracal that they'd rented for the purpose. It wasn't even much out of their paychecks. Hardly even a dent. The Secretariat had issued all applicants to the upcoming station project a solid living wage. He'd been able to eat good every night, and their state-provided billet had proved far more comfortable than the cramped confines of a Filhab's tiny living quarters.

Back home, the Filhab had been two small rooms. One bathroom/steamer module, on the desert side of the cone, and communal area with a kitchennette, a knee table, and some cushions around it. They'd slept on hammocks that had descended from the ceiling every night.

Truth be told, he'd kind of liked the cramped quarters. They had felt lived in. Mornings, he'd remember, he would wake up to the smell of whatever of their food stores the elected representative of that year had slated for consumption that morning simmering on the autochef, while Uncle Yombo had stood over them on lanky legs, taking in the odor and seasoning it with packets of synthetic spices. He and Temba would untangle themselves from their hammocks, and crowd around the knee table, jawing back and forth about the upcoming work, and gossiping about the other families. Uncle Yombo would always eat first, devouring his breakfast -usually some form of potatoes, tomatoes, and some protein, with vitamine-rich supplements mixed in within minutes, and tousle both of their hair before heading off to the filtration modules in the upper filhab, or boarding one of the Filhab's three Skyfish with his coworkers Monty and Xingen to go and tend to the macroplankton-pits scattered around the hab's hundred-kilometer area of operation.

Liem and Temba would almost always slack off right after he left, taking the hour before their shift began to talk about which of the girls in the filhab were the best-looking. When they were younger, and they had more time before their four-hour schooling blocks, they would always play Chartist or soldier or Catch-The-Wonsu, pretending they were off on adventures in wider Solace, running around, leaping from the climate control station to their hammock, to the top of the autochef. When they were older though, they had begun to simply lounge there, and talk of girls. Those had been good days.

When Liem had ended his schooling early to work with Temba in the waste pits, they had less time for play, but could just talk in the pits too. Then, when the sun had ended it's zenith, and was on it's way towards the horizon, and their shift ended, they would go around the Filhab and meet with their friends. Before Rari had left, he and her would often go to the pond with Temba and his older friends, and then Uncle Yombo or Xingen or Nikolai, the Filhab's best mechanic, would tell them stories of the big sandstorms, or the first settlers coming to Tylo.

He remembered those ones best. Nikolai, with his grizzled, grey-stubbled face would stand by the edge of the wide knee-high macroplankton pond in the Filhab's center, and tell them who had come.

"From Cyrene," he would always say. "In the old days. In the years following when they writ the Solace Charter, and the LUMAR was opened." In the decades before the Chartist Union was set down, Cyrene explorers had found the forgevessel, floating in the iron dark near Rarene, the red giant on the edge of the Cyruset system. It was hidden in its thousand rings like a nightscorpion burrows under the sand. They found it there, thinking it was a moon and they were amazed. They landed on it with their spaceships, and it was bigger than anything people could make. When they went inside, it came alive, and groaned with the power that the Elder Peoples had given it, before they died. The explorers all ran back to their ships, and watched as it unfurled, and the forgevessel's throat came alive in blue fire. The Shapers shaped all peoples, save for the humans like us, and the Watchers shaped lives and minds, but the Makers made the Forgevessels, and the Forgevessels made the LUMARs. It rose and climbed to the middle of the Cyruset system, and there, it reshaped itself into two LUMARs, and they called their brethren, in Tyluset, in Signuset, and in Minduset. It called with light, with a great laser. When the light reached Tylo ten years later, then the LUMAR here heard it's call, and opened, and it sent a call out to the Sunduset LUMARs. And so the First Cascade began. Always rimward, always from the Core out to the galactic rim. And so, the first settlers came to Tylo soon after.