Orion's Belt - A Dark Sci-Fi Western Romance

“Don’t look up,” I remind the girl. Then I push her head down when she insists on looking up anyway. Good god, she does literally nothing she’s told to do.

When we go bird hunting, we keep our heads down and take aim through mirrored guns. We started doing that after we realized the birds generate images all the way down. Getting your face captured adds another collection point for the Imperium to track you with, and sometimes leads to a posse of bounty hunters catching you out in the very next town you ride to.

“THREE INCOMING!”

Three dark shadows descend from the sky. Imperium birds are nasty looking things, designed to unfurl feathers and look like real birds. That would work if we were completely stupid. They were obviously designed to fool non-sentient life, but the Imperium decided to deploy them here too, figuring a Cabbage Patch farmer would have about as much brains as your average coyote.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Three shots. Three kills. Three thousand square miles of country liberated from surveillance until the Imperium bothers to replace the birds, which, with the way they’ve been resourcing the colonies lately, could be a very long time.

Shards of metal fall from the sky, along with feathers following thereafter. There’s a smell, like rotting flesh and oil, and there are yowls and whoops of joy at having taken them down, followed by a scramble to get the cannons broken down. I mount my horse and pull the girl up behind me.

“I’ve never seen them before,” she says, her pointy little chin digging into my shoulder. “The birds. How many are there? What do they do?”

“They’re Imperium spies,” I explain. “They watch for outlaw activity and they report it. They have limited offensive…”

“They look like birds. Like, really,” she chirps. “I wonder if you could catch one and make friends with it.”

“I don’t reckon them things are made to make friends with. They’re nothing but flying eyes for the Imperium.”

“The horses ate parts of them,” she observes. “They must have meat in them. They must be alive.”

“Alive’s a hard thing to say these days. They’re more machine than animal.”

“You’ve got a machine for an arm and you’re still alive.”

Josie

I feel him stiffen. That was the wrong thing to say. I guess he doesn’t like his arm being mentioned.

He doesn’t say anything to me after that, just spurs his horse on again and leaves me to rock against him from behind. The rest of the posse follows in his wake. I’m curious as to where we’re going, but I don’t reckon he wants to hear anything more from me.

Men can be sensitive. They’re bigger and stronger than women, but their egos are far more fragile. I learned that not long ago. I don’t usually care about that, but maybe I’m not going to mess with Orion Steelbane.

I don’t know why he is wasting time with me. Pulling me off the tracks, that coulda been curiosity, but riding around with me? That feels like he has a plan of some kind. I know better than to think any plan involving Orion Steelbane is going to end well for me. I’m also not sure why I keep referring to him in my head as Orion Steelbane. Both names. Every time. Kind of formal, which I’m not given to being. I guess he just pulls it out of me. Respect or maybe fear, or something else.

Finally, we’re riding into forest. The heat of the day fades immediately, as if it was just straight sucked out of the air. I breathe a sigh of relief as we ride through the leafy interior, losing ourselves in thick undergrowth, big leaves with droplets of congealed humidity rolling over them. The climate on Patch changes abruptly with biomes. The land under these forests is rich and fertile, but as soon as the trees are cut down, it dries up within a few years. Upshot is, we’re ripping through these forests and leaving nothing but deserted arid land in our wake. There’s people who protest it, but nobody listens to them for very long, and they soon starve or change their minds.

Out of the forest, into rolling hills, across a river or two, this is no small journey. Orion and his men are putting a big distance between where they started the day. For that, I am grateful. I’m going to be a lot harder to find if I’m nowhere near where I was left.

Chapter Three

WELCOME TO SLITNECK

A rickety hand-painted sign welcomes us to what seems to be our destination. Orion holds up his arm and the riders behind us come in, bunching up to form a tighter group. I’ve seen this before. It’s a show of force. One or two riders tend to attract predatory attention, a dozen or more tend to put fear into others.