Crash Land on Kurai – Chapter 10

Kazuo and I head left instead of right, the opposite direction of Gen and Ryoko. Directions like north or south make no sense here since we haven’t had the chance to study how the moon works. Everything we walk past is brown and gray, but little shoots of green have pressed through dead leaves and pine needles. The scene reminds me of spring back home, the world renewing itself. Does this moon have seasons? How long are they? How do they mark time here?

My journalist brain kicks in, wanting answers, though there’s no one around to interview. I run my hand up the bark of a tree and strain my ears to hear the birds or bugs surrounding me, but the whipping wind drowns out everything. My hair smacks into my face, stinging my skin, a welcome change from the burning pain in my leg.

“I think we’ll continue along this ridge until we come out of the woods.” Kazuo steps over a tree trunk, and I place my hand on the bark to vault over it. The wood crumbles underneath me, and I stumble forward, tripping over more desiccated underbrush.

“Be careful,” he says, catching my elbow before I fall down the hill to our right.

I look at my hand, the one I placed on the log to jump over it. Dirt covers my palm, so I brush it away, a niggling feeling eating at the back of my brain. Maybe this is not a winter to spring transition. Something’s wrong with this place, and it’s not the strange constant twilight.

“So, we should talk about… stuff.”

I tear my eyes away from my hand and focus on Kazuo leading down the path. He’s handling a long blade, shorter than a sword, but longer than anything I’ve seen him use for camping. This was one of the survival knives stocked in the life pod. Gen got one too. Kazuo turns his head to the side, staring at me out of the corner of his eye.

“What sort of stuff do you want to talk about? I’m already familiar with sex and babies.”

He hacks a branch off a tree, the wood crumbling into a powdery puff of air.

“I believe you learned about the birds and the bees when you were seven. That’s hardly news to you.”

I snort a laugh. “Remember that hard-hitting news piece I did on rutting pigs?” I guffaw, sending me over a wave of hysterical giggles. “My teacher had never been so simultaneously proud and embarrassed.” I sigh, letting out a few tears at the memory. My journalism teacher sat at the back of the class with her hand pressed to her mouth, watching both the film I so lovingly crafted and my classmates elbow each other across the aisles. I got full marks, of course. And a trip to the principal’s office.

“How could I forget? We spent weeks in the barn to get that footage. It’s one of my fonder memories.” Kazuo’s delivery is decidedly deadpan. He spent every night soaking in the hot outdoor baths trying to wash the stink off of him.

“And no, I want to talk about the secondary mission to Hikoboshi. One of the more important reasons why we’re here.”

I step around a root sticking out of the ground, glancing behind me on the trail. Nothing is following us, but my neck prickles with dread anyway.

“Why we’re here? Do you mean all of us in general? Or me and you?”

“Minamoto.”

I take a deep breath of the rich air and let it all out.

Here we go.

I’m about to learn why it’s so important for my particular family, my clan, to be here. It’s not something I want to hear, either. I’ve spent a good deal of my life trying to play down my family name without actually saying I hate it. Because I don’t. I just find it… inconvenient. Mom told me how crucial it was to own the Minamoto name, that my dad had fought hard to bring honor to the family after what his own father had done — treasonous things the empress put my grandfather to death for.

Yet, all I ever saw was elitism. I saw a system of reprehensible tycoons, from the empress down through our family to lesser known clans and then the native and Terran populations. Those fat cats ran everything on our planet from the farm plains in the central region to the deserts in the North to the fishing town I called my home.

My first reaction to Kazuo?

“Fuck that. I don’t want to hear about Minamoto.”

He sighs, his shoulders dropping. “You know, you could be a little less defensive, right? It’s not as bad as you think it is.”

“It’s always worse than I think it is.”

This time Kazuo laughs. “I’ve never met a bigger pessimist than you.”

He pushes through to a cleared path, and we look left and right along it. Still, no one around.

“Huh.” He leads off in the same direction we were going. “Here’s the stuff we need to talk about.”

I walk backwards behind him, suddenly fearful of turning my back on anyone who may be creeping up on us. If this is an engineered path, perhaps other people will be traveling it.

“When the Exodus from Earth happened and the two Japanese ships left to colonize Orihimé and Hikoboshi, we know that Minamoto ancestors left on one of the ships, right?”

“Right. I think? Wait.” I beckon him to slow down. “No. I was never told that. I was told Minamoto ancestors witnessed the two ships that left, not that they were on board.” Kazuo purses his lips. “Damn.” I whistle. “How come I never thought about that before?”

The family story is that Minamoto Clan stayed behind and helped build the last city on Earth, and that they, much later, persuaded Earth settlers to go to Orihimé to colonize. That’s how I came about, through the union of Minamoto Clan from Earth and Oda Clan from Orihimé. Minamoto wasn’t on Orihimé before they settled there from Earth.

“Because it’s not something we learned about until recently. Kentaro… Sorry, your father spent years combing through the family records and reading every last family diary he could find. There are Minamoto family members here. Distant ones.”

I wince as I climb down a steep part of the path, my leg smarting. “Well, okay. While I guess that’s interesting and all that, I don’t see what the big deal is. Our family is big enough as it is.” Minamoto is a few hundred blood and sworn relations wide. Certainly not the most powerful family out there, but we’re closest to the empress’s family, whether I like it or not.

Mom loves to tell me about how I can keep my name when I find my own man to marry. That, maybe, he’ll want to be a part of our family. Not likely. At this point, I’m going to be single till I die.

Kazuo steps out to a ledge overlooking a valley below. “Our family is just fine the way it is, but there was an entry in one diary that concerned your mom and dad. We couldn’t stop the mission to Hikoboshi. It was something your mother’s family promoted for decades. But if what we think Minamoto brought to Hikoboshi is true, we’ll be seen back home as…” He shakes his head and my skin prickles with goosebumps. “Monsters.”

I swallow, trying to calm my stomach. On the one hand, I care about my family a great deal. I love my parents, Kazuo, my older brother, and Shintaro. I love the way we protect each other, watch out for each other. I love our family recipes and the stories from both Orihimé and Earth. I’m honored to be from such a long-standing and noble family. People come to us for help, and we give it. Always.

On the other hand, I hear the rumors behind my back that I don’t deserve my success, that I didn’t earn it. There are whispers that my family is manipulative and gets everything they want because of our ties to the royal family. That we do business with the mob and the police turn a blind eye. That my father murdered his own father to take a seat next to the empress, and they call my mother “Namika The Witch” because of her bright white hair and love of technology. I’ve even heard rumors she does experiments on mice at night, which is a total lie and simply crazy.

I shudder when I try to picture my dad, the one who tucked me into bed, killing his own father. Or my mother cackling like a witch while dissecting a live mouse. It doesn’t sit right.

“Monsters? What kind of monsters?” I don’t want to know, but my journalistic instincts take command and push aside my need to protect myself.

Kazuo sweeps his hand out. “Look around you. This place was terraformed.”

I follow behind, ducking under a low branch. “I suspected as much.”

“And we believe the Minamotos who came here were the ones who engineered this… and possibly more. There’s a reason why Shintaro has the potential to be the greatest geneticist of our time.”

I swallow, trying to forget the burning pain in my leg. I always joked that Shintaro got all the brains in the womb which left me with all the angst. He would wince whenever I said it, complaining that he never asked for the gift.

“Kazuo,” I call out, stopping. He stops and faces me. “Mom gave me the most peculiar speech before we left.”

“What did she say?”

I lick my lips, closing my eyes and trying to remember every word. “She said that should the mission fail or change, we were to unite Orihimé and Hikoboshi at all costs. That someday other worlds colonized by Earth would find us, and we should stand together as one.”

“Sounds like something Namika would say.”

“And our family, with the support of the empress, would lead the way. That if these people didn’t have the same core family values we have, we’d give those values to them, make them conform, though she never said how.”

“We can start by finding and allying with any Minamotos already here, okay?” He grasps my shoulder and squeezes. “But it’ll be hard if they’ve died out or…”

“Are monsters,” I fill in.

We walk in silence for a while, and I think about everything Mom said to me, all the years of family stories I have stored up in my head, the traditions I’ve witnessed, the teasing I’ve endured for being Minamoto. Ugh, I do not want this kind of responsibility. I’m a journalist, not an ambassador. As soon as possible, I’m going to get behind the camera and stay there.

“Look,” Kazuo says, pointing down the hill. Not far in the distance at a bend in the river is a city straddling the two banks. It’s dark, though. No lights on in the street or in any window.

“This moon feels wrong, doesn’t it? Like something’s missing.”

Kazuo nods. “Yeah. And when we arrived, there was the SOS message, the one about someone exiled here. So there must be people on this moon. Maybe they live underground?”

I draw in a quick breath as a line of light breaks through the darkness in the distance and sweeps towards us at a brisk pace. Grabbing onto Kazuo’s arm, I prepare to run. My brain believes we’re under attack, a nuclear weapon of some sort, though my hearing remains calmed and mute.

“It’s okay.” Kazuo takes my hand in his and squeezes. “It’s dawn.”

I squint my eyes as the line of light marches across the distance, filling in all the details I’ve imagined the last few hours. Forested hills roll for kilometers in every direction, but to the left, following the river to the horizon, I catch sight of a large body of water, some kind of lake or sea. This moon is more diverse than I thought it would be.

We close our eyes and hold our free hands over our faces as daylight springs upon us fast, like hiding under a blanket in midday and having it pulled off once our eyes had adjusted. Heat returns to the land along with daylight, and I start to sweat.

Kazuo’s breaths come heavy and fast as we both peek out through our fingers and face the new world. He runs his fingers through his hair, his eyes sweeping over the land and cataloging everything he sees.

“We’re going to need to find cover before we’re found out.”

Boom!

Something explodes above us, making me jump out of my skin. I pull us back to the tree line and crouch into a ball.

“Wait!” Kazuo taps me on the head. I look up in time to see a ship streak above us, breaking the sound barrier.

But it’s the sight above that has me more worried.

The Murasaki is an incandescent ball of fire moving from one end of the craft to the other. Bits of the ship come loose, streaking out in arcs that hit the atmosphere and burn in bright beacons of death. My chest tightens, thinking of how far the Murasaki has gone. She came from Earth to Orihimé, and then she was overhauled for this mission. We all expected her to last another hundred years.

Not anymore.

My head ping-pongs back and forth between the Murasaki and the ship coming to land off in the hills past the town.

Kazuo grabs my hand and squeezes it before acknowledging my concern.

“Looks like we won’t be rescued, and we’ll have company soon.”

If I had any thoughts of making it back home to Orihimé, they’ve been ground into the dirt.

This mission just became life or death.