ARC: Under Nameless Stars Read Free Page B

head down hard on her knee. The hog’s next pull would be too much for her. Then Liam’s arm was around her waist.
    “Scarlett,” he breathed through clenched teeth, his face close to hers. He held the maze-caut in his other hand. “Where’s the on-switch?”
    Zenn snatched the cutter out of Liam’s hand, pressed the power pad, and saw the blue-white maser tip crackle to life. The hog tugged again, and her trapped hand, with the rope that held it, was pulled out of sight into the hatch.
    “Liam, I can’t see to cut. Pull up hard. Now!”
    The towner boy’s arms were strong around her. He heaved backward with all his might, crushing the air from her lungs. But the effort brought her arm up far enough to see the rope. The sandhog gave one more powerful jerk, the line went painfully taut, and she swung the cutter blindly.
    With the sudden release of tension that followed, she and Liam flew backward from the hatch, rolled awkwardly and came to rest several feet away, lying next to each other, exhausted, Zenn’s wrist burning.
    A chattering, scolding noise came from nearby.
    She raised herself up to see Katie, perched on the backpack. The rikkaset was sitting upright on her haunches, vocalizing in high-pitched squeaks and signing a stream of words that equated roughly to “Friend-Zenn being silly. Katie doesn’t like. Stop now.”
    Zenn got to her feet, massaging her shoulder, which felt as if it was nearly dislocated by the hog’s final pull on the line. She scanned the surroundings. The ship’s storage hold stretched on for hundreds of feet, the stacked containers arranged with narrow walkways between them. There was no one in sight.
    She moved cautiously back to the hatch. The animal raised itself up to snarl at her, then dropped its bulk onto the seda-field dish, crushing it flat, before retreating out of sight to a dark corner of the crate. Liam joined her and together they hefted the hatch lid shut.
    “Well, Tiny seems fine. But I think your knock-out ray is toast.”
    Zenn just nodded and started to work the knotted rope off her wrist.
    “Bad hog-thing! Stinks,” Katie signed.
    Zenn had to agree.
    “Yes,” she signed, then spoke aloud for Liam’s benefit. “Sandhogs have a strong odor.”
    “You got that right,” Liam said. “I’ve come across road-kill that smelled better.” He sniffed at his own shirtsleeve. “Ugh. Now I reek as bad as he does.”
    “It’ll wear off,” Zenn told him.
    “Not soon enough. I mean, why bother with these damn things, anyway? I know: they turn useless sand dunes into soil for crops. I’m not totally dense. But there are chemicals for that. Those are cheaper. And won’t kill you.”
    “Sandhogs don’t kill people, Liam.”
    “Oh?” He gave her a hard look.
    “Your dad? That was an accident, you know that.”
    Intending to steal a valuable generator and sell it to pay off his gambling debts, Liam’s father had mistakenly crept into the wrong shed on Gil Bodine’s farm one dark night. It was his last mistake.
    “Yeah. I know,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like the things. Or their stink.”
    While her uncle Otha was fond of saying hogs weren’t worth the trouble, the truth was that resource-strapped colonists on Mars needed all the crop-growing soil they could make. In fact, Zenn had been assisting her uncle when he went to treat this particularly troublesome sandhog boar out on Gil Bodine’s farm. It had burrowed out of its enclosure the night before. After it suddenly reappeared and almost attacked Otha, Gil said he was through with sandhogs, that he was going to send the creature back to its owner on Sigmund’s Parch. That piece of information had come in handy. Hiding in the Pavonis warehouse, she’d heard her abductor talking to someone about her kidnapped father, saying that the Skirni was going to take her up to the Helen . After that, it was just a matter of hiding in the hog’s cage-crate and waiting till it was loaded on