The Caves of Klydor

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Soon after being exiled to the planet Klydor, five young people begin to suspect that their struggle for survival is somehow linked to the rebel uprising against the Earth's harshly authoritarian government.

Release date: July 31, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 111

Sample

The broad river, more than a kilometre across, swept smoothly along under the hot orange sun of the planet Klydor. The water was clouded with reddish-brown silt, its dark surface glistening greasily. On either side, the banks rose in low, rugged slopes, formed mostly from bare rock, creased and ridged and broken. Here and there the surface of the rock was softened by a patch of grey-green turf, or a stand of dark brush. But the river seemed to be the only moving thing under that sun. No creatures moved across the harsh terrain, no breath of wind stirred the brush. The land lay silent and still, as if asleep and dreaming some unknown alien dream.

But then the silence and the stillness were disturbed. A strange floating object came into view around a bend in the river. It was a raft, made from slim poles held together by stout vines. And on the raft rode five beings who seemed totally out of place in that wild landscape, and yet somehow totally at home.

Five human beings. Five young people from Earth, who had been on Klydor for only a few weeks, yet who had come to feel that it was theirs, in a way, since they had no doubt that they were the only ones of their kind on the planet.

They were all between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and they all wore similar clothing—plain, dull-brown tunics and trousers. Each of them carried small backpacks, made from torn strips of cloth. But otherwise they were very different, in surprising ways.

On opposite sides of the raft sat two boys, one small and wiry, with skin the colour of old ivory, and the other tall, rangy and coffee-coloured. The heads of both were entirely hairless, with a ridged scar on each naked scalp that formed a letter—J on the smaller one, R on the tall one. Each of them also had a small letter s, made of some silvery metal, embedded in the skin of his forehead.

The boys held flat lengths of wood, roughly trimmed to make crude paddles. Equally crude but effective-looking spears lay on the raft within easy reach of their hands. And a similar spear lay beside a girl who sat next to the smaller of the two boys. She was short and sturdily built, with black hair that bristled up from her head like wire. The skin of her face was darkened with what looked like black paint, while the rest of her exposed skin, on her hands and neck, was reddened and peeling from sunburn. And her eyes were squeezed nearly shut, as if she found the sunlight painful.

The other two in the group, a boy and a girl, seemed ordinary by comparison. The boy, sitting at the rear of the raft with another paddle, was broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a thatch of dark red hair. His stockiness made him look a little overweight—until, as he paddled, his tunic tightened over the mounded roll of solid, powerful muscles. The weapon at his feet was not a spear, but an even more primitive wooden club, heavy and knotted.

At the front of the raft knelt the fifth member of the group, a slim girl with tawny blonde hair and intelligent grey eyes, who carried a hand-made knife at her hip. She was carefully studying the river ahead of the raft, and the rocky slopes of the banks, with a small frown creasing her brow.

“I think the current’s speeding up,” she said.

“Good,” said the smaller of the two scarred boys lightheartedly. “Get us outa here faster. What did you call this place, Samella?”

The blonde girl, whose name was Samella Connel, turned her frown towards him. “I’ve told you twice, Jeko. Badlands. It’s what places like this are called back where I grew up.”

“Good name for a bad place,” muttered the black-faced girl.

Jeko grinned. “Ol’ Heleth doesn’t like all this sunshine,” he announced. “What you could do, Heleth, you could empty your backpack and pull it over your head. Then you’d be outa the sun and we wouldn’t hafta look at your face …”

Heleth clenched her fists and glowered. “You want to go for a swim, yeck-mouth?”

“Don’t hurt him, Heleth,” said the taller of the scarred boys, with laughter in his deep voice. “We might need him.”

“Sure,” Heleth growled. “For bait, if we go fishing.”

They all laughed, but the small frown had still not left Samella’s brow. “What do you think, Cord?” she asked. “The river’s definitely faster.”

All of them glanced round at the red-headed boy, whose name was Cord MaKiy. They were not looking for orders, since there were no leaders in their group. But Cord was a Highlander, one of the tough, untamed folk from the bleak mountains of northern Britain. He knew about wilderness survival, and the other four deferred to that knowledge.

“Let’s keep going,” Cord said. “There’s no telling what kind of things we might meet on land, in those rocks. We’re safer out here—and getting through the badlands faster, like Jeko said.”

“Don’t want to move too fast,” the tall boy put in quietly.

“Rontal’s right,” Samella said. “If we hit rough water, it could wreck the raft.”

“Maybe,” Cord replied. “But we haven’t hit any yet. We’ll get off the river if we have to.”

“If we can,” said Rontal, the tall boy. But he agreed without demur when the others decided to go along with Cord’s suggestion, and stay on the raft for a while longer. To all of them, the badlands—all the steep-sided ridges and gullies of bare and broken rock—seemed more and more forbidding. And they were grateful to the broad, silty river for hurrying them through that region.

But they became less grateful, some distance farther on. The current had continued to speed up, rushing the raft along alarmingly, and many sudden swirls and eddies appeared on the water’s surface, possibly created by rocks below the surface. Cord needed all his startling strength, leaning on his paddle to steer the raft, to keep it from spinning like a dry leaf on that rushing torrent. And though they might all have plied their paddles to fight the current and get the raft to shore, there was no longer any point in doing so. The banks had become higher and closer to the vertical—sheer cliffs of grim grey rock, offering no level areas for landing.

As they rounded another tight bend, the river seemed to leap ahead even faster. Cord was mentally calling himself every name he could think of, for having talked the others into staying on the increasingly dangerous waterway. But then all thought fled from his mind for an instant, and his knuckles whitened as his hands clenched on the paddle.

The sound from ahead of them was like the rumbling growl of some impossibly enormous beast. Heleth, Rontal and Jeko turned towards Cord, questioningly. But it was Samella, pale beneath her tan, who answered the unspoken question, in a tense murmur that was almost drowned by the swelling noise ahead.

“White water,” she said. “Rapids.”

Cord nodded miserably. But there was no time for him to say anything, even if his words could have been heard. The river flung them forward, around another bend, and they saw it. A seemingly endless stretch of foam and froth and turbulence, with sharp edges and points of rock rising wetly out of it, like claws, waiting to rend and tear at their flimsy craft.

Then they were plunging into the midst of it. The raft leaped and bucked on the seething water, and the river roared as if in greedy triumph, muffling Jeko’s wild reckless yell. Cord drove his paddle deep, muscles bunching as he forced the raft to swerve away from a looming fang of rock. Then he was powering his paddle in the opposite direction, the others paddling as furiously, to avoid another cluster of craggy deadliness. Time and again they fought the grip of that terrible current, swinging back and forth, in and out among the barriers of rock.

Then the river’s roar grew impossibly louder, and Cord froze into stillness as he saw roiling, foaming disaster rushing towards them.

A waterfall.

Before they could try to brace themselves, the river swept the raft to the edge of the fall and hurled it over. The teenagers were flung away from it, hurtling through the blinding spray, deafened by the river’s maddened bellow. It was only a low fall, less than twenty metres, but it seemed that they were dropping through the spray for many minutes. Then the water rose up and struck them like a sheet of granite. They sank deep beneath the surface, where the furious water seemed to grow a thousand hands that clutched at them, dragging them deeper.

Cord’s lungs were bursting, the weight of his clothes and backpack were holding him down, and raw panic battered at his mind. Yet by instinct he kicked and flailed, trying to force his way to the surface. Then, as if by some strange whim, the river stopped clutching him and flung him away. He shot upwards, in the grip of a different swirl, and burst through the surface like a suddenly released cork.

Air had never tasted so sweet to him as he filled his aching lungs. He flung water from his eyes, looked around, and al. . .