'...transport you to the luxurious colony world of Heritage, where you will spend the days doing the vital work of Thydonium mining, and spend the nights enjoying all the amenities of a state of the art colony Habitat...' Federation brochure for Heritage.
***
The first person to notice it dismissed it almost instantly.
He happened to glance briefly up, and saw the pale glow, and then spat into the dust and went about his business. Why should he worry? He'd seen the moons before, and they hadn't yet fallen on him. He didn't even glance back up as this moon continued to grow and burn, choosing instead to wrap himself in his bed and fall asleep.
The second person to see it wasn't quite so nonchalant. By the time she cast her eyes up at the sky, the moon was a moon no longer. Now it was a second sun, burning bright in the sky, bringing daylight. And this sun was growing with a speed that was unbelievable. In the two seconds it took for her to shade her eyes with her hand, it had already doubled in size and intensity.
Then the growling started. An angry static, it cut the air and tore at ears.
Within moments, the second person to see the new sun was no longer alone. All around her, people appeared, bare feet stirring up the dust and dressing gowns carelessly flapping over bare knees. Soon, nearly the entire town was out in the streets, eyes to the heavens, squinting against the glare. Each had their own theory about what was happening. None were right; after all, how could they be expected to guess the truth?
As it grew larger, confusion grew into disbelief. People blinked, as if hoping it was merely a mass hallucination, as if that would be easier to understand. Mouths hung open, eyes gaped, hearts skipped a beat. From behind a plastic window, a small red-haired girl stared agog, trying to make sense of this strange new vision, this interloper into her quiet world.
It was only to be expected. The last time most of these people had seen a shuttle craft, it had been arcing off into space, leaving them the bone-breaking task of building a new world.
The air still bled with the roar of the shuttle's engines, and retros scorched the sky as it sped overhead. Every pair of eyes followed the same arc through the sky, and finally came to rest on the shuttle's destination, the landing pad. To any other town, it would have been obvious. To Heritage, it was as if the wonders would never cease. As one, the townsfolk turned with their eyes still fixed glassily on the sky. Without a word, they headed to the landing pad, following those that could remember where it was.
By the time they got there, it was already too late.
A thick cloud of dust had been thrown into the air, choking the whole area. It swam in front of their eyes and pushed itself into their lungs. No one coughed, they were used to it by now.
No one spoke, because everybody was thinking the same thing.
The piercing roar of the shuttle's engines could no longer be heard; the pilot had obviously sobered up and put as much distance between himself and Heritage as he possibly could. Many who stood in the choking dust envied him. None expected what happened next.
Reluctantly, the dust settled again, revealing the shuttle, sat incongruously on the split and cracked tarmac. Deep within, the red dust could easily be seen, the thin blood in Heritage's veins.
From behind the slack-jawed crowd came a voice:
'Move! Get outta my way! Let me through, Goddamn it!'
Most parted, but no one took their eyes from the shuttle. They had seen the bullnecked man with the bristled hair every day of their lives for the past twenty years. They knew his beady eyes and ruddy cheeks as well as they knew the badge pinned to his chest, the badge that read 'SHERIFF' - or would if not for a dent obscuring the 'E'. So what if he was struggling to pull on an old leather duster over bulging paisley pyjamas? That was the kind of excitement needed on a mundane day, not today. Today would be something talked about for decades; the day the shuttle landed.
The latecomer stood there in silence, staring at the shuttle, his eyes barely visible beneath his frown. Nothing happened. Sheriff coughed quietly, more to break the silence than anything else.
Still nothing.
'Clear back,' Sheriff growled, raising his hands to the crowd. 'Give me some -'
Something hissed behind him.
Sheriff only managed to half turn before he was hit full in the face.
The crowd screamed, and leapt back as one.
The airlock door had opened, air rushed to fill the vacuum, dragging with it thin red dust. It swallowed Sheriff instantly, leaving him coughing and cursing. The crowd reacted as if the dust was afire, jumping back out of its way and landing on those too slow to get out of their way. They shrieked as if this was some new alien invader, rather than the same dust they had been washing out of their clothes and hair for the last twenty years.
With a thump, the airlock door hit the ground, creating a gangplank. Sheriff just about managed to rub the shock out of his face before the girl appeared, looking down at them all.
The townsfolk looked up, amazed.
The girl looked back down at them, their faces smeared powder red.
'Gordon Bennett,' she said.
***
At first, Sheriff had been convinced that the entire town was going to follow them all the way to Cole's. They had kept their distance from the strangers, as if afraid that they might disappear if touched. But every step the two strangers took, the entire town had taken with them. Sheriff was convinced that if the three of them had paused mid-step, then the twenty people following behind them would stop too. An entire town of flamingos, wading in the dust.
Not that Sheriff could blame them; had he been anyone else, he would have been equally agog. First, there was the shuttle, then came the girl. She was young, and somewhere in the middle ground between plain and good-looking: she had good structure, though - perhaps when she was older, and had grown out of displaying her badge collection on her coat. But she was something new, and on Heritage that meant she was a goddess; after two decades of staring at the same faces, anything different was beautiful.
She had stepped down from the shuttle - rucksack casually flung across one shoulder - with a look of calculated composure on her face. Sheriff could tell she was trying to give the impression that this sort of welcome was nothing new to her. Perhaps it wasn't.
'Professor!' she had yelled across her shoulder, into the dark doorway. 'The welcoming committee's here.'
And then he had appeared.
He had stood there for a moment, looking at them with cool grey eyes. He was an imp of a man, barely up to Sheriff's chest, and dressed in an understated and yet wholly inappropriate manner. His hand was clutched on the red handle of an umbrella as he casually applied his weight to it, those eyes rolling across the crowd. Then, like a switch being flicked, a gap-toothed grin had split his face and he had bounded down the gangway to share it with his public. Sheriff wasn't fooled though; he had felt those slate grey eyes fall on him, a second before the grin. He had felt the coldness in them, a vacuum, and had shivered.
Trouble, he had thought.
'Somebody told you we were coming, didn't they,' the stranger had demurred, overcome. 'You shouldn't have.'
His young - what? Daughter? Friend? Lover? - had simply glared at him, a look of exasperation on her face. She'd looked at Sheriff then, just for a moment, and given him a look. He does this all the time, that look had said.
The little man was passing through the crowd, grinning and raising his straw hat at each of them in turn.
By the time he had reached the girl, he caught sight of the look on her face. There was a flash of guilt then, before he had turned that toothy grin on her and scuttled by, his hat still in his hand.
His other hand had been twirling his umbrella with a flagrant disregard for the safety of any of the onlookers' eyes.
'Come on, Ace, no time for autographs,' he'd said.
The girl had sighed, and kept on glaring. But she had shouldered her bag and followed in his footsteps, too. He had some hold on her, then.
'I wouldn't stand there if I were you,' he had announced to the crowd. 'Not unless you'd like to be frazzled.'
He had taken too much pleasure in that one word for Sheriff's liking, rolling his Rs with more than a little relish.
Seconds later, everybody had dived for cover again as the shuttle's engines belched fire, and it gracefully rose into the morning sky. Everybody except the two strangers, who were heading towards the town.
Definitely trouble, Sheriff had thought.
***
Sheriff hurried across the dirt, his duster falling open at the front and revealing his pyjamas to the morning. A few well-placed glares had dealt with the crowd - not many in Heritage dared argue with his sunken eyes and brow - and they were doing their best to disappear now. That was quite a feat in itself; there was only one route into Heritage, and the desert was as flat as roadkill all the way across the 'Flats until your eyes ran into the mountains. Still, by the time Sheriff caught up with the two strangers, he couldn't see another soul from the landing pad to Cole's bar and grill.
Sheriff had used the time it had taken him to huff and puff over to the strangers well; he had the perfect opening gambit to regain the upper hand.
'You oughtn't have done that,' he said coolly, although the effect was dampened somewhat by the sweat trickling into his eyes.
'Done what...' the little man's eyes dropped to the dented badge. 'Sheriff...?'
'Just Sheriff,' he replied automatically, although it had been a good few years since somebody had asked that.
The girl just glared at him. She obviously had some problem with the law; guilty past.
'You oughtn't have let your shuttle take off without you,' he continued, fighting not to let them see how out of breath he was. 'That's the first shuttle we've had round here in a good long while. You might have a wait on your hands, once you realise you ain't where you want to be.'
That one worked; the little man looked worried now, no cheek to cheek grin to be seen. The girl just glared at him. Not again, her eyes said.
'Oh,' the little man said, crestfallen. 'You mean this isn't Heritage?'
A cloud of dust rose into the air, as Sheriff's jaw fell into it.
***
'Come on, Professor,' the girl said, not taking her eyes from the lawman. 'I'm getting bored.'
The little man gave an apologetic smile and doffed his hat. He scuttled up the road to join the girl, whispering something that Sheriff didn't catch under his breath. Perhaps 'road' was being a little optimistic; it was really little more than a patch of dust that people who didn't want to get trampled by horses tended to avoid. Certainly there was no sidewalk to speak of; the dust rolled from Cole's bar on the one side, right the way to the foot of Sheriff's own station. There were a few more buildings down the road - Roberts' General Store, Doc Butler's office-cum-barber's shop - but for the main, the road was Heritage. A handful of wooden shacks further down, a scattering of farms outside the town limits, but that was all. Nothing impressive. Nothing Sheriff wouldn't leave behind in a second if the opportunity arose.
Nothing worth hiring a shuttle to come and visit, no matter how 'in the neighbourhood' you were.
Sheriff's eyes drifted unconsciously across the horizon, barely noticing the way the sky seemed to melt into the sand. His eyes looked elsewhere.
He shook himself - visibly - and then looked nervously about to see if anyone had seen him. All up and down the road, curtains twitched. Obviously, the novelty had worn off, the adrenaline of the surprise soured and cold. All up and down the road, people were starting to have the same thoughts: who were these strangers? What did they want? Why had they come here? Why now? What did they know? Fastening his duster against the cold, Sheriff resolved to find out.
'Hey,' Sheriff called, striding after the retreating figures. They were talking to each other, their heads nodded into each other's and whispering conspiratorially. 'Wait up.'
The little man turned and doffed his hat again.
'Ah, Sheriff, just the man.' he said, that smile back again, hiding something. 'I'm the Doctor, and this is my friend Ace.'
The woman nodded at him, barely acknowledging the introductions. Sheriff eyed her carefully, trying to suggest both innocence and deep mistrust at one and the same time. Knowing his luck today, it probably came out looking like constipation, but he had to do something to claw back the upper hand.
All the time, his brain was racing; 'Doctor' and 'Ace' - not real names . . . code names? What else could it be? What kind of man gave up his identity and hid behind a title for the rest of his life? One with something to hide from, obviously.
'Doctor,' Sheriff nodded, keeping his voice even. 'Ace. What brings you to Heritage.'
'The friendly locals,' the girl suggested, not even bothering to mutter it.
'Ace,' the Doctor warned under his breath. 'We're just here for a little visit, that's all. Take in the sights. Visit some old friends. Actually, we were wondering, I don't suppose you'd know where we'd find the Heyworths, by any chance?'
The thing about somebody of Sheriff's size was that they had more blood than a smaller person. It sat close to their skin, trying to cool itself in the breeze, and reddened them, making them constantly blush. Because there is so much more blood to push round, the heart had to work that much harder. It strained and stressed and tried to keep the blood circulating with panicked, scampering beats.
Because Sheriff was such a red-faced, fast-pulsed man, it made the effect so much more startling as the blood drained from his face, and his heart paused.
'The Heyworths?' he said lightly.
'Yeah,' the girl piped up, still glaring. 'They're old friends of the Professor's.'
Sheriff felt something gnawing in his belly, his ulcer had just awoken.
'Well you've had a wasted trip. They don't live here any more.'
The little man's face fell, all the joy seeping out of it. He looked for all the world as if he'd just dropped the world's largest icecream into the red powder dust.
'They don't?' he said, as if hoping he'd misheard.
Sheriff shook his head, and said:
'They moved out. Couldn't stand the dust no more.'
He prayed for just an instant that a storm would suddenly blow in and whip the dust into a frenzy. At least then he wouldn't have to deal with the little man's eyes boring into him, stripping away the layers one by one.
The stranger looked round then, taking his eyes from Sheriff for what seemed like eternity. It didn't make it any easier for Sheriff to bear.
The Doctor was looking at the main road, at how its surface was a just a sea of the dry red dust. Maybe he was looking at the houses, crude plasticrete prefabs with the dust lubricating every joint. He was looking at the dry sheen on the plastic windows, the clothes people wore. He was looking at his own clothes, seeing how they'd already been invaded in just these few moments, how the dust had worked its way into the seams, desperate to cling to his skin. At least, that was what Sheriff hoped he was thinking.
An acid tang in his belly, his ulcer growled again.
'They must have left on the last shuttle out,' the Doctor said lightly.
In his head, Sheriff let rip with the loudest, most disgusting swearword he knew.
The Doctor fixed the red-faced man with one last look, before swinging his umbrella up onto his shoulder and turning to rejoin his friend.
'Come on, Ace. Try and keep up.'
This time, Sheriff didn't bother chasing after the two figures as they shuffled away down the road, one swinging an umbrella and the other kicking sullenly at the dust. There wasn't much more he could do or say, not if his last great brainwave was anything to go by. No, now it was time to bite the bullet and do what he should've done in the first place. Wakeling would have to be informed. And God alone knew what his response would be. Anything but good, Sheriff didn't wonder.
Pulling his duster tight around him, Sheriff spun around and headed back down the road, trying to ignore the fire in his belly and the pounding of his tired heart.
He failed on both counts.
***
And elsewhere, a little red-haired girl was staring out of the window, still in her pyjamas from the night before. She was looking out into the dust, watching the little man with the umbrella and the girl with the brown hair as they walked away from her. Something about the little man held her attention; she watched him all the way down the road, until she couldn't see him any more.
'What are you looking at, Sweetness?' said Daddy behind her.
