by Drew Avera
She lunged towards him, knocking him to the ground, his weapon falling over the lip of a crater. She’s fast, he thought as a torrent of blows impacted his body in rapid succession. Each kick felt as if it was knocking the wind out of him, and with how thin the air was, breath was becoming a precious commodity. Brendle swung a heavy fist towards her and she ducked, smiling at the fact he had attempted and failed. She attacked again, fiercer, wilder. She was backing him into the crater; with nowhere else to plant his feet he did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed her and tossed her over the edge, causing both of them to tumble down the rocky crevice to the bottom of the crater. Rocks cut and tore at his body, but he barely felt it as his heart raced. Brendle had always been afraid of heights and falling wasn’t doing him any favors. The end came with a sudden stop that succeeded where his attacker had failed in knocking the rest of the air out of his chest.
She apparently didn’t have the same problem he did Brendle realized, as he felt the impact of her boot kicking him in the ribs. He rolled his body out of the way of the second kick, but exposed himself as he lay on his back, all but completely defenseless. She jumped on top of him, trying to beat past his flailing arms, trying to attack his face or gouge out his eyes. Somewhere in the onslaught of fist wailing on him he realized he was laying on his gun.
The problem with being on your back in a fight is that you are exposed to whatever damage the other person throws at you. The woman dishing out violence on Brendle was trained to hit where it hurt, which for Brendle was everywhere. He groaned and rolled with the punches, each one threatening to break a bone or puncture flesh. She was wild with rage and a part of him wanted to strike back, but another part of him didn’t want to harm a woman. So much for growing up with morals, he thought as another blow glanced across his shoulder. He was running out of time to do something, so he went with the first idea that came to mind.
Brendle timed the next swing with the inertia of her body springing forward, and he kicked his legs up and rolled backwards, effectively pinning her in the same way she had him. He reached forward for his gun and felt the tight grip of her hands squeezing his throat. He was already having trouble breathing, but if he wanted to end the fight then he needed the gun. He continued reaching, his vision tunneling as his fingers touched the hard steel of the grip. His head felt like it was about to explode as pressure built up. He could feel blood dripping from his nose as he strained to suck in air, fighting to get the oxygen to his deprived lungs.
He was running out of time.
Brendle pressed the barrel of his gun against her face, the bulk of it covering it from her eyes down. “Let go,” he choked. Her grip didn’t loosen, though. He tried to stand up, but her grip was too tight. He reached down and pressed his hand against her throat as well, pushing with his weight. Her flesh felt warm in his grip and he could feel her fight to breathe as well as the movement of her throat with each shallow gulp of air. “I said, let go.” His words were raspy and choppy. He wondered if she could even understand him. He drove the weapon down; pressing it hard against her face, knowing that the weight pressed against her would weaken her resolve. “Don’t make me shoot you,” he said, or at least he thought that was what he said. The sound coming from his lips was unintelligible.
Her grip loosened, but she kept a hold of his throat. It was enough to breathe. They stared at each other for a long time, each one’s grip loosening enough to relieve the other, but neither one willing to fully let go. He looked into her teary amber eyes. There was fear there, desperation. He could have seen it even if he had been blind, and there was a beauty there too. He shook the thought from his head. He wasn’t here to fight, or to do anything other than radio for help. Brendle tried to rise, but her grip held him fast. He didn’t want to pull the trigger, but she wasn’t leaving him with much choice. He took a deep breath, releasing it slowly as they stared hard into each other’s eyes.
“Bang!” he screamed. The woman’s eyes grew wide, expecting the weapon to discharge into her face. “Now, let me go before I really pull the trigger,” he said.
Her grip faded and then let go entirely.
Brendle fell back, keeping the weapon trained on her. “Thank you,” he said as he rubbed his sore throat. Each gulp of air felt like a gift as he inhaled deeply. He watched her back away, eyeing him warily. He could see the distrust in her eyes. Hell, I can even smell it, he thought as she backed against a rock and leaned her body against it. Her gray coveralls were smudged with blood. Probably his, he presumed, until he saw the gash in her leg. “You’re wounded,” he said.
The woman glared at him, “I’ll live,” she spat.
“If you have a medical kit on the transport I can patch you up.”
She continued to stare at him. Distrust was potent as her amber eyes bore into his. She looked at his weapon as it lay next to him and he wondered if she might try to take it. She didn’t move and neither did he― for a long while at least― and then she did.
19
Anki
Thoughts of being manipulated into giving up flowed through Anki’s mind. She had his life in her hands, all she’d have to do was squeeze harder, rip his throat from his pale Greshian neck and he would have been dead. But that wasn’t what happened at all. He had shoved his loaded weapon in her face and the fear of being killed toyed with her emotions in a way that no amount of training could have combated. The sensation made her feel weak and powerless, and it left a bad taste in her mouth. She watched him, sitting on the ground; his weapon lying useless on the ground next to him. He didn’t seem like much of a threat, but what he didn’t have in fighting skills he more than made up for with quick thinking and strategy.
This was the enemy’s greatest threat: cunning.
Anki had to admit that it was a skill set that proved more useful to surviving than the training she had received on Luthia. She was trained to be a killer, weapons in hand or with only her hands. She never received training on solving the problems of going against a combatant more skillful than herself. Perhaps that was the issue all along, they trained me to die, she thought as she watched the man leaning back, his chest rising and falling as he fought to catch his breath in the thin atmosphere. She struggled as well, and the smoke wasn’t helping at all.
“Is your transport still operational?” He asked.
Anki looked at him, meeting the gaze of emerald eyes looking back at her. She expected to see contempt, but it looked more like resilient hope. “It crashed and is burning; what do you think?” it was hard to keep the anger and contempt from her voice. She wondered why she was even concerned about that to begin with.
“I know it isn’t flyable, but if the computer system is operational, maybe I can use it to call for help,” he said. He brushed his hair from his face.
“I don’t know. The ship was pretty damaged, and I was trapped by the collision gel. It took me a while to break free.”
He smiled at her. “I’m sorry about that. I tried to control the landing a bit better, but there was too much external damage to your transport. Luckily, you had the collision gel.”
Anki glared at him. All that time she thought the ship had a glitch disabling her ability to control its descent. Instead, this Greshian had been responsible for her crashing. Her blood was beginning to boil and she could see the expression on the man’s face begin to change as her eyes narrowed.
“Maybe I need to explain myself,” he said as he backed away, getting his feet underneath him to make it easier to stand. She watched as he pulled a com-unit from his jacket, the device reflecting light from a distant fire. “I used this device to hack into your transports flight control system, but it was relatively unresponsive. I could get it to maneuver towards me, but controlling the pitch of the transport was next to impossible. You were crashing anyway, but I was trying to lessen the impact,” he finished.
“Why?” Anki asked, her voice biting back rage.
The man shrugged for a moment, trying to find the r
ight words to say. “Honestly, I saw the transport as an avenue to get off this rock. I was exiled from my ship, framed for treason. I’m just trying to survive.”
Anki made a move to stand and the man flinched, but didn’t draw up his weapon. She stood there, considering her options for a moment. He could have been telling the truth, but the truth didn’t mean trusting him was a favorable option. Still, when she looked to the sky above, she saw the remnants of the Seratora burning in the orbit surrounding the moon. She would be trapped and dead if they didn’t find a way off the moon. Her transport was destroyed and none of the bits of burning steel would provide any hope of getting back in orbit and heading home. “Why should I trust you?”
He rose to his feet and stared at her. “I know you look at me and see a Greshian, someone you think is your enemy. But that is the same way the Greshians on the ship that destroyed your ship look at me. I’m no longer a Greshian in the way I was before. I was called a traitor because I saw no value in conquering other worlds. I’m not a killer.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” she snapped.
He stood there, dumbstruck. “I don’t have an answer to your question. I can only hope you’ll believe me when I say I have no intentions of doing you harm. All I want is a way off this moon and to survive.”
Anki watched him, trying to determine if she believed him or not. There were two things she knew for sure, the first thing being she was stranded with an armed Greshian with no way to get herself to safety. The second thing was that he had the means to shoot her dead and hadn’t done so, at least not yet. “Do you really think you can get us out of here?”
He shrugged. “I can try,” he answered.
Anki responded by turning her back and walking towards her fallen transport. She held her breath for a moment, waiting for him to fire, but it didn’t happen. After a few steps she heard him follow behind her.
“My name is Brendle, Brendle Quin,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She felt some reservation about answering his question, but in the end it didn’t really matter if he knew her name. She answered anyway. “Anki Paro,” she replied as she took a long stride over loose rocks.
They climbed from the crater in relative silence. The only sound she heard was heavy breathing and the rustling of rocky debris moving under their hands and feet. They crested the rim and were surrounded by pillars of dark smoke wafting around them. The air was thinner, and the smoke made breathing even worse than it had been before. She covered her face with the neck of her uniform and made her way towards the transport as Brendle followed close behind. When they made it to the wreckage, she was surprised to find it not engulfed in flames like she thought it would be.
“Here it is,” she said, gesturing to the twisted carcass that was once a personnel transport. Now it was technologically advanced wreckage; the type of thing she never would have bothered with when she spent her summer working salvage. The irony was that Brendle wanted to tap into it and try to call for help. It seemed unlikely to Anki, though.
She stepped aside and let Brendle enter the airlock leading into the small cockpit of the transport. Most of the collision gel had receded and allowed enough room for both of them to enter, though it was still a tight fit. Brendle sat as Anki leaned over his shoulder and watched him work. His hands scrolled over the console, searching for something that Anki was unsure of. “Where is the interface for your radio?”
Puzzled, Anki shrugged. “I don’t know about a secondary interface, but the helmet contained the controls for communicating off ship.” She pointed to the helmet lying between the seat and the left console, the wiring fixed to the console and disappearing behind a kick panel below.
“This should work,” Brendle said as he lifted the helmet from the deck and manipulated it in his hands. Anki watched as he worked, first disconnecting the radio controls from the helmet and scanning over the console with his com-unit. The device in his hand chirped and a smile spread on his face. “We use the same frequencies,” he said enthusiastically. “I could reveal our identities by sending a beacon out verbally, but there’s no way of knowing who might respond. The Telran knows I’m here, so they should ignore it, but if we don’t mask the identity of this transport, then it could put us in more danger than it’s worth.”
“How can you mask the distress call?” Anki asked.
Brendle smiled and removed something from his jacket. “With this,” he said, lifting a small beacon in his hand. “This is a neutral distress beacon. It should ping pretty far out into the dark, but I needed a transmitter and a significant power source to make it work.”
She watched as he removed another item from his jacket and worked everything together. The beacon was a cylinder shaped device and he used the wiring from the helmet to connect to the beacon, which made it resemble a battery of some sort.
“And with that, we should have a signal reaching out to the stars.” He smiled as he looked up at Anki, but she kept her reservations to herself.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Brendle moved his com-unit along the beacon and measured the power output of the device. “It could take a while to get a reading on anything picking up our signal, but in the meantime we just sit and wait.”
The idea of sitting alone with a Greshian didn’t sit well with Anki, but what other choice did she have? What she didn’t expect was what happened next. Someone answered the call with a ping of their own.
20
Brendle
They watched as the ship fell from the sky. It was under thrust, but not in a way that made Brendle at all comfortable with whoever was piloting the machine. It was once a warship, he noticed, because of the protrusion on cannons pointing out from the dull gray hull. If the inside matches the outside, then this ship is a flying hunk of space trash, Brendle thought as the landing gear descended from the skin of the unknown craft, hissing and grinding as metal raked against metal. It landed, if you could call it that, with a rumbling of shaken ground and scattering of dust, choking the atmosphere with debris. Brendle and Anki shielded their eyes and held their breath as everything settled around them. They watched as the port airlock cycled open, Brendle with his weapon drawn, the cold steel reminding him of the threat that might appear on the other side of the airlock. He didn’t want to make the same mistake and get shot at for the second time in one day. At least this time he didn’t feel responsible for crashing the ship, though it might have benefited if he had helped pilot it. The ship didn’t appear to be Greshian, but his was a hated race regardless of who they might encounter.
The airlock was open now, but they saw no one on the other side. Anki squinted to look through the unsettled dust wafting in front of the airlock. “I don’t see anyone,” she said. “Do you think no one is onboard?” It was a question that didn’t sit well with Brendle. The ship wasn’t likely to be empty and the attempt at trickery might mean they were in more danger than they bargained for.
Brendle’s grip on his weapon tightened. “No, there’s no way that kind of landing was computerized. There’s someone onboard who just doesn’t want to be seen,” he said quietly. “Stay behind me.”
Anki ducked behind him, keeping her movements small as he moved forward in a crouch. The scattering of dust on the wind peppered his face with grit and he tasted it on his teeth, but he didn’t have time to focus on the mouthful of dirt. It was more important to stay vigilant, alive.
The rocks were loose in this area. Not the most appropriate of landing spots, Brendle thought. Even ships without engines requiring air intakes could be damaged if foreign material got snatched up into the controls or vectoring nozzles. The most amateur of pilots would have found a more solid surface for landing. It only made his theory of someone being onboard more realistic. “Do you see anything?” he asked.
Anki peered over his shoulder. “No,” she answered. He felt her breath hot on his neck, the rapid breathing of nervousness hanging heavy in the air around him. He could
relate, he was scared shitless right now if he was honest with himself.
“Drop the weapon, sir. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.” The voice seemed to come from all around him.
Brendle looked around, ignoring the demand for him to drop his gun. The thought of them prying it from his cold dead fingers came to mind, but he wasn’t much in the mood for dying today. He lifted his hands instead, refusing to drop the weapon to the ground, but hoping it was a display that showed the unknown man that he was willing to not resort to violence. Willingness and being forced into violence were two different things in his mind and with the day he was having Brendle wasn’t much in the mood for forced compromise. He wasn’t dropping anything.
“When a man tells you he will shoot you, you take him seriously, yet when I said I would shoot you, you kept walking towards me. Do you have a problem with women?” Anki asked, the sarcasm heavy on her tongue. He would have laughed if fear wasn’t an all-consuming emotion coursing through his veins at the moment.
“What?” Brendle asked, looking back at her, distracted. That was a mistake.
A shot rang out and Anki grabbed his collar, pulling him towards her before the projectile hit either of them. Somewhere in the swift movement Brendle realized his weapon was no longer in his hands, but instead was in hers as she aimed it towards a man hiding behind the aft section of the ship.
