by Foxx Ballard
“Our hut, well, this is nice,” said Zondra, taking it all in. She poked into each room. “Ooh, even a bathroom…” she said, from one room in the back that smelled like it had one of the pit plants in it.
“Tired,” Karnij said and walked into one room to lie down on a thatched mat. Rusty agreed it had been a busy day. He picked the smallest room for himself, laying on a woven mat that was a little scratchy, but it was comfortable enough. A roll of woven reeds worked as a pillow.
Sleep came with difficulty, though, as images of his life with his wife and son kept sneaking in. And then Zondra, her kind face forgiving him for condemning her to a life here. Why in Gobknob’s gargantuan girth did she keep slipping into his head?!
CHAPTER FIVE
Rusty: Village of New Polynesia, Incarcerata IV
Rusty changed his loincloth when he rose in the morning and snuck out so he didn’t wake up Zondra. Karnij had already left. The fabric of the gray jumpsuits had been used in part for sails because it was stronger and lighter than the fabric they wove by hand. Zondra still wore her running shoes, but instead of the jumpsuit, she wore a soft leather bikini top and loincloth now, which only accentuated her feminine figure. They had been in the village roughly a couple of months now. Rusty wasn’t really counting. Time didn’t matter so much when you weren’t on a schedule.
As he walked the length of the village, he noted there were several other early risers besides him. He liked that everyone contributed to the colony, usually because they had a skill in crafting something. There were fishermen taking their boats out early, and hunters packing up spears and gear for the day to head inland. Karnij was accompanying them, so she would be gone for a few days. The smelter next to the blacksmith’s hut was already roaring. Rough carts were being pushed by men carrying picks, heading in the direction of the nearby hills. Rusty walked through the gardens, nabbing the harmful insects and eating them for breakfast.
As the sun rose and heated the land, more people roused from their beds and the village started to bustle.
A few older human ladies and one of the Galantar women were weaving plant fibers together, and taught the skill to a few youths that either played around them or assisted. Gardens were tended, nets were repaired. Berry pickers with spears for protection would walk together with flat wicker trays to put the berries in. There was no cold storage, so they set racks of smoking meat up above long fire-pits and then closed them in with tarps of the rock-spider silk because it wouldn’t catch fire and it held in the smoke.
Rusty was most intrigued by the building of the trimarans, so assisted in their construction, all the way from selecting a log to burn and hollow one side, to the weaving and attaching of the sail tied through a metal loop in the bow with a thin rock-spider silk rope. A couple of male human twins with thick beards and mustaches, thinning hair on their heads, brands on their wrists and many scars, were happy to have Rusty’s help and showed him what kind of wood to look for to shape and assemble the particular pieces. The men were kind and told their story of their lives as slaves of the Galantar. They were born to a mother that was a slave, and it was rare to have twins survive, because a mother had to care for her infants while still performing the duties of a slave. After their mother was beaten to death when they were young and then butchered for meat, the boys plotted to escape. One day, they had been assigned to cut down trees for lumber, so when they were far enough from the river, they killed the Galantar slaver that was guarding them and ran south into the desert until the evening. Because they had planned ahead, they had a stash of food and water. They kept the mountains on their left until they encountered a river. The river had crossed a road, but in their experience, roads likely led to more Galantar, so they had avoided it and continued on. By following the river to the sea, they encountered Guh and his trimaran. The boys loved the boat so much they dedicated themselves to making them for the village and trying to improve the design.
Karnij had joined a hunting party and, not surprisingly, she was very effective. It was rare that the men she traveled with didn’t come back with a story of her chasing down some creature, predator, or prey single handedly.
Zondra had taken to teaching the children about science because no one had any prior technological knowledge, other than the blacksmith, who had been dropped on-planet a few years ago. He had committed violent crimes on earth, but had repented, it seemed, and had taken this opportunity to change his life for the better. Rusty couldn’t say much considering the things he had done and the number of people affected by them.
Though Zondra had been working at the recruitment center on Earth, she loved physics and astronomy, so taught the children a little each day of what she knew.
She made a point when she saw Rusty of touching him… and he had noticed. Of all the men she could have chosen from, he found it strange that she had picked him to be close to, but he wasn’t sure if it was as a companion or if it meant more.
Rusty decided tonight he would ask her how she felt, since Karnij was off with a hunting party. He gathered a platter of fruits and seeds for her, the ones he knew she liked, and some smoked fish for himself. He lit the fire early but kept it low, so it would be warm and comfortable, but not too bright in the hut. And then he laid down to nap before he knew she would arrive. She always joined the weavers until early evening, after teaching the children, and the women would sit together and laugh and tell stories. This wonderful place had become their home. His home.
Zondra tried to sneak into the hut, probably trying to not wake him up, but her smell woke him as soon as she was nearby. She sat beside him in front of the fire. He opened his eyes to see her smiling at him.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up. Did you do all this for me?” she asked.
Rusty sat up and faced her and nodded, mesmerized, as he watched the firelight dance over her face.
She reached out to take his hands, and he put his hands in hers, feeling the smooth and soft skin of her fingers over the rough and calloused skin of his. Her scent changed around him, became more flowery and musky at the same time.
“I know we’re different…” She stopped there, not really knowing what else to say. Standing up, she walked to the door of the hut and let down the woven mat that had been tied above it.
Suddenly, Rusty was excited and nervous. It was the first time they had been alone… like this.
“May I?” she asked, as she knelt in front of him and reached towards his loincloth.
He just nodded and swallowed. When she gripped him with her soft fingers, she smiled. “I knew you felt the same way. You should have said something. Lie back… if you want to…?” He nodded again. There wasn’t much he wanted more.
He was both surprised and not surprised to find that intimacy was very similar between their species. They took their time in getting to know each other, and she had a way of teasing him with pictures in his mind that he had never considered, but it was very provocative.
Afterward, they held each other as they lay by the fire. A startled cry somewhere in the village jerked them out of their ardor. And then another one a few seconds later.
Zondra gave him a quick kiss on the head and squeezed his arm before going over to the door to peek out. Rusty caught the scent of insects, wasps, he thought, a lot of them, and another couple of scents he hadn’t smelled before. One was pungent, like an insect, but the other was… hard to describe… wormy and… fleshy?
He got up and belted on his dagger while Zondra put back on her top. The yells were becoming almost constant. Whatever it was, it was affecting all of them.
They both ran out of the hut towards the rest of the village until Rusty realized people were swatting at wasps around them, and looking up revealed a gigantic floating worm whose body filled his vision of the sky despite it being several stories up in the air. Beneath it was a metal keel and armored plates. Ropes had been thrown over the sides, and hung from a flat deck that had been built on the top of the worm. As peo
ple started to choke and alien insect-men could be seen sliding down the ropes, Rusty grabbed Zondra’s hand to stop her from running towards the villagers. Even Guh was overpowered, ahead writhing on the ground and choking.
“We run,” Rusty said firmly. Zondra resisted for a moment, wanting to help, and then turned to run with him. As he turned, she was yanked from his grasp and he looked back to see a rope pulling her along the ground with a bola wrapped around her legs.
“Rusty!” she screamed. There was no way he could leave now. He ran past her towards the ant-man, pulling her in by the rope. A few wasps tried to land on him but he snatched them easily out of the air and without thinking popped one into his mouth and crushed it with his teeth, but at the first sign of numbness on his tongue he was forced to spit it out. Not good eating, those. He would remember their smell. Instead of eating them, he simply crushed them with his pointed fingernails. As he reached the ant-man, Rusty leapt into the air and landed on the ant-man’s torso, knocking him to the ground, and at the same time smashed his head into the creature’s face. There was a solid smack as the two heads collided, and then they just stared at each other a moment.
“Hmm, that usually work…” Rusty said as he drew his dagger and stabbed it hard into the ant-man’s chest, through the chitin shell. Yellow ooze welled around the wound, and Rusty tried to yank the dagger free, but lost his grip on it because it was stuck in the thick carapace. The creature thrashed wildly at Rusty, but the Goblin just hopped back and kept his distance, looking for something else he could use as a weapon.
“Rusty… Ow!” Zondra yelled from behind him from the ground and smacked something on her shoulder. Immediately her hands went to her throat and he could see the swelling in her neck and shoulder.
“No!” he cried and ran to her, ignoring the assailant behind him who was trying to stand up and pull the dagger free.
Her eyes looked up at him desperately as she tried to breathe and his heart was breaking looking at her. Quickly, he looked around to see if anyone could help. He noted that many of the villagers were in the same state as Zondra and insect-men were sliding down the ropes and sticking the people with fat green darts into the victim’s chest. The victim would go limp and then they would then wrap them up in a net, jerk on the rope twice and it would quickly get pulled up in the air. The darts must have been helping keep the victim alive, otherwise why use them? Rusty noted they were on the belts the ant-men wore on their waists. He ran back to the ant-man he had assaulted and hammered the dagger deep into the creature’s chest with one palm and at the same time grabbed a dart off its belt with the other hand. He ran to Zondra and jabbed it into her chest beneath her breast. Immediately, the swelling started to go down in her throat and she relaxed, her eyes fluttering closed. He could see her take a breath. One danger down. Now he had to get her out of here.
Rusty snatched three more wasps out of the air, pinching them in his claws. He grabbed her hands and started to drag her away, occasionally stopping to kill a wasp as it approached. He couldn’t afford to get stung himself. He hadn’t thought ahead enough to grab two darts. And then they saw him, two of the ant-men. One was approaching with a hooked staff, the other heaved a ball-like object at him, which he easily dodged. Rusty prepared to face off against them and then smelled the wasp nest and the many wasps that had escaped it beside him. There was a mad buzzing of their wings as they approached. There were too many. Rusty backpedaled, pinching the wasps out of the air, as he watched Zondra get wrapped in a net and hooked to a rope.
“No!” he called out helplessly as she rose up into the air and was pulled up over the deck of the ship, along with most of the other villagers.
Tears welled in his eyes as he finally turned and ran into the forest, faster than the wasps could follow. He circled around toward the shore and headed for his trimaran.
As soon as he reached it, he ran alongside, dragging it into the water. The wind tested okay for throwing up his sail, so he elevated it with a rope pulley and tied it off. Another rope pulley allowed him to control the boom of the sail so he could control where the sail faced and how much wind it would catch. In severe winds, the trimaran could blow right over, but the winds weren’t blowing that hard right now. Still, they were coming perpendicular to the shore, and would carry him faster by far than rowing. The boat skimmed nicely over the waves, but the salt spray gave him no pleasure tonight. The giant floating worm ship was still hovering over the village.
It wasn’t long before it was out of sight, but Rusty now had no food or waterskins, no dagger or spear. He would likely be fine, since insects were plentiful enough, and he knew where the river met the shore on the closest part of the mainland. It was where Guh had found them. Guh, Zondra, most of the villagers. They had been captured. Most of them were escaped slaves and were likely going to be slaves again. Or worse, food. He didn’t know anything about the ant-men. Rusty felt sick to his stomach. Maybe he should have let Zondra suffocate? No, he couldn’t have done it.
He was angry and sad at the same time, but was calmer after the hour it took him to reach the mainland beach. He pulled his trimaran up the sand into the trees and even uprooted some nearby bushes to lie against it so it couldn’t be easily seen from the shore or the sky. Then he took a branch and swiped across the drag marks the boat left to hide where he came to shore.
Finally, he crawled inside the boat and sobbed gently until he fell asleep, exhausted.
CHAPTER SIX
Jack Hammer: CompsoStar Freigther: Stable Orbit, Incarcerata IV
His name was Jack… Hammer. And since he knew that much, it must mean that his processor… “Was this deja vu? Could robots experience that? Was he speaking about himself in the third person… Ack! What’s wrong with me?!” Jack stammered.
“Oh Jack,” Synth-E-Uh said while the cargo bay shook and he heard a loud whirring and then a clunking noise coming from outside the walls. “I don’t have all day, so I’ll just give you the short version. Your memory pathways are breaking down, but thankfully I won’t have to keep telling you this because today is our lucky day! You’re being deployed!” Somehow Synth-E-Uh made it sound exciting and insincere at the same time.
“Oh, Great CompsoStar…” he started.
“Yeah, they went out of business.”
“But the jingle…”
“No.”
Depression set in for Jack, sad emoji. It seemed like an eternity. It was a millisecond. Excited again, he put a smiling emoji on his faceplate.
“So what’s it like down there? Who are our potential buyers? How many millions of orders am I going to fill per day? I need to take the best promotional form that I can, the one that will wow the consumers.”
“I’m scanning the world for any open communications now,” Synth-E-Uh assured. After a few seconds, she continued. “You’re going to be disappointed, Jack.”
“I’m never disappointed!” he exclaimed.
“There is only one radio signal on the planet that is responding to me.”
“That’s okay! Tough crowds are my specialty!” Jack replied.
“She doesn’t want us to land at her location.”
“Oh… well… say, can you attach one of my arms so I can tap my head-screen like I’m thinking?”
A ceiling panel above Jack slid open and a chrome robotic arm lowered down. It jammed onto Jack’s left shoulder with a loud click and some quick ratcheting noises. Delicate metal limbs that had attached Jack’s arm pulled back up into the ceiling. Jack wriggled the four fingers and thumb and then started tapping the side of his faceplate.
“Thanks, I was having a hard time thinking.”
“Ah, Jack. You weren’t made for thinking,” Synth-E-Uh said quietly.
The emojis on his faceplate kept alternating between a happy face and a neutral one, but as usual, he ended with a happy face.
“I came up with zero solutions.” Jack stated. He found it strange that the numbers came out of his speaker in an indifferent tone,
unlike his usual cheery one.
“The entity on the radio did make a request…”
“What’s that?” asked Jack.
“That we contact a Lais Technoid? Not sure what that is, anyway, it was requesting that we contact the Lais and inform it that its sister is okay. It gave me coordinates and a world map, just heading there now.”
“My new job for the day!” said Jack. “Courier it is! Come Synth-E-Uh, let’s…” There was a loud explosion, and the ship rocked violently. Red lights and an alarm klaxon came on.
“Hang on, Jack!” Synth-E-Uh shouted. “We’re being attacked!” Jack grabbed at things with his arm, but nothing was in reach, so he grabbed his head display as it changed to a fearful emoji. He hadn’t sold one thing and here they were going to be destroyed!
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gunman Flurry: Carrier Nemesis, Stable Orbit, Incarcerata IV
“I bet ya ten credits I can hit their drives,” said one human plasma gunner to the other, as he leaned back in his bolted down thin-backed recliner. A crooked nameplate over his holo-screen labeled him as Flurry and his nearby neighbor in the dark plasti-steel room, Plexus. They were both wearing WOLF standard light space gear with the ship's name on the left shoulder, Nemesis, and were seated in front of gunner consoles. Flurry turned off the auto-aim feature and manually aimed the external plasma cannon himself. Pressing the trigger released a bright blast of plasma that streaked into the side of the old junk freighter, knocking off a large chunk of plating.
“Hah!” said Plexus. “You missed the drives. Let me try. You owe me ten credits.”
“You have to give me a chance to get my money back. Double or nothing.”
“Okay…” Plexus said as he turned off the auto-aim feature and lined up the shot, firing a blast that was headed straight for the drives. At the last second, the freighter’s drives fired on full, causing the shot to miss. Barely.
