Caveman Alien's Trap

by Calista Skye

  The warrior then started talking to her, and his deep voice was clearly audible even over the roar from the air they were falling through. He spoke calmly and mildly, looking her right in the eyes the whole time. And his eyes – hadn't they been a very vivid blue before? Now they were definitely taking on a purple hue. But maybe it was just a trick of the light in the cabin.

  Harper was pretty sure the whole spaceship was on fire – outside the windows, there were only blue flames to be seen, as if the hull itself was burning brightly. She only registered it in the background, because most of her attention was occupied with the warrior and his face and his voice and the purple light in his eyes. He talked to her still, his deep voice calm and monotonous, his language so melodic that the hard consonants added depth to it. And then he smiled. It was not a grin, just a calm and reassuring smile that warmed her up while he gently squeezed her shoulder.

  And then they crashed.

  It was just a bang that rattled the whole cabin, but it held together. Then there was another bang, and Harper was thrown against the webbing that held her securely. The warrior calmly took his hand off her shoulder and then pulled a lever. The next bang was different – flatter and harder, somehow, and suddenly Harper was completely alone and in darkness and cold, moving so fast through the air that she had to clench her eyes shut because of the wind.

  Wind. She was no longer inside the spaceship.

  She opened her eyes to little slits and saw an arrow-shaped object crash into the rocky ground far below her feet. Flames shot up from it as it tumbled across the surface, rolling around and shooting sparks and fire like a Catherine wheel that had gone insane.

  She realized that she would also be crashing into the ground very soon, because she was very high up in the air. Before she had time to panic, there was a noise above her and she looked up in the night sky. Ah. That was probably a parachute. It was not like any parachute she had ever seen, but it was clearly attached to the webbing around her very firmly and braked her descent so well that the wind she had felt was now completely gone. She was no longer falling, just descending gently through the cold night air on the alien planet Bry.

  Bry. The fire planet. Not a planet Harper would have chosen to crash land on. Sure, landing on Bry very gently, ideally on a luxury space liner with a good spa and a decent restaurant, along with friends and experts to look at the fire from pretty close up, but not so close that it was dangerous at all – yeah, that she would have liked. If there were firefighters among the group. And a couple of fire trucks.

  But this, landing on the surface alone after being thrown from a crashing spaceship, with no way of getting off it and only a garden trowel to fight the eternal fire with ... yeah, this she would not have picked.

  The crashed spaceship had come to a rest on the ground, and the wreckage was still burning fiercely. But it was clear that Harper would land a good distance away from it.

  And the warrior pilot? She looked around, but she couldn't see another parachute. It was pretty dark around her, but the burning wreck beneath her illuminated her own parachute just fine. So it should have been possible to see his, too.

  Shit. What if he had crashed with the ship? What if he was at this very moment burning to death in the wreck? Maybe there had only been one parachute on board, and he had let her have it. He had been so careful and firm in tightening the harness around her, like a father fastening his child in the seat belts in a car and pulling them taut so they'd work as well as possible.

  She knew nothing about the warrior. He might be an axe murderer. The fact that he was absolutely carrying an axe around with him was a pretty good indication, Harper couldn't help thinking. But still. He had been decent to her. More or less. Sure, putting a damn leash on her wrist and then dragging her into his ship was perhaps not the absolute peak of gentlemanly behavior. But that was probably just theatrics for the benefit of the stinky aliens. So Harper was willing to give him the benefit of doubt.

  Yeah, she knew nothing about him. But she really wished she wouldn't have to be alone. Alone on the fire planet.

  She glanced to the horizon. The sky was definitely brighter there, and it did seem to be pulsating. It looked like the eternally wandering fire wasn't that far away. Well, maybe it had been here not so long ago and it would be a year until it came back. If so, then she was probably pretty safe for now.

  She was getting close to the ground and would have to prepare for landing soon. She could see bare rocks where the wreck of the spaceship had now pretty much burned itself out. That was a good sign. One thing that was known about the fire planet was that the intense fire burned all the vegetation completely away, so if it had passed by here not to long ago, bare rock and ashes was probably exactly what could be expected. And that was what Harper was seeing underneath her.

  And in front of her -

  She gasped and leaned back reflexively, but because she was hanging in mid-air it only started her dangling back and forth. She only had time to give a panicked yelp before she smashed into a huge tree that she had only discovered at the last second.

  The tree trunk was smooth, and she couldn't get a good grip in it, even if she tried to dig her nails into the bark. It was thin enough that she could clasp her arms and legs around it, but it was so smooth that she slid down the trunk in a display that seemed pretty undignified. She didn't meet any branches on her way down to the ground, and after a few seconds her butt encountered hard rock as she plopped down.

  She was about to get to her feet when a silent sheet of silky fabric draped itself over her and made everything very dark. She panicked and flailed wildly against it before she realized what it was.

  Ah. The parachute. Of course.

  She pulled the fabric off her and looked up. That was a tall tree she had slid down. She was lucky she hadn't hit it further up, because the crown looked huge and even spiky.

  There were many other trees just like it all around her, along with a thick underbrush of bushes and smaller trees. The chemical smell was very strong, as if she had landed in the middle of some kind of alcohol spill. The fumes were making her nauseous, too.

  She got to her feet and stood on shaking knees on the surface of the alien planet.

  The surface of Bry. The fire planet. There was vegetation all around her, so ripe with flammable organic chemicals that it was plain that the fire hadn't passed through here for months. But it would soon be here. The horizon pulsated with yellow light.

  A hand shot out from behind her and Harper squealed as someone grabbed her wrist and quickly tied a rope around it.

  She looked up. It was the warrior. His eyes were flashing red. And he wasn't smiling anymore.

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