by Sara King
A few yards away, the creature watched her, tense. Ten feet long, with huge, powerful arms and a thick, massive neck, the creature gleamed in the sunlight. Bright silver, it had big, half-moon scales covering its entire body, with short arms that ended in six long, webbed fingers tipped in sharp silver claws. The body looked vaguely seal-like, but the tail was as powerful and as distinctive as a shark’s, with minor flippers on either side of the underbelly, keeping it upright. Its eyes were located on the front of its head, indicating it was a meat-eater.
The alien watched her, poised to flip back into the ocean at her slightest movement.
“Nice to meet you,” Athenais said. Then she stuffed the bloody chunk of fish into her mouth and started chewing.
The creature continued to watch her. While blocky and powerful in the upper body, it was sleek, perfectly hydrodynamic. Its most distinguishing feature was the powerful tail. Almost six feet long, it made up most of the alien’s body. She guessed that it could probably kill much larger predators with a single blow from its tail.
When she finished, she said, “So what are you, exactly?”
The creature watched her a long moment, obviously in some sort of internal debate. Finally, it said, “Taal.”
She was so stunned it spoke Utopian that she just blinked at it and said, “Taal?”
“Yes. My name.”
“Uh. Okay. What are you, Taal?”
It bared long white fangs in an expression that was definitely not a smile. “I am People.”
“You haven’t been categorized? What species index are you? Obviously oxygen-breather, since you aren’t dying as we speak. Are you carbon or sulphur-based?”
The alien’s face contorted. Even with the stiff, fishlike lips, it was very expressive, in a lupine way. “Your words mean nothing to me, human.”
“You male or female, Taal?”
The creature scowled at her. “What does it matter?”
Athenais shrugged. “You’re hanging around. I thought you wanted to make conversation.”
“We do not conform to your rules of sex.” But it continued to watch her, almost with the morbid curiosity of a kid watching a worm roast on a sidewalk.
“Fair enough,” Athenais said. “But for simplicity’s sake, I’ll think of you as a male. I hate conversing with aliens without having a mental image of their gender.”
It bared its teeth in another smile-that-was-not-a-smile. “I’m not ‘male.’”
“Are there many of you out there, Taal?” Athenais asked, firmly classifying the creature as a ‘he’ in her mind. “I’ve never heard of an intelligent marine life-form, and I’ve been around awhile. Intelligence seems to favor land-dwellers for some reason.”
Taal scowled at her with gigantic white fish-eyes and changed the subject. “The Intruders set you afloat. Usually they kill their enemies.”
“So I’ve heard,” Athenais said. She flopped back to the sand and sighed. Her mouth tasted slimy and fishy, and when she tried to swallow, her tongue just slid around in the slime, no saliva to wash it down. “You gonna untie me now?” she said to the sky.
Taal didn’t respond.
“I’m unarmed, obviously,” Athenais said. “You can check my underwear if you want, but you probably don’t want to go anywhere near that canister. It’s due to explode any minute now.”
Taal pulled himself closer with his stubby forearms, dragging his ten-foot-length awkwardly. Athenais shifted and he froze, looking like a panicked space-rat.
“Lay still, human,” he growled, and it sounded like a rumble from a redcat.
“You got it,” Athenais said.
The alien grunted and closed the distance. Holding up his weight with one stubby forearm, he awkwardly began sawing at the ropes with a broken clamshell with the other. Now that she had a better look at him, she could see a large, bulbous growth protruding from the back of his neck. With the sun on the other side of the alien, she could almost see through it. The tumor was one big pustule, filled to bursting with a clear liquid.
Athenais reached out to touch the growth. “You sick?”
Taal jerked back, cutting her fingers on his scales.
“Ow! Damn it! What the hell?” Athenais closed her bleeding hand into a fist. “You’re one jumpy bastard. Damn!”
Taal scowled at her, his huge pupils wide and dangerous.
Athenais reached down and took the clamshell he had been using. She started sawing through the ropes on her own, then gave a triumphant laugh as they fell away. Soggy silk seemed to lose its integrity. She wondered if Juno had planned on that. Probably. Better for digestion.
Elated, Athenais stood up—and immediately toppled back to the ground as her vision dimmed to a dark tunnel. Dehydration, she guessed. She took several deep breaths, then sat up again and glanced at the island behind her. There was no question it was an island, and a small one, at that. She could see the shoreline on the other side through the thin patch of trees.
When she looked back, the Taal was again poised to flop back into the ocean. Seeing the tenseness in his alien body, she had the sudden feeling she had to calm him down or she’d never see her mysterious benefactor ever again.
“Where’d you find that water, Taal? Is there a spring on the island?”
“No. It’s a long swim from here.”
“Think you could take me there?”
“No.”
“Then you want me to starve here?”
Taal moved closer to the water.
“Wait!” Athenais cried. “Why save me just to strand me on an island?”
Taal slapped the ground with his tail twice and disappeared in the surf. Athenais realized disgustedly that her boat was gone.
“Great!” she shouted, throwing the clamshell at the water. “Just great! Damn fickle alien bastards! I hate the whole lot of you!”
Athenais got up and stumbled around the island, but found no food. She waded out into the water during low tide and pried some bright red shellfish from the rocks, then broke them open and ate them. They were surprisingly good. She just hoped they weren’t laced with a neural toxin. A narcotic might be nice, but poison was a pain in the ass.
When Athenais finished eating and moved to the edge of her boulder, she came to the unpleasant realization that the nice, dry rock she had chosen as her living-room table was now surrounded by water several feet deep. While she had been busy with the shellfish, the tide had come in, and fast.
Grimacing, Athenais crawled from the rock and reluctantly began to wade back through the cold, awkward wetness. She hated water. Such an unnatural substance, especially when cold. Humans were never meant to flounder around in cold, contaminant-ridden H20. If they’d meant to be wet, they would’ve been born with fins. At best, water should be sterilized, hot, and preferably laced with antibacterials. In fact, whenever Athenais found herself in situations like this, wading through some unknown creek or seabed after a crash or a marooning, she always caught herself wondering what kind of weird parasites and viruses could be crawling into her various pores and orifices whenever she fully immersed herself in the bacterial soup that was a planet’s natural water bodies.
Stupid water. She hated the stuff. The worst possible way she could imagine to die was to drown, with nothing but cold, amoeba-ridden liquid seeping into her eyes and nose and mouth… Athenais was grimacing at that thought, already having waded most of the way back to shore, the cool water already up to her breasts as she moved along on her tiptoes, when her feet slipped and went under.
Despite her long life, Athenais did not know how to swim. In fact, being a spacer who detested the stuff, it had never even occurred to her that there was a trick to it. Thrashing, panicking, she began gulping saltwater. In moments, she was choking, gasping, completely forgetting about the beach, mindlessly trying to flail her way back to her rock.
Something grabbed her leg under the surface and at first Athenais thought it was Taal trying to help her. Then the light nudge became razor-sha
rp teeth puncturing her flesh and pulling her under. Her lungs burned and she tried to kick at whatever it was with her other leg, but the thing held fast and began to shake her.
Athenais breathed in water and lost consciousness.
Ragnar sat at the window, watching the panic on the docks when the empty canister was discovered. Older Strangers began to issue orders, barking commands for more nets and crew. People scrambled over the ships and dropped nets into the water, trying to fish the floaters back out.
Then something very interesting began to happen.
One by one, the men manning the nets collapsed. Panicked men retreated from the edges of the dock, staring at the water in horror. Three Priestesses were lead to the center of the dock, their scarlet robes fluttering in the breeze. They began chanting in the off-pitch tone of the deaf, then they, too, collapsed.
The three Warriors leading the Priestesses dragged their fallen charges back to the entrance to the wall and began shouting at the Merchant who had delivered the floaters. He began shouting back and several more Warriors had to come out to restrain them.
This was turning out even better than he hoped.
Odd, that a few round blobs could cause so much havoc.
Ragnar walked to the opposite side of the wall and looked down. He was about twenty stories up, staring down at the complex array of ponds and agriculture covering the inside of the walled landmass. His father and brother were trapped in the walled enclosure on the other side of the island. Ragnar had not returned to check on them since the day he escaped. Too risky.
He glanced up. At the top of the wall, almost precisely above the enclosure where his family was imprisoned, a spaceship sat squatting out over the ledge like a quiet sentry. He guessed that the landing pad was there, near the same area as the Emperor’s gardens. Around the ship, he could see twenty Warriors stationed on the ramparts, watching the ship.
It’s going to take a miracle to get out of here.
Sighing, Ragnar crossed back to the window overlooking the dock and looked back down upon the chaos he had created. Tattooed men were pouring huge canisters of colorless fluid into the ocean, though few of them finished delivering their product before they collapsed. Did the floaters produce some sort of poisonous fumes? One that was toxic to humans, but not his own biology? Highly unlikely. After all, Ragnar had hefted them through the air like footballs. He frowned, trying to puzzle it out.
Suddenly, a Warrior rushed down the dock with a burning spear and lobbed it into the water. As he retreated, the ocean exploded in a wave of heat. Ragnar pulled back as the plume of fire shot upward, billowing like rocket fuel.
As the ocean burned, the same high-pitched keening from earlier began again. The sound intensified until it was all Ragnar could do just to stay upright, feeling as if the alien shriek was piercing his eardrums. Ragnar backed away, pressing his hands to his ears.
Very slowly, the howl died away, leaving heart-pounding silence broken only by the crashing of the waves below. More timidly, this time, Ragnar returned to the window and glanced down.
Blue-white floaters were bobbing on the surface, the flames eating at their bulbous, fluid-filled bodies. The men on the docks were spearing them with long poles, dragging the basketball-sized organisms through the burning waters and up onto the sunbleached planks.
As Ragnar watched, the Strangers punctured the bulbs and drained the clear fluid into ornate containers. Then they tossed the deflated bodies back into the burning ocean.
He frowned.
Below, the Strangers were kneeling before six Priestesses, who were accepting the ornate containers filled with floater liquid. Was this some sort of victory rite?
He did not have a chance to find out. A familiar voice blasted over the island-wide intercom, making him flinch.
Ragnar Reeve of the Second House, it is the Emperor’s Will that you return to your holding area immediately. If you do not, we will kill one of your kind for every day you wait. You have until dawn tomorrow to show yourself.
So. The game had come to an end.
Frustrated, Ragnar started walking. He had no doubt, if their mysterious benefactor was what they thought she was, that she would prove to be as brutally efficient as Athenais in forcing them to capitulate to her demands. Which left him to do…what? As far as he could tell, there was no way off the planet. The government had no enemies to work with. The entire planet was one global government, powered by brainwashed fanatics. Which meant, as much as he hated it, he had to go back.
And soon. He knew that she would kill to bring him back—the last thing she would tolerate would be a shifter running loose on her perfect little world. Unfortunately, he’d been wandering for days, and he wasn’t sure he could find the place again if he tried. Debating this, Ragnar finally stopped a Merchant in the hall, grabbing him by the jacket to slow him when the man tried to simply sidestep him and brush past.
The Merchant gave him a horrified look and tore his ornate blue-and-gold coat off as if Ragnar had contaminated it with his touch.
“I’ll report you, you disgusting creature,” the Merchant said, throwing the garment to the floor. “You ruined a good coat!”
“I’m the shifter,” Ragnar said, once again thinking that humans were stupid, easily manipulated lunatics. “I need to get back to the Emperor.”
The Merchant’s eyes widened and he glanced at his coat as if he were re-assessing its value. “You are? Prove it.”
“I’d rather not. It takes too much energy. Just get the Emperor.”
Yet the infuriating human simply peered at him. “How do I know you’re not a Stranger trying to get out of execution?”
Ragnar realized he was going to have to shift sooner or later to prove himself, so he shifted back to his normal human form. He went slow to save energy, but he was still exhausted when he was finished.
The Merchant stared at him.
“Now that you’ve seen, I need some food,” Ragnar said, feeling dizzy. “It was too soon after my last yeit.”
“Of course,” the Merchant babbled, his outrage gone. “Come. My cook makes a very good floater tart. You can rest in my room while I get the Warriors.”
“Thank you,” Ragnar said. He followed the man down several flights of stairs until he could hear the surf crashing on the walls of rock outside the windows.
“Here,” the Merchant said, indicating a door. Inside, a small, sparse bed with a utilitarian trunk at the end were the only furnishings. It looked more like a prison than a domicile. For a moment, Ragnar felt sorry for the man.
“Please stay here while I tell the others. My cook will be here in a few minutes with your food.”
“Not floaters,” Ragnar said. “Fish is fine, but not floaters.”
The Merchant gave him an odd look, then nodded. “Of course.” Then he departed.
Ragnar reclined on the bed, feeling frustrated and helpless. He should have known they would use his family against him. Their captor must have known it too, that’s why she wasn’t too worried about him escaping.
He had only been lying in bed a few minutes before a graying woman appeared with a platter of steaming pink fish. The succulent aroma preceded her and Ragnar winced as spikes of pain laced through his body in response to the sight of food.
“That was fast,” Ragnar said appreciatively. “Thank you.”
She smiled and nodded to him, set the steaming platter on the bed beside him, then departed.
Ragnar breathed in the savory smells and sighed. Maybe it wasn’t so bad being a guest here, after all. Hell, all the Emperor wanted was for him to breed. That wasn’t so bad, right?
He was halfway through his meal when he blacked out.
Athenais awoke on the beach to the stench of blood and a horrible burning in her chest. She sat up with a start and her lungs convulsed. Saltwater spewed forth, making a divot in the sand as she coughed it from her lungs. Shaking, exhausted, she didn’t realize she was not alone until Taal spoke.
�
��You were dead, human. I heard your heart stop.”
The alien had a red gash down his side, the source of the blood. It was oozing down into the water, staining the surf red.
Athenais looked down at her leg. The bitten limb was pink and inflamed, but the bite wound was gone. She eyed the slash along his side. Not a slash, she realized, upon closer inspection. A bite. Scales all along his underside were missing, and she could see holes in the flesh in a semicircle, where his belly had almost been ripped out. “You all right?” she asked tentatively.
“Sharks,” he said, looking out at the surf with a snarl. “The Intruders brought them to wipe us out.”
“You scare them that much?” Athenais got up slowly so as to not alarm him.
“The elders do,” he said, watching her warily. “We grow throughout our lives. The old ones can sink their big ships.”
That would do it. Slowly as not to scare him, Athenais straightened and padded to the surf. Squatting, she cupped her hands in the saltwater. Then she started walking back toward the alien.
“What are you doing?” His words came out as a snarl.
“I’m gonna help you clean that up,” Athenais said, not slowing. “You’ve got sand in it.”
Taal bristled. “I only need to swim, human.”
“Well, right now, you can’t swim because that blood’s going to attract more sharks, isn’t it?” She gestured at the crimson waves.
Taal glanced at the red surf and made a lupine scowl, showing sharp, needle-like teeth. When he turned back to her, his alien face was filled with mistrust…and fear.
Athenais ignored the look he was giving her and dumped the water over his wound. This she repeated until the sand around the alien was soaked with red and the gash was clean. Taal watched her through the entire process, silver eyes sharp, clawed hand half-curled like he was about to bury his fingers in her chest and be done with it.
When she finished, Athenais went to sit down on a dry patch of sand and stared out at the waves. That was just like Juno—bring in one hostile population to kill off another. And, now that she thought about it, there was another thing that she’d never done…
