by Archer, Mia
“Hold on. You’re going to get yourself killed or acquired. Just do what I say and you might make it out of here.”
A line from one of those scifi movies Natalie showed me came to mind. I smiled a half smile.
“Don’t you mean to say come with you if I want to live?”
The girl paused and stared. Her eyes narrowed, and that was enough of a distraction for her to miss the flying saucers gathering behind us.
“Look out!” I shouted, whirling her around so I was in between her and those alien jerks when they fired.
When the blast hit it was more a tickle than anything. Like I know they were throwing everything they had at me, we were talking the same weapons they’d used to fight off a giant irradiated lizard after all, but their best wasn’t enough to take me out.
“How are you still alive?” the girl asked.
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “I’ve had worse than this thrown at me.”
“So you’re from earth?” she asked.
“You bet your ass I am,” I said.
Whatever the aliens were firing at me stopped. Maybe they’d decided they were going to stop and make sure handiwork had killed us. Or maybe they’d realized whatever they were firing at me wasn’t doing the trick and now they were going to bring something even bigger into the fight.
I looked down at this woman under me. Although it would be more accurate to say she was in front of me. Pressed against one of the strange alien buildings.
I was suddenly very aware of how awkwardly nice it was being this close to a girl this pretty. She was no slouch in the looks department. She had dark hair and a killer body that was obvious under a purple catsuit.
A catsuit that looked a lot like something Natalie would wear. Very similar, yet different. Like the pattern on the material was different.
“Please stay where you are,” an amplified voice said from behind.
“We need to get out of here,” the girl said. “If we stick around they’re going to try and smother you, and you don’t want that to happen.”
“Smother me?” I asked.
That was a new one. I’d never been in a situation where I couldn’t breathe. I guess I’d flown in the upper atmosphere before where the air was supposed to be thinner, but I was never up there long enough that it became an issue.
Come to think of it, it was probably a good thing none of my enemies had ever thought to try taking me out by suffocating me considering I had no idea if it would work.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“No time to talk,” she said. “We need to get out of here.”
She pushed and I reluctantly floated away. I also felt a flash of guilt that I was reluctant about pulling away. I was still Natalie’s girl, for all that I was stranded on a planet somewhere out in the galaxy.
Or maybe somewhere out in the universe. I had no way of knowing if I was even in the same galaxy. I sure as heck wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
“Fine,” I said. “If we need to get out of here then we need to get out of here.”
The girl floated away from the building. Okay then. So she could fly. That made sense considering she was all the way up here, but the first time she hit me I’d been a little distracted by all the alien weapons firing on me to be sure.
She grinned and held her hand out. “Let’s do this right. Come with me if you want to live.”
I smiled right back at her. Those geeky movies weren’t really my thing, but I knew how happy it made Natalie when I played along. This girl reminded me of Natalie, and I figured if she was the only other human on this planet then I was going to play along until I had a better idea of what the heck was going on here.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
She shot off faster than I would’ve thought. Not that it was so fast that I couldn’t follow.
“So, um, do you want to maybe tell me where we’re going?” I shouted as I caught up with her.
The girl pointed down to the city below and then put a finger to her lips. The meaning was clear enough. I figured she was the first person I’d met on this planet who was trying to help me rather than shooting at me, so I went ahead and shut up.
When in alien Rome and all that.
It made it a little easier to shut up when people started firing at us again. I was getting really tired of this place. The aliens certainly weren’t very hospitable!
I’d always hoped if there really were aliens out there, that they’d be the friendly kind of aliens. Like that cute little puppet that ate the candy. Or those pointy eared guys who were always hanging out with that Shatner guy Natalie worshipped.
Natalie explained that in reality any aliens that might come along were going to be more like the ones from that Will Smith movie. The alien invasion one. Not the funny alien one. I couldn’t remember the name because I tended not to pay attention when Natalie put them on.
I was always way more interested in the chilling part of Netflix and chill, thank you very much.
I also always got the feeling Natalie was so certain about extraterrestrial animosity because she’d thwarted a few alien invasions herself, but I could never get her to come out and admit anything.
The evidence I’d found on this world seemed to back up that if there was alien life out there, it was hostile and trigger happy.
“Why is everyone on this planet trying to kill me?” I shouted.
“Get used to it,” the girl said. “They’ve been shooting at me for years.”
“But why are they shooting at me? I was trying to stop the giant monsters attacking their city!”
The girl moved a little closer so she didn’t have to shout as loudly. She looked like she was genuinely surprised that I was confused about getting fired on.
“Seriously? The worms want those giant monsters for themselves. They’ve been trying to take one over ever since they started showing up,” she said.
Okay. So I know she was trying to explain things to me, but if anything I was only more confused now than I’d been moments ago.
“You’re saying words and I know they all have definitions and mean stuff,” I said. “But I have no idea what all of that is supposed to mean when you string them together like that.”
The girl rolled her eyes. Even when she was rolling her eyes she was pretty. I knew I shouldn’t be thinking of her like that when I still had Natalie to think of, but Natalie was somewhere on the other side of the galaxy so whatever.
“Later,” she shouted. “Flying around in strong winds isn’t the best time to have a conversation.”
The girl had a point. I did some evasive maneuvers to avoid some of the crap being fired up at me. It was like I was in the middle of some old World War II movie about crazy bastards who flew giant hunks of metal into the middle of a metal storm to drop bombs with no escorts.
There was one big difference between me today and those magnificent bastards back then. In my case it’s not like the aliens could hurt me, but they were powerful enough to knock me off course and force me to constantly adjust my course.
“This is really annoying!”
“Here, let me take care of some of that for you,” the girl said.
She paused and pulled something off her side. I hadn’t noticed the thing there, but it was hard to miss once I got a good look at it. She held a comically oversized pistol that looked like it could do some damage. Like it looked like some sort of futuristic raygun or something. A real futuristic raygun and not something out of a cheesy old movie.
“What are you…”
The girl pointed the gun at a couple of open air flying saucers closing in on us. You’d think they’d realize what they were doing wasn’t working and give up, but not these jerks.
The girl had better luck with her shot. Her gun fired sizzling bolts that looked a lot like the kind of stuff Natalie used, though of course she wasn’t a fan of carrying anything that obviously looked like a weapon.
Which seemed a little silly. If she was
carrying around weapons that could level an entire building then it was a little ridiculous to put it in a shape that let her pretend it wasn’t only a weapon, but I’d learned not to question her design decisions.
The blasts slammed into the flying saucers and they disappeared in hulks of metal. I stared with a mixture of surprise and horror.
I guess I’d gotten so used to being around Natalie and her habit of trying to avoid collateral damage that it surprised me to see someone who didn’t give a damn what happened to the people they were firing on.
Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, the whole point of firing a weapon like that was to destroy whatever the weapon was pointed at. Natalie was the weirdo for trying to avoid causing damage and dancing around whether or not what she was using was even a weapon.
“You killed them!” I said.
“Some of them might survive the fall,” she said. “You never know. Either way, I took out their cats which means they’re free. Better to die free than live in the hell they were stuck in.”
Again the words leaving her mouth all had meaning, but that meaning was lost when she started stringing the words together in a sentence.
“Come on,” she said before I had a chance to really reflect on what she’d just done. “We’re not safe here. They’re going to send out more before you know it, and it’d be better if they didn’t track me and figure out where the hell my lair is.”
Lair. I didn’t like the sound of that. That was something that sounded downright villainous, and I wasn’t a villain.
But I had no choice. This woman was the only person on this whole planet who hadn’t tried to kill me from the moment she saw me. So reluctantly I followed, and reminded myself I was the one with the super powers here.
I could put a stop to her any time I wanted if it turned out she was a villain, but first I was going to feel this out before I went doing anything rash or stupid.
8
Volcanic Real Estate
I was surprised when she flew straight to her lair. For all that she seemed concerned about the aliens on this world finding out where she lived she wasn’t doing much in the way of operational security.
I liked that term. It was a fancy word that Natalie used which meant she didn’t want people finding out where she lived.
“Um, aren’t you worried about them finding you if you fly straight to your lair?” I asked.
“Not at all,” the girl said.
“But what about satellites and drones and all that stuff?” I asked.
Those were all things I never would’ve thought of before dating Natalie. She was always going on about how there were eyes in the sky. Though there was a part of me that thought maybe she enjoyed having people keeping an eye on her all the time.
For all that she went on about hating the Starlight City News Network she sure seemed to like watching her exploits on there.
“Don’t need to worry about satellites on this world,” the girl said.
“They don’t have satellites?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “This planet is being bombarded on all sides by all sorts of weird radiation that comes together to make an environment where nothing should be able to live, but somehow multicellular life developed here by being tenaciously badass.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” I said, though it reminded me of Natalie when she got really excited about something. She started talking faster than I could follow and it was totally cute. I loved watching her get excited even if I had no idea what any of what she was saying meant.
“It means that life, uh, finds a way,” she said.
There was something about the way she said it that made me think she was quoting something. That was something else Natalie was doing all the time, and just like with Natalie I decided to ignore it. She frowned, but whatever.
“So if there aren’t any satellites then how do they get their TV?”
“Mostly cables they run everywhere,” the girl said. “Cable man is a noble profession on this world since they have to fight off the Sand Yorps both great and small that burrow through the sand channels in the bedrock.”
“Oh, you mean like that big endangered thing I killed outside the city?”
The girl stopped. Like one moment she was flying along at a pretty good clip and the next moment she’d come to a halt and stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“What?” I asked.
“That was you?” she asked, looking me up and down.
Normally I wouldn’t mind a girl as pretty as her looking me up and down like that. It was nice to be noticed even if I was spoken for. There was something about the way she looked at me that had me shivering though, and not in a good way.
She was looking at me the same way Dr. Lana used to look at me when she was yelling about turning me into a science experiment. Not fun.
“Maybe that was me,” I said. “The thing swallowed me and one of those giant monsters. What was I supposed to do, let it turn me into monster crap?”
I was pretty sure there wasn’t a chance the thing would be able to turn me into monster crap even if it wanted to. No, something told me I was going to be the piece of corn in its monster poo, secreted out the other side in a giant pile of sand that would take me forever to dig my way out of.
Better to get out of the thing from the front end.
“Damn,” she said. “I don’t think someone has taken out a Grand Yorp within living memory.”
“Really?” I asked. “They were griping at me about it being an endangered species.”
The girl snorted. “They don’t know what they’re talking about, but whatever. I need to get you back to my lair!”
Again there was something about the way she said “lair” that left me uneasy. Again I comforted myself with the knowledge that so far there hadn’t been anyone on this world who seemed capable of hurting me, and I figured she’d be the same.
We continued flying until the city gave way to rock that looked like something out of the land of Mordor. Or maybe a trip to Hawaii I’d taken one summer after getting to college.
It was easy to take nice vacations like that when I could fly anywhere I wanted, after all, without worrying about paying airfare.
“Are we heading to a volcano or something?” I asked.
The girl nodded ahead of us. I looked up and yup. Sure enough there was a giant mountain rising in the distance. A mountain with a steady glow coming out of the top that reflected off of the dark clouds gathered above it. As I watched it belched out a cloud of rock and lightning arced around it.
“Um. You live there?” I asked.
“Well yeah,” the girl said. “It’s not like I can get real estate in the city. Not very easily, at least. The hive mind there doesn’t like me all that much.”
“You keep talking about that,” I said. “What does it mean?”
She put a finger to her lips again. “I don’t want to keep yelling over the slipstream.”
We settled into silence. Maybe this chat was taxing her vocal cords. That was another one of the many things I didn’t have to worry about thanks to my ability to withstand just about anything. Up to and including my throat not getting raw when I yelled at the top of my lungs for extended periods of time.
That’d come in handy when I was a cheerleader back in high school.
We moved down towards the volcano and those reservations I kept having about this whole thing only got bigger and bigger. There was something about moving down towards a volcano lair that screamed villain.
I repeated over and over that this girl had been friendly with me. She’d helped me out instead of firing on me. Then again we were on a strange alien world which meant we were the aliens, and if all the authorities were firing on us and we were the ones breaking the local rules and killing local wildlife what did that make us?
I decided I’d rather not think about what that made me. I’m not a villain, dang it!
We landed and the gi
rl turned back towards the city. Everything was bright there, or at least it was bright by the standards of this planet which wasn’t very bright to begin with. The cloud of volcanic ash over us dimmed things even more.
“Everything seems kind of dark around here,” I said.
“Yeah,” the girl said. “You get that in a triple star system.”
“I was talking about the… Huh?”
She nodded to the sky. To the giant star hanging up there. I could look right at it, but then again I could look directly at the sun back on earth without worrying about permanent damage to my eyes.
At least I could’ve before I lost my powers. Now that they were back I looked up without worry. It was still bright, and also…
“That star up there is a lot bigger in the sky,” I said. “Bigger than those other two out there.”
“Yup,” she said. “Perks of orbiting a red dwarf that’s orbiting another dual star system.”
I frowned. “That star doesn’t look very red or dwarfy to me.”
“Well yeah,” she said. “It’s still a star. They’re fucking bright if you look directly at them. Like you’re doing right now. Which you really shouldn’t do if you don’t want to go blind.”
“I’m not going to go blind,” I said, not really thinking about what I might be giving away with that offhand comment.
“Right,” she said, just a little too slowly. “So anyway. I should probably introduce you to my totally bitchin’ volcano lair.”
“Um, right,” I said, turning and looking at the massive mountain towering over us.
The thing was intimidating. That was for damn sure. Like I know people always talked about volcano lairs on earth, but I’d always thought the idea was ridiculous. It seemed like most everywhere that had a volcano on earth that was active enough to have lava but not active enough to be in danger of blowing up was in an impractically remote spot for someone who dabbled in world domination.
The fact that there was an active volcano within spitting distance of this city made it the perfect spot for…
