“For too long, mediocre results have been glamorized by a bunch of misfits. You are a terrible mistake made by this empire, a mistake that shall be rectified. That is why you find yourselves in the middle of the universe, surrounded by creatures you don’t understand. You see, we have gifted you to them. We believe you will be useful to an alien civilization that has just figured out how to communicate with the Milky Way. That being said, you are now their property. And you shall do as they say. We have an agreement with the Ursines. An agreement that involves Alpha Ship One. In exchange for your Jump Ship, and all the technology on it, they will keep you as far away from Earth, its friends, and Pilgrim Tech as possible. We hope you enjoy your new lives. Oh, and as for those prisoners on the ship, we commanded the Ursine to kill them. They were sympathizers to the Alpha Ship One Legion, and you no longer have our sympathy.”
The video went dead. I stood there, shaking, not quite believing what I had seen. The humans had abandoned us.
“Come, move. We land ship on your new home. You will like it there. Hot. Human like hot,” the Berserker said next to me. I nodded my head.
It was all I could do. Life as I knew it had changed. Me and my crew had been tossed away like the trash that they thought we were. But at that very moment in time, as I stood there surrounded by Ursines, I vowed to myself that if the opportunity ever presented itself, Earth would pay for what they did to us.
Alpha Ship One would be victorious again. I was certain of it.
Chapter Three
As the ship was coming in for landing, I felt the bridge shake. The instruments were going crazy. The digital speedometer that included the angle of our bearing was displaying three different readings. I could tell that the planet we were landing on was harsh and hostile. Not only was our point of entry bumpy, but the images that I was seeing on the monitors confirmed my deepest fears. The Ursines planet was rocky and craggy. Our ship was about four hundred feet off the ground. I was piloting it. My crew was watching from behind me, along with the bear-like creatures that now pretty much owned us. Dread was running through my core as I attempted to keep Alpha Ship One steady. She was a big vessel. Outfitted for long haul merchant services. We were usually hired to find and extract goods from neighboring planets. We usually did so under the guise of official business. But Pilgrim Tech used us in a different way. We were basically unsanctioned pirates for the empire. Our job was simple: get wealth and bring it back to Sector Omega. We were paid thirty credits on the century. Think of a credit as an old world US dollar. Think of a century as a hundred dollars.
For a long time, they were making money off us. And when things went wrong, they were the first to deny us and act like we were rogues. But I suppose I knew that this day would come. The day when they would sever all ties with us, and we would be left by ourselves with no allies and no empire to back us. And when you’re in the job of stripping wealth from various planets, galaxies and empires, you can imagine that it doesn’t leave you with very many friends. We’d ripped everybody off, and for what? To be banished when the new Earth government came in to power? I guess things ran differently now. We were on our own. Well, not quite. We had the bear creatures to answer to now. I could only imagine what they had in store for us.
“Pull the ship up one hundred meters,” one of the Berserker Ursines said as a heavy paw touched my shoulder. It weirded me out a little. These creatures were strangely tactile. They had a way about them. Like they understood compassion. At least, compassion in the human sense. I’d met plenty of aliens in my life, but none of them carried themselves like the Ursines did.
“Okay, just tell me where to land,” I said, pushing a few knobs and pulling on a lever. The ship straightened out and then the nose rose at a ninety-degree angle for a few seconds, straightening out after it reached its new altitude. I watched as the the air around the ship on the outside started to change color. I’d never seen such a thing before. It truly was a wonder. The air was causing condensation on the outside cameras, generating all sorts of colors to reflect on the screen. I guess the lead Ursine could tell that I was worried, for it rested its paw on my shoulder again.
“Those colors you see are incoming scans from our different scouts. They scan you to see if you are bad or not. The scans can see that we are on ship. They can see how many different human and alien on ship. They can also see us. So the scans know we are good. They will let us land,” the bear creature said through its computer translator box.
The colors on the outside disappeared and the mountainous region below us vanished, revealing a massive area that resembled a pre-space-exploration Earth city. It had skyscrapers, antennas, roads, vehicles and housing. It was astonishing. I guess the current Ursines technology is primitive compared to most of the galaxy, but the fact that they had such a metropolises was frightening. If they were able to build such buildings and technology with no thumbs, what could they do with us?
“How did you build all this?” I found myself asking as the Ursine behind me got closer. He pushed me out of the way and took command of the controls. I stood there in shock at what I’d just witnessed. There was no way that the bear creature could handle controls on this ship. They were designed for human beings. Their paws just wouldn’t be able to twist, grip or pull like a pair of human hands could. But without saying so much as a word, I watched the bear land the ship smoothly. We came to a stop and some sort of anchor system gripped the ship tightly, slowly lowering it onto the concrete landing strip that they had.
My mind was truly blown. They had a damn landing strip! These primitive bears had a landing strip for aircraft. Nobody back home, human or otherwise, would believe what we were seeing. It just wasn’t fathomable.
“Welcome to your new home. We have beds, food and television,” the bear said, turning from the controls and facing me and my crew, who were all a little terrified. Dale was staring wide-eyed at the bear. Jess, my second-in-command was looking at the floor in disbelief, Raj was staring at me and I was shaking my head.
“How the hell do you have all these things? What’s the meaning of this? You Ursines are supposed to be big and dumb. You’re not supposed to have technology. You’re not supposed to be able to land ships. And you certainly aren’t supposed to have cities that look like they belong on Earth!” I said, walking toward the Ursine, and giving him a full bodied look. I examined every inch of its big brutish body. The other Ursines watched on in curiosity. Their faces didn’t hold expressions like human faces did. It was difficult to gage whether they were angry, sad or happy. You had to stare into their eyes. And even then, it was difficult to work out.
“You seem surprised?” the leader bear said to me, raising his paws slightly from his sides.
“I am,” I replied. “I’ve never seen something like you.”
The Ursine in front of me, along with its three other friends made a weird sound in unison. It sounded like chirping at first. But then I recognized what it really was. They were laughing.
“I don’t know why you so surprised. That is problem with you humans. You humans too stupid for own good. You humans think that you are center of universe. Universe doesn’t care about you. It never did. It also doesn’t care about us. It never will. Do a favor to yourself humans. Forget about what you think you are. But remember what you are up against.”
Suddenly, we were being pushed out of the ship forcefully by the bear creatures. It was like a switch had gone off in their heads, and now they were angry. I didn’t know if it was something I had said or done. But I knew that we weren’t coming onto this planet as guests. We were coming onto this planet as prisoners.
They frog-marched us off the ship. We’d waited a few minutes for the airlocks to open and the ramp to go down. It made for an uncomfortable feeling among me and the three crewmen by my side. We were then prodded down the ramp. The air around us was muggy and hard to breathe. It had a certain smell to it. A smell that I wasn’t all too familiar with. I couldn’t really pin point the odor,
but if I had to describe it, I’d say that it smelt like burnt meat. Not a great omen while stepping foot onto an alien planet for the first time. It was an even bigger omen considering we weren’t walking around freely. It was obvious from the very moment we set foot on their soil that we were going to be treated like dogs.
A group of bear creatures, just like the ones that were escorting us down the ramp were awaiting our arrival. One of them looked remarkably different compared to the rest of them. It was wearing a black hood and it was holding some weird looking energy lassos. They were transparent, yet looked like electric thread at the same time. I didn’t quite get what they were until I reached the bottom of the ramp. The bear in the black hood grabbed me by both arms and snapped the energy lasso around my wrists. The electric thread tightened and looped itself around my arms, binding my wrists like handcuffs. The bear pushed me away and I was escorted through a crowd of Ursines. These aliens were jeering and chirping at me. I turned my head and saw the black hooded bear slap the electric lassos on my crew. Each one of them was bound and pushed toward me.
After a few seconds, all of my crew were now back at my side. We were pushed and prodded by the bear creatures until we reached some sort of building. We were on the outskirts of their city and didn’t have much of an opportunity to walk through it before we were taken into a building. From what I did manage to see of the city, it looked just like any regular Earth city from the pre-space travel era. It had billboards, cars and pedestrians. But instead of the pedestrians being people, the city was full of bears. It was such a surreal sight. To know that there was a civilization in space that was more or less mimicking another was astounding. I wondered if they even knew what Earth looked like, or if they had an idea of how similar their cities looked to ours.
But I didn’t have time to ask any questions. The Ursines escorted us through the building, which looked like some sort of prison. It had cells with metal doors on them. The metal doors had small square flaps in them, just like a prison cell. We were walking on a platform, just like a catwalk in a cell block. On the far end was another hooded bear. He was also holding something. It looked like pillows and blankets. We reached the bear, and he handed us a pillow and a thin blanket each. He then opened a cell door and pushed us all in. The cell door closed behind us and everything went dark.
We were not only prisoners on an unknown and hostile planet, but we were prisoners to the facts. Why were they treating us like this? What could they gain from locking us up? And what the hell was Pilgrim Tech thinking, giving a technologically advanced ship to a sub-tech species like the Ursines? What possible good could come from such a thing?
It was rattling me something fierce. My mind was rushing with unprofessional thoughts of vengeance and violence. I could hear the collective fear of my crew around me. We didn’t even say a word.
We just sat there in silence until everything sank in.
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