by Sara King
“What are you doing?” Esteei called, eying the crate.
“Come find out,” the Huouyt offered, disappearing once more into the ship.
Hesitantly, worried at the range of the Huouyt’s weapon, Esteei got just close enough that he could hear something moving inside the crates, then stopped.
“What is it?” Esteei called.
“Vaghi,” Bha’hoi said, dropping a second crate beside the first.
Esteei recoiled. “The vermin?”
“The very same,” the Huouyt said. He boarded the ship once more and returned with a third crate. “I hear they have an appetite for the same molecular makeup as the Geuji. We’ll see.”
Esteei was stunned. Voracious, vaghi could eat six times their own weight each day and breed dozens of times a week. More, if food was plentiful enough.
“But the Geuji are sentient.”
The Huouyt snorted. “Of course they are. It took me two tics after first stepping off the ship to determine that.” The Huouyt tapped its downy head. “Simply because your brain is the size of a pebble, you assume everyone else’s is, too.”
“Then what…?”
The Huouyt’s cilia rippled over its body, amusement pouring off of him in a wave. “The Huouyt are next in queue for a planet, little Jahul. This one has an ocean absolutely unpopulated by native filth.”
The Huouyt are aquatic.
Terrified, Esteei said, “You don’t need to kill them. The Geuji aren’t using the ocean. You can share the planet.”
“The Huouyt don’t share.”
Esteei stared at him, unable to speak.
“Now,” Bha’hoi said, returning his attention to the crates. “You have a decision to make, little Jahul. Will you hold still while I kill you quickly, or will you make me leave you here on Neskfaat, to starve to death?”
“Neskfaat…?”
“It’s what we’re naming it. It means—”
“Holy water.”
Bha’hoi’s face twisted into a frown. “Yes.” He moved to the closest box of vaghi, which squealed when he neared.
“You loose those things on the land and you’ll never get rid of them,” Esteei said, desperate, now. Around them, the empty shoreline stretched miles in any direction, the blackness of the Geuji reaching to the highest flood mark.
Bha’hoi snorted. “We don’t care what happens to the land.” He kicked open the first crate and watched the scaly flood that followed with greedy eyes.
The sudden, intense fear emanating off the Geuji as the vermin coursed over its glistening black body almost drove Esteei over the edge. He stumbled back, toward the water.
Bha’hoi kicked open two more boxes before Esteei regained his wits. He ran forward, intending to knock the Huouyt away from the box.
The Huouyt caught him and held him by the throat, his downy arm like solid ruvmestin.
“Listen to me very carefully, little Jahul.” The Huouyt’s mirror-like eyes were icy cold. “I’m not an Overseer. I never went to Huouyt Basic. I was trained in a different place, one you might know. Does ‘Va’ga’ mean anything to you?”
Esteei’s inner chambers stretched to bursting, pumping rank fluids over his skin.
Bha’hoi’s face twisted. “I thought it might.”
To punctuate his statement, he kicked open another box, to the resulting terror of the Geuji.
“Now,” Bha’hoi continued, “Of all the creatures on that ship, I liked you the most. You didn’t get in my way.” He kicked open another box, allowing the vaghi to course out over the landscape. “In fact, it would’ve been hard to split the Ooreiki up without you taking up Nirle’s cause like that. Truly noble of you, Emissary.”
Esteei shuddered at the cold, psychotic emotionlessness of the assassin gripping his throat.
He was faking. All this time, he was faking his emotions. It was all an act.
“The little Jahul finally understands,” Bha’hoi said, smiling. “Yes. I can switch off my emotions as you flip the incinerator switch on your body wastes.” He cocked his head. “I have the feeling you picked up one or two real ones, but it never worried me. I knew your brain was too small to put it together.”
Absolute, psychotic nothingness emanated off of the Huouyt—so devoid of emotion it was an emotion.
“Let me go,” Esteei whispered.
Bha’hoi released him. “Stay within sight. If you attempt to call the Claims Board, your death will be much more horrific than the simple one I have planned.”
“Please,” Esteei said, backing away down the beach. “Let me go.”
Bha’hoi laughed. “You want to stay on Neskfaat? What will you do out there? You have no food, unless you wish to eat your Ooreiki friends.” He motioned down the beach at the half-buried corpses, laughing. “You’ll die slowly, Jahul. If I do it, at least it will be painless. Besides, you’ve got time. I’ve still got three other continents to visit.” He kicked open another box.
Esteei continued backing up. He could outrun the Huouyt. With six legs, running was one of the only things Jahul could best other species at. Seeing that, the Huouyt paused, a darkness settling over his narrow face.
“Come here.”
Esteei froze.
The Huouyt assassin sighed and started toward him.
Esteei ran.
#
Agony.
It was all around him.
The Philosophers were being eaten alive.
Crown flinched as the tiny jaws ripped at his flesh, burrowing into it, consuming him as he lay there, unable to fight. Crown’s memories were disappearing with the agony in his body; the connections, the conversations, the theories that he had made during his lifetime slowly being devoured with his flesh.
Crown endured it, but many others couldn’t.
Around him, Philosophers were losing their minds along with their bodies. They rambled, they pleaded, they cried.
The vermin continued to devour them.
When the first Philosopher died, it was the most horrible experience Crown had ever felt. It broadcast its final, terrified moments outward to all the others to help the others understand, maybe prevent their own deaths.
Crown wished he had kept it to himself.
In time, they would all understand.
#
Esteei stumbled along the shoreline, plagued by guilt, weak with hunger. The vaghi were spreading across the planet. When Esteei could catch the squirming, biting beasts, he ate them.
Jahul did not eat living creatures.
Yet Esteei endured the emotional anguish in his sivvet and smashed the vaghi’s scaly heads open to reach the tiny clump of edible flesh inside…anything was endurable now he had to listen to the Geuji’s constant emotional scream.
They were being eaten alive.
Esteei was sure it was ‘they,’ since the Geuji along the coast had been whittled down to patches, now. Each patch gave a different type of emotional scream. It built to an unending crescendo in his head, driving Esteei to the very brink of sanity. He had nowhere to escape, trapped between the ocean of water and the ocean of Geuji.
After two weeks, Esteei turned back, praying the Huouyt hadn’t left, willing to die to avoid the Geuji’s scream.
Bha’hoi and the ship were gone.
“Please,” Esteei whimpered, slumping against a Geuji-covered, tear-shaped rock. “Please. I can’t take any more.” He didn’t know how far he had traveled, or how long he’d been going, but his legs would no longer carry him.
Slumped against the rock, Esteei trembled from the pressure in his sivvet. He slid into a ball, as he had countless times the last couple weeks, knowing it would do no good against the torment, but instinct taking over.
#
Suddenly, Crown understood.
The Jahul can feel us.
He passed the message outward, sending it to everyone he could still reach.
Immediately, the Philosophers silenced their emotions. They knew the chance was slim, that the Jahul wo
uld be more worried about his own life, but it was possible that he could help them.
Could. But would he?
From what Crown had seen of these creatures, they were not like the Philosophers.
They were nothing like the Philosophers.
#
The emotional anguish stopped.
Esteei tentatively unrolled.
His eyes fell upon a single patch of Geuji, a ring of vaghi around it, eating it.
The Geuji was clearly alive, its glistening black flesh flinching away from the gnawing teeth as they chewed towards its core.
Turning, Esteei saw another, only a few feet away. It, too, was being eaten.
And another, further up the hill, bore its own ring of vaghi.
But the Geuji weren’t screaming.
The silence in his head was as absolute as if someone had removed his sivvet.
Given the first peace he’d had in weeks, Esteei’s mind was suddenly very clear.
“Get away from them!” he screamed, diving at the vaghi.
They scattered, only to resume chewing on another patch of black, further away.
A heavy, palpable fear hit his sivvet from the Geuji that was now being eaten at twice the speed, then disappeared just as quickly.
“Get away!” Esteei shouted. He ran at the vaghi, making them flee over the rise. Esteei felt the sudden fear of the Geuji on the other side before it was contained.
They’re doing it for me, Esteei realized, stunned. They’re dying silently so it doesn’t hurt me anymore.
Behind him, another vaghi had found the Geuji the others had fled.
Furious, Esteei reached down, plucked up a rock sticky from Geuji residue, and threw it.
It hit the vaghi, making it shriek. It ran over the hill and disappeared, needing no further encouragement from Esteei.
Amusement coursed through the air around him, coming from many directions at once.
“You understand, don’t you?” Esteei said.
“Yes,” the one upon the tear-shaped rock flashed. It was the only one that was still mostly whole, saved by the shape of its perch, but even that wouldn’t last.
“I can survive,” Esteei said. “You don’t need to endure it.”
But, as one, they continued to hide their pain from Esteei, allowing him peace.
“I can’t save you,” Esteei whispered.
The Geuji sent him an emotion that broke his heart. Understanding.
Fury uncoiled in Esteei’s soul.
He picked up another handful of rocks, and this time he aimed to kill.
#
Esteei went back to the Ooreiki’s bodies and collected their rifles. He staked out a territory encircling the tear-shaped rock and patrolled it during the day, when the vaghi fed, and gathered surviving clumps of Geuji from the surrounding areas at night, bringing them into his circle.
When Esteei’s nightly journeys grew too long, when he began collapsing from exhaustion, unable to focus during the day, Esteei whispered apologies to those he couldn’t reach and stopped seeking out survivors. He knew there were more out there. He felt them die, even as he felt gratitude from the ones he protected from the vaghi’s gnawing mouths.
The vaghi eventually moved on, finding easier pickings deeper inland.
Without vaghi to eat, Esteei began to starve.
As weakness overcame him, Esteei propped himself against the tear-shaped rock and continued to watch his tiny domain, rifle across his lap.
Esteei’s days became a haze of sunny delirium, followed by a night of rest. When he was lucky enough to kill one of the vermin, he crushed its scaly skull open immediately and sucked out the flesh raw. Killing no longer bothered him.
Neither did dying.
Esteei was barely conscious most of the time. Several times, he lost a Geuji in broad daylight, too weak to protect it from the now-starving vaghi.
Give up, a tired voice in his mind told him. No one’s going to come.
Then, a louder, angrier voice said, I am the Emissary of this planet. I’m sworn to protect these people.
And so it went on. His inner arguments grew longer, what he remembered of his days shorter. He lost more and more Geuji, the vaghi growing bolder with every passing hour.
I’m going to lose them all, Esteei realized.
No.
Just hold on.
Just a little longer.
Esteei wasn’t sure if the words were forming on the Geuji’s glistening bodies, or if he was imagining it. Either way, he somehow found the will to stay alive.
Every horrible day, Esteei stared up at the sky, felt himself slipping away, then dragged himself back to shoot more vaghi.
Just a little longer.
#
The planet was dead.
Except for their tiny patch of survivors, the entire planet was dead.
Crown knew it as surely as he knew the Jahul was dying.
Soon, maybe only days, the respite from the vaghi’s gnawing jaws would end.
Crown wished he could do something. In the beginning, the Jahul had communicated with him, scribing in his flesh, giving him words to show their rescuers, if they came. Then, over time, the Jahul had stopped responding.
Now, he said nothing, wrote nothing. He just stared out over the tiny patch of ground, killing the vaghi, losing consciousness in broad daylight. The other Geuji were failing with him, no longer connected, no longer having anyone to speak to but themselves.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Fury overtook him when Crown realized his people would not have the bodies that they had hypothesized, had waited for. He knew that somewhere, this alien culture had the power to grant them mobility, but they were never going to get it.
They were all going to die here.
He could only watch as the Jahul began to slip away.
And somewhere, over the rise, he heard the vaghi.
Please, Crown wrote. Please stay awake. Just a little longer.
#
Neskfaat,
10th Turn, 193rd Age of the Huouyt
“Excuse me?”
“A Jahul, sir. He’s clearly mad. He’s staked out an acre of land inside our claims territory and is refusing to leave.”
Pingit put down his pen and sighed. “Who’s he with?” Just what he needed—another trade dispute.
“Sir?”
“Which company?”
His assistant gave him a nervous look. The slowness with which he responded suggested the kid knew more than he was saying. “Sir, he’s been here a very long time. He’s been eating vaghi to stay alive.”
Pingit recoiled. “Vaghi?”
His assistant nodded. “Has piles of corpses around him. We think perhaps since the first exploration. He matches the description of the Jahul who went missing.”
Pingit snorted, thinking the kid had lost a few bolts along the wretched trip out here. “Jahul don’t kill their food.”
Reluctantly, the kid said, “He was starving, sir. He’s been starving a very long time.”
Pingit sighed and glanced at the ceiling. Why couldn’t mineral extraction at the edge of the known universe be easy? Why did it have to involve politics originating thirty turns away? “Bring him here.”
His assistant’s headcrest started to tremble. “He won’t leave the area, sir.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s defending a patch of Geuji against the vaghi.”
This time, Pingit’s own headcrest quivered with surprise. “Some of the mold survives? Congress registered it as extinct two turns ago.”
“A few patches still live inside his territory,” the kid assured him. Again, Pingit got the idea he was…nervous. Holding back.
“It’s our territory, now,” Pingit reminded the furg. “We’ve leased it from the Huouyt.”
Headcrest trembling harder, his assistant finally admitted his mistake. “The Congressional recon force stayed to help him fight off the vaghi. Sir.”
Pingit scowled. “You let him commandeer our troops?”
“The Ooreiki decided to help him,” his assistant babbled. “Everything he mumbled was gibberish—I don’t think he even knew we were there—but he had rank, sir, still pinned to his tattered atmosuit. An Overseer of some sort. I couldn’t stop them.”
Pingit cursed. “So it was the Emissary. Take me to him.”
#
“That Jahul is dead,” Pingit snapped. It had already released its death-toxins, drowning the place in a putrescent, eye-burning smell.
Yet the Ooreiki continued to shoot the vermin, ignoring him. The multitude of vaghi that had accumulated to gnaw at the edges of the Geuji were quickly being picked off to nothing.
Frustrated, Pingit grabbed one of the Ooreiki by the arm. “What in the hell—”
“Sir,” the Ooreiki said, nodding at the rock against which the Jahul now leaned in death. It went back to firing.
Pingit frowned at the mold spread across its surface. In it, someone had scribed, “Help.”
“Who wrote that?”
Then, before any of the Ooreiki could answer, the impressions in the Geuji’s skin shifted and changed. “Sentient.”
Pingit’s headcrest quivered against his skull.
Beside the tear-shaped stone, his assistant was trying to lift the limp Jahul from the ground. The death-toxins rubbed off on him, and his assistant backed away, gagging.
Pingit’s eyes were torn back to the Geuji covering the rock.
“Help,” the mold said again. “Sentient. Register us.”
Then, “They ate us alive.”
“Someone call the Regency,” Pingit managed, a thin sound in his throat. “We’ve made a big damned mistake.”
-END-
About the Author:
Sara King is an Alaskan author who thinks that there’s a better way to do publishing. She’s best known for her Legend of ZERO books, but she’s got plenty of other novels to check out (Outer Bounds: Fortune’s Rising is a good place to start). She’s a certified browncoat (Jayne is her favorite!!), trekkie (Spock for the win!) and aspiring Jedi (though she wishes that they sold better light-sabers at her local comic shop). She is one of the founding members of Parasite Publications, a radical new character-based publishing company that’s completely revolutionizing the stodgy world of traditional publishing.
