Caveman Alien’s Sword

by Calista Skye

  “This has proved effective before,” he says as calmly as if downloading an app on his phone.

  “I think it is the way this spaceship can travel through space,” I say quickly. I seriously don’t want him to poke out Delyah’s eyes. “I’m not sure how it works. But I wanted to find out. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Why would you want to travel through space?”

  “We don’t want to.”

  “You just said you wanted to find out how it works. But you don’t want to use it. Can you see the discrepancy in your statements?” The claw inches closer to Delyah’s eye.

  “Yes,” I hurry to say, cursing my stupidity. I should never have mentioned spaceships. I want him to think that we are the simple cavewomen we look like. “The Prophecy… our Ancestors foretold about the large boat from the stars that would land, and we could travel among the stars with it. It is called a spaceship. Our shaman told us this was it. And it is. That,” I point to the Weirdness, “is their Blessing to us.”

  The dragon makes a slight frown look both heart-rendingly beautiful and heart-stoppingly chilling. “A blessing? And you really wanted to find out how it works?”

  I think fast. “Our shaman commanded me to. And I found the Blessing.”

  Zahak gives Delyah a shake, and she groans in pain again.

  “And this one? Was she looking for the same?”

  “She went to the top of the… this ship. I don’t know what she found.”

  “Ah. You don’t?”

  I just shrug.

  The dragon unceremoniously drops Delyah to the floor, and she groans and curls up. There are new spots of blood on her chest and on her back.

  Zahak walks over to the Weirdness and looks up at it. “You are right. This makes the ship move through space. I find it somewhat suspicious that you know it. It’s not something that leaps easily to the eye.”

  He turns around, crosses his arms across his chest, and takes up a thoughtful pose that reminds me of that famous painting of President Kennedy. “I have a confession to make. The Zahak you see before you is not the dragon I truly am.”

  I walk over to Delyah and kneel down beside her. She might be badly hurt. And she is pregnant.

  “Really?” I prompt, fine with the dragon talking while I check on my friend.

  “Really. I am in a much reduced state. Fly through space, you say? I have done that. It is most exhausting. You must leave your hoard behind when you do it. And when you get to your destination, you must build a new hoard from nothing.”

  “Where is it worst?” I whisper to Delyah.

  She points to her throat. Yeah, that doesn’t look good.

  “You must?” I ask to keep the dragon talking.

  “I think, possibly, our prey knew it. The builders of this… boat of yours. Thus they came here, the last of them, to a planet so remote and so desolate that building a hoard has proved unreasonably difficult.”

  I don’t have my Stone Age medpack anymore, so all I can do is wipe some of the blood off Delyah’s bloody and bruised throat. “Can you breathe?” I whisper.

  “I see,” I say louder.

  “You see,” Zahak apes, “there’s nothing here. Only primitives and their unspeakably useless weapons. Yes, well made steel does have some value. But it is only suitable for a hatchling’s very first hoard. It’s not enough for a dragon such as I. I need gold, but there is none. No silver, even.”

  “Barely,” Delyah wheezes.

  “Stay down,” I whisper, fearing that there might be something wrong with her windpipe. “Don’t move.”

  “Goel?” I prompt louder, pretending not to know the word.

  Zahak chuckles. “Gold, yes. As you well know. Every planet has it. Even quite primitive ones. Here there might be some, but I haven’t found any. The Inferiors knew it, of course. That’s why they built this ship and lured us here. First, they exhaust us with the long flight through space, then they make sure there’s no hoard to be found here on this planet. Or at least not much.”

  “How shrewd.” I don’t know what to do about Delyah. She looks gray, and her eyes are alarmingly bloodshot. A little drop of blood has run down from one of her ears.

  “Shrewd, yes,” Zahak goes on. “They learned a little bit of that from us. They were not shrewd at all in the beginning.”

  I run my hand over Delyah’s hair and smile in a way I hope is reassuring. But this isn’t looking good. I’m not sure where Zahak is going with his speech, but I have a feeling he’s circling around something big.

  The silence is oppressive and I realize I haven’t responded to the dragon.

  “Why not?” is the first thing that comes to mind.

  Zahak inspects one of his fingers, looking bored. “They weren’t shrewd. That was all. But they had a wonderful planet. Great materials. Large cities. Special houses that could create objects of high quality in large numbers! It was like a dream. Many dragons built great hoards there. Somewhat light on the gold, maybe. But there were many other things that made their owners rich and fat and mighty. Then it was empty. I arrived too late to acquire my part of it. Gorgoz and Maretriok, too. And several others. But the Inferiors were fleeing, and we followed. Surely, they would lead us to another rich planet. It was a long hunt through space. And it ended here.”

  “Can’t you acquire a hoard in this ship?” I suggest, just wanting him to leave. “There are many strange things here.”

  “The things here are strange,” the dragon agrees. “But they are of Inferior manufacture. The Inferiors started making their things from such tainted and toxic materials as no dragon would touch. Trash. All this,” he says and moves his hand in an arc. “TRASH!”

  The sudden furious scream makes both Delyah and me jerk, and my ears start ringing. But if Zahak expected some kind of echo to impress us with his voice, he must be disappointed. The Weirdness allows no resonance.

  “Then leave.” I state the obvious. “The planet can’t give you want you want. Well, leave.”

  “I was stranded on an island for weeks. With Gorgoz and Maretriok. We couldn’t even transform long enough to fly away from there. From an island! Can you imagine the humiliation? We had no scrap of a hoard. Nothing. Reduced to inferior form, unable to change. Even a primitive canoe looked tempting to us. At least it had been made by someone. At least there was skill and care behind it. A canoe! All three of us knew that the only possible hoard was the scales of a dragon. It is a tainted hoard, but it would work briefly. One of us had to die. But we were three. It was too risky for each of us to start the attack. It would be two against one, and it was imperative that I not be the one. And I wasn’t.”

  I stroke Delyah’s hair again. It’s sticky with sweat and the blood on my hands. “So, you can’t leave the planet. You have no hoard, no strength.”

  Zahak lifts his gaze and looks at us with an expression that’s almost childishly open. “I want to be rich and fat. I want a hoard like those other dragons built on the Inferior planet. I need another planet. A good one. Not this one. This is not a good planet. I need a good planet. Where there is gold. Where there are cities. Where the murder is ample. Where they will plead for mercy before they feel the heat of my fire. Where there are objects of careful making. Objects with such quality and complexity that they need not even be gold to be full of power. Objects that simply can’t be made without the work of thousands behind them. Thousands of Inferiors and thousands of days.”

  I feel a stab of guilt and unconsciously check my secret pocket.

  Still empty.

  Fuck.

  Not that. Please, not that.

  Zahak points to the spearhead on the floor. “You see? One smith can take a piece of iron and give it greater value. It will take him a day, maybe. But that is not all. It took more men more time to make the iron for him to turn into something else. That is all value. Now, imagine an object that it is not possible for one man to make. An object created with care and precision. As close to perfection as it is possible
to get. Simply impossible for one man to create. Simply impossible to make on a planet like this one. Simply impossible to even imagine until you see one.”

  Delyah whimpers, and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing I am. I keep stroking her hair.

  “King Garunzigur let me handle one such item from the Inferior planet. He had many of them in his hoard, and the ones he couldn’t fit in his cave he simply destroyed to increase the value of the others. The item was small and smooth. It wasn’t gold, but it was pleasing to the touch. I held it in my hand.”

  Zahak closes his yellow eyes, clenching one silvery fist in front of him. “I held it. And I could feel the work behind it. I could feel the centuries of experience and development it had taken for the planet to be able to make something like that. I could feel the concentrated work and focus of a whole society that had gone into it. Not just into making it, you understand. But into making it possible to make it. It was… intoxicating. Not like gold, I grant you. Not like gold. But not much lesser. The lives that had gone into it! I could see them! And that planet had millions of these objects. Millions! They were commonplace! And there were many others. Some large, some small. All incredible.”

  I shift my hand and let it run all over Delyah’s dress. Just to check if she has anything in her pockets. Anything at all.

  “I want a planet like that,” Zahak states. “All to myself. Fresh. Untouched. Unrobbed. Undestroyed. Unmurdered. Alive with life I can extinguish at my leisure, for my own entertainment and enjoyment. Full of gold and carefully manufactured objects. I’ll be the richest, fattest dragon there has ever been. The planet will have no life. It will be my cave, my hoard. Only I will be there. I will kill Garunzigur and be king of the dragons!”

  Again, the Weirdness ruins his attempt at using his voice for dramatic effect. But the effect is strong enough. He’s deadly serious about this.

  Delyah puts her hand on my wrist and squeezes. “The Weirdness,” she whispers. She must have some idea of where this is going.

  I glance over at the Weirdness. I don’t know how it can help us here.

  “I want a planet like that,” Zahak repeats and looks up in the air. “Where is it? How far?”

  Delyah and I exchange glances.

  “WHERE IS IT? HOW FAR?” the dragon yells, fixing its hard, cold eyes on me.

  “I… I don’t know…” I stutter. “I’ve never heard of another planet.” Shit, that’s not very convincing.

  “You’ve never heard of it?”

  I clear my voice. “Never.”

  “Your quiet friend said the same. And I might have believed you. I might. But you see, I have been here in this abomination of a tainted heap of trash that you call a spaceship for almost as long as you have. And I have watched you and your male. It was my intention to gain his impressive blade as the start of my hoard. But then you dropped something. And things changed.”

  I didn’t think it would be possible for my heart to drop further in my chest. But it just did.

  Zahak opens his hand and shows us what’s in it.

  23

  - Juri’ex -

  I run into the shadow cast by the spaceship and make my way up to the door I came out of only hours before.

  It doesn’t open when I touch the pad.

  I find the cracks between the door and the wall and try to insert my fingers, but there’s no room. I bang on the door, kick it, and ram it with my shoulders. But it remains shut and unmarked.

  I draw my sword and slash it across the door at chest height. It leaves a small cut in the material, which seems hard but appears soft and resilient further in.

  But it’s a start.

  I keep slashing and whacking and hacking, and soon there’s a little heap of alien material by my feet. When I finally hack through it, I insert the blade and slowly cut the tough material. I make a hole that’s barely large enough for me to crawl through, and then I’m inside.

  And I’m even more worried than before. That door wasn’t closed before. What other surprises await me further in?

  Thankfully, the small elevator appears to work.

  On the garden level, the lights are flashing and there’s a piercing noise that makes me stressed.

  A robot lies dead on the floor. I go over and kick it. It’s very light.

  I kneel down and stare into its lifeless eyes. It was possible to talk through this thing. “Ashlynn? Delyah?”

  Nothing.

  I drop the robot again and look down. There are more robots down there, lying still.

  Hm. More than one. Seems like there must have been some things happening here. But I have no idea what they were.

  I take the elevator up to the control room. It’s empty, and it gives me a less tidy impression than before.

  But Ashlynn’s shoulder bag is there. I don’t know what to think about that. Is it a good sign? Yes, probably. She has been here after I left her.

  There are markings on the window, written in blood.

  I scratch my chin. That’s probably not a good sign.

  Well, there’s no reason to wait. I’ll search through the entire ship.

  I make my way down the ship, including the smaller escape ship that Ashlynn showed me briefly.

  I return to the garden level and carefully climb down the stairs. I can’t help Ashlynn against the dragon if I fall down there and break my back.

  But the good thing about this level is that I can see the whole of it from above, and there’s no movement anywhere.

  I run through it, heading for the white beam and finally walking into it backwards to go down.

  The lights are flashing on each level, and it seems like I can’t escape that stressful noise. There’s no movement until I get down to the waterfall. There are more robots, one of them unmoving on the ground, and the others doing something around the waterfall.

  I jog over, and behind the cliff there are robots busy with... something. It looks like they’re putting things back in order, smoothing out the ground.

  A tree has been cut down. I examine it. Someone has used a small knife on it. And I know Ashlynn had one. Why would she need to chop wood?

  I make my way further down, seeing nothing more of interest. I don’t take the time to search through each level. The smartest approach must be to give each level a short glance, and if there’s nothing obviously of interest, go one level further down. If I get to the bottom without finding anything, then I will thoroughly search each level. But that would probably mean I’m too late.

  “Holy Ancestors, please don’t let me be too late,” I mutter as I give a city level a cursory look before continuing down.

  I finally reach the level right above the final one. It is the next level down where I have the highest hopes of finding Ashlynn. Right under there again is where I left her, the room with her Weirdness.

  I inspect my sword. Hacking through the outer door took its toll on it. The meticulously cared-for blade is notched and dull now. I briefly consider sharpening it before I enter the beam again to go down further, but I decide that time is more important.

  I step into the beam backwards.

  I hardly have time to materialize on the lowest level before something pierces both my hands all the way through. I yell out in pain and drop the sword.

  Then there’s a new searing pain from my knees. They give way under me, and I collapse to the floor.

  24

  - Ashlynn -

  The object in Zahak’s hand is blue and white. About the size of an old-fashioned cell phone. It has a slight shimmer to it.

  resealable

  Kleenex®

  BRAND TISSUES

  SOFTNESS 4 PLY STRENGTH

  9 White Tissues

  Delyah glances up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, but I can barely get the words out the way my lower lip trembles.

  She squeezes my wrist, hard. Probably in support, but maybe in anger.

  Zahak closes his fist around the unopened pocket pa
ck of tissues, making the plastic crinkle. “The care,” he sighs. “The work. The value. The perfection. The weight of a full civilization behind it. This is no ordinary object. It rivals the Inferior-made thing I once held in my hand for sheer quality. And I sense that this is only one of millions. Hundreds of millions! It had to be like that. It would be impossible to make in any other way. This took a planet to create. A real planet. Not the one we’re on. Far from it. No, this was made on a planet that may well be richer than the Inferior planet. It comes, in fact, from the same planet you come from. It was yours. You treasured it.”

  He makes the tissue pack disappear somehow. “This is hoard enough to transform me to my real form and to travel in space. To your home planet. Possibly the richest planet in the universe. Now, where is it and how far?”

  I clench my eyes shut. This was exactly what we were afraid of. A dragon finding an object that is clearly not from Xren. A clue that Earth exists. And it is worse than I feared. This dragon is obviously determined to find it and to kill everyone there.

  “That thing is not mine,” I try. “I found it.”

  Zahak takes two steps closer and places one pointy claw right under my rib cage, piercing the dinosaur skin of the dress and my own under it. It hurts like shit, and I yelp in anguish.

  “I will slice you open,” the dragon hisses, all civility gone, now pure predator with a clear objective. “Where and how far?”

  He’s asking me to betray my own planet. My family and everything I call home. I’m not sure I can do that.

  He pushes the claw further in and up behind the ribs, and I scream. My heart isn’t that much further inside.

  “We don’t know exactly where,” Delyah wheezes urgently. “But we know approximately how far. We didn’t come here of our own will. We were abducted, and we don’t know how we got here.”

  Zahak keeps his claw inside me. “How far? How many days’ flight?”