by Aaron Frale
Rock Ball was a lot like what Sarge had called football, except there were six teams, and six end zones. It was a complex strategy game because the teams would often win and lose allies throughout the course of play. While only one team could win, almost every winning team had the support of an ally. Often, a weaker team would seek the support of a stronger one because allies of the winning team were honored as much as the winners.
Alliances were always shifting and changing, and the team on top one season may not be as good the next. For Kal, it was easy to understand where Per went wrong with his strategy. He always tried to align himself with the strongest team and viewed Kal’s team as the rival. If Per didn’t get close to the strong team, he believed Kal would. She changed the whole game when she realized that the weakest teams were going about it all wrong. If she made an alliance with Per and the other bottom tier team instead, then the strongest teams would be kept too busy focusing on each other to worry about the weaker teams. The strong teams would never bond together because they wouldn’t want to share their victory with their rivals.
Kal’s plan had worked out flawlessly. Per’s team went on to win the game, and of course Per gave himself all the credit, but Kal didn’t want glory. She was happy enough to feel a part of her earth brothers’ and sisters’ activities. Her reward was that she felt like she belonged rather than like an object of pity. The experience had taught her an important lesson, though. Even blood feuds may be forgotten when there is something greater at stake.
She slapped Grannork awake. She was poking a bourkakor beast in its den, but she needed to wake him up before the doctor came to visit. There was an absence of screaming coming from the doorways, unlike the last time she visited. The doctor could emerge at any moment. After some light slaps and nudges wouldn’t rouse the hulking creature, she kicked the thing in the stomach. Grannork’s eyes opened with a snarl.
“I thought Orcandus didn’t feel pain,” Kal said.
“We feel pain. It just doesn’t control us. What you hear about us are rumors we care not to dispel for their advantage in battle. You will now pay the blood price, betrayer of…” Grannork stumbled to his feet. The beating had taken its toll on his body, but his spirit was intact.
“What did my father do?”
“It is not what your father did, but what your species does. My people have a blood feud with your people.”
“My village is peaceful!”
“I’ve had enough of your lies!”
“Whoa! Whoa!” Kal said as he grabbed her by the shirt. “Wait, I think you might want to hold off on that.”
“Why? What can you offer that will be more satisfying than your death?”
“A way off of this station.”
“How?”
“Let’s just say I have a way to get to the Teristaque level. From there, we just need to commandeer a ship.”
“Excuse me,” A muffled voice said from the room with the Quadhelix.
Kal slipped out of the Orcandu’s grip. She opened the door to the nightmare factory. The Orcandu gasped at the sight of body parts. “What sort of evil wizardry is this?”
The Quadhelix’s head now had a torso and the arms of a couple of different species. He was shackled to an operating table. There were marks where flesh was taken for samples, burns, and signs of other experimentation. He sat up as best as he could when they entered the room. “I couldn’t help but overhear talk of escape. I would very much like to be a part of your plan.”
Grannork snarled, “What makes you think we have time to bring a cripple?”
“Because I am an expert at computer systems. I specialize in breaking in and out of complex security.”
“You cannot walk!”
“Legs are a simple matter of acquiring new ones. There are plenty of suitable ones in this room. What else does a being who can change his appearance often do with his time, other than pursuing less than legal occupations? Trust me when I say that you’ll need me if you intend to leave here.”
A plan began to formulate in Kal’s mind. Earlier, she was just making it up to save her the pain of another Orcandu attack, but the Quadhelix’s skills could be put to use.
“We will find a way to get you out of here,” Kal said.
She heard a door open from down the hallway. Kal turned to Grannork and put his hand on her shirt. She gave him a sign to lift her off the ground. Grannork roared and picked her up. “I will feast on your remains!”
Dr. Feslerk injected something into Grannork, and he was out in seconds, toppling on top of Kal. The doctor leaned closer to see Kal’s face, “They are such brutes. I’ll get my aide to take care of him. As for you, I’m excited to get to look at a half-breed myself. It is so rare when different alien species can produce viable offspring.”
“What do you mean?” Kal said. “Who was my father?”
“Tsk, tsk. You don’t get to ask the questions. We have some dissections to do.”
He pressed a few buttons on his eNeedle and injected her with something. Her body went limp, but she was fully aware and could feel pain.
_______
Haath-Nlo provided her with more healing goop, and she silently vowed to get him out of this prison. She didn’t care that he felt like he deserved to be here. He had changed. She knew it. Grannork would probably be hard to convince about Haath-Nlo’s value, but she knew they would be injured in the escape. They wouldn’t have a choice but to fight their way out of the prison. She knew they would need him after they were out.
While her wounds faded and the memories of living dissection were buried, she thought of her mother. Kal had always thought of her mother as being the strongest one in the village. While most mated couples would be surrounded by their children, Kal’s mom had only the one child and never any other mate. When Kal had heard her mother weeping late at night, she knew her mother wept for her father. Kal had never pressed for more information because she knew the pain it caused.
Now that Kal was in prison and had experienced pain in unfathomable ways, she wished she had pressed her mother for more information. It wasn’t fair that Kal should only know vague references, and that she was shielded from the truth her mother had buried. Her mother would eventually bounce back from any pain his memory would cause, and Kal had the right to know. For the first time in her life, Kal hated her mother.
Kal felt a pang of guilt when she cursed her mother. Her mom was dead now, and Kal felt it was wrong to dishonor her spirit with such feelings. But it still didn’t change the fact that her mother’s suppression of the knowledge had put Kal in this precarious situation. At least her mother had taught her one valuable lesson. From her mother’s example, Kal knew how to suppress her emotions, so she buried her mother’s memory deep in her subconscious.
5
After a couple of weeks had gone by, she was cleaning out one of the food dispensers one day and Hayden was cleaning one of the others. The spouts providing the raw material from the sludge room would get caked with the excess matter by the end of mealtime. Cid and the bird-like star species were taking their turn in the cesspool. The food dispensers rearranged matter to any form through various spouts, lasers, and other technology. Hayden said they were called atomic printers, but most humans called them replicators after an epic human story called Star Trek. Humans were so egocentric. They always prided themselves on being the center of the universe. From the star charts, Kal found in the library, the human homeworld wasn’t even in a centralized part of the galaxy, and it was smaller than most of the rocky planets in the life sustainable zones. It was a wonder that humans ever made it off their planet at all.
She was rubbing a particularly rough spot with a grimy sponge when she looked up to a guard on the metal grating above. She yelled at him, “Hey! Could you get me a scraper?”
“Prisoners are not allowed sharp tools,” the guard’s voice clicked.
“You can take it back when I’m done. Besides, do you want the crap to build up on this expensive mac
hine? You think the warden will take it out of your pay because you wouldn’t get me a scraper?”
The guard turned without a word and disappeared from the edge of the grating. Once Kal was sure they were alone, she turned to Hayden. “You think these things could replicate some thunder clubs?”
Hayden laughed, “You mean guns?”
Even though she had read about guns in the library, she hadn’t made the connection. She never saw a picture of one, and none of the books described them because they assumed the readers knew what they were. There were very few pictures, and most had been censored by the Teristaques. “Do you think it’s possible?” she pressed.
“You aren’t the first to have that fantasy.”
“Just tell me!”
“Ok, yeah, for sure. It can make guns. Replicators can make anything with the right pattern. But these are locked down. There are security protocols.”
“You let me worry about that. So, can you pilot a spacecraft?”
“Yeah, I mean, we all had to do flight sims…wait, you’re serious about this?”
“Yeah, I have a way out of here.”
She heard the footsteps of the guard above.
“I need to know that you are with me.” she said.
“Yeah. Count me in.” Hayden said.
The guard returned with a scraper. He opened a hatch in the ceiling and dropped it towards Kal.
“Hurry up,” the guard said and brandished his gun.
Kal complied and began scraping the gunk from the various nozzles. She saw Cid standing in the doorway to the cesspool. How long had he been there? What had he heard? And above all, could she trust him?
_______
That night she decided to accelerate her plan. She had wanted to wait for a couple of weeks until Makiuarnek’s ship would be back at the station. That way, she could win both her freedom and her revenge, but she couldn’t trust that Cid would keep her plan a secret. He had hated her from the moment she had taken the mealtime duties. Nothing she did seemed to impress him. She couldn’t risk him formulating a plan of his own, or worse, exposing her to the Teristaques.
That night at the library, she told Seayolar to give Grannork the signal. She had conscripted Seayolar into the plan. He was happy to join for a chance at something different than the same old stale routine of prison life. He seemed never to stray from the books about mating rituals. Everyone had their preferences; she enjoyed histories, current events, and star charts. Even though she was floating in an asteroid belt in a giant chunk of metal, she stilled planned to see the stars.
She was scouring over a star chart when Seayolar put down his book. He made eye contact with her, and she nodded. Seayolar stood up and left the library. Kal waited for about thirty minutes and then left the library to find Grannork standing in the hallway.
They replayed their previous encounter with a little more screaming and flair. Grannork pummeled her. She attacked him. There were shouts of blood rage and threats of violence. The Teristaque guards broke them up as usual, and Kal awoke in the doctor’s corridor. Predictably the doctor was nowhere to be seen. She kicked Grannork awake, and he slapped her, sending her flying against the wall.
“Careful,” she hissed. “We don’t want to make too much noise.”
Grannork nodded, and they left for the Quadhelix’s room.
The Quadhelix smiled to greet them. He had a completely different torso and one leg. The Quadhelix grinned, “Ah, my friends, are you ready to get me out of here?”
“Yeah,” Kal said. “But first, how do we get you some new… parts?”
“Ah yes, just grab some for me, and I’ll do the rest.”
Kal turned to grab an arm off the wall. She went for the nearest one.
“No, not that one,” the Quadhelix said. “Those right over there. They have fingers that can expand into several hundred, and it’s great for typing in a hurry. And get those legs up there, they are good for running.”
Kal pulled a pair of purple curved legs with a backward kneecap down from the wall. The arms looked like strands of thread woven together to form a basic arm shape. She tore the plastic cover from the surgery bed and used it to wrap the Quadhelix and the loose limbs into a bundle. Before she was about to tie it off, she asked, “Are you sure you’ll be ok?”
“I will be quite fine. My brain can go into stasis for quite some time. It’s rare when a Quadhelix needs to change heads, but our ability to put our brain in stasis helps out with the eventuality that every body part breaks down eventually.”
“Enough talk, the doctor will be here any minute,” Grannork said and sealed the plastic. They used a surgical laser implement to make it air tight, lifted the bundle to a garbage chute and shoved it inside. There was a moment of suction and then the bundle was on its way to the cesspool.
Grannork and Kal turned to each other.
“Let’s make it look good,” Kal said.
They put up a good show of Kal dodging through the room while Grannork raged and destroyed everything in his path. They tossed and toppled equipment, used laser scalpels, and destroyed as much as they could. Grannork made sure to smash the body parts near the surgery table until it was an unrecognizable mess. The pulp of flesh could be the Quadhelix remains, or at least until the doctor did a DNA scan. Hopefully, they would be out of the prison by then.
The doctor finally arrived with a Teristaque squad to break up the fight. There was screaming, yelling, and beatings. The guards nearly killed Kal and Grannork that night. If the doctor hadn’t intervened and convinced them of her importance to his work, she probably would have died from the beating. As she was fading into unconsciousness, she heard the words the doctor had spoken. She was beaten so severely that she couldn’t be sure if what she heard was real. It sounded like he said half-human.
_______
Kal stood in her mother’s kitchen. The smell of her mother’s stew made her mouth water. She could hear her cousins in the family room, but couldn’t see them. It was like there was a thick haze in the great room. Her mother was gone, too.
“Mother?” Kal said to no one. The voices of her cousins didn’t react. They didn’t stop playing. “Mom!”
The stew boiled over, and Kal cut off the flow of air to the fire pit. The sound of her cousins playing got louder. The stew would not stop boiling. The fire wouldn’t go out. She ran to the living room to enlist the help of her cousins. Instead of her cousins, she saw Teristaques. They were standing over the bodies of her family. Their guns were smoking. Her cousins’ bodies were a crinkled mess, their faces trapped in expressions of horror.
Kal stumbled back as the Teristaques marched forward. She ran upstairs to the bedrooms and from her mother’s room, she heard weeping. Kal opened the door, seeing her mother next to the bed, tears streaking down her face.
“Mom?” Kal said. As she got closer, she noticed a body on the bed. A sheet covered it. Her mom continued to weep. “Who’s that?”
Her mother wouldn’t answer her. She leaned in close to the bed. Her mother’s sobs echoed in her ear. She pulled back the bed sheet. It was Sarge. He was her father. She stumbled backward and cried out.
_______
Kal woke up in her cell. Haath-Nlo’s goop was doing the trick. She decided it was time to tell him. “We are getting out of here today.”
“Oh?” Haath-Nlo said. “I didn’t know you had a parole hearing.”
“Not me, us.”
“I’m afraid my time for escapades has passed. I don’t know what an old bug like me would do for you.”
“We are going to need your healing services.”
“I don’t think-“
“Look,” Kal said. “I know you think you deserve to be here, but if more people in the universe had a heart like you, we wouldn’t need places like this. I don’t care what you believe about yourself. I believe in you. I’m going to get you out of here, and you are going to help us.”
“Well, I guess I can’t argue with you. What do you need me
to do?”
“Conserve that healing goo.”
_______
After breakfast, Hayden and Kal went to the cesspool to clear out some of the chunks. Kal began poking around at regular intervals.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the Quadhelix.”
“The what?”
“He’s going to help us escape.”
“If this is about making guns from the replicators, it will never work. They wouldn’t put them down here if there were a way to bypass the security measures.”
The pole hit a large clump. Kal grabbed the sack of surgical table coverings and dragged it out of the cesspool.
“What are you doing? What is that?”
“You know,” Kal thought, “I don’t even know his name. Let me introduce to you our computer person.”
Kal tore open the sack, and an almost entirely new man crawled out. What had been a mess of body parts was now a fully bipedal creature with arms and legs. The legs were the purple reverse knee kind, and the arms were the strands woven together kind, but they fit perfectly like they had always been a part of his body. The extra leg that had been attached when she threw him in the sack was gone.
“There was enough air in the sack to finish my DNA fusing process. I also had that extra leg to patch all the rough parts before my oxygen supply ran out.”
“How could…? What is…?” Hayden was lost for words.
“I couldn’t help but overhear. I woke my brain the minute you started moving the sack,” the Quadhelix said. “The name for this phase of my life is Maker. You can call me Maker.”
“This phase of your life?” Kal said.
“Bodies, names, they are all so fleeting, but I do suppose it would get confusing if you called every one of my kind Quadhelix, so Maker will do. Now if you would be so kind as to leave the door unlocked when you leave today, I can’t work with the Teristaques watching from above.”
_______
The attack began at lunchtime. In between breakfast and lunch, the guards sent the mealtime crew to clean the bathrooms. Since all prisoners were accounted for, there was no need for the guards to watch the cafeteria. Maker could do his work hacking into the replicator systems while Kal scrubbed toilets and floors. By the time they got back from bathroom duty, Maker had left a signal by inverting a kitchen implement in Kal’s area. They were all set to go.
