The Planet Dweller

by Jane Palmer

  ***

  ‘Don’t say anything to me until you’ve breathed enough air to make sense,’ Kulp warned Tolt and Jannu, depositing them on the floor of his flight deck where he could watch them as well as the dangers outside.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ Tolt eventually managed to gasp, not willing to admit he was glad to see Kulp again.

  ‘Evidently not. At least I only had to be rescued once. You two actually muffed dying three times. If you weren’t so incompetent, I wouldn’t have bothered to save you. Having two idiots like you around makes me feel secure in my superiority.’ Kulp saw the Mott monitoring station zooming towards his ship. ‘Now shut up while I concentrate on what our four-legged friend is up to.’

  ‘When the Mott know they can’t colonise the planet dwellers’ homes,’ Jannu whispered to Tolt, ‘it’s going to upset the plans they had to take over the galaxy.’

  ‘Of course it is! What do you think I’m doing here?’ snapped Kulp. ‘Now shut up!’

  Tolt and Jannu looked at each other in mute apprehension. Had their self-centred, egotistical leader noticed the presence of other life forms in his attempts to swindle, bully, and snatch anything he could make a profit out of after all? Had he of all people become a philosopher? Perhaps the shade of pink he’d been contaminated with had somehow infiltrated his brain. The fact that he was still alive must have meant that someone or something had saved him. Even so, gratitude had never been a part of his nature. Before they could silently turn over the possibility of him losing his grip on what he called sanity, an explosion on the hull of the ship told them the Mott had taken things even more badly than they had expected.

  ‘What was that?’ yelped Tolt in terror.

  ‘The Mott has diverted the power from his station’s engines and is trying to blast us,’ replied Kulp.

  ‘That means it’ll lose its orbit. He won’t survive very long either,’ Jannu said.

  Kulp shrugged. ‘It makes no difference to him. He needs one last defiant act so it can be recorded he died gloriously, even if very expensively, when the station collides with us or burns up.’

  ‘I rather think we should disappoint him,’ Tolt suggested.

  ‘It looks as though we’re going to have to,’ Kulp agreed. ‘If my instruments weren’t damaged by that blast, the Mott artillery fleet are on our tails.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of us going back outside, is there?’ inquired Tolt.

  ‘No time to stop, even for that. You’re on my side now.’ Kulp pulled his ship out of the Mott station’s range and accelerated out of the ill-treated solar system.

  Not sure what side Kulp was referring to, Jannu and Tolt decided they preferred to risk of death at his efficient hands, to execution at the incompetent Mott’s. They could worry about the dubious condition of Kulp’s mental health later.