by Scott Baron
“Do not know what dog, but most powerful of vislas from red system could make change, yes.”
“And you’ve seen this?”
“Seen? Of course not. Power men that strong no come to my world. But cousin have friend who know man who have turned into fooshkar when offended a visla.”
“A friend of a friend knew a guy...” Charlie sighed. “Okay, cool. I see how it is. And I suppose yellow and white suns work differently as well.”
“You learning fast, Charlee.”
“Yeah, well, Mama didn’t raise no fool.”
Charlie lay back on his cot and stared at the strangely illuminated ceiling, pondering what he could possibly do in the depths of space to make the situation better.
Rika’s locked up somewhere, we’re in the middle of nowhere, and even if we could get free, I have absolutely no idea how to operate this tech. It’s all based on mythology and bullshit, though I’d love to know the science behind it. These guys are light years ahead of us in propulsion tech and shielding design, he thought, looking out the invisible window. For now, I guess I just watch and learn.
He lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes, exhausted from his ordeals. Soon, he was drifting off into a shallow sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Charlee,” Tuktuk said. “Charlee, you hear me?”
Charlie woke from his slumber. He was groggy, but the exhausted edge was gone, at least.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Your head,” Tuktuk said. “I look to help cleaning where you cut, but it already healing.”
Charlie sat up and ran his fingers gently over the area he’d injured when Captain Tür flung him into the bulkhead.
“Huh, still working, I see.”
“You power man?” Tuktuk asked, his eyes going wide on their stalks.
“Nah. It must be the water.”
“Water? What you mean?”
“Oh, just when we were exploring that desert, there was this weird water, is all.”
“There no water in Balamar Wasteland, Charlee. Everyone know this. Me tell you so.”
“Then it must’ve been one hell of a mirage.”
“Mirage?”
“Illusion. But this one was wet, and it made my skin heal.”
Tuktuk gasped. “The Flow?”
“The what, now?”
“Me tell you, but you no listen. The legend. Gone when Visla Balamar destroyed. Him tap into something bigly, make to pull and store power in water. Them say that why he live so long. Why he so strong.”
“Well, I don’t know about anything like that,” Charlie said.
This guy sure is worked up about this Flow stuff, he was musing just as the lights to their cell abruptly grew bright as Captain Tür and his right-hand man, Saur, stormed into the cell.
“You are to come with me,” Tür demanded. If Charlie had any thoughts of resistance, the look on Saur’s face made him think twice. He could heal fast, but probably not fast enough.
The two led him down a corridor. It was his first look at the ship outside his cell, and the rest of the craft was devoid of any signs of technology. Smooth walls, gently glowing ceilings, and doors that, while apparently open, made the collar around his neck tingle if he strayed too close.
A soft chanting came from one room, and as they passed it, Charlie saw a dozen men and women, all of them with a faint, glowing blue tint to their skin, sitting in a circle. They appeared to be in a trance as they repeated the same words over and over again.
Floramar Ivanti Necctu, he silently repeated to himself. Not a very catchy tune.
“Hey, what’s with the kumbaya people?” Charlie asked, leaning in toward the door. He received a jolt to his collar that sent him sprawling to the floor, the clatter breaking the concentration of one of the chanting women.
The ship lurched a moment before she regained her composure and began chanting once more.
Okay, now that was weird.
“Do not do that again,” Saur growled. “Ever.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t make fun of the sing-along. Got it.”
They turned left, following a curving passage until they reached a small room with two seats and a table.
That looks an awful lot like an interrogation room, Charlie noted.
“You will sit,” Captain Tür said.
Charlie obliged.
“Would you like refreshment?” Tür asked, sliding a cup of water in front of him. He watched Charlie glance at the beverage but not drink it with curiosity, then poured another and slid it in front of his prisoner, swapping cups and drinking deep.
“It is not poison, I assure you,” he said. “I know the water provided our guests can sometimes be less-than refreshing.”
“Oh, I’m a guest now?”
“Of course you are,” Tür said. “We merely got off on the wrong foot. A misunderstanding. I’m sure you understand, it can be so tiring in the Balamar Wasteland. Even the best of us get cranky at times.”
“If you call blasting me with that thing cranky, then yes. Very cranky.”
“But we are rested now, and refreshed. A nice drink of water makes all the difference, does it not?”
“I suppose,” Charlie replied. These guys are all about water all of a sudden. They must’ve been eavesdropping in our cell. They heard everything, and this was so important to them they took me away from Tuktuk to talk about it. Which means––
“You must have had a difficult time out there,” Captain Tür continued in his nicest voice. “And with limited supplies, that could be difficult, I’m sure.”
“It was,” Charlie answered. “But we were making do.”
“I noticed you dug holes in search of fluids. But tell me––”
Aw, hell. Here it comes.
“Tell me, Charlie. Did you happen to find water out in that desolate place?”
Captain Tür was doing his best to appear totally at ease. Disinterested, even. But the underlying desire driving him was impossible to entirely conceal.
“Uh, well, there was some water out there,” he said.
Tür almost jumped at the words. “Oh, how interesting,” he managed to say in a relatively calm tone. “And was there anything unusual about this water?”
He knows. Not what we found, but something, Charlie realized. I’m going to have to play this very carefully.
He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could. “Well, it was kind of iridescent, I suppose. And when I got it on my skin, it made the sunburn go away.”
“Sir! It has to be!” Saur blurted.
“Refrain from outbursts, please. You’ll frighten our guest.”
“Apologies, Captain.”
The intimidating man turned back to Charlie. “I’m sorry for my lieutenant’s enthusiasm. It’s just such a rarity, finding a water source in the desert. It would make stopping there so much less of an ordeal. Tell me, could you show me where it was if we went back?”
“I could try to find it again, sure,” Charlie said. “But it was a pretty vast desert, and it might be hard to––”
“Saur, turn us around––”
“But it wouldn’t matter,” Charlie continued. “It was only a tiny little puddle, and we drained it completely when we found it.”
He could have sworn the captain took a little step back from him when he heard that.
“Oh, I see. And, did you drink that water?” Tür asked, his hand slowly creeping toward the pouch he kept his slaap in.
“Drink it? Oh no, of course not,” he lied. “We didn’t know if it was poison or not. I just got some on my skin when we were gathering it up, is all.”
I hope he buys that, Charlie thought, while trying to maintain his best innocent face. The one he perfected as a boy when his mother would come home to find something disassembled on the floor. Of course, she knew it was him, and she was angry, but she humored her son. He had a knack for repairing things. He just had to take them apart first to figure out how they worked.
T
he green-hued alien’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly.
“Probably for the best. One should be careful in the wasteland,” he said. “But you say you emptied the pool.”
“Puddle, really. Not much there.”
“Puddle, then. You filled containers?”
“Yeah, brought them back to camp to analyze and see if they were safe to drink.”
“And did any of the others touch the waters?”
“Nope, just me,” he said, casually omitting his impromptu swim with Rika in the water-filled cistern.
A smile began to grow on Captain Tür’s face. “So they are still there.”
He turned to Saur, ignoring his “guest.”
“It splashed his skin. Saur, it would explain this one’s resilience.”
“He did not drink it, but even so, is it worth the risk?”
“He is weak. Unpowered. Just look,” he said turning to Charlie. He realized the human was listening. “San ovusk,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Charlie suddenly found himself unable to understand the aliens.
So, that’s the command to shut off the translation software. ‘San ovusk.’ That may come in handy, he thought, tucking away the alien word for another time. The two Tslavar continued to speak in front of him, but he couldn’t make out a word of it.
“If I may speak freely, sir. If he came in contact with the water, he is unpredictable. It makes him a risky cargo. I believe it is best to get rid of him at the next planet.”
“Perhaps. But first we return to Balamar Wasteland and collect the waters. Do you realize, Saur, that no one has seen a drop since the great war? It was thought destroyed. And he claims to have several containers full? We will be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”
“I know, sir. But perhaps we should unload him first. Sell him to a Zomoki breeder for chum.”
“I’ve made up my mind, Saur. I appreciate your counsel, as always, but this one may be of use to us yet.” He turned to Charlie. “Impezu ovusk.”
I understood those words. They sounded different than that other gibberish. It must be a base coding language. Not their native tongue. ‘Impezu ovusk,’ he silently repeated to himself.
“We are going to return to your ship to gather more salvage. Perhaps when we are there, we will even bring the water containers on board and complete the tests you were running for you. Where did you say you hid them?” Tür asked, buttery-smooth.
“Oh, I didn’t hide them,” Charlie replied. “They were sitting on the sled your goons dragged back to our camp when you ransacked the place. It’d be great to get some of our supplies, sure, but the water is long gone.”
“Gone, you say?”
“Yeah, I saw it happen. Don’t you remember?” Charlie asked, relishing what was coming next. “Actually, it was you who did it, if I remember correctly. You kicked the containers over before brutalizing my friends. It all drained out into the sand.”
If the alien weren’t already green, he would have turned that color.
“If legend is true, it doesn’t evaporate,” Saur said.
“But it certainly did soak down into the ground,” Charlie muttered.
The slave ship’s commander’s shoulders slumped slightly.
“It is lost to the sands, Saur,” Captain Tür said quietly. “It was there, right under our noses. The find of a lifetime. And we lost it. By our own hands, no less.” He took one final glance at Charlie, sighed, then turned to his aide. “We’re done. Take him back.”
The wiry alien roughly hauled Charlie to his feet and hauled him unceremoniously out of the room and tossed him back in his cell.
“That went well,” Charlie said with a laugh, then settled into his bunk for a long flight to who-knew-where.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Two days of their deep space voyage through the blackness between solar systems had passed. Charlie couldn’t even guess the rate of travel at which they were moving, but to pass from solar system to solar system so swiftly, he knew full well it was far beyond anything humanity could have dreamed of.
Tuktuk apparently had one thing right: Captain Tür had spared no expense on procuring enough Drooks to get his ship moving at ridiculous speed. Whatever the tech was they used to achieve that end, Charlie had to admit they certainly did their job well.
Apparently, there was an even faster way to travel. A warp, or jump, or something of that sort, but it was prohibitively expensive to use with any regularity, and the captain seemed to be all about saving his coin.
Charlie woke on the third day to a faint blue glow coming in through the window. At first he thought it was some sort of work light or display reflecting through the opening, but he didn’t have the opportunity to look before the Tslavar toughs came and dragged him and Tuktuk out of their cell and brought them to the ship’s store rooms.
It was only after the work boss had directed them to pick up the large containers fitted with shoulder straps and marched them out of the ship that Charlie realized the astonishing reality. They had landed.
“Holy shit,” he gasped. “This is another world.”
“You saying this as if never happen,” Tuktuk said, craning his eyestalks to get a better look at the bustling marketplace they and the other slaves were being herded toward.
“It doesn’t ever happen, Tuktuk. At least, not on my world.”
“You people not have strong magic, do they, Charlee?”
“Enough with the magic talk, already. Let’s just say we have different tech and leave it at that, okay?”
“Fine. Your tech-magic is no very good strong.”
“Seriously?” Charlie grumbled.
The blue giant illuminating the sky was a marvel to behold. The intensely burning ball of helium within a hydrogen plasma envelope had once been a red dwarf before entering the blue giant phase of its dwindling life.
The sun’s rays felt strange on Charlie’s skin. Not as though it was burning, exactly, but the spectrum was simply so different from what he was accustomed, his body didn’t know how to react.
Tuktuk, however, being a blue-skinned being, seemed to revel in the warm glow. His load almost seemed to lighten on his shoulders.
“You okay, man?” he asked his happy blue friend.
“Very okay. Feels good to have sun on my skin.”
“I’ve never seen a blue sun before. I mean, not like this. They’re incredibly rare, you know.”
“Is weaker than my home, but feel good. And blue not rare, though power people from blue sun worlds are much rarer than others. Almost everyone just normal person, like Tuktuk. Just want to live our lives.”
As if he heard their conversation, the Tslavar leading their procession shouted for them to keep up, then muttered a few words that Charlie couldn’t quite hear. The resulting shock from his collar, however, he didn’t miss.
“Ow!”
“Keep moving. If you fall behind again you will receive a much less gentle reminder.”
“He calls that gentle?”
“For Tslavar, yes. We lucky he no make us shock until we no move. But, of course, they need us for to carrying supplies, and no moving make us bad for that job.”
“Great, so the one thing that’s our saving grace is we can carry stuff for them. Lovely.”
Charlie made a point to stick with the other collar-wearing slaves as they moved through the marketplace. Despite his circumstances, he couldn’t help but marvel at all that was going on around him.
This is incredible. Actual aliens. A shit-ton of them, too. Charlie only wished he were on this world as a tourist and not a beast of burden. There was so much to see, so many different species of aliens to discover, and Tuktuk was happy to be his guide.
“Hey, how about that one? What’s that kind called?” Charlie asked, pointing at an extremely pale alien with thick black hair. The man was wiry and relaxed, yet radiated an unstated strength. He was wearing a light material in the heat of the blue sun, and what appeared to be
small spinal ridges made a slight bumped impression through his tunic, the only real oddity to his otherwise humanoid appearance.
“Oh, him Wampeh. You no want get too close to Wampeh. They typically bad mood people,” Tuktuk said, unconsciously veering farther from the pale alien.
“What’s up, Tuk? You okay?” he asked, noting his friend’s discomfort.
“Yes. Is just that some Wampeh sometimes have strange people from them. Known to hurt power people for take their blood.”
“I’m sorry, they what, now?”
“Is rare. Very, very rare, but them come from black hyper-giant place. That why they so pale. But power there very strange for different species. Even among other Wampeh, they anomaly. They sometimes power-taker.”
It was then that Charlie noticed the Tslavar leading them through the marketplace had also observed the Wampeh, and his slaap was already on his hand, held casually, but ready for rapid deployment if needed.
Damn. The guy doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone, but if it got him spooked. Charlie may have been a foreigner to the strange world, but he was not stupid.
“I have no idea how any of that works, my friend, but I’ll take your word for it,” he said, steering well clear of the pale man.
Apparently, the Wampeh had drawn the attention of others, and not scrutiny of the good kind, Charlie noted as they plunged into the depths of the tents and stalls. Everyone gave the intimidating man a wide berth, but wary eyes were continuously on him. It felt like one of those old movies where prison yard toughs circled the new guy, waiting to see who’d be the first to test his mettle.
Charlie turned and kept up with the others. Whatever befell the pale man would happen with or without him watching, and he had no desire of another zap from that collar for holding up the others. He looked back one final time, wondering what would happen to the man, then trotted off.
Not my problem.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The sights and smells––often incredible, though occasionally not in a good way––left Charlie feeling akin to a kid in a candy shop. Sure, he was a beast of burden at the moment, but he was actually walking through an alien bazaar. The first human ever to do so. The thought made him once again wonder where Rika was. She’d be amazed at the cacophonous marketplace.
