by Viki Storm
I get into my own ship and start it up, and despite myself, when the instrument panel starts to light up, I feel the old excitement of heading out into battle.
I want to make these fuckers pay.
Once I’m up, I feel the cold embrace of the Womb of the Void. For once in my life, it’s comforting. I always feel insignificant up here, surrounded by nothing for lightyears in all directions. But this time the insignificance is a comfort. Some things will always be out of my hands. And I shouldn’t feel so self-important. To the Universe, I’m a speck of a speck of a speck. Even that’s a generous estimation of my importance.
I fly in a daze, lost in the blackness of the Void, returning to the Womb of creation, the darkness where we all came from, the elements that were fused from supernovae billions of years ago.
Then I see something on my radar.
The Guuklar fleet.
I involuntarily grind my teeth together. I can’t wait to blast these bastards back into the constituent atoms from which they were fused. Some of the healers and chemists insist that the Guuklar and the Zalaryns share a common ancestor, but I can’t believe that sort of heresy. The Guuklar biology is somewhat similar to Zalaryn, that much can’t be denied. But I refuse to believe that we once stemmed from the same species.
They are a corruption, an abomination. Conjured by some evil sorcerer’s experiment gone horribly wrong. They are pure evil for its own sake. The Rulmek, you can at least say their evil is only means to an end, which is to fuel their greed. The Guuklar, however, do not fight and kill for territory or resources. They do it for bloodsport.
They’ve evolved to do it for bloodpsort.
Their entire despicable bodies are honed for cruelty. They can synthesize their own glucose, giving them energy reserves far beyond a regular lifeform’s. Their eyeballs are huge, all pupil, allowing them to see in the dark. They are armored with scales, and their claws are razor-sharp, so they are never wholly without a weapon.
I check the comm, waiting for the signal to attack. We’re supposed to get into position and then—
Light erupts in the sky, white-hot pure energy. Shit, someone got trigger-happy. Oh well, no time like the present, the old nursemaids say.
I dart in close, trying to capitalize on whatever brief moment of surprise this unexpected blast has caused. I fire my weapons, unleashing a torrent of missiles homed in on the Guuklar fleet. One of them finds its target, exploding in a bluish flame as the fuel reserves ignite.
The other Zalaryns fire their weapons, and similar bursts of fire and light explode in the blackness of the Void.
It is hypnotic, and I start to act on instincts alone, but it is not the same as hand-to-hand battle, where both the Zalaryns and Guuklar excel. My instincts are not as keen cloistered in my ship. I cannot smell the blood in the air or hear the boots crunching on the ground. My sensory pads are useless in the recirculating, purified air of my ship’s cabin.
Still, I fight.
And try not to think about Suse, out there somewhere.
Try not to think that she’s one of those bluish bursts of fire and light.
- - -
Battle is always over sooner than you expect. In the moment, it feels like an eternity because adrenaline slows down your senses. But after the last Guuklar ship is dispatched, I look at my timepiece and marvel that only twenty-four minutes have elapsed.
“Suse?” I call out on the comm-link. No answer. I know that doesn’t mean anything. Over half of the Zalaryn comms are disabled, the delicate fiber optic wires damaged by the blastwaves of the battle. I try not to panic. And I’m not panicking. Yet.
I do not feel as if Suse has been hurt or killed. I would like to hope that through the strength of our bond, I would know in an instant if she was hurt. But I can’t quite convince myself of that in the black Womb of the Void. Out here, no one knows anything. Out here, you’re a speck of a speck of a speck, and any attempts to control your own destiny are laughed at.
I land back on Ureb-R’iora, throw on my suit and strap on my oxygen tank, and burst forth from my spacecraft. I run as best I can in this bulky apparatus, going from ship to ship, trying to find Suse. I know we lost twenty ships in the battle and hers was not one of them, so I have faith that her ship will turn up soon enough.
“Orlon!” I hear the voice through the speaker in my helmet. It’s not her. It’s Qeb, the Chief Commander of this mission.
“Sir?” I ask. Even through the polymer of his rapidly fogging helmet, it’s obvious that his expression is grave. “We got them all?” My fear is that a few rogue Guuklar ships were able to escape undetected.
“Mostly,” he says, “and there’s a scouting crew trying to pick up the signals of any stragglers or escapees.”
“What is it?” I say. I know it’s something.
“This,” he says. He holds out his comm panel. It only takes a second for me to read the message, straight from Tos himself, the Guuklar warlord.
Did I really think we were just going to stumble on Pior’s hidden weapons silo and vehicle fleet, blast a few Guuklar ships, and go home to a celebratory revel full of freykka and roast meat?
I told you that I’m going to Lekyo Prime to get my lawful property. That was a cute little trick you just pulled. I know you Zalaryns are full of cute little tricks, which is why I did not travel with my main fleet. I must say, I’m insulted. What sort of fool do you take me for? I’ll see you on Lekyo Prime. But most likely by the time you fools get there, it will be nothing but ash.
One more thing: I intercepted one of your comms, and I know you have a human female called Suse. Damn it, what’s with all these Rulmek selling me human females that disappear before I can deflower them? She’s mine, too, you better believe it. She’s the first one I’m going to find, and I’m not going to wait until I get her back to our planet. I’m going to take her on the blood-soaked battlefield.
“He’s right about one thing,” Qeb says. “We are fools.”
“Can we intercept him?” I ask, feeling all the more a fool for my hope. Rage is brewing inside me. How does he know about Suse? And what did he mean, ‘Rulmek selling me human females?’ Suse wasn’t sold to the Guuklar, was she?
“It’s possible,” Qeb says. My chest swells at the hope. “But we have no weaponry. We fired all the missiles, the laser cartridges are empty, the particle blasters are spent. Our fuel reserves are dangerously low. We had one shot, and we blew it.”
“Void take us,” I spit. “Tos made fools of us all. No—” I correct myself, “we made fools of ourselves.”
“If we pool our remaining fuel and weapons, we might be able to muster a few ships,” Qeb says. “It’s the only thing we can do—and we have to do something.”
“Alright,” I say. I look at my timepiece. “Are all the ships back yet?”
“What do you mean?” Qeb says. “You were the last one in.”
A dizzy swoon threatens to overtake me. I was the last one? I think about it, since I’ve been on the ground, I haven’t seen any others land.
“Suse?” I ask. “Her ship? She’s not on the casualty list.”
“Suse? Your mate?” he says. “She was out there? I didn’t have her ship in my flight plan.” I can see the contempt in his eyes, glowering at the incompetent, weak male who let his bonded mate fly into battle.
“Yes, she was out there,” I say. “The Rulmek abducted her mother and the Guuklar killed her father. I was honor-bound to let her avenge her family.”
“I’m sorry,” Qeb says. “But everyone else landed a while ago. Suse is definitely not here.”
It’s the smell of smoke that gets through the daze and finally wakes me up. It’s not ordinary smoke, the pleasurable smell of fire at a woodstove. It’s a chemical scent of electrical wires and metallic elements sizzling at high heat. There is the crackling and popping of circuits shorting out, not unlike the sound of meat frying in the pan.
I try to sit up, but I can’t. It takes me a minute to realize
that it’s my harness, still buckled, strapping me into the pilot’s seat. I unlatch the buckles and tumble sideways out into the wreckage of my small fighter ship. My head is swimming; it feels like I’m whirling around on a centrifuge when I’m just sitting still, like someone’s got a big wooden spoon inside my head, stirring it up like a stew. Stew? Frying meat? I’m hungry, too, and that’s not helping.
I pull myself up to the instrument panel, hoping that the ship is still airworthy. Hissing smoke rises from cracked glass panels, lights are dark, buttons are nonresponsive. I toggle the switch to enable the navigation distress beacon, but nothing happens. My comm-screen is black, and no amount of cursing or fist-pounding is getting it to turn on.
Fuck. I have no idea where I am or what time it is. Is the battle still going on, or have I been here knocked out for a couple days and that’s why I woke up thinking of meat and stew?
My little fighter ship is too small to be equipped with an escape pod, and if the signal beacon isn’t working… I don’t want to think about what it would mean if my ship was utterly demolished.
I got myself into this mess, so I’m going to have to get myself out.
I have no one to blame but myself, and damn it if that isn’t worse than blaming someone else.
What did I tell Orlon, that I didn’t want to sit around and let things happen to me? That I wanted to be an active agent of change?
Well, that was stupid.
I’ve changed things alright—and obviously not for the better. Although I did take out a few Guuklar ships before one of the bastards got me and I spun out of control. And that felt pretty damned good. Really damned good. I never knew revenge would be so satisfying—but I should have guessed it; that’s why people are obsessed with it.
Look at what it’s cost me. Not just crash landing on some planet without working communications or navigations equipment—and that might cost me my life.
But it’s cost me more.
It’s cost me Orlon. And our bond.
After he took me—claimed me—I felt it. I felt everything. In an instant, as he thrust his cock into me, uniting our souls through the crude instrument of flesh, I knew that everything he’d been talking about was true. That there was something otherworldly about our connection, something beyond our own measly capacity for comprehension.
And I just basically took a look at that awe-inspiring power and gave it the middle finger.
After I swore to him, pledged to toil for the benefit of our union and our future offspring, I went and did something entirely selfish—but we will both have to pay the consequences.
This has got to be my divine punishment for daring to get into the spacecraft and fight in this battle.
The Universe’s draconian retribution: Stupid human, deny the power of the bond, seek to risk the rare gift we have bestowed upon you for a fleeting, bloodthirsty moment of revenge? Alright, then take this.
I deserve this, I can admit it—and possibly accept my punishment with good grace.
But Orlon? He’s innocent in all of this. He wasn’t going to let me go—he knew how risky it was. And now he’s being punished for something that he tried to prevent.
I can’t do that to him, can’t let my stupidity and desire for revenge rob him of his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a bonded mate.
I resolve immediately to get off this planet. I will get this ship in working order and get the communications system back online. I will send a distress beacon.
I will grow wings and fly if that’s what it takes.
But I am getting out of here.
I crawl to the small storage closet and pull out a spacesuit. I slide into it and line up the contact points for the helmet and seal it shut. At least when the ship crashed it didn’t depressurize, otherwise I’d have frozen to death by now. The flight panel is going haywire, but there are analog temperature and oxygen gauges still working. It’s cold outside the ship, well below freezing. The oxygen saturation levels appear to be breathable, but I’m not taking any chances. I enable the oxygen flow from the tank on my spacesuit and step outside the ship.
The terrain of this planet gives away no clues to its identity. It’s rocky, and the ground is hard-packed and scattered with small pebbles and stones. There’s no water and no trees, at least in this vicinity. But it’s not flat and desolate. The entire landscape as far as I can see is dotted with huge rocky outcroppings, caves, mesas and mountains. It’s going to make foot travel difficult, but more importantly, it’s going to make it difficult for any scouts to spot my ship. That might turn out to be a blessing if there are any Guuklar in the area, hunting down stray ships—or it might be my curse, if the Zalaryns decide to do the same.
I go back inside the ship, the seed of an idea beginning to sprout.
I check the recessed storage compartments and the drawers underneath the seats until I find it, what I know should be here. An emergency comm.
It’s huge because it’s battery powered, and I only hope that whatever rebellion my father was planning, he didn’t go cheap on his equipment. If this is a secondhand, outdated device with corroded batteries, then I’ve really got no hope. The panel is housed in a thick polymer case, designed to withstand impact—and it seems to have survived the crash quite nicely. Probably better than me.
The panel can’t be removed and carried around like a normal one; it’s got to stay connected to its bulky power source. Likewise, it doesn’t have an internal nano-antenna but a large collapsible satellite antenna that needs to be set up in a wide-open area. I inspect all the buttons looking for the power switch. It is meant to be universal, so there is no writing on the buttons and switches, only vague symbols and shapes meant to be easily decoded by speakers of any language. Great idea and all, but without an instruction manual in my language, I have no idea if I’m supposed to push the orange triangle or the green square to turn this damned thing on.
I start pushing buttons until the screen blinks—then fades to black, killing my hopes. But after a pause, the screen lights up and the software booting sequence begins. I let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.
It seems to take forever, but the panel is finally ready for use. I navigate to the network controls, but it displays an icon that is more universally recognized than a triangle or square.
No signal.
It’s probably all these damned rocks and cliffs. These comms can ping signals off satellites orbiting light years away. Terran devices rely on radio waves or other short-distance signals to send and receive the encoded binary, but the space-ready devices use ultraviolet radiation that can travel faster than light speed, locating and relaying off satellites in different galaxies if necessary. But not if the UV signals are blocked by, say, a fifty-meter slab of impenetrable iron ore.
I heft the comm case onto my hip and take it outside. Even with my space suit, I can tell that it’s freezing out here. And dark. There is faint light from a star so distant it appears to be no more than a glowing melon in the sky. But there’s enough light to work the panel, provided that I didn’t have the misfortune to land somewhere at sunset. Actually, with my luck today, it probably is sunset, and I bet the solar cycle here is something ridiculous like five hundred hours until next daylight.
On the plus side, the gravity here is light, much lighter than on Ureb-R’iora. I feel like I’m practically flying as my feet glide over the rocks. I scope out the terrain, looking for the best spot to set up the antenna, but it’s pretty craggy. I guess if it’s all sheer rock faces, it doesn’t matter what direction I go, so I just go forward, intending to just go in a straight line and keep my ship in my sights. No turns, no climbing, no getting lost.
I hike for what feels like an hour, but I can still see my ship behind me. There’s a spot where the cliff faces seem to be shorter than before. There’s no way to prove this, no other features of the geography that I can use for comparison. But the red, jagged rocks seem less intimidating, less towering. I feel less like I’m hemmed i
n, less like a bug caught in a specimen jar.
I fall to my knees and start setting up the equipment, part of me thinking that wouldn’t it be funny if this was a fully inhabited planet, but I just happened to be in their equivalent of a desert. The home planet of my childhood had thriving settlements, but it still had large swaths thousands of kilometers wide without a single soul.
But no, this can’t be the case. My emergency comm would have picked up a network signal if this planet had any settlements. As for animal life, there’s no vegetation, so it’s unlikely that there’s going to be any viable ecosystem. That’s the one rule of the Universe—if you want life, you need plants.
Still, I’m getting a creepy feeling, something different than when I was at the ship. At the ship, I was pissed and sad and hopeless, but definitely not creeped out. Now? I don’t know. I look over my shoulders, half expecting to see a Guuklar with a sharpened blade dripping blood.
No one there. Of course.
I’m just getting the heebie-jeebies because I’m far from my ship—it’s my last symbol of civilization and hope. It’s my shelter, too, and that counts for a lot. I passed by a few caves while I was walking out here, but I am not keen to go spelunking to find a place to sleep tonight.
I finish connecting the antenna and then scan for network signals again. It takes a long time because even going faster than light speed, stuff is really, really far away in space. I remember when I went to school as a child, the teacher said that the teeny tiny stars we’d see at night were so far away that it took the light hundreds of years to reach our planet, even traveling at 180,000 miles per second. All the starlight you see, it’s hundreds of years old.
I lean back and lie down on the dirt, first swiping away the rocks that cover the ground. My head still feels a little dizzy from the crash. I’m too wired to sleep, though, too tense and anxious, worried if this comm will be able to connect to anything out here.
