When The Unconstant Lover does eventually come to rest, it’s after a lengthy scrape along the planet’s surface. As it slows to a stop, Odisseus both hears and feels pieces – hopefully of ice – literally snapping off and ground beneath the ship’s decelerating slide.
There are two more immediate blessings, however; the Lover is right side up and Odisseus is alive.
The Ortok takes a moment to ratify this last fact, to ensure that his heart still beats, all his limbs are still attached and that his bones weren’t powderized in the crash. As terrible as some of the Lover’s previous crashes may have been, Odisseus thinks he can safely attest that this one is – by blooming far – her worst to date.
Odisseus sits, strapped to an unflushed toilet, amid the utter ruin of the water closet. Rivets, pills and jagged triangles of glass are littered like confetti across the floor. His breath comes slow and ragged as he listens to the ship’s skeleton groan from all her recent trauma.
From within the sink, the comm suddenly burbles to life.
“I’m pretty sure,” begins the Captain tentatively, “I’ve shit my pants.”
Moira stands on the rim of the airlock, blinking back tears. She’s unable to really appreciate the utterly alien world that's swept panoramically out around her. Instead, she has to cower, wincing and scooting back, from the harsh glare of Gi's angry orange sun, like she’s some unearthed subterranean horror exposed to naked sunlight for the first time.
For a second, her euphoria at escaping the prison The Unconstant Lover had become is overshadowed by how infernally hot the outside world actually is.
All their research, plus Gella’s own testimony, should have warned them how hot Gi would be. They’d assumed a forbidding desert climate, on par with Rith or Malerba or Hivu, and came equipped for same – survival gear, cloth wrappings, the whole nine yards. Never, even at her most paranoid, could Moira have imagined a heat as fierce and punishing as this one.
At the moment, she’s even standing in the shade and surrounded by thousands of tons of solid ice. It occurs to Moira that perhaps here, her usual outfit of monochromatic black wasn’t necessarily the wisest wardrobe.
Moira lingers in the mouth of a glacial cave. Jagged icy slopes fall away at her feet while jagged icy cliffs climb still higher above her head. Through occasional gaps in the ice, she spots patches of wet black teltriton hull, the Lover’s true colors peeking through her frosty disguise. Everywhere she looks, however, Moira sees a great miasma of steam that rises in twisting tendrils, as the spaceberg visibly evaporates all around her.
Given ten minutes in this heat, Moira predicts that all that will remain of their trusty disguise is a circle of wet mud and The Unconstant Lover, baking beneath this unnatural sun.
Gi’s single sun is a hateful eye of orange flame that glowers furiously over the landscape. It dominates its acrid yellow sky, a sky unmarred by the white whiffs of cloud that would suggest any other weather but endless sunshine. Every breath that Moira takes tastes chalky and desiccated, the very air robbed of its moisture.
The countryside in every direction is barren, shrunken and shriveled into a wasteland by such a severe sun. All color has been utterly bleached from Gi’s sandy surface, giving the landscape an incongruous resemblance to freshly fallen snow. Closer examination, however, reveals the ground to be cracked and spiderwebbed, all moisture sponged from the soil aeons ago.
The Lover and her frozen shell appear to have, from where Moira’s standing, come down amid a stretch of flatland. The very occasional rise that Moira spots appear, at first glance, to be great boulders of glossy stone. When she spies her perfect reflection – Moira standing at the mouth of a cave in a lumpy mountain of ice and teltriton – in the nearest one, she realizes the truth.
Great mounds of glass, sand made molten and subsequently cooled, dot the surface of Gi. It would have taken temperatures unspeakably higher than these, Moira reflects, to smelt raw sand into glass, and she wonders idly how old those stones must be, dating to an earlier age in the mysterious planet’s history.
The true culprit behind the planet’s inhospitable conditions, however, is undeniably the Consortium. All their data should suggest that, under normal conditions, Gi ought to be a torrid, tropical planet, rife with flora and fauna. Under the oppressive climatic field, however, the planet’s all dusty deserts and barren salt flats, the soil utterly hostile to anything but the most extreme forms of life. When she gazes skyward, Moira can even discern, like the strings of an unseen puppeteer, the seams of the field’s many yellow hexagons. She wonders what color an untampered sky might be.
Gi might be fairly far from the ideal vacation spot but Moira, beggar among beggars, can’t be choosy. She’s not about to complain; all she wants is escape from the Lover and her contemptible crew.
Moira practically sprinted out the airlock the moment they made planetfall. Far as she knew, the remaining crew were still sequestered aboard, preparing themselves for their exhausting jaunt into the desert sun. Volunteering to put first boots on the ground before anyone could object, Moira could do a little recon around the crash site, not even bothering with the desert survival gear for the moment.
There’s plenty of time for all that later. Right now, what Moira really needs is an afternoon constitutional, two months overdue. Here, she could enjoy actual solitude, with wide open skies, fresh air and no teltriton walls to entrap her.
To fully appreciate this newfound freedom, though, Moira must find some means down the icy slopes all around her.
With hands and hobnailed heels, Moira picks her way carefully across what remains of the spaceberg, clinging tenuously to the ship’s hull. More than once does a substantial piece of ice break away beneath her feet and Moira’s forced to, in a supremely dignified manner, scurry to safety, all four limbs flailing.
All around her, more and more of the ship’s shape is exposed by the melting ice. Moira’s relieved that every bare patch of hull she sees is only superficially scratched and dotted with rust, rather than seriously damaged. Their gamble that the spaceberg disguise would completely cushion the crash appears to have paid off, from the little Moira can glean on the way down.
Even were, moons forfend, her beloved Antagonist damaged, Moira wouldn’t voice once word of complaint. All that matters, at this point, was that Odisseus could, with a little elbow grease, make her spaceworthy again. There was no friendly neighborhood fix-it shop here; the only intelligent life they could hope to encounter down here were spice rangers.
After a graceful slide across a sheet of separating ice, Moira kips off the side of The Unconstant Lover and lands in an instinctive crouch. She marvels at the sensation of solid ground beneath her boots and even stoops sentimentally to run some mud between her fingers. Standing, Moira surveys the scene with the contented sigh of a farmer, still squinting against the blinding glare from above.
She starts her perimeter around the crashed spaceberg, careful to stay always within the glacier’s voluminous shade. Moira savors every sensation, no matter how stupid. The wind whistling across the sand, the sound of grit crunching beneath her boots, even the sun’s harsh scrutiny. Everything that life aboard a spaceship’s denied her is suddenly so idiotically fascinating.
Soon enough, she knows, her companions will be along to spoil her solitude, with their questions and their voices and their faces. For now, Moira is alone, the only living creature walking the surface of this planet.
As she walks, she unclips the scanner from where it hangs on her belt, slapping against her hip. Properly dialed, the device she’d borrowed from Odisseus would survey the surrounding area, in search of the nearest life signs – specifically those of botanical life.
Considering the empty horizon in every direction, Moira assumes it’ll be a lengthy overland trek to the nearest grove of Gitter trees. A few days hike, to some watery oasis somewhere, sounds utterly divine to Moira, even in this murderous heat.
According to her scanner, however, there’s
something large and alive nearby – practically on her position.
Moira scowls and quickens her pace around the side of the melting spaceberg. She’d assumed this stretch of wasteland completely unfit to support plant life. Perhaps they’d crashed smack dab into a stand of the stuff, their planetwide search over before it began.
It’s when she starts to hear noises that she draws her weapons.
Without line of sight, Moira can still hear, from around a bend in the spaceberg, the sounds of ice crunching and cracking. There’s assuredly some boring and logical explanation for the sound – fissures in the spaceberg splitting open beneath the intense heat – but she cannot help imagining gargantuan jaws munching through solid ice. Moira is precisely paranoid enough to tread with caution around the corner, especially considering the massive lifesign supposedly nearby.
Crouching down, Moira peers around a horn of melting ice and gets first visual contact on what’s making the sound – far from what she was expecting.
A great tentacled mass is slumped against the side of the spaceberg, all dark and writhing tendrils. As Moira watches, the creature wriggles its innumerable feelers deeper and deeper into the ice, breaking the glacier apart into manageable chunks that disappear within its coils. There doesn’t appear to be any central hub or main body of all the tendrils. Far as Moira can tell, the entire mass moves like a thousand independent limbs, all driven by the same insatiable thirst.
So much, then, for the theory that Gi was too hot to support animal life. Looking at this creature, though, Moira would be hard-pressed to call this an animal.
She’s starting to inch back into cover, planning to creep back to the airlock and report to her crewmates, when somebody shouts her name.
“Moira!” calls the distant voice of Nemo, from high atop the Lover’s airlock. “Moira? You out there?”
Moira strangles a curse. A more violent reaction, however, ripples through the amorphous form of the strange blob-beast. More than a dozen of the creature’s tentacles extend with an almost wooden groan and anchor themselves into spaceberg’s ice, pulling the massive bulk behind it. At alarming speed, the alien monstrosity goes climbing and clambering across the asteroid’s slippery surface, carried by an innumerable number of legs, appearing and disappearing into its ever-shifting body.
It’s heading unerringly towards the open airlock and the unsuspecting Nemo.
More new and original curses occur to Moira as she slinks along, shadowing the massive creature’s progress along the Lover’s portside. Her options are dwindling. She could shout and warn Nemo but he’d certainly misunderstand and continue to shout back. She could engage the creature with Righty and Lefty but this she saves as a last resort; something about this shapeless creature seems to suggest an immunity to traditional weaponry.
She ultimately settles on warning Nemo somewhat more sophisticatedly than simply shouting at him.
“Oh, hey, Moira,” the Captain answers his comm, completely oblivious to the alien horror about to devour him. “Jotor’s nutsack, is it hot here or–”
“Nemo!” she hisses into the comm, careful to keep her voice low, her crouch low and her pace quick enough to stay within sight of the creature. “Shut the airlock door!”
“What? Shut the airlock? Why would I–”
“Can you not argue? Can you just shut the airlo–”
His tone becomes suddenly indignant. “Everybody’s giving me fucking orders today,” he starts to complain. “You all seem to be forgetting that–”
“Bloom this,” Moira mutters and drops the comm to the ground.
Righty and Lefty whistle from their holsters and into Moira’s hands in the same motion that she spins, stands and takes aim. Up on the spaceberg’s side, the scrabbling, many-armed nightmare rounds a corner, seconds away from reaching Nemo and the airlock. Blistering yellow ditrogen explodes against the creature’s two most extended pseudopods, those mere feet from the Lover’s open airlock.
To Moira’s surprise, traditional weaponry proves extremely effective against the creature. Yellow fire licks hungrily across its amorphous body, crackling like dried wood everywhere it burns. Both limbs are instantly severed and its entire form shifts and swells, focusing suddenly on Moira’s position at the foot of the spaceberg.
Nemo completely forgotten, the creature comes careening down the side of the melting Unconstant Lover. Much to her horror, Moira watches as the two tentacles she’d just severed, still smoldering and also still mobile, also come scurrying towards her, completely independent of the creature’s main body.
Moira concentrates her fire there, on the smaller tendrils, unwilling to make the same mistake twice and create even more monsters to battle. Unfortunately, this is precisely what her next salvo does. Righty wreaks havoc on one, Lefty the other, both revolvers sowing destruction amid the bundles of writhing black tendrils. When the smoke clears, however, yet smaller bundles of writhing black tendrils come crawling from the wreckage, all headed unerringly toward Moira.
All the while, the main creature keeps rambling down the spaceberg slope on scores of legs, like a gigantic prickly agwaifapede.
Her mouth falling open in wordless surprise, Moira backpedals away from the Lover and out into the open plain – anything to gain a little distance on the monster. Soon as she's outside the shadow, the sun strikes Moira and she nearly goes weak in the knees from the sheer heat. Righty and Lefty sing an angry duet, battering the massive creature as it reaches a cresting promontory in the ice. Each successive shot, however, succeeds only in spawning more smaller creatures to join the chase.
Unimpeded, the monster oozes over the ledge in a movement at once wooden and liquid. Soon, it’s cleared the shadow of the Lover and, under Gi’s blazing sun, Moira is granted her first good look at her freakish attacker.
In this stark light, Moira realizes that this aggressive fauna is actually aggressive flora.
The approaching creature is undeniably a plant, a tidal wave of tangling briars, perpetually flexing and twisting around one another. It extends even more pseudopods, revealed to be thorny branches, that drag its writhing and bulbous form across the sand. It’s accompanied by a swarm of smaller thorns, the bits and pieces Righty and Lefty have shot off, clawing and inching their way across the dusty, cracked earth.
A wave of these reach Moira first and she works double duty. She stomps and crunches them beneath her hobnailed baby-stompers, all the while peppering the oncoming monster with Righty and Lefty. Her attention split, she’s unable to keep track of her ammunition and, with the creature seconds away, both her pistols click empty.
She has a heartbeat to react and she’s plumb out of escape plans. Moira’s only instinct is to draw both weapons to her chest, close her eyes and meet her doom. She’s absolutely no idea what this thorn monster does to the prey it’s caught – impales them a billion times would be her best guess – but she imagines, no matter what, it’ll be a pretty gruesome end. Moira feels the creature wholly envelop her. She feels the moment the sun is blotted out by the canopy of brambles. She hears the crunching and groaning of branches and briars as they close around her.
Moira is not, to her continued surprise, instantly or even eventually torn to shreds. After a moment, she risks opening one eye to see what’s staying her execution.
She stands inside a living cage. It’s dim and stifling, sunlight only permitted through tiny gaps in the always opening, always closing, always moving walls. Careful not to draw a breath or move a muscle, Moira watches the thorny creature squirm all around her, the branches knotting and entangling in an endless snarl. Always, however, they keep a respectful berth around Moira, an inch away at the widest, as though uncertain how to react to this humanoid creature.
Before Moira can react, however, the creature suddenly withdraws. The wall of thorns peels away before Moira and disappears behind her. Left utterly confused, Moira spins around, pistols raised, to see the creature regrouped and thrashing about, as though struggling with
something that Moira cannot see.
Anxious about whatever’s so distracted her potential killer, Moira, both pistols extended, starts to edge back towards the Lover. That’s when she notices the dust cloud that hovers about the whole scene, as though a large or numerous something has arrived from across the wasteland.
In support of this theory, a shape starts to emerge, only fleetingly visible, from within the menacing mass of brambles. That shape is accompanied by the occasional bright flash, the sun glinting off something sheer and shiny and metallic. Soon enough, the dust and the whipping tendrils part perfectly, allowing Moira a moment’s glimpse at the shape.
It’s safe to say she couldn’t possibly have been more surprised.
A towering warrior, green-skinned and many-armed, comes whirling into view. Dressed only in a barbaric raiment of thongs and medallions, the warrior swings a number of jagged weapons from its multiple arms, sunlight splayed along their scintillant edges. Each of these blades hack and slice through the thorny tendrils, severing any reaching limb before they can even approach the warrior.
An astonished Moira watches as more and more warriors emerge from the surrounding haze and give battle to the outnumbered creature. The scene that plays out before The Unconstant Lover is one of savage bloodletting, a pitched battle between beast and barbarian.
“Oh, shit,” comments Moira sagely.
CHAPTER 8
Odisseus is hot.
Native to the chillier regions of a generally chilly planet, Ortok do not come equipped with sweat glands. On the contrary, they actually came equipped with a less-than-helpful layer of insulating blubber. Under Gi’s tyrannical sun, Odisseus instinctively starts panting like a beast, his great black tongue lolling out of his mouth.
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