by Alan Black
Dusty crawled in a circle around the spaceship and slid again into the little depression next to Larry.
Dusty said quietly. “They don’t watch out of the view screen. I can only see two on the bridge from here. There remains yet one Almas on the ground near the main hatch. I have done all that you have asked and more. May I die now?”
“Maybe. Can you outrun an Almas?”
Dusty shook his hands no. “I can only outrace an Almas for a short distance. In the long run they would catch me.”
“Then let’s be quick. I’m going to leave my translator here, so we won’t be able to talk. I want you to go around the spaceship that way. I’ll go the other. I want the Almas to see you and turn toward you. Do not die yet, run away if you must.”
Larry took off running. He held the heavy pry bar in both hands, as if it was a rifle held in the port arms position. He hadn’t been in the military, but he’d seen enough war movies having men running with rifles, not to mention he’d had a whole bag of little green plastic army men to play with as a youngster. At least, he’d played with them until the Independence Day holiday rolled around and he blew them up with fireworks and tiny Molotov cocktails.
He rounded the ship without slowing or looking. He hoped Dusty was successful in distracting the Almas at the airlock. If not, Larry wouldn’t survive to help the crazy little Teumessian. Larry suddenly remembered Dusty said the Almas sprayed acid. That didn’t sound like a good thing to run into head first.
The Almas was exactly like Scooter had described to him way back in the shower the day of the kitchen fire. It was exactly like an Earth beetle only different, since he’d never seen a beetle about three feet tall. Larry had no way to know if this Almas was representative of the species or if it was a freak among its own kind — time would tell … if he lived.
The Almas was so black in color it seemed to shimmer blue as the sun glinted off its hard shell. From the backside, the shell was about all Larry could see of it. There weren’t any wings like some beetles, and as Scooter had said, it had short little legs, short enough to even be remarkable to a creature like the Teumess whose legs were really short. It had skinny little bug-like arms, just long enough to reach to its middle.
Since the Almas didn’t have a head, Larry wasn’t sure how to tell which way it was looking. He hoped Dusty would help him sneak up on the alien creature.
The scruffy Teumessian was more than successful as a distraction.
The Almas stood with its back to Larry, spraying acid at Dusty. The little Teumessian was taunting the Almas, dodging the stream of liquid, rolling, moving, and running back and forth. Larry could see how the little Teumessian lost patches of fur. Small splatters of acid splashed on Dusty as he raced and bounced with the dexterity of a fourteen-year-old Chinese Olympic gymnast.
Larry raised the bar and brought it down on the Almas like he was splitting a hardwood log. He heard a crack. The Almas fell to the ground on its belly. Larry slammed the bar again and again, until a pus-like jelly oozed from the crack. He jammed the bar into the bug; swishing it around until he felt a hard nodule.
Larry wasn’t an expert exobiologist in alien physiology. He wasn’t an expert in exo-anything. But he’d stomped on his share of bugs over the years. Every creature he knew of with any sense of intelligence whatsoever had a central command center, a brain, or at least some sort of nerve center. He hoped the Almas fit the stereotype.
He jammed the sharp end of the bar into the nerve center and twisted. The bug quit squirming.
Larry jumped into the spaceship. He assumed it would be the same layout as the other one. It was.
A mass production assembly line must crank the ships out like a Kentucky auto factory. He left both hatches to the airlock open and raced to the bridge. The jelly from the dead Almas coated the metal rod, but rather than make it slippery, the jelly was making the bar sticky and easier to hold.
He hoped the Almas had left the stairway to the second deck in place. The bridge was on the second deck and without it, he was stuck. The stairway — ladderway was down. The deck above was open and clear. He ran to the bridge and through the open hatch.
There were two Almas on the bridge. Both were facing the monitors on the pilot’s console with their backs to him. The Almas were only about three feet high, but they had those tough, little, bug shells. He’d be reduced to a protein paste if they turned and shot acid at him. He wasn’t near as fast as Dusty and wouldn’t be able to avoid a splashing.
He realized he should have held his attack until he was prepared to deflect acid. More importantly, he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice one more Teumessian to Almas entertainment and hunger.
Larry crashed the bar into the back of the first Almas. He heard its shell thump with a hollow sound, but it didn’t crack. The six-legged killer bug slammed belly down onto the deck. Larry grabbed the other Almas by the back of its shell. He picked it up bodily, carried it to the hatch, and tossed it into the corridor.
Larry jumped back and hit the wall where he thought the hatch switch was. He had a good idea of the location since it was clearly marked in Scooter’s operational manual. Nothing happened. The Almas in the corridor screamed, trying to rise to its feet. A furry ball knocked it down and fairly flew past Larry onto the bridge.
Dusty hit the button to the bridge hatch and it un-melted closed with a slam.
Larry jumped to the pilot’s console and hit the manual override on all of the doors, slamming and locking them all closed. He turned to the down Almas, but it hadn’t moved. He didn’t know whether it was stunned, dead, or just confused. He pounded on its shell until it split open. He jammed the bar into the nerve center and left the bar stuck there.
No one had been able to tell him how many Almas were on the spaceship. He was safe for the moment, but there was an override to the manual door locks in the engineering compartment. It wouldn’t take long for an Almas to undo what he had done, assuming the Almas ever bothered to read the manual. He didn’t have any idea how technological their society was.
Larry sat in the pilot’s seat, spun a few knobs, and shot the spaceship beyond normal orbit and into space. He sped away from the planet as fast as he could go. There was no motion inside the ship, so he cranked the speed up as far as he dared for an exit from the gravity well. He wasn’t an astrophysicist. He didn’t know how far Plenty’s gravitational pull went, so he went to what looked like the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
The airlocks would have, according to the manual, automatically slammed shut when the sensors detected a rapid change in atmospherics. He snapped a few other buttons, forcing the airlock in the main corridor on the first deck to open both hatches. He spilled all of the air from the corridors into space. He hoped the Almas in the corridor went with the air.
He hit the override button on every hatch and door in the tiny spaceship, except the one to the bridge. He allowed the cold of space to invade everything and everywhere. The vacuum of space sucked anything loose out of the ship and into the nothing that filled space beyond a planet’s atmosphere. He could see a frozen Almas float past the view screen amid a pile of rubbish. The iced body bumped against the hull and the bug shattered into small pieces.
Larry heard a Teumessian style laugh behind him. He looked and Dusty was rolling on the floor pointing at the bug pieces floating past. Dusty was crazy, he was actually bughouse nuts. Larry didn’t feel like laughing, he knew he’d done what had to be done, but he’d still killed more sentient creatures than his heart wanted to remember.
Dusty finally quit laughing. He yipped and yapped a few times.
The translator was still on the planet. Larry took a guess and said, “No, Dusty. It’s not time to die yet, maybe later.”
There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. (Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LARRY sighed in resignation. He’d moved quickly once he determined a course of action. He’d had to move quickly. Given time to think about what he was doing, he might not have done it. Killing was one thing, he’d done it to deer, rabbits, chickens, and more fish than he could count. He made his living offering up cattle for sacrifice to the prime rib gods.
That was food.
This was murder. Yes, killing the Almas was self-defense. It was protecting the Teumessians, justifiable by any legal show definition. However, the Almas were sentient, sort of—well, depending on your definition of sentient. By some definitions, the Rickenhauser brothers didn’t really qualify for sentience level status, either.
He hoped the three Almas he killed were all there was aboard ship. Not that three was an acceptable number of intelligent creatures to kill, but his psyche could manage with fewer rather than more. By their standards, the Almas didn’t deserve to die. They deserved the right to feed their families and provide proper nourishment to their children. Human society was only three meals away from collapsing into riots and chaos — but then, some cities would riot even after a good meal.
Larry understood hunger and the drive that hunger provided. Not from a personal perspective since he’d never skipped more than one meal at a time, and usually only then because he’d had a belly full of fermented malt, hops, and sugar. He wasn’t a beer and pizza kind of guy. He liked them both, just not together.
He’d looked away from television commercials showing pictures of starving children with distended bellies and tiny arms and legs. He understood the Almas drive to feed, but why did they have to make a game of it? Why did they have to be so brutal about it? Most of all, why did they have to feed on sentient creatures?
Larry’s mind gave him a little hiccup as he wondered what a whole planet of meat eaters would do to cattle prices on Earth. He could quit worrying about vegans taking over Earth now that he had another readymade market for his beef.
He didn’t have a spacesuit, therefore he didn’t have any desire to get closer to a vacuum than he was now. A few quick button presses sealed the airlock doors and restarted life support. He hadn’t left the little ship open to the cold of space for long, but even in the short time he’d left the front door open, a slight frost was building on the bridge hatch. No matter what Dusty was trying to indicate, Larry wasn’t in any hurry to open the bridge to the rest of the ship.
Sitting in the captain’s chair, he was surprised to find it swiveled and he could face the hatch. He glanced at Dusty. “Just relax, little guy. Might as well make yourself comfortable.”
Without the translator, Larry could see Dusty didn’t understand a word he said, nor were they familiar enough with each other to glean any information from body language. Ol’ Bucky would have gotten the hint they weren’t going anywhere by Larry’s tone and how he leaned back, relaxing in the chair.
Dusty missed the whole meaning and began pounding on the hatch. He quickly quit pounding when he realized how cold it must be on the other side. Plunking down on the deck, he pouted. Or Larry assumed he was pouting since he really had much the same look on his face that Grandma got when Larry refused to eat her special asparagus and Spam casserole. Not that Larry didn’t like asparagus and Spam — actually, he was much more fond of Spam than asparagus, but that was beside the point — he just didn’t think the two should ever be mixed together in Grandma’s lime and cayenne pepper marinade. Dusty even did that turning his back and hunching his shoulders thing that Grandma had perfected long before Larry was born.
Larry took a cue from Grandpa’s long standing relationship with Grandma and ignored Dusty. He sat watching the frost melt on the hatch. The ship’s dashboard said life support was operating at maximum capacity, or at least that was what the gauge showed, although Larry couldn’t make heads or tails out of the numbering system on the dial. For all he knew they weren’t numbers, but symbols indicating open the door now and die, or breathe normally now, or even, warm as toast in summer. The few hours he spent studying the manuals with Scooter had given him the bare minimum in spaceship technical knowledge.
He hadn’t planned on Dusty coming along, although it was nice having company. Even in the throes of a snit, Dusty was better company than Grandma since she’d reached an age where she passed gas frequently, even more so when she was sulking about something. Fortunately for Grandma, Larry’s parents had a couple of house dogs to pass the blame onto for passing gas. Unfortunately for Grandma, no one believed the dogs farts smelled that bad. Ol’ Bucky’s did, but Larry couldn’t stop him from eating roadkill skunks. Larry’s mom insisted her babies eat only specially formulated dry dog food.
The frost receded enough that Larry levered himself out of the chair and placed a hand on the hatch. It felt warm, actually room temperature — assuming you like your rooms slightly above freezing. Back at the dashboard, Larry could see the lights indicated both airlock hatches were closed and the rest of the ship was either livable or the filled with chlorine gas. The life support gauge was straight up and down, just like the manual said it should be, but Scooter wasn’t even sure what some of the symbols on the gauge meant.
With a sigh, Larry flipped open the bridge hatch. Dusty went from slumping in a deep huff to sprinting out into the corridor with a whoop. Larry followed a tad bit more sedately, only after grabbing the heavy pry bar from where it stuck out of the back of the dead Almas. He hoped he’d only killed three Almas, but if there were any more, and if they were alive, he wanted to be prepared. The original Almas goo had already dried on the bar, so it wasn’t sticky as he swung it around, listening to the swoosh it made cutting through the air.
He knew where most of the door buttons were since they should be in the same place as the first spaceship he’d been on. Larry stopped and chuckled. Just a few months ago, he hadn’t even known that aliens existed beyond the confines of science fiction and bad television. Now he’d been on two spaceships, admittedly they looked like twins coming off the same assembly line, even more identical than his high school friends, Merrie and Terrie Huckleberry. At least Merrie always had a few more zits than Terrie, so a person could tell them apart. Now he had one of his own—not Terrie or Merrie — but a spaceship.
All he had to do was make sure some ingenious little bug hadn’t found a way to survive the cold of space as it flooded the ship. Then he had to get the ship back to the planet.
Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Except, he couldn’t find the hatch button to the kitchen. He knew where it should be but he couldn’t see it, nor could he feel it with his fingers. The damned hatches melted so smoothly into the bulkhead he couldn’t even see cracks where the hatch should be. He realized leaving the bridge hatch locked in the open position was a good thing or he might never get back in. He had the height of the button just about right. His memory of where it should be wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t remember it from Scooter’s ship — or the Tetra’s — or whoever owned the other craft. He was even just about the perfect distance to the kitchen hatch from the bridge hatch, but he was at a loss.
Dusty was on his sixth time racing around and around the corridor, running just like Ol’ Bucky did when he had an itch to be somewhere else, but there wasn’t anywhere else to go. The little ragged-looking Teumessian skidded to a stop, hit the hatch button, and raced away continuing his round robin trips.
Larry sighed, pulled a marker from his pocket, and put a small dot where the button was. He’d been about three feet off his estimate. Larry had planned to be ready when the door opened, holding the bar in attack position, prepared to defend himself against a horde of angry Almas trapped in the kitchen, but he’d been startled by Dusty’s quick button mashing technique and wasn’t ready.
No Almas came boiling out. From the looks of the kitchen, nothing had boiled in the room for quite some time. Whatever — or whoever — the Almas had been consuming didn’t require a kitchen. He was really quite relieved at not finding leftovers in the fridge. Cleaning up af
ter a host of what looked like giant headless cockroaches was just about as high on his list of things to do as mucking out the barn. He didn’t spend much time looking around the kitchen as there wasn’t any place for a three foot alien to hide.
He was ready with the pry bar held in the attack position, standing near the door of the ship’s bathroom, when Dusty raced by again. Larry had lost count of the number of circuits the mangy looking Teumessian had made, but the little guy didn’t seem winded in the least. Larry knew he was in the right spot having walked from here to the bridge often in their last few days.
Skidding to a stop, looking at Larry as if he was an idiot, Dusty pushed the button on the bulkhead behind Larry to open the bathroom door. The door swished open and Larry spun about, prepared to do battle. Nothing came out of the room. Dusty yipped in excitement and raced away.
Stacked in what Larry had considered his bedroom, but was really the ship’s bathroom, were piles of Almas. Laying on their backs, arranged deck to ceiling, bulkhead to bulkhead, there were neatly arranged heaps of Almas. It looked like they were sleeping, except they had the freezer burned look of a two-year-old steak chipped out of the ice bound chest freezer on his porch.
He stood ready with the pry bar, ready to strike if something moved, but nothing did. He marked the button spot on the wall and closed the hatch.
After waiting for Dusty to come around again, they spent a half an hour pantomiming and gesturing back and forth until Dusty understood that Larry wanted to open the ladder going downstairs and throw the bug carcasses out the open hatch. He needed Dusty to find the right buttons.
The little Teumessian hadn’t been a part of any ship’s original crew. Larry could understand why, even crazy people didn’t want to be around someone as loony as Dusty. That proved to be problematic, since Larry knew his way around the ship better than Dusty did.