by Trevor Scott
Liam’s body ached as he began to check himself over for injuries. Remarkably, the sand was fairly forgiving, and his rough cloak had borne the brunt of the impact. Its brown earthy color had become a light beige, the fine grains of sand weaving themselves into his cloak. Liam lay on his back shielding his eyes from the sun. The Ansaran ship had landed and the soldiers approached, dressed in their usual beige garb with an oblong helmet and a black slit through which to see. Their weapons were drawn and pointed at Liam and Ju-Long, who lay off to his left, cradling the hand where Saturn had stabbed him. Apparently, sand didn’t agree with his wound.
The street, once bustling with Dinari, was now empty. The doors of the clay buildings shut behind the aliens as they took cover inside. Liam saw numerous pairs of eyes watching the scene through their windows. The Dinari he’d met didn’t suggest they were a meek race, but maybe Liam’s sample was skewed. The average Dinari looked terrified of the Ansaran soldiers.
“Halt, Outsider,” one of the soldiers said as Liam made to rise from the sand. “You’re coming with us.”
Liam and Ju-long’s eyes met and they seemed to be on the same page. Ju-Long slowly sat up, his hands raised, and said thickly, “What was our crime?”
The Ansaran soldiers both turned to Ju-Long with weapons leveled at his chest. “Hold it, don’t move.”
Liam’s hand traveled down his side and found his energy weapon. He put a hand on the grip and squeezed. He could feel it pulsate as it built up energy at the tips of the elegant curves.
Ju-Long held his hands out defensively. “We haven’t done anything wrong. We’re here at the behest of the Caretaker.”
“Shut up, Outsider. Put your hands behind your head and turn onto your stomach.”
Ju-Long complied and the Ansaran soldiers approached him, but before they could reach him Liam pulled his weapon from its holster and released the energy that had been building up at the tip. A ball of electricity hit the nearest guard square in the chest and he toppled over, convulsing on the sand.
Liam quickly gripped the weapon hard once more and released a smaller blast at the second soldier. It was enough to knock him to the ground and drop his weapon, but it hardly stunned him. Soon the soldier was reaching for his gun, his fingers wrapping around its handle and suddenly going limp. Ju-Long landed a crushing blow to the soldier’s helmet with his good hand, cracking the visor and sending the Ansaran’s head into the compacted sand, where he lay still.
Ju-Long fell to one knee with both hands hanging limp at his sides. The devastating blow he’d dealt sounded like it hurt Ju-Long as much as the other guy. Liam holstered his weapon and dragged Ju-Long to his feet by his forearm. He felt the eyes of dozens of Dinari on him as he led Ju-Long away. Liam pulled the hood of his cloak closer around his face, though he doubted his disguise was fooling anyone by that point.
“Let’s get out of here,” Liam said. “More will be on their way.”
22
With Ju-Long’s help, Liam raised the hover bike upright and powered it on. The bike sputtered before raising itself up nearly half a meter. The two of them mounted it, Ju-Long grasping Liam’s cloak, and the hand he’d used to punch the soldier hanging uselessly by his side. The hologram of the Akaru Colony map flickered in and out, the red dot that marked the hangar jumped around to several locations, as though trying in vain to get its bearings. Liam swung his hand through the image and hit the dash with a closed fist. The transparent lines of the map flickered a few more times before becoming solid, clearly visible once again in the bright morning sun.
“Hold on,” Liam said before pressing down his toes and accelerating down the dirt road.
Liam veered the hover bike right along a bend and the street was once again full of Dinari. They were headed through the middle of a street market with countless carts and booths blocking their way. Liam slowed the bike and maneuvered around the stands. As he approached, the Dinari wisely moved out of his way. They were going slow enough that several of the Dinari stopped and stared at Liam’s face under his hood. A few of them pointed and spoke amongst themselves in awe. Liam imagined seeing an alien roaming the streets of Toronto during the New Year’s Festival. The news would have traveled far faster on Earth, where the technology was primarily concerned with sharing information fast rather than more useful pursuits like feeding its people.
Liam broke through the far edge of the street market and accelerated once more, making a few turns through alleyways out of caution. In five minutes, they were approaching the red dot on their map. Liam came to a halt at the edge of an alley looking out onto one of the main streets. The red dot was flashing straight ahead. He gazed across the street and saw a massive structure that was five stories tall and stretched for a few city blocks. The building was metal with tendrils of clay creeping up from the bottom, as though it was being eaten by the sand. In front of them, there was a large hangar door that was standing open several meters. Enough room for a hover bike.
“What are you waiting for?” Ju-Long asked.
Liam turned his head over his shoulder and replied, “I’m making sure we weren’t followed.”
They waited a couple of minutes without hearing the distinctive rotors of the Ansaran ships. Liam nodded and pressed his foot down, jetting across the street and through the open hangar entryway. When they made it through, the corrugated metal door dropped behind them, slamming on the ground with a thud that reverberated throughout the building. The sound caught Liam off guard and he broke hard.
The hangar was lit mostly by two rows of small skylights about five stories above them. Liam looked down the row of ships, unable to see the end in the dim light. In front of them was a large craft with sharp wings which folded back over its frame like a beetle. The body was rounded on the bottom and terminated at a sharp point where the cockpit would be. It was easily seventy-five meters long and twenty-five wide when the wings were back. The ship was a copper color, but made from an alloy unknown to Liam. Instead of being smooth like the Ansaran vessels, this ship was asymmetrical, with bits and pieces thrown together on the outside hodgepodge as though repairs had been frequent over the countless years since its construction. Sand was caked in the crevices making it appear even older. Deep down, Liam wondered if it would even fly.
A voice greeted them from behind.
“What took you so long?”
Saturn stood with arms crossed, Nix to her right and their bikes pushed into a corner behind them. Nix’s hood was down and the light from one of the skylights bore down on his tan scales. Liam and Ju-Long dismounted the hover bike and faced them.
“We got held up, but we took care of it,” Liam replied.
Nix’s expression turned grave and he stepped forward with concern in his eyes.
“You took care of it? Did the Ansarans see you?”
“We’re here and we weren’t followed, so can we get on with this?”
Nix’s gaze moved to Ju-Long’s broken hand and he seemed to understand. He walked toward the craft and started pushing buttons on a control panel off its starboard side. The computer terminal came out of the ground and appeared to control the hangar doors and the clamps which held the landing gear in place. When Nix pressed a button on the console a hologram appeared over it. Nix swiped his hand and the clamps were released. With another swipe, the doors opposite them began to open.
“Get inside,” Nix said. “We haven’t got much time.”
When Liam approached the ship, a ramp extended down from its underbelly and clanked against the concrete floors, disturbing the fine layer of sand collected there. Liam made his way up the ramp and was quickly joined by the others. At the top of the incline, Nix pressed a red button on the wall and it retracted, the air compressing around it as they were sealed inside.
They were in a cargo area with several metal boxes strapped to the floor along the wall. The room was rectangular but rounded at the edges to conform to the ship’s hull. The walls curved up like the thorax of a bug. On either
side of the cargo area were circular passageways. Nix immediately went to the starboard corridor and marched toward the front of the ship. Liam and the crew followed along the curved, dimly lit path, looking to the left through multiple doorways as they passed. They passed a kitchen, which doubled as a meeting area on their way forward. The path curved in toward the center before a circular entryway marked the cockpit.
Inside, there were four seats upholstered with cracked leather made from the skin of an unfamiliar animal. It was harder than cow’s leather and dried out from the desert planet’s arid climate. What would have been high quality at one time was now broken and uncomfortable. The cockpit was a good size, with two chairs facing the front and two directly behind them facing forward, each with a console of their own. A center aisle a meter wide separated the pilot chairs. Overhead, a strange purple energy coursed through the conduits, flowing along lazily.
Nix sat down in the pilot’s seat and powered on the craft. Above his console was a holographic image of the vessel in a soft orange color which grew brighter as the ship came to life. The purple energy coursing above them agitated and began to buzz in time with the sputters of the engine. Liam could hear the whir of the engines and wondered how they were powered. Were they made with the same technology that powered the lifts in the spire? The alien technology was so foreign at times that it hardly seemed possible.
Through the glass window of the cockpit, Liam could see the hangar doors open wide, the busy street humming on the other side. Nix slipped his hand through a circular metal ring and grabbed a handle on the other side. It was like no controls Liam had ever seen, but somehow it felt oddly familiar.
The handle came up off the console and the circular piece of metal clamped down lightly on his arm. When he tilted his hand up the engine groaned and the vessel was lifted into the air a few meters. Nix pushed his arm forward and the ship moved through the hangar doors and out into the light of the bright yellow sun.
Nix used his free hand to make a gesture over the holographic image of the ship. Liam heard a loud sound from behind them and the wings of the ship spread out. Their wingspan was now almost as long as the ship itself.
Liam looked up through the cockpit window at the brilliant sun. The window was wide at the front and tapered off into a half meter sliver which ran most of the length of the cockpit above them. Liam looked at Saturn and Ju-Long who were bathed in the yellow-orange light. They stood behind Nix, watching him maneuver the vessel up above the spires.
“You may want to sit down for this,” Nix warned.
Liam took the seat beside Nix while Saturn and Ju-Long strapped themselves into the seats behind them. Liam turned to Nix and asked, “Are the Ansarans going to try to block our path?”
As if on cue, two Ansaran vessels came up on either side of them. A channel opened and a voice came through. “Dinari vessel. Transmit your port codes now or be shot from the sky.”
23
Nix flipped a thin metal switch on the console and pressed a finger down on one of the screens. The screen filled up with an encoded message. Several seconds passed with Liam and the crew holding their breath. Finally, the Ansaran voice came back.
“Your flight plan has been cleared. Godspeed.”
The voice cut out and Nix closed the channel. Liam breathed out a sigh of relief. He asked, “What did you send them?”
“I arranged for us to deliver goods to the disciples on Surya’s moon. Even the least pious Ansaran wouldn’t want to risk angering the gods.”
Nix was hiding a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Without warning, Nix pulled back on the control handle and the ship shot up toward the sky. On their way up, Nix retracted the wings until they were once again facing the rear of the ship, conforming to the lines of the vessel. Through the window of the cockpit Liam could see the craft heating up, though the metal didn’t turn orange like the mining craft. Whatever hardy material it was made from was meant to go in and out of the atmosphere at will. The vessel hardly shook at all as they breached the upper atmosphere into outer space.
Liam felt the familiar feeling of weightlessness creep over his insides. Nix seemed to feel the same sensation, because he quickly said, “Sorry, I almost forgot.”
He flipped a copper switch and Liam’s feet hit the floor, his insides feeling like they just hit the bottom of a roller coaster and started their ascent. The Dinari’s artificial gravity technology was far beyond their own, though Liam couldn’t discern how it worked. It was indistinguishable from being on the surface of Surya, still just ninety percent of Earth’s gravity, give or take, but at least enough to know which way was up.
Nix accelerated the craft as they left the atmosphere, gaining speed until they were traveling far faster than their old mining craft was capable. Liam read the numbers on Nix’s screen, which due to his translation chip he knew meant they were traveling seven hundred and fifty thousand kilometers an hour and gaining. Nix released his grip on the handle and pulled his arm out from the loop. He pressed a few commands on the screen and sat back in his chair. “It will be about an hour until she reaches the moon. It would have been sooner but the rotation of the planet wasn’t the most favorable at the moment.”
Liam examined the star charts on his screen and nodded. “Enough time for breakfast. Where do we eat on this thing?”
“Follow me,” Nix replied. “I’ll make you the dish of my people.”
•
The galley was a compact room with sturdy metal cabinets along the wall across from the entrance and a single table with a cook-top in the center, positioned in the middle of the chamber. Nix was feverishly adding ingredients to a steeply-curved pan with no regard for measurements, while Liam, Ju-Long, and Saturn looked on in awe. The ingredients he was using bore similarities to vegetation on Earth, but with striking differences. The colors were mostly a deep purple that Liam remembered seeing on the surface of the planet, and the smells were, well, potent.
Nix turned off the flame at the center of the table and removed the copper pan from the heat. Inside, several plants swirled in a creamy broth. The odor was pungent in Liam’s nostrils, prompting him to cover his nose with the back of his hand, his eyes watering. Liam watched Nix continue to add all manner of ingredients while stirring the concoction steadily to mix in the spices. It looked appetizing enough, but smelled like feet mixed with curry and mold.
“This is Leguma,” Nix said while dishing up four bowls and passing one out to each of them.
The mixture didn’t cook for long, but it was bubbling from the heat even after it was poured in a bowl. Nix didn’t provide any utensils so Liam waited to see how Nix planned to eat it. The dish was more of a stew, with bits of meat and vegetables and a long plant that looked like purple seaweed churning around the creamy orange broth. Nix picked up his bowl and said, “Dinevra.” For a moment, Liam thought his translator had broken, before realizing there must not have been a translation for the phrase on file. Nix raised the bowl, with its pointed lip, up to his tilted head and poured from several centimeters above his mouth, the stew boiling as it touched his tongue but not phasing Nix in the slightest.
Liam looked around at Saturn and Ju-Long, who each were fussing with the heat coming off the soup, blowing continuously to cool it down. Liam raised the bowl to his lips and took a sip of the broth, slurping loudly to cool it as it went down his throat. The taste was sharp, several spices dancing on his tongue as he tried to decide whether it was a pleasant or repulsive flavor. To his surprise, the spices overpowered any of the less enticing smells and the effect was a delicious, albeit scalding, dish. The heat from the spice was piquant, and caused him to salivate.
Liam took a sip of water to cool down his mouth and watched Nix smile with his set of pointed yellow teeth. His bowl was already empty and he was patting his stomach, slightly rounded from the meal. Liam had never seen him so elated or relaxed.
“What do you think?” Nix asked Liam.
“I think I need to let
it cool down, but it’s delicious. It’s not what I would have expected. How’d this dish come about?”
“A long time ago, the Dinari ate mostly meat. Animals were plentiful on Ansara. Thousands of species to eat. On Surya, very few plants grow, and they are usually found along the water. Likewise, what game we have crowd these areas. This dish represents the very best we could find on Surya. Our resources might be scarce, but our imaginations are anything but.”
Saturn and Ju-Long each tried a sip and their expressions turned from skeptical to that of surprise. Ju-Long seemed to like it the best, because he slurped down most of the broth in a single sip and started picking out the vegetables with his fingers and forcing them in his throat. Ju-Long was about to put the long purple seaweed into his mouth when Nix stopped him.
“The Nerva plant has many benefits when eaten, but that’s not its only use. Give me your hand.”
Ju-Long put the hand Saturn had stabbed with a fork on the table, Nerva plant still in his other hand. Nix removed the makeshift bandage he wore and took the purple length of vegetation from him, wrapping it around Ju-Long’s scabbed hand. Liam watched as the purple plant took on a darker and darker shade until it was withered and black. It took only a minute to shrivel to half its size, the plant’s moisture absorbing into Ju-Long’s wounded hand.
“It feels hot,” Ju-Long said.
“It will fade,” Nix replied. “The Nerva Plant’s oils are a stimulant to cellular repair.”
Saturn seemed confused and asked Nix, “What happens when it’s eaten?”
“I assure you it will do no harm. It’s mild on the stomach and it helps with digestion.”
Ju-Long removed the shriveled black plant from his hand and observed his palm. The punctures where the fork had struck looked like they’d progressed several days in the healing process in a matter of minutes. Most of the scabbing had flaked off and the punctures were red around the edges. Ju-Long flexed his hand and made a fist. “Most of the pain is gone,” he said, smiling wide.