by A. A. Ripley
Inan found herself digging through the supply locker. There had to be some heat-orbs, right? All that was there were some multiester blankets, as shiny as processed mercury. She wished she had packed her private heat-orb. She hadn’t thought she would need one. There is, after all, no bad weather in space. Inan the Idiot – went to space unprepared. That was something that could be written into her demise-chant after they found her dead body stiff and frozen in absolute zero.
Hijinks took one of the blankets and soon there was only a pair of black eyes and a sharp end of a nose visible from under the cover. Inan wasn’t sure what that was supposed to accomplish. Then it dawned on her. Hijinks must be warm-blooded! The multiester would keep the heat generated by its organism and prevent the marsupial from losing heat! Suddenly it became obvious what she should do. She could use Hijinks as a heating-orb. To use a sentient being as an object should be unthinkable. All of her Mothers would lash out at her and the assignment to clean the complex’s waste disposal unit would surely follow. Oh, if they could see her right now, contemplating such a blatant disregard for the Codex. “A being is a being is a being. Not stone or tool, nor beast nor plant, nor food nor shelter. A being is not to be used.” A Codex-breaker… A sour taste of shame came over her. Hijinks is just an alien, but Inan would be as guilty. But I’m going to die otherwise, she thought. She took a breath. She made her decision. If she had to be one thing, she would rather be a live Codex-breaker than a dead Codex-keeper. She hoped no one would ever hear of this.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘please let me in with you. I’m not sure how I can stay warm on my own.’
The only response she had was a sharp, suspicious glance from Hijinks.
Couldn’t it understand what it meant for her to be exposed to the cold? I’m an ectotherm. I can’t just bundle myself up and hope for the best.
‘Hungry, Inan?’ said Hijinks from under the covers. ‘How long until too hungry? How long until you bite?’
Even this alien being thought that Inan was a Codex-breaker, and a people-eater at that! She had to say something, anything, explain herself.
‘I’m not a monster!’ Inan cried. ‘I’m cold-blooded, I can’t heat myself. I’m afraid, Hijinks. I don’t want to die!’
There was no response.
‘Please, Hijinks, help me!’
The intense silence persisted.
Inan opened her mouth to speak again, but there were no more words forming in her mind.
She gathered a few things from the emergency locker and floated towards the farthest corner of the pod, as far from Hijinks as she could. A few multiester blankets, a molecular cutter, a first aid kit – they were like elements of a puzzle that were to be fitted together to form a way out of this situation. It was like one of those impossible mathematical equations, a brain-teaser, a joke. A problem that has no solution, rigged against the hard-headed student who believes himself the centre of all wisdom. A deadly test with no right answer.
‘I’m sorry, Matriarch,’ she said to herself. ‘I was a bad student.’ She pressed both hands to her nostrils to stifle a sob that found its way from the bottom of her chest.
The lights dimmed and switched into emergency mode. The batteries were dwindling to the end of their life. Inan lifted her head. In the weak light she saw a shape floating towards her like a dark cloud. Her heart leapt. Hijinks had come to solve the carnivorous problem.
But there was no aggression, only the fluttering sound of blankets floating unrolled all around them. Soon after, Inan was held as softly and carefully as a freshly-laid egg. At the beginning she felt very self-conscious, huddled to a hairy body. To add to the tension, Hijinks was male. A female wouldn’t be working as a simple spacer, of course, prone to accidents and tribulations like the one they were in, right? That notion did not make it easier for her to accept this sudden change in personal boundaries. Slowly she began to relax. The soft texture of Hijinks’ fur reminded her of the nesting material they had in the nursery. The heat of the marsupial’s body was like the pleasant radiation of high-powered heat-orbs they used to keep the hatchlings warm.
Time passed. The temperature started to fall, slowly but steadily. Inan observed from under the covers how the humid vapour that Hijinks was breathing out was turning more and more visible in the cooling air. So cold! A frost started to form on the metal surfaces, giving everything a silvery sheen. The filters still worked, but now they were just blowing the same recycled icy air, like the breath of a dead planet. Even with the heat coming from the marsupial’s body Inan could feel a deadly chill creeping under the blankets. Her joints started to stiffen. How long before she wouldn’t be able to move at all? Minute by minute, her thoughts slowed down, her body overwhelmed by the cold, chilled and unusable. Her mind started to drift; her senses began to shut down, one by one, like lights in an abandoned dwelling.
*
There was a disturbance, an uncomfortable noise, mechanical clangs that penetrated her clouded mind. The airlock was cycling. Rescue! They were found at last!
Inan wanted to disentangle herself from the blankets, and Hijinks’ embrace, to go and let their rescuers in. But the noise grew louder. Something was pounding at the hatch. Inan watched with horror as it buckled and broke. The hiss of equalising pressure mixed with a high-pitched snarl. There was a gust of hot air, like the blast from a furnace. Many-tentacled arms, fortified with steel-clad armour, invaded the entrance. A monstrous, ovoid head showed up behind the tentacle mass, its neck encased in a strange, spiked collar. The head split in half to uncover a mouth full of serrated teeth. The creature howled again. It squeezed its body through the hatch, the tentacles writhing and flailing all around it, spreading like a horrible fern. It braced itself against the wall. The tentacles darted towards them.
Inan tried to get away, but there was nowhere to run. Still stiff, she tried to float away as far as she could. She was too slow. The tentacles drew closer. She clawed madly at it with her freshly-healed hands. She scraped against the steel sheaths to no effect. The tentacles were undeterred. One of them coiled itself around her ankles, tiny hooks catching her clothes. The tentacle started dragging her effortlessly towards the monster. She tried to kick it off, but it held steady.
The monstrosity handled her as though she was made of Scrynian grass. Inan saw the huge mouth open even wider, the jagged fangs drawing closer and closer. A hot spray of goo busted from the creature’s throat, enveloping her completely. It hardened instantly, leaving her immobilised and barely able to breathe. She could only watch helplessly as Hijinks got dragged and restrained by the weird substance from the depths of the beast. She realised that they had gone from rain to deluge.
The horror turned around and took them both through the hatch. They were still screaming when they were enveloped by the hot darkness of the alien spaceship.
Blinded by the sudden plunge into darkness and made breathless by the difference in ambient temperature, Inan was dragged along the floor of a narrow corridor. She could hear the scraping of the tentacles on the steel walls as the monster pushed its body forward.
The corridor ended and they were tossed through the bulkhead opening into the main control room. The room was very small, not a ship’s set-up at all; more like a one-person unit, a short-distance transport, most likely. It was built with a transparent globe, reinforced with ribbons of metal, like an ancient deep sea exploration vessel. There was nothing outside but the endless field of stars. It smelled stale and sour. It made Inan cringe in disgust and retract her tongue as far back as she could. The monster lost interest in them completely. It wound itself tightly around the seat in the middle and with one flip of the tentacle it initiated the departing sequence. There was the swish of activating compression seals, and they were away, leaving the escape pod behind them. Inan and Hijinks rolled on the floor like fallen fruit, barely avoiding smashing into walls with the acceleration.
Somet
hing changed behind the thick surface of the front view. Something appeared – small, blocky in shape at first, it grew rapidly. Sprawling like a misshapen fish of sharp angles and sharper shadows, there was a menacing silhouette. In the weak light of the nearest star, the stern-side engine battery rose like a mountain of artificial mass, black and silenced. The outer plating was dilapidated and worn with years in unforgiving open space, nearly stripped in places by the micro-bombardment of space dust and debris. There was a cannon mounted on the “back” of the ship, its huge opening gaping and darker than space itself. It was almost impossible to think about it as anything but a wreck, but then Inan noticed the position lights on the access points. They were blinking, like amber eyes in the shaded crevices of the hull. The ship was powered and alive, like an ancient predator lying in wait.
‘Goliath,’ said Hijinks, in a muffled voice.
Goliath! It couldn’t be, could it? The Goliath-type ships were built as a last attempt to turn the Human Wars into victory for the aggressors. The huge dorsal cannon was capable of slicing a small moon in half when fully charged. There were only five ever built, testament and warning against human capabilities, all of them destroyed by the combined effort of the Core Races. All of them, except one. The one named after a warmonger or a hero of ancient human history. The one that her star-faring cousins had always talked about, while sharing incredible stories among themselves after dark, the subject of many eavesdropped conversations.
*
The hangar doors opened like a maw and swallowed the transport. The doors closed behind them, cutting them off from the stars. The ship greeted them with a flight deck painted grey, with an expanse of rusty paintwork and invasive floodlights. Inan’s senses were overpowered by the smell of super-lubricant that was turned to chunks by age, and by the disarray of shapes, bathed in the lights of orange, high-pressure sodium lamps that messed up her heat perception. And there were humans, humans everywhere! Their fuzzy forms were swarming in the recently repressurised hangar, climbing the catwalks, crawling on the hulls of other craft parked here, filling the stale air with the jarring clamour of their voices. Inan’s vision adjusted slowly, just in time to see a thick-soled boot enter her field of vision. A human had come to deal with them. Some vile, chemical-smelling compound was misted all over Inan and Hijinks. The mass that was binding them became soft and soon it disintegrated into a stringy mess. It was still disgusting, but at least they were able to stand up.
The monster pounced. It entangled the human’s legs in a knot of tentacles and bared its razor-sharp fangs. For an instant, Inan thought that they were all lost but the human didn’t even flinch. Instead, he reached into the pocket of his overalls and produced a morsel, which he fed to the beast. The beast hissed with obvious contentment. The human petted its bulbous head and spoke in soft tones. The beast uncoiled itself and moved aside and lay down with its head among its tentacles, uninterested in anything around it.
The human turned its attention to them. He pondered for a moment.
‘Walk!’ he barked finally.
Inan hesitated. She wanted to say something but the human interrupted.
‘No talk. Walk!’ He turned to the monster. ‘Bandit!’
The beast roared, spreading its tentacles, sharp points towards them, letting them know that they had both better do what they were told, or else.
The human took them up the narrow catwalks, deep into the belly of the ship, through the narrow winding corridors. The only sounds that they could hear were the distant, muffled voices of machines working in the depths of the ship, the sounds of their footsteps, the clicking and scraping sounds of the armoured tentacles of Bandit sliding behind them. They passed a couple of bulkheads before arriving at what seemed to be a kind of cargo bay, filled with tall containers that towered above them. In the corner of the bay there was a workstation surrounded by flickering displays. A large human was bent over it. He looked at them and shouted angrily. The other human responded and for a few moments the air was filled with the cacophony of their alien voices. Bandit joined them too, roaring, spreading and shaking its tentacles. Then the shouting match died down as suddenly as it had started. The cargo master calmed and spoke tradespeak.
‘I’ve told you not to send Bandit out by himself. Just look at what he brought. What the hell I am supposed to do with that? A useless rat, obviously Lifted, and some kind of lizard. What is that anyway?’
A hairless, gnarly hand caught her by her neck, while the other went exploring her body, bending her joints and counting teeth inside her mouth. Inan forced herself to stand still, trying not to close her mouth and not to gag. She realised that angering the alien would only make her situation turn from bad to worse. She could hear Hijinks protesting behind her back and the human ordering him to stand still.
Inan felt relief when the human let her go, which turned instantly to terror when he spoke.
‘It’s useless. Who’d ever want to buy those? Just throw them out of the nearest airlock.’
‘No, wait!’ Inan spoke before she had even realised it. ‘I am worth money! A lot of money!’
‘You are lying, lizard.’ The human looked straight at her. His alien eyes with the irises shaped like bottomless holes seemed to bore into her being.
‘I am not! I am an asset to my House!’ she said, steadying her voice and with as much dignity as she could manage. ‘We have vast holdings and you are bound to gain even more if you return me. My Matriarch will give you anything you want, tradeunits, astarium, machines, any kind of goods!’
To her surprise, the words flew out on their own, like a torrent after heavy rain. She was hardly aware of what she was saying.
The human hesitated.
‘Fine! Space the rat then.’
‘Hijinks is an indentured servant. He’s been ours for years. There would be a reward for the property of the House as well.’
‘What does it do? Serve you tea dressed as a French maid?’ They both made a noise Inan recognised as human laughter. She had no idea what “tea” was or what kind of maid a French maid would be, but she knew she could not stop talking now.
‘Hijinks is a highly-skilled maintenance and repair worker specialising in short-distance spacecraft internal installations. I’m sure he can show you a thing or two.’
‘Well then, maybe we can keep your friend full-time, then.’ The cargo master chuckled again. ‘I suppose I believe you, but it had better be the truth. I’ll call the captain, but if you’re lying, you’ll be begging to be spaced soon enough.’
The alien called up an intercom and talked into it. The intercom sputtered an answer. The cargo master waved at their guardians.
‘You’ve heard him. Go! And take this useless beast with you too. I don’t want Bandit to eat anyone important, like last time.’
The human led them out again, through the dim corridors, upwards this time. The high-velocity lift muttered something, probably deck numbers, in a monotone voice. Finally, it stopped. Here the corridors were better lit and populated. The humans walked about, their faces sharp and uninviting. Inan could feel their eyes following her and Hijinks down the corridor.
In the room there was nothing except the long, polished surface of a table. A single lamp was giving just enough light to illuminate it. Beyond the table the stars were visible, stretching crisply along the whole wall. There was a shape obscuring the stars, a darkness in human form. The darkness took a step forward into the light.
‘Welcome aboard Napoleon Bonaparte.’
A wiry human stood before them, his skin dry like a page out of an ancient book, his eyes like those of a carnivorous avian – piercing and cold. His head-fur was short and grey, like bristles on a yap-beast. He was dressed in a suit of clothes that carried strange metallic insignia. The unidentifiable cloth was worn and threadbare, but the metal glimmered in the light menacingly.
Inan had never seen him b
efore, but she knew it had to be him; the Moon Killer, the Raptor, the one which human government refused to acknowledge. A relic – just like the ship he commanded.
Words froze in Inan’s throat before she could spit them out. Hijinks, just say something, please! she thought. Anything! He spoke.
‘I am Cochrane, captain of this ship. And who might you be?’
‘I am Inan Skoss-ar, of the House Skoss.’ Inan found a way to push the words past her teeth. She added a hurried bow, in case the human knew the customary gestures. ‘My Matriarch would be more than grateful to any person who would secure my safe return.’
‘You are izara, aren’t you? And your little Lifted friend? I’m not familiar with that species.’
‘He’s property of the House.’ Inan looked at Hijinks, but the marsupial remained silent. It went through her mind that she didn’t know his species either. She decided to change the subject instead.
‘You know of my people?’
‘Oh, I know. It is my business to know my enemy.’
‘But I am not your enemy and the war is over! It was over many years ago.’
‘Over?’ his voice grew into a rumble. ‘It is over for cowards and traitors! It is not over for me, or for my crew! And you! Where were you when Core Races delegated my people to be blamed for everything that goes wrong in the galaxy?’
He slammed both his fists on the table. He looked at them with a hate-filled stare that could freeze a sun. His flat, alien face was twisted in a grotesque expression. Inan thought, He will have us executed, ransom value or not. After a few seconds, as long as the life of a galaxy, the savage lines on his face smoothed. He turned around to face the stars and after a pause spoke again.
‘Forgive an old soldier his outburst. You are guests on my vessel, and will remain as such until we can get into the vicinity of a communication hub or a signal buoy to get a message out. Until then you will remain in my care.’
He called out. Another human creature appeared in the door.