by Bertina Mars
As he went from room to room, Akketon found more female Raspettians from the conquered ruler’s harem. Finally, he asked one group were he might find a comfortable clean bed.
An elderly female – a servant? Akketon wondered – separated from the rest of the huddling females. She slipped past him, into the hall way. The female reached back and gripped the sleeve of his tunic in one seven-fingered hand and drew him with her, through the halls of the citadel.
“Babbhak le’ey hah hak trubtelbrun…” You are the warrior leader? She croaked up at him.
“Yes,” Akketon added a clear, affirming nod to the reply, just in case she didn’t get the verbal message.
“Rath hah – le’ey bakkalta poi leihun.” This room will suit you then. The older female opened one of the double doors before him, tossing it wide.
The room appeared to be the suite the defeated, now dead, Raspettian ruler had claimed. It was untouched by the violence and final take-over that Akketon and his warriors had wrought in recent days – the space was clean and the furnishings rich.
Having managed to bathe earlier that day, Akketon decided to put off another bath until morning; instead he stripped and headed for the massive bed – it was large enough to comfortably sleep ten men in addition to himself.
A few steps short of the bed, the inner feeling that had invaded his senses when he had been standing on the cliff returned. Akketon turned from the bed and instead strode to the opened doors and the balcony that lay beyond the door, the citadel was overrun with the structures.
Nude, Akketon stood in the cool night. The hazy light of Raspett’s ‘dancing moons’ illuminating the landscape, otherwise awash in darkness now that the fires in the city had finally burned themselves out.
Akketon once more gazed into the expanse of the sky, trying to pinpoint the direction, the course, something about the force that was affecting him so dramatically. Finally, heaving a large sigh, he turned back into the chamber and with exhaustion weighing down his limbs, numbing his movements, Akketon collapsed onto the massive bed.
The last thing he did before giving in to the dark oblivion of sleep was to pull one of the silken bed cloths up over his hips. As his mind slipped into the darkness, Akketon couldn’t help but ponder the timeline in which the unknown force, not yet on the planet, might present itself.
---
Deep Space
Lana stirred from the uneasy slumber exhaustion had thrown her into. She sat upright on the cot and instantly regretted that decision; while prone the cot would automatically tighten the sheets to keep her against the firm matt at her back.
Unfortunately, the instant Lana sat, the sheets recoiled to the foot of the utility bed and she went drifting. Ever since the passage through the asteroid belt had damaged the ship’s artificial gravity unit, Lana could only get gravity the ‘old-fashioned way,’ by putting the ship into a spin, and she could only stand the effects of the spin on her equilibrium for a couple of hours at a time.
She used the spin time to maintain her health, to keep her body in shape – the idea of atrophied muscles was quite far from making the list of Lana’s desired qualities for herself – as well as to handle certain bodily function and ablutions – gravity made routine so much easier.
Three weeks. Trapped in space, with no human interaction for three weeks…Damn asteroids. Well, at least I have had all of the research files to read. If I hadn’t had that to focus on I would have been brain dead when I finally arrived on Rizpet – or is it Raspett? Considering how much static had transmitted through that last message, the ‘z’ could just be the result of distortion. Ugh! Why me? Why did Pursad suddenly decide to send me into space after the review?
Lana didn’t bother to pull on the jumpsuit in zero gravity, considering she had had no contact with earth for as long as she had been without regular gravity, she saw no reason to concern herself with excessive zero-gravity struggling.
There was no one to see that she had spent much of the voyage dressed only in undergarments: panties, socks, and a strapped breast band. If there was no one to witness her state of undress, Lana felt no urge to wear anything more.
Bracing her thinly shielded feet on walls and doorways, Lana propelled herself through the short corridor from the sleeping room to the control room.
Having used a little too much force, she had to catch herself on the back of the chair before she crashed into the controls and found herself desperately trying to reverse whatever programming she gave to the ships main computer.
The abrupt stop had forced Lana into a weightless handstand braced on the back of the chair. Giggling, she tucked her knees to her chest and rolled down into the seat. Stopping her momentum, Lana hit the series of controls – intentionally – in order to send the ship into a spin.
“And now for the crappy part of the process,” Lana muttered aloud for no one but herself. The roughness of her voice indicating she would need to start speaking aloud to nothing but the machinery so that when she arrived at her destination in a week she would sound mostly normal.
Lana braced her body against the seat as the centrifugal force of the spin started to create a semblance of gravity. Though she had been going through the process at least twice a day for the last twenty-one days, she still found herself getting queasy until enough speed was built up in the spin and the ship stabilized so that Lana wouldn’t be walking on the ceiling.
It took several minutes for the ship to finally stabilize and by the end Lana was gasping, desperately grateful that she only had a week remaining of the torture. Oh please let these ‘technologically advanced’ aliens be able to fix the artificial gravity unit.
---
Earth
“Has anyone heard from that stupid bitch?” The tenor of Dr. Jay Pursad’s voice bounced off the walls of the hall in the advanced research wing as his impatient footfalls clicked along, a staccato back-up of his irritation.
His nastiness was more pronounced than ever. Technicians muttered to one another, relieved for once for his arrogant rule that he would only speak to scientists with no less than a doctoral degree.
“The bastard is on the loose…you should let the others know.” James Partridge softly commented to one of the kindly, older, senior researchers, Dr. Ruth Basil.
“James,” she gently chided, “He isn’t that bad.”
“Yes doc. Yes he is.” James shook his head in disgust, if Harrison Labs didn’t have such excellent benefits; he would have quit if for no other reason than the way everyone catered to Pursad.
“Doc, is no one else bothered by the way he acts? By the way he talks about Dr. Zinevichinevich? I heard in one of the other departments that the ship had been programed to be unable to chance its course to return to Earth until after it reached the alien planet. What if the damage done when she passed through the Belt was more severe than we know and she needed to return to earth, but can’t?
That means that Pursad cares nothing for the safety and wellbeing of others. He values what he can gain from that alien race that he is obsessed with more than he does the lives of the people that work for him.
If he is going to be that way, he should have taken the risk instead of subjecting someone else, who he didn’t tell important details, to the potential torments of space travel much less what must be faced if she makes it to that planet alive.”
When the sweet Dr. Ruth had nothing to comment, James sadly turned back to his duty of prepping various equipment needed for one of the experiments that she had scheduled for later that morning.
As he worked, James began to weigh the value of the benefits provided by his job against his personal morals and realized that there were more important things than becoming vested for the corporate contribution to his retirement account. Happiness was one such thing.
---
Having just completed her daily workout, Lana returned the last piece of exercise equipment to its designated storage. She laughed again at the thought that had occurred to her w
hen she had been using the treadmill. Closing the cabinet, Lana turned and faced the mirrored wall.
“Well, with the past three weeks of consistent working out, I have finally achieved my sex-worker’s body. Now all I have to do is build up a clientele when I get back and then I can follow my true calling.” Lana shook her head at that silliness.
“Yeah, right. Papa would come back, dig himself out of his grave, claim transportation from Moscow, hunt me down and read me the riot act on wasting my ‘considerable intelligence,’ before summing the whole mess up by interrogating me as to why I changed my name. Have you ever been interrogated by a Russian?” Convinced, she was losing her mind, Lana heard her father’s heavily accented English in her mind.
Svetlana – have you no pride in your family’s name? The Belzinevichs have proudly conquered science since before the last Tsar fell. Now, because that little pompous fool sends you off to possibly be killed, because he is coward, you would throw all of that away and become a prostitute?
“Maybe I should build a robot pet…something to talk to…”
Chapter 3
An incessant beeping woke her. It wasn’t a danger alarm, thankfully, but it was almost as annoying. Drowsy, she hadn’t managed much sleep; Lana sat upright causing the sheets to recoil into the storage at the end of the cot.
She sighed as she braced her feet against the wall and launched herself across the room to the open door – had there been constant gravity, she would have utilized the doors of the ship.
However, without that planetary force she was becoming accustomed to being deprived of, but still missed terribly, it was difficult to open the doors without drifting off into the middle of the small chamber where there was nothing she could use to propel herself.
When Lana reached the control room and the main display, she hit the control to bring the system out of sleep mode. She hoped that it would be easy to determine the cause of the beeping. Once the system came back to life Lana couldn’t care about the beeping because she now understood the cause. She had arrived.
A planet loomed in front of the ship. The autopilot already in the process of beginning the pre-landing phase, the ship had slowed perceptibly, affording Lana the opportunity to gaze down at the world she would soon see the surface of.
The planet was a variety of shades of blue, purple, and green – brilliant jewel-tone greens. There wasn’t a single trace of brown on the surface detectable from space; the world practically glowed. Lana hoped that the planet was as lush as it appeared to be from her vantage point.
Ever since the “Renew the planet” statutes had been passed in the mid twenty-first century, significant strides had been made in returning Earth to its iconic blue and green state.
However, while those efforts had preserved the then remaining forests and other green spaces, the most significant wastelands still remained, though they were smaller than they had been a hundred years before.
Unwilling to delay the landing in order to put the ship into a gravitational spin, Lana decided to face the chore of becoming a presentable representative of Earth while weightless. It took twice as long as normal.
Yet, when the alarm went off, heralding the ships official descent into the planet’s atmosphere – Lana avoided thinking about the planet’s name, she had decided to wait until she heard a local confirm the pronunciation – she was dressed, her hair was neat for the first time in a month, and her teeth were clean. Lana felt she was pretty freaking presentable to an alien race, all factors considered.
The ship began its descent; however, as it slipped into the planet’s atmosphere, Lana realized that there was something very wrong. The ship wasn’t slowing enough; she was hurtling toward the lush planet’s surface in a metal drum.
Sure, the ship was technically more substantial in structure than a metal drum, but at the present velocity, it would doubtless crush around her – crush her with it.
Because I have always wanted a massive, miserably expensive coffin…Fuck! Where is the damn manual deployment for the flaps and solar-chute?
---
Stars! It’s so close that it’s making me burn. Akketon couldn’t fathom what immanent force could cause such a reaction. Whatever it was, it had caused his body to catch fire.
His nerve endings were searing; his body nearly beyond his control – it was so bad that he had given serious consideration to a Raspettian female just that morning, but dismissed that idea before he could proposition one. There were limits – even he wasn’t that desperate…yet.
Akketon and his warriors had crushed any potential uprisings. Planet-wide the Raspettian population was significantly diminished. And while the amphibious race liked to consider themselves superior, they weren’t as smart as they liked to posture, and not one of them had the aggression to be able to cause an uprising worth exerting military force over.
The few gatherings ‘intending to overthrow their unrighteous conquerors had been easily squashed by a small group of soldiers. Using no weapon other than their fists, Akketon’s lower level comrades had easily forced the Raspettian’s to disband.
“You look miserable,” came a voice, more familiar to Akketon’s ears than even his own, from the doorway. Akketon turned and found Varan leaning against the jamb.
“You know, if you were open to breaking that rule that we have between us – the one to never cross certain lines – I could help you out with that problem that you are suffering at the moment.” Varan nodded at the significant shape of his sex, straining against the confines of his thin leg-clothes.
“Varan, you know that is something that I can’t do,” Akketon commented laughingly.
“Surely, I am more appealing than one of those females I saw you considering earlier?” Varan finished that observation off with thoroughly ridiculous flutter of his lashes – that action broke much of the tension that had been building within Akketon. Entirely Varan’s intention.
“Seriously though, what is going on with you the last few days? We had a successful campaign. We have claimed this planet for you, our superior ruler. Sure, we could stand to have some females – the ones that are more our kind – for you and the others, that is. But this is a happy time. Instead of celebrating, you are strung tighter than a siaketh drum skin and snarling at everyone…and contemplating an interspecies mating.”
Akketon doubled over at the waist, desperately trying to catch his breath, gales of laughter spilling from his lips.
However, before he could get his breath back and throw out a snappy retort, one of the warriors that Akketon had assigned to the squad that was on rotation today came skidding through the doorway.
“Commander, commander! There is something incoming. You need to come see the readings on the scanners.”
In that moment, Akketons whole persona changed; he was the powerful warrior. The leader. The conqueror. Straightening, Akketon spun on the toe of his hard hide boot and strode from his chambers. Then he broke into a run.
---
Lana could tell that something was wrong with the ship. It seemed that the passage through the asteroid belt had caused more damage than she had realized. Than anybody had realized – as in the final moments of communication, no mention was made of the sensors, reporting to the command center back on Earth, registering damage to the landing systems.
Now it was painfully apparent that the whole mission had been well and truly rushed. Pursad in his impatience had prematurely declared the technology ready for a ventureNot only had she lost artificial gravity and Communications, it appeared that she was well and truly fucked.
As she descended further into the atmosphere of the alien planet, she realized that the ship was more and more out of control. The entire Hull was vibrating violently. The ship's autopilot couldn't control it any longer.
The Ship cut through the cloud cover like a whip. It sliced through the atmosphere of the alien planet as though the clouds and the gases were nothing but butter; and she was trapped in the hot knife of a ship
streaking through the sky. Lana took in what little she could of the world beneath her.
The clouds drifted in shapes of hazy greys and delicate pinks; Lana could tell that the world beneath her, Raspett, what as Lush and fertile as she had hoped it would be from what she had been able to see from space.
Large lakes of the purest sapphire blue were scattered through forests – mottled patches of brilliant green and astonishing lavender. It appeared that trees of this world would naturally blossom delicate hues that the people of Earth only saw recreated in art or synthetics or sometimes through the recovering smog at dusk.
As far as Lana was able to determine, the inhabitants of the world she was plummeting toward seemed live either solitary lives or have congregated into the single city that had registered under her ship's sensors.
Despite her curiosity of the glimmering world so exquisitely reminiscent of the gem that Earth had once been – Lana knew that she had to focus on the dire straits that the malfunctioning equipment has put her in.
While she did not fear death and the mysteries of the unknown, of the beyond that death might bring, Lana was sure, confident, convinced that it was not net her time to make that journey. That there was yet more that she was meant to do with her life. That her destiny was not to be the guinea pig of a man whose facade she had found admirable, but found his true character to be absolutely reprehensible. Lana did not want to be one of his victims.
Throughout her journey, she tried to cling to her optimistic beliefs that the great Dr. Pursad was I not as bad as she had thought him to be; however, in that moment, she finally lost any semblance of respect for the man.
Lana once more forced her mind from reflection back to the problem at hand – survival. Yet, as she refocused, she wondered if staying trapped in reflection would not have been kinder, for the ship had streaked over the planet’s city and was on a death course to the side of a cliff.