by Eric Vall
She surveyed the damage around us and then the crystal in my hand. I looked up at her in confusion and disbelief.
“We should have melted,” I told her hoarsely. “Why… why didn’t we melt?”
The mechanic’s brow furrowed for a moment but then understanding lit up behind her eyes. She reached out and placed her hand on my chest. I was bewildered before I realized she was pulling at my coat.
“Odrine,” she whispered as she ran her fingers down the yellow trim, and I suddenly remembered the properties of the metal ore that was woven into our coats: highly durable and able to withstand a large range of temperature fluctuations. When I had jumped on top of Akela, and Akela in turn on top of the two people we’d just saved, our Odrine-lined coats had shielded us from the brunt of the ion cannon’s heat.
I suddenly began to laugh. It hurt my raw throat, but I couldn’t help it. Akela stared at me for a moment before her mouth began to tremble and then she was laughing too.
“I don’t know what’s so funny!” Neka yelled in our ears, and by the wobble in her voice, I could tell the cat-girl was crying.
I opened my mouth to calm her down, but Akela beat me to it. “You just saved our skins, Neka,” the mechanic said, still laughing, her violet eyes were from tears of mirth and irritation from the sand. “Literally. Like holy shit, I think I might kiss you when we get back on the ship.”
“Ohhh?” the cat-girl mrowled as she raised an eyebrow.
“The coats, Neka,” I explained. “The Odrine coats. They saved our lives. You saved our lives.”
The cat-girl sniffed again over the line. “Well… you’re welcome. But don’t ever do something like that ever again, okay!”
Before I could respond, a cough interrupted me. I looked down, and a pair of navy blue eyes, solidly navy blue without pupil or sclera, looked up at me. I sat there frozen for a moment, and then the eyes blinked two sets of eyelids, and I realized I was still lying half on top of the two people we had saved.
“Oh shi-sorry,” I stumbled out. I shifted and managed to get to my feet. I was a little wobbly, but I held out my hand to Akela, and then to the two others. After a moment’s hesitation in which the pair shared a look, they took my hand and slid to their feet.
Now that we weren’t in mortal peril, I was able to take in the details of the two individuals. They were mostly humanoid in shape and size if not a little taller and more willowy. Their faces were more long and narrow, too, and they had no nose, save for two small slits in the center of their faces that flared with each breath they took in time with what were apparently gills on the sides of their necks. Their skin was grayish-green, like algae over brackish water, and it looked to be smooth in some places, like the skin of a frog, but along the sides of their heads and in various other spots around their faces and necks, scales stood out in darker greens and blues that appeared iridescent. Their eyes were large and wide and oval, solid navy blue in color, and on each side of their heads, where ears would be, stretched two elongated fins, about half a meter long that extended back past their heads.
These were the Almort.
With a start, I suddenly remembered what Akela and I were doing here. I cleared my throat and brushed off the front of my coat. It was mostly an empty gesture. I had sand everywhere and I’m pretty sure I looked like a crazed lunatic, with my slightly singed hair, wild eyes, and the large rifle discarded at my feet.
“Hello,” I said to the pair that stood before me. “My name is Colby Tower. Can you understand me?”
The two Almort blinked at me and then shared a glance with each other. The one on the left took a tentative step forward and opened its mouth. The noise that issued forth sounded like the hiss of the surf on the sand, like the tide going out, like the spray of the sea.
“Uh, Omni,” I muttered as the Almort turned back to its companion and they conversed in a series of hisses, gurgles, and clicking noises.
“Calculating,” the AI replied as he ran the Almort’s language through his programs. After a moment, he said, “Hm. This is interesting. It seems their language is similar in sound and syntax to the people of Klath.”
Klathians were a reptilian race found in the nearby Eridani Galaxy. We had brokered a deal with them years ago, and I vaguely remembered the similar hissing and clacking sounds of their language.
“Will the translations work?” I asked the AI. The Almort had finished discussing and were staring at me expectantly. At least… I think it was expectantly. It was hard to read the expressions on their flat faces.
“It should,” Omni responded.
“Should or will?”
“Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, Colby,” he told me, and I almost rolled my eyes. Seemed like he got over the fear of us nearly dying pretty quickly.
I fished around in my pocket for the voice modulator Akela had taken out of my old flight suit and adapted. When my hand closed around the small black box, I lifted it up toward my mouth and cleared my throat once more.
“Hello,” I repeated as I pressed the button on the outside of the box. “My name is Colby Tower. Can you understand me now?”
When I released the button, there was a second’s delay before my voice issued out of the box, but this time in a series of hisses. The Almort stared at me in shock and then tried to start speaking all at once, their voices sliding and meshing together to sound like the waves of the ocean at our backs.
The box couldn’t differentiate between the voices, and so the translation came out as a garbled jumble of words. I held up my hand to the two, and they fell silent.
“You have to speak one at a time, or I won’t be able to understand you,” I said into the box. The translation clicked and gurgled out, and then the Almort on the left stepped up again. I pressed the button once more, and the Almort began to speak.
“Understand we yessssss,” the box hissed back at me. Seemed like the transfer from Klathian wasn’t perfect, but at least it was comprehensible. “Understand you?”
“Yes,” I responded and nodded my head to emphasize the point. “I can understand you.”
The Almort on the left clicked a rapid sequence of noises. “Destroyed you the Opalks. Do how?”
My brow furrowed in confusion. “The… Opalks?”
The Almort clicked and lifted a hand to point behind me to the carcass of the creature we had just killed. I noticed for the first time that they had webbed fingers, twice as long as my own. “Opalks,” the Almort repeated, and I realized that must be the name of the beast’s species.
“Oh! Yes, we killed the Opalks.” I gestured to the ship behind them. Omni had set it back down in the sand, and the remaining Almort had gathered around the slowly extending loading ramp. “We killed it with our ship. It has ion cannons.”
The box buzzed loudly in my hand, the signal that there was no translation for ‘ion cannon.’ I racked my brain for a moment before I pointed at the rifle at my feet. “Guns. We killed it with big guns that are on our ship.”
The Almort listened to the translation and then hissed, “Rescue you we. Owe we now you.” The other Almort at his side wove its head from side to side in what I construed as a nod.
I shook my head in response. “No, you don’t owe us anything. We were happy to help.”
The Almort didn’t seem to like that and he clicked his tongue. “Owe we now you,” he repeated. “Want you what?”
I almost repeated myself that they didn’t owe us anything, but then I remembered I wasn’t on this planet for my altruism. I was here to make a deal. I glanced at Akela, and she seemed to understand what I was asking because she nodded ever so slightly. I turned back to the Almort.
“I would like to speak to your leader,” I told him plainly. “Do you have a king? Or a government? Who makes your decisions?”
The Almort seemed to not understand the question. He turned to his companion, and they clicked rapid-fire sentences at each other. Then, the one on the left said, “Chief. Go you chief?”
he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied in relief. “Yes, I would like to go to your chief.”
The left Almort wove his head from side to side. “Take we chief you. For Opalks. And for rescue you son chief.”
I blinked and wondered if the translation had glitched. “Wait. The son of the chief?”
The Almort on the right stepped up and puffed out his gills. The scales that ran down the side of his head and around his face flashed in bursts of blue and green. Apparently, the Almort were bioluminescent as well.
“Cyl’ass,” he declared, and I realized he was introducing himself. “Son chief.” He then gestured to his companion. “Slal’ops. Under chief. Take we you.”
I deduced that ‘under chief’ meant something akin to ‘second in command’ so I dipped my head respectfully at both of them. Suddenly, Akela cleared her throat beside me, and I started as I realized I had forgotten about the silver-haired woman for a moment.
“Oh, my apologies. This is Akela,” I told them and gestured at the woman who gave a small wave and a dip of her head as well. “She is our ship’s mechanic.”
The two Almort… frowned at each other, for lack of a better word. “Machine… healer?” Cyl’ass asked hesitantly.
I winced and wondered how technologically primitive the Almort actually were. “Yes,” I told him and pointed at the ship again. “She fixes our ship and other things when they break.”
Cyl’ass and Slal’ops chittered excitedly at each other. “Go machine-healer chief?” Slal’ops asked Akela.
The mechanic looked at me in question but then hesitantly responded, “Yes?”
Both Cyl’ass and Slal’ops flashed their bioluminescent scales in what I hoped was happiness. “Take we you,” they told her in unison and then they turned back to me.
Cyl’ass attempted to hiss something, but the box buzzed in my hand again. The Almort clicked in displeasure. “You?” he questioned, but I had no idea what he was trying to say. He tried again. “You call what?”
“I think he’s asking your name again, CT,” Akela muttered to me, but Cyl’ass had heard her.
“CcccT,” he hissed, the letters of my name elongated exponentially. The son of the chief clicked at me until I nodded.
“Uhh yes. Yes, I’m also called CT.”
Cyl’ass wove his head from side to side. It was a very hypnotic gesture, I thought, as my head swam a bit. Then I thought I really hoped I didn’t have a concussion.
“Take we chief you,” the Almort prince said. “First but cut we Opalks. For feasting when take we chief you.” He lifted his long-fingered hand again and pointed to the body in the surf.
I blinked in shock. That carcass was huge. It would take hours, if not a whole day, to chop it up. I looked around the empty beach. I didn’t see any type of tools or anything to cart the pieces back in either. Did they intend to rip the beast apart with their bare, webbed hands?
I was just about to ask when both Cyl’ass and Slal’ops suddenly tilted back their heads and unleashed an eerie, chittering cry in unison, like the call of a dolphin back on Earth, except a hundred times more creepy. It sent a shiver down my spine, and Akela shuddered.
Before I could ask what they had done, another sound reached my ears. It was an answering call, and as it echoed out across the beach, the ground began to shake once more. Not as catastrophically, but enough to have the sands shifting around our feet.
I turned in the direction of the noise and looked past where the Lacuna Noctis was resting in the sand. About another fifty to seventy-five meters behind our ship, the sand seemed to give way to nothing, the line of the dunes bleeding directly into the indigo sky. I realized, however, that the dunes were the top of a hill, and whoever had answered Cyl’ass and Slal’ops’ cry were now attempting to crest it.
“Wait you ship,” Cyl’ass said to me. “Take this not long.”
As he finished his sentence, the sand at the top of the dunes exploded in a flurry of motion. I gaped in awe as what looked to me like… vehicles sped down the dunes and across the flat beach toward us. They were wheeled vehicles, or at least that’s what I thought. The outside was made of an semi-translucent, perhaps metallic blue-gray substance. The sides and edges all faintly glowed green and blue and pulsed like the scales on Cyl’ass’ head. It made me wonder if their vehicles were organic. It looked like they weren’t too technologically primitive after all.
The driving party reached us in no time, even after they stopped by the ship to pick up the small group still huddled by the loading ramp. There were four vehicles, two of a smaller, more compact style, and two larger ones that were tethered to a large flatbed trailer that they dragged behind them in the sand. A dozen or so Almort jumped from the vehicles and came to stand before their prince. They clicked and hissed and gestured at me and Akela with odd, sinuous movements. I didn’t even bother to try to translate any of the bedlam.
After a moment of conversing with his people, Cyl’ass turned to me and said, “Return we soon. Cut we Opalks. Take we chief you. Wait you ship. Yessssss, CT?”
I realized the last part had been a question. “Yes, um. Yes, we’ll wait with our ship. Unless… you need some help? Help to cut the Opalks,” I clarified.
As one, the Almort let out a raucous chittering sound, and their scales flashed in odd bursts of bioluminescence. I pressed a few commands on the translation box, and the best approximation it could come up with was laughter.
“Do you enough,” Slal’ops said to me. “Finish we.”
With a few gestures, the Almort got back into their vehicles and sped off toward the carcass of the Opalks, sand and glass crystals flying in their wake.
Akela and I stared after them in silence for a moment.
“Is your life always this weird?” the mechanic asked me out of nowhere, the question seemingly loud now on the quiet beach. The Almort had reached the Opalks’ body, but their hissed exclamations faded into the whispers of the sea and wind.
“No,” I told her honestly. “I can say I’ve never done something as strange as kill a giant, alien sea beast during my first five minutes on a planet. I think the strangest thing I found before this was probably Neka.”
“Hey!” the cat-girl cried out over my earpiece. “I can hear you, ya know.” I could just see the pout on my assistant’s face.
I smiled. “I’m just joking, Neka. You know you’re one of the best things ever to happen to me.”
“That’s right, I am. Now hurry up and come back to the ship so I can hug the two of you already and yell at you for giving Omni and me heart attacks.”
“Seeing as I don’t have a heart,” the AI cut in, “I cannot have a heart attack.”
“You know what I mean!” Neka yowled, and I shook my head at their antics.
I turned back to Akela to ask if she was ready to walk back, but before I could get a word out, the mechanic sagged against me.
“Whoaaaa there,” I said as I wrapped an arm around her. “Are you alright?”
I tried to look over the mechanic for injuries, but I didn’t see any blood. Her arms, however, were faintly pink from the heat of the ion cannon since her coat did not have the coverage of sleeves like mine did. I reached out and faintly ran my fingers around her elbow, and the mechanic flinched with a hiss.
“Ouuuuuuuch,” she muttered. She tilted her head back against my shoulder, and there was bone-deep exhaustion in her amethyst eyes. “Hm. Seems like the adrenaline is wearing off, huh?”
As she said that, I could feel my own muscles start to shake, and my own vision flicker. “Yeah,” I chuckled roughly. My voice and throat still felt raw from inhaling nearly-molten sand. “Seems that way.”
The silver-haired mechanic looked up at me, her eyes already half-mast. “You lean on me and I’ll lean on you?” she offered.
I nodded and, together, we picked up our discarded rifles and started our comical three-legged limp back to the ship. When we had nearly reached the loading ramp, Akela pulled at the
back of my coat until I slowed and looked down at her.
“Thank you,” she said quietly as she lifted her eyes to mine. “For saving me. Looks like you evened out our deal after all.” Her full lips twitched upward in a tired smile.
I shook my head at her. “You don’t have to thank me for that. I’m just sorry you got hurt,” I said as I jerked my chin at her singed arms. “Maybe next time you should stay with Neka on the ship. This planet is a lot more dangerous than I realized.”
Akela’s tired smile transformed into a scowl. “Hey, I can take care of myself. I was a little thrown at first by the enormous fuckin’ sea monster, but I think I held my own pretty well in the end.”
I stared down at her incredulously. “Of course you did,” I said sincerely. “This whole debacle probably would have had a totally different ending without you. But…” I trailed off.
“But what?” the mechanic challenged, the old hint of steel from Theron back in her voice.
I sighed and tilted my head back to stare up into the darkened sky. “But I promised your mother I’d bring you back alive,” I said. “And…”
I contemplated whether to be honest and then thought we were almost just killed by a giant tentacle monster, so really what was the point in lying. “And I don’t want to lose you,” I finally admitted.
I had only known the mechanic for a few weeks now, but she was smart, intuitive as hell, stronger than almost anyone I had ever met, and so beautiful sometimes I couldn’t look at her straight on. She had quickly become a part of my family, and that moment where we were running toward each other across the beach, a charging ion cannon on one side and a charging, ravenous beast on the other, and I didn’t know if we were going to make it through what was honestly one of the scariest moments of my life.
Akela was silent, and I glanced down to see her staring straight ahead. Her cheeks flushed bright, bright red. “Well… maybe I don’t want to lose you either. So let’s make a deal to not do stupid things anymore, alright?”