by Calista Skye
I find nothing else in here I can use, so with much easier steps I go back to the glass cylinder room where I entered. The dragon cylinders are empty, just as I expected.
I feel pretty safe here. The lower part of the ship is plainly automated, and the spirit doesn’t control all of it. The dragon’s cylinders she must have controlled, but not much else. She can’t even see if anyone’s down here unless they’re using one of her spypads.
I take the elevator up to the room with the dragon projections on the walls and the couches on the floor. I’m pretty sure I know what the purpose of all that is now. And in some ways, it might be the most interesting part of the whole ship.
I make my way up to the hanging gardens. This time I’m much less careful when I walk down those murderous stairs, and I try to not notice the place where Brax’tan threw himself down so I would land softly.
No. A man like that could not attack my cave and my girls to enslave them. It’s just not him.
I walk over to the crystal column in the middle, picking some fruits and eating them on the way. I have a feeling I’ll need all the energy I can get.
I take a deep breath and walk backwards into the mysterious crystal beam.
Shit, I wish I had a weapon.
I step out on the upper level, the ship’s control room. It’s still alien and advanced and not showing much sign of life. I study one of the panels and press a couple of buttons.
The frosted-glass enclosure in the middle is still the same as last time, and there’s no obvious way to breach it to get to the evil entity within.
Well, we’ll see what I can do.
I take the translator device out of my pack and turn it on for the first time in many months.
I put my hands on my hips. “I know you’re in there, Alesya. You can come out now. It’s all over.”
31
- Sophia -
“Put your hand on my shoulder.”
I help Heidi get off the not-dactyl, although I hate to get close to the damned things. But there’s no denying that they’re good for reconnaissance from the air.
“Thank you.”
The other girls come sauntering, wanting to keep their distance to the flying horror, but also curious for news.
Heidi sits down heavily in front of the cave, pale and shaken. She pushes her glasses up on her nose. “So. There are two dragons coming. Straight here from Bune.”
There’s a stunned silence, only punctuated by one or two whispered “shit.”
“They’re burning their way through the jungle. Straight through the trees. Huge pillar of black smoke. It’s not that fast, but they’ll be here soon enough. I suggest we be gone when they arrive.”
All the girls look at each other.
“Fuck!”
“I knew this place was too good to be true.”
“We just escaped one of those things. And now there are two?”
“We killed one. We can kill two more.”
“What the hell do they want from us?”
“Yeah, but that was pretty damn hard, to kill just one. Two freaking dragons? No way.”
The dragon girls have mostly recovered from their terrible ordeal over several months, but they’re not as used to seeing things go well here on Xren. And nothing scares them more than dragons.
I totally sympathize.
“We’ll handle this,” Aurora says confidently, hefting her ever-present crossbow. “Whatever it takes. We’ve had worse.”
“There is also an army,” Heidi says heavily. “Or something that looks like one. On its way here. I don’t know how many men. Dar’ax flew to check it out. I was getting tired.”
“It’s the attack,” Caroline says calmly. “The one Delyah was always worried about. It’s happening.”
“And she’s not here to lead us,” Emilia adds.
I adjust my dress, which is getting looser around me with increasing time since the birth. “Where can we go for refuge? Jax’zan’s tribe cast him out.”
“Dar’ax doesn’t have a tribe,” Heidi says.
“Ar’ox’s tribe is just the purest of trashy-ass fucking shit,” Emilia implies. “Except for maybe one guy.”
Aurora looks towards Bune. “Trak’zor’s’s tribe might be okay. They’re still not strong, though. They may have trouble coming up with a meaningful force.”
“Xark’on’s tribe is trash, too,” Caroline says. “But mostly because of their former chief. They could probably be whipped into shape. If we had more time.”
“At any rate, we have to get out of the path of these dragons,” I state. “Everyone pack up. We’re leaving the moment we’re ready.”
I walk back to the cave and tell Jax’zan the news.
“Ah. It is what we feared. But I did not expect dragons. Yes, we have to leave immediately. I’ll tell the men.”
He places one hand on my shoulder, and his gentle touch makes me break down in tears.
“Oh God! Not now, not now! The babies… Heidi is so pregnant…”
He holds me close and lets me weep. “We’re not dead yet. They’re not here. We’ll plot our escape cleverly. We tribesmen have made certain preparations. Nothing about this has been settled.”
His touch and calm voice make me feel better. And I know he and the other cavemen in our tribe have prepared for an attack. But they’re only five. There are limits to what they could have accomplished.
“Yes,” I sniff and dry my tears. “And anyway, this is not the time for this. We have to get ready. The further we get away from here when those things arrive, the better.”
There’s not much to pack, even after almost a year on this planet. Still, I’m leaving a lot behind. We have to be able to carry everything, including the babies. I make sure to pack the empty gun and all the Earth stuff I have, which is pretty much nothing. Delyah has the translator device, so at least we won’t have to bring that.
I walk out of the cave again and dump my backpack on the ground.
Then I freeze when I see a man standing in the middle of the clearing. He has orange stripes and is clearly quite old. He holds a staff in his hands, and his sword is still in its scabbard. He looks more uncertain than dangerous.
I do something extremely inadvisable and walk all the way up to him.
“I seek tribesman Ar’ox,” he says stiffly when I approach.
I smile. “Warrior Gur’ex, I presume?”
He frowns. “Am I expected?”
I hide a smile behind my hand. If he knew how strong the resemblance is…
“You are not expected, warrior. But you are very welcome. I am Sophia. Please, come into our village.”
Ar’ox comes out of the cave and goes straight into an embrace with his old father. “I am not surprised you’re here.”
“No? I am,” the old man says. “Never thought I’d leave the safety of the tribe again. But here we are.”
“Did you hear about the attack?”
“Everyone has heard about the attack. Even I. Most will have no part of it. And some say, let’s help our former tribesman, the worthy Ar’ox, against dishonorable assault.”
Ar’ox smiles. “How many say that? Only one, is my guess.”
“Perhaps,” Gur’ex admits. “But the number is less important than the quality.”
“Indeed. And your quality is the very highest.”
Emilia squeals and comes running as fast as her recently-gave-birth body will allow, and throws herself around the old man’s neck. “Gur’ex! I missed you!”
Ar’ox introduces his father to the tribe, and suddenly the atmosphere is lighter than before. People are coming to support us from other tribes. That has to be a good sign.
We just need a few hundred others to do the same.
And some dragon-repellant.
32
- Delyah -
The seconds pass, and I’m starting to think that maybe my shock strategy in getting her to show herself has failed.
Then there’s movement. Two
of the robots we met last time come from behind, very fast, and grab my arms in hard hands, their limbs humming and creaking.
Then Alesya comes walking around the column in the middle. “You’re here again? I can’t help but wonder why.”
She says it in cavemanese, so I flip the translator in my hand to ‘off’. I won’t need it after all. “Just waiting for my friends to come here. We’ll fuck your shit up pretty good.”
Alesya was a slender, Russian blonde with perfect makeup and deep brown eyes. That hasn’t changed. But now she has an extra sheen to her, an otherworldly glow that doesn’t make her more attractive, just more weird. Especially since she’s still wearing her white lab coat, jeans and sweater.
But of course this isn’t Alesya. This is an alien wearing my friend’s dead body like a jumpsuit.
She takes a couple of measured steps towards me and puts one hand on her hips in a caricature of imitated femininity. “Which friends would these be?”
It’s Alesya’s voice, too, not surprisingly. Any trace of a Russian accent is gone.
“You’ll see. You know some of them. Some others you have never met. They live here on Xren. And they are very dangerous to you.”
“I know all the beings living on Xren.”
I force myself to laugh. My bluff isn’t that great, really. “It turns out that you don’t. There are some powers here that really don’t like you. But they really like us.”
She stares holes in me, then turns around. “I think there are not. But you women have created a major problem for me. I’m taking care of it as we speak. Tribe or not, your gaggle of chattering alien females will soon cease to exist.”
I force a confident chuckle. “Nope. We screwed up your project pretty good.”
She whirls around. “My project?”
“Your efforts to create the perfect warrior. The whole reason you’re here on Xren.”
I have the satisfaction of seeing her surprised.
“The Plood told you.”
“The Plood told us nothing. No, your pathetic efforts are just too transparent. Everyone knows what you’re doing. In your defense, it is the perfect planet for it.”
She snorts. “You’re too primitive a species to understand. But I find that I slightly enjoy being in conversation with you. Such as it is. Tell me what you think you know.”
I shrug. “Why should I?”
“Because you will not leave here until you do. And because...”
The robots holding me increase the pressure in their fingers.
“Ow! Okay, okay. I’ll tell you about your own project. Just don’t squeeze so hard.”
Their grip loosens slightly.
I take a deep breath and collect my thoughts. I know some of this. Other things I’ll have to guess about. “Okay. You needed good warriors. Really great ones. So you abducted the best ones you knew from their own world. You took them away from their own villages and families and dumped them here on Xren. A planet where you’re either spectacularly strong, or you just die. You wanted them to live here for a few generations, making sure only the best of them survived and procreated with the Lifegivers. Those Lifegivers let you direct which qualities should be cultivated and prolonged. The result would be a number of extremely large and powerful warriors that you could use in your own wars. It’s not a bad idea. Any man who could survive or even thrive on Xren must be a marvel of strength. It’s a freaking pressure cooker of death, this place.”
The alien in Alesya’s body stands there stiffly with no expression on its face. “Continue.”
Yeah. I really have to stall. It could take hours for him to get here. “But things went wrong from the beginning. The cavemen revolted before you could land here. They somehow broke out of their suspended animation inside the glass cylinders and forced their way into other parts of the ship. The clues are all over the lower floors here. There was a fight. Between cavemen and your silly robots. Between the best warriors in the universe and your artificial servants, which were never built for combat. They created such a chaos that the ship crashed.”
“Those idiotic men! They nearly killed us all,” not-Alesya seethes.
I smile with some satisfaction. My guesses have been good. “The ship crashed, and they made their way out. Into a cave. They scribbled everything they had seen inside the ship, so they could remember it if necessary. And they remembered a lot. They found their caves and drew walls full of the things they had seen. I wondered for a while why that was. Then I realized that when you took them from their home planet, you also emptied their minds of the memory of that planet and their lives and their families. They filled that empty space with the things they saw inside this ship. The symbols and the markings. They tried to make sense of it.”
“As if their primitive minds could ever hope to understand the intricacies of our beautiful language,” not-Alesya scoffs.
“Oh no,” I state. “On the contrary. They understood it well after a while. And they started writing things of their own. In their caves. It took me a long time to understand. I was mostly wrong. I think I understand it now, though. The thing I had to realize was that the cavemen are much smarter than I thought. Much smarter than you think. I had to meet the very bright Brax’tan before I understood.”
“Intelligence is important in a warrior,” the alien agrees.
I glance at the control panel. The buttons are still pressed down. “Well, the cavemen went and set up tribes the way you had programmed their minds to. With the ridiculous myths and Prophecies and Ancestors and The Woman. Everything set up so that they would keep going and not lose hope, even in a world without women. That was the only impressive thing you did. You made these extremely alive, active, energetic, warm and loving men go on with their incredibly hard lives without women or any real hope of seeing one. Just by dangling silly myths in front of them. I mean, it was evil, like everything you did, but pretty impressive. From a psychological point of view. You’d think most men would see no sense in going on without female company. But of course, these guys are mentally strong, too. They can live hard lives today if tomorrow promises to be better. You harnessed that strength.”
“I chose my warriors well.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Oh, some insignificant planet not so far from here. They’re not really warriors on their home planet. They find killing their own kind abhorrent. But they seem to have no such compunctions here!” The alien laughs, probably the creepiest noise I’ve ever heard.
“Their original society is very advanced, right? Where they come from?”
“I suppose.”
“In fact, some of the technology in this ship was made by them.” It’s just a wild guess. I’m playing for time.
“Was it?” not-Alesya says, not too interested. “I really don’t remember.”
“How long since you had a body of your own?” I try another topic, dragging this out as long as possible.”
“By the orbit of this planet, three hundred years.”
“That explains the robots. Hundreds of robots that you used to attack us, even though they’re not meant for attack. It was an old attempt by your species to reverse your decision. To re-enter the physical world with a body. Except it wasn’t that good, was it? Even with wonderful gardens to walk around in, clad in a robot’s body. It wasn’t the same. It was too perfect. None of you enjoyed it. So the robots went unused, just hanging from the ceiling. Waiting for nothing. Then we came along. And you couldn’t resist having a real body again. How did you find Alesya’s body?”
“You buried it on top of me. I could easily retrieve it. The mental processes were completely gone. But the rest of the body was fresh enough.” She flexes her fingers as if to demonstrate her control.
“You’re pitiful. Did they force your people to upload yourselves into computers, or did you do it willingly? Ow!”
The robots tighten their grip.
“You just keep telling your story,” not-Alesya snarls.
Not-Alesya is staring out the windows on the jungle outside, far below. “A useful tool. How much of this have you read on the wall of some cave, and how much have you dreamed up yourself?”
I force a little smirk. “This is all me. Not bad, huh? Passes the time, anyway. So, there was a wild card. You didn’t know that we six other girls had survived as well as the twelve you thought you had under control. Until you saw us with that damn spypad of yours. But there wasn’t much you could do. You only had two more dragons, but you needed them for later, so you couldn’t send them after us. You probably thought we’d die, anyway.”
Not-Alesya laughs again. “It was interesting to watch you and your primitive friends try to survive. So much weeping in your filthy cave! For the smallest little thing. Waaah, I hurt my foot. Waaah, I’m giving birth. Waaah, one of us is missing. Waaah all night long for no reason.”
“Well, we are girls. We get emotional. But we did survive. Why did the Plood dump us here?”
“The filthy little Plood are a slave species,” not-Alesya spits. “They serve our enemies.”
“Ah. That’s why you shot down their saucer. They were trying to screw up your project. And succeeding. Pretty spectacularly, as you will soon discover.”