by Calista Skye
“If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right,” I say, choking up a little. “This alien was pretty shitty to us. But it didn’t drag us here. The Plood did that. Probably ordered by the dragons, their masters. I feel really sorry for the alien. For her. There’s nothing left of her revenge. We got her best cavemen and gave them a better life. After that, she had no chance. Our men love us much more than they love anything else. It never crossed her mind that it was possible. She’d been confined to a computer for so long that she’d forgotten what it means to love.”
“We’re still tools of those dragons,” Aurora grumbles. “Their attempt to have us ruin her plan worked perfectly. I’d say the dragons are our enemies. And they’re much worse enemies than Bune ever was.”
“Wait a minute,” Caroline says. “The dragonslayers still exist. Our men, our husbands. And thousands of other cavemen on this planet. A dragonslayer, every one. Her plan is still working. Sure, the dragons are probably worse than her. But we control her weapon now. Her carefully designed dragonslayers. Didn’t she say the dragons are coming here? I think they’ll get a nasty surprise if they do.”
“We’ll chase those fucking dragons to the ends of the universe,” Aurora states. “They can’t be invincible. Shit, weren’t there three of them in glass cylinders in this ship? They must have been captured.”
“They must have,” I agree. “Troga and the two other ones. I think not-Alesya was planning to use them in the last stage of her plan, to show the cavemen what they would be fighting and to have them practice here. Maybe she even planned to grow them to full size first.”
“Like a warm-up exercise,” Sophia ponders. “Not a bad idea. So, we know that killing dragons isn’t that hard for cavemen. They killed two just the other day. But they were small ones. They didn’t even fly. Can they handle full-size dragons?”
I throw the pit of the fruit I’ve been eating as far away as I can, seeing it land in a bush. This tidy garden needs some chaos, some life. “They can kill not-dactyls that fly. But I think we’ll know soon enough.”
We stand there for a little while, just looking and enjoying the safety. No dinos in here. No other creatures, either. Just us.
Finally, the sterility of the place is getting to the other girls.
“So, this is a beautiful place and all,” Tamara says. “But fuck if it isn’t creeping me out still. I think I prefer the jungle. Anyone else want to go outside?”
“Yep,” Caroline says and picks one last fruit. “Let’s leave. I don’t think I want to set up shop in here, after all. It’s safe, but it’s like… too safe. It feels dead.”
The girls slowly walk towards the narrow staircase.
“You coming, Delyah?” Eleanor calls.
“Soon. Got some things to take care of first.”
“She’s going on an inspection tour,” Sophia whispers loudly so I’ll hear it. “She owns this place now.”
I wait until they’ve gone. Then I look at the crystal column in the middle of this immense room.
Do I own it?
I walk over to the column and walk backwards into it.
- - -
Some of the dark spots on the alien floor is my blood from when the not-Alesya pierced me with Brax’tan’s sword. And the large spot is from him. He struggled here, an inhuman struggle with his own brain that nobody will ever understand.
Except maybe me. I will always adore and admire him for this. I know I could never have done it. Only Brax’tan. Only my husband. Only he could break not-Alesya’s hold on his mind.
And he did it for me.
“You here still?” I ask into the silence.
For a few heartbeats, nothing happens. Then a weak blue light comes on behind the cylinder of frosted glass.
“Yes.”
“You’re back in the computer now?”
“I was hoping you’d return.” The voice is weak and thin. It’s not Alesya’s melodious soprano anymore. This voice comes from a machine, staccato and monotonous.
“And I was hoping you weren’t gone yet.”
“I will soon go.”
“I know. You’re tired.”
There’s a long silence. Then: “I am.”
I look out at the jungle. “We will beat the dragons.”
“Perhaps.”
“Anything we should know about them?”
“They’re horrific and evil. And they’re on the way here.”
I scratch my head. “We kind of knew that already.”
“That’s all there is to know.”
I look out the screens that look like huge windows. I can’t hang around. Heidi could go into labor at any moment, and I want to be there. “I’m sorry about your species. And your fate.”
“My species. Yes. I am sorry about… everything. So many mistakes. Even recently. With the sword. I was envious. You have a body. I didn’t. It wasn’t mine. I injured you. On purpose. Such a shameful thing. Something a dragon might have done. Will you overcome your injury? There are substances in the medical bay. In this ship. As I recall. I might be wrong.”
The cuts she gave me have pretty much healed already, thanks to Trak’zor’s miracle gel. “There still are. They still work.”
“Good. Good.”
The alien voice is growing weaker. I should probably ask my questions and leave.
“That room. The one with the dragons being projected onto the entire wall. With the couches. Just a couple of levels down from here.”
“Yes?”
“That’s a separate spaceship, right? One that still can fly? It feels like one. I mean, you had to have a plan to take the dragonslayers off this planet to fight the dragons. Or did you mean to have them clash with the enemy here on Xren?”
“It is a spaceship,” the alien confirms in its thin voice. “A transport for my warriors. With images to inspire them to maximum effort. No, I didn’t want them to battle the dragons here. Too many dangers. It is better to attack than to be attacked.”
I nod. That’s ancient wisdom for any species that wages war. “It is.”
“I will fade now. I am very tired. I’m truly sorry for the problems I’ve caused you and your friends. Things could have been much different had I acted otherwise.”
“They could.”
“You’re alive. Cherish your life. Even if it’s your last minute alive. Even if it’s not all you wanted it to be. Cherish it. It’s so brief.”
Even with the weak computer voice, the sincere emotions in the statement makes me tear up. “I will. I promise.”
“Your man. My general.”
“Brax’tan. What about him?”
“He had no choice. The neural net. It’s powerful. He was only here a few times in his life. Outside. On top of the ship. I could give him small Commands there. For this last Command, the Attack and the Victory, I had to get him all the way in here. The signals are stronger here. It had to be the strongest signal. It went against everything that he is. I felt the resistance in him. And finally he broke the control. Know that it is not thought to be possible to defeat the neural net.”
“He’s strong,” I agree, and my voice cracks. “Just one more thing: what’s your name?”
“My name was Uraoa.”
“Are you a woman?”
“I was. Give them hell!”
The last sentence comes with a sudden burst of energy. Then the blue light inside the glass flickers and goes out.
I put a hand on the glass, using the other to wipe some moisture off my face. She was the last of her whole species. And she nearly died with nobody knowing who she had been.
“We will,” I whisper. “And that’s a promise.”
- - -
“You Can’t Be Fucking Serious with This Shit: Giving Birth to a Half-Caveman Baby on a Jurassic Planet,” Heidi groans, and five minutes later she’s holding her new daughter in her arms.
“Meet little Daralyah,” she says when she and Dar’ax are done with their first joyful greeting. “Named af
ter her father and our chief.”
Of course, I well up, and my hand flies to my mouth. “Really? After me?”
“You bet,” Heidi smiles. “Without you, we would all be dead.”
I gently stroke the head of the perfect little baby in her arms. “Thank you.”
“Another girl,” Sophia muses as she and I walk out of the cave. “Three out of three. Think those babies are trying to tell us something?”
I sniffle and wipe my tears. “I don’t know. If so, they should wait until they can give us that message using actual words. Then they can just write us a letter.”
We stop outside the cave to wash our hands.
“So weird with Bune missing,” Sophia says and nods towards the mountain, which is now much smaller and resembles a high plateau more than a mountain. Or something like Uluru in Australia, except less red and more green. “But the view is better now.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “Less oppressive. More airy.”
The other girls have been waiting, and now they’re tiptoeing into the cave to greet the new girl, two by two, whispering with excitement and relief because this was an easy birth, too.
Ashlynn, Mia and Phoebe come sauntering across the yard, three of the dragon girls. “Everything okay with the new mama?”
“Yep,” Sophia beams. “They’re fine. Pretty easy birth, even. Except I’m not an expert on that.”
Mia shuffles her feet. “Delyah, we want to build a hut for just the three of us. We know there aren’t really enough resources in the village, but we’ll cut down our own trees and do everything ourselves.”
“Great,” I say calmly. “Do it. But there’s one condition.”
The girls exchange glances as if to say ’told you she’d be a bitch about it’.
“What?”
“Make it a really good one. As big and great as you can get it. I want it to be the best hut in the damn tribe. Find some limestone if you can, make mortar and build it from stone. It can be a pretty big hut then. Only if you want. I’ll show you.”
They break out into cautious smiles. “All right! We will. Thanks.”
The three of them walk back into the yard and start to pick out a place for their new dwelling, chatting happily.
“You sure about that?” Sophia asks me. “They’ll be building that hut for weeks, and they won’t contribute much to the tribe in that time.”
“Of course I’m not sure,” I state, sitting down on the flat rock in front of the cave. “I don’t know the future. It might turn into a disaster. But it might also turn out really well. And if it does, then the tribe suddenly has three experienced hut builders. I’m willing to take that chance. We need more huts. Well, they’ll build one. A good one. Three girls to a hut. Works for me. They’ll build many more if theirs turns out well.”
She sits down beside me. “I think that caveman of yours has been good for you. You’re totally a chief now.”
“Someone has to be,” I say and squeeze her wrist. “It doesn’t really matter who it is. So it might as well be me.”
“Delyah, I want no other leader than you. Ever. You saved our asses. Totally. When you landed with that spaceship, with fucking Bune, right on top of us… I mean, if you hadn’t spent months studying the cave paintings and the pad, learning how to fly that thing, we would have been killed by the tribes and by the dragons.”
“Maybe. I hope I earned my keep. But without Brax’tan pretty much dying for us, or doing his damndest to defeat that neural net in his brain, even if it would kill him, it would not have happened. We would all be dead now.”
“Oh, your husband’s great,” Sophia laughs. “Absolutely. But you saved our bacon.”
“Maybe a couple of slices. Like you girls and your guys have saved all of us before. We’re a good tribe.”
“We are. And we better be. Because we can’t go home after all. Bune is broken.”
I think for a moment. We have to talk about this at some point. “Sophia. You are aware, I’m sure, that the moment you became pregnant with Jax’zan, going home to Earth was no longer an option for you?”
She shrugs. “Kind of. I guess. Umm… no? Why, exactly?”
I take a deep breath. “So here we are, landing on Earth in an alien spaceship. We are girls kidnapped from Earth a year ago. We have alien husbands and half-alien children. What do you think will happen?”
“We’ll go on Ellen and be instant celebrities?”
“Yes. Maybe. After about ten years in strict quarantine and endless medical tests. And that’s just for us full human girls. Do you have any idea what they would do to your daughter? Your half-alien daughter? Or your full-alien warrior husband?”
She’s alarmed. “What?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. But if I were the government person in charge of handling this much alien stuff, I’d make sure I squeezed all the information out of us. Anything I could use. Anything any corporations could use. Blood and tissue and information. We’d be a sensational opportunity for any genetics business. For any researcher.”
“We’d be a resource,” Sophia whispers, her face pale. “Nothing else.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Not to mention the spaceship. Any spaceship that could take us light years through space would be the most valuable object that has ever existed on Earth. Can you imagine what the military could do with that? What I’m saying is that we don’t know what the government would do to us. But it would definitely not be conducive to a nice family life. They might take Jax’zan and Brax’tan away from us for good. We just don’t know. We’d have zero power. And aliens would have zero rights. Even your rights or mine would be ignored whenever it was convenient. God, the military would be all over us for as long as we lived. I suspect that our lives would become fucking nightmares.”
“We can’t go home,” Sophia states with sad certainty.
“Not without careful consideration and planning. And still… yeah, you and I and the old girls can probably never go home. Regardless. Whatever happens. We got pregnant by an alien. We never want to be separated from that alien. And we sure don’t want to be separated from our kids. End of story.”
“We don’t know what happened on Earth when we were taken by the Plood,” Sophia says. “There might be nobody there now. It might be completely devastated. Ruined.”
I kick at a rock by my feet. “Maybe. I think we were the only ones who were taken. I think there was only one saucer. I think that beam that took us up distorted our vision so we thought we saw more. But I don’t know. I might be mixing a lot of hope into all that.”
“Well,” Sophia says and stretches, “it’s all theoretical, anyway. Bune can’t fly.”
“Bune can’t,” I say carefully, not sure how much I should reveal. I don’t want to create false hope. “But it’s a big ship. Big and full of secrets. You never know what we might find. Actually, Sophia—”
“That’s right,” Emilia agrees, sitting down beside us. “You just never know. What are you guys talking about?”
“Same as always,” Sophia says. “Boys. Fashion. Celebrities. Parties.”
“It’s high school all over again,” Emilia sighs. “I thought I was done with that bullshit. Can’t we talk about something else? I mean, boys I’ll talk about all day long and most of the night. But fashion? Have you seen the sack I’m wearing? Meanwhile, those warriors who came to help us — some of them have gone home, I think.”
I toss a little rock into the creek. “Some of them will be back. They’ll switch tribes for good. Some of them are going back to their villages to stay. They just came to help when we needed it. Most of them wanted to live here, but I asked them to stay in their old villages for as long as they can. We need allies in other tribes.”
“Like ambassadors,” Caroline says and dumps water into a pot, preparing to cook. “Not a bad idea, Chief.”
“Oh God,” I groan. “Is that going to be a thing now?”
Caroline chuckles. “Calling you ‘chief
’? You bet. You are the chief of our tribe, Delyah. Elected, fair and square.”
I pull a stray hair off my face. “How often do we have elections in this tribe? We’re coming up on a year since I was elected. I decree that it’s about time for some more voting.”
Sophia laughs. “Not a chance, Chief. We’ll do the four-year thing like for presidents back home. Actually, you want to be president instead of chief? Sounds better, doesn’t it?”
I groan again. “Anyone calls me ‘president’ and I’ll seriously try to fly Bune home alone. Even if it’s falling apart.”
“That’s grounds for impeachment,” Emilia says. “Specifically states in the constitution. ‘The president may not fly ramshackle alien spaceships into space all alone and in a huff.’”
I scratch my head. “Hmm. Say the president’s not in a huff, just miffed?”
Emilia frowns. “I don’t think it says anything about that. Yet. I’d have to come up with something. Our constitution is a work in progress.”
Aurora comes over and dumps a bunch of cut-up vegetables into Caroline’s pot. “Our tribe is growing fast. At some point, we actually should consider getting a constitution. Or something like it.”
“Rules to live by,” Caroline suggests. “Rules of the tribe. Yeah. That could be useful. I vote for Aurora to head our Constitution Committee.”
“Good grief, a committee,” Aurora groans. “Now we know we’re a real tribe. Sure, I’ll make a constitution for us. It’ll be heavy on the coffee.”
“We don’t have any coffee,” I remind her.
“Exactly. All the more important to base our existence on it. Okay, I got it. ‘We the People of umm… this really great cave, in order to form a more perfect… uh... tribe, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of coffee to ourselves and everyone who wants a decent cup of cappuccino once in a while, do ordain and establish this constitution of… this cave and the surrounding huts, I guess. Also, the spaceship way over there which I think is now ours.’”