by Calista Skye
Then she looked at the man holding her.
She had to look up at his face, because he was tall. And wide, with densely packed muscle. The face was definitely human, but the eyes were absolutely not. There were no whites and no irises, just a cold, blue light that sent shivers down Harper's spine. He looked at her with no expression on his face that she could detect. But he was definitely studying her with those radiant eyes. She felt like an insect under a microscope. A handsome and rugged microscope with golden hair and blue eyes that could light up a room.
This was getting ridiculous. Finally she found her voice again. “Umm ... hi?”
The man didn't reply, just loosened his grip on her wrist so she could pull her pants up all the way and fasten them. She got a grip on the gardening trowel in her belt. The ceramic blade was blunt and dirty with artificial soil from the biodome, but it might also be used as a weapon. Somehow.
The man said some words to her and pushed her in front of him with at firm hand, towards the hole he had come from. Beyond it was dark, and Harper wasn't too sure about going in there. But staying among the ugly, stinky aliens in here wasn't much of an option, either.
The man quickly tied something around Harper's wrist. It was a loop of a leather-like material, and he held the other end in his hand. Had he put her on a leash?
“Hey, what the fuck are you do-”
The man placed a hand at the small of her back and pushed her in front of him towards the hole in the wall, and she stumbled towards it.
Shit. He had definitely put a leash on her. That had to be a bad sign. Had he bought her from those ugly aliens? Harper had been to enough supermarkets to know that a transaction of some kind had taken place here, and that the item being bought and sold here was her.
She turned as well as she could. “You know, these guys kidnapped me and tried to rape me. I'm here completely against my will. I don't agree to any of this. You have no right!”
The man frowned and gave her another push, then said something in his own language, something that had a rough sound to it.
Harper was in two minds. On one hand, this guy hadn't tried to harm her yet. On the other hand, she had no idea what he might have in mind. Maybe these stinky guys just wanted to rape her and then let her go. Sure, that would have been pretty terrible. But maybe this guy would always keep her on a damn leash.
She reached the hole in the wall. “What are you going to do with me?”
The man just nodded once, then placed a large hand at her back and pushed her through the jagged hole.
On the other side was a hatch into another spaceship. This one looked less alien and had a better smell. It was probably smaller, but it was surprisingly bright and even had a huge window out to space. Parts of it reminded Harper of the shuttles that ferried people from the Earth to the Moon back home. Outside, she could see the fire planet Bry and a moon that had to be Gideo, where her base was located.
The man led her over to a hi-tech chair that looked like a co-pilot's seat, and she plopped down in it when he put a little pressure on her shoulders. He was so casual about it she felt like a piece of cargo.
“I know you don't understand me,” she said as he fastened a safety web around her, “but unless you're taking me back to the base, you're just as guilty of kidnapping as those aliens were. I think,” she added. She had never had any reason to look up the details of interstellar law when it came to kidnapping, but it seemed reasonable. “And if you think I won't report you, then you're sadly mistaken.”
The man ignored her and got into the seat next to her and hit some buttons. A hard jolt went through the cabin, and then Harper was pushed back hard in the seat by powerful acceleration.
She glanced over at the guy. Apart from those remarkable eyes, he had a face that was more characterful and striking than downright beautiful, with a strong jaw and straight eyebrows. His back and one arm were almost completely covered with an intricate tattoo pattern what was so well integrated with his body that Harper wasn't sure if it wasn't a natural part of him. It looked like infinitely fine metal threads under his skin, thousands of them. He was wearing pants made from some kind of reptile skin, it looked like, and it had a pattern of fur here and there.
He had placed his axe in a special holder on the ceiling, and his hair was an anarchy of gold and darker tones. He looked like some kind of warrior out of the past, Harper thought. Out of the distant past, even. But here he was, piloting a spaceship with what looked like pretty good skills.
He was concentrating intensely on flying the ship, and he was also staring intently at a screen that seemed to show a picture of the ship the aliens had. There were no flashing lights on that ship now, and it just looked like an egg-shaped black spot in space. With a large hole in it where some unhealthy-looking yellow light was streaming out.
“You really blew a hole in that thing, didn't you,” Harper said unnecessarily. The adrenaline in her veins made her want to say something, even if she knew the man couldn't understand anything.
She yelped as all of space around them seemed to be criss-crossed by intensely white beams, and the man said something that sounded suspiciously like swearing. Harper leaned over and looked at the screen that showed the alien ship. “Damn, are they shooting at us?”
The man hissed something and yanked one end of her safety harness, so that Harper was pulled back in her seat and the webbing tightened so much she had to gasp for breath. Well, at least he had let go of the leash he had fastened around her wrist.
The ship tumbled through space as the warrior pulled the controls and kicked pedals, probably trying to jerk the ship around so much that the aliens couldn't get a clear shot at it. The planet Bry spun wildly in front of them, and Harper realized that it was they that were spinning, not the planet.
She clutched the armrests with her fingers. That planet was getting a lot closer very fast. “Umm ... yeah, so any time you'd want to pull up from there would be fine ...”
The warrior didn't look at her, just fought with the controls. Still the space around them was full of intense, white beams that seared lines in Harper's retinas. The ship suddenly jolted once, so hard that Harper was thrown forward in the safety harness, and then it was followed by another jolt and another.
Then the white beams were gone. It was suddenly very quiet in the cabin, and the control panel in front of them went dark. The warrior fought furiously with the controls, but it was clear to Harper that the ship was completely out of control and that the engines were probably broken. The warrior swore again, then stared straight ahead, where the fire planet Bry was now filling the entire screen. The gigantic fire was clearly visible as a thick, pulsating, uneven band on the night side of the planet.
The warrior sighed heavily, then turned his head to Harper and looked right at her for a moment. Then he said something in his alien language, and it sounded regretful.
“Yeah,” Harper said, “I'm not to happy about this either. I'm sure you don't happen to have any parachutes or things like that? Pa-ra-chutes?” She tried to show him what she meant using hand signs, but it was a challenge.
The warrior stared at her, and now it seemed to Harper that he was frowning, as if puzzled.
“Hey, it doesn't have to be parachutes. Ummm ... it's not that I mind the attention, but maybe you have some emergency plans for this? Like, trying to break our fall or doing something to not die? Anything at all?”
The warrior looked at her for three more heartbeats, then reached over and pulled the same strap as before, tightening the harness even further. He growled something into her ear at the same time, and while the sound of his voice was pleasant enough, she had no chance of deciphering what he was saying. But it had to be something like “I can't believe the trouble you got me into” or “this is what I get for rescuing someone”.
The planet was filling the whole front screen now. Because of the spinning motion, Harper lost track of where exactly the fire was. A screaming sound as from air rushing pa
st the window increased in pitch until it was just a deafening roar, and Harper saw intense flames stretching out from the hull outside the window. Alarmed, she looked over at the warrior. “So we're not going to reach the surface at all, are we? We'll burn up long before we crash.”
Her mouth was dry and scared tears were burning in her eyes. But the warrior calmly took her in with those spectacular eyes, and then he reached over with a hand and placed it on her shoulder. It was a heavy hand, but it was also warm and gentle. She didn't mind that touch at all, now. The touch itself seemed to ground her, to send a physical reassurance through her body.
He growled something again, something that somehow sounded mild and certain. And inexplicably she calmed down and the tears didn't run after all. This was alarming, but they were in it together.
The warrior then started talking to her, and his deep voice was clearly audible even over the roar from the air they were falling through. He spoke calmly and mildly, looking her right in the eyes the whole time. And his eyes – hadn't they been a very vivid blue before? Now they were definitely taking on a purple hue. But maybe it was just a trick of the light in the cabin.
Harper was pretty sure the whole spaceship was on fire – outside the windows, there were only blue flames to be seen, as if the hull itself was burning brightly. She only registered it in the background, because most of her attention was occupied with the warrior and his face and his voice and the purple light in his eyes. He talked to her still, his deep voice calm and monotonous, his language so melodic that the hard consonants added depth to it. And then he smiled. It was not a grin, just a calm and reassuring smile that warmed her up while he gently squeezed her shoulder.
And then they crashed.
It was just a bang that rattled the whole cabin, but it held together. Then there was another bang, and Harper was thrown against the webbing that held her securely. The warrior calmly took his hand off her shoulder and then pulled a lever. The next bang was different – flatter and harder, somehow, and suddenly Harper was completely alone and in darkness and cold, moving so fast through the air that she had to clench her eyes shut because of the wind.
Wind. She was no longer inside the spaceship.
She opened her eyes to little slits and saw an arrow-shaped object crash into the rocky ground far below her feet. Flames shot up from it as it tumbled across the surface, rolling around and shooting sparks and fire like a Catherine wheel that had gone insane.
She realized that she would also be crashing into the ground very soon, because she was very high up in the air. Before she had time to panic, there was a noise above her and she looked up in the night sky. Ah. That was probably a parachute. It was not like any parachute she had ever seen, but it was clearly attached to the webbing around her very firmly and braked her descent so well that the wind she had felt was now completely gone. She was no longer falling, just descending gently through the cold night air on the alien planet Bry.
Bry. The fire planet. Not a planet Harper would have chosen to crash land on. Sure, landing on Bry very gently, ideally on a luxury space liner with a good spa and a decent restaurant, along with friends and experts to look at the fire from pretty close up, but not so close that it was dangerous at all – yeah, that she would have liked. If there were firefighters among the group. And a couple of fire trucks.
But this, landing on the surface alone after being thrown from a crashing spaceship, with no way of getting off it and only a garden trowel to fight the eternal fire with ... yeah, this she would not have picked.
The crashed spaceship had come to a rest on the ground, and the wreckage was still burning fiercely. But it was clear that Harper would land a good distance away from it.
And the warrior pilot? She looked around, but she couldn't see another parachute. It was pretty dark around her, but the burning wreck beneath her illuminated her own parachute just fine. So it should have been possible to see his, too.
Shit. What if he had crashed with the ship? What if he was at this very moment burning to death in the wreck? Maybe there had only been one parachute on board, and he had let her have it. He had been so careful and firm in tightening the harness around her, like a father fastening his child in the seat belts in a car and pulling them taut so they'd work as well as possible.
She knew nothing about the warrior. He might be an axe murderer. The fact that he was absolutely carrying an axe around with him was a pretty good indication, Harper couldn't help thinking. But still. He had been decent to her. More or less. Sure, putting a damn leash on her wrist and then dragging her into his ship was perhaps not the absolute peak of gentlemanly behavior. But that was probably just theatrics for the benefit of the stinky aliens. So Harper was willing to give him the benefit of doubt.
Yeah, she knew nothing about him. But she really wished she wouldn't have to be alone. Alone on the fire planet.
She glanced to the horizon. The sky was definitely brighter there, and it did seem to be pulsating. It looked like the eternally wandering fire wasn't that far away. Well, maybe it had been here not so long ago and it would be a year until it came back. If so, then she was probably pretty safe for now.
She was getting close to the ground and would have to prepare for landing soon. She could see bare rocks where the wreck of the spaceship had now pretty much burned itself out. That was a good sign. One thing that was known about the fire planet was that the intense fire burned all the vegetation completely away, so if it had passed by here not to long ago, bare rock and ashes was probably exactly what could be expected. And that was what Harper was seeing underneath her.
And in front of her -
She gasped and leaned back reflexively, but because she was hanging in mid-air it only started her dangling back and forth. She only had time to give a panicked yelp before she smashed into a huge tree that she had only discovered at the last second.
The tree trunk was smooth, and the couldn't get a good grip in it, even if she tried to dig her nails into the bark. It was thin enough that she could clasp her arms and legs around it, but it was so smooth that she slid down the trunk in a display that seemed pretty undignified. She didn't meet any branches on her way down to the ground, and after a few seconds her butt encountered hard rock as she plopped down.
She was about to get to her feet when a silent sheet of silky fabric draped itself over her and made everything very dark. She panicked and flailed wildly against it before she realized what it was.
Ah. The parachute. Of course.
She pulled the fabric off her and looked up. That was a tall tree she had slid down. She was lucky she hadn't hit it further up, because the crown looked huge and even spiky.
There were many other trees just like it all around her, along with a thick underbrush of bushes and smaller trees. The chemical smell was very strong, as if she had landed in the middle of some kind of alcohol spill. The fumes were making her nauseous, too.
She got to her feet and stood on shaking knees on the surface of the alien planet.
The surface of Bry. The fire planet. There was vegetation all around her, so ripe with flammable organic chemicals that it was plain that the fire hadn't passed through here for months. But it would soon be here. The horizon pulsated with yellow light.
A hand shot out from behind her and Harper squealed as someone grabbed her wrist and quickly tied a rope around it.
She looked up. It was the warrior. His eyes were flashing red. And he wasn't smiling anymore.
2
- Vrax'ton -
At least her parachute ejector had worked well, and it had thrown her clear of the ship and high into the air right after it first touched the ground. His own had fizzled, and he'd had to break the windshield with his axe and then manually jump clear of the wreck before it caught fire. His hand had caught on a jagged edge somewhere, and blood was dripping down to the ground as he made his way over to the forest where he had seen her parachute descend. He was so dizzy he thought he might faint, but he had to
stay alert.
He peered at the horizon and swore viciously. They could not have landed in a worse place. The Fire was only days away. Outrunning it would not be possible, as he knew only too well. His wounded hand throbbed with both fresh and ancient ache.
The smell in the forest sent a clear signal that all the vegetation here was fully prepared for the blaze. All the plants and trees and grasses had produced highly concentrated flammable chemicals for a year, and they were just about bursting with liquids that would make the fire just that much hotter and more intense. And then their seeds would be caught in the updraft and would soar high into the atmosphere, where they would be blown by the high winds to the distant parts of the planets. There they would take root and lay dormant until the fire passed over them once more, and then the cycle would start again.
Small kverks were sniffing around, trying to find the plants with the most concentrated chemicals to eat to get the energy they needed to run from the fire. He spotted two pairs of different animals mating unashamedly among the trees. Life moved at a very fast pace here. Just another sign that the eternally revolving blaze was coming closer.
He had to steady himself against a tree trunk. That crash had shaken him hard and he had to collect his thoughts.
He heard a thin yelp. That was her! He ran over, making as little noise as possible.
She was sitting on the ground with the parachute over her head, frantically trying to get it off her.
He was relieved that she was fine, but also worried. He had to get her away from there. The bef trees tended to attract more beings than just little kverks. And she was very visible in her bright yellow clothing.
He fastened the band around her wrist and she looked up at him with scared eyes. Again he had to suppress an impulse to stroke her cheek in a comforting gesture. There was no time for that now. He could hear the mewling from a pack of hergs, and they probably had the scent of her. It was a very alien scent, but it was also extremely alluring.