by Ian Woodhead
Every single orange dragon ground to a sudden halt. They lowered their staff weapons then lowered their heads before they shuffled backwards, creating a wide path through the middle of them.
He didn’t even try to explain what was happening. The Diannin picked the human out of the sand, kept a tight hold of her hand, then ran as fast as he could through the aliens. Walish Din tried not to focus on the fact that the view of even more desolate wasteland filled his vision. He’d bought them about a minute more time to keep breathing. This featureless desert offered nothing to shelter behind.
Walish Din carried on pumping his legs, praying that something might happen that didn’t involve a painful death. He risked a glance over his shoulder to discover that even if they had stayed by the lifeboat and take shelter behind that, the orange dragons would have still roasted their bones. He bit his bottom lip and silently wished for the other human, the imaginary one to make an appearance. She’d know what to do.
“Don’t look so distressed, my furry friend,” she said.
The girl turned his head away from the melted remains of his lifeboat and pressed her lips against the tip of his nose. “Thank you, and I’m sorry for calling you an idiot.”
He wondered if this was her way of clearing the air between them before those staff weapons melted them too. Even as she moved her head away, he saw the surviving monsters were already getting ready to fire again.
“Come on, we best keep moving. I think I can deflect another blast now.” She grabbed Walish Din and pulled him to the left.
He dare not look behind him now; he just hoped that she was right. Also, he now wanted his last image to be of the human and not his execution squad. Walish Din felt something warm brush across his back, and he knew that the human had just saved their lives one more time.
She stopped running grabbed both his hand then pulled him to the ground. “Okay, when I say so, you need to roll towards me. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The orange dragons were now some distance away, but they were now catching up. Did she expect them to start burrowing into the sand? He wanted to tell her that his species were not subterranean dwellers. Come to think of it, he had no idea that humans possessed any burrowing ability. He wanted to tell her this, but before he got the first word out, the human told him to roll and then, just for good measure, grabbed his shoulder and savagely pulled him towards her.
The ground vanished from under his body. He instinctively pushed out his arms to slow his descent, but by the time the tips of his fingers brushed against the hard-packed sand, Walish Din had already reached the bottom before he had a chance to cry out.
The girl jumped in after him. She placed her hand over his mouth. “You need to stay quiet; the Gizanti can track through noise.”
It was all very well for her. Humans probably saw in the dark like the spine-raptors from his planet. He heard her rummaging through her clothing before he found some of the darkness had vanished thanks to the dim yellow light coming from the end of a flashlight. That made Walish Din feel a little better about this whole situation. Having some alien girl being able to see in the dark on top of everything else would just finish him.
The young Diannin followed the human and her weak flashlight through the dry, hot tunnels, trying to keep his feet from tripping himself up. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of those horrific staff weapons cut through the silence. Every time one of them fired, Walish Din jumped. He couldn’t help himself. He guessed that now it looked like he was finally safe, the shock of everything that he’d been through decided to pay him a visit.
“Are you okay?”
The Diannin hadn’t realised that the girl had stopped moving. He stopped dead then leaned back against the wall to catch his breath. He followed the girl’s beam as she played it over the hard-packed sand. “Are we okay to talk now?”
“As long as we don’t start shouting and jumping up and down, we should be okay now. Those freaky Gizanti are pretty stupid.”
“Is that what they’re called?”
She smiled. “Don’t you know?”
Walish Din kept his mouth shut, deciding not to tell her that he’d been calling them orange dragons since he first saw the monsters. He did find himself starting to shake though, and no matter what he tried, the shuddering refused to leave him.
“Oh, you poor thing!” She put her hands on his shoulders and gently pushed him to the ground before wrapping her arms around his body. “Shit, I’m sorry, it’s just struck me that you’re a herd species.” She pulled back and gazed steadily at him. “What’s your name?”
“Walish Din,” he managed to say.
“I’m guessing that your home-world is experiencing the same disaster as what’s happening here?”
“They’re birthing worlds.”
“Who told you that?” she snapped.
Walish Din found enough energy to smile at her. “You did.”
“How can that be? We have only just met.” She shook her head. “No, don’t worry about it; since when has anything these past few days made sense anyway? So you managed to escape from your planet while the freaky Gizanti were going around and melting everyone, convince some pilot to travel here, and then slip through that web they’re constructing around the planet?”
“I just wish I knew why.” Until now, Walish Din hadn’t even asked his imaginary human girl why it was so important to link up with the real version. It certainly wasn’t to save her life as she’d obviously been doing that quite well up to now. “Have you been seeing people who aren’t there or dreaming of strange far-away places?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve been too busy spending the last three days running for my life to notice invisible people and have spaced-out dreams.” The girl gently removed her arms. “I think it’s accurate to say that I’ve not had the best days since coming to this crap-hole of a planet.”
“Oh, so you are from here?”
“You are joking? This place is literally on the edge of the Galactic Expanse. There’s nothing here but sand, the odd trader like me, and the natives.”
“The blue ones?”
She nodded. “For someone who has only just got here, you sure know a lot about where you are, Walish Din.”
He cast his mind back to his vision. Walish Din placed his fingers around her slender hand. “You were inside an eating establishment when the big orange aliens entered the city. An old human standing next to you kept muttering that they couldn’t be Gizanti.” He swallowed hard. “That’s the point when you first saw those monsters fire upon the two fleeing natives.”
“Stop!” she gasped, pulling her hand away. “No more. I’ve had enough freaky and weird stuff happening to me for some total stranger to start telling me my past. Come on, we’d better keep moving.” The girl stood up and started to move away.
“Wait. At least tell me how you managed to find me. I mean, it can’t be a coincidence that you just happen to be right at the place where I landed.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been using these snake trenches to move from town to town while trying to find some way off this damn planet.”
After seeing what had happened to that Imperial warship before his lifeboat slipped through that rapidly closing net, it’s probably best that she hadn’t been able to get a lift. How long would have lasted if she hadn’t been here to save him? It’s probably best that he didn’t think about that too much either. “They’re really called snake trenches?”
“It’s not as silly as it sounds, Walish Din.” She placed her fingers against the sand wall. “These tunnels really were carved out by huge snakes.” The girl giggled when he pulled a face. “Oh, don’t look so scared, they don’t exist anymore. The native species hunted them to extinction decades ago.” The girl reached into another one of her pockets. “It’s the sole reason why I came to this otherwise miserable planet. You see, the Slitherline can’t get enough of these little things.” She opened the lid on a small box a
nd showed him the contents.
He frowned at the sight of hundreds of tiny, pale worm-like organisms frantically trying to climb up the sides of the box. Walish Din moved his hand a little closer only for her to slap it away.
She closed the lid. “That’s not a good idea. These are flesh-eaters. It doesn’t bother the blue guys though; just the hint of a smell coming from these gross things sends these normally peaceable creatures into a blood-lust frenzy.”
He wanted her never to stop talking. The sound of her melodious voice helped to smooth off the rough edges of his jittery feelings. “So, you’re not from this world. Okay, so how did you find out about this place?”
“No, you’re right there, I certainly am not from here. My world is close to the Imperial centre. This is the first time that I’ve travelled so far from the inner systems. I still don’t believe that I’m here, running through these snake trenches on this dead-end backwards planet. I honestly thought that I’d be gone from here the day after I arrived.”
“You do not have a high regard for this world?” He didn’t rate the place either. Somehow, he thought that all the other planets would look so different to his world, that they’d be strange and exotic places, full of alien creatures that looked so different to anything else he’d seen.
“I don’t want to insult you, Walish Din, as I know your species live on a frontier world, but no, I hate this planet, and not just because of what I’ve gone through either. I’m a trader, remember, and the less advanced races out here only seem to care about whether the next harvest is going to fail. How can a mind like that appreciate the complexities of planetary market trading?” She sighed. “Why am I even trying to explain this? I bet you’re a farmer too.”
“No, I’m a shepherd.”
“Right, and how is that any different?”
Walish Din decided not to mention that the Imperial prospectors had never bothered to visit his backwards planet. He thanked all the spirits roaming the Plains of Gopin for this fortitude as every Diannin knew of the vast wealth of precious metals lying under their ground. They also knew of the terrible consequences of what happened on other mineral rich worlds when that knowledge reached the God-Emperor. He knew a lot about trading, certainly a lot more that this human gave his credit. He decided not to bother mentioning that too. “It still doesn’t explain to me why you are on the planet. Unless this is where you chose to take your vacation?”
“Very funny,” she muttered. “Come on, we’d better find somewhere better than this before it gets dark.” She started to walk away from him. “You know, just in case the blue guys were lying about the snakes. In the morning, we can try to work out a way of getting off this damned rock before it’s too late.”
Walish Din hurried after her. For a start, the girl possessed the only light. The thought of being stuck down here in the dark made his blood turn to water. “Wait, please, you’re going too fast. Please, tell me why you’re here. I know you said you came to this planet to give the blue guys your worms, but you still haven’t explained how you heard about them.” When she stopped talking, that jittery feeling came back with vengeance.
“I was in this bar,” she said. “Minding my own business, swirling the remains of the cheapest drink in the place around the bottom of the glass. I’d been in there for over two hours, trying to think of some way to find enough credits to stop the Imperial auditors from taking everything I owned away from me.” The girl shined the flashlight under his eyes. “Thanks to a few unfortunate deals that I’d made in the past, as well as two months of having no job to do, I really was down to my last couple of credits. Anyway, so there I was, generally feeling sorry for myself when this guy sits next to me. He said hello then bought me a drink. Usually, I would have told anyone making a pass at me to clear off but, like I said, I had no more money to buy myself another drink.”
“What was he called?”
“I remember that he had such pretty eyes.”
His heart started to beat a little faster. This human was about to repeat the name she said in his first vision.
“I can’t quite remember. I was too busy looking at his eyes.”
“Was it Danny?”
Her own eyes lit up. “Yes, that’s it. How did you know? Wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want this day to get any stranger. Well, we started talking and he told me about the Slitherline.”
Walish Din tried not to laugh. “Let me guess, he just so happened to have a container of these worms and needed a plot and a ship?”
“He said he would split the profits in half. It sounded like a great offer, and at that moment, I had no other choice. It was either take this job or wait for the Imperial auditors to take all my stuff. Looking back, he must have bewitched me with his lovely eyes.” The girl shrugged. “Not that it matters anyway. I’m not sure what matters. After what I’ve seen those things do on the planet, I very much doubt that there will be any Empire to return to, even if we do get off this rock.”
Some great cosmic deity had spun a web which spanned the whole Galactic Expanse and they were both caught on the threads. He suspected that the other human, this Danny, could also be stuck inside this web too. He made his hand into a fist and smacked it against the sand wall.
“What the hell are you doing now?”
“Shaking the web,” he answered. “Don’t you see it yet? Nothing we have gone through had transpired by accident. You see, I don’t really believe that this Danny was really there in that bar.” He leaned forward until his face was just inches from her nose. “I also believe that he hasn’t left you either.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” she retorted before pushing him back. “I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. You’re just some simple shepherd who’s in the same amount of shit as me.” The girl sank to the floor. “I just want to go home. Is that too much to ask for?”
This shepherd might not have come from an advanced species like this human, but that hadn’t stopped him from achieving something which had initially sounded impossible. Her journey hadn’t been as traumatic as his, but Walish Din suspected that her nightmare began once the aliens invaded. He sat down opposite the girl. “Every person I knew at home is now dead.”
“I’m sorry. I should have been more careful with choosing my words.”
“There’s no reason to be sorry. If you hadn’t been there to help me, I would have most probably died with them.” Walish Din didn’t expect the girl to answer him, so he wasn’t shocked by her silence. “I bet he vanished at the same time as you saw the lifeboat plummeting to the ground.”
She nodded.
The girl was nothing like the one who’d shouted, dragged, insulted, and threatened him into following her requests and orders. Looking back, if she hadn’t been so forceful, Walish Din doubted that he would have made it this far. Did this mean that the imaginary Diannin living in her head would have acted in a similar manner? The deity had shaken his vast web and brought the pair of them together, presumably to wait for the third one, the other human, Danny. Surely, there must be more to it than that? If that was the only reason, then why did she have to come all the way out here? It would have been much easier and safer for him to travel to where she originated from.
Walish Din would have liked that.
He stood up, put his hands around her wrists, and pulled her onto her feet. “If this is another birthing world, then there must be somewhere on this planet where the aliens had deposited the incubators? I bet you know where they are as well.”
“Please don’t make me take you there,” she whispered.
Her sudden emotional change took him completely by surprise. Where had the human’s brashness gone? It then occurred to him that perhaps her imaginary Diannin treated the human in the same way as his imaginary human female. Walish Din would like to meet the deity who built this web and smash him in the face.
“Don’t you start begging already. We’re both here for a reason, and it’s about time you faced up to this notio
n.” He snatched the flashlight out of her hand. “Where did you land your ship? I assume that it’s still intact?”
“That’s going to do any good. You know we won’t be able to get off the surface. Not now, not with that cage they’re building around it. Why did I stay here? I must have been insane.”
“You sure do ask a lot of impossible questions, human. I also notice that you’re filled with quite a lot of regret.” He let go of her and carried on walking while shining the flashlight over the tunnel surface. “Where did you land your ship?” he repeated.
“I almost died during the landing. Something went wrong this the guidance computers as soon as I hit the atmosphere. I still done know how I managed to land the ship safely. Oh, don’t worry, I checked it couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Not that I’ve been able to check the ship recently.” She took a deep breath. “Those human incubators appeared all around my damn ship! This was obviously before I discovered these snake trenches.”
“Again, he shakes his web.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. I’m guessing that these trenches will take us to your ship?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Why?”
Should he tell the human the idea that came to him a few moments ago? “I believe that there’s a greater power at work here, and I think that whoever is controlling our fate has brought us here to do something.” He paused. “From what you have seen of the power from these invading aliens, do you think that the Empire will be able to defeat them?”
It took her a few moments before she answered him. The girl nervously licked her lips. “They have displaced thousands of humans from one planet to another. They have managed to turn a race of creatures millions of years older than the human species into soldier slaves.” She looked up. “And now they’re making an impenetrable shield around this world. They’re probably doing the same to their other conquered worlds as well. No, I don’t think the Empire stands any chance of defeating them.”
Walish Din followed her example and licked his lips too. “You are obviously aware that there are countless alien races out there would welcome the Empire’s extinction.”