The Teristaque Chronicles

by Aaron Frale

Kal made it to the top level. The only Teristaque left was the one with the different tattoos. She recognized him immediately as the one who ordered the execution of her village. She would never forget his tattoos and rank insignia. Kal roared with hatred and rushed towards him. He was just turning when she crashed into him, sending them both sprawling to the ground. She pounded her fists on his chest with little impact. His skin was made of metal, and she ended up bloodying her hands.

  The Teristaque grabbed her neck and squeezed to the point that her breath grew short. She struggled against his grasp, but it was no use. He stood up and held her thrashing form over the railing. She looked into the deep abyss of his eyes and saw nothing.

  “Ah, the girl from the Nig village. I knew there was something special about you. Most Nigs run from conflict. You seek it out.”

  He tossed her to the floor and stepped on her chest. She was determined not to cry out from the pain. The rough sports of her earth brothers and sisters trained her to endure pain, but this was almost too much. She could feel herself about to pass out from the pressure on her chest.

  “What’s your name?” The Teristaque said.

  “Kal’Da-“

  “I don’t need to know your life story. Kal will suffice. I guess you should know mine, Captain Makiuarnek. Now, so we are clear, Kal. If you attack me again, I will end your pitiful life right then and there. But as it stands, I need you. You see, there’s a prisoner who used to work for Sarge. I think this prisoner will be invaluable for insight in regards to capturing Sarge. You may have a better chance of getting the information than I will.”

  Makiuarnek let up on the pressure on her chest. “Why should I help you?” She could barely wheeze between gasps.

  “I think we both have a mutual interest in capturing Sarge. After all, it was his betrayal that put you here.”

  Kal held her tongue. She had mixed feelings about Sarge. She wanted to know why he gave her the tracking device. Surely he knew what the Teristaques would do when they caught her with it? Still, she couldn’t help but think that maybe something went wrong. Perhaps he thought that he deactivated the tracking device, and it would have fetched a large sum of money on the black market. Makiuarnek had no excuse. He was a vicious terrorist, unworthy of pity or love. Had their situation been reversed, and Kal had been the one with metal skin and Makiuarnek a flesh and blood creature, she would have snapped his neck long ago.

  “There is a boy who works in the kitchen.”

  “The human?”

  Makiuarnek laughed. “Human? Only a Nig… yes, he was under Sarge’s command. Show him this symbol. I found it in your possessions, and I know Sarge gave it to you.”

  Makiuarnek pulled out the patch from her father’s uniform. He let up the pressure on her chest, and she coughed. He tossed the patch onto her as she fought back tears. She couldn’t let Makiuarnek know the patch was more to her than just a trinket from Sarge. “What will I say to him?”

  “Let him do the talking. I’ll be back in six months. If I don’t have Sarge, I’ll come looking for you, and I won’t be as friendly. Come, take my hand…”

  Kal hesitated.

  “Unless you want to be discovered up here and suffer a punishment worse than anything I could devise.”

  Kal grabbed his hand. He activated a floating disc and brought her to the ground level. The chaos she created earlier was just getting wrapped up as Makiuarnek dropped her off behind some unattended machinery. She slipped into the gawking crowd and watched the guards cart the Orcandu away. Grannork locked eyes with her and snarled. The guards shocked the Orcandu and pushed him forward. Kal resolved to go along with Makiuarnek’s plan. However, the next time she saw him she planned to have the advantage.

  2

  A few weeks later, Kal made a point to make herself scarce during free time. She knew the Orcandu was coming out of solitary and would be seething, so she decided to wander a network of passages in the prisoner level. The prisoners had little restriction on their levels because there wasn’t any place to go as they were on a space station. The Teristaque levels were only accessible by floating disc, so the guards were there less to prevent escape and more to maintain order.

  Most prisoners played sports, and these light based things called video games during free time. Some would use free time to enhance their physical bodies with exercise equipment. After her meeting with Makiuarnek, she attempted to find the human during free time but wasn’t able to. She hadn’t been able to say more than a few words to him in the cafeteria. She attempted to get cafeteria duty herself, but the Teristaque guards only laughed at her. She was pulled from her thoughts when she noticed the word Library over a set of doors.

  The library had only a handful of prisoners and a single guard on the grate above. The Teristaques always patrolled above the population and only came down to break up fights. Kal felt a certain ease she had not felt since she arrived at the prison. Grannork wouldn’t come here looking for her. The library was fairly sizable, and it had workstations with limited access computers, reading chairs, and many shelves of books. The librarian, a multi-tentacle being with no discernible eyes, said that eReaders were forbidden because of the potential for misuse, and the computers weren’t networked so don’t bother trying. Kal wasn’t even sure what an eReader or computer was, so his warning meant nothing to her.

  She was amazed at the volume of books, containing shelf after shelf of knowledge. Her village only possessed a handful of books, most of which had been left behind by Kal’s father. Her mother taught Kal to read. Each of the books contained wild adventures in distant lands, and Kal often fantasized about going on the adventures in the books. Most of the villagers didn’t share Kal’s wanderlust. They focused on the present and did not dwell on the past or think about the future.

  “Kal?” Seayolar said.

  Seayolar had rounded the corner and took her by surprise.

  “No reason to be embarrassed, I like erotica too. Helps with the lonely nights if you know what I mean.” He grinned.

  Kal looked at the books in her section. They were mostly about mating rituals and featured muscled human males on the cover.

  “I was here to read up on the Teristaques,” she said, her face flushed.

  “You probably want the military history section, but there won’t be any useful information there.”

  She crossed the library and began to scour the shelves for any book that could help. She needed to find their weakness so she could exploit it. The next time she met Makiuarnek, she wanted to have the upper hand. She wanted to make him feel like she did. Kal felt her village slipping away from her. The village elder would always talk about weakness as an opportunity to hold a person up when they couldn’t walk, be their eyes when they couldn’t see, or in Kal’s case, do their work when they couldn’t lift. Kal always felt that weakness was something to overcome, and if she couldn’t lift heavy stones like her earth brothers and sisters, she should find another way to get it done.

  But now she was taking it a step further. Rather than treat weakness as a barrier to overcome, she was actively seeking a way to exploit it in others. It’s one thing to teach the blind earth brothers and sisters to walk on their own. It’s something completely different to take advantage of their disability. While Makiuarnek earned her hate, she wasn’t sure how far she could go. She could easily justify to herself that she would never murder a village, but how many lines would she be willing to cross, just how far would she go? She had to remember that regardless of what happened, she could never sink to Makiuarnek’s level. She owed it to her village to have a higher standard.

  However, finding the weakness of the Teristaques would only level the playing field. She would never defeat Makiuarnek if she didn’t find something. Finding even a mention of the Teristaques was a task in its own. There were even some books with whole sections deleted from the text. The book would say “THIS SECTION INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ORD. 352.116,” and after some blank pages, the book would continue
. She could only conclude that the Teristaques wanted to remain mysterious and unknown.

  She approached the librarian. It was putting away books with its multiple tentacles. Kal wasn’t quite sure how it knew she was coming because she wasn’t quite sure how it could see. The being spoke before she could even formulate her question, “Due to my unique physiology, I am well suited for maintaining the library, keeping me out of the refinery, for which I am grateful. You will learn that some prison jobs are better than others. Once you have one of the good ones, be sure to do it well because they can always use more workers in the refinery.”

  “I wasn’t asking about a job,” Kal said.

  The being continued to put books away and pushed the cart down the aisles, “You will eventually after you get the cough. All the refinery workers have it. My body soaks up toxins. I wouldn’t last a day out there.”

  Kal felt the burn in her throat already. The refinery was taking its toll on her, but she endured and carried on through the pain. “I wanted to find out more information about the Teristaques.”

  The being stopped putting away books. Three of the tentacles pushed her toward the exit, “Out. Get out! Certain knowledge is forbidden. Out! Out! Out!”

  The being shuffled her out the door of the library and slammed it shut. The Teristaques controlled every part of prison life, and the inmates were afraid. Had she trained herself to face her fears too well? She resolved to come back and try a different approach. Hopefully, the librarian would forgive her transgression and let her back in at some point.

  Kal turned to go down the corridor when she ran into Grannork. She only stood as high as his waist, and he was much more intimidating when she lacked proper escape route options. She stalled to think of a plan, “Did you have fun in solitary?”

  “They tortured me.”

  “You should probably go rest then…”

  “Orcandus feel no pain,” the creature growled and picked Kal up from the ground to look her in the eyes.

  “Apparently, you do feel wounded pride, though.”

  The Orcandu roared and slammed Kal into the wall. All the air left her lungs, and she felt like someone had smashed her chest. The Orcandu slammed her on the ground where she heard her bones crack. A giant Orcandu foot came crashing down on her face, and the pain was too much. She blacked out.

  _______

  Kal walked into her house, the smell of evening stew touching her nose as her mom tossed spices into the family cooking pot. She smiled, beckoning Kal to the kitchen. The great room was half family room and half kitchen with wooden couches, chairs with green pillows, a giant dining table, a counter for preparing food, and a fire pit. Her cousins gathered around the small table in the center of the couches playing a game with wooden round and square pieces. Others were lounging. Her uncle carved a bird from a wood block. He looked up and asked her about her walk.

  The houses in Kal’s village were massive. They were several stories high and housed many families. Though Kal and her mother were the only ones from her inner family, her extended family was massive, and the house was always busy. Kal wandered back to the kitchen side of the room to watch her mom cook the stew. It was a large pot with vegetables, meats, and root plants. She could smell the cooking, and her mouth watered.

  Her mom nodded and continued to cook, humming a tune while cutting vegetables. It was a tune that Kal had heard many times before. It was slow, beautiful, and not one of the village tunes. It was a melody her father had sung, the tune from a music box her father had left behind. The solar cells had shattered one day when Kal had dropped the device. Though the music from the box wouldn’t play anymore, that didn’t stop her mother from singing the familiar tune. The people of the village sang the music of the ancestors, except Kal’s mother, which left Kal wishing she knew more about her father.

  The singing began to slow down. The notes stretched out a little too long. Something was wrong. The chords became more and more dissonant until the music was imperceptible. A bright light shone from the windows. A fire burned through the walls of the house, engulfing her mother who continued to stir the stew pot in her last moments. The fire streaked toward Kal.

  _______

  Kal woke in a dark hallway. Her body ached, her breath was short, and her ribs felt shattered. The Orcandu had nearly killed her, and her body protested the abuse. She forced herself to her feet despite the waves of pain. There were several doors in the hallway. Screams came from a door at the end. A human face poked out, and the screams subsided to moans. The face was wrinkled with goggles over his eyes. She recognized his teeth; they were gold and silver, marked with rot. He looked at Kal and said, “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  Kal heard a shriek of metal on metal coming from the room, and the door slammed. A few seconds later, the screams continued. Kal limped up and down the hallway, looking for a way out. All of the doors were locked except one.

  The door opened to a horror show. There were tanks with various dead star species and body parts. A body pieced together from various star species parts was on a table. A large tube full of wires and liquid connected to a disembodied purple head with large eyes and orange hair. Kal stumbled back in horror when the emerald green eyes of the head popped open.

  “Oh, hello,” the head said to Kal.

  “What are you?” Kal backed toward the door.

  “I seem to be a head at the moment.”

  “Your head! It’s… it’s…” Kal couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  “Detached? Oh yes! Quite right!” The head explained. “All my parts are detachable! I’m a Quadhelix.”

  “Quadhelix?”

  “Most life forms have two DNA strands. I have four. It’s complicated, but the short of it is that I am compatible with the limbs, cells, and organs of just about any life form.”

  “You steal people’s limbs!”

  “Only after they are dead, out of courtesy. But they have to be fresh, so we cut deals with morgues. Most species don’t keep the remains anyways, so recycling makes for a healthier planet, as my mom used to say. However, the doctor hasn’t been abiding by the Quadhelix rules of courtesy with his crazy experiments.”

  “What is he doing to you?”

  Kal felt a presence over her shoulder. It was the human from earlier. He leaned into the tank to look at the Quadhelix. His teeth glinted off the surface. “Splicing his DNA onto other life. Imagine, if double helix life forms could use the abilities of the Quadhelix, we could live forever.”

  “Provided you had enough body parts,” Kal spat.

  “Some of us must die so the others can live forever, but that’s the way it always is and always will be. Now, let’s take care of those wounds, but after a thorough exam. I found something interesting in the DNA sample I collected when we first processed you.”

  When the human put his hand on Kal’s shoulder, she spun around to fight despite the pain in her body. She knew humans had soft flesh and were probably weaker. She swung her fist at the human, but it was too late. He injected her with an eNeedle. She was instantly limp, and her body wouldn’t respond. She attempted to cry out, but even her lungs would not react. She was frozen. The human smiled. “Come, let’s get you fixed up. You may call me Dr. Feslerk. I am the physician.”

  _______

  Kal woke up in her cell a day later, the horrors of the insane doctor echoing in her mind. Kal’s initial “appointment,” as Dr. Feslerk called it, involved poking, prodding and various forms of torture. Every tissue that could be cut, scraped, or sawed was taken for collection. There was no attempt to comfort Kal or deaden the pain. She had been treated with painkilling roots at home when she broke her bones. The repeated breaks as a child had helped her endure what would be devastating torture for most.

  Dr. Feslerk didn’t take pleasure in Kal’s pain. The insane doctor just worked away without reaction or comment except to note her interesting physiology. Dr. Feslerk told her that he would have to run more tests because she was the m
ost unique individual he had ever seen. He said that he had never encountered a star species quite like her. Eventually, the pain was too much for even Kal to bear, and she passed out.

  She woke to Haath-Nlo secreting some gooey substance on her. Kal stood up in bed ready to fight as she attempted to wipe the slime off, crying out, “What are you doing to me?”

  “Relax,” Haath-Nlo said. “It’s a healing agent that will mend your wounds and strengthen your muscles.”

  She didn’t quite know what to make of the bug just yet. “What do you want in return?”

  “Nothing. I find it’s best to make peace with your cellmate. Now can I finish?”

  Kal sat back in the bed. Haath-Nlo sprayed more goop. The substance was warm and green. The effects on her body were quick. She could see the chunks of flesh taken by the doctor fading away. While the doctor left her skin in bad shape, he had at least fixed her ribs that had been shattered by Grannork. It no longer hurt to breathe.

  “You could have warned me,” Kal said and looked out the cell door. She could see a couple of rows of the spiral but nothing more. The lights were dimmed but not off entirely.

  “About what?”

  “The doctor!”

  “From what I hear, you should be more careful before you decide to make enemies of an Orcandu.”

  “I needed to…”

  “To what?”

  “Nothing,” Kal said and turned over in her cot.

  Haath-Nlo wisely didn’t press her. He shuffled his way back to his bed.

  “What happened to your legs?” Kal said after a while.

  Haath-Nlo wiggled his stumps. “These? Oh that was long before I got here, and if you are wondering, the healing serum only closes wounds. It doesn’t regenerate limbs.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “A mistake I made, unlike most who seem only to look at a Teristaque the wrong way and end up here.”

  Kal didn’t press any further. It was all too much for one day. The goo calmed her nerves, and she drifted to sleep.