by Drew Avera
He rose to his feet and stared at her. “I know you look at me and see a Greshian, someone you think is your enemy. But that is the same way the Greshians on the ship that destroyed your ship look at me. I’m no longer a Greshian in the way I was before. I was called a traitor because I saw no value in conquering other worlds. I’m not a killer.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” she snapped.
He stood there, dumbstruck. “I don’t have an answer to your question. I can only hope you’ll believe me when I say I have no intentions of doing you harm. All I want is a way off this moon and to survive.”
Anki watched him, trying to determine if she believed him or not. There were two things she knew for sure, the first thing being she was stranded with an armed Greshian with no way to get herself to safety. The second thing was that he had the means to shoot her dead and hadn’t done so, at least not yet. “Do you really think you can get us out of here?”
He shrugged. “I can try,” he answered.
Anki responded by turning her back and walking towards her fallen transport. She held her breath for a moment, waiting for him to fire, but it didn’t happen. After a few steps she heard him follow behind her.
“My name is Brendle, Brendle Quin,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She felt some reservation about answering his question, but in the end it didn’t really matter if he knew her name. She answered anyway. “Anki Paro,” she replied as she took a long stride over loose rocks.
They climbed from the crater in relative silence. The only sound she heard was heavy breathing and the rustling of rocky debris moving under their hands and feet. They crested the rim and were surrounded by pillars of dark smoke wafting around them. The air was thinner, and the smoke made breathing even worse than it had been before. She covered her face with the neck of her uniform and made her way towards the transport as Brendle followed close behind. When they made it to the wreckage, she was surprised to find it not engulfed in flames like she thought it would be.
“Here it is,” she said, gesturing to the twisted carcass that was once a personnel transport. Now it was technologically advanced wreckage; the type of thing she never would have bothered with when she spent her summer working salvage. The irony was that Brendle wanted to tap into it and try to call for help. It seemed unlikely to Anki, though.
She stepped aside and let Brendle enter the airlock leading into the small cockpit of the transport. Most of the collision gel had receded and allowed enough room for both of them to enter, though it was still a tight fit. Brendle sat as Anki leaned over his shoulder and watched him work. His hands scrolled over the console, searching for something that Anki was unsure of. “Where is the interface for your radio?”
Puzzled, Anki shrugged. “I don’t know about a secondary interface, but the helmet contained the controls for communicating off ship.” She pointed to the helmet lying between the seat and the left console, the wiring fixed to the console and disappearing behind a kick panel below.
“This should work,” Brendle said as he lifted the helmet from the deck and manipulated it in his hands. Anki watched as he worked, first disconnecting the radio controls from the helmet and scanning over the console with his com-unit. The device in his hand chirped and a smile spread on his face. “We use the same frequencies,” he said enthusiastically. “I could reveal our identities by sending a beacon out verbally, but there’s no way of knowing who might respond. The Telran knows I’m here, so they should ignore it, but if we don’t mask the identity of this transport, then it could put us in more danger than it’s worth.”
“How can you mask the distress call?” Anki asked.
Brendle smiled and removed something from his jacket. “With this,” he said, lifting a small beacon in his hand. “This is a neutral distress beacon. It should ping pretty far out into the dark, but I needed a transmitter and a significant power source to make it work.”
She watched as he removed another item from his jacket and worked everything together. The beacon was a cylinder shaped device and he used the wiring from the helmet to connect to the beacon, which made it resemble a battery of some sort.
“And with that, we should have a signal reaching out to the stars.” He smiled as he looked up at Anki, but she kept her reservations to herself.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Brendle moved his com-unit along the beacon and measured the power output of the device. “It could take a while to get a reading on anything picking up our signal, but in the meantime we just sit and wait.”
The idea of sitting alone with a Greshian didn’t sit well with Anki, but what other choice did she have? What she didn’t expect was what happened next. Someone answered the call with a ping of their own.
Chapter 20: Brendle
They watched as the ship fell from the sky. It was under thrust, but not in a way that made Brendle at all comfortable with whoever was piloting the machine. It was once a warship, he noticed, because of the protrusion on cannons pointing out from the dull gray hull. If the inside matches the outside, then this ship is a flying hunk of space trash, Brendle thought as the landing gear descended from the skin of the unknown craft, hissing and grinding as metal raked against metal. It landed, if you could call it that, with a rumbling of shaken ground and scattering of dust, choking the atmosphere with debris. Brendle and Anki shielded their eyes and held their breath as everything settled around them. They watched as the port airlock cycled open, Brendle with his weapon drawn, the cold steel reminding him of the threat that might appear on the other side of the airlock. He didn’t want to make the same mistake and get shot at for the second time in one day. At least this time he didn’t feel responsible for crashing the ship, though it might have benefited if he had helped pilot it. The ship didn’t appear to be Greshian, but his was a hated race regardless of who they might encounter.
The airlock was open now, but they saw no one on the other side. Anki squinted to look through the unsettled dust wafting in front of the airlock. “I don’t see anyone,” she said. “Do you think no one is onboard?” It was a question that didn’t sit well with Brendle. The ship wasn’t likely to be empty and the attempt at trickery might mean they were in more danger than they bargained for.
Brendle’s grip on his weapon tightened. “No, there’s no way that kind of landing was computerized. There’s someone onboard who just doesn’t want to be seen,” he said quietly. “Stay behind me.”
Anki ducked behind him, keeping her movements small as he moved forward in a crouch. The scattering of dust on the wind peppered his face with grit and he tasted it on his teeth, but he didn’t have time to focus on the mouthful of dirt. It was more important to stay vigilant, alive.
The rocks were loose in this area. Not the most appropriate of landing spots, Brendle thought. Even ships without engines requiring air intakes could be damaged if foreign material got snatched up into the controls or vectoring nozzles. The most amateur of pilots would have found a more solid surface for landing. It only made his theory of someone being onboard more realistic. “Do you see anything?” he asked.
Anki peered over his shoulder. “No,” she answered. He felt her breath hot on his neck, the rapid breathing of nervousness hanging heavy in the air around him. He could relate, he was scared shitless right now if he was honest with himself.
“Drop the weapon, sir. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.” The voice seemed to come from all around him.
Brendle looked around, ignoring the demand for him to drop his gun. The thought of them prying it from his cold dead fingers came to mind, but he wasn’t much in the mood for dying today. He lifted his hands instead, refusing to drop the weapon to the ground, but hoping it was a display that showed the unknown man that he was willing to not resort to violence. Willingness and being forced into violence were two different things in his mind and with the day he was having Brendle wasn’t much in the mood for forced compromise. He wasn’t dropping anything.<
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“When a man tells you he will shoot you, you take him seriously, yet when I said I would shoot you, you kept walking towards me. Do you have a problem with women?” Anki asked, the sarcasm heavy on her tongue. He would have laughed if fear wasn’t an all-consuming emotion coursing through his veins at the moment.
“What?” Brendle asked, looking back at her, distracted. That was a mistake.
A shot rang out and Anki grabbed his collar, pulling him towards her before the projectile hit either of them. Somewhere in the swift movement Brendle realized his weapon was no longer in his hands, but instead was in hers as she aimed it towards a man hiding behind the aft section of the ship.
“What was that about?” Brendle asked, rubbing his neck from where his collar had chaffed his skin. Never mind the fact he was a little embarrassed to be man-handled like that.
“You’re an idiot,” Anki said. “You stood there looking stupid when an armed man told you to drop your weapon. I just saved you. That’s what that was about.”
Brendle looked where she was aiming and the man poking his head out from behind the ship. “I told you I didn’t want to shoot you, but you didn’t drop the gun, and I saw you were a Greshian. I thought you were going to kill me,” the man’s voice quivered. It was fear, Brendle recognized it.
“He’s not armed any longer,” Anki said, moving the gun to aim it directly at Brendle. “Come out from behind the ship and speak to me directly.”
So I guess she’s in charge now, Brendle thought. He saw out of the corner of his eye the man peeking around the corner. Brendle looked at Anki and eyed her warily, the rise in his eyebrows saying I thought we were through pointing guns at each other, and she just shrugged.
“You, you’re not Greshian,” the man said it like a question. The weapon he carried looked too heavy for his small frame. That might’ve been why he missed, Brendle thought.
Anki laughed, it was the first time since he had met her that she made a sound other than mild regret at not killing him. The sound of her laughter made Brendle smile, but not too big considering the fact she might not have decided whether or not to pull the trigger yet. “I promise you, I am the furthurest thing from Greshian you will ever know,” she said.
Brendle thought about looking offended, but it wasn’t a good time. At this point he wasn’t sure he qualified to be considered Greshian anymore either.
“I don’t want to shoot a woman,” the man said. “Won’t you drop the weapon too?”
“Yeah, drop it,” Brendle whispered, a coy smile showed his teeth. Anki just glared at him.
“I tell you what. I will lower the weapon, but I will not drop it unless you do the same,” Anki replied.
“He’s not going to go for that,” Brendle started to say, but Anki shut him up by driving the business end of the gun hard enough into his face to cause his lip to bleed. “Ouch,” he said louder than necessary.
“Shut up,” she sneered. She looked back at the man in hiding and said “Do we have a deal?”
The man peeked around the corner again and watched as Anki lowered the weapon to a more neutral position. He followed her move, allowing his own weapon to rest at hip height. The man watched Anki lower the weapon to the ground and he matched her movements until both guns were resting safely on the ground. Anki grabbed hold of Brendle and shoved him away from weapon. Away from the danger of my taking it up again and doing something stupid, he thought she might say.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it,” Anki said. Brendle could see the satisfaction of neutralizing the threat without having to fire a shot in her eyes. There was smugness to her look that border lined on condescending, but it was also endearing. He liked the way the lines of her face came down to accentuate her lips. It was like despite the fierceness of the warrior she was, there was a softness she didn’t want people to see. That was his perception anyway. If nothing else, she struck him as peculiar, but that just made her all the more interesting in his opinion.
“Who are you?” the short man said as he came from around the ship. Fully erect, Anki was at least a head taller than him as they stood on level ground. Brendle thought it might have been the shade of the ship, but his skin was an ashy gray color, which made his yellowish eyes look like tiny stars against the darker canvas of his flesh. The tattoo of a bird-like creature was etched into the bald skin atop his head and Brendle wondered if it might have been a religious thing.
“My name is Anki. This Greshian is named Brendle. We mean you no harm,” she said.
“He was armed. Are you his prisoner?”
“I am no one’s prisoner,” Anki assured him.
“Is he your prisoner then?” The question was a bold one.
Anki turned to look at Brendle and she looked on the verge of laughter.
Not to be pushed into a corner he couldn’t get out of, Brendle said, “We haven’t come to terms on that actually,” Brendle said, trying to ease his way into the conversation. Anki rolled her eyes. “But like she said, we don’t mean you any harm. We just hailed you because we need a ride off this moon and back to some kind of civilization. If you can provide a ride for us then we would really appreciate it,” he finished.
The gray man eyed them warily. Even though they were unarmed, the man was afraid of them. Brendle knew it was because whatever world he came from had at least heard of the Greshian Empire. Was there nowhere in the Alorian Galaxy where the word Greshian didn’t evoke fear and loathing? “My name is Deis,” the man said. “My husband and I escaped our world from your people. Everyone we know is dead. How can we trust that you won’t kill us?”
The words hit Brendle like a kick in the chest. “You have my word no harm will come to you,” he said. He meant every word of it too.
Deis shook his head, Brendle could tell it wasn’t enough. The furrowing of Deis’ brow preceded his words. “Your word means nothing to me, to us. Your people, your empire of lies, slaughtered our world. Why should I trust you?”
Brendle looked at Deis, not knowing what to say. The man spoke the truth and he didn’t have any right to try and refute it. The Greshians took everything they wanted, he knew it just as well as the Anki and Deis. The only difference was he once was the heel stepping on the throats of people like Deis and Anki. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t that man anymore. He wondered if they would understand that he gave up his life to not be that person anymore. As Brendle stood lost in thought, trying to find the right words to say, another gray man stepped from around the ship and stood behind Deis. Brendle watched as the other man moved in, whispering into Deis’ ear.
Deis’ eyes widened.
The second man looked a lot like Deis, though he was skinnier and slightly taller. He also didn’t have any visible tattoos, though his jacket and pants covered more flesh than Deis’ wardrobe. Brendle remembered that Deis said he had a husband, this man was presumably him. Deis turned to whisper into his lover’s ear, about what― Brendle could only speculate― but their conversation had put Deis more on edge than he had been before.
“What’s wrong?” Anki asked.
Both men had fear in their eyes as they looked at Brendle and Anki, but the fear wasn’t directed at the people standing before them. It was because of something else. “My husband, Malikea said our ship has been pinged by another warship. It seems that entering this moon’s atmosphere triggered our transponder to emit a signal and I was too concerned with not crashing the ship to pay any attention to it.”
“Who is it?” Anki asked. Dread crept into her voice as well. All this fear made Brendle suddenly more uncomfortable than he was when Anki had his own weapon pointed in his face.
Deis looked at them with a forlorn expression on his face and said, “It is called GNS Telran. The Greshians have found us.”
Chapter 21: Anki
Brendle said something vulgar under his breath while Deis and Malikea held each other, dread in their yellow eyes. Anki ignored the fear coursing through her veins, but it wasn’t something
she was trained to do. This form of coping with the danger was something more primal, more dangerous. A thousand thoughts flowed through her mind, each one a calculated risk which would ultimately result in their destruction. How do you stand up to a Greshian war machine, a world-killer?
There was movement to her right and she finally realized Brendle was reaching for his gun and stuffing it back into his holster. He said something, but she wasn’t paying any attention, only the dull thudding sound of her heart beating in her ears captured her thoughts. The shock of the situation seeming to remove her ability to think clearly. The next instant she saw Brendle standing in front of her, shaking as if the ground was quaking beneath his feet. It took a moment for Anki to realize the shaking was a result of him grasping her arms and trying to get her attention.
“―got to go. Anki, we’ve got to go,” he was shouting when she finally shook the veil from her mind. His grip was strong, but not tight enough to hurt.
“All… all right,” she stammered. The world came back into focus, the thud of her heart in her ears, the vision of Brendle and the other two men hustling towards the airlock of a ship that looked like it had seen better days. Every fiber of her being said this is a deathtrap; you’re going to die, but she followed anyway. She didn’t have a choice. Or did she? The three men stopped when they reached the bridge. It was dark, almost dead. The ship must have been shut down. She wondered if Deis had shutdown after landing or if Malikea did so when the Telran found them. That didn’t matter now because it was too late, shutting down the ship didn’t make them invisible, but she doubted either of the Lechun men knew that.