“It’s the same galaxy. We’re still in the Milky Way. But this particular sector is part of our history. Did you know your planet was named for a supercontinent on earth more than 275 million years ago?”
“If I don’t know two hundred years of history, it’s not likely I’ll know 275 million years of history. I only know what my grandmother told me. What difference does this history lesson make, anyway?”
Shrtz pointed at the planet suspended in space outside our clearshield. “That,” she said, pointing a tentacle toward the window and then back at the planet on the screen. “Is this.”
I gawked at the labeled blue planet. “That’s Uranus?”
Shrtz said, “It’s not pronounced yer-, that’s an anatomical location. It’s pronounced -uhnus.”
“Says who?”
“Have you ever read a book?”
“I’ve read quite a few of them.” I crossed my arms defiantly. “My reader was pretty full.”
“Then you should recognize this map.” She emphasized with a flick of a tentacle.
“I didn’t read about planets. I like reading creative narratives about people.”
Shrtz cocked her head at me curiously. “Ah. This is why you are named Story Book?”
“Yes. My mother read them to me when I was young, and I continued to read them.”
“What about factops?”
“I find facts and opinion boring. I’d rather read imaginative narration.”
“And that’s why you don’t recognize the Solar System of our ancestors.”
As I moved my foot, I felt the goo beneath it. I fetched the canister from the floor; its contents were all over the place. Splattered during the jump into hyperspace, for wont of a seat belt. The goop was even on my skinsuit. “I never imagined I’d need to know that. I never thought I’d be on a prisoner transport ship.”
“And yet you extol the virtues of imagination.” One of her hairless eyebrows quirked up.
“I’m imagining you with a plaster over your mouth right now. You and your massive brain just told me it’s Ur So it doesn’t matter.”
“Except you don’t know how to pronounce anus.”
“Whatevs. So can we land there?”
Shrtz made a snorting sound.
“What?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s an ice planet.”
“Oh. Well groovy.”
“And I believe we are being pulled into orbit around it.”
My eyes darted back and forth between her and the navcomm. “Then what happens?”
“As long as I can control the thrusters, then we orbit the planet.”
“For how long?”
“If I master the use of the engines to match the curve of the planet, we will orbit forever, unless our fuel is finite, in which case we will crash into the planet. If we maintain orbit, we will do so until our food is depleted and we die, whichever comes first.”
I blinked at her. “You’re such a delight, Shrtz.”
“Ah. Sarcasm, yes? I’m sorry, but I speak the truth.”
My whole life had been like this. Always circling something I could never have. Always going somewhere but never getting there. “How are we going to...avoid the dying part?”
A tentacle poked upward into the air like a gesturing finger. “I believe I can operate the engines, so the criterion of survival are air, shelter, food and water. We have all of them, at present, but I don’t yet know the amount of fuel, or if it is self-replenishing, and until that calculation is made, we have no way of knowing how long we will be in this ship nor how long the supplies must last.”
I studied the confusing console again. “Can we use the hyperspace button again? Maybe get ourselves somewhere else?”
“As I said, the shield is now useless.”
“Can we make it without the shield?”
She shook her head. “No. A single speck of space dust could demolish the entire ship at those speeds.”
“So we shot our wad already?”
“In a manner of speaking.” One tentacle scratched at her bald head, another tapped on various screens. “Also, we have no knowledge of how to properly pilot the ship, nor whether or not the fuel supply for the thrusters is now limited. Again, without fuel to counteract the gravitational pull, we could crash into the planet.”
“And an ice planet is...”
“Uninhabitable.”
“Right.” My head fell to my chest.
A tentacle landed softly on my arm. “You are despondent, Story Book?”
I lifted my head in wonder. “And nur yot?” I shook my head clear. “Quasar! Damn feralmoans!”
“Your brain will become accustomed to the pheromones eventually.”
“That’s a plus.” I moved over to the porthole, away from her chemical sorcery. “What I meant to say was, you’re not? Despondent?”
“No rational reason to despair yet. We are without large amounts of data. I suspect this reading—” She pointed a tentacle. “—is the thruster fuel, and it is at 98%. Thus, the positive news is that we now have time for me to study the ship and the controls. Perhaps I can discover a solution in time.”
“, as in with a little more time, or , as in before we die?”
“Hmm...” Shrtz mused with a cock of her head. “An unintentional double entendre.”
“Double what?”
“No matter. The point is I have much more work to do.”
I stepped closer. “Well you have litul teeum...Shite!”
I retreated again, out of reach of her fuckering chemicals, gave it another go. “You have until we run out of food, then.” Resolutely, I started for the doors, stepping over the beef and beans on the floor. “I’m going to take inventory in the galley.” I plucked the Merkel from its mount on the wall. “And check on our prisoner.”
Shrtz turned in the seat. “Shall I go with you? Perhaps the guard will try to attack you again?”
“I have this—” I held up the weapon.
“You had that last time.”
I squinted at her. “Just figure out how to drive this thing.”
“As you wish.” Shrtz spun back to the console.
“I’ll be back soon.”
After the doors swished apart, I stepped into the shiny corridor, lit by a strip of glowing green on each side.
In the galley, I removed all the food from the storage compartments onto the table and counted them up.
One hundred canisters of food, one hundred packets of water.
It was only enough to feed one person one meal a day for 100 days, or for 50 days at two meals...or maybe not, if that person was also largely in a suspension pod. So the guard...if Shrtz was right, and he was the only one on board, aside from the pod prisoners, and he was only to be awake long enough to set the autopilot and then awakened by the ship just before arrival at the destination, the food was for emergencies. Or maybe it was enough for several guards to eat only a few meals each, before going into suspension. There could be other guards in those pods that got blasted into space.
I might never know the answers to all those questions.
And it was just as hard to know what the rations should be for me and Shrtz, since I had no idea how long we’d have to be circling Uranus. Maybe one canister per person, per day? We had to feed the guard as well. The food and water supply would only last thirty days, give or take.
Maybe I should put him in a pod, so we wouldn’t have to feed him. But mine might be broken, and that left the pod Shrtz occupied as the only operational one.
Leaving the galley with my grumbling stomach, I returned to the room where we’d left the P-Murt. Looked through the viewing window. The cabinets were open. He was not in sight, but I heard the sound of the water-module. Who knew that a P-Murt cared about personal hygiene? My eyes went back to the open cabinets. But I’d need Shrtz to hold him while I checked the room for anything useful. Like something edible.
My mental curse almost made me laugh. I’d heard that s
hanks were really good, but only the elite members of government ever had them. And we’d never found any on our raids of the warehouses.
I returned to the Bridge.
“Shrtz, can you come restrain the guard again? I want to check the room he’s in, in case he has something to use against us in there, or some way to escape.”
“Certainly.” Shrtz joined me on a trip back down the corridor.
When I peeked through the porthole window, all I saw was an empty room. “Can’t see him. Maybe he’s still in the water-module.”
She opened the door with a few taps on the console and held out a preemptive tentacle in front of me. “I’ll fetch him.”
The door slid open and one tentacle floated forward like an antenna. A flash of metal, and Shrtz jerked her arm back. There was a bloody slice on the appendage. Except the blood coming out of it was blue.
With other tentacles, she made short work of snatching the Barner Blade from his hand and coiling her arms around him, carrying him into the corridor.
So, he had tried to fool us. And overall, it had worked. I pointed at the injured appendage. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. The wound will heal itself.” Her tentacles held tight, though the guard struggled to free himself, grunting and cursing.
“Oh. Well, good thing he didn’t cut it off.”
“I could regrow the limb, if that happened.”
I stared at her. What must it be like to regrow a severed limb? She had powers I didn’t even know about.
Inside, I went about searching the room.
One cabinet was locked, and it had dents in it. He’d tried to get it open. Since Shrtz seemed crazy-strong, I came back out and asked for her help. she broke the cabinet open without much effort, while still holding the P-Murt in her other wiggly arms.
In the compartments, I found several other weapons, a shoulder pack, utility belt and a personal ePad. I also found a couple of recharged Merkel cylinders. I filled the pack with various things I thought might be helpful, and made sure there were no more weapons or tools at his disposal.
“Say, Shrtz...we only have one hundred canisters of food and water...don’t you think we should put him in a pod? That way we’ll only have to feed the two of us...”
Shrtz narrowed her eyes and then smiled. “That is a very clever solution. Shocked I didn’t think of it myself.”
“I’m not sure that was a compliment, but okay.”
We headed for the pod bay, with the guard cursing and spitting. I opened the pod I’d been in, and Shrtz stuffed him inside. When she pulled her tentacles free, he popped up, screaming, “Abomination! I’m going to kill you!”
She gave him a quick whack with the end of a tentacle and he fell back inside. I pushed the seal button, then the engage button, while he beat on the glass and we waited for the pod to do its magic and freeze his ass. Along with the rest of him.
The suspension chamber spewed and throttled down, and a flashing light appeared on the console.
“What’s that?”
Shrtz leaned over to look closer. “System failure.”
“Quasar!” I cursed. “Let’s try the other one.”
Shrtz removed him without ceremony and transferred him to the other pod, with the same result.
“Smeg!”
Shrugging, Shrtz hauled him back out. “I will return him to the quarters.”
All I could think of was that we would have to feed him, too. “Shrtz...maybe we should just—”
“We are not spacing him, Story Book.”
“Why not? He’s only a P-Murt.”
She stopped in the corridor to face me. “And you are only a samegender. Yet you fight for your right to be treated with compassion.”
Blaster jets! Why did she always have to make sense? I looked at the guard. “Back to the room you go.”
At his makeshift cell, Shrtz set him down inside the door, and I shoved him inside and slammed the button to close the door. Wordless, Shrtz reset the lock on the panel and I snatched the Barner blade from her before she started back down the corridor toward the bridge.
I swiped my hands together in a gesture of a job well done, just to make myself feel better about the whole thing. I peered into the porthole in the door, and he spit on the glass.
I smacked a hand against the glass and turned to see Shrtz making her way back down the corridor, tentacles lilting around her as if she were rowing herself through the air, leaving drops of her blue blood along the corridor.
Happy to be rid of him, at least for now, I backtracked to the galley to load a few more canisters of food into my pack and then joined Shrtz again at the Bridge console. “Lenny uck?” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Can you turn those icles...chemicals...off?”
“Would you like me to suppress the pheromones?”
I stared at her. “So you can do that?”
“Of course.”
“Then why didn’t you do that before?”
“It’s pleasurable. And you have only now asked me.” After a moment of staring at her, the ceph closed her eyes, took a deep breath and was quiet for a moment. Then she opened her eyes. “There.”
I felt something like a cloud moving away from my brain. “Okay...what I was saying was...have you had any luck?”
“I am only now accessing ship logs and looking at metadata. Perhaps I can find ship operation manuals inside that directory. It will take more time.” Pulling out a few canisters from the pack, I realized again I had no idea what cephs considered food. “Is there a particular food you can eat?”
“I am able to consume anything a whole human can.”
“Slicey,” I said happily, holding up two cans. “Here’s a beef one, and a fish one.”
“Oooo. Fish. I love fish.”
While two tentacles dug into the canister of fish, the others were still on the console. I half expected her to put the food into the mantel hole probably between her legs, but she ate and chewed with her human mouth.
5
The canister food wasn’t much better than the food I normally ate, but I have to say, the Sister Resisters periodically feasted after hitting a P-Murt food depot. That food was meant for government officials and it was a far cry from the mush they shoveled toward the masses.
After my meal, I stood at the makeshift cell, opening the door and holding the Merkel in one hand, the canister in the other. One of them was aimed at him, and it wasn’t the canister.
I had brought him the precious life-giving sustenance that probably had no business passing into his ugly stomach.
“You’re an abomination!” he growled.
“And you’re a pock-faced hatemonger with bad breath.” “Do you even know where your beliefs come from?” I tossed the canister to him and he caught it, ripping off the spork attached to the side, tearing at the opening.
“Why don’t you tell me, smegger?”
“Okay, I will, blork-for-brains. They come from the man who caused the end of planet Earth. You’re the reason why an entire planet died. Don’t you even care?”
“When I get out of here, I’m going to kill you. Very slowly...” Mushy beans dripped out of the corners of his mouth. His eyes were on fire, and the hunger of hatred was stronger than his hunger for beans.
“You’re not getting out of here. So shut your fuckering smeg-hole.”
He blurted a screaming growl and lunged toward me, and I stepped aside and cranked him on the head with the Merkel. He slumped to the floor, unconscious, half-chewed beans dripping out of his filthy mouth like backwash from a public water lock. “I wish I was a deather. I’d rid the universe of your stench,” I said to his unhearing ears.
My hatred of P-Murts came naturally. I had seen my neighbors and friends hanging from poles in the streets at the hands of his kind. The PMMM—P-Murt Militia of the Ministry—had ripped everything from me.
My grandmother had been taken first. They feared her knowledge. My mother and father had been taken away soon after, never to be seen a
gain. My sister and my brother had been assigned to workcamps, though I didn’t know if they were sent to Smegunus or Sintori-5.
I had only survived these militia sweeps by hiding, and when I was wandering around in the streets, the only member of my family left, I joined the clan of samegenders—the most powerful of resistance clans, with the most skilled members. They were called Sister Resisters, even though some of their members were male, because the clan began as a group of females. All of them, though, were samegenders.
They’d taken me in. Their founder had snatched me right off the street where I was running from a P-Murt.
When she jerked me into that alley and held me fast, her hand over my mouth, I struggled against her beefy arms, but could not get free.
“Shh-sh-sh...” Her breath was hot in my ear. “Keep still, if you want to live.”
After the P-Murt marched past us, oblivious, she unhanded me. I came out of her grip with my fists up, prepared to do battle.
“Easy, there, fleeker.” She pulled her wild dark hair back and slipped a band around it. She wore black boots and a common patch coat. Nearly everyone made clothes from remnants of other clothes. This one was all in darker colors, though.
My eyes lingered, taking her in. Rich brown skin, piercing dark eyes and full lips, slightly red.
She licked those generous lips. “I’m just trying to help you.”
“Why?”
She readjusted her patch coat. “Because you’re my peep.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw you at the Double Zero only a few minutes ago.” She swiped a fingerless glove under her nose, sniffing. After a second or two of us staring at each other, she motioned for me to follow her deeper into the shadows, and against my better judgment, I went.
“I’m Cassio. Founder of the Sister Resisters and leader of the First Rank. I saw the P-Murt following you. So I came to help.”
“I don’t even know you. Why would you risk—”
“That’s what peeps do.” She gave me a light punch on the arm and I tried not to whimper. It hurt. “The Sister Resisters helps its own peeps. Simple-simple.”
After that, it wasn’t long before I was a chip-carrying member of the Sister Resister movement. Since I had no useful skills in anything, she trained me as a soldier. I became part of the First Rank—the samegender militia that fought against the P-Murts and the progeny he had produced who held onto that power over eight bloody, oppressive generations.
Sister Resister Page 3