by Tammy Walsh
He’d heard it long before I had and he focused on it.
“Is it them?” I said.
Egara pressed a finger to his lips, listening closer.
Then his eyes widened.
He grabbed me and shoved me onto my back at the foot of a sand dune.
Then he fell on top of me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He was still wearing his clothes. He wasn’t going to use his chameleon ability to hide from the drones effectively like this.
“Take a deep breath,” he said.
He swept large handfuls of sand over us, burying us beneath the surface.
I took a deep breath as he pressed his lips against mine.
It was completely dark in there and the heat hit me immediately.
My hands were clutched over my eyes, which was a good thing because I couldn’t have stood it otherwise.
I didn’t move a muscle and focused on holding my breath.
How long could I last under here?
Egara’s lips clamped over mine, sealing them tight and leaving no space for where the air could escape.
We lay in total darkness and I wondered how long it would take for the drone to pass overhead.
Not long, I thought.
I hoped.
But they might be performing a sweep of the area and who knew what kind of technology they possessed.
The heat grew intense and I could barely stand it.
Our bodies were pressed together just as tightly as our lovemaking last night but lacked the same sensation.
I couldn’t hear the drone overhead.
I could only hear my heart thud in my chest.
I would have to follow Egara’s lead when it came to coming out of our hiding place.
I felt relieved I wasn’t alone.
Then my oxygen reserves began to fade.
I was going to need to take another breath.
And soon.
A few more seconds passed.
I gulped and my body shuddered.
Maybe Egara’s species could survive beneath the sand like this but humans definitely couldn’t.
My body ached to take a fresh mouthful of oxygen and bucked when I tried to prevent myself from doing so.
Egara pressed his lips more firmly over mine, his hands wrapped around my head to keep me in place.
Was he trying to suffocate me?
Was he trying to kill me?
I struggled harder and found he’d already wrapped his legs around me.
He must have known I would react this way.
I tensed my muscles, unable to free myself from his incredible grip.
I couldn’t wait any longer.
I had to breathe.
I had to breach the surface.
But he held me pinned in place.
There was no escape.
Finally, unable to wait any longer, I sucked in a breath.
I was shocked I didn’t inhale a mouthful of sand.
Instead, my lungs filled with delicious, fresh oxygen.
I could breathe.
Egara opened his lungs up to me.
His breath was warm and moist and I could taste him on my tongue.
I eased into him, careful not to take too much oxygen from him.
I felt his breath press against the back of my throat too and realized we were sharing each other’s breath, each other’s oxygen, cycling it between us.
I remember reading that our bodies don’t absorb all the oxygen when we draw in a single breath.
Most of it gets expelled, which is how professional divers can reabsorb air bubbles they breathe out.
But the oxygen we shared would run out eventually.
It would grow toxic as it was recycled, accumulating more carbon dioxide with each exhalation.
My throat felt like it was closing up, tightening as I struggled to drag in each breath.
But I didn’t panic.
I was used to struggling to breathe on this alien moon.
After a while, we settled into an easy rhythm with me breathing in, him out, and vice versa.
It must be what it felt like to be twins enclosed within the same womb.
I entered a deep hypnotic state until finally Egara began to move.
He pressed against the heavy weight of the sand above us.
I could barely shift it and was glad he was there to help me. I couldn’t have escaped earlier even if I wanted to.
We burst through the sand and our lips parted.
I gulped in a huge lungful of sweet fresh oxygen.
Egara did the same only he didn’t need to struggle the way I did.
He panted, a little out of breath, but otherwise fine.
He peered up and down the valley roads and at the sky, looking for something I couldn’t see.
“Are they gone?” I said. “Did they go?”
“Yes,” he said. “We got lucky. We won’t get lucky again. Come on. We have to find those who took the shuttlecraft and get it back. Then we can get out of here.”
He took me by the hand and led me away.
We traveled in bursts, moving at a fast walk.
Every step I took ground the sand deeper in my crevices.
Boy did I hate being covered in sand!
A thick streak of it wound up the back of my leg and rubbed against my pants.
I could already feel the chafing and wondered if the shuttlecraft had any creams on board.
Shuttlecraft.
Crazy to think how easy it was to believe there were ships that could travel the depths of space so easily, ships that few had traveled in on Earth.
I kept my eyes focused on the swell of the sand dunes, the sharp inclines that had seemed so protective before could now house guards and drones by the hundreds and be on us before we could react.
Egara’s hand held mine firmly, his eyes darting left and right, focused on the blind corners as we took them each in turn.
The sun beat down hard and harsh, and as the day slipped by, we didn’t stop, not even to eat.
To avoid indigestion, I nibbled at the snacks the same way Egara did.
It was high noon, or as close to it as I could assume without a clock to check, when my boot caught on a protrusion of sand.
I fell and landed hard on my hands and knees.
My breath racked my lungs and I could barely breathe.
Egara bent down to help me up but I could hardly move.
I was exhausted.
Each breath sawed in and out of my throat, coming out horse and horrid.
They were not the painstaking breaths I fought for due to the atmosphere but from pure exertion.
My mind might be focused on the task at hand, able to keep going and push on, but my body had just about enough.
“We have to keep moving,” Egara said.
“I… can’t…” I said between gasps.
“Then I’ll carry you.”
I shook my head but he already bent down to sweep me off my feet.
His powerful arms clutched me close.
He staggered forward, more due to the uneven surface than struggling beneath my weight.
“I thought you… wouldn’t let me… slow you down?” I said.
“What can I say? I’ve grown attached to you.”
After about twenty minutes, I had recovered.
“I can walk now,” I said.
He didn’t say a word and continued to power through the valley that cut through the huge sand dunes.
I wriggled in his arms to get free.
“Really. Put me down. I can walk.”
He glanced at me,
“Are you sure?”
I gave him a look and wiped the sand from his cheeks and nose.
He sat me down and I dusted off my clothes.
He rubbed a hand over his face and hair, dislodging a bucket load as it spilled from his shoulders.
“Do you think they’re close?” I said.
“The drones cou
ld be anywhere. If it were me, I would send those drones out everywhere I could. They’ll cross each other’s paths, looking for any sign of us. All it takes is for one of them to discover our footsteps and they’ll find us for sure.”
Our footsteps in the sand.
Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I peered back at the valley floor, at the single pair of steepled humps kicked up by Egara’s boots.
Any drone could make out those.
It would be nigh-on impossible for us to cover them up behind ourselves.
“Do you think we’re close?” I said.
He didn’t look at me and focused on the next rise.
“Could be,” he said, noncommittally.
In truth, there was no way he could know for sure either way.
He knew no more than I did.
“Come on,” I said. “If we’re going to find this shuttlecraft of yours, we’re going to have to get a move on.”
We marched onward and rounded the next corner.
I checked the sky, looking for a flicker of light that might bounce off a drone’s hard outer shell.
Egara had much better hearing than me.
He would likely hear a drone’s loud buzzing, like giant hornets, before he would see them.
We had to take each corner at a time, hoping it would be the last, each counting down to the one that would finally reveal the merchants who’d stolen his shuttlecraft.
“Who would live in such a place as this?” I wondered out loud.
“This moon was colonized long ago,” Egara said, trudging through the sand that never failed to catch the front of his boots. “That species had to sell it to pay off debts. The debtors came and evicted most of the locals. They were allowed to stay so long as they didn’t hinder the building of the prisons.”
“What happened to those that did?”
“Well, there’s plenty of room at the local ‘hotels.’”
I gasped.
It somehow seemed perverse to imprison the very species that, through no fault of their own, had lost possession of this moon to an opportunistic alien race.
Especially since they had done nothing wrong to deserve it.
“The prisons get more funds the more prisoners they have here,” Egara said, mildly surprised at my shock. “The more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”
It was an entire field of the prison’s operating procedure I had never considered before.
Why would I? It wasn’t like it affected me.
Except, it did.
I was a part of that system now.
If the prison was run like a business, then I would be considered nothing more than an expenditure.
A single line on a ledger somewhere, where a thin nosed accountant would squint at the numbers and question the tax liabilities of each item.
I wondered how I would be referenced.
Entertainment?
A tax write-off?
Would they get tax back for my depreciation?
It might be irrational but it made me angry.
I’d been abducted through no fault of my own and now I was part of someone’s profit and loss accounts?
We turned to another corner, identical to so many others we’d turned before.
I expect to see nothing but rolling sand dunes as far as the eye could see.
Pretty soon, the suns would set and we would be left in semi-darkness from the grey moons that circled in the suns’ wake.
Instead, I saw a figure.
I was shocked to see another person out here and immediately came to an abrupt halt.
Egara slowed but did not stop.
The figure stood with his hands held in front.
His robes were long and tickled the sand’s surface.
I wondered how he could possibly survive wearing such black clothes in such a climate as this.
“Follow my lead and move slowly,” Egara said out the corner of his mouth.
He released my hand and walked with his hands swinging on either side, putting the shivs tucked in his waistband within easy reach.
Sunlight winked off their wicked edges.
I might have mistaken the figure as a fellow escaped prisoner except he looked far too at ease to be anything of the sort.
He had a heart-shaped snubbed nose with two thick slits for nostrils and wore a curved cap on his head that hid any hair he might have underneath it.
I had seen similar species to him in the prison but there were enough differences for him to occupy his own subcategory.
There was something very pig-like about the creature, and with it came all the negative associations of the poorly-regarded farmyard animal.
Maybe it was his small squinting black eyes, virtually invisible beneath the goggles that clung tightly to his face.
I had an immediate revulsion to the creature, irrational and unfounded, perhaps, but it was still there.
I didn’t trust him.
As I drew alongside Egara, I placed my hand on his in a signal for him to be careful.
Funny, I thought, me giving Egara advice on how to talk with alien creatures.
During his years as the captain of a pirate ship, he must have come in contact with many other species—far more than I had—and he likely had to deal with this piglike creature too.
Still, with the way the creature eyed both Egara and me, it set my teeth on edge and my stomach to grinding like an old cement mixer.
“Evening,” Egara said pleasantly.
“Evening,” Piggy said, barely even moving his thick lips.
“We came this way looking for a merchant ship,” Egara said. “Is it far ahead?”
The figure ran his eyes over him and pursed those purple lips.
“That would depend on who’s asking,” he said.
“My name is Egara. I’m the captain of a pirate ship and I would like to open negotiations.”
“You seem to be missing your ship, captain,” Piggy said with a sneer.
“It’s not missing,” Egara said. “It’s out there with my crew. But there’s one thing it’s missing and that’s my shuttlecraft.”
Piggy’s eyes moved to one side and a smile curled his features.
“I’m not sure we have a shuttlecraft among our stock,” he said. “I suggest you turn back and look elsewhere.”
Piggy turned, making the leather of his uniform squeak.
Egara moved so fast, it was like a magic trick.
One second my hand rested on his, and the next, his hand was wrapped around Piggy’s upper arm.
The figure turned back, just enough for him to find Egara out the corner of his eye.
His attention dropped to Egara’s hand resting on his arm.
Egara didn’t release his hold.
“My crew left me a shuttlecraft that I believe you now have in your possession,” Egara said, his tone turning cold. “You would be wise to return it to me.”
Piggy stared at Egara but not for long.
He turned his head to one side where a loud clacking noise arrested my attention.
I gasped as a fellow piglike creature dressed in identical long flowing robes of black rounded a shallow sand dune.
Another appeared on the other side, penning us in.
I might have shown I was surprised but Egara didn’t.
Maybe he’d heard them there, or maybe he hadn’t, either way, his body remained tense.
Those twin shivs tucked in his pants remained within easy reach.
The figures were armed with strange weapons shaped like crossbows.
I suspected they didn’t fire bolts of cold metal but unloaded from the glowing glass orb of plasma underneath.
“We wondered why the guards and their drones were out in full force,” Piggy said. “I suppose now we know. If we were to shoot you down, it wouldn’t make much difference to us. The guards would be relieved we’d dealt with one of their escaped prisoners.”
His eyes drifted over to me.
> “And returned their… property to them,” he said.
The armed guard closest to me shifted his target from Egara to me.
I’d seen Egara fight.
He could take out two, maybe all three of the figures before they could confidently defend themselves.
But with me present, I suspected fighting was the last thing on Egara’s mind.
He released Piggy but didn’t ease his tensed muscles.
He shared a look with me.
It was both humble and reproachful.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said.
There was a curl to his smile that dimpled his chin and gave me a little hope he wasn’t only saying that to allay my fears.
“Bring them,” Piggy said.
As he trudged through the sand, the two guards followed on our heels, the glowing orbs of plasma casting our shadows across the sand that stretched and clipped at Piggy’s heels.
We were prisoners once again.
They led us into a broad valley that’d been cleared on one side.
Random objects protruded from the sand and a dozen other piglike creatures stood in circles cradling metal cups in clipped trotters.
They turned and watched us with tiny black eyes, like raisins drying in the sun.
They wore goggles of varying size. Some were big and wide and round, others even smaller than Piggy’s.
A couple raised their trotters and squinted, forming wrinkles on either side of their eyes like used tea bags.
The object that took up most of the space was a long cylindrical structure.
One side was raised and perched on a hydraulic arm. A ramp lay half submerged by sand that led inside.
Attached to the front of the building was what appeared to be a giant drill bit.
It was chipped and stained with dirt, and some of the teeth were missing from having chewed dirt and hard rocks.
A pair of rudimentary robots fussed over the dust, sweeping it up into tiny dustpans.
Lights blinked on the top of their heads, flashing red every time they sensed more dust and sand that needed clearing.
Piggy drew to a stop outside the cigar-shaped building.
“Watch them,” he said, issuing an order to our guards, their weapons still trained on us.
The dozen other figures fingered the blaster pistols at their waists.
I peered closer at the weapons hanging from their belts.
One was an empty handle that didn’t support a blade.