Chapter Three
“What the blazes are you doing?!” screamed Alicia Parkinson.
“Is this a trick question? I’m saving you,” replied the creature, throwing her over his shoulder and making a run for it.
Alicia tried to explain patiently that she had no wish to be saved, at least not while draped over the shoulder of some huge lunk and facing in the wrong direction, by letting her legs be spokespersons and kick furiously at said lunk; but his arm pressed them to his chest and they may as well have been welded there. Apparently she and they both were going to have to cope for a while.
“I don’t even know you!” she cried, switching tactics.
The first thing she had noticed about him, beyond what she had glimpsed through the smoke, was that he was pink.
The long hair which covered his body and stuck straight out, making him resemble a large puffball, was a light shade of pink. His massive limbs and his head, which was attached to a very stretchable neck in front of his body and merely came up for observational purposes, were darker pink. His lips were luscious and red, but that was beside the point.
Unlike Kahlo Kache, whose present (actually future, as it took place a few hours after this – never mind, don’t worry about it) situation was enviable from theirs, this creature, who can safely be called a man because he was intelligent, male, and more importantly had no intention of eating poor Alicia, also had a great deal of experience exercising his wit in life-threatening situations. “That’s right,” he said, not breaking stride, “don’t trust strangers. It’s a much better idea to stay here and face certain death.”
Hey, no one said it was a sharp wit. And by the way, for those of you who are still thinking from the last paragraph that “intelligent” and “male” create an oxymoron, you are probably right, but that really has nothing to do with anything so get over it and read the rest of the story, okay?
“But I can’t leave,” Alicia protested. “My boyfriend – my family – my robot –”
“The robot is present and accounted for, Mistress Parkinson!” called Kaycee, who was suddenly right behind them. Further behind them they heard the deafening crash of the Town Hall building toppling to the ground – and through, among other things, Alicia’s house.
“No!” she shrieked. But she quickly realized that the house had already been evacuated, as her father ran up to greet her, obviously having anticipated that she would return home. He gestured for them to follow into a small alleyway for cover, and her captor reluctantly obliged, rolling his eyes and muttering impatiently.
“Alicia,” he gasped, “you’re safe.” He clearly wanted to hug her but this was made impossible by the large bulk over whose shoulder she was still thrown. “You may put my daughter down, please, Mr. –?”
“Tell you later, after we blow this joint.” He extended a hand but made no move towards putting Alicia down.
Mr. Parkinson shook the proffered hand hastily and said, “Thank you very much for saving my daughter, but please put her down now.”
“Can’t,” said the man, “I’m saving her. It’s rather important.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Where’s Mom, and Gina?” Alicia demanded.
“They are someplace safe,” her father insisted, “for the moment.” Tears came to his eyes. “Now do you see, why I was so keen to keep you away from The War? Do you see what I was protecting you from?”
“Yeah,” said Alicia dryly, “Thanks. I can see it did a lot of good.”
“I had no way of foreseeing this!”
“Look around you! This has been happening to billions of worlds since The War started! This is what people are fighting to stop! This is what I could have prevented!”
“You would have died and it would have happened anyway.”
“Well, it’s happened anyway and I’m going to die. Wow, this is so much better! Thank you, dad!” She tried to remember what Kaycee had told her earlier about his love, but it was all going fuzzy. She was just too frustrated.
“There’s a safe place with Mom and Gina. Come along.”
“No, I’m taking her to my ship,” said the other man. “Come with us.”
“I can’t, my wife and other daughter are –”
“Get them too! But hurry!”
“They are somewhere very safe. Come along, Alicia, we have to join them.”
“There is no place safe on this planet anymore. I am taking her to my ship.”
“Over my dead body.”
Suddenly he was a dead body, or at least on the way to becoming one, which simplified that situation but surely for all that wasn’t a good thing. An electro-javelin had just gone through his groin and continued on, barely missing Alicia and her captor who jumped with reflexes surprising in one so large. It whizzed past and sunk into the wreckage of the Town Hall building across the street.
She shivered. She’d felt the weapon graze her hair. But the fear was quickly overridden by despair, a feeling of despair deeper than any she had ever known. She looked at her father, who was blinking in surprise more than pain, and realized she could never feel deeper despair, any more than she could ever feel happy again. He collapsed at her feet without time to utter moving last words. Tears began coming to her eyes.
“Oh gratz,” said her captor, turning and backing off.
“Wait!” cried Alicia, shaken out of her despairing trance. She twisted around. Behind them she saw another figure emerging through the smoke, atop the alley wall. This one she could hardly make out, but somehow it radiated menace and foreboding, and was clearly not about to rescue anybody.
The man shifted her over with more than a slight bounce and pulled a sidearm from somewhere deep within his thick fur. He popped off a couple of shots at the figure, which screeched like shards of rusty steel on a chalkboard and fell headfirst over the wall. Half a dozen more quickly appeared in its place.
He dove behind a conveniently situated dumpster as they returned fire with their own weapons, which were, unlike the javelin, of a more common variety which shot pure energy bolts rather than solid projectiles, and were likely to obliterate said dumpster rather more quickly.
He stood, delivered some more shots, and quickly ducked down again. Then he repeated the process a few times. Alicia was beginning to get rather disoriented. She could not ascertain much of what was going on but it soon became apparent that the Skreel were being well protected by the alley wall and that by contrast the dumpster was, as predicted, rapidly disintegrating. The man realized this too and quickly ran while it still hid him from their view.
And Alicia noticed as they passed that her father appeared to still be breathing.
“Wait!” she cried again. “That’s my father! I have to help him!”
“All we can do now is shoot him,” he replied, “and I don’t think you would appreciate that.”
They reached the alley entrance and he paused to get his bearings. She could see the figures top the wall, and then they were all obscured from view as the smoke intensified and the distance between them increased. “We have to stop them! Stay and fight!” she insisted.
“No way, sister!”
“Figures, you’re a spineless cretin like all the rest!” she spat.
She felt him stiffen. “I am not,” he said. “I am a very nice person and I have no less than twenty-seven vertebrae. But this isn’t a battle we can win. I’m aiming for one more in my league.” He decided to go forward and to the right, so they did.
As they passed the pillar’s base, a well-dressed but disheveled human emerged from the elevator with an attractive woman clinging fearfully to his arm. Under other circumstances he would have been thrilled by her attention, but then under other circumstances he probably wouldn’t have gotten it. As it was, his concerns lay elsewhere. “Five minutes of Muzak,” he gasped, “and that dreadful shaking. Time to get back to shuffleboard!”
***
They eventually came to a stop in front of the Riko City spaceport’s smoldering ruins. Other beings ran this way and that, clearly having the same logical idea of getting the heck off the planet as fast as possible. Whether their ships were intact was, of course, a different matter entirely. “Docking Bay 42,” the man murmured, squinting through the smoke. “Which way, which way?”
“That way,” said a fleeing spaceport employee.
“Thanks,” he replied, and started in the direction indicated.
“Wait,” said the employee, suddenly catching a better look at the two of them. He frowned. “Lady, is this guy kidnapping you?” he asked Alicia.
She craned her neck to look over her captor’s shoulder. “Yes!”
“Good for him,” said the employee, and continued to flee.
“Why don’t you come with us?” the man called.
“Got things to take care of,” the other called back.
The man shrugged and continued in the indicated direction.
“Sure, give him a choice!” Alicia sputtered.
“He’s a man; he can take care of himself,” came the reply, and this time being welded on couldn’t have stopped her legs from kicking.
He winced suddenly, not from pain, but from the anticipation of it when he rounded a corner and found the next hallway swarming with rats. Giant filthy sewer rats, no less. He didn’t smell a broken line or anything and assumed they were simply fleeing for their lives, and while he couldn’t exactly blame them for wanting to do that he wished they had picked a different route to do it by.
But that didn’t make sense, he realized. The sewer would be a much safer place in these conditions, at least for now.
Though he had no way of knowing it, the local section of sewer just under the floor behind a door had been blown wide open, and the reason he didn’t notice the smell was because it was masked by the much more prevalent odor of the rats right in front of him. These rats had just finished picking clean their many deceased relatives and were just now getting on with the business of fleeing for their lives.
The point is, anyway, that Alicia and her captor needed to escape, and there were giant filthy sewer rats swarming in their path. Alicia was facing away from them but she heard the vicious squeaks, the scrabbling claws, the agonized screams of the occasional rat that couldn’t hold its own in the rat race. Though they were not particularly familiar sounds, they were unmistakable.
“Oh…” she began to feel lightheaded, especially when they began to run between her captor’s legs in full view of her. She couldn’t think clearly enough to find an obscenity suitable for the occasion, so she left it at that.
Rats. For centuries, explorers on the Mother Planet had unwittingly carried them across the oceans to foreign lands, where they invariably wreaked havoc on the local ecosystems, spread diseases, spread parasites that spread diseases, and generally caused nearly as much trouble as the explorers themselves. One would have thought they could rectify this situation, but here they were, over a millennium later, on a colonized planet several light years away. Fortunately in this case the quordlepleens had forced them to retreat to the sewers. Therefore the problem was discovered well after the incident with Leonard J. Smith, and so everyone else simply blamed it on him as well and that was that. Alicia was used to such things, of course, being descended from the explorers like everyone else, but she had no reason to like rats.
“Don’t panic,” the man said softly. “Stare them down. I’ll step right over them. If we don’t panic, they won’t attack. Just stay calm.”
Alicia tried. She held her breath, which was a good idea anyway because of the smell, and watched the living carpet move beneath them.
He stepped cautiously, one foot in front of the other, never taking his eyes off of them. A few scratched at his feet, but quickly lost interest. “Stop shaking like that, doll,” he told her. “The secret is to show them no fear.”
No fear… no fear…
“Docking Bay 42 should be just around that next corner and through a door,” he added soothingly.
No fear… no fear…
“You’re doing good,” he said, gently nudging away a rat that sniffed at his toes a bit too long. “Easy does it.”
No fear… no fear…
Suddenly, a rat darted up his leg, lunged for her foot, darted up her leg, and zipped up the rest of her body onto the top of her head where it seemed content to scratch around and fill her hair with fleas and dirt.
A bloodcurdling scream filled the air. In a moment, Alicia realized it was coming from her, and that she was also wildly thrashing around. Though she couldn’t see it, she imagined, correctly, that it was watching her attempts to throw it off with mocking bemusement.
“Hey now,” said the man, extending his head over her. He gingerly plucked it off and stuffed it into his mouth. The filthy tail protruded, thrashing frantically, for a moment, then quickly went slack and disappeared between his luscious red lips.
Alicia shivered. She hadn’t even seen his teeth.
Suddenly, rats began leaping on them left and right. He broke into a run. Rats did not give chase, being content to chew on their brethren that were crushed to a pulp beneath his pounding feet, but considering their numbers being leaped on was bad enough. “Either you scared the daylights out of ‘em, or they didn’t appreciate me offing their pal like that,” he shouted.
She winced.
“I can get one for you,” he chided.
She shook her head politely, trying not to feel ill. “Thanks,” she said with uncharacteristic sarcasm, “I just had a ferret for lunch.”
He chuckled. “It’s not that barbaric,” he insisted, trying to keep her distracted from the rest of the rats which were still swarming around his feet. “I nerve-pinched it to sleep with my tongue first. Of course,” he added after a moment’s contemplation, during which he slowed down because the rats were thinning out, “that’s completely necessary anyway because the sewer variety can be pretty dang strong, and you never know if one will manage to chew its way right out of your stomach.”
“If mine hadn’t already been emptied, it would be now,” she said. “Please, shut up.” She tried to put her mind on other things. Who did she have left to live for? Well, no one, actually, except –
“Where’s Kaycee!? He’s not with us! Where is he!?”
***
Kaycee had stopped in the street, and not followed them into the alley. This whole time, as he waited patiently like a good little robot, he had been staring, solemnly, at the chaos around him.
If anyone were there to see him and not preoccupied with running for their lives, they would have said he looked mournful, insofar as it is possible for a robot to look mournful.
In fact they would have been exactly right. The scene disturbed him, at a level too deep for words. The empathy towards his Mistress’ father and towards human beings in general, that was part of his natural programming, could hardly explain it all. As he looked at everything going on, the horrible wrongness of it struck him more than anything, and he felt a deep despair settling over his circuits. Several courses of action presented themselves to him, conflicting, overriding; all wrong.
Deep within his robotic soul, something inside of KC-1138 changed that day.
***
“Kaaaaayceeeee!!!” Alicia hollered. She wriggled out of the man’s grasp with a sudden adrenaline rush and ran for the exit, heedless of the few rats which hadn’t cleared out by now and were scattered in her wake.
“Forget him, come on,” he called.
“Bite me,” she told him. “He’s my best friend. Kaaaaaayceeeeee!!!”
“Look,” called the man, “we have to get out of here while we still can. They’re gonna come after us.” Stupid human broads, he thought to himself, what is up with them?
***
A Skreel warrior put down the remains of Alicia’s father and stared at them with immense satisfaction. They were no longer recognizable as anything that had once been alive, but the blood staining its carapace served as a trophy in and of itself, a reminder of this small victory. But there was much more to be done here that would be even more enjoyable.
It motioned to its comrades to keep up, and moved on. The next thing it saw through the smoke was a robot.
The robot was half-waddling, half-shuffling towards it in what was apparently meant to be an endearing manner and is a great trick if you can do it right. It stopped, timidly extended a hand, and stared at the Skreel with benign innocence radiating from every circuit.
“I am KC-1138;” it said, “will you please be my friend?”
The Skreel was momentarily startled. Normally it would have paid absolutely no attention to what was clearly a worthless menial servant robot, wouldn’t have even wasted ammo on it, much less breath. But although it had been taught the Gragallans’ native language, or rather the colonial descendants’ native language which was English, for the sake of better appreciating their pleas for mercy, it could never comprehend that one word, that one pesky little word.
Friend.
The sound was easy enough to pronounce, with practice, even for the alien mechanisms which it employed to do so. The concept it embodied, however, was a different matter. It was completely foreign and mind-shattering to the Skreel, and to this date not a single one of them had managed to comprehend it in any of the trillions of languages in which it appeared. It was elusive, tantalizingly so, not to the point where it consumed their curiosity and delayed them from laying waste to the universe, but at least so that when confronted once more with the word which they had given up on, if there was no perceived immediate threat, they would stop and ponder it once more, trying and perhaps getting a little bit closer each time. There were other words like this, of course – love, charity, and of course, pasta; to name but a few – but Kaycee had picked the one most fitting for his persona, although the Skreel he had encountered were now so absorbed in pondering that it made precious little difference.
He took out the blast rifle he had appropriated and shot them all dead.
***
Alicia and Kaycee nearly ran each other over at one of the seemingly infinite number of corners. “Kaycee!” Alicia exclaimed. “Where the blazes were you?”
“None of your strakking business,” said Kaycee. Fortunately, her pitiful organic ears could not pick up the sounds of his pursuers elsewhere in the building being smothered and torn apart by a blanket of agitated sewer rats.
Alicia looked as if she had been punched in the stomach, but there was no time to dwell on little details now. “Come on,” she said, grabbing his arm, “we’ve got to follow that guy. He might grab me again if I don’t.”
“Whatever,” said Kaycee, but he followed her, or rather he followed the man who had followed her and grabbed her again anyway. Thoughtfully he had thrown her across his shoulder facing forward this time, and she did not see her faithful robot quietly tossing aside a freshly depleted blast rifle.
They had to make several detours through the rubble, but Docking Bay 42 was relatively intact. Only one wall was caved in and the ship looked shiny and brand-spanking new enough to take all four of them.
It was a miracle of technology, a sleek, slender silver arrow with long pointy wings on either side. Mounted on them and the underbelly were an amazing assortment of state-of-the-art weaponry, and the mammoth engines on the ship’s back looked big enough to fry a small moon. The ship resembled, in fact, a seagull with wings raised in lazy flight, aside from its silver coloration and the guns and so forth of course, and since Alicia had seen holograms of seagulls from the Mother Planet, for once the analogy was not lost on her. Spaceships had never terribly interested her, but she couldn’t help being very impressed.
“This must be one mother of a mover…” she said with a whistle.
“Whoops,” said the man, “my mistake. One door over. So hard to tell when the signs are obscured by crap you know.”
Alicia had a bad feeling about this. Her bad feeling was confirmed when, a moment later, they entered what she presumed to actually be Docking Bay 42 and were confronted with a total piece of junk.
It was, basically, a slightly squarish flying saucer with pointed elliptical wings haphazardly tacked on to the sides. They were unified by a black color scheme which was scarred, scratched, burned and pitted now from heaven only knows what. The landing gear which held it two meters off the floor was spindly and seemed about to snap at the slightest vibration. It still dwarfed them considerably, but size was not Alicia’s primary concern.
“Welcome,” said the man proudly, “to the Ankled Apex.”
“The what?” she asked distractedly, trying to take her eyes off one particular bolt which seemed more than a bit loose.
“The Ankled Apex;” he continued, “I’m afraid it lost a bit in the translation.”
***
Back in the streets, the tide was turning slightly. This was because the spineless cretins from the party and elsewhere had finally gotten their act together and decided to do something about not getting killed.
The Chikkiter ran through the Skreel ranks without his gloves on, touching all he could reach. They quickly gunned him down, but moments later nearly two dozen of them collapsed, writhing in apparent agony. At the Pearly Gates, he admitted that it had been a bluff because he hadn’t known if his neurotoxins would actually have an effect on them.
The Kreeb, as advertised, became a homicidal maniac. His comrades gave him a wide berth because he was not discriminating in his selection of victims. Somehow, through the irrational adrenaline of a phobia, he killed nearly three dozen Skreel before he died of exhaustion. At the Pearly Gates, he was still a bit disoriented and went to lie down before consulting with St. Peter.
The train, which had been reassembled, weaved its way through them at its breakneck speed, avoiding blaster bolts and projectiles alike and crushing them with sheer velocity. When one Skreel, more through luck than skill, actually managed to shoot one of its segments, the rest of it simply closed the gap.
Zork gave them his flowers and they spared his life because he assured them he could get more. The reason why was the missing piece of information that Alicia wondered about, but it has little to do with the rest of the situation here.
The Foojoo Floff, still in its moisture tank, scraped its way over to the Quatti who was watching and looking very depressed. “I got you some hydrogen and oxygen stuck together,” it said. “Go blow yourself up and make a heroic sacrifice.”
The Quatti showed it the book. “I can’t,” it admitted sadly.
But there were those who could. Beings with certain pressurized gases being pumped into them for survival found that when the mechanisms responsible were damaged, an impressive explosion occurred. They made sure to stay well away from allies after that and those who could set up automatic destruct mechanisms for the moment their life signs failed.
And Bert Jackson himself helped direct the activity, especially those beings that did not have such keen natural defenses, with skill and intelligence that had never before been apparent. He was a mere human boy, to be sure, but they listened. Very soon he had a significant portion of the Skreel’s ground troops closed in and dwindling fast.
The smoke was unbearable. It scorched his throat and stung his nose with the stench of roasting flesh. Why am I doing this? he wondered. To commemorate his girlfriend, whom he’d left for dead back at the Town Hall? To make up for all these years of ignoring the bigger picture? Or simply to increase his own miserable odds of survival?
Probably that last one, he figured. His odds of survival were looking pretty good now, actually. But it was also true that he’d been branded a coward, if only to himself; and there was only one way to change that now.
Then the tanks hovered in; metal behemoths with guns mounted on the top and sides and no other features to speak of. They spread out to cover the rest of the city, and one remained to bear down on Bert’s makeshift army.
One was enough. A single shot whistled over his head, nearly igniting his hair with its proximity. He fell to his knees and spun around just in time to see debris and bodies go flying. A crater the size of the tank itself appeared underneath them.
Snap. This was not promising.
More shots began to detonate behind him, and he hardly heard the chattering in his ear that nearly made him jump out of his skin. Beside him, he suddenly discovered, was standing a quordlepleen that just as soon would have probably nibbled his ear off. But it seemed to be telling him something, and that something seemed to have something to do with the miraculously undetonated grenade it clutched in its paws.
He tentatively reached for it, but the critter darted away and made a run for the tank. In seconds it was there, and it clambered up the behemoth’s side and leaped for the muzzle of the central gun, down which it promptly shoved the grenade.
The force of the explosion was unable to penetrate the tank’s armor, and was directed inward. It shuddered in the air, and then the top hatch opened. Smoke billowed out as the sole survivor popped up its head to see what was going on, at which point the quordlepleen leaped on it and started biting.
Wow, thought Bert. They really are violent little critters.
That was the last thing he thought before another blast came from close behind and tossed him through the air like a rag doll.
***
Alicia had no intention of setting foot on this oddly named and poorly put together ship, but as usual today her intentions were irrelevant. A ramp lowered to let them in, and the man quickly carried her to the bridge inside the cockpit bubble. There, sitting in front of the complex row of instruments, another alien looked up at them. Without a word he flipped a switch and took the ship up, and Alicia had to admit the flight was smooth; it didn’t even jolt her. Only by looking ahead and watching the clouds could she tell they were moving; and at a great speed.
This out of the way, the alien turned back to them and she got a good look. He was a tall lanky humanoid, but with grey skin and a mouth rather like a duck’s bill, plus teeth; as well as two stiff antennae in place of ears or hair. His wide eyes glistened with naked hunger.
“You brought a snack,” he said to the pink one.
Alicia Parkinson screamed yet again and tried to squirm away. Her captor actually dropped her this time, but she had nowhere to go. He stood in front of the door.
Time seemed to stand still as he leered at her. She could see his teeth, now, between the misleading set of luscious red lips. They looked much like her own, in fact, but were much more massive, and, she could sense, much more able to crush through hard things. For a completely unrelated example, bone.
He reached out one of his large hands… into his fur… and pulled out... a bag of party mix.
He tossed this to his companion, who tore into it voraciously, and smirked down at Alicia. “You thought –”
“– that you were going to eat me, yes!”
“Typical.” He shook his head, which bobbled a bit on his long neck. “Humans. I don’t get why they even assume they taste good.”
“Hey, speak for yourself!” yelled his duckbilled companion. There was an awkward silence. “Just kidding, heh heh,” he added, and suddenly frowned in deep concentration at the party mix. “Aw, come on,” he complained, “you picked out all the cheesy marshmallows! Those are the best!”
The former shrugged. “Hey, next time if you go out and risk your skin gathering refugees, you get first dibs.” He laughed.
“Hey, this ship doesn’t keep falling wreckage off herself, you know.”
“Refugees?” Alicia was adamant about that point, mostly because she was so eager to take her mind off the other, significantly more disturbing thing he had said. “I only see me, myself, and I here!”
“‘Me’ is my new name then, I presume?” snapped Kaycee.
“Sorry Kaycee, I just meant –”
“Hok Tubok and the Bleeming Squeegees are already settling in their cabins,” the new alien reported.
“Sent them here. Didn’t have much more room, or time to go out of my way searching,” added her original captor.
“We’re glad to have you, though;” said the new alien quickly, “what’s your name anyway?”
Alicia scowled. “I’m here under duress and after the treatment I’ve been through,” she snapped, “I’m certainly disinclined to be civil and cooperative.”
“Oh!” He arched his eyes in surprise. “Where are our manners?” He offered the party mix. “Care for a bite?”
“No thank you,” said Alicia, having seen him lick his fingers as he was eating. “Anyway, what I meant was being dragged here by this big pink lunk and not knowing either of your names –”
“You’re right,” said the big pink lunk, offering a hand. “I’m sorry. The name is Roor, Buckton Roor.”
“Buckton.” She tried the word out on her tongue as she shook the proffered hand. It sounded to her more like a small patch of dirt masquerading as a town in a larger patch of dirt masquerading as a county in the middle of nowhere than an alien’s name, but then the thing about aliens was that they were so unpredictably alien.
“And that over there is Zickle Farbreing,” Buckton added, gesturing to his friend, who waved and said “Hi, call me Zick.”
Alicia looked the two over as a pair. They looked like a classic mismatched comic relief duo, to be sure. Furthermore their eyes shared the same look of manic restlessness which sort of disturbed her.
“So now,” said Buckton, “tell us who you are.”
She hesitated.
“Look,” he pressed, “you’re stuck here for a while, which I might add is the only reason you aren’t dead, so you may as well learn to get along with us.”
“Parkinson,” she said at last. “Alicia Parkinson.”
“It’s all right, we won’t hold it against you,” said Zick, looking at her sympathetically as he picked a bit of black licorice from his teeth.
Alicia felt her temper rising. This was too much. “Look,” she snapped, “ever since I met one of you freaks I’ve been kidnapped, humiliated, insulted and on top of it all not allowed to say goodbye to my dead father. I’ve had it up to –”
“Sorry, but you’ll have to shut up for a while,” Zick said, “because we’ll be too preoccupied to listen. Skreel blockade coming up.” He eased up on the controls and they slowed to a crawl. Physically, Alicia wasn’t jolted in the slightest, but her emotions went through a nasty shock as she looked out the viewport and confirmed his words.
“Fiddlesticks,” muttered Buckton, and jumped into a seat next to him. He sighed. “Remember I said I’m aiming for a battle more in my league?” he asked Alicia.
She nodded dumbly as her blood ran cold.
“Well, this is it,” he said, even as the enemy ships began turning slowly, but not slowly enough, to face them. “Strap yourself in.”
Her mind not working, she moved like a zombie into a seat next to him. There were at least fifteen seats in front of the control panel, able to maneuver away and around each other so that as many people could easily share the controls. Most of the essentials, of course, were in the same spot, directly in front of Buckton and Zick.
And the blockade ships, well, they were incredibly massive things. Alicia didn’t even try to approximate a guess, but they were big. They were shaped like upended wastebaskets with windows and weaponry across every available surface. At the wide end there was a tower which contained its sensor and deflector shield arrays. Why these were left vulnerable like that she didn’t know either, but it wasn’t really much of a comfort.
“I should hope you’re better at blowing giant ships up than you are at interacting with the ladies,” Kaycee said dryly. “If not please let me know, so I can prepare for oblivion properly.” Both pilots ignored him.
This snapped Alicia out of her trance. She glanced sidelong at Kaycee. This, like his other behavior of late, was not like him at all. “What’s happened to you?” she queried.
“None of your strakking business,” he replied.
That phrase again. It worried her. First of all, domestic servant robots weren’t supposed to be able to swear, at all. Second of all, and this was the part that really concerned her, they weren’t supposed to be capable of speaking rudely to humans and especially not refusing answers to direct questions. Perhaps someone tooled about with him while I was at the party? she wondered. But no, he had saved her life, and when he’d said “The robot is present and accounted for, Mistress Parkinson” it wasn’t with the sarcastic bite that now filled his every sentence.
Saved her life. Before he changed. And started acting the way robots aren’t supposed to act.
Would he save her life now? Could he even be trusted?
Would he kill her himself?
Alicia shivered. Stop that, she ordered herself. That’s no way to think. There was certainly enough on her proverbial plate already. The life she once knew had been forcibly blown away in less than an hour, and here she was about to die in someone else’s battle without ever getting the chance to join her own. After all, they couldn’t possibly stand up to this many ships, not with the piece of junk they were in, not with anything.
As if to emphasize that statement, one of them chose this moment to launch a couple dozen massive titanium-plated warheads. They tore through the empty vacuum at an incredible speed, and would not only tear through the Apex with little more trouble but blow it up into the bargain.
“Calculated impact time thirty seconds,” said a computerized voice. With more than a little cursing they swerved hard to port, but the missiles effortlessly moved to follow them. Furthermore, they seemed to be gaining momentum. In fact it should be clarified at this point: they did not only seem to be gaining momentum, they were gaining momentum.
“If you have any prayers left, say them now,” added the voice.
Despairingly, Alicia glanced out the rear of the cockpit bubble for a last look at her beautiful home planet and saw something incredible. The skies of Gragalla were obscured by the space traffic, not just from Riko City but beyond, from the whole world it seemed. It had only come after their departure, and she realized everyone else was following their lead.
These guys must have a reputation.
She reassessed them yet again. That look in their eyes she had noticed, she knew where to place it now. They were rogues of the highest degree. The sort of arrogant, cocky, devil-may-care rogues who take all kinds of crazy risks and always come out on top. Though the going may get rough, rogues like that never died, as if their guardian angels were just as good at their jobs as them. And furthermore, she remembered, their ships frequently looked like pieces of junk.
Alicia settled more comfortably into her seat as the missiles loomed closer and closer, to the point where she could have read the brand label, had there been any. She felt much better now.
“Impact time five seconds,” said the computer. “I hope you guys are finished praying.”
“Fancy that,” said Zick suddenly. “Shuffleboard off the starboard bow.”
Next: Chapter Four
“Is this a trick question? I’m saving you,” replied the creature, throwing her over his shoulder and making a run for it.
Alicia tried to explain patiently that she had no wish to be saved, at least not while draped over the shoulder of some huge lunk and facing in the wrong direction, by letting her legs be spokespersons and kick furiously at said lunk; but his arm pressed them to his chest and they may as well have been welded there. Apparently she and they both were going to have to cope for a while.
“I don’t even know you!” she cried, switching tactics.
The first thing she had noticed about him, beyond what she had glimpsed through the smoke, was that he was pink.
The long hair which covered his body and stuck straight out, making him resemble a large puffball, was a light shade of pink. His massive limbs and his head, which was attached to a very stretchable neck in front of his body and merely came up for observational purposes, were darker pink. His lips were luscious and red, but that was beside the point.
Unlike Kahlo Kache, whose present (actually future, as it took place a few hours after this – never mind, don’t worry about it) situation was enviable from theirs, this creature, who can safely be called a man because he was intelligent, male, and more importantly had no intention of eating poor Alicia, also had a great deal of experience exercising his wit in life-threatening situations. “That’s right,” he said, not breaking stride, “don’t trust strangers. It’s a much better idea to stay here and face certain death.”
Hey, no one said it was a sharp wit. And by the way, for those of you who are still thinking from the last paragraph that “intelligent” and “male” create an oxymoron, you are probably right, but that really has nothing to do with anything so get over it and read the rest of the story, okay?
“But I can’t leave,” Alicia protested. “My boyfriend – my family – my robot –”
“The robot is present and accounted for, Mistress Parkinson!” called Kaycee, who was suddenly right behind them. Further behind them they heard the deafening crash of the Town Hall building toppling to the ground – and through, among other things, Alicia’s house.
“No!” she shrieked. But she quickly realized that the house had already been evacuated, as her father ran up to greet her, obviously having anticipated that she would return home. He gestured for them to follow into a small alleyway for cover, and her captor reluctantly obliged, rolling his eyes and muttering impatiently.
“Alicia,” he gasped, “you’re safe.” He clearly wanted to hug her but this was made impossible by the large bulk over whose shoulder she was still thrown. “You may put my daughter down, please, Mr. –?”
“Tell you later, after we blow this joint.” He extended a hand but made no move towards putting Alicia down.
Mr. Parkinson shook the proffered hand hastily and said, “Thank you very much for saving my daughter, but please put her down now.”
“Can’t,” said the man, “I’m saving her. It’s rather important.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Where’s Mom, and Gina?” Alicia demanded.
“They are someplace safe,” her father insisted, “for the moment.” Tears came to his eyes. “Now do you see, why I was so keen to keep you away from The War? Do you see what I was protecting you from?”
“Yeah,” said Alicia dryly, “Thanks. I can see it did a lot of good.”
“I had no way of foreseeing this!”
“Look around you! This has been happening to billions of worlds since The War started! This is what people are fighting to stop! This is what I could have prevented!”
“You would have died and it would have happened anyway.”
“Well, it’s happened anyway and I’m going to die. Wow, this is so much better! Thank you, dad!” She tried to remember what Kaycee had told her earlier about his love, but it was all going fuzzy. She was just too frustrated.
“There’s a safe place with Mom and Gina. Come along.”
“No, I’m taking her to my ship,” said the other man. “Come with us.”
“I can’t, my wife and other daughter are –”
“Get them too! But hurry!”
“They are somewhere very safe. Come along, Alicia, we have to join them.”
“There is no place safe on this planet anymore. I am taking her to my ship.”
“Over my dead body.”
Suddenly he was a dead body, or at least on the way to becoming one, which simplified that situation but surely for all that wasn’t a good thing. An electro-javelin had just gone through his groin and continued on, barely missing Alicia and her captor who jumped with reflexes surprising in one so large. It whizzed past and sunk into the wreckage of the Town Hall building across the street.
She shivered. She’d felt the weapon graze her hair. But the fear was quickly overridden by despair, a feeling of despair deeper than any she had ever known. She looked at her father, who was blinking in surprise more than pain, and realized she could never feel deeper despair, any more than she could ever feel happy again. He collapsed at her feet without time to utter moving last words. Tears began coming to her eyes.
“Oh gratz,” said her captor, turning and backing off.
“Wait!” cried Alicia, shaken out of her despairing trance. She twisted around. Behind them she saw another figure emerging through the smoke, atop the alley wall. This one she could hardly make out, but somehow it radiated menace and foreboding, and was clearly not about to rescue anybody.
The man shifted her over with more than a slight bounce and pulled a sidearm from somewhere deep within his thick fur. He popped off a couple of shots at the figure, which screeched like shards of rusty steel on a chalkboard and fell headfirst over the wall. Half a dozen more quickly appeared in its place.
He dove behind a conveniently situated dumpster as they returned fire with their own weapons, which were, unlike the javelin, of a more common variety which shot pure energy bolts rather than solid projectiles, and were likely to obliterate said dumpster rather more quickly.
He stood, delivered some more shots, and quickly ducked down again. Then he repeated the process a few times. Alicia was beginning to get rather disoriented. She could not ascertain much of what was going on but it soon became apparent that the Skreel were being well protected by the alley wall and that by contrast the dumpster was, as predicted, rapidly disintegrating. The man realized this too and quickly ran while it still hid him from their view.
And Alicia noticed as they passed that her father appeared to still be breathing.
“Wait!” she cried again. “That’s my father! I have to help him!”
“All we can do now is shoot him,” he replied, “and I don’t think you would appreciate that.”
They reached the alley entrance and he paused to get his bearings. She could see the figures top the wall, and then they were all obscured from view as the smoke intensified and the distance between them increased. “We have to stop them! Stay and fight!” she insisted.
“No way, sister!”
“Figures, you’re a spineless cretin like all the rest!” she spat.
She felt him stiffen. “I am not,” he said. “I am a very nice person and I have no less than twenty-seven vertebrae. But this isn’t a battle we can win. I’m aiming for one more in my league.” He decided to go forward and to the right, so they did.
As they passed the pillar’s base, a well-dressed but disheveled human emerged from the elevator with an attractive woman clinging fearfully to his arm. Under other circumstances he would have been thrilled by her attention, but then under other circumstances he probably wouldn’t have gotten it. As it was, his concerns lay elsewhere. “Five minutes of Muzak,” he gasped, “and that dreadful shaking. Time to get back to shuffleboard!”
***
They eventually came to a stop in front of the Riko City spaceport’s smoldering ruins. Other beings ran this way and that, clearly having the same logical idea of getting the heck off the planet as fast as possible. Whether their ships were intact was, of course, a different matter entirely. “Docking Bay 42,” the man murmured, squinting through the smoke. “Which way, which way?”
“That way,” said a fleeing spaceport employee.
“Thanks,” he replied, and started in the direction indicated.
“Wait,” said the employee, suddenly catching a better look at the two of them. He frowned. “Lady, is this guy kidnapping you?” he asked Alicia.
She craned her neck to look over her captor’s shoulder. “Yes!”
“Good for him,” said the employee, and continued to flee.
“Why don’t you come with us?” the man called.
“Got things to take care of,” the other called back.
The man shrugged and continued in the indicated direction.
“Sure, give him a choice!” Alicia sputtered.
“He’s a man; he can take care of himself,” came the reply, and this time being welded on couldn’t have stopped her legs from kicking.
He winced suddenly, not from pain, but from the anticipation of it when he rounded a corner and found the next hallway swarming with rats. Giant filthy sewer rats, no less. He didn’t smell a broken line or anything and assumed they were simply fleeing for their lives, and while he couldn’t exactly blame them for wanting to do that he wished they had picked a different route to do it by.
But that didn’t make sense, he realized. The sewer would be a much safer place in these conditions, at least for now.
Though he had no way of knowing it, the local section of sewer just under the floor behind a door had been blown wide open, and the reason he didn’t notice the smell was because it was masked by the much more prevalent odor of the rats right in front of him. These rats had just finished picking clean their many deceased relatives and were just now getting on with the business of fleeing for their lives.
The point is, anyway, that Alicia and her captor needed to escape, and there were giant filthy sewer rats swarming in their path. Alicia was facing away from them but she heard the vicious squeaks, the scrabbling claws, the agonized screams of the occasional rat that couldn’t hold its own in the rat race. Though they were not particularly familiar sounds, they were unmistakable.
“Oh…” she began to feel lightheaded, especially when they began to run between her captor’s legs in full view of her. She couldn’t think clearly enough to find an obscenity suitable for the occasion, so she left it at that.
Rats. For centuries, explorers on the Mother Planet had unwittingly carried them across the oceans to foreign lands, where they invariably wreaked havoc on the local ecosystems, spread diseases, spread parasites that spread diseases, and generally caused nearly as much trouble as the explorers themselves. One would have thought they could rectify this situation, but here they were, over a millennium later, on a colonized planet several light years away. Fortunately in this case the quordlepleens had forced them to retreat to the sewers. Therefore the problem was discovered well after the incident with Leonard J. Smith, and so everyone else simply blamed it on him as well and that was that. Alicia was used to such things, of course, being descended from the explorers like everyone else, but she had no reason to like rats.
“Don’t panic,” the man said softly. “Stare them down. I’ll step right over them. If we don’t panic, they won’t attack. Just stay calm.”
Alicia tried. She held her breath, which was a good idea anyway because of the smell, and watched the living carpet move beneath them.
He stepped cautiously, one foot in front of the other, never taking his eyes off of them. A few scratched at his feet, but quickly lost interest. “Stop shaking like that, doll,” he told her. “The secret is to show them no fear.”
No fear… no fear…
“Docking Bay 42 should be just around that next corner and through a door,” he added soothingly.
No fear… no fear…
“You’re doing good,” he said, gently nudging away a rat that sniffed at his toes a bit too long. “Easy does it.”
No fear… no fear…
Suddenly, a rat darted up his leg, lunged for her foot, darted up her leg, and zipped up the rest of her body onto the top of her head where it seemed content to scratch around and fill her hair with fleas and dirt.
A bloodcurdling scream filled the air. In a moment, Alicia realized it was coming from her, and that she was also wildly thrashing around. Though she couldn’t see it, she imagined, correctly, that it was watching her attempts to throw it off with mocking bemusement.
“Hey now,” said the man, extending his head over her. He gingerly plucked it off and stuffed it into his mouth. The filthy tail protruded, thrashing frantically, for a moment, then quickly went slack and disappeared between his luscious red lips.
Alicia shivered. She hadn’t even seen his teeth.
Suddenly, rats began leaping on them left and right. He broke into a run. Rats did not give chase, being content to chew on their brethren that were crushed to a pulp beneath his pounding feet, but considering their numbers being leaped on was bad enough. “Either you scared the daylights out of ‘em, or they didn’t appreciate me offing their pal like that,” he shouted.
She winced.
“I can get one for you,” he chided.
She shook her head politely, trying not to feel ill. “Thanks,” she said with uncharacteristic sarcasm, “I just had a ferret for lunch.”
He chuckled. “It’s not that barbaric,” he insisted, trying to keep her distracted from the rest of the rats which were still swarming around his feet. “I nerve-pinched it to sleep with my tongue first. Of course,” he added after a moment’s contemplation, during which he slowed down because the rats were thinning out, “that’s completely necessary anyway because the sewer variety can be pretty dang strong, and you never know if one will manage to chew its way right out of your stomach.”
“If mine hadn’t already been emptied, it would be now,” she said. “Please, shut up.” She tried to put her mind on other things. Who did she have left to live for? Well, no one, actually, except –
“Where’s Kaycee!? He’s not with us! Where is he!?”
***
Kaycee had stopped in the street, and not followed them into the alley. This whole time, as he waited patiently like a good little robot, he had been staring, solemnly, at the chaos around him.
If anyone were there to see him and not preoccupied with running for their lives, they would have said he looked mournful, insofar as it is possible for a robot to look mournful.
In fact they would have been exactly right. The scene disturbed him, at a level too deep for words. The empathy towards his Mistress’ father and towards human beings in general, that was part of his natural programming, could hardly explain it all. As he looked at everything going on, the horrible wrongness of it struck him more than anything, and he felt a deep despair settling over his circuits. Several courses of action presented themselves to him, conflicting, overriding; all wrong.
Deep within his robotic soul, something inside of KC-1138 changed that day.
***
“Kaaaaayceeeee!!!” Alicia hollered. She wriggled out of the man’s grasp with a sudden adrenaline rush and ran for the exit, heedless of the few rats which hadn’t cleared out by now and were scattered in her wake.
“Forget him, come on,” he called.
“Bite me,” she told him. “He’s my best friend. Kaaaaaayceeeeee!!!”
“Look,” called the man, “we have to get out of here while we still can. They’re gonna come after us.” Stupid human broads, he thought to himself, what is up with them?
***
A Skreel warrior put down the remains of Alicia’s father and stared at them with immense satisfaction. They were no longer recognizable as anything that had once been alive, but the blood staining its carapace served as a trophy in and of itself, a reminder of this small victory. But there was much more to be done here that would be even more enjoyable.
It motioned to its comrades to keep up, and moved on. The next thing it saw through the smoke was a robot.
The robot was half-waddling, half-shuffling towards it in what was apparently meant to be an endearing manner and is a great trick if you can do it right. It stopped, timidly extended a hand, and stared at the Skreel with benign innocence radiating from every circuit.
“I am KC-1138;” it said, “will you please be my friend?”
The Skreel was momentarily startled. Normally it would have paid absolutely no attention to what was clearly a worthless menial servant robot, wouldn’t have even wasted ammo on it, much less breath. But although it had been taught the Gragallans’ native language, or rather the colonial descendants’ native language which was English, for the sake of better appreciating their pleas for mercy, it could never comprehend that one word, that one pesky little word.
Friend.
The sound was easy enough to pronounce, with practice, even for the alien mechanisms which it employed to do so. The concept it embodied, however, was a different matter. It was completely foreign and mind-shattering to the Skreel, and to this date not a single one of them had managed to comprehend it in any of the trillions of languages in which it appeared. It was elusive, tantalizingly so, not to the point where it consumed their curiosity and delayed them from laying waste to the universe, but at least so that when confronted once more with the word which they had given up on, if there was no perceived immediate threat, they would stop and ponder it once more, trying and perhaps getting a little bit closer each time. There were other words like this, of course – love, charity, and of course, pasta; to name but a few – but Kaycee had picked the one most fitting for his persona, although the Skreel he had encountered were now so absorbed in pondering that it made precious little difference.
He took out the blast rifle he had appropriated and shot them all dead.
***
Alicia and Kaycee nearly ran each other over at one of the seemingly infinite number of corners. “Kaycee!” Alicia exclaimed. “Where the blazes were you?”
“None of your strakking business,” said Kaycee. Fortunately, her pitiful organic ears could not pick up the sounds of his pursuers elsewhere in the building being smothered and torn apart by a blanket of agitated sewer rats.
Alicia looked as if she had been punched in the stomach, but there was no time to dwell on little details now. “Come on,” she said, grabbing his arm, “we’ve got to follow that guy. He might grab me again if I don’t.”
“Whatever,” said Kaycee, but he followed her, or rather he followed the man who had followed her and grabbed her again anyway. Thoughtfully he had thrown her across his shoulder facing forward this time, and she did not see her faithful robot quietly tossing aside a freshly depleted blast rifle.
They had to make several detours through the rubble, but Docking Bay 42 was relatively intact. Only one wall was caved in and the ship looked shiny and brand-spanking new enough to take all four of them.
It was a miracle of technology, a sleek, slender silver arrow with long pointy wings on either side. Mounted on them and the underbelly were an amazing assortment of state-of-the-art weaponry, and the mammoth engines on the ship’s back looked big enough to fry a small moon. The ship resembled, in fact, a seagull with wings raised in lazy flight, aside from its silver coloration and the guns and so forth of course, and since Alicia had seen holograms of seagulls from the Mother Planet, for once the analogy was not lost on her. Spaceships had never terribly interested her, but she couldn’t help being very impressed.
“This must be one mother of a mover…” she said with a whistle.
“Whoops,” said the man, “my mistake. One door over. So hard to tell when the signs are obscured by crap you know.”
Alicia had a bad feeling about this. Her bad feeling was confirmed when, a moment later, they entered what she presumed to actually be Docking Bay 42 and were confronted with a total piece of junk.
It was, basically, a slightly squarish flying saucer with pointed elliptical wings haphazardly tacked on to the sides. They were unified by a black color scheme which was scarred, scratched, burned and pitted now from heaven only knows what. The landing gear which held it two meters off the floor was spindly and seemed about to snap at the slightest vibration. It still dwarfed them considerably, but size was not Alicia’s primary concern.
“Welcome,” said the man proudly, “to the Ankled Apex.”
“The what?” she asked distractedly, trying to take her eyes off one particular bolt which seemed more than a bit loose.
“The Ankled Apex;” he continued, “I’m afraid it lost a bit in the translation.”
***
Back in the streets, the tide was turning slightly. This was because the spineless cretins from the party and elsewhere had finally gotten their act together and decided to do something about not getting killed.
The Chikkiter ran through the Skreel ranks without his gloves on, touching all he could reach. They quickly gunned him down, but moments later nearly two dozen of them collapsed, writhing in apparent agony. At the Pearly Gates, he admitted that it had been a bluff because he hadn’t known if his neurotoxins would actually have an effect on them.
The Kreeb, as advertised, became a homicidal maniac. His comrades gave him a wide berth because he was not discriminating in his selection of victims. Somehow, through the irrational adrenaline of a phobia, he killed nearly three dozen Skreel before he died of exhaustion. At the Pearly Gates, he was still a bit disoriented and went to lie down before consulting with St. Peter.
The train, which had been reassembled, weaved its way through them at its breakneck speed, avoiding blaster bolts and projectiles alike and crushing them with sheer velocity. When one Skreel, more through luck than skill, actually managed to shoot one of its segments, the rest of it simply closed the gap.
Zork gave them his flowers and they spared his life because he assured them he could get more. The reason why was the missing piece of information that Alicia wondered about, but it has little to do with the rest of the situation here.
The Foojoo Floff, still in its moisture tank, scraped its way over to the Quatti who was watching and looking very depressed. “I got you some hydrogen and oxygen stuck together,” it said. “Go blow yourself up and make a heroic sacrifice.”
The Quatti showed it the book. “I can’t,” it admitted sadly.
But there were those who could. Beings with certain pressurized gases being pumped into them for survival found that when the mechanisms responsible were damaged, an impressive explosion occurred. They made sure to stay well away from allies after that and those who could set up automatic destruct mechanisms for the moment their life signs failed.
And Bert Jackson himself helped direct the activity, especially those beings that did not have such keen natural defenses, with skill and intelligence that had never before been apparent. He was a mere human boy, to be sure, but they listened. Very soon he had a significant portion of the Skreel’s ground troops closed in and dwindling fast.
The smoke was unbearable. It scorched his throat and stung his nose with the stench of roasting flesh. Why am I doing this? he wondered. To commemorate his girlfriend, whom he’d left for dead back at the Town Hall? To make up for all these years of ignoring the bigger picture? Or simply to increase his own miserable odds of survival?
Probably that last one, he figured. His odds of survival were looking pretty good now, actually. But it was also true that he’d been branded a coward, if only to himself; and there was only one way to change that now.
Then the tanks hovered in; metal behemoths with guns mounted on the top and sides and no other features to speak of. They spread out to cover the rest of the city, and one remained to bear down on Bert’s makeshift army.
One was enough. A single shot whistled over his head, nearly igniting his hair with its proximity. He fell to his knees and spun around just in time to see debris and bodies go flying. A crater the size of the tank itself appeared underneath them.
Snap. This was not promising.
More shots began to detonate behind him, and he hardly heard the chattering in his ear that nearly made him jump out of his skin. Beside him, he suddenly discovered, was standing a quordlepleen that just as soon would have probably nibbled his ear off. But it seemed to be telling him something, and that something seemed to have something to do with the miraculously undetonated grenade it clutched in its paws.
He tentatively reached for it, but the critter darted away and made a run for the tank. In seconds it was there, and it clambered up the behemoth’s side and leaped for the muzzle of the central gun, down which it promptly shoved the grenade.
The force of the explosion was unable to penetrate the tank’s armor, and was directed inward. It shuddered in the air, and then the top hatch opened. Smoke billowed out as the sole survivor popped up its head to see what was going on, at which point the quordlepleen leaped on it and started biting.
Wow, thought Bert. They really are violent little critters.
That was the last thing he thought before another blast came from close behind and tossed him through the air like a rag doll.
***
Alicia had no intention of setting foot on this oddly named and poorly put together ship, but as usual today her intentions were irrelevant. A ramp lowered to let them in, and the man quickly carried her to the bridge inside the cockpit bubble. There, sitting in front of the complex row of instruments, another alien looked up at them. Without a word he flipped a switch and took the ship up, and Alicia had to admit the flight was smooth; it didn’t even jolt her. Only by looking ahead and watching the clouds could she tell they were moving; and at a great speed.
This out of the way, the alien turned back to them and she got a good look. He was a tall lanky humanoid, but with grey skin and a mouth rather like a duck’s bill, plus teeth; as well as two stiff antennae in place of ears or hair. His wide eyes glistened with naked hunger.
“You brought a snack,” he said to the pink one.
Alicia Parkinson screamed yet again and tried to squirm away. Her captor actually dropped her this time, but she had nowhere to go. He stood in front of the door.
Time seemed to stand still as he leered at her. She could see his teeth, now, between the misleading set of luscious red lips. They looked much like her own, in fact, but were much more massive, and, she could sense, much more able to crush through hard things. For a completely unrelated example, bone.
He reached out one of his large hands… into his fur… and pulled out... a bag of party mix.
He tossed this to his companion, who tore into it voraciously, and smirked down at Alicia. “You thought –”
“– that you were going to eat me, yes!”
“Typical.” He shook his head, which bobbled a bit on his long neck. “Humans. I don’t get why they even assume they taste good.”
“Hey, speak for yourself!” yelled his duckbilled companion. There was an awkward silence. “Just kidding, heh heh,” he added, and suddenly frowned in deep concentration at the party mix. “Aw, come on,” he complained, “you picked out all the cheesy marshmallows! Those are the best!”
The former shrugged. “Hey, next time if you go out and risk your skin gathering refugees, you get first dibs.” He laughed.
“Hey, this ship doesn’t keep falling wreckage off herself, you know.”
“Refugees?” Alicia was adamant about that point, mostly because she was so eager to take her mind off the other, significantly more disturbing thing he had said. “I only see me, myself, and I here!”
“‘Me’ is my new name then, I presume?” snapped Kaycee.
“Sorry Kaycee, I just meant –”
“Hok Tubok and the Bleeming Squeegees are already settling in their cabins,” the new alien reported.
“Sent them here. Didn’t have much more room, or time to go out of my way searching,” added her original captor.
“We’re glad to have you, though;” said the new alien quickly, “what’s your name anyway?”
Alicia scowled. “I’m here under duress and after the treatment I’ve been through,” she snapped, “I’m certainly disinclined to be civil and cooperative.”
“Oh!” He arched his eyes in surprise. “Where are our manners?” He offered the party mix. “Care for a bite?”
“No thank you,” said Alicia, having seen him lick his fingers as he was eating. “Anyway, what I meant was being dragged here by this big pink lunk and not knowing either of your names –”
“You’re right,” said the big pink lunk, offering a hand. “I’m sorry. The name is Roor, Buckton Roor.”
“Buckton.” She tried the word out on her tongue as she shook the proffered hand. It sounded to her more like a small patch of dirt masquerading as a town in a larger patch of dirt masquerading as a county in the middle of nowhere than an alien’s name, but then the thing about aliens was that they were so unpredictably alien.
“And that over there is Zickle Farbreing,” Buckton added, gesturing to his friend, who waved and said “Hi, call me Zick.”
Alicia looked the two over as a pair. They looked like a classic mismatched comic relief duo, to be sure. Furthermore their eyes shared the same look of manic restlessness which sort of disturbed her.
“So now,” said Buckton, “tell us who you are.”
She hesitated.
“Look,” he pressed, “you’re stuck here for a while, which I might add is the only reason you aren’t dead, so you may as well learn to get along with us.”
“Parkinson,” she said at last. “Alicia Parkinson.”
“It’s all right, we won’t hold it against you,” said Zick, looking at her sympathetically as he picked a bit of black licorice from his teeth.
Alicia felt her temper rising. This was too much. “Look,” she snapped, “ever since I met one of you freaks I’ve been kidnapped, humiliated, insulted and on top of it all not allowed to say goodbye to my dead father. I’ve had it up to –”
“Sorry, but you’ll have to shut up for a while,” Zick said, “because we’ll be too preoccupied to listen. Skreel blockade coming up.” He eased up on the controls and they slowed to a crawl. Physically, Alicia wasn’t jolted in the slightest, but her emotions went through a nasty shock as she looked out the viewport and confirmed his words.
“Fiddlesticks,” muttered Buckton, and jumped into a seat next to him. He sighed. “Remember I said I’m aiming for a battle more in my league?” he asked Alicia.
She nodded dumbly as her blood ran cold.
“Well, this is it,” he said, even as the enemy ships began turning slowly, but not slowly enough, to face them. “Strap yourself in.”
Her mind not working, she moved like a zombie into a seat next to him. There were at least fifteen seats in front of the control panel, able to maneuver away and around each other so that as many people could easily share the controls. Most of the essentials, of course, were in the same spot, directly in front of Buckton and Zick.
And the blockade ships, well, they were incredibly massive things. Alicia didn’t even try to approximate a guess, but they were big. They were shaped like upended wastebaskets with windows and weaponry across every available surface. At the wide end there was a tower which contained its sensor and deflector shield arrays. Why these were left vulnerable like that she didn’t know either, but it wasn’t really much of a comfort.
“I should hope you’re better at blowing giant ships up than you are at interacting with the ladies,” Kaycee said dryly. “If not please let me know, so I can prepare for oblivion properly.” Both pilots ignored him.
This snapped Alicia out of her trance. She glanced sidelong at Kaycee. This, like his other behavior of late, was not like him at all. “What’s happened to you?” she queried.
“None of your strakking business,” he replied.
That phrase again. It worried her. First of all, domestic servant robots weren’t supposed to be able to swear, at all. Second of all, and this was the part that really concerned her, they weren’t supposed to be capable of speaking rudely to humans and especially not refusing answers to direct questions. Perhaps someone tooled about with him while I was at the party? she wondered. But no, he had saved her life, and when he’d said “The robot is present and accounted for, Mistress Parkinson” it wasn’t with the sarcastic bite that now filled his every sentence.
Saved her life. Before he changed. And started acting the way robots aren’t supposed to act.
Would he save her life now? Could he even be trusted?
Would he kill her himself?
Alicia shivered. Stop that, she ordered herself. That’s no way to think. There was certainly enough on her proverbial plate already. The life she once knew had been forcibly blown away in less than an hour, and here she was about to die in someone else’s battle without ever getting the chance to join her own. After all, they couldn’t possibly stand up to this many ships, not with the piece of junk they were in, not with anything.
As if to emphasize that statement, one of them chose this moment to launch a couple dozen massive titanium-plated warheads. They tore through the empty vacuum at an incredible speed, and would not only tear through the Apex with little more trouble but blow it up into the bargain.
“Calculated impact time thirty seconds,” said a computerized voice. With more than a little cursing they swerved hard to port, but the missiles effortlessly moved to follow them. Furthermore, they seemed to be gaining momentum. In fact it should be clarified at this point: they did not only seem to be gaining momentum, they were gaining momentum.
“If you have any prayers left, say them now,” added the voice.
Despairingly, Alicia glanced out the rear of the cockpit bubble for a last look at her beautiful home planet and saw something incredible. The skies of Gragalla were obscured by the space traffic, not just from Riko City but beyond, from the whole world it seemed. It had only come after their departure, and she realized everyone else was following their lead.
These guys must have a reputation.
She reassessed them yet again. That look in their eyes she had noticed, she knew where to place it now. They were rogues of the highest degree. The sort of arrogant, cocky, devil-may-care rogues who take all kinds of crazy risks and always come out on top. Though the going may get rough, rogues like that never died, as if their guardian angels were just as good at their jobs as them. And furthermore, she remembered, their ships frequently looked like pieces of junk.
Alicia settled more comfortably into her seat as the missiles loomed closer and closer, to the point where she could have read the brand label, had there been any. She felt much better now.
“Impact time five seconds,” said the computer. “I hope you guys are finished praying.”
“Fancy that,” said Zick suddenly. “Shuffleboard off the starboard bow.”
Next: Chapter Four
