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“AIM! FIRE!… FUCK!”
There are shouts of disappointment in the mid-distance, followed by what I hope is a belated discharge of the weapon. I see a dozen flashes of light go up from the forest and into the sky, joining together as they rise upward. Singly, those bolts wouldn’t do much damage to the Mare’s shielding, but together their force is exponentially multiplied.
I watch that ball of power flash through the heavens, hoping I don’t see it hit something unseen and spread out into a true explosion. I know how that will look. At first there will just be an oddly-shaped light, but very quickly the ship will blink into visual range as the cloaking devices fail. Then burning bits will start to rain downward like a super low meteor shower.
Fortunately, none of that happens. The ball shoots upward, then starts to dissipate as it loses charge and finds no solid object. I breathe a sigh of relief. That was a close call. Either these saurians would have killed a lot of the crew or captured them. The latter is probably worse than the former given the conversation I overheard.
I just need to lie low and make it to the next rendezvous point. We know that the captain and, well, the other captain are both being held inside the city proper. At last check, they were located inside the largest residence, the one belonging to the city’s alpha.
It’s practically impossible to reach that residence. Not only is it under heightened guard after what must have been recent events of some kind or another. What, we don’t know. We have been trying to keep surveillance tabs on the captain and the other captain, but Sullivan has been largely confined to the alpha’s residence since she made a bold escape attempt, and Raine threw herself off a cliff twice before being similarly confined. I wonder how they’re getting on in that house together. My guess? They’re fighting like tomcats.
I hope Sullivan and Raine can overcome their differences and work together to get out of captivity. They’re going to need each other, and we are going to need both of them to get off this planet. The crew is unanimous: we’re not leaving anybody behind. But we’re also not going to take insane risks in order to rescue the captain and… the other captain. We’re going to bide our time, wait for the best opportunity, and take it when the time is right.
We’re also going to do what we can to fill the ship’s coffers. That’s why I’ve been tailing these outlaws. Listening to them has been incredibly instructive and absolutely horrifying. They have recently come into some ore reserves which sound like they’d be valuable.
I start moving through the undergrowth, heading away from the criminals and toward the city. I want to try to hit the next rendezvous point as fast as possible, but that might not mean I’m safe. The outlaws can see the ship, and that means we’re going to have to find some way to operate in plain sight.
I’m thinking we use the docks. There are interstellar vessels moving through that space all the time. It’s possible the Mare could dock and I could board there, right in the heart of the city. I like that plan. It’s bold and it’s workable. Yeah. That’s going to be the method I float once they come back into communication range.
A flitter of movement at the peripheral of my vision is all the warning I get before I am grabbed.
“SHAN GOT ONE!”
A saurian starts yelling at the top of his lungs while another saurian carries me nearly upside down. He grabbed me by the suit over my hip and I’ve rotated around that axis as his big alien hand grips me tight and hoists me aloft.
“They’re down here?”
“It’s a female! It’s pretty!” Mr Shouty keeps shouting.
The saurian holding me turns me around in his grip and inspects me, though he doesn’t actually turn me around the right way. He must like the way I’m oriented, or maybe he doesn’t know how humans go.
“My feet go on the ground,” I say, helpfully.
I can’t really make him out in the low light of the night. Yes, there is some illumination from the stars and the fading light of their ill-fated weapon discharge, but it’s the kind of silvery light that washes colors out and gives way to shadow far too easily. He’s a big, scaled, horned, silhouette of a creature. All I really know about him is that he’s strong, and agile, and he moves silently like an apex predator when he is on the hunt.
“Spread out! See if there’s more! They can’t run very fast at all!” Wrath issues orders.
The saurian outlaws start beating the bushes in the hopes they will find more like me. They won’t. I came down here alone because yeah, we’ve noticed that every time one of us gets on the planet’s surface, we get caught. I really thought I’d be the exception to that rule. Stealth is my thing. But hunting is their thing. We keep underestimating them, and that just cost me my freedom.
“This will be the first mother of hybrids,” he says. “You caught her, Shan. She’s yours to breed.”
Fuck. Me.
How the hell did I get myself into this mess?
Not that long ago…
A big, purple saurian with magnificent flowing dark hair flies past the ship with our captain in his arms. He swoops and soars, and damn near collides with us. He can’t see us, on account of we are invisible. But we can see him, and if he does that again we’re about to see him smeared across the ship.
“De-cloak!” I shout at the navigator.
“I’m not going to de-cloak! He’ll see us!”
“That’s the fucking point. He almost slammed into the hull. If Sullivan dies on our watch because we hit her with an invisible spaceship we’ll never forgive ourselves!”
“They’ll all see us if I de-cloak. I’m moving the ship.” Maria’s hands move over the controls unsteadily. She’s drunk again, and not the every day kind of drunk that some of the crew have going on, where you can’t really tell and frankly, they’re improved by it because at least it means they stop shaking for a bit. She’s the kind of drunk that makes her waver over the controls, her body swaying as she tries to desperately remember what each of them do.
“We should never have been this low.”
