Nick coughed and rolled back onto his knees. On the ground in front of him, Asl propped herself up on her elbow while Et stared upward and blinked. Damian was slumped back in his chair, looking dazed.
Nick took a moment to understand what Damian had said. “Cr-crashed… we…crashed?”
There was a sproing as Triskar unclenched his fists from the corner of his console. He left five indents in the metal.
“What do we do now?” Asl asked weakly, pulling herself back until she leaned against the wall. “We need to get to Extor…”
“The ship. Has crashed,” Damian said, spinning in his chair to glare at the princess. “We will deal with your… vacation… later.”
“Vacation?” Asl said indignantly. “Et and I are on a diplomatic mission of vital importance to maintaining peace in the system.”
“The loan, right?” Nick asked.
Asl turned to him, looking surprised to hear him talk. “Yes. The loan. It is of vital importance.” She spat the words at Damian. “And we cannot afford to be delayed.”
“Asl is right,” Et said, pushing himself off the floor. His eyes were half closed and he slurred his words as he looked around the bridge, blinking.
“I don’t care what kind of time crunch you’re on, this thing isn’t going anywhere.” Damian punched the console, then winced.
Asl looked like she was about to say something else, so Nick leaned forward. “How far are we from Extor?” he asked, trying to defuse the situation.
Damian pointed dramatically at a small, cracked screen set into the console. “Ask that,” he said gruffly.
Et seemed to understand Nick’s efforts to maintain calm. “You said you were flying toward the city, right?”
“I thought we might run into friendly ships. Maybe air traffic control you two could do you “diplomatic mission” schpeele on. On the other hand, it might be a good thing no one was around to watch us blow up those police ships.”
“How far are we?” Et asked.
“I turned before we went over the city.” Damian frowned, thinking. “About… how fast were we going… forty miles, I’d guess. In…” he pointed, “that direction. No. Wait. That way.” He pointed again.
Asl rolled her eyes. “We’re doomed.”
“No, this will work,” Et said. “We just need to get to Extor, then we can send a repair crew back for the ship.”
“Extor?” Damian asked. “Where did you think the people who just shot at us came from? There’s no way we’re going there.”
“My brother and I are invited guests,” Asl insisted. “We just need to get to Extor, then we can work everything out. I’m sure the governing council would be more than happy to pay for repairs for your ship.”
Damian’s grunt indicated how likely his thought that was.
“We need to get to Extor,” Et said. “On foot if we have to.”
“You’re going into the lions den,” Damian said. “I don’t know why, but someone betrayed you. They want you dead, and they were willing to go through an imperial attack cruiser to do it. I’ve got to look after me and mine. Go if you want, but you’ll go alone.”
“We can’t let them go off by themselves,” Nick said.
“No, Nick,” Damian turned on him, “no. This is a mission. That means you do what I say, no questions asked. You promised me.”
“Damian, they’re going to follow us,” Nick said. “Unless the six ships that attacked us were the end of it, it won’t be hard for them to find where we are. If we sit here trying to fix the ship ourselves, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
Damian frowned. “We can get the weapons systems firing again…”
Triskar shook his head.
“We can…” Damian sighed.
“If we go to Extor and find out who was behind this attack,” Nick said, “we might be able to stop them before they come looking for us.”
Damian sighed again.
Asl got to her feet, gingerly. “Et and I will get our things. We’ll wait by the exit for whoever wants to join us.”
They left through the right-most bridge door. The left slid halfway, then stopped, twitching slightly, when they tried to open it. The bridge was silent after they left.
“Nick…” Damian began.
“We have to help them.” Nick pushed himself to his feet, wincing at the sudden motion. He left the bridge before Damian had the chance to say no.
In just over an hour, Nick met the impatient royals just outside the ship. The ship’s exit ramp was at ground level, facing slightly upward, so instead of walking down the ramp Nick had to climb awkwardly up it and slip out the side. The royals were waiting for him, sitting on a fallen tree just outside.
“Is he coming?” Asl asked coldly.
Nick nodded. “Just a minute. He’s trying to see how bad the ship is.”
From the cliffs notes Nick got, it was pretty bad. Most all of the ship’s systems had been impacted by the crash in one way or another. The food still works, lights, gravity if they had the power to run it, and Damian said the power system was still barely running. Other than that, the ship was pretty much dead.
Nick felt like explaining that to Asl, but judging from her face, she wasn’t inclined to be generous at the moment. She stared ahead with a steely, determined expression on her face. Et stood beside her, far more tired, but still determined.
Nick’s thoughts were interrupted by the noise of Damian clambering through the exit behind him. Nick offered him a hand and pulled the larger man to solid ground.
“I’m coming with you,” Damian said. Asl raised her chin defiantly, but Et looked relieved.
“Triskar and my mechanic will stay behind to take care of the ship,” Damian continued.
“But… the attackers…” Nick said.
“The best way to keep the ship safe from attack is to do as you said,” Damian said to Asl. “If whatever ‘misunderstanding’ in Extor that got us into this mess can be resolved, that’s our safest option. We’ll protect them by moving fast.”
Heavy, metallic footsteps echoed through the ships’ open entrance.
“Everyone else aboard the ship will be coming with us,” Damian added. Nick’s eyes widened as he saw RX-9 pulled herself up with her long arms. Her metallic feet sank into the dirt when she landed and straightened up.
A tad taller than Nick, RX’s bulky chest made her look squat. Her polished black surface reflected the light as she waved with her main set of arms. Her shorter arms were tucked in tight around her stomach, while the small arm/antennae sprouting from her neck rotated slowly. Her eyes, two white lights in an expressionless face, remained constant, but Nick thought he felt a pleasant spark of recognition in her body language as she walked over.
“Greetings, organics,” RX said jovially. “Our captain has informed me of our circumstances, and I intend to travel with you to Extor.”
“Highnesses, this is RX-9,” Damian said.
“An R-series droid?” Et asked, raising an eyebrow. “Traveling with a mercenary?”
“Captain Stargazer has not engaged in for-pay warfare in the time I’ve been traveling with him,” RX said. “Though he has shot a number of people. Smuggler, thief and arguably pirate would be more accurate descriptors of the man.”
“Pirate?” Nick asked. He hadn’t heard that story.
“It’s nothing…” Damian said. He was saved from further scrutiny by the creaking of the exit ramp. The metal of the ramp groaned and started to push deeper into the dirt as a large head, antennae flailing, poked through the door.
“Evech,” Nick said, walking toward her, though he thought better of trying to help her up.
Two long blue arms reached through the door, one digging into the dirt, the other resting against the scorched metal of the Stargazer. With a chirp that Nick thought was the equivalent of a grunt, Evech pulled herself out of the hole and onto solid ground.
The royals, surprised at RX’s appearance, stared in awe at Evech. Ten feet tall, Evech looked like a giant ant. Three-segmented body, six legs and a pair of large, diaphanous wings. The body parts were the size of sedan cars, the legs as thick as a ten-year old tree, and the wings tall enough to brush the top of the downed space ship, but other than that, very like a bug.
“Hello, all,” Evech said, spreading her antennae wide. Her nearest arm-equivalents were her two forelegs, which could grasp, primarily large, things in their rough three-fingered grip, but she had taken to using her antennae for gesturing.
“Hey, Evech,” Nick said. “It’s been a while.”
He patted Evech’s nearest leg. The chitin was dry and warm.
“Hello, Nick-child,” Evech said in her buzzing voice. “It’s good to see you, too.”
Et and Asl stepped forward, eyes wide. “You have a Wreithling queen on your crew?” Et asked Damian.
“Evech and her mate-pair have traveled with me for a time,” Damian said nonchalantly. He smirked at the royals’ expressions.
“Evech, RX, are you coming with us?” Nick asked. RX usually preferred to stay on the ship and work on any of the three research papers she was righting at any given time, and Evech needed to sleep frequently, sometimes for days on end.
“Robot-friend cannot continue her studies on the crashed ship,” Evech said. “And I would be more help to you walking through the wilderness than I would be in repairing the ship.”
“Fleith and Triskar will take care of the ship,” Damian said. “We’d best get moving.”
Et glanced up at Evech once more, then nodded. He flung his sack over his back and followed Damian’s lead into the forest. The rest of the group followed.
The forest they had landed in looked an awful lot like forests on Earth. It was a dark forest, with the trees crowns focused on the tops, hogging all the light from the ground below. From the moment they left the impromptu clearing made by the Stargazer, the group was cast in twilight.
Fortunately, the low light seemed to have blocked out most smaller plants. There was thin grass, and a number of lichens growing on rocks, but what bushes there were were thin and reedy. There was even enough room between the ancient trees for Evech to squeeze through.
Damian seemed to know where he was going, so the group followed him without question. Even the royals, still the ones paying for the trip, followed him without question. Nick looked around excitedly at first, but soon grew tired of the unending march of trees. He walked next to RX and struck up a conversation. With RX, that basically meant that she gave a off-the cuff lecture on whatever topic she was researching lately. Today, it was Imperial terraforming techniques in radical environments in the second and third centuries.
She was halfway through a description of the colonization of the lava planet Reithark-IX when Damian stopped in his tracks and held up a hand.
“RX?” Damian asked.
Nick followed Damian’s gaze. In front of them, like a traveling pack of stars, hung a small cloud of… Nick wanted to call them fireflies. Tiny sparks of light hanging between the trees, just above his head and out of reach. They were larger than fireflies, their movements more steady. And there was something about their light… Nick could stare at it for hours. He wished he had his camera.
“Trylaxian hungbetls,” RX responded to the unasked question. “Imported to Blen by accident sometime after the first terraforming. They are predatory. It is advisable for most sentients to avoid looking directly at them. Their light is mesmerizing, and they often lead prey over cliffs, or into other hazardous environments, then feed on them.”
Nick’s eyes went wide. “Feed on them?” he asked. Maybe he didn’t want that picture. But they were so pretty…
“Eyes down,” Damian said gruffly. He walked forward, hand by his forehead, like he was protecting from the sun’s glare. The rest of the group followed, Nick regretfully tearing his eyes from the lights in the sky. They were so pretty. The light was constant, but almost seemed to shift at the same time. As it got closer, he almost heard something, at the back of his mind, a sweet melody just out of reach…
“Nick!” Damian said.
“Right.” Nick directed his gaze at the ground. Only the ground. Nothing else. There was nothing above him. Nothing he wanted to see so desperately…
“What happened to Reithark?” Nick asked RX, desperate for a distraction.
RX’s calm, even description of ancient historical conflicts helped. He was able to focus on her words and not the nagging itch to look up, just one last time, to see if they were still there.
Eventually, RX, safe from the bugs’ tricks, said that they were safe, and the expedition continued like before. Nick resisted looking over his shoulder for the beautiful bugs. He distracted himself with his conversation with RX.
As they walked, Blen’s sun, presumably, traveled across their sky and began to set. The little bits of sky they could see became gold, then orange, then purple. As the perpetual twilight of the forest faded to actual night, Damian called a halt for the day.
“There’s no use tripping over ourselves in the dark,” he said. “We’ll camp here for the night.”
Everyone got to work getting out the supplies Evech had been carrying. RX said that a fire might attack more of the hungbetls, so they did without. As the forest got darker, their conversation slowed, words coming infrequently from the blackness around them. They quickly went to sleep.
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