(Art by jeshields)
Kra'vessa clung to the underside of an icy fen-tree bough. The cold penetrated her carapace. Out in the frozen morning, something moved around on the forest floor. It snuffled and grunted. Others joined it and crunched on the baknuts she'd piled up as bait. She worried her mandibles. Fluttered the vestigial wings along her thorax.
"Chera, this is Kra," she said into her comm, jagged mandibles quietly scraping out the words. “I've got movement over here."
The radio fuzz broke.
"Hold," Chera said, his voice growling around the Core Prime trade language they shared. "Our fucking marines are still eating breakfast."
"Hold?" She rubbed her doxa against her face, the scrape of the jagged inner part of her arm soothed her. "I've been stuck out here all night. That noble isn't going to pay us unless we deliver."
"We're moving," Jedoc said over the net.
The marine. These humans and their need for hot chow. She knew it was a bad idea to throw in with a group so disparate. Three human gunsels. Unpredictable in very predictable human ways. Chera, the kopal pilot. They were nearly-blind, frail beings from the spinward frontiers. Large skin-and-bone wings folded up along their backs and their ursine snouts packed with jagged teeth. Most of them were feral corporate raiders. Chera seemed okay. She still didn’t understand how he piloted a starcraft. And then there was her. A prag from the coreward sub-sector of Prag’Kar. She had not been chosen as one of the prisk-prophets allowed to travel outside prag-space, but was here nonetheless. Exiled. A spacer engineer and leader of this unlikely assembly.
"Sending telemetry," she said. "Looks like a whole pod of ghon. That’s a lot of money. "
The largest of the beasts, thick-bodied hexapods, raised its head as if it smelled the marines or heard Kra’s quiet clicking accent. A local nobleman, the Vesterial Stellarch Munchen, had said they were mammalian, but Kra noted fluffy white feathers mixed in with their thick fur and distinctive maxillary palps along their jagged canid jaws.
She didn't care. Capturing a mated pair would net them enough to cover some much needed repairs on the Holy Diver. Get them a parsec closer to a real system where they could sell Chera's cargo hold full of plastic dildos. Why that fezik thought there was money in that lot, she'd never know. He claimed humans had a constant need for stimulation "down there." She was only vaguely aware what he referred to.
It felt as if something popped in her head. Warmth radiated down her thorax and her black eyes narrowed. Spasms wracked her antennae, as a waking dream erupted within her mind. Blood. Screaming. Humans. And the unearthly squeals of ghons. Flames.
"Chera," she said, too loud. The beasts below her froze then scattered with wild squeals. "Call them off. Something is wrong."
"What's wrong?" Chera said. "They're already..."
"Keep the net quiet," Jedoc cut in. "Mev, overwatch. Circle right. Toran. Hold there."
"Jedoc, pull your troops back," Kra'vessa said and moved further up the tree trunk. "Something's not right."
The first blasts drowned out the comms transmission before they echoed to her ears where she clung to the freezing tree on the freezing planet of Merisoc. The screams of dying humans only echoed in her mind.
###
Art by jeshields
Chera scrambled into the pilot's seat. The tiny engine on their little planet hopper, the Bug, already whined to life.
"Kra," he yelled into the comms. "I need your location data."
The transporter lifted off, sluggish with two streamlined cargo modules attached to each side. He couldn’t drop either. One held their medical bay and cabin space, while the other was packed with cargo representing of the current value in the CNK partnership, considering the Holy Diver’s value didn’t fall to assets on the balance sheet. It was leased. Their cashflow had been almost non-existent over the last month. Those plastic dongs were their only hope, now that the Stellarch’s little hunting job probably wasn’t going to pay.
“Sending,” she replied. “Where are the mercs?”
“All telemetry is offline. They haven’t responded,” he said, angling the Bug toward the flashing red dot on his heads-up display. Despite how Kra misunderstood kopal physiology, he could see close up, especially in the darkened cockpit. “I’ll circle back to them after I have you.”
“We can’t leave them,” she said.
He had visual on her, a gangly insectoid with a particolored carapace. Most prag gutted other species the first chance they got. Studied their entrails like the witch-braga of Chera’s cavernous homeland. Kra was a weird one. Engineer. In love with star-drives and planetary approach calculations, and other stuff Chera took for granted.
He popped the airlock, and Kra skittered inside.
“Go, go!” she said. “They were north-northwest of my position.” She loomed over the sensor array in the cramped cockpit.
“Shit!” Chera slewed the Bug toward the ground as laser-tracer fire skimmed the top of the treeline. A spherical drone zipped over them. “This fucking transporter isn’t made for combat. We have to go!”
“Jedoc. Mev. Toran. Please respond,” Kra said on the net. “Jedoc…”
“This is Mev,” the marine whispered. “I’ve got three drones. Look to be home-jobs. All armed with pulse lasers. I lost one of them over the trees. Jedoc and Toran are down. They’re…”
The woman sobbed before she keyed off the comm.
“Mev, I need your location,” Chera said. He dipped the hopper-craft into a tight clearing and hovered. Dots skipped over the green radar screen, the old tech barely keeping up with the swarming drones. “There are at least six,” he said. He hadn’t broadcast that back to Mev. She was fucked. He wasn’t sure what he could do for her. Her location pinged on the crew tracker. Newer tech, but not that new. Precise enough.
There were four green dots between the Bug and her.
“What’s the call, Kra?”
“We’re not leaving her,” the engineer said. “That’s not happening.”
“Fuck.” He loved human curse words. Like their ridiculous creators, the words held a literal meaning, but everything seemed to blur into vague disgust and a strange attraction. It’s like they invented the words and then put themselves into situations to use them.
The Bug creaked as it lifted out of its covered position. Something banged in the hab module. Hopefully not the old autodoc he’d found. It wouldn’t last too many beatings.
“Incoming, Mev,” Kra said. She moved to the airlock and popped open the inner door. Wind shrieked against the hull as the Bug accelerated to its top speed. “Be ready.”
“Firing chaff,” Chera yelled. A third sensor screen displayed three dotted-line tracks. He hoped they were rockets and not guided missiles.
Kra’s head swiveled over her back, her gleaming eyes taking in the crew screen. “Here! Drop here!”
Chera’s stomach soared, his last meal flowed up into his gorge. The Bug slammed into the side of a low hill, icy grass and dirt churned up, aerosolized in the blast of braking engines. Kra slapped the hatch release for the outer door. Frigid air and the scream of the transporter’s engines flooded into the space.
“Mev, run!”
The woman broke from defilade, fired her bulky assault rifle towards the top of the hill, and sprinted for the transporter. The ground around her churned up in bright flashes against the dull morning light, blackening the permafrost.
As she neared the door, Chera spread his webbed fingers over the throttle and lift-lock. The Bug wasn’t fast, but it could break atmosphere faster than these homemade drones.
Another barrage of laser blasts raked the ground around Mev and the marine fell, her back armor plate smoking. Chera would never forget her stricken face, one eye burned from its socket as she watched the Bug slew across the ground and streak into the air.
He was only aware of Kra raking him with her doxa and screaming when the blackness of space and its tiny diamond stars came into view.
###
“I shall gut you, you yaziliar muiloc!” Kra’vessa screeched, slipping into her native tongue. The premonition of fire and blood felt like acid across her thorax. She couldn’t take the image of Mev’s last desperate cry from her mind. “I shall tear your wings from you and feast on your innards.”
“She’s dead, Kra,” Chera growled, fending off her half-hearted attacks. “She’s fucking dead! And we’d be dead too if we lingered.”
“Monster! I tried to warn them.” She slid to the steel grates, quivering, in the narrow space behind the pilot’s seat. “I tried…”
“What was that?” Chera said, flipping a bank of switches. The thrum of the Bug’s engine through the floor grates ceased. “How’d you do that?”
A face flashed into her mind, another prag. Another exile. Zek’thara, the pilot of the scout vessel they had shared so long ago. Both had just awakened, unsure how long they’d been out, orbiting an unknown moon. Zek’s black eyes clouded with doubt. They are still in my mind, her companion’s thoughts had been hers. From that time, Kra felt tremors in space and time, never when she needed them. Always unbidden. Rarely helpful. Like today.
The vessel-hearts along the inside of her abdomen slowed. Air flowed through the apertures more easily.
“I do not know,” she said and rose on her four hind legs. “We have to contact the Stellarch.”
“I am stowing the Bug, and we are getting the fuck out of here,” Chera said. He watched the telemetry screen as a large, fat-bottomed trader vessel slid across the slitted viewscreen. “Send him a tightline. ‘Sorry, your magnanimousness. We weren’t paid to fuck with separatists. Just capture bird-pigs’.”
“Ghons,” she corrected. “And we were paid to scout that area, in addition to the hunt. We still may get something from our report.”
“Two hours to docking and fourteen to clear the gravity wells,” he huffed. “Feel free to tell him any lies you wish between here and the railhead.”