Chapter 6
A hundred legs were far too many legs, and those were the visible ones. A lengthy creature hovered above us, the tip of its head skimming the ceiling. Flowers blossomed along its back, peeking through cracks in the shell and setting loose pollen that had me putting on my visor.
“Roys,” I whispered to the sleeping captain, entirely unaware that a creature watched us with its many unblinking eyes. There were dozens upon dozens sitting in neat rows across the head where six antennas sprouted from a dense brow.
I punched his leg, and Roys jolted. The sudden movement had the creature swerving.
“Wait,” Roys barely got out before I raised my blaster and fired.
The creature lurched back, releasing an ear-splitting wailing noise like scattered comms. A green ooze leaked from the wounds to sprinkle around camp.
Neither of us was interested in testing whether that blood was as acidic as the flora.
I had the water canister slung over my shoulder, blaster firing, as I fled the alcove.
Roys fumbled to grab what we had and made chase.
“You are the definition of shoot first and ask questions later,” he snarled.
“Thanks!”
“That wasn’t a compliment!” He ran around me, scanner up, trying to determine which path to take.
The creature scattered toward the tunnel we came through. The speed shook the cavern. I held my breath, imagining the ceiling and walls caving in, sheer darkness and excruciating pain. If my luck held out, we’d die instantly. If not, we would be trapped under the debris and suffocate slowly.
The rocks settled. The creature escaped. We were alive, but my visor blared in warning. My heart rate had skyrocketed and wouldn’t relent.
“Have you ever heard of the word patience?” Roys asked in that lecturing tone of his.
“Our job doesn’t exactly reward patience.” I nodded toward the tunnels and kept my muscles tight, hoping to stop my shaking. “Has the scanner picked up anything?”
The scanner showed one tunnel had more fresh oxygen than the others.
If there was an exit, it would be that way, so we walked, putting distance between us and the creature before stopping to finish our canteens.
I refilled our water and ate half a rations pack.
Roys took the other, snatched it out of my hand like he thought I wouldn’t share.
The rations didn’t taste as shitty when we were starving.
Both of us found our visors more useful off, especially since mine wouldn’t stop showing my accelerated heart rate.
I let the damn thing hang off my belt. The air wasn’t too thick in the caves, and the visors ran low on energy, especially Roys’, considering his exoskin released much of the air the visor filtered, anyway.
Roys continuously attempted to call out through our commlinks.
No one responded. I had never witnessed the captain so unsettled.
Roys kept his cool under most situations.
Honestly, I might have been the one constant that managed to piss him off, otherwise he was calm and collected.
But here, like this, he had a jerkiness to his movements that I didn’t believe came from his wounds.
We wandered the cavern that opened in places and became crawling spaces in others. Occasionally, we struggled to push through paths, then trudged through murky water, only after the scanner deemed it clear of flora. If any planet had man-eating flora in water, it was this one.
By midday, we took another break, seated on a rocky growth in one cavern.
A type of worm clung to the ceiling, emitting a low green aura.
Each had similar budding flowers as the larger monster earlier.
A defense mechanism, I had to wonder, a way to trick local flora into believing they weren’t edible.
Roys gave me a look that said, don’t shoot. I wouldn’t, so long as the fuckers stayed on the ceiling.
The tension from last night lingered. Though Roys didn’t hide popping another candy into his mouth, he hadn’t done so as frequently, or perhaps that was also because he had to be running low.
When we took a break, he sat the lamplight in his lap and I hovered my hands over it.
Roys abruptly stood. He barely caught the lamplight from falling out of his lap.
“What is it?” I asked, hand on my blaster and holding my breath.
“My call went through a moment ago.” His shoulders deflated. “It isn’t anymore.”
“Hearing things over there, sweetheart?”
He ignored my mockery. “We might be close to the exit or leaving behind whatever is blocking our comms to begin with. We’ve rested long enough.”
“You’re the one that needed the rest, still do based on your huffing.”
“Worried that you may have to prove your threat and leave me behind?” He challenged with his back to me.
The med spray wore off, no doubt quicker because of our continuous sweating.
Blood and pus wet the back of his shirt.
The exoskin hung at his waist, broken and flickering.
Squeezing through the caves didn’t help.
My exoskin held up while his deteriorated little by little, leaving a path of broken pieces, a trail of our slow demise.
“As if you wouldn’t leave me the moment the opportunity arose,” I grumbled.
Roys faced me, his expression slack. “I had the opportunity yesterday, didn’t I?” He ran a hand across his jaw, over the beard that practically sprouted overnight. It was ridiculously attractive, making my mind ponder what it’d feel like to have that beard rubbing against my thighs.
“You think I got all this from my own stupidity?” he growled.
“Yeah, actually.”
“You’re…”
“A dick?” I smiled while slinging the water canister over one shoulder.
Shaking his head, Roys wandered off the cavern shelf to continue through the maze.
Multiple times he attempted to call, to no avail.
His vexed chuffing echoed in our low pathway where the rocks curved inward and around.
Our steps reverberated, a reminder of our isolation, that we could die down there, where no one would find us, rotting away to become part of The Planet.
At least it was a better way out than the Colony, another body on a lost asteroid that no one cared about.
Here, we would be feed for the soil, for the flora, some of which grew along the cavern walls.
They were a distinctive purple color, creeping through cracks and wet from the damp air.
Those worms from earlier crawled through them.
They’d crawl through our bones eventually, illuminating our slow decay, one I envisioned every time I blinked.
“How did you get them then, the scars?” I asked, swallowing hard.
My throat felt too tight, the cavern walls too close.
I swear they were closing in around us and all I wanted to do was run, crawl, scrape my nails against the rocks and dig my way out even if I breached the outside world with my bones breaking out of my skin.
Roys stopped at a fork in the path. His scanner indicated the left, and we continued. “No need to feign curiosity. I know you don’t care.”
“True, but I am bored, and we’ve been walking for hours, so prove it wasn’t your stupidity that fucked up that ugly mug of yours.”
We both knew that last part was a lie, or at least I assumed he knew he was entirely fuckable.
“My first tour was on Xenothasyllius-673.”
See? Stupid names. I doubt he pronounced that right.
“Straiers love hand to hand combat, prefer it above all else, and when our troop was captured, I was given the opportunity to free someone for every straier I put down,” he finished, though his voice got progressively lower.
I flipped the canister to my opposite shoulder to give the other a rest. “Bullshit. Straiers are ugly fuckers to make up for being twice our size and built like tanks.”
“Clearly, I didn’t get out of there unscathed.”
The scars on his back were the most vicious, cutting across in harsh, jagged lines.
Straiers preferred weapons of old, ragged blades that tore through flesh rather than seared.
If the cradle couldn’t heal them completely, then they were wounds that would have killed.
The cradle could piece us up fairly well, but even it couldn’t rid us of every scar.
Well, not the ones the militia employed, older renditions that did the bare minimum and would be used until they imploded.
As long as the cradle had our bodies working at a reasonable time, then that was all that mattered.
“And I only spared three, but those three made it back on speeders and got us out of there. This one though,” he tapped the scar along his cheek. “Was from a superior officer. He liked having his way with the cadets, the youngest ones.”
“So you tried messing him up but got fucked up in the process?”
Roys smiled viciously. “I shattered one of his kneecaps and broke three of his ribs. Nearly got kicked out too, except the colonels learned about it. The other captains couldn’t shield what the bastard did with all that attention, so the situation was dealt with.”
Dealt with. Not solved. They never were.
Roys’ story was one in a million. Every cadet had a tale of a superior officer using their position to get their way, whatever that way was.
One of ours enjoyed betting on fights, rounded the new cadets in the middle of the night to beat the shit out of each other.
They made us believe we’d be expelled if we didn’t comply.
When so many of us had nowhere else to go, well, getting a broken rib was easy.
In my case, I was pretty good at breaking ribs.
Took nearly six months before the ring was broken up.
Our commander wasn’t dismissed, simply reassigned, as they always were, so they could pick up from where they left off in another galaxy and the cycle repeated.
“So it was your stupidity. Got some kind of death wish?” I asked, stopping when he did.
We came upon a thin walkway. It took all my willpower not to hurl at the thought of squeezing through another one. Each time, I envisioned the walls squeezing us until our eyes popped. I thought of bones shattering under an immense weight, our lungs aching, aching, aching.
Roys moved in first, giving me a stern look. He thought I was being a pain on purpose, and I would let him believe that rather than admit that my knees were about to give out, that any moment, I feared my body would betray me and snap under the pressure.
Removing the canister, I set it between us and kept my eyes on Roys’ hand grabbing the strap.
I held the other. He slid between the walls, trying not to let his back touch the rocky surface.
More of his exoskin scraped off, dropping at our feet while I made a mantra in my head; breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe.
He likely spoke to keep his focus on anything other than the pain. “Not exactly. I know what it’s like to have no one on your side, to see the worst-case scenario heading right at you and to be scared out of your wits. If I can ease that for someone, then I want to try.”
Roys walked out of the path into another open cavern. I followed, heaving a breath of relief and refusing to glance behind us. While I put the canister back on my shoulder, he reached into his pocket for a piece of candy.
“Well, ain’t you so fucking sweet.” I walked by his side, carefully maneuvering over rocks to another path below. “What’d you do?”
“What?”
“Only someone trying to rid themselves of a guilty conscience is that nice to strangers they can’t possibly give a shit about. What did you get into?” I glanced toward the marks no longer hidden on his arms.
Under our lights, the veins were a dark brutal black, like rot beneath his skin. He hadn’t used once or twice. There had been years when he hadn’t taken a break, when there was more synthetic in his body than blood.
“Just because you are a jerk doesn’t mean everyone else is.” He actually sounded sincere. A good actor, then.
“It’s exactly because I’m a jerk that I recognize the cruelty in others; they just aren’t as honest about it.”
Roys stopped in front of the next path to check his scanner. It seemed to need an extra moment. “Have you always hated everyone, or is this a more recent development?”
“I like to believe I was born to be a spiteful prick.”
“Parents didn’t hold you much, did they?”
“Parents didn’t have many opportunities to do so. They died when I was eight.” I laughed at Roys’ not-so-subtle flinch. “Don’t get sentimental on me. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I gave a shit.”
A lie. Of course I fucking cared, but I was angrier above all else, and anger was useful.
Sorrow, not so much. One couldn’t sit around moping if they wanted to survive in this world.
The Colony wasn’t a family-friendly environment.
The upper ring wanted more kids; they were the future workforce, and that was necessary, seeing how many miners died on the regular.
My mom and dads were fuel for the tank, workers until they weren’t, replaceable, bodies under the rocks.
“You didn’t answer the question, by the way.” I stopped to take a drink. Roys did the same. I stuck the canister back on my belt. “What did you do to get that guilty conscience of yours?”
Roys smacked his lips together. “Will you believe my answer if it paints me as anything other than trash?”
“No, because everyone is trash, maybe not now, maybe not back in the day, but one day everyone makes that grand fucking mistake. You, however, have certainly made yours.”
Roys turned his back to me, made another failed call attempt, and sighed. “My mistake was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.”