Chapter 3
- Nator’ax -
I jerk awake. The floor is moving, and I’m being pushed into it in the most alarming way.
I fight my way to a standing position, cracking my head against a low ceiling. What on Xren is going on?
Ah. It’s the Plood ship, the saucer. And I am hiding in a space under the floor in order to spy on Dex and find out what he does with this thing. Just as Chief Korr’ax ordered.
But that yelp… that wasn’t the drone’s screechy voice. That was something very different.
The movement stops, and I quietly lift the hidden plate above, then stick my head up out of the hole, partly to be able to stretch my back. From this angle, I can’t see what’s going on and who’s in here. But I can see where I am—high above the jungle. The Red Rock is only a small shape, far below.
I steady myself on the floor to not fall over from sheer dizziness. This thing is flying. And it must be Dex—
There’s a muted muttering from somewhere I can’t see. “Damn alien bullshit saucer… nothing makes sense…”
Although the words are alien, it doesn’t sound like Dex. It sounds like a boy, or maybe even—I swallow—one of the women.
What do I do? Chief Korr’ax only wanted me to spy on Dex, not on the women. But he also didn’t know that one of them would start to fly around in this thing.
My aversion to spending possibly a long time hiding under that low ceiling makes it easy to decide. I haul myself out of the small hole and replace the plate, then turn the corner.
Indeed there is a person. A small one with a round shape.
My heart rate quickens. “Good evening, Riley.”
She whirls around, face contorted in surprise. “Fuck!”
“No,” I state as calmly as I can, “just Nator’ax. What in the deepest Dark are you doing?”
She turns back to the panel. “It not… I want it to go down, but not happens…”
“Hmm.” I take in the bewildering amount of alien mysteries in the saucer, as well as Riley’s immensely alluring shape.
Her thighs look soft, and her feet are small, and she has that female chest with a double bulge in it.
Her hair looks smooth and falls softly down her back, obscuring my view of her thin neck. “It would be nice to go down.”
She gives me a quick glance. “Why you here? You know how to fly?”
“I don’t know anything about this thing except that your Dex keeps coming and going in it. The chief wanted to know what he was doing and asked me to find out.” I prod a strange alien table with many colored lights on it. “Should I assume that you also don’t know?”
“I wanted to learn how to fly it,” she says, busying herself with the panel. “So not only Dex can. But now I not know what to do. Is very high up!” She points to the side, where the many trees of the jungle are seen from above.
I take a step closer to the console, bracing one hand against the curved wall as the saucer hums beneath my feet. “Perhaps you shouldn’t touch anything else,” I suggest carefully.
“That what I thought before,” Riley mutters. “But also nothing happen.”
She presses another glowing symbol before I can stop her.
The saucer answers with a violent shudder.
“Maybe—” I begin.
The floor tilts sharply to one side.
Riley squeals as the entire craft lurches. I grab for the console, but miss, and we both stagger as the saucer suddenly shoots upward again, far faster than before. The jungle drops away in a dizzying rush, the green canopy shrinking until it looks like moss on the forest floor.
“Oh no no no!” Riley gasps, accurately echoing my own sentiments.
The saucer banks hard to the side.
We are thrown across the small chamber. Riley crashes into me, and we both hit the floor in a tangle of limbs. Instinct takes over. I wrap one arm around her waist and pull her against my chest, while grabbing a protruding ridge in the wall with my other hand to keep us from sliding further.
“Hold still!” I shout over the rising whine of the saucer.
“I am trying!” she yelps.
The craft tilts again, sending us sliding across the smooth floor. Riley’s hair brushes my face, and she clutches at me as if I am the only solid thing left in the world. She finds the waistband of my loincloth and slides three fingers under it to get a good grip.
Outside the transparent walls, the jungle spins wildly, then vanishes beneath a rising layer of mist.
The light changes. The roaring climb finally slows.
A moment later, the saucer steadies itself with a soft humming vibration.
For a few heartbeats, neither of us moves.
Then Riley lifts her head from my chest and stares out through the glowing wall.
“Uh,” she says faintly.
I follow her gaze.
Below us there is no jungle anymore.
Only a vast, endless field of soft, bright hills—clouds stretching to the horizon, glowing in the sunlight.
Riley gets to her knees, then notices her hand is still down my loincloth. “Oh! Sorry!” She yanks it out.
“It’s all right,” I tell her as I get up. “You had a good grip there.”
“Where are the jungle?” she asks with a thin voice.
I look up, having to shield my eyes from the light. “And why is there sun this late at night?”
“We travel far,” Riley says and looks down at the panel. “Other side of the planet, maybe.”
“Maybe we should press that same thing again,” I suggest, “and it will fly back. Or maybe we shouldn’t press it at all.”
“I not want to press anything,” she says with the strange, but immensely charming, lilt to her voice, raising both hands. “You press now.”
I stiffen. “Me?”
She shrugs her little shoulders. “You are here too. I am not better at fly than you. Nator’ax is your name? I saw you. You guard us.”
“I have been trusted by the chief to keep the women safe,” I agree. “After this, I doubt he will trust me to even watch the fire.”
She tilts her head. “Why? You did nothing.”
“Perhaps that was my failing. The result is that I am stuck halfway between the sky and the ground with a woman I’ve sworn to not abduct, half a planet away from my village. My explanation will have to be astonishingly good. Are we not moving at all?”
Riley turns around. “We are not. I want back to village. I press again, as you say.”
“I didn’t actually say that,” I protest as she presses the same flat part.
Nothing happens.
“Maybe I press this,” she says and touches another. “It lights.”
Indeed, that part of the table shines in yellow, although it may be a reflection from the sunlight.
“It’s worth a try, I suppose,” I say, putting one palm on the ceiling and taking hold of Riley’s upper arm in case the ship does unpleasant things.
Riley’s hand shoots out and grabs my waistband again. “We’re going down!”
Indeed, the floor appears to be dropping under us. I manage to stay upright and keep Riley standing, too. “That’s not really what we wanted.”
“I know!” she presses other buttons, then takes hold of the strange contraption in the middle of the table.
Immediately, the ship turns to the left, and only by pushing my hand up against the ceiling and keeping my feet firmly on the floor do I manage to not fall.
The ship turns the other way.
“I think is good,” Riley says tightly as she pulls her hand out of my loincloth.
The saucer shudders again, and the bright clouds outside begin to slide upward along the curved walls.
“Yes,” Riley says with fierce concentration, both hands on the strange stick. “See? I make it go to sides.”
The humming lowers in pitch, and the endless white sea beneath us slowly grows larger.
Then it grows larger faster.
“Riley,” I say carefully, “are you doing that?”
She pulls the stick back a little. The saucer answers by dropping even faster.
“Not really,” she says.
My stomach feels as if it has been left somewhere high above. Below us, shapes begin to form through the mist. White shapes. Very large white shapes. Mountains, but very strange, clad in white.
“No no no,” Riley mutters, jerking the stick in the opposite direction.
The saucer tilts sharply. The horizon spins. The ground surges closer.
I brace my feet wide apart, push hard up with one hand, while holding Riley upright with the other.
“Perhaps you should do the opposite of what you are doing!” I suggest.
“I am trying!” she snaps.
The mist tears away, and suddenly we are low over a vast white landscape that glitters in the sunlight.
Then I see something that chills me more than the cold world below. A dark circle racing across the snow. Our shadow.
And it is growing larger very quickly. Which has to mean…
“Riley,” I say calmly, “I think we are still falling.”
“I know!” she cries, yanking the stick again.
The saucer jerks sideways instead of upward. The ground tilts toward us like a wall of white stone.
The impact comes a heartbeat later. The saucer strikes the ice at a steep angle with a thunderous crash. I pull Riley against me as the entire craft slams sideways. The world outside becomes a spinning blur of white and blue.
We’re rolling. The saucer turns onto its edge and begins to spin across the glacier like a giant wheel. The saucer hums peacefully while we tumble across the ground, sliding and crashing into the curved walls.
White shapes flash past the viewscreens again and again.
Then, without warning, the spinning stops. The saucer jerks violently and slams to a halt with a terrible screech that goes through all of me.
For a moment, there is only silence, and the faint creaking of stressed metal.
I slowly open my eyes. I’m lying on the wall of the ship, and the world outside is tilted.
The saucer is standing on its side, wedged deep between two towering walls of translucent blue,
And we are very, very far from the jungle.
For several long moments, none of us speak.
“I think we’re down,” I finally state. “Are you all right?”
Riley moves in my arms. “Yes, thank you.”
It takes us a while to stand up, with the wall as our new floor, and the floor as a new wall.
Riley looks around at the landscape around us. “We’re stuck in… in water.”
“Water?” I repeat. “This isn’t water.”
“Hard water,” she says. “Water get cold, go hard.”
“Ah. Ice,” I remember the word we use. “I’ve heard of that.”
“You never seen ice before?” she asks.
“Oh, many times,” I lie, not wanting to seem like an ignorant hick. “Just not this much. Not in the jungle.”
“There’s a lot,” Riley agrees. “Can we still open the hatch?”
I try to think of how the exit hatch is positioned, but the whole thing is too confusing.
“Stay here.” I slowly make my way along the wall to the angled wall and past it.
The hatch is at an angle, not straight up.
Which is good, because I’d have no chance to reach it.
As it is, I can both reach up and touch the hatch itself and the plate that I know closes and opens it.
I make my way back. “It should open. But can we try to fly again before we have to go outside?”
“If I can reach the stick,” she says and climbs onto the nearest console, which is now above us. Standing there, she can just reach the panel and the stick. She starts using it and the panel, and the saucer does jerk and move. But not enough to get loose from the ice.
“We must be wedged in really tight,” I ponder, as the ice outside stays where it is. “I’ll go out and try to push it over.”
Riley looks me up and down. “I think is really cold out. Ice and snow are cold. There, furs.” She points to the lowest point of the round “floor,” where all the loose items in the saucer have ended up. Among them are indeed some furs and leather sheets, none of which will do me much good.
“I’ll try without them first,” I tell her as I make my way back to the hatch. I hit the release, and the hatch opens with a hiss. Immediately, a wash of ice-cold air hits me.
But it’s either the cold outside or staying inside, possibly forever. So I grab the sides of the hatch and lift myself out, using knees, and hands, and forearms until I’m crouched in the opening. It’s cold, and all around is snow and ice.
I drop down to the ground. It crackles under my feet, making me grateful that I wear close-toed sandals for all my tasks that the chief orders me to. I take a few steps away from the saucer, noticing to my alarm that I’m breathing smoke.
But there’s not much I can do about it, so I check which way that saucer is leaning in the crevice and try to push it further, so that it will land with the right side up.
The saucer flexes slightly when I push it with all my weight and might, but it’s too heavy to make it fall over. It’s wedged in too deep.
It crosses my mind that the one thing we must avoid at all cost is to have it land with the wrong side up—then we will be able to get in, but I can’t imagine how we’d get it to fly upside-down, when it’s hard enough to control right side up.
Trying to roll it further along the big crack also doesn’t work, and I only see one possibility for getting it out. But that will take a lot of luck and work.
I climb back up the hull, but it’s so slippery I have to take off my sandals and place my bare feet on it. It’s not too cold yet, but I can tell that it won’t be long. I drop through the hatch and hit the plate to close it.
“It won’t move,” I tell Riley. “Possibly it could, if you use the controls and I push in the same direction.”
Riley looks uncertainly at the strange panel, then towards the exit where the freezing air is waiting on the other side. “If the ship move wrong way,” she says slowly, “you get crushed.”
I consider that for a moment. Outside lies a frozen wilderness on a part of the world no one from my village has ever seen. Inside stands a human woman who can barely control the alien machine that brought us here.
I sigh and roll my shoulders. “That does seem like a possibility. And yet, we will try. On my signal, Riley. Try to get it flying again. If you do, I will ask you to land and pick me up before you fly back home.”