Chapter 20 #2
They were trying to buy humans from me to sell as meat, not knowing what I was.
"Fuckers," I spat out, knowing they couldn't understand me. "Is there any way we can get these guys arrested? I don't want to leave them running around."
"Just tell us what the price is," the hyena alien demanded before turning back to the woman. "If you keep translating for us so we can get more of your kind, we won't eat you, we promise."
Several of the other hyenas let out a chuckle.
"You won't eat her regardless," the messed-up Vaurelcar snarled.
"It has other humans it can sell you, but wants to see your ship first," the woman said to the hyenas. "It wants to go on board and look at what you have to trade."
"Why would you say that?" I asked her.
I absolutely did not want to go on their ship.
"They might have navigational data or records or something to explain where they got the other humans from," she said in English. "Plus, we can't kill them here, where people can find them. We should do it on their ship."
Woah she was bloodthirsty.
"You want to kill them?" I asked.
"They eat people," she replied, as if that were the obvious answer to my question.
"What is it saying?" the hyena demanded.
"It says the humans it has are fresh and very valuable; it wants to make sure you can pay for them," the woman said in their language.
"I'd rather turn them over to the authorities," I said. "Killing them will just kill the trail to their superiors."
“I understand your intentions,” Lyrien said on the private com. “But they won’t be imprisoned or stopped unless their activities are public enough to cause an outrage.”
"They won't serve time," she said in English. "You won't have to do anything. Eun can do it. There won't be anything or anyone to stop them if we don't get rid of them."
"Eun is not a normal Vaurelcar name," Lyrien added in, noting the other male’s name. “Not at least any one that I’ve ever heard before.”
"You will come too," the hyena said. "To translate."
"As long as your kind won't ever bother me again," the woman said.
"Agreed," the hyenas all chuckled again, and they headed back down the alley, the woman and Eun following after.
I clunked along beside them.
"Are you sure about this?" Lyrien asked on our private channel. “The likelihood of this ending in a fight is high.”
"I’m not sure about the fighting part," I said. "But I’m not going to leave the first human I’ve seen in a situation like this."
"I don't like this," Eun said, his voice low.
"We got this, remember?" the woman said to him as she laced her fingers with his. "Let's go see inside their ship."
The woman looked up at me.
"Do you have a ship?" she asked. "Are you leaving the system? Can we catch a ride with you back to Earth? We need to get off this planet, right now. We can pay upfront in full, or work for passage, whatever you need. Please, you're the first person I've met who even knows the name of my planet."
"I don’t want to let that Vaurelcar onboard," Lyrien said. "Not unless I know what happened to him. If he has been cutting off his own neurofilaments he is too much of a risk."
"Let's get more information before we say yes or no either way," I said on a private channel to Lyrien.
"Sure," I replied out loud. "But I need to discuss it with my partner."
"What is it saying?" one of the hyena aliens asked.
"I asked it if it could give us a ride," the woman said. "We're looking for passage off this planet."
"We'll provide you passage," said the hyena with a toothy grin and a chuckle. "To pay you for translating."
We clunked up the ramp onto the hyena alien's ship.
It stank like rotten meat and piss. We had walked up the ramp straight into a large cargo hold, with stacks and stacks of boxes lined up.
There were more on the landing at the bottom of the ship.
The hyena alien walked over to one of the boxes and lifted off its lid.
A cold plume of visible air hissed out. Inside were piles of individually wrapped chunks of meat.
"We have selections from every species you can think of," the hyena leader said to me as it walked deeper into the hold, opening several more boxes. I stayed near the open door at the rear of the ship, unwilling to go deeper.
Eun's shoulders were tight, his short neurofilaments lashing out all around him.
"Remember to stay out of range of his neurofilaments," Lyrien said. "Even short like that, they will give your armor trouble."
"This isn't a trade, this is a trap," the woman said. "My friend here isn't interested in buying what it can just take."
There was a manic lilt to the woman's voice, and though I didn't appreciate her trying to bully me into a fight, I wasn't upset at her either. From what Lyrien told me about this planet, it was a terrible place to get trapped. She was doing what she thought she needed to do to survive.
"Leija, if the robot wants to steal from them, we should stay out of its way," Eun said. "This isn't our fight. You could get hurt."