Spawn of the Living Ship

Chapter 1

ONE

NOELLE

I stepped off the metal ramp and into a sky burning the wrong color, the wind slapping against my faceplate, the smell of copper and sour wine drifting through the filter that let me experience this alien planet where no human had gone before.

I repeated that thought to myself: I was on a different planet.

The sheer magnitude of it made my heart clutch in my chest so hard that, for a fleeting moment, I wondered if I was getting enough potassium in my diet.

This was something that I couldn't imagine in my wildest dreams. I wasn't this person, standing here, my fabricated boots sinking into the marshy surface of a planet no human even knew existed, let alone capable of supporting life.

I ran a Michelin star restaurant! I wasn't an astronaut.

I used to run a restaurant, I reminded myself.

It had been at least months since I was kidnapped and stuffed into a shared prison cell on an alien spaceship; my landlord was already drooling with eagerness to get me off the extended lease so that he could double the rate with a new tenant.

Without me to keep things going, no one would pay the rent, and even if I got back to Earth tomorrow, it was almost guaranteed my entire business would be evicted, my years of work seized and resold.

The big dream of my life, what I had worked toward my entire life, was gone.

Instead, I was an astronaut.

My knees wobbled, and a gust of wind took that moment to push me, hard enough that I stumbled and fell, my knees squishing down into the soft surface of this brand new frontier.

The wind rushed past my ears in a low, screeching howl, sweeping in from the pitch-black horizon toward the bloated red sun stuck frozen in the dusk. I reached out to steady myself, my fingers sinking into a moist, spongy carpet that covered the ground.

When I looked down, I gasped. The vegetation wasn't green.

It was a terrifying, glossy black and deep, bruised crimson.

I knelt on the damp earth, my knees soaking through my trousers as I reached for a thick, rubbery stalk sprouting beside my boot.

Its leaves were broad and ribbed, shaped like giant raven feathers, glistening with an oily dew.

To my eye, it looked almost like a wild, mutated kale, but as I pinched a leaf between my fingers, it felt unnaturally dense, supple, and surprisingly warm to the touch.

Further down the slope, nestled in the sheltered lee of a massive black rock, grew a cluster of bulbous, plum-colored pods.

They hung low to the soil, heavy and swollen, glistening in the eerie, perpetual twilight.

They reminded me of dark figs, but when the wind gusted, they vibrated with a low, subtle hum.

It was smart of Mei to allow us to hear and smell the outside world despite being in environmentally safe suits, but that forethought didn't surprise me.

I recognized a kindred soul when I saw her.

She was the kind of person driven to make, to create something from nothing more than a collection of ingredients.

The difference was whether our creations were edible.

I pressed harder on the ground, feeling the squish with my hands.

Mutated kale, bulbous pods- those were interesting, sure, but this ground felt alive as well.

Feeding people wasn't just about flavor; it was about bulk.

I only served tiny plates to people who wanted to pay for it.

The people who came to my Sunday free food pop-up kitchen didn't want the essence of tomato served in a shot glass; they wanted calories that would keep them going if they couldn't get enough to eat tomorrow.

A large knee entered the corner of my vision as the alien male crouched down next to me, the strange metallic fabric of his trousers bending without issue.

"Are you trying to make me look good, or are you naturally incompetent?

" he asked. "The Adventures of Garlithian the Space Pirate has many alien females who fall frequently.

It is entertaining, but the females in other shows don't fail in basic functioning like that, so I think the creators of the show might have decided that Garlithian looks better if incompetent females always surrounded him. "

I stared at him for a moment, startled by the sheer amount of words that had erupted from him.

He had been completely silent from the moment that Sara had called me into the room she was using to perform surgeries and asked me to take him with me.

He had been just standing against the wall for over a week after she asked him what he was going to do with himself now that he was free from the control chip she had removed from his brain.

He answered her a week later and asked her to assign him a task.

I joked in the last meeting that I needed a personal assistant, and now I had a tall alien male with bright yellow skin and bare, muscular shoulders covered in small divots.

His face had a pointed look, his eyes completely black, with small white spots in the upper corners that moved when he looked around.

He had feathers instead of eyebrows, but his head was bare, except for more of those strange pockmark-like divots that ran down the center of his skull.

Tiny little spines were sticking up out of the divots, like thick little hairs.

When Sara assigned him to me, he said nothing, just followed me around until I put on a suit and went out the airlock on the planetary expedition.

Like the other alien males, he didn't wear a suit like us humans; he just walked out into the air, looking around, like the composition of the atmosphere being drastically different from the ship didn't matter at all.

"Is calling me incompetent really the first thing you want to say to me?" I said, my mind catching up with the moment. "You're the one who walked out an airlock without a spacesuit."

"You're the one who requires environmental protection. Caliciums are adapted to operate in a wide range of environments," he said. "The five percent carbon dioxide isn't a danger to me as it is to you."

"Humans can breathe small amounts of carbon dioxide," I said, confused. I thought the issue with the air was alien spores or something, not carbon dioxide.

"No, you can't," he said. "Your pitiful lungs rely on a pressure gradient to work; the carbon dioxide level here is higher than the partial pressure in your blood, making your body unable to exhale the carbon dioxide you produce.

If you take off your helmet and breathe the air, the reversed gradient will force carbon dioxide back into your bloodstream, causing rapid acidosis, and you'll panic and die.

It's like that time that the Taygetans double-crossed Garlithian by slowly increasing the depth pressure in the meeting room while their diving suits protected them.

If he didn't have a medical implant installed to monitor his body, he would have died without ever knowing the cause! "

"I didn't know that," I said. He was alien-explaining to me, but it was something I didn’t know. I had no idea that such a small increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would end human life simply because of how our lungs worked. "You seem well informed."

He smiled at me, then reached up and touched his cheek, as if the motion of his mouth was surprising to him.

"It is easy to look things up," he said, dropping his hand back down, his tone cheerful as he took my compliment.

"For example, you humans suffer cognitive and systemic cellular decline in an atmosphere of 0.

1% carbon dioxide. But not everything is easy to look up.

There is no documentation to explain why my biological suppression system tried to fire when I met you or what its point is.

I thought it was to keep me from being distracted from tasks, but I feel much more alert and sharp with it turned off.

Also, nothing that explains why you're on your hands and knees.

If you aren't incompetent, what are you doing? "

He really liked to run his mouth off, didn't he?

I didn't think he was negging me. I had experienced plenty of that particular phenomenon, where a man would say something insulting with a smile and a phrasing that sounded just enough like a compliment to give me the wiggle room to gaslight myself into accepting it.

This felt more like he had an idea of what social skills were supposed to be through observation than through practice. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and answer his question.

"The ground appears to be plant matter, and there is a lot of it," I said. "I'm wondering if it is edible enough for bulk processing into a basic material for cooking."

He reached down to his side and unclipped a small device. He pointed it at the ground, but didn't look at it, just kept staring at me. Then he gave a short nod.

"It is," he said. "I withdraw my question of incompetence. It is clear your mental processes are highly functional."

"I found an edible fruit!" Saoirse called out through the comms installed in our helmets. I looked down the hill where the other women and aliens had gone, and she stood there, hefting a crimson pod in the air as she waved a small device like the one the alien next to me held.

"It will be easier to obtain large amounts of calories from cutting and rolling up this turf than picking individual fruits," he said, making my own point for me.

Paired with his comments about me being incompetent, having him take my idea and declare it as his own was enough to push me past my held-back politeness straight into feeling a bit snippy.

"No shit, Sherlock," I said.

"Sherlock?" he asked.