Chapter 11 #2
The radio crackles an announcement that tells me it is over for Drako. I hate this. This can’t be how this ends. They’ll hang him, for sure. My eyes fill with tears as I desperately try to think of some way to save him.
“They’re here. Let’s go out and meet them,” Thor says.
He grabs Drako by the arm and escorts him out of our cave. I have been going through numerous arguments to ideally help Drako’s sentence be as minimal as it possibly can be.
We stand in the clearing between the cave and the forest, and we watch as, true to Thor’s words and the radio’s heralding, a dark dot that at first is nothing more than a speck in the sky quickly grows.
It comes down close enough to the planet that we can see the massive white underside of the vessel. It is the size of a small town. I’d forgotten how large spaceships are.
It is just inside the atmosphere when a spark appears on the horizon. At first I don’t pay much attention to it, assuming it is glinting off the rescue ship or something similar to that.
“What the…”
The light is growing fast. Impossibly fast. It’s getting bigger and swifter, and all of a sudden it slams into the side of the ship and the whole thing explodes in a gigantic fireball.
Bits of ship start to rain from the sky, trailing dark clouds behind them as the whole thing loses structural integrity.
I watch, jaw dropped, as a second ship is blown to pieces. More explosions follow the first explosion, a bam bam bam bam bam of destruction as the rescue vessel detonates over and over.
It crashes down horrifically close to the field of the terrible horde, and we watch as that mass of creatures surges into activity, awakened from their slumber. They start to feed on the remnants of our rescuers.
“Wow,” Drako deadpans. “That was unexpected.”
Thor turns to him. “You did that. How did you do that?”
“Of course I didn’t do it. I’m your captive, Golden Boy. There’s no way I could have done that.”
I’m too shocked to have a lot of feelings about what just happened. I know that I have just witnessed my second mass tragedy of what feels like a week or so. There’s only so many times you can see terrible things before the part of you that gets upset when you see terrible things goes numb.
A dark ship is moving across the horizon. It is black, with red insignia that are all too familiar to us. It slides over the broken remnants of our rescue vessel and pauses for a moment.
“See that, Golden Boy? That’s a Vikar warship.”
“You told me they wouldn’t come and rescue you,” Thor croaks.
“They haven’t come to rescue me. They came to attack your vessel. Just as they did the first time you were shot down.”
“So it wasn’t you who gave that order?”
“No,” Drako smirks. “It doesn’t matter, though. I would have given the order if I were a war captain. I am still guilty by association, so you can continue to blame me, Golden Boy. You can blame me for what will likely happen next, too.”
While the horde feeds on those who would have saved us, a port on the Vikar ship opens and it sends out a smaller vessel, an arrow-shaped ship that orients itself to our position.
The moment the sharp tip of the still distant vessel points to us, I feel a bolt of fear like none I have recently experienced.
Facing the troll gave me less anxiety than this ship does.
A troll might have pulled my limbs off and eaten them.
I know the Vikar are capable of far, far worse.
“Run,” Thor says to me. “Run now.”
We bolt, leaving everything behind besides the weapon still slung around Thor’s shoulder. We run for our lives, knowing that what would become of us if a Vikar ship were to capture us would be a fate worse than death.
“There’s no point!” Drako shouts. “They’ll find you!”
We disappear into the thickest part of the forest and run in what I assume is a direction we have never gone before.
I certainly haven’t. I am running faster than I knew I could, keeping up with Thor, or at least seeming to.
I hope he is not slowing his pace on my account.
He would fare even worse with the Vikar than I would, given all the shit he’s been giving Drako.
My fear grows as we run and my mind runs through the many possibilities of what would happen if we were to be captured by the Vikar. There is no guarantee of good treatment at their hands, and we are almost certain to be enslaved and used most awfully.
We run through the forest until Thor grabs me and pushes me down and orders me to crawl into the interior of a rotten fallen log that has been hollowed out by disease and time.
I crawl in as far as I can, and he follows, stuffing the hole we came through with a piece of wood that was usefully sitting at the edge of it.
“Stay quiet,” he says, his voice low. “But listen to me.”
I nod, silent. He is on his hands and knees in this tight space. I am able to sit, sort of, but in a coiled-up kind of way. It’s not comfortable for either of us, but it is considerably better than being caught.
“They’re going to hunt for us,” he says. “But there is no guarantee they will find us. I haven’t been relying on rescue.”
“What does that mean?” I whisper.
“It means I have caches spread out in the forest. I didn’t want Drako to know, so I left you to entertain him while I was preparing.”
I stare at him, feeling a welling of a sensation I haven’t had before. He’s so fucking hot right now. Muscular and prepared for all eventualities? He has a plan B?
“Did you think the ship wouldn’t come?”
“Drako was too fucking smug,” he says. “And I always have a backup plan. They’re going to hunt, but they’re going to get bored. They’ll take Drako, I think, and leave this planet. Then we can try and…” He breathes. “Survive.”
I nod. Right now I don’t care what tomorrow brings as long as tomorrow doesn’t bring Vikar custody.
I snug as far as I can to the end of the log to try to make space for Thor, who looks impossibly uncomfortable. He is able to lie on his side after a little shuffling, his head in my lap. I pass the time by braiding his hair. Neither one of us speak. It’s not safe to.
We’ve been in danger the entire time we have been on this planet, but we have never been in danger like this. This feels like death itself is stalking us. Suddenly, I am deeply afraid of Drako as well. He has shifted in my mind and become a horror again.
A little time passes, and we hear voices approaching. I used to think it would be nice to be around other people again. Right now, I would be so happy to never, ever hear another person’s voice again.
“They can’t have gotten far. They were on foot.”
“If we had hounds, we could apprehend them in a matter of minutes.”
“If we had hounds, they’d rip them into pieces. Jarl Drako wants them in one piece. Keep looking. They came through here in a panic.”
Thor and I make eye contact. Drako is giving orders. He must have a lot of rank. He tried to make himself sound like a settler, little more. But this is not what happens when a settler…
“What the fuck is that?”
We can’t see what it is, but the tone of the soldiers hunting us suggests that they don’t like the look of it.
“Looks like a big bug,” the other one says.
Thor and I make even more intense eye contact, our eyes widening as we understand something the men trying to kill us do not. I have a brief impulse to help them, but there’s nothing we can do.
“It’s coming over this way… argh!”
There is the sound of weapons fire, and then a general screaming and sounds of what I can only describe as consumption. Maybe some stray horde creatures are out here looking for food. They seem to have found it.
We are not going to be able to leave this hiding place until the horde goes back to sleep. Right now they are crawling everywhere, searching for remnants of crash proteins and such. It’s awful. But they have just saved our lives.
I do not know how long it is until we speak again. Hours, certainly. No more voices come our way, and the forest is still, as far as we can tell.
“It’s going to be okay,” Thor says. “Two ships lost around the same planet will draw further attention. We still have a chance at rescue, and one hopes that there was some distress signal sent before it was destroyed.”
I don’t think there was. I think that ship was there one moment, and gone the next. Whatever weapons the Vikar are using, our ships are not able to stand up to them. I do not argue, though. I will not steal hope from him, even if I cannot manifest it myself.
By the time we crawl out of that log, I can no longer properly feel my limbs. That is a mercy, because as feeling returns, they start to burn and ache complaining about the abuse they have suffered in the course of survival.
Thor then moves us to a dense part of the bush, where he has set up a very small camp under a tarp. It’s barely a camp in the proper sense of the word. It’s a few rice rations that we cannot heat, and a flask of water. Both of them taste like heaven to our parched throats.
“I couldn’t believe…”
Thor puts a finger to my lips gently. No talking.
We cannot risk being overheard by people who are close, or surveillance that might be listening in.
I understand his meaning, but it creates an ache inside me.
I need to speak so badly, to hear him tell me what he saw when the horrible thing happened, to hear that I am not alone even though his presence tells me I am not.
I lie down on the ground, my head resting on my forearm, and I am asleep in an instant.
It is not a good sleep. It is the rest of exhaustion, the slumber of hunted prey.
I am restless, waking every time the forest makes the slightest sound, but then falling back to sleep almost immediately all over again.
I miss the comfort of the cave. I miss Drako.
I miss Thor, strangely, though he is right beside me.
You aren’t really with someone if you can’t hear their voice, or at least communicate in some way besides haunted looks.