Mare Doloris

by TinCan

Desperation

The horrible sight, predatory eyes staring from the infinite dark, tapped into some primal part of my brain.

The voices of my ancestors, from their trunks and warrens back on the cool, wet forests of home, rose up from the depths of my instincts and gave their unanimous command:

"curl up into a ball and release a foul odor until the scary thing leaves."

We are, alas, not a species known for an excess of martial prowess. Or dignity.

As I was in the sealed environment of a less-than-supple space suit, the wisdom of the ancients was worthless. Even so, the glands on my neck began producing the rotten-flesh scent without my conscious intention. I gagged.

The blue, shining eyes with their slit pupils rose up and began advancing on me. There was something uncanny about them. The dust-statues had surprised me, but I had thought they were beings like myself. Not so the owner of these eyes. It seemed as if the intensity of their gaze alone could rupture my suit if they remained on me any longer.

The suit...the suit!

I was not entirely defenseless.

I began backing away from the thing in the dark with my lower four limbs while I fiddled with the control panel on my left forearm.

The creature increased the speed of its approach, eyes narrowing in malice.

Choking on my own defensive scent, I let it draw closer and closer.

Closer...

I could see the web of filaments in its irises. The slit pupils were opened wide to catch the meager starlight.

Now! I clenched my own eyes shut as tight as I could, consigned my anima to the Increate, and mashed a button on the suit controls. The twin lamps on my helmet emitted a split-second flash at maximum intensity.

Whirling around, I fled in the direction of the crater, not pausing to see whether my trick had left the creature blinded. Finding my way in the darkness was easy; as long as I kept ascending, I would reach eventually the top. Somewhere on the inner slope of the crater was the captain's sidearm, and on it I placed all my hopes for survival.

I had never killed anything larger than an insect, yet I knew I could pull the trigger on that thing without hesitation. I did not wish to kill, but I was ready to do anything so that I would not die.

A small corner of my mind found it amusing. Before I had made the decision to withdraw from the worlds, I had spent sleepless nights toying with the idea of self-annihilation. And over what? Petty trivialities: heartbreak, betrayal, misfortune. The lot of all. Now, hunted and friendless in the dark, I loved my life more than I ever had, or even imagined I could.

As I reached the ridge of the crater, the darkness of the rise suddenly gave way to the diamond-studded sky all around me. A great leap carried me into the sky, and I spread all six limbs to land in the soft dust of the inward slope.

It did not go as planned. After a few seconds, I had still not felt the ground beneath my feet.

I began to panic. Was there some enormous hole I had blundered into? Several more heartsbeats passed in the air, and my nerves could take no more. I raised my forelimbs to re-light the suit's lamps, but as soon as I looked down at my claws, I froze in shock. An aura of blue light shone around the suit's gauntlets, no, around my entire body!

All space travelers know what an azure glow means: Cerenkov radiation. The tell-tale sign at the edge of a warp field. How was this possible? Was I about to be ripped into a burst of particles?

I tentatively reached over and pressed the button again. The lamps flickered and came back to life. There was the steep ground still below me, growing neither father nor nearer. I was suspended in space a mere few ells off the ground.

And then something started pulling me backward, away from the crater and back down toward my cell. My limbs windmilled uselessly in the vacuum.

I tried to treat the situation as being in freefall and flicked my tail to rotate as I'd learned to do on the ship. The ground slowly rolled by beneath me, and then I faced the horizon upside-down. There was my dwelling, there the beacon, and next to it, the thing with the terrible eyes. My course would take me directly to it.

That was my first good look at the creature in white light. It was nearly the same gray-white color as the moon, or maybe it was only covered in dust. A deep blue, glittering cloud hung behind it, flowing as if disturbed by an impossible wind. Unlike the statues, it bore some sort of rigid headgear and breastplate as well as boots, but other than that, it was naked. There was no breathing apparatus, no shell to deflect cosmic rays, not even insulation to protect it from the chill. According to my own suit, the surface temperature was a mere hundred kelvin. It did not seem bothered by the cold.

The spike on its head glowed with the same blue nimbus that surrounded me. Was it bending space itself? I am no engineer, but I have seen the devices we use to flaunt the lower laws of the universe. Their scale means even the largest vessels have to be built around them, and nothing short of an annihilation furnace or the output of several linked fusion engines are sufficient to power them. Yet there it stood, doing the same thing in miniature with no visible apparatus or power source.

It brought me to a stop right before its face, squinting in the light from the lamps. I felt the rolling instinct tugging at me again, but fear of damaging the inside of my suit stopped me. The glow around its horn and myself vanished, dropping me unceremoniously on my head next to the beacon. The creature's mouth opened and shut a few times, and its lips twisted to form phonemes, but of course no sound came out.

Still upside down, I blinked at it, shocked to still be alive.

Towering over me, it bared its teeth in a snarl as if it were my fault sound didn't carry in a vacuum, then launched into a more animated fit of pantomime speech. It raised one of its front legs and pointed at the beacon light, then at the beacon's controls, then at me.

I righted myself and double-checked my radio and translator. I had left both on after I had tried to talk to the statues, and they were still active.

Voice cracking, I asked it if it could hear me.

Its blue eyes rolled in a surprisingly normal-looking expression of irritation. One of its legs swept out, caught me by the back of the head, and roughly forced my helmet against the beacon's control panel. I squirmed and flailed, but I couldn't get its foot off of me. It let me up for only a moment, and then slammed my face against the panel again.

To my horror, a crack began to crawl across the faceplate, the barrier standing alone between myself and the airless void. There was no deadly hiss of depressurization yet, but I doubted it could take any more abuse. I ceased struggling and held up my front claws in abject surrender.

The creature leaned down to my level, causing its floating hair to roll about me. It silently yelled at me again, punctuating each non-word with a stomp into the dust next to the beacon's controls. My scales rattled at each stamp, and the beacon began leaning to one side, so great was the thing's strength.

I finally understood. With fumbling claws, I reached out and turned the switch to re-light the beacon. The surroundings were once more flooded with crimson light.

Its spike glowed blue again and it flicked its head curtly. The same web of force that had carried me before now tossed me in an arc across the sky to crash-land before the door to my cell.

To try again to find the weapon would be foolhardy. My suit felt like it would break down at any moment, my oxygen was nearly depleted and my body was aching all over. Not knowing what else to do, I opened the airlock and crawled back inside my home, wretched and defeated.

As soon as the airlock was pressurized, I tore the damaged helmet off and took great gulps of air not scented with my miasma. It only took a few minutes to barricade the inner door of the airlock with all the supply containers I was able to move, and only a second to flip the breaker that sent power to the airlock's outer door. Even as I did it, I knew all this would be useless if the creature chose to enter.

Next to the door, there was a narrow slit of a window. I peeked through it. The creature was still just outside. It lay on the ground with its back to the habitat and stared into the light of the beacon as though mesmerized.

Seeing it silhouetted in the red light, something clicked in my mind. The image across the face of the moon that had so excited the navigator; long neck, protruding snout, large eyes, spike from the brow...it was the thing right outside my door. Oh, how smug and pious I had felt to recognize it as a sign when the captain dismissed it as mere chance! Oh how shrewd I had thought I was to trouble the navigator about it no further, lest his interest draw others to my moon!

In my self-congratulation I had forgotten that signs, especially great ones, can also be warnings.

What could I do? I could think of nothing. I was at the brutal beast's mercy. With numb claws, I took the icon from the shelf and clutched it to my chest. I shut off the habitat's interior lights, curled into a scaly ball in the corner and lay there in the darkness, trembling and befouling the air.

Comments

[Jaycee]

Well this is different... I like it, continuing reading captain