Page 3 of Breed

“They have a fucking energy weapon aimed at you. Move NOW!”

I’ve never given an order before. It feels quite interesting. It also feels very hopeless, because there’s no way for me to tell if it has been followed. Now that I’m no longer looking at that tablet I can’t see the ship. One good sign is that comms dropped with a snap, crackle, pop, which does suggest they’ve moved.

The bank behind me starts to hum even more intensely. Lights start to cycle up the side of it, a series of orange blinking LEDs culminating in two bright green bulbs.

“AIM! FIRE!… FUCK!”

There are shouts of disappointment in the mid-distance, followed by what I hope is a belated discharge of the weapon. I see a dozen flashes of light go up from the forest and into the sky, joining together as they rise upward. Singly, those bolts wouldn’t do much damage to the Mare’s shielding, but together their force is exponentially multiplied. These saurians are trying to shoot the ship down, caring not at all what damage they do to it, or to the crew. I get the impression they’d drag us out broken and on fire in order to use us.

I watch that ball of power flash through the heavens, hoping I don’t see it hit something unseen and spread out into a true explosion. I know how that will look. At first there will just be an oddly shaped light, but very quickly the ship will blink into visual range as the cloaking devices fail. Then burning bits will start to rain downward like a super low meteor shower.

Fortunately, none of that happens. The ball shoots upward, then starts to dissipate as it loses charge and finds no solid object. I breathe a sigh of relief. That was a close call. If that had hit, these saurians would have killed a lot of the crew or captured them. The latter is probably worse than the former given the conversation I overheard.

“How did they know to move? How did they do that? It’s like they overheard us!?”

There is an outraged cacophony of indignant male saurians as they try to work out what just happened.

I hold my breath and sink deeper into the shadows, moving away from the power bank as much as I dare. They’ve already guessed at the truth of the matter. This is not a good time to be rustling bushes and making an obvious escape. Sometimes you have to follow your instincts, and other times you have to deny them. Knowing when to do what is most of the battle.

I need to lie low and make it to the next rendezvous point. I suspect that the outlaws are going to have a much harder time detecting the ship during the day, and I know the ship won’t leave me behind. As soon as they come back into range, I will be able to transport back up there. My suit will tell me when that is. It’s just a matter of waiting. Fortunately, unlike the captains, I am still free.

I am not panicking too much about being unable to return to the ship. What I really want to do is get down into the city. We know that the captain and, well, the other captain are both being held inside the city proper. At first, we waited for them to free themselves, but it quickly became apparent that getting anywhere near a saurian is practically asking to be abducted. They don’t seem to recognize the fact that we own ourselves. They see us, and they instantly mistake us for one of their own possessions.

The crew is unanimous: we’re not leaving anybody behind. But we’re also not going to take insane risks in order to rescue the captain and… the other captain. We’re going to bide our time, wait for the best opportunity, and take it when the time is right. My mission is a reconnaissance one, officially, at least. Because we’re not only going to get our captains back — we’re going to get paid for the time we’ve wasted being stuck in orbit around this backward planet. We’re going to fill the ship’s coffers with saurian wealth, and we’re going to make damn sure these aliens know they made a mistake when they thought we were ripe for the taking.

That’s why I was not too unhappy to find myself in the presence of these outlaws. Listening to them has been incredibly instructive, as well as absolutely horrifying. They have recently come into some ore reserves which sound like they’d be valuable. I think those will do us nicely, as a starting point for recouping our time and expenses.

Having put a little distance between myself and the cursing saurians, I start moving through the undergrowth, heading away from the criminals and toward the city. I want to make contact with Sullivan and Raine. I want to let them know what the plan is. And I want to find a way to keep the ship safe now that it’s clear these creatures can see it in spite of the cloaking device. We’re going to have to find a way to operate in plain sight.

I’m thinking we use the docks. There are interstellar vessels moving through that space all the time. It’s possible the Mare could dock and I could board there, right in the heart of the city. I like that plan. It’s bold, but it could work.

Little do I know, I’ve already made a huge mistake. In wasting time thinking about my plans, I’ve taken precious attention off my senses. A flitter of movement at the peripheral of my vision is all the warning I get before I am grabbed.

“SHAN GOT ONE!” A saurian starts yelling at the top of his lungs while carrying me nearly upside down.

Shan, the one who has presumably ‘got’ me, has grabbed me by the suit over my hip. I rotate around that axis as his big alien hand grips me tight and hoists me aloft.

“It’s a female! It’s pretty!”

The saurian cheerleader continues to narrate my capture, while the saurian holding me turns me around in his grip and inspects me, though he doesn’t actually turn me around the right way. He must like the way I’m oriented, or maybe he doesn’t know how humans go.

“My feet go on the ground,” I say, helpfully.

I can’t really make him out in the low light of the night. Yes, there is some illumination from the stars and the fading light of their ill-fated weapon discharge, but it’s the kind of silvery light that washes colors out and gives way to shadow far too easily. What I can tell is that he’s a big, scaled, horned, silhouette of a creature. I also know, from being captured, that he’s strong and agile, and he moves silently like an apex predator when on the hunt.

“Quiet,” he says, his voice low but commanding.

More yelling follows, in a not-at-all quiet way. “Spread out! See if there’s more! They can’t run very fast at all!”

The saurian outlaws start beating the bushes in the hopes they will find more like me. They won’t. I came down here alone, because yeah, we’ve noticed that every time one of us gets on the planet’s surface, we get caught. I really thought I’d be the exception to that rule. Stealth is supposed to be my thing. But I guess hunting is their thing. We keep underestimating them, and that just cost me my freedom.

Wrath, the saurian overlord, comes lumbering over. Shan is still holding me in this undignified position. I feel like a fish having been yanked out of water, breathless, squirming, and afraid. This is bad. This is very, very bad. My entire MO depends on staying undetected. Pretty much all my options disappear the moment I appear.

“What is this?” He asks the question rhetorically, because he knows exactly what I am. I am the very thing he set out to take this evening. I denied him my sisters, but he’s got me in his grip. Or Shan does.

“Saw something moving in the undergrowth,” Shan says. “Picked it up. Wasn’t hard.”

Wrath lets out a snort. “These humans seem to lack survival instincts,” he observes. “Was it you, little human? Did you alert the rest of your friends to the fact we were about to shoot them down?”

---