Page 70 of Alien Viking's Plunder

The brightly painted sled soared into the sky, reacting to her movements with the primitive iron controls. She’d noticed how Bragr drove it, and for an Earth girl with a driver’s license, who’d been aboard fast boats and airplanes and helicopters and spaceships and seen them all controlled by experts, the shortship held no secrets. It was clearly made to be easy to fly.

If only she knew where to fly it.

She slowed down and looked behind her. The green fields and hills rolled all the way to the ocean. There was nobody following her yet.

Maybe nobody ever would. She was apparently not as important to anyone as she had been led to believe. Though the owners of this flying sled probably wanted it back. It was an incredible thing, a flying machine that didn’t make a sound.

Damn, she suddenly wanted to get away from all this. This part of the island was obviously not the place for her. She’d been much happier out in the wilderness.

She knew that Aretha and the girls were held in Gornt’s house. That sounded like a pretty bad place to go. And she had no idea where it was. If she started searching among the villages, she was sure she would be seen and shot out of the sky by an arrow on fire. For all Bragr’s talk about the honor of being able to look an enemy in the eyes, his people were clearly no strangers to bows and arrows.

No, her thoughts were too chaotic right now. She needed distance to everything that had to do with Bragr.

Turning the shortship to the right, she had it start climbing the hills towards the mountains.

- - -

Acouple of hours later she was standing in front of the rock hut where they had spent the night before. The only other place she knew was the sauna hut, but she didn’t want to go back to that forest with the trolls and the vettir. This flying sled wouldn’t protect her against those horrors.

There was a chance that the young Hansr would climb up here soon to restock the hut, over-awed with Bragr’s commanding presence, and by having been noticed and praised by his earl. That was a chance she had to take. She needed time to herself, to think about things and not act rashly.

She sat down on a flat rock where the snow had melted in the warm light from the pulsar in the sky. A part of her was hoping it would sweep one of its energy streams across planet Gardr right now, frying her on the spot with all kinds of gamma rays and X-rays. And tachyons. All her problems would vanish on the spot.

She turned on the camera on the headset. The frame-in-image on her retinas showed the battery at about the halfway mark.

“This is the mountains of the island and earldom Hjalmarheim on planet Gardr,” she narrated. “That’s towards the east, where it’s all mountains. And this,” she turned her head, “is the coast where the humans live. There are other sentient species on the island, but nobody has made much of an effort in making contact with them. Except with the blade of a sword. So nothing is known about the trolls and the dfergir.”

She wasn’t feeling too benevolent towards the Viking aliens right now.

“That’s the planet’s sun, called Straum. It looks like a pulsar. My guess right now is that its energy beams are different from those of every other pulsar we know about. I suspect that they spray some super exotic particles that make things behave in a strange way here on the planet. I’m not going to say for sure that they are tachyons, but that is one possibility.”

The narrating was keeping her calm and forcing her to think of something other than Bragr. Trying to ignore his huge footprints in the snow all around her, she could feel the darkness and the despair surrounding her on every side.

She grabbed Tornado and held it up into the intense sunlight. “See how there are sparkles along the blade? That’s not a visual effect. That only happens in the light from that pulsar. It doesn’t seem to be bad radiation. I’m feeling no ill effects from it. It actually gives me energy.”

What else could she say that was at least semi-scientific? Her brain was empty.Shewas empty.

“That sled flies in the air with no engine that I can see.” She got up and went over to it. “See those iron bars that look like something from an old covered wagon from the pioneer times? Those are the controls. I have no idea how any of it works. The Viking aliens don’t either.”

She sat back down and stared into the distance, not seeing anything but his face, not hearing anything but his voice.

Why did he have to be so great? Of course she was pretty sure that his real reason for wanting to send her away was to keep her safe. That other thing had just been to make it easier for her to leave. Tohatehim.

But now that the anger was gone, she couldn’t hate him. He had filled her life to the brim, and where he had been there was now a big void that was quickly filling up with all the things he had kept away from her. Fear, worry, the old darkness that had always been lurking at the edge and sometimes came too close.

She couldn’t stop it. Her face scrunched up all by itself, acid tears started running, and she turned the camera off. They didn’t need to see this.

The little movement with her hand was echoed by a movement behind a rock fifty feet away.

Josie grabbed Tornado and stood up, heart beating like crazy. If Hansr would climb up here, he would approach from the other side, not the side that faced the woods and the mountains.

When she saw the black face and the snout, she relaxed and wiped her nose.

“Ninja?”

The fenr pup came out from behind the rock and trotted towards her on his six legs, then pretended to be fierce and put his head down. His double tail rotated like airplane propellers.

He came closer, then bounced back.

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