That first step was an ordeal unlike any other.
First, into the airlock of the Herald of Oblivion’s shuttle - a Jar’ron military shuttle servicing a Jar’ron military ship. Was he the first human allowed into a ship like this? He had no idea; he was an ignorant adolescent dud who played video games too much. Surely, he wasn’t the first; there had been plenty of diplomatic missions and joint military exercises. If he was? Well, what a disappointing ambassador he would be.
There is only one way into the beast's maw: straight through the front door, past the pearly white chompers.
The nanosuit made him feel a little safer. He looked down at his torso and thought he looked pretty damn badass. The suit’s outer layer looked like a mixture of clay and carpet, maybe carpet made from clay. Grey clay carpet. It had created sturdy armour plates in all the right places, ready to stop the bullets for him. But then again, he was literally walking into a military vessel where they probably had tools to crack his smart little nano suit like a soft egg, with some even softer human yolk bits in the middle.
The shuttle flight was short, and Gop seemed oblivious, as usual, to the gravity of the situation. When the shuttle docked, and Arker was once again faced with crossing another frighteningly dramatic threshold, at least in terms of his personal growth and development, the panic became even more acute.
The inner airlock door opened without announcement, and there they were. All of them. Arker was rooted to his seat, staring like a man exposed sitting on the toilet in a public bathroom. Why were they just standing there? They were a tableau of silhouettes, tall and grand. They loomed above him like nightmares to a child, shifting slightly as the moments passed. The sound was only the life of the ship ticking over; the rest was composed of a terribly uncomfortable silence that accentuated his fear, allowing him to feel its physicality. He could hear them breathing in the corridor, coarsely, as if they had just completed laps of the ship.
Gop extricated itself from its small seat.
“It is a pleasure to be invited aboard your most magnificent Jar’ron vessel, esteemed allies and friends of the human race. Please accept our most gracious thanks for rescuing us from a most terminal fate for which we were destined.”
The silence that followed, too stubborn to leave, expanded the void between the two parties.
Arker held eyes as wide as they could be. Trying to remain calm, he tried to rationalise the situation. It was no different from encountering some exotic animal, monkey or ape. Sure, they were different, but there was a commonality here: shared intellect, creativity, and so on. The Jar’ron were aliens, but these were aliens with the same needs and wants. We were a species with parallel aspirations, ideals, and ways of furthering ourselves and our people. Our fraternity was one of such uniqueness, for what other species in the known universe shared such-
“Where do you want to go?” The nightmare closest to Arker and Gop spoke flawless conglomerate standard with a dog’s accent.
“Master Arker would very much like to find his father,” Gop replied.
Arker decided to lean heavily on his round robotic crutch and remain silent.
“What ship?”
“The Forstella”
The leader of nightmares glanced upwards, showing a flat face with a long jaw, squat nose and large, veined forehead. Something about the lighting seemed to highlight the features most appropriate to a child’s notion of what the boogeyman would look like. Their skin was the colour of a midnight sea, a deep navy blue bordering on the darkest shade of grey, and it was leathery, thick and creased. Their faces were unsettling; there was a hint of something simian, or perhaps they reminded Arker of the gargoyles he had seen on a gothic building somewhere. Their mouths were pulled at the corners and drawn up their cheekbones like kids do with their fingers. They had no discernible nostrils, just a deep midline crease in the skin from the top of their mouth to the start of the brow. They had deep eye sockets, like pits, and no facial hair or eyebrows. Their jaws appeared shaped by acromegaly; they were prominent, wide and ridged. The eyes were round with no sclera, just bright orange irises and black pupils. Why were they so tall, though? And their arms were too long. Arker presumed these were the sights one may expect to see strolling through the uncanny valley. The Jar’ron looked too much like humans and too much like beasts. There wasn’t really an animal parallel. Again, maybe an ape mixed with a gargoyle, but it was a very strange ape indeed; the more he thought about it, the less it fit.
"That ship has gone to Raysor. Is that where you want to go?"
Gop looked at Arker
"Yes" Arker said with a cracked voice.
The lead alien turned to its numerous brethren and barked a series of scratching, open-mouthed tones, which brought about a reluctant retreat by the pack. Soon, Gop and Arker were left in the company of the slow-panting alien leader, looming above them, staring like a hungry wolf who had found cabbage; Arker was fairly sure the Jar'ron didn't want to eat him, just as long as it wasn't too hungry.
"My name is Marneka"
Arker blinked "Arker, nice to meet you"
More barking wretches. Arker assumed it was pleased to meet him, too.
__
"Interspecies space-faring protocol dictates that survivors of a disabled vessel or station are to be ferried to the nearest permanent habitation, or adequately provisioned vessel, occupied by that species. The Forstella appears to be in orbit over Raysor; however, it is not responding to our attempts at communication and is broadcasting a pre-formulated reply announcing that all crew have been ferried by shuttle to the surface. Raysor is not technically a Conglomerate Colony but is a permanent human habitation, so it will meet our criteria. We will not require permission to land a shuttle there, so we can escort you to the last known location of the Forstella's shuttle at any time. Would this be adequate? As our guests and refugees, we need your permission to do so. Once we have made contact with the crew of the Forstella, we will no longer be responsible for your well fare, and we will return to our ship."
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Arker almost forgot most of the details as soon as they found his ears. It was just too difficult to concentrate on a conversation when speaking to an apex predator from another world.
“That sounds great”, Arker replied as he and Gop followed the Jar’ron Captain to the Herald of Oblivion’s landing shuttle.
The previous day had been the longest in his seventeen years. After meeting Captain Marneka, Arker and Gop were escorted from the shuttle to what was described as a ‘holding area’, which Arker found far closer in design and feeling to a cell. The walk from the shuttle to the holding area had been brief and uneventful. Arker had seen little of the internals of the warship, just corridors that looked like every other spaceship, perhaps a little neater and a little darker. The holding area was a large room, partially lit with a reclining couch that doubled as a bed, a toilet of the minimalist design and a sink that also dispensed spheres of packaged drinking water.
Thankfully, Raysor’s system wasn’t too far away, and Arker may not have survived a longer journey in that room. Gop had been unperturbed by the near-constant sound of footsteps In the corridor outside their room. From his brief tour from the shuttle, Arker couldn’t believe that all that movement was just run-of-the-mill traffic past his ‘holding area’. The corridors had been empty when he had traversed them. Like the stupid chimpanzee at the zoo, he felt like a caged animal.
After over twelve hours of waiting, the Captain reappeared, clad in armour, and led him and Gop to the landing shuttle.
So Arker followed the large alien in a fatigued daze and agreed with whatever the thing had to say.
“The rest of the crew will accompany us to the surface; the flight should take less than an hour.”
“How do you talk like us?” Arker asked the alien’s back.
“Programming”
Although still confused, Arker left it at that.
In the landing shuttle the rest of the crew were strapped into their seats. Arker felt awkward as he took his seat. They all stared at him. Seeing the aliens in their armour made him doubt the soundness of his plan for the first time, which was remarkable considering the circumstances. They looked like warriors now. They weren’t just soldiers; there was a difference between uniform and armour, especially the armour these aliens wore. It was reminiscent of more primitive times; knights, ninjas, and gargoyles all rolled into one and then renovated with the tools of modern warfare.
Arker leant over to Gop. “How the fuck did I end up here?”
Gop considered the question, looking about itself. “The key to answering that question is a sound knowledge of where exactly here is.”
Arker looked at the robot as one would regard a child who had just recited poetry during a nappy change.
___
What did you do when it seems that the whole universe has turned its broad starry back on you? What did you do when it placed a cold hand over your dry, cracked lips and pushed you away, back into the dust and muck, back into the gnarled, eager clutches of disease and poverty? What city did you create? How did you exploit your neighbours and swindle your family? To where did you run? In what elixirs did you place your hope in? What nectar did you suckle or boil in a pipe? How did you suspend your spirit and soul? What step ladder did you use to tie your noose to the rafters? To which baser instincts did you surrender to maintain your feeble grasp on your fleeing humanity?
There are times when the struggle for survival prints itself on a place - invests itself in the make-up of everywhere, where it’s obvious the environment has been etched by it. Where every stone and brick bends the knee to man’s violent and chaotic affairs. Raysor was such a place, and Primary was its exemplar. The city seethed in a primitive sprawl where men, women and children were more ants in a flat nest with the ceiling removed. The newest structures were hewn from the moon itself. These were beige or khaki stone boxes, two or three stories at most, squeezing the narrow streets between them as if to huddle together or push out the volatile insects that crawled about. These hovels spread primarily across the desert like it was smeared with a knife across toast.
In the centre of this sprawl were the dying remains of the original colony, the structures that housed the builders and noble pioneers of the Conglomerate Pioneering and Colony Building division. These were storm-coloured concrete monoliths resembling geometric thunderheads squatting in the city's centre. They were abandoned. The living spaces, manufacturing hubs, administration offices, and medical facilities were stripped of everything valuable and left to implode slowly and decay from within. The beta-paired electron from Relay had escaped its ansible containment field. The class III colony fusion battery, the Primary, had been sabotaged long ago and now, in a jeckel and hyde fashion, had become a slow-burning dirty bomb, suffusing the whole complex with radiation.
There were two spaceports. The largest was situated a few hundred meters from the old Colony Building facility. Constructed by humanity's best engineers, it endured despite the punishment of regular traffic. Another smaller spaceport, built by the locals, was relegated to the outer suburbs; it was smaller, consisting of low-grade auto-levelling concrete stolen from a commercial hauler that made the mistake of seeking a safe orbit in Raysor while conducting repairs. The Mary Jane was a space hulk now, its crew either murdered or assimilated into Raysor’s population.
The smaller spaceport was far less frequently used; it was where spaceplanes, shuttles and landers came to die. Vessels once capable of dual flight now sat, grounded on the stained cement, too expensive to repair and invariably stripped for parts. Only a tiny portion of the remaining space was still clear, and only a handful of smaller machines could land at any one time.
Here, amongst the sad corpses of space planes, degraded sensors watched longingly as the Herald of Oblivion’s landing shuttle swept through the hazy atmosphere like a shark through silty water and descended towards the surface of the moon. Its navy blue and black fuselage was dull in the tinted light of the distant star as it flared upwards and lowered itself onto the chipped concrete. It was too perfect, too sleek and whole. The rotting skeletons of other landers and shuttles were far more suited to the surroundings, but they were lifeless now, whereas the Jar’ron shuttle was filled with fusion fire and bursting with filtered atmosphere.
Despite their station, the denizens of Raysor were not ignorant. This military shuttle did not belong to Raysor or to humanity. Onlookers pointed and gawked, others swore and hollered. Ripples rode on the backs of scuttling messengers as the information spread through the hovels and shanties, flowing towards the city's centre. The news was striking and hot, passing lips and entering the atmosphere as radio waves. It made the barebones of low bandwidth local networks stutter, and those lucky enough to be connected became nodes from which the news passed by more traditional routes.
There were older rumours that suggested there was another outsider on Raysor, a demigod who called Primary it's new home. Glimpses and hearsay said this being had arrived some time ago on wings of starlight. Sightings had placed it lurking in the ruins of the CBC building. Surely, the news of the Jar’ron military making landfall would wash about the dark places this being inhabited, surely, it would taste the fever of the city, hear the rustle of feet and stir. Surely, this would see the demigod rise.
Squatting menacingly on the oil-stained concrete of the dilapidated spaceport, the rear door of the Jar'ron shuttle opened and out came history in the making.