Salvage Destiny

With the terran slung over her shoulder Cortha stomped heavily back down the gangway towards the shaft she had climbed down when leaving the ship. Her slitted irises focused on the soft and round shape of her captain waving to her from the ledge hundreds of feet up. He had pitifully short arms, she thought, as she began her ascent. Her forelegs gripping and tearing easily into the nearly vertical shaft wall while her powerful rear limbs launched them from perch to perch.

The power had died in the consoles with a pop when she’d pulled him free of the tubing snaking into his helmet. Borgen wouldn’t like that. But what could she do. He had said to go get whatever it was that was down there, and this was it. She idly wondered what he smelled like. He wasn’t impressive, yet, she had actually been surprised to see any survivors from the battle of this scale that had long since ended. She had been privy to little more than digital information and radiation signatures. Their ship had waited passively at the edges of even their own impressive scanning range for an extra two cycles just to be sure that all the patrols were gone. Her ear-flaps flicked against the inside of her helmet in irritation. Her people were far more mighty than any of these, beings, they were nothing more than mere fledglings. This part of the galaxy was drowning in poor cripples lacking for even the right number of limbs, but without the technology of these advanced races, her own people had been repeatedly forced to bow low to such others.

Borgen rubbed his hands excitedly as the agonizingly dim witted help made her ascent. He waved again encouragingly trying to will her upwards at a faster pace. She was definitely carrying something. A core? Could it be one of the cells were undamaged? Or even some kind of terminal. He was salivating at the thought. The cavernous pit yawned before him as he tried to get a better look. The magnetic locks clamped to his boot soles kept him from falling through and with a wild riggle he fell back awkwardly spinning away from the chasm. He nearly forgot himself in all of his excitement, it wouldn’t do to go floating away, it wouldn’t do at all. Stepping back from the ledge he decided to pace instead.

He could see the ever frothing Eshka’s bobbing head in the cabin window looking down at him. His breath fogging and saliva coating the port and thin trails of drool were visible even from outside. He stopped pacing to stare at the pilot. The melden nodded eagerly as if pleased to be noticed. Splashing even more froth out onto the ship’s interior. Borgen took a deep breath and tried to remind himself how expensive guidance A.I. were, and the regulations they were programmed to follow.

A single black gauntleted claw slapped the surface of the shaft and the tremendous Cortha emerged. Her armored frame bending sinuously over the lip. Something limp and disappointingly biological hung draped across her shoulder.

“What the fuck is this?” he objected into his com with narrowed eyes. His glare did little to upset the imperturbable Cortha. She merely shrugged causing the alien to jostle wildly. Quickly realizing his mistake the formerly excited captain made placating motions with his arms as he gestured for her to bring the “prize” up the gangway. Even if it wasn’t still alive there if it was a terran there was a standing bounty out for this kind.

Surprisingly, it was alive. After setting the atmospheric controls to increase the right gases they removed the space suit. Peeled out of its coverings an alien body fell to the deck with a soft whump. It began rolling in earnest down the uneven plane along the floor. Cortha arrested the flopping motion with a lightly stomping forelimb. Yellow and purple coloring seemed radiate outwards across both it’s upper and lower parts seeming to randomly fade into the pink skin. The trio of crew stood in silence around the pale terran.

“Well ain’t much to look at is they.” Eshka commented his voice coming out muffled from behind the bulbous mask covering his face. The first mate was hunched over the form. Stooping low he prodded the fleshy cheeks of its face. And make a yick sound in disgust as it wriggled at him. “A truly hideous race.”

“That’s not his face.” Borgen said while seriously reconsidering his choice of navigator. “Cortha roll him over. I want to make sure you didn’t break anything too important….” The body flopped bonelessly and presented him with, a more familiar if still alien picture.

“Not worth the time. Just stick it in cold storage. We can trade the body at the next post for a bounty.” Cortha groused. He had forced Cortha to surrender her quarters. It was her own fault for bringing back something so troublesome. His eyes dilated to a deep purple as he began to focus.

He knew it was a terran, he had seen them before. There wasn’t a corner of space within the Eradi territories that hadn’t. Images of them had been broadcast across holonet news boards for years, but they all looked the same to him. Unimpressive and unassuming just another species that wasn’t his own.

The news was always the same. Total quarantine of the species. Full blackout no contact and no travel was permitted within a gigantic swath of the active borders. Violation of this military quarantine would be considered treason. He personally pitied the Terran race. They would find no succor from a foreign power either. The Galactic Hegemony would not interfere for a non-member race. Appeals to their unified governing bodies for protection and amnesty would not be granted to any cultures in times of war.

He took time inspecting the creature. Almost universally they appeared as stick-like scraggly creatures. In possession of a mere single head tentacle as a rule demarcated a pitifully low level of intelligence. Few of this kind managed to achieve the graceful folds of body lining that signaled opulence and success. He reached out lightly to touch the warm skin. There wasn’t a lot of muscle tone. It probably wouldn’t make a great laborer either. Air bladders seemed to be slowly cycling through inflations. That was a good sign, probably. As if the suit hadn’t confirmed it this also meant it wouldn’t be particularly suited to work well in a vacuum. His prospective profits were in a rapid decline.

The Broken Tusk was great for smuggling inanimate cargo, but between the spartan main deck and comparatively massive cargo space there was no room or value wasting space to setup for live containment. He hoped it wasn’t carrying anything, but even with a proper quarantine he was certain the pitiful medical facilities onboard would fail to detect foreign contagions. Still a living slave was worth far more than a dead bounty. He opened the jaws.

No he probably wouldn’t trade this one to the Eradi. The fact that it was alive would raise too many questions but it would too wasteful just to kill it. He let the mouth fall shut with a clack. Dusting his hands off Borgen stood and walked over to inspect the space suit.

A suit and a slave. He thought. Well at least one thing fell in my favor. Package deal.

Out along the rim they didn’t ask so many questions. It was cheaper to use expendable labor for some of the more dangerous tasks than it was to pay for robotic workers sporting expensive AI, though if he bargained well it wouldn’t be by much. He wondered what kinds of skills this one possessed. Robots and to a lesser extent androids worked tirelessly and barring an accident lasted forever, It was just that those kind of workers were almost universally stolen and reprogrammed for new masters before they could earn any profit. Slaves were just too plentiful and perishable to bother stealing.

At the door Borgen slapped a hand on the access panel and left while pondering the appropriate price of such a “rare specimen”. He left orders to get it down to the medical room and make sure it didn’t die.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Now that Borgen had left, Eshka was technically in charge. Sensing the expectant eyes of his subordinate on him he shuffled forward and grinned amicably. Borgen would probably do it like this.

“Hello...Ter..-hummen. You have been rescued!” Eshka said in standard, mentally patting himself on the back for remembering that they called themselves Hummens rather than Terrans and likely preferred the moniker. He stared pointedly at its’ face. Despite his gracious mannerisms it made no response. Eshka’s bladdermask jostled in surprise as he looked from the still silent terran to the resident strongarm. Cortha looked amused.

It wouldn’t do to let her think mere chattel could defy him. He thought while nervously shuffling closer. Weak captains didn’t last long after all. And he would be a captain someday. Knowing this he cleared his throat and tried again.

“Congratulations you are very lucky to be alive! I Eshka have saved you.” he said trying out lowering the pitch of his voice and increasing the volume. Maybe they were more deaf and slow on the whole than he had been led to believe. To his relief the limbs began to stir. It was working. They either just couldn’t hear very well or only responded to a show of force. He glanced up at Cortha smugly. Knowing that she would be properly impressed Eshka unconsciously began bobbing his head. But Cortha merely rolled her eyes. Glowering at her he continued to communicate.

“You were in an accident are you hurt?” Eshka shouted while wincing at the strain.

James woke to a pounding headache, and a terrifying sight. No doubt his delirium had taken a turn for the worse. Looming over him was the underside of something monstrous green and scaly. It was the mixture of a dragon and a woman. A large claw of the monstrous beast pinned his chest to the floor, but that wasn’t what disturbed him the most. He had followed the direction the feminine face was looking and it wasn’t looking at him. Glancing down he saw something truly horrendous. A grotesquely oversized yellow slug was currently screaming into his crotch. Despite knowing it was a nightmare he gave a startled yell and began to fight.

Reflexively grabbing at the talon pinning him to the floor he flailed his legs in panic. A stray foot kicking out and catching the startled alien in the side. He lost sight of the creature when he was quickly pulled upward and restrained. A wretchedly foul odor began to permeate the room making his eyes water.

Cortha roared with laughter while clutching the struggling terran against her chest with one arm and pointing at the navigator with her other. She practically bellowed with unconstrained mirth at the sight of his unconscious form. Until the smell hit her as well, and her laughter became a hacking and choking rasp. She retreated from her old quarters deciding to rescue the terran as well. She squeezed the terran tightly in joy not having laughed so hard since the last call to port, and headed off to the modest medical room.

James glimpsed the sprawled form through watering eyes gagging at the smell. He tried to get his bearings and struggled on despite the deafening roar in his ears and the violently disorienting shaking making it so hard to focus. As he was being crushed to death he continued stubbornly punching and biting at the scaled arm that held him. Quickly becoming exhausted he could do little more than bounce along down a broad tunnel.

***

Ian Helford clutched the stout glass of brandy in his hands. Rolling it slowly between well groomed fingers.

“You know Stephen, my friend’s used to make fun of me for enjoying such a cheap drink. It isn’t elegant like wine, nor truly distinguished like a proper Bourbon can be. Bourbon they’d say, now that is a proper drink.”

“Bourbon is a gentleman’s choice.”

“Indeed! Do you remember South Africa that time after Reynold’s firm acquired the Exitor contract?” Ian let out a chuckle while musing.

“Quite well sir, a remarkable occasion.”

“Hmm, it was remarkable wasn’t it? He claimed having attained the pinnacle of his career that the only way not to stagnate would be to endure conquering a lifelong dream. And what was that dream Stephen?”

“Sailing.”

“That’s right, it was sailing, and he decided that when life was that good you just had to properly commemorate the occasion. We were supposed to take up sailing off the coast of Cameroon? I remember now. He had purchased that commercial monster and the rest of us were cheering from the docks as he disembarked, but something happened. He never made it out past the jetty before he was…” Ian trailed off as if searching for the right word.

“Arrested. Apparently it was illegal in Cameroon to purchase state owned property from a bartender.”

“Arrested, right.” Ian said, rolling the word on his numbing tongue as if to taste it. “There was a whole thing in the media after that, all of us were to be included. You know Frederick threatened to take away the reigns of the company. You know he would have given it to a member of the board over that. I should have let him do it, the rotten bastard. I would have loved it, watching those useless sycophants attempting to deal with the naval manufacturing conscription. It would have served him right to see it all torn down.”

“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead sir, especially not your father.”

“Well then who would we talk about? The Eradi? Besides the local telecasting companies had an absolute field day with the story and most of them are dead too. Or they would have anyway if it weren’t shut down almost immediately. Frederick never did tell me what he had to do in order to keep me out of it entirely.”

“It is actually one of the few places in this solar system to which your colleagues, and the esteemable Captain Reynold are no longer welcome to drink nor visit. The court even managed to mandate six months of involuntary rehabilitation.”

“I always thought they were a little harsh on them, what do you think?”

“Just so sir, perhaps your friends, having attained near prescient awareness of the human condition, due to their elevated station in life, while simultaneously wallowing within the apparent stigma of sociopolitical inadequacy foisted upon them through the inhumane connotation of a peonage towards affluence acquired throughout the history of mankind when confronted by the primal jealous force that lurks within all of human nature upon realizing difference, were merely forced to act upon an unfathomably noble appreciation of the mundane while becoming entangled within the corruption of a world’s fundamentally inimical mores with regards to the truly guiltless gentry which exist in tandem to such a diametric inequality that holds falsely guiltless a life of burgeoning destitution through inaction which heretofore resulted in the unrighteous and shameful condemnation of the victims.”

“Truly?” Ian asked in surprise.

“No sir, a goodly number of your friends are indeed alcoholics.”

Ian tipped back the glass and swallowed. The chilled brew trailing bitter notes of flame as it passed. Warmth crested outward through his chest as the fiery liquid battled against both the arctic cold and frigid memories.

“Did I ever tell you that I actually hate it? Brandy that is. I can’t stand the stuff to be quite honest.” Ian said. And now it was Stephen’s turn for surprise. For after a life of devoted service he had thought to well and truly know the man before him. The man currently peering down at the icy depths of the an ocean beyond the arctic circle and yet he had never suspected it.

“I only drink it because it reminds me of her.” Ian said with a sigh, “And now, I suppose, of him too.” He took a long draft finishing off the glass, before hurling it out over the Atlantic. “My son the hero, dead at 29 in some backwater system and for what, so that a few more rich bastards like me can run away and start over? Frederick would never have put up with this shit. I will say that, the old man had a lot more spine than I do I guess.”

“That’s not fair sir, you did all that could be done, but he was already out system and off world before you even got a chance to stop him. Not even I suspected that he could have broken your family’s private encryptions and removed himself from the network. I don’t even think he booked a private flight, it was some kind of passage as an illegal stowaway. I’m quite sure he didn’t even enlist with his own DNA and obviously not under his real name.The only reason we know where he most likely ended up was because of Ingrid’s quantum bonding. As it stands she absconded with the entire Plution estate's private security detail to search for him. If he misled even her somehow… There was absolutely nothing that could have been done…”

Stephen trailed off under a baleful gaze.

“Well go on, don’t stop. Tell me again why it’s okay that my son is dead, and I’m not.”

A silence settled over the tableau broken only by the unending waves continually to lapping against the sides of a ship with a rhythmic tinny thok.

“We don’t know that he is dead. They could have found him in time. He might have went somewhere else.” he quietly answered.

“That’s the thing you keep failing to say Stephen. There is nowhere else to go.”

A portion of the billowing atmosphere that shrouded the world began to glow brighter and brighter violet before burning away beneath a ponderous globule of plasma. It fell inexorably planetside until colliding with the field from an in-atmosphere shielding frigate that immediately erupted into a coruscating nova. The sheer force of it thundered deafeningly out over the atlantic before reaching the two onlookers and showering them in a blast sound and spray of freezing meltwater. The mushroom cloud slowly billowing upward from the ruined metropolis it had been defending was only one of many to come.

Gazing out through the broken clouds Stephen was sadly forced to agree.

The night sky was illuminated by the still raging engagement hundreds of miles overhead. The mixed wreckage of the both the United Earth Reserve force in orbit and the Eradi fleet ships continually plummeted through the stratosphere. Burning smoking meteorites of flickering light fell through the night. The debris that resisted the friction of reentry ended their journey in dire consequence for anyone unlucky enough to be trapped below. Rapid lances of chaotic energy tore through the heavens as the desperately outnumbered humans made a final stand above their homeworld.