Chapter Eight
Don’t Hate Me Cause I’m Handsome
Armen came in, looking as sultry, attractive, and sexy as Jenna remembered, but she felt mildly bored looking at him. She let her head loll back as she waited for him to speak.
“You’re not sleeping?” Armen noticed. His breathing was heavy like he had jogged to her room.
“What’s going on?” she prompted.
“There’s been an attack on a hospital on Octavia Prime. The Adamis Prime Minister is demanding you go down to the surface to calm the Hipposyphis causing this.”
“How come he can say the name of the enormous octopus?” she complained.
“He’s butchering it,” Sardius put in.
“We can’t wait for Lucy to be ready to go down to the surface. You’re ready, and they need you now,” Armen said urgently.
Jenna rose to her feet. “Like I need Lucy to go with us. I wasn’t the one who wanted her in the first place. If I was the only one that mattered we could have left last night. Whose fault is it that we didn’t? Lead the way.”
Armen bit his tongue on whatever retort he had on the ready and led Jenna out of the room. They met Favel in the hallway and hoofed it down to what Jenna thought was an elevator. Well, Favel didn’t hoof it. He slooshed it, mushing his body forward on the ground, but also attaching his suction cups onto the walls to propel himself forward like a lazy Spiderman. Honestly, he made a very good distraction from Armen as his every movement fascinated her. Armen kept propelling her forward whenever she stopped to watch Favel.
“He’ll catch up,” Armen pointed out as he hurried her along.
Inside the lift, Jenna soon realized it wasn’t an elevator in the way she was familiar with. It was something else. It had seats, and each of them took one. Just as the doors closed, she had an impulse to tell them to stop and wait for Sardius to join them. In the nick of time, she remembered that was crazy. He was in her ear.
“How are we going to get to Octavia Prime?” Jenna asked.
“This vehicle,” Armen said, indicating the tiny room that was now descending at a measured pace downward. “It will be carried on tracks to a sky launch platform. Here, we don’t have personal vehicles. A vehicle like this one can ride tracks in all directions. Meaning, it can scale the side of any building and let you off at the correct floor, as well as taxi you to the sky launch platform, like the airport on earth. It’s a nuisance to wait for an elevator, wait for a taxi, and wait for your plane to take off. Here, the elevator becomes the taxi and the taxi is loaded onto the rocket, which will shoot us out into space, take us between the moons, and drop us as pleasantly as possible onto the surface of Octavia Prime. Once we’re on the rocket, Favel will leave us because it’s uncomfortable for him to always be out of the water, so he’ll join the other Octavians in the spacecraft.”
“I know this seems odd to you,” Favel said, raising a tentacle the way a person would raise a finger. “Because you would never consider an elevator in the same realm of technology as a rocket ship. These pods can withstand the differences in pressure whether they are underwater or breaching an atmosphere and that’s necessary for us because of the nature of our worlds.”
“Sounds efficient,” Jenna said as she looked out the window at the vast oceans and horizons of Octavia Three.
The star their solar system used as a sun had set long ago, and instead of seeing it, she saw the four other moons of Octavia Prime hanging in the air. The star patterns in the sky were different and vast. Jenna whispered, “Are any of these stars the sun of my world?”
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
“Of Earth? Yes.”
“Yes.”
Sardius and Armen had answered at the same time.
“I’m sorry, Armen. I was actually talking to Sardius.” She clenched her jaw, kept her gaze focused out the window, and tried to listen to the explanation Sardius gave about how solar systems span around each other, but she found it impossible to pay attention.
Instead, she was completely aware of Armen. He was clearly the worst, but some part of her responded to him and that part made her sick. What had been mouth-watering about him had become loathsome. She kept her gaze out the window because that was all she could do to stop herself from screaming.
“Madam Diplomat?” Sardius prompted and she heard that.
“Yes, Sardius, I see,” she said snottily for the benefit of all in the room.
Slowly, he said, “I understand. I’ll stop blabbing in your ear and let you absorb what’s around you.”
He didn’t say another word as the craft jolted mildly as it stopped descending and moved forward on a new track that ran along the ground. The grass under them disappeared and the track went across water as it neared an island that had a rocket launcher on it.
“All this technology and infrastructure will be gone in the next twelve years,” Favel said conversationally. “On Octavia prime, we have no need for tracks like the ones on the ground here. There, a pod can ascend and descend without tracks. Once you’re in space, you can get picked up by a ship and taken wherever you want to go.”
“That sounds really exciting,” she agreed, not wanting to offend Favel.
He continued, “As it is, this rocket will take us to space. I’ll get us deposited in the correct vessel and once all its passengers have disembarked to other crafts, the rocket will fall back to the surface and be prepared for another launch from Octavia Three while we continue on to the planet.”
“Are we going to have to wait for many passengers to get on before we can start traveling?”
Favel looked mildly excited with the blue flaps over his eyes raising slightly like eyebrows. “There are no other passengers. We are the only ones going.”
“They chartered a spaceship for us?” Jenna asked in disbelief.
Favel put out two tentacles and made a heart shape out of them. “Yes.”
Armen snorted through his handsome nose. “A lot more than this has already been done for you, Jenna. So much money, so many resources, and so much time has been put forth to bring you here. You might not appreciate it, but you should at least understand it.”
Jenna turned away from him and watched the view change as they took a turn that moved them upward into the rocket that would carry them into outer space. She watched as they loaded their pod into the side of the rocket, almost exactly the same way a cassette tape was loaded into a player.
“You stay conscious until you’re locked onto the spaceship. You won’t get to enjoy the scenery on the way to the planet, but you’ll be able to enjoy the view for a few more minutes,” Favel explained kindly.
“What happens when we’re loaded into the spaceship?” she asked.
“I’ll leave out the bottom. When the hatch is locked, this pod will fill with gas and both of you will be unconscious in ten minutes.”
“Will you go to sleep for the journey as well?” she asked him.
“No,” Favel said and it almost sounded like he was laughing. “I’ll pilot the ship to Octavia Prime. Do you think I would trust you to the yahoos they get piloting these simple routes? I’m taking care of you myself.” He nodded reassuringly. He pointed out the window with the tip of his tentacle. “Watch. This is a miraculous sight.”
Jenna turned her head in time to see the central star’s light break out over the crest of the Octavia Three. She caught her breath.
“Do you see why it’s important for you to be here?” Armen asked peevishly.
“Armen, please stop talking to me if you don’t have anything important to say,” Jenna snapped back. “I’m very displeased with the way you handled me. The dishonesty is what is bothering me the most. I may not have been given all the details, but my family believed in this program enough to attach the heirloom to my head when I was a baby. I knew this was coming. Please be quiet and give me some time to adjust.”
Jenna had been staring out the window, watching their journey up through the stratosphere, and higher when she heard something like muffled speech on the other side of the pod. She glanced over to see Favel with a tentacle suction cupped over Armen’s mouth.
“I’m sorry, Favel. He must taste disgusting,” Jenna said with a wry smile.
Favel glanced between them. His thoughts were unreadable for Jenna. She didn’t know what octopus expressions meant.