Surrounded by turquoise water as far as the eye could see, Malik leaned back to physically distance himself from his current project. A sigh slipped from his lips as he looked up from the mess of Dyneema straps that he’d been working on for hours. He'd known that disassembling the five-point harnesses attached to the crash couches would be a long, grueling process. That would have been true before he hurt his shoulder during the storm last night. Now, preoccupied with concerns of making the injury worse, his progress had slowed to a crawl.
He had considered all that before he began trying to repurpose the safety harnesses. What he hadn’t counted on was the steady stream of heckling he’d received from his audience. Oscar had spent the entire day being highly entertained by Mal’s struggles and the gargantuan reptile didn’t bother to hide its amusement.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, chuckles,” Malik said as his blue eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ll remember that when you’re begging me to share the next coatl I shoot.”
Unperturbed by Mal’s reprehensible threat, Oscar’s amber eyes sparkled with effervescent mirth.
It was difficult to stay angry with the leviathan. At least as difficult as it was to work with the woven Dyneema and polyethylene cloth. After struggling most of the morning to get one of the five buckles free of its strap, Mal couldn’t even blame Oscar for laughing at his expense. After all, he’d been sitting cross-legged on the pod’s tritanium floor for most of the day and had little to show for it.
“Ugh, you’re right. Don’t rub it in,” Mal groaned like a toddler after taking a spoonful of bitter medicine. “I know what you call someone who does the same thing again and again expecting a different result, alright?”
Oscar didn’t even try to restrain the smug shimmer in his eyes while gentle waves lapped against his thick, coarse hide.
“Hah!,” Mal said triumphantly as he rose to his feet. “He didn’t even say that, you oversized handbag. Some newspapers misquoted him but by the time it was corrected, the public had already embedded the false citation in its collective subconscious.”
Haughtily unimpressed with Malik’s weaponized knowledge bomb, the sea monster’s eyes closed in a slow, challenging blink.
“No, I don’t know what paper it was,” Malik said grumpily as he bent down to pull the filter out of his desalination rig. “It was like…,” the dark-haired man paused, one hand rising to scrub his cheek in silent contemplation. “..Like a long time ago. Before everything migrated to the EMV network.” His baritone voice trailed off as his fingertips drug slowly against his jaw. A thunderous scowl scrawled its way across his lips when he felt a week’s worth of dark stubble marring his normally clean-shaven jaw. “All those old world periodicals had been transferred to the Earth-Mars-Venus matrix before I was born. You have to spend part of your bandwidth allotment to dig into the historical archives. I had better things to spend my allotment on.”
Malik caught the knowing gleam in Oscar’s pointed stare. In reply, the human rolled his eyes so hard it felt like they might spill from his skull. “I’m not even going to dignify that statement with a response. Even if I did spend some time on that kind of ‘research’,” Mal went so far as to put the word in air quotations after he knocked the salt out of the filter and slid it back into place, “there’s nothing wrong with that. It's a perfectly normal and healthy thing to be curious.”
“I mean,” the human continued as he knelt and counted his ration bars, “where do you think little alligators come from?”
Malik was grimacing down at his slowly depleting stores of food when his head snapped up to cast a withering gaze in his best friend’s direction. “Yes,” the Chief deadpanned, “I do, in fact, know what an egg is.”
“That isn’t what I was talking about,” Malik said as he moved toward the hatch. Mal took hold of the threshold with his right hand as he gingerly leaned out over the ocean so he could scan the sky for unwanted pests. “I was talking about…,” his voice trailed off as he let his eyes drift across the horizon. “You know what? Nevermind. We should be talking about the island anyway.”
It was obvious to Mal that the resident sea monster wasn’t nearly as excited about the prospect of dry land as he was. The listless look in its amber eyes when Mal brought up the subject was a sure sign that Oscar would rather be talking about something else. Probably food, knowing Oscar’s gluttonous soul.
“Oh no you don’t,” Malik scolded as the massive alligator’s eyes began to sink beneath the waves like a comically inept thief trying to slip out the back door. “We talked about this and we’re going. Adventure, remember? New and exciting places, remember?”
Mal could tell that he was losing his audience when more than half of Oscar’s golf ball-sized eyes had dipped below the ocean’s surface. It was time to pull out his trump card.
“What about the new foods?” Malik called out anxiously. “Eh? You don’t want to miss that, do you?”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
A sigh of relief slipped past his lips when Oscar reversed his descent to rise back toward the surface like a submarine abruptly changing course.
“Now I know that you’re not thrilled about this whole harness thing,” Mal said diplomatically as he flipped a hand dismissively toward the pile of Dyneema straps he'd spent his morning working on. “But after last night, we’ve got an actual destination. We’re not going to be sailing the high seas in the hope of finding land. We’ve already found it! That was the hardest part.”
Malik’s smile shone like a newborn star as he met Oscar’s skeptical gaze. “To stretch its battery life out as far as I can, I’ve got the drone shutdown except for its transponder. Even if it dies, I’ve already got the coordinates recorded.”
Mal paused to take a deep breath when he realized his impatient words were beginning to outpace his brain. It was a godsend that Oscar had proven to be such a patient listener. Having a sounding board to organize his thoughts into an actionable plan had proven instrumental over the past week.
“I’m guessing that, with your size, we’ll be able to move at somewhere around 12 knots while you tow the pod. At that speed, we’re something like sixteen hours away.” Malik was pacing as he spoke, his bare feet moving across the tritanium floor with mechanical precision. “There’s no way you can pull the pod for sixteen straight hours. I imagine we’ll have to double that, at least, for breaks. So that’s thirty-two.”
Mal’s blue eyes flashed like uncut sapphires as he looked across the gently churning ocean to meet Oscar’s gaze. “A day and a half. A day and a half, at most, of travel time is all we’ll need to get to the island.”
He despised the plaintive tone that crept into his voice by the end. He’d sailed across the stars with his crew for decades, believing all the while that there was no lonelier place in the universe than out there in the expanse of nothingness between the stars. All it had taken was one week, one anxious, tumultuous, desperate week to disabuse him of that notion. Out there, in the furthest reaches of space, no matter how isolated he’d felt, he had never truly been alone. The Starlight Journey had been more akin to a secluded village than a drifting life raft. There had always been someone to talk to. Someone to share the labor with. Someone to grow older with. Always.
And now all he had was a snarky crocogator the size of a small gravfreighter.
Malik shook his head to clear his mind. He’d come a long way in the week since he’d splashed down on this alien planet. It’d be a shame to fall apart when his first real victory was in sight.
“You know,” he began haltingly as he turned to address Oscar’s amber eyes. “If we’re going to start traveling, we’ll need to start naming the places we’ve been to. It’s going to get confusing if we refer to everything as ‘the island’ or ‘the ocean.’”
“Let’s start with the planet.” Oscar perked up immediately, much more engaged in this topic than all this talk of travel and land. “I think we should call it…”
“Ryujin,” Malik murmured with a smile. His reptilian pal could be mistaken for a dragon if you squinted.
Maybe.
Regardless, it felt right. Like a puzzle piece snapping into place, or a dash of the perfect spice to flavor a dish. “Ryujin,” Mal said again with a nod as he stepped into the threshold of the hatch to lean against the open door. “That makes the moon Tsukuyomi.”
With a satisfied smile, his eyes slid shut as he allowed himself a moment to breathe in the briny air and feel the gentle sway of the pod beneath his feet as it rocked to the rhythm of the endless waves. For a few stolen heartbeats, Mal cast aside his worries about his crew and his anxiety about his survival.
He might not have finished the harness today, but he’d named a planet. That was no small feat.
“Heh,” Mal chuckled as his sapphire eyes cracked open to look out across the rolling waves. “I hope nobody else had the same idea, Oscar. If anybody disagrees about naming rights, I’ll have you explain things to them, okay?”
Still smiling, Mal’s eyes settled on a gauzy cloud in the distance. After a moment’s study, he thought he saw black specks the size of pepper flakes floating through the sky. The sight made his brows narrow so sharply that he winced at the inadvertent tug it applied to the gash over his right eye. An indrawn hiss, like the sound of bacon tossed on a hot griddle, filled the air around him. Reflexively, he lifted a hand to let his fingers delicately probe his injury.
“What is going on over there?” Mal asked aloud, half to himself and a half to the prehistoric sea monster lazing about outside the pod. Once he’d assured himself that the gash hadn’t reopened, he used his hand to shade his eyes from the bright sunlight. In seconds it became obvious that the specks in the distance were steadily growing larger.
Curiosity rapidly gave way to alarm as the distant objects grew close enough to make out details. Large leathery wings kept creatures that looked like two-meter-long anacondas aloft. Aquamarine and teal scales glimmered in the noonday sun as they approached with their clawed feet held tightly against their sinuous underbelly. Their eyeless heads were triangular, reminding Mal of iguanas and other land lizards back home. Except that Mal knew from experience that unlike the reptiles native to the Milky Way, these winged serpents had a mouthful of jagged teeth reminiscent of a shark’s.
The coatls were a familiar sight by now. This time, however, instead of a solitary pest, an entire flight of the creatures were winging their way toward Mal’s lifepod. There were dozens of the alien monsters in the sky flying in a loose flock that was losing altitude as it grew nearer to Malik’s floating fortress.
Any hope that the pests were just passing through died when the air split with the savage war cry of dozens of coatls. An ear-splitting shriek filled the air that sounded like a piece of steel being held against a spinning grinder. Even Oscar was affected by the sonic assault, immediately thrashing from side to side so violently that the pod lurched from the suddenly pounding waves.
Mal could only lower his hands from his ears as he watched the flight of coatls approach like a man stepping in front of a firing squad.
“Well shit. I guess there'll be plenty of coatls for both of us.”