Sip. It went down as easily as ever, and before he knew it, a good third of the bottle was gone. The bartender noticed, commenting “You actually like that stuff? Thought it was one of those acquired taste things.”
He would’ve nodded, but fearing that the hood would hide his body language too much, he responded with a simple “Always had a thing for sweet flavors.”
“I figured as much, but doesn’t the actual flavor bother you? Everyone that’s ever tried it says it tastes like blood-fruit but wrong, like it’s at the bottom of a culinary uncanny valley,” the thorny barman continued.
Armless took another sip. He could easily see the basis for the flavor being some sort of dark red fruit.
“I’ve never had blood-fruit,” he said, eye-lights flickering. His response seemed to surprise the barman magnitudes more than what little of his outlandish appearance came through, the lizard’s brow furrowing briefly at the declaration.
“That’s… Out there, but I buy it,” he said, clearly implying that if Armless liked the drink he couldn’t have tasted actual blood-fruit before.
“You from one of the arctic colonies?”
Arctic colonies. He didn’t even think this world had arctic regions, but on second thought, he would’ve been more surprised if someone had told him the whole planet was the same biome. A nod and a response of “I think so. I recall being hungry, cold, and then waking up in a cargo rover,” to further build his facade. The bartender made an understanding “Hmm,” mulling over the information while he reached for another bottle and knocked twice on the bartop to request payment.
“Grew up in the caravans?” he asked.
The chits made pleasant click-clacking noises as they hit the faux-wood. Armless finished his bottle and reached for the new one. Half a liter really wasn’t much when one was drinking something that went down this easily. He nodded again, this time he looked the barman in the eyes. “Yeah. Lost my arm to a sandstorm, bad one. Hit us while we were rooting around in some crashed voidship, the wind kicked up a bunch of black sand. I didn’t make it to cover quickly enough and my whole right side got sanded down,” he said, letting out a dark chuckle at his own fictitious joke.
There was compassion in the thorned alien’s reciprocation, in his facial expression and subtle change of demeanor. Armless felt bad for weaving lies like that, but he needed to build a persona to better integrate during his time here. “If they think they know me, they’ll have an easier time accepting me,” he thought, “and it’s not as if I have a past to speak of before all this. Might as well come up with one.”
“Your eyes go in the storm too?” the lizard questioned, and armless shook his head. “A malfunctioning 3D-printer sprayed superheated nanofilament in my face,” he explained.
The lizard inhaled through his teeth at the idea, a gesture that seemed to surpass the species barrier. “Yikes, sounds painful,” he said.
“The worst part about it wasn’t the pain, it was getting it out that did the most damage. I would’ve healed, but it’d have taken a while.”
“Too busy to sit around nearly blind drinking stimmix, eh?” the barman said, a well-intentioned smugness evident in his voice and the pointy-toothed grin on his face.
Armless would’ve smiled under his mask, were he able to. “Sure was. Not today, though, so get me another bottle,” he said as he reached into what was effectively his wallet and pulled out a pair of chits and let them drop onto the counter. He still had a good two thirds left in his current bottle, but something in the back of his head told him he’d spend the next few hours here. The bartender put the bottle in front of him, and walked off to attend another customer.
And spend the next few hours there, he did, slowly sipping away at bottle after bottle. He’d drained five in total by the time he felt his biogel reservoirs were full. “Burning through the stuff like mad lately,” he thought, and a possible reason came to mind. He hadn’t craved stimmix this much since he first awoke. Where was all that biogel going, and why?
“System, biogel consumption statistics please.”
A familiar voice chimed in his head, having been supplanted by Amalgam’s during his time in the cockpit. It was his own, only distinctly robotic. “Affirmative. Statistics report ready.”
The data flashed before his mind’s eye. He subconsciously searched for the highest portions of his current biogel consumption, and within a few milliseconds, the data he was looking for had floated to the top.
SELF-REPAIR: 64.351%
HARDWARE INTEGRATION: 24.706%
“Should’ve figured,” he thought. He wondered if he should stay at the bar or explore the rest of the fortress-town, and quickly decided on the latter. There was nothing to be done here. He couldn’t play the games, as they universally somehow involved one’s “blessing”, and the others had already left for their own devices elsewhere in town. So, he simply got up and walked out the front door. This one opened quite readily at his approach, but he still stopped for a split-second before crossing the precipice in case it got stuck, so as not to bump into it. Who knew what kind of malfunctions all this reclaimed, barely maintained tech could have.
It was now that he realized the canyon itself was pointed westward, as the sun hung above the horizon, the brighter of the planet’s stars and moons already visible. There were lizardmen of all castes milling about, and though he caught some sideways glances and double-takes as he walked, nobody accosted him. To them he was a masked cripple hauling a big box, no more. The polymer walkways didn’t so much as creak under his weight, which on second thought shouldn’t have surprised him, considering the fact they carried warriors twice his weight without buckling. Much.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Armless spent the next hour and a half walking through town, taking in the sights and memorizing its layout, building a rough three-dimensional map in his memory. As he did so, he took notice of the town hall, which upon closer inspection, was much larger than it at first seemed. The part of the building which was visible only made up a small part of its true size, as it extended further into the cliff face, and his sensor array couldn’t determine how far. For all he knew, the town hall could be a town of its own, hidden in the mountain the same way the tunnels were.
Whilst he walked the walkways, observed the people, and took in the scenery, he noticed something. Indeed, the fortress-town was far from what he had expected it to be. Armless had seen the worst it had to offer, he had seen the servants of its militaristic, theocratic ruler. But as it turned out, its people were the same as anywhere else, just individuals trying to get by. They weren’t openly fighting their oppressors in the street, but everywhere he looked, there were subtle signs of resistance. He saw murals and etchings extolling the virtues of piety and hard labor, but most of them were barely even legible, made with little true regard for their quality. There were a few shrines with polymer slates covered in strange symbols, but they were scribbled-on and inconsistent, the offering bowls nearly empty. Most notably, there were streetside shrines with effigies of an armored warrior-caste, which he presumed to be the Ecclesiarch. He even asked around, questioning the people at the shrines who they think their faith worships, and most of the answers he received pointed not towards humans, but the Ecclesiarch for his supposed divinely appointed power, which was somehow supposed to be related to the inherent virtues of man. What these virtues were, nobody could tell him, and the answers from those that answered varied, person to person. These people had no regard for the faith under whose rule they lived, but it continued to maintain a stranglehold on them.
During his tour of the town, he visited the butcher, and by the stench, the size of the shop, and the massive fish tanks, it also doubled as a fishmonger. “You grow the fish yourself?” he asked the butcher, a thinker-caste half his size, whose body shape was somewhat similar to Vezkig’s, only sleeker. He wasn’t sure whether they were male or female, but he made an assumption based on the LED screen behind the counter, which constantly displayed “Auntie’s Special - Live Sandswimmers 3 Chits Each”. Female it was, and the higher-pitched, hissy voice that responded confirmed his assumption. “Of course dear, you don’t see any natural bodies of water around now do you?” Auntie hissed from behind her counter, her pride in her ability to cultivate fish in the desert evident in her tone. She hopped up on a bench that had been placed behind the counter, which was too tall for her to comfortably see over it, and shrank back at the sight of Armless. “By the seven, you look famished! Here, have a sandswimmer, on the house,” she doted, reaching into one of the tanks and pulling out what looked to be some sort of sleek ten-legged crustacean, its shell the color of sand. There was no fear in her voice, only a genuine concern for what she perceived to be his frail health. “Here, I’ll crack it open for you,” she continued when she noticed Armless’s apparent lack of a right arm. Before he could say anything, the lizard-woman dug her claws into the seams of the plates that covered the sandswimmer’s underbelly, and with a strong yank, she ripped it in half, tossing the back half away while a foul-smelling tar-like substance poured from its alien innards. She reached up, holding out the upper half of the creature for Armless to take, a beaming smile on her face. Like a mother, handing her child a popsicle on a hot summer day.
The course of action was obvious. He took a bite of the light-blue meat that the creature’s upper half was full of, pulling out long strands and slurping them up like some sort of noodle. Salty, savory, yet light. It was good. He hadn’t intended to buy anything, but what he’d just experienced was as good a sales pitch as he was going to get. He looked up from the sandswimmer in his hand and towards Auntie. She had a self-satisfied grin on her face. “Three chits for one?” he asked.
Auntie shook her head. “I’ll give you five for ten, just this once. You look like you’re starving. Ah, you’ll need a bag.”
It took her only a little over a minute to gather five sandswimmers, package them in some sort of wax paper, and put them in a polymer cloth bag. She put it up on the counter, and waited for payment. Armless grabbed a handful of chits from the pouch - which he’d placed in one of the pockets of his disguise - and counted them out on the counter.
He wasn’t sure if he should say anything beyond a greeting, and so a simple “...Thank you.” was all that sounded from under his mask before he turned to leave. “Don’t mention it!” Auntie yelled after him. Her doting nature was as genuine as could be, but there was something she’d hidden. Something she only allowed to show when she was absolutely sure Armless was gone. She could tell he wasn’t starving, the way his eyes shone from under the mask was familiar to her. After all, she was only years from her metamorphosis into an elder. She was old. Old enough to recognize what little of him showed.
“Those teeth… A human? No way,” she muttered to herself.
----------------------------------------
By sundown, Armless had returned to the bar, taking note of his comrades having gathered around the same table that Rika and the Marksman occupied hours prior. He joined them, and immediately received a question of “What’d you buy?” from Vezkig.
“Sandswimmers,” he said, and received an incredulous look in return.
“Sandswimmers? They have those here?”
“Three chits a piece, evidently.”
“Thr- Three chits? In the middle of the desert?! Now you’re just fuckin’ with me.”
“The butcher has cultivation pools in a cave behind her shop,” the Word-bearer interjected. “They’re just big enough that the rainwater keeps them full. Old hag’s got a monopoly on meat around here.”
The conversation carried on as such for a good few hours, and over its course, Armless began to feel a slight craving for stimmix again. He excused himself from the table, and walked over to the bar, going out of his way to find the same bartender that had served him before. All it took were two knocks on the bartop and four chits dropped onto it, and he had two bottles of light pink in his hand. Before he could turn to return to his comrades, however, the barkeep stopped him. “Hold on,” he said.
“What is it?” Armless questioned.
The lizard shuddered and began looking around. Armless followed his gaze, and noticed the same thing he did. Most of the patrons had shuddered and were looking around, anticipating something. Strangely enough, the Word-bearer was among them. “Oh boy, he’s back early,” the barman muttered.
“Who?” Armless asked.
“The big boss. He’s got us all blessed, but the connection is a two-way street so we know when he’s approaching the town. That’s how we’ve been able to avoid getting caught for so long. I’d give it around fifteen minutes until we’re in range, so don’t get offended once everyone gets all obnoxiously preachy. Don’t bring it up, most folks don’t notice they’re doing it.”
Armless nodded, and walked back to his table to crack open one of the bottles. The Word-bearer was clearly disturbed, but Rika, Vezkig, and the Marksman seemed unaffected. “Something’s wrong. I think the one we’re here for is coming back early,” he said, his eyes flicking back and forth, scanning the room.
“The Ecc-” Vezkig began, only for the toadman to silence him with “Yes, him, now don’t mention that name again. Now, the good news is, I can’t feel his grasp on my mind, so it seems that the ashes of my blessing only serve to alert me of his presence. Bad news, it’s fuzzy enough that I can’t tell how long until he reaches town.”
The radio in Armless’s mask hissed. It could’ve only been Nesgon, as they’d agreed to not use radio comms while in the fortress well before they reached it. And it was him. His voice rasped from the other side, hectic. “He’s returning early, we have an hour at most. Get down here, same path as last time. The door will open for you.”