Arcturus

“—Captain! Captain, can you hear me?”

Someone was shouting at him from far away, their voice demanding. The insistent words reached him distorted, like an echo down a tremendous hallway. Arcturus groaned–his head hurt, pulsing, and he felt like he was spinning. Somewhere nearby, liquid was dripping. He could hear the droplets ringing against metal, with a steady, maddening cadence.

“I hear you,” he mumbled. By the black, he hurt–what was wrong with his head? It felt like all the blood in his body was pooled in his skull, and his chest felt bruised. “Just a minute.”

The other voice didn’t seem to hear him. “Captain, come in. Please.” The last word took on an urgent note, almost pleading.

“I said, just a minute!” Arcturus tried to shout the words, but they came out in a croak. Forcing his eyes open, he blinked stupidly around. The console in front of him swam in his vision, blaring with a hundred alarms. Red and yellow alerts screamed for his attention, demanding that he answer them, but to his foggy mind they were only meaningless lights. He forced himself to look harder at them, trying to think. That was a lander console. What was he doing in a lander? Why did everything hurt? Flashes of memory returned–he’d been traveling to the third planet, to retrieve his wayward daughter…and something had gone wrong. Badly wrong, judging by the bewildering array of lights in front of him.

“I can hear you, Argo,” he groaned, finally summoning the willpower to transmit on the Link. He tried to stand up, and found himself dangling sideways in the acceleration couch’s restraints, with the wall of the cockpit beneath him. Well that’s not right, though it does explain a lot. “What happened?”

“Oh, thank the stars,” Argo’s voice cracked, and a rush of emotions washed down the Link. Relief came chief among them, but a sense of anxious worry followed hard in its wake. “You’re still alive.”

Arcturus tasted salty blood in his mouth, as another fat drop trickled down from a cut on his brow to splatter below him. It splashed bright red next to its fellows, staining the white wall panel. His helmet lay a few feet away, open side up. “Mostly. What happened?” he repeated.

“We don’t know. We’re not getting any signal from Lander Two...do you know where you came down?”

Arcturus remembered a viewscreen full of jagged mountains, flashes of fear as the sprawling dark landscape rushed up at him. He’d been hauling at the control sticks, yanking hard, and tumbling out of control through the air…and then nothing.

“Something went wrong,” he answered slowly, feeling around for the restraint release.

Arcturus felt Argo rolling his eyes, sarcasm displacing the worry in the Link somewhat. “Astonishing insight. Any idea what?”

“I was too close to the mountains when I got the screens back up.” Arcturus found the release for the straps, thumbed the clamp open, and promptly fell to the deck. He landed hard, pulling into his shell with an undignified squawk to avoid banging his head. He hit shoulder first, the flight suit taking some of the impact and smearing the blood splatters. “Ow! Something broke when I tried to turn. Felt like it might have been one of those makeshift engine mounts…too much strain, maybe.” He stood up, grabbing the arm of the chair for support, and glanced around. “I don’t think Lander Two can get back to orbit.” That was probably an understatement. If even half of those red warning lights were accurate, Lander Two was basically scrap.

“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t let Reel run wild.” Argo’s voice grew accusatory. “I knew this was a bad idea. I knew it. You should have listened to me.”

That had the advantage of being true, but Arcturus was in no mood for it. “Just as soon as you’re the Captain, I’ll start taking orders from you,” he snapped back. “But for right now, I need you to shut it. I’m bringing Reel into the Link.”

“Oh sure, that will be helpful. Just what we need to add in to this mix, a disobedient whelp with no regard for-”

“I said shut it!” Arcturus roared. He hadn’t meant to yell it, but now that it was out, it felt good. He felt Argo flinch at his sudden fury, and that felt good too, in a small, mean-spirited way. Spittle flew from Arcturus’ mouth as he shouted, unable to keep from vocalizing. “I don’t give a cracked egg what we should have done. That’s in the past. You mine the blasted asteroid in front of you, no matter how ugly it looks. Until I’m dead I’m the captain, and I make the decisions. Are we clear?”

It was a long, tense moment of silence. “As a viewscreen, sir,” Argo said, mulishly.

“Reel has the only other working lander.” A vein in Arcturus’ forehead pulsed, and he rubbed at it with an angry scowl, smearing blood across his scales. “She can come get me, unless you’ve got a better idea for how to get us both off this planet.”

“I don’t,” Argo admitted, somewhat sulkily. “We might be able put a lander power supply and engines on a tug, but they aren’t built for atmosphere…and it would take weeks to do, at least.”

“Reel it is then, but hang on to that idea as a last resort,” Arcturus said grimly. Now that the heat of the moment was past, he felt a little guilty over his outburst. Argo shouldn’t have antagonized him, but he was the Captain. He shouldn’t be losing his temper. “And sorry,” he added. “I’m just a little stressed out.”

“Understandable,” Argo answered, stiffly. “And I shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s...not the time for it.”

That was the closest he was ever going to get to an apology from the first mate, so Arcturus let it go. He focused instead on the young engineer, picturing her in his mind. “Reel, this is Captain Arcturus. Come in.”

He felt the connection take, but there was no audible answer. Pain coursed down the Link instead, vicious and biting, worse than his own bruises by far. He gasped, and felt Argo recoil on the other side of the Link.

“She’s been Stricken again!” the first mate cursed. “Again! Agh, that burns!”

It was worse than any Strickening he’d felt before. Bile rose in Arcturus’ throat, and he swallowed it with an effort. He’d have broken the Link to avoid feeling that agony, but he needed her. “Reel,”he said. There was no answer. He gulped his fear down and tried again. “Reel, come in. Answer me, blast it, can you hear me?”

He felt misery stir beneath the pain drifting across the Link, a horrible, sucking shame, vast and deep enough for her to drown in. By the black, what had happened? He cursed, slamming a hand against the interior hull of the ship and tried again. “Reel, I need you to answer me.” Still nothing. “I’m in trouble, and I need you to come get me. I can feel you hurting, but I need you to push through it.”

Shaking his bruised hand, he waited. He could feel her trying, struggling, and for a moment he could have sworn he felt her transmit, but the thought was too dimly formed to come through clearly. A sense of apology, of longing and loss, and then the connection started to fade.

“Reel!” he called out one last time, but to no avail. A moment later, the Link slipped away, leaving Argo and himself alone.

“Blast it,” he snarled. He raised his clawed fist again, thought better of it, and slammed it against the padded seat instead of the hull. “Blast and crack it!”

“What now?” Argo whispered, his earlier stubbornness giving way to worry. “What under the stars do we do now?”

“Keep it together,” Arcturus snapped. He wanted very much to scream himself, but he crushed that feeling beneath the iron of his will. Turning, he wobbled his way to the main corridor of the lander, his footing unsteady on the curve of the walls, and the emergency light offering only a dim view. The emergency pack nearly tripped him as he stepped over it, so he scooped it up and slung the bag over the bulky shoulder of his suit. Stooping to fit through the sideways passage, his head brushing the opposite wall, he thought hard. He needed to give Argo something to do. “Where am I, anyway?”

“Western German controlled territory. The location from just your implant isn’t perfect…Are there any landmarks near you?”

“I don’t know…let me see if I can get the hatch open.”

“Oh blast…Are you trapped?” Argo’s voice took on a tight, strained note.

“I don’t think so. Thankfully, I landed with the door facing up.” He straightened in the hatch bay, with the hatch overhead, his brow furrowed. That was lucky. If he’d come to rest the other way, he’d have had to try to use the engines to tip the ship back over. And that, he reflected, wouldn’t even have been the dumbest thing I’ve done today. He had to stretch to reach the control panel, and it refused to respond to his touch, stubbornly dark on the wall overhead.

“Alright then,” he muttered, and felt his way along the wall-turned-ceiling until he found the emergency hatch release. Tearing the cover loose with a snap, he tossed it aside and yanked the handle up. It clicked loudly in the dark confines, and the hatch above him popped and hissed as the mechanism forced it open. To Argo, he said, “Tell Roddel to add resetting the emergency hatch release on Lander Two to his task list.”

There was an incredulous pause on the other side of the Link. “Was that a joke?”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Not a very good one,” Arcturus admitted, as he gripped the sides of the hatch and pulled himself up, just far enough to peer out over a dark, alien landscape. Lander Two was resting on its side in a pile of rocks, surrounded by shadowed columns that stretched far overhead. Plants of some kind. That was what they thought, at least, based on the vast swathes of green they’d seen in the satellite photos, but it was hard to be sure. These were nothing like the plants he’d seen on Efree. In the dark of the night, he couldn’t see more than shapes anyway. He blinked, trying to adjust to the gray moonlight.

“What do you see?” Argo pressed.

“Not much.” He turned his head from side to side, scanning the dim scenery. “It’s pretty dark. There are some tall, cylindrical things around me…They might be that vegetation we saw on the satellite imagery.”

There was a long pause while Argo consulted the computer. “Trees?” he offered. “Do they have leaves or fronds or something?”

Arcturus squinted. “Uh…Yes, but they’re very thin. Weird.” He grabbed the lip of the hatch and hoisted himself up, halfway out of the ship.

“Find some Germans,” Argo suggested, with sudden inspiration. “They can get you to Peenemunde, and you can fly yourselves home.”

“Not a bad idea.” Arcturus concentrated for a moment, telling the implant to feed him the words in German. Cupping a hand to his mouth, he shouted the unfamiliar syllables out into the dark. “Hello! Is there anyone there?”

A loud, sharp crack answered him. Something whined past his head, caroming off the ship’s hatch with the malignant twang of a micrometeorite. He yelped and dropped back into the lander’s interior, out of sight.

“Captain?” Argo’s voice spiked in alarm, mirroring his own surge of adrenaline. “What’s wrong?”

“Something almost hit me!” he panted, struggling to his feet. There were voices outside, shouting, but he couldn’t make out the words. He looked at the hatch and saw a scar torn across the metal where the impact had landed. That thing could have killed me. Stars, that had been aimed at him, he was sure of it. Someone had tried to blow his head off. “What in the black was that for?!” he shouted out the hatch, fear and fury warring for supremacy in his chest.

The voices outside fell silent. He waited, straining his ears. What if they came to the hatch? He backed up a step, getting ready to retreat back to the lander’s cabin if he needed to. Finally, one of them answered back in German. “Sorry! That was…ah, a knee jerk reaction.”

Knee-what? Arcturus’ implant flagged the voice as male. The translation scheme clearly wasn’t working perfectly yet either.

“You just gave us a little bit of a fright, is all,” the speaker went on.

“Well how do you suppose I feel?” Arcturus shot back, but without much force. They certainly didn’t sound aggressive…more embarrassed, than anything.

“Not great, I shouldn’t wonder. Are you alright?”

Blinking in the dark, overturned ship, Arcturus considered the question. It was, he decided, probably the last thing he’d expected to be asked, and it drained the last dregs of his anger away. “A little bruised,” he admitted. “If I come out, do you promise not to do...whatever it was you just did again?”

There was a short, barking noise–his implant flagged it as a laugh. Odd. Arcturus didn’t see the humor, personally, and the sound had something of a nervous edge to it. “Yes. Do you need help?”

“No, I can manage.” Arcturus grabbed the edges of the hatch again and took a deep breath, preparing to haul himself up.

Argo interrupted him. “Captain, you’re not seriously considering going back up there?”

Arcturus started, almost dropping back down. In the heat of the moment, he’d kept transmitting his own thoughts. Argo must have filled in the rough shape of the alien’s half of the conversation from there. “What else am I going to do?” Arcturus asked. “Sit here until the Efreet arrive?”

“Seems safer to me than exposing yourself to people who tried to kill you two minutes ago,” Argo replied bitterly.

“Accidentally, I think. They asked if I was hurt.”

There was a short pause while Argo digested that, and Arcturus could just picture the old Torellan’s face wrinkling up in disbelief. “And that’s enough for you to trust them?”

Arcturus hesitated, hands still on the edges of the hatch. It really wasn’t much to go on, and Argo’s skepticism was leaching into him through the Link. Haven’t you already made your quota of bad decisions for the month? he thought to himself.

He had, but if they really meant to kill him, they weren’t likely to ignore him and leave if he just hid in the ship. And if they did mean him harm, he would just as soon not die cowering in his shell. “No, but I’m going anyway,” he said. Firming his grip on the lip of hatch, he lifted himself up and out into the night again, before he could change his mind.

A sharp intake of breath from behind him made him flinch, but there was no repeat of the earlier cracking sound. Nothing came thundering out of the night to snuff his life out, and that heartened him. Clambering up onto the hull of the ship, he turned around to get a good look at where the sound had come from.

There were three of them, standing clustered together and staring wide eyed at him in the dark, the whites of their eyes like miniature moons in their faces. That was different from the solid color he’d expected from Vorona’s simulation, and they were less hairy. All told, they looked a lot less like Efreet than he’d thought they might, and that relaxed him further still. They wore loose clothes over their legs and upper bodies, and tough looking footwear. Their hands and faces were bare. Based on the shape...Two males and a female, maybe? He couldn’t be sure. The tallest of the three cradled a long, cylindrical metal tool with a flared base in both hands.

We should have had Reel give us a better description of them, he realized. He’d been so busy nursing his anger at her, that it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask.

The smallest gave a small, nervous sounding giggle. “It’s a turtle,” she whispered in French, her voice confirming his suspicion about her gender. “It’s a giant turtle, walking on two legs.”

He had no idea how to respond to that, or what a turtle looked like, so he kept silent. They stood like that for a long moment, him atop his crashed ship, the three humans down by the trees, staring at each other. The two males traded a look, and Arcturus realized that they were flailing in vacuum just as much as he was.

Well, he could take the lead, then. He coughed to clear his throat, not sure what language to use, and decided to stick with German since that’s what he’d started with. “My name is Captain Arcturus, of the Old Bug. May I ask who you are?”

The shorter male raised an eyebrow at him. “What kind of crazy name is ‘Old Bug’?”

“It’s my ship,” Arcturus answered, a little offended. “Old Bug” was a perfectly good name, and it had served his people valiantly for generations. A little absurd to let something like that bother him right now, but still…He glanced about, looking for a way down off the crashed lander. “We’ve called it that for generations. Your names, please?”

The female elbowed the shorter male. “Mark, what’s he saying? Translate for me.”

“He wants to know our names.”

Maybe they weren’t all Germans. Stepping carefully down off ship, he grabbed hold of the edge of the hatch and used it to lower himself to the ground. Something crunched under his boots; he glanced down and saw a thick layer of the same thin leaves from the trees around him, but dry and dead. Stranger and stranger. He turned to face the humans, and switched to French. “Is this better?” he asked.

Their eyes went even wider, if that were possible. The tal, darker male leaned down to the shorter one. “His accent is better than yours,” he said, in a loud whisper.

“Like hell it is,” Mark grumbled back to him. Then, to Arcturus he said, “I’m Corporal Mark Lateen. This ugly fellow is Francois Dubois, and the lovely lady is Liliane…” He turned to her. “Come to think of it, I don’t know your last name.”

She stepped forward smoothly. “Liliane Berger. Your name is Arcturus? I think I understood that part correctly, yes?”

“Captain Arcturus,” he corrected her. He floundered for a moment, looking for the right words; when was the last time he’d had to introduce himself to someone new? “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She ran a hand over her mouth. “Likewise. Well, Captain Arcturus…Where are you from?”

That brought him up short; it wasn’t a question he’d ever been asked before. “Do you mean, what ship do I serve with? I just said, it’s the Old Bug. It’s orbiting between the fourth and fifth planets of this solar system.”

She made a small noise, more a sudden exhalation of breath than a word. Mark shifted his feet, and Arcturus thought he heard him mutter something about “Little green men,” though he had no idea what that might mean. Francois was more direct.

“Mon Dieu,” he whispered. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I was coming to retrieve a crewmember of mine,” he answered slowly, not sure how much to tell them. He’d thought he was in German territory, but the female, Liliane, probably wasn’t German…Were the other two? Where did they fall in this planet’s conflict? He couldn’t be sure, so he kept his answer vague. “She hasn’t been answering our calls, and may be in some trouble.”

“So are you, by the look of things,” Mark put in, looking past Arcturus to the lander. “And you’re bleeding, by the way.” He pointed at the thin trickle of blood running down Arcturus’ cheek from the cut over his eye.

Liliane started towards him, reaching into the bag at her side as she went. The tall one, Francois, made a grab for her shoulder as she went by as if to stop her, but she shook him off, coming right up to Arcturus and drawing a clean white rag out of her bag. “Here,” she said, craning her head up to look at him. “Sit down so I can take a look at it.”

Bemused, Arcturus glanced around and found a rock that was about the right height. It put them at eye level with each other, and he settled onto it with a grateful sight, his suit creaking. She dabbed at the cut with her rag, wiping away the blood much like Vorona might have. Alien though she might have been, with soft pink hands and only vestigial claws, the gesture was comforting.

Mark and Francois came up to join her. Mark was glancing back and forth between Arcturus and his ship with naked curiosity, but Francois…Francois stared at him with narrow, slitted eyes. He resettled his grip on the base of the metal tool he held, keeping the tip pointed to the ground. “So, where is this crewmember? We have not seen or heard of anyone who looks like you…” The tall man’s eyes flicked over Arcturus, taking in his clawed hands, and his scales before returning to his face. “...And I believe a seven-foot-tall turtle speaking German would be hard to miss.”

There was something in his voice, and in the way that Francois looked at him, that set Arcturus’ scales on edge. It was a sort of hardness, bordering on hostility. A turtle, he knew, was some kind of animal...was this human implying that he was a beast? But the other two seemed pleasant enough, and Liliane’s hands on his cut brow were soothing. Maybe they could tell him something useful, about how to get there or where he was, for that matter.

“She was in north-eastern Germany, the last time we spoke to her,” he answered. All three of them tensed instantly, Liliane’s hands going still on his head and a small hiss escaping from Francois’ lips. Something there, Arcturus thought to himself. He kept his face still, but his eyes flicked across the three human’s faces, taking in their reactions. They don’t like the Germans, I think. That could be…messy.

“Well.” Liliane said carefully. She took her hands away and wet the cloth with water from a flattened, round container at her waist. The damp cloth cooled his brow as she returned to wiping away the dried blood. She used long, gentle strokes, taking care to follow the grain of his scales, buying time as she considered her next words. “That is a problem.”