TOC MetaStories: Ineen Aldrop's 'He Stood taller Than Most'

Part 4 -Forging Ahead-

Paulie looked at the small alien female as she trembled next to him. Her expression scales had gone pale and she glanced around nervously. Paulie stood and tried to think fast. Danger, best to arm themselves. He scooped up a pair of the baton-like weapons that the guards had lost when they had been unceremoniously dispatched.

He handed Krissh one and asked quickly, “I know this is a weapon of some type. How do they work? Quickly!”

She alternated between looking at him and the lights in some manner of fear. But to her credit she acted even under the extreme duress they found themselves in. She pulled down on the bottom of the laser baton exposing a small hidden switch. “This is the arming switch, the line of lights here above it indicates charge and the other tip is obviously the danger end.” She handed him the activated one. “It is pressure activated, so be careful you are much..” She barked as the weapon fired when he took it. The pale reddish beam connecting to the ceiling between them as he nearly lost his grip on it amid the small shower of sparks.

“..stronger than us.” She shook her head.

“My bad..” He apologised, ducking his head as he adjusted his grip on the weapon. They were like the world's most dangerous laser pointers. As he stood he realised that he felt lighter on his feet than normal. In all the commotion earlier he had not even thought about it. He turned to her, “Is the gravity in here lighter than on Earth?”

She looked up at him as she finished arming her own laser baton. “Urth?” She asked, the implied question in her tone conveyed by that strange innate understanding.

He gestured to himself. “Earth. My homeworld. What did you call it again?”

She spoke slowly. “Urren.” She said it like she was afraid of what his reaction would be.

Paulie took a few steps towards the doorway, the laser baton raised and ready to fire. He glanced over his shoulder at her and nodded. “Got it. We need to move, does this ship have escape pods or something like that?”

She caught up to him, waddling on her stubby legs as she stood closer to him than she had before. “Escape.. pods?” She rolled the term around in an unfamiliar manner. Her barking hisses taking on a questioning tone.

He shook his head, “Damn hollywood.” He muttered under his breath. He revised his approach. “How are we going to get off this ship? You know? Escape?”

She made an unfamiliar gesture with her good arm, the other still secure in its sling. “Well, I really hadn’t thought about it. The ship has a crew of twenty or so, all of them loyal to Jual as far as I know. I guess we will have to take command of the ship. It has no.. escape pods.”

“Shit.” Paulie said.

They moved out into the flashing light of the hall. It was low and narrow, almost too low for him to stand to his full height and so he was forced to hunch as he and the small alien moved down the corridor. All at once he froze, his ears picking up the sound of approaching footsteps. “Shit!” He swore again. “Do you hear that?”

She shook her green scaled head and the small Zen’kkalkian female asked, “Hear what? The sirens?”

“No, the footsteps.” He supposed that his hearing might be more sensitive than her own. He glanced down at her again and saw no ears, no otolith patches and no discernable way of hearing. There were those small horns that sprouted from her skull, but they weren’t for hearing. They didn’t seem to have that kind of function.

He would have pondered the mystery further but he was forced to snap back to reality as the sound of shouts grew nearer. He pressed up against the corner at the top of a small flight of short stairs. He gestured for Krissh to take cover across from him and then held up his free hand with three fingers.

She seemed to understand as he slowly put them down one by one, as he reached zero they whipped around the corner. He was a lot more agile than the smaller alien, likely due to the ship’s much lower gravity which made him feel very light on his feet. In the hall he saw four more of the suited aliens waddling his way with laser batons in hand. They were wholly unprepared for him and only had time to bark in surprise as he fired at them. Three of his shots struck true, the first two going down with smoking craters in their torsos, the last crumpling as the right side of their face was partially vaporised in a spray of yellow gore.

The last of the short alien thugs had the survival instincts to dive to the floor, the small scaled alien loosing off a shot at him as he did so. Paulie hissed as it grazed his thigh. Before another shot was fired the guard’s head was snapped back with a cracking sound. A smouldering hole appeared in their forehead as Krissh fired her own weapon with a skill and accuracy that surprised him.

He stood with a slight limp, his leg smarting from the near miss, a single curl of smoke coming from the fabric of his slacks. “Nice shot.” He complimented the diminutive alien female.

She gave him another toothy smile. “Just because I am a veterinarian doesn't mean that my sire didn’t teach me to hunt.” She hissed low and long, the sound almost like an angry alligator. He supposed she had a point.

He looked past the bodies. The hall continued on grated flooring over pipes or conduits of some type. The walls were the same grey metal, but bare and unadorned. The entire place felt quite claustrophobic to him and he had to blink several times to clear his misty vision as his heart beat a little faster. He hated tight spaces, but he pushed that ancient panic back down next to his simmering rage. He wouldn't let his actions be defined by his fears, no, he needed to keep moving.

They walked down the hall for another few meters when they reached a small doorway. This one was very Zen’kkalk sized, meaning there was little chance he was going to fit through it with his comparatively massive stature. Krissh stomped over and peered inside instead.

She nodded, “Engineering. Seems empty, must be where those guys came from.” He looked over towards the cooling corpses, they were wearing slightly different suits than the first guards. More utility looking with none of the smooth composite looking plates he had seen on the others.

He turned back to ask Krissh what they were doing there, but she was gone. He got down on all fours and saw movement in the back of the darkened room. For somebody supposedly attuned to the healing of others, she was remarkably cool about the dead crew. He speculated that they must have mistreated her terribly, but he was a little afraid to ask.

“Hey!” He hissed, not wanting to shout across the whole ship, his deep voice seemed to carry along the metal halls quite easily. “Krissh? What are you doing?!”

The small scaly alien rummaged around in the far corner of the room for another minute before barking triumphantly and rushing over to him on her stumpy legs. He saw an open cabinet filled with strange glowing crystals behind her, she looked to have pulled some of them out.

As she tottered over he saw she was holding some sort of large red crystal. It was long and shaped almost like quartz, but something about it seemed off to him. He stood as she exited, pausing to gaze up at him from her much shorter position. She reached up with one of her long arms and offered him the crystal which he took from her small six fingered hand gently, a question forming on his lips.

She anticipated his question and nodded, “It’s a memory crystal. It has data on all of Jual’s dealings. And who he was dealing with.” her barks took on a more conspiratorial tone and he cocked his head as she once more took point and gestured for him to follow. He got the feeling he knew where she was going with the idea.

He hefted the crystal, it was a lot smaller than he at first had thought now that he held it in his much bigger hand. Now that he was looking at it closely he could see what was strange about it. It wasn’t in fact a single monocrystalline structure, but instead many hundreds or thousands of perfectly interlocking smaller crystal units that together made it look as if the face of the thing was shattered. But it was solid, not an actual crack marred it’s glasslike surface. They must have grown the larger crystal with all the small ones in inclusion to produce it, the technology required to do something of that complexity was beyond him entirely.

He asked her suddenly, the two of them rounding another bend as the sounds of shouting barks got closer once more. “Hey, why are you helping me? I understand best odds of survival and all that. But what makes me different from all the other people you have seen?”

If he was expecting a flattering answer then he was to be sorely disappointed as she simply looked up at him and responded, “It’s simple really. You are the first one to act intelligently.”

And with that she rushed off down the hall on her stumpy legs. He paused as he thought it over, if he was acting intelligent then how did everyone else act? He wasn’t special, sure he had gone to college for two years, but he had ended up dropping out to pursue his own goals. Goals that had never managed to take him anywhere but dead end job after dead end job.

He started off after the short alien female, catching up to her in a few steps with his much longer legs. She glanced his way with those bright purple eyes, the yellow of her sclera flashing at him as she rolled her eyes. “Oh, way to show off Urrenian. Not all of us are as tall as a hab block.”

She had a point, he was still having to hunch slightly to fit through intersections and around low hanging lights that dotted the hall. She gestured ahead towards a notation on the wall nearby, the strange alien scrawl looking akin to slashes or scratch marks. They were clearly notations, letters and words written in an alien script.

He shrugged. “I don’t read alien..” She gave him what he assumed was a sharp look. He coughed and ducked his head, “I am the alien, right. Sorry, I don’t understand zan’calk.”

She corrected him. “Zen’kkalk.” he shrugged again and she let out a small hiss. “It says that the bridge is ahead. All we need to do is take it and seal the door. We should be only a few dozen jumps from the nearest GGI outpost. Once we get close enough we can call for help.”

He cocked his head. “The gee gee eye? What is that?”

She waved the hand holding the laser baton and explained in a few words. “The Greater Galactic Intercession. The de-facto power in charge of this galaxy? Oh c’mon, you didn’t really think you were alone in the universe did you?” She seemed to chuckle again, that gurgling laugh making him take a look at his own long-held personal beliefs.

He started to say, “Well, kinda. Yeah? We have not detected any signals from the rest of the galaxy, so we always just assumed that we were alone..” he trailed off as the small woman laughed again.

She scoffed as they rounded yet another corner and took a flight of stairs, the flashing yellow lights reflecting off her shiny scales. “You Urrenians really are daft, ever heard of signal dampening technology? There is a whole network around your solar system to filter out galactic communications. Can’t have another Yuwier event, can we.” She muttered the last part quiet enough that he wasn’t sure she meant him to hear it over the chirping sirens.

“You keep calling me a Urrenian, and the first time you said it you seemed to hesitate. Does it mean something?” He saw her flinch slightly as he said it, the skin around her eyes paling again as she turned to look up at him. Her eyes seemed to stare into his own, looking through them and into his very heart and mind. He blinked.

She hesitated and then glanced down towards the floor as she came to an internal decision. “Well, roughly translated it means pit of doom.” She paused as he frowned. She shook her horned head and asked him, “Well, look at yourself. You are the scariest thing on this entire ship. And on your home world are you the scariest thing you can think of?”

Paulie scoffed as he thumped his chest with his free hand. “Me? Scary? Shit, I could name a dozen animals more threatening than me off the top of my head...” he trailed off as he realised he had just made her point for her.

She nodded. “It was worse in the past. The planet was host to such terrifying monstrosities that somebody tried to wipe out the planet by dropping a comet on it a long time ago. They were punished for that of course, but clearly it didn’t stick as Urren is just as scary as it ever was.” She gave him a very appraising look and then reiterated, “Well, scarier now.”

He tried to take a second to process what she had just said. “Wait a minute. What?”

She didn’t give it to him though. “The bridge looks clear, let's go.”

He followed close behind her as she rushed onto the bridge of the ship, jamming the red crystal into his back pocket as he went. The bridge did indeed seem to be clear, it was small though. Much smaller than he would have expected for even a ship the size of the one they were in. He hunched through the small door and took up a place behind one of the child sized consoles inside. It didn’t offer much in the way of cover, but it was certainly better than leaving his huge ass hanging in the breeze.

Paulie turned to ask Krissh what their next move was, and stopped.

A voice issued from the speakers all around them. He stopped as he recognised it. It was the harsh barks of the taller zen’kkalkian, Jual as Krissh had named him. His voice was harsh and dripping with venom that was entirely undisguised.

He growled, the harsh barking hiss of their voice sending a shiver down Paulie’s spine. “Krissh’shanibe, you have signed your own tomb-warrant. For this abomination there is only death, do you hear me you stupid hulking Urrenian? You will suffer for this insult, you will bur…” The voice cut off and he looked over towards Krissh.

She shook her head. “I deactivated the internal comms. But they are coming, more of them than I can handle alone. And there is worse news.” She paused as she pressed another button that closed the doors to the bridge.

“What?” He looked back from the door to the little scaled alien.

She swallowed. “They raided the armoury. They likely have the big guns now, ones that not even you can withstand. I am sorry, but there is nothing more I can do.” From outside the thick metal of the blast door a loud thud sounded, and Paulie shivered.