“Unlike the rest of the
galaxy, Tanitran anger is always cold.”
—Tanitran saying
2275 A.D. (17 Years Ago)
Avarrus Cluster – Kalerai System
Human Colony C-1081 “Charter”
New Hope Settlement, Residential District
0032 Hours
The
girl awoke to the sound of piercing screams, her eyes snapping open as intense
heat began to fleck her cheeks. The smell of burning kerosene and wood hit her
first, then the sight of the nearby apartment complex belching black smoke.
Then she heard the screams.
The
young child bolted upright, stricken by panic and other emotions she was too dazed
to understand. She felt that her heart was going to burst out of her chest at
the rate that it was beating. She had no idea what was happening. All she heard
were the screams, all she saw were the orange flames of her bedroom door on
fire, and all she felt was the heat from the home of her childhood, all
burning.
The girl
threw off the covers and flattened herself against the floor. She had to think.
She was only eleven years old, but her parents had always done drills so she
and her brother knew what to do in an emergency. This was no drill, however.
She could see black smoke invading the room through her partially open bedroom
door. That meant the fire had already spread to the hallway, blocking her way
out. She could not even check to see if her parents or little brother were
alright. Her eyes began to water from the smoke, and her chest ached slightly.
She coughed a few times, but it did not do much good against the thickening haze.
Regardless, she had to get out of there.
She scrambled
as quickly as she could to the window. It was two stories to the ground level,
but the heavy snow from the previous night would cushion her fall. She hoped.
Thinking ahead, she grabbed her boots from the end of the bed before wrenching
open the window. She hesitated for a few precious seconds before jumping and
agonized over leaving the bracelet her mother had given her for her birthday,
but knew that it was in the living room and that she would never be able to get
it.
Smoke was quickly filling the girl’s
room; great clouds of black fumes billowed out of the open window and
dissipated into the cool night air. Bright orange sparks flew from the surrounding
buildings to create the illusion of a forest of shooting stars. It would have
been beautiful had it not been so terrible.
The young
girl hit the drift-covered ground. It was not as soft as she had imagined it would
be. Battered, confused, and nauseous from the smoke, the girl ran as fast as she
could in the snow-filled cityscape to search for help. The road, unplowed, was
disturbingly empty. In fact, she realized, she could no longer hear screams. She
could not hear much of anything at all. Oddly enough, that was what scared her
the most. No sirens, no vehicles, no people… nothing. She gasped heavily in
great heaves, the tiny white puffs disappearing into the snowy milieu,
mirroring the greater clouds that sprang from other burning buildings.
No, the girl reasoned. Someone has to be alive. She could not
possibly be the only one left. She ran around frantically, shouting for her
mother and stepfather and brother, but no one answered. She ran to one of the
houses that had miraculously not caught on fire, its door left ajar, but no one
was home. The girl was feeling increasingly apprehensive and could no longer concentrate
on her family’s emergency procedures. She recognized distantly that panicking
in a situation like this was the worst thing she could possibly do, but she had
no conscious control over her rising apprehension.
However,
despite her temporary surge of adrenaline, she was soon too tired to run any
longer. The sharp winds cut through her thin nightshirt, and she regretted not
being able to grab a coat. Cold and scared, she collapsed onto the frozen
ground, heedless of the icy numbness that seeped into her small hands and face.
Her breath still came in great gasps that froze in the frigid night air,
silhouetted by the fiery orange light that hid the stars.
[Hrrrrg…
what is here?] a gravelly, hissing voice suddenly said from behind her. The
language was obviously a Threnner dialect; her implant automatically translated.
The girl stopped moving, too scared to even so much as blink.
“A survivor,”
a second voice said. Whereas the first voice had been clearly alien in origin,
the second was very close to human; it belonged to a Tanitran, and one from an
educated background at that. It spoke perfectly understandable Imperiate, but
with an animated, embellished tenor that was not intrinsic to most humans’
voices. The voice had a clipped accent that she had only ever heard on shows
like Intergalactic News Tonite. The
man was good looking by human standards, but his cold and detached gaze did not
match his glib tone.
However, the girl’s temporarily coherent
thoughts were brutally interrupted by a long serrated claw being pressed to her
throat. The girl could not take her eyes off of the cruel talon; the scope of
her entire world condensed to just below her chin.
[I will kill it. The Krllssshr
demands it! The blood-prize will be mine!] the Threnner crowed. The girl’s terrified
mind somehow refocused on what had to be the most terrifying alien face that she
had ever seen. The reptilian eyes, red and glowing in the light of the young
girl’s burning childhood, were completely and utterly devoid of humanity as she
understood in her limited experience. The pitiless eyes looked straight at her,
and seemed to see through her to pierce her very soul with their intensity. A shadowy
forked tongue snaked its way out of a mouth full of huge, finger-length fangs.
She was certain that the creature towering above her could taste her fear.
“Now, now. No need to do
something as uncouth as all that, my hasty friend,” the Tanitran murmured, his pale,
almost-white skin a stark contrast against his bright blue hair. “I think that
this colony has been sufficiently cowed, wouldn’t you agree?” The reptilian creature
did not move or blink. Its eyes were still disturbingly locked onto hers. The
girl finally broke their mutual gaze and tried to focus on the man, but it was
strangely difficult to see straight. Her limbs felt numb, and not only from the
cold wind that swept the streets.
The Tanitran was unconcerned by
his companion’s intensity, and blinked his solid blue eyes with deliberate
sloth, an indication of tried patience. “After all, we do need a messenger, do we not? Everyone else in the colony is
dead. How are we to send a message without impact?”
Everyone is dead?, the girl thought with mounting shock and horror.
That simply could not be. It was impossible.
The Tanitran moved into the
Threnner’s field of vision. “Impact! Get what I mean?”
[You seek to protect this
spawn?] the Threnner growled suspiciously. Its tongue flicked out again,
tasting the air.
The Tanitran shrugged enigmatically.
“Not at all. However, I might well mention that no impact lessens the chance of
the Alliance going into full out war. Without survivors to tell their story, no
one would even know for sure that you did it.”
This seemed to convince the
Threnner to some degree, and it reluctantly retracted its claw from its
position next to the girl’s neck. It snarled menacingly in annoyance.
[Hrrrrg, we do it your way for
now, trnigkarr. If you disappoint…]
it omitted the consequences for effect.
“Fine, fine. You worry too much,
my scaly comrade.”
[Hrrrrg. We shall see.] The
scaled creature grabbed the girl by the neck and shook her roughly, though the
show of force was hardly necessary at that point. It met her eyes, forcing her
to stare into deep, red pools of cruelty and malice.
[You will tell them we came. You
will tell them we will destroy more hoonen
hatch-nests. The Threnners will destroy all hoonens.]
The girl could do nothing but nod haltingly. The Threnner dumped her
unceremoniously into a snow bank as both it and the Tanitran turned to walk
away. By the time the sound of crunching ice finally
faded into the freezing night, snow had already begun to fall once more. The young
girl could not see it, however. The tears in her eyes made it too difficult to
see anything at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment