Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Chapter 9

“So…..what are we going to do?” I was still leaning forward in my seat excitedly as I watched Tengu and his brother t urn tail and r un. “They’re getting away!”

Puck stared at me blankly. “I think you’re missing one of the vital highlights of this situation,” he said slowly. “In case you weren’t really paying attention to the events of the last twenty minutes or so, we’re the ones getting away, here. We got rescued. Now we’re escaping. That’s how it works.” Smiling indulgently, he reached over to pat me on the head. “You’re new at this. You’ll get it eventually.”

“But…..they kidnapped somebody. Two somebodies, unless I really missed something. We’re just going to let them go….?”

“Uh….yes. Yes, we are, Holly, because…..once again, in case you missed it….they almost blew us up.” Setting a few controls, Puck leaned back in his seat again and let the ship pilot itself. “We can’t take them. So we’re running away now. If we get the chance in the future to help that boy and his sister, we’ll take it, but right now we’d just be wasting all the effort that our lovely rescuer just expended to save our asses, and you don’t want to do that, believe me.”

My reply was cut off as a piercing whistle leapt from the console, making me jump. Puck winced. “Oh. That would be said rescuer right now.” He sighed as he opened the channel with obvious reluctance, but by the time the screen flickered to life he was smiling his most charming smile. “Hello, beautiful! Have I mentioned yet today how hot women who can shoot the power supply out of a shielding unit from three lightyears away are?”

“Puck.” The figure on the screen was hooded, keeping her facial features from view. “Karu was not incorrect in his assessment of your intelligence.”

Puck turned to me with a wry grin. “She has an open channel to all the communications on this ship. That’s her way of saying that she thinks I’m an idiot, too. Holly, this is Kiasis. Lucky for us, she was orbiting the colony while she waited for me to get my ship taken care of. She doesn’t think I ought to be allowed to travel between solar systems without a chaperone, you see.”

“A theory based on the long years of our acquaintance that I have yet to see disproven. I assume that your ship will function until we reach our destination?” The voice was sharp, the words terse and slightly accented, as if English was not the speaker’s native language. I was curious about what was behind the hood; did everyone outside the colony keep their faces covered?

“Well, it hasn’t given me any trouble yet, aside from the shields, so I’m assuming that too.”

“I will keep the lines of communication clear, in case you find reason to conclude otherwise.” The communication was cut without warning, with no closing or warning of any kind.

“Charming,” I said dryly. “Is she from your world too?”

“Nope,” he said calmly, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “She’s from Sch’sil’ya.”

That was not an everyday occurrence. “You’re kidding.” All I knew about Sch’sil’ya I’d heard in Universal Studies classes. It was a humid, jungle covered planet, crawling with huge carnivores that could snap up a human sized being in a single bite. The Sch’cil’ians were a recently civilized race compared to humans, but they’d achieved space travel some one hundred or so years earlier; once they managed to travel outside their solar system, they’d become the bullies on the block, conquering all their neighbors and stealing the technology from them to extend their reach even further. Then they’d undergone some kind of political reformation, and become a semi-democratic society, something like twenty or so years before they encountered humans. They were the most influential race in interstellar politics outside the humans, but they were supposedly pretty secretive and still more than a little warlike. The rumor was that they didn’t make friends at all, nor did they really form any kind of attachments to anyone, outside of immediate family. I’d really never pictured one of them being friends with someone from Earth.

Wait. When, exactly, had I started thinking of Puck as being from Earth? Was I really starting to believe all this shit?

I stared out the window (Somehow, after being shot at and convincing myself that I was going to end up in little bits scattered all over the orbit of the colony, watching the stars zoom by didn’t bother me nearly so much.), lost in my own thoughts. I wanted to believe Puck. I was a little iffy on the whole fantasy-world-become-reality part of things…mythology and fantasy stories had never really been my cup of tea; but I really, really wanted to believe that I was going somewhere where I was going to be happy, and safe, and taken care of, childish as that might have sounded. It may have been a little selfish, because I was sure there were kids out there who had it worse than I did, but I wanted a home, and a family, and a childhood. I wanted them so badly, in fact, that I began to consider the possibility that maybe Puck wasn’t nuts. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe….

“Awfully quiet over there,” Puck interrupted my thoughts, and I turned to frown at him. “I can practically hear the gears turning.”

Word started tumbling out of my mouth before I could really stop them. I couldn’t help it; that had always been a failing of mine. My mouth sometimes just started working of its own volition, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to make it stop until, usually, it was too late. “You want me to believe that you’re from some weird world where dragons and unicorns and shit like that are real. You really want me to believe I’m some kind of princess or something, and you’re just going to take me away and everything’s going to be just great. Just because you say so. Is that it?”

Puck eyed me warily before nodding, probably a little taken aback by my outburst. I guess, to anybody not privy to the dialogue going on in my head, it might have seemed pretty random. “Yeah, I guess that about sums it up. Why?”

“So convince me…! Tell me something, anything, that might make me think you’re really telling me the truth. You knew my parents? What were they like? You were born on Earth? Why are you living on a planet somewhere out in bum-fucked Egypt that nobody’s ever heard of? Shit, tell me something…!”

It was another second or two before Puck turned away from me, eyes fixing on the glass in front of him as he frowned. “I’ll tell you something. Hell, I’ll tell you everything I can. But I don’t know if it’s going to do anything more to convince you that I’m telling the truth, or if it’ll just convince you that I’m even more nuts than you probably already think I am.”

I nodded. “I’m listening.”