Raven Tide

SMACK

“Ow!” I clutched my hand to my head.

I was on the floor in a black room lit up from the floor with soft orange lights having just struck my head on a metal wall. Out of nowhere the room jerked and knocked me up in the air.

“What the hell is happening?”

I stood up and scanned the room. No sign of the creature, not that I’d be able to see it anyway.

Strange...

I wasn’t in a cell, or a med-lab, or even restrained from moving, and the door was wide open.

Contrary to the harsh black walls, the room smelled light and freshly disinfected like a handful of antibacterial soap suds tickling my nose.

My feet and legs were bandaged but I didn’t feel any pain.

The room banked sharply to the right again and I caught myself on a giant bed. From the small indention of wrinkles, this is where I had been sleeping.

BOOM!

I yelped and curled to the floor. There weren’t any windows but I was certain something big was banging on the outside of the craft overhead.

There was also a tray with a smattering of stray medical supplies sprawled across the floor along with an empty syringe rolling back and forth.

I touched the top of my shoulder. No bruise but the recollection of the violation was unsettling.

“Two options, Chyani,” I grit my teeth while staring at the door. “No one ever made things better by sitting alone in the dark.”

The hallway was empty and nothing prevented me from wandering the ship, there was only a faint grunting sound echoing from the end of the corridor. Low, angry, and mingled with clicking.

“It kept you alive,” I sucked in a long breath through my nose. “Though probably only to experiment on or to profit from selling me into intergalactic slavery...”

I peeked in at what was clearly the bridge of the alien’s ship. Everything was black and there was a large horizontal black chair in the center with an array of holo controls hovering in the air ... and him seated at the helm.

The large holo screen in front of us displayed various external views of the alien’s spacecraft.

We were under attack by some kind of giant demented space moth with a dozen legs and large yellow wings littered with irregularly shaped holes.

“Holy shit!” I smacked my hands over my mouth realizing I’d spoken out loud.

The alien man paid me no attention and continued navigating his ship out of the moth’s grasp.

The room tilted again and from the view screen, he was looping the ship into a steep dive between a snarl of moth legs.

“Ell-osde’ pauk!” He shouted and steered the ship in a sharp winding arch while letting loose a barrage of white-hot lasers into the creature’s side.

I lost my footing and couldn’t stop from sliding into the back of his chair.

The big alien roared and punched his fist into a red circle floating by his side. Then he got up and came at me.

“I didn’t mean-” I cringed and tried to make myself small.

He grabbed my arm and threw me over his shoulder then kicked the wall to summon a small stool from the floor.

“Ki’cte!” He threw me on the chair and promptly buckled me in with a metal harness unhinging from out of nowhere.

Then he returned to his chair and ignored me and my bruised rear.

His skin was white and smooth with little red blunt quills poking out in places human men were prone to grow hair. I couldn’t see his face, he wore a silver mask with glowing white eyes, and he had a mane of long thin rubbery tendrils draped down the length of his back. And not that I was staring but he didn’t wear a shirt or pants. Just patches of metal armor, a loin cloth, and gray fishnet stretched over his exposed limbs.

The moth scratched the hull of the ship and tried to wrap its wings around us. I almost covered my eyes but was startled by the alien man’s manic laughter. He threw his head back with this deep gravelly thrum then laid into the beast with a volley of torpedoes that exploded point blank next to our vessel.

Great, not only had I been abducted in the middle of an alien invasion and was seconds away from being devoured by a freaking kaiju, my kidnapper was a psycho!

The ship’s hull groaned and the moth let go. Then the alien redirected our trajectory and a barrel rolled away from the creature.

“AHH!” A panel next to me sparked and then ignited on fire.

The white alien shot up from his captain’s chair, unhooked me from the wall, and flipped on a series of switches to expedite the emergency extinguishers built into the ceiling.

He took a firm grip under my right arm and we both looked down when his white claws tinked against the synthetic casing.

I tried to pull away but he wouldn’t budge.

“H’ko,” he shook his large masked head side to side and tugged me forward.

It was terrifying to feel his hand on me, his fingers and palm easily encircled my entire bicep.

Seeing no other option, I lowered my head in capitulation.

Then he tugged me to his big metal chair, sat down, and heaved me onto his lap.

His metal grieves and weird trinkets tethered to his belt poked into me but I curled up sideways on his chest and did my best to wedge in and keep out of his way.

“Ver’i tkaa,” he nodded and activated a semitransparent forced shield to hold us in place.

I folded my arms tight around my chest and glanced up at the numerous screens lighting up the space around us. The rapid amalgamation motion was dizzying to stare at directly but it was a relief to see the distance between the moth and our ship expanding.

Where were we going? And what was that thing trying to kill us?

The alien flicked his fingers over a thick gauntlet on his left arm and began speaking. Not to me. He didn’t even look at me. No other voice responded so I assumed he was sending a message.

Contrary to the alien’s rugged exterior he smelled like wild roses and the steady rumble of his breathing was calming.

His hands swished through a series of real-time schematics revealing that the majority of the ship’s vital systems were blinking in red. He growled, opened another menu, and entered a sequence of verbal commands.

Unlock icons swirled open and expanded into a configuration comprised of sinister angles.

The alien chittered and flexed his claws.

Shit... he’s not done!

The spacecraft banked left and twirled, then came about to fly directly at the moth.

Three new white reticles popped up in front of the alien’s face and danced in the air before locking onto their targets.

He stroked his fingers over a dial and increased velocity.

Why couldn’t he have knocked me out again for this part?

I covered my face and involuntarily squeaked into his chest.

The ship creaked as we sped up and lights lit up all over the screens indicating multiple weapon systems were charged to their maximum.

Then everything compressed and my ears popped. It was like standing inside a subwoofer during the base drop in an over-packed nightclub. I wanted to hurl.

White light flooded every screen until there was nothing.

The moth vanished and all that remained were soft flickering yellow embers.

Suddenly, the ship jerked and tumbled. More fires broke out across the bridge and warning alarms sprang up, highlighting other areas of the ship that were in dire distress.

The alien deactivated the force shield harness and shoved me off of him then he ran off to extinguish his ship.

I wanted to help. After all, I was invested. His ship being destroyed meant I would perish too but I didn’t have a clue where to start. Instead, I turned to the crescent wall of floating monitors. There was a small window with a layout of the ship’s interior and a single blue circle fluttering to and fro while a second green dot remained stationary.

It was a motion sensor.

I dared to tap the little square and stretched it wider.

“There’s the hallway, the bedroom,” I hovered my hand over the glimmering image tracing the path out from my green dot. “I hope that’s not the engine room he’s tending to...”

The rest of the panels were littered with peculiar dashed line lettering and bloopy runes I couldn’t understand.

“I wonder if there’s a way to get a message to Hecte,” I sifted through the virtual panels for symbols that implied communication. “Galactic Defense should be aware of what happened on Phirsa 3 by now or at the very least know that the colony had lost contact. Maybe there’s a comms beacon floating nearby?”

A giant clawed hand wrenched my wrist away from the panels.

“H’ko!” He snapped at me with his masked face very close to mine.

I wanted to shrink away but I refused to give him the satisfaction. I learned a long time ago not to give bullies what they desired.

“Where are you taking me?” I snarled.

He grabbed my shoulder and choked up his grip on my arm then heaved me back onto his lap as he reclaimed his seat in the big black metal chair. Once again, he triggered the safety force shield and resumed piloting the ship.

I grumbled and settled down. The ship was no longer on fire so death had been abated for at least another few minutes.

Then the alien opened up a chain of star charts and zoomed in on a nearby system. I recognized the configuration vaguely, it was way beyond the protected territories.

I don’t think I was out for that long... to make it this far... His ship must be way more advanced than anything constructed by the Galactic Federation.

Several miniature text boxes popped up next to the three largest planets. Nothing I could read but some of the glyphs on the side were large and ominous.

He pressed the middle planet, the largest, and dragged his index claw up a color-coded scale on his captain’s chair. A secondary window emerged depicting larger replicas of the cautionary glyphs. He slapped it away and struck the top button on the armrest again. Immediately, the ship’s engines responded and redirected its course automatically to the planet he selected.

Then his chest reverberated like thunder in the distance and he turned his masked glowing eyes down to me.

I tried to recoil away but the force shield limited my movement.

“Do I have to sta-”

WHAAM!

There was an explosion from the back of the bridge and hot metal went flying by our heads.

The white alien pushed my head down and took manual control of the ship. Buzzers were blaring and I clung to his bare chest in instinctual terror.

The room spun and all of the virtual view screens were blinking but before I lost the nerve to glance over my shoulder, I saw the ship’s trajectory reroute toward the smallest planet.

.

.

.

TRANSLATIONS:

ell-osde’ pauk= fuck you

ki’cte= enough

h’ko= no

ver’it’kaa= now stay