Alien Freak - Calista Skye Page 0,20
follow, sounding like they come from below the ship.
I scurry over to Zaroc. “What was that?”
He keeps working. “That was probably the Fentrat.”
“Oh. And what is the Fentrat?”
“The Fentrat is the monster which living on the planet. Very deadly.”
I don’t want to know any more about that right now. “Can you repair the ship?”
“Probably.”
“So no need to leave and go outsiiiee!”
The ship shakes again, harder. I fall to the floor, and a loud boom resonates through the whole room.
“That not the Fentrat,” Zaroc says. He ducks out from the machinery and walks fast out of the room, only slightly unsteadied by the several new booms that follow.
Okay, this is not the time for misplaced pride. I feel safer when he’s close, so I scurry after him, half crawling, while more booms shake the ship. We make our way up to the control room.
Zaroc sits down in his usual seat, and I stand right behind him. Thankfully, the sucking mouths are gone from the windshield. All I can see outside is various shades of green.
Another boom forces me to hold on to Zaroc’s chair, and a green flash outside lights up the control room.
“Are we being bombed?” I exclaim, because that’s what it feels like.
“We are,” Zaroc confirms tightly. “Those who shot us down want to make sure I really dead. But Fentrat makes bombs hard to aim. Everything green, can’t see this ship when under it.”
“The plants protect us?”
“The plant restrains us,” he corrects. “The Fentrat is only one plant.”
He does something on the control console, and the panels come to life with lights and graphs and buzzing that has to be some kind of alarm. But the hum is starting to spin up, too, and that reassures me.
“Did you fix the ship?” I ask carefully.
“As far as is possible to fix now,” he confirms. “Sit down and hold on to the seat.”
I quickly plop down in the seat with the now useless webbing harness.
Outside the windshield, a tiny green vine with a fat bulb on the end is snaking its way out of the greenery. It hits the glass and immediately blossoms into a gigantic, brown eye with six oval pupils. It pushes itself at the glass like a little girl’s nose at a candy store window.
I point at it. “I think we’re being watched.”
Zaroc doesn’t reply, just inspects the instruments, presses buttons, slides sliders, and grunts with annoyance at everything that doesn’t work the way he wants.
Then he leans back, grabs the controls, and pushes a lever.
The ship wobbles as it rises about one foot into the air.
Zaroc pushes the lever further, and the ship rises five more feet.
He growls and pushes the lever all the way forward. The hum increases sharply in intensity, drowning out all the warning buzzers, and the seat trembles very faintly. I can feel the power in the ship.
But I can also feel that we’ve only risen about one more foot. The huge eye outside is still watching, the pupils slowly revolving.
“It is holding us down,” Zaroc hisses. “Will not let us leave. Ship is overgrown by plant.”
He pulls the lever back, and the ship settles down to the ground again.
The hum dies down, but the warning buzzers remain.
Zaroc stands up and hits the windshield with the flat of his hand, right at the eye. “Let us go!”
The eye reflexively recoils an inch, then presses itself up against the glass again, staring at us with unblinking curiosity.
Zaroc stares right back. “I have to burn it off.”
He turns on his heel and walks to the elevator squares.
“What?” I call after him, alarmed. “Are you going outside?”
He looks right at me. “Yes.” Then he’s gone.
No, I’m not having that. I run over there myself, quickly figure out how the elevator works, and zoom down to the lower section where the cages are.
Zaroc is taking a big, ugly-looking weapon down from the wall and inspecting it.
“You can’t leave me alone in here,” I protest. “If you don’t come back, I have no idea how to fly the ship.”
He inspects the weapon. “The Fentrat not let us fly away. Someone must go out and show we serious. Will you?”
“Just be careful.”
He walks to the hatch. “Stay in here.”
The hatch hisses open, a sickly green light fills the room, and he marches out, weapon held ready. The air from the outside is hot and humid and smells so strongly of rotting leaves I almost throw up.
The hatch closes again, and from the outside I can hear the muted