Caveman Alien's Riddle - Calista Skye Page 0,81

Perhaps the cavemen have defeated them all while we’ve been talking up here?

Boom!

Again and again the whole ship trembles in its very foundations as the cavemen pull the ram back on its huge frame and pull it forwards with thick ropes, giving it more speed. It’s made up of twenty thick tree trunks bound together to form a massive hammer that can swing back and forth.

Boom!

Several of our own cavemen come up to the control room to check on us.

“We have to fight this,” Aurora says tightly. “They’ll crush the whole ship to shards. Everyone grab a gun and load it. They will do more damage against cavemen than against dragons. Let’s go! Let’s go!”

She would make a perfect marine sergeant, I reflect as we quickly make our way down to the garden level, where we keep all our stuff.

“Everything is ready,” Aurora continues. “Gunpowder there. Ammunition there. Wicks there. Matches there. One gun for each man, one for each girl.”

“Indeed,” Brax’tan says as he approaches, a tight smile on his face. He’s our general and the best leader among the cavemen. Which is reasonable, since he’s Delyah’s husband. “One weapon each. The women will stay inside, while we warriors deal with the nuisance outside.”

Nobody protests, not even Aurora. Brax’tan has great authority, and he’s always right.

There are several exits from the mysterious spaceship, and three minutes later, all the cavemen are outside and all the girls are right inside the various doors, aiming guns in case we see a face that’s not one of ‘our’ cavemen.

“They stopped banging,” Beatrice observes. She and I are kneeling down behind a big bank of instruments in the medical section of the ship, where alien machinery keeps manufacturing the Magical Space Gel that heals all wounds and burns and apparently all illnesses, too.

“They have other things on their minds,” I whisper unnecessarily. Nobody can hear us in here, but this is all pretty tense. Brax’tan might seem confident, but our guys are badly outnumbered.

Beatrice rests the muzzle of her heavy blunderbuss on the floor. “Do you think Kyandros and Aragadon might scare these guys away?”

“If they had their strength, they totally could,” I whisper. “But they are still recharging.”

“I guess they should save their strength for the other dragons,” Beatrice says. “Feels like the cavemen aren’t really the major problem here.”

“So weird, them all turning on us like that,” I ponder. “Even most of the guys in the army. I thought they were all content with having some kind of meaning in their lives. We never promised them wives, did we?”

Beatrice shrugs. “We don’t know what our own cavemen told new recruits. Maybe they dangled imaginary women in front of them. And anyway, they wouldn’t have to, probably. If you were a caveman, you would probably assume that more women were coming, even if nobody said it outright. At the very least, you would want to be close to the few women here, just in case. There are still unmarried girls.”

I nod. “Yeah, and maybe one of us would take a fancy to them. It would be worth it for any caveman to at least try. Like entering a lottery, I guess. But with only six unmarried girls left, and the spreading rumor that those would be leaving, I guess it was too much to expect that they would stay on our side. Suddenly, the lottery prize was gone.”

“Everything is up in the air,” Beatrice agrees. Nothing is certain. Except I thought of one thing. If the Plood are here, and they agreed to take you and your dragon and all the other dragons there — Earth must still exist and be fine, right? There was no mass invasion when we were abducted? The other saucers we thought we saw were really only some kind of visual effect?”

I shift the grip on the blunderbuss. My hands are sweaty, and the thing keeps slipping from my grip. “It might be a moot point if the dragons are on their way there right now.”

She sighs. “Yeah. We don’t even have that anymore.”

It’s been on my mind ever since I left Caronerax: this is bigger than me. The possible invasion of Earth by dragon is the worst disaster I can imagine. Nothing could be worse than that. An asteroid strike might wipe out most of the human life on my home planet, but probably not all of it. A dragon planet invasion could, if what we know about them is correct.

“This is the time”, I mutter