terrible to behold in battle. But to us, she was the sweetest, brightest thing in all the stars. This is the solar anniversary of her loss, and we are still in mourning.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
The sound of the shuttle still unattended to in the ingress bay demands my attention. Saya has become part of the past, and now I must attend to the future.
Tusk hits the camera feed, and we are faced with the lower half of a broad-faced grin from a murketeer who is standing too close to the screen.
“GREETINGS,” the wide-faced being declares. “WE HAVE YOUR PRISONER.”
“You should get down to the human,” Tusk says. “Before Scizzor gets to them.”
Scizzor was the closest to Saya and in the wake of her passing, he destroyed a planet with his bare hands. He is, safe to say, not safe. We have remained almost constantly in distant orbits since her loss and his resulting rampage, which was so brutal even we were shocked. Scizzor does not know that a human prisoner is being taken aboard. If he finds out, she will be serving a very short sentence and for all the wrong reasons.
Today cannot be about Scizzor, or even Saya. It has to be about the human. My thoughts have been full of nothing else since I was approached by her previous captors and asked to take her as my own personal imprisoned pet.
My first impulse was to refuse. To break a human, you have to get close. Very close. It is hard to do at the best of times being a scythkin, and grief only makes it harder. Grief is an emotion which turns a being inward, makes it hard to touch the world.
But this is a rare opportunity. One which is not going to come up again. With humanity limited in large part to the IHPZ, or Interstellar Human Petting Zoo, there is no opportunity for our kind to have an encounter with a human, let alone possess one.
So I did not turn them down, even though they made her sound as unappealing as possible. They told me she was unbreakable. They sent me an exhaustive list of her crimes. Many of them were violent. This is not a typical human being, and these are not typical circumstances.
“Warden? Are you going down?”
I realize I have been standing here, staring at Saya’s picture.
“Yeah.”
There is a big, yellow submarine-looking bulbous craft sitting in our bay. It looks as out of place as anything could ever look. It is marked with a big, cheerful G, which has been halfway scratched out and then left. The scythkin brood who took the IHPZ from the Galactor corporation have not been performing maintenance, so it would seem.
This is not what I expected. I expected a scythkin war shuttle. Something with defensive capabilities. This yellow bubble is a sitting duck bobbing among the stars.
“WELCOME! I mean HELLO!”
A murketeer appears outside the ship. They are loathsome little creatures. They only come up to my waist, but their bulbous bodies and their great big eyes and their even wider mouths with grins like cow teeth are disgusting.
“I AM USED TO WELCOMING,” it booms noisily. “BUT YOU ARE THE ONE WELCOMING US.”
“I’m not welcoming you. Why are you here? I expected a scythkin guard.”
“THANK YOU!”
“Stop yelling at me, and tell me why you are here with the human. The human is here, isn’t she?”
“The human was given to us to transport because she has a tendency to be violent to scythkin. We’re the only ones she doesn’t want to kill,” the murketeer explains. “And she was supposed to be asleep, but she woke up halfway here. It has been… difficult. She threw one of my colleagues out of an airlock in an attempt to escape.”
He says every word with a big, broad smile, completely incongruous to the words he is saying.
“And if you had been attacked?”
“Galactor colors are the safest to travel under,” the murketeer says. “Galactor is expanding again. Hadn’t you heard?”
I had heard. Expanding is what Galactor does. They’re even more proficient at it than our species is. But of course they are not a species. They are a corporate state, a coalition of species who like the color yellow and the letter G.
I do not like them. Under any other circumstances, I would kill these murketeers without a moment’s hesitation and feed on their entrails. But doing that to them would no doubt be impolite, and annoy the hell out of the brood which sent