She fell right at my feet. The weapon she had been brandishing landed right on my toes. Kora lay insensate not four feet to my left. Karellion, relieved of his head, lay to my right. The urge to pick up the weapon and start firing at random crashed through my brain like a roaring elephant.
I almost did it.
They saw it in my eyes, the way my shoulders suddenly got all bunched up, the way my jaw clenched and unclenched. I guessed I would have been dead before I could get the weapon in my hand, so I just stared them down with all the ferocity in my seething brain. That’s when I saw a surprising thing in their alien eyes.
They wouldn’t have blamed me for trying. Further, they would kill me to stop me from harming them, but they would regret having to do so.
As my fabled ancestress, T’zirth, was often reported to comment, “Life is never dull.”
I stood and continued staring.
What else could I do? Lora, my only communications link, was out cold. That’s when things really got interesting.
The Iglendas gathered around Lora in a circle. Several of them checked her, patted her cheeks, but she wasn’t about to wake up.
“Smart girl,” I thought. “Stay out as long as possible. When you wake up, all hell is waiting!”
When it was clear she wasn’t about to join the party, they started talking to each other.
Six dimensions to my left Adana was checking Kora. Our four remaining compatriots, Rale, Jorn, Katha, and Perl were gathered tensely at my back. “Four babies,” I thought. None of them were over 50. Of the four, only Jorn had ever been off-world.
After what felt like a century, but was probably only five minutes, two things happened. Kora moaned and responded to Adana, and the Iglendas appeared to have reached some kind of consensus.
Perl and Jorn moved to help Adana with Kora. Three of the Iglendas moved toward me. I positioned myself between them and my people. The Iglendas looked grim. I looked grimmer. What could I do? I could have ordered
Raynah reorient us, just whoosh Karellion’s remains, Kora’s probably concussed body, and the rest of us back home. I could cut our loses and just leave Lora here with her mess. Maybe that is what I should have done, but only three of my neurons even seriously considered that option.
Call me stupid. I’d agree with you. For some reason I was dead set on taking her back with us. Maybe I wanted to shout at her for six years once I got her back, make her fall into a state of terminal guilt. Yeah, maybe that was it. I just needed to get close enough to her to slap the reorientation bracelet on her senseless wrist, then she was all ours. Yeah!
Before I got any further in my hasty deliberations and mounting self-recriminations, the three Iglendas stopped two paces from me. They lined up. The center one offered me a long, jagged blade as the one to my left said something, I have no idea what. The blade looked sharp enough to slice the eyes off a fly in flight. I declined to take it.
The Iglendas sighed and said something to each other.
Adana said, “they realize you don’t understand their customs.”
“What?” I almost shouted, as I turned to stare her down in her turn.
“I’m sorry my dearest,” she said placatingly. “The
Harr are translating for me. They have offered the life of that one in the middle in return for Karellion. That is their custom. You must kill him, then the score will be even. He has offered himself to you of his own free will.”
She said all that calmly, like she was translating during breakfast as some guest from Prussia speaking a dialect of German I had never mastered offered me an egg.
I briefly wondered if every last one of us had gone completely mad.
In keeping with the increasingly surreal events I asked, “What do you counsel, dearest? Should I stab him in the chest or the left eye? Which would be most likely to kill him? I am unfamiliar with their alien physiology!”
She sighed. “I counsel we get out of here, but I suppose we can’t leave Lora, now can we?”
“I suppose not,” I replied. “So, I am left with my little conundrum.”
“Well obviously you aren’t killing anyone,” she finally snapped.
“Obviously,” I managed to spit between my clenched teeth….not for wanting to, not for wanting to!
She returned her attention to Kora just as Lora began to stir. In fact, she sat bolt upright as though someone had just goosed her soundly.
“Well, welcome back,” I managed to spurt out acidly. “Your friends have decided I should kill this guy right here,” I said, gesturing toward my willing victim. “What do you think I should do?”
She promptly turned green and threw up again, all over one of her new friends.
“How much vomit can be in one little girl,” I shouted.
Adana said, “You’re not helping! It would help if you killed that guy in the middle,” she shouted. “But, if you’re not going to do that, grab Lora and let’s get the hell out of here.”
There were at least six big, burly Iglendas between me and vomit-girl. I wondered if any of them had ever played human football.
“I’m going to assume they can’t understand what we are saying to each other,” I said, pointedly looking at them as I said that.
The look on their faces led me to believe they were clueless.
“I’m going to pretend I’m a quarterback sneaking,” I said to Adana. “When I plant this on Lora, have the Harr and Raynah get us out of here!”
“I can do that,” Adana said.
I did my best imitation of a first-class quarterback. I dodged, rolled, faked and did an end-run around my six problems and dove straight for Lora. Unfortunately, I had forgotten one important thing and not anticipated another.
First, Lora could understand me.
Second, she clearly had no intention of going anywhere with me.
She rolled out of the way of my dive for her wrist, shouting something to her Iglenda friends.
In very short order I found myself pinned under my six problems with that nasty jagged blade pressed uncomfortably to my throat.
