Blade of the Lucan: A Memory of Anstractor (17 page)

She didn’t succumb to her fears and pushed on in the general direction of the camp that the Ranalso told her they were set up in. After a few more hours of flat nothingness, she could see a myriad of triangular tent tops on the horizon. She pulled up a comm-link and called the leader, Illi, who was the same man she had contacted on Lochte.

The comm kept on beeping for a long time, so she slowed the hover-bike to a crawl. She didn’t want to approach them without them knowing who she was, so she stayed outside of sniper range and whispered a silent prayer that Illi would pick up before his scouts discovered her.

The Ranalos answered the comm with a gruff, impatient voice, “Where are you at, Tyheran?”

“About 2,000 yards out from your campsite, Ranalos. Seriously, can we get past calling each other by our respective races and use names like friends are supposed to do?” Marian said.

“Of course, Lady Raf, we can do that. Now tell me which direction you’re coming from and I’ll tell the boys to ease up so you don’t get yourself dead,” he said.

Marian shook her head at the title Lady Raf. It was as if everyone in Luca wanted to remind her that she was only a circumstance of her legendary husband. She should be upset by it, especially after doing enough things without him to warrant her having a name. But she knew that when she had married him, she was the enemy, and not many of them had gotten the chance to get to know her for who she really was. She was still a stranger to them, and all they knew about her was that she was married to a man they loved very much.

“I’m coming from the east, Illi,” Marian said.

“Coming from the island city, eh?” said the Ranalos, and she could feel the sly smile behind his words. “How was it there? Haven’t been there in a long time, not even to fight or take a lover … isn’t that what they do there, Lady Raf? Fight and take lovers?”

His gruff laugh broke in suddenly and it startled Marian since she hadn’t expected it.

“You know your stuff, Illi, that’s for sure,” she said, trying to keep the sarcasm in her voice to a minimum. “I saw enough of that stuff there to make me sick. This is why I’m coming out to stay with you boys for a time. I’m ready to spill Felitian blood and rescue our comrades from the prison camp they have here. Right?”

The Ranalos grew quiet, and she didn’t know whether he was thinking about what to say to her, or if he was distracted and therefore ignoring her. “Come to the camp, Lady Raf. We have a tent set up for you. We heard about what you and your friend did on Veece recently, and it goes without saying that we consider you to be a mighty warrior, just like your husband.”

Marian blurted out a “thank you,” and it came out like a gasp, causing her to widen her eyes with surprise and embarrassment. “That means a lot to me,” she said after collecting herself. “My friend was able to get to Qeran Kyle, and now Tyhera is in an uproar. That will keep the Fels off of us as we take this camp, and afterwards I hope you all will join me in liberating Veece from the Felitians once and for all.” She started to move her bike slowly towards the camp.

“Tempting. That really is tempting, Lady Raf, but we want to rescue these rebels and head back to Lochte. As long as Palus Felitious is alive, I don’t want to be anywhere near Veece. We are brave, yes, but we are outnumbered a hundred to one. As you may not know—being that you have not been here for some time—no, if Palus Felitious falls, whether it be by your deadly friend or by yourself, I promise we will be there to help you take Veece. But until that happens, we will do this, and then return to our planet where we can fight to keep Palus Felitious off of it,” Illi said.

“I understand, warlord,” Marian said to him. “This will be me coming over the hill, so don’t shoot.”

She turned off the comm and then drifted into the camp where she parked her bike and stepped off. She felt a sudden pain in her inner thighs from riding for several hours. She walked around and stretched her back while the men looked on in admiration.

She was in her 3B suit, so there was not much of her spectacular shape that would be left to their imagination. A few inched forward to try their luck but she stared icy daggers into them and motioned to the knives that she had strapped to her legs.

These were Ranalos warriors, all wearing colorful dragon bone armor, and as a unit they stood glaring at her with war paint on their stoic faces and dye on the tentacles of their heads. Marian waded amongst them to get to the large tent in the center. She noticed that as she pushed her way through, a few of the men were reaching back to grope her backside. These were gruff men that had been at war for long months, and they hadn’t seen a woman of her caliber in ages. But Marian was not interested, so she slapped hands away and pushed past them even more violently until she was standing in front of Illi.

He was the biggest man in the camp and wore all black, and he had enough weapons on his person to arm a militia. Unlike the oranges, greens and reds that were on the tentacles of his group of warriors, his tentacles were painted black, and they reminded her of rolled up plaits on the top of a human’s head. He had a wicked scar that stretched from his right eye down to the left side of his neck. His body—the parts that she could see—was riddled with old bullet wounds and Marian wondered how it was that he was still alive.

“I see you admiring my beautiful face,” the big man joked. “I can’t believe we’re in the presence of a delicate, Tyheran flower such as you. Careful that you don’t get plucked out here, soft born,” he teased and Marian looked around in disbelief.

She flexed one bicep to show off her strength, and then used her other hand to try and check for any fat on her arm. She squeezed her bicep and looked at him quizzically, as if he was out of his mind.

“Which part of me do you see as soft, Illi? Because I’m not really seeing it. I’ve been put through the fire on several levels of training to prepare me for any situation. Felitian fencing arts started it, then the military, oh and then there’s the actual firefighting as a Tyheran rebel. Then there was the Phaser Academy, which is the type of force that only about one percent of military personnel qualify for.

“Soft born, huh? Really Illi? If any of your horny, testosterone-crazed lunatics try to ‘pluck’ this flower, they will learn that my blade is quite precise, and you will lose more men than the Felitians could manage in any war that you would ride into.”

Illi was still smiling, but Marian could see that something had changed in his demeanor. He regarded her with a strange look in his eye and then surrendered to her bravado by nodding and smiling. “Alright, alright, girl, you’re not so soft. But, let’s not waste any more time exchanging niceties out here. Come inside the tent so that we can plan the rescue of our friends and bring some hell to the Felitian ranks.”

R
afian VCA touched the large, black crystal, lost consciousness, and appeared in Luca, outside of Veece, deep in the same forest where Marika had killed the two troopers. He lifted up a tracking device to his face and scanned for crystal residue. He saw the telltale traces of them in areas of the forest, and when he sent the scanning further out, he saw that a few jumps had been made within Veece city.

Sighing loudly, he started walking, trying to work the situation out in his mind of how he would get Marian to come back. It was night time and the frogs were singing songs of mating while Talula hid behind a cloudy sky.

Marian had been gone for two weeks from Anstractor. The time difference was very different between the two galaxies, and he knew that to Marian it would have felt like a month had passed since she left him. He recalled how upset she was with him, but she had left his ring on her finger, even when she said she wanted a divorce.

He recalled the night vividly, especially how upset she was. He had apologized like he always did, but it had done nothing to help. Then she ran off, to come here, to Luca. With two weeks gone, he knew she would have felt neglected, as if he didn’t care for her and was content with leaving her alone.

He touched his forehead and tried to massage away the worry. How had he not thought about this? Yes, the war was at full boil in Anstractor, but that was no excuse for neglecting her. No, he had let it pass, and he had relished the freedom of her absence. Why couldn’t he act on the immense love that he felt for her? Was it so hard to stay loyal but for the few times that a mission required seduction?

That was all she had asked, yet he wasn’t willing to do it. He felt small and immature for the way he’d behaved, but it strengthened his resolve to seek her out for an apology.

He spat and touched the bark of a large tree, looking out at the open field that ran the length of the area in front of him. In the distance stood the tall walls of Veece, and there were numerous cruisers flying over it, like flies at a trash dump.

“What have you done, Marika?” he asked out loud, and smiled with guilty pride.

His jump into Luca was miscalculated, and instead of ending up in Dearin, Talula—which was a city he knew well—he had ended up near Veece, in the heart of the beast. He crossed the plain to the large, looming gates, and two troopers that were seated on the walls pointed rifles at him as he got close.

“Identify yourself, stranger, and show proof of who you are,” one of them announced.

Rafian vanished and appeared next to him, driving a fist into his helmeted jaw. The move was so sudden that the other man couldn’t react and all he could do was drop his rifle and hold up his hands as Rafian kicked the fallen man in the stomach and turned to face him. He didn’t know how it was that the stranger could vanish the way he did, but it was frightening, so he backed up slowly, begging for his life.

“You all aren’t true believers,” Rafian said. “Well that’s a relief. Seems like Kyle’s lackadaisical recruitment practices will be the undoing of Palus. But don’t feel bad, boys, you’re no traitors. You’re probably up here playing sentry in order to feed your families, right? A good, honest job where you get the added bonus of a bird’s eye view of a few plump, Primian bosoms. Right?”

The men nodded slowly. Rafian helped the first one up and took his rifle.

“Listen, I’m not from around here – which you probably realize by now. I’m not here to make trouble, but I do need to visit a friend in the city, and I really don’t want any of you toy soldiers giving me problems. Give me the all-clear so that I can walk the street in peace, and I promise you that I won’t hurt anybody,” he said.

The guards nodded and turned away from him, and Rafian hopped down to the nearest curb inside of Veece. He walked down the main street, away from the gates. A brown-skinned Tyheran woman stumbled across his path, forcing him to stop. She looked over her shoulders and then into the sky, then placed her palm on his chest.

“We’re all going to die,” she said under her breath. “Those resistance bastards are everywhere. Get inside and cover yourself up, man. You look as if you have no clothes on.”

She dry-heaved and Rafian flinched, but with her hand still on his chest, she walked off into the darkness. He looked down at himself and at his 3B suit, and saw that he stuck out like a man’s first grey hair. More people stumbled past him as he walked: some were drunk and others were just curious. Most of them were looking over their backs, but others looked up in the hills as if rebels were up there, looking to pick them off.

He noticed that much hadn’t changed since the time he was there, but he wouldn’t allow himself to become too nostalgic about it. For him, Veece was Marian VCA. It was here that he had met her, fought her, made love to her, and married her. Everything else about the city was pain and loss. He did notice the wall, which was new, and that there were more aliens on the streets now than he remembered in the old Veece.

He strode down a steep hill lined with shops, and past a gathering of prostitutes who reached out to gently touch the front of his 3B suit. There were four Primians and a couple of Tyherans, and behind them on the top floor of the house that they stood in front of them was a mean Deijen woman, watching him curiously. Rafian winked at them and pressed on through the city.

When he had been walking for a time, he decided to stop inside a bar. The neighborhood was rundown, sleazy, and stunk of a mineral that hinted of old, Ranalos blood. He’d grown weary of watching his back as he passed the shadowy houses and the bar had lights and music, which drew him to it.

A shower of stringed beads hit his face as he walked inside, and he saw that they were hung at the entrance for decoration. Inside of the bar, the atmosphere was smoky. There was a sweet smell that reminded him of cinnamon combined with the perfume of Tyheran ladies. He walked forward and the smell changed to the rank odor of men who had spent the entire day face down in their own vomit.

The lights were so dim that he could barely make out the face of the bartender. He could see that she was a Daltak, a tiny thing, and the numerous plaits that were all over her head complemented her quirky sense of dress.

“
Tuwoll
, dark and handsome, he is, and smells of off-worlder. You a brave one stepping inside Cecille’s with the twoopas on a rampage like this,” she said to him, speaking not in Tyheran but the basic language of the Anstractor galaxy.

It took Rafian a second to realize that he still wore the decoder chip behind his ear and it was distorting the woman’s Daltese into a strange accent that made him smile. He put up his hand to tell her to wait and then reached up and tugged it off.

“Let me get a shot of whiskey and a little information, doll,” he said to her, and she nodded and spun to commence the pouring.

“What type of information you looking for, tall, dark, and handsome? Listen, I’ll keep calling you that until you give me your name,” she said, stopping the pour to look back at him.

He noticed that she kept a shotgun near the credit-slide machine, and she had a pair of needles jutting out of her ear lobes. She had trooper-issue leather boots, and a skirt that was too short for the temperature, accentuating a pair of shapely legs wrapped in stockings.

“You flirt with everyone? You’re quite the sight,” he said.

She placed a glass of murky black liquid in front of him. When he didn’t drink it immediately, she leaned on the bar top, revealing cleavage that Rafian found magnetic—as if his eyes were metal—and waited.

“Tell me if it’s okay,” she said in a cute, nasally way, and he lifted the glass and knocked it back before slamming it down. It felt like he was drinking the runoff from a spicy offering of meat. It burned so much that water came from his eyes, and when the liquor touched his stomach, the dark room lightened a bit, and the cute bartender was looking even better than when he had first regarded her.

“Take a shot, lady. The next one’s on me,” he said, and she turned around and poured herself a glass and stayed in position so that the thick liquid could take its time coming out. Rafian stared at her nice, narrow waist and plump posterior. Even when she turned a bit to smile as she waited, he kept his eyes on her body.

Never made it with a Daltak before
, he thought, wondering If he pursued his urges, would it pose a problem for the reunion with his wife? Or would it be him just doing a bit more of what she was upset with him for doing anyway?

A smile crossed the Daltak’s lips slightly as she looked at his empty glass. She walked back over to him and raised her own glass and then sucked it down. A few drops fell from her dark, full lips and landed on her chest. “Oops,” she remarked and licked her lips.

“Maker!” Rafian said and squeezed his eyes shut to resist. He took the napkin from below his glass and leaned forward to dab the droplets that had landed on her breasts.

When he had finished cleaning her up, he reached in the pouch and pulled out two credits that he had brought along. They were classic coins that he’d kept as keepsakes from the last time he had visited Tyhera. He placed them on the bar and the girl winked, then he brought out a third and slid the change over to her.

“You expecting something more for that third hundred?” she asked him, and he made an audible grunt when he saw the amount of money that he had laid down.

“Just information, if you have any for me. My name is … Anstractor, and I need a private charter to take me to Talula,” he said.

“Talula? What you going up there for?” she asked, focusing in on his eyes as if she didn’t expect any other customers for the night. The place seemed more lounge than dive bar, and the number of pillows thrown about on the tiled floor numbered in the hundreds. As his eyes grew accustomed to the low light, Rafian began to see lovers of all shapes, sizes, species and genders, parlaying—along with other things—with one another. There were illegal spices being smoked, and two seedy underworld types were brokering deals out in the open.

He looked at her and shrugged, and she turned her head slightly. The low bulb that sat on the bar illuminated a tattoo she had behind her ear. It was a stylized word, written in old Tyheran, and it stood for Palus Felitious. Smashing the word was a three-fingered fist, a symbol of Daltak defiance. She pulled the collar of her tiny vest up to hide it again and then placed her hands on the counter to gauge his reaction.

“How did you know?” he asked quietly and she took his glass and pushed the coins back to him.

“After you have been fighting for as long as I have, you start to know your friends from your enemies just by looks alone. No one that looks like you would be loyal to them, not unless you were a lord, a baron, or some sort of big-shot trooper, and none of those types would swallow mud with me. So you could consider it a test that I served you mud instead of your whiskey. But, you aced it. So, welcome to Cecille’s, brother,” she said.

“What is your name, Daltak?” he asked again.

“Jelline, Mister Made-Up Name. Care to tell me what they really call you, or are you still trying to pretend that you aren’t one of us?” she said, staring up at him.

“Don’t say my name around too many people or both you and I will regret it,” he said. “My name is Rafian. I have a bit of a reputation.”

“No way you’re Rafian,” she said with a smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead or something? The boys still talk about you as if you were a folk hero or something. You gotta let me do it,” she said suddenly and Rafian raised an eyebrow at her.

“Do what, exactly?” Rafian asked, and she jumped up and grabbed him by the ears, then planted a wet, sugary, liquor tasting kiss on his lips.

Their tongues touched and he found it pleasant, so he threw care to the winds and brought his hands up to caress her slender shoulders. She sucked on his bottom lip and held him steady. This went on for a few, long seconds before she released him. Rafian stood stunned as the place grew silent, and he stared at the tiny, horned beauty.

“It’s not every day that a girl gets to make out with one of the most wanted men in the galaxy,” she said. “I can strike that off my list of goals. Thank you, Rafian … or should I say,
Anstractor
. Hold up a sec, will you? It’s closing time. Don’t get any ideas of running off when I lock up, either. I know a guy that can charter you, but I have to take you when I get outta here,” she said.

Jelline then got on top of the bar and slammed two glasses together. They didn’t shatter but made a loud crashing noise as if they had. The people inside of the bar didn’t seem to pay much attention to it, but then one by one they got up, waved their goodbyes, and exited the door.

By the time the last patron left the building, Jelline had the bar cleaned off and was placing chairs on top of the tables. Rafian volunteered to help and she handed him a wet cloth. He proceeded to wipe off the beer-stained tables and pick up food that was on the floor. When he saw her lifting more chairs to get them off the floor, he playfully threw the rag at her and they decided to swap duties.

“I think that looks good and clean,” Jelline said after mopping up the floor and locking the front door.

Rafian took a look around and observed how old and dark the place was. It still smelled of sweat, old perfume, and cheap liquor, but there was now an added scent to this vile mélange. It smelled of putrid, disgusting water.