Of course the word “inside” filled us each with dread, though we had surely just survived worse than mere enclosure.
“The sheet metal’s pretty thin,” Jicklet said. “If it wasn’t then the spar tip wouldn’t have penetrated. But see? There are wires and other sorts of primitive conduit running through the skin. I can peel the metal easily enough. The wiring will take a bit longer if we’re to save what’s here. And if you want me to open the hatch, well, I’d first have to trace each wire.”
She waited for an answer. For orders. It occurred to me that no one had any clear sense of who, if anyone, was in charge.
Finally Lackofa said, “Preserve the function of the alien ship. But hurry. Get us an opening.”
Jicklet went to work, and two of the others zipped in to help her. They were experienced techs, Lackofa and I and the remaining members of our strange rescue party were not.
Lackofa looked more worried than I’ve ever seen him. Me I didn’t need any help feeling grim. The memory of my home falling away trailing a mist of Ketran blood behind it was still fresh. Would always be.
I could see the alien too well now. His lidless eyes were darkening. As if some deeper blue pigment were seeping into the iris. His head was bulbous, large by our standards. He had no wings. He had a beak for a mouth, a sharp, downturned thing that gave him a sad, disappointed expression. A number of long, thin, multiple-jointed arms hung limp. His skin was a green so dark it might almost have been black. The long crystal spear entered his head from directly above.
“Capasin,” Lackofa said in answer to my unspoken query. “I guess our mission of peace is canceled.”
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“You tell me, gamer.”
Jicklet wiped her face. A nicked conduit had sprayed her with some pressurized fluid. She had closed it up. “That’s as much as we can do. There are main structural supports back of this. If we cut those we’ll never get her closed up again.”
There was a squarish hole, lined with sharp curls of steel and jumbled wiring. A hole big enough for one of us to enter through — once the spar had been removed.
“Let’s pull the spar out,” Lackofa said quietly.
It was gruesome work. When we lifted the spear stuck and the alien corpse began to rise through the hole. Lackofa and one of the techs put their pods against the alien’s soft, yielding skull, and we pulled all at once. There was a sucking sound and the spear came away. The body fell in a heap on the deck of his ship.
Two of the techs flew the spar away for disposal. No one was going to suggest reattaching it. Not a killing weapon. No one looked at me. No one said anything, but no one looked at me, either.
“We need to see whether we can fly this thing,” Lackofa said. He licked his lips. He wasn’t volunteering. Neither was Jicklet.
It wasn’t hard to understand: An enclosed space was bad enough. An enclosed space occupied by a corpse was still worse. Dead bodies were not meant to be kept around. They fell away from their docks to burn up on the surface below. Anything else was hideous and perverted.
And yet I had a relationship with this dead alien. He was mine in some indefinable way.
“I’ll do it,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to,” Lackofa said kindly. But his eyes said different: If not you, gamer, then who?
“You’ll have to help hand me in and out,” I said. I looked pleadingly at Lackofa and Jicklet. “You’ll get me out?”
Jicklet put her hand on my arm. “If I have to slice the ship up like a fresh bat, we’ll get you out.”
I took a couple of deep breaths. No time to waste. Farsight would be anxiously waiting our report. He wanted — we all wanted — to get back to Ket.
“Look for weaponry,” Lackofa said.
I nodded. I’d look for weaponry. If I could fight down my urge to panic and lacerate my wings in an enclosure rage.
I landed on the ship. I folded my wings tightly. Do it in one quick drop, Toomin. All at once.
I stepped off, fell through the hole, and landed with one pod on blood-slicked floor and the other on a pair of the alien’s arms.
I fell over, prostrate on the deck, my face inches from the Capasin’s now-opaque eyes. The scream was in my throat before I could think.
I screamed, panic, all around me, closed in! No sky! No sky!
“Close your eyes!” Lackofa yelled. “Toomin, shut your eyes. Don’t look!”
His own fear-edged voice scared me more. But I closed my eyes. Squeezed them shut. And my wings stayed tight.
I breathed hard, then softer, forcing myself to be calm, calm.
Slowly open one eye, Toomin. No, look away from the Capasin. Up. Look up at the hole, look up at the open hole and beyond at the star field. A night sky. Not my night sky, but a sky just the same.
Sky. Okay, I can do this. I can.
I opened my other eyes. I climbed erect, shaky, but not panicky. But it took real effort to tear my longing gaze away from the safe square above me, to look away from the sky and the faces of my companions.
The cockpit of the ship was small by any standard. And it was made smaller still by the instrumentation that seemed at first to be a randomly assembled pile of black boxes with glowing green lights.
It reminded me of nothing so much as our own emergency backup systems. Primitive systems made of metals, using electrons rather than photons to carry data. And all designed to be manipulated by touch rather than memm.
It was crude. How could it be so crude? The larger version of this ship had murdered my home crystal in less than five minutes. How could this ship be so laughably
