They were not the painstaking breaths I fought for due to the atmosphere but from pure exertion.
My mind might be focused on the task at hand, able to keep going and push on, but my body had just about enough.
“We have to keep moving,” Egara said.
“I… can’t…” I said between gasps.
“Then I’ll carry you.”
I shook my head but he already bent down to sweep me off my feet.
His powerful arms clutched me close.
He staggered forward, more due to the uneven surface than struggling beneath my weight.
“I thought you… wouldn’t let me… slow you down?” I said.
“What can I say? I’ve grown attached to you.”
After about twenty minutes, I had recovered.
“I can walk now,” I said.
He didn’t say a word and continued to power through the valley that cut through the huge sand dunes.
I wriggled in his arms to get free.
“Really. Put me down. I can walk.”
He glanced at me,
“Are you sure?”
I gave him a look and wiped the sand from his cheeks and nose.
He sat me down and I dusted off my clothes.
He rubbed a hand over his face and hair, dislodging a bucket load as it spilled from his shoulders.
“Do you think they’re close?” I said.
“The drones could be anywhere. If it were me, I would send those drones out everywhere I could. They’ll cross each other’s paths, looking for any sign of us. All it takes is for one of them to discover our footsteps and they’ll find us for sure.”
Our footsteps in the sand.
Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I peered back at the valley floor, at the single pair of steepled humps kicked up by Egara’s boots.
Any drone could make out those.
It would be nigh-on impossible for us to cover them up behind ourselves.
“Do you think we’re close?” I said.
He didn’t look at me and focused on the next rise.
“Could be,” he said, noncommittally.
In truth, there was no way he could know for sure either way.
He knew no more than I did.
“Come on,” I said. “If we’re going to find this shuttlecraft of yours, we’re going to have to get a move on.”
We marched onward and rounded the next corner.
I checked the sky, looking for a flicker of light that might bounce off a drone’s hard outer shell.
Egara had much better hearing than me.
He would likely hear a drone’s loud buzzing, like giant hornets, before he would see them.
We had to take each corner at a time, hoping it would be the last, each counting down to the one that would finally reveal the merchants who’d stolen his shuttlecraft.
“Who would live in such a place as this?” I wondered out loud.
“This moon was colonized long ago,” Egara said, trudging through the sand that never failed to catch the front of his boots. “That species had to sell it to pay off debts. The debtors came and evicted most of the locals. They were allowed to stay so long as they didn’t hinder the building of the prisons.”
“What happened to those that did?”
“Well, there’s plenty of room at the local ‘hotels.’”
I gasped.
It somehow seemed perverse to imprison the very species that, through no fault of their own, had lost possession of this moon to an opportunistic alien race.
Especially since they had done nothing wrong to deserve it.
“The prisons get more funds the more prisoners they have here,” Egara said, mildly surprised at my shock. “The more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”
It was an entire field of the prison’s operating procedure I had never considered before.
Why would I? It wasn’t like it affected me.
Except, it did.
I was a part of that system now.
If the prison was run like a business, then I would be considered nothing more than an expenditure.
A single line on a ledger somewhere, where a thin nosed accountant would squint at the numbers and question the tax liabilities of each item.
I wondered how I would be referenced.
Entertainment?
A tax write-off?
Would they get tax back for my depreciation?
It might be irrational but it made me angry.
I’d been abducted through no fault of my own and now I was part of someone’s profit and loss accounts?
We turned to another corner, identical to so many others we’d turned before.
I expect to see nothing but rolling sand dunes as far as the eye could see.
Pretty soon, the suns would set and we would be left in semi-darkness from the grey moons that circled in the suns’ wake.
Instead, I saw a figure.
I was shocked to see another person out here and immediately came to an abrupt halt.
Egara slowed but did not stop.
The figure stood with his hands held in front.
His robes were long and tickled the sand’s surface.
I wondered how he could possibly survive wearing such black clothes in such a climate as this.
“Follow my lead and move slowly,” Egara said out the corner of his mouth.
He released my hand and walked with his hands swinging on either side, putting the shivs tucked in his waistband within easy reach.
Sunlight winked off their wicked edges.
I might have mistaken the figure as a fellow escaped prisoner except he looked far too at ease to be anything of the sort.
He had a heart-shaped snubbed nose with two thick slits for nostrils and wore a curved cap on his head that hid any hair he might have underneath it.
I had seen similar species to him in the prison but there were enough differences for him to occupy his own subcategory.
There was something very pig-like about the creature, and with it came all the negative associations of the poorly-regarded farmyard animal.
Maybe it was his small squinting black eyes, virtually invisible beneath the goggles that clung tightly to his face.
I had an immediate revulsion to the creature, irrational and unfounded, perhaps, but it was still there.
I didn’t trust him.
As I drew alongside Egara, I placed my hand on his in a signal for him to be careful.
Funny, I thought, me giving Egara advice on how to talk with alien creatures.
During his years as the captain of a pirate ship, he must have come in
