Skaalt’s personal ship still, to this day, has some of my stuff in it. Little things: Chintilik-style chairs and bedding and decorations. Things that make small, bi-pedal folk like me comfortable. Most of it, though, is suited for his species. The control panels are over my head in some places and the furniture is twice my size.
He set me down in one of the chairs on the bridge and let me stretch out my leg. Sandra hurried in after me, paused to squeeze my arm, and then immediately got distracted by the controls of the spaceship. She had to stand up on her tiptoes to see them.
“I’m in a spaceship,” Nick said as he turned on the spot, “holy shit… I thought it would be more chrome.”
“Chrome gets old fast if that’s all you’re looking at,” Skaalt said. “It’s just me and my hitchhikers here most of the time, and they don’t have eyes to offend.”
Nick touched one of the glass domes containing biological specimens. The curled plant inside of it uncurled lightning fast and spat a series of stringy white tendrils at the glass where his hand touched. He jumped back.
“Be careful with those,” Skaalt said, “they’re from my home world, and very acidic.”
“How acidic?” Nick asked, “is it like battery acid, stomach acid, vinegar?”
“It will melt through small stones,” Skaalt said. “So, similar to Chintilik stomach acid.”
Both humans turned to me, surprised at the comparison.
“What?” I asked, “not every planet has bacteria to digest food on it. Some of us have to make our own enzymes.”
Sandra smirked at me, and I flicked an ear back at her. She came over to my chair and tried to pull the one beside it closer, but it was bolted to the floor, so she just sat.
“Whatever your name was,” Skaalt said to Nick while he flipped levers and pressed buttons with all four hands, “you should sit too. Take off can be a bit disorienting if you aren’t used to it.”
“Nick,” I reminded him. Sandra was struggling with the chair’s safety harness. I wanted to help her put it on, but she was too far away and my body too drained by pain. Instead I said to her, “leave it off. Skaalt is a very good pilot.”
She looked at me doubtfully, then at Skaalt, who was clicking his fangs against his bottom teeth like he did when he was concentrating. She raised her eyebrows at me, saying, “Really?”
Nick sat down and gripped the chair like that was going to make a difference if the ship actually crashed.
I wiggled in place to get comfortable and take all the pressure off my leg that I could. It was starting to swell, which was not a good thing. Especially because scales, being what they are, don’t expand or contract very efficiently.
Skaalt touched a screen, and the ship slid forward in the air. It made my head spin and seemed to leave my internal organs somewhere in the air behind me.
“Whoa,” said Sandra, gripping her chair hard. Nick had his eyes squeezed closed and was turning pale as the blood drained away from his face.
“It’s less nauseating if you aren’t also feeling a planet’s gravity,” I said.
“That’s good to hear,” Sandra said, “cause this feels really weird.”
Skaalt dipped the ship a little as it exited the warehouse, and then it rose straight into the air, which oddly feels more natural than the sideways slide.
“We have an audience,” Skaalt said, neck extending over the controls to look towards the ground.
Sandra and Nick sprang up and hurried unsteadily to the controls. They were too short to see, like me, so Nick knelt while Sandra climbed onto his knee to see below.
She breathed a sigh. “That’s good. I thought it might be the military, but it looks like it’s just curious people.”
Skaalt swished his tail through the air. “They still might attack us.”
“Maybe,” she agreed.
“We should go,” Nick said, pushing Sandra off him, “get out over the ocean, over international waters.”
Skaalt glanced at a map of Earth. “Where exactly are we going?”
“North and East,” Sandra stretched up and drew a little circle on the map that I couldn’t see. “If we go here, we’ll have doctors who speak English.”
“That’s a long way to go,” Skaalt sounded doubtful.
“I’ll explain on the way,” Sandra said. “How fast can we fly?”
“Not very fast while we’re in a planet’s atmosphere,” Skaalt said, “but we have a small engine capable of bending space over short distances.”
Both humans were silent for a moment. Then Nick said, “that’s fucking cool. We don’t have anything like that at all.”
Skaalt hesitated, then asked in English, “did you just use a euphemism for sex as a positive adjective?”
Nick just blinked at him, uncertain how to respond. Sandra was halfway laughing, halfway mortified.
“It’s a very versatile word for them,” I said, unhelpfully.
Sandra and Nick started explaining human expletives between plotting a course towards Europe and correcting each other. I sat back, closed my eyes, and relaxed. For the first time in several months, despite the pain, I felt totally safe. Skaalt would not let anything happen to me, and I had two humans watching out for my well being too. I was possibly the safest person anywhere in that galactic quadrant.
After a few minutes, I felt Sandra sit on the edge of my chair, appearing soundlessly like she did sometimes. I opened my eyes to see she was still mostly focused on Skaalt and Nick and their conversation, but when I reached out and touched her wrist, she took my hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Hi,” she said to me, “are you still in pain?”
I nodded just a little. “It’s not bad if I don’t move much. It’s nothing life-threatening.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Would it help if I stayed here with you? Or should I go hang out in another chair?”
I squeezed her hand again, fascinated suddenly by how much it helped with the pain.
“You can stay here,” I said. “I’m going to try and sleep.”
“Want some Advil?” She asked.
I shook my head, “It won’t work, Sandra.”
“Okay,” she squeezed my hand and then let me go. “You try to relax.”
I nestled into the chair and closed my eyes. I was going to pretend to sleep even if I didn’t actually manage to.
Sandra chatted with Nick for a minute more, idly stroking her fingers over my hand. She stopped after a while and just sat with me.
I was falling asleep when I heard Sandra ask Skaalt, “Why do you have so many specimens from your home planet? Are you still studying it?”
I opened my eyes to watch his tail flick back and forth rapidly as he chose how to respond.
“I guess,” he said at last, “that of all people, you would relate. My home world doesn’t exist anymore.”
“What happened to it?”
“We—my people did,” Skaalt said.
Nick and Sandra both looked down, a gesture I had come to associate with guilt or shame in humans.
Skaalt pushed the throttle hard forward. “It was before I was born,” he said, “so you could say that I am studying it. I, and the few others of my kind alive, are the only remains of our civilization, and the story is mostly gone now. I think we were shamed into silence on the topic.”
“What happened?” Sandra asked.
“I’ve heard a few stories,” Skaalt flicked his tail again. “The one I believe goes like this:
“A long time ago, on my home world,” here he said the name of it, which does not translate to any human tongue, “the only way for a civilization to survive was to farm crops. But almost every year, animals would break into the fields and eat them. The farmer built walls and fences of all kinds, and they tried to chase the animals away, but to no avail. Eventually, they started killing the animals. And they kept on doing it, until no more of them came to the fields. But then children started being attacked by larger and larger predators, so they killed the predators to keep the children safe. And the herbivore population exploded again, so they had to kill even more of them to keep the fields safe. And this went on and on until, eventually, there were no large animals in the forest left.
“And then came the small animals and the bugs and the birds, carrying with them diseases and parasites. And they decimated the fields and the population. The moss and the mushrooms which we depended on for our health began to die. The forests grew overgrown and impassable.
“And so it was, eventually, decided that we should live apart from the forests and the jungles and the oceans. It was just what we had to do. So we dug for metals and burned the plants in our forges and began to build places where we, at least, would be safe from the animals and the plants. And we dug far and deep and cut down and burned many large plants. We choked the sky with smoke and the ground with chemicals. We slaughtered species by the thousands to wipe out diseases. And we left huge swaths of land barren behind us. Portions so large that you could starve to death trying to cross them. Eventually, we did too much damage, and the planet could not recover.”
“Then the rest of the animals died. The flying ones with their sharp beaks, the little ones with their huge teeth and claws. Even the bugs began to die. So many that the ground was covered with a layer of them and inch thick outside the walls of our cities.
“It was then our scientists realized what we had done, and that there was no way to repair the damage. Our planet had tried to kill us, and in retaliation, we had killed it instead. And we would die too if we didn’t manage to leave.
“So we took our moss and our mushrooms and our precious crops, and we left as fast as we could. And left the planet a barren wasteland behind us.”
Sandra took my hand again. She was shaking just a little.
Nick spoke first though, “We, humans I mean, we’re trying not to do exactly that. We’ve been trying for a hundred years now.”
“And is it going well?” I’d never heard Skaalt sound like that before. I couldn’t identify the emotion at all.
“Not really,” Nick said.
“It’s difficult,” Sandra said, “to repair a planet when so much of it is dead. We’re just trying to hold it together until nature does its thing and bounces back. We’re just lucky there are so many different species that fill similar roles. And that we noticed what was happening before we completely destroyed everything.”
“We’ve been limping along since the early 2000s, trying to keep it from getting worse.” Nick made a face, “we didn’t even try to leave the planet. Maybe we should have.”
Skaalt’s tail switched, but luckily he didn’t use it to smack Nick like he would have if another one of his species had irritated him. The human would have been taken off his feet, and then Sandra and Nick would both have been itching to fight him. They were still nervous about being around such a large, heavily armed creature. He offered no comment.
The ship’s communicator crackled and Skaalt picked it up. A human on the other end, a government representative breaking galactic law by calling us, but very worried about the presence of a spacecraft in the atmosphere, was on the other end. Skaalt, not being the surveyor assigned to the world, was not forbidden from talking to them. He told them what was going on, and that he would fly low. The humans could not stop him without firing weapons at the ship, so they really had no choice. Skaalt agreed to use actual airports and landing zones, but he wasn’t very happy about it.
Sandra finally looked back to smile at me. She leaned down and whispered in my ear. “I like him. He reminds me of a praying mantis.”
I flicked my ear against her nose. I felt her smile and breathe out a little laugh before sitting up again.
“So, if you’re a Deathworlder,” Sandra said after Skaalt and the air traffic controller had come to an agreement, “how do your species handle extinction events or apocalyptic scenarios?”
“We prepare for them,” Skaalt said. “Food and water supplies. We also keep seeds and plant cuttings we need. Why do you ask?”
“Humans sometimes fantasize about how we would survive in an end-of-the-world scenario. It’s a very common setting for books, television, and movies.”
“Do you have a fantasy about that?” Skaalt asked her.
Sandra nodded. “I had it all planned out, back in Berkeley. I would have barricaded myself in for two weeks, then taken all the food I could and hiked into the hills to the East, away from the big cities.”
“Why away from the cities?” Skaalt asked.
“Because being near other humans will be the most dangerous position to be in, if society completely falls apart,” she answered promptly.
Skaalt let out a rumble of laughter. All the flaps along his back blew open, and a puff of mushroom spores spat into the air and were instantly sucked into the ship’s air filters. “And has your planet had many apocalypses?” He asked, in a tone that never even hinted that the final criteria for Deathworlds was that they experienced mass-extinction events regularly.
Nick laughed once, sharply, like an earth dog. “Sure,” he said, “we’re living through one now!”
I felt a lurch in my stomach that wasn’t related to the pain in my leg, Sandra’s closeness, or the ship moving. There it was: humans were actively living through an apocalypse and had been for a century. I had heard them describe the symptoms for the last year: species going extinct, natural disasters tearing apart cities, diseases killing millions of humans a year. I had heard them, but I hadn’t really been listening, because what it all added up to was a horrifying picture of a planet in death throes and a species fighting to keep it alive.
“Oh yes, and before that?” Skaalt asked.
“Well,” Sandra said, “sure. There was an extinction after the last ice age a hundred million years ago—humans were around for that one. Then before that there were the dinosaurs; they died when a meteor impacted earth and caused a global winter. Then before that there was a mass extinction during some other ice ages possibly caused by supervolcanoes. And before that maybe more. we don’t know.”
Skaalt turned away from the viewport and looked at me. I gave him a look that I meant to be conspiratorial, but must have looked pleading.
“We should just add that question to our standard list for beginning explorations,” he said.
“It’s on mine,” I said, “but when they said yes, a hundred million Earth years ago, I didn’t think that constituted a pattern.”
“What?” Sandra asked me, surprised. “You and I have talked disaster prep before. Half the population of America is waiting for the Yellowstone supervolcano to vaporize the continent. We’re talked about nuclear winter and climate change several times.”
“Always,” I said, pained, “through the lens of speculation.”
“Speculation is how we mentally prepare ourselves for reality!” She exclaimed. “Do you think we’d be this calm about war with the Canteron if we hadn’t already told ourselves the story of the first interstellar war of humanity a million times?”
That I hadn’t considered. I’d thought humanity was just one of those species that couldn’t grasp the scope of interplanetary war. There are plenty of civilizations like that, and it isn’t their fault they aren’t prepared for it. But now Sandra was saying just the opposite.
I just looked at her, aghast. Horrified by my own lack of understanding.
Skaalt clicked his teeth together. “Don’t blame Acharya,” he said, “they didn’t evolve like we did. Their mind is meant for catching bugs and dodging birds, not calculating the best way to survive on a hostile planet.”
“I wasn’t blaming them,” Sandra said, and then addressed me, “but I thought you understood. We’re not going to just roll over when the Canteron comes. We’re scared, but we’re prepared, and we’re going to kill every last one of them.”
“Oh,” I said quickly, “yes. I did know that. I know what you are capable of.”
“Good,” Sandra squeezed my hand hard, and I wasn’t sure if it was a threat or a comfort.
Skaalt turned back to the viewport. His species had never been involved in an interstellar war, but that was because they had never had very much to fight over. How eager was he for war? I didn’t want to know.
I sat up painfully and reached for my notebook in my bag. Sandra took the bag and set it back on the ground for me, then pulled out her own notebook and began to search for something furiously.
I ticked off the last box on my checklist and ran my eyes over them again. There it was: Earth was a deathworld. It met all the criteria. There could be no more doubt.
I wanted to write a formal report to the librarian and identify the planet. If I did it fast enough, and with enough details to scare the Canteron, they might even turn around and fly away again, and drop the whole war.
The second I started to, though, the ship lurched and dropped, and pain shot up my spine from my leg, and I yelped.
Sandra’s head whipped around and she reached across me and fumbled with the seat restraints, buckling me securely into the seats.
“I’m alright,” I said, “I need to write a report.”
Sandra took my notebook and slid it back in my bag. “Sleep,” she told me. “You can work when your leg is better.”
“She’s right,” Skaalt said.
“Fine,” I said in galactic common. “I’m outnumbered.”
“You are,” Sandra said, looking not at me but at Nick, who was standing on the other chair to see out of the viewport. He nodded. In agreement.
“Fine,” I said. “Wake me when we get to the hospital.”
“We will,” Sandra promised me.
