“Put your weapon down and step out slowly – hands up.”
She wouldn’t do that. If she was lucky, these men might be recruits, and she could scare them off.
They’d have her in their sights and would be able to gun her down if she peeked. She needed an advantage.
Taking the sensor she’d been using, she set her system to overload every piece in it at once. It was far too much heat for the device to run them all, and there was a component in the sensors she knew from experience would produce quite an uncomfortably bright flash when it overheated.
She chucked it out the gap. Shots came in return, confirming her suspicions. But none of the bullets hit the tiny sensor, and a moment later-
BANG. It burst, and while it wasn’t the best cover, she leaned out and squeezed the trigger on her rifle.
A burst of rounds fired out, not hitting them, but hitting close enough to send some ducking. Others, she saw, had recoiled – the bright flash had been worse through their scopes, enough to stun them-
But then she realized just how many there were.
She ducked back just as return fire came, flinching as round after round hit the piping behind her. But the metal was thick, and only fools used rounds that could punch through things on a ship or station.
At least a dozen, she figured. Only about four times as many as she’d first thought.
“Shit,” she said.
“Pirra,” Cenz flashed.
“Just stay down!” she signalled, waving him down and hoping he’d not try to go out. Not try to do something stupidly brave again.
“Pirra, I just want to say how sorry I am.” He was still going.
She tried to wave him down again. This was not the moment for him to be feeling bad for getting injured. She had to figure out something, and quickly.
“I know you threw your singing stone away,” he said.
That caught her off-guard. “Wait, what?”
“I’m sorry, I looked up more after we spoke on the ship. I didn’t know how bad it was for your people. What it meant for you to have them – how hard it was.”
Their translators always did an incredible job of sharing the feeling behind words, reading inflections and tones and context to try and impart the most accurate portrayal of what a being was saying. She didn’t know how Cenz’s kind even displayed emotion like sadness. In his current state it was hard for him to even talk, and yet he was trying so hard to impart the emotion to his words.
She’d never heard his voice more full of sorrow.
“It’s all gone,” he continued. “Almost all of your people killed, your language and culture eradicated . . . and you had to throw it away.”
Pirra didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how she could possibly let herself delve into the emotions that moved him so much now. Even at the best of times they were something she was scared to consider.
But it meant enough to him to bring up when he was, in all likelihood, dying.
Kneeling, she reached out a hand and touched the mechanical hand at the end of his arm.
The fingers closed around her hand gently.
“I’ll get us out of this,” she told him softly. Her voice cracked all the same.
Now she just had to figure out how-
“Hey, who are you?” she heard a human shout. Someone else was out there.
Six guns pointed to Kell, while another six kept their sights trained on the doorway.
“Identify yourself, immediately!” a man barked. Half a dozen other voices were screaming orders.
Kell ignored them all.
“I am Ambassador Kell from the Sapient Union.”
Kell’s voice did not sound as it normally did. A slip of something strange, inhuman, came into the tones.
And the men facing the Ambassador caught it. To a man, those present felt fear enter their hearts. Something in them was triggered by what the being before them had just let slip.
Its voice, the kind of voice that it would have used in ages past to cry out as it hunted life like theirs. From the simplest bacteria to humanity itself, Shoggoths had preyed upon them. Instinct existed in all such life to fear their sound.
One man, the oldest, spoke. His voice trembled, but he did a good job of keeping his strength.
“I don’t care who you are, get out of here!”
But he made no move to force the issue.
“Am I to take it, then, that you will try to keep me from taking my compatriots out of here?” Kell asked. The voice was simple, quiet. But more of the truth of what it was slipped into its voice.
Part of Kell wanted them to listen.
But they didn’t.
“These are my prisoners! Get out of here before I shoot!” the man yelled. He was nearly to the breaking point, his hands shaking. At any moment he’d let off a shot on accident.
Kell smiled.
“Good.”
Other Terrestrial 