Planet surface
Whew, thought I was in trouble and falling behind. But I'm finally back up there again.
Wordcount: 32,054
Everyone was thinking about running but nobody moved. We just stood and stared. Suddenly, the large double doors closed behind us...
It was a mad rush to get to the door. Some of the humans began pounding on it with their fists and trying to shove it open again. Mara and Yuyu had stayed where they were. “Only the guards can open it now,” Yuyu said. Chris was on the floor, trying to revive the one who had fainted. He looked about like he was going to up and crack as well. Mara wasn’t sure what to feel. She could see the people yelling and pounding against the unyielding door like a bunch of crazy people. She didn’t want to be crazy but as she looked at the room filled with aliens and containers of preserved humans, she felt like she wanted to run and scream too. The guards were starting to surround them on all sides as if they were sheep. They carried the long poles with the blue torch light on the end and each of them had a shield force field that prevented the humans from getting near them. Mara’s wrist with the metal band was drawn to one of the long metal poles as if it was a magnet. It seemed like each guard was assigned a human to bring along.
Mara tried to pull back but it was no use. They were pulled along the line of containers into the heart of the laboratory room. She kept looking at Yuyu. He seemed defeated, his head was starting to hang a little. Mara had hoped he would put up a fuss and possibly get someone to notice that this was all wrong here. People shouldn’t be treated this way. But he did not seem like he was up for any sort of fight right now.
The containers they passed were all slightly different but the humans inside of them all had one thing in common. Their clothes were all the same white tunics that the rest of them were wearing. “End of the road trip I guess,” Chris said quietly somewhere behind Mara.
There was a group of tables and equipment at the end of the cave. A line of scientist aliens and their military overseers were standing behind the tables as if waiting for them to come. Mara was in front so her guard was dragging her to the first table. Mara pulled and tried to twist away with everything she had. “No! Please no!” she pleaded as she was dragged along, getting louder and more panicky as she got closer. There was an open container on the table, it’s wires and pipes hanging out of it as if waiting for an occupant. The scientist at the table was saying, “Hold this one still please. I cannot get close enough.” The guard held her arm down indirectly to the table and the scientist was approaching with a blue tube of some sort of liquid. Mara was helpless as he approached and reached for her arm.
There was a crash of glass behind the group and the scientist stopped as everyone turned to look. The commotion was a container breaking and the human inside of it falling out to the floor. At the controls in front of it was Yuyu, holding down a lever and touching different switches. A high pitched whine was filling the air that made everyone cover their ears in pain. At it’s peak, all of the blue lights went out on all the guards’ weapons. Mara found her hand released from the magnetic attraction. She grabbed Chris’ hand and yelled, “Run!” It was chaos after that. The guards were only armed with the metal rods, only two or three of them actually had gun weapons. The humans were free and were causing as much trouble as they could, trying to find a way out. They were upturning tables and running around as the aliens were panicking and shooting wherever they could while still trying to keep their distance. Through this chaos, Mara and Chris came running followed by Yuyu. He had a flat object in his hand and as they neared the door, he tossed it against it. It stuck to the doors and a few seconds later, there was a great explosion. Mara and Chris ducked and covered over each other. The doors were torn from its settings and lay in fragmented pieces.
“Come, quickly!” said Yuyu, grabbing Mara’s hand. The three of them ran from the laboratory away from the sharply clicking aliens and screaming humans as they were stunned and shot down.
“How did you do that?” Mara asked, panting as she ran. Yuyu ascertained her meaning and held up a small object between two fingers. Mara took it and found it was a hairpin. “The lady who was on the floor. I took it from her hair and disengaged my restraint band,” said Yuyu. “Clever alien,” Mara said with a smile.
They were running up the slope back towards the ship. But the end of the tunnel was open. The ship was gone. The three of them ran out onto the planet surface. The cooler air of the outdoors whipped their hair around as they stepped out.
Mara caught her breath at the sight. “Amazing,” she said, stopping to stare. They were standing in the midst of an area of dark gray rocky cliffs and hills that stretched all the way to the horizon and became taller mountains. There were no snow on these mountains. Instead they were dark, black, and foreboding. But it was the sky that had caught Mara’s attention. It was a dark black sky with points of light for stars in different patterns than those back on earth. Across this dark background stood out flowy wisps of white light that danced and moved across the whole sky. It was as if the light was flowing out of the horizon itself as smoke from a fire. It lit everything up in a soft bluish light that one would never get from Earth’s own sun. That was what struck Mara the most was the lack of sun. The light that came up from the horizon and beyond was the only light around but somehow it was bright enough to see.
Chris was awestruck by it too but he could hear footsteps coming up the tunnel they had just left. He grabbed Mara’s hand to pull her out of her reverie. “Come on, we can’t stand around! They’re coming!”
The two of them raced off down the rocky hillside after the small alien running ahead of them. Two guards exited the tunnel and steadied their weapon sights on the humans. Mara and Chris ran amidst a hail of streaking light blue shots that hit the ground around them, just barely missing them each time. They split up and zig-zagged till they were out of range. Mara stumbled once but Chris caught her before she hit the ground. “I’d give anything for a pair of shoes right now,” she said, picking her way around a pile of rocks. They weren’t jagged, thankfully. Every rock on the hillside had a smooth edge to it as if they had all been polished and dropped there. This at least was helpful in their escape as it wasn’t too hard on their feet. Yuyu, used to this kind of terrain, was making tracks faster in front of them and now and again had to pull up to let them catch up to him. “Come on,” he was saying. “If we do not hide soon, they will overtake us.”
Mara wasn’t sure where he was taking them but he seemed to know where he was going. So they continued to follow, looking over their shoulders at times to make sure their pursuers were not gaining on them. It seemed as if they had not left the tunnel entrance yet, so the three escapees were able to put some distance between themselves and the aliens as they ran down the hillside.
"Ow!" Mara said as she stubbed her toe once again on the smooth rocks around her. "We're not going to be able to run for much longer."
Yuyu was motioning from the top of the next hill. "Come faster please," he said.
Mara and Chris scaled as fast as they could. "Advanced race and they still don't have shoes?" Chris asked to no one in particular. They finally stood next to Yuyu and looked out over the landscape. Under the horizon with it's wisps of light floating above it was an alien city. It's spires and strangely shaped buildings reached up to the sky. It stood out as white against the dark rocks it was nestled in between. Here and there in the blue light, Mara could see patches of green from far off and wondered what they were. "Looks kind of desolate, doesn't it?" Chris asked. Mara nodded. "We probably can't see anyone from this distance."
A humming sound filled the air around them. Yuyu grew very anxious and began to run down the hillside. "We must not be caught!" he said. Mara and Chris followed as well as they could as the humming grew louder. Yuyu was heading for a hole in the rocks, a small cave. At the last second, the humans threw themselves into the cave as something mechanical buzzed by their location. Mara lay on the floor of the cave, breathing hard and trying not to move. Chris was behind a group of rocks and looking out the entrance of the cave while he was also trying to catch his breath. The humming was moving around outside the cave back and forth. Mara worried that it would never leave, whatever it was, but finally after a few minutes it moved off and the humming died away. Only then did Mara allow herself to move again. She sat up slowly, letting out a sigh of relief. Chris joined her and Yuyu at the back of the small cave. "What was it?" Mara asked, rubbing her sore feet.
"It looked like a satelite, only it could move around on its own very close to the ground," said Chris. "It must have been looking for us."
Yuyu confirmed what Chris had said. "It can shoot us down if we are spotted. We must not be found, they are anxious to bring us in from the outside. Out here, we are seen as a threat."
Mara rested her feet and leaned against the rock behind her. "Well, maybe we can stay in here till dark and..."
"And what?" asked Chris. "For starters, we don't even know if this planet has a 'dark' or a night for that matter."
"Fair enough," said Mara, crossing her arms. "And secondly?"
"Secondly, what are we going to do? Sure we've escaped but now we're stuck here. How are we supposed to get back home? I don't know about you but I can't fly a spaceship." Chris sat down dejectedly on the cave floor, leaning up against the opposite wall as Mara.
Mara chewed her lip in thought.
"We don't even know if any of the others made it," Chris said sadly. "Those guards didn't even give them a chance."
"I know," said Mara. Yuyu had come to sit next to her and was watching her and Chris converse with each other. His head moved back and forth as each person talked, like he was watching a tennis match.
"We could try to go back and free everyone..." Mara began. "Though we don't know if anyone is left alive in there."
"True," said Chris."
"If we did want to get back to Earth..."
"Which we do..."
"...we'd have to find some way of piloting one of their ships. Which means we'll have to find one of their ships for starters, even if we don't have anyone to pilot it."
Chris pointed at Yuyu, "What about him?"
"What does he say about me?" said Yuyu, recognizing the pointing motion.
"What about him?" Mara asked.
"Maybe he can fly one of those rocket ships. If we could find a way to ask him..."
Mara drummed her fingers on her thigh, looking at Yuyu and thinking how she would go about doing that.
"You are planning something," Yuyu said. "I had not thought it possible, you can plan and execute what you have planned. We had been told humans were incapable of complex thought patterns. You humans are quite intelligent after all."
"Thanks...I think..." said Mara. She picked up a rock that had a slight greenish hue off the cave floor and moved aside from the cave wall to give herself room to work. She drew a facsimile of the cave tunnel entrance with the ship still attached to it as it had been before. She paused as she started to draw the ship. "I just realized, we never saw the outside of the ship," she said, looking at Chris for help. He shrugged. "I never saw it either."
Yuyu however was catching on to what Mara was doing. He took up his own piece of rock, a bluer one, and began to draw in smooth strokes the outline of the ship. His drawing made Mara's look like a preschooler but she didn't feel bad about that. The outline of the ship was smooth, flat, and round. "I should have guessed," Mara said when Yuyu was finished. "A flying saucer, of all things."
Moving over slightly, Mara added a couple of hills and then began to draw the city they had seen. A small hole for the cave they were in was added somewhere in between the two drawings. Mara pointed with her drawing rock at the flying saucer picture and drew a line towards the city with an arrow at the end. "Is this the way it went?" she asked Yuyu.
Yuyu watched carefully, not quite understanding until Mara pretended to pick up the flying saucer and move it along the line towards the city. "Is the ship in the city?"
The little alien moved Mara's hand aside and brushed away the line. He motioned her aside and she moved from where she was sitting. He began to draw another section farther away from the city on the side away from them. It didn't look like anything recognizable at first, just a bunch of circles in a larger square but when it started to take shape, Chris got the idea. "It's an airfield. Well sort of, for flying saucers. They must store them there."
"And if this is correct, it's somewhere on the far side of the city, just outside of it," said Mara. She quickly drew three stick figures at the entrance of the small cave on their makeshift map. "Ok, we're here." She drew a line slowly towards the city. As she started to draw around the city, Yuyu stopped her with a series of clicks ending on a low note. "What did he say?" Chris asked as Yuyu erased the line with his flat fingers. "He says there is no way around the city, we'll have to go through it."
"Well, that's out. We would stand out like a sore thumb. in among all those aliens."
Mara pointed at Yuyu and at one of the flying saucers in the airfield. She tapped it for emphasis, trying to get him to understand what she was asking. "You want me to get to the ship hanger," said Yuyu. "Well, with us too," said Mara indicating all three of them this time. "Can you do it?"
Yuyu was considering. His eyelids actually closed and stayed closed for a couple of seconds. "I think he's thinking," said Mara.
He opened his eyes to reveal the white pearls again. "I cannot return home. I am a traitor now. They will chase me as well as you." He looked at Mara. "I would like to know how it is wrong to help another being. I will help you to reach the ships."
Wordcount: 32,054
Everyone was thinking about running but nobody moved. We just stood and stared. Suddenly, the large double doors closed behind us...
It was a mad rush to get to the door. Some of the humans began pounding on it with their fists and trying to shove it open again. Mara and Yuyu had stayed where they were. “Only the guards can open it now,” Yuyu said. Chris was on the floor, trying to revive the one who had fainted. He looked about like he was going to up and crack as well. Mara wasn’t sure what to feel. She could see the people yelling and pounding against the unyielding door like a bunch of crazy people. She didn’t want to be crazy but as she looked at the room filled with aliens and containers of preserved humans, she felt like she wanted to run and scream too. The guards were starting to surround them on all sides as if they were sheep. They carried the long poles with the blue torch light on the end and each of them had a shield force field that prevented the humans from getting near them. Mara’s wrist with the metal band was drawn to one of the long metal poles as if it was a magnet. It seemed like each guard was assigned a human to bring along.
Mara tried to pull back but it was no use. They were pulled along the line of containers into the heart of the laboratory room. She kept looking at Yuyu. He seemed defeated, his head was starting to hang a little. Mara had hoped he would put up a fuss and possibly get someone to notice that this was all wrong here. People shouldn’t be treated this way. But he did not seem like he was up for any sort of fight right now.
The containers they passed were all slightly different but the humans inside of them all had one thing in common. Their clothes were all the same white tunics that the rest of them were wearing. “End of the road trip I guess,” Chris said quietly somewhere behind Mara.
There was a group of tables and equipment at the end of the cave. A line of scientist aliens and their military overseers were standing behind the tables as if waiting for them to come. Mara was in front so her guard was dragging her to the first table. Mara pulled and tried to twist away with everything she had. “No! Please no!” she pleaded as she was dragged along, getting louder and more panicky as she got closer. There was an open container on the table, it’s wires and pipes hanging out of it as if waiting for an occupant. The scientist at the table was saying, “Hold this one still please. I cannot get close enough.” The guard held her arm down indirectly to the table and the scientist was approaching with a blue tube of some sort of liquid. Mara was helpless as he approached and reached for her arm.
There was a crash of glass behind the group and the scientist stopped as everyone turned to look. The commotion was a container breaking and the human inside of it falling out to the floor. At the controls in front of it was Yuyu, holding down a lever and touching different switches. A high pitched whine was filling the air that made everyone cover their ears in pain. At it’s peak, all of the blue lights went out on all the guards’ weapons. Mara found her hand released from the magnetic attraction. She grabbed Chris’ hand and yelled, “Run!” It was chaos after that. The guards were only armed with the metal rods, only two or three of them actually had gun weapons. The humans were free and were causing as much trouble as they could, trying to find a way out. They were upturning tables and running around as the aliens were panicking and shooting wherever they could while still trying to keep their distance. Through this chaos, Mara and Chris came running followed by Yuyu. He had a flat object in his hand and as they neared the door, he tossed it against it. It stuck to the doors and a few seconds later, there was a great explosion. Mara and Chris ducked and covered over each other. The doors were torn from its settings and lay in fragmented pieces.
“Come, quickly!” said Yuyu, grabbing Mara’s hand. The three of them ran from the laboratory away from the sharply clicking aliens and screaming humans as they were stunned and shot down.
“How did you do that?” Mara asked, panting as she ran. Yuyu ascertained her meaning and held up a small object between two fingers. Mara took it and found it was a hairpin. “The lady who was on the floor. I took it from her hair and disengaged my restraint band,” said Yuyu. “Clever alien,” Mara said with a smile.
They were running up the slope back towards the ship. But the end of the tunnel was open. The ship was gone. The three of them ran out onto the planet surface. The cooler air of the outdoors whipped their hair around as they stepped out.
Mara caught her breath at the sight. “Amazing,” she said, stopping to stare. They were standing in the midst of an area of dark gray rocky cliffs and hills that stretched all the way to the horizon and became taller mountains. There were no snow on these mountains. Instead they were dark, black, and foreboding. But it was the sky that had caught Mara’s attention. It was a dark black sky with points of light for stars in different patterns than those back on earth. Across this dark background stood out flowy wisps of white light that danced and moved across the whole sky. It was as if the light was flowing out of the horizon itself as smoke from a fire. It lit everything up in a soft bluish light that one would never get from Earth’s own sun. That was what struck Mara the most was the lack of sun. The light that came up from the horizon and beyond was the only light around but somehow it was bright enough to see.
Chris was awestruck by it too but he could hear footsteps coming up the tunnel they had just left. He grabbed Mara’s hand to pull her out of her reverie. “Come on, we can’t stand around! They’re coming!”
The two of them raced off down the rocky hillside after the small alien running ahead of them. Two guards exited the tunnel and steadied their weapon sights on the humans. Mara and Chris ran amidst a hail of streaking light blue shots that hit the ground around them, just barely missing them each time. They split up and zig-zagged till they were out of range. Mara stumbled once but Chris caught her before she hit the ground. “I’d give anything for a pair of shoes right now,” she said, picking her way around a pile of rocks. They weren’t jagged, thankfully. Every rock on the hillside had a smooth edge to it as if they had all been polished and dropped there. This at least was helpful in their escape as it wasn’t too hard on their feet. Yuyu, used to this kind of terrain, was making tracks faster in front of them and now and again had to pull up to let them catch up to him. “Come on,” he was saying. “If we do not hide soon, they will overtake us.”
Mara wasn’t sure where he was taking them but he seemed to know where he was going. So they continued to follow, looking over their shoulders at times to make sure their pursuers were not gaining on them. It seemed as if they had not left the tunnel entrance yet, so the three escapees were able to put some distance between themselves and the aliens as they ran down the hillside.
"Ow!" Mara said as she stubbed her toe once again on the smooth rocks around her. "We're not going to be able to run for much longer."
Yuyu was motioning from the top of the next hill. "Come faster please," he said.
Mara and Chris scaled as fast as they could. "Advanced race and they still don't have shoes?" Chris asked to no one in particular. They finally stood next to Yuyu and looked out over the landscape. Under the horizon with it's wisps of light floating above it was an alien city. It's spires and strangely shaped buildings reached up to the sky. It stood out as white against the dark rocks it was nestled in between. Here and there in the blue light, Mara could see patches of green from far off and wondered what they were. "Looks kind of desolate, doesn't it?" Chris asked. Mara nodded. "We probably can't see anyone from this distance."
A humming sound filled the air around them. Yuyu grew very anxious and began to run down the hillside. "We must not be caught!" he said. Mara and Chris followed as well as they could as the humming grew louder. Yuyu was heading for a hole in the rocks, a small cave. At the last second, the humans threw themselves into the cave as something mechanical buzzed by their location. Mara lay on the floor of the cave, breathing hard and trying not to move. Chris was behind a group of rocks and looking out the entrance of the cave while he was also trying to catch his breath. The humming was moving around outside the cave back and forth. Mara worried that it would never leave, whatever it was, but finally after a few minutes it moved off and the humming died away. Only then did Mara allow herself to move again. She sat up slowly, letting out a sigh of relief. Chris joined her and Yuyu at the back of the small cave. "What was it?" Mara asked, rubbing her sore feet.
"It looked like a satelite, only it could move around on its own very close to the ground," said Chris. "It must have been looking for us."
Yuyu confirmed what Chris had said. "It can shoot us down if we are spotted. We must not be found, they are anxious to bring us in from the outside. Out here, we are seen as a threat."
Mara rested her feet and leaned against the rock behind her. "Well, maybe we can stay in here till dark and..."
"And what?" asked Chris. "For starters, we don't even know if this planet has a 'dark' or a night for that matter."
"Fair enough," said Mara, crossing her arms. "And secondly?"
"Secondly, what are we going to do? Sure we've escaped but now we're stuck here. How are we supposed to get back home? I don't know about you but I can't fly a spaceship." Chris sat down dejectedly on the cave floor, leaning up against the opposite wall as Mara.
Mara chewed her lip in thought.
"We don't even know if any of the others made it," Chris said sadly. "Those guards didn't even give them a chance."
"I know," said Mara. Yuyu had come to sit next to her and was watching her and Chris converse with each other. His head moved back and forth as each person talked, like he was watching a tennis match.
"We could try to go back and free everyone..." Mara began. "Though we don't know if anyone is left alive in there."
"True," said Chris."
"If we did want to get back to Earth..."
"Which we do..."
"...we'd have to find some way of piloting one of their ships. Which means we'll have to find one of their ships for starters, even if we don't have anyone to pilot it."
Chris pointed at Yuyu, "What about him?"
"What does he say about me?" said Yuyu, recognizing the pointing motion.
"What about him?" Mara asked.
"Maybe he can fly one of those rocket ships. If we could find a way to ask him..."
Mara drummed her fingers on her thigh, looking at Yuyu and thinking how she would go about doing that.
"You are planning something," Yuyu said. "I had not thought it possible, you can plan and execute what you have planned. We had been told humans were incapable of complex thought patterns. You humans are quite intelligent after all."
"Thanks...I think..." said Mara. She picked up a rock that had a slight greenish hue off the cave floor and moved aside from the cave wall to give herself room to work. She drew a facsimile of the cave tunnel entrance with the ship still attached to it as it had been before. She paused as she started to draw the ship. "I just realized, we never saw the outside of the ship," she said, looking at Chris for help. He shrugged. "I never saw it either."
Yuyu however was catching on to what Mara was doing. He took up his own piece of rock, a bluer one, and began to draw in smooth strokes the outline of the ship. His drawing made Mara's look like a preschooler but she didn't feel bad about that. The outline of the ship was smooth, flat, and round. "I should have guessed," Mara said when Yuyu was finished. "A flying saucer, of all things."
Moving over slightly, Mara added a couple of hills and then began to draw the city they had seen. A small hole for the cave they were in was added somewhere in between the two drawings. Mara pointed with her drawing rock at the flying saucer picture and drew a line towards the city with an arrow at the end. "Is this the way it went?" she asked Yuyu.
Yuyu watched carefully, not quite understanding until Mara pretended to pick up the flying saucer and move it along the line towards the city. "Is the ship in the city?"
The little alien moved Mara's hand aside and brushed away the line. He motioned her aside and she moved from where she was sitting. He began to draw another section farther away from the city on the side away from them. It didn't look like anything recognizable at first, just a bunch of circles in a larger square but when it started to take shape, Chris got the idea. "It's an airfield. Well sort of, for flying saucers. They must store them there."
"And if this is correct, it's somewhere on the far side of the city, just outside of it," said Mara. She quickly drew three stick figures at the entrance of the small cave on their makeshift map. "Ok, we're here." She drew a line slowly towards the city. As she started to draw around the city, Yuyu stopped her with a series of clicks ending on a low note. "What did he say?" Chris asked as Yuyu erased the line with his flat fingers. "He says there is no way around the city, we'll have to go through it."
"Well, that's out. We would stand out like a sore thumb. in among all those aliens."
Mara pointed at Yuyu and at one of the flying saucers in the airfield. She tapped it for emphasis, trying to get him to understand what she was asking. "You want me to get to the ship hanger," said Yuyu. "Well, with us too," said Mara indicating all three of them this time. "Can you do it?"
Yuyu was considering. His eyelids actually closed and stayed closed for a couple of seconds. "I think he's thinking," said Mara.
He opened his eyes to reveal the white pearls again. "I cannot return home. I am a traitor now. They will chase me as well as you." He looked at Mara. "I would like to know how it is wrong to help another being. I will help you to reach the ships."