Charlie MacNamara, Intrepid Explorer 1: Building a Sanctuary

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Here’s some friendly life advice for you: don’t ever go to space.

I mean, I guess if you’re an astronaut or whatever, and spend years training to leave the prison of Earth’s gravity and behold the universe, more power to you. But otherwise, don’t go. I guess what I’m specifically saying here is that you shouldn’t get kidnapped by aliens and taken far from your home planet with no hope of return. And if you do, don’t put together the perfect escape plan only to chicken out of it at the last minute in the name of preventing a likely interplanetary war with Earth in a couple of generations that would get countless people killed. Like I did.

Okay, maybe preventing a likely interplanetary war is a good idea, but it sure doesn’t feel like it when you’re up to your thighs in partly frozen mud, feeling around for fist-sized jellyfish to pass off to a giant praying mantis to process into vital survival materials.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me back up.

My name is Charlie. Charlotte if you want to be formal. Lottie if you want to be punched in the face. I think I’m around 28 years old by now, but it’s kind of hard to keep track these days. I have two beautiful little boys, both of whom are still on Earth and presumably think I’m dead. I guess my sister and parents have reached the same conclusion.

I’m not dead. But sometimes I wish I was.

What I am instead is red and itchy and freezing and hot at the same time. The planet I was on was weird; The sunlight was very hot if your stood in it, but it didn’t penetrate more than a centimetre or so into the ground, not even into the chilly mud of the swamp. I wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t exactly had a chance to research the planet in advance.

The crew of our little space pirate ship (long story) had fled an impossible battle four days ago, faked our own deaths to throw the heat off and crash-landed our escape pods on the first available planet with a breathable atmosphere that one of our navigators could find. At least, I assume most of us did. We lost contact during the whole crash landing part. So far, I’ve found five of my crewmates. Kerlin, the previously mentioned navigator, is a drake. Think ‘giant shiny goanna with dragon wings and four flail-like tails’. Only in Kerlin’s case he’s missing a wing due to an old war injury. Harlen’s a drake, too, and her specialty is chemical synthesis, which means it’s really her fault that I was harvesting jellyfish in freezing mud. Harlen didn’t have wings either, but this wasn’t due to an injury; drake biology is just needlessly complicated and when males mature into females, one of the many morphological changes they undergo is losing their wings. She did get some big teeth out of the deal, though.

Okay, okay, you don’t care.

My other three crewmates were aljik; basically, giant six-limbed space mantises. They have a biological caste system, and Lln, whom I was handing the jellyfish to, was an atil, who are the servants and janitors of the aljik world. Atil are the smallest caste, white in colour, and tend to glue bits of flint to their faces as decoration. All aljik glue stones or crystals to their faces. I’ve never bothered to ask why. She gently took the struggling jellyfish in her big claws and dropped them in a bucket we’d improvised out of a piece of wrecked escape pod hull.

When I say atil are small, I mean they’re small for aljik. Lln was slightly larger than me. Her forelimbs were tipped with claws bigger than my forearms, she had a pair of huge fuck-off mandibles, and I knew from experience that aljik exoskeleton is strong enough to substitute their disembodied limbs for iron bars. They are not to be fucked with.

They also taste like crab and their blood tastes of thousand island dressing. Just a fun fact for you.

Lln and I were alone out in the freezing swamp. The other two aljik on our team were enjoying the comforts of our camp with the drakes. Kit was a member of the dohl caste, which so far as I could tell were a cross between butlers and mid-level administrators; I had expected him to be completely useless in a survival situation but had been pleasantly surprised. The other member of our little group was another atil, Kisa. I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t know about half of my group very well.

I’d had quite a few friends aboard the Stardancer. Some of them were still with me, but as for most of them, I had no idea where they were. Or if they were alive.

That was a problem for later. My immediate problem was getting the jellyfish and getting out of the swamp before I lost any toes to frostbite. The topography of the planet (which we had called Sanctuary for now) was unusual, or at least the area we’d ended up in was. It was mostly dry reddish sand, but it occasionally gave way to large, vaguely circular swamps, most of which were about the size of a football field. I supposed they had to be connected underground or something, because stuff was living quite happily in them. Including fist-sized jellyfish that we were pretty sure probably weren’t venomous in any way that could hurt me. Probably.

You might think these swamps would be easy to find amid dry sand. You’d be wrong. Over the entire ground stretched long networks of… something. Some kind of life. They looked a bit like purplish grass roots that had been dug up and spread out and woven over each other to create a kind of huge net spanning horizon to horizon. They grew identically over sand and swamp, and made it difficult to tell what you were about to step on until you put your weight on it.

Yeah, discovering the swampy patches had been a bit of a surprise. On the positive side, most of the swamps in the immediate area were probably easy to find by that point. They tended to be marked by big holes in the ground cover where someone had fallen in.

Lln dropped another jellyfish into our makeshift basket. “It’s full,” she told me in the clumsy mix of verbal sounds and sign language that our crew had developed to communicate across species.

“Go on home,” I told her. “I’m going to take a more roundabout route.”

“You’re looking for the Ambassador, aren’t you?”

I touched the homemade back on my shoulder. The weight inside shifted under my prodding, but didn’t otherwise respond. “Yes.”

“He was sucked out of a spaceship hurtling towards the ground.”

“I know. I was there.”

Lln fluttered her wings restlessly. (All aljik have ladybird-like wings nestled under a hard carapace, but as they’re far too heavy to fly, I’ve never been sure what the wings were for.) “It would be impossible to survive such a thing,” she said.

“For you or me, perhaps. Do you know anything about the biology of Ambassador colonies?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“I think it’s time to give up, Charlie.”

“Have you given up on finding the Princess?”

She looked away.

“I’ll see you back at camp,” I said firmly, climbing out of the swamp. I wriggled my toes. They all seemed to still work.

I’d been simplifying when I said I’d found five of my crewmates. I had part of a sixth with me. Facsimile Of A Perfect Ceramic Bowl With A Fine White Rim, whom I called Glath for short (don’t ask), was a hivemind constructed of millions of tiny aliens that looked an awful lot like flying black spiders, each smaller than the nail of a pinky finger. We’d been sharing an escape pod on the way down to Sanctuary, and our ship hadn’t exactly stayed in one piece the whole way down. Most of Glath’s colony had been torn out of a hole in the hull as we fell, probably burned up or crushed in the friction and scattered on the planet below. I’d been able to hold onto a small amount; I had about the volume of a human forearm’s worth of alien spiders on my shoulders, in a bag I’d made by cutting up my own ruined space suit. But they were completely lifeless.

I hadn’t entirely given up hope. I’d seen Glath lose spiders before, and they stiffened up and lay as if dead until they were close enough to the main mass to talk to it again. I didn’t know much about Ambassador colonies, but it might be possible that the spiders in my bag were alive, and that some of the other spiders had made it to the ground alive, and that if I could collect a critical mass… well, I didn’t know what volume the critical mass would have to be. I didn’t know if there was some kind of really important Queen Spider or something, or if any survivor would do. I didn’t know if, even if I collected enough to get Glath moving again, there would be enough information in the colony that he would still be my friend. But I had to try. I had to try something.

So I’d been careful not to take the same path anywhere twice, and to keep my eyes on the ground. If I saw a colony spider, I stuck it in my bag. So far, after four days of wandering, I’d found two spiders.

It wasn’t a fast process.

I took a swooping circular path back towards the camp. The alien plains were practically featureless, but it was impossible to get lost – the very first thing we’d done after picking our campsite was pile as much scrap from the escape pods as we could into a big tower, in case any other wandering survivors happened within visual range. So long as I remembered whether the camp was North, South, East or West of me, heading home was a matter of heading in the right general direction until the tower was visible. (The East-West axis was impossible to lose; we only walked around while the sun was up.)

My roundabout path made it a long walk home. This didn’t bother me; I liked walking, even though the swamp mud was cold, the sun was hot and the air pressure and gravity on Sanctuary were low enough to dizzy me slightly. Walking reminded me that my body was still in pretty good shape.

Sort of. I was blind in my left eye and had no idea why or whether the injury would heal itself (it had done so before). I was covered in little cuts where I’d been thrown against sharp wreckage in the crash; the wounds weren’t deep but keeping them clean and infection-free was a bit of a chore. I’d destroyed a muscle in my left shoulder a long time ago and used a sort of primitive electrical prosthetic to move my left shoulder; it was holding up fine so far, but if it broke, I wouldn’t have the materials to fix it. And I was allergic to something on Sanctuary that was leaving my skin red and itchy. At least, I hoped it was an allergy. I could very well be being poisoned or infected by something. I didn’t know what was causing the problem so I had no way of avoiding it. So perhaps I should say, walking reminded me that my body was still in pretty good shape being that I’d walked away from a spaceship crash four days ago.

Anyway, I didn’t find any more colony spiders on the way home.

Our camp was primitive. There wasn’t much in the way of construction materials in the area, so everything was built of wreckage we’d dragged over from our various escape pod crash sites. Aside from the tower of junk, we had a primitive distillery made from an unbroken escape pod window over a couple of makeshift buckets, various improvised tubs and storage containers, and the junkiest workspace ever built for Harlen. It was basically just a bench made from an upended pilot chair.

As I approached the camp, I saw that the others had been busy while Lln and I were gone. Actual shelter had been constructed. It was only a bunch of hull panels piled into a sort of lean-to, but still.

Kerlin was under it. With his good foreleg, he was grinding up a mass of the rootlike life that covered the ground everywhere between a makeshift mortar and pestle made, like everything else we had, from wreckage. I resisted the urge to laugh. I was watching an interstellar navigator operate one of the most primitive machines in all existence… that happened to be constructed from broken bits of shielding for faster-than-light travel.

He crushed the roots until they started to leak fluid, then draped the long, separated fibres over a thin pole suspended above a long half-pipe that had once carried water aboard the Stardancer. The fluid would be passed on to Harlen; the fibres, when dry, would join a growing pile that would eventually be woven into fabric. We weren’t wasting anything.

I watched him silently for awhile. Kerlin and I were the only people on the entire planet who were at fault for being there. On the Stardancer, I’d made the split-second decision to fake orders from the captain and send us to the nearest survivable planet; Kerlin had been the one at the controls, and he’d seen through the lie and obeyed anyway.

I wasn’t entirely sure why. He knew where the captain had intended to send us – right to the heart of her sister’s interstellar empire. He could very easily have followed her actual orders.

I strode over and tapped him behind the wing to get his attention. “Where are the others?” I asked, in our crude interspecies language.

“The aljik are scouting for more survivors,” he replied. “Lln left the jellyfish over there.” He indicated the bucked with one of his four tails. “Harlen is searching for materials.”

I considered asking what materials, but even if Kerlin knew, we probably didn’t have the shared vocabulary to communicate it. I turned my attention to my next task. Medical attention.

I fetched some water from the distillery with an emptied escape pod control panel casing for a quick wash. It’s impossible to stay clean when you spend your days thigh-deep in a swamp, and cleanliness was important when you had multiple puncture wounds and no access to antibiotics. Was my biochemistry similar enough to the planet’s for local germs to infect me? Probably. We’d been able to make edible food from the planet; there was no reason that it couldn’t do the same to us.

Fortunately, we’d found a way to keep wounds clean pretty easily, if we were careful.

I rinsed off the mud and then reached for my toolbelt. I’d been one of two engineers on the Stardancer, so I had a decent supply. As well as a large emerald and a phone broken beyond any repair (it’d been shattered during the crash on Sanctuary, but I held onto it anyway; it was my last object from Earth), I had multiple types of wrenches, cutters and levers. My most effective cutting tools all required power to use and so were useless on Sanctuary, but I didn’t need those. I needed my smallest, most delicate knife. It was practically a scalpel.

I fished it out and grabbed a jellyfish from the bucket. After rinsing the mud off the jellyfish, I pressed the scalpel to it and gently, cleanly sliced around it, about half a millimetre deep. I had to be very careful not to cut too deep, or I would slice into internal organs that contained juices that were, to me, reasonably toxic. The jellyfish writhed, protesting this procedure, but I’d done it often enough to be able to deal with that. I didn’t make any mistakes.

Then I very carefully lifted the transparent skin off. The rest of the jellyfish was dropped into another bucket for Harlen.

I pulled an old, dry jellyfish skin off my leg, wincing as it pulled slightly at the wounds beneath it. Then I lay the new skin on my leg instead, and waited for it to dry enough to stick to my skin. The inside of the skin was sterile, was nontoxic so long as I didn’t cut too deep, and would provide a good barrier against infection if I wasn’t rough with it.

There may not be many resources around our campsite, but we used what we could. We’d survive this.

——————-

There was going to be trouble.

“Kit,” Kisa called. One of my atil.

I had two atil. Two atil and me, a dohl, were the only confirmed survivors of the rebellion of the Rogue Princess. I had them, a pair of drakes, and the human – that was the extent of my resources.

Somehow, I had to leverage this force to find the Princess again. Assuming she had survived the crash. If she hadn’t… well, then I’d have to find a way off-planet to the Queen, and if Kerlin and Charlie were right, the Queen thought that we were all dead. No dohl had ever faced a task like this. Or, if they had, they hadn’t survived to make it into the histories.

“What is it?” I asked Kisa.

“Scent. It’s one of ours. Aljik, I mean.”

“Who?”

“Too far away to tell. I smell blood.”

I fluttered my wings and tried to pick up a good scent. My senses weren’t as good as hers, of course; I could smell blood on the air, but that might easily be one of us. “Lead the way,” I told her.

She did. Lln, my other atil, picked up the scent shortly after and matched pace with Kisa; by the time I could pick it up, the source was already on the horizon.

Crash site. With every step, my mood dipped lower. Nothing had been moved from the site; the wreckage lay where it fell. And the scent of blood was getting stronger. I knew what we’d find before we got a good look. I didn’t know who we’d find, though – the scent of blood masked the individual identity of the pod’s occupants.

“Check who it is,” I tole the atil. I didn’t have the heart for it.

An escape pod comfortably holds two occupants of normal size. The atil, as I expected, dragged out two. Both had broken joints, pale golden blood oozing out afresh ad the bodies were moved and placed on the sand before me. Neither were huge or pink; not the Princess. So it wasn’t the worst possible news.

It was about the second worst, though. The bright red form of the tahl didn’t bother me overmuch. Tahl are a huge, bulky warrior caste who are very expensive to feed; while they are invaluable in a fight, we hadn’t found anything hostile on Sanctuary, and she would’ve been a burden. I leaned close enough to pick up her individual scent.

It was Nel. I didn’t know her very well.

The second body was much more concerning. As soon as I saw the pale blue carapace, I knew that we had trouble. Only two aljik castes are that colour, including my own, and the Princess had only three dohl; myself, Gth the Ambassador colony, and Ain. If Ain was dead, then I was the only living dohl. The entire future of the Princess’ Court rested on my claws. I leaned forward to pick up the scent.

It wasn’t Ain. It was worse. The other caste with a carapace like that are the engineers, and the Stardancer had had two engineers; Tyzyth, and the human Charlie.

Now we had one engineer. One single engineer to get us off the planet, and they weren’t aljik.

The atil worked together to lift Nel’s heavy body while I pulled Tyzyth over my own back. We began the slow trudge back to camp.

There was going to be so much trouble.

————————-

“We have to get moving,” Harlen said. “There simply aren’t the resources here to sustain us.”

“No argument from me,” I said quickly. I was signing the physical part of the conversation one-handed; my other hand was engaged in holding a dead swamp jellyfish up by its tentacles while Harlen found exactly the right spot to pierce it to drain the small bladder of highly valuable fluids rather than the many small bladders of highly toxic fluids. This only took one of her tails, so she had three others to talk with. Signing with one human hand is trickier.

“If we leave,” Kerlin pointed out, “we can’t take any of this with us. Do you want to drag our distillery across the sand? We’d have to leave much of our resources behind, and we’re not going to simply luck into more escape wreckage wherever we go.”

“I can’t plant here, Kerlin!” Harlen snapped.

“Then wait!”

“For how long?! If the Princess – ” Harlen broke off suddenly, and glanced at me. I pretended not to notice. There was something complicated and political happening with the drakes and I was really hoping that nobody would feel obligated to tell me about it. I already had enough problems.

“If we run out of consumables, we die,” I pointed out. “We can only generate so much food, and there are less and less jellyfish every day.”

“Then use another swamp,” Kerlin said.

“We have. The numbers are decreasing everywhere; I think the swamps are linked. Face it, our crew is an environmental disaster here. We’re going to eat our way to death in this ecosystem if we don’t move.”

“We’ll die quicker without water.”

“A surmountable problem,” I said. “Give me some time to think. I’ll come up with a portable distillery.” I had no idea how to do that, but the crew of the Stardancer all thought I was an engineer and tended to assume I could make anything. I was sure I’d figure it out. A distillery isn’t a particularly complicated device. You just have to make water be steam in one place, move it somewhere else and make it not be steam any more. The trick would be making something small that could process large volumes of it.

That, and the fact that sunlight was our only reliable source of heat. So that meant glass, and with steam travelling upwards and a day/night cycle being difficult to take advantage of on the move I’d have to build…

Eh, I’d figure it out.

“There’s no point even having this discussion until we have something portable,” Kerlin pointed out. “Not to mention our processing systems.”

I glanced at our ‘processing systems’. They were not complicated. Aside from the distillery, our most important piece of ‘machinery’ (to utilise a word that by association with our systems devalues the very concept of machinery) was a rack holding root fibres over a trough made from a pipe. The root fibres had long dried, and as we spoke, Kerlin added them to his growing pile of root fibres ready for weaving. The liquid that had dripped from them into the pipe had long vanished evaporated, too, leaving a whitish powder coating the inside of the pipe.

Harlen pierced the jellyfish I was holding with a long needle held in one tail spur, and a clear liquid gushed out into the pipe. It fizzed and hissed as it hit the white powder. I cut the jellyfish’s tentacles off and tossed them into the hissing fluid, put the rest of the jellyfish aside for a moment, and grabbed another.

“Our processing systems are a pole and a pipe,” Harlen pointed out.

“And a mortar and pestle,” I added, helpfully.

“Just spin and weave the fibres before we leave,” Harlen said, gesturing to the pile with one tail spur. “Once it’s cloth, it’ll be easy to transport.”

“We don’t even need to spin them,” I pointed out. “We can transport them as string.”

“No, we need a loom to weave them. Unless you have the materials to make a portable one…”

I didn’t know how to make a loom at all, but I wasn’t about to admit that. “I’ll introduce you to the wonderful world of crochet,” I offered. “It’ll blow your minds.”

“The aljik are back,” Kerlin cut in, with the brisk tail movements of someone changing the subject before they had to admit to losing an argument. “They’ve got something.”

I looked up. I couldn’t leave the jellyfish reaction trough until we were done, so I couldn’t go out to meet them. I swallowed around a lump in my throat as I saw what they were carrying. Even in the fading light, it was clear that they were bodies. Aljik bodies. The reddish tint of the sunset made it hard to discern what kinds.

By the time the last jellyfish tentacles were tossed in the trough, the aljik were almost back at camp. I rushed out. I recognised one of the bodies.

Fuck.

I ran to Kit to get a better look, hoping I was wrong. But no; it was Tyzyth. My fellow engineer. My friend. I felt the energy drain out of me. Together, we’d kept the Stardancer limping along far longer than it ever should have. We’d done the impossible, keeping it in good enough shape to shepherd the crew to Sanctuary.

Kit gently laid the body down. The other, a tahl I didn’t recognise, was laid next to it. I blinked back tears. One lifeless friend on my shoulders, another at my feet. Were we six the only survivors?

After several seconds of solemn silence, Kit said, “Kisa will show you where their wreck is tomorrow. Salvage any useful parts that you can.”

“That’s what you’re thinking about right now?” I replied. “Really?”

“Kit,” Lln said, “the funerals.”

“There aren’t enough of us to do it properly.”

“We have to try. We can’t leave them out here.”

“Fine. Lay them out.”

I helped them lay out the bodies. I knew the ceremony. I’d participated in one once, before I had the context to properly understand. It had been the funeral for my predecessor, Tyzyth’s previous partner in engineering. The one I’d been abducted to replace. And it had been Tyzyth who, when expressing disgust at the human rites of burial and cremation, had explained the philosophy to me.

Aljik have a complicated philosophical relationship with energy and matter. Individuals are individuals, but they are also part of the Court, and to be abandoned to the ground simply because they were dead would be considered the greatest insult. Sometimes, bodies were unrecoverable, but when they could be salvaged, they were honoured by having their energy recycled back into the Court, that they would always be a part of it and their service would carry on. The aljik were cannibals.

“Can you use the carapace?” Kit asked me as we carefully played the limbs.

“Probably,” I said. “Some of it, at least. What happens to the gems?”

“Tyzyth’s are yours to claim by inheritance, if you want them. We’ll have to abandon Nel’s. There’s no tahl to carry them.” He clicked his mandibles in a distressed manner. “The other tahl are going to be upset about that.”

“Can the drakes carry them?” I asked. “They’re not really part of the system, are they?”

“Unfortunately no. They partook of the ceremonies when the Stardancer was cut in half and we lost most of our crew and supplies. Everybody did. We would have starved otherwise. And they’ll have to assist us this time. We can’t possibly consume Tyzyth and Nel before leaving without their help.”

“Leaving?”

“We can’t stay here any longer. We have to find the Princess. We’ve scouted this area; there are no other survivors here. There is no reason to stay.”

“The Princess is dead,” Kerlin said. “We need to focus on regrouping.”

“She is not dead!” Kit snapped. “She had as much chance to survive as any of us.”

“She would have taken and entire escape pod by herself, with her size. That alone decreases her chance of survival. And she was weak already. You think we didn’t notice that?”

“This sort of thing is what Princesses do, Kerlin. Until we have a corpse – ”

“Guys,” I cut in. “We all agree that we need to get moving, right? We can’t control who we run into first. So this is a pointless argument.”

“… Fine,” Kerlin said. “But it informs our strategy – ”

“What strategy? We have no frame of reference. Any direction is as good as any other.” I pointed out towards the horizon. “That’s the way we should go. Whoever we meet, we meet.”

“Why that way?” Lln asked.

“It’s Charlie’s flight path on the way in,” Kit said. “Isn’t it? You’re still looking for the Ambassador.”

“Those bugs of his are pretty tough. If I can find enough – ”

“He’s dead, Charlie!” Kit snapped. “He’s gone, okay? You keep carrying his corpse around everywhere like you’re not ready to set him down and get on with the funeral, but all you’re doing is dishonouring him and the whole Court! You were there, you saw it happen. He’s gone.”

I hesitated. It hadn’t occurred to me that Glath and Kit had been close friends long before I came on the scene. My face grew hot.

“Until we have a corpse,” I said quietly, “a corpse complete enough to declare it a corpse, that is, no, he’s not dead.”

“You have to give him up for the funeral eventually, Charlie.”

I tried a new tactic. “Don’t you want as much of him as possible for the funeral?”

Kit hesitated. “I suppose.”

I rounded on Kerlin. “And do you have any ideas for a better direction to head in?”

“Hey, I have nothing to do with this,” Kerlin said, backing away.

“There we go then,” I said firmly.

“Guys?” Kisa cut in. “Are we having this funeral?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Yeah, let’s… let’s do this.”

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