Merith II
Secondary Planet of the Merith Confederation
After the unpleasantness of the space station explosion, Faal returned home from his extended visit to Earth. He had plans to visit Selta, as he had told the Spo general, but first he had business of his own to transact.
Faal of Merith II was generally agreed to be the third most powerful Merith in the galaxy, and an invitation to his home estate on the planet of Merith II was a great honor. It was particularly a pleasure to those who, like Faal himself, considered themselves aficionados of exotic animals. Underneath Faal’s estate was an underground zoo that housed possibly the finest collection of rare and exotic animals in the galaxy. His agents had gathered species from every mapped, and many of the unmapped, sectors of space. He’d even visited the interdicted Velvidian Enclave to retrieve a Crested Raptor before the Velvidian star went nova.
Only the most powerful entities in the galaxy could hope for a visit to his famed underground zoo - and many wondered whether it even existed.
It did exist and it was grossly illegal by Council standards, but knowledge and favors, and occasionally an invitation to visit, had gained him the blind eye of his fellow Council members.
The excellence of his staff made it unnecessary for Faal to visit the zoo more than he wished, but he frequently spent hours amusing himself in its lower levels, particularly with his more intelligent ‘animals.’
On this occasion of his homecoming, after his personal physician confirmed that he had not been injured during the unexpected explosion of the Spo space station, Faal went to see his human.
He had acquired it several years before and had found it a very interesting study. It was a breakable thing, of course, and he’d broken it long ago. Still, he found it an adaptable and valuable addition to his zoo. Indeed, he’d even seen signs of repair in the human during the last few months. All in all, he’d grown a bit fond of it, and was not sorry to be able to tell his human that its species had achieved sentient status during the recent trial.
Of course, Faal could not keep the human as an ‘animal’ in his zoo now that it was part of a recognized sentient species. Even if he did handle the necessary bribes, there would be little value in having a human when they became commonplace. He might have sold it to a less meticulous collector, but the hard value of his human had fallen drastically, now that many humans would be flooding the galaxy. This situation had arisen before, but this time Faal had decided not to dispose of the human as he normally would. He had a code, and the human had earned a better fate than to be put down like any mewling pup.
No, for the first time, Faal planned to release one of his animals.Claire ran out of her cage and slammed the door shut behind her. Faal lay trapped and injured inside, where she’d pinned him to the floor with a felled oak tree.
“How dare you,” Faal said, a cold fury in his voice. “I came to give you good news. I was going to send you back where you came from.”
Claire ignored him. She took a deep breath, could she do this?
Faal glared at her with his one large eye and his beak snapped in anger. “I have rarely been so insulted. I would have set you free.”
“She doesn’t believe you!” Claire said, then she blinked and corrected herself. “I don’t believe you!”
Faal’s one-eyed gaze seemed to hold her in place. “Do you know what sector you’re in? Do know what planet you’re on? You know nothing, human. You won’t make it off the grounds.” He groaned in pain and closed his large eye. When he broke eye contact, Claire found the courage to move again. She’d been planning this escape for months, while Faal was gone, and she’d decided that she had to do it the first chance she got. Otherwise he might have found her hoarded supplies... or she might have lost her nerve.
She ran towards the exit, but then paused.
In less than ten minutes, the Merith’s security team would realize he was trapped and come to release him. Here was the exit, but she wanted to get one more thing before she left. Did she have time?
Claire sprinted away from the door and went down the next hall, to the huge third cage on the right. Using an old-fashioned key she’d pick-pocketed from the zookeeper, Claire unlocked it and made a cooing noise in the back of her throat.
“Come here, little guy, come here,” she said in English. She dashed over to the tiny enclosure where Kit usually slept during the day, and stood on her tiptoes to look inside, but the weskit wasn’t there.
“Where are you?” she called softly, trying not to sound frantic. She cooed again, shading her eyes from the simulated sunshine, and searching the vines to where they disappeared into the trees. She cooed once more, and it broke on a sob. She had to go.
Claire backed to the door. “Come on, little guy, come to me. I’ll leave the door open –”
A thick weight landed on her back, tiny clawed hands clinging to her tangled brown hair.
“Yes!” Claire said, and ran for the exit.
As she cycled the outer door, she could hear Faal laughing. Harsh, angry laughter that made her teeth ache with dread.
When the door opened, air hissed outward from the pressurized building and Claire dashed through. A wide corridor of stairs lay in front of her. The steps were about twice as high and twice as deep as human stairs would be, black and slick, like marble. She tried to take each step in a single stride, but every third stair or so she had to make an extra jump. Claire ran up them nonetheless, paying no attention to the burn in her thighs.
At the top of the stairs she passed through an arch and found herself under the open sky. She was in a wide atrium with a reflecting pool that mirrored the emerald color of the noonday sky. This must be the Merith’s private entrance to his zoo, where he brought his special guests. She’d never seen it before. Decorative trees surrounded the pool, like the palms from her hometown but with feathery yellow flowers.
Claire gasped for breath, the humid atmosphere filling her throat like wet cotton balls. She knew from the zoo arrangement that the Merith and humans could breathe the same atmosphere, but she hadn’t actually been in this atmosphere since she was brought to the zoo three years before.
The weskit coughed wetly behind her, and rubbed his furry face against her shoulder.
“I know, I’m sorry,” Claire said.
She ran through the atrium and out another wide arch. She came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a cliff. The ocean roared, at least eighty feet below.
She could see the waves crashing onto a crescent of black beach far below. The location made sense, now that she thought about it. A third of the zoo was for aquatic animals. She’d seen it and she knew where the saltwater tanks were, but she’d never oriented it to the outside world.
She turned from the ocean to run inland. No time to think about it now.
This was the crucial moment. She’d stolen a kind of transportation pass from Faal’s zookeeper, having finally pieced together that he didn’t live on the estate, but came to and fro each morning. That meant there was transportation within a short walk of the zoo, and that meant there was a possibility that she could escape. If it was public transportation (she spoke some of the Merith language now), and if it was automated, or whoever operated it didn’t know she was an escaped ‘animal’...and if she had time to get there before the Merith’s security team came after her...she could get away. That was a heck of a lot of ‘ifs,’ but it was the best chance she’d had in three years.
She could see other Merith buildings further inland, the closest only a few hundred yards away, but she didn’t see any vehicles. A paved walk led to those buildings, but it looked more like a meandering path than a road. It ran alongside a shallow stream, artfully landscaped to twist and turn as it headed toward the cliff and the ocean.
Claire pushed herself as she headed toward the nearest building. She ran in a straight line, ignoring the path. Her chest ached and she felt ill.
“This is bad, this is bad...” Claire muttered. No one was in sight at the moment, but surely that was unusual. As far as she knew it was roughly midday, when they brought lunch in the zoo.
A huge shadow covered the ground in front of her and Claire thudded to a stop, looking up into the green sky, which now looked bruised with dark clouds.
A shuttle! It was heading to her right, and as it swept noiselessly over her, she saw three black circles, like a target, on its side. That same symbol was on the card she’d stolen. Claire sprinted after the shuttle, heading straight across the spongy greenish ground to what she now recognized as an airfield. Her bare feet sank into the cold vegetation, but the scratchy plants didn’t bother her. She hadn’t worn shoes in a long time.
The shuttle landed on a wide tarmac, and Claire stopped running as a side panel hissed open and two Merith aliens disembarked. She froze for a moment. The Merith were a humanoid species: two legs, two arms, and one head, but it did nothing to make them more appealing. They were between seven and nine feet tall, with overdeveloped upper bodies and long sinewy legs. Their most striking feature was the large, single eye that dominated their face, even overshadowing their sharp beaks. They were Odysseus’s Cyclops, stunted and deformed.
Their eye had a vertical pupil like a cat, and as wide a range of coloring as cat eyes. Claire had memorized the golden-red gleam of Faal's eye, and come to hate the way he blinked his translucent eyelid when he taunted her.
Though she knew that this whole planet was populated by the Merith species, she always thought of her owner as “the Merith,” as if he were the only one. She couldn’t bring herself to move until these two Merith turned away from her, releasing her from their one-eyed, basilisk stare.
Claire pulled the zookeeper’s satchel off her shoulder and gently stuffed the weskit inside.
“Shhh, shhh. Be good, baby,” she said.
Claire walked as smoothly as she could toward the shuttle, as if she had every right to be there in her short tunic and bare feet. She had long suspected that the zoo she’d been kept in was not exactly kosher with the rest of Faal’s species. She wasn’t sure if it was illegal or just distasteful, but she was counting on her hope that not every Merith she met would know about the zoo, or recognize her as an inmate.
The two Merith did not stop her. They did turn and look after her, but Claire refused to meet their one-eyed gaze again or break her stride. She stepped into the shuttle with the stolen card in hand.
The interior was dim, and the floor warm and smooth against her feet. Three more Merith sat inside, two reading from some sort of screen, and one with her eye closed, clearly dozing. Several rows of Merith chairs remained empty. Just another morning commute, perhaps?
And could Claire ride, or would she get thrown off?
A waist-high wall separated the passengers from the pilot. And when she looked at the pilot, Claire suffered a shock. He was a Spo, and he was staring at her.
Claire shuddered and rubbed the tattoo on her face. It marked her as a trainee of the Spo aliens. This was a species she knew all too well. They were a more insectoid race, with four double jointed legs, twitchy eyestalks, and a harsh, bleach-like scent from their soft tissues. Squaring her shoulders, she stepped forward, showing the card and bowing slightly.
“Fair day,” she said in the Spo language.
The Spo’s translucent skin washed faintly purple in surprise. It looked at her card, and back at her face.
“You work for Faal?” he asked.
Shoot. She’d hoped this was a generic pass, not something with Faal’s personal ID.
“I work for the...for Faal, also.” She almost said “the Merith,” but caught it. “I will get supplies for him today.”
She knew that although the zookeeper ordered most of the special fare for the zoo inmates from off-world, he regularly brought supplies for the indigenous animals with him. Still, it was a thin lie, and she knew it.
The Spo eyed her, one eyestalk twitching down and taking in her bare feet and rough tunic. He doesn’t know, Claire told herself. He doesn’t know what a human should or should not be wearing. I could be some outlandish new servant of Faal, how would he know?
Plenty of ways, probably, but Claire refused to face defeat yet.
The Spo reached one of his clammy hands forward and Claire’s nose wrinkled at the stench of bleach. He took the card, rubbed it against a smooth patch of the bulkhead, and then gave it back to her.
“Fair day,” he said, and pushed a button that lowered the side panel.
Claire blinked. That was it? It was too easy. Was it a trap?
She slunk back into one of the too large chairs in the passenger area while the pilot took the shuttle into the air. The two Merith were back to their screen, but she could feel that they’d been watching her. They were talking softly to each other, but she caught a few phrases.
“Ugly larva, no?”
“Faal has strange tastes, yes, strange.”
“Safer not to say so.”
Both of these Merith looked bigger than Faal, physically, but they didn't give her the icy chill she felt when he was near. Neither of their eyes was the same tabby-cat gold of Faal's eye, which helped her separate them in her mind.
Claire took a deep breath. Step One of her escape was done, but she was oh-so-far from safe.
Having never seen this planet, she only had vague plans past this point. First, she had to get to a more populated place; somewhere an unfamiliar alien wouldn’t draw attention. Then she’d get off this transport and get on another.
Faal would check with this pilot for his lost human very soon, and the pilot would no doubt tell him where she’d gone. She needed to be far away by the time Faal traced her that far.
There was some money in the zookeeper’s satchel, but she suspected it was nothing more than pocket change. It probably wouldn't get her off this planet. She would need some kind of job, something low profile where Faal couldn't find her, until she could afford to get away. This was the fuzziest part of her plan. Surely there were jobs equivalent to dishwasher or janitor that she could do? And then someday...Earth.
Stop, she told herself. You’re only on Step 2 of escape, that’s like... Step 17.
The shuttle stopped two more times, and both times Claire hunched in on herself, instinctively holding her breath until the shuttle lifted.
She was just allowing herself a deep breath when she heard a burst of chatter from the pilot’s area. It was a kind of radio or communication device, and the Merith voice coming into the shuttle was icily familiar.
It was Faal’s voice, and he was describing her. “Repeat. The criminal is small, with two eyes, legs, and arms. Long brown hair on its head. It is to be detained at once, and held under Faal’s orders.” The words repeated, and Claire realized it was a recorded message, probably going to more than one shuttle right now.
The three other Merith in the shuttle stared at her and Claire cringed back in her seat, expecting them to attack at any moment.
“Come up here,” the pilot said firmly.
Claire looked up, and saw the ugly Spo gesturing to her. “I cannot open the shuttle with you back there.” He was beginning to land again, and it looked like a larger city this time.
“Just let me get out there. You’ll never see me again - ” Claire said.
One of the other Merith snorted. “No one will ever see you again. You’ve angered Faal.”
Claire shuddered, and the pilot snapped his clawed fingers. “Come!”
She went to where he said, skirting around his large mushroom shaped chair.
“Sit,” he said, pointing to the floor next to him.
Claire sank down, a cold, dead feeling sweeping through her. This was it. She should’ve known it would never work.
The pilot brought the shuttle down into a huge airfield crowded with crafts. Claire looked longingly at the shuttle door as it opened, but she knew the Spo pilot could pin her to the floor in one jump if she tried to run. The other passengers left quickly, clearly glad that the pilot was going to deal with the fugitive.
The Spo pilot cleared his throat with a rasp. “I see you, Cadet,” he said, his accent in Merith not much better than hers. “But you must not stay.”
Claire frowned at him.
“Not stay? Are you letting me go?” Claire clambered to her feet. “If Faal asks you...” She sputtered to a stop, afraid to hope.
The Spo faded to orange. The color of disgust. “Faal... Faal stands always on two feet,” the Spo said. Two feet - that was the Spo stance prior to an attack. A two-footed stance suggested poise, balance, and a vicious inclination to attack anything that moved.
The Spo shrugged. “You chose a good day to cross him.” He pointed to a huge spaceship that took up nearly a quarter of the field. It towered at least three stories above all the other ships. “That ship is called Final Say, it’s been commissioned by the Diarena. You could take it, get to Comboda or further.”
Claire caught her breath, and almost smiled at the hideous Spo. Comboda was another of the main Merith planets, but definitely far away from here.
“Who is the Diarena? Would she take me?”
The Spo looked confused. “The Diarena is... the Diarena. The Pontifex’s wife. Do you not know? She and Faal have a feud. That is why I say you chose a good day. If any ship will take you away in defiance of Faal, it is hers.”
Claire pulled out the money in the bag. Kit was fast asleep, thank heaven.
“Is this enough?” she asked.
“Not enough, no. Go to the aft entrance,” he pointed out one of the many ramps attached to the spaceship, “and ask to work. Tell them about Faal.”
“Uh... thank you,” Claire said. Imagine thanking a Spo.
The Spo clicked ominously. “The desert remains hot through the night,” he warned. “You may thank yourself if you make it to Comboda.”
In other words, he thought the ship would still be dangerous for her, but a better chance than staying on this planet. The day time desert vs. the night time desert was a common Spo metaphor.
Claire swallowed. Okay then. She nodded once to the Spo, and walked out into the cold breeze that swept across the busy airfield.