Tusk is not at all mollified by my comments. He is trying to push Ham back through the wall, which is not going to work because Ham is not physically moving through the wall. He is understanding that there is no wall, and therefore he can pass through it. Unfortunately, the wall is asserting itself in return with a surprising amount of self belief for an inanimate object.
“Ham, get back in your cell,” I sigh, folding my arms over my chest. I don’t want to have to hurt him. He’s one of my favorite prisoners. Most of the others are here for acts of brutality. He’s here for acts of cleverness. I’ve enjoyed many interesting conversations with him over the years.
“I’m supposed to be out! I got my date! I got my date!”
To describe a Demtelf is to describe the impossible. They are round, bouncy little things with eyes all over their heads which makes most aliens they encounter very uncomfortable. Fortunately, they can only see out of two of them at any given time. Unfortunately, you never know which two are active.
They are incredibly wise, and able to access knowledge from all over the universe. This makes them exceptionally difficult to keep imprisoned, as they have a tendency to access that knowledge and use it to escape.
“What date?”
“January 17, 1934.”
“Look it up, would you, Tusk?”
Tusk sighs and walks away muttering about his wall. I am not upset by the wall. Since taking our human prisoner, I have not been upset about hardly anything. It is very un-scythkin of me.
“That’s a date in the ancient past,” Tusk says over the communicator.
“Exactly! That’s my date! I should have been out tens of thousands of years ago.” Ham gesticulates with dozens of brows.
“You get out when I receive notice in this timeline that you’ve been pardoned,” I tell him.
“Time is not linear. It’s circular. You think that’s the past. I know it’s the future.”
“Whatever it is, you need to get out of my wall, and back into your cell.”
“You know this cell is nothing but an illusion, and that you are not a warden of anything besides your own pain,” Ham says with all that wisdom he has at his disposal, wisdom which would be far more compelling if he were not still half sticking out of the wall. If I go inside the cell, I’m going to see his little feet hanging in mid-air, I just know it.
“I know. It’s all an illusion. But it is a persistent one.”
“True,” he admits with a sigh. There is a squelching sound as he slips back through the wall and then a hollow bouncing sound followed by a curse, as he boings from the floor and hits his head on the very persistent illusion of a bed.
We could keep Ham inside the concept of a small glass jar without causing him any extra discomfort, but we do it this way because this is more traditional, and it’s easier to keep track of a physical cell than the concept of one, which tends to get lost in the back of the cabinet among all the other concepts and ideas squirreled away by deviant and punitive species like our own.
Making An Entrance
Hours earlier…
“Warden, your prisoner is here.”
Those words bring me up to the bridge where Tusk is piloting our prison ship. He is second hatched in our clutch, my right hand man, the most reliable entity I know in the entire universe. He is the scythkin who knows where the bodies are buried, and where the keys to locks long lost lie. He and I know more about one another than any two beings have known one another in all time, or at least, that is how it feels.
He gestures to the control panel where a light is flashing to indicate the presence of a ship in our ingress bay. It has been a very long time since that light flashed.
“You happy? You’re getting your own human to punish.”
“This is hardly a day to be happy,” I say, hiding the truth. “It is the anniversary…”
“We cannot mourn forever, Warden,” Tusk says.
We can, and we very well may. The other five of my brood have secluded themselves in their quarters and will not emerge until there is something to kill.
After the tragedy, we swore off breeding. Never again will we destroy a world to allow a place for matriarchs to lay their clutches. Never again will we spawn life into a dark universe. The cost is too high, and the reward too fleeting.
Tusk turns Saya’s picture toward me. She is smiling, a rare expression for a matriarch. She was the rarest of creatures, and her loss is still felt.
Was this always going to be her destiny? Or could I have done something differently to save her? I was the first to hatch, and as such became the dominant broodkin. It was my job to protect Saya, and I failed. Matriarchs are rare creatures, fearsome and terrible to behold in battle. But to us, she was the sweetest, brightest thing in all the stars. This is the solar anniversary of her loss, and we are still in mourning.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP
The sound of the shuttle still unattended to in the ingress bay demands my attention. Saya has become part of the past, and now I must attend to the future.
Tusk hits the camera feed, and we are faced with the lower half of a broad-faced grin from a murketeer who is standing too close to the screen.
“GREETINGS,” the wide-faced being declares. “WE HAVE YOUR PRISONER.”
“You should get down to the human,” Tusk says. “Before Scizzor gets to them.”
Scizzor was the closest to Saya and in the wake of her passing, he destroyed a planet with his bare hands. He is, safe to say, not safe. We have remained almost constantly in distant orbits since her loss and his resulting rampage, which was so brutal even we were shocked. Scizzor does not know that a human prisoner is being taken aboard. If he finds out, she will be serving a very short sentence and for all the wrong reasons.
Today cannot be about Scizzor, or even Saya. It has to be about the human. My thoughts have been full of nothing else since I was approached by her previous captors and asked to take her as my own personal imprisoned pet.
My first impulse was to refuse. To break a human, you have to get close. Very close. It is hard to do at the best of times being a scythkin, and grief only makes it harder. Grief is an emotion which turns a being inward, makes it hard to touch the world.
But this is a rare opportunity. One which is not going to come up again. With humanity limited in large part to the IHPZ, or Interstellar Human Petting Zoo, there is no opportunity for our kind to have an encounter with a human, let alone possess one.
So I did not turn them down, even though they made her sound as unappealing as possible. They told me she was unbreakable. They sent me an exhaustive list of her crimes. Many of them were violent. This is not a typical human being, and these are not typical circumstances.
“Warden? Are you going down?”
I realize I have been standing here, staring at Saya’s picture.
“Yeah.”
There is a big, yellow submarine-looking bulbous craft sitting in our bay. It looks as out of place as anything could ever look. It is marked with a big, cheerful G, which has been halfway scratched out and then left. The scythkin brood who took the IHPZ from the Galactor corporation have not been performing maintenance, so it would seem.
This is not what I expected. I expected a scythkin war shuttle. Something with defensive capabilities. This yellow bubble is a sitting duck bobbing among the stars.