“WELCOME! I mean HELLO!”
A murketeer appears outside the ship. They are loathsome little creatures. They only come up to my waist, but their bulbous bodies and their great big eyes and their even wider mouths with grins like cow teeth are disgusting.
“I AM USED TO WELCOMING,” it booms noisily. “BUT YOU ARE THE ONE WELCOMING US.”
“I’m not welcoming you. Why are you here? I expected a scythkin guard.”
“THANK YOU!”
“Stop yelling at me, and tell me why you are here with the human. The human is here, isn’t she?”
“The human was given to us to transport because she has a tendency to be violent to scythkin. We’re the only ones she doesn’t want to kill,” the murketeer explains. “And she was supposed to be asleep, but she woke up halfway here. It has been… difficult. She threw one of my colleagues out of an airlock in an attempt to escape.”
He says every word with a big, broad smile, completely incongruous to the words he is saying.
“And if you had been attacked?”
“Galactor colors are the safest to travel under,” the murketeer says. “Galactor is expanding again. Hadn’t you heard?”
I had heard. Expanding is what Galactor does. They’re even more proficient at it than our species is. But of course they are not a species. They are a corporate state, a coalition of species who like the color yellow and the letter G.
I do not like them. Under any other circumstances, I would kill these murketeers without a moment’s hesitation and feed on their entrails. But doing that to them would no doubt be impolite, and annoy the hell out of the brood which sent this human to me.
It is not common for scythkin to send prisoners. It is even less common for those prisoners to be human. This may be the first time in history that any scythkin has willingly given up a human. It is almost certainly the first time a female has been handed over.
“Bring her out, then you can go.”
“OF COURSE!” He beams and almost shouts the words, then goes running back into the innards of the ship, wibble-wobbling from one side to the other with an awkward gait.
I wait, feeling impatient. Aside from her crimes, I have been given very little information about this human. There are many curiosities I wish to satisfy.
I hear the sounds of struggle and swearing. The entire ship rocks back and forth with the effort of the murketeers to move their precious cargo. I would go in and get her myself, but I would tear that ship apart just trying to go through the door.
So I wait. And she comes.
They pull her off the freighter with no small amount of difficulty, bruising her skin with their careless hands. I can see already see marks on her that should not be there. Her transport has obviously not been handled well. She is dark haired and dark eyed, rebellious to the core even at first glance. She has beauty of the kind I have found to be rare in humans. It is not soft. It is hard. It is the beauty of suffering and rage, the harsh marks of life and time written clear across her face as she stares directly at me, ignoring the murketeers as if she considers them as worthless as I do.
She is dressed in a sleeveless, skin-tight, white leotard which does nothing to hide the obvious marks of torture on her body. They’re old scars which must have been inflicted before her most recent capture. I wonder how many times she has been taken by authorities, and I wonder how many more times she has escaped.
The murketeers are gabbling at one another with their usual nonsense. They are the workers from the Interstellar Human Petting Zoo, a facility custom designed from the ground up to control humans. But not this human. This one was too much trouble. This one corrupted every human in her orbit, even the ones she was not permitted to talk to. Charisma, humans call it.
Scythkin don’t have to rely on charisma. We have bodies covered in blades and physical capabilities beyond any one might reasonably imagine. Scythkin are destroyers. I am a destroyer, but she is safer here than anywhere else in the known universe.
She is the kind of criminal our kind love to loathe. If she were anything other than human, she would have been killed by now. But humans are sacred to the scythkin, and she cannot be seriously harmed. I think she knows that.
“Careful,” I bark as they lift her down the ramp. “She's worth more than all of you combined.”
She should have a scythkin escort. I have no idea why the IHPZ were so careless as to have sent her with just murketeers. They are big-eyed, wide-mouthed, perpetually beaming entities who feed on bureaucracy. I can see one in the back already salivating over the paperwork. Humans are predators who can only be bested by other predators.
With a cry of annoyance, the prisoner lifts her arm up and sends a murketeer flying. I cannot help but smirk with amusement at the high pitched screech the little beast makes, or the way it bounces when it hits the shuttle bay floor.
In an effort to make her comply, the murketeers swarm her. There are a half dozen of them, but she puts up a good show, having got one hand loose, which she uses to slap the closest murketeer off the ramp. It spins around in a full 360 degree circle before flopping to the floor in defeat. I restrain a bark of laughter in favor of a grunt.
I could intervene, but I refrain. I want to see what she’s got. I want to know what she is capable of. And, to be fair, I want to watch her beat these annoying little murketeers back to where they came from.
“GET HER! PUT HER IN BINDINGS! BLINDFOLD HER!”
I notice that the prisoner does not say so much as a word. She presses her lips together and stays silent throughout her struggle, which is desperate. They have obviously tried to bind her with packaging tape and plastic wrap, which would have worked if she were standard cargo - but I get the sense there is nothing standard about this human woman.
A half-dozen murketeers charge her all at once. En masse, they are more successful. Though one is punted across the room with a jab from her knee, the other five manage to get her re-packaged, wrapping ‘G’ branded tape and around her legs and arms and even her eyes until she is presented to me like a cross between a turkey and an express package. One of them jabs her with a needle, no doubt containing extra sedative. Pathetic.
They have taken her senses to try to keep her calm. It is not working. Beneath her bindings, I can see her muscles flexing and her shoulders and hips wriggling back and forth. She can’t move her limbs because they are thoroughly restrained, but that is not going to stop her from trying.
“ENOUGH!” I boom the word before the murketeers take it on themselves to exact any revenge on their now helpless prisoner.
“SIGNED, SEALED, DELIVERED,” the murketeer in charge declares. “IF YOU WOULD BE SO KIND AS TO SIGN A FEW FORMS…”
I know precisely what he is trying to do: get a free snack. He has no idea how close he is to becoming one himself.
I stride forward, grab her from their inept hands, and throw her over my shoulder. She grunts. I hope she is not hurt in some way. If she has been harmed, I will personally consume their entrails.
“Are you alright, human? Did they hurt you?” I address the questions to her shapely, well-wrapped rear.
She replies with a grunt which could mean almost anything.
"She can’t talk. We filled her mouth with rubber so we didn't have to hear her very unpleasant words,” the murketeer explains. He has no shame. He does not realize how close he is to death now that I am no longer entertained.