I sat with my back to him, looking toward the tall rocks we’d scaled down from, and took a long sip of water from my canteen.
And it was then that I felt Eric’s back stiffen straight. “Charles,” he hissed.
“Yes?”
“Don’t. Make. A. Move.”
The ground thudded. And again. I looked oh-so-slowly over my shoulder. A ten-foot-tall, six-legged beast with dappled green hide and a fiercely reptilian face hissed at us.
But that wasn’t what made my stomach clench. A thin-limbed man, with skin so pale it looked almost transparent, stood up on leather stirrups and pointed what was unmistakably a long-barreled weapon at us.
From farther down the trail, three more mounted Venusians plodded along, their long rifles aimed right at us.
“They’re bipedal,” Eric breathed. “And humanoid. How graceful!”
“They have weapons,” I murmured.
“This must be some form of parallel evolution. This is the sister planet, and these are sister peoples,” Eric said to me out of the corner of his mouth. “Or maybe we all came from the same organisms …”
He didn’t get to finish his thinking, because the four Venusians charged us. The heavy-footed beasts thundered as their long necks slinked forward with more eager hisses.
I grabbed Eric’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet and we ran, but within seconds the thud of saurian beasts filled our world and nets with heavy weights slapped into our backs.
We fell to the ground, entangled and struggling to get our machetes out to chop at the netting. I managed first, sawing through and scrambling up. Eric followed.
He raised his machete, and a bright flash of light cracked out from one of the rifles. Eric screamed and dropped his blade, then raised his hands warily. “You’d better drop yours too,” he said.
I let it fall to the ground.
The Venusians regarded us with large eyes and dark pupils, then dropped to the ground with loops of rope.
Within a minute, we were tied behind the beasts and being pulled along down the trail, through the jungle.
“I don’t understand,” Eric said, in shock. “We are visitors from another world. They must have seen the rocket ship. We must look alien to them. This is a First Contact situation, what are they doing?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and gasped as the rope yanked at me.
They pulled us into what looked like a village, with huts made out of long poles and woven with fronds. Wary Venusians sat around cooking pots. They began to shout and point at us with large smiles, while the Venusians who captured us responded with similar whoops.
“We. Come. In. Peace,” Eric declared, but was rewarded with a strike to the head for his efforts. I grabbed him as he staggered and helped him stand as we were shoved into a set of cages at the center of the village.
I should have spent the next couple of hours paying attention and learning what I could about the Venusians, but instead I did my best to make Eric comfortable and keep him from falling asleep.
A blow to the head was never a good thing.
As a result, I almost didn’t notice another party of Venusians returning in triumph with the rest of our crew. Cmdr. Heston James, shoved forward by gunpoint, Shepard by his side, both of them holding Tad up by an arm and looking exhausted, bruised, and shocked.
Inside the cage with us, Heston took a look at Eric briefly. “He should be okay,” he said in a grim voice. “But Tad’s in worse shape. He fought back. All the way. They shot him.”
There was a burned hole in Tad’s stomach. It was blackened with cauterization, but we all had enough medical training for the trip to know that it was fatal.
“Charles, you’re the languages and communications expert, any read on these Venusians?” Heston asked.
I shook my head. I was the languages guy, which meant that I’d studied seven or so before the war while I was in college. The half-completed linguistics degree had helped edge me into the communications spot on the crew. “It’s another planet. Another species. And I’ve been watching after Eric.”
“Fucking savages,” Heston spit. “Animal-riding, hut-living savages.”
I said nothing.
Tad died a few hours later, gurgling out his last breath with a whimper of pain. Eventually, we all tried to get some sleep as the ambient, cloud-filtered sunlight faded away.
We woke early the next morning to Shepard’s shouting at several tiny Venusians who were poking him with a sharp stick.
Eric was looking around, dazed and awake, thank goodness. His only comment on the situation was a bemused observation. “I think the superpale skin they have is an adaption,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Not much sunlight gets to the surface of Venus. If you look at people on Earth, it’s the same. The farther north, the less sun, the paler they get.”
3.
WE WERE TAKEN DOWN OFF THE PLATEAU THE NEXT MORNING on a two-day-long, jolting cart ride to a fortress that looked like a giant sea urchin with black, spiked rock spurs radiating in all directions.
Under one of the spurs, the Venusians argued for fifteen minutes with another set of Venusians wearing fancy red silks.
Then more Venusians came out with a crate full of rifles.
“I think we just got traded for rifles,” Shepard said. “Jesus Christ.”
The hill Venusians turned and left us standing in front of the spiked fortress, heading back to their swampy home.
“They won’t know we came from the sky,” Eric said, his voice quavering slightly.
“Then we learn the local lingo,” Commander James said quietly. “However long it takes us. And we tell them. They can see, with their own eyes, that we look different.”
“For all they know,” I said, speaking for the first time that morning, “we’re strange Venusians from some unknown location on their planet.”
“Stow that talk,” Heston ordered.
—–—
The next week of travel blurred. More carts. Baggage trains. Often we were forced to walk along them, our hands bound, pale Venusians shouting at us. Shepard and Eric had been keeping shifts tracking our turns and directions, trying to keep an internal map of how to get back to our ship.
The humid air stopped feeling so strange in the second week of walking. The feathery fronds of the vegetation began to stop looking so strange. Though every time something rustled from deep inside the vegetation, I still felt nervous.
We arrived at a coast in the second week. A great walled city sat half in the emerald forest and half projected out into the gray ocean. Docks stuck out like fingers from a hand, and a crude seawall protected it all from the ocean swells.
Rock houses leaned this way and that inside the walls. Warehouses painted in pastel shades leaked strange scents none of us could recognize. Was that cinnamon? With a bacony sort of vanilla?
We’d been fed Venusian food. A tasteless, pasty stew that caused me to spend the first night in agony with stomach cramps but that I’d adapted to in the days of walking. But smelling the scents, I realized we’d been given their equivalent of gruel.
We followed our captors down streets no more than four or five people wide, then into a central market. It was filled with Venusians selling flanks of meat, what looked like misshapen vegetables in unappealing colors, and the spices that we’d smelled passing the warehouses.
A short Venusian with scars advanced on us with a knife. We recoiled, but he used it quickly to cut our clothes away.
“Damn it!” Heston screamed, uselessly, as he stood in the air naked as the day he was born, his naturally ramrod straight back suddenly curved as he tried to cover himself.
Venusians threw buckets of water on us to clean the road dirt away and scrubbed us clean.
And we were marched over to a stone dais.