Space Rocks!

Tom O'Donnell

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ISBN: 978-1-101-62669-6

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I
crouched, motionless, and watched the alien invaders in the canyon below. There were four of them, and they were hideous. Each had four long appendages radiating from a central trunk. On top of their bodies sat wobbly round heads with two slimy-looking eyes stuck right in the middle. And on top of each head was a ridiculous tuft of colored fur!

I was only a few dozen meters away. It was the first time I'd seen the aliens.

They had invaded Gelo two months ago. Their huge ship had dropped from the sky in a cloud of fire brighter than the sun. They landed, and almost immediately they began to dig.

Terrified, I had asked Kalac, my originator, where the space invaders came from.

“They come from Eo,” it replied.

“You mean that little blue dot between us and the sun?” I asked, thinking back to astronomy instruction. Kalac nodded. That dot didn't seem impressive enough to be the home of an evil alien empire. T'utzuxe the Red Planet, I could believe. But not Eo.

“There are billions of them there,” said Kalac.

Well, I guess their home planet didn't have enough iridium for all of them, because they sure wanted ours. Day and night, they drilled huge holes toward the core of our asteroid. Their oversized vehicles rumbled to and fro. Into the tunnel, empty. Out of the tunnel, heavy with ore. It seemed like they meant to take it all.

The one good thing about this particular alien invasion was that the aliens didn't seem to know they'd invaded anyone at all. They'd been mining our asteroid for two months and they weren't even aware of our existence.

We watched them from the shadows. We examined whatever they left behind. We eavesdropped on their radio transmissions from the safety of our tunnels and tried to make sense of their strange language.

The fact that we had not been detected was not just due to the unobservant nature of their species. It was also because we Xotonians are very, very good at hiding. For starters, each of us possesses the innate ability to change the color of our skin at will—perfect for camouflage.

In fact, at that very moment, I had turned myself a dull shade of blue-gray (the same exact blue-gray of everything on the surface of Gelo). I was hiding, more or less in plain sight, from the four “humans.”

Yes, that is what they called themselves: humans. Two months of secretly listening to them talk to one another on their radios, and we'd at least figured out their name for their own species.

Honestly, I had not come to this place expecting to see any humans at all. After much pleading, Kalac had finally allowed me to go on a “reconnaissance mission” to the surface, to a canyon called Jehe, a few kilometers from where the human mothership had landed.

It was an area where no one had seen any humans, and no one expected to. I was simply to check the area for their garbage—which they tended to leave everywhere they went—and make sure that Jehe Canyon was still human-free. Indeed, if I saw any actual humans, I was to return home immediately to avoid the possibility of detection. No exceptions.

Some might have considered this a menial or even useless task, but not me. I was excited to finally get a chance to do my part, however small, for the Xotonian cause. I was desperate to show Kalac—and everyone else, for that matter—that I could do a good job, that I could handle responsibility. It was on my sixth tour of this garbage-free canyon that I suddenly saw four specks on the horizon. Actual humans.

At this point, I should have returned home to avoid the possibility of detection. But I didn't. I couldn't. I just had to see the humans for myself. So I hid among the rocks.

The humans approached with astounding speed, each riding on a small rocket-propelled vehicle. We Xotonians have nothing like these rockets. The fastest we move is when we run or occasionally ride an usk-lizard.

They pulled up to Jehe Canyon in a cloud of exhaust: two “males” and two “females.” Kalac had tried to explain the concept of human “gender” to me once, but I still couldn't quite wrap my brain around it. Apparently, the human population was equally divided between two subspecies possessing minor physical differences. These differences were not always apparent to our Xotonian scouts. So the Council had to come up with a quick rule for telling the two apart: Often (but not always) the female humans have longer head-fur than the males. But male humans have more fur overall. Aliens are weird.

My initial observation on seeing these four specimens: They were smaller than I expected. I'd been told that the average human is between 150 and 190 centimeters tall, a giant by Xotonian standards. But the shortest of these was barely 130 centimeters (about my height).

Each of them was encased in a shiny coating with a transparent helmet over their heads. The elders said they couldn't breathe the atmosphere on Gelo's surface, so they had to bring their own Eo air with them. Why go somewhere you can't breathe? I wondered. In my experience, breathing is one of the most important things.

Once they were in Jehe Canyon, the four humans began to fly to and fro on their personal rockets. These vehicles had a sort of saddle around which the humans wrapped their lower appendages and a pronged steering mechanism that they gripped and turned with their upper appendages. They were capable of very tight maneuvers. Was I witnessing some sort of military exercise? Were these humans practicing tactics that they might eventually use against my own people?

Sometimes they would talk among themselves via communicators inside their helmets. I listened in as best as I could with my Nyrt-Snooper.

The Nyrt-Snooper is another classic example of Xotonian sneakiness. It is a tiny device that fits in a Xotonian ear cavity and allows us to secretly listen in on radio transmissions. There are only thirty-one Nyrt-Snoopers in existence on all of Gelo, so I considered it quite an honor that I had been given the use of one for this mission (even if it was staticky and had a little bit of earwax on it from the last Xotonian). Though I couldn't understand a word of human, I wanted to determine their command order and build a profile of each of them. You know, reconnaissance stuff!

Let me begin by describing the largest human of the group. The brownish head-fur was cropped close to the head, so I pegged him for a male. He had the deepest voice of all four. But his voice would occasionally crackle into a very high register, seemingly at random. Quite disturbing. From what I could tell, he seemed to be the leader of the group.

Next there were the two medium-sized female duplicates. I say “duplicates” because in all respects they appeared to be exact copies of one another: same long black head-fur, same build; even their voices were alike. The only difference I could see were the transparent glass-and-plastic lenses one of them wore over her brown eyes. Perhaps this was simply a courtesy so that others could tell them apart?

As physically similar as the duplicates were, they seemed to be different in temperament. The duplicate without the lenses (whom I will call “No-Lenses”) seemed to challenge the authority of the large male (whom I will call “Crackle-Voice”) at every turn. Meanwhile, the other duplicate (whom I will call “Lenses”) was more docile and quiet. Lenses seemed to quickly lose interest in swerving around on the rockets. She soon abandoned hers and sat down on a rock to watch the others.

Now to the smallest, and perhaps the most puzzling, of the humans. He was male and a full thirty centimeters shorter than the duplicates, with a wild puff of bright red head-fur (or maybe plumage?). Unlike the others, he seemed to constantly be falling off his rocket—marked with considerably more dents and scratches than those of his comrades—and landing in the blue-gray Gelo dust.

Whenever these tumbles happened, Red-Fur would hop right back up, making a peculiar gurgling barking sound. Then he would get on his rocket and try again. Usually with the same result.

Once, after making sure he had the full attention of the other three, Red-Fur attempted to fly his rocket through the narrow gap between two big, standing boulders. He backed up and then blasted off.

But the space between the rocks wasn't wide enough. Red-Fur hit the gap, but his rocket got stuck fast. Unfortunately for him, he kept going. Red-Fur flew at least ten meters through the air, then skidded another ten on his head.

He lay on the ground, motionless. I wondered if he had been squished to goo inside his shiny encasement suit. All the other humans stared at each other in silence. Then, once again, that familiar barking sound over the communicator. Red-Fur arose, apparently unhurt.

“Yoo-gize-toe-duh-lee-thott-i-wuzz-dedd,” he chirped over the radio.

“Nott-funn-ee,” replied Lenses.

“Kine-duh-funn-ee,” said Red-Fur. Pure human gibberish. I couldn't understand one bit.

After spending a good ten minutes helping unstick Red-Fur's rocket from between the boulders, Crackle-Voice and No-Lenses pulled the nose-cones of their own rockets into alignment. Then they started to point out various landmarks in the canyon and talk via their communicators. That's when it dawned on me. They were going to race!

Lenses was summoned from her rock to be the judge of the outcome. She stood between the two rockets, holding her two upper appendages high. Then she called a single human word: “Go!”

The rockets were off! Crackle-Voice and No-Lenses blasted forward with a deafening boom. From what I could tell, they were traveling twice as fast as I had seen these small rockets go before. The two racers kept nose-and-nose as they traced the crescent curve of Jehe Canyon. White smoke and blue dust billowed behind them. Even Red-Fur, whose attention certainly seemed fleeting, watched the race intently.

The rockets swerved to dodge rocks and craters and avoid the ever-shifting walls of the canyon on either side. They must have been going 150 kilometers per hour, but somehow they stayed neck-and-neck with each other. There was barely any space between them, and I couldn't tell who was winning.

At the far end of the canyon, they rounded a wide crater: the halfway point of the race. Crackle-Voice cut the curve a little sharper and grabbed a clear lead. No-Lenses leaned forward on her rocket, trying to catch up.

They were in the home stretch now, flames exploding from their thrusters. No-Lenses was about one rocket-length behind, and she couldn't seem to make up any lost ground. Crackle-Voice was going to win.

All of a sudden, with less than three hundred meters to go, No-Lenses swerved off to the right. What was she doing? Had she just given up and conceded victory? Even Crackle-Voice turned back to look.

No-Lenses flew straight for the two standing boulders—the very gap where Red-Fur's rocket had gotten stuck!

Then I understood her plan: If she could somehow squeeze between them, the distance between her and the finish line would be cut in half.

But there was no way she could squeeze between them! There just wasn't enough space. And No-Lenses was flying twice as fast as Red-Fur had been. I shuddered to imagine the aftermath of a wreck like that: She would surely be killed!

Wait a second. Why should I care if No-Lenses got smashed to bits in a rocket race? It would be a good thing. One less alien invader for us to deal with.

Still, my is'pog was beating fast, and I couldn't look away. Neither could Lenses or Red-Fur, who both stood mesmerized at the finish line.

No-Lenses was flying fast toward the gap, only a few meters away now. At the last possible moment, she leaned right while rotating the rocket sideways to the left. Could she somehow narrow the rocket's width by putting it on its side? No-Lenses hit the gap with the squeal of metal scraping against rock. Sparks flew and—

Somehow she came flying out the other side! Victory! No-Lenses finished just ahead of Crackle-Voice. I wanted to cheer, but I held my gul'orp. Red-Fur leaped into the air. Lenses just shook her head.

Slowly, Crackle-Voice climbed down off his rocket and approached No-Lenses. Crackle-Voice, apparently the group's leader, had just been defeated by a subordinate in front of others. Totally humiliated. Now they will fight, I thought.

The two humans stood staring at each other for a moment. At last Crackle-Voice extended one of his upper appendages. No-Lenses took it in her grasper, and they shook. Both began that weird human barking noise. Red-Fur joined in too.

That was when it dawned on me. All the barking and the teeth-baring expression that accompanied it: It was laughter! When Xotonians laugh, we make a loud metallic honking noise (naturally). I hadn't even considered what the human version might sound like. Or even that humans could laugh at all.

But if these four were laughing so much, then flying their rockets through Jehe Canyon probably wasn't a military exercise at all. They were just goofing around and having fun.

Crackle-Voice, No-Lenses, and Red-Fur spent the next ten minutes excitedly reliving the race. Eventually, all three hopped on their rockets and flew to the gap in the boulders. No-Lenses proceeded to teach them the trick of turning the rocket sideways to pass through the narrow space.