Michael Siemsen - Exigency

I know, hon. Just not the realest in hers. You know that she and John would’ve sacrificed anything for the good of the mission and crew. Remember that time, a week after she moved in—

“In the hall outside John’s office.”

They were so close, his hand in the small of her back, their heads low, sad.

“She told me he was begging her to reconsider.”

Is that what it looked like?

“No.”

Minnie ran.

Something was coming. Thousands of them. She dared not a backward glance. Hynka or cats or the knobby stilt legs of an infinite dali herd, they were chasing her, and she had to speed up.

Warm gusts against nose and lips. Body so cold. Minnie couldn’t feel her legs anymore. She supposed she was through with legs. Used them all up.

A thick drop on her upper lip. It crawled toward her cheek and streamed slowly down. She didn’t know where she was, but the crispy crackles beneath her back felt like a pile of potato chips whenever she moved. Petrified lichen? Snow, but her skin had gone numb?

An awful odor.

The warm puffs brought her cheeks back to life. Suddenly, she actively felt the pain of the cold, no longer in some vague, intangible manner. She was freezing to death. Her body rotated on its own, rolling to the side. Was she doing this? Still couldn’t feel her legs. Was she in motion, rolling and sliding down some hill?

And then she was in motion. No question. She was being carried.

Some body parts were being heated while others suffered against an increasingly frigid wind. Was she on a skimmer?

It didn’t matter.

Body hurt, sick, done. Brain fried.

Let someone else be in charge for once.

She faded out.

Leg cramped, headache, thirsty, weak, suffocating heat, hollow gut. Minnie’s legs were crossed in an awkward sort of twist, one foot pinned beneath something, preventing her from shifting. Her hair and face were soggy, probably from whatever cloth was being dabbed against her face. Not cloth. A water bag? And not being dabbed. She was being moved up to it. The sensations all over her body suddenly made sense. Her back lay atop an arm, her rear cradled in a pair of giant fingers, her arms across her chest and wedged between an immense thumb and her belly. Her face, more wet pressing on her mouth.

The urge to cry, chest quaking with fear of impending agony.

She dared a peek.

Hazy sunlight from somewhere. A blurry shine. Dark cave—some strange, moist nook. The smell! Though lacking firsthand experience, she concluded with certainty that this was the stench found behind an overactive bull’s testicles.

“Rrloch-tss.”

Her host had seen Minnie’s eyes open, felt her body come to life. Another pair of fingers moved near Minnie’s face, like leathery Dobermans with conical claws for heads, and pinched at its wrinkly drapes of armpit skin, pressing it against Minnie’s lips. Thick, gray milk percolated from a hundred lactiferous ducts. The Hynka was trying to nurse her.

Relief flushed through her. She cast aside visions of her own body thrashed about like Ish’s, and turned her fone back on. She couldn’t see anything but purple-black skin, had no idea if she’d been carried into the middle of a bustling village or was still somewhere near her campsite.

Nine hours had passed.

Pressing her lips shut against the increasingly insistent Hynka, Minnie’s fone reacquired GPS and established position 14.4K from John and the campsite.

John! He must be losing it!

Had she brought the medkit into the tent the night before? Would he be able to take his morning dose? Or had Hynka gotten to him, too?

Minnie switched optics and rolled her eyes around. She was in an above-ground burrow set between a mature epsequoia trunk and one felled long ago. At her current angle, she could see no other mobile lifeforms in the area.

“Rrloch-tss!” The Hynka gave Minnie’s ribs a near-crushing squeeze.

A scary thought: even if “Mama” wished only benevolence upon her new adopted daughter, Hynka were accustomed to a much more rugged offspring. Even their newborn’s bones were three times denser than a human’s. Mama wanted Baby to nurse. Baby wasn’t cooperating. Mama was getting mad.

Crapshake, Minnie thought, and regretted the ironic expletive.

She steadied her nerves, pried apart chapped lips, shut her eyes, and felt Mama raise her body once more, pressing the skin flap to her mouth.

Breathe through nose, don’t let it in mouth, don’t swallow, don’t taste… like a stage kiss… the galaxy’s most vile stage kiss…

The ducts didn’t just seep, though. After a few seconds, a gush of fluid sprayed to the back of her throat and she choked.

Mama rubbed Minnie’s tummy with her thumb and uttered approval, or maybe soothing. “Otch… otch…”

Minnie let the overflowing milk ooze out the sides of her mouth. Ducts flowed like a broken shower head—starts and stops, jarring blasts. Minnie was being soaked. It saturated her shirt, spreading down her front and back.

At least she was warm. And Mama seemed content, rolling onto her back and easing the pressure on Minnie’s body. Now, Minnie stood on hands and knees in a nest of dry litterfall, between Mama’s side and arm, face still buried in spurting armpit. The milk streamed from the corners of Minnie’s mouth, coursed down to her chin, and ran like a faucet to the ground. Surely Mama would soon run dry.

And then what? To both plan and distract herself, Minnie inventoried her assets. At some point she’d lost her suit, and with it all sorts of essentials: water, personal climate, multitool, mini medkit, boots, PA, signal boosters. She was practically naked in only environment shirt, tank, and undershorts. A toe wiggle divulged a single sock’s presence.

Her brain and fone would be her sole resources. But within that little device, she had Ish’s data, and a 2,611-word Hynka core language DB, with a regional dialect sub-catalogue of another 601 words.

Without warning, a thick glob slopped into Minnie’s mouth with a gaseous splutter—like a shot of pudding or expired milk chunk—and she gagged, blowing away the sour air while trying to eject the lump out the side of her mouth. Her tongue only spread and split the dollop apart. Still heaving, she pulled her face away and spat.

At least the milk had ceased flowing.

Mama disapproved, hissing, “Onykyah! Rwitz!” as she smacked the back of Minnie’s head—a smack that felt like a medicine ball.

Minnie’s face and upper body crumpled into the crunchy, soaked floor. A giant digit slid beneath her chest and she was flipped like a ragdoll, the back of her head striking a solid object on the burrow’s side wall. Milk and sludge coated her face, bits of dead twig, spore, and foliage adhering. Mama brushed away the outer mess on Minnie’s cheeks and nose, finding little globs of the rejected goop, and guided it all back toward Minnie’s lips. She poked at Minnie’s sealed mouth with a single, dull-tipped claw—a thick, stubby rhinoceros horn jabbing against tender flesh, cutting lips on teeth—and Mama directed the substance back into Minnie’s bleeding mouth, bit by bit.

The Hynka jerked Minnie into the crook of an arm, reaching with the opposite hand into the soup of spilled milk and compost below. Minnie had evidently spat out a vital shot of nutrients. Mama’s determined bronze eyes shimmered in a dusty bar of sunlight as she brought a filthy thumbclaw to Minnie’s mouth, carefully peeled down Baby’s bloody lower lip, and pressed, sliding. A bitter cereal of kindling and mammary snot scraped across Minnie’s teeth and filled her cheek. She yelped as the claw slid too far, stretching her lips near to tearing. The thumb was withdrawn as Mama stared.