SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

I checked the charge on my rifle. I’d come prepared to defend myself, but not so armed as to cause alarm among the Jötnar. As it was, I wasn’t sure I’d have enough to carry me through, tough as the Jötnar were.

My HUD filtered through the gloom. This area’s ruins were denser, and the HUD seemed to be having a hard time pinging through the stone, metal, and ice. Even the heat sensors couldn’t pinpoint Sjórisar’s location. So I went a short way in and stopped at the first wide clearing I could find. I built snow and rubble walls around me—and I hid. I needed an advantage, and maybe the surprise would be enough.

I waited.

Eventually Sjórisar appeared, scanning just past me. I sighted her in, and as she turned, I fired.

She lashed me with her tail, demolishing my shelter.

The scale I had hit—above her brow—was still intact. I turned up the setting on the rifle as I rolled to avoid a second blow from her tail. She used it like a whip, to cut my legs out, to force me to the ground where she could crush me.

I fired twice more. The first went wide. The second caught her primary arm, where the scaling was thinner, and I could smell the fat frying underneath the plating. “Bloodied insect stamens,” Sjórisar muttered.

I glanced at my rifle charge: half gone already, and I only had one cartridge to replace it with, plus another in the demolished shelter, and then the reserve charge on my pistol.

Sjórisar swiveled around, and I threw myself back to stay away from her tail. It grazed my shoulder with the force of an avalanche, but I managed to keep hold of the gun. I fired again, lining several shots up along her nearly twenty feet of bulk.

She squealed as the shots tore into her, cauterizing flesh and heating her scales until they glowed. But still she came.

Her tail swept my leg, and my ankle twisted and popped. I went sprawling, and she loomed over me, readying for the kill.

I turned my gun to maximum charge. Whittling away at her torso wasn’t going to work. I needed to end this. I fired one more shot—clear through her head. The moon peered at me from the hole as she tipped forward.

I realized, too late, that she was going to fall on top of me, or at least on top of my legs. I scrambled backward, but not fast enough. I screamed as she collapsed onto my knee.

When I managed to wiggle out from under Sjórisar’s corpse, I made an unpleasant discovery. The edges of her scales had been sharpened to razors. My suit was damaged, and there were a number of cuts across my legs and shoulder. I couldn’t tell how much blood I’d lost.

One of my legs wouldn’t hold my weight. I forced myself to probe the wounds, and I nearly fainted when my finger brushed my shoulder bone.

When the spots cleared from my vision, I brought my hand to my hurt leg. My finger sank into the wound mid-knuckle, and I had no doubt that some of the muscle had torn.

I fought for the tube of first aid goo in the suit, to staunch the bleeding, but at least one of the lines used to administer it had been cut, and even when I cleared the blockage, it wouldn’t push out.

Frozen.

Shouldn’t someone have fixed that shit before plopping me on a subzero planet?

Fuck.

I used Sjórisar’s corpse to get me off the ground and steadied. I measured her arm from the gunshot down. It was about the right length for a crutch. I tried to pry it loose, to no avail.

I decided to use one of my precious remaining shots on the weak spot. If I died here it wouldn’t matter if I’d saved it for later. The cold was already biting me hard, and I had no spare fabric to bandage myself.

Using the severed arm as a makeshift crutch, I forced myself back toward the entrance, but it was slow going, and the Jötnar met me before I’d even left the immediate area. Ivy gathered me into her arms, all four of them, but Bergrisar pushed past to Sjórisar, shrilling her grief in a voice sharp enough to make my HUD warn me of the potential for cochlear damage.

Ivy nodded. “Let her mourn in peace.” She carried me back to her shelter.

She clucked sadly as she laid me out on the floor and examined my wounds. “You’re lucky.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How so?”

“In ancient times, she would have eaten fungus for a month to make her blood poisonous, and then dipped her scales in her droppings, to ensure you died of infection.”

I chuckled. “I’m lucky, then.”

“She was not ready to fight you. We all knew it.”

I remembered the tension in Bergrisar’s face. “Was that Bergrisar’s objection?”

“Yes. She just couldn’t admit it.”

I wanted to ask how Ivy knew, but I let the thought go as she helped me out of my suit, and the chill got ten times worse despite the fire.

“We cannot have fabric in your wounds. I will warm you once they’re bandaged.”

For a moment I pictured Drew in this situation, and people teasing him for getting caught with his pants down with yet another alien species. But then Ivy bent over my leg, pressing flesh into place around a brownish paste, and sealed it with a long, rubbery synthetic fabric.

Though she was being gentle, the spots returned to my vision, and this time I didn’t fight unconsciousness.

I woke up in a moment of suffocated panic. The world was dark, and Ivy’s smell surrounded me, much more so than it ever had before. Tender flesh pulsed against my face, accompanied by a thunderous gurgling that unnerved me. I wiggled and probed, trying to understand what surrounded me.

Supple flesh on one side, the underside of crystalline, rounded plates on the other.

My face felt sticky—likely secretions to keep the plates from grinding on each other. It brought to mind suffocating during sex.

But something about that smell…It was so far from human, but the nuance of its spice pushed into my brain in a way no woman’s perfume ever had.

Ivy’s fingers, their plates rolled back, stroked through my hair, and the gesture calmed me. I realized the gurgling was circulation—her heartbeat.

I tried to remember feeling so completely protected and cared for, but nothing compared. I tried to imagine leaving her cocoon’s embrace, and couldn’t.

I lost track of the days I spent suspended inside Ivy’s shell. She had to help me to the bucket that collected our wastes for the Jötnars’ farming.

Her body formed around me as though I had always belonged there—some places loosening, others tightening, to take as much pressure off of me as possible. And strangely, surrounding myself in her soft, fragile flesh felt natural, like lying on a waterbed or floating in a pool. When her heartbeat surrounded me, pushed against my face as I rested, it pushed thoughts of the Nexus , even Louise, out of my head.

I wondered what my crew’s reaction would be if I gave up on the treaty and just stayed with the Jötnar. Perhaps in time the Jötnar would need my help, or our technology, to relocate to a more hospitable home, like the initial report had speculated.

But having known them, I didn’t see them doing that. Surviving their brutal ice age was part of their identity. How could they create lenses without winter-long fires?

I didn’t believe they could rewrite themselves. But I wondered if I might rewrite me .

Days bled together, until at last I could stand again.

I had to speak to Bergrisar, find out how this situation was going to play out.

When Ivy released me, her scales slid away from me, allowing me to pass through the cracks. I feel barely an inch onto my mossy pallet, and I prepared myself for an unpleasant conversation.

“Is Bergrisar still mourning? How many contenders are left?”