“I’m not a brat.”
“Yes, you are. Of course you are. A good, sensible girl would never have met my gaze. Would never have spoken to me. Would never have agreed to leave her planet. That’s right, pet,” he reminded her, tapping her gently on the nose with his forefinger. “You agreed to this.”
“I didn’t understand what was happening.”
“People rarely do,” he said dismissively. “We are landing, pet. Ready yourself for a new world.”
She was absolutely not ready for a new world. She wanted her old world. Her shitty little apartment which cost too much and had to be shared with three others. They’d report her missing, probably. But nobody would ever find her. She’d become a mystery. Another face in a long series of faces forever gone from their loved ones.
“What about my family?”
“What about your family?” Dominax asked the question with casual interest, as if he didn’t understand what she was trying to get at.
“They’ll miss me.”
“Will they?”
The answer was actually no, but she didn’t want to say that. She had never known her father, and her mother was an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane. That sounded a lot more interesting than it really was.
“No. But still.”
“Why won’t they miss you?”
She wished she hadn’t brought them up. “Because my father doesn’t care if I exist, and my mother thinks the CIA is watching her with spy birds.”
“They could be.”
“I know,” Katie sighed. “But it doesn’t give her a lot of time for being a mom. Especially not after the incident.”
“There was an incident?”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Well, let’s not talk about it, then,” Dominax said evenly.
“What is this place called, anyway?” Katie changed the subject with a question.
“In our tongue, it is Homeworld.”
“Which brings me to my next question. How are you speaking English?”
He looked at her and smiled enigmatically. Apparently, that was all the explanation she was going to get.
A heavy CLUNK heralded their arrival. In all the arguing, they’d completely missed the bumps and judders of re-entry. She had travelled across space and time. And she’d done it buck ass naked.
“We’re here?”
“We are here,” he said. “Come, you must be curious.”
She was curious. She thought about being afraid, but fear was something calibrated to the human experience. She could be afraid of losing her job, or maybe afraid of snakes or spiders. But it had never occurred to her to be afraid of a new planet of flying aliens. Her DNA and ancestral memories were completely useless in facing this challenge.
Dominax took her by the hand and led her from the contained space she had woken up in, down a series of metallic halls and then out into a bright dawn blasting through an opening in the ship’s side, where the gangway had been extended down onto a rocky red surface riddled with cracks.
A blazing blood-red sun cast its glow over the terrain, which was as desolate as it was impressive.
“You are the first human to ever see Homeworld,” Dominax said, his hand moving from hers to the back of her neck. “This is a great honor. I hope you can enjoy it rather than spending your time in petty attempts at rebellion.”
The sight completely took her breath away. It wasn’t that this world was beautiful. It wasn’t beautiful. It was terrifyingly, awe-inspiringly spectacular. As far as the eye could see, there were great mountains which rose to plateaus of various sizes, none of them bigger than Manhattan that she could see. Every one of them had sheer cliffs many hundreds of feet tall leading down to…
Suddenly, the king’s wings made sense. Only creatures capable of flight could survive on a world such as this one. At the base of every island was an ocean, not of water, but of what looked like lava. It bubbled and moved with viscous intensity and there was a constant dry heat which strongly suggested that everything was pretty much on fire all the time.
This was a world of reverse volcanoes. All the lava lay outside the mountainous landmasses, and all existence had to take place atop those relatively narrow precipices. Here and there, some were joined with land bridges, but even at a distance, Katie could see how they crumbled. Before her very eyes, one such a structure began to puff dust into the air before sliding unceremoniously into the boiling lava below.
They’d never have a problem with waste disposal, she thought to herself. You could throw things into a lava ocean and not worry about them until the end of time. That made her wonder why humans had never just tried throwing all their rubbish into volcanoes rather than into the sea. Transportation costs, probably.
“Stay away from the edges,” Dominax said, hooking a finger into her collar and drawing her back from the verge of the cliff where she was drawn like a moth to a flame.
“We can fly, but you will only fall.”
“I’m familiar with gravity… OW!”
She complained as his palm met her ass with a firm swat, swung away, and then returned again to sting her terribly.
“That is enough of the attitude, pet,” Dominax cautioned her. “This world is far more dangerous than the one you left. That collar you railed against is the very least of your concerns here, where only the winged may move safely. You will be confined here, at Royal Rock. There is a space of ten of your Earth hectares here. It is quite expansive, though one of those hectares is occupied by the palace, as you can see.” He gestured toward the massive fucking palace which rose from the rocks in an impressive fashion.
Being from New York, Katie was used to really big buildings sitting around attempting to be impressive. She hadn’t bothered to pay attention to the palace at first, distracted by the strange and wondrous nature of the world at large. But, now she looked properly, she had to admit that it was much more impressive than even the most impressive of human buildings, or at least, the ones she had seen. It reminded her of something exotic and perhaps ancient, ornately carved from a mountain, the beast of a place was as large as an entire city block. It looked solid and foreboding, but also intricate. There was a lot of the building outside the building, walkways and parapets, and big sweeping paths which looked just about steep enough to slide down on one of the trays from work… In some respects, it looked like a palace with bits of its insides sticking out.
It must have taken the work of many great artists to achieve the effects she was seeing, even at a distance it was obvious that every inch of the palace was carved with ornate designs. Being able to fly probably made that a lot easier.
“It is said one can stare at Royal Rock from sunrise to sunset every day for an entire solar cycle and still not observe every detail,” Dominax said proudly. “Generations have put their marks on the place. This is more than a building. This is living history.”
“Pretty cool, I guess,” Katie said.
“You guess,” Dominax replied with dark humor. “Because you’re not certain you are in the presence of a work of art greater than any still in existence on your own planet?”
“I mean, I think we have rock houses there too…”