“NO!” Another brute has appeared, even bigger and angrier than the one who dragged me out of my crashed ship by the hair.
“MINE!” the first troll roars.
“MINE!” the second troll roars back.
What they lack in sparkling conversation they make up for in sheer brutality. I am left on the ground as they begin to battle, shaking the ground with the ferocity of their stomping. They don’t have claws on their fingers, but they know how to use those teeth. They rip into each other with no regard for their personal safety, tearing off large chunks of flesh and bits of scale. They are naturally armored, but the armor does not do much in the way of anything to protect them from one another. Their fangs are too long, their teeth too sharp, their ferocity too insane to stop them when it would make sense to stop. There are bits of flesh and blood absolutely everywhere. It’s raining alien.
I take the opportunity to wriggle slash crawl away into some bushes and just keep going, putting as much distance as I can between me and them. The fight seems to be increasing in intensity if their shrieks and calls are anything to go by.
A sharp rock provides a surface on which I can start to free myself, sawing my bonds across it until they loosen and I get my limbs free.
Please, god, please, let the Authority come rescue me. I have to hope that they can extrapolate my trajectory based on the last information sent back by my computer. I have to hope that these aliens will fight each another long enough to forget about me and lose my scent.
It’s important to put as much distance as I can between myself and the crash site. My suit has limited life support capacity. There are rations secreted in the pockets. I could pretend that’s Authority standard practice, but it’s really my personal SOP. There’s also a small energy weapon, which I didn’t have a chance to use because they found me while I was still unconscious after connecting with the ground more aggressively than I planned.
For now, I crouch in the bush. I don’t know where to head next. That’s the thing about being on an alien planet outside charted territory. My best chance of being rescued is if I stay near the wreckage.
Cowering passes the time very slowly indeed. Every minute feels like an hour. I am terrified that I am going to sneeze or make some other involuntary physical sound or smell. The last thing I ate was freeze-dried macaroni and cheese, and both of those ingredients are performing an elegant, striking, ten-out-of-ten flamenco in my gut. This is what the body does when it goes into survival mode. It gets messy, embarrassing, and very uncomfortable.
The bushes nearby rustle suddenly. I freeze. This is how it all ends. Something in the wilderness is going to claim me. If the troll aliens are the sentient species on this planet, and they are equipped with such violent physical capabilities, I can only imagine how wild the truly wild animals are.
“Human? Human! I see you, human.” The voice which speaks is a great deal more calm and refined than the grunting animals who are now wearing the seat covers as trophies. That doesn’t mean I want to interact with this new voice either.
“No, you don’t.”
Sometimes refuting things will throw someone off.
“Yes. I do. Come out of there.”
This alien speaks human much more smoothly than the others. They grunt words here and there; he speaks it fluently. That might mean he’s accustomed to traveling and perhaps trading with us. He might be an ally. He might be safe.
I peer out and look at him. He does not look like the trolls. He also doesn’t look what you’d call safe. He is green, but that’s about where the similarity ends. He has a very powerful but narrowed jaw, like the famed detective Humperflink Bendersnatch. His eyes are bright purple and narrow, giving him the look of someone you’d be foolish to trust. His hair is dark and rough-swept back from his forehead in a way I can only describe as… stylish?
He is wearing a leather harness across his muscular green chest. I’m surprised he doesn’t have more clothing on his upper body but I’m not mad that he doesn’t. The lower part of his body is covered in black shimmering material which clings tightly to his musculature. In the midst of chaos and terror, being rescued by a big, green, hardly-clad alien is something of a dream come true. This is best case scenario in a very worst-case scenario.
“They’re like animals,” I tell him. “I mean, they’re… they are not friendly.”
“Indeed. We should leave. Your scent is rich and they will soon find it again. I will not be able to stop them from taking you without a mass slaughter, and that is strongly disapproved of these days. Come.”