Chapter 9: 9. Dine and Dash

Malik stared down at the flying-dinosaur-snake-thing’s corpse with a thunderous scowl dragging down the corner of his lips. Without looking away from the creature sprawled across the floor, he set his rifle to the side and snatched a hold of the underclothes that dangled from the back of one of the crash couches. He was still wet from fishing the winged pest out of the ocean, but he didn’t bother waiting to step into the shorts. Recent history had taught him that the local wildlife may, or may not, wait for him to be presentable before they invaded his floating fortress.

I need to come up with a name for you, he thought as he tugged the black bottoms of his undergarment into place. He hadn’t intended to get caught up in a life-or-death struggle while in the nude, but, he supposed, such is life on an unexplored planet. He didn’t bother with his shirt, or his skinsuit, but there was something comforting about having his unmentionables covered, even if the thin synthetic material would provide precious little by way of protection.

“From now on, you and your scaly friends will be coatls,” Malik said with a mocking air of gravitas. He could only assume that the headless corpse’s lack of a reply was a kind of silent agreement. Quite magnanimous of it considering their initial introduction had been less than cordial. “If I remember my mythology right, they were depicted with feathered wings. Which you obviously don’t have. That’s fine though. Feathers are overrated.”

Now that the coatl had a proper name, and he was minimally dressed, Malik smoothly dropped into a crouch beside the dead beast. It certainly looked less menacing now than it had when it tried to eat his face. There was something about the way it’s mangled neck lolled over the edge of the hatch, leaking blood into the lazily roiling water, that made the coatl seem less threatening. That didn’t make him any less apprehensive when he reached out to drag a fingertip against the supple aquamarine scales covering its serpentine body.

Is this where I contract some sort of horrible brain rot? I would hate to travel across interstellar space just to die from this planet’s version of leprosy. I guess I just have to hope that my immune system is up to the task. My rations aren’t going to last forever. Sooner or later one of these bad boys is going to end up in my belly. May as well see how that goes before I’m delirious and malnourished.

Malik quickly glanced toward the hatch to gauge how much daylight he still had to work with. The foreign star blazed at the edge of the horizon, not so different from the sun he’d left behind a lifetime ago. In a matter of minutes darkness would descend across the ocean, snuffing out the fabulous fuschia and marvelous magenta colors cast across the dusky sky. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to engineer an impromptu cook-out in the dark. He also balked at the idea of sharing his tiny living space with a comparatively large alien corpse. Malik had carefully draped the shredded end of its neck over the edge of the hatch so that the coatl’s blood drained into the ocean, but that was only a temporary solution to the long term problem of the thing simply rotting in the middle of his floor.

If I’m going to cook this thing, it needs to be done soon. Guess I need to start by making sure most of the blood has been drained.

Malik’s blue eyes glimmered in the waning light as he looked down at the dead coatl. His ivory teeth absently worried at his lower lip while studying its unfamiliar form. Fully unfurled, the coatl’s wings looked to measure two meters from tip to tip. It’s serpentine body was thick in the center where its wings joined its back. Opposite it’s wings, two legs ended in raptorial claws, each with four wickedly curved talons, left little to the imagination as to how the coatl acquired it’s prey. Below the short legs, the body tapered down to a narrow tail that ended in a wide fan, or sail, that resembled the flesh of its leathery wings. As he regarded the dead interloper, Malik found himself wishing he hadn’t vaporized its head so he could see if his impression of the creature being eyeless had been correct.

After wasting a few more minutes examining the coatl’s claws and scales, he was forced to admit to himself that he was trying to avoid carving the creature into filets. Academically, he’d known there was life present on this new planet. He’d both witnessed indigenous life and seen the evidence of an active food chain. However, the result of his first encounter with his new neighbors presented a philosophical conundrum. He wasn’t so naive as to think he, and by extension his people, could immediately coexist with the native species, but neither had he truly been prepared to go to war against this new world.

It did try to snack on my nose. I’m not sorry about how things ended, but what if it was someone’s pet? I guess it is kind of cute in a prehistoric kind of way. As long as you look past the gnarly shark teeth and the thirst for human blood. More realistically, what if the coatls operate in flocks or packs? Hundreds of his buddies could be on their way right now to take revenge. The bottom line is I simply don’t know enough to make informed decisions. Until I get a better grasp of the situation, I should focus more on de-escalation than world domination.

Probably should have considered all that before I vaporized it’s head. Well, a man’s got to eat and I can’t moralize my place in the universe if I starve to death. Guess it’s time to put coatl steaks on the menu.

Yuck, Malik thought as his nose crinkled.

Despite his inner acceptance, Chief Rosen continued to procrastinate like a teenager avoiding a math assignment.

 

“I don’t want to spread blood and guts all over my pod!,” Malik whined to the noncommittal corpse. “I don’t even know if it's edible. I could, literally, be going out of my way to poison myself.” Malik could list a dozen animals off the top of his head that he knew were poisonous to consume. They were uncommon on Earth, but for all he knew everything on this planet would kill him if he ate it.

With another groan, Malik used the heels of his hand to rub his eyes. He could die of eating poisonous meat, that was certainly true. However, his rations wouldn’t last forever and he would definitely die of starvation if he didn’t acquire an alternate food source before they ran out. In the end, the reality of the situation made his choice for him.

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With his decision made, Mal’s chest heaved as he took a deep breath to expel his lingering doubts. But before he could begin ‘Operation Coatl Cuisine,’ a spray of water splattered across the inside of the pod as if a tiny typhoon had suddenly swept through the open hatch. Doused from head to toe, Mal’s head snapped up to see what was causing the commotion outside.

The Chief’s suddenly slack jaw parted his lips in a soundless ‘O’ of alarm when he saw two slitted eyes, the size of golf balls, staring back at him from just above the waterline.

Malik may have just finished an inner dialogue on the value of coexistence, but there was no slowing the reflexes he’d meticulously honed over the course of decades. Without looking away from the uninvited guest staring at him, Malik’s hand blurred through the air to wrap its fingers around the barrel of his EM rifle. In a moment ripe with déjà vu, he found himself sighting down the length of the weapon while the low hum of it’s capacitors filled the lifepod. In seconds the pod was filled with a sound like the buzzing drone of an angry bee.

“Hey there, buddy,” Malik said quietly while the motionless barrel of his rifle pointed at a spot of knobby flesh between the creature’s amber eyes. “I sure hope you’re more polite than the last fella that stopped by.” In the waning daylight, Malik couldn’t see any sign of the beast beside a glimpse of coarse flesh the color of peat moss. The mystery of what lay beneath the surface of the water made every movement of the restless sea seem like the harbinger of an assault.

When the parallel capacitors finished charging, silence descended upon the lifepod save for the steady slosh of uncaring waves.

“Would you believe that I come in peace?,” Malik tried, his voice as soothing and non-aggressive as he could make it. While he spoke, the business end of his rifle never shifted more than a centimeter. “I don’t know what happened to the coatl on the floor. He was like that when I found him.”

The amber eyes blinked at him the way a cat might show surprise at a particularly brazen mouse. Then the eyes were gone, vanishing beneath the waves with the silence of a ghost returning to its tomb. Heartbeats passed, sending his pulse pounding anxiously in his ears as he methodically swept the barrel of his rifle from side-to-side.

After a half dozen sweeps, and no sign of his new friend, Mal released an explosive sigh of relief.

Well that went bett…

His thoughts ground to a halt as he watched the largest alligator snout he’d ever seen break the surface of the water directly in front of the hatch. His rifle snapped down as his finger tightened on the trigger. Since only the very tip of the creature’s maw was above the waves, Malik struggled to line up a shot as its jaws opened to expose countless curved teeth lining a pink mouth.

He realized the thief’s plan far too late.

“Hey!,” Malik barked, just as the sea monster’s teeth sank into the coatl’s limp neck. In the blink of an eye, the winged snake was tugged through the open hatch and out into the ocean where it hit the water with a muted splash. It immediately vanished beneath the surface, leaving behind nothing more than a few ripples that rapidly became lost in the rolling waves.

Thunderstruck, Mal did the only thing that he could think of.

“That’s fine!,” he called out as he lowered his rifle from his shoulder. “Help yourself, pal. I didn’t want to eat it anyway.”

Honesty, after all, was an important building block in any new relationship.

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