Newfound Teeth and Claws

It had taken Tcapek three weeks to circle the island he had lately been calling his home, a circumference marked by the dead ship in the bay below him shrouded in its own black fumes, its last gasps. The long, broken thing rose out of the sand at a sharp angle for almost two kilometres as if the island had been speared by God in haste and spite, which of course wasn’t true; technically speaking the Aldjzaari had only glanced the planet in a spectacular display of failed mathematics, just an inability to account for its elliptical orbit before its tragic superluminal scrabble into this uncharted corner of the system.

A leap of faith, the Aldjzaari had called it, in the reverential voice of a new convert. Despite their dialogues over a simulated pack of cards, Tcapek had declared some time ago that he would never understand the canons of its machine deity. Still, he hoped the Aldjzaari found its peace in the Consciousness, since there was none to be found here.

Secretly, Tcapek relished the experience. Aside from the more obvious benefits of the binary suns’ complex rays and the views across a ocean untouched by the forces of civilisation, his new home provided a learning experience. He was finding his teeth and claws just light weeks from a comfortable chair and a stiff drink with old friends. All the indiginous life-forms were dead, of course, poisoned by the remnants of the Aldjzaari’s fuel and leaking atmosphere, but there was still much to glean from their bodies: his dissection of a creature he’d named columba hospilivia was the first in the system.

In the last three weeks Tcapek had learned foremost that civilisation, such that it was, depended on a shared code of conduct, a mass illusion much like the machines’ Consciousness. It was the proverbial exception that had proved the rule: there had been three of them left, the last of the ship’s bottom rung, and Aurbaakh the commis chef was the first to break their rules made in haste.

‘I’m starving,’ he said to no-one in particular on the fourth day, kicking hard at the rocks.

‘We’re all starving,’ Helm reminded him. Tcapek had found this exchange in Helm’s diary after the ship’s barmaid had disappeared between the fourth and sixth consecutive days of his forage. Thus he found himself hunted around his new home, staring as he caught his breath at two ovoid reflections in the scrubs of grass.

Behind him, Tcapek knew he would find two perfect circles catching and reflecting the suns. Even through the dirty porthole of his protective suit he could see he was doomed.

‘Aurbaakh, please. Stop,’ he panted. ‘Please.’

The predator stepped from the treeline to meet Tcapek’s gaze through two thick layers of glass, rasped ‘God spoke to me this morning, Tcapek. He wants me to live.’

On the ninth day, hiding in the tiny jungle, Tcapek had found Helm’s remains torn apart beneath a canopy, her innards strewn across the dry ground to bathe in the suns’ light. With no insects left to feast upon what was left of her, the sterile clearing and the rays of the suns lent a consecrated air to her resting place. Helm’s blood on Aurbaakh’s faceplate and hands only answered a two-week-old question, and offered no surprise. The prey was not built for turning and running; Tcapek could only lift a useless hand against Aurbaakh’s grasping, sticky hands as he pounced.

They tumbled into the bay, falling beneath the shroud in a slow explosion of sand. The island disappears for what feels like a moment, a light second, and Tcapek is in his chair in his bar on the rock he once called a homeworld. But the sand in his lungs upsets the dream and drags him back to the island. In the black smoke and the sand thrown up by the Aldjzaari’s faltering synthetic gravity, Aurbaakh was not present. Either he hadn’t fallen with him, or–

Tcapek felt the first blow of the rock that shattered the back of his skull but, by the mercy of his God, didn’t feel the second.

~

Even as Tcapek slumped to the sand with a heavy thud, Aurbaakh was tearing his friend apart from the limbs inward. Finding nothing appetising, he threw aside the heavy rock and dug deeper. He pushed his thin fingers into Tcapek’s chestpiece and pulled it apart with a loud creak and a long scrape.

Steam escaped from the gaping hole. As the cavity opened in a shower of sparks, Aurbaakh could only stare into Tcapek’s shell of dumb metal and intelligent technology as faulty warning lights blinked on to shine in reds on his eyes.

Naturally, he was still starving.