Tales From the Terran Republic

Chapter Stankworld 8, Freefall

The shuttle bug started to shudder slightly as it dipped into the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere.

As it started to feel the delightful sting of the air starting to tear at its skin, it took one final look at the planet’s surface before withdrawing its eyes and closing their thick protective eyelids.

As it started to feel the cleansing kiss of the wonderful heat burning away its old, itchy outer shell, it couldn’t help but giggle happily.

It loved this part.

***

GuruG was correct. Speech was no longer possible as the passenger chamber was filled with a shuddering, roaring sound and a dim red glow.

This was probably for the best because neither Alan nor Grace was feeling particularly talkative.

Alan sat impassively with his jaw tightly clenched, and Grace just sat there with huge eyes and tried not to flinch with each jolt that rocked the entirely too-thin walls behind her.

Alan unstuck one of his arms and placed it reassuringly on her shoulder, causing her to look over and smile hesitantly.

GuruG just happily sat there as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

Grace started to nervously sing a cheerful little tune about Valhalla…

***

Forever later, the roaring subsided a bit.

“Ah,” GuruG said cheerfully. “We are right on… oh.”

“Oh?!?” Grace yelped, “What, oh?”

The shuttle bug violently lurched. Causing Grace’s façade of calm to finally break.

“What the fuck was that?!?”

“Oh, nothing,” GuruG replied, “The shuttle bug just had to deploy its airfoils a little early, that’s all. There was a little misunderstanding involving our landing site. It’s not a big deal.”

There was another even more violent lurch, and the craft started to tumble.

“Aaaa!” Grace squealed as she clenched her eyes shut.

Alan calmly closed his eyes and silently prayed a little prayer to Azathoth, asking for it to welcome their souls should they fall (for real).

“The bug just lost a wing, that’s all!” GuruG exclaimed. “We…”

“That’s all?!?”

“It happens,” GuruG replied with a shrug of his protuberances. “It had to change course at the last moment, and the increased air resistance was a bit too much for its primary winglets. It says that we are ‘close enough’ to the right trajectory.”

“Close enough?!?”

“The planet’s big,” GuruG replied, “It’s not like we are going to miss it.”

“Missing it is NOT my concern at the moment!” Grace shouted over the noise.

“Good,” GuruG replied, “Because we are guaranteed to reach the surface. Don’t worry.”

“I (urp),” Alan said, “I don’t believe that reaching the surface is our concern. It is the manner of reaching it that has us a little disquieted.”

“We will hit pretty close to where we initially planned.”

“Could you please use a term other than ‘hit’?”

“Haha!” GuruG laughed, “Oh, is the centrifugal force from the spin causing you discomfort?”

“A bit, to be honest,” Alan said as calmly as he could manage, “We are experiencing forces a bit more than we are used to, but we are in no danger… from the spin, that is.”

“That’s a relief!” GuruG replied, “Because there isn’t anything we can do about it now. Don’t worry. When its airspeed drops a bit more, it can deploy the main wings, and we’ll level out.”

“Lovely…” Alan said with a raised eyebrow.

A few minutes later, GuruG’s prediction proved correct. There was a lurch followed by a different sort of tumble, and then the craft leveled out.

“Gotta love this guy!” GuruG enthused. “He was able to salvage that without using the emergency chutes. That saves us a lot of time.”

“So, what happened, anyway?”

“An ancestor abandoned cargo ship wasn’t paying attention,” GuruG replied, “and it wandered right into our splash point. Shuttle bug had to do a last-minute course correction, that’s all. We are going to have to land a bit farther out from the pier, but that’s fine.”

“Pier?”

“That’s where you tie off,” GuruG said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Don’t your ports have something similar?”

“Our seaports, sure,” Alan replied. “But not our starports.”

GuruG looked at him curiously.

“You use different ports?”

“You don’t?” Alan asked.

“No?” GuruG replied, a bit confused, “Why would we? Water is level (mostly) by nature. It’s a perfect landing strip… mostly… The shuttle bug is just going to glide onto its surface and come to a halt. We were going to do that in the harbor, but now we’re going to have to wait for a tugfish. Sorry for the delay.”

“A tug… Of course, you would have tugfish,” Alan smirked.

They glided in silence for a bit, only to jump when an especially violent jolt shook the cabin.

GuruG laughed.

“The look on your faces!” he exclaimed. “Is that alarm?”

“No,” Grace snarked, “I was just practicing my Kegels.”

“That was a sonic boom,” GuruG said calmly. “You are familiar with those.”

“We are,” Alan replied after yet another silent and eldritch prayer, “just not this intimately,” triggering another bout of laughter from GuruG.

“It should be smooth sailing the rest of the way,” he said.

“You just had to fucking say that, didn’t you?” Grace replied grimly.

***

GuruG’s prediction once again held true, at least for the moment. After that, the conditions in the cabin returned to some semblance of normalcy.

Grace fidgeted.

“Would it kill you to put some windows in this thing?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, it would,” GuruG replied as both he and the shuttle bug let forth a peal of laughter (thank the void for respirators). “We are now gliding toward our final destination. We should be splashing down in… roughly ten of your minutes… more or less.”

“More or less?” Alan asked.

“It comes down to the shuttle bug,” GuruG replied. “Its secondary wings are now fully extended, and it has a fair amount of control of our speed and rate of descent. It comes down to their preferences at this point.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

Alan, Grace, and GuruG sat in uncomfortable silence for a few moments.

“I couldn’t help but notice you vocalizing during our descent,” he said to Grace, desperate to break the silence, “What were you saying?”

“What?” Grace asked, a bit confused. “Oh! I was just singing. Sometimes I do that when I’m… um… bored.”

“And the descent was particularly ‘boring’,” Alan smirked.

“Really, you didn’t seem…” GuruG replied in confusion, “Oh! Minimizing one’s emotional distress! Very good! I get it! HA!”

Grace just gave GuruG a very human single-digit response.

GuruG looked at her curiously.

“It’s a nonverbal gesture that we sometimes use to communicate,” Grace said, “It means to go and fuck yourself.”

GuruG and the shuttle bug both shook with laughter.

“I love it!” GuruG howled as he extended one of his fingers in a similar fashion. “I can’t wait to use this!”

“You’re welcome,” Grace smirked.

“Now that you are less bored,” GuruG snickered, “Would you perhaps sing it again? I… we would love to hear it.”

“Sure,” Grace replied.

She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath.

Ships on vigor of the waves are skimming

Barren summits to the verdant plains

Each horizon is a new beginning

Rise and reign…

GuruG (and everyone else that was eavesdropping) listened with rapt fascination, including the bug who almost overshot his target.

Alan just smiled. Grace had such a beautiful voice.

Once she finished, the ship let out a little fart.

“And you sang that for comfort?” GuruG asked incredulously, once again accidentally translating for the shuttle bug.

“Yeah?” Grace replied, “My mom used to sing that to me when I couldn’t fall asleep.”

“You…” GuruG said carefully. “You do realize exactly how fucked up your Sames are, right?”

“Yup,” Grace grinned. “Never claimed otherwise.”

***

“We will be hitting the water in three… two…” GuruG said a few minutes later, “…ONE!”

There was a sharp deceleration and the unmistakable sound of water as the shuttle bug skipped along the surface like a stone across the pond, playfully catching the air to soar into the air briefly before slamming into the water again, even indulging in a barrel roll or two throwing Alan and Grace back and forth, upwards, and down. The glue-like substance holding them to the chamber’s walls strained, stretched, and even peeled slightly under the intense movement. “Do… Do they always land like that?” Grace asked as she willed her heart rate to get back under control.

“Only the good ones!” GuruG exclaimed happily as the shuttle bug let out a smug little toot.

They bobbed quietly in the water for a few minutes while GuruG made small talk.

“Oh, you are going to love… um… Where we’re going,” he enthused. “It doesn’t have a sound word for it. I guess its name translates roughly to ‘Where the river reaches the ocean’.”

He laughed.

“We aren’t terribly imaginative when it comes to naming things, I’m afraid… Oh, cool!”

His protuberances wiggled happily.

“We are in for a treat!” he exclaimed, “A baleen wants to meet you! It is approaching to take us on board!”

“A baleen?” Alan asked.

“An ancestor freighter!” GuruG exclaimed. “It is the natural end state of the great ships. It has become an ancestor that still sails the seas, carrying freight and relaying the will of the ancestors across the waves! It’s quite the honor!”

“We look forward to meeting it,” Alan replied.

***

About fifteen minutes later, something bumped the shuttle bug, which pitched forward, raised its butt into the air, and opened it, flooding the interior with bright sunlight.

“Are you capable of swimming?” GuruG asked.

“We are,” Alan replied, “It is universally taught among my people.”

“Well, that makes this easy, then,” GuruG replied cheerfully as he clambered out of the shuttle bug and disappeared with a splash.

“Of course,” Grace grumbled as she felt a dampness on her back as something dissolved the glue, “a fucking elder race, and we have to swim. Of course.”

“I thought you loved swimming,” Alan smirked as he pulled himself away from the shuttle bug’s colon, the glue pulling away in long gooey strands.

“In a pool,” Grace replied. “That’s the fucking ocean out there! There’s… stuff in it.”

She detached herself from the wall and started crawling towards the gaping opening.

“They are fucking with us,” she grumbled. “They have to be fucking with us again.”

As she reached the opening, she looked around with wide eyes.

“Woah.”

Floating nearby was a manatee/fish/insect the size of a large rowboat with a large wicker basket strapped to its back in which GuruG was already sitting…

And floating a short distance away was a massive being the size of an ancient cargo ship that appeared to be made of coral wrapped in copper sheet metal green with verdigris. A giant coral tower grew from the rear third of the vessel, and gigantic “trees” the size of redwoods grew from the deck, each sporting a cluster of truly massive sails.

Grace just crouched there, amazed, until a gentle poke to her backside snapped her out of it.

“Sorry,” she muttered, too stunned to be rude, and dove into the waves only for Alan to emerge and have exactly the same reaction.

As Alan finally recovered his senses and dove into the water, Grace reached the “manatee,” which obligingly rolled onto its side dipping one side of its basket into the water.

“Thanks!” Grace exclaimed as she clambered aboard to be joined by Alan a few moments later.

The manatee launch then rolled upright, the water draining through the wicker, and it started slowly swimming towards the massive baleen freighter.

Grace looked back at the shuttle bug and gasped. Its skin was burnt and peeling, falling away revealing battered and bloody blue-green meat underneath. Large membranous wings drooped, broken and torn into the waves, with another shredded wing floating nearby.

“Is he okay?” she asked.

“What?” GuruG asked, looking over at the bug. “Oh, he’s fine… aren’t you?” he called out.

The shuttle bug let out a happy little burble, waved its maneuver jets, and sank beneath the waves.

“The rest of his old skin is going to slough off, and it will spend a few months swimming around and goofing off and getting laid. After it grows a bit and gets bored, ie will come in close to shore near a port somewhere, its shell will harden, it will wash ashore, and get hauled back into space.” GuruG said. “We’ve already requested him, so it’ll come back to us… eventually.”

“How long will that take?” Alan asked as they approached the gigantic baleen ship.

“Who knows,” GuruG laughed. “It can be months. It can be years. It all depends on what he wants to do. However, that guy just loves to fly. He’ll probably be back soon and only half as big as he should be.”

“Huh,” Grace said.

As they approached the side of the ship, what appeared to be a crane made of wood and thick vines reached over the side and gently scooped up the launch, which wiggled happily as they were lifted to the stone-like coral deck of the massive ship. After they debarked, the crane then took the manatee launch over to one of several large pools on the deck and plopped it in.

Grace cautiously took off her respirator, and her eyes gleamed with delight.

“It doesn’t stink!”

Alan took off his respirator.

“It doesn’t,” he said in surprise.

“We’re in the open air,” GuruG laughed. “Even we don’t stink that bad. Come on. Let’s go meet the old man.”

He paused and wiggled his bits in amusement as Alan and Grace stared up at one of the massive “redwood sails,” which was indeed rooted in the deck exactly as a tree would.

“Do you mean that we actually have something you do not?” he said with satisfaction. “We do not need to use thrusters, or power plants, or power at all. Those giant leaves catch the wind and…”

“Look at the size of those sails!” Grace exclaimed as she rushed towards it. “They are massive!”

GuruG sighed. They had sail technology. Of course, they did.