1
Gruff
Humans are trouble.
The one I am watching is moving through my territory completely unaware. She is human, female, and of fertile age. A mane of red hair is braided and pinned to her head, but I see it flashing every time she moves her head, which she does a lot as she looks around to what to her is unfamiliar terrain.
She wears clothing over almost every inch of her body, the attire wrapped tightly around her feminine form. My gaze keeps dropping to the curve of her rear. That is a bottom made to be owned.
These thoughts are a travesty. Humans should be slain on sight. That is the law of our land.
“Strumpet!” she calls out in her strange human tongue. She makes this sound often.
Finally, a creature answers her cry. I see a small goat break out of the brush and come to be by her side. It is a female animal as well. It, too, moves with a certain naivety. Both of them are in immense danger. Neither one of them seems to notice. I watch as the little doe nibbles at leaves, just barely avoiding the poisonous plants that grow alongside the nutritious ones.
As for the human, she strides about the place with the sort of confidence reserved for the very young and the very simple. She appears to have decided to forage alongside her goat, picking berries and fungus from the forest seemingly at random. I watch as she very nearly puts a piece of terribly poisonous mushroom flesh into her mouth, only to trip over her goat and drop it. She loses interest at that point, and instead pulls a ration from her pocket. It smells sweet and rich even at a distance. It is not the only scent emanating from her. She smells like female. Like woman. Like sex. It is a smell that is being carried far and wide. I am sure I am not the only buck to catch the scent.
I am looking at two prime examples of invasive species, but I do not need to kill either one of them. The way they are going they will not last until the end of the day. Unless, of course, someone were to do something to save them.
Jem
Someone is watching me.
The hair on the back of my neck stands erect as the eerie sensation of being seen flows through me, an ancient instinct still yet to be explained by science. The sensation is extra creepy because I am supposed to be alone on this planet. If I am being watched, it can only be by something with predatory intent.
An alien world is unfolding at my feet, twin suns burning off misty green fog to reveal a mountain jungle of unimaginable beauty. This world is wild, and I must be wild to survive it. For the next five years I will live here completely alone. I am a member of Earth’s extraterrestrial services. EET, and it is my mission to explore, investigate, and document every inch of this remarkable world.
Meheheheh.
“Fuck!”
I almost jump out of my skin. I keep forgetting she’s there. Strumpet lets out a little goaty laugh and nibbles at the strap of my pack for good measure.
“Quit it,” I say, waving my hand toward the pest.
She does not quit it. She ignores me, as she has been doing since we met, more or less. I look down at her, into her sweet golden eyes and I speak words of censure and judgement.
“You’re a brat.”
“Hehehehe,”she says, her mouth full of strap. She does not care about my opinions of her actions. I do not know if she is capable of caring about anybody’s opinions of her actions. It’s one of the many things I like about her.
Strumpet is a specially trained support animal. Well, of sorts. She’s not your traditional support animal. She’s a goat, for starters, and not a particularly large one. She comes up just above my knee and has a habit of screaming loudly at inopportune times. I’ve come to rationalize her presence by telling myself that she’s just as good as any dog, with the added benefit of being able to survive on almost anything.
Strumpet is mostly white in color, which means she has no camouflage properties whatsoever on this mostly verdant planet. Greens are mostly the order of the day. There are plenty of flowers of various colors, but nothing white. No snow against which she might blend. Even the rocks have a rough green lichen covering for the most part. Strumpet sticks out like a sore thumb, and I suppose I do too, given my uniform is also white apart from the black EET logo on the left chest.
“Stop nibbling me and come on,” I tell her. “We need a new campsite.”
“Ehememeh,”she says. She does not understand a word I say, but she does understand tone.
I have been on this planet a very short time. Deployed in a small capsule, I floated down to a specified landing spot with Strumpet strapped in beside me. We watched the planet come rushing up toward us, and together we set up the geodesic dome designed to give us protection and shelter for the first thirty days or so.
This is a reconnaissance mission to see where I’m going to set up my proper base. The forests of Capricorn are dense enough that the probes we’ve flown by on previous missions haven’t caught much in the way of anything. It’s considered to be a wild planet, uninhabited by intelligent life. I’m not expecting to have any good conversations any time soon, though Strumpet does make a decent listener, especially when she sits with her little legs tucked beneath her and chews her cud. She can be quiet a lot of the time, but when she’s hungry, or bored, or lonely, she makes a sound like a startled foghorn.
She does this as we are walking over a precarious log perched over a rushing river. I have taken the lead, and Strumpet is behind me. She is more agile than I am. I have to be careful and focus on every step I take. One slip here and I might die.
MAHAHAHA!
Strumpet shrieks suddenly, scaring the absolute hell out of me. I screech, lose my footing, and start tumbling into the rocky rapids in the ultra slow motion way you do when something very, very bad is happening. I know if I hit this water, I’m gone. It’s moving very fast, and the undertows are obvious. Everything I’ve ever seen fall into this river disappears within seconds and eventually washes up, bloated and unrecognizable on a sandy beach a few miles away. My brain has time to consider the horror of my end at leisure as I tip and fall, fall, my hands grasping at objects in the periphery of my vision.