Identity Crisis
The Adventures of Seeker and the Serpents, Chapter Five
This is the fifth chapter of my serial sci-fi adventure story, The Adventures of Seeker and the Serpents. The story picks up where my novella SEEKER leaves off. It should read well as a stand-alone story, but you can get a free copy of SEEKER by subscribing to my mailing list! (You’ll get a link in the welcome mail.)
Start with Chapter One: Déjà Vu Dinner
Go back to Chapter Four: Into the Crucible
The sickly-sweet scent of public transportation filled Opie’s nose along with the sense of journeys he’d never taken. He and Harja were aboard a largely empty common shuttle, on their way to a ship that would carry them to Impha III—the home of the Crucible.
The common shuttle’s stabilizers were on the fritz. The little craft wobbled unsteadily and Opie worried he would be sick. He often got queasy all the way down to his paws before space travel, but today he trembled uncontrollably, burning the last drops of energy in his exhausted body. He hadn’t slept. His brain had been running overtime all night, trying to reconcile the horrible contradiction that a successful mission meant he wouldn’t see Harja anymore.
Some prize, he thought now. As the shuttle rumbled and pressed Opie gently against one side of the craft, he shot a glance at Harja. She was strapped into a passenger chair, looking especially sad and small in the equipment made for humans.
Opie looked down at his paws. They were a little off-white. He hadn’t felt like grooming himself. Over the last few hours, his subconscious and the HUD had processed the map of the Crucible, its rules, and what the top secret government databases had to say about it all. It had slowly dawned on Opie just what they were about to face.
He wasn’t looking forward to it.
He allowed himself one horrible thought: Should I throw the mission? Under normal circumstances, Opie would have felt immediate shame at such an idea even occurring to him. But all of his probability features, every bit of computing power his HUD offered, were no help when it came to matters of the heart—and that meant he had no clue how to proceed.
The common shuttle slowed as it swooped closer to the spaceport, mercifully leveling out to dock. The floor trembled again as the shuttle’s landing equipment connected to the grimy tunnel they would take into the spaceport.
Opie’s ears popped as the pressure adjusted. Harja knuckled her ears furiously; she caught Opie’s eye and managed a small, weak smile.
Opie knew in that instance he would do everything in his power to keep both of them safe and alive. Harja needed his help, and he was a good boy.
Air hissed as the temporary doors on both the spaceport and the shuttle slid open. Harja dropped off her chair and shouldered her rucksack, holding the straps against her chest in a visible act of self-protection. “Let’s go, O.”
Opie nosed at his seatbelt and it disengaged, sliding away into the wall. He dropped down out of the chair on half-numb paws and followed Harja down the landing tunnel and into the spaceport.
Screams, loud voices, and bright advertisements greeted them. Following signs for their gate of departure, Opie and Harja navigated a thick crowd and rounded a sharp corner into a narrow hallway.
A familiar figure hunched in their path.
“Where the hells do you think you’re going?” the figure—Dax—demanded. He was scratched up, as if someone had clawed his face and arms. His forehead crunched in anger… but he was alive.
“Dax! You’re okay!” Opie whined in unfettered delight. He bounded towards Dax, licking the Shihari on the cheek. “We were so worried about you.”
Dax shoved Opie. “Get away from me.”
Opie stumbled under Dax’s strength. The muscles in his left leg twinged as they took his full weight without warning. He recovered his balance, favoring his paw.
Dax’s gaze never left Harja. He stomped towards her, towering over the smaller female Shihari, staring her down.
Harja backed her ears, but she didn’t move. “What, Dax? This isn’t about you and you should know that.”
“Do you understand the medical realities of carrying on an imphus line?” Dax shouted so forcefully that he spat. “You are a mammal! That is a bird!”
Harja didn’t flinch. “I trust they have doctors who have done things like this before,” she responded in a calm, low voice that Opie envied. “They told me about plenty of humans who’ve been in love with imphi.”
“And you believe them?” Dax snarled venomously. Opie’s nostrils stung with Dax’s fear-stink.
“Yes! I assume they’re not lying to me. Why would they?” Gently, Harja let her rucksack slide down onto the floor, and she spread her paws out in front of her. “It doesn’t benefit them to kill me before I’ve even done anything to them. It’s going to be worth my while, Dax… and I’m going to survive. That’s what I have to believe.”
Harja looked so fragile as she spoke that Opie’s mind immediately leapt to all of the Crucible rules about immense physical challenges. He shuddered with fear as his HUD flooded his brain with clips of current events as potential comparisons. Over and over, small beings were beaten down by objects much larger than they were.
Opie willed his HUD to stop.
Dax formed one hand into a fist and punched it into the other palm. “And what about the cultural differences, huh? You will never be seen as one of them. You don’t have feathers, you have fur. You don’t have a beak, you have a muzzle.” He took Harja in with a single, dismissive sweep of his hand.
Harja tossed her head lightly and looked up at Dax with a smirk. “I don’t have wings, I have paws. Do you get it? I don’t care about that.”
Dax leaned forward, baring his teeth. “The imphus care. The Shihari and the imphus are different people, Harja. They won’t understand you. When you lose someone, they will not know the ways to make you feel okay again. They will judge you for how you choose to grieve.”
This finally made Harja hesitate. She glowered down at her feet.
“If I’m not all in, I’m not really committed,” she said finally, with shaky but unwavering resolve. “And I’m committed, Dax. If you don’t understand that… you don’t understand me.”
Her resolution scared Opie. He was sure that she didn’t understand—not what she was saying, nor what her actions would do to her.
Opie shoved his head between the two Shihari, pushing them apart. They still didn’t take their eyes off one another.
Opie butted his forehead against Harja’s chest, forcing her to look at him. “Dax might be right. You’re not obligated to do this.”
Harja glared at Opie and swatted at his muzzle. “And you don’t need to have an opinion on this.”
Opie backed his ears. All too often, he’d been told he shouldn’t have an opinion on something. Plenty of times, he’d thought whoever said it might be right… but in this instance, he was putting his own life on the line, too.
Opie let his words slip out with a snarl. “I’m the only Serpent going with you, so maybe I do need to have an opinion.”
Exasperated, Harja shook her head. “What does your HUD say, eh? Is Dax right? Am I going to die if I do this?” Her words were dismissive, but she was genuinely asking him what he thought.
Opie gulped and ran a probability on Harja’s chances of survival on Impha III, and of going through the kind of medical procedure it would take to let her carry an imphus. The verdict returned quickly: MEDICAL OUTLOOK OPTIMISTIC. CRUCIBLE OUTLOOK GRIM.
He relayed this to Harja. “You’ll probably die… but it’ll be the jungle that kills you, not the medical treatment. Dax, she’s right about that. They’ve done a lot of successful fertility procedures.”
Dax ignored Opie, shoving a claw in Harja’s face with each thing he leveled at her. “And even if you survive the procedures—even if you survive the cultural differences—how are you going to adapt to Impha III? The gravity will break your body. You will feel ancient in just a few years. You won’t even get a whole life with the one you love. The atmosphere will rot your brain.”
Harja’s voice shook, as if she was trying not to cry. “Oh, because the pollution on Shihar is so much better? I’m already broken, Dax, if you hadn’t noticed. You were there every time I shattered my bones and broke my spine.”
Opie recalled Harja’s pain. He’d laid beside her as she was healing those wounds.
“You could be allergic to everything they feed you there,” Dax countered.
“There’s import treaties everywhere,” Harja said. “I can find food.”
“You don’t even know if you can drink the water!”
Now Harja was spitting too. “Why the hells are you trying so hard to keep me, Dax?”
Shaking, Dax delivered the final cruel slash in his lowest voice. “I guess I really do make broken things.”
Harja’s eyes widened and her ears disappeared against her skull. “Fuck you,” she said through bared teeth.
Opie pushed between them again, his tail tucked between his legs. “Harja, please don’t. Let it go.”
“Why should I?” Harja said, choking on her words. “He means it, Opie. You heard him. He wants to hurt me.”
Opie had nothing to say to that.
“Ship arriving for Impha III,” a robotic voice said over the PA system. “All passengers for Impha III, please proceed to the boarding dock.”
Already, the members of the imphus delegation who had attended the Fable Freight dinner were crowding the boarding door. At the price Opie and Harja had been able to afford, seating on the ship was first come, first served. They had to hurry.
There was no time for apologies or reconciliation. Opie and Harja rushed down the hallway, dragging their luggage with them.
Before the first bend in the boarding tunnel, Opie looked back.
Dax stood unmoving, his eyes locked on Opie.
Taking a break, so back in two weeks with Chapter Six: Welcome to the Jungle!