It was unsettling. Did they not see how important our presence was? This was the first time any of my people had been brought to their dwelling in the Beyond the World. Surely they knew how momentous an occasion this was. The Rule had been cast aside - that the Sky Gods could advise while in our World, but those who dwelt there were to remain with our feet firmly upon the frozen ground.
“We are inside your sky cave,” Rimbet said as we trailed behind the Sky God like obedient younglings.
“Our ship, yes,” came the reply.
“We are on water?” Hroash asked.
“No. You are correct in that we are above your sky. But this is not a cave. It is a ship, but one that sails among the stars.”
That made sense. They and the demons came from the stars, flying down into and across our skies in their metal graks. No, not graks - ships.
“Ships,” Rimbet repeated.
“Yes, now hurry along. We need to fit the hoomuns with tranzlaytuhrz.”
“What are tranzlaytuhrz?” Rimbet asked.
The Sky God opened a door that led to a metal tunnel, lit just as brightly as the space we were leaving.
“It’s something our healers will give them so they may speak with you all.”
My steps faltered for a moment. The hoomuns would be able to speak with us, with full understanding? This was miraculous! They truly were like the gods they insisted they were not. They would give this thing to my Rah-bee, and he would just know all of our words, unlike the painfully slow progress we’d achieved using the primer.
My heart sang, and I started forward again, Rah-bees hand clasped in mine. The moment was nearly upon me, when I’d be able to explain to Rah-bee that he was my mate and all that it meant.
31
ROBBIE
I smiled up at Gree-Gree, happy that he was listening to the Gray-Green explain about us all getting translators. I was super happy about that too, even if I was also rather pissed off about the whole “we can’t take you home or settle you all on a nicer planet” thing. Because, fuck! What kind of people just up and decided it was okay to leave people to live in a frozen wasteland? I wasn’t stupid; I’d had a suspicion that those guys in the forest weren’t native to this planet. In the back of my mind, I’d been mulling it over ever since we first saw them and then discovered those lights. And they’d had a portal when Gree-Gree’s didn’t. Plus, the sight of those ships on the sea? Yeah, I’d bet my last dollar, if I had any on me, that those were a third race of aliens. Hell, I wasn’t even certain that Gree-Gree’s people were even from the planet.
I mean, come on, the planet looked like one giant frozen ball of a whole lot of nothing as far as the eye could see outside of the mountain, until you came to that weird forest. And it must be unreasonably far to the coast where we met the Gray-Greens if they invested in tech to make the journey so fast between points. So where was everyone else? If Gree-Gree’s people had always been here, where were they all?
I had a cynical mind at times, I knew that. It was the product of being promised far too many things and never having them pan out. Seasonal work where none of the temp workers were actually hired on at all, so in reality, the promise of ‘maybe you’ll get a regular position if you work your ass off’ had been an obvious lie. Not technically, I suppose, as ‘maybe’ hadn’t been a definite, but the implication of at least one permanent job opening that one of us would get had been firmly there. The ‘flexible hours’ jobs that claimed it was simply different shifts and days each week, only to come up with a six hour shift that was the only one for the entire week and the explanation of the terms of employment became that I was flexible as to how much or how little I worked, grateful for the scraps left after the full time and senior part-time employees got all the hours they wanted to work. Might as well have been a goddamned zero hours contract.
And let’s not forget the jobs that hired me, got me all excited, only to turn up for my first day to discover it was a fucking MLM or cold call sales with the salary actually only guaranteed if you hit your sales targets because you were really working on commission, no matter how they tried to dress it the fuck up.
“Rah-bee?” Gree-Gree asked me, and I shook myself mentally. Gree-Gree was looking at me, with what I’d come to recognize as concern replacing the happy sparkle in his eyes. Shit. He’d picked up how upset I was. What if he thought I believed the Gray-Greens were planning something bad and he refused the translator? We all needed those, so we could communicate. And while none of us humans were engineers or scientists, I bet with some of the existing know-how of the existing population down on the big ball of ice we were going to be returned to could come up with some better comforts. I mean, Gree-Gree’s people were pretty medieval, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to get them to understand basic plumbing, surely. We could scavenge pipework from the downed ship, just as they had already scavenged metal plating they repurposed. I’d lived in enough shitty rentals with deferred maintenance that I’d picked up a thing or two about fixing pipes. It couldn’t be that hard to extrapolate from how I’ve seen how it all connected together to making it so we could at least have sinks and tubs in our houses.
Okay, maybe I was daydreaming, but those guys in the forest had working fucking lights, and those required some kind of maintenance, and that meant at least a couple of them probably knew how the lights there worked, how they were powered, and whether or not Gree-Gree’s village’s caves were lit the same way. Between whatever DIY skills the rest of us humans had picked up in life along the way, we could raise the standard of living enough to be more than subsistence, and maybe give us all a real chance of not just surviving but thriving. And who knew, maybe the Gray-Greens and whoever else they had to answer to would see that we were advanced enough, deserving enough, to give us one of the more temperate worlds they set aside for colonists.
I smiled up at him, forcing my posture to relax, determination filling me with purpose. We’d get the translators, and then, Gree-Gree and I would get our peoples to work together for the advancement and betterment of everyone on that damned arctic hellscape of a planet. He searched my face, then smiled back, reassured. It was just in time too.
“Here we are. Please go in and line up against the wall. The medics will explain the procedure shortly,” our guide said, repeating it in Gree-Gree’s language for the benefit of his people.
“I don’t know about this,” Beth whispered, and I knew the Gray-Green had heard her, as he turned to look at her.
“It’s cool,” I promised her. “We’ll get to talk with everyone, and then we can pool what we know to try to make things better. More comfortable and all that.”
My new friends all looked at me doubtfully.
“We will,” I insisted as the Gray-Green opened the door. Just to prove my point, I went in first, Gree-Gree right behind me, still holding my hand.
32
ROBBIE
“Is it me, or does it feel like any moment, a robot will come out waving its arms, warning Will Robinson of danger?” Patrick asked as we looked around the new space we found ourselves in.
