from

The scream cut through the dry air, muffled only slightly by the dense jungle that surrounded the camp.

Rak Velnub ignored it. Too many aliens numbered among his coworkers on Kurko. To his great annoyance, they often reverted to their native languages. Half the time the other members of the landing team seemed like they were screaming, especially the Budors. Budors may have shared the anatomical features of prehensile tails with Orfezzins, but in Rak’s opinion they shared none of his civility. At least the insectoid Lurdiks just clicked and screeched rather than screamed like those howling Budors.

Rak had not wanted to work on this thirteenth day on Kurko. Most Orfezzins found thirteen to be an unlucky number. Every Orfezzin without a birth defect or an amputation had three fingers on each hand and three toes, for a total of twelve digits. Orfezzin cultures saw the thirteenth of something as one beyond natural, or one beyond personal control and had carried the superstitions with them beyond Orfhez. Rak tended to believe in anything that suggested any reason for inaction.

The Blakkarrion security team responded to the scream. They rushed from the general direction of the privacy tents within the small encampment that surrounded the shuttle. Rak assumed they had been playing cards or otherwise relaxing while he and the other mission scientists worked to study and sample the alien environs. Some of the Xenthiabot security drones hovered ahead of the brutish Blakkarrions.

The smallest Blakkarrion pushed Rak to the ground as he hurried by. The Blakkarrion shouted neither warning of impending danger nor instruction for Rak to seek safety. The Blakkarrion just shoved Rak into the moist, mossy ground and chuckled.

Rak picked himself up. At least his fall had been softened by the grass that had slowly been growing towards the shuttle and encampment since they had landed. If he had been pushed down like that on one of their first days, he would have landed on rocky ground, flat and level on the plane but jagged and uneven in texture. Mossy fibers clung to his uniform tunic. The Blakkarrions were already deeper into the overgrown jungle. Rak had stayed close to the encampment and directed his studies to the mosses and grasses in their obviously busy growing season. They weren’t poisonous, and he had started sampling them as herbs and brews. The little native rodent things that chewed on the flora never seemed to drop from the lush growth to the ground, so Rak figured that concentration on the less spectacular features close by the encampment would keep him from being bitten by the native rats, or devoured by bigger things the jungles might conceal.

"Time to break anyway," Rak said. He scowled at the green stain on his tunic and the lichen fibers that clung there. He raised his left hand and jerked his three fingers into an obscene Orfezzin gesture at the Blakkarrions’ backs. Then he shook, clearing his wingflaps of the moist plant strands. The spasmodic motion would give him plausible credibility in denying the flip off in case the Blakkarrions had seen it. While everyone else in the landing crew rushed towards the scream that had ceased as suddenly as it had started, Rak Velnub went into the mess bubble and steeped a mug of zako flavored with some strands of the native lichen. The scream echoed in his mind.

It Lives available on Amazon.com