Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

[Read part 1 first!]

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Rignon’s joints were stiff and a damp ache soaked into his bones. He grimaced and peeled his waxy fingers away from the handle of his umbrella, stretching and moving his fingers while pinching the umbrella’s shaft in the crook of his neck.

“I’m too young for aching joints,” he muttered to himself. His lungs felt hollow as he said it. All around him raindrops mercilessly assaulted every exposed surface, thumping hard and deep on the fabric of his umbrella, pattering endlessly against high leaves, and splashing pointlessly into a sea of puddles and mud holes. It was dark, though he had no idea if it was daytime or nighttime. Thick clouds overhead had closed him off from the heavens, leaving him here abandoned and alone.

He didn’t care what time it was. He could think of nothing but Caprin. It had been a whole month since he’d seen her last. He clenched his jaw as he walked. If only she weren’t so danger-blind and reckless. No matter how much he wanted to believe she was alive, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was on a mission to retrieve her body.

Up ahead he caught sight of a faint glow and his heart jumped before racing on ahead with his imagination. “The dome,” he whispered reverently. His mind’s eye marveled at what he was about to see, his heart yearned to find Caprin safely inside.

Ignoring the way his cold knees protested, he quickened his pace, keeping the softly illuminated trees in view as he navigated the dense undergrowth. His boot slipped on a muddy branch and he stumbled, nearly dropping the umbrella as he fought to steady himself. The downpour soaked the small of his back before he could get the canopy back overhead. He shivered and continued onward, taking fast, shallow breaths of cold, humid air.

Soon the warm light was all around him, penetrating deeper into the forest than he had imagined possible. The light seemed to bounce off everything in sight, from rough tree trunks and rocks to the mud beneath his feet. It was surreal, and every step he took ramped up its intensity until each individual drop of rain was glowing like a diamond shimmering in sunlight.

At last the trees gave way to a vast clearing that ran along the edge of the magnificent dome structure he’d seen from the hilltop on the other side of the fence. He froze and gawked at the sight, no more able to speak than breathe. The structure shot straight up out of the ground with vertical walls nearly ten feet high then began a long, gradual collapse in toward the center. Giant metallic ribs ran the entire course and framed sheets of glass big enough to cover several houses. Support beams connected horizontally between the ribs at regular intervals, giving the whole structure a pleasing, rigid geometric presence.

Rignon found himself staring up along the converging paths of two of the great ribs, rain pounding down on his open mouth. He squinted against the aquatic assault, but could not bring himself to move or replace the umbrella overhead.

The light emanating from inside the structure had him trapped in a trance. Its warmth had a slow, throbbing quality when seen this close, and he could almost feel his heart synchronizing with its rhythm. Slowly it took on a new visual texture as shadows were cast up through the glass, dancing and sweeping along, moving gracefully at first but more erratically as they descended on the top of the featureless wall along the base.

Rignon was suddenly startled out of the enchantment when a hand grabbed his wet arm and yanked him to the side.

“Rignon!” a familiar voice barked. He was jerked back again. “Rignon! Come on!”

He turned, wide eyed, and gazed stupidly into Caprin’s wet face.

She growled at him and pulled once more. Finally, he leaned toward her and stumbled along as she pulled him back into the trees. Soon she had him jogging alongside her, still dumb with shock.

“Good grief!” she cried. “I thought you were never going to snap out of it!” She kept running but smiled at him over her shoulder. “I called your name a hundred times. You didn’t hear me?”

He felt as though his chilled brain was emerging from a thick fog. “No,” he managed, shaking his head a few times to clear it.

“Well I grabbed you just in time. If that wall had opened up I never would have seen you again.” She shot him another look, lingering a bit longer on his face. “It’s good to see you again,” she added.

He smiled. “I had to come find you. I…” he wasn’t sure what else he intended to say.

She waited, but when it was clear he wasn’t going to finish the thought she said, “well you came just in time. There’s something big going on here, and we need all the help we can get.”

---

The rush of falling rain outside echoed around the rocky walls of their cave while a crackling fire radiated enough heat to finally thaw Rignon’s fingers. He held his palms out toward the fire, scooting as close as his face could tolerate.

He tried to watch the flickering shadows around the cave, but his eye was constantly drawn to Caprin’s new friend. Soon he abandoned his attempts not to stare and just took in the completely alien sight.

The creature had two legs, two arms, and a head, though its entire body was encapsulated in some kind of thick clothing that was topped off with a rigid headpiece dominated by a large piece of domed glass through which Rignon could see a normal-looking face. Normal enough, anyway. Still, he found himself gazing at it as though it wasn’t right. Although it could just as easily be himself inside that suit, something in the back of his mind told him this creature was nothing like himself. Perhaps if he looked a little longer, gazed a little deeper, he could find the difference…

“Rignon,” Caprin hissed, elbowing him as she lowered herself onto the ground by his side. She handed him a plate of food unlike anything he’d ever seen before.

“What is this?” he asked, poking a layer of sponge.

She smiled. “Just take a bite,” she said. She had a plate of her own and demonstrated picking up the entire ensemble and taking a bite out of one edge.

He stared at it while she chewed, then resumed staring at the silent creature on the other side of the flames. Even if it was like him, was it a man or a woman? Could it speak? It had a mouth like his. Surely it could use words.

“Stop staring,” Caprin whispered, giggling. “If you’re curious, you could try talking to her.”

A woman? He scanned her cheekbones and eyes, admitting that she did indeed have softer features than most men he knew.

He opened his mouth to speak, but a flood of possible questions left him in gridlock.

Curiously, her lips began to move silently behind the glass. He listened, but could hear little more than a muffled, modulated hum over the crackling fire and the chattering rain.

Eventually a sound came through strongly, though not from her lips. It had the rigid quality of metallic saw teeth chattering against metal, and it almost seemed to cackle and hiss along with the fire and rain. “My name is Maria,” the voice said, though she only smiled while the sound came out.

Rignon’s eyes bulged and he looked briefly to Caprin, then back to the woman creature.

Caprin laughed and he watched as the woman’s eyes darted between them, still smiling. Her lips moved again and continued to move while the voice shredded the air after a long delay. “It’s a translator,” she explained. “I speak into the helmet and a computer translates my words so you can understand them.” She was back to smiling while the last jarring sounds trickled out into the cave.

Rignon stared a moment, then looked to Caprin for something he could understand. “A computer?” he began.

“Yes!” Caprin cried. “Isn’t it great? It’s a mechanism that performs computations! In this case it can translate her words so we can understand them!”

“Translate?” he asked, feeling more lost than he had earlier that day when he crossed the fence alone.

Caprin smiled. “Maria doesn’t speak our language. She doesn’t know our words. And we don’t know her words. Without the computer, we wouldn’t be able to understand each other.”

Rignon’s eyes shot back to the strange woman. “Why does she have the glass over her face?”

“That’s her helmet,” Caprin explained. “She also can’t breathe our air, so that suit is completely sealed. Inside she has her own air to breathe.” She paused and smiled. “When we go inside the dome, we’re going to have to wear similar suits.”

Rignon looked back to Caprin with wide eyes. “What?” He glanced back at the woman in the suit, then at Caprin again.

“I’ll let Maria explain,” Caprin said, taking another bite of her food. “You should eat though. You’ll need your strength.”

He looked down at the strange food on his plate. “What is it?” he asked.

“Maria calls it a sandwich. The spongy slabs on the top and bottom are called bread. I guess it is another way to eat grains. Think of it like a dried, bubbly porridge. And between the cuts of bread there are meats and vegetables. It’s really good. She’s been bringing me food since she found me out here.”

He stared at the woman again. He didn’t like the metallic sound of her voice. He didn’t like that her face was behind glass. He didn’t even like her stupid name. Maria? What kind of a name was that? But… she had been taking care of Caprin. How bad could she be?

“That’s right,” the voice said.

He hadn’t even noticed when her lips started moving again. Now she was rambling on. He didn’t touch the sandwich, but he did listen intently while she explained.

“I found your friend outside the dome a few weeks ago. We hadn’t had any of you approach the dome in such a long time, we had stopped monitoring the alarms.”

Rignon’s eyes bulged and he glanced back at Caprin, who had finished half her sandwich already somehow.

“Alarms?” he asked.

The woman explained. “We have systems… computers that monitor the area around the dome. I just happened to check on them and found that Caprin had triggered several of the alarms. She’s lucky it was me. Anyone else inside would have taken her to a lab and…” the voice stopped. The woman’s eyes were searching Rignon’s face, but he was struggling to make sense of anything she said.

He glanced back at Caprin again. She shrugged and took another bite of food.

“I’ll go back to the beginning,” the raspy saw voice said. “Roughly five hundred years ago my people left their planet in search of a new place to live. Well, not all of us left. Presumably some stayed behind to try to save our planet. But millions of people got on hundreds of thousands of ships and flew out into the stars.”

Rignon’s mind raced. Ships sailing among the stars? “Is this some kind of story you tell children?” he asked, looking to Caprin for support. “That sounds crazy!”

Caprin let out a hearty but gentle laugh that somehow warmed him better than the fire. “Oh Rignon,” she said. “Believe me, she had to tell me the story a hundred times before I started to believe it. Wait until you see some of the crazy things she can do. I swear it’s magic, but she claims it’s just technology.”

Rignon, squinted at the woman. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s say I believe you can sail among the stars. Continue.”

She smiled and resumed moving her lips. The crackling, hissing voice returned. “All of the ships went to different stars that had potentially habitable planets. We had tried to learn as much as we could about them beforehand, but as we got closer to this planet’s star we realized we wouldn’t be able to breathe the atmosphere. It has too much…” she had stopped moving her lips and she was staring at Rignon inquisitively. “Well,” she resumed, “I’ll just say it’s not right for us. If I take off my helmet right now, I’ll slowly die trying to breathe your air.”

Rignon waited for her to pause again then interjected, “So… what? You guys arrived and found us here?”

The woman’s face winced and she shied away from answering for a moment. He could see guilt in her eyes. “Well,” she began slowly. “No. We found much of the vegetation and a bit of wildlife, but after searching for a few years we realized there was no intelligent life. So we had two options. We could try to alter the planet to meet our needs, destroying the local ecosystem as a result, or we could try to evolve ourselves biologically so we could breathe the air.”

“Alter the planet?” Rignon interrupted while her translation droned on about evolving. “How?”

“Some of our scientists proposed we could release chemicals and jumpstart certain processes that would change this air into the same kind of air we need to survive. But other scientists in our group, including me, wanted a chance to figure out how to adapt our bodies to breathe the air. We all voted, and in the end both teams of scientists were given a period of time to prove their method would work best.” She paused while he processed the information.

“I don’t understand,” Rignon said. “You said we weren’t here when you arrived. So where do we come in?”

The woman smiled. “Good question. The scientists who wanted to adapt our species were able to create a hybrid version of our people. That is you. We created several colonies, but your colony has survived the longest. In my opinion, your genes prove that our people can adapt to living on this planet.”

Rignon chewed on the idea for a moment, glancing over at Caprin again. She gave a wry half-smile. “Wait,” he said. “So that means… we are an experiment?”

The woman nodded slowly, a pained expression on her face. “Your species was made in a lab to be just like ours, just better adapted to this planet. I’d say it was a huge success though!” she added, trying to smile from within her helmet.

“Woah,” he said, feeling lightheaded. He looked at Caprin in disbelief. “You’re right, there is something big going on here.” His mind was spinning.

Caprin smiled, wincing. “Well, that’s not what I meant. It gets worse.”

Rignon whipped back to the woman.

“Unfortunately, despite the success of your experimental village, the scientists in favor of transforming the planet have won. Starting tomorrow, they will begin bombarding the planet with weapons that will destroy all living things while transforming the atmosphere for us.” She grimaced. “My team of scientists have been unable to dissuade them. Our only hope at this point is if you two can somehow convince them that we can adapt.”

“How can we do that?” Rignon asked. “How in the world can we convince them where you have failed?”

“I’m not really sure,” Maria said after a long pause. “But if I can get you to my lab I’m hoping we can think of something together.”

Rignon looked at Caprin who had finished her sandwich.

“We’ve been talking about this a lot over the last few weeks,” Caprin remarked, shrugging. “We’ve talked through a ton of ideas, some worse than others, but in the end we think we’ll find more answers in the lab than out here. You came just in time. I was going in tomorrow morning. Now you can come too!” She leaned warmly against his side and rested her head on his shoulder.

All of the tension inside him melted instantly and he deflated. Any will he may have had to protest the idea dissipated and he found himself wanting only what Caprin wanted. If she was going, he would go with her. It was that simple.

Maria and Caprin showed him where they’d sleep for the night. They had set up what Maria called an “air mattress” that was just barely big enough for him and Caprin to share. They would be close. His heart pounded and he felt lightheaded while Maria said goodbye and promised to return with two suits in the morning.

When she disappeared into the endless rain Caprin turned to Rignon and smiled. There was a seductive undertone to her smile, though it was overpowered by a confidence he’d never seen before. It seemed to say, “I know I don’t need to seduce you.” He was sure the pounding of his heart was louder than the rain or the fire or anything else in the world in that moment.

Without saying a word, Caprin pulled off her wet shirt, revealing a thin undergarment that left little to the imagination. He stumbled in place and swallowed hard. He took a deep, sharp breath and shuddered, his trembling lips trying to form words but his head could supply nothing to say.

She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his torso into her body, her soft head tucked under his chin. “There is a chance we won’t survive our trip into the dome tomorrow,” she whispered. “I’m really glad I get to spend tonight with you.”

He put his arms around her and held her tightly, resting his cheek on the crown of her head and staring down at the air mattress. His whole world had just been turned on its head, but something about holding Caprin made him feel as though everything was exactly as it should be.