Konan seemed to forget about her for a short while. She became an irrelevance. Too afraid to move, far too scared to say a word, she just lay over his lap and allowed herself to be alien abducted for a second time in her relatively short life. A line from an old play came to mind. To be alien abducted once, well, that was misfortune. To be alien abducted twice, that was carelessness.
“Dominax is too good to hold audience with me? I should unleash my death cannon upon his precious Golden City.” Konan grumbled to himself for several more minutes while underlings rushed about him. The others were similarly built to their king, but not as brightly colored. Some of them were somewhat closer to her own hue, and much less scaled. Others approached the king’s color, but only in the most deferential of ways. Elizabeth had the impression that Konan was not the sort of monarch who would tolerate being upstaged in any way.
It seemed to Elizabeth that alien societies worked much as any animal society did. There were traits which were considered favorable, and anybody happening to possess those traits by lottery of birth was elevated to exalted status. Of course, she had to make some allowance for the idea that being very big, very blue, and very scaled might coincide with personality traits which exemplified a good king. Intelligence, strength…
“UNLEASH THE CANNON!”
Konan gave the order to his peons, and his will was done in a matter of seconds. The screen at the end of the bridge was displaying the fast retreating ground below, the Golden City looking like a city for ants.
Elizabeth braced herself over his lap, averting her gaze so she would not have to see all the life she had become accustomed to wiped out in a fit of rage. She had not been treated well on the planet of the winged aliens, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see them obliterated. Mass murder was not an appropriate response to mild offense, at least in her view.
There was a jolt as the missile was fired, followed by a series of rattles like ripples in a pond. Was this ship held together by anything more than hope? It did not feel like it would pass even the most cursory of pre-flight checks. Back on Earth, Elizabeth had once trained to be a private pilot, so she fancied herself somewhat knowledgeable about what a flying machine should and should not do.
The missile certainly seemed to be more than effective. It started as a big fiery thing, and quickly became a much smaller fiery thing as it hurtled toward a planet which was also quite fiery.
BEW! A corona of molten rage erupted on the planet’s face. She saw it, because she had only averted her gaze in theory, rather than in practice. It was one of those things one could actually not help but look at. She could be witnessing the end of a world.
“Gah! Missed! What’s the bleeding point in hitting lava?”
His missile may have missed, but… hm.
Now she thought about it, the word miss was right there, baked into the word missile. No wonder missiles never ever seemed to hit the things they were allegedly aimed at. Maybe the very concept of missiles was a misdirect.
Maybe she was trying to distract herself with abstract thoughts so she didn’t have to consider the fact that the alien whose custody she now found herself in had just attempted to kill many thousands of citizens, which did not bode well for her own wellbeing. There was no reason for him to care about her if he didn’t care about anybody.
“KONAN!” A roar rattled the ship’s speakers, and various other parts of the ship too. A bolt came loose and bounced merrily across the floor before falling into a grate and disappearing from view.
The face of the winged alien king appeared just in front of the screen displaying his city which was still very much standing. Apparently, screens could be manifested out of thin air in this vessel.
“What the bloody hell are you doing, Konan?” Dominax did not seem happy, most likely because many thousands of his people had only narrowly avoided oblivion in the last few seconds.
“Leaving, Dominax. I do not wait to be greeted by you like a hapless whore who must sit patiently while your cock medication takes effect. If you wish to continue our talks, you will do it groveling to me on my world.” Konan made a dismissive motion with his hand, and the mid-air screen blew away like dust on the wind. Elizabeth had seen a lot of impressive things in her time on the strange alien world, but that was one of the stranger ones.
The ship was a strange blend of dilapidation and ultra-high technology. In addition to the tree trunk which seemed to be at the very center of operations, there were bits of greenery growing here and there, like moss. But obviously the underlying tech was still solid, because they were flying and not plummeting to their fiery deaths.