Exit Only ✔︎

|01|

Torint

My legs pumped harder underneath me as I scrambled down the hall with as much speed as I could muster. The sound of my boots hitting the metal floor echo off the walls and grade on my nerves.

Turning a sharp corner, I glance behind my shoulder quickly to make sure I was still far ahead of the remaining gurges that continued to follow behind me, their jaws snapping with the need to get at me.

They were disgusting creatures, covered in sharp scales and small, gray tufts of fur. They smelled of feces, and their beady eyes came in varying shades of puke green.

It made it all the more hard to get near them to destroy them, but I had to do what I could to protect my ship.

That included escaping while I could.

GET TO THE PODS! RETURN HOME! THIS SHIP IS DEAD. WE'LL NEVER RECOVER IT. GO, GO, GO!!!

Captain Exel's words are still loud and clear in my mind as the noise of the gurges continues to chase me.

The engine was dead, our ship was floating in space with no way to get home. Not to mention the hundreds of gurges that are still flooding in. I can't help but think that this mission was for nothing. They all were.

I turn another corner, sprinting as fast as I can and still trying to gain more speed as I go.

How we deserved this, I didn't know. We only had good intentions when we attacked the gurges.

It was a slave ship. Gurges were notorious in the galaxy for harboring sex slaves from all walks of life. Whenever we spotted a slave ship, no matter what kind, we boarded and attacked mercilessly, killing the terrible creatures by the thousands.

Freeing slaves wasn't easy work, and we did it to save people, but there was also another important mission involved that couldn't be ignored.

Our race was dying, and we needed females. Desperately.

We had gone through so many slave ships, freed thousands of slaves, but we have never discovered a compatible species to rekindle our kind.

Some days, it was all I could think about. I'd never seen a female that resembled our kind. Not even close.

The only alien we'd found that even stood on two feet like us had terrible differences. For starters they had tentacles coming out of their noses.

And that wasn't even the worst of it.

Somehow, we still held out hope. Hope that we would find females that looked like us, females that could become our mates and give us kits.

It was a dream that seemed too good to be true.

Countless missions, countless slave ships, and yet no sign of hope that we would ever fulfill our dream.

I was almost to the escape pods when I was tackled to the ground, something that couldn't be accomplished by one gurge alone, but three of them.

They slobbered on me, the stench was so putrid I nearly lost the contents of my stomach on the ground, I held my breath.