Meeting the Daisies

Twelve hours had passed, and now the ship was bucking and tossing up and down and sideways. A few years back I had taken a river ride on a pleasure planet and we had hit a Class 5 rapids. It was all fun in that experience. We were splashed with cold water and held on to the sides of the boat as the guides took us through the tossing green-blue waters with smiles on their faces.

I remember asking what Class 6 rapids felt like. The Bok guide had turned and looked at me with his slanted green eyes and long whipping purple mane.

“Ye don’t want to know and if ye ken somethin’ double the size of this, then ye know what that means.”

Well today, I was getting a very good idea about a Class 6 and I must have muttered it out loud, as both Bo and Waj turned towards me.

“What did you say?” asked Bo.

“What is Class 6?” fluted Waj as she wedged herself tightly between the nav and weapons consoles.

“I have accessed what Ranko is referencing. He speaks of rapids which are fast-moving waters over rocks and holes in a river…”

We all waited as PK paused.

“The Katjoki drop!” Waj sounded like a full orchestra on that one. “Pray to your gods that this is not the same!” yelled Waj as she hunkered further into a wedged position. Obviously the hell with dignity and appearance at this juncture.

“PK! Kill the internal grav field,” I shouted as Bo and I double-strapped ourselves into our seats and hung on as the bottom dropped out. Even in micro gravity we felt ourselves falling and falling.

We had no sensors. PK was completely blind. The view screen showed black nothingness. The fall seemed to go on forever but then a sudden SNAP! and we were out in normal space once again.

“Am scanning now,” announced PK in what seemed to me to be a relieved voice. Waj, Bo and I hung on PK’s observation while we also looked at the nearby constellations.

“We are in the Epsilon Delta quadrant… we have traveled the equivalent of 50 million light years.” PK definitely had a surprised English butler emphasis and I think even Waj picked it up.

Even the Slj’s fastest courier ships could not span 50 million light years in less than 25 years and we did it in seconds.

“We have passed through some kind of space warp and we are the first discoverers,” whispered Bo as she stood at the view screen taking it all in.

“My people know nothing about this sector of the galaxy,” murmured Waj in low flute-like tones.

“I detect several objects approaching us on intercept vectors. Their speed is several times our top speed. We can not outrun them. They are not answering my hails. I compute their ETA in 80 minutes.”

“Let me try,” I said as I punched the open frequency.

“Attention, this is Ranko El Poso, of the Human Federation of Planets. We come in peace and have only arrived here by accident. We have been caught and now ejected by some kind of space warp. Please reply.”

We waited in silence for 30 long seconds.

“Let me try,” trilled Waj. She then fluted away for about ten seconds and again we waited as we watched the unknown craft speeding toward us.

Nothing.

“PK, weapons analysis of these ships?” I asked as I noted that Bo had powered up the J Grav at the weapons console.

“If their energy signatures can be converted into a small fraction for their weapons, then they can easily blast us into dust well outside of our weapons range.”

“There is one alternative Ranko. We can’t outrun them and we

can’t outfight them, but maybe we can J Grav and get out of here.”

I looked hard at Bo and glanced at Waj. Well, either we took the chance and fired the J Grav again and let the secret be known to Waj, or we were all going to be space dust or slaves or whatever was in the minds of the obviously unfriendly folks who were rapidly closing in on us.

I nodded my head and off we went again.

SNAP! We were back in the formless nothingness that we had just been ejected from.

“So it was you who caught my ship.” Waj was not happy and was leaning towards us with scintillating eyes.

“Not on purpose Waj. We didn’t know it was going to do anything like that. It is a prototype. We were delivering it to Station for further testing when you showed up. Until now, we had never seen the J Grav in action. No one knew about the null space we got tossed into,” I said in a calm, slow voice. Relief swept through me as I watched Waj visibly relax. She was a formidable ship guest. Invoking her fury was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Very well. PK, are we caught in a current again?” asked Waj as she moved to the view screen. As if in answer, a flare popped up right in front of us and then slowly moved off to the right.

“Our science is not aware of this J space which your J Grav

somehow opens. Perhaps you Lessers hold more promise than we

first thought.”

“You mean maybe we are actually worthwhile communicating with as equals?” asked Bo in a sarcastic tone.

The sarcasm either went right by Waj or she chose to ignore it.

“Yes, we now have a reason to open communications. I will instruct my House to do so.” She turned and looked at Bo and me with her brilliant prismatic flashing eyes.

“I am the First to the Queen and she will listen to me.”

All we could do was nod at each other and hold on again as our ship was caught once more in a wild J space river.

Imagine riding a crazy set of rapids, passing out, and while you are unconscious, your boat shoots out of the waves and into a quiet lake surrounded by picnickers, some of whom were fishing and just happened to have a net big enough to snag you.

This is what happened to us. One minute we were being tossed about in the J space rapids, and the next minute we were waking up on a shoreline with green and blue creatures staring down at us with faces that looked like huge daisies.

My eyes slowly traveled down from the daisy face nearest me to the rest of the body, which reminded me of the trunk of a slender purple tree surrounded with soft green, wide petals.

Below the petals were two thin antennae that constantly swiveled back and forth. I could not see any mouth or eyes.

About another foot or so lower were what looked like two branches each with eight twiglets per branch.

The nearest daisy slowly circled us with constantly moving roots, making it look like a centipede with a six-foot-tall flower on top of it.

“PK?” I was able to croak out on my wrist communicator.

“I am here sir, but I have been immobilized by some kind of force field which grappled us when we emerged from J space. It neutralized all power and I was not able to move us again back into J space.”

Waj and Bo had been listening and the three of us slowly began to sit up when an invisible hand pushed us back down on our backs.

“Please do not move until the authorities arrive,” I heard in my brain.

“Huh?” I mumbled out loud.

“We can only understand you if you speak internally,” beamed the bluish-green daisy staring down at me.

“We understand you. Where are we?” came the fluting question from Waj, who sounded like a full orchestra in my brain. The daisies all jumped back and my daisy once more focused its face on me.

“Please speak quietly,” it said, as it swayed to a non-existent breeze.

“Ranko?” I heard Bo query my head.

“I hear you both,” I sent back brain to brain to brain.

“Let us ask again,” came the toned-down response from Waj.

“I will answer your questions as best I can. You have emerged from nothingness into the middle of our fishing expedition, and Tyjokla netted you.”

A yellow-orange daisy appeared in my vision. I could only stare upwards and could not even move my head to the side. It swayed above us beneath a pinkish sky. I could not see the sun, but I could feel the heat on my left side.

“I am Tyjokla. What are you?”

“Tyjokla, that is a question best left to the specialists who have been dispatched and will soon be here,” said the first daisy.

“Gyjokla, aren’t you the least bit curious?”

“We will find out when the specialists arrive,” responded my blue-green daisy who I now knew was Gyjokla.

“How did a fishing net capture our ship?” asked Bo.

“I can answer that madam. These creatures…”

“Call them daisies, PK,” I interrupted.

“Very well. These daisies use a type of energy web wrapping to capture large denizens of a large body of liquid on whose bank you and Bo and Waj are presently lying supine upon. I would recommend not touching the liquid with your skin as it appears to be highly acidic.”

I was about to ask more questions when I heard a commotion in the distance.

“Ah, the authorities are here,” intoned Gyjokla. Suddenly a brown and white daisy was staring down at us.

“Remove them to the labs where they will be studied,” ordered the daisy to someone I could not see. Abruptly I felt myself being lifted up, and noted that Bo and Waj were on either side of me.

One plus of being carried by walking flowers is that the air was continually full of wonderful scents.

I called out loud to Bo and Waj. “Remember that they can’t understand us if we speak out loud. Bo don’t forget your arm, I have no idea how long we have been out of it.”

“I can only move my head Ranko. If my arm goes off, you’ll be the first to know,” yelled Bo.

“Of what do you speak?” inquired the brown and white daisy suddenly appearing above me and staring down at my face.

I had nothing more to hide from anyone anymore, lat of all Waj, and I really did not want to end my life in a big blast.

“Bo and I have explosive capsules in our right arms which will blow if we do not rub them immediately,” I gasped out as we came to a sudden halt and I felt myself drop to hard black dirt.

“The net has been removed. Do so immediately,” I heard in my brain. Every Daisy had suddenly disappeared from view.

I sat up and looked around. There gathered in the distance looking like a waving field of multicolored flowers were the daisies, just standing, if you could call it that, and aiming their antennae at us.

Bo and I both vigorously rubbed our arms. Waj also sat up and looked at us.

“You two are never-ending surprises,” she sung out to us. “Any more secrets I need to know about?”

I was now standing up and noted a blue-green, wide river on my left. In the distance were what looked like huge flowers over 120 feet high. The had thick red and black trunks and at the very top, a spreading umbrella of yellow flowers.

“Remember what PK said about the water,” warned Bo as she read my mind about escaping.

“Listen to Bo,” agreed PK in that annoying butler voice of his. “It’s better to find out what these daisies are about and…”

“Halt!” came a booming ringing in my brain. “You shall cease opening your speaking areas or we shall close them for you.”

I suddenly found myself grabbed by the net force, turned on my back and once more being carried forward with Waj and Bo on either side of me.

I moved my head to look at Bo who was looking at me and shaking her head. I then moved my head to look at Waj, who was also looking at me. The daisies were moving beside us. Who knows what was running through the head of the First to the Slj Queen?

Next Chapter: Chapter 4: How Bo and I met