Alien Velocity by Robert Appleton

favour, Charlie.”
    “Tell me the good news.” He groaned.
    “The good news is you kicked his arse. You can kick all their arses.”
    Charlie shook his head. “Strange time for sarcasm, Marley, but nice try.”
    “Sorry. Your sense of humour is…nuanced.”
    “There’s a euphemism.” He told her to head directly for three o’clock, into the passageway through the mountains. Ten feet wide at most, and more undulating than he’d hoped, it snaked all the way through to the far side.
    They rarely paused for rest. It took a sunset and a half for them to reach an enormous stretch of orange-yellow flatland through which a network of purple veins and arteries flowed. Behind the procession, precipitous rock walls, hundreds of feet high, seemed ready to topple onto them while Charlie led Marley out. He collapsed to his knees, exhausted, parched and famished. Running his tongue over his lips felt like licking sandpaper. He massaged his neck to alleviate the stiffness of his sore throat.
    “What can you see?” she asked, her legs now grinding and stuttering.
    “Dry desert for miles, and lots of narrow rivers.”
    “No more mountains?”
    “None.”
    She knelt and began to feel around in the dirt with her fingers. After finding a relatively soft spot, she made a mechanical fist and, rotating it like a drill, burrowed into the ground. First orange dust flew up, then dark yellow sand. Before long, damp mud spat out of the hole. She quadrupled its diameter. The whole operation lasted only a few minutes.
    “There you go, Charlie. Fresh water. Just as I promised.”
    He licked his flaky lips and leaned in to cup the water with both hands. Hmm, not a hint of salt. None of that sickly metallic stuff he’d tasted after crashing, either. His head pulsing with delight and stabs of delirium, he managed about two pints of heaven. There was no other word for it. Lucozade? Forget it. Baccarat water had the right stuff. It had no taste and yet every taste, all at once, in this very moment, the stuff life was made of.
    “Ah.” He lay back, folded his arms under his head. “Now if you could dig me up a side of roast beef, mashed potatoes, piping-hot veg and thick, smooth gravy, I’d gladly adopt the whole lot of you.”
    “It won’t be long now. As soon as we reach our ship, there will be something for you to eat.”
    Fantasizing about that traditional English Sunday roast dinner, he licked his lips and let his head sink onto his arms. The sky was about to go dark, the coronas of three suns all ready to vanish behind the giant, sky-reaching trees. Realising he hadn’t slept since starting the mountain trek, he managed a warm chuckle and, with a long sigh tickling from his shoulders to his toes, drifted into a wholesome, earthbound dream.

Chapter Four
    “Sartoris B.” Marley finally named her home system, approximating her own syntax into something resembling English. “In the Crystal Hydra Nineteen galaxy.”
    “Okay, I’m not much of an astronomer,” he said while crossing the third natural bridge over a purple river on their way to the family’s crash site.
    She nodded, another human trait she’d started using. “Actually, neither am I. There is a difference between knowing a thing and having a passion for it. Instead of school, our complete knowledge was uploaded over several weeks to our artificial cerebella—the sum total of everything our species had ever learned. We therefore missed out on that experience you gained from interacting with school friends, from learning through trial and error, from assimilating information by choice or primary interest. You see, our formative years were spent programming our ship’s computer, outfitting her with sufficient spare parts to last us for centuries, until we could find a comparable planet to call home.”
    “I was meaning to ask you about that. You guys are still growing.” He tapped Christina’s metal shins with his knuckle. “But if you’re hardwired to all this