Running back the way they came, they didn’t hesitate passing all of the traps the girl had pointed out to them, the strange flower garden, the serpent pool, and the cave of bugs. They had to slow down climbing back up the slimy crack, but they soon found their way back to the ship.

Climbing inside, they sat down and rested for a good long while. There was no sign that they had angered a giant underground dragon, and nothing seemed to have followed them out of the crack. It was quiet, and they reveled in it.

“I’m going to get started working on the ship. Mind helping me?”

“Sure. I don’t have much else to do.”

For the next twenty hours, they tore into things, rewiring them, calibrating it, and then doing it some more, until finally, Dustin held a small bomb in his hands. They were both exhausted and the interior of the ship needed to be put back together, but Dustin was sure he knew everything there was to know, about this ship.

“I say we get some sleep, then get out of these caves,” said Olivia, laying down on the bench.

“Nope,” said Dustin, starting to reattach the panels. He was tired, but if something came to attack them, he didn’t want something to go wrong because he had wires dangling everywhere.

With a groan Olivia got back up to help. It only took about twenty minutes, and then the inside of the shuttle looked much improved.

“Now do we get to sleep?” she asked, hesitating before sitting down.

“Yes, but we’re not leaving when we wake,” he said.

“What? Why not? I thought that was all you could think about!”

“It is, but I need to take into consideration that this might be the only calm I get until we’re done with the Josagn. There’s some things I want to look into on our PED’s before we fly off.”

With a sigh of defeat, she threw herself onto the bench and was quickly out. Dustin settled himself into the pilot chair, so that if anything came along, he could react as fast as possible.

-Dreaming…

-“The subject is responding well to the memory adjustments. We should be able to get twenty trips out of it, easily,”

-“That’s good. The last one only lasted three trips before it started becoming unstable.”

-He was able to open his eyes a little, but it was like looking through muddy water. Everything was blurry and indistinct.

-“The female that we acquired with this one, is also looking promising. There has even been some talk between the superiors about breeding them after the hunts are through. It would be exciting to see how that would turn out.”

-“You shouldn’t talk about such things.”

-The scene changed and he was being strapped to a table. The monster had eaten his lower half, and he had been in so much pain! But now it was like he was floating. There were Josagn moving about him, poking and prodding, but he couldn’t understand their words.

-This time, he drowned. His gills didn’t grow fast enough, but the Josagn fished him out. Ironic that one.

-The carpet monster had wrapped around him, spitting out a cocoon that paralyzed his limbs. A stick person watched from another tree before moving away.

-“We’re going to lose this one if you don’t administer the medicine now!”

-“If I administer it too soon after the antivenom, it will kill it for sure!”

-He was shaking, and burning, and he couldn’t breath. It felt like he was dissolving from the inside out, while also melting. How could anything hurt this bad?

-“The stinger is still in it! Get it out! It’s dissolving the medicine as fast as I can put it in!”

-The vision of a stinger, that was streaked yellow and black, crossed his vision, before everything finally, mercifully, went dark.

Dustin woke with such pain coursing through his body, he was sure he was dying. He couldn’t hardly move, from the pain. Turning his eyes back and forth, he didn’t see any reason for the pain, and finally, it started to fade. Surely that wasn’t a phantom pain from his dream?

He was sure that was exactly what it was. And he also knew without a doubt that these dreams were not made up trash. These had been real. And it also made him wonder about his desire to have children. Was that created because they wanted him to breed?

As his limbs finally started responding, he turned to see that Olivia was still out. Licking his lips, he stretched before turning to his PED. He was relatively certain it was upgraded as far as he could with what he had. But he hated the programming. He wanted to hook it up to the shuttle so that he could check out the programs and see what he could do.

Hooking the PED up to the shuttle computer only took him a few minutes. Then, using the shuttle keypad, he started to investigate.

Hours later, Olivia woke with a start. She stared at the ceiling for a long time, before rolling over and seeing him typing away furiously on the keypad.

Dustin ignored her as she came up next to him to see what he was doing. He had figured out how to access the commands and was in the process of changing them. The annoying thing was that whoever wrote them, had them all contingent on each other, so when he changed one, there was a chain reaction that required him to change another and another. He knew that if he stopped at any time, he might lose his place and then everything would be messed up.

She got bored after only a short while, and moved off. Thankfully she didn’t bother him as he continued to type furiously. There were several times he had to pause to check on something. After six hours, he finally had it figured out.

“PED, can you contact the cloud to access the genetic material information, without notifying the Josagn and other aliens that you are once again connected to the system?”

(YES)

“How much information can you store?”

(ALL OF IT)

Now to fix her PED!