Prison Dilemma

I could hear Briana shouting my name, though it seemed to be a long way away.  I started to turn to see if I could see her, and maybe reply, but the alien looked down at something it was holding, did something with its face that might have been a frown, and pushed at a dent on a small metal box.  The box hummed and I got a blast of the aniseed smell again, and suddenly Briana didn't seem very important any more.
"What time is it?" said the alien, its head warping and distorting.  Nearby two other aliens seemed to be having a conversation in a different language, and instead of their whole head changing shape they would lean in close to each other and ripples and waves would spread over their skin instead.  I thought I ought to be interested, but I just couldn't muster the energy.
"Earth time?"  My wrist seemed heavy, but I carried on trying to lift it up anyway to look at my watch.
"No...." The alien seemed confused, and I finally pulled by wrist to where I could see my watch.  Somewhere, someone was shouting my name.
"It's about half-past five," I said, though the time was meaningless to me.  Somewhere, so far away that the distance was measured by how long it took the fastest moving thing in the universe to get there, it was half-past five.  I had no idea what happened at that time of day that it had been considered worth giving a name to.
"I was hoping that you could tell me if R'th'gabose had happened yet?"  He clicked the apostrophes and I wondered if there was some hard surface in his throat to help generate such sharp sounds.
"What a Rutherford hose?" I said.  The stars in the constellations looked like they were moving.
Another alien leaned in and ripples and whorls chased each other across his head in rapid, ever-changing, merging patterns.  My interrogator's head responded, and his greyness lightened slightly.
"We are waiting for the ones who want to kill us to leave," he suddenly said, speaking quickly.  "When they are gone we would like your help to return to our world.  It will be easy, and we can then help you."
"Wha–" I started, and then everything turned inside out and squashed back down again and I was being hugged by Briana.  In my hand, the steel straw had run and melted like ice-cream on a hot day and was puddled around my feet.  Neither my hand nor feet were hurt.
"Do you think they were telling the truth?" said Briana after I told her what had happened.  "It sounds very strange to me.  Perhaps they're all prisoners somehow?"
"I... it could be, I mean, they could be."  I was still feeling slightly confused.  "But they're still part of the people who disappeared.  I suppose we have to try and talk to them somehow."
"But suppose they're the reason that all the rest of them disappeared," said Briana.  "Then we'd probably be next on their list of people to kill."
"How can we know that from one of them just talking to me?  You're sounding hysterical, Bri.  What's wrong?"
She didn't answer me at first, instead she held up an oddly shaped skull with a hole in one side.
"There's thousands of them in the hill," she said.  "I think the hill might just be some kind of heaped up mass grave."
"Suicide?" I offered, but I didn't believe it either.
"So what do we do?"
"We pass it back up the chain of command," I said.  "If we can get back to the Guinevere."
We both looked out at the sea of metal straws, all of which might be capable of taking us back to that other world, the place that seemed to be at right-angles to this one, that filled the area between us, the landing ship, and the mountains.
"Yeah," said Briana.  "So, fancy your chances building a boat, or shall we go mountaineering?"

Ten foot steel straws

Briana sniffed.  "Can you smell that," she asked.  I sniffed, a little tentatively at first, and then a little harder.  There was a faintly eggy smell about the moon that I didn't exactly mind, but made me vomit when it got strong.  The air was human-breathable, but there were persistent rumours that the sulphur compounds that gave the air its eggs smell were carcinogenic, teratogenic, and just about any other -genic you cared to suggest.  I made sure I got a monthly check-up and reminded myself every so often that so far, only Auntie out of all the people in this career had made it to retirement.
"I think so," I said, sniffing again.  There was something else against the eggy backdrop and the loamy smells from where we'd disturbed the earth.  I sniffed one last time, and suddenly caught it quite strongly.  "Aniseed?" I said.
"I was thinking fennel," said Briana, "but I think other people describe that as aniseedy, so it's probably the same smell.  Where's it coming from?"
It was kind of a rhetorical question as it pretty much had to be coming from the ten foot metal straws that now separated us from our landing ship, the Guinevere.  I sniffed again, and edged towards the straws.  The smell vanished immediately.
"Apparently not from where we both thought," I said. coming back.  The aniseed hint returned to my nose.  "It disappears when I start to walk towards those straws."
"Bugger," said Briana.  "That would have given us somewhere to start, at least."
"We've got two places to start now," I said.  "We've got a field of metal straw that might be some kind of Spoon harvest, and we've got food smells, that might lead to a Spoon Diner."
She laughed, but she also punched my arm, just above the segmented armor we both wore.  I said ow in a loud voice, and she laughed again.
"Let's follow the smell," she said.  "We know where the straw is, but the smell might go while we're looking at the straw."
"The straw came up pretty fast, it might go again just as fast."
We looked at each other for long moments, and I found myself admiring how she arranged her blue hair to frame her face and draw the eye to her seriously sharp cheekbones.  She looked almost too beautiful to touch, and her choice of mission partners was limited to just three of us, who could each be guaranteed not to fall in lust with her.
"You do the straws," she said.  "The smell has to be more interesting."
"Ok," I said.  "So, standard protocol.  Visibility at all times, unless you radio contact me first and show me where you're going to be and how long you're going to be there for.  Veto rights applied, and we'll use band 35 as the fall-back if we think we're compromised.  First scout, twenty earth-minutes."
Our watch timers all carried earth-standard time as a universal default so neither of us had to work out the local time conversion rates, for which I was grateful.  I started off back to the straws, turning round from time to time to make sure I could still see Briana.
  When I reached the metal straw Briana was still navigating her way. I reached out to the straw and touched one.  It was slightly warm to the touch, and vibrated all the time. I gripped it a little harder, trying to see if it would snap, and it seemed to flex and bend somehow; the world around me flattened out, went two-dimensional, and then seemed to recede as though at the end of a long tunnel, making me feel instantly nauseous.  When I recovered, I'd broken the straw off and was clutching it tight in my fist.  Then I looked for Briana, and instead of seeing her, I found myself surrounded by tall, thin Grey-like aliens and the sky behind them was already dark with strange new constellations visible.
"Hello?" said one of the aliens, his head stretching and distorting to make the sounds as though he were running through a circus-grounds Hall of Mirrors.
"Hello?" I replied, and then everything went weird.

Spoon harvest

Four hundred years ago, give or take a handful of years (and that depended on whose hands you were looking at, as well), the civilisation known to historians as the Spoon somehow managed a mass destruction event.  They'd spread out a little from their home planet, colonising various asteroids and small moons in their system, and as far as we could tell, they'd destroyed anything small enough to be either blown up or put into a orbit that fell into their star.  Two moons were too large for that, and one of them had been dealt with quite effectively by redirecting a large asteroid onto a collision course with it.  The other moon still retained traces of their civilisation, mostly worked stone and some tiny caches of artefacts, but the big giveaway was really the lakes of metal where big things had been melted down to slag and left to harden.
The home planet had also been razed, but more had survived, as might be expected from a longer inhabited planet.  Sealed underground chambers had been found, some including mummified remains, and some containing unpleasant traps.  On a small island far away from the continental landmasses a village had been found, apparently overlooked when the main destruction had occurred.  And in orbit around the planet, seemingly forgotten, was a satellite network that still contained plenty of data.
We were investigating them, mostly on the pretext of finding out why they'd done it, and either preventing ourselves from doing it, or making sure we were only in the audience stands and not on the playing fields if we couldn't.  The majority of the research was taking place on and around the home planet, but there were teams sent out to other points of potential interest in the system.  We were a scouting party; our job was to look for things that were out-of-place and report back about them.
That is, out-of-place if you were a Spoon.  And that's what made the job so hard.
Briana pointed to a small hill.  She and I were stood on some kind of wide, shallow plain that had mountain ranges on two sides, shallow foothills on most of the a third, and kind of ran out into sand, and eventually a sea on all the remaining bits.  The mountains loomed, in the proper sense of the word, and gave anyone coming here to see them nightmares sooner or later.  This was the moon that had suffered the asteroid collision, though that was the other side to where we were, and so the atmosphere was thinner and shallower than its gravity could retain because much of it had been blown away, and the mountains were new.  They poked up well beyond the top of the atmosphere, and computer models I'd been running put it as touch and go as to whether they'd ever be back inside the atmosphere until they'd eroded.  There were no foothills on this side, just a sheer wall of rock that rose out of the ground up nearly a mile and a half before the first wrinkles and creases appeared.  In a few thousand years time, I thought, they'd be great for mountain climbing, but right now they were a lethal temptation.
"Do you think that's a man-made hill?" she said.  Her eyes were too large for her head, as were mine; we had had a number of small surgical alterations to make the job easier.  Everyone said that you could have them reversed at the end of the job, but I didn't know anyone but Auntie who'd survived to retirement, and she was now too fragile to risk that kind of surgery.  I looked, my overlarge eyes taking in more of the electromagnetic spectrum, and focused down from panoramic view to a tight view.  Muscles around my eyes tightened, and a second set that had taken me four months to learn how to use adjusted my corneas.  Effectively, I had a built-in zoom function, which was kind of cool.
"No," I said, shaking my head.  The atmosphere here was slightly viscous, though no-one had put forward an explanation for it yet, and it was like shaking my head underwater.  A little bit too slow.  "I think this is just the result of high-speed geology.  Water was thrown up when the mountains were, creating a glacier up near the top.  When the atmosphere thickened enough to reach it, it thawed out enough of the bottom to release the ice-mass, which then crashed down, skating down across this area and finally creating that sea."
"That's stupid," said Briana, which was her come-back to anything I said that she didn't like but didn't know how to argue.  "So where did the hill come from?"
"Rock and mud deposits either torn off by the glacier's descent, or left behind by the glacier as it melted."
"While it was rocketing down to the seashore?"
"Geologically fast," I said.  "It probably happened over a hundred years, which is bullet-fast for geology."
"Let's take a look anyway."
I shrugged; we'd not found anything interesting yet, and though I was pretty certain the hill was just terrain, it beat standing around looking for anomalies.
"Hey, what's that?"  Briana stopped, but I'd heard it too.  Something had tinkled.  We looked down, and Briana spotted it first: a slim metal straw caught half-under her boot.  She lifted her foot to see what we'd found, and it popped upright and started pushing out of the ground.
"Hey!"  She stepped back, and there was another tinkle.
We looked around; all the way behind us metallic straws were pushing their way out of the ground, rising eerily fast and swaying and clinking together as they did so.  We didn't need to say a word, we both just ran towards the hill.
When we reached it we looked back and saw that, like a field of wheat, there was now a field of swaying, clinking metal straws, each nearly ten feet high.  The edge of the field was perhaps a minute's walk from us, and seemed to be fixed.  Caught up near the tops of the straws were small rocks and clumps of dirt, some neatly skewered through.
"What the hell?" I said, and I could see from Briana's face that she'd been thinking exactly the same thing.
"Some kind of harvest crop?" she said.
Maybe.  Maybe we'd just found a Spoon harvest.