The Catire

[escopton]

This is a story that old grannies tell corsair kids to scare them off when they are misbehaving or just want to frighten them. It is a story about a small group which once was among a lot of other Hispanic people on board the sleeper ship that took them all to Sirius.

The Catire were countryside people. Back in Terra they used to live quiet lives in the harsh plains of northern South America. They were hard workers with strong traditions and weird superstitions. There were very few of them when they were forced to leave their lands, and only two families made it to the Hispania sleeper ship. When they arrived on board, they did not trust anyone there, and remained somewhat isolated, guarding the little things they had brought with them with their own lives. The Catire were not warriors, but hard working field laborers, and though they did not have the combat skills of a soldier, they were agile and strong. And very valerous, because the lands they once called home in Terra were mysterious places with cursed rivers and enchanted forests. With unnamed hills were the danger always awaited, places were the Mandinga lived, as they called the Devil when he disguised himself as a human to trick unwary man to do foul things. So they soon started believing the sleeper ship had it's own Mandinga, and that instead of escaping Hell, they had bought a ticket into it.

That was how, when word of the ship's sabotage started spreading, the Mandinga were one of the first to violently secure their way out of the broken colony. The two family leaders, Paco and Raul, decided that given the situation, they had to protect their families at all cost. They sent the kids to steal some first need goods from the other colonizers before brutally killing the escape pods guards and putting one family on each of them. Only one of them had flown a ship before, and only twice, so they knew their life expectancies were low. But they were firmly convinced that they were doing the right thing.

The escape pods drifted together for some weeks, it's passengers were very tired and desperate, unable to see any inhabited planet or even a small moon were to descend. Food started to scarce and the little kids got ill in one of the vessels. There wasn't enough water either, so the disease soon took over the escape pod and they all died quite horribly.

Now, the escape pods were still drifting together at that point, so the people in the other one had to watch all what happened without being able to actually do something. Raul, the leader of that family, started to blame himself for the death of his friend and his relatives, and weird ideas begun to fill his head. Horrid allucinations of him killing his own family on their sleep. Vivid flashes of mindless bloodshed and uncontrolable demons coming out of him kept him hostage, and his wife, kids and nephews started to fear that he would not be able to save them.

One terrible night when the fever had put him to bed, his wife decided to try something. She had been praying to the Virgen and seeing her prayers were not heard, decided to try something. He told the kids that he was going to give some medicine to Raul so after they all fell asleep he made a tea out of a powerfool mixture of roots and flowers that her grandmother gave her before dying in Sol. These people had a great knowledge of plants and their medicinal uses. This particular one would make Raul sleep for five days without the need to feed or drink. The thing is, she saw that the kids and themselves wouldnt survive much more. So, in hope that they landed soon by the Virign's compassion, she decided to keep her husband sane, because they would all need them to guide and protect the family.

Her prayers were heard, though not by the actual Terran Virgin, but by Baffin's Goddess, Eris. Their ship soon found its way to the Barrier Cloud in Coronado, and as Raul awoke, he was forced to pilot an emergency land on Planet Yuma...


(to be continued)

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