“Why planets in sci-fi are always just one kind of ecosystem. Like, Tatooine is just a desert planet, but that doesn’t make sense. Climates vary at different altitudes and if the planet could sustain those screaming sand men that means there has to have been water and fertile land somewhere, and forests or at least a fucking grassland, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But there’s just sand everywhere and that’s impossible. That’s not how planets work.”
“Writers are lazy,” I said.
“A moon maybe,” he said, apparently not hearing me. Jonathan’s vice was life science the way mine was chemistry. He was in some far-away corner of his mind, pouring over maps and charts and books and whatever else biologists have in their toolbox. “A much smaller body with an atmosphere could feasibly have limited biomes, but even then, there’s probably an ice cap involved, and unless the whole thing is covered in ice that means there’s at least two.”
“Saturn is just a swirling mass of gasses all the way through,” I said. “And Mars is almost nothing but a hyper-cold desert.”
“Okay, there should be more variation for a planet with a substantial breathable atmosphere in the habitable zone of its sun. If there’s life, there’s atmosphere, and atmospheres retain heat at different levels depending on the degree of the planet’s axis, so there would be different weather and different environments, especially if there’s mountains. Assuming there’s water, but that’s probably a given, too, right? If there’s life, there’s water.”
“As far as we know,” I said. “We could be dealing with super-evolved tardigrades.”
“Oh Christ, no,” he said. “The last thing I want to hear is that we’re going to some basically uninhabitable planet full of extremophiles. Do you know how hard those things are to kill?”
I did. An extremophile was an organism that could live under mind-bogglingly uncomfortable conditions and endure stupid amounts of stress. Tardigrades – “water bears” with a fondness for open vacuum – were rarely more than a millimeter long, but if an extremophile had evolved into something bigger, something sentient…the possibilities weren’t endless, but they were numerous and unpleasant.
“Britt?” said Jonathan after I’d been silent for a while.
“Here,” I said. “Yeah, that would be bad. So we’re definitely on the killing train?”
“Unless you’ve got a better idea.”
“Cool. We’re gonna need weapons,” I said. He was only half kidding and so was I.
“They’ll probably have guns,” said Jonathan. “Or something like guns. If they’ve got space ships they definitely have guns.”
“Maybe we just bite them really hard.”
“We could do that. Or scream. Maybe they have really sensitive eardrums. Maybe they’re just brains in little glass beakers and all we have to do is smash them.”
“We can dream,” I said.
The door on the other side of the room irised open, and I jumped. I hit my head against the top of my cage and spent a moment massaging my throbbing skull before looking at what walked in.
Aliens. Obviously. But not so alien as we’d feared.
There were four of them: tall humanoid silhouettes with long hair and eyes that glowed vaguely in the dark, flickering when they blinked like dying neon. They were silent, they were huge, and they were about as close to human as we could have hoped for.
And they weren’t wearing masks. However different they were from us, they were breathing oxygen, and that was huge.
My eyes didn’t have time to adjust to find the finer details. One of them, tall and thin and wearing something that billowed when they moved, stepped forward. They looked over the cages, muttering to themselves in a language I didn’t know – surprise surprise, Brittany doesn’t speak alien – and slowly lifted their arm to point. Up and to my left.
“Oh balls,” Jonathan muttered.
The other three moved. Slowly, it seemed, deliberately. One of them pressed his hand against his wrist, and the cages around Jonathan started to glow, casting a hazy bluish light across the room – and across their faces. They appeared male, with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth in roughly human proportion, though their features were significantly longer, more elven than anything. Their skin was an ashy grey, their hair white as starlight. They wore black body suits that made them almost invisible in the dark. Every one of them was strapped down with knives and what I could only assume were guns or stunners.
The glowing cages rattled, and Jonathan’s cage slid out, floating in a blue cloud of light. Two of the elfish men grabbed it by handles on either side. The light disappeared, and they caught Jonathan when his cage dropped.
And they walked out.
Oh shit. My blood froze, a cold that seeped into my bones and fused my tongue to the roof of my mouth.
“Um,” Jonathan said shakily, “Brittany?”
“Jonathan,” I said, barely a whisper – then, snapping back into full reality, louder, “Jonathan!” All my panic manifested at once. I shook the door of my cage, throwing myself against it even though I knew it was no good. “Jonathan! You’ll be okay! You’re going to be okay!”
I could see the whites of his eyes as the door closed over him.
The room was plunged briefly into darkness. My eyes took a full minute to adjust, so all I could see for a while was the glowing white stripes and the small shadows they cast.
“Dammit,” I muttered. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.” I slammed my fist against the metal floor, shaking. My voice twisted and caught and then I was crying, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Breathe. Breathe.
I couldn’t get myself to think it’ll be okay, so for a while I just sat there, my mind doing nothing but spitting breathe at me on repeat. Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe…
It took me a while to realize the only sounds in the room were mine.
I held my breath. All the noise, the whimpering and breathing and shuffling, all of it was gone.
I felt the panic begin to set in, properly this time, starting in the back of my throat and coiling down like a string of lightning. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe they were just being very, very quiet. Maybe everyone was asleep.
Or maybe I’m alone in here now, I thought. No one else had reacted when they dragged Jonathan out, no one else had screamed or even told me to shut up. I swallowed and closed my eyes, pressing my hands into the floor. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. I didn’t have the energy to be afraid. I couldn’t worry about anyone else now, not when there was literally nothing I could do. Just breathe. Just keep breathing and everything will be alright. Just breathe and breathe and breathe.
I inhaled. I held my breath. I exhaled. Again and again, sucking in cold air and digging my nails into my palms, leaving deep divots in the skin, drawing blood, or maybe that was only sweat. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. My lungs stung, maybe because I was holding it too long, maybe because it was cold, and it was getting colder by the minute, or maybe I was going into shock. Maybe I was dying. Maybe this was where it ended, here in the cargo hold of a ship that belonged to an alien race I couldn’t even see.
It’ll be okay. Just as long as I kept breathing, it would be okay. I would be okay. Jonathan would be okay if I just remembered to breathe.
Jonathan. Where were they taking him? What were they planning to do? I imagined a room, a stark white room full of humanoids in stark white coats, with latex gloves and a vast array of needles and knives, scalpels and stitches and little electric modules for examining muscle responses. A room full of curious scientists, the kind I’d been in, worked in dozens of times, leaning over the shoulders of surgeons and watching as they dissected an animal to teach me how it worked.
I was close to vomiting. I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.
Don’t think about grandpa. Don’t think about mom and Toro. Don’t think about your bed at home or the open
window, don’t think about the rose grandpa gave you that might not get watered if you don’t come back. Don’t think about sunlight. Don’t think about sunlight. Don’t think about sunlight.
A little voice, small and reasonable, piped up in the back of my mind. At least you won’t have to do your homework.
I laughed. Aloud in that little cage, maybe alone on the ship and in the world, I laughed, loud enough for it to echo. At least I won’t have to do my homework. I probably didn’t even have any homework left to do, but I latched on to the thought, and then it was the only thing that existed. At least I won’t have to do my homework. Other thoughts lanced in, but they were small, soft like distant thunder. You’ll never graduate, they said, you’ll never see the ocean again. But they were all overshadowed by that asinine little realization of I won’t have to do my homework.
I won’t have to do my homework. I was laughing loudly now, and I couldn’t seem to stop. The noise seemed to come from outside of me, bouncing off the walls and sliding down the back of my throat, only to drag itself up and out again even louder than before. I won’t have to do my homework. I won’t have to do my homework.
It might have been minutes or hours. Gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you how long I sat there, laughing like a Shakespearean madwoman. Laughing like I’d sprung a leak, lost a screw, like some critical fuse in my brain had short-circuited and set everything around it on fire.
The door irised open, and cold blue light spilled in from outside. Three silhouettes walked in and it closed behind them. I swallowed my laughter, feeling absurdly giddy. Ooh look, I thought lamely, new friends. I almost started laughing again, but the sound of their footsteps cut me off cold, heavy, metallic footsteps. Iron-clad, bone breaking footsteps that shattered the silence like glass.
One of the silhouettes stepped forward. I blinked away the residual blue light and looked at him.
The man – if I could call him that – stared at the stacked cages with deep set eyes made black by the dim light. He was shorter than the guards flanking him by a full head, and he was stouter too. I squinted and could make out the vague outlines of a padded uniform. He was strapped down with small pouches and holsters. A belt of knives glinted in the darkness when he moved, five of them hanging from his hip, long and thin and sharp as needles. He grunted and sniffed, and said something in a guttural voice to the two behind him. They didn’t respond. Above and around me, I heard bodies shift and stir – so I wasn’t alone after all. Some sat up quickly and pushed themselves back when they saw our visitors. Others moved slowly, moaning, barely reacting to them at all.
His eyes roved over the cages – and stopped on me.
I felt parts of my body stiffen – neck, legs, back, the usual bits – but by and large I didn’t feel a damn thing. I blinked slowly at him, examining his squarish face and roundish arms. They were thick with fat and muscle in equal measure, if their jiggling was anything to go by. His build was different in every possible way from the two with him. I wondered which of them was the anomaly. I smiled at him.
He smiled back. It wasn’t the ugliest thing in the world, but it was hardly sincere.
The man snapped his fingers and pointed at me. This one.
Oh dear.
The two tall ones moved forward. One of them had a small remote control in his hands, a slick black rectangle dotted with soft blue lights. He ran his thumb across them and the cages around me rattled, glowing blue and lifting themselves away from me. They reached in, grabbed the cage by two jutting handles on either side, and hoisted me down like a box of clothes. I dropped and braced myself, but the cage stopped before it hit the ground, hovering. It bobbed like a buoy in rough water, rising slowly until I was eye-level with the aliens. They spared me a cursory glance.
And I felt us move forward.
***
The ship’s hallways were tall and round. They were lit, like the storage room, by white stripes, but these ran along the floor and at intervals along the curving walls. We passed a host of iris doors, opening and closing to expel and admit bored looking alien crew members. Some carried tablets, others narrow silver toolboxes. They were all humanoid, and ludicrously tall, with skin all across the spectrum of grey and hair ranging from night-black to blistering white. The majority of them had dark grey skin and long white hair, and none of them was shorter than six feet; all wore skin-tight bodysuits of red, black, white, and green, their colors probably denoting their station. The ones I guessed were female (assuming their anatomy aligned more or less with ours) were between three inches and two feet shorter than their male counterparts, but there was variation there too, like there is with everything. Some of the females were taller than the males, and a very, very small number of males were shorter by a wide margin than my guards, but none of them were quite so short as the armored man walking beside me.
I stared at him as we moved along. His jaw was square and he had a pronounced overbite. A wash of white hair draped across his shoulders, half of it tied up behind his head in a drooping topknot. His eyes were darker than most – closer to black than anything remotely silver – and while no one on the ship seemed happy to be there, this one looked especially upset.
He turned abruptly to look at me, scowling, and said “Milthak vol taras?” in a terse tone – something I could only assume meant “What are you looking at?” or something to that effect.
I shrugged. He squinted at me with what was either suspicion or surprise and turned away, shaking his head.
Milthak vol taras, I thought, repeating his words back to myself.
One way to find out if that’s what it meant. I looked one of the aliens in the eyes – burning silver disks staring at me with curiosity – and said, “Milthak vol taras?”
His eyes went wide and he took a small step back, the way you might react if your dog suddenly looked up and told you it wanted to go outside…and I came to a disturbing realization.
Holy fuck, they don’t think I’m intelligent. We’re in cages because they think we’re dumb animals.
I felt a surge of indignation. Dumb animals that could build and pilot rocket ships, dumb animals with research stations and pocket-universe light-speed travel on par with their own? Dumb animals with the same eyes, the same shape, dumb animals that could clearly speak in a language that was foreign to them, yes, but it was a language and that should have been more than enough.
They think we’re parrots, I thought. Mimics, stupid little mimics, no more sentient to them than monkeys are to us.
Which, the more I thought about it, almost made sense. Gorillas like Coco had displayed their ability to learn languages and appreciate music, and they interacted with us on a scale not so different from a toddler, but we didn’t consider them our equals. Not elephants either, or parrots, or dolphins, or octopi, and they were some of the smartest creatures on the planet. They were intelligent, sentient even, but we kept them in cages and studied them, because they still weren’t us.
Which didn’t bode well now.
I thought of the kind of experiments I’d read about different universities running on chimpanzees and gorillas. They were largely behavioral, but some of them were markedly unpleasant, even if they weren’t allowed to be inhumane. I wondered if these aliens had a code of ethics, or a board to enforce them, or a public that would riot if anything unsavory happened to us. I hoped it didn’t matter.
As more and more eyes fell on me, I felt the hysterical giddiness finally begin to fade, and I realized I was shivering violently. It was slightly warmer out here in the halls than in the storage room, but for all my body knew we were naked in the Arctic. I took deep breaths and listened to the aliens murmuring, probably about me.
I should have been ready for them to walk me into a lab – it should have been my first guess, why else would they be moving us? – but when the black door irised open and revealed the sleek white and grey interior, I felt my blood go cold. It’s something you hear get said all the time, “My blood ran cold”, bu
t you don’t know what it really means until you feel your whole body get twenty degrees colder in a fraction of a second. It was like I’d swallowed an iceberg, like I was choking on it, stuck in the back of my throat, the cold of it knifing through the roof of my mouth.
I looked between the guards, these emotionless grey creatures that might as well have been human.
“Do you speak English?” I said. Predictably, neither of them responded.
They settled my cage onto an island in the middle, the kind of metal slab table you’d expect to find in a vet’s office. The plastic floor grew immediately colder. They drew their hands away and took a few steps back, standing at attention in the shadows. The room was mostly empty, with flat silver blocks running wall to wall and floor to ceiling on three sides of it. There were no perforations or handles, but I assumed it was for storage. There were metal carts and tables laid out around us, full of small instruments and paperwork. It all felt very haphazard – either the space had been poorly prepared or the person in charge of it was just hellishly disorganized.
The disgruntled alien I was already calling Shorty in my head walked over to a control module in the corner, a half-circle desk with an angled surface full of glowing things that might have been anything from charts to maps to mission imperatives. Behind it stood an alien in a white bodysuit – baggier than the rest, and full of pockets – who looked up at Shorty’s approach. He was immediately disenchanted with his presence.
The one in white was more expressive than most of them, that I could tell right away. He frowned deeply when he apparently recognized Shorty, but just as quickly flattened his face. He offered Shorty a shallow bow and muttered something polite.
Shorty said something curt and gestured to me. There was a pause. A smile tugged at the corners of the white one’s mouth, as though he was scuttling a laugh. Then he gave Shorty a solemn nod and turned to his table, fiddling with touch screen controls while Shorty breathed down his neck. He stopped moving and both of them stood in tense silence, waiting for something.
“Qel tasri suval?” Shorty said irritably.
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 3
