by Ashe Barker
“Okay,” I reply. “Some improvement, but it’s slow going.”
“She looks a better colour,” offers Luca, though how either of us would really know is debatable. I understand his meaning, though, because I had also detected a slight change. I’ve been checking at regular intervals and have noted that the Fyorlian’s skin is now slightly deeper in colour than when we found her, and the markings on her shoulders more vivid. The unusual colouration extends around the front too, over her shoulders and down her ribs, then across her lower abdomen where the markings meet just below her navel.
“Yeah. She started breathing again a few minutes ago, and her core temperature has risen by three degrees.”
“Does it hurt you? Doing this?” Luca peers at the tubes linking my body to that of this alien being.
“No, not after the cannulas are in. I fucking hate that bit. Now, it’s just boring having to wait for her to respond.”
“How much longer?”
“This session, maybe a couple more hours. Then I’ll see how she does on her own. The virus might well start to multiply though as soon as I disengage, so I’ll probably need to link us up again fairly soon to complete the job. Assuming her autoimmune system isn’t compromised, though, she should be all right after that.”
Luca nods, his attention now drawn to the exquisite form of the petite alien nestled at my side. I can’t say I blame him; she is nothing short of stunning.
“Fine-looking females, these Fyorlians,” he observes. “No body hair, apart from on her head.”
I had noticed that. No eyebrows either, though she has long eyelashes in the same bluish black of her hair. I can’t find it in myself to argue with Luca’s overall assessment. Instead I direct the conversation toward the salvaged ship. “Everything all right over there?”
“Yeah, I got the ship to walk nicely to heel for us.”
“Right. So, what do we know about that meteor then? The one that destroyed her home world.”
“Ah, yes, Fyorli. CAID dug out the back story. They were a technically advanced civilisation, totally destroyed when their planet was caught in a meteor strike in twenty-six fifty-nine. They saw it coming, obviously, and evacuated most of the population to neighbouring moons, but couldn’t manage to maintain the necessary regulatory systems to support life indefinitely. The Patreaos Quadrant is a remote planetary system and although they signalled for assistance, it took too long for ships from other galaxies to reach the evacuees and by the time help arrived there were no survivors.”
“What about the other worlds within the quadrant?”
“Only Krysorus had the necessary capability to reach the stranded Fyorlians, and they refused to intervene. There was a row at the time, once the consequences of their refusal to lend aid was known. Krysorus was subject to intergalactic sanctions, not that they cared much. They’re an isolationist race with no real interest in anything beyond their immediate planet and few circling moons.”
“Bastards,” I murmur, not that this helps much. The Fyorlians are still long-dead, apart from this one. “I wonder how that particular ship came to escape the destruction.”
“We can ask her, when she comes round.” Luca strips the environmental suit off and settles into a chair beside my bed.
“I take it you’re staying then. Don’t you have any work to do?” Daft question. Of course he has things to do, but we’re both concerned about this little alien we seem to have salvaged along with her stricken ship. Like me, he’s going nowhere until he knows she’s out of danger.
I wait another three hours before I ask Luca to disconnect the tubes from the alien’s cannulas. She is starting to stir a little now, and she seems restless. We need to handle the next stage with care. She’ll be fucking confused when she does regain consciousness and we have no idea how she might react to the presence of two alien males, and to finding herself on another ship, though she shows no sign of wanting to move away from me. If anything, she is clinging to my side even more tightly.
Before long, her eyelids flutter and she cracks them open to reveal irises of a deep amethyst shade. At once she closes her eyes again, her forehead crinkling. Luca calls out the command to CAID to lower the illumination in here. The sound of his voice seems to cause her to curl into a ball and we exchange a glance. This is not going to be easy.
I’m just considering whether to try to speak to her again when suddenly, all hell breaks loose. The soft, pliant body in my arms becomes rigid and she hurls herself across the bed. She kneels up, glaring at me, then at Luca, her small fists raised as though to batter us into submission. Neither of us moves.
“It’s okay,” I offer. “You’re safe here.”
Her beautiful eyes flash and she lets loose a stream of incomprehensible sounds. I suppose ‘get your hands off me, you bastard’ is much the same in any language.
“CAID, activate multilingual sensors and translators, please.” Luca issues the request, then steps forward to speak to her, his tone low and even. “Do you want to try that again, honey?”
She swivels her head to peer at him, clearly bewildered, though it is equally obvious that she understood what he said this time. We both attempt a reassuring smile.
She opens her mouth again, closes it, then, “Why am I naked? And what are you doing in my bed?”
Luca laughs out loud, the fucking moron. “Ah, sweetheart, I don’t blame you for taking issue with that. Please forgive my companion’s clumsy approach, his skills as a lover have never been up to much.”
“Lover?” She narrows her eyes at me, though I like to think Luca is included in her general disgust at the situation.
I seek to rectify matters. “Ignore my colleague’s inane ramblings, he’s an idiot and can’t help himself. I believe he was dropped on his head in a previous life.”
The Fyorlian backs away from me, only halting her retreat when she comes up against the wall. “What is this previous life? Who are you and where is this place?” She lowers her fists, but only to attempt to cover her perfect breasts from our perusal. Her expression is accusing now, and fearful though I suppose that is to be expected. “Where are my clothes?”
Ah, her terror of us seems to be for reasons I had not entirely expected. This, I can put right.
“You were naked when we found you and we assumed that was your preferred state.” I get to my feet and move slowly across the room to the closet where I store my clothes. I grab a loose shirt and toss it on the bed in front of her. “You can wear that, for now, until we find you something more suitable.”
The alien doesn’t move. It’s as though she has no notion what the shirt is or why I am offering it to her. I step forward again and pick it up, then open the buttons. I drape it around her shoulders. “There. Better?”
She grabs the fabric and clutches it before her chest.
“So, if your nudity is such a problem for you, why were you naked when we found you?” It seems a fair enough question to me, and we have to start somewhere.
The alien glares at me, her pretty mouth working. Her brow furrows, as though she is trying to remember. She takes her time before responding. “I was alone. Who, then, might I dress for?”
“Okay,” I agree. “Fair enough. So—”
“Who are you and why have you brought me here?” She interrupts my next question with some of her own. Her expression is wary as she looks from Luca to me then back again. “What do you intend to do to me?”
Ah, such delightful possibilities occur to me, and I daresay to Luca too, but now is not the time. We often share a female or two when the opportunity arises, but they are always willing, as enthusiastic as we are for the sport. Luca and I exchange a glance, then I sit on the edge of the bed and meet our strange little guest’s startled, deep purple gaze.
“My name is Sylvan, and this is Luca. You are on board our ship, the Zephryean, a scientific vessel with the primary function of reclamation and salvage. We detected your vessel and believed it to be abandoned so we started the
clean-up. That’s when we came across you. When we realised you were alive we brought you back to our ship to take care of you.”
“You…? I… I do not understand.” Her eyes widen. “And what is that?”
She is pointing to the door, where Eric has chosen this moment to make an appearance. He sits in the entrance, his nose quivering, his eyes alert as he observes this latest acquisition of ours.
“Ah, that’s Eric. He’s a rabbit.”
“A… a rabbit?” she repeats. “What…?”
“An animal. A pet, sort of.” I don’t consider Luca’s explanation especially helpful and it’s clear that our guest is similarly unimpressed.
“Animal? Pet?”
“Don’t worry about him, he’s harmless,” I seek to reassure her. “Now, how are you feeling?”
Her attention had been distracted briefly but her focus is suddenly back on her current plight. “How did you do this?” She gestures to herself. “I was in stasis. Only Fyorlian technology could have reversed the process. You are not Fyorlian. There are no Fyorlians remaining…” She breaks down, as though perhaps only now remembering the fate of the others on board her ship. “Where are they? The rest…?”
We both shake our heads. “I’m sorry,” starts Luca. “There was nothing to be done for them.”
“I know that, they died of the contagion. I was ill also…”
“Yes, you had a virus but we were able to help you fight it.” Her gaze returns to me as I speak to her. “Do you feel better now?”
She lifts a hand to her forehead. “Yes… perhaps. I think… I am not sure.”
This is my territory and I need to take charge. I summon what I hope is a reassuring smile.
“You need to feed, and you need rest. The virus might start to multiply again, and if it does we’ll deal with it. You will survive, I promise you that.”
“I… are you sure?” Her voice is quiet now, little more than a whisper.
I reach out my hand to take hers. This time she doesn’t scuttle away. “I am sure, yes.” I pause, then, “Do you feel well enough to tell us how you came to be here in the Patreaos Quadrant, alone?”
“I was alone because they died, the rest of the Renascient crew. They became ill, as I told you…”
“Renascient? Is that the name of your craft?” Luca interjects with his question. He is seated on the chair across the room, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.
The Fyorlian nods.
“And you, what’s your name?” he continues.
She regards him across the room. “Llianna,” she whispers.
“We’re delighted to meet you, Llianna. So, obviously your ship managed to survive the meteor strike on your planet. Why was that? Were you off-world when the disaster occurred?”
Another small nod from our guest. “They were, yes.”
“They?” I pick up on the odd use of word. “Were you not on board the Renascient then?”
She shakes her head. “Of course not. I was not even born.”
Luca and I exchange another bemused gaze. “CAID, remind us of the date of the meteor strike on Fyorli.”
“According to the galactic web records I have been able to access, the impact occurred in the year two thousand six hundred and fifty-nine, sir.”
“Almost two hundred years ago,” I observe, superfluously. I daresay we can all do the arithmetic. “Llianna, when were you born?”
“Zero one zero zero one one,” she replies.
“CAID?” I look to our computer to decode the binary numerals.
“Two thousand, seven hundred and eighty-six.”
“So, that would make her… seventy years old,” I state.
“Negative. Bio-scans indicate the alien to be twenty-one helio-cycles of age,” comes back the instant response. “That is approximately twenty-three percent of the normal lifespan for this species. The female has just recently achieved sexual maturity, though Fyorlians become intellectually and physically mature by their tenth helio-cycle.”
“Right,” I murmur, assimilating all of this. “So, Lianna, you’re seventy helio-cycles old, but it’s clear you’ve worn well. Are we to understand from this that you haven’t aged whilst in stasis?”
“That is correct,” she replies, her expression wary. “It is usual.” She hesitates, then, “How many helio-cycles has it been…?”
I do the quick mental arithmetic. “Forty-nine.”
She blanches. I decide to move on. “We’ll come back to this. For now, tell me, where were you born, since your home world was gone?”
Her expression suggests that she considers my question particularly dim. “I was born on board the Renascient, of course. That is all there is, all there has ever been, for me.”
“Your parents?” This from Luca, still listening intently from across the room.
“My mother’s body is one of those you found when you came on board my ship. My father died when I was very young.”
“So, your mother, and the others we discovered, they were the crew on board your ship at the time of the meteor strike, but as the Renascient was not actually on the planet’s surface, they survived. Is that right?”
“May I remind you, sir, that this species has a lifespan of just ninety-seven helio-cycles, on average. It is highly improbable that anyone alive at the time of the destruction of Fyorli would still be living now.” CAID has a way of sounding eminently patient and at the same time totally patronising. One day I might just give in to the temptation to flick his fucking ‘off’ switch for good.
“Thank you, CAID but I think we already worked that out.” Luca gets to his feet and approaches the bed.
Llianna retreats, only to come up against me at her back. “You believe me to be untruthful? I am not. My account is accurate. My great-grandparents were on board the Renascient when our home was destroyed. They and their companions, a crew of over seventy members at that time, had left Fyorli on a first contact probe mission and were over three lightyears away when they picked up the signal from our home world. They returned to this quadrant in response to the distress call but the journey took them over twenty helio-cycles. By the time they arrived there was nothing left of Fyorli apart from fragments of rock. They visited all other planets and moons within range of the planet and found plenty of remains but no survivors.”
“So, what happened then,” I prompt when she falls silent.
“There were other Fyorlians also who were not on our home world when it was destroyed, though not many. Our technology was advanced, but we had little interest in galactic exploration at that time so tended to construct short-range craft, which required a base for refuelling and maintenance. Such vessels were unsustainable without the home world, and our closest neighbour with compatible technology, Krysorus, refused them permission to land on their planet. Our people were condemned to a slow death among the stars.”
“Your ancestors found those craft also?” Luca’s tone is gentle. In fairness, he does this stuff far better than I do.
“Yes…” She blinks, her eyes glassy with tears. “They were all dead. Only the Renascient remained, though that was not the name of the ship then. The Fyorlian crew renamed her, to better reflect her new mission.”
“Which was?”
She turns to look up at me. “To find anything, anything at all which might remain of our civilisation. And to start the re-genesis of our people.”
“Ah, yes, Renascient. Reborn. So, you were in search of a new planet to colonise?”
“Yes, and eventually we would have found such a world.”
“You’ve had two hundred years in which to explore other galaxies to find your new home, yet you remained in the Patreaos Quadrant. Why was that?”
“At first we hoped to forge some sort of alliance with Krysorus. We had no desire to depart this galaxy, our roots are here. But our efforts at diplomacy got us nowhere, so we began to look at other options and took the decision to explore further afield. Meanwhile our crew was utilising o
ur technical expertise to experiment with cloning technology as a way of increasing our numbers. The work was proceeding, but not quickly enough to counteract the losses as crew members succumbed to old age. Some children were born naturally, including both my parents, but we knew enough of genetics to realise that we needed a greater gene pool to ensure vigorous offspring and that was the one resource we did not have. We continued to scour our galaxy for any more remaining survivors, it was our only chance.”
“And…?”
“None. There were none. By the time I was born we had become convinced of that. My father was the last Fyorlian male and when he died that finally killed our hopes. Unless we could discover a reliable method of reproducing asexually we would not survive. I was the last, the youngest of all of us. I suppose I always knew I would eventually be alone.” She pauses to haul in a deep breath, then buries her face in her hands.
“Well, you’re not alone anymore. This will work out, somehow.”
Luca is the one with the fancy, encouraging promises. For my own part, I remember my role as quasi-physician. “You’re tired and stressed. You need to rest.”
“I… I am fine.”
I shake my head. “Not quite yet, but you will be.” I get up and fetch a scanner and data tablet from the remote control consul in my room. The scanner is a short, narrow rod, just big enough to hold in a fist. I place that in Llianna’s right hand. “Hold this. Squeeze it as tight as you can.”
She obeys me without questioning my instruction, and I observe the data now streaming across the screen of the handheld tablet. I compare the readings to the optimum values provided by CAID. Llianna’s heart rate is slightly elevated, her respiration near enough normal, and her temperature similar. Blood pressure is low but not worryingly so. I am aware from my recent link-up with her that the virus has not been completely eliminated, but there’s a reasonable chance that Llianna’s own immune system will be able to cope. If not, I can and will step in again.
“Lie down, get some sleep. One of us will stay with you and CAID can maintain a visual scan. He’ll alert us of any sudden or obvious change in your condition.”
