by Ellen Mint
“Rather convent how close this was,” I said. Unease crept along my spine as the promise of getting to see an alien intergalactic craft faded to a ten-foot square shed in the mountains.
Nolan’s gaze darted off of me to the sweeping valley below. “I suppose I was drawn to it, to protect it.”
Or he knew I’d agree to help him. There was still a chance this could be a trick, and he organized the entire thing to get me to walk into his murder shack. Okay, tentacle man was hard to explain, but they could do amazing things with rubber suits these days.
“Is there a problem?” he asked, causing me to jump. My foot remained hovering right above the dark line where the shed’s interior hid in shadows. Every potential threat lingering inside was vague and fueled my nightmares. Nolan glanced in and he leaned forward. Oxygen clogged my throat as his hand reached for me…and skipped right past to tug on a dangling light cord.
No blood-stained farm equipment decorated the pristine shelves. No handprints from previous victims covered the textured plastic walls. It looked like the whole thing was just pulled out of the box. Nolan shrugged and stepped into the small shed first.
I gave one last glance around, trying to spot any hidden bear traps on an empty floor. “It’s only,” I began, easing over the threshold. “It’s rather small for a spaceship.”
“Hm.” A cheeky smile that rarely graced the gregarious man’s lips caused my breath to catch. Suddenly, the door slammed shut and the lights snapped to darkness.
Trying to not shriek, I stumbled away from the self-closing door and right into the body of the only possible threat in the empty shed. Something brushed across my hips and my brain pictured giant spiders crawling over my skin. I was about to swat one away when eerie green light rose not from the bulb above my head but the floor itself.
As it did, I looked up into Nolan’s eyes. He held me close, his lush lips twisted in a wry smile. “Might want to steady yourself,” he said and ten thousand pounds of force launched me into the air.
Or so it felt. I couldn’t see anything, the colors and lights of the shed fading to a sharp white. Sound vanished with a hard pop. But I felt the kick deep in my gut, the way a bird knows which way is north, how sea turtles can navigate back to where they were born. One moment I was safely on earth six thousand feet above sea level, the next…
Black spiked through the white, hard outlines forming first. Slowly, the gray worked its way in between the gaps. I tried to raise my fists to rub my eyes, terrified that I would never see color again when a beautiful blue and purple appeared before me. It was patterned like the scales of an exotic fish gliding through the ocean and drew me in.
Hot air twirled through my ear. I clenched my bare toes, a shiver crawling along my spine when words formed in my brain. “Breathe.”
Holy shit. I gasped, shoveling oxygen into my starving lungs. Pain burned across my brain and it scolded my foolish self for holding the breath so long. Why had I even…?
The blue and purple scales vanished to reveal the naked skin of Nolan nearly pressed to my chest. His hands were still cupped to my hips as if he was about to make me do a little dance. Or circle around to my ass and…
Probably not that.
“What.” I shook my head, trying to wick away the pain, and my gaze landed across a sweeping vista impossible to find on Earth. “Was that…?” my mouth finished as I wandered to the circular array of windows revealing a blue marble planet rising below us. Darkness claimed the area directly beneath, but as I stared East, I spotted the rising sun and a dusting of cotton white clouds.
Nolan snickered and stepped back, freeing me. In an instant, I took off for the windows. Geography was not my strong suit, but I recognized the same mountain terrain we’d been on. Lights sparkled between the shadows like fireflies fritzing out in a field. There was more too. A gap between the lights. Black as pitch and…I knew that. It was the lake I’d sometimes walk when I needed to get out of the lab. That thing’s gigantic, can’t see across, can’t even see to the middle. And there it was, a tiny drop amongst a sea of everything I’d known.
The whole world right there. To scoop up in the palm of my hand.
Because I was in space.
“Oh my...” I sputtered, about to clasp a hand to my mouth when I turned to find Nolan staring at me. He had to think I was a complete fool, nerding out over something he could see every day.
It was a smile I found and not an eye roll. “Welcome to lower orbit,” he said, “above a planet the galaxy knows as S42-3.”
“Why? I’m guessing the three is because of the third planet from the sun. But how does the 42 connect? The S must mean something else. Or is that translated? How did we even get up here? The energy required to break atmosphere alone…and to have done it like…” I tried to snap my fingers, but only a dull thud escaped.
Nolan chuckled at my sudden enthusiasm. “Transporter, of sorts. Seed a pod on a planet for easy extraction. Much easier than burning all that fuel and raising questions of the locals when leaving.”
“Okay, that…yeah, that makes sense.” I began to pace back and forth across grates I realized were soft on my feet and warm to the touch. Not in a creepy, I’m walking inside the belly of a whale way. It was almost like moving on a bouncy castle that was a few inches above the plywood. Sturdy but cushioning. Was the entire ship made out of this material or only the floors? What even was it? To the eye it looked metal but…
“You’re glaring at the ground,” Nolan whispered beside me.
I leaped into the air and, to my shock, flew two feet into it. Ah! My arms pinwheeled out, only for me to gently glide back to the confounding floor. I’d assumed there’d be some kind of fake gravity on the ship, but that was…
“Slip too far away from the Demithelian rug and you get a little bounce in your step,” Nolan said. “Common, especially on ships this size.”
“I have…” Swallowing, I tried to stop staring at the vast consoles scattered around the open floor like desks. What I took at first to be the chairs were easily five feet tall. Could be something else. They didn’t have backs, only a hard high stool. Even the console was a guess. Black glass lay across the raised counters ready for a hand to revive them. Or maybe it was a table to eat on. Who knew in an alien ship.
“Questions?” Nolan asked.
“A few thousand, I think,” I admitted, trying to not laugh, and cry, and scream all at once. A real-life alien spaceship.
“Tell you what, how about you ask them while I prep for launch? The longer we wait, the more likely it is for the Kirkan to notice us,” Nolan said, getting back to the business.
Right. Evil squid that wanted to steal my research. But my late-night fiddling with data meant nothing in the face of all these technological wonders.
Nolan stepped closer to one of the propped up consoles and pressed his hand to it. Sure enough, green light rose from below the black glass. I couldn’t understand a single one of the squiggles appearing and vanishing below him, but he didn’t bat an eye. Nolan didn’t scramble to sit on the stool but leaned against it.
As he pushed more buttons, the ship hummed in a haunting melody and two extra consoles rose from a gap in the floor. It reminded me of those old adventure games where you shine a mirror the right way and the temple emerged from the seabed. But with aliens.
“What’s the matter? Kirkan steal your tongue to wear as a necklace?” Nolan turned his glittering eyes at me, a laugh in his words, but the reminder of what was out there caused me to focus.
“The transporter. Will the Kirkan have one?” Was its…her ship orbiting earth somewhere too?
“Doubtful,” Nolan said while the main window shifted to what looked like a black and green strategy game map. “Placing a transporter that won’t be intercepted by locals requires time. Considering how quickly that Kirkan went from appearing on-site to attempted theft…”
“And murder,” I added. The bruises might be gone, but I feared that every time I closed my ey
es I’d still see that robot’s dead stare glaring at me.
Nolan tipped his head as if to acknowledge my opinion without giving it weight. “Most likely she’s using an atmo skipper. Lightweight, easily maneuverable. Very touchy.”
“So, the transporter you placed in the shed, I assume?” I asked, receiving a nod from the man going through a flight check. “How does it work? Quantum entanglement? People say that every time one is used you’re essentially creating a perfect duplicate of what you were down to the atomic level. Except one of you has to die in the transport and you have no way of knowing which it was.”
The quick hands gliding across the controls froze and Nolan spun around to stare at me. “I don’t think any version of me has been cloned and died.”
“Then what are the mechanics?”
A snicker answered me. “Do you understand exactly how a tv remote works?”
“Of course, a digitally-coded infrared signal is bounced from…” slipped free before I caught the knowing smirk in the bounty hunter’s lips.
“I should have known you were the type to break a remote to see how it works.”
“No, I would never…!” Ignoring the old calculator I pried apart using Ava’s nail clippers. And our father’s not-so-old phone whose innards I thought would work great at show-and-tell. The look passing across Nolan’s face, a smug ‘I knew it’ caused my cheeks to burn hot.
It felt like the word ‘dork’ lit up in bright lights across my chest. Why was I incapable of even faking being cool? Everyone wanted Dr. Martinez to be a badass instead of an awkward nerd that attended math competitions as a kid and had a favorite Powerpuff Girl. It’s Bubbles.
Feeling flustered, I reached out for the first thing I could find to aid as a distraction. “What does this do?” I asked aloud while picking up a small box with a short wand attached.
Nolan cocked an eyebrow and turned to say, “Oh, that’s a species detector.”
“You mean a DNA sequencer?” I asked even as I inspected the line of buttons. There were five in total, but most likely the largest ones would…
“Nothing that precise. I can show you how to use it once I’ve finished—”
“Detecting Species, Require Input,” the device chirped in a sharp voice from my hands.
“Or you already got it.”
With a laugh, I ran the wand down my arm. The box displayed a series of graphs which kept jutting out incomprehensible symbols. I had to assume they were numbers, perhaps a percentage count. It wasn’t until I reached my wrist that I wondered if this could cause cancer. Before I could ask Nolan, the scanner answered, “Species Detected, Chipmunk.”
“What? Chipmunk?”
Nolan laughed. “It’s a cheap knock off. Only good for helping to narrow down to planet of origin. To be fair, you do have quite a lot of DNA shared with a chipmunk.”
“I am not a chipmunk!” I thundered as if this was a vital fight to win.
His gaze licked down my fuming body and swerved around my hips he’d held onto during zap up here. “No,” he shook his head slowly, the tip of his tongue gracing his lips, “you are not.”
Heat burst through me, both embarrassment at my childish outburst but also that long-ignored flame some called a libido. Endlessly stupid. I’d tried asking Nolan out three times, just to gauge his interest, then at Ava’s insistence. He’d shot me down every time. This was probably some alien way of staring askance at a foolish person.
A bounty hunter with access to a spaceship and technology beyond any human’s understanding. And here I held in my hands a way to see if he was as human as he looked in the shower. There went the blush again. Sidling closer like I was a spy about to steal microfiche, I held the scanning device out. Nolan paid me no attention as he continued with his flight check.
More of those symbols flashed past. I think the small triangle with a hat was a five guessing by the pattern. Then again, it could be base-12 math, or even more alien. “Species Detected,” the device chirped up.
This time, Nolan swung around and stared dead center at me. I clung white-knuckled to the box revealing that all along my lab partner was a…
“Cheetah,” the device declared.
The air sharpened to a thousand pinpricks, all of which beamed at me. He had to know why I checked. Why I was curious and growing more so with each minute. But I put on a smile and said, “Sure, you get to be a cheetah while I’m stuck over here as a chipmunk.”
“Ha.” Nolan shook his head to clear away the rising awkwardness between us. “As I said, cheap knock off.”
“Warning: Vessel approaching from planet’s surface,” the entire ship murmured like a narrator in a nature documentary.
“Damn it. I thought I’d have more time,” Nolan said. The view screen map switched to a camera feed focused on the earth. A small dot shot out of the atmosphere, its hull glowing bright red. But once it reached the cool endlessness of space, its trajectory shifted toward us.
“Is that…?” I asked, standing beside Nolan as if I could transform into some security expert in two-seconds.
“Come on, you old piece of coprolite shards! Why didn’t I invest in the engine upgrade when I had the chance?”
“Warning: Approaching vessel is on an intercept course,” the ship’s computer kept on.
“I’m aware of that,” Nolan said back. “I have eyes and data feeds.”
In almost no time, that supposed tiny ship loomed closer and closer in the window vista. It was hard to judge size in space, but as the wings of it stretched from one end of the bridge to the other I’d say it was easily two-hundred feet across. Or more.
“Weapons are locked on our location.”
“What?!” I stared at the console near my fingers, prepared to poke at it and somehow erase the weapon’s lock. But a vision of us falling through the atmosphere in a fiery ball kept my hands locked at my side. “What do we do? Can we fire back?”
“Only if I jettison the garbage at it,” Nolan said while gritting his teeth. “Open the comms,” he ordered and a scratching noise broke through the air. “Kirkan, you don’t want to do this.”
“Yaxha. How did I know this was your ship? Oh yes, because no one in their right mind visits this miserable rock.”
I sneered at the murder creature’s dissing of my planet. Where was the torpedo button?
“I’m telling you nicely,” Nolan continued, “the last thing you want to do is fire at us.”
“Tricky little Yaxha, always trying to deceive. But I have sensors same as you and know your payload is nonexistent. Consider this my final gift to you. You should have followed your instincts and shot me when you had the chance.”
“Weapons powering…” the damn dulcet ship announced. I gripped to the console, uncertain what to do. Should I drop to a ball? Put my head between my legs? Or would we be reduced to atoms in a split second and nothing mattered?
A loud whine rose and I whipped my head around expecting to find fires breaking out across the bridge. It wasn’t until I heard the crackling underneath that I realized it was on the Kirkan’s end. Suddenly, fire shot not from our ship but across the wing of the Kirkan’s. The momentum caused her little dragonfly of a ship to spin and a scream broke over the line.
“Kill the comms,” Nolan said with a soft chuckle. The shriek of rage vanished, to only be filled with my bounty hunter saying, “I did warn her.”
“What… What the hell happened?”
As I asked that, a comforting woom noise rolled under my feet. I flexed against the strange floor and felt the sound reverberate up my bones. Slowly, the view screen and ship turned, leaving the spinning Kirkan alone.
“Just a touch of sabotage. As if I couldn’t recognize a Kirkan on sight,” Nolan said with a cluck of his tongue.
“Is she…?” God help me, but I was worried that the Kirkan—the bounty hunter who kept trying to kill me—was in danger.
Nolan must have sensed my foolish weakness as he paused in his flying the ship pas
t the moon. He reached out and cupped my cheek with his palm. “Don’t worry. A minor engine failure that was only triggered should someone try to fire the weapons. I’m sure she’ll have it fixed in a day or two. By then, we’ll be long gone.”
The moon shot past, little more than a pebble on a black sand beach to my eye. I was too lost in Nolan’s, both gleaming with a strange understanding. Helplessly stupid, I cupped my hand around his wrist. The touch was barely a whisper, but I couldn’t stop rolling my fingers down his forearm and savoring in the tendons and veins rising amongst the hard muscle.
“Warning, warning!”
“Oh, what now?” Nolan said, snapping back to his console. Had the Kirkan already repaired her ship and come roaring after us for revenge? I tried to peer through the jet black screen, but could only make out what looked like a red marble pinned to the upper right corner.
There was no ship threatening us, so why did Nolan pale?
“Ship designation ENC-2987, you have exited a protected planet.”
“Fuck.” Nolan slammed a fist on the console but all it did was cause the lights to jitter.
“Prepare to be scanned for any illegal lifeforms.”
“Fucking poacher drones,” Nolan fumed. He kept prodding at the console, but it didn’t seem to amount to anything.
“Poacher drones? What does that…?”
“Earth is a protected planet. You can’t take anything off it without permits.”
“So?” I shrugged. “I mean, unless you have a rhino on board you should be…” Nolan glared at me, and my heart sank. “When you say anything do you mean?”
“Any flora or fauna, including chipmunks.”
Fuck indeed.
“What do we do? What happens if we’re caught? If I’m caught?” I’d never been a stowaway before, but those were traditionally not treated well. Was that how the alien whatever that was would see me? What was the space equivalent of keelhauling?
“Confiscation of me, of you, of my ship. A fine. Potential time served asteroid mining. Oh, and there’s a good chance if they can’t blank your memory they’ll exterminate you instead.”
