I glanced back at Selina a lot as Coreg steered me away, across the grounds. We walked at normal speed—and time—which also gave me a chance to scrutinize Coreg. When I thought about it I had to give the guy props for navigating the universe, blending in at our school, and fooling us all. I didn’t like him. Yet. But I supposed that if I had to emulate somebody he’d be a good choice.
Intergalactic battle. That was what I was here for. Training. Time-pacing. Fighting. Putting my video game skills to the test. Whoa, games were so pathetic. Especially since I’d already been a hundred percent successful in destroying a fleet of Gleezhians, well, with help.
“Here,” Coreg said. “Enter. Use your thumb ring.” He showed me which side to press into the reader and we walked through the opening, my guard still on my heels. There was a hissing like when you open a Coke, some sort of ventilation system no doubt. We walked over a grate that threatened to suck my clothing down through its grill. Coreg laughed at me. “You need tighter clothing,” he said.
I lifted my thumb ring. “I can pay apparently.”
“No need. Your first body suit will be in your room. It should last you thirty or forty double-moons.”
Another interesting facet: here people didn’t change clothes every day.
We passed several guys, all tall like us, well-built and muscular and of varying skin shades like pale Easter eggs. I didn’t get a touchy-feely greeting like Selina did with the girls, but I was introduced and picked up a few names. No bowing or handshaking or fist bumps, but a lot of tongue-clucking after I repeated their names, with my guard watching me like a hawk.
Hagab smiled when he met me, none of the others did. He had a ruddy, red complexion and super pink fingers.
Payat, who was a fairly dull green, darker on one side, squinted and stood slightly angled as if to concentrate all of Coreg’s crazy words into his left ear. He was the only one that Coreg commented on to me later. “Genetically untrustworthy,” was his assessment. Hmm, takes one to know one.
Rander spoke English. It was very basic and he faltered in his greeting, but of all the guys I met that day I rated him as a potential friend or ally. There seemed to be more than a little animosity between several trainees I met. I suspected there was a lot of competition. I also noticed their wariness of the guard and a disrespectful attitude.
We reached what had been Marcum’s room and would now be mine. I thought about how he was back on Earth by now, living in my room, under my dad’s protection. The guard stood outside and Coreg ushered me in.
“Change into that,” he ordered, pointing to a neatly folded square of black material. I couldn’t believe it was big enough to cover me from neck to foot, but I already knew that Marcum was my size if not a little bigger. “I’ll order you some shoes.”
“What about my clothes? Will they be burned or fumigated or something? I’m kind of surprised nobody hosed us down with bleach when we got off your ship. Aren’t you afraid we might have brought in some bad bacteria or virus from Earth?”
“That was taken care of by the properties of the bio-metals when you and your father stole Marcum’s ship. As soon as you stood in the pilot’s post or sat in the chair, you came into contact with the smallest of the living metals. They made you part of the ship, neutralized any incompatible organisms you may have been carrying, and inoculated you against potential threats to your system.”
“Cool.” Glad I didn’t know that at the time, the thought of a nano-army of neutralizers crawling all over me would have had me itching.
“You are cold?”
“No, I meant, uh, cool like awesome, you’re a pretty advanced civilization.”
Coreg snorted. “Change. I’ll return with the shoes and we can begin your training.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“How about some food?”
“There is food on the shelf. Drink one.”
He left and a pretty normal looking door swished closed behind him. The whole building, this room, the bed, everything looked amazingly normal. Familiar. But off a few degrees, like I imagined it would be if I was plunked down a couple hundred years forward or backward in Earth’s future or past.
I stripped off everything and tried on the uniform. Talk about painting on your clothes. But it was comfortable. The one thing missing was an opening for using the bathroom.
Across from the bed was the shelf with a row of bottles arranged from small to medium to large. I didn’t see any food, though. I supposed he got the words mixed up. There was no use going out and asking the guard for food; Coreg had never spoken English to him so he probably wouldn’t understand me. I reached for the largest bottle on the end. There were strange symbols on the label, and there was also a picture of a baby animal. It was cute, but it looked nothing like any farmyard creature I’d ever sung about. E-i-e-i-o.
The top of the bottle snapped off without much effort and I sniffed. Not bad. Not fruity or medicinal or rotten—all good things to not be—but also not the least bit familiar. I squeezed a drop onto my tongue. Huh. Interesting. I squirted more in and swished it around in my mouth. Another full gulp satisfied more. Tasty. Still not familiar. Totally odd yet pleasant.
Another couple of swigs and I finished the bottle. My brain said that was hardly enough, but my stomach was happy and I didn’t feel any need to open another bottle. Maybe they only ate—or drank—once a day. I had a lot of questions for my reluctant host. I set the bottle back on the shelf and noticed a thumb ring behind the next one. I compared it to the one I’d been given. It seemed old and tarnished. I figured it was Marcum’s and put it back.
♫ ♫ ♫
SELINA LAUGHED ALONG with the nine girls who coaxed her to drink from a long thin bottle. The thick milky liquid tasted better than what Marcum had given her on the ship. She smiled and nodded her head when she finished half of it. She handed the bottle to the girl who’d given it to her. The girl’s brown hair and pasty white skin set her off from the others who looked much more alien. Their skin was greenish or yellow or tinged blue like they weren’t getting enough oxygen. The white girl pinched the neck of the bottle, sealing it, and handed it back to Selina with a jumble of repeated words.
“I don’t understand,” she shrugged her shoulders. Two of the girls picked up on the gesture and did several exaggerated shoulder shrugs. Selina kept smiling. “Sheesh, I might as well be in China or Japan. At least you all seem friendly. Nobody’s going to eat me, right?” She raised her eyebrows and six of the girls did the same. She tapped two fingers on her own chest and repeated her name, “Selina, Selina.” Several of the girls pointed up.
Right. Selina remembered what Marcum had told her about her name: that it meant heaven. She nodded her head along with them and pointed skyward too. “Hotah,” she pointed to herself, “my name is Selina.” She couldn’t believe that Coreg had dropped her off here and not told these fluttering teens her name. She pointed back the way the guys had left and said, “Coreg.” Then she pointed to herself, said her name, and then pointed to the girl nearest her and waited.
“Renzen,” the girl with bluish skin said. That set off a flurry of pointing and naming and Selina worked hard to keep up, using a memorizing technique she’d employed when she first started learning Spanish.
Learning nine names, some with throaty g’s or tongue clicking l’s, took a while, but after she’d pronounced them all to their satisfaction they bowed to her guard, turned away from him and led her through the squat building and into a common area where it was obvious they slept. There were no windows, but radiant disks of light on each wall made the room glow with enchantment.
“Looks like someone’s idea of a harem,” Selina mumbled aloud, squeezing the bottle unconsciously. “No wonder the guard didn’t follow me. Hashtag flying carpets and genies. Cue the snake charmer.”
Renzen took her arm and pulled her toward the center where several girls were adding thick blankets to a pile. Once she settled onto the comfortable ne
st Renzen coaxed her out of her jacket. That set off a series of clucks, startled exclamations, and giggles as one by one each girl tried on the jacket, discovered the pockets, and played with the elastic at the wrists.
Selina slumped into the silky bedding and closed her eyes wondering if she could sleep and time-bend all at once. She’d been awake for days.
♫ ♫ ♫
“THESE AREN’T FROM Plickkentrad, but they’ll do.” Coreg handed me a pair of shoes identical to his.
“Plickkentrad?”
“My hometown. Everything’s twice the price there. Twice the quality. Or at least that’s how it was before the Gleezhians’ last terror campaign. I’ve only been back once since I started at the academy.”
I pushed my feet into the blue boot-like foot coverings and a rhyme from a rap song flit through my mind, something about Adidas and cutting the sand of a foreign land. The shoes were too big—at first—but then they hugged my toes, heels, and ankles, vibrating like a mini-massage. I looked up at Coreg. “What the—?” They stopped vibrating and all of a sudden fit fine. “Bio-metals?”
“No, bio-materials, thicker, stronger than what you wore before.”
I had the creepy sensation that the shoes and clothes were made of millions of insects, like invisible bedbugs or something. “Awesome,” I said. “What now?”
“Now you train. Unless you need a rest period. A double-moon is like a day on your planet, but without the darkness. We sleep as required, sometimes as long as three or four time units, there are forty in a double-moon, but you can rest before we train.”
“No, I’m good,” I lied. I tried to figure the math in my head. It didn’t sound like they did much sleeping here. Or much eating. Come to think of it, no one was overweight. I hadn’t noticed any especially big people when we were paraded through town.
We left the room and headed for the bridges, followed, of course, by my guard. I heard the bridge battles before I saw them. I imagined sword fights because of the metallic clangs, but what I saw was much more subtle, not openly violent. From where we stood on the balcony we could see several bridges linking the various towers. They looked like metal ladders that had been spider-webbed horizontally between the rocket-shaped towers, bracing them. The rungs were close enough together that no one’s whole body would slip through, but I cringed at the thought of a misplaced foot forcing a full stop at the groin. I supposed that would be preferable to falling off since there were no rails. I watched the trainees stabilize themselves on the rungs, hold an arm out for balance against the empty space, and proceed in their strange movements. They hissed and growled like farting motorboats.
“That’s how you fight?” I was incredulous. Coreg gave me a contemptuous glare. Perhaps the match was harder than it looked, but what I saw was dancing. A long-haired man, an instructor or referee maybe, stood on a higher bridge, the only one with railings, and stared down at the students. He held shiny round objects in both hands. When he clanged them together pairs of combatants sprang into different positions, aiming weapons similar to the arc-guns that were on the ships. “Just shoot,” I muttered, “and be done with it.”
“You have much to learn,” Coreg sneered. “The Gleezhians’ weaponry is susceptible to vibrations from arc-guns. Using our guns in the standard fashion in close quarters would make their weapons blow us all to pieces. We practice this challenge often in case we have to fight on their starships or on the quaking flatlands of their planet. Watch Rander and Payat. They’re holding spikers.”
They were on the bridge closest to us. Coreg had told me about Payat being genetically untrustworthy, so I expected to see him present some powerful advantage over Rander. I secretly rooted for Rander, the one who spoke a few words of English.
The clang sounded and Rander fell into a crouch while Payat took a step closer and loomed over him. They took turns repeating something. Their ears twitched as if they were performing their own battle against their skulls.
“They’ve memorized the Gleezhian words for surrendering,” Coreg explained. That made me remember Marcum uttering something like the bass line of a fugue when we were face to face with a group of Gleezhians. I’d had no idea then that he was surrendering, or pretending to surrender.
They held the pose until another clang, a lower note rang—B flat—and Rander rose up and swung his spiker to within an inch of Payat’s ear. Payat lurched back and switched his weapon to the other hand. He didn’t wait for the next note, but turned and leaped across several rungs. I glanced over at the second and third bridges; the other pairs had moved apart, jockeying for advantages. I couldn’t see how there could be any advantage; there was nowhere to maneuver. This was crazy and I had to say so.
“You know … I used an arc-gun to kill some of the Gleezhians who entered the Galaxer. Marcum shot too. It was pretty loud, but their weapons didn’t explode or blow us to pieces like you say.”
Coreg gave me the funniest look; he probably didn’t believe me. I ignored the next clang, other than to recognize it as an F sharp because I have perfect pitch, and said, “It was when we thought you were dead. The Gleezhians had landed. I did a little time-pacing but they paced with us and shot our ship. The bio-metals failed, but took the force of the hit. When the Gleezhians appeared Selina did her slow-down-time thing, then we switched and I speeded things up, that is, I paced. I used the arc-gun like I was shooting ducks in a row. Maybe you should be pacing in close quarters … maybe pacing changes up the vibrations.” Another clang, high C, and I knew my theory made sense. Coreg still stared at me, but his facial expression—if these aliens’ thoughts registered on their faces—meant he believed me.
“I won against Marcum on our very first bridge battle.” He gave a quick glance at my guard as he said it.
“You paced, didn’t you?”
“Not consciously, but—”
He leaned out over the balcony and focused on Rander and Payat. I watched too. Another B flat clang sounded and Payat charged at Rander. He swiped Rander’s weapon from his hand, pushed him sideways, then jumped and hooted like a victor. It was a startling cry, but apparently the right thing to signal every other battler to make a move. A moment later and every pairing had a winner holding two weapons and a loser dangling precariously over the edge. The winners pulled the losers up and both combatants left their bridges. On the highest bridge the clanger went purple in the face, screaming Klaqin words at the losers and finishing his tirade with a discordant wheeze.
“The second Gleezhian ship …” Coreg said softly as dozens of new trainees carefully walked out and took their starting stances. “I sneaked up on it. I did pace. I took them all easily, dragged their bodies to the Intimidator’s processor. You and Marcum weren’t in the Galaxer when I got there. The time-bender, Selina, was in a trance … bending time to its slowest. I had to push against her power … pace twice as hard …”
I interrupted Coreg’s recount. “Just how often do you go into hand to hand battle with these dudes? Do you have enough pacers to send one along every time?” Three dissonant clangs started the new battles, but I didn’t pay any attention. Coreg’s usual animosity toward me had softened.
“I will take you to Commander Gzeter and you will tell him your theory. You may be as useful as a thinker as you might be as a pacer.”
I took that as a compliment. But I eyed him with the same suspicion I had for a chess opponent. It could be he was setting me up to look like a fool to his Commander. I stepped back and bumped into my guard. He acted more embarrassed than I did. I tried to apologize, and Coreg translated for me. The guard tilted his head a bit, said hotah, and then followed us, this time a little farther behind than before. I wondered if he was guarding me for my protection or Coreg’s.
♫ ♫ ♫
SELINA WOKE FROM a dream in which she was sipping a dark chocolate and caramel shake while monkeys were busy grooming her hair, hands, and feet, chattering like excited gossips at a salon. When she came fully awake she let out an uncharacte
ristic curse, pulled her feet away from two girls and her hands from two others. She’d been sleeping on her back, limbs extended, and two more girls had been fussing with her hair. She quickly sat straight up, yanked her hair free of their fingers, and discovered that she was wearing a one piece body covering that stretched from her ankles to her wrists to her neck.
“What’d you do?” The six girls around her shrank back. She looked across the room at three more, one who wore her jacket, one who wore her jeans, and a third, blue-faced Renzen, sporting her shirt. She saw her bra and panties on the floor at their feet and totally freaked out. “Did you drug me? Holy crap. What’s the deal?” She jumped to her bare feet and ran her fingers over her body, feeling for buttons or zippers or some way to remove the covering, hopping from one foot to the other in near hysteria. “How do you get this off?” She put her palms out to emphasize her question and nine startled Klaqin females did the same. With their hands gesturing the same confusion Selina stopped jumping, saw the humor in the situation and took a breather. “Okay, okay, sorry I blew up. I’ll wear the onesie. It’s kind of comfy anyway. Actually,” she stretched and twisted, “and I know you don’t understand me, it’s amazingly comfy. I feel naked though.”
She spoke in softer terms, but remained on her feet. “This is like a pajama party—not that I’ve ever been to one though.” She felt the braids that ran from ear to ear, then checked her fingers and toes. “You’ve done my hair and painted my nails. We’re not so different.” The orange and black polish that had been peeling off her toenails since Halloween was covered with a green fluorescent lacquer; her fingernails were also green.
Renzen retrieved the underwear and walked closer, removed the shirt, and handed all three objects to Selina. “Tubah,” she said.
The Time Pacer: An Alien Teen Fantasy Adventure (The Time Bender Book 2) Page 3
