by Lauren Esker
"Trick's gonna be whether this engine is up to the job." Gary patted the dashboard. "If she can't do it, we might have to bring a tow truck down, or even rent a bulldozer, and that's gonna be a damn sight harder to arrange. How big is your ship, son?"
Rei's implant translated their word "ship" as "water vessel," but he understood by now that they meant the battlepod. "Not too large. And not very heavy. Your truck is heavier." He still couldn't get over how solidly constructed everything was here, made out of metal and wood and dense, primitive plastics.
"We'll have to take your word for it," Sarah said. "You're going to have to do the hard part, though. Someone has to dive underwater and find the ship and hook the winch cable to it. I could probably help—"
"The hell you will," Gary said promptly. "That water's probably forty-five degrees at this time of year. You sure the kid can swim in it without killing himself?"
"He can," Sarah said. "He did before. And I wish you'd stop calling him a kid, Dad. He's no more a kid than I am—"
She broke off as Rei started to remove his borrowed shirt. He stopped in the act of pulling it off, remembering that these people had a strong nudity taboo.
"... Anyway," Sarah said, and though the night was dim even to Rei's enhanced eyes, he could tell that she was blushing. "Let's just get the truck backed down to the water, and then you can—er—take things off in here, while Dad and I get the winch cable ready."
Their nudity taboo must make their sex lives difficult, Rei thought. He would very much have liked to see Sarah naked. In fact, he was thinking about it now, which was going to make disrobing somewhat awkward.
Especially in the close confines of the truck's cab, with her body so near to his. He'd almost ceased noticing it on the drive over. Now, with his interest freshly awakened, he couldn't stop noticing.
Sarah didn't look at him and, once the truck was turned around with the trailer pointed at the water, she departed the cab at a great rate of speed. As soon as she was gone, Rei stripped quickly, despite the awkwardness of doing it in the truck when undressing on the beach would have been so much easier. No wonder she had acted so strange about it earlier, given how strong their nudity taboo seemed to be. There was no way to retrieve the pod without getting naked to go into the water, but he hoped it didn't offend Sarah and her father too badly. He tucked the floppy-brimmed hat behind the seat where it wouldn't get crushed, and then found the door handle after some fumbling, and stepped down to the sand.
Wet, cold wind blew past his naked body, eliminating the last traces of his hard-on; in fact, it felt like his genitals were trying to crawl up inside his body. He focused on using the nanites to raise his body temperature a degree or two. His shivering eased, and the wind grew more comfortable. With wet sand and pebbles squishing between his toes, he walked to the water's edge.
"Rei?" Sarah called. She sounded slightly choked, and he didn't want to look around at her, to see her expression of disgust at his nakedness. "Rei, uh, we've got a flashlight in the truck. I don't know how well it'll work underwater—"
"It's all right," Rei told her. He didn't recognize the word she'd used, but whatever it was, it would probably be unnecessary to the pod's retrieval. "I'll dive first to find the battlepod, then again to hook your hauling line onto it."
He waded in, step by step. The water climbed his calves and crept above his thighs, making him stagger against its pressure. He pushed his metabolism up another notch or two, and took several deep breaths, oxygen-loading his tissues. With the nanites at full capacity, he was capable of holding his breath for several minutes. They were barely working at half capacity right now, based on the slow speed of his healing—he was still limping on his injured leg, and his arm twinged a warning when he moved it, when it should have been strong enough for normal use by now. So he'd better not count on their usual level of assistance. Still, he should be able to easily stay under for a couple of minutes at a time.
And he had another asset that he didn't want his hosts to know about.
Two of them, actually.
He dove forward into the water, slicing cleanly through it. His inert cuffs glinted under the water's surface. Rei kicked himself beneath the surface, and as he sliced deeper into the black water, he shifted.
Suddenly it was no longer a human figure kicking through the water, but a huge, lean wolf with a shaggy, blue-gray pelt.
The cold of the water was suddenly much less acute, though it dragged at his fur more than his bare skin. With water clogging his ears and nose, he didn't notice the sharpening of his senses as he normally did. His night vision was about the same in either form.
But oh, it felt good to stretch his legs as a wolf again.
He'd been allowed to shift occasionally during his time as a Galatean slave. It was known, or at least believed, that Polarans had to shift regularly to maintain their sanity, and if it wasn't true, Polara certainly wasn't disabusing outsiders of the notion. But the tightness of the collar made it impossible for him to shift at will. His wolf neck was thicker than his human neck, so he needed to have the collar unlocked for every authorized shift.
Now he could shift whenever he wanted.
But he had to be careful. He didn't know if this world had shifters or not. They were rare among the human worlds. He knew of only a few shapeshifting races, including his people and his dead septmate Skara's, as well as rumors of shifters among the Galateans themselves. And of course there were Lyr's people, the dragons, but they weren't even remotely human. They had evolved independently rather than coming from Birthworld stock.
Like all Birthworld shifters, Rei was restricted by his human mass. His wolf was exactly the mass of his human body, no more, no less. Dragons had no such limitations.
It still made him a big wolf, two hundred pounds at least.
His implants ached as always; they made the shift with him, but never quite seemed to settle into his wolf body the way they did when he was human. But he didn't care. It was a small discomfort that he pushed aside, glorying in the strong grace of his lupine body.
Running would have been better. He could have stretched out along the shore and run; oh, he could have run. The wolf was less well suited to swimming. But its endurance and natural cold resistance made up for it.
Even so, his lungs began to ache. How far had he come? Not far enough; he kicked deeper. The lake bed dropped off steeply here, and his battlepod was down there somewhere in that blackness. As man or wolf, his night vision, however acute, couldn't penetrate the gloom when there was no light at all.
But he had another way.
Staying up late last night hadn't been in vain, because with the tools from the kit, he'd managed to get one of the damaged cuffs back online. It still didn't have most of its functions; he couldn't yet use it to produce weapons or shields. But the cuffs had a homing function. In the absence of other data, they defaulted to the battlepod they had last been linked to.
His internal nanites might be damaged, but they were still capable of utilizing the cuff linkage, giving him a rough sense of the battlepod's location. With the cuffs fully functional, he could have built a three-dimensional map of the surrounding area, delivered directly into his brain for unerring navigation. This was much more limited, but it could still do what he needed it to do.
He blew the air out of his lungs to force himself deeper. Silver bubbles streamed surfaceward, dimly glimpsed in the faint light coming down from above. Beneath him was only blackness.
And then his paws brushed something that was not lake bottom. Victory!
Rei kicked upward. There was a ringing in his ears now, and his chest burned with a rapidly growing urgency to inhale that would soon, and fatally, overwhelm his self-control.
His snout broke the surface. He opened his jaws wide, gasping as he dog-paddled.
He was far enough out that he didn't think Sarah and Gary would be able to see him. He gulped air in great, greedy heaves before he risked shifting and swam more slowly toward
the shore.
Sarah came running to meet him as he stumbled out of the water. "You were down there for so long! Are you okay?"
Rei nodded wordlessly. He was still panting. His nanites were more damaged than he'd thought. He had guessed they were at fifty percent efficiency, but now he revised his estimate downward to thirty or even twenty percent.
"Here." Before he could stop her, Sarah shrugged out of her heavy fur-lined coat and put it around his shoulders. She seemed to have a habit of doing that, he thought dazedly as she led him, stumbling, through the sand to sit on the end of the trailer.
His shivering began to ease as he hunched into the coat. Rain was still falling on his head, but he was so wet that he hardly noticed it. Sarah's sweater was soaking through as she stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder. He wanted to tell her she should get out of the rain, but with the shivering and the way his teeth were chattering, he couldn't seem to get enough air to speak properly yet.
He really had come within a hairsbreadth of staying down too long. He wasn't used to having his nanites so badly damaged.
"You shouldn't go down again," Sarah was saying anxiously. "You should at least warm up first. We don't have to do this tonight. We can find another way."
"She's right, son," Gary said, coming up on his other side. "We could go out in a boat tomorrow. Got a neighbor with a nice Grumman and a fishfinder. We can borrow it."
Rei shook his head, wet hair slapping against his ears. "I found the battlepod," he finally managed to say. "I can dive again to take your line down with me. Show me how it works."
Sarah and her father exchanged a look, a whole wordless conversation passing between them, before Sarah brought him the end of the cable. It looked strong, he was pleased to see, made of braided metal strands with a sturdy hook on the end.
"You need to find something on your ship that won't break off and wrap this around it," Gary explained. "Set the hook and come back up."
Rei nodded impatiently. As if he couldn't understand how a simple rope worked!
"Are you sure?" Sarah asked. "We could wait for a while. You can warm up in the truck."
Rei started to answer, but fell silent as he became aware of something else, a low thrumming vibrating in his chest.
"Helicopter," Gary said softly.
The word was unfamiliar, but they were both looking up, so Rei did too. Through the thick mist and clouds, he couldn't see what it looked like, but fog-dimmed lights passed over them and across the lake. The chop-chop-chop of the vehicle changed pitch. It was circling somewhere over there.
"We've got to get this show on the road," Gary said softly. "There's no telling what they have up there. Infrared cameras, sonar, who knows. They might've already spotted us."
Rei nodded. He took off Sarah's coat and handed it back to her with an apologetic grimace.
"Please be careful," she said. There was the briefest hesitation, as if she wanted to say something else, do something else, but all she did was reach out to give his hand a quick squeeze.
He could still feel the warm pressure of her fingers on his cold ones as he walked back into the water, the cable unspooling behind him.
***
Sarah watched anxiously until Rei disappeared under the water.
"How can he stay down there so long?" she asked her father as she put the coat back on. She was shivering, and tucked her fingers into her damp sleeves for what little warmth they had to offer.
"Get in the truck, hon. Warm yourself up while we wait."
Sarah shook her head. She looked anxiously across the lake, where the helicopter could still be heard but not seen, and then out at the ruffled gray waves. "I need to be here in case something goes wrong."
"Nothing you can do for him if it does," Gary said gently. "You dive in there, you'll be a popsicle in minutes."
"I pulled him out of the water on Saturday night."
"Really?" He gave her a long, searching look. "You know, there's still a whole lot you haven't told me about how this alien kid ended up in our barn."
"It's not that much of a story," Sarah said as the memory of Rei, limp in her arms, flitted through her mind. "He crashed in the lake, I fished him out and took him home."
"How long was it gonna take you to tell me if I hadn't found him on my own?"
"I ... don't know," Sarah confessed quietly. "I just didn't know how to tell you, or what you'd say if I did. 'Dad, there's an alien in our barn' isn't an easy conversation to have."
Gary patted her shoulder. "Punkin, you know I always tried to make sure you could bring your problems to me, but this sure is a new one."
"For you and me both, Dad."
They both looked out at the lake. There was no sign of Rei breaking through the surface. The winch cable had stopped playing out into the water, nearly at its full extent, and hung limply off the end of the trailer.
"Can you understand what he says?" Gary asked. "That up-and-down talking of his."
"Sort of. I can catch most of it now, but sometimes it's too scrambled to figure out what he's trying to say. He says it'll get better as I adjust to the translation thingie."
"Mind if I have a look at where he put that gadget in your head?"
"Sure, be my guest." Keeping one eye on the water, she tilted her head to the side as her father's work-roughened fingers probed around the injection site while he held a flashlight in his other hand. "Ow. Be careful. It's still sore."
"I don't like him putting alien crap in your head."
"Me neither, but things are a lot easier when I can talk to him."
"He tell you anything about himself yet, since he can talk to you so great?"
"I haven't really asked." Deep down, she wondered if she was avoiding the question intentionally. What was Rei, really? An escaped criminal? The advance scout for an invasion? Like revealing his existence to her father, asking him about his true mission on Earth meant opening a can of worms she could never close.
Her father started to say something else, then broke off as the winch cable jerked and went taut. "Ah, there's our cue, kiddo. I'll put 'er in gear. You stay back here, handle the winch an' make sure the cable don't tangle up."
"All right," Sarah said, but she was still scanning the wavetops, hoping to see Rei's dark head in the water. So far there was no sign of him.
Her father was an old hand at towing things with the truck. The winch whined, the cable vibrating over the end of the trailer. As the weight of the unseen ship threatened to drag both truck and trailer toward the lake, the truck's wheels spun and it ground slowly forward instead.
Come on, Rei. Where are you?
Something dark began to breach the ruffled gray waves, sending white foam rolling in all directions. Sarah craned forward, her worry about Rei temporarily subsiding beneath her curiosity about his ship.
This was her first chance to see it when it wasn't either an incandescent fireball crashing on top of her, or glowing wreckage sinking rapidly beneath the lake.
It didn't look big enough to be an actual spaceship. This must be some kind of escape pod, she thought as the truck ground onward and the dark bulk rose, inch by inch, from the lake's depths. It was bubble-shaped, perhaps eight or ten feet in diameter, bristling with projecting fins, antennae, and stubby bumps all over its surface. Most of the longer projections were warped and twisted, though Sarah had no idea if they were meant to look that way or if they'd been damaged in the crash.
Then her attention was drawn from the slowly rising pod to something in front of it, a wet dark shape that looked like it was tangled in the winch cable, rising and falling limply on the waves rolling up the shore.
"Rei," she gasped and ran into the water. It was shockingly cold, soaking through her sneakers and jeans as it climbed up her legs until she was waist deep. Heavier waves rolled over her, wetting her to mid-chest, pushed ahead of the vessel that the truck was now dragging into the shallow water by the beach.
The closer she got, the less it looked like
Rei and the more it looked like some kind of trash or flotsam, wrapped around the cable. An old carpet? A shaggy coat like her sheepskin jacket? A ...
A big dog?
She couldn't believe it until she actually dug her hands into the dog's thick fur. It was draped over the cable just in front of the ship, its front legs hanging over the cable and back legs trailing loosely in the water. She couldn't tell if it was alive or dead, but it looked drowned, a mass of sodden fur rolling limply on the waves.
"Rei!" she screamed across the glimmering wake trailing behind the pod. "Rei, where are you?"
Her first thought was that he might be inside the pod, but now that she was closer, she could see how badly damaged it was. Its side had been torn open, and muddy water gushed out as the winch and the truck dragged its bulk inch by inch toward the beach. She kept pace with it, walking backward through the roiling water so it didn't roll over her, still holding absently to the drowned dog.
There was no sign of Rei anywhere.
He couldn't have drowned, not after all of this. That's—that's not right.
The depth of her shock and grief startled her. She'd only known him for two days. But she could finally talk to him. She could hear about the alien planet he came from, and find out what it was like to fly between the stars.
She'd never gotten to comb her hands through his dark hair, or run her nails across his long blue back ...
She'd finally had wonder and magic at her fingertips, all the exotic adventure she had craved for her entire life, and it had vanished forever into the dark, cold waters of the lake.
"Rei!" she screamed again.
As if in response to her cry, the dog jerked suddenly under her hand and gave a wet cough. It was by far the biggest dog she'd ever seen, bigger than even the most enormous Husky or Rottweiler. The glow of the trailer's taillights made it look black, but she thought it might be more like a dark gray or ...
Or blue, maybe?
It was an alien dog.
Well, of course it was. What other kind of dog was going to get dredged off the lake bottom along with an alien space pod?
