I still asked myself why Silver couldn’t get all the shifts, but then, again she was an android with a particularly advanced artificial intelligence system. It was easier for me to treat her like another one of the crew than like a regular robot. At least that was what I said to myself many years ago when I decided on that. Now, the water running down my naked body, I wasn’t sure I had made the right choice.
But, with the hot water calming down my nerves, relaxing my muscles and dulling my senses, I realized that Silver was not the thing that had occupied my mind lately. For the last six months in space with Jay, the symbiotic alien I knew nothing of, many things had changed.
I was drying my body at the air pressure room when the alarm started ringing through every hallway of the ship. Using the first setting, a warm wind bustled through the air holes around the pod. I was back in my clothes in less than a minute, ready for action.
I ran out of my room and bumped straight into Jay. His beautiful, platinum silver body and big, purple eyes made me gawp for a second. I was afraid he might pick up on something, especially since the last two months, I ended up at the same room as him every single time. However, thick as ever, he proceeded to make one of his usual, irrelevant remarks.
“Is something wrong with my attire human? Your eyes run up and down my body for quite some time now,” he said.
I flushed and kept my mouth open for a second, still tight from the sudden alert. He was wearing a dark blue, sleeveless uniform that kinda toned down his huge muscles. Out of nowhere, I remembered the last time he touched me, six months ago, back at Primordial Earth.
I sighed, and when the words finally came, I wished I had just nodded and ran.
“No, no...not at all. You look hot...I mean, not bad. Yeah, that’s it. Not bad.”
A hit straight at the Hull shook the whole ship. Fortunately, it was Silver’s shift. That meant that we had a high chance of getting away unharmed from this chase. Among the four of us — me, Jay, Silver, and Zan — she was the best pilot by far.
Well, she’s an Android, you can’t hope to rival an Android in piloting. Or in anything, in general.
There was nothing she wasn’t great at, except for cooking. That, she couldn’t do.
Still, the ship was shaking under out feet, both of us trying to stay up, gave our little scene a surrealistic tone. I knew I wanted to run, but the Pirates were not the reason.
“You humans are so strange. We’re in the middle of a fight, and you seem more slower than usual. We should get going, Eladia,” he finally said.
Jay...well Jay was a big question mark. Jay wasn’t a human or part of any of the known species. It was like his whole existence was deleted from the Known Galaxy Archives way before I was born, or way before the human history was even created.
Six months ago, while at an excursion on Primordial Earth, Silver and I found his crashed ship and managed to wake him up from a one-hundred-year slumber, a slumber that caused him to forget everything about the Esuh of the Two Faces, his people.
Long story short? He was a moody, irritable alien with a big idea about himself that kinda winded up with us because our most prized Nusae relic didn’t go anywhere without him.
Yeah, stories like this are not just movie clichés.
Still, during the last six months visiting countless planets to amass more information about the cube, we passed from the generic ‘human’ stage, to him calling me by my first name, occasionally.
At least, from his side. He turned his back on me and I breathed in. I had to focus on the attack, and not the tall, black haired, alien male walking before me. Another hit on the hull shook the ship and snapped me from my deep thoughts. The same thing happened every time I bumped into him like that.
I ran down the end of the hallway and found the elevator door. The swishing sound somehow calmed my nerves. I passed by Zan’s room. I figured it would be best if I sent him to the bridge with Silver. He hadn’t been amid a space dogfight before and since he was a primordial human, he must have been really scared.
“Zan? Are you okay?” I knocked twice but he didn’t answer.
There was no time to lose so I decided to get inside. “Zan…?”
His room was empty.
Right then, I finally remembered. Silver and Zan always shared the shift. Zan, the cute teenage boy with the overgrown hair all over his body, was another hitchhiker from Primordial Earth. He was protecting Jay’s cryo-pod and kinda attacked me when I woke Jay up, only to get into a surprising budding relationship with Silver. They were best friends now, always talking and spending time together. I kinda felt lonely sometimes since she spent most of her time teaching him our language, but at the end of the day, it was okay. Zan was one of us now after all.
“Eladia? Where are you? Jasih is already down the armory, manning one of the cannons. You need to hurry down there and help him,” Silver said through the speakers, her electronic voice no less intimidated.
There were times I considered getting an upgraded assistant, but I always ended up turning down the possibility. Silver was a very special morpher and had been my assistant for as long as I was a Chronicler...which I must admit wasn’t that long.
When I finally got at the armory, I heard Jay swearing down the hall.
“Die you Setrin fucks! You’d wish you had never been brought to life from your hometown cubes!”
Jay had a very particular way of swearing. Most of the time I didn’t understand what he was talking about. But his loud voice was somehow comforting. I would have hated to come down here alone.
I got inside the right canon while Jay was already firing from the left. This was only the second time I had been here so I needed a moment to get comfortable with the equipment. I had to put on the optic helmet, that much I remembered, but I couldn’t remember if the red, flashing button in the left meant danger or was danger itself.
Come on, girl. You have to figure this out quickly.
I put on the helmet, and I quickly got into a virtual image of the outside of the ship. Everything was black with many dots at the horizon distinguishing the distant stars. At first, I felt dizzy and disoriented since my point of view had changed to that of the cannon. But as the first enemy fighter approached, my instincts took over.
By using my hands, I could shoot and ion beam -- a system in the mainframe tracked my movements and synchronized them with those of the cannon. It was high-tech alright, but it was certainly nothing compared to the huge, army dreadnaughts. Those beasts had the most advanced weapons in the galaxy.
Silver was doing her best to maneuver our way out of this situation, but Pirates were best known for one thing, being extremely persistent. However, shooting down one or two of their spaceships usually made them retreat. They had to keep their losses to a minimum since pirating was their only means to get more resources and they could only repair their ships by salvaging.
Most of their firepower was currently focused on Jay’s side. He managed to keep three fighters at bay, all by himself while I tried to work my way around a single target. A small, type 1 fighter, custom build and speed enhanced, tried to intimidate me by firing flares. But I was not that clueless.
I turned my head, aligned the ship’s targeting system, charged the ion cannon, took a deep breath and focused on the right moment.
I took the shot.
I saw the ion beam tear the blackness of the empty space and waited to see the explosion signaling the end of the enemy ship. Only to miss, gloriously.
“Eladia, I can’t keep them very long all by myself. Can you take some load off me?” I heard Jay bellow behind me.
The swarm of fighters had grown bigger on his side. The three fighters had doubled to six, and I couldn’t even handle one. But, for him to ask for my help in that way, I had to try again, this time seriously. During the last six months, he hadn’t even asked me to cook for him or something. He did everything on his own.
So, for the second time, I started the process my dad had taug
ht me in the past -- I aligned the system, charged the cannons, took a deep breath and waited.
‘Don’t just trust the system to make the shot for you. Follow your instincts and always shoot a tiny bit to your left.’
To be honest, I never understood why he said that last part, but I decided to follow my pa’s advice. I followed the target with my eyes, I tried to shut out Silver’s constant status reports, and I took another shot.
The beam traveled quickly through space again, and while I was sure I had missed again, I heard the sound of a crash.
“Boom!!!” I shouted.
I felt Jay’s eyes on me and I tried to cup my mouth with my hands, only to get stopped by the metal helmet. I smiled at my own incompetence.
“I never knew you had it in you,” I heard Jay say behind me.
Well, strange alien stud, neither did I.
But, with renewed confidence, and a new wave of enemies approaching our way, me and Jay quickly managed to scare them off by both destroying a couple more of their forces. By the time we were passing by Hoevis, the last planet of the system, we were way out of the danger zone, and luckily, still in one piece.
The first thing I noticed was my head feeling heavy. I had never had an adrenaline rush like this before. I wasn’t proud I had killed three entirely strangers today, but the excitement of surviving a battle like that somehow had brought me an unprecedented joy.
I wanted more.
The second thing that came to my attention, was that Jay was looking at me the same way I was at him earlier. His eyes nailed in my body, and I felt the blood climbing up to my cheeks.
“Eladia, Jay, we’re out of danger for now. Estimated time of arrival to Yaerus: two hours. I think it’s time for a brief up. Come to the brief room as soon as you can.”
Silver’s voice kinda broke the spell between us. We turned our heads away from each other at the same time.
The Nusae Cube was my priority from now on and meeting the Professor was the only important thing for me now.
Chapter Fifteen
Jay
My neck hurt. I had to turn my head so many times during the fight that I almost dislocated my shoulder. Those Pirates would have been nothing if my ship hadn’t crashed, but after having to abandon it back on Primordial Earth, everything seemed to go so slow. The engines of this ship weren’t particularly strong, and having to play by the rules of this era, turned out being quite an ordeal. Arming a gun with that peculiar helmet was another one of those limitations.
Back in my days, when the Esuh ships traveled through the systems at a speed of light, pirates wouldn’t dare attack us. They would even take a long detour so as not to coincide with our route, making sure we didn’t even spot them at the neighboring systems.
Nowadays, it seemed that the galaxy had fallen back to chaos. Humans and all the other species were useless. Esuh of the Two Faces, my people, were the ones that had managed to bring justice to the world, and since they had mysteriously vanished, everything returned back to the same chaos.
Eladia, the female human scientist that woke me up from my eternal cryo-sleep, was now walking next to me. After we had managed to scare away those fighters, she seemed especially radiant, like she had won a war singlehandedly or something.
Frankly, what she did was indeed unprecedented for a low human. To manage to keep up with me, a military trained Prime while shooting down those fighters, that was a feat all by itself. But it was certainly nothing to celebrate about.
I walked ahead of her and pushed the button to the elevator. Her black ponytail swung behind her, while her dark eyes sparkled with excitement. Eladia seemed kinda cute, more now than before. Adventure suited her well.
She was standing behind me now. I could smell her fragrance, an intoxicating aroma of otherworldly flowers and a tint of soaked dirt. A little closer and her breath would have caressed my back. For a moment, that thought seemed more alluring that I would dare admit.
“Human...you did the right thing today,” I said.
An Esuh Prime always counted his words, never saying anything more than he had to. However, those five words seemed excess and inappropriate. And yet I felt good for sharing them with her.
“Thanks,” she interrupted me. “ We did this together, especially you, someone not accustomed to the current technology. But--”
“But, in a true fight, you would have died today. You were too slow, missed one for your shots, and were too fast to admit defeat. If I hadn’t given you that command back there, we would be in trouble.”
My words weren’t meant as a scold, but rather as a warning. Eladia had potential, but she was also too young and immature when it came down to warfare.
Not that I shall be the one to talk.
Having forgotten almost everything about my people, our customs, the battles we fought and almost anything that mattered to me, I was just as immature as she was.
And that bugged me.
When the elevator doors opened, I waited for her to get in first but she did not. I thought that Eladia would stay back, but eventually, she stomped inside. Now, she seemed annoyed and like she had lost her mood for talk. I couldn’t understand why, even though I had just complimented her, but thankfully, I was not in a mood to chat either.
We rode the slow pod to the upper floor, where the bridge was. I waited for the door to open, but Eladia was faster than me and squeezed herself off the elevator even before the doors had opened all the way.
I didn’t know what was wrong with her, and at that moment, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know. Six months had already passed since we first met. Six months with no new memory of my people, not a new lead of what had happened to them, nothing that could actually help me learn who I was and what my purpose was. The only thing that seemed to recognize me was that tiny cube, that little, red thing that was always kinda warm.
The silver android, Silver, had run some tests on it throughout our trip to the planet Yaerus, but she could find nothing, or at least anything indicating why it had connected with me in that way. That was the reason why Eladia decided it would be better to spend six months traveling from planet to planet, from town to town, visiting libraries that supposedly were humanity’s storage of amassed knowledge.
And yet, failure after failure, nothing.
I arrived at the bridge, my head hurting from the deep dive in my thoughts. I spotted Eladia looking at the monitors above the main console, coming up with some sort of schedule.
“Yaerus is the last place we can check about the cube. The Professor should be able to point us to the right direction,” she said, half mumbling to herself, half consulting Silver.
She pulled her hair into a tighter tie, and she frowned while watching the monitors, even though I was certain that that frown was intended for me.
“Eladia, are you sure you want to visit the Professor again?” Silver asked.
Again? Why does the robot sound so uncertain?
That was my cue to butt into the conversation.
“Isn’t this Professor of yours your only chance to analyze the Nusae thing?”
I put my hand in my pocket and revealed the tiny cube. Both Silver and Eladia looked surprised at seeing it. Every time was like the first time for them. It wasn’t like I could leave it behind in my room. The one time I did, it almost went through the wall to return to me. It was weird.
After they went through the first shock, they started explaining things to me. Eladia was always the first one to talk.
“The Professor is the only one with the level of knowledge we need right now, about the Great Mystery of the Nusae. Of all the Chroniclers that research it--”
“There are not all that many left,” Silver added to the conversation. This sounded a bit cynical.
She earned a side glance from Eladia, but the human didn’t get discouraged. “--the Professor is one of the greatest. After all this time to still find reports to the Archives about the Mystery is a big feat, and a significant part of
the research the Professor conducted, helped me find this relic. There’s no one better to consult if we need more information and a good lead.”
“So, why didn’t we go straight to this man from the start? Why we had to visit all those libraries throughout the last six months?”
Eladia wanted to say something, only for Silver to stop her this time.
“Man? What man? The Professor is just a crazy person. An eccentric lunatic that most of the time jokes about everything. Certainly not a person of trust.”
Eladia sighed but didn’t reply.
She looked at me for a moment, but she quickly averted her glance behind me, seemingly thinking about something else. This was happening for two months now, and I had no idea what was going on with her. At first, I figured she was sick, her face being red all the time, and her eyes glistening. But she had no other symptoms, so I decided to turn down that possibility.
Nevertheless, in the end, the only chance I had to find out more about this artifact and my people was a crazy, old man. That was just my luck. But, an Esuh Prime Officer never relied on luck. That much I remembered.
Yaerus sounded like a big planet. There must had been someone that could help me there. Looking at the one human I had met since I woke up, and her peculiar robot, I didn’t think I could be surprised anymore.
Wait. There is also another human here, the hairy, young one. Where did Zan go?
Chapter Sixteen
Eladia
Some people were so insensitive and unthoughtful of other people’s feelings that they dropped a bomb and then acted like they didn’t know what was wrong. Jay was one of them. Back downstairs, at the armory, outside the Cannon rooms, I thought he actually praised me for a moment and that he passed from referring to me as just human to calling me by my first name.
Well, he did it now and then, but there were times I couldn’t stand him at all. If it wasn’t for the Nusae Artifact, I would have left him back on Earth. Or one of the other inhabited planets. He would certainly not be on my spaceship.
Jasih: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Àlien Mates Book 2) Page 7
