Colonization

by Scott McElhaney

  I’d probably relieve him after I caught a few winks instead of making him do the full twelve. Prior to going to bed however, I wanted to check on Doctor Lord’s patient. I headed down to the medical bay. Just inside the door, I immediately located Commander Stark asleep at the doctor’s desk. Her face was hidden in her arms and she was snoring loudly. It was sad to see that she was still wearing the remains of her EVA suit and still hadn’t showered or changed clothes.

  “She was already asleep when I got out of surgery,” Doctor Lord whispered from behind the door, “The patient is going to be fine, but will need a cloned kidney when he gets to Earth. It was too damaged to save. I’m also going to recommend complete hip replacement due to the extent of the damage there.”

  “But he’ll manage fine until we get to Earth?” I whispered.

  “Oh yes, definitely,” she replied, “The pain nanos will have shut down all the nerve pathways to the damaged tissue and bones, and those will stay shut down for the duration. Sadly though, I will have to keep him fully immobilized since the lack of pain receptors could make him believe he’s perfectly fine. The hip and femur are the areas that concern me the most.”

  “All that damage to the man and you decided that the hip is the area you’re concerned with?” I wanted to laugh, but kept my voice down.

  “He broke the femur near the hip and the hip socket itself was literally crushed. I’m amazed that the cracked femur didn’t sever the femoral artery which is one of the biggest arteries in the body. If that got severed, he’d die before we could get a tourniquet on him,” she said, showing me the X ray, “I’d rather a more qualified person deal with that injury, especially seeing the condition of the hip socket, so I immobilized him completely until someone can take over.”

  “Good work, Doctor,” I said, “When she gets up, can you recommend she get cleaned up and dressed before spending time with her husband? Doctors seem to carry more authority than ship’s captains around here.”

  She chuckled and patted me on the arm, “Yes, I’ll get that handled for you. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  I took her advice and quietly left the medical bay. I started down the corridor when I saw an impossible figure heading my way. This porcelain doll was wearing Navy-issue black gym shorts that were short enough to burn a permanent image of those thin, yet shapely ivory legs onto my retinas. The plain white t-shirt she wore was too small, hugging her upper body in all the right (wrong) ways. I didn’t get control of my stunned gawking in time before she stopped inches in front of me. Her perfect smile as she looked up at me told me that I’d just been busted.

  “Is Zane awake yet, Commander?” she asked.

  Zane…

  Not “How are you, Rigel?”

  Not “Nice to see you, you handsome beast.”

  Zane.

  I couldn’t compete with an injured man, “He just got out of surgery and is still asleep. You shouldn’t visit him until tomorrow.”

  She made a pouty lip which instantly caused my heart to flutter. I breathed in, shook all the images from my head, and then told her I needed to get some sleep. I started past her when she called to me.

  “Captain,” she said.

  I turned to her and raised my eyebrows in question. I noticed just then that she was truly seeing me all of a sudden. I had been invisible to her up until now. Her eyes told me she actually saw me – the thirty year old man – instead of seeing some unapproachable captain of an ugly Navy vessel.

  “What is there to do here for fun?” she asked, tilting her head to the side, “Surely people don’t just work and sleep, do they?”

  “Uh… well, we’ve got more than a million movies to watch. We have a small library, but that’s probably a deceiving title. It’s really just a gathering of books that have been left by passengers and crew over the years,” I said, wondering what she would consider fun, “Some of us have gaming systems that we brought with us. I personally brought the Ricon-X which I got last year. That system comes preloaded with five hundred of the latest Reality Helmet games and I’ve got two helmets.”

  “I never heard of it,” she said, closing the distance between us.

  “Well, you actually wouldn’t have, I guess. I forgot that you haven’t been in this solar system for over thirty years,” I said.

  “Guess that would make me old enough to be your mother, Captain,” she said with a grin, standing much too close now, “I’m your elder. That’s kind of funny.”

  “Well, I need to get to sleep. If you want-”

  “Can I come to your suite and hang out with you? Can I see that Ricon game?” she interrupted.

  My heart was beating a million times a minute. I couldn’t have this beautiful girl in my room, much as I sincerely wanted to. But at the same time, it would be nice to have someone to play Kuiper Belt Wars with and it wouldn’t take someone long to learn it. The game would also guarantee that I didn’t do something that a Navy captain shouldn’t be doing with a passenger. Gaming was a safe way to socialize and have some fun.

  “Sure, Renata,” I said, “But seriously I can’t stay up for long because I’ve got to relieve the XO in a while.”

  Sarai Stark

  Chapter Eleven

  “Either this place smells nice, or you smell nice,” Zane said, his head turned to me.

  Although he was lying stiff as a board and completely immobilized from the neck down with the exception of his arms, his bed was raised at the head and lowered at the feet by about forty-five degrees. I sat in the chair next to his angled bed.

  “It’s probably me. The doctor wouldn’t let me see you until I showered and changed,” I said, “And once I started washing off the smell of KMA, I couldn’t stop. I washed my hair three times in a row.”

  He laughed, “I can’t wait to bathe as well, though it sounds like it might be a while. What do you think of the doctor’s report?”

  “First of all, she saved your life by draining your lung and fixing where the rib had punctured it, so I think she’s pretty awesome. And the kidney? We have no choice but to get that done. They can clone a kidney in a lab in about a week she said. And the hip…”

  “Yeah, the hip,” he groaned, “All the other damage can have me back to normal in less than a month. The nanos can heal the bones in less than two weeks.”

  “Are you telling me, Zane, that you’re upset that you will have to be off your feet for up to eight weeks? She confirmed for certain that you would have died within the next week. For certain,” I said, feeling my pulse rise in anger, “If not from the injuries, then definitely from pneumonia or infection.”

  “I know it sounds silly,” he said, “There’s so much more that we need to do. I’ve got enough work to last me until I’m eighty.”

  “And I told you what the Secretary of the Navy said!” I stated, rising from my seat so I could see him more head on, “By the time you and I even return, it’s going to be a whole new world. That work you needed to do? It will be obsolete. Do you think the awesome furnaces you built will even be there anymore? The shuttles husks will even be obsolete. Let’s both step back and let the colony get the little boost we so much deserve.”

  “But can I… Can we still return while I’m laid up?” he asked, “Those are my people, Sarai. Those are our people.”

  “I know,” I sighed.

  I knew exactly what he was saying. This ship represented a life we both had fully resigned ourselves from. This ship represented pain and suffering. It represented the deaths of half the people we knew. Zane and I were no longer “Navy” and we had consoled ourselves that we would never see the inside of a ship ever again. We had grown to love our new home, in spite of all the bad. We had grown to love the people and those people were family.

  “I support you one hundred percent in returning to the colony as soon as it’s medically permitted. If they say you can go back immediately following the surgery, even if you are put on bedrest, I’ll pack our stuff and get us on the next flight. But y
ou will abide by the bedrest even if there’s work to be done in the colony,” I said, leaning over him and making sure he could see how serious I was, “Would you be okay with that?”

  “Only if this good-smelling woman would kiss me,” he said.

  I leaned closer and pressed my lips to his. He reached up and ran his fingers through my hair which I was no longer self-conscious about. I knew it was clean and silky like it used to be. When I leaned away, he groaned.

  “I wasn’t done,” he whined, “More. You smell good and I stink. I need your scent to rub off on me.”

  “You can bathe to some extent if you want,” the doctor said from behind me.

  I wondered how long she had been watching us. Judging from her smile, it must have been long enough.

  “He’s actually mounted to a minimally-visible rear exoskeleton shaped like the back of his body and he isn’t clothed at all. If you’d like to bathe your husband, I can get him safely lifted from the bed and lowered into a partially filled bath made just for something like this. It’s got a hose and sprayer attached so it’s not very complicated,” she offered.

  “Yes, please?” Zane pleaded.

  I laughed and nodded to the doctor.

  It wasn’t even five minutes before the tub had been brought in and placed in the middle of the room. Three men lifted Zane from the bed and I could then see what the doctor was talking about in regards to his bracing. There were padded thin metal rods that were conformed to the exact shape of his body. They even curved to the exact shape of his back, butt, and legs and these were connected to him with several nylon straps. There were several metal rods that wrapped around the bruised hip and upper thigh making him look almost robotic in that region.

  After they got him situated, everyone left us to ourselves. Doctor Lord left the door cracked to her office so she could hear if I needed any assistance, but she promised to give us some privacy.

  “I feel so helpless,” he chuckled.

  I turned on the sprayer and wet his whole body. The inside of the tub was angled upward so that the water flowed down toward his feet and helped to keep his head out of the water.

  “Never thought the time would come when you were all tied up, naked, and at my mercy, did you?” I laughed, soaping up a bathing sponge.

  “Wow, now that you mention it,” he said, “I don’t have to bathe alone, you know.”

  “Is that always on your mind?” I whispered, hoping the doctor wasn’t too close to the door, “You were just getting surgery a few hours ago and-”

  I had been running the sponge over his chest and stomach when I realized that it truly was on his mind and since he was naked, he wasn’t able to hide it.

  “Are you serious?” I laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “You smell good, you look good, and you happened to be touching me.”

  I just smiled and continued to wash him, trying to stay clear of the fresh stitches on the side of his bruised chest. All the while, I secretly examined the way the tub was shaped and how secured he was from movement. While it might have been a crazy request, I was quite certain it could work. Besides, he wasn’t losing any of his resolve.

  “Do you want me to ask?” I whispered.

  “Seriously?” his eyes went wide, “Yes, go ask.”

  “Oh my god,” I shook my head.

  I was certain that my face was red as I got up and peeked into the doctor’s office. I stuttered and stammered and eventually got my question out as eloquently as I could. She seemed reluctant for a moment and then explained that I would need to keep his movement to an absolute minimum. If I could do that, then yes.

  She closed the door and I had my clothes off even before I returned to the tub. I don’t think I’d ever seen my husband smile so wide in all his life.

  Rigel Knight

  Chapter Twelve

  “They’re coming at us from behind! What do we do?” she screamed, “I can’t shake them!”

  “Bank hard right and I’ll bank hard left,” I hollered back, “We’ll force them to split up and then you go after the ones chasing me and I’ll go after the ones chasing you.”

  I hit the thrusters and turned to the left, “Now!”

  I suddenly saw her ship explode even before she could execute the turn. I kept my ship circling around and was going to tear those aliens apart. That was the third time they killed her in the last two missions. While she wasn’t by any means an expert yet, she was doing pretty well.

  Suddenly I felt the ship’s yoke being tugged out of my hands… the controller… then I realized why. She was in my lap all of a sudden, though instead of seeing her, I only saw my ship getting riddled with plasma rounds. My helmet was being taken off of me. I was back in the real world now, sitting on the floor up against the couch where Renata and I had been playing Kuiper Belt Wars. Renata had my helmet in her hands which she was now placing on the couch behind me, her arms on each side of my face and her breasts dangerously close to my lips.

  “Can I ask you something?” she asked innocently, as though it wasn’t even unusual for me to be sitting here with her straddling me, “Would you consider it to be horribly hateful if your mother decided that the only way she could control you was to take you away from the whole rest of the world?”

  “It would all depend,” she was now resting her hands on my shoulders, “Was she protecting you from something bad?”

  “She considered men to be bad. All men,” she said, “Every boyfriend I ever had was bad even before she met them. This was all because she had a bad relationship with my father, whom I never met. So she thought that the only way to prevent me from ever making the same mistakes as she did was to bring me to an uninhabited moon where meeting a man would be scientifically impossible.”

  I swallowed, finding myself at this beautiful woman’s mercy.

  “She couldn’t comprehend how wrong that was. She couldn’t understand that everyone wasn’t like my father,” she said, drawing closer to me, “She would have been satisfied if I never so much as kissed a man for the rest of my life.”

  She pressed her lips to mine and as wrong as it felt, I accepted. I kissed her, drawing my hands around her waist and holding her. I was amazed at how gently and passionately she was able to kiss a man that she didn’t even know. At the same time, I wondered how often she’d done this same thing before. She playfully bit my bottom lip, then kissed my stubble-covered chin.

  “You’re beautiful, Renata, but I really don’t know you,” I said, wondering what she planned as she kissed me along the jawline.

  I held her head in my left hand as she started nibbling my earlobe. It sent chills down my spine, reminding me that I needed to get control of this situation before it fully got out of control. I didn’t want to reject her because in truth, I’d love to get to know her and see where things could go with us. But I didn’t want to bypass the whole dinner and go straight to the dessert. Especially a dessert as delicious as this one probably was.

  I leaned forward, took a hold of her, and lowered her to the floor beneath me, all the while keeping my hands from any of her bare flesh. I then kissed her deeply and tenderly, letting her know just how much I truly did want her.

  “You’re beautiful, Renata,” I said before kissing her again, “Would I be able to see you more often? We’ve got a few days together and I’d really like to get to know you.”

  “Really? You find me interesting?” she asked.

  “You’re ability to dodge the alien armada could use a little improvement, but otherwise, I’d bet you’re a really fun person,” I said, “I’d bet you’re the kind of girl who believes in people and just wants to be believed in as well. You believed in me enough to come hang out with me and get to know me.”

  “See, I knew you were different,” she said, leaning forward and kissing me again.

  “So can we keep seeing each other? I obviously need to still do my duties on this ship, but beyond that, you want to go to breakfast with me in the morning?�
�� I asked.

  I could feel it in her movements that she was finally starting to accept that I wasn’t looking to skip straight to dessert. Whatever her past boyfriends were like, that wasn’t me. While I definitely found her attractive and I most certainly wanted to pursue a relationship with her, I couldn’t take something so precious that I didn’t earn or deserve. Even kissing her as intimately as I was felt a little like I’d taken something I wasn’t entitled to.

  “What time do you work tomorrow?” she asked, running her fingers through my short hair.

  “Six to six,” I said, “But I don’t have to stay on the bridge for the full twelve hours. As long as I have the alarm pad with me, I only have to make sure to check in once an hour.”

  “So we could play the video games all day as long as you go to the bridge every now and then?” she asked.

  I laughed, “Technically, yes, but as captain of the ship, I think that would be sincerely frowned upon. Let’s save the video games for after dinner tomorrow.”

  “Can I sleep here?”

  I closed my eyes, worrying suddenly that I didn’t give the right cues after all.

  “Not like that, of course!” she said, slapping my cheek playfully, “I’m a decent woman. Everyone knows that the kind of woman who goes out with an officer doesn’t just give it away on the first date!”

  She sounded like she was reading a script, though I honestly appreciated it and was glad she would play the part if nothing else.

  “So, you’re asking to sleep on my couch?” I asked.

  “If you wouldn’t mind. I really don’t like to be alone,” she said, “It’s sort of a big problem of mine.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather sleep in Commander Stark’s room since she is a woman?” I asked.

  “She, uh… we don’t get along all that well,” she replied, “And I already feel very comfortable with you.”

  “Well, then if you’re alright with it, I’m okay with it as well,” I replied, “I’ll do my best not to wake you in the morning since I’m getting up so early.”