by Lisa Medley
He watched Noah and Tess ride off toward the ridge with Welcome Wagon and Bimisi, keeping his eyes on them until they disappeared over the horizon. How he was going to communicate without Bimisi was a mystery to him, but from the looks of his crew, they weren’t big talkers anyway. It was pretty clear Chief Itza-Chu had backed the more important mission by sending his interpreter with Noah and Tessa. Probably for the best, considering his mouth usually got him into more trouble than he needed. Surely he couldn’t piss anyone off too much if they couldn’t understand him. Even he wouldn’t lay odds on that bet.
Stuffing his hands into his flight suit pockets, he was only minimally comforted by the firm metal of his revolver in the hidden holster. He made his way toward the band of braves who were growing visibly impatient at the edge of camp, a universal scowl of disgust and mistrust clear on each of their faces.
***
Tessa picked through the food supply while Noah scavenged the medical and trauma kit. They tossed necessities into a quickly growing pile on the tarp below. Bimisi’s eyes were wide with wonder as he made his way around the ship, touching every available surface like he was reading Braille. She didn’t blame him. It had been an impressive ship. She couldn’t even imagine seeing it for the first time at his age, let alone in this time period. Hell, trains had only been running for a few years, and new rails wouldn’t make it to New Mexico for another seventy plus years.
“Oh man, this might just be our ace in the hole,” Noah said, holding his hands behind his back.
“What did you find? A measles vaccination?” Tessa turned to see.
“Well, no. That would have been way too fortunate. Translate for me, will ya?” Noah smiled mischievously. “Bimisi, come. I have a treat for you.”
Tessa translated but aimed her puzzled glare at Noah. She didn’t like surprises. Ever. And the last few days had been nothing but surprises.
Bimisi approached and waited, hesitant but interested.
“What’s the one universal love of all kids?” Noah asked Tessa.
“Video games?”
“Geez, no. You’re such a geek. Ice cream.” Noah pulled his hand from behind his back to reveal a small package of freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. The one space MRE NASA had gotten right. Even Tessa agreed with that.
“Ah, yes. He’ll love that,” Tessa said. “Hell, I have brothers. I should have thought of that. Nothing endears a kid to you more than offering him sweets. Good thinking.”
Noah tore the foil packet open and fished out the little paper envelope with the freeze-dried slice of Neapolitan ice cream. He selected a broken chunk of chocolate and held it between his fingers, sure to show it to Bimisi, then offered one to Tessa. The lump felt like a dense packing peanut between her fingers. Noah chose another piece and popped it into his mouth, making a production of showing it sitting on his tongue as it slowly dissolved into a creamy consistency. He closed his eyes in fake rapture and swallowed it down.
Tessa did the same.
“Give him a piece and explain what it is. He’ll trust you,” Noah said, holding out the packet.
Tessa chose a chunk with chocolate and vanilla and held it out to Bimisi, telling him it was a dessert and a special treat where they were from.
Bimisi’s eyebrows knitted together in concern, but his curiosity won out. He reached for the piece.
“See. It’s good,” Tessa reassured him and took another bite herself.
Finally, Bimisi gingerly laid the piece on his tongue, holding his mouth open like Noah had. Tessa could see the saliva damming up in his mouth. If Bimisi’s eyes had been large while exploring the ship, they were practically saucers-sized now. His mouth closed and immediately formed into a shy smile, his eyes lasered on the remaining stash of ice cream chunks.
“Go ahead. You can have them,” Tessa told him, handing him the rest of the package
Bimisi’s infectious smile filled his face. He ate a few more pieces then stopped and looked out the hatch door where Welcome Wagon was standing guard.
He bent his head submissively then peered up beneath his long black lashes at Tessa and asked, “May I share this with Narsimha… outside?”
“Of course, if that’s what you want.” Tessa smiled.
Bimisi nodded and carefully rolled up the paper packet around his treasure then dropped to the ground out the hatch door. Noah and Tessa watched discreetly as he spoke with Narsimha, holding the ice cream like a prize then taking a bite just as she and Noah had to show how delicious it was.
Reluctantly, Narsimha accepted a bit and chewed it quickly, but not before it was clear he’d gotten enough of it to understand how special it was. The two shared the remainder of the treat in the mid-morning sun. She even caught a ghost of a smile on Welcome Wagon’s face before he turned away.
“I think you have a friend for life,” Tessa said.
“Let’s hope so. If we can’t save the chief’s daughter, it may take more than ice cream to smooth things over. Let’s hope we’re out of here before we have to find out.”
Tessa took one more look around the cargo hold. “That’s really the last of things. We have all of the food, the blankets, tools, and medicines. I don’t know what else we might want to strip until we get a look inside that ship.”
“Here,” Noah tossed Tessa another MRE and a bottle of water. “Beef stroganoff. Better eat up. I have a feeling this will all disappear as soon as it gets back to camp.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
“It all depends on if, when, and how long it takes for us to get home. Starving to death in space may be the least of our problems.”
Tessa sat on the cargo hold floor and activated the valve on her space MRE pouch, causing the packaged water to be injected into the freeze-dried contents for rehydration. The stroganoff was supposed to be eaten warm, but without power from the ship, that wasn’t going to happen.
Noah joined her on the floor and did the same with his package of lasagna. “Breakfast of champions.” He smiled.
“We should save one for Cole. How do you think they’re doing out there?” Tessa looked out the hatch door and across the desert. She didn’t see any action near the location where the creature had entered the cave after their encounter. Maybe they were already in one of the honeycombed caves searching for it.
Maybe they were all already dead.
Cold dread shimmied down her spine. She shouldn’t think that way. Cole had the gun. And while she hadn’t seen any other firearms except the rifle Narsimha had brandished, she didn’t doubt the Apache’s fierceness. She’d read her New Mexico history too. The Apache nation was historically one of the most feared and hostile groups of indigenous people on the continent. The Spaniards had encountered Apache nomads in the mid 1500s. Relations had progressed friendly enough for a while, but then deteriorated when the Spaniards raided the Apache villages for slaves. From that point forward, there were tenuous stretches of peace interrupted by wholesale slaughter on both sides. She was just thankful they’d seemed to have arrived in a time of peace.
Without knowing the exact decade, the one rifle she’d seen helped her place them near the early 1800s. Any later, and every brave in the tribe would have had a firearm, stolen from homesteaders and prospectors, no doubt. She was very curious to know how they’d come upon the one they had.
Perhaps ignorance was bliss.
Chapter Fourteen
Cole discerned his role in the Apache search party pretty quickly. He was the canary in the coal mine. After the third honeycombed cavern the braves pushed him into with no sign of the creature, they were already growing frustrated with his efforts. Blind leading the blind was an understatement.
He beamed the small pen light he’d pocketed from the ship into the narrow tunnel before him. The pen had caused some consternation when he’d first whipped that little prize out for display. He’d like to think wielding the penlight had earned him some respect and perhaps even minor deity status. M
ore likely, the whispering behind his back, as he made his way forward, was in regard to which one of them would hit him in the back of the head for the token and leave his dead body behind.
So far he had managed to keep his revolver a secret, but he kept one hand at the ready in the event they stumbled upon the beast or other nonsense ensued. They’d bouldered and free climbed up almost as far as they could manage without more serious climbing gear. From what he remembered, the alien hadn’t had near this much difficulty scrambling up the face of the mesa. Honestly, he prayed they didn’t stumble across it.
A glint from the floor to his right flashed in the light beam, and he focused in on it. A tennis ball-sized puddle of something dark and viscous gleamed there. He bent to exam it, but caution made him hesitant to touch it. One of the braves pushed his face in near Cole’s, and the man’s mouth twisted in a grimace. The brave swiped two fingers through the puddle and brought them to his nose to sniff. Before the digits made the trip, the brave began screaming in pain. The fluid began to sizzle and foam around his two fingers as it ate through his skin. The other men quickly grabbed hold of the brave and dragged him, fighting and screaming, back to the entrance and the light, leaving Cole alone.
Cole turned a tight circle, tracing the beam slowly from floor to ceiling and back again in three horizontal passes before his beam landed on two greenish dots far back in the narrowed tunnel. He passed the beam over them once, twice, and then again, making sure it wasn’t some mineral formation reflecting his light, then the lights winked briefly, simultaneously blinking on then off like the vertical closing and opening of an elevator door far away.
That was enough for Cole. He spun around and beat his way back to the entrance, quickly following the other braves back down the makeshift rope, his hands blistering at his rapid rate of descent to the desert floor. He didn’t know if he’d seen the alien in the back of that cavern or something else, but, whatever it was, it was alive…and bleeding acid.
Gathering his wits about him, Cole tried to will his pounding heart back into a more sensible canter. The injured brave writhed in the dirt while four members of their band tried to hold him down to examine his damage. One of the men nodded briskly at Cole and motioned him in to take a look, apparently thinking he would somehow know all about corrosive alien blood. Cole held his best poker face as he got his first good look. All of the flesh had been eaten away, and the white bones of his two fingers seemed to be held together with nothing but magic until even that gave way and they crumbled to the ground.
Cole pulled a bandana from his back pocket and bent to wrap and tie it around the man’s hand. No bleeding? The wound seemed to have been cauterized by the acidic nature of what he kept assuming was alien blood. The problem was the corrosion didn’t seem to be stopping with the fingers. Before he’d wrapped the hand, he’d seen the flesh already beginning to melt beyond the third knuckles and into the palm pads of the man’s hand. At this rate of destruction, the arm would be gone before they got him back to camp.
The men managed to get the now semi-conscious brave over the front of another rider’s horse. Cole mounted his own horse and followed as the party made its way back to camp. He was hungry, nearly dehydrated and only mildly hopeful he wouldn’t be held responsible for this fiasco when they got back. Best case scenario was that Noah and Tessa had good news about the ship because if whatever was in that hole in the mesa made its way out… no amount of goodwill or antibiotics could fix that.
***
Tessa and Noah stood at the base of the alien ship, trying to make sense of the thing, considering this was the first time they’d gotten a close-up look. She wasn’t going to lie. She was happy to have watched the occupant not only vacate the craft but be so helpful as to leave the hatch unlocked and open. One obstacle already overcome. What could possibly go wrong from here?
Bimisi and Welcome Wagon kept their distance, most likely still in a mild sugar coma, while Noah and Tessa surveyed the outer structure unimpeded.
“What sort of metal is this?” Tessa asked, looking through a thin webbing embedded across the ship’s metallic skin.
“I’m guessing its some sort of platinum blend.”
“Platinum? But that’s so heavy. My god, the salvage value on this ship with even a small amount of platinum would be…incalculable.” Her hand hovered millimeters from the ship’s skin.
“Careful, let’s touch it with something other than your bare hand first. Don’t you think?”
“Probably a good idea, what do you suggest?” Tessa asked.
Noah walked over to a nearby growth of scrub brush and broke off a couple of scruffy branches. “How about this? In case the thing is charged or has some sort of force field protecting it.”
“Go for it.” Tessa stepped back and waited as Noah tossed the first branch at the ship. It promptly fell to the ground, unaffected.
“So much for the force field idea.” She reached forward and slid her hand over its surprisingly icy surface. The dessert had heated up, and this shiny metal ship, sitting in the full afternoon sunshine, should have been blistering. “Noah, feel this.”
He pressed his palms to the surface as well, and they felt their way around the ship, experiencing it much as Bimisi had their own, until they came across a small lever.
Noah looked at Tessa. “Might as well.”
Tessa clicked the latch and a gush of hydraulic air hissed out as a rectangular seam began to be revealed in the skin. A side hatch door opened, and a series of six steps ratcheted down, activating an internal light source along the sides of the tunnel.
They exchanged a quick glance. “Beauty before age,” Tessa said and stepped onto the first tread. Slowly, she eased upward, palming a small knife she’d commandeered from the canteen box of their own ship. It wasn’t much, but she was supremely hopeful there was nothing stab worthy still aboard the vessel. She felt Noah shadowing her all the way up. Ten steps in all, four within the ship, led her across a grating floor straight to the cockpit.
Prudence told her to check the entire ship before they proceeded to explore the helm, but Noah’s open mouth mimicked her own. This wasn’t alien tech before them. The instrument panels, the gauges, the levers, switches, sensors, and detectors were all very familiar. Only the language of the markings was different. The layout was nearly identical to their own ship’s helm with only a few minor additions, which didn’t immediately make sense to her.
Tessa slid a hand over the back of the single captain’s chair and locked eyes with Noah. “What the fuck is this all about?”
“So you’re seeing it, too? I’m not just having some sort of desert hallucination? Some Apache wacky-weed vision quest?”
“Not unless we’re both having the same vision.” Tessa glided around and settled onto the captain’s chair. The dash hummed to life with a flash of lights and activity when she sat.
“Motion activated boot up. That’s…”
“Very, very cool,” Tessa finished.
A whirring sound snapped her attention outside the viewing windows, and she watched as the front two stabilization legs extended before her. The ship shook as all six legs made contact with the ground.
“Okay, then. The legs must act as jacks when the ship is stationary,” Noah said.
Tessa studied the cockpit panels. “One pilot. That’s why things are arranged differently, but it’s all here. Altimeter, propellant tanks, fuel gauges, cabin pressures. He’s like us, no suits needed inside the cabin once it’s properly pressurized.” Tessa pointed to a set of gauges. “Do you think we could get so lucky for this to be oxygen?”
Noah reached up and pulled down the hatch, twisting and locking it from the inside. “Our docking controls would be here.” He pointed to a small panel on the right then flicked a switch and the landing step tunnel lights went out.
“Close,” Tessa smiled. “Try this one.” She flipped the next switch to the up position, and the steps began to retract.
“I wish I had
a Sharpie,” Noah said. “It would help if these were marked. In English.”
The steps folded into the ship, and the ship doors closed behind them. Tessa’s ears popped as the pressure began to change inside the ship. Several terrifying seconds followed as they waited to see what the oxygen mix might be, if any. Noah kept his finger on the docking switch, ready to reopen the hull before they both passed out if the mix was wrong. Panic worked its way up from Tessa’s gut and lodged in her throat until she was unsure if the trouble was the air she breathed or her own failure to adapt and overcome.
Noah checked his watch. “Three minutes.” He pointed to a gauge that would have been the oxygen sensor on their ship. “It’s stabilized. Green for go. We have oxygen. This should be the tanks.” He pointed to another gauge. “Full. And look at the fuel gauge.”
“He must not have traveled very far. It’s practically full, too. What sort of propellant do you think they have?” Tessa asked.
“One way to find out. Let’s go look.”
Tessa eased out of the captain’s chair, unsure how the ship’s power grid would react to leaving the helm unattended, but the control board continued to hum along.
“Once the ship is engaged, I guess being in the chair isn’t as crucial. Interesting. Do you think they have some sort of auto pilot, too, you know, in case of a biology break? I mean, one person up here all alone…”
“First of all, don’t forget, it wasn’t a person. We don’t know what it was, but person was nowhere on the radar for what I saw crawl out of this shell.” Noah walked down a narrow passageway toward the back of the ship. All sizes of hatches and doors with flat metal handles covered every square inch of the interior walls. Tessa wanted to open and explore them all.
More distracting was the floor. The grates allowed access below to what appeared to be the engine room. The fuel cells would be there. They just had to figure out how to get down to them. The farther they went from the helm, the darker it got.
