by Enid Titan
I waited until nightfall. As Minerva had correctly pointed out before, my best chance at going unnoticed was to travel at night. The air was thick with the scent of evergreens and manure. As I walked through the trees along the highway, I could hear the individual cars rushing by, the thousands of birds in the trees and even the delighted scuttle of insects in the earth and rotten logs beneath my feet.
My biometric data indicated the earthling’s experiments had weakened me. I wasn’t one to succumb to weakness and let it control me. I could find the strength within to press onward. That was a part of why I’d been selected for this mission — resilience.
After the sun went down I emerged at the edge of the highway and waited. If I couldn’t find an opportunity, I’d have to create one. Cars zoomed past, none of them stopping or slowing down as I stood just outside the thicket of trees. I moved quickly along the edge, running nearly as fast as the cars for around twenty minutes. I hadn’t had good food in days, so my energy stores were limited.
When I reached a sleepy downtown, I only met three earthlings, burrowed inside cardboard boxes and sleeping on the street. My implant sensed toxic compounds in their blood and I noticed two were intoxicated and a third was drugged with a strong opioid sedative. Talking to these three wouldn’t help. I peered past the men and noticed a glass windowed store with clothing inside. They would be the only witnesses to what I was about to do.
I grunted and thrust my elbow into the window. The glass shattered with a loud crash, and the three men raised their heads.
“What’r’ye’doin’ere,” one mumbled sleepily.
I stepped inside the window, my feet crunching the glass into the hardwood floor as I searched for the largest clothes I could find. I dressed quickly and heard the sirens in the distance. The three men crowded around the open window.
“Oi. They’re going to blame us y’know. Feckin’ criminal.”
“Can you tell me how to get to Vermont?” I asked calmly.
“Jimmers. Jimmers, are you seein’ what I’m seein’?”
“A purple giant. Shit that dope was good.”
“Fellas. I need to get to Vermont. How far away is it?”
“Brattleboro’s ‘round 20 minutes drive West,” one replied, punctuating his assistance with a loud hiccup.
“Thanks.”
“You ain’t from ‘round here?”
“No. I’m not. Tell the police my name is Hans Trout.”
I closed my eyes and activated my implant, focusing my attention on landing five miles west. I didn’t have too much more teleporting left in me, but I figured I could follow the signs along the highway and run all the way to Brattleboro, Vermont.
My ship was further north than that, in the woods just north of a small town called Winooski. If I could find some technology in Brattleboro, I could amplify my implant and increase my transport range.
Once I had my ship, I could find Minerva. Until then, she was at the mercy of her own government, if they hadn’t killed her already. The thought that she could be in serious danger or even dead urged me to move faster. I doubted Minerva needed my saving, but I had to try everything in my power to get to her… soon.
Nine
The Torture
Minnie Hsu
I thought they’d kill me when they took me. They shot John in his house and separated us. They injected Vidar with something too, a frothing white liquid that looked like an anti-freeze based compound. If he were human, he would have certainly been killed from it. Without studying more data about his species, I couldn’t guess how the injections would have affected him.
If his skin could stop bullets, I told myself, it made sense to have hope that he could survive whatever my people flung in his direction. When the soldiers took me from John’s house, they shoved me in the back of a black armored van where the bound me in a straight jacket and shoved a filthy red ball gag in my mouth. I retched as we pulled away from the driveway of his old colonial. Tears welled in my eyes.
John was only trying to help. He didn’t deserve any of this. The soldiers stared at me with disgust as we drove. As we drove around sharp corners, I had no way of bracing myself. I fell off the chair and rolled onto the ground of the armored van. One of the soldiers pushed me with his gun. I tried to scream. Another angry-faced Hispanic soldier with dark hair and eyes that would have otherwise seemed soft, kicked me back in the other direction.
“Traitor,” one of them spat. And then, the same soldier actually spat right on my cheek. The glob slid down my cheek and the ball gag deafened another one of my screams. I wriggled my legs and flailed them as much as I could in an attempt to regain balance, but that only angered them. Another boot hit me in the hips and then the armored van turned another sharp corner. My head hit the wall of the van and the horrid world around me faded to black.
A dull throb at the base of my neck awakened me. For a moment, I forgot where I was, and everything that had happened at John’s place. I could only feel the throb and as my eyes fluttered open, I was drenched in darkness. As I attempted to shift my limbs, I recognized that I was strapped to a table. I recognized that the stuffy air in the room and the complete darkness could not have been from John’s house.
My memories filtered back and I slammed my head back against the metal table. I was trapped. And thirsty. And hungry too. Once I moved and groaned, a doctor came in. He wore a mask and a white lab coat and he didn’t speak to me nor look me in the eyes.
“You will be questioned by the lieutenant in a few minutes. This serum will make you more amenable to telling the truth.”
My mouth was free from the ball gag, but I didn’t bother answering him, not like he expected a response. He lifted my sleeve and dabbed my arm with alcohol before injecting me with a clear serum. As my lids drooped, I wondered what mixture of compounds the man had injected into my veins.
I must have been awake for hours. When the drugs wore off, there were two armed soldiers in the room as well as the doctor who administered the drugs. They must have been there for a while and I must have spoken to them, despite not remembering a single word. The man administered more drugs and then hooked me up to an IV. I felt my arms prickling right as I fell asleep.
I soon wished that I’d never woken up from that sleep. The next day, they tortured me. I’m loathe to recount the details. After the day was finished, they bandaged my wounds and burns. As I slept, I had a strange dream that Vidar was floating above me — not just above me, but above the facility where they kept me, above the United States, and just above the atmosphere.
“Did they kill John?” I asked him in my dream.
Before he could answer, a bucket of water landed on my face, forcing me awake once again. More soldiers. More instruments. More water. Oxygen harder and harder to breathe as they cut me, hit me, prodded me, and submerged my head. Did you tell government secrets, Dr. Hsu? Are you a traitor, Dr. Hsu? Did you force Dr. John Billings to cooperate, Dr. Hsu? It wasn’t long before I was unconscious once again.
My eyes fluttered open once more. This time, I was alone and by my estimates, it must have been nighttime. I bet there were soldiers outside the door. I bet that they’d kill before they allowed me to escape. I fell asleep again.
Three more days passed, perhaps more, before there was any change in my condition. I slept again and my dreams were more vivid than the previous night. I saw Vidar.
“Minerva, can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can.”
“I’m going to be there tomorrow. I need time to penetrate their fortress but then I’ll come get you.”
“I keep dreaming about you.”
“This isn’t a dream. All I need is for you to stay alive.”
“Vidar, I can’t survive this any longer.”
I still thought I was dreaming. There was no way he could communicate with me like this.
“You must…”
My dream faded into blackness and when I woke up, I felt hopeful for the first time in days. W
hen the doctors came back, I didn’t react as they drugged me again. When they asked me questions, I refused to answer, even as the torture methods grew more extreme. I screamed. I cried. I bled. But I wouldn’t tell them anything they wanted to know — I owed it to Vidar and John.
Once the doctor’s left, they didn’t clean me up or bandage my wounds. I hadn’t given them anything they could use and they were angry. I hadn’t just betrayed America, they said, I betrayed my planet. Whatever they accused me of had never happened. I assumed their higher-ups kept the truth under wraps. The truth didn’t exactly paint them as the good guys.
Just as I was about to fall asleep, I heard a whooshing sound and then my body faded from its binds and I felt that odd sensation of teleportation — my body, twisted into bits and pulled through a tiny hole. When I erupted forth, still lying on my back, I was too weak to stay conscious any longer.
Ten
The Healing
Vidar
I had her back on my ship and back in my grasp. I’d taken a chance on the little earthling and come to prize her more than any female I’d ever touched. As her weakened body lay on my medical examination table, my ocular implant projected a reddish glow around her. Critical condition. Three more days in that hellish underground laboratory and they would have killed her without guilt. They would have killed one of their own.
What kinds of people were this, I wondered? What could the other governments in the alliance have seen in these barbarians that made them wish first contact? Minerva was so severely damaged that it would take at least a week to heal her, even with my advanced technology. I’d have to keep her unconscious for at least another day.
Recognizing the magnitude of the task ahead of me, I began to care for her. On my ship, just outside of the earth’s orbit, I was at last closer to home. My mission had hardly lasted six weeks before I’d been forced to take this retreat.
Clearly, despite their primitive tech, we couldn’t take first contact with this species lightly. They varied greatly from cruel scientists to pacifists to loving females. I dabbed Minerva with a cool, wet sponge, washing away all the blood and grime from her skin.
Taking a metal healing probe, I began to work at sealing the contusions and lesions on her body and healing her burns. Her skin reformed easily as the nano-probes patched her back together. Once the surface work was finished, I’d have to tackle her internal structures. I couldn’t heal her all in one day without knowing more about her physiology. My instruments collected as much data as possible as she lay in my emergency sick bay.
I slept in a chair next to her hospital bed, making a mental note to respond to the consul within the next day. I hadn’t submitted a report in a while and I knew my superiors would chide me for the long delay.
I slept very little knowing that Minerva was still hurt.
In the morning, I ate an excessive portion of my rations, stabilized the ship’s position in the higher atmosphere and pored over data from my galactic sextant. If I couldn’t reach the Polluxians, there were other governments I could contact regarding the earthling.
There was nothing within our contracts or assignments that would have prepared me for what happened between myself and Minerva. The mission itself should have been a rather uncomplicated six months. Maybe I’d brought this on myself by touching her in the first place, by wanting to hold her close.
To say I’d complicated things with this human woman was an understatement. I couldn’t send her back to her home world only to subject her to more torture. Refitting my probes with the correct nanotechnology, I scanned her internal organs, assessing the depth and breadth of her injuries.
She’d been lying there for days with a fractured collar bone and cracked ribs. One of her ribs had punctured her gall bladder and her feet were sprained just the day before. The drugs that the so-called physicians had stuck into her veins were slowly poisoning her blood. I fixed her blood first, performing a nano-transfusion and boosting her platelets and plasma. Then, I fixed the broken bones, strengthening them with microscopic plates so that if she were hit in the chest again, her bones would no longer be so brittle.
As my ocular implant captured all the data from Minerva’s medical procedures, I wondered if she’d give permission for me to send the data back to the imperium and the Alliance. Perhaps they’d forgive my early departure from the mission if I plied them with this level of detail about the planet I was supposed to be exploring.
Finishing the work of repairing her bones then left me with the final task of repairing the damage to her internal organs. Her physiology was remarkably inefficient. Instead of a single multi-chambered lung that occupied the expanse of her chest cavity, her mammalian torso was still occupied by two lungs, a single liver and a host of different weaker, smaller organs. Her heart was fragile, and I could sense my own pounding as I recognized her species lacked the 500 year lifespan of my own. She was so young… and she’d always be young simply because she could never hope to grow as old as I.
Working with these unfamiliar organs was not only difficult, but dangerous. Especially given her fragile condition, I was loathe to do anything that could result in Minerva being injured. I coaxed her better slowly.
I paced myself, taking long breaks when it suited me. After studying her injuries, applying what exobiology I knew, and such slow work, my ocular implant finally showed positive results. Minerva needed another night of rest, but aside from that, she was positively healed.
I didn’t want to leave her in my sick bay, but I could barely keep my eyes open from so many days of non-stop work and the exhaustion that generally accompanied my studies of her alien physiology. Despite my impatience, I knew I’d have to wait for her to awaken and that she surely would after another day of sleep.
After I took a much needed rest of my own, I rushed to sick bay and checked on her vital signs. The ship would have alerted me had her condition changed overnight, but seeing her lying there and finally looking close to normal again helped a lot. I stroked her hair out of her face and left Minerva to sleep some more.
Waiting could be painful. The more time I spent nursing Minerva back to health, the stronger my compulsion to make a confession to her that I couldn’t predict how she would respond to. I hadn’t studied her planet’s socializing instincts and mating strategies enough yet to know how she’d respond to my proposition.
From observation, I’d learned that she had turned down both John and Dr. Trout. And although in both cases, her feelings were understandable, I couldn’t be certain that her responses to them weren’t just a quirk of the species. Maybe that’s all men were to them — experiences, but nothing more. I’d find out once the little earthling awakened.
The ship rumbling beneath my feet hastened my exit from sick bay and I returned to my cockpit to figure out what had just happened. The ship’s warning signal blared and I adjusted my spatial sensors to understand the nature of what caused the rumbling shake.
I peered out the forward cockpit window. A primitive satellite object in earth’s orbit had just crossed paths with my ship, hurtling close enough to briefly destabilize us from orbit and cause us to fall around the curvature of the earth a few kilometers/second faster. I tapped into the satellite’s transmissions and found more data than I knew what to do with — personal phone calls, news channels, radio broadcasts, and terabytes of information came through in a single stream.
Delightful. I wasn’t supposed to get a hold of data like this until months into my mission during an orchestrated and assisted “escape”, far more controlled than the one I’d actually participated in. At least the imperium would have this evidence that I hadn’t botched the mission. At least not intentionally.
After studying the satellite, I studied the interstellar bodies in the Terran solar system that I could observe from my ship. Their hot yellow star was puny compared to our twin stars, but generated enough heat to fuel all life on the little planet, as well as life on Venus, Mars, Uranus, Neptune, and their Moon.
From comments I’d heard in the lab, they had yet to discover the lifeforms on these planets. Given how the Terrans had treated me, I wasn’t so sure this was a bad thing. What a bitter fate for these tiny creatures, microscopic and otherwise, that they’d be sentenced to a life of poking and prodding in some deep basement lab.
I’d worked enough. After a hearty meal, I slept some more and then finally sent out my subspace communications to the imperium — the ones I’d been dreading since I’d reunited with my ship. I broadcasted messages on a broad Alliance frequency so that any other nearby ships might hear it and arrive first. I’d prefer a Polluxian, of course, but I could handle an Arietan clan leader, a Devoran royal, or a Taurean senator just as easily.
My ship’s sensors sounded, alerting me to activity within sick bay. The moment had finally arrived. Minerva was awake. I could tell her everything — what happened, how I felt about her, and even the confession that had weighed on my mind since I first took her onboard my vessel.
Eleven
The Vessel
Minnie Hsu
The gentle, white noise hum, the cool sick bed and the gentle throbbing of a heart monitor led me to believe that the government officials had simply moved me into a different, more secure facility. Then I noticed my pain was gone. I sat up, and before I could swing my legs out of bed and decide whether I was truly free, large doors swung open and Vidar entered the room, overhead lights illuminating as he entered.
He was dressed in clothing that was certainly alien. A pair of tight leather trousers slid into his pair of black boots that were made out of a material that looked like crocodile skin. A white linen tunic hung loose over his rippling chest muscles and a leather vest trimmed with animal fur hung open on his shoulders, armed with a variety of probes and what I presumed were weapons. His hair was messy, as usual, but fell rather handsomely around his pointed ears.
