First Encounter

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  Clayton woke up in darkness, feeling like he couldn’t breathe. There was a dark shadow at the foot of his bed, approaching steadily.

  He tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t move. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were not responding.

  Not again, he thought. Lights on! He thought.

  A blaze of white light flooded the room, and the shadow shimmered and vanished with the light. Gradually, control of his muscles returned and he sat up, looking around his quarters for any lingering signs of the hallucination.

  Clayton flopped back down with a sigh. “Lights to twenty percent,” he said, and the glaring white diminished to a soft golden hue.

  His bouts of sleep paralysis were getting so frequent now that they’d become routine. Dragging his hand up from the covers, Clayton checked his watch. It glowed to life and Samara’s smiling face greeted him. Four AM. The perfect witching hour. Maybe that’s what this is; some kind of curse. Going back into cryo would be a relief. No more interrupted nights.

  Clayton lay blinking up at the ceiling, his heart rate slowing as his eyes once again grew heavy with sleep. Not long now and he’d be enjoying six months of uninterrupted slumber. Not that cryo actually functioned like sleep, but it was a comforting thought to drift off with all the same.

  Chapter 21

  Six Months Later...

  Lori cooed in her daughter’s ear to no effect. “Shhhh, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Keera was wailing incessantly.

  “What is it now?” Richard growled, rising from the bed and stomping over like an angry giant. Keera had been having these crying fits for weeks now, but this was by far the worst.

  Lori shook her head, bouncing Keera in her arms as she paced the deck in front of the windows in their quarters. Unlike most of the other windows in the ship, these were real. Seeing the stars usually calmed Keera, but tonight she was inconsolable, and Lori had no clue what was wrong.

  “Maybe she’s sick.” Lori grunted as she hefted Keera up to a better position, draping her over one shoulder rather than cradling her like a baby. Keera was only six months old, but she weighed forty-five pounds, and she measured one point two meters tall. She was already walking and talking in full sentences. Her development was completely off the charts for any normal human growth curve—more comparable to that of a five-year-old girl, not a six-month-old baby.

  “Keera, what’s wrong, honey?” Lori tried for the umpteenth time.

  “Bad. Bad. Very bad! Pain!”

  “You’re in pain? Where does it hurt?”

  “No! Not hurt me. Pain!”

  “Talk to me, sweetie. What’s wrong.”

  “Pain!” Keera cried again.

  “Did she have a nightmare?” Richard asked as she paced back his way.

  Lori shook her head. “No. She says she couldn’t sleep.”

  “She’s been awake all night?”

  Lori shrugged helplessly.

  “Did you try feeding her?”

  She stopped pacing to glare at him. “Of course I tried!” She’d tried, despite the fact that her breasts were swollen, shriveled lumps covered in scabs and bite marks. Keeping infection at bay was a daily struggle. Keera still didn’t want to accept formula as a substitute for breast milk, and at her size she needed a lot of breast milk. Fortunately she’d begun eating solid foods after just one month, and she got most of her calories that way. Breast milk was more of a comfort food. A way to put her to sleep, but it hadn’t worked.

  Keera’s cries went on and on, shrill and keening.

  “So what’s wrong!?” Richard screamed.

  “Maybe she’s sick,” Lori said while rubbing Keera’s bony back. Her vertebrae stuck out sharply, forming an unusually prominent ridge running down her spine.

  Richard walked around behind Lori to put his angry face in Keera’s. “What is wrong with you?!”

  Keera cried all the louder with that rebuke, and Lori whirled away from him, her eyes flashing. “Why don’t you go sleep in one of the other officers’ quarters? I’ll stay up with her.” It was just the two of them up on The Wheel, so there were plenty of empty rooms.

  Richard crossed his arms over his chest, revealing a collection of thin, long white scars of crisscrossing claw marks on his forearms. Lori had all of the same marks and more, but they went up and down her chest, too. When Keera’s claws had started coming in, it had taken a while for her to learn to be careful with them. If it weren’t for accelerated healing sprays and the cache of antibiotics that they had on board, they might have died from infection by now.

  Lori turned Keera in circles, bouncing her, rubbing her back, and cooing softly in her ear. Nothing was working.

  “Maybe it’s time we admitted that we can’t handle her anymore,” Richard said.

  “What are you suggesting?” Lori asked, her eyes narrowing on his.

  “We could go into Cryo with her. She’s not like any other six-month-old. She’s far more developed. I don’t think it would be dangerous anymore.”

  “No.” Lori shook her head vigorously. If Keera went into cryo now, she wouldn’t be awoken until they reached Earth. None of them would. And then who knew what would happen next. Keera would probably be taken to a government facility, maybe separated from them forever.

  Suddenly Keera’s cries quieted, replaced by a sniffling sound. A moment later it was followed by her small, husky voice: “Mommy, I wanna stay here with you.”

  “It’s okay, honey, I’m not going to leave. Daddy is going to go to one of the other rooms so he can sleep. I’m going to stay with you, okay?”

  “Promise?” Keera leaned away from Lori’s shoulder to look her in the eye. Keera’s sunken red eyes were brighter than usual from all the tears, and her pale face was flushed dark gray. The fish scale pattern of black veins was darker and more visible than usual beneath her skin. All four of Keera’s cranial stems turned toward Lori, the ear canals flaring into small funnel shapes, indicating that all of her attention was fixed on her mother. Unlike a human, Keera didn’t have ears in the sides of her head. She had them on top instead—four ears attached to short, flexible appendages that could be directed independently of each other to hear frequencies of sound far outside of the normal human range of hearing. Her vision was also sharper than a human’s. Two spongy bulges protruded from the sides of Keera’s head where her ears should have been. Lori had no idea what they were or what purpose they might serve. Much of Keera’s biology was still a mystery.

  “I promise,” Lori said.

  Keera nodded and subsided against her shoulder once more. Whatever had been wrong, at least now she’d stopped crying. Maybe now she could finally fall asleep.

  Richard held her gaze with a heavy frown, his brow dropping a dark shadow over his eyes.

  “What?” Lori hissed.

  “We’re going to talk seriously about this when the captain wakes up.”

  “We already talked about it,” Lori replied.

  “Not with him.”

  “You will not speak to him.”

  “You can’t stop me. He needs to know what’s been going on. How she’s developing. When he sees her and hears about everything, it won’t be up to you or me anymore. He’s going to put her in cryo whether you like it or not.”

  Lori caught Keera leaning away again, this time she was glaring at her father. A low, mewling hiss escaped her lips.

  “Look at the way she’s looking at me! She looks like she wants to kill me! And I’m her father.”

  “Then maybe you should start acting like it!”

  Richard threw up his hands. “I give up. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Richard stalked toward the exit and waved the door open as he approached. It opened with a whisper and then slid shut behind him with a muffled thump.

  “Is it true?” Keera asked.

  “Is what true, sweetheart?”

  “That they gonna put me in cwhyo.”

  “Cryo, s
weetie. I won’t let them. Not yet, anyway. It’s too soon. We still have time.”

  “What is cwhyo?”

  Lori carried her daughter over to the bed and set her down on the edge. She took a moment to arch her aching back and shake out her burning arms. Keera was getting harder and harder to hold. Luckily Lori spent a couple hours in the gym every day. There wasn’t much else to do.

  “Cryo is where they freeze you...”

  Keera gave an involuntary shiver. “They make you cold?” She turned and grabbed the blankets and drew them up around her shoulders.

  Lori helped wrap her up. She shook her head, smiling broadly at her daughter. “Yes, sweetie, but you don’t feel it. They put you to sleep first.”

  “For how long?” Keera’s bony brow lifted in question.

  “Well... that depends. Sometimes just for a few months. Sometimes years.”

  “But they wanna fweeze me for long time.”

  “Maybe.”

  Keera’s expression darkened and she shook her head as she absently flexed her hands in her lap, raking her claws over the blankets. A tearing sound reached her ears, and rips appeared in the fabric.

  “Don’t do that, honey.”

  “Sawy.” She stopped flexing her hands.

  “You mean sorry.”

  “Yes, sawy.”

  Lori smiled at Keera’s persistent lisp. She was still working on pronunciation. Sometimes she got it right, and other times she defaulted to her old bad habits. Somehow Richard missed all of this. He only saw what his eyes showed him: sharp claws and teeth, a frightening face and demonic eyes. He didn’t see the very human personality emerging underneath, or how sweet and vulnerable Keera could be. As far as Lori was concerned, she was just like any other human child, only her appearance and physiology set her apart.

  “What if we make them sleep instead? Then I can stay awake with you.”

  Lori hesitated. “What do you mean, honey? They’re already asleep.”

  “We could make it so they don’t wake up.” Keera was staring sightlessly at the door by which her father had left.

  Goosebumps appeared on Lori’s bare arms, and she rubbed them away. “They’re going to wake up automatically tomorrow whether we like it or not.”

  “But you could stop them. Make them stay asleep.”

  “No, I can’t. I’d have to go to the bridge to deactivate the auto-wake cycle, and even if I did that, there are two officers on the bridge right now who are taking turns watching it. One of them would stop me if I tried anything like that.”

  “Then they are the problem,” Keera said.

  “No, darling. No one is a problem.”

  Keera finally tore her eyes away from the door. “But the captain will make me sleep if he wakes up.”

  Lori offered a reassuring smile and slowly shook her head. “I’ll talk to him. He agreed to let us raise you here until you’re two years old. You still have another year and six months to go before you reach two.”

  “Daddy doesn’t want to wait.” Another hiss escaped Keera’s lips, and she bared her long, pointed teeth, making it clear what she thought about that. Her hands flexed into talons again and the blankets bunched up in her lap.

  Lori placed her hand over Keera’s. “He’s just scared.”

  “Of what?”

  Lori hesitated. She’d painted herself into a corner. How to tell your child that her father is afraid of her? She couldn’t tell Keera that. “He’s afraid of things he doesn’t understand.”

  “Things like me,” Keera said. Her hands relaxed and her gaze drifted out of focus, staring into her wrinkly white palms.

  Keera was getting harder and harder to fool. She was incredibly perceptive—more so than most adults.

  “It’s not your fault,” Lori tried again.

  “I know you love me,” Keera replied, and leaned her head against Lori’s shoulder. The implication was that she didn’t think Richard loved her. Lori winced and swallowed past a painful knot in her throat. Damn you, Richard.

  She wrapped an arm around Keera’s shoulders, and they sat there staring out the windows at the dizzying swirl of the stars as they rotated around and around Forerunner One’s central column. That jutting gray and silver spear seemed to be looping endlessly around them, but in reality, of course, they were the ones who were spinning.

  “Lights off,” Lori said, and darkness enveloped them. They sat there quietly with the minutes trickling by, their faces agleam with starlight as they stared into the swirling void.

  Growing dizzy, Lori looked away. There was a setting on the windows to activate them as viewscreens and show a rock-steady view from an external camera in the stationary center of the ship. But ever since Keera was a baby, she had preferred it this way. The movement soothed her.

  As Lori’s body and mind grew heavy with sleep, she thought to ask Keera one more time—maybe now she had enough distance from her emotions to make sense out of them. “What were you crying about before, sweetheart?”

  Several seconds passed before Keera replied. And when she did, her voice was a ragged whisper. “I saw blood everywhere and... they were screaming.”

  Another chill prickled Lori’s skin with goosebumps. “Who was screaming?” she asked slowly.

  Keera shook her head. “I don’t know. A man and a woman.”

  Us? she almost blurted out, but that would be giving in to Richard’s paranoia. Keera had just said that she didn’t know who they were.

  “How did you see them? Was it a dream?”

  “No. I wasn’t asleep. I saw them up here.” Keera tapped the side of her head with one wickedly curling black claw.

  “In your head... you mean you imagined it?”

  Keera nodded.

  Maybe she did need to ask. “Was it your father and I you saw?”

  Keera shook her head quickly, her red eyes flashing with alarm.

  “But it was a man and a woman. Did you recognize them?”

  Another shake.

  Lori frowned. Keera had never met anyone besides her parents. Not in the last six months, anyway, and she doubted that Keera had formed any lasting memories as a newborn.

  But, they had watched enough holovids with her to feed her imagination.

  “Were they people you saw in a movie?”

  Keera shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “You mentioned blood. Did something happen to them?”

  Keera’s eyes filled with tears and her lower lip began to tremble. “Yes.”

  Lori frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!” Keera whirled away and scooted down to the end of the bed. She wiped her tears away furiously.

  Lori got up and went to sit beside her again. “It’s okay. You can tell me anything. I’ll always love you. No matter what. Whatever it is, it’s not real. It’s just your imagination.”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “You can’t love me! I’m bad. I’m very bad.”

  “No, you’re not, Keera! You haven’t done anything wrong.” Lori wrapped her in a hug, but Keera resisted, trying to wriggle free.

  “Let me go!”

  “No.”

  “I killed them!” she screamed.

  Lori recoiled from the force of her words as much as from what Keera had said. Her reaction lasted only a second, but the damage was already done. Keera smiled bitterly, her cheeks streaked with tears. “You see? You don’t love me.”

  “Honey, it wasn’t real. You haven’t even left this deck. There isn’t anyone here for you to have hurt, and even if there were, I don’t believe that you would hurt anyone.”

  Keera’s expression blanked, becoming suddenly sober. She reached out with a trembling hand and ran her fingers lightly over the scars on Lori’s arm.

  “That’s different. Those were accidents.”

  “Not accidents. It is what I am—” Keera broke off, her expression twisting up in self-loathing. “—A killer.” She began sobbing in earnest now, staring at her ha
nds, her bony, coat hangar shoulders rocking violently and air whistling in and out of her sharp, narrow nose.

  Lori pulled her into a hug and kissed the top of her bony head. “You’re not a killer, Keera,” she whispered. “Killers don’t cry because they are killers. They don’t feel bad about what they do. You haven’t done anything, but you can’t even stand the thought that you might. That’s not how killers act.”

  “You don’t understand,” Keera said in a muffled voice.

  “What do you mean?” Lori whispered. “Talk to me.”

  “Sometimes I want to hurt Daddy.”

  It felt as though her blood had turned to ice. Rather than give in to it, Lori held fast to what she knew. If Keera had really wanted to hurt her father, she could have easily done so by now.

  “That’s because sometimes he’s mean to you, even when you don’t deserve it, and that makes you mad. It’s normal to feel that way, Keera. What’s important isn’t how you feel but what you do with those feelings, and I’ve never seen you intentionally hurt anyone. Do you understand?”

  Keera nodded quickly, her bony skull knocking against Lori’s chin.

  “Good. Now come on. Let’s try to get some sleep. We have a busy day ahead of us tomorrow. You’re going to meet the crew for the first time.”

  “You said they already met me.”

  “Yes, but you don’t remember it, so for you it is the first time.”

  “Do you think they’ll like me?”

  Lori hesitated for just a second, before pasting a lie on her face. “They’re going to love you, sweetie.”

  “That isn’t twoo.”

  “True,” Lori correct. “And yes it is.”

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s wait and see, shall we?”

  Keera nodded and they both crawled up to the top of the bed and lay down. Keera’s bed was on the other side of the room, but Richard wasn’t here, so there was no point in making her sleep there tonight. Lori curled her body against Keera’s and wrapped her daughter in the blankets, making sure to keep them off herself. Keera’s body heat was like a roaring fire beside her, and more than enough to keep her warm. Her natural body temperature was forty-one degrees Celsius.