Energize (From the Logs of Daniel Quinn Book 1)

by Thomas R. Manning

  “Al, while we’re away make sure you do regular sensor sweeps and take another look at our passenger’s boxes. I find it hard to believe they’re empty.”

  “Acknowledged sir. While I have no human emotion to be concerned for your well-being, I will wish you good luck.”

  “Thanks Al. Keep the ship in one piece while I’m gone.”

  I took my leave of the bridge and hustled to my room. Once there I grabbed everything I needed including a change of clothes, sleeping bag, water jugs, and the pills which helped to calm my mind. Lastly, I stopped in front of my secret compartment and grabbed my tactical suit. I stared at my rifle for a couple of minutes, but ultimately decided against bringing it. Scanning our surroundings didn’t reveal any danger and if we did happen to make contact with an alien I didn’t want to look aggressive.

  The suit is a lower grade of armor than most soldiers wear. I dressed in a black, skin tight mesh that was resistant to certain ammunition such as bullets and plasma. Over that I attached various pieces of grey colored armor including a chest piece, shoulder pads, forearm guards, and gloves. My legs had similar armor pieces and all were designed to shield my body from various dangers including plasma blasts and intense heat. The outfit wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, that is, until you realize that it raises your chance of survival by 100%.

  When I reached the bay Cessa was sitting on the same box she had carried toward the door. Now that I was up close I could see that she was wearing her comfortably tight armored suit, metallic plates covering her upper arms, chest and thighs. It was the same outfit I met her in, but it looked even more impressive now. Her sword hung at her side and she had also equipped small daggers in her belt. I stood next to her and took a quick look around my ship.

  “Where is your weapon?” Cessa asked me. “Please tell me you have one.”

  “Ha! Of course I have one. I just chose not to bring it.”

  I think she nearly fell off the box when I said that. Cessa stood and walked up to me. Her chest was touching my arm, her face centimeters from mine.

  “Don’t be an idiot! How do you plan on protecting yourself? How do you plan on handling any potentially hostile natives?”

  I looked right in her eyes and replied, “Isn’t that why I have you”?

  After that she folded her arms and said nothing. I took the moment of silence to inquire about the box.

  “Beacon indicators,” she muttered. “We can use these to mark our journey and not get lost.”

  “Smart,” I said, then walked over to the door lever. I put my hand around it then turned back to Cessa.

  “Ready for this?”

  She stood up straight and loosened up her arms, placing her hand around the hilt of her sword, which was apparently her standard pose.

  “Are you certain we won’t require masks or helmets?” She asked.

  I shook my head, “Multiple scans were completed of the environment outside the ship. The air is going to be a little lighter than what we feel on Earth, but gravity and oxygen levels are very similar to what we’re used to.”

  I threw down the lever and the doors grinded against the hull as it lowered to the grass. I immediately felt a gust of wind and inhaled it. The aroma was wonderful. The air smelled like a spring morning, standing in a flower bed after a light rainfall. The temperature was warm and the wind comfortable. I moved slowly off the ship and onto the boarding ramp. To my right the sun was shining a brilliant golden light.

  As much as I wanted to explore the planet and go looking for the empyreus, I also wanted to get a look at my ship to discern the damage from the asteroid belt. There was a lot of paint damage and some dents in the wings of the ship. I didn’t see anything that needed immediate repair, which was fantastic. I walked back to the bay and initiated the closing sequence. Within seconds the Belle was secured and Cessa and I were completely on our own.

  “Do you hear that?” I heard Cessa mutter. Stopping to listen, I didn’t hear anything but the wind, at least at first, but then I did hear something far off in the distance. Was it animals or bugs, like a bunch of noisy crickets? As I focused on the sound the answer was neither. The sounds that Cessa heard were music. Some sort of melody was playing on the wind, the sounds reminding me of a flute or piccolo. I had to strain in order to hear it, but it was beautiful. For a brief moment I considered activating my bionic eye to get an extra sense of perception, but I wanted to take this time to enjoy the moment of being here. Sure, I was still uncomfortable with the terms of my journey, but you couldn’t deny the brilliance of moments like this no matter how you got here.

  To my left, Cessa pulled her sword from its scabbard. She bent her knees and wrapped both hands around the hilt, taking a stance of caution.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her. “Put your damn sword away.”

  “We have no idea what’s out here . . . we need to be ready.” She kept looking from side to side, moving her sword to match her direction.

  “Didn’t I just tell you that this area was scanned multiple times? Not only is the planet environmentally safe, but it detected no signs of humanoid life. Nothing is going to happen to us, we are completely fine.”

  That’s when I felt a sharp pinch in my neck. I tried to feel the area with my hand. I thought I felt something stuck in it, but immediately my hand went numb as did my feet. I heard a thump beside me and turned to see Cessa on the ground, unconscious. When I tried to take a step my legs failed me and I hit the ground too.

  The music grew louder as my sight got darker. My head felt like it had been completely separated from my body. I couldn’t feel a thing. Eventually I lost complete control of myself and my eyes closed to blackness.

  NINE

  The nightmares were so numerous that I questioned whether they were actually real. For brief moments I recall lying on my back looking up at the night sky. The stars above were foreign to me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate them just as much. I could hear music all around me, some of it soft and tranquil and some more aggressive.

  Seconds later I was somewhere else. Two heavily armed guards dragged my body down a corridor. The back of my head throbbed in pain as if someone struck me with something hard. As the guards turned left, then right I realized the sights around me were familiar. I was on a starship about a week after I departed Earth for the first time. I tried to speak to one of the guards. My words came out a jumbled mess, but I felt like I knew him somewhat. Maybe he could tell me what was going on.

  “You need to shut your mouth right now Quinn,” he said to me with his teeth forced together and a look of hatred about him.

  I didn’t argue or say another word. Something had gone horribly wrong and I knew that, but my head was swimming and I couldn’t focus on the events of the past few hours. The three of us entered a large octagonal room where each wall held a smaller room encased in thick, impervious glass. The guards opened one of the smaller rooms and dropped me there, then locked me in. It was a brig. I was a prisoner.

  None of this made sense. What was I doing in the brig? I stood up, but became lightheaded very quickly. I put my hands on the glass wall to steady myself and that’s when I noticed my hands. They were both covered in blood. My heart raced as I searched my body for wounds, but then my memories resurfaced. The blood wasn’t mine. Memories attacked me, showing me things I didn’t want to see, a body in my room, the blood spattered everywhere. I ran to the body and fell to my knees screaming a name I couldn’t comprehend.

  Screaming. There was so much screaming. When I woke up to the starry sky, I screamed. When I blacked out the memory replayed over and over and ended with my screams. During the night I woke up shivering and sweating at the same time. A warm hand covered my forehead, but I couldn’t see who it was. I could only see stars above me. I could only hear music playing.

  At some point my nightmares continued past the screams. I was still in the brig though my hands were clean. The doors to the main hub opened and a woman st
epped in. She approached my cell and stopped just short of her nose touching the glass. I stood up and saluted her.

  “Commander King,” I said, my voice hoarse.

  She didn’t tell me at ease, nor did she say anything for a good while. She just looked at me in a way that made me feel like she was considering her options.

  “You’ve murdered a member of my crew, Daniel.”

  I murdered? No, I didn’t remember being the one who committed murder. I found the body in my room. I wanted to say something to her to try and convince her that I didn’t do it.

  “Don’t speak,” she said while holding her hand up to me. “You will be taken to the nearest space station and be placed in a holding cell until you can be put on trial. It is the Captain’s and my recommendation that you be sentenced to death.”

  My entire world fell apart in a matter of hours. She turned and left me there, screaming her name, telling her to come back. I didn’t commit murder and I couldn’t allow myself to be placed in holding on a station. Somehow, someway, I had to escape.

  The memory slowly faded away and my consciousness returned to reality. The starry sky had been replaced with bright sunlight and the air was cool on my face, but my body was covered with something. I moved my hands and felt a light, soft cloth that ran from my chest to my feet, a blanket. It took a while for my mind to process that I was finally awake and the nightmares were over. I sat up and found myself lying on a cot . . . in a cell.

  This wasn’t any kind of cell I’d ever seen before. For one thing, there was no roof. That explained how I saw stars before and the sun now. The cell itself looked square shaped with a soft curve in each corner. The walls were cream colored and solid, though on four sides there were open gaps. I walked up to one of them, which began above my feet and ended a foot above my head. There was enough space to comfortably look through, but not nearly enough room to squeeze through and escape.

  My prison stood in a meadow of bluish grass. A forest of rich brown bark with branches covered in leaves of red, gold, and blue stood on the opposite end. I squinted at the ground toward the border of the forest and counted a couple of dirt paths leading into it. I assumed my captors would be entering the area from one of those paths.

  Someone screamed. At first I wrote it off as something that was in my head, just a figment of my imagination from the nightmares. When the screaming didn’t stop I focused on it. A flurry of words followed the primal screams.

  “Let me out! Now! I swear on each and every one of your lives that I will end you!”

  Cessa. I quickly sidestepped to my right until I found the next set of gaps. Beside my cell was a second cell where Cessa was being held and she was angry. I could see the foundation of the cell trembling. Every couple of seconds I saw a womanly figure rush back and forth past the gaps, presumably slamming herself into the walls to try and breach them. I could hear her labored breathing. She had been at this for some time.

  I couldn’t help but feel a sense of comfort knowing she was alive. I was taking this imprisonment a lot better than her, but that didn’t mean I was comfortable. I tried to remind myself that the two of us were aliens to whatever life form existed on this planet. I pressed my face into the gap as much as I could then whispered loudly to Cessa.

  “Daniel?” She gasped. She ran to the opening opposite mine.

  Besides her hair being messy from the running and sweating, she seemed okay. Her eyes were wide in a look that could have been terror or hatred. I couldn’t be sure which.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Do you have brain damage?” She was on the verge of screaming again. “No I’m not okay! I’m trapped like an animal! They took my sword! They are vile, loathsome, bastard freaks!”

  She must have seen them already. I turned to give her a moment to breathe and cool off and noticed that like her sword, my equipment was missing as well. The only thing in the cell that belonged to me was the suit I wore and of course, my bionic eye. Whoever they were they had my bag, my clothes, my medical supplies and with that, my medication to control the nightmares. I muttered a curse to myself, but quickly got control of my own temper. If the roles were reversed and these aliens landed on Earth they would be going through a lot more trouble than the two of us were right now.

  Despite our imprisonment being relatively comfortable, that didn’t stop Cessa from continuing her assault on her cell. I now saw what she was like in captivity. It wasn’t pretty. She was acting like a crazed animal, shouting, screaming, and attacking the walls in various ways, testing their durability. In the open world she was a predator, but inside a cage she was a victim.

  I became distracted from Cessa’s aggression when sounds carried on the wind towards us. The sounds were those of music again. I looked out all four openings but saw nothing. Maybe there was a village through the forest. As time passed, I thought I could hear the music grow louder. The trees across the small meadow rustled and I pushed my eye against the gap in the cell to look. Two of the aliens . . . no, the natives, walked into the meadow and gave me my first look at this new alien race.

  They were taller than me, much taller. With a twitch of pain I activated my bionic eye and within seconds I had details of their heights, 7’2’’ and 6’5’’ respectively. Curiously, when my eye scanned over the clothing I received unknown readings and errors. Whatever the material was made of it wasn’t anything known to man. The clothes made me think of ceremonial robes. The skin on their hands and faces was a modest shade of lavender. Their heads were longer and more oval than the average human. They didn’t have eyebrows or ears, but instead on each side of their head had two indents with various openings. Their eyes were twice as large as a human’s, golden irises surrounding dark brown pupils. The mouths were similarly shaped to ours except they had no lips. I counted three fingers and an opposable thumb on their hands. Everything else was covered by their clothing.

  As they approached us they were speaking to each other, gesticulating with their hands. I tried to concentrate on what they said until I realized that the music I’d been hearing was coming from them. They spoke in musical intonations. My knees became weak and I almost fainted from the beautiful melody, but this presented a problem. How was I supposed to establish communication with them? I didn’t expect them to speak any human languages of course, but I hoped it would have been something I could have learned to translate. I had no idea whatsoever how I would translate their musical speech patterns.

  The two of them first stopped in front of Cessa’s cell. From this close up I could see that their shoulders were very broad, but one alien’s shoulders were square and the other’s were curved. The curved alien’s chest was slightly bigger than the male’s, supposedly her breasts, but they were higher on the chest than a human woman’s.

  “I’ll kill you! Where’s my sword you bastards?”

  Cessa forced her face as far through the opening as she could. From my point of view it looked ridiculous, almost painful. They stood in front of her a moment watching her reactions to their presence. Then both of them, in sync, turned toward me. My stomach erupted in a flurry of butterflies. I quickly deactivated my eye hoping they didn’t notice the soft glow the pupil made while active. Goosebumps formed on my skin as they took position directly in front of me.

  What was I supposed to do? Should I say hello? Wave to them? My mind was a completely blank slate. If there was one sure thing, it’s that I wasn’t a diplomat and I only knew the basics of the first contact procedure. What would I want to know if I captured an alien creature and had no idea of its intentions? I would probably want to know that it wasn’t a threat. I had no idea what they considered to be a sign of friendship so I did the first thing that came to my mind. Slowly extending my right hand over my heart I bowed to them. They looked at each other and conversed, their musical speech mesmerizing. The change in notes was quick and precise.

  The male looked back at me and leaned in. He sang something to me, but I obviously couldn’t
understand him. The music itself sounded somewhat unsure of itself like a progression of notes in a minor chord. I shook my head and decided now was as good a time as ever to let them hear my speech as well.

  “I am sorry, but I do not understand you.”

  He retracted his head and looked to his associate or partner. There was more musical speech. This species walked and talked with their own personal soundtrack and that astounded me. I could only imagine what Earth scientists would think about this.

  The two . . . Dawnians? I had to come up with a name for them at some point. They turned to walk away from me and my shoulders dropped. I hoped my sincerity would somehow read in my expressions, but with the lack of communication there was no way to be sure what they thought of us or what they would do with us.

  I could still hear them singing. They hadn’t left the area yet, but they had moved out of sight. I pressed my face through a couple of the openings to try and see them through my peripherals, but that didn’t work. I tried listening, which was difficult thanks to the variety of curses Cessa was still spouting out. She only made the situation worse and I wish she realized that. On the other hand maybe I was being too calm about it. We were locked up, which I was no stranger to. Who knew what they were going to do with us?

  The male Dawnian returned with a strange device held in his palms. The female stood behind him, paying close attention to the scene in front of her. The device looked similar to a motherboard from a computer console. What caught my eye were multiple charges and pulses of blue and gold emanating from it like a visible electric current. He moved the device to his upper chest and attached it there, though I didn’t know how. He tinkered with it for a minute then sang towards it. I heard a buzzing sound and he played with it some more. After his third alteration of the settings I almost lost all feeling in my legs and fell.