by Joe Vasicek
She stood up straight and faced him, making no effort whatsoever to cover herself. Hot blood rushed to Isaac’s cheeks. Not only was she naked, she was gorgeous.
Realization finally struck him, making his jaw drop. Her face, her hair, the tattoos—this was the girl he and his brother had picked up in the Nova Alnilam system, the one the Imperials had confiscated at Colkhia. They must have thawed her, though how she’d managed to escape from them he didn’t know.
“You—you’re—I know you!” he stammered, words failing him. She frowned and crossed her arms beneath her breasts, saying nothing.
She doesn’t speak Gaian, Isaac thought to himself. He remembered a message he had found at Alnilam Station, written to anyone who happened to find it. Even with the autotranslators, it had been virtually incomprehensible. Nova Alnilam was too far away, and the people had been isolated from the rest of civilization for too long.
“Sorry,” he said, switching to his own native Deltan. “Can you understand me now?” When it was apparent that she couldn’t, he switched to Orianan creole, then to the mix of dialects spoken in the New Pleiades. Each time, she only stared at him, clearly uncomprehending.
Without acknowledging anything he said to her, she stepped past him into the cabin. He followed close behind her, though not too close—she was naked, after all. Perhaps he should do something about that.
“Here,” he said, pulling out one of his brother’s jumpsuits from a wall compartment. “You probably need something to wear, since, ah …”
The look of contempt on her face as he held out the clothes to her was positively venomous. He shrank back, unsure how to respond.
“No, then? Okay, ah, let’s find something else.”
He stuffed the clothes back in the locker and followed her to the lounge table, set inside a cozy niche opposite the bunks. She examined it casually, as if he weren’t there, and when he cleared his throat, she glanced over his shoulder and scowled at him.
I’ll bet she’s hungry, he realized. Or thirsty, at least. He pulled out a tall glass and filled it with water.
“Here, would you like some?”
When she didn’t take the glass immediately, he set it on the table and went about fixing a bowl of synthmeal. He added in just the right blend of spices, along with some partially reconstituted fruits and vegetables to give it flavor and body. It took him about three minutes to fix the bowl, but when it was done he pulled it out and walked over to the table.
“Here you are, I—”
To his surprise, he found her sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back to the wall. Her eyes were closed and her arms were folded neatly in her lap. It looked almost as if she were asleep.
“Hello? Would you like any food? I fixed this for you, if you’d like to …”
His voice trailed off again as he realized that the girl wasn’t listening. In fact, she had gone as still as a statue. He considered reaching out and lightly tapping her on the shoulder, but figured it wasn’t a good idea to disturb her. With a sigh, he placed the bowl on the table next to the untouched glass of water.
This is the girl that Aaron was so eager to rescue, he couldn’t help but think to himself. To have her on the ship, no longer frozen in cryo but living and breathing just like him? If only Aaron could see it.
But the girl herself seemed less than enthused. In fact, she’d been downright cold since he’d brought her onto the Medea. Was it something he’d said or done that had garnered such an ill-favored reaction? Or had the Imperials mistreated her, and she thought that he was just another one of them? The thought made him shudder—it was his fault that the Imperials had taken her in the first place, his fault that she had fallen into their hands.
But then again, Aaron was probably dead by now, and that was his fault, too.
The heavy weight of guilt made him all too aware of his growing exhaustion. With the Medea safely away from the Colkhia system, it was time for a long overdue sleepshift. As awkward as things were with a naked girl on his ship, he would have to leave off dealing with her until he had a chance to rest.
Still, there were some precautions that had to be taken. Just because the girl didn’t speak his language didn’t mean that she wouldn’t do something stupid like try to fly the ship. He went to the cockpit and locked the piloting controls so that only he could access them. Better to be safe than sorry, after all. Or dead.
As he stepped back into the cabin, he took one last look at the henna girl. She seemed completely unaware of the fact that she was naked—that, or utterly unconcerned. He realized that he was staring and turned quickly away, his cheeks burning and his legs a little weak.
We’ll sort it all out next dayshift, he told himself as he climbed into the bottom bunk. For now, sleep.
* * * * *
Reva took a deep breath and opened her eyes. Her newfound captor/rescuer had fallen asleep on his bunk, and was now snoring soundly. She waited a few minutes before getting up, though—the last thing she wanted was to wake him up and have to deal with him again.
From the way he’d stared at her, she could tell he was just as perverted as the people she’d escaped from. Why was it such a strange thing to them that she didn’t keep herself covered all the time? She shuddered as she remembered the man in white pinching her breast and running his hands in places that they never should have gone. Was that all these people could think of when they saw a woman who didn’t cover her body like them?
Still, she had to admit that he’d treated fairly well so far. Retrieving the escape pod, offering her food and water, and leaving her free to do as she pleased was a lot more than she’d expected. But the second-skin he wore to cover his body was like a mask of irrational shame. She would never understand why these people felt the need to cover themselves all the time. Not only was it indecent, it was downright ugly.
She rose to her feet and stretched—quietly, of course. With her captor/rescuer asleep, she was free to wander about his starship. It seemed surprisingly small, but maybe that was just because she hadn’t seen the whole thing yet.
It wasn’t. Besides the cabin, which served as the eating, sleeping, and living quarters all rolled into one, there was just the bathroom, a short corridor leading to the airlock, and the cockpit. She walked from one end of the ship and back again in less than twenty steps.
Still, it felt more cozy than cramped. The little niche with the table for the eating area was quite comfortable, with a couch that wrapped in a smooth semi-circle around it. A chair unfolded from the wall next to the bunks, with some sort of helmet-like computer device stowed above it. The food synthesizer, the washer unit, and the storage compartments were all built into the bulkheads to conserve space. Even the bunks were set into the wall, with curtains to offer some privacy.
As cozy as the starship was, though, it was clearly built for two people. That surprised Reva more than anything else, because clearly she was the only other person on board. And yet, the evidence was undeniable. Two bunk beds, two chairs in the cockpit, even two escape pods. And yet the young man clearly flew the ship alone.
She tried to access the controls in the cockpit, only to find that they were locked. That frustrated her, not so much because she wanted to pilot the ship as that she wanted to check the nav-computer to see where they were. Then again, even if she could access the controls, they were all so foreign to her that she would probably screw things up somehow. Perhaps it was for the best that they were locked.
That didn’t mean that Reva had to like it, though. Ever since waking from cryo, the thing that she hated the most was her complete lack of control. She had no idea where she was, how long she’d been frozen, who had woken her, or where she was going. Even if she found out, though, there was nothing she could do to change any of it. She was surrounded by strangers who had almost complete power over her, and she couldn’t so much as talk with them.
She returned to the cabin and glanced at the bowl of food and the glass of water that her captor/rescue
r had left for her. A part of her wanted to refuse to eat it, just to show that he didn’t own her. But the rational part of her knew that she didn’t have much of a choice. She would have to eat and drink eventually—putting it off would only make it that much clearer that she couldn’t live without him.
Still, that didn’t mean she had to rely on him completely. She walked over to the food synthesizer and examined it carefully. The writing was all in a foreign language, but the design was pretty similar to the ones back home. If she fiddled with it long enough, she should be able to come up with something.
The food reminded her of the famine back home at Anuva Station. The synthesizers had still worked, but without hydroponics to supplement their food supply they might as well have been eating sand. She remembered the bland, unmixed synthmeal all too well, filling the emptiness in her stomach but never really nourishing her.
What had happened to everyone back home? Had they managed to find a supplementary nutrition source to save them? Probably not. If they had, she wouldn’t be here in this strange place. She tried not to think about that and focused her attention on the task at hand.
It took her about fifteen minutes to figure out the basic controls. The machine hummed as it worked, making her glance nervously over her shoulder, but her captor/rescuer was sleeping so soundly that it didn’t wake him. A thick paste spilled out into the bowl that she’d placed under the dispenser, and with a beep, the machine finished.
Reva took a spoonful of the concoction and winced. It tasted like bananas and cilantro, with some sort of foreign spice that overpowered the whole thing. Her eyes watered, but she forced it down, resolving to figure out how to fine-tune the taste settings as soon as possible.
After four spoonfuls, she couldn’t take anymore. She dumped the half-eaten food into what looked like the recycler unit and set the bowl on the table. At least he’ll know that I can fix my own food, she thought to herself, leaving his bowl untouched.
A sudden urge to use the bathroom gripped her bowels like a vice. It was that fluid pack—it was passing right through her. With her hands jammed between her legs, she ran to the bathroom as quickly as she could.
The bathroom equipment was just as confusing as everything else on the ship. Instead of a simple porcelain hole and a little platform to squat on, the toilet was a seat with half a dozen tubes and hoses surrounding it. She didn’t have any idea how to use it, but she did recognize the hole where everything was supposed to end up. By perching herself carefully on the seat with her hands on either wall for support, she managed to squat just enough to pull it off. Aiming was difficult, but thankfully, she managed not to make a mess.
As she washed up, she took a good, hard look in the mirror. The henna tattoos were still as dark and vibrant as the day they’d been painted, but bags had formed under her eyes, and she looked exhausted. She realized then that she was exhausted. Barely half a dayshift had passed since she’d woken from cryo, but it felt like so much more.
“What am I doing in this place?” she asked aloud. The sound of her voice surprised her, as if her own reflection had spoken. In some ways, perhaps it had. She had no home anymore—no family, no friends, nowhere to go back to. She was utterly and completely lost.
What was the point in going on? What did she have left to live for? The question made her hands shake, so she put it out of her mind and stepped back into the cabin. No sense thinking too deeply about those sorts of things now.
Sleep. She needed sleep. Thank the stars there were two bunks on the ship. The young man was in the bottom bunk, but she managed to slip into the top one without disturbing him. The bed was even made for her, with a blanket and foam pillow.
Her eyes drooped shut almost the moment she was horizontal, and sleep soon followed. But as she drifted out of consciousness, the question still haunted her.
What do you have left to live for?
Strangers Unmasked
Isaac stretched and yawned, waking from a dreamless sleep. He climbed out of his bunk and blinked at the brightness of the lights. So the henna girl hadn’t turned them off—but how could she, when she didn’t know how? He glanced around the cabin looking for her, and almost panicked when he didn’t see her anywhere. But then he thought to check Aaron’s bunk. Sure enough, she was sound asleep.
“Rough dayshift, huh?” he muttered, smiling to himself. He thought about waking her, but decided that it was probably best not to disturb her. Instead, he went to get dressed.
As he walked across the cabin, he noticed the empty bowl on the table, next to the untouched synthmeal he’d set out for her. It had an odd smell to it, almost like dried bananas. Was that what they ate at Nova Alnilam? It would take her a while to get used to Deltan cooking, then.
He opened the universal washer unit to toss his dirty clothes in and was struck almost immediately by the stench. “What the?” he said, pulling out yesterday’s clothes. They were covered in uneaten food, dumped there by the girl. Evidently, she’d thought it was a recycler unit for garbage.
So your dish was actually a failed culinary experiment? he thought, chuckling a little. He would have to show her the right place to dump garbage, though, before all his clothes were ruined.
After starting up the universal washer unit, he fixed himself a breakfast shake from the synthesizer and stepped into the cockpit. Everything was exactly as he’d left it—no messes to clean up here. Then again, with all the controls locked, she hadn’t had much of an opportunity to make one.
After unlocking the nav-computer, he took a good, hard look at the starmap to figure out where they should go next. The stars in the New Pleiades were all about three or four days away from each other—none further than a standard month’s voyage for a starship the size of the Medea. That was good, since he was running low on fuel and supplies. Even so, he couldn’t go just anywhere. If the Imperials still occupied Colkhia—and it was almost certain that they did—there was nothing stopping them from striking straight at the heart of the New Pleiades.
He had to take an alternate route, then, one that the Imperials wouldn’t follow. That meant skirting the minor systems through one of the outlying rifts in the dust clouds surrounding the star cluster. He studied the starmap until he found a route through the Shiloh Rift that seemed suitable. It would involve passing through a region infested with pirates, but that was a risk he had to take.
It only took Isaac about twenty minutes to plot a course. They would head for the Shiloh system first, a three-day journey that took them a little out of the way but put them in a corridor that led to the far side of the New Pleiades. From there, they would push ahead to Ithaca, a relatively minor system on the other end of the rift. Ithaca was completely unremarkable, except that it was part of the jump beacon network that ran through the core of the New Pleiades. Those beacons enabled rapid travel throughout the star cluster, effectively connecting the entire star cluster through a rapid transit network. If that network was still intact, it would be easy to contact the Resistance from there. And if the network wasn’t intact and the Imperials had pushed on to the heart of the New Pleiades … Isaac didn’t want to think about that.
After plotting the course, he checked the jump drive. It was charged to about seventy-five percent—good enough for a jump in open space, but still unsafe with all the local dust clouds and nebulae remnants in the sector. The last thing they needed was to jump into the heart of a dust cloud so dense that it compromised the Medea’s hull integrity. His brother might have risked it, but Isaac was more cautious. Besides, they would be able to jump much further on a fully charged drive. Paradoxically, waiting in the short-term would allow them to move faster in the long-term.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair. With their next jump set and their course plotted, he could turn his mind to other things, like the henna girl.
It was a strange twist of fate that had brought her back on board the Medea. He vividly remembered finding her at Alnilam Station, frozen in cryo. The station itse
lf was dead, the dried and desiccated corpses of its former inhabitants littering the hallways and corridors. Aaron was the one who had found her, and at his insistence they’d brought her on board, frozen in a makeshift cryotank. They’d gone from star to star, looking for someone who could thaw her, but at the Imperials had confiscated her at Colkhia. Aaron had sworn to get her back, but secretly, Isaac didn’t believe it would ever happen. Now, here she was, awake and very much alive.
Why was she being so uncooperative, though? From the way she’d glared at him, it seemed as if she saw him as an enemy—or at least as someone who couldn’t be trusted. And why did she refuse to wear any clothing? Perhaps those tattoos had something to do with it. He doubted the Imperials would have kept her naked as their prisoner, though he could be wrong.
The Imperials probably abused her, Isaac realized. She probably thinks I’m one of them.
It was clear that he would have to work to earn her trust. But how to do that when she wouldn’t even touch the food he left out for her? He would have to do it soon, though, before they arrived at Shiloh. She wouldn’t get very far if she didn’t speak the language, and it didn’t seem right to just leave her there.
He shook his head and finished off the last of his breakfast shake. There were so many things to consider, he hardly knew where to start. The best place would probably be the Gaian Imperial Catalog, one of the most comprehensive surveys of explored space. He brought it up on the cockpit’s main display.
NOVA ALNILAM, the entry for the girl’s home system read. Class F dwarf, 1.23 standard solar masses, 5 planets, number of moons unknown. Charted settlements: Alnilam Station. Date of first settlement: unknown. Population: unknown.
The rest of the brief entry detailed the chemical composition and heavy metal content of the system, as detected from long-range telescopes and other instruments. It was clear that the authors of the catalog had never actually been to the system, but relied mostly on second- and third-hand sources for what they couldn’t gather from astronomical observations at Gaia Nova. Isaac scoured the footnotes for any other information on the people who had settled there, but found only a couple of references to obscure sources that weren’t at his disposal.