Arlynn rested for a while with her eyes closed, then she looked to him again. “I need another day of rest. All I need is water. Will you help?”
“You need a hospital.”
“No. Please. Trust me.”
They looked at each other uncertainly until Greg made the decision for all of them. “Okay, go back to sleep.”
She fell asleep without a sleep disk on her arm. They woke her every few hours for water, but they did not test her strength with questions. Instead of giving her one day, they gave her two. Greg spent most of that time in the tent with her. Early on the second day, he convinced her to eat from one of the food packets he had brought from her ship. He did not ask her to talk as he fed her, and she did not volunteer any information, but her eyes rarely left his as he spooned the oatmeal-like mixture into her mouth.
She was noticeably better later in the day. After helping her through another meal, Arlynn insisted that Nancy help her clean up. Greg and Jim left the two women to their own devices. When Nancy called them back into the tent, her ministrations had clearly helped. Encased in her sleeping bag, the only burns they could see were on the side of her neck. The area still looked horrible under the sprayed-on bandage, but Arlynn seemed a lot stronger than when she had arrived.
Were there painkillers in that medicine, Greg wondered? She had the gaunt, emaciated look of the seriously wounded, clear evidence of the ordeal she was going through, but her eyes, deep blue and friendly, captivated him. Nancy had combed out her hair and arranged it on the pillow. What Greg looked for and did not find were signs of fever. Arlynn was hurting, but she was not sick.
Maybe she was right. Maybe a hospital would not have helped.
Nancy introduced everyone again, and Arlynn picked up from where they had left off. “How did I get here?” she asked.
“In my plane,” Greg answered. “I was flying the red and white plane that got mixed up in your fight.”
Arlynn’s eyes opened wide. She reached out a shaking hand toward him, and he changed places with Nancy. Looking into his eyes and choosing each word carefully, she spoke solemnly. “Thank you. My people thank you.”
He felt himself blushing. “Uh . . . I’m not sure how much help I was. I’m not even sure whose side I should be on, but we have more immediate concerns. Besides lots and lots of questions, we still haven’t ruled out a hospital for you. I know it’s not what you want, but if you get sick out here in the wilderness, you’ll die.”
Arlynn took her time before answering. Her gaze moved from Greg to Nancy, then to Jim and back to Greg. “You have made difficult decisions about my care with limited information. You have chosen well, for which I thank you. Your doctors cannot help me as much as the medicine from my ship. I am already healing.”
“You’re in a lot of pain,” Greg argued. “Can we give you something for that? I brought a lot of stuff from your ship.”
“I will use another sleep disk if necessary,” she answered. “The medicine is remarkable by your standards. I am completely protected from infection on your world, so I will not get sick, and it reduces the pain. You have done all the right things. The help I now need is in another area.”
The three of them exchanged glances, not totally convinced, and waited expectantly for her to continue. She looked at each of them again, letting her gaze linger, judging, until she reached a decision.
“The help I need can come from you. Only you. I wish there were another way, but there is not. I need to return to my people as soon as possible. Will you take me to my ship?”
“Wait a minute,” said Greg. “You can’t even stand up, let alone fly. Besides, your ship crashed.”
“I have another ship.”
Greg’s mouth dropped open as a flush of excitement coursed through his body. Was there an opportunity here? An opportunity to get onto a real spaceship? He was surprised at how much that opportunity meant to him, but with a quick glance toward Jim, he pushed the thought aside – for the moment. There were a host of other implications to deal with first.
“It might not be that simple. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Arlynn, but we’re not even sure who the good guys are. Just because these Harbok fly round spaceships doesn’t mean they’re the bad guys. In fact, from all appearances, they’ve been around Earth for a long time and might be our friends.”
She closed her eyes, looking forlorn for some reason known only to herself. When she opened her eyes again, she looked at each of them in turn, directly and silently, which seemed to be one of her mannerisms. “Greg asks many questions,” she said, “and they are all relevant. Let me start with his last.”
She looked into the distance for a time, then said, “The Harbok might be your friends. I don’t know. What I do know is that my people want them to be our friends, but they refuse to communicate with us. We find ourselves caught up in a war without a mechanism for ending that war. Until we find a way to communicate with them, I cannot say whether the Harbok are your friends or your enemies. I promise you that my people want only friendship with you.
“As to the matter of my ship, it is hidden far from here. The ship you saw belonged to my friend Jarl. He’s dead.” She stopped as tears sprang into her eyes. Greg’s mind whirled with questions, but instead of barging in, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gently wiped her eyes.
His touch startled her. She looked uncertain, then she closed her eyes.
When she returned her gaze to him, she spoke softly, looking him directly in the eyes. “Jarl is dead.” She moved her gaze to Nancy and Jim thoughtfully, then back to Greg. “As for piloting my ship, I will program it before starting out on the voyage. It will fly itself. I will be needed only if I encounter the Harbok. As for doctors, I need my own doctors. My doctors can speed up the healing process, but the ugly burns you see are already healing from the medicine you administered. They will completely heal without further assistance. I will be weak while my body repairs itself, but I am quite capable of programming my ship. Does that fully answer your questions?”
“Uh, no, not exactly,” he stumbled. “I have a lot more questions, beginning with what you’re doing here, on Earth I mean.”
She studied him intently. “After I leave, you will be questioned by your authorities, especially if the Harbok do not destroy the remains of Jarl’s ship. You have earned the right to answers, but I must limit what I tell you.”
Greg looked to Jim who nodded his head grimly. “I’ll accept that for the moment, but we might come back to it,” Greg said, turning back to her.
She stared at him thoughtfully before saying, “Harbok ships are technically superior to ours in one important area. In most other ways, we are evenly matched. Jarl and I came here to discover the secret to this technology. We think we got what we came for, but the Harbok discovered us. Jarl died during our escape, and as you can see, I nearly did as well.”
She closed her eyes, seeming to reach deep into herself for strength, then added, “Greg, the bag you brought with us might contain answers to our questions concerning this technology. I have to get it home as quickly as possible.”
He stared at her, speechless, stunned by the implications of her words.
The consternation on his face must have been obvious because she responded to it. “You are torn with the question of loyalties. Whose side do you support? Greg, the Harbok might be your friends, but they might not be your friends. I don’t know. What I know is that my people seek peace with everyone. The information in my bag will not provide us with the tools to beat the Harbok. That is not our goal. It might provide us with the means to defend ourselves against their superior technology while we search for a means to communicate with them. Communication is all we seek at present.”
Greg continued staring at her, still speechless. Had he heard right? When he turned to Jim, he found his brother-in-law glaring back at him. There was no forgiveness in that glare. This was a lot more serious than he had ever imagined, and a lot more complicated.
The deeper he thought about her words, the more he found himself wading through an almost endless quagmire of possibilities, all of them frightening.
Just knowing the cause of the battle he had taken part in raised the danger level for them enormously. If they were sitting on some top secret Harbok technology, there would be a massive effort underway by the Harbok to locate them. He was shocked, and even a little angry with himself, when for a moment he had an urge to just bow out and go back to work on his thesis, to be Greg Hamilton, historian, for a while. He had dealt with big issues all his adult life, but this was way over his head. And considering her position and who she was, he doubted if Arlynn was telling them the whole story. What if the stuff in her bag really would turn the tide of their war?
“Will you help me?” she asked again, breaking his trance.
He chose his words with care. After all, he was talking to an alien and did not want to start off on the wrong foot, but he needed answers. Despite those blue eyes, he knew she was not exactly the best source for obtaining the truth.
“This is complicated, Arlynn. I don’t want to create misunderstandings here, but we have to address a couple of issues before going any further. You say you’re a spy and have stolen something from the Harbok. We have no way of judging the value of what is in that bag, at least I don’t think we do, and the Harbok are not here to present their side of the story. I’d really like to help, but we need to know more about what’s going on.” He looked at Jim who nodded his head in agreement, then at Nancy who was appalled.
“What are you saying, Greg?” Nancy demanded. “Look at her! She needs our help!”
“You are already helping, for which I thank you,” Arlynn interrupted. “I am suddenly very tired. It’s the medicine. May we discuss this later? You have questioned my honesty, which is something I have never experienced before. I need to think more clearly before we continue.”
“You’ve never had your honesty questioned before?” Greg asked with a look of disbelief on his face.
“Never, and I am not certain how to respond to you.”
“I don’t understand. It was not my intention to offend you. Maybe I just didn’t word it very well . . .” he trailed off, disconcerted.
“Do not be concerned about offending me. You caught me by surprise, but that is because we come from such different cultures. I have been studying your cultures here on Earth for some time now—the Harbok are not the only ones interested in you. I confess that I do not understand most of what I have learned, but I have an open mind and am not easily offended. I ask that you keep an open mind as well, at least until we continue this conversation. Time is of the essence for reasons I cannot discuss, but for now I must rest.”
Nancy shooed them out of the tent, staying herself until Arlynn had gone back to sleep with another disk on her arm. As impatient as they were, they forced themselves to let her sleep until the following morning.
Greg was deeply concerned, not only about her request, but about the danger they were exposing themselves to from the Harbok. Not much in the mood for fishing, he and Jim spent the afternoon cleaning out his plane and scrubbing the worst of the tree stains off the floats.
“I thought you’d given up combat,” Jim commented with a twinkle in his eye.
“This is one guy who is never, ever going into combat again,” Greg snapped back fervently, and he meant it. “The Harbok in that ship are just one example of why. I’m tired of seeing good people die. Those Harbok weren’t innocent, but I have this feeling that they’re not bad guys either. They could easily have killed me, and they didn’t. I tell you what though, I’d give almost anything to get on her ship. Can you imagine? And can you believe we’re sitting right in the middle of First Contact? We have an incredible opportunity if we play our cards right, and not just for ourselves but for the whole planet. I can’t get over the fact that this has fallen into our laps like this.”
“You’re seeing her spaceship, not the potential downsides of this whole thing. What if both sides get mad at us? Or what if Earth becomes their battleground? We could end up getting the whole planet sterilized. I don’t see any sure way out of this.”
Greg shook his head. “I don’t either. The first decision, whether we bring anyone else in on this, is ours to make. Whatever choice we make will anger one side or the other.” He peered hard at Jim. “I asked you for two days to let me figure things out. My two days are up, so where do you stand?”
Jim stood up in the shallow water and wiped sweat from his brow. “I don’t know. I’m not as certain as I was, but I keep thinking about the billions of people on Earth. What’s right for them?” With a look of chagrin, he added, “Arlynn doesn’t strike me as an alien at all. She’s hard not to like.”
“Agreed.”
“You’re our history expert. Are there any examples you can find that will help us decide?”
“I’ve been wracking my brain since this whole thing began, Jim, and I’m not finding much. I know this: we should avoid taking sides in Arlynn’s war, but I don’t see any way to do that. The alternative is to make it appear that we’re not taking sides. I haven’t figured that one out either. But the biggest challenge we face is preventing stupid blunders. When vastly different cultures attempt to communicate, misunderstandings like we just saw when I questioned Arlynn’s honesty are impossible to avoid. We will blunder. If we make a big enough faux pas, the fact that we are only involved as individuals might not prevent some gun-happy spaceship skipper from taking it out on our whole planet.”
He sighed, shaking his head with worry. “History is rife with things like that. To further complicate the issue though, and I mean really complicate it, we’re not just dealing with different cultures, we’re dealing with three different species, and we’re the underdog. Historically, consequences are clear on this matter: underdogs always lose.”
“So, what are you suggesting?”
“We’re in trouble, Jim. Our whole world is in trouble. I’m not suggesting anything yet, except that we try to keep Arlynn alive while we learn more. And we can’t forget for a moment that she’s a trained spy and an accomplished warrior. She’ll be every bit as well trained as I was, meaning she’ll be an expert at manipulation and misdirection. After all, out of a whole civilization to choose from, they sent her, and I can see why. She’s one tough lady. Can you imagine yourself stranded on an alien planet, horribly injured after getting caught, yet still focused on the completion of your mission? You know as well as I do that she’s hurting. I don’t know how she’s able to function at all, let alone think and plan.”
“Maybe her body is so different from ours that she doesn’t feel pain.”
“If you’d been there when I sprayed that bandage on, you’d know she feels pain just like we do.”
“So,” Jim summarized, “we have a beautiful alien special ops soldier who feels pain just like we do and who is probably playing us like puppets on a string.”
“Yeah. Despite knowing that, I like her. For some reason, she strikes me as a nice person. Isn’t that just great?”
Jim got a sly look on his face, and a twinkle came into his eyes. “The fact that she comes equipped with a fully functioning spaceship probably has something to do with it. Come on, let’s go catch some dinner.”
Later that night, Greg awoke to the sounds of heavy rain and thunder. It was just his luck to have drawn the short straw for the fourth cot they didn’t have.
Chapter Five
Greg drew breakfast duty the next morning while Nancy and Jim went fishing. He removed the sleep disk from Arlynn’s arm, then he busied himself with chores. Expecting to have to wait a couple of hours, he was surprised to find her awake and watching him just a little while later as he hunted through his duffel bag for a fresh shirt.
“Good morning!” he said brightly.
She licked her lips, then responded in a gravelly voice, “Good morning to you, Greg Hamilton.”
“Here, let me get you a drink,” he
said, gathering up the water jug. He carefully lifted her up to where she could reach the cup without spilling. For some reason, he knew she would think it undignified to spill. He took great pains to keep her covered with the sleeping bag, conscious of the fact that Nancy had undressed her. To his surprise, he found her eyes twinkling with amusement over his efforts, even though each small movement caused her to gasp for breath.
“I’m sorry this hurts. I don’t know any other way to do it.”
“I’m a survivor. I’ll get through.” She looked him in the eye from inches away, seeking something, perhaps a reaction to her next comment. “I realize we are not exactly in a modern hospital here. You do not need to be concerned with modesty.”
Blushing, and annoyed at himself for it, he wondered aloud, “Is that another difference in our cultures?”
“Perhaps. We treat such things differently than you do, but we are a modest people. More important, we have respect. For that, I thank you.”
“Ah . . . sure! You’re welcome,” he stumbled, embarrassed. He settled her back down, asking softly, “How do you feel?”
“I am much better today, thank you.” She looked thoughtfully at him, clearly uncertain how to ask a question that was on her mind.
He helped her. “Ask away,” he said.
Her lips firmed, then she blurted out, “You walk with a noticeable limp. Clearly, your hip is injured.” Her eyes traversed his bare torso, and she added, “You have old wounds.”
Embarrassed, he returned to his duffel bag and found a shirt. He was not ready to let her know that he, too, was trained at interrogation techniques, so he said, “It’s just an old injury. I consider every day since then a gift, so I have nothing to complain about.”
“I would heal you if I could, Greg. My people have the skills, but I do not.”
“It would be nice to be able to walk and run again, but like I said, no regrets. Uh . . .” He paused, uncertain how to proceed.
She understood. “I am horribly disfigured, I know. I can’t think about it yet. In truth, I might not live long enough to worry about it, but I’m sorry you’re seeing me like this.”
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