by Lauren Esker
"Are you taking the whole thing apart?" she asked.
"Just takin' off the damaged parts. Can't go to space with shielding that doesn't work."
"Since when are you an expert on spaceships, Dad?"
"Since an alien started tellin' me how to build 'em."
"I thought you still couldn't talk to him." Sarah leaned inside the ship to get a better look; her voice echoed in the small space. "Or did he find a translator for you?"
"Nah. We get by."
"Where is he, anyway?" Sarah asked, looking over her shoulder.
"Up in the loft, gettin' some stuff for me."
Sarah nodded and turned back to her exploration of the ship. Not that there was much to explore. If the outside of the ship had surprised her with its small size, the inside was downright tiny. There was just enough room for the ship's pilot to sit in a cradle made of gray material, resilient enough to spring slowly and soggily back when Sarah poked at it. Water beaded on the surface where her finger had left a dent.
She couldn't tell how the ship was controlled. There was no steering wheel or joystick-type control, no panels of buttons like in a spaceship on TV. There were some switches and levers, but the main feature of the controls was a pair of holes in the molded console panel in front of the seat. They were placed where someone sitting in the seat could insert their arms, so Sarah cautiously reached into one of them. Her fingers squelched in slime and mud from the ship's immersion in the lake, but she also felt mechanical bits and bobs, and finally a handle. Experimentally, she gripped it, and tried to imagine clutching those handles with the ship sealed up around her.
It would be like being trapped inside a tin can. She wasn't claustrophobic, but it still made her shudder. How did the pilot see where they were flying? She couldn't see any signs of windows, ports, or screens. Just a molded gray cradle and two handholds. Maybe that part there, about face height if you were sitting in the cradle, folded down over your face? She shuddered again; that was even worse.
How could Rei bear it, flying through outer space trapped in this cramped tomb? It had to be an escape pod, not an actual spaceship. Maybe there was, even now, an alien ship up there in Earth's orbit somewhere, looking for him.
"Sarah?" said a voice from outside the pod, in a musical, lilting accent.
Sarah banged her head against the pod's ceiling. "Ow," she muttered, backing out, rubbing her temple. Yeah, this was exactly the view of her that she wanted Rei to have, just her ass and feet as she rummaged around in his spaceship.
Rei was standing behind her with a toolbox. He wore a jacket of her dad's, too tight across the shoulders and a little too short in the arms, revealing the bracelets he was never without. Under the cuffs of a pair of rumpled sweatpants, his feet were bare as usual.
"We can get you some shoes that fit," Sarah said. "Unless you like going barefoot all the time. Or is that, um, traditional for your people?"
"Ah." Rei set down the toolbox in the straw. "Your shoes are uncomfortable for me. On the ship, we mostly wear light slippers, as there is no need for heavy footwear when one is indoors all the time. For the slaves, particularly."
"Slaves?" Sarah repeated. Her dad glanced up at her shocked tone as much as the word.
Rei froze. That was a deer-in-the-headlights look if she'd ever seen one. One of his hands started to come up and then dropped down again.
A few different thoughts spun through her mind:
He was right, the translator seemed to be picking up more of their languages, because she could understand him with near fluency.
Which meant she could ask him questions about who he was and where he came from.
Except now, she thought she knew. At least she knew a lot more than she had a minute ago. Rei was an escaped slave, and he was scared.
"Don't be afraid," she said quickly. "We aren't going to send you back. I promise. We're not going to do anything to you. You know that by now."
Rei's hand still hovered at about waist height, fingers clenching and unclenching. He started to raise his other hand toward his neck, but quickly lowered it. "I thought you might know," he said quietly.
"No. We didn't." Sarah glanced at her dad, who was watching them, able to understand only her half of the conversation. "Rei, do you want to take a walk? I think it's time for us to have a proper discussion about things."
"The pod—" Rei began, gesturing to his ship. Then his face twisted into a rueful grimace. "As if it's ever going to fly again. Yeah, come on. Let's walk."
As the implant picked up more English, it seemed to be translating his speech in more colloquial ways. That couldn't possibly be what he was really saying, could it? Well, the implant had learned English from her; presumably it picked up Sarah's speech patterns as well.
"Yeah," she said, "let's walk. Hey, Dad? We'll be back soon."
"Don't forget the hat," her dad said absently, working on a piece of steel with a cutting torch.
"Hat?" Sarah asked, but Rei was already picking up the floppy-brimmed hat from last night. He settled it over his ears and smiled at her.
"Dad," she said, trying not to start laughing, "he's blue. I really don't think it's going to help."
"Better safe than sorry," her dad said serenely. "Be careful out there, kids."
***
"I've been a war slave since I was nine standard years old."
They were in the back pasture, walking through the wet grass. Sarah's jeans were sodden from the knees down. Through the trees, their barn and other outbuildings could be glimpsed now and then, but otherwise it felt as if they were the only people in the world.
But they weren't, of course. Sarah reminded herself to turn back at the old mill, because just beyond it they'd be able to see into the Haverfords' hayfield, which meant someone might see Rei.
"You were stolen from your people?" she asked, looking over at Rei's profile, his gaze downcast as the high meadow weeds whispered past their legs. The hat looked ridiculous, perched on top of his dark hair, but she could see her dad's point; it would help disguise him from a distance. People would see the hat before they'd see the telltale blue.
"No," he said. "I was taken as taxes."
"I think the translator didn't get that right. I'm not sure what you mean." Tribute, perhaps?
"The people who rule my world, the Galateans, leave us mostly alone, but we don't have much that they want. Mine is a primitive world. So they take their taxes in the form of young people to be cannon fodder for their wars."
She wasn't sure what he'd said in his own language that her implant translated as "cannon fodder," but she didn't need to know more. Didn't want to know more. "Those assholes," she snarled, clenching her fists. "They took you as a child? How dare they! You were nine!"
"My years are not the same as your years," Rei reminded her. "Unless you have the standard calendar here."
"I doubt we do, but—okay, so, is nine years old still a child? Pre-pubescent? You were a kid?"
"Yes, I was." Rei turned his measured amber gaze on her. "You seem very shocked by this. Your people don't keep slaves?"
"No!" she exclaimed, horrified. But then honesty compelled her to add, "We used to. We don't anymore. I guess we still do, in some parts of the world. People are trying to end it."
"Different planets have different ways. I don't know how it was for your people, but unlike some parts of the galaxy, Galatea doesn't have hereditary slavery—that is, a slave's children are free. It's also not lifelong. They consider it very humane. For war slaves like us, we owe twenty years of service from the time we become old enough to fight, at fifteen standard years."
"You've been fighting since you were fifteen?"
He shrugged.
"And how old are you now?"
"Twenty-four," he said quietly.
She wondered how that compared to her twenty-six Earth years. He looked about the same age she was.
She tried to imagine knowing she would have to spend the next ten or eleven years of
her life as a slave, fighting in a war she'd never signed up for, trapped in that tiny, awful tomb of a spaceship. No wonder it looked so uncomfortable. Nobody worried about a slave's comfort.
"Humane is not the word that comes to mind. How could your people let this happen? What kind of people would do that?"
Rei shrugged again. The pain that ghosted across his face was old and deep. "They didn't have a choice. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else's child. Some see it as an opportunity, a chance for their children to get a galactic education and come back with useful skills after their twenty years of service is up."
"You. Were. Nine."
Rei smiled very slightly. "I like that you're angry for me."
"Of course I'm angry," Sarah said. "Any sane person would be."
"I'm used to being around people who consider this situation normal."
"It's not," she said heatedly. "I don't care if some people think it's normal in Galatean or in yours. That doesn't make it right. There is no planet where it's morally okay to take a nine-year-old child, put a collar on them, and send them off to fight in someone else's war."
"Yes. Well." He looked down at his hands. "The universe is an unfair place."
It had never really hit Sarah, until now, what a safe and comfortable life she had lived. She knew bad things, terrible things, happened elsewhere, but they had never touched her life. Ordinary deaths, yes. Tragedies, yes. But nothing like this. Sidonie was so small it hadn't even had a murder in her lifetime.
"Do you have friends out there?" she ventured. "Others like you?"
"They're all dead," he said, and it was the calmness of his voice, more than anything else, that brought bile to the back of her throat. "All but one. I don't know if he's still .... But I have go back and try to find him."
"Yes," she said, when she could speak. "Yes, you have to try."
They had been walking alongside the old millstream, and now reached the footbridge that her dad had built years ago to replace the old, rotting bridge that had once been able to accommodate wagon traffic. He'd dragged the old bridge out of the stream with the tractor, leaving it to rot beside the path. It was little more than a snarl of wild roses and blackberry brambles now, with mossy timbers poking out like the spars of a sunken ship. Someone who didn't know it used to be a bridge couldn't have guessed; it looked like a tangle of brush at the edge of the cleared pasture.
Her mother's ashes were scattered here, along this very stream. She took a breath and tried to turn her mind away from that.
"Is there any chance that they might be able to find you here?" she asked Rei.
Rei hesitated. His fingertips glided over one of his bracelets, back and forth, in what looked like an unconscious habit. "I don't know. My collar and cuffs burned out at the moment I fled. That was why I escaped when I did. Normally they would have been able to find and punish me from afar. And the collar would kill me if I got too far from the mothership."
"Kill you?" Sarah repeated weakly, while a cold voice in the back of her mind said, What did you think being a slave meant?
"Yeah, but it didn't happen, so I know the collar is nonfunctional. I don't think they have a way of tracking the pod, not from a distance, anyway. They'd have to jump to the same system I fled to. And I set the coordinates randomly. I don't think they could do it by accident."
"So ... they can't find you?" Sarah ventured.
"I don't think so. But we are within Galatean space, so it's possible they have a detachment in your system—"
"Wait, wait, what?" She stopped in the middle of the footbridge, turning to face him. "What do you mean, we're in Galatean space?"
"The pod's jump drive didn't have enough power to jump far enough to get me out of the Empire," Rei said. "Wherever your planet is, it's within Imperial space."
"No. No way. We're not part of some galactic slave-trading empire!"
"They might not know you're here. Space is vast, and habitable worlds are many. They may not have found you, or they might still be planning the conquest of your world when resources are available. They might just be watching and learning about your people right now. They do that."
"Wow, when you start talking, you really don't mess around, do you?"
"I don't understand?" he asked hesitantly.
"Nothing, just—this is all a lot to dump on a girl, you know?"
There was a large rock on the far side of the footbridge, a glacial erratic that she'd used as a makeshift bench to sit and watch the water ever since she was a little girl. Just downstream, the water swirled into the old millrace, past the dark bulk of the tumbledown mill. Sarah sank down on the rock and patted it in wordless invitation. After a moment, Rei sat beside her. He cocked one leg over his other thigh to rub his foot. In the sunlight, the silver traceries in his skin glinted and the gold spots on his face, trailing down from his eyes to his chin, held a hint of metallic green.
"I see why your people wear shoes," Rei remarked, chafing at the sole of his foot with his thumb. "Walking on a planet is not like walking on a ship."
"Dip your feet in the water," Sarah suggested. "It feels nice when your feet are sore. More so on a hot day, it's actually pretty chilly for it at this time of year, but you said your people come from a cold planet."
"Your planet is very comfortable for me." Rei stepped down to the water's edge and waded in, holding up the cuffs of the sweatpants. "You're right, this does feel pleasant."
"If you think that feels pleasant, then your world must be cold."
He made an amazing picture like that, his indigo skin contrasted against the green pasture and blazing fall colors behind him. Even the hat no longer looked so odd to her.
It was a picture she could never take, of course. She wasn't about to record any photographic evidence of their otherworldly visitor.
Their amazing, beautiful alien visitor.
"Rei," she said, leaning back on her hands on the sun-warmed rock. "Did you really turn into a big dog last night?"
Rei had been starting to lean down to dip his hand into the stream; he froze before he continued rinsing his fingers in the water.
"I assume from your reaction," he said slowly, "that you don't have jaegan on your world."
"Apparently not. I don't even know that word. We do have, um, legends of people who can turn into wolves, but they're just stories, you know? Fiction." At least she'd always thought so. "Just to be clear, that was you? You really did change?"
"I did." He smiled briefly. "Would you like to see again?"
"I'd love—" Sarah stopped, alarmed. She'd been hearing helicopters off and on all morning, but this was much louder. It sounded like it was coming their way.
"Is something wrong?" Rei asked.
"I don't know. I hope not."
She scrambled off the boulder. Now she could see it, a dark shape against the blue sky. It was low, barely above the treetops and rapidly getting larger, the thunder of its rotors thumping in her chest.
"Quick, Rei, the mill!"
She hurried to open the door. They didn't usually keep it locked. Even with her dad's hydro project, there was little inside that thieves might be interested in.
Rei crowded in on her heels, and Sarah shut the door almost all the way, leaving it open a crack so she could peek out.
The helicopter sped toward them, its shadow flitting across the fields underneath. It passed just to the south, arrowing onward toward the neighboring farm. Sarah waited a moment and then cautiously opened the door. "No, stay inside," she told Rei, and went around the edge of the mill, watching the helicopter cruise across the fields without slowing or stopping.
"Your people are seeking me," Rei murmured behind her.
"They sure are. I wonder if they know about you, or just about your crash landing the other night." She stared after the helicopter. "Does your ship put off any signals that people of my world might be able to detect? Like some kind of radiation or a distress signal or anything?"
"Not that I a
m aware of. But I'm no expert."
The helicopter dwindled against the sky until it could no longer be seen. After straining her eyes to recapture the tiny shape in the blue bowl of the sky, Sarah reluctantly turned away.
"I guess it's probably not a good idea for you to be outside too much, even on the farm. You need to stay close to somewhere to hide." She gave him a critical look. "Maybe Dad wasn't wrong about the hat."
Rei spread his hands, glancing down at himself. "But as you said, I'm still blue. There is no one this color on your world?"
"Nope. Not in the slightest." She gave him a light shove, herding him back into the mill. "We should stay in here for a few minutes in case it comes back."
He let himself be maneuvered into the mill, but kept looking over his shoulder. "Is there any chance your people might have contacted the Empire about me?"
"My people? No, of course not. People on Earth don't even know that life on other worlds exists."
"Are you sure?"
"Very sure," she said firmly, even as a tiny worm of doubt squirmed in her stomach. "If we'd found life on other planets, it would have been all over the news. They couldn't possibly hush it up. Now let's just wait 'til they're gone and go back to try to get your ship working."
Rei took off the borrowed hat and looked curiously around the mill's shadowed interior. Sunlight slanted across the high ceiling through windows near the roof, and the sound of rushing water was almost as loud as outside.
"What is this building used for?" he asked.
"It was built to grind grain, a long time ago. Now my dad's trying to make a power plant out of it. For generating electricity, you know?"
The smell of fresh-cut lumber was strong; her dad had been out here off and on all summer, shoring up old timbers, fixing rotten floorboards, and otherwise doing work that his doctors undoubtedly would not have approved of. His original plan with the old mill had been to restore the former grinding equipment and use it as a gristmill again, to demonstrate to tourists how flour used to be made in the old days. Part of the mill's interior was taken up with the scaffolding from repairs for that project, but at some point he'd switched over to his new idea of turning the mill into a power plant, supplying power for the farm and maybe even enough to sell back to the local power company. So now there were coils of wire and Rubbermaid totes full of electrical components scattered around, along with shop lights and a sleeping bag on the floor. Sarah worried for a minute that he'd started sleeping out here—surely she would have noticed!—but she decided it was just for insulation from the floor, so he could sit and work on his project.