by Hana Starr
But even the bed beneath her wasn’t the same. It was a cot, hard and thin and not at all comfortable. And when she moved, there wasn’t enough of it. Suddenly off-balance with her arm flung out and batting at thin air, there was no way she could catch herself and she tilted over and fell. It was a longer fall than she would have thought, longer than a drop from a hotel bed to the floor might have called for, and when she hit the ground she discovered it was smooth and solid. There was no echoing thump, only a dull thud of contact which her skin echoed inside herself with a murmur of pain.
There was more wrong here than she realized at first. She knew that now. Drugging and kidnapping came to mind, but other than the difficulty breathing she couldn’t find anything wrong. And was it difficult to breathe? Her heart beat steadily, and her lungs worked fine, as near as she could tell. The air was just thick, but somehow without being musty or thin.
Maybe that was a sign of being drugged. Maybe all this was a feverish hallucination, and she was high in some jerk’s basement. Recalling her dream, of an expressionless man, it upset her how likely the scenario was. And what could she do about it?
Experimentally, she looked around. With such low light as this it was impossible to tell what anything was for certain, but this room didn’t resemble a bedroom or basement in any way. In fact, judging by the chemical smell and the hard, flat angles with polished gleams all around her, it looked very close to being a hospital room. That wasn’t a reassuring thought. This couldn’t be a hospital, which meant she was being held by someone who was very sick.
I wasn’t tied down, she reminded herself. That either spoke to her kidnapper’s incompetent, or it meant there was something else keeping her inside: a locked door, for example.
But how long had she been awake now after making a great deal of noise? Five minutes of sitting, listening, and waiting, and she hadn’t heard a single voice or footstep. Actually, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t hear anything but her own breathing.
And that was enough thought. It was time for action. Rolling over, Mariella pushed herself up to her feet and blinked several times to try to get her eyes to finish adjusting.
To her, at least, it did look like some sort of medical room but again, not quite. From what she could tell, her cot was set flush against the wall. The rest of the room was ringed with shiny countertops, though some seemed to have screens, buttons, or otherwise simply be shaped in weird ways. Some of the counters had tall chairs before them, and a space beneath for leg room, but what any of this meant she had no idea.
The middle of the floor, such as it was, was narrow and really offered nothing in the way of answers. But there across the way she saw a darkened entryway. No door, merely a long dark hall. And as little light as there was in this area, she simply couldn’t get a feel for that hallway. She had no idea how wide it was, where it led to, if there other ways to go when walking down it. She knew nothing.
So, lacking anything else to do, uncertain if anyone would come for her or when –or who they would be- she took matters into her own hands and strode the few feet to the hallway. Stretching out her hands to touch either side, she started to walk down its length and into the blind depths.
The hall seemed to go on for ages, never splitting off into separate directions. Several times, her hands encountered more doorway-gaps in the wall but she skipped over them and continued on. She would follow this train of thought until the end, and when it proved fruitless she could circle her way back to one of these entrances and see if it branched off there.
As it was, she didn’t have to. Suddenly, the hall ended. Rather, it spit her out in the entrance to another room. It was brighter here than in her mystery room, bright enough for actual colors to edge out through the grey, and it was larger and completely rimmed around the outer edge with more of those cots.
And sitting on one, absently playing with his own fingers, was a man.
Mariella stopped in her tracks. The man looked up and his eyes went wide. Her heart stuttered for a moment as she recognized him as the roguish, emotionless man from her dream –from what she now suspected were partial memories. And then he stood. She realized suddenly that her impression was wrong. They weren’t the same. This guy looked younger by a few years, with curlier hair, but otherwise they were nearly so identical as to be brothers.
The man stiffly rose to his feet, as if his joints were bothering him. And then he spoke, but it wasn’t English. In fact, it wasn’t any sort of language she’d heard before until now. It was composed of many, many light and quick syllables, but there was also a hum beneath it which continuously changed pitch and tone as he spoke.
Silence fell. The strange man looked at her, obviously waiting for a reply of some kind.
He doesn’t seem harmful, but I thought the same thing about that dog, too.
And if she was wrong about this, she would end up with more damage than a warning bite. Still, she couldn’t do anything else now but try, and so she just shook her head. “I’m sorry,” Mariella said softly, shaking her head again. “I don’t speak your language.”
The man sighed and muttered something in a tone of disdain, though he immediately looked apologetic for it, and then he strode past her. He said something else as he brushed by without touching her, and she stood there watching the shadows swallow up his back, wondering whether that was a command to stay where she was or go with him. After a few moments when she did neither, he looked back at her, and then lowered his head in a bow before muttering a few words.
She took a few steps forward, and then man went off again.
What the hell is going on? she wondered, hurrying to catch up. This guy didn’t act like any man she’d ever seen before, what with all his submissive posturing, and she tried to remember any cultures where women were prized but couldn’t think of any. In any case, this one didn’t look to be too foreign, but maybe that was because everyone looked the same in near-darkness.
At one point, she ran into his back when he suddenly stopped. The guy flinched and then muttered yet something else she couldn’t understand before his footsteps started receding to the right. Obviously she had missed this turn of the hallway while thinking it was just another doorway.
And it was lighter here, and growing lighter all the time as they walked. She looked up at where the ceiling should be and finally identified the source as tiny slits near the top of the wall, tucked beneath the ceiling. They grew in power and intensity the further along they went, but she still had to squint to see anything even once the amount leveled off. But what she could see still made no sense. Metal, metal, and more metal. The corridor was boxy and impossibly long, or so she felt. And this branch didn’t have any other doors along it, at least not any that she could see.
Suddenly, she saw the end. It was a flat wall and nothing else, but as the man continued to approach the entire wall suddenly split in half and heaved apart just enough to allow them access.
Motion-controlled, Mariella wondered, sliding her fingers along the inside of the split. The surface beneath her fingers was warm and pulsed faintly. However, she quickly lost interest in that due to the fact that this room was just that much brighter than the hallway, allowing her to finally see as much as her heart desired.
And it looked like what movies portrayed as being NASA’s control room, if on a smaller scale. There were rows of desks and strange computerlike devices, and a man sitting before each –they all looked so similar to the one that she followed in here that it was dizzying. Even more dizzying than that was the sudden realization that those computer screens were not black, and neither were the walls. They were overlain with a grid, with a barest speckle of color, with a variety of things, and they were moving. As she watched in the moment before her presence was noticed, the grids shifted, the colors blinked in and out, fingers moved over odd keyboards or reached out to touch the screen.
The barest of an idea formed in her mind at long last, a niggling suspicion of what all this could be,
but she just wasn’t sold on the idea until she looked over to the far side of the room and saw him.
He was dressed differently from the horde of identical men, and he did not sit with them in their rows. Instead, he was surrounded by a raised circlet of metal, secluded off to one side with his own private screen that was far larger than theirs. His eyes were hollow and golden, and his jaw was much stronger.
Very slowly, he looked away from his screen and turned in her direction. Those unnatural eyes narrowed, and he said, in perfect English, “You are awake at last.”
Chapter Three
The man who led her here moved away and strode over to the row of computers, taking his place at the only empty spot. As he moved away, everyone else moved closer.
Mariella pressed her back against the wall, heart starting to pound with unpleasant thoughts even though she willed herself not to do that, but they didn’t actually head for her. They headed away, through the hidden doorway in the wall.
After a moment, the man with golden eyes said something in that unidentified language, clearly addressing the lone man at his computer. He argued back, but it looked like there was no arguing with someone who was apparently above his status, because at the end of it he lowered his head and filed out after the others.
And then they were alone, the two of them.
In English again, the man said, “I have heard and seen quite a lot of you, Dr. Robertson.”
Mariella stared at him. “Excuse me? Who do you think you are?” She hated to act like a prissy little bitch but this was going too far. “How about you tell me what’s going on here, and then I’ll decide if I want to exchange pleasantries.”
The man shrugged, but bowed his head submissively. That startled her. She hadn’t expected that gesture from him, had assumed he would be higher up in power than the other man, and therefore might not consider himself low enough to bow. But, no. He did, and then spread his hands submissively. “I am truly sorry if I have made you uncomfortable, Doctor. It was not my intention to do so, but I saw no other way.”
“You couldn’t have introduced yourself at the party after the seminar?” she asked bitterly, somehow knowing all the while that he hadn’t been there.
He shook his head, as she knew he would. “Something so simple for your kind is not for mine. We are near enough to the same but not quite. Your air is too rich in oxygen for my blood.”
Your air.
At least this explained –even in such an unbelievable way- why it was so hard, but just barely manageable, for her to breathe here. And their anatomy did look remarkably similar.
What am I thinking about?
Mariella shook her head at herself, feeling a little scandalized by her own romanticizing of the situation, but she was a scientist through and through. She couldn’t deny having wondered at the universe before. Was this her answer, then? At least, it seemed to be. In her fields of work and knowledge, the simplest answer is often the correct one.
“What’s your name?” she asked, and braced herself for something she couldn’t pronounce.
“Dante,” he said, and then reached out for her hand. “It has a similar meaning to my name in my own language,” he explained, sensing her confusion as he bowed low over her offered hand. “And you are Mariella. Should we be as such to the other, or would you prefer a more professional arrangement?”
Mariella raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain things to me a lot more before I’m going to want to have anything to do with you, Dante. In any capacity.”
It just slipped out, that bit of a taunt. It held only the barest hint of sexuality but the man blushed like she stuck her hand down his pants.
Turning his head away slightly, Dante took a deep breath and visibly forced himself to relax again. “Very well. I should have known that is what you would require. I apologize for making you feel uncomfortable. My name is Dante, and I am not from your world.”
There it was, out in the open.
If she was anyone else but Mariella Robertson, she would have slapped this bastard in the face and then run away to try and claw through these metal walls. Unfortunately, she was very distinctly herself. This was too grand a thing to be a façade, too real to be fake.
All the same, she started breathing faster and had to force herself to stop. Too much of that and she’d have a panic attack.
Eventually, she just said, “Okay. What world are you from?”
“I believe you call it Venus?”
Venus. What did she know about Venus? It was closer to the sun, and similar in size to Earth. It rotated in the opposite direction of most planets, and had a day that lasted longer than its year. Other than those bits of trivia, all she could remember was that the surface appearance of Venus was said to be similar to traditional accounts of Hell.
Delightful.
She looked him up and down, noticing how he squirmed when she did so. “How can you survive on Venus? You look way too similar to humans.”
Dante shrugged a bit. “We are different in a number of ways, I am assured. We do not spend much time on the surface, and we have special suits for terrestrial travel. Otherwise, the atmosphere in our buildings and craft are rather similar to this. But, that is not of a concern to you. That is not what we need your help with.”
“My help?”
“Yes. You see, your broadcasts from Earth leave your planet and head into the atmosphere. It is the same for all such things, and most of it is pure drabble. However, I recently became aware of a pattern within the broadcasts and paid closer attention. That is how I heard of you and your work.
“I deliberately piloted my ship away from our regular patrols to come here and find you, Mariella. I have left a sizeable gap in my planet’s defenses and I will very likely be punished in a harsh manner once I am returned, but I and my men were willing to risk it all for a chance to meet with you. You see, this is a matter of power.”
Of course it is.
“You want my help with power when you have all this?” She gestured around. “Obviously your people are a lot further along with technology than mine. I’m not sure what I could help with.”
As she spoke, Dante’s eyes darkened. He sighed. “Yes, we would have no need of any of you at all if not for certain circumstances. Your people are violent and my Queen resisted giving me permission to seek your help because of this. One adversary is enough. However, a single human should be no problem to dispose of if you choose to hurt us.”
Her mind spun with all this new information. “I would be stupid to try and go up against a whole planet.”
“You will have to convince them that, not me.”
“I shouldn’t have to convince anyone of something I don’t even know about yet,” she said pointedly.
“Yes, I apologize. I will tell you now that there are not many of our kind left. Those of us who remain live in a single colony beneath the crust of our world. We are dying,” he said simply. “Our resources have been depleted greatly in the past several years. That is why we keep the ship so dark. Even so, this is one of the last ships still in operation. All the rest of our fuel and energy must be used to take care of our females and young.”
“But why do you have such an issue with power?” she pressed, trying not to feel frustrated. “What’s depleting your resources?”
“We are under attack. Under siege. They are called Mites, to you. They are a parasite unto the universe, destroying everything they touch and enslaving those who will not fight back. We have not surrendered, and so they have killed us all and destroyed our resources. We are all that is left, and when our power is gone, there will be nothing to stop them.”
Mariella looked down, thinking rapidly. On the one hand, her heart cried out for this solemn, attractive man and his noble mission –going against the wishes of his Queen and risking everything to come here. Yet, on the other, she knew that this wasn’t really her fight. It sounded incredibly dangerous and besides, her mission was helping to
further Earth’s development.
But, everyone on Earth has access to everything I knew. Everything. I didn’t keep anything a secret, so even if I’m gone…
She knew she was just stalling for time. Her mind had already made itself up without her consent and if she went against it, she would hate herself forever.
“Okay,” she said softly, “I’ll do it.”
The change that came over his face was almost worth all this strangeness and confusion. He smiled, and his entire face lit up. His honey eyes glowed brighter than the lights. “Thank you,” he said, and suddenly went down on one knee. The gesture was so similar to a proposal that she almost slapped him away out of surprise, but she held still and waited. He merely stayed leaning against his knee, head down and supplicating at her feet. “You’ll change everything, Mariella. I know you will.”