Mimic Saves Her People

by James David Victor

  “She’s amazing,” I said.

  “She is,” Ciangi agreed. “Now, I know you all have a lot to do with the situation at hand, but do you mind giving our family some privacy while she learns how to feed the baby?”

  “Feed the— Oh. Right. That is a thing that we humans do,” I said, just barely catching myself.

  “Ah, yes,” Mimi said. “I remember reading this about your Earth mammalian species. So fascinating that the mother’s body can create food for her children. My species has no such ability. I would love to see such a process.”

  “Yes, fascinating,” Harunya agreed. “But it can be difficult at first, and I choose for it to be a private moment for me, if you don’t mind.”

  “But—”

  I grabbed Mimi’s hand and pulled her out with the rest of us.

  “I do not understand,” she mused as Eske, Gonzales, and I headed out. “Normally, Harunya is excellent about explaining human culture to me.”

  “Yeah, but you remember how I had to explain to you how nudity is a private thing a lot of the time to us?”

  “Yes, it is why you waste so much time on creating clothes even when you live in perfectly maintained environments.”

  “Well, this is kinda just one of those things. You may think it silly, but some people want to keep some very personal things to themselves, and some people want to share it.”

  “I see.” She nodded, and I got the feeling that she mostly understood. “We should be focusing on the children anyway.”

  “Exactly,” Gonzales said as we headed into the same room we had used for many meetings before. But after being gone so long, the room no longer felt nearly as familiar to me. I guess we certainly had been gone for a while. “And I think we all know exactly who took them.”

  “The aliens,” Eske said. “I mean, the alien slaver people. You know we really should give them an actual name.”

  “Like giant pain in our behinds and kidnappers?” Gonzales shot right back. “Or GPIOBAK for short. It kinda rolls off the tongue.”

  “But the question is, if they had this kind of firepower, why didn’t they send it the first time?” Mimi asked, sitting at the table. “All of us here know we wouldn’t have survived, and they would have saved themselves a good chunk of time.”

  “Well, we’re assuming that warship was their standard warship,” I said quietly, fiddling with my datapad. I didn’t like how naked I felt without my hair. Too many people were looking at me all at once and there wasn’t anywhere for my eyes to go. “What if it just happened to be an old model that was on an outer mission, or even on its way to being junked, when they got the distress call from the alien who was here? Maybe they only sent the big guns once their other ship limped home and told them what we were packing.”

  “Huh,” Gonzales murmured. “Sometimes you understand these guys a little too easily.”

  I shrugged. “I guess I like thinking of all the possibilities.”

  “Fair enough. So, what do we do?”

  “What do we do indeed?” Mimi asked, rubbing her head.

  “I think the answer is fairly obvious,” Gonzales said, the glib expression on her face darkening. “We go to them and we steal our family back.”

  “We can’t just go to them,” Eske said. “…can we?” She looked around uncertainly. “I mean, they got at least a two-week head start. I can’t imagine how long it would take us to get there.”

  “Too long,” I said. “I think also, this is a conversation for Ciangi and Bahn, maybe they can work something out engineering-wise.”

  “Maybe,” Gonzales muttered with a nod. “Or maybe this is something where we need someone with a knack for breaking the rules.”

  “And who exactly would that be?” Mimi asked with concern.

  “Oh, you know exactly who it is.”

  5

  The Quickest Way from Point A to B is to Cheat

  “So lemme be clear on this. You lot want me to help break all known laws of physics and get ye to a place faster than possible.”

  “Basically.”

  I watched several emotions flit across Aja’s holo-face as she considered what we were asking.

  “You realize the last time you traveled that far, you used a wormhole from a sun that also had a nuclear bomb detonated into it, and that was a wild toss. You want me to somehow accurately do that?”

  “That about sums it up,” Gonzales answered again, just as levelly.

  “I…” She let out a string of words, laughing the entire time. “You know what? I’m not the one who’s gonna have my hind on the line, so sure. I’ll help ye with yer little project here. And why are you all in a rush? Got another planet to save?”

  “The alien race that we already encountered once came back while we were gone and took all the children.”

  “All the children?”

  “All the children,” Gonzales answered flatly.

  “Well, why didn’t you say that first?! Get me those money twins. We have crap to do!”

  “Coin twins,” I corrected automatically. “And they’ll be a little busy for a few more minutes. Is there any prep work us grunts and newbies can take care of for you?”

  “Wait, is that my Higgens boy?” She peered around as if I would somehow appear in the background of the holo-scanner, but I wasn’t within its path. Letting go of Mimi’s hand, I stood and walked into the area that our tech was holo-projecting to Aja. “Ah! There he is! How have you been?”

  “Well, all of my adopted brothers and sisters have been taken and I watched one of the eldest die in Mimi’s arms.”

  “Right, straight to the point as always, friend.” She paused for a minute to shuffle through some things below her. A moment later, she held up what looked like a book made of loose paper. I thought I had seen those in a net-museum once. “Alright, here’s what we’re gonna need.”

  “But how are we going to test making a temporary wormhole?” Ciangi asked from below the console she was modifying.

  “Well, that part’s easy,” Aja said from her ever-present holo. “We replicate the details of your escape.”

  “Meaning we make a big boom?” Gonzales asked from her own work station where she had been altering every weapon we had for the past two days.

  “A big ol’ boom,” Aja confirmed.

  “I know we have been hazy on the details considering we’re still trying to do the basic hardware changes,” Bahn said from somewhere above us where he was suspended from…something. While I had learned a lot about engineering, there was still a whole lot more I needed to learn about how our warship worked. “But I’m still not clear on how we’re going to exactly replicate all the variables from our initial trip while also somehow controlling it enough to follow the alien ship. For that matter, how do we even know where the alien ship has gone? It’s not like we have a tracker on it.”

  “Actually, you kinda do,” Aja replied. “Your Mimi friend’s makeup is unique over everything I’ve ever encountered in my long life. I figure we create a sort of scanner set only to that, and we can set an amazing range on there.”

  “Really? A scanner that goes lightyears?” Ciangi asked skeptically.

  “You know, if y’all aren’t going to believe me, then I can just go.”

  “No!” Mimi snapped from where she had been pacing quietly. “We have done stranger things. I believe in your skill.”

  “You know, normally, I would say that’s an exaggeration, but considering what you’ve all been through, I think you’re actually right.”

  That seemed to quell the doubts of the coin twins, but it didn’t do a lot to calm all of us. It had been two days since the birth of Harunya’s daughter and while we were working around the clock as best we could, there was still so much to do.

  And the time definitely hung heavily on Mimi. She helped as best she could, basically being the grunt for all of us, but she knew even less about ship engineering than I did. However, every second she was away from her brothers and sisters s
eemed painful to her, and I certainly couldn’t blame her.

  We’d been up against some insane deadlines before, but nothing like this. Nothing that had thousands of children hanging on the line. And as we frantically worked toward our goal, I couldn’t help but wonder: what if it was too late?

  I tried to ignore that thought, never giving it the time of day—especially when time was so precious, but occasionally, it would float to the top.

  We didn’t know how long they’d had the children already. We didn’t know what they wanted to do with them. Logic said why take them if they were just going to kill them, but there was always the chance they just wanted to use them for scientific experimentation, or to destroy them in a contained environment. The thought made my stomach churn, and I imagined Mimi was going through much of the same.

  “Higgens!” Aja’s voice surprised me out of my reverie, and I looked up from some of the safety hardware I was dismantling.

  “Yes?” I asked her floating face. Normally, holos projected full bodies and scenes within a certain field, but it seemed that Aja had altered hers to just show her giant, disembodied head.

  “How’s the shielding coming along?”

  “Still dismantling some of the fail-safes so I can put in the…thing you had me make yesterday.”

  “That thing is an illegal process converter,” she said, sounding far too excited over a single small mass of wires and crystal parts. “It’s going to allow you to divert way more energy to the shields than was allowed before our, uh, modifications. I think you’ll find it’ll serve you well when you’re hurtling through a wormhole at lightning speeds.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” I said idly, continuing through the instructions that she had given me that morning.

  “Oh, I know so. Just make sure you do it right, ya know. Otherwise, you might just all end up blowing up in a space that’s neither here nor there and maybe not even a part of the fabric of reality.”

  “Comforting,” Ciangi remarked dryly, still under her console.

  “What can I say? I’m here to get you guys across the universe so you can all be heroes once again, not hold your hand and tell you it’ll be alright. So, let’s keep on crackin’ y’all. We keep on going at this rate, we can have ya hurtling toward either death or rescue in another two days.”

  “Another two days,” Mimi echoed under her breath, so quiet even I almost didn’t hear her, and I was always listening for what Mimi might say. “Just another two days.”

  6

  Do or Die, but Preferably not Die

  “And you guys are sure you went down the preliminary checklist?” Aja’s floating head asked us, for once the tone honest instead of layered with sarcasm and puns.

  “We are,” Bahn said confidently. “We’ve gone through it three times, in fact.”

  “But the time for testing is done,” Mimi said, her tone determined. “It’s time to either succeed or fail.”

  It had been a busy two and a half days since I had finished with the shielding alteration I had to do, and we’d basically been working around the clock. Even Eske had been pitching in from time to time between her hours tending to Harunya.

  Apparently, I’d never been educated on how long it took a woman to actually recover from birthing a child. I had always thought they’d need a good sleep and then that would be that, but apparently, there was a whole healing process involved.

  I just wished there was somewhere we could have left the woman behind. Not because I thought she would slow us down, but because if we messed up, I wanted at least one of us to live. Well, two of us.

  But leaving her behind would mean putting her alone on a planet that had recently been ransacked when it was clear that she had a whole lot more healing to do. So that really wasn’t an option either.

  Besides, we had Eske’s family in the hold too, as well as the rescued baby mimic, since we really couldn’t leave anyone behind in that mess.

  “I like your determination, girl, but I’m feeling way more nervous than I should be about this kind of thing.”

  “You and me both,” Ciangi muttered. “Everyone ready for me to engage the engines and take to orbit?”

  My hand slipped into Mimi’s and our fingers interlaced. “Ready,” I said, giving her a nod.

  “Ready,” Bahn echoed.

  “Let’s do this,” Eske said, Harunya sitting in a medical hover-chair we had printed for her. It was amazing what kind of supplies the medical room had in their database.

  “I believe in all of you,” was the woman’s calm reply, her baby letting out a coo as if she too agreed.

  “Alright, friends. Here goes nothing.” She began to engage the engines from the pilot seat. Normally, that was Gonzales’s job, but for the initial launch after such intense meddling in our ship’s already pretty complicated systems, it made sense that an engineer was carefully taking us through each step.

  The engines buzzed to life, rumbling and thrumming beneath our feet. There was a solid three seconds as it picked up in pace and pitch, but the entire time, we didn’t explode into a fiery end.

  “Well, that’s encouraging,” Gonzales remarked.

  “Let’s not get our hopes up too early,” Ciagni said before hitting the comms. “Bahn, I’m about to initiate and exit from the atmosphere. How are things looking down there?”

  “So far, every reading is in the green. The fields on our internal environment control are inching toward yellow though, so I’m diverting power from the lower decks for that.”

  “Good. Make sure you keep an eye on the internal gravitational generators. I’m short enough as it is.”

  “Heard. Preparing to leave orbit. I highly advise that everyone buckles up.”

  He didn’t need to tell me twice. As we lifted into the air, I could feel that the ship was inherently different. I couldn’t quite say how, but I could say that I had flown around in it enough to know how it felt, and right then it definitely didn’t feel like it was supposed to.

  But hopefully that feeling was a sort of stumbling into success feeling instead of a “we’re about to die” feeling.

  The rattling and vibrating picked up in earnest as we moved to the higher levels of the atmosphere, and I found myself gripping Mimi’s hand once more. Funny, I had never been much of a physical person before her, but I guess I had changed a lot since I had met her.

  “Engaging the shield system now,” Ciangi said. “I hope you did a good job, Higgens.”

  Yup, definitely a whole lot. There had been a time where I couldn’t help with anything beyond being a wrench monkey. Now I had taken on an entire project by myself.

  Hopefully, I hadn’t messed it up.

  There was another, competing thrum at a different frequency and for a moment, it seemed like the conflicting vibrations were going to rip us apart. I gritted my teeth, sure that this was the moment we would fall to pieces, but then the two found a common ground and we were shooting toward the final atmospheric layer between us and space.

  “Leaving the planet in three…two…”

  She didn’t even need to say one, the feeling of us rocketing out into space was such a stark difference between rattling through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Like a hot knife sliding through butter, we glided through the great void.

  “Wow. We made it,” Ciangi said with a breath.

  “Step one done,” Eske murmured. “About five more to go, each one harder than the last.”

  “Well, now that we know at least part one has gone well,” Gonzales said, far more chipper than she should, “I guess I’ll take over the helm while Ciangi goes down to engineering for more damage control?”

  “Sounds good to me,” the blonde said, undoing her buckles and sliding out of the seat. “That was just plain uncomfortable. Give me like five minutes to get down there.”

  “Five minutes heard.”

  Gonzales slid into the seat and called up Aja’s hologram. It took a few minutes before the woman answered, but when she di
d, she looked outright surprised.

  “Huh, y’all are still alive.”

  “Why, did you doubt our technological expertise?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “Fair enough. But we’re about to boot up the scanner. Any last bits of advice?”

  “Yeah, don’t die.”

  “Fabulous.” Gonzales rolled her eyes and called down to engineering. “Start up that scanner as soon as you’re ready.”

  “Booting up now while I’m waiting for Ciangi,” Bahn said. “Eske, how’s Harunya?”

  “We’re all buckled up here with the wee little babe in a secured infant containment unit. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they’re protected.”

  I could hear Bahn’s sigh of relief even over the comms.

  “Thank you,” he said before returning to his normal engineering tone. “Scanner at forty percent boot. Gonzales, you might want to kill the engines and hold our position to get a good reading.”

  “Alright. Killing our momentum now.”

  This time, I didn’t feel the transition of our speed, which was impressive in and of itself. One moment, we were moving and then the next…we weren’t.

  “Wow, that was smooth,” Gonzales remarked with a whistle. I definitely agreed, but before I could verbalize that, Bahn’s voice was crackling over the comm.

  “Scanner at ninety-five percent. Ciangi is loading the tissue sample.”

  I found myself holding my breath once again while Mimi squeezed my hand. I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing that I had taught her that particular coping mechanism, considering she could easily crush my bones, but I was already down a couple of fingers—what would some crunchy metacarpals hurt?

  It seemed to take forever before the nav-system finally let out a series of beeps, and Gonzales leaned over it. “Um… I’ve got like eight readings on here,” she said after a beat.

  My heart fell, and even holo-Aja’s face crumpled.

  “You sure?”