Though my aunt and uncle had done a wonderful job as surrogates, the loss of my parents left a hole in me that had never been filled. Why did the hole seem to be more apparent now? Why were new holes opening up? Holes and uncertainties. Lots of uncertainties. Why didn’t I know what path I needed to walk? And why had it all struck me with such a panic at the lab today? If that was truly what had overcome me. I was eighteen now, eighteen and one day. Maybe that was what becoming an adult entailed: figuring out all the grown-up things like where you fit into this world and how you want—no, need—to live your life.
Perhaps my aunt and uncle coming up for my birthday had made things worse. Stuck here in the cold, gray Ohio winter, did I simply miss my family and the Florida sunshine? Of course, I did.
Maybe I just need to go back home, I thought, as I sank deeper into my comforter.
No energy left . . . to stay . . . awake . . .
CHAPTER 3 -
GAIGE
“Gaige!” I heard Tas’s voice in my ear.
I jerked awake, confused for a moment, and then remembered where I was. I realized the team had switched to the communication device in my suit, probably after having given up on the shuttle’s crippled system. “I’m here. What time is it?”
“You’ve been out of link for twenty Earth minutes. They’re zeroing in on you, Gaige. A rescue team is on the way to Earth, but you’ve got to get away from that location!”
“Understood.” I released my harness, leaned forward, and rested my head in my hands. The pain in my brain had gone from a sharp, stabbing sensation to a dull ache. I felt better than I had when I’d first landed, but my energy was nowhere close to normal. I couldn’t wait until it was, though. I pushed myself from the seat. With the shuttle inoperable and with no spare mental energy, I needed to do things manually. I kicked the latch on the floor behind the cockpit seats and pushed the hatch open.
For a brief second, my eyes caught sight of the Earth clothes I’d brought, but there was no time for that now. I dropped from the shuttle. As soon as I landed on firm Earth, I saw the distant headlights shining through the skeletal trees. The shadowy arms cast by the tree branches reached out in my direction and touched me.
“Gaige to Ship.”
“We see them,” Nav said. “Do you think you have time to self-destruct the shuttle?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then just get out of there. Conner and the rescue team will be on Earth soon.”
“I can’t leave the shuttle. They’d misuse our technology. You know that.” I gripped the rungs on the interior of the hatch, determined to make whatever feeble attempt I could manage to get back into the shuttle and initiate a self-destruct command.
Three vehicles ground to a stop only a few feet from the edge of the craft. Dust flew into the air around them and wafted over me and the shuttle.
My chest tightened. Unable to breathe, I released my hold on the ladder and bent over, gasping. No. She couldn’t have. It was too soon. I apparently hadn’t been able to maintain enough of a filter on my presence during the crash to block her awareness of me. She mentally pulled at me now, draining what little energy I’d been able to recover. I collapsed onto the ground, knowing the vehicles were no longer my only problem.
She’d connected.
CHAPTER 4 -
TORI
A harness held me back as Earth grew closer. Faster and faster Earth approached. Something was wrong. Maintain. Maintain shuttle. Maintain cloak. Bigger and bigger, faster and faster. Maintain! I slammed into Earth with a hard jolt.
I sat up in bed and clutched my throat, gasping for air. After a few seconds, I was able to pull in a solid breath, but something was . . . different. I felt odd. My head ached and a coldness encircled my wrists as if I wore metal bracelets straight from the freezer. I rubbed my wrists but felt nothing. The room seemed to shrink, locking me inside. I threw the covers back and ran to the bedroom door. It stood wide open. So why did I feel trapped?
Dropping to my hands and knees I crawled back to my bed and reached underneath. Swiping my hand along the floor, I made contact with my softball bat. I dragged it out from under the bed and held it close. Hearing nothing, I clutched my bat and tiptoed to the light switch.
The clatter of ice from the ice maker startled me. I jumped and flipped on the light switch. Squinting in the harsh light, I could see the room clearly enough. Kristen’s bed sat empty, still made. Mine lay in a crumpled mess. Everything remained exactly how it had been when I went to sleep, including the closed and locked window. I leaned out of the bedroom doorway and looked down the hall to the main door of the apartment. It also remained locked and secure.
Whatever had woken me must have only been a dream. Yes. A crash landing. But not in a plane. With the dream fuzzy and fading fast, I couldn’t be certain of anything. I did know that no one had broken into the apartment, so I turned off the light and rolled my bat back under the bed. Pounding the edges of my pillow with my fists, I fluffed up the middle and lay down, snuggling my head into the freshly fattened padding. My heart still raced from the dream, but sleep quickly reclaimed me.
CHAPTER 5 -
BRIAN
“We’ll let the interrogators see if they can get anything out of him. Sign language, pictures, I have no idea what they’ll use in a situation like this. But that’s in their swim lane, not ours.” The general tipped his head to someone standing farther inside the bay and left to go speak with him.
I couldn’t believe what the general had just told me. Called back to work after-hours, I stood in the doorway of a small lab off the main bay of the test facility, where earlier I’d been having a perfectly normal day running experiments and mentoring interns and new hires.
I stared into the smaller room at a man with short, dark hair and tanned skin. A man who looked like any other active young male you might see around town any day. But NORAD had tracked his craft entering our atmosphere from space. Could it really be true?
The man watched us through the bars of his cage where he sat in a metal folding chair, cuffed hands resting in his lap. The general had at least allowed the man a chair. A humane gesture that went above and beyond, according to the general.
“Brian!” General Ash snapped his fingers at me.
“Yes, sir.” I stepped away from the small room that held the man’s cage and stood next to the general so he’d know he had my full attention.
“They’re bringing it in now,” he said.
The back wall of the hangar-like test facility cranked open to reveal a flatbed truck, accompanied by several smaller vehicles. The general moved closer, but I kept my distance. The driver skillfully backed the semi into the hangar and the crane affixed to the ceiling of the facility slid over the top of the truck. It latched down onto the bus-sized wooden crate sitting on its bed and raised it into the air.
“Take it easy with that thing!” the general yelled.
The crate stopped and swayed gently, then proceeded to glide toward the general. The crane eased the box down in front of him. After the semi pulled out of the facility and the door cranked closed, six men from the entourage surrounded the crate and began prying the edges of the box loose.
“Ready?” one of the men asked.
“Yes. Open it up,” the general said.
I bounced my leg, nervous as hell to see what, exactly, the crate held. I knew what the U.S. had hidden behind its top secret classifications, and we knew something about what other countries possessed. One look and I’d know if this was really from beyond Earth or not.
The crane lifted the lid from the container, allowing the sides to fall away. They landed with a thud that echoed throughout the bay. Inside sat a dark, pewter aircraft about twenty feet long. Four pencil-thin legs supported the craft. They looked as if they could snap like twigs, but held it solid about six feet above the ground. The nose of the craft came to a point with the rest of the vehicle spreading wider toward the rear, like a spearhead. The midline, t
hick enough to hold passengers—a pilot, at least—narrowed as it reached the sharp outer edges.
“Holy shit!” It was true. “Pardon me, sir. I mean, wow! That’s incredible.” From where I stood, the man in the cage looked indistinguishable from any other, but the craft . . . That craft was definitely not of this Earth. It was extra-terrestrial. And whoever flew it here couldn’t be from Earth either. ET and his spaceship sat right there in our lab. I looked at the man—or whatever he was—who continued to watch us patiently. I couldn’t wait to examine his craft. The opportunity to even lay my eyes on such a thing was mind-blowing. But what the hell were they going to do with him?
“Well?” the general asked.
Turning back to the craft, I stepped closer and then stopped. “Have the radiation levels been checked?”
“Of course. At the crash site,” he said. “It’s clean.”
I continued my approach, glancing into the smaller room at the man, torn between my excitement for the craft and my concern about his fate. Regardless of how much he looked like us, he was an alien being. What would become of him here, in the hands of General Ash and others like him? A new world had just opened up to us. Were we going to abuse the opportunity we been given, out of fear or greed or lust for power?
“Brian!”
I jumped and realized I was standing dead still, deep in thought. I continued on, with General Ash glaring at me. When I reached the craft, I lifted my arm toward it. “May I?”
“Yes. I want to know what you think,” the general said, waving his arms toward the spacecraft.
I ran my hand along the edge of the sleek, smooth craft. “I can’t even imagine the technologies this thing holds.”
“Can you reverse engineer it?” the general asked.
“If I can’t, no one can.”
CHAPTER 6 -
TORI
The slam of the apartment door woke me.
My head throbbed. “Kristen?” I called out, way too softly for her to have heard, even if she’d been standing right next to me.
Kristen scurried into the bedroom, flipping on the light as she entered. “Hey, Tor.”
“Hi, Kristen. Do you need the light? My head is pounding.” I rolled on to my side and curled into a ball, shielding my eyes from the light with one hand and gripping my covers tightly under my chin with the other.
“You have a headache?” She flung her clothes off, throwing them on her bed.
“Yeah. Maybe it’s your Ohio allergens, or the cold, or whatever. Can’t wait to get home to Florida.” I tucked my hand back under the covers and, through squinted eyes, watched Kristen rifle around in her drawers trying to find an outfit.
“Don’t know why I signed up for a class first thing in the morning. It isn’t even light out yet this time of year.”
She hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “Kristen. The light. Do you need it? Maybe the bathroom light would be enough, instead?”
“Oh, sorry, Tor. I’ll be outta here in a minute. Just gotta make a quick change. Can’t be doing the walk of shame around campus today.”
“No, I suppose not. Why do your parents bother to put you up in an apartment? They’re wasting their money.”
“They pay because they think I’m a good little girl living with my college roommate. Any real knowledge of my college experiences would put them in their graves.” Kristen’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God, Tori. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Kristen. That was a long time ago.” I felt a twinge in my heart, like I was betraying my biological parents. I really did miss them, even after so long, but Kristen didn’t need to feel bad about reminding me.
“I really am sorry, Tori. I wasn’t thinking.” Kristen’s hand still covered her mouth. Her eyes pleaded for forgiveness, though I’d already given it.
“Really, it’s okay. Let’s talk about something else.” There was one topic that would make Kristen forget everything else. “I take it Justin is doing okay?”
Her hand dropped from her face and the panic in her eyes turned into the same spark of light I saw in them any time her boyfriend walked into the room.
“Justin does more than okay, if you know what I mean,” Kristen said with a grin.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I closed my eyes and pulled the covers over my head. “Just kill the light on your way out, will you?”
“Sure, Tor. Today a class day or work day for you?”
Kristen went back to changing, slamming a drawer closed in the process. I winced.
“Work. Remember? First semester was school. Now it’s a work semester.” She wouldn’t remember.
Kristen clattered around in the bedroom, then the bathroom. Finally, I heard the click of her shoes heading toward the door. “See ya, Tor.”
“Kristen, the light.”
The front door slammed shut. Or maybe it only closed—any noise was an assault on my pounding head. I lowered the covers to the bridge of my nose and opened my eyelids ever so slightly. “Uh, light, will you go away?” The words stabbed the inside of my skull like knife blades.
The light hissed, popped, and went dark.
I sighed and whispered a quiet thank you for the small miracle.
As I lay there trying to decide if I should get ready for work, I remembered waking in the night, gasping for breath, and thinking someone may have broken into the apartment. A faint trace remained that something else had happened, but the details of that something hovered just beyond my reach.
I dozed in and out of sleep for a long while. Eventually, the muted winter sunrise began to permeate the room. In it, I searched. For what, I wasn’t sure. The thing just beyond my reach, maybe. I lay quiet, contemplating the thought.
Yes, I was sure. That thing, whatever it was, still lingered.
CHAPTER 7 -
BRIAN
I walked around to the nose of the craft and stepped backward so I could study the sharp lines from a distance. My excitement rose over the unimaginable technologies that sat in front of me, and then sank again every time I looked at the man, not knowing his fate.
Making a wide arc, I circled around to the rear of the craft. I eyed it from every angle, squatting then standing. I took a few steps toward the right side of the craft and squatted again. General Ash stood by and watched.
“You can begin the reverse engineering process as soon as we arrive at the new location,” he said. “Determine how to best prepare the craft for a long transport and be ready to leave when the transport team arrives.”
Leave? I froze in the middle of a squat. Springing to a stand, I jogged from the far side of the spacecraft back around to the general. “What new location? What transport team?”
“There’s a team on the way to get this. And that.” He motioned to the man in the cage. “Wright-Patt has excellent secured facilities. We were lucky the craft went down nearby. But this place is not isolated enough for what we have here. Not anymore. So we’re moving it to a better location. The team is set to be here this evening, after night falls.”
As anxious as I was to start uncovering all the technologies that the craft held, something made me nervous about the whole situation. “I didn’t know we were relocating the craft. Where are we taking it? And how long will I be gone?”
“You’ll be filled in on the details later. Consider the time to be an extended period.”
“I can’t just—”
“Brian, I realize you’re a civilian and as such operate under a different type of structure, shall we say. But, if you’ll check your job description, as with all civilian positions, it includes other duties as assigned. So, consider this to fall under that category.” General Ash’s eyes dared me to argue.
I wasn’t sure what to say. Other duties as assigned was tacked onto every job description. But relocating for an indefinite period of time seemed extreme. As much as I wanted to be a part of the project, being forced to participate caused an uneasy feeling to settle in the pit of my stomach. I opened my mouth,
ready to respond, but said nothing. I looked from General Ash to the craft to the man, whose brow crinkled into a heavy ridge.
“It’s just that I . . . well . . . this was, obviously, a bit unexpected . . . and . . .”
“Jesus, Brian.” General Ash flung his hands in the air. “It’s a damn alien spacecraft. You really want to take a pass on that?”
“No. I mean . . . well, hell no. It’s just . . .”
“Look,” General Ash said, his jaw tight. “You’re involved now and this is not the kind of thing you get uninvolved with. Do you understand what I’m saying? You are part of the project now. Whether you planned to be or not, you’re in this.” He leaned in with each word until his face was too close for me to keep in focus. “Do I make myself clear?”
I took a step back. His eyes, solid and unyielding, stayed fixed on mine. Couple that with the tension in the muscles of his face and I couldn’t decide if he looked determined or desperate. Neither option was good for me. Or for ET. I’d always known General Ash lacked people skills, but now it was more apparent than ever that he’d reached his current rank with a good measure of intimidation.
The craft was incredible, no doubt, and impossible to walk away from. Still, the situation didn’t set well for many reasons. How much control was General Ash about to take over my life? And if I refused to go, what was the general capable of? Would he fire someone with my credentials? And what was going to happen to the man who sat passive and defenseless in his cage?
The Anuan Legacy: Book 1 of The Anuan Legacy Series Page 2