by Derek Baker
Chym, the trusty translator, hastily exchanged negotiations with the soldier as I stood there helpless, my life in the soldier’s hands.
“It appears our adversary offers us a choice. Our surrender, or your life,” Chym finally said solemnly, pointing his face down.
Had Alexander failed us? Was he no match for the Wendran soldier that awaited him in the other passage?
I shook my head. “No, we can’t stop now. Even if Alexander and I both die, you can still escape. No, tell him he might as well do what he wants to do to me anyway.”
Chym gave me his passive yet so intelligent stare, digesting my decision. Then he looked up at the soldier, likely giving him the verdict.
This is the end. All this for nothing. I wonder if heaven will be nice? Wait…heaven? After everything that’s happened, and you still think there’s a heaven? Even if there was one, you’d never get in, you damn murderer. Okay, okay…think happy thoughts…
SPLAT!!
Chapter 12
The roar was deafening in my ears, there was blood everywhere, drenching the whole right half of my body. Everything became a blur as I tried to bring my surroundings back into focus and try to determine had just happened. Was I dead or alive? From what I could tell, the blood I was covered in what not my own, and I wasn’t really in any pain. Somehow fate had intervened, for I was still conscious and still in the cockpit of the ship that I, along with Chym and Alexander, was trying hijack.
I looked up, trying to overcome the initial shock of the moment. Hovering over the dead body of the Wendran soldier who had just a moment before almost taken my life was none other than Alexander. Cradled in his arms was none other than the Wendran rifle that Chym had given him, vapor pouring out of its tip from a recent discharge.
“Your timing was most excellent,” nodded Chym as he so casually removed the pilot’s body from the seat and strapped himself in, “Now we must worry about departure. Hopefully the Wendrans conceive not that we have met success. I shall commence to fly this vessel, but I will require some assistance.” His body sunk into the chair, his face took a manner of concentration, moving his hands around the controls, making sense of them all in his head.
“Assistance?” I blinked, wiping a read smear off my arm with the other hand, “Are you saying you need a co-pilot?”
He turned his head around to meet my gaze, studying the mess in which I was covered with his passive, untelling eyes. “Precisely,” he nodded.
I considered his request, knowing that if there was one thing I knew about, it was astrophysics. I supposed that knowledge could be adapted and used to help Chym in piloting an alien space vehicle. In fact, if I couldn’t, I figured, then I would be as good as useless, or at least the weakest link in this runaway trio. I needed to be good at something.
“Go for it, man,” Alexander looked at me wearily, motioning to the co-pilot’s chair with a wave of his hand, “All yours.” He sensed the insecurity in my voice. It might have been because we were still pretty much naked without the false-gravity suits we had discarded in our escape.
With the new worry that Alexander may hold his action of saving my life over my head for eternity, I lifted the monstrously heavy Wendran co-pilot out of his seat and then managed to get my own weightless, naked body into it. I wondered how long it would be until we found some clothes.
Chym pointed around at the controls that were in front of me. “In a Wendran ship such as this, the pilot must first make the maneuver that he wants the ship to make, and his first officer must emulate his execution as a confirmation to the ship’s computers to take the ordered action,” he explained.
“Wait, you’re saying it’s impossible to operate it alone?” I asked.
“Correct.”
“So then what would’ve happened if that Wendran had blown my brains out?”
“I cannot say for certain what I would have done. It is with great fortune that our companion joined us when he did.”
I glanced back to see Alexander awkwardly finding something to hold on to since there weren’t any other seats in the cockpit. When he heard Chym’s remark, he gave a half smirk as if he were uncomfortable with the whole affair. Like he didn’t want the recognition. He was fighting something inside, this new ferocity that he had found when battling the Wendrans.
“Time is of the essence, gentlemen, we waste too much time talking. Now let’s get out of here,” Chym began fiddling with certain buttons. Remembering my role as co-pilot, I hesitantly started to copy him. Paying attention to what I was doing, I saw his reassuring nod out of the corner of my eye. I continued.
The next few minutes, much to my joy, were rather uneventful in comparison to everything that had just happened. Chym used his knowledge of the Wendran language to fool the mother ship into believing we had seen no sign of the captives and that we would be back in the landing bay soon after they had been found on board the ship. The plan was, in reality, to make a run for it once we were beyond the range of the mother ship’s weapons. Where Chym was taking us I had no idea, but I knew, based on what I had witnessed so far, that he had everything planned out in that superb brain of his.
Following Chym’s instructions and copying his every move on the controls of the ship, I started to get a feel for how this Wendran ship worked. We cleared the doorway of the mother ship and I got a full view of space for the first time, a full span of the universe before me. If I had had the time, I could have gazed at the beautiful cosmic wasteland for a lifetime. Off in the distance, I again saw the planet I had seen days before on the bridge of the Tinzyick, the name the Wendrans had for their mother ship.
“Do you know what planet that is?” I asked Chym.
“Indeed, it is the planet Wendra, for which the Wendran race is named. However, I realize that you have no knowledge of its existence. Once we have escaped and have had a nice long rest, I will explain everything to you, as it is most necessary that I do so.”
I gave him a weird look, to which he said, “Worry not, human. It will all be clear soon.” I went back to manning the controls.
Staying focused on the task of escape still looming over us, I continued to mimic Chym’s every move as was required until we had put a fair distance between us and the Tinzyick.
“How long until they notice we escaped?” asked Alexander.
“It will not be long,” replied Chym.
We slowly approached the end of the range where the mother ship could still harm us, trying to do so without arousing suspicion. Subtlety was our key, Chym was telling me. As I continued working the controls of the craft, I started getting an idea for which button did what as time went on. I felt more and more comfortable, almost like I was right where I was meant to be. How exciting it would have been to be an astronaut back on Earth! The thrill of exploring new, unexplored places, especially when people were sent to the moon in the twentieth century. But hell, that’s as far as we ever ventured, I remembered.
“Now for the trans-dimensional sequence…” Chym muttered under his breath. With the activation of a few short patterns of buttons, the engines of the ship roared like a massive diesel engine. The stars became stretched lines instead of dots, until they disappeared. Darkness prevailed.
“What’s going on?” Alexander wondered aloud from behind me.
“Trans-dimensional travel,” Chym said inattentively, “
No one I know could ever possibly imagine what I’m doing right now. It seemed highly unlikely that anyone would ever believe Alexander and me; as I envisioned it would come to pass. We would just end up being like all those other crazies who had claimed to have been abducted by aliens and then miraculously lived to tell of it. Maybe that’s what Chym was going to try to explain to us: that we would be returned to Earth and we would never see him or the Wendrans again; that the human race would have to go on believing it was alone in the universe and that we could do nothing about it. Then again, I thought, it might be better that way. In general, I had been satisfied with the life
from which the Wendrans had kidnapped me. On the other hand, that satisfaction wasn’t good enough. Though it seemed the easiest way, I was scared of wasting my life away like my parents and their parents before them did.
And now, after discovering there was something else out there, I knew that I had to go for more.
It was then, in that moment, that I knew my degree in astrophysics wasn’t sufficient. I wanted to not just gaze at the cosmos, I wanted to explore them. Chym could attempt to explain all he wanted, but I wouldn’t listen to him. I would beg him to let me stay in this strange new frontier, to take in everything that the universe had to offer. I would not take no for an answer, I resolved.
I woke the next morning, or whenever it was. There was no sense of time in space. It was doubtful that these aliens went by the same time or circadian rhythm as ours. For all I knew, our friend Chym could stay awake for days on end, hardly ever needing to sleep at all. I guess that would have to be necessary if he was to guide our ship through the vast reaches of space, I assumed.
Our escape had been successful, had gone better than what I could have expected. Before the mother ship knew what had happened, Chym and I managed to power up the smaller craft’s superbly advanced engines and blast away from the mother ship at speeds beyond that of light itself. I honestly didn’t have a clue how it was possible, even with my college degree in astrophysics from Poston University in Baltimore. These Wendrans had technology past my capacity to even begin to understand, it appeared. So much to learn, so little time. Uncertainty ran rampant in my mind.
I was, at this point, now clothed and had been able to lie down in the back of the vessel with the false sense of gravity that the Wendrans’ suits gave me. It was such an odd feeling to experience. Imagine for a moment that when one lies down, their torso, arms and legs are all held down by the suit. But the suit quite inconveniently did not cover my head or hands or feet. I was faced with the odd position of holding one arm over my face so my head would stay down instead of trying to escape into the air while the rest of my body lay firm on the ship’s floor.
Since the ship required two men to pilot, Chym and Alexander were still in the cockpit, giving me the long awaited chance to sleep. Never had I wished for sleep more. In the middle of the night I had been woken up only to go on a wild escape adventure through an alien ship. On top of that, I came only seconds away from an inevitable death. The stress and fatigue pushed more weight on my shoulders than the false gravity ever could.
The bodies on the ship were a gruesome mess that had required cleaning up before I could let my dreams take me away from this unimaginable nightmare, which is what I was almost beginning to think of it as. The Wendran that had nearly ended my life in the cockpit was a heap of brain matter that would have surely smelled – according to Chym, that is – floating about in the air. As disgusting as it was, I managed to pull myself together and keep from puking as Chym showed Alexander and me how to properly make use of the ship’s vacuum cleaner that hurled the bodily waste and guts and brains all out into space to rot or drift eternally.
When that was finished, I had been told to get some sleep. It was still rather disconcerting as I said before to try to sleep in the midst of outer space, but the severity of my tiredness facilitated the passage in the realm of slumber.
In the morning I picked myself up and made my way down the passage to the cockpit, the passage where Alexander had been unable to kill the Wendran soldier in time before it reached me and held me hostage before Chym’s eyes. I wondered how long I must have been aboard this very same ship on the voyage as a prisoner at the hands of the Wendran scouts that had landed on Earth, in an induced coma and on my way to the tank in which I was eventually awakened on the Tinzyick. Maybe the space at the back where I had slept was the same spot that I had been unconscious after being knocked out in the middle of nowhere at our campsite. It felt like ages ago. Then again, I had no idea how much time had passed since then. I made a mental to ask Chym if he knew.
The door opened to the cockpit and Alexander turned his head around to look at me. The fatigue that had weighed me down so was evident in his eyes as well. Bags were forming and the droopiness in his posture were the sure sign that he was relieved to see me up and ready to take over.
“Hey, man,” I gave a downward nod in his direction. He returned it lackadaisically.
“Hey,” he said back, “you ready?”
“Yup.”
He glanced back at Chym before rising from the co-pilot’s chair. He walked past me with his head down, tiredly patting me on the shoulder. All signs pointed to that he was completely void of energy.
“Listen,” he whispered, “Chym’s given the scoop on everything.”
So Alexander knew what I wanted to know. In that moment I wondered if he could sense the million questions instantly brewing in my head. Who are the Wendrans? Why do we think we’re alone in the universe? What is Chym? How long have we been gone?
Remembering my ultimatum about becoming an astronaut, the biggest question leaped out from my mouth without thought.
“Are we going back to Earth?” My eyebrows raised in inquiry.
“Eh, you’ll see. Have him tell you,” he answered drowsily, yawning and stretching. He turned his head both ways, and I could hear his neck pop. He did the same with his back. Then with his fingers.
With that, he took the sleepy steps out of the cockpit. I guess he just wanted to leave me hanging. Maybe he didn’t know where to even begin to attempt to explain what Chym had told him. There was only one way to find out. I took my place beside Chym and strapped myself into the chair. All was silent except for the hum of the ship.
“So, Delvon, I shall give you a full explanation as to what has happened just as I did for your friend Alexander,” Chym stated finally, breaking the awkward silence that had been building up.
I realized it was the first time he had said our names. “Did Alexander tell you our names? I’m confused,” I scratched my head.
“Alexander informed me, I am not telepathic,” he answered matter of factly, “And if you’re already confused at this point, I’m not sure how you will handle the rest of the conversation that is about to occur.” If he were human, I would have taken his statement as sarcastic, but I knew Chym enough to realize he wasn’t one to speak thusly.
The alien turned his dinosaurish-looking head toward me, the intellectual eyes black as space. “I suppose it would be best to go back to the beginning,” he continued.
I shrugged indifferently. “I suppose it would.”
“As you wish,” he nodded in assent.
He began: “I imagine the events that have transpired have more than likely proved to be traumatic for you. This is quite understandable, of course, when taking into account that you as a human living upon Earth have had no previous knowledge of any culture other than your own. Such is the special case of Earth’s residents. For centuries in ancient times, my race and others made frequent visits to your planet. We were doubtless envious of your boundless oceans and fertile agricultural lands. What baffled all races was that with these supplies at your disposal, your race did not advance in a technological sense in the same manner as others. However, it became clear to us that it was merely because your race is so very young still and has not had sufficient time to mature. Impatient as we races were, we began to show humans means of progress and prowess, helping them to build magnificent works of architecture among other things.”
“Like the great pyramids,” I gathered.
“Just one example among many that has stood the test of time. I, along with all those of my race, am quite knowledgeable of your history as it intertwines with my own. Your language and culture are also familiar to me because I was formerly an ambassador to your planet.”
“An ambassador? How can you be an ambassador to some place without that place knowing about it?”
“Your confusion necessitates my further explanation,” he continued, “so I shall dwell deeper into o
ur shared past. As the different races from nearby star systems continued to interfere in the development of your species, the consequences of our actions began to grow ever more negative. Because you were advancing with such rapidity due to our interference, the human race showed signs of strain. You invented religions that would either try to dispel us or worship us in ridiculous sacrifices of your own individuals. Your growing civilizations grew competitive and warred amongst themselves as a means of winning our favor. However natural this is in the course of a species’ history, it was a sign to cease our operations. Finally, it was clear that more harm than good had been dealt.”
“So then what happened?” My eyebrows were locked in concentration, with so much information being spilled all at once by this creature who I not known for any more than twenty-four Earth hours.
“My race, seeing the horror being wrought upon your kind, decided that enough was enough. Feeling a sense of attachment being so close in proximity, we issued a dictum that made it clear to all other species that Earth would no longer be trifled with. The outrage expressed by the other races led to war. Indeed, we attacked their planets in defense of ours; we even fought battles in Earth’s own atmosphere. In the end, we successfully defended our sister planet; and from that point, we only made ourselves known to your world leaders as deemed necessary. The agreement reached at the conclusion of the war was that Earth was off-limits to outside influence. Centuries wore on, and generations forgot about aliens from outer space. It became a topic of legend and lore, as we had hoped it would become. Most unfortunately, however, your religions continued to revolve around our second coming, but this could not be further remedied. We decided to let things take their own course. It was for your own good, we believed.”
There was so much to absorb, but I had been following along intently as he slowly told his story. He was so thorough, but the million questions lingered back.