First Contact Captives

by Enid Titan

  Even if she were a different species, even if chance brought us together, I craved her touch. From the moment I saw her and recognized the stillness within her human body, I’d been entranced. Polluxian males rarely go through what I was going through.

  The next morning finally came. I lay still, waiting, as usual, to be taken to my torture chamber. The soldiers brought me to the table and strapped me down. I heard Dr. Trout’s footsteps coming closer, but not Minerva’s. She was late.

  Another doctor entered the lab.

  “Where’s Minerva?” Dr. Trout growled.

  “She just called. She’s running late. John couldn’t give her a ride today and she’s struggling to get out of the city.”

  “When she gets here you tell her to get her ass down here.”

  “Yes, Dr. Trout.”

  “I don’t know where that insolent woman thinks she can get away with something like that,” he growled.

  The other doctor sounded apologetic as he explained, “I think she and John had a bit of a falling out, Dr. Trout.”

  Dr. Trout scoffed, “A falling out? Over what?”

  “He asked her out. She said no.”

  “Hm. This is no place for office gossip.”

  “Yes, sir. I know. It’s just… the hours have been getting to all of us.”

  “Do you know why she turned him down?”

  “John called last night after the whole thing. He thinks there was someone else.”

  “I see,” Dr. Trout replied, sounding pleased, “Well there’s no need to gossip. Run along. I’ll talk to Minerva when she gets in. She knows how you scientists get. It’s up to her to stop tempting the men in this office.”

  “Yes, Dr. Trout.”

  The new data I collected from my implant sent a pang of worry surging through me. Dr. Trout wasn’t angry at the news of Minerva’s lateness, nor about John’s ill-fated attempt to court her. He experienced a troubling response. I struggled against my paralysis to lift my arms. I would be shaking out of my paralysis soon, but I couldn’t rush it.

  Minerva eventually showed up. My ocular implant revealed troubling information about Dr. Trout’s reaction as she entered the room. I’d never put much weight on the older doctor’s physiological responses. He was typically calm, and cold, with readings far less interesting than the other physicians. When it came to Minerva, the rise in his neurotransmitter levels yoked my attention.

  She aroused him.

  “Minerva,” Dr. Trout began gruffly, “I want an explanation as to why you’re late.”

  “Sorry. My ride with John fell through.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “You did?”

  She was nervous and frazzled. I strained to break free from my binds, to pry myself off the table and remove Dr. Trout with all his lascivious intentions away from her. I wondered if she could see what he was feeling even without an ocular implant of her own. He was dangerous to her.

  “Yes. Now we need to talk about dress code in the office and how some of your choices may have led to John’s misunderstanding.”

  “I’m wearing clothes that are within dress code.”

  “Don’t you think that dress is awfully low cut? I can see your… you know, your breasts.”

  “Dr. Trout!” Minerva gasped.

  “I’m sorry, Minerva, but it’s hard for the gentlemen in this office to focus with your perky little breasts bouncing around in that shirt.”

  “It’s a button down! It’s very work appropriate.”

  I could sense her shame and her frustration, rising to the surface all at once. He was taunting her, attempting to force her into a corner. She was vulnerable…

  “Well, Minerva, that isn’t the only thing,” Dr. Trout continued smugly.

  “Dr. Trout, I’d prefer if you referred to me as Dr. Hsu,” she replied, getting testier as her blood pressure rose along with her heart rate.

  “Dr. Hsu, your shirt isn’t the only thing inappropriate around here. What about your trousers?”

  “What’s wrong with my trousers?”

  “They are very tight around your round peachy bottom.”

  I heard him smack his lips in delight.

  “Dr. Trout! This is really inappropriate. If I’m not allowed to wear a button-down and trousers, what am I permitted to wear?”

  “Dr. Hsu, it sounds like you’re making excuses and like you’re unwilling to accept responsibility for your clothing. I understand working in an office with men it can be nice to get male attention for your perky breasts and your young tight bottom.”

  “Dr. Trout, I’d like to change the subject. I know I’m late but can we get to work? I’ll show up in something more appropriate tomorrow.”

  “Dr. Hsu, I’m your supervisor. You won’t be able to get away with this insolence for long. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Dr. Trout.”

  She sounded meek and sheepish, but I could tell that was only to shut him up for the time being. She was frightened. I attempted to move my arm again, but it was futile.

  “I’m going to prep the MRI. Prepare the subject for the soldiers,” Dr. Trout ordered.

  He exited the room and left alone with me, Minerva rushed to my side and touched my arm, stifling a sob.

  “Vidar,” she whispered, “Why won’t you wake up? What’s wrong with you? I need you right now. I’m scared. Dr. Trout… I think he’s taking advantage of the fact that I can’t tell anyone about this research. Please, if you can hear me, wake up. Please… help me. I don’t want to be alone in a room with that guy for an hour.”

  She kissed my cheek and as much as I wanted to wake up and pull her on top of me, hold her in my arms and promise that I’d do everything to protect her, I was powerless.

  The soldiers grabbed me and lay me on a large table. I could hear the hum of the magnet as they strapped me to another bed and slid my rigid sleeping body another primitive machine. I’d seen ancient machines like this one on Pollux. I only wished I could catch a glimpse of it. My ocular implant could only share the basics of the machine — it worked by magnetic resonance and used more power than most of the machines in the lab.

  Minerva and her boss re-entered and they stripped me down to only my briefs before pushing a button and thrusting me beneath the large domed magnet. Thankfully my implant was biological in nature and not metal like the primitive implants on my planet from centuries ago.

  I heard them walking into the other room.

  “Are you ready to do the scans?”

  “Yes, Dr. Trout.”

  “Good. Now Minerva…”

  He lowered his voice and then I heard her scream.

  “Dr. Trout!”

  “I warned you, your clothing is too much of a temptation!”

  “That doesn’t give you a right to grab my ass!”

  “Grab your ass? I have three PhDs from Yale, Cornell, and Harvard, yet you think I grabbed your ass?!”

  “You did! You touched my ass and I swear if you do it again, you’ll regret it,” Minerva yelled.

  “Are you threatening me you insolent little… you little…”

  “Say it!” She challenged, “Say it and let me report you!”

  “You insolent little whore!”

  “Now the cat’s out of the bag, isn’t it?” Minerva hissed.

  “You think you can walk around with your perky breasts and your ass and get away with anything! We would have never allowed a woman like you onto the premises if it weren’t for your father.”

  “Right, because I suppose my father got my PhD from UVA and my second PhD from Columbia?”

  “You don’t deserve to be in this office if you refuse to learn your place,” Dr. Trout grasped.

  “If my place is getting my ass groped by a creepy old man like you, then I’ll be content to never know my place.”

  “Why you little…”

  “AHHHH!” Minerva screamed, “Let go of me! Let go!”

  “No one can hear you Minerva. We’re a mi
le beneath the city and no one will be able to hear you,” Dr. Trout growled.

  “STOP IT! STOP IT! LET GO OF ME!”

  I heard fabric ripping. She screamed again.

  Five

  The Accident

  Minnie Hsu

  I kicked Dr. Trout in the chest as he ripped my lab coat off. He tossed the fabric aside and pounced again, pressing my back up against the glass wall as I screamed. I kicked again and he pressed his forearm against my neck.

  “If you’re not going to learn your place in this office, I’m going to teach it to you.”

  I spat in his face. He slapped me.

  “LET GO!”

  I kicked him again.

  I realized how powerless I was. I couldn’t stop him from doing what he was going to do, but by hell, I wouldn’t make it easy for him. And if I delayed him at least, there was still hope.

  He punched me in the gut. I cried out and thrust out again, but he was stronger than me and much larger. I tried not to cry, to convince myself that I could fight him off. Then we heard the the loud screech of ripping metal and then the glass between us and the MRI machine shattered and Vidar burst through, his half-naked purple body shuddering as shards of glass protruded from his skin. His eyes glowed fluorescent green as he towered over both of us, his body heaving in rage, his fangs exposed.

  His tail whipped back and forth like an upset feline. He was more tiger than house cat, thankfully.

  Dr. Trout dropped me to the floor in surprise.

  “Step away from her,” Vidar instructed.

  Dr. Trout lunged for the pager that would call the soldiers outside. Vidar swiped it across the table and stepped between me and Dr. Trout.

  “Step away from her,” Vidar growled again.

  “AHHH!” Dr. Trout yelled as he grabbed the MRI computer and yanked it off the desk, throwing it at Vidar.

  Vidar moved faster than Dr. Trout could keep up with, catching the large screen and tossing it to the ground. Dr. Trout reached into his lab coat and pulled out a weapon. A gun which I didn’t even know he possessed. Likely a last ditch precaution against Vidar’s escape.

  “DR. TROUT! NO!” I screamed.

  He fired. The bullet bounced off of Vidar’s chest. I screamed again. Vidar lunged for Dr. Trout again. Another gunshot went off. Vidar grabbed Dr. Trout by the neck. Dr. Trout pointed the gun to Vidar’s skull.

  “NO! VIDAR! PUT HIM DOWN!”

  Dr. Trout fired directly at Vidar’s skull. The bullet bounced off and entered the doctor’s jaw. Blood spurted from Dr. Trout’s neck. I screamed. Vidar dropped the doctor, his hands shaking.

  “He’s dead! Oh my God… He’s dead!” I screamed.

  The life had gone from his eyes instantly. I’d watched it happen as if in slow motion. But… he’d had the gun pointed at Vidar’s head. How could this be?

  I retched, stumbling backward and covering up what parts of myself I could, and threw up in a trashcan in the corner of the room. Vidar rested his giant hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Minerva, we have to go…”

  Shattered glass and blood had exploded all over the room.

  “We have to go…” Vidar insisted.

  “I can’t go anywhere… It doesn’t matter where we go… They’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill you!” I sobbed hysterically.

  I was a scientist, not a soldier. I didn’t want to do harm to anyone, not even Dr. Trout. Not Vidar either. If the military found him, they’d kill him.

  “Minerva, trust me.”

  “He’s dead!”

  “He killed himself. I would have let him go,” Vidar insisted.

  I believed him. Vidar, impervious to bullets, could have killed the doctor before any time he wanted to. He hadn’t done that and I believed him when he said that he never had the intention to do so. He only wanted to protect me.

  He reached for my hand and I grabbed him tightly.

  “I’ll get you out of here, but you need to trust me. I only want to protect you, Minerva.”

  “How are we going to get you out of here? You’re seven feet tall… and…”

  “Purple?”

  “Yes. That.”

  There were tens of other alien traits he possessed too, but the purple skin had to have been the biggest one.

  “I’ve prepared for every contingency. All I need is for you to trust me and for us to find a place to stay at least for tonight.”

  “The U.S. government can find us wherever we go,” I whispered.

  The weight of what happened settled over me at once, despite Vidar’s hand holding mine, providing a certain measure of comfort.

  “We’ll leave now then.”

  “How?”

  “My ocular implant permits site to site teleportation.”

  “What? You mean you could teleport out of here?”

  “I can get us five miles from here on the surface, no further.”

  “Can you get any more precise?”

  “Not with this much magnetic interference from the soil.”

  “How does it work?”

  “You hold on now.”

  Vidar gripped my arm tightly and then he closed his eyes, tapping the side of his temples. Then it all disappeared as if sucked through a needle eye. I tried to open my mouth to scream but no sound came out. We rematerialized on flat earth with fresh forest air. I fell to my knees and a loud wheezing escaped my lungs. Vidar was unaffected from our teleportation.

  Teleportation. I’d actually done something that had been a staple in earth science fiction for years. It was actually possible and my scientific mind was desperate for an explanation as to how on earth any of this could be possible at all…

  “Are you alright?”

  I dusted the dirt off my palms and rose to my feet, nodding despite the nausea threatening to knock me off my feet.

  “I think so.”

  The sun had already begun to set. I had no idea where we were, but if we were within five miles of the lab, we had to get moving.

  “I can give you our coordinates,” Vidar offered, trying to get me stable so we could get moving. He might have been impervious to bullets, but I wasn’t.

  “Coordinates won’t help me. I can hear cars. We must be near the highway.”

  We were surrounded by trees, but I could hear the familiar sound of trucks whooshing down the highway and car horns honking like crazy. Rush hour would have the city grid locked for about another hour, so escaping by car would have been senseless.

  “Can you do another one of these teleports?” I asked.

  “It would help if I knew where we were going.”

  “What about your ship? You said it was nearby?”

  “Yes. It’s in Vermont.”

  “Vermont isn’t nearby?!” I half-yelled.

  Vidar wrinkled his nose.

  “Of course it is. It’s not in England or anything.”

  Right. To him, anywhere within this country counted as “nearby”. If we were to get to Vermont, and could only teleport five miles at a time, I’d be sucking my body through that tiny needle hole over and over again… I didn’t think I could take it.

  “Surely there’s a more sophisticated way to get to Vermont.”

  “I’m supposed to be here for six months. To get an emergency broadcast to my people I’d need a HAM radio and an amplifier.”

  “I wouldn’t begin to know where to find that.”

  “I need you to think, Minerva. Where can we be safe. Think.”

  He grabbed my shoulders and gazed into my eyes with such fearsome determination. He’d protected me so far. It was my turn to protect him.

  “If we can make it to the highway, I can figure out where to go next. I think I know someone we can trust.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Billings. John Billings. Things are a bit awkward between us but we’ve been good friends for years. If we explain everything to him, he’ll help us out.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Yes,
” I replied after giving it some thought, “John’s a good person.”

  “Okay. You wait here. I can make it to the highway and back faster than you can.”

  Not only could he teleport, but Vidar could move faster than any human being. I rested my back up against a large tree, still gasping for breath. The image of Dr. Trout’s neck as blood spurted forth from the bullet wound couldn’t leave my mind. I gasped and sank to the ground, crouching and pulling my knees in close.

  Pull it together, Minerva.

  By now, the soldiers had likely discovered the bloody, gruesome scene in the lab. I wanted someone to blame for what happened, but I had to admit to myself that Vidar was only protecting me. Dr. Trout wanted to hurt me and he planned on it. Vidar followed his instincts. His instincts to protect me were stronger than I could have predicted, just like my instincts to save him after we’d… bonded.

  What had only happened a few days ago felt like aeons ago. And I couldn’t help but feels more strongly for him than I had for any man. He was strong, masculine, intelligent, quick and…

  Vidar appeared beside me, his chest heaving slowly as if he were barely out of breath.

  “We’re just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.”

  “Okay. I think we can get to John’s apartment, but we should wait until it’s darker.”

  “Alright.”

  “I think we can make it in five rounds of teleportation.”

  “That’s too many. I can only handle four before I need to recharge.”

  “How do you recharge?”

  “Without access to my ship? Sleep.”

  Right. I should have been able to figure that out. The stress of everything that happened made me overly tired and I wasn’t thinking straight. Hopefully I was thinking straight about John. Hopefully I was right about him helping us.

  “We’re only three miles away from the lab,” Vidar explained, “Will their scanning devices be able to pick us up?”

  I reached into my pocket and found my cellphone. A lump formed in my throat.

  “What is that?” Vidar asked, snatching it out of my hand.