Authors: Marla Therron
"As close as we can handle without cryo sleep," Captain Harper confirmed, rolling an e-cig to the corner of her mouth, "Got any sevens?"
Sergei reluctantly handed over a card.
"Did I read the plans right when I saw the interval between two of our stops is going to more than a month?" Paolo asked, laying down several matches.
"Yes, but that's the longest one," Erena confirmed, "I tried to plot a course with as short a distance between stops as I could. Using gravity to our advantage is what's making this possible. That month long wait would have been centuries if we weren't using my plan."
"Still, we will have to think of something to pass the time," Paolo waggled his eyebrows at Erena, "All those weeks in the lonely void of space with only each other for company..."
"Don't worry, Paolo," Alice replied dryly, "I'll keep you busy."
The others laughed but Paolo looked worried. His fling with Alice had ended quite quickly. Apparently she was a little more than even he could handle.
The trip proceeded almost uneventfully. Two months and several planets later, it was beginning to wear on even Erena.
She sat back from her microscope with a tired sigh, rubbing her temples.
"Is that the data from the last planet?" Sergei asked, leaning against the console where she sat and offering her one of the two cups of coffee he held, "You're still going through it?"
"Yeah," Erena pushed her hair back from her face and accepted the coffee, draining half of it, "It feels like I've been staring at it for a week."
"I take it you're not dwelling on it because it is fascinating?" Sergei sipped his own coffee, his dark eyes understanding.
"No, it's just tedious," Erena replied, "It's so similar to the other samples we've picked up that I keep feeling like I must have made a mistake and grabbed the wrong slide."
She looked out at one of the portholes, through which only empty space, shimmering with stars, was visible.
"We're so far from earth," she mused, "Farther than anyone else has ever been. But we haven't even located a planet worth setting down on yet. I guess I just assumed we'd have found something exciting by now."
Hardly had she spoken those words than ship suddenly shook hard, nearly knocking Erena from her seat, spilling her coffee.
"What the hell was that?" Sergei asked, clinging to the console for support.
"It felt like an impact," Erena scrambled to her feet, hurrying for the cabin with Sergei in pursuit, "Meteorite?"
"Bigger," Captain Harper answered as Erena entered the room, "It came out of nowhere. It wasn't even on our screens until it hit us."
Finn was standing next to Alice, staring at the screen in grim worry.
"It put a dent in us," Paolo dropped in from the engineering section, "But it didn't break the hull. But that's not why we should be concerned."
"What should we be concerned about then," Finn asked sarcastically, "If not the huge thing that just rammed us out of nowhere?"
"The fact that it has grabbed us, right over the airlock, and appears to be dragging us off course."
"Holy shit," Finn replied articulately.
"Holy shit is right," Alice's face was pale but her gaze was steady, watching the console, "I can expend some fuel and try to pull away from whatever it is, but we don't have much room for unscheduled maneuvers like that in our flight plan. We might have to cut the last few planets off our trip."
"Assuming that shakes it off at all," Paolo pressed his lips together tightly in worry, "The way it is holding on to us, it's not like any meteor I've ever seen, or anything else."
Alice fixed him with a cold, serious stare, echoed in the solemn, anxious expressions of everyone else.
"What exactly are you suggesting?" she asked.
"It feels foolish to say extra-terrestrial when we left everything terrestrial behind light years ago," Paolo said, taking a deep breath, "But this feels like technology."
"Like a tractor beam?"
"More like a grappling hook."
Erena swallowed a lump in her throat, sudden fear fluttering in her stomach.
"Should we burn the fuel?" she asked, "Try to outrun it?"
"Whoa, we don't have any proof that's even what it is yet," Finn argued, "We shouldn't make any rash decisions."
"And if it is alien," Paolo's bronze skin had a sheen of nervous sweat, his hand gripping his shirt, "We have a responsibility to make First Contact."
"It's
not
alien," Finn insisted, "We're getting carried away."
"Well, the facts we have are this," Captain Harper cut through the anxiety with a clear, decisive voice, "Something is attached to us, and it is pulling us off course. The longer we wait the more fuel we lose trying to get back into our flight lane. We have to make a choice quickly. Sergei, as our security officer, I need your input before I make a decision."
Sergei had been quiet, Erena assumed because he knew this was coming. He took a deep breath.
"Burn the fuel," he said, "We work with what we know, and that is we have to get back on course."
"Agreed," Harper nodded firmly, "Everyone strap in. And I'd suggest helmets. Just in case."
The crew scrambled for their suits, well-practiced at getting into them in under a minute. They headed for their seats in the cabin, strapping in, helmets on their laps.
"Alright everyone," Harper called, "Hold on tight, we're-"
She cut herself off suddenly, and drew back from the panel like it had shocked her.
"What is it?" Erena asked, feeling cold and shaky in her suit and trying to maintain the calm that had been trained into her.
"We may need to reevaluate," Harper turned the screen to show them what was outside the nose of the ship, "A craft has just appeared in front of us."
The alien ship was huge. The Spirit of Exploration was maybe a tenth of its size. The vast craft was shaped like an anvil, black and green, dark and terrible and outlined starkly by the light of a blue star behind it.
"That evidence enough for you, Finn?" Paolo asked, his voice dry with fear.
"Holy shit..." Finn repeated, pale as milk.
"No more cursing," Alice said sharply, turning to a view screen on her console, "I'm recording. This is the crew of the Spirit of Adventure, two months into our voyage, hoping this message reaches earth. We appear to be on the verge of making First Contact."
"We could still run?" Erena offered with a nervous laugh.
"If those are engines like I think they are," Paolo gestured to the wide vent like cavities on the back end of the ship, "We will not outrun it."
"Get your diplomacy faces on everyone," Alice said firmly, "Prepare to represent the best of the human race."
"Do me a favor," Finn wheezed, "Tell them urinating on yourself is normal for humans?"
"Hold it together Finn," Sergei reached over to squeeze the medical officer's arm, "We will be fine. We were prepared for this. If they are intelligent enough to build a ship like that, they are intelligent enough to communicate and reason with. I doubt they would have any reason to harm us."
"From my experience," Finn swallowed hard, shaking in his seat, "Humans have never needed much of a reason to harm each other."
The grappling hook dragged the Spirit of Adventure into the gaping maw of a bay on the side of the vast alien ship. Erena's heart was hammering so fast she could hardly breathe.
She was fighting not to start hyperventilating. She'd been trained to deal with stress and stressful situations for this mission, but an encounter with an alien ship was an entirely different caliber of stress. She gripped the arms of her seat tightly as their ship came to a shuddering stop inside the bay.
A few minutes of silence ticked past.
"Maybe," Erena spoke slowly, unsure, "They're waiting for us to come out?"
The team glanced at each other nervously, and then slowly unbuckled themselves and stood, moving slowly toward the door, everyone hesitating to take the lead until Alice pushed her way to the front, her jaw set in determination.
"Remember we're still recording," she said as she put her hand on the hatch, "So try to be on your best-"
She didn't have a chance to finish that statement, as the hatch door suddenly exploded open, the decompression throwing them all backwards. Erena crashed into one of the chairs, the impact dizzying her but not knocking her unconscious.
She struggled to sit up as three figures moved into the ship through the ragged hole where the door had been. All three appeared to be of different species by Erena's guess, though they had enough extra limbs and sensory organs between for twice as many humans.
Only one of them was even a bipedal humanoid, with a long, tapering neck and a triangular head. One of the much less humanoid aliens skittered towards her on its too many limbs and grabbed her by the face. Too dazed to defend herself, she could only stare back as it looked her over, realizing the other two were examining her teammates.
"Excuse me," Alice spoke sharply and Erena looked over to see one of the bigger, more brutish looking aliens pulling at the captain's clothing, "I don't know if you can understand me but that is not polite. I do not want you to do that. We are explorers representing the human race. If you would allow us, we would like to-"
She was cut off once again as the large alien, with a grunt of annoyance, punched her in the face, knocking her out. The rest of the team exploded into shouts of anger.
Sergei tackled the alien nearest him and Paolo and Finn rushed to help him. Erena was still trying to get her bearings back from hitting her head on the seat, but she snapped into focus as she saw the thinner alien trying to drag Alice away.
"Hey!" she shouted, running at the creature, "Let her go!"
A whip like tail appeared behind the alien seemingly out of nowhere and struck Erena in the neck before she was even within arm’s reach of the creature. At once she staggered, a weird heat blossoming from where she'd been punctured, which slowed her down and made her stumble, falling to her knees, and then to the ground completely, unable to move her body.
The last thing she saw as the creature dragged her and Alice away was the brutish alien pulling some kind of weapon on the other three members of her team. There was a flash of light, and then darkness swallowed Erena entirely.
She woke in a cage to the sound of strange drums. A whip cracked in the distance, making her jump, and outside the cage swarms of beings too strange to identify bustled and shouted.
She was naked, and her skin felt raw as though she'd been washed, scrubbed down. She burned with humiliation, but she didn't have the strength to move or even cry out. She'd been drugged, or maybe it was still the poison from the alien's stinger.
The drumming, driving music pounded like her heart beat, panicking. Where was her team? What was happening to her? Sergei and Finn and Paolo. She'd seen the alien fire that weapon at them. Were they dead? And where was Alice? She knew she and Captain Harper had been taken together, so where...?
She could only move her head a fraction, the drug making her limbs too heavy to shift, but on either side of her there were only more cages, none of them containing humans.
They held other aliens, looking as naked and drugged as she was, their hands and feet shackled with pretty silver chains, collars around their throats. Blinking down at herself, Erena realized she was wearing the same kind of chains. What was this place?
She felt tears stinging her eyes as she realized the rest of her team was probably dead. She'd been kidnapped by aliens and they'd murdered her team. She didn't want to think about what it meant that only the female team members had been taken alive.
She was millions of light years from home, the only one of her species in this solar system probably. She was almost certainly never going to see another human face again. She would have sobbed if she'd had the strength. As it was, she couldn't even resist as someone reached into her cage and dragged her out.
She knelt on the stage, too drugged and frightened to disobey, as the auctioneer praised her long hair and pale skin, using a few of its extra limbs to grab her wrists, spreading her out and putting her on display for the buyers.
She blushed with humiliation, but there wasn't much else she could do with barely the strength to hold herself up. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared out into the audience, seeking out those piercing eyes again. Even if they couldn't save her, they were something to focus on besides the helpless shame and despair she was experiencing.
Her price climbed higher as she searched for those eyes. But when she found them again, the man suddenly turned away. Her heart broke at this final abandonment.
Whatever nightmare was waiting for her would probably make this place seem like a dream, and yet Erena couldn't help praying for this to be over. She just wanted to be off the stage and out of sight of all these eyes.
"One hundred million!" someone shouted, a much higher price than she'd heard so far.
Erena looked up in confusion, searching for the bidder, but she was too dazed to see anything. The darkness was closing in on her again as the auctioneer cried.
"Sold!"
She woke lying on something soft, a blanket around her shoulders.
“I can’t believe you actually bought that thing,” someone was laughing, “I’ve never seen you buy anything from the auctions.”
“It was an impulse buy.”
“A hundred million credit impulse buy?”
“I can be very impulsive.”
“You know Rokir isn’t going to let you bring it on the ship. Ugly bug makes me miss the old captain. I don’t know why you ever let him take over. You could have been captain just as easily.”
“And have him crawling after me, the way he crawled after the old captain, just waiting for a chance to put powdered glass in my coffee? No thanks.”
“Anyway, he’ll probably insist you give it to him when he finds out you have it.”
“I will eat it before I let Rin’rokir have it.”
“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” the first voice laughed, and Erena heard footsteps, “Whatever you’re going to do with it, take care of it fast and get back to the ship. We’re heading out soon.”
There were a few more murmured words, then a door slammed and Erena, realizing she had the strength to, slowly sat up.
She was in what seemed to be some kind of home, if she was guessing right. She was lying on a low fabric platform like a mattress on the floor in front of what she thought was a sunken fire pit, mostly based on the blackened interior and the set of metal pokers beside it. Possibly electric or gas, judging by the buttons.
She was indoors, the room spacious and clean and full of objects she couldn't identify. Were they decorations or furniture or something else? From what she'd seen at the auction, they might be people for all she knew. There was a wide window behind the couch mattress thing, and a balcony, and beyond it a view of a dense, tangled urban sprawl, not unlike photos she'd seen of the Kowloon walled city.
This apartment must be high up to be able to look down on it like that she thought, pulling the blanket closer around her. She was still naked, she realized, taking stock of herself, and still wearing chains. She was also desperately thirsty. She felt it must have been a few days since she'd drunk or eaten. She felt weak with hunger.
A moment had passed since she'd heard the door slam, and she turned quickly as she glimpsed someone coming through the open archway at the opposite end of the room from the window.
The man was humanoid, more so than any others she'd seen so far. He was tall, with a broad chest and powerful arms beneath the simple black one piece suit he was wearing, whose sleeves ended just above his forearms.
His skin was a deep russet color at his hands and above his eyes, fading into a lighter tan. Proud, sweeping horns grew from his brow back over his long, dark hair.
But other than the horns and coloration, his features seemed very human. When he looked at her, fixing her with a piercing stare, she realized at once that he was the man she'd been staring at from the stage. Then, he took a step towards her.
Erena darted at once, realizing she might not get another chance to escape. She sprinted over the mattress and towards the window and the balcony, scrambling to find the latch.
"Oh no you don't!"
She'd just managed to throw it open before strong arms closed around her waist, picking her up and pulling her away as cold air blasted through the open door.
She shouted, struggling and trying to escape his grip, but he only held her tighter, turning away from the door and moving back towards the mattress.
"Let me go!" she shrieked, "Let me go! You're not going to eat me!"
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