Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 61982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
“Final ship departing,” he notes.
“Good work, Arkon,” the voice on the other end. “See you at home.”
Arkon glances over at me. “Are you okay?” He asks the question with some concern. “Did all of that flying around shake anything loose?”
“No.” I giggle at the audacity of the question.
“Good,” he winks. “I’m going to increase speed for a bit. Warp feels strange. Try not to be sick.”
“I…”
The ship phases out around me and I am in the middle of space without so much as another hint of warning. There’s a bubble around me, a warping, shifting barrier keeping me from getting all tangled up in the bits of existence that are streaming by at incredible speeds.
For a while, that is all that happens. The universe wraps itself around me and I curl up in it.
Then I hear voices.
“Warp sickness.”
“Might have lost her somewhere out there.”
I become aware of the fact that we have stopped. I open my eyes to find myself lying down in what I guess is an alien hospital bed. I am wearing a white gown. I don’t know where my clothes went. I am pretty sure I was wearing them, though.
“There you are.” Arkon smiles down at me, his alien features warm with relief.
“Where am I?”
“You’re at our base,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’ve been informed human consciousness can’t travel at warp speed. We had to go and retrieve yours.”
I try to process what that means and I get absolutely nowhere with it because I don’t understand. We were definitely going faster in the massive vessel that got me to that even more massive port, and I didn’t experience my brain falling out, not even once.
“I got lost in space?”
“Something like that,” another alien says. A doctor, I presume. She has the air of someone competent and medical. Her hair is dark and short, cut in a sleek bob that frankly would be fashionable in any place and at any time. Her eyes gleam green, and her teeth are slightly less obviously sharp. She is wearing a white robe that sweeps about her tall, regal frame.
“Am I fine now?”
“Your consciousness has experienced more in the last few hours than it was ever designed to hold,” she says. “When the psyche comes unglued from the mind, the effects can be unpredictable. But, having said that, you are human, and you are fairly simple, and it may be as easy as plugging it back in.”
She looks over my head at Arkon. “We will keep her for observation. You can leave for the moment and check back in a few hours.”
He nods. “I will attend to some business matters,” he says.
I am feeling very small and very lost as he leaves. I knew that I would be the only human in many lightyears when I came all this way. I knew, too, that I would be working for aliens. I didn’t know how I would feel when I got sick for the first time, and how much I’d want to have someone around who knows how to make chicken soup.
Maybe I look forlorn, because the doctor puts her hand on my arm.
“I want you to rest,” she says. “I’m going to lower the lights and give you a chance to sleep. A nap would be ideal to help your consciousness re-sync with your body.”
She dims the lights and leaves the room, and I am alone on an alien outpost. I feel pretty normal by all standards, not like my mind has been glued back to my body at all.
I think I’m fine. I’m also not tired. Everything I’ve been through recently has been intense as hell. The dog fight among the stars, and before that, the way Arkon touched me. My alien boss is a very hands-on manager, I think to myself with a little giggle.
The door opens and the doctor looks in. “You’re supposed to be resting,” she says firmly before shutting the door again. Apparently I am being monitored more closely than I imagined. Good to know.
As I was looking around, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tech here. I bet I could slip some of it into my pocket. Or I could, if I had my normal clothes on. And if I wasn’t almost certainly being watched through a monitor or similar. I have got to get better at telling when the aliens are looking at me.
The urge to steal is, well, not a new one. It certainly didn’t first emerge at Alpha Core. This is the first time it has felt something like noble, if I am to be honest.
I have been snatching stuff most of my life. First I did it to get a little extra in the way of food when the credits didn’t quite go far enough. My mother worked as a secretary in the public service, and we lived in a little apartment in a building full of more than a thousand of those little apartments. She had to work a lot. I used to sit at home, feed myself on whatever I could scrounge up, and do homework. But sometimes I’d go out and snatch things from the various vending carts that would park up on some of the main lobbies. Our building had twelve of them on various levels. I could get donuts, noodles, and sometimes fruit. Kebabs, even.