My eyes fluttered open once more. This time, I was alone and by my estimates, it must have been nighttime. I bet there were soldiers outside the door. I bet that they’d kill before they allowed me to escape. I fell asleep again.
Three more days passed, perhaps more, before there was any change in my condition. I slept again and my dreams were more vivid than the previous night. I saw Vidar.
“Minerva, can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can.”
“I’m going to be there tomorrow. I need time to penetrate their fortress but then I’ll come get you.”
“I keep dreaming about you.”
“This isn’t a dream. All I need is for you to stay alive.”
“Vidar, I can’t survive this any longer.”
I still thought I was dreaming. There was no way he could communicate with me like this.
“You must…”
My dream faded into blackness and when I woke up, I felt hopeful for the first time in days. When the doctors came back, I didn’t react as they drugged me again. When they asked me questions, I refused to answer, even as the torture methods grew more extreme. I screamed. I cried. I bled. But I wouldn’t tell them anything they wanted to know — I owed it to Vidar and John.
Once the doctor’s left, they didn’t clean me up or bandage my wounds. I hadn’t given them anything they could use and they were angry. I hadn’t just betrayed America, they said, I betrayed my planet. Whatever they accused me of had never happened. I assumed their higher-ups kept the truth under wraps. The truth didn’t exactly paint them as the good guys.
Just as I was about to fall asleep, I heard a whooshing sound and then my body faded from its binds and I felt that odd sensation of teleportation — my body, twisted into bits and pulled through a tiny hole. When I erupted forth, still lying on my back, I was too weak to stay conscious any longer.
TEN
VIDAR
I hadher back on my ship and back in my grasp. I’d taken a chance on the little earthling and come to prize her more than any female I’d ever touched. As her weakened body lay on my medical examination table, my ocular implant projected a reddish glow around her. Critical condition. Three more days in that hellish underground laboratory and they would have killed her without guilt. They would have killed one of their own.
What kinds of people were this, I wondered? What could the other governments in the alliance have seen in these barbarians that made them wish first contact? Minerva was so severely damaged that it would take at least a week to heal her, even with my advanced technology. I’d have to keep her unconscious for at least another day.
Recognizing the magnitude of the task ahead of me, I began to care for her. On my ship, just outside of the earth’s orbit, I was at last closer to home. My mission had hardly lasted six weeks before I’d been forced to take this retreat.
Clearly, despite their primitive tech, we couldn’t take first contact with this species lightly. They varied greatly from cruel scientists to pacifists to loving females. I dabbed Minerva with acool, wet sponge, washing away all the blood and grime from her skin.
Taking a metal healing probe, I began to work at sealing the contusions and lesions on her body and healing her burns. Her skin reformed easily as the nano-probes patched her back together. Once the surface work was finished, I’d have to tackle her internal structures. I couldn’t heal her all in one day without knowing more about her physiology. My instruments collected as much data as possible as she lay in my emergency sick bay.
I slept in a chair next to her hospital bed, making a mental note to respond to the consul within the next day. I hadn’t submitted a report in a while and I knew my superiors would chide me for the long delay.
I slept very little knowing that Minerva was still hurt.
In the morning, I ate an excessive portion of my rations, stabilized the ship’s position in the higher atmosphere and pored over data from my galactic sextant. If I couldn’t reach the Polluxians, there were other governments I could contact regarding the earthling.
There was nothing within our contracts or assignments that would have prepared me for what happened between myself and Minerva. The mission itself should have been a rather uncomplicated six months. Maybe I’d brought this on myself by touching her in the first place, by wanting to hold her close.
To say I’d complicated things with this human woman was an understatement. I couldn’t send her back to her home world only to subject her to more torture. Refitting my probes with the correct nanotechnology, I scanned her internal organs, assessing the depth and breadth of her injuries.
She’d been lying there for days with a fractured collar bone and cracked ribs. One of her ribs had punctured her gall bladder and her feet were sprained just the day before. The drugs that the so-called physicians had stuck into her veins were slowlypoisoning her blood. I fixed her blood first, performing a nano-transfusion and boosting her platelets and plasma. Then, I fixed the broken bones, strengthening them with microscopic plates so that if she were hit in the chest again, her bones would no longer be so brittle.
As my ocular implant captured all the data from Minerva’s medical procedures, I wondered if she’d give permission for me to send the data back to the imperium and the Alliance. Perhaps they’d forgive my early departure from the mission if I plied them with this level of detail about the planet I was supposed to be exploring.
Finishing the work of repairing her bones then left me with the final task of repairing the damage to her internal organs. Her physiology was remarkably inefficient. Instead of a single multi-chambered lung that occupied the expanse of her chest cavity, her mammalian torso was still occupied by two lungs, a single liver and a host of different weaker, smaller organs. Her heart was fragile, and I could sense my own pounding as I recognized her species lacked the 500 year lifespan of my own. She was so young… and she’d always be young simply because she could never hope to grow as old as I.
Working with these unfamiliar organs was not only difficult, but dangerous. Especially given her fragile condition, I was loathe to do anything that could result in Minerva being injured. I coaxed her better slowly.
I paced myself, taking long breaks when it suited me. After studying her injuries, applying what exobiology I knew, and such slow work, my ocular implant finally showed positive results. Minerva needed another night of rest, but aside from that, she was positively healed.
