I didn’t want to leave her in my sick bay, but I could barely keep my eyes open from so many days of non-stop work and the exhaustion that generally accompanied my studies of her alienphysiology. Despite my impatience, I knew I’d have to wait for her to awaken and that she surely would after another day of sleep.
After I took a much needed rest of my own, I rushed to sick bay and checked on her vital signs. The ship would have alerted me had her condition changed overnight, but seeing her lying there and finally looking close to normal again helped a lot. I stroked her hair out of her face and left Minerva to sleep some more.
Waiting could be painful. The more time I spent nursing Minerva back to health, the stronger my compulsion to make a confession to her that I couldn’t predict how she would respond to. I hadn’t studied her planet’s socializing instincts and mating strategies enough yet to know how she’d respond to my proposition.
From observation, I’d learned that she had turned down both John and Dr. Trout. And although in both cases, her feelings were understandable, I couldn’t be certain that her responses to them weren’t just a quirk of the species. Maybe that’s all men were to them — experiences, but nothing more. I’d find out once the little earthling awakened.
The ship rumbling beneath my feet hastened my exit from sick bay and I returned to my cockpit to figure out what had just happened. The ship’s warning signal blared and I adjusted my spatial sensors to understand the nature of what caused the rumbling shake.
I peered out the forward cockpit window. A primitive satellite object in earth’s orbit had just crossed paths with my ship, hurtling close enough to briefly destabilize us from orbit and cause us to fall around the curvature of the earth a few kilometers/second faster. I tapped into the satellite’s transmissions and found more data than I knew what to do with— personal phone calls, news channels, radio broadcasts, and terabytes of information came through in a single stream.
Delightful.I wasn’t supposed to get a hold of data like this until months into my mission during an orchestrated and assisted “escape”, far more controlled than the one I’d actually participated in. At least the imperium would have this evidence that I hadn’t botched the mission. At least not intentionally.
After studying the satellite, I studied the interstellar bodies in the Terran solar system that I could observe from my ship. Their hot yellow star was puny compared to our twin stars, but generated enough heat to fuel all life on the little planet, as well as life on Venus, Mars, Uranus, Neptune, and their Moon. From comments I’d heard in the lab, they had yet to discover the lifeforms on these planets. Given how the Terrans had treated me, I wasn’t so sure this was a bad thing. What a bitter fate for these tiny creatures, microscopic and otherwise, that they’d be sentenced to a life of poking and prodding in some deep basement lab.
I’d worked enough. After a hearty meal, I slept some more and then finally sent out my subspace communications to the imperium — the ones I’d been dreading since I’d reunited with my ship. I broadcasted messages on a broad Alliance frequency so that any other nearby ships might hear it and arrive first. I’d prefer a Polluxian, of course, but I could handle an Arietan clan leader, a Devoran royal, or a Taurean senator just as easily.
My ship’s sensors sounded, alerting me to activity within sick bay. The moment had finally arrived. Minerva was awake. I could tell her everything — what happened, how I felt about her, and even the confession that had weighed on my mind since I first took her onboard my vessel.
ELEVEN
MINNIE
The gentle,white noise hum, the cool sick bed and the gentle throbbing of a heart monitor led me to believe that the government officials had simply moved me into a different, more secure facility. Then I noticed my pain was gone. I sat up, and before I could swing my legs out of bed and decide whether I was truly free, large doors swung open and Vidar entered the room, overhead lights illuminating as he entered.
He was dressed in clothing that was certainly alien. A pair of tight leather trousers slid into his pair of black boots that were made out of a material that looked like crocodile skin. A white linen tunic hung loose over his rippling chest muscles and a leather vest trimmed with animal fur hung open on his shoulders, armed with a variety of probes and what I presumed were weapons. His hair was messy, as usual, but fell rather handsomely around his pointed ears.
His tail swayed out behind him and landed on the ground with a thud as a wide grin lit up his face.
“My guest of honor is finally awake,” he announced.
After I’d done due diligence in taking him in, with all his gigantic glory, I noticed how alien the room I lay in truly was.A bluish-silver metal created the walls of the room, which were rounded and soft as opposed to the cold, austere environments of earth hospitals. Needless to say, the lab where he’d been experimented on was far more austere.
“Vidar,” I managed to croak, after remaining silent a little too long, “Where am I?”
“You’re still tired,” he replied gently, “Have some water first, then we’ll discuss it.”
He rushed to my side, placing a warm, comforting hand on the small of my back. Vidar offered me a drink and the water sent shockwaves of relief through me. I could hardly feel any aches or pains, except my head, which throbbed from the base of my neck all the way to the top of my skull. I winced as the cold water hit the roof of my mouth.
“Careful. You’re still a bit sensitive from the surgery.”
“Surgery!?”
I scanned my body quickly for any sign of scars or stitches, but there were none.
“Yes,” Vidar continued, careful to talk in that slow, gentle way of his, “I had to perform surgery on you from the injuries you sustained while captive.”
Tears welled in my eyes as the last few hours of my horrid stay in the government facility came rushing back
“They tortured me,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“But… It’s what we did to you. Except what we did to you was worse. I participated in that. Vidar…I’m so sorry…”
His hand remained on the small of my back as he wrapped the other around me. My head nestled in a soft crook of his chest, just beneath a bulging pectoral muscle that I wouldn’t have been able to reach if I weren’t sat atop a hospital bed.
“Do not think of what happened in the past, little earthling. Only now.”
