The Strangers Read online

  I needed to understand what he meant by neutric energy. This could be the beginning of a breakthrough. It was desalination on a scale we'd never seen before. A plant that could convert liquid to clean drinking water in a matter of seconds, powered by an energy source that didn't seem to cost the Etrallia anything at all. As far as I was concerned, it was pure magic.

  LENA

  "But what does it feel like?" Kymera asked.

  "It's warm," I laughed.

  "But how warm, what does that mean?"

  "Well." Memories of trekking through the California desert surfaced in my mind. "Where I work it's mostly burning. At high noon, it's so hot, you feel like you're boiling, or like someone's thrown you into the heart of an open fire."

  It was her favorite topic of conversation. Earth weather. For someone cooped up in a spaceship, I imagined it served as a kind of escape.

  "That sounds nice," said Kymera, tying off the bandage on her patient's arm.

  "It's brutal, really."

  "Not like the cold of space."

  "No," I admitted. She had yet to ask me anything about human medicine.

  "Next patient," Kymera called.

  An Etrallian guard came ambling through the curtain, but instead of sitting in the examination chair, he remained standing.

  Kymera scanned him quickly. "What do you need?"

  The guard grumbled something I couldn't make out.

  "He says he's sore all over," Kymera explained. "What have you been doing?" She asked him.

  "Walking." The guard voice was deep and raspy. "Can barely do my duties."

  "And why is that, Celway? Have you been drinking again?" Kymera sounded more like a chiding mother than a concerned doctor.

  I studied her patient more closely. "Could be the flu," I said.

  Kymera frowned. "He's not bleeding," she said blankly. "It must be the ale."

  "Or the flu." I pointed to his forehead where tiny beads of sweat were gathering. "Fever, body aches.."

  The guard heaved suddenly and a mucus-like substance went flying through the air.

  "Congestion," I added, mildly.

  The guard shuffled forward and for a moment I thought he was finally going to sit. Instead, he dropped to his knees and keeled over.

  Kymera jumped to her feet. She shouted a phrase I'd heard before, one I'd come to recognize as an obscenity.

  Christ. This Etrallian wasn't just fatigued, he was experiencing full-on exhaustion. I wondered how long he'd been ignoring his illness, fighting to continue his duties as a guard before giving in and seeking help. I wondered belatedly why Kymera looked like a grenade had just landed in her medical bay.

  I knew it was our fault. I knew it even before Kymera explained to me there was no such thing as an Etrallian flu. They had other diseases, rare ones, but no one had ever experienced something like this before. This was unprecedented in their history.

  By the end of the week, a quarter of the fleet was infected. And those are just my rough estimates as a doctor.

  It didn't take long before Kymera's initial panic spread from the medical bay to the rest of the ship.

  A week passed and still, we couldn't find a cure. I took my knowledge of the human flu vaccine and attempted to adapt it for Etrallian physiology, but our initial trials proved fruitless. The Etrallians we vaccinated didn't improve. Our new vaccine was as good as a placebo.

  Feeling utterly useless, I walked around and made sure the patients were comfortable. Half of them didn't want me anywhere near them so Kymera would send me into the supply closets on any errand she deemed remotely necessary.

  I felt guilty and unreasonably tired for someone who could do little to remedy the situation.

  It was a day much like this when the President arrived in the overflowing infirmary.

  "Lena." She made a beeline for me, careful not to look Kymera in the eye. "You need to come with me," she said quietly.

  I stood slowly, unnerved by her tone.

  She leaned closer. "We're leaving." Barely a whisper in my ear.

  "Why? What's happened?"

  She met my gaze pointedly. "This," she said simply. "Tensions are rising. We're being blamed for spreading contagion to the Etrallia. I won't put this team at risk a minute longer."

  "I'm not leaving," I said resolutely.

  The President stared. "Do you really want to have this discussion here?"

  Several of the Etrallia were staring at us from their beds. Even if they couldn't understand us, body language was a powerful thing.

  "Running isn't the answer," I said. "If we stay, I might be able to help with the quarantine. People could still recover, their immune systems just need to adjust."

  "Lena, we're aborting. There's no need to--"

  "I'm not staying for your stupid intelligence. I'm staying for them." I gestured to the Etrallia suffering in their beds. They may not be human, but they're living, breathing beings just like us. They deserve our help."

  Either the President didn't want to make a scene or she saw in my eyes that there'd be no swaying me. "Very well."

  I took a deep breath as she left me to my own devices.

  "Lena." A cool hand on my wrist.

  I whirled at the strange, clammy touch.

  Henry peered down at me. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to startle you."

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest as I looked at him, our formidable guard. He hadn't fallen ill yet, thank god.

  "It's alright."

  "I think that was very brave." He indicated the door where the President had disappeared.

  "Thank you." I met his eyes, tired and more than a little defeated. "Henry, can you do me a favor?"

  He cocked his head.

  "Can you get me out of this place for a little while?"

  Silently, he nodded. "Of course, Dr. Cordell."

  "Call me Lena," I sighed.

  "Lena."

  "You can manage right?" I asked Kymera.

  "We'll be fine," she assured me.

  Henry led me down several corridors and at first, I tried to pay attention to where we were going, but the layout of the ship was unfathomable. It was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other, head low so I wouldn't have to look into any more Etrallian eyes.

  "Henry."

  He stopped mid-stride.

  "I wanted to thank you." I reached for his hand without meaning to, clasped his strange, scaly skin in my mine before I realized that I'd never done such a thing before. It should have been strange, that skin to skin contact except touching him wasn't alien at all. The sensation wasn't unlike touching human flesh. That zing of awareness. Sentience.

  Henry stared at my hand where it rested on his forearm. I squeezed gently. "Thank you for protecting us. And thank you for helping me."

  "Of course." Cautiously, he returned the gesture. "Lena."

  I took a deep breath. "So, where are we going?"

  "The Common Space."

  We stopped by the lab to gather Mars and Rhine. The utterly abandoned workspace made my gut twist.

  "She tried to convince us to evacuate," said Mars. "But we figured we'd keep you company instead."

  Rhine wore his usual stern expression.

  "Is Gillis..."

  Mars gave a short laugh. "No, he's holed up in there." I followed his gaze and realized the lab wasn't entirely abandoned. Secured behind the glass wall of his office was Gillis, back to us all, fiddling with something on his desk.

  "Afraid he'll get sick," Rhine grumbled.

  I swallowed. "I don't blame him."

  The place Henry took us turned out to be the Etrallian version of a bar. Chairs and tables lined the walls with one corner set up for dispensing drinks. The other corner housed a stage where a female Etrallia gyrated slowly under the bright lights. In the shadows beneath the stage, a few of our human coworkers sat watching, their faces obscured. Clustered around a table to our left stood a group of Etrallian workers, throwing back their drinks.r />
  "What are they doing?" I asked, indicating the strange objects in the center of the table.

  "Playing pardai." From the way Henry said this, I gathered it was a fairly ordinary event. "You can't keep thousands of Etrallians cooped up in a fleet without providing some form of entertainment." He gestured to the counter across the room. "We should sit."

  Mars began to follow him, but I made for the crowd around the table.

  A hand grasped my shoulder. "Lena," Rhine said in my ear. "We don't know what this is--"

  Irritated, I shrugged him off. "It's a game, Charles."

  He followed me anyway, jostling past Etrallians nearly a foot taller than him as I pushed my way to the table. It was there that I made my discovery. Among the bounty on the table was a small cylindrical device not unlike the one I'd seen before.

  "I'm in," I said.

  The Etrallians stopped their bickering.

  The ringleader met my gaze, surprise in his eyes. A second later it was gone, replaced with the calm, arrogant air of one who knows his own power. "In for what?" His hands hit the table as he leaned forward, his face a foot away from mine. "What are you doing here, Earth girl?" His growl was low and gravelly. "What have you come to play?"

  MARS

  I tried to ignore the fact that I was alone on an alien spaceship. I really did, but after a few minutes of pretending to calmly sip my drink, I couldn't take it any longer.

  Despite my fears of being crushed, or worse, pissing off an Etrallian, I pushed stubbornly through the group clustered around the pardai table. When I could finally see what was going on, I nearly turned tail and ran to reclaim my chair.

  Lena faced a particular fierce-looking Etrallian. I wanted to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, but Rhine was speaking urgently into her ear. She promptly ignored him, replying back to the Etrallian across the table.

  It was Zubeida, Commander of the Etrallian Guard, a hulking armored Etrallian whose face was currently pinned to a whiteboard down on Earth.

  "Better luck next time, Earth girl." Zubeida smirked, caressing the weapon on his hip.

  "I believe you mean Earth woman, Commander." Lena fixed him with a hard stare.

  And here I thought she had passed her psych evaluation.

  The Commander huffed. "Thirty Earth years and you humans think you're all grown up." He cast a reproving glance toward Henry. "Is their insolence wearing off on you, boy?"

  Henry watched them silently, ever the sentinel. I couldn't imagine what he was thinking. Was he wishing Lena hadn't challenged his boss or hoping she beat him in whatever crazy game they were playing? From what I could tell, she was losing. Not that I had any idea how this worked.

  Zubeida took another swig of his drink, dark liquid sloshing down the side of his cup. Lena reached for two dice-like objects and his hand clamped down on her wrist, firm and unyielding.

  "She gets one more roll." Henry stepped forward, his voice clear and steady.

  The Etrallian next to me growled.

  The Commander slammed his empty chalice against the table, making the metallic surface vibrate. "One more for the Earth girl," he declared.

  Without taking her eyes from him, Lena threw her hand to the open air. I watched in fascination as the objects caught in the center of the table--literally stopped in mid-air, an anti-gravity field slowing them as if they'd hit a wall. It seemed to be over, but then the end of one die turned over the other, spinning in a slow circular dance. She still had velocity on her side.

  Around me everyone grew strangely quiet, holding their breath as if the slightest disturbance could influence the outcome of the roll. Hell, maybe it could.

  The dice ceased their movement, frozen two feet off the table as surely as if they were frozen in a block of ice. Zubeida extended his hand into the invisible field.

  Eyes still locked on his, Lena waited a long, torturous moment, searching for something. Finally, she jabbed a finger on the edge of the table, pushing a button I hadn't seen earlier.

  The dice fell through the air, released from their weightless prison. Zubeida flexed his fingers, ensuring his palm was flat and the dice landed in his hand soundlessly.

  Everyone leaned forward to read the markings. Everyone except me. On the right side of the table sat an assortment of objects, devices I didn't recognize and had no names for, but as soon as the dice could be clearly read, Lena reached for one object in particular.

  Zubeida cursed and slammed a hand on the table.

  "Just this," she said. "This is all I want."

  The others hissed in disappointment. Zubeida had a strange look on his face. "That?" He asked, incredulously. "A useless toy."

  "It's not useless to me."

  Zubeida gestured for her to take it.

  I didn't need to ask what it was because Lena was grinning. Henry and Rhine ushered us away from the group and I found myself grinning, too. We'd just won a small water converter, the kind of simple gadget the Etrallia had in droves, but which we desperately needed.

  "This little thing could convert ocean water for a hundred people back on Earth." Lena tilted it sideways and the metallic surface flashed in the light.

  "Twice as many children," I added. It was a simple bit of gadgetry, compact yet powerful.

  "Do you realize the implications of this?"

  "You don't need to convince me." I held up my hands.

  Lena turned to Rhine.

  "Don't try that again," he said.

  A loud screech split the air, echoing across the metal walls and we froze in our tracks. Across the room, there was a very human groan and two men sprinted away from the stage, faces alive with terror.

  I turned to grab Lena and realized Rhine had already hauled her into the corridor. My feet moved without my permission as Henry's arm clamped around my own, dragging me to safety.

  3

  Disturbance

  LENA

  He was dead. A member of our team, a human being. The shock of it had us huddled in the briefing room on the Base, awaiting direction from our President.

  The General's face was red with anger. "This is murder," he huffed. "Pure and simple."

  "The body's been removed and returned to his family," the President said quietly. "We all knew the risks that were involved and I can't say that any of us completely grasp the situation yet."

  "He was murdered," the General repeated. "By that lady Etrallia." He jabbed a finger skyward.

  Beside me, Rhine nodded in agreement.

  The President sighed. "Our two eyewitnesses say he transgressed in some way. If it wasn't unprovoked, the last thing we should do is start making demands of the people who still blame us for causing an epidemic."

  The General shook his head. "I say we remove their purifier and end this whole exchange. This farce of playing nice, of getting to know each other is over."

  I felt his anger, his fear. I couldn't say I felt any differently except that I needed to know more. It was like the President said, we didn't fully understand what had happened. We needed more information.

  "We've been over this, General." Maria Burgess regarded him sternly. "Even if we could extract the machine from the ship, we don't understand how to operate it."

  That was considering it was even possible to extract such a contraption from the ship that contained it. I had my doubts.

  "We could figure it out," the General persisted stubbornly. "With the brightest minds in the country, are you seriously telling me we can't figure this out?"

  "Not to mention," the President added, "removing it without permission would be a direct violation. You know as well as I do that we can't afford a war."

  It was my turn to nod in agreement. We'd only just begun to learn about the Etrallia. Their incredible technology was what we needed to survive. They could teach us so much. They might even be able to save us.

  "War's always been coming." There was a darkness in the General's eyes, so unlike the amused, jovial man I'd met only a month ago.


  "He was one of us," someone spoke up. "His name was Richard. Whatever he did...he deserves someone to fight for him."

  There was a murmur of assent around the room.

  "I'm not denying that," said President Burgess. She looked to the General. "We'll petition the Etrallian Council for reparations. It's the least we can do."

  Begrudgingly, the General accepted.

  When we arrived back on the main Etrallian ship, we were ushered quickly into the Council Room where Galentide received his subordinates. I felt the same sense of insignificance that I'd felt the last time we were here, when we were being chastised for Rhine's exploration of the ship's restricted areas.

  The dais that held Galentide's throne was a good seven feet above the floor, the height of an Etrallian and far beyond the height of a human. This was by design, I was certain.

  On Galentide's right sat Curran, slightly dwarfed next to his magnificent leader. On Galentide's other side, Zubeida stood at attention, fingers stroking his oblong weapon. Henry had called this a blaster and his description left me with a full understanding of what it could do. Across the dais stretched Galentide's Council, an assortment of politicians and representatives from each of the ships.

  Their voices died away, replaced by a wary silence as our footsteps echoed throughout the chamber.

  Galentide spoke first. "Well?" He leaned forward to peer down at us. "Why have you come?"

  Always to the point, these Etrallians.

  The President was our only representative. Thankfully, she'd managed to convince the General to stay behind to man the Base. Now, she looked a bit like she regretted that decision as she stepped forward to face fifteen Etrallians, seated high above her.

  "As you're aware." She cleared her throat. "A member of our team was killed yesterday. He suffered what appeared to be blunt force trauma and a terrible bite to the neck."

  Galentide said nothing.

  After a long moment, Curran finally spoke. "Terrible, indeed." To my ears, he sounded sincere, but his inflection was nothing I could reliably recognize. Etrallian translations through the comm device were stiff at best.