3.15 Second Contact
Good Lord, Nora was an uncooperative patient.
For one, she was skittish about needles. It was an odd thing to notice about someone else. Before I’d been abducted, I’d clammed up at the prospect of shots.
I’d had so many blood draws now though, I was just…numb to them now.
“Don’t say it!” she said, fingers hovering over the IV.
“…I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, but you were thinking it,” she said.
“At this rate you’re going to pull out your IVs in your sleep.”
“I know, I know. It’s for my own good. You think I haven’t said that myself a thousand times? I wrangle a throng of fifty middle schoolers.”
“Mister Caleb, we need her to tilt her head to one side for this.” Doctor Besigris was one of only three physicians authorized to oversee Nora. She’d been called in to relieve Nerin.
But Nerin was sticking around anyway. ‘Too invested’, she said.
“You got it,” I said. I was getting better at switching between Starspeak and English. “Hey, they need you to tilt your head over.”
Nora did so, with a quizzical look on her face. Doctor Besigris held a headband with a wire running to one of the new machines in the room. Nora wasn’t sure what the Casti was doing, and to be honest, I didn’t at first either.
“Oh, ahaha okay…uh, here just hand it to her,” I told the doctor. “She can put it on herself. It’s a headband.”
“The monitor needs to stay close to the nerves near the ear, the gap in the skull,” the doctor said.
“Make sure the device bit goes on your temple,” I said. “I think it’s an electromonitor: just to watch if your brain suddenly loses its sparks.”
“Oh that’s reassuring,” she said, nestling it into place. “I just woke up from a coma, and I feel so tired I’m going to fall right back asleep.”
“You do need rest,” I said.
“Screw that,” Nora said. “I know my body is shit right now, but I’m awake. Why are you so skittish about talking?”
“Because conversations can be stressful, and your doctor is being very clear with me about how carefully to tread.”
“You really learned the language?” she asked, glancing at the aliens in the room. She was nervous, but hiding it well.
“Yeah. I’m still in disbelief that the Vorak didn’t teach you. Your guy, Halax? I can’t believe you actually managed to teach him English,” I said.
“It was a team effort,” Nora said. “But he still picked it up fast , like, just a few weeks , fast.”
“Well it’s a pretty gross violation of procedure that the Vorak didn’t teach you guys Starspeak,” I said.
“They…kinda did,” Nora said. “Or at least, they tried. They only had two Vorak talking to us at all. The other ones we saw were guards, in sealed suits. We’ve been under quarantine for months.”
“Well, I got tested,” I said. “And unless I’m an extreme outlier, there shouldn’t be any significant risk with exposure, biologically speaking.”
Nai, sharp as ever, didn’t miss my tone.
“…You’re talking with them now, right?” Nora asked, looking over the two Farnata. “…So, telepathic aliens, huh? Halax didn’t mention that.”
“Yeah, uh…he wouldn’t have,” I said. “Farnata aren’t telepathic naturally.”
Nora latched onto that.
“Really? They said telepathy,” Nora pointed at Nai.
“Yes,” I said. “These two are telepathic, but…not how you think, and it’s not because they’re Farnata. I made the telepathy and shared how with them.”
Nora’s eyebrows climbed, implicitly asking ‘how?’
“It’s complicated,” I said. “I’ll show you another time. For now chill out and I’ll…well, I don’t know what to do right now, but decompress.”
“Decompress,” Nora nodded. “That sounds an awful lot like going back to sleep…but, no, not the same thing. Okay, probably a good idea. I can decompress. I still want to talk though. Idle conversation?”
“I still don’t know your last name,” I admitted.
Nora grinned for a moment, only to falter when she remembered the circumstances where I’d only learned her first.
“Right. Clarke, Nora Clarke, nineteen years old, former freshman at Berkeley, now alien abductee extraordinaire,” she introduced.
“Caleb Hane, juni— former junior at a Cali high school I’m sure you’ve never heard of, now…well, same as you.”
“See, now I know you’re an alien imposter,” Nora grinned. “No one actually from California calls it ‘Cali’, good lord…”
It was hard not to smile at that.
It was the first time in forever I’d even gotten to say anything about Earth and have someone know what I meant.
“Nice to properly meet you, Caleb Hane,” she smiled, reaching to shake my hand.
“You too, Nora Clarke,” I said. “These are my friends, this is Nai Cal-Yan-Ti and her sister, Nerin.”
“Shamya,” Nai greeted. So did her sister.
“She’s got powers,” Nora said, nodding to Nai. “Enumius.”
“Adept,” I translated, bringing a page of paper into existence for a few seconds. “That word means ‘super-able’ in Starspeak.”
“Starspeak. Right. Cool. Adept,” Nora said, nodding. “It fits. I like it.”
“Good to hear. You seem to be doing pretty well for having just woken up,” I said.
“Well I am feeling really weak right now,” she moaned. “What happened? How long has it been?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Halax and I were plodding toward a rocket that was going to take us to the planet...and…hey, you tried to kill me!” she said, trying to sock me in the shoulder.
Hearing her say it made me clam up.
“I-I…yeah. Sorry. I thought…well it doesn’t really matter what I thought. I’m sorry,” I managed to get out.
“Well…thanks for sucking at it, then. I remember…you said you thought we were going to sabotage your ride off this moon,” Nora said. “Why?”
She just moved right past my attempt on her life. Like it was nothing. How was I supposed to answer a question after she did something like that?
“…Because I think you and I have had very different experiences with Vorak,” I said.
“How different?”
“Have they tried to kill you?”
“No,” Nora frowned.
“Pretty different then,” I said.
“Seriously? Halax said First Contact was a super big deal, that it gave us a lot of protections…Just how much danger have you been in?”
“Vorak have tried to kill me more times than—well, okay not more times than I can count, but still a ton.”
“I mean…don’t take this the wrong way…” she said. “But you attacked us first. Did you…maybe attack them first too?”
“That…depends on your point of view,” I said, “and I’m just recently learning how complicated it gets.”
“How recently?”
“Last twenty-four hours,” I told her.
Her eyebrow silently climbed.
“Well…” she huffed, lying back in her hospital bed again, “I’m not exactly going anywhere else this…morning? Afternoon?”
“Morning. Early morning,” I informed her. “This moon has an artificial day-night cycle.”
“Point is, I’ve got time to hear a story, and we have a lot of them to share. So spill, what have you and your gang been up to?”
That made me truly freeze up.
Even Nerin noticed.
“Caleb?” Nai asked.
“I-ah, th—” My voice wasn’t answering me properly. Breathe! I demanded myself.
“Caleb, are you alright?” Nora asked.
“No,” I said. “No, yes. It’s…Sorry. I wasn’t prepared to talk about that—this. Nora, there isn’t—I don’t have ‘a group’. It’s just me.”
“You said you were abducted on a ship like ours,” she frowned. “Twenty-four kids, people, whatever. All dudes. You’re from the fourth ship.”
I nodded painfully. “Yeah. But it’s just me. No one else…I’m the only survivor,” I told her.
It crushed me actually saying it to another human. She must have gone through similar things to us, but she’d come out of the trial with only two fatalities out of seventy-two.
The shame of being the only one still breathing of my twenty-four was just…awful. In no small part because I knew I had nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t my fault, but how could I explain that to the reflex I felt just saying it aloud?
“Jesus…no one else?” Nora said, blanching. “I’m sorry—I don’t know what to say…”
“Sorry,” I said. “I—I didn’t realize—I forgot you didn’t know already. It didn’t come up the first time we talked.”
“It was a pretty hectic moment,” she agreed.
“Believe it or not,” I said, “It’s actually not in my top three. Probably top five though.”
“Caleb, no, you don’t have to talk about it right now,” she said.
“I know, I’m fine. I was just unprepared to bring up being alone. Besides, you’re right, we can really only talk right now.”
“As long as I’m not pushing you to relive trauma shit,” she said.
“It is ‘trauma shit’,” I told her, “and you can’t make me one way or the other. So you might as well hear it and laugh about the funny parts.”
“…Fair enough.”
“But you gotta promise not to judge me,” I said. “Please recall that there isn’t a manual for this stuff, so I made a lot of mistakes. A lot of dumb, risky, ignorant decisions.”
“Cross my heart,” she agreed.
So I settled in and told a story about a kid, his not-quite-imaginary friend, and some aliens all running for their lives. Breaking out of the Vorak cell, finding the other abductees’ bodies, running into Nai for the first time…
“Seriously?” Nora chuckled, “you forgot the safety?”
“Tell you what,” I said, “you pick up an alien gun while you’re a pint low and we’ll see if you figure out if there’s a safety.”
I wasn’t sure what to say about Daniel. That explanation could come later, with more details about psionics.
But I told her about Stalker, the trust that had seen Tasser and I scrape by. I told her about killing Trapper. Mostly. I glossed over how I felt about it later. How I didn’t learn of their death until much later. Courser with their animals, improvising more and more Adeptry on the fly.
Nora’s was smiling as I told my story. I was surprised the smile didn’t upset me. I suppose it was nice to have someone eager to listen, no matter how bad things had been. But the longer things went, it faded slightly.
I’d come too close to death too many times for anyone my age.
No—for anyone at all. Age had nothing to do with it.
Telling her about Chief was hard. Out of all the things I’d gone through, that was the one that frustrated me most. It still bothered me just how viscerally I’d reacted to her death. She’d been trying to kill me, and none of it had been my fault.
Except now…I think I might have understood why.
Sendin Marfek must have been under Tox’s orders. And the Coalition talked about her with the same fear the Vorak had for the Warlock.
“The more I think about it now…” I admitted, consulting Nai too, “I think she wasn’t actually going for the kill. I think Tox ordered her to, but she didn’t want to.”
“Could she have been trying to take you alive?” Nora asked.
“…Yeah,” I said. Realized. “She was too close to me for too long. If she…”
I knew more about both combat and Adeptry now. With what she’d been capable of? If she’d been serious, she could have gored me from the first move.
It sucked to even consider. Daniel had sacrificed himself to help me survive her. If that had actually been pointless…
No, that was a red herring. Daniel had been falling apart at the seams anyway. Knowing what I did now? It would have been a miracle if he lasted even another day.
I told her about life at Demon’s Pit, the quirks of living on an alien planet, settling my differences with Nai.
“You two didn’t get along, huh?” she said, giving Nai a curious look.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“What, were you and Halax instant buddies?” I asked.
“Kinda…?” she started. “I mean, he almost shot me, but that was half the point: he didn’t. So a bond was made.”
“Funny,” I said. “I almost shot Nai. Halax almost shot you. Symmetry.”
She cracked up at that. Enough it made her start wheezing.
That made her doctors start fretting all over again.
Eventually I got around to telling her about my doctors’ visits. The Green Complex was of great interest to her, especially when I said we could get her an individual nutritional index too.
“You’ve been eating real food?!” she screamed.
“Whoa! Only since getting here,” I said. “The first time we talked I was eating the same rations that were on the ship.”
“Still though!” she complained. “Real food?”
“Yeah, we’ll get you some,” I said. “I know some people in charge around here.”
Nora nodded. “That’s good. You sure they haven’t been taking advantage of you?”
“Oh, they definitely have been,” I said. “But they’ve at least been honest about it, and I made sure I got stuff in return.”
“Like food?”
“Like help,” I said. “I’ve been working to try and find Earth, or at least how we got out here.”
“…That means…you’re looking for my group, or at least where the otters are keeping the spaceships we were on. Wait, shit, if you wound up with them too, they have your ship too! All of us winding up with them? That can’t be a coincidence…”
“I thought so too,” I cut her off, “but I’ve already been down that road. Proving the Vorak abducted us gets…”
“Complicated?”
“You have no idea,” I said. “And…if I’m honest…the evidence doesn’t point that way. Even if I wish it did.”
“Okay…” Nora breathed. “That’s reassuring. We’ve been operating under the assumption that the Vorak were as clueless as we were. It would suck finding out Halax was complicit in abducting me.”
“No, they’ve definitely been keeping information from you,” I said. “But…they don’t have to have abducted us to be…contextually hostile.”
Nora nodded ponderously. This conversation was probably more cathartic to her than it was to me. She was finally talking with someone outside the cage Marshal Tispas—or some subordinate—had kept her in.
“So, how long are you going to avoid saying how long I’ve been out?” Nora asked cheerfully. Her tone gave me shivers. It sounded like more of the same chatter, but the look in her eyes told me exactly how seriously she was taking this.
“…Almost seven weeks,” I told her.
“Is that Earth weeks or—” she gestured about, “—alien weeks?”
“Earth weeks,” I said, doing the math with my psionics. “A bit more than eleven-hundred hours.”
“…Shit,” she muttered.
“I…For a while I wasn’t sure if you were going to wake up,” I said. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
“Halax and I weren’t planning to be gone longer than two weeks,” she said. “That was the hard time limit we agreed on. Is he nearby?”
“No,” I said. “He’s…well, actually he was on another moon for this planet a few hours ago, but I’m pretty sure he’s on his way back to Archo.”
“We were on Archo,” Nora recalled. “And…we aren’t on Archo now. Where are we?”
I materialized a journal page with a diagram of the star system.
“You were here, on Archo. It’s Yawhere’s only moon. When you were shot, things moved fast. Halax had to leave you with us because we were better prepared to handle you, medically speaking. We flew from Archo to here, Lakandt.”
“We’re on another moon,” Nora recognized. “Seriously? The planet is called Paris? Like, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, croissants Paris?”
“It’s a false cognate,” I said. “There’s not a lot of them, but it’s not the only one.”
“Where did you see Halax?”
“Here, this moon,” I said, pointing out Sorc. “It’s under Vorak control right now.”
“Under control? Like an occupation?” she asked.
“Nothing ‘like’ about it,” I said. “It is an occupation. The otters are occupying Harrogate, Yawhere, Archo, and Sorc. These two moons, Lakandt and Draylend, are the opposition.”
“…So it’s a long way back to the others,” she said. “Shit…what am I going to do? Those guys need me.”
“They need you alive,” I said. “So remember, decompress.”
She did not look like she was considering that.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “My group, they rely on me. A lot. I’m basically their leader. I was organizing things, helping people keep in a normal headspace, I was clothing a bunch of us too.”
I only just noticed that she wasn’t wearing a hospital gown anymore.
“Wait, where did you get those clothes?”
She was in a simple dark green t-shirt and plain grey sweatpants.
“Made them,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You didn’t make yours?”
“No,” I said. “I was wearing crappy rags and Farnata duds that didn’t fit for months. These were custom made by another Farnata.”
“You didn’t have any decent clothes for months? And when you finally got some commissioned, you went with suspenders?”
“Hey…” I said defensively, “I actually like the suspenders…”
“You look like you’re in the Great Gatsby,” Nora smiled, “like some astro-socialite off to see Daisy Buchanan…but you also kinda look like a caveman. You realize you need a haircut, right?”
“I…yeah, I haven’t cut it since I got abducted,” I said, grinning. “I’m…I’m just really glad someone can notice now.”
·····
The next few days, I bailed on the now hybrid Adept-psionic workshop, and the investigation meetings. Nai could cover for me.
Funnily enough, Nora was actually released from the hospital just a day after waking up. If something did go wrong, then there was very little the hospital would actually be able to do. Dyn estimated the Organic Authority wouldn’t make any significant progress in creating more human medicine for at least a year. Keeping her at the hospital had mostly been to monitor her coma for changes.
Since she didn’t give any indication of falling into another, she was moving into one of the spare rooms in our place. The other Farnata to whom the room belonged would be disappointed, but he’d deployed to one of the resistance cells on Yawhere for months now.
Nora moved in pretty easily. No personal effects whatsoever.
Of course, with any new roommate, there’s always bound to be some initial friction.
“Oh fuck! What is that thing ?” Nora shrieked, flinching back when Nai’s pet came lurching out of her room.
The grubby little worm was the length and thickness of my shin. He resembled a dry tan caterpillar, with dark spotty flecks running down its back and a thick mane of fur around the base of his head. He gazed up at Nora questioningly with two pairs of beady little eyes before giving a small chirp from his beak-like mouth.
Seemingly dissatisfied with Nora, he squirmed toward Nai who scooped up her little monster affectionately.
“That’s Toe,” I told her. “He’s a…well, I don’t actually know.”
“One thing after another…” she muttered. “That is the most horrifying thing I have ever, ever seen.”
“She alright?” Nerin asked, carefully eyeing her patient.
“Yeah, she’s just disturbed by Toe,” I told her.
“Thank you!” Nerin huffed. “That animal is a nightmare for everyone but you, Nai.”
“Don’t listen to them,” Nai cooed, scratching the worm’s head. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”
“If it’s any consolation, Nerin agrees with you,” I said, roaming into the apartment’s kitchen. “For that matter, so do I.”
“So this is where you’ve been crashing? It’s really weird,” Nora said, looking around the apartment. “It’s so…gah, I can’t even put it into words.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You can tell it wasn’t made by humans: all the halls, walls, and doors are just ‘off’, a tiny bit? But then it also seems super normal, because even though it’s all alien, there’s still, well, halls, walls, a lot of the same features you’d see in human apartments.”
“Yeah, yeah! Right on the nose,” Nora said. “I’ve spent the last few months in prefabbed aluminum cabins shoved into the middle of an airplane hangar. But this is just weirdly domestic. Like, this is a recognizably a kitchen. Aliens have kitchens. Why is that so weird to think about?”
“Because it’s easy to think about how aliens could be different from us,” I said. “But it’s significantly more complicated to think about how they might be similar.”
“Or why…” Nora said. “If aliens have legs…it stands to reason they would develop stairs at one point. Unless they just used ramps all the time.”
“Congratulations, you just participated in Underpinning Theory,” I said. “It’s a pretty wide field dedicated to learning why alien species are the same and different in the ways they are.”
“Have you had to do much with that?”
“Not really,” I said. “I got letters from about forty different universities across this star system and the neighboring ones before the Coalition had to start blocking them.”
Nora gave a small laugh at that. “How’d they even learn where to send them?”
“The Organic Authority,” I said. “We’re headed there tomorrow to get you checked out allergy-wise. I can show you the schedule. But I thought you might appreciate this beforehand.”
I materialized a bowl and spoon in front of her, unscrewing the cap to a bottle of broth retrieved from the cupboard.
I heated it with Adeptry before pouring her a bowl of the black broth.
She stared at the food like it was a last meal instead of a first. But as eager as she was, she still kept a healthy amount of caution.
“…You said your first alien meal triggered an allergic reaction,” she said. “Is this safe?”
“Almost certainly,” I said. “I was allergic to a contaminant that got onto the bread they gave me. This broth is almost too simple to set anything off. But…even if I’m wrong, we have these.”
I pulled the blue epi-pen analogue I’d carried on habit.
“Epi pens?” she asked.
I nodded. “Saved my life more than once,” I said. “The Organic Authority made us a bunch. Nai, Nerin, and I all carry one just in case.”
“For me or for you?”
“Both,” I said. “But eat up now. It’s not going to stay hot forever.”
She did.
I got the impression things were overwhelming for her right now. Waking up amongst new aliens, plus healing from her injuries, taking in Lakandt and all its eccentricities; it would be overwhelming for anyone.
So it was immensely gratifying to watch her enjoy the food. The look on her face was pure bliss. She wound up abandoning the spoon and drinking the rest straight from a bowl.
I’d forgotten how good it felt to be happy for someone else. That wasn’t the kind of experience I often got to share with my alien friends. Maybe it could be.
I made a note to think about finding out more about what Nai and Tasser liked. Nerin and Nemuleki too.
“Holyfuckingshit,” Nora swore. “That is…so good…I…probably shouldn’t have any more…”
“Correct,” I said. “You’ve been fed by an IV for a while. I don’t know exactly how long is too long, but best not to overdo it.”
She nodded. “My stomach has to get back on the job first. I gotcha.”
Now that she was awake, getting her settled was just the first of many, many steps. Past that, our next priority was getting her back to functioning condition.
Because when she was done with the meal, she began to stand only to immediately fall.
She wound up falling more than a few times under our building’s gravity. After the second time, she started catching herself by materializing a large cushion where she fell.
“Easy, easy,” I said, extending a hand to help her up. “You alright?”
“Yes!” she snarled impatiently. “It’s my stupid body. I’m still weak. If I’m not pumping adrenaline.” She half braced herself to get up on her own, but abandoned the idea, letting me pull her back to her feet.
My impression was that she was more frustrated with herself than me. She was probably feeling helpless, so it was best not to put off rehabilitation.
So the gym in our basement became her second home. Not because she necessarily needed to work out, but because the gym’s gravity could be modified independently of the rest of the building’s. Just spending time under Earth-like gravity would help her.
So Nora’s physical therapy progressed quickly, if painfully.
Having spent most of her coma under the customized gravity and atmosphere of her hospital room, she hadn’t lost as much muscle and bone integrity as I’d expected.
The fact that she was also developing augmentations didn’t hurt either.
“Augmentations usually develop in response to a regular action, or some activity you’ve got your mind on,” I said. “Otherwise they crop up almost directly in response to trauma.”
She was doing very careful and slow squats with weights. In the gym’s Earth-like gravity, she was actually proving to be more coordinated despite the extra strain.
“How’d you learn this stuff?” Nora asked, holding a metal plate at arm’s length in front of her chest.
“Adeptry in general, or the augmentation stuff?”
“Both.”
“Well Nai taught me most of the beginner stuff, but I stumbled my way through some of the rest. The augmentation stuff I learned at the Organic Authority. They had to do all kinds of tests on me, I learned a lot about my body. I have bulletproof hands, you know?”
Nora winced.
Nerin didn’t miss the face either.
“Is she alright?” she asked, “How intense is the pain?”
“Pain?” I asked Nora.
“Uh, no,” she said, continuing to hold her weights. “It’s nothing.”
But actually…I’d only given Nerin the intro module, but I was in high demand as a translator. Not that I was going anywhere without Nora any time soon, but the more people who could communicate with her the better.
No matter how awkward it got.
<…Not much? I’m not Adept. I can’t really add to the intro module. I can only take notes with the pages you included.>
<…I don’t want to say,> she admitted.
“Hey Nora,” I said. “I told you I’d explain how I made her telepathic. You want to see?”
“Oh, hell yes!” she grinned.
<…Fine, give the stupid dictionary.>
As I set my psionics copying the dictionary and sharing it with Nerin, I explained the basics of psionics to Nora.
“Long story short? I made mental tools with Adeptry. They’re…based in, or connect to, consciousness. You operate them by thought, and you can use them for…well a ton of stuff.”
“And one of these tools is a dictionary?” Nora asked.
“Yeah, it’s kinda like being able to remember a really big spreadsheet automatically. Each entry is paired, one for Starspeak, one for English. I’ve got an intro module first though; it’s got some super basic tools that help you perceive and use the rest.”
“Probably has some risks,” Nora said. It wasn’t a question. “Sounds like they’re worth it though. I’m in.”
“Just like that?”
“Are the risks bigger than I might think?”
“Possibly…” I said. “but I think they’re manageable, maybe even eliminated if you go slowly and stay informed about what you’re doing.”
“Then let’s get going,” Nora said. “I want to start learning more Starspeak ASAP. Halax didn’t have the time to teach me more than a few phrases.”
“Well I’m sure Nerin can help with that. Since you’re not in a coma anymore, a lot of her time just opened up.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“I think you’re going to make a friend,” I grinned.