Aeva
The walk back to Alex’s cabin was a silent one, as both of us pondered what had happened not even five minutes ago. It had never occurred to me that Alex, despite him being so small, was so fragile. I mean, he had made mention of it when we had met face to face for the first time, but it never really clicked for me until as soon as he had caught his breath, he had thanked Iskender for saving his life. It seemed like when he wasn’t complaining about the overall quality of his mech, he was thanking her.
They really do need to have these mechs to interact with us in a meaningful way. As I pushed the mech in the wheelchair, I noticed at the edge of my vision that Alex was staring blankly at me, as if he was staring right through me. I had seen it many times, especially on those that had just come back from battle. “Credit for your thoughts?” I asked, snapping him out of his funk.
“Well,” he started. “I guess it’s a bit difficult to describe it, but I’m what Terrans call an adrenaline junkie. Basically, what that means is that I chase whatever will give me the biggest hit of adrenaline.”
“And what just happened gave you a lot of it?” I asked, not really knowing what adrenaline was.
“Well, yeah. The human body is designed to give us lots of it when we are in dangerous situations, something to do with our fight or flight instincts, but usually there’s little or no risk of getting harmed or killed for those like me because there are so many safety procedures in place to prevent us from getting harmed,” he said. “Like for example, there are these things called rollercoasters, that are specifically designed to simulate the experience of dogfighting in a plane, or at least the good ones are. They’re completely safe though.”
I shuddered at the imagery of that. “That sounds horrible,” I said with no small amount of disgust.
“Oh, I’m sure once this whole war thing dies down there’ll be theme parks that will start catering to people your height here in a year or so, if they haven’t already started. I’ll take you to one of those eventually. But that’s beside the point,” he suddenly said shaking his head. “The point is that this is the first time in my thrill-seeking life that I have come this close to death.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Didn’t you get hit by an IED earlier this week? I seem to remember that it caused all this stuff embroiling the galaxy right now.”
“I wasn’t worried then because I knew that nothing short of another IED was going to get me out of that thing without my permission.” He paused and swallowed. “This is the first time that I was that close to death, and it terrified me.” There was silence for a moment before he finally decided to speak up again. “I might just have a slight fear of heights now.”
After everything that Alex had just said, I was shocked to hear that from him. I gave a small chuckle to help quell my own emotions, and hopefully quell his. “Well, it seems you’re in the wrong line of work then.”
He gave me a look. “Well, it was either this or continue to work on some Terran merchant freighter and be forgotten by the annals of history or take this job and make a name for myself one way or another.” He gave a heavy sigh.
“Well, I can confidently say that you have made some kind of impact.”
He gave another sigh. “If it’s good or bad, that’s up to the history books to decide,” he said as we finally rounded the corner to his cabin. I keyed in the code that I had memorized at this point. “I’m going to have to have that changed now, shouldn’t I?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” I said as I looked down at him, wheeling the mech into the room and next to its maintenance rack. Alex then started to climb, more carefully this time, down it and onto the floor. He then grabbed a previously unnoticed cable from the floor near the feet of the mech and plugged it into an access port in the heel of the mech. Satisfied that it was in there securely enough, I watched him as he took the elevator at the desk. Even from this distance I could see him gripping the safety bar on one of the sides of it far tighter than I had seen him previously. This really must have affected him. I can’t say that I blame him.
It wasn’t long before he was finally sitting down at the computer on the desk, and running the diagnostic program that was presumably provided when he got the thing. There was a moment when he finished typing when he suddenly turned in his chair and faced me. “So, we’ve talked a lot about what I’m going to be doing when we reach the Strength Through Diplomacy, what are you going to do?”
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I thought for a moment. I hadn’t really thought about it because I was too busy thinking about what was going to happen to him to think about me. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I suppose if they even let us onto their ship, I would want to check out some Terran things that aren’t clouded by your bias,” I said, leaning back onto the wall.
“What do you mean bias? I have all the most correct opinions?” he asked with a smug sense of superiority.
I snorted. “Yeah, and I’m smaller than you,” I said, prompting him to try and throw one of the various machine parts on the desk at me. It didn’t even make it all the way to the bed and fell to the floor with a resounding clank. I was about to say something snarky back to him when there was a ping from the computer. Alex quickly turned back around and looked at the program. “Did you figure out what’s wrong?” I asked.
“Yeah, it turns out that the battery is completely drained. I don’t even understand how that’s even possible. I mean, it was fully charged this morning and the battery is completely new. I’ll have to call up a friend to see what he can figure out. While I’m dialing him up, do you want to plug the mech in? It should be the blue cable about as thick as I am around at the base of the rack.”
I searched around for it, only to find it seconds later. “Is it this one?” I asked, holding it up for him to see.
He looked up from the computer once again. “Yeah, that’s the one. There’s a hatch in the ankle of the left foot for that chord, shouldn’t be too difficult to open,” he said as he turned back to the computer to type away some more.
With a bit of luck and a bit of digging my claws into the access hatch, I was finally able to plug it in. “Is it charging now? And what about your friend, is he a Terran?” I asked, getting off my hands and knees and back onto the bed.
He scoffed at my questions as he looked a bit harder at the computer screen. “Yeah, it’s charging, and of course my friend is Terran! He and I go way back when I was doing the mech training courses. And I don’t know if you know this, but I don’t exactly talk to other aliens very often, and if one had known that that was a mech instead of a spacesuit, I think I would be having these same issues much earlier than now.”
I was going to snap back at him when the screen suddenly shifted from the diagnostic program Alex was looking at to a live feed of another Terran in what looked like some kind of hangar for Terran sized spacecraft. He had blond hair and an off-kilter nose, and wore an easygoing smile similar to the one that I would see Alex wear when he wasn’t dealing with something particularly difficult. The smile wavered the moment that Alex came into view. “Aw shit, what happened now?” he asked in a tired tone.
“Hey David, I know that it hasn’t really been a long time, but I had a quick question for you,” Alex said with a bit of hesitancy.
The Terran I assumed was named David put his face in his hands and sighed heavily. “I get the feeling it’s not going to be a quick answer but go ahead.”
“So, I got my mech to interface with the security camera system of the ship I’m on, but when I tried to disconnect from it, the mech completely lost power. Is there any reason why that happened?”
“What’s the make and model of the mech?” he asked with a sigh. “Some of the less expensive brands out there don’t mesh very well with alien systems,” he explained.
“It’s a Stardust Solutions Model 1377,” Alex said. “Is that one that doesn’t mesh very well with alien systems?” he asked.
“Jesus Christ dude, you couldn’t have picked a worse mech for what you were trying to do!” David shouted out as he ran a hand through his hair.
“What do you mean?” Alex asked.
“What I mean by that, is that Stardust Solution mechs, and specifically the model that you have, is notorious for not meshing well with alien systems! It causes a feedback loop in the mech itself that eats at your computing power and completely destroys your battery life. How long were you plugged in for?” he asked, his voice rising with each passing word.
“Um, I would have to say for a little under ten hours,” Alex said, physically bracing for the verbal storm that was coming his way. “That explains all the warning messages that I had to exit out of,” he whispered loud enough for me to hear.
David didn’t say anything for a minute, before finally throwing his hands in the air and walking a bit away from the camera. “Why do I even bother with you? If you had just read the owner’s manual, you could have avoided the problem altogether! But noooooo! You just HAD to go in gung-ho like always! It’s a wonder that you even passed the written portion of the mech ex-“
The video suddenly cut out without even a warning message popping up. I stood up and looked over the Terran as he read through an error code that popped up. “What the hell? That’s never happened before.” His eyes narrowed. “And this error message, I’ve never seen it before.”
“Well, what does it say?” I asked, not bothering to get out my communicator to use my visual translator.
“It says that it lost QE connection. For something like that to happen, something would have had to happen to one end of the connection, and nothing happened at this end. Something must have happened on the other, which is on the Strength Through Diplomacy.” His eyes got wide as a thought suddenly appeared in his mind. “Something terrible must have just happened to that ship.”