She was awake, her delicate, small, porcelain skinned hands reaching up and driving the heels of her palms into slowly opening and, what I assumed were, tired eyes.

I stared at her through the one-way glass door of the holding cell, my skin still stinging slightly from my previous decontamination and watched as she took in her surroundings, the childlike innocence of tiredness wrought across her face in the transient moments before the fog of fatigue left her and the memories of her situation returned. As they did her body lurched with a jolt of panic and inspection, hands clapping themselves against her pale form checking for any injuries or tampering. There was none to be found.

I was transfixed. She was so small, so delicate and so white, whiter than I had ever seen or imagined a person to be, a far cry from the swarthy cast of my own complexion, she looked unhealthily pallid in comparison, maybe something happened to the sun? I’m not entirely sure how long I watched her for, only that every time my hand reached for the button to give me entry to her cell it was racked by a debilitating wave of shakes and indecision. She was the first true human I had ever seen; it was a… Strange feeling.

I watched her cry, I watched her ask to the person less void of her cell what was going on, first with a tentative, fearful voice and then with a more indignant, frustrated and demanding tone. I wanted to go in, ask her everything I had ever wondered, learn about my wayward home. But I couldn’t and so I watched her get up and examine her room, the sterilized surfaces, the blunted corners and the sink which smelt of the manicured perfume of medicine and bureaucracy.

Finally, almost involuntarily, my hand reached toward and pressed down the button, depressing the small, metal knob until it was flush with the white and matte wall. Then the door slid open and I stepped in, head ducking slightly under the door frame, I closed the cell glass behind me, I very much doubted that she was any threat.

She recoiled like a cornered and wounded animal at my presence, rushing toward the far corner of the room and placing her lead shoulder and outstretched fists toward me, her eyes were frantic with both fear and anger. I supposed it was justified, her planet had been destroyed, it still hurt more than I supposed it should have, I didn’t look that alien, did I?

“Ave.” I said in the small, hurt voice of a boy rejected. I wanted so desperately to feel a kinship with this woman, but now, looking at her small, short and stubby form I just felt, different, foreign, wrong. I must look to her how the fish looked to me the first time. Monstrous.

“Pardon?” I shivered at her parsing, an alien word to be sure, one whose meaning I could not completely decipher. But it was without a doubt a derivative of the language of my father and his father’s fathers. I closed my eyes for a brief moment and basked in the afterimage of the single word and, for a brief moment, I knew what it sounded like to be home, not that space station of artificial environs and misshapen gravity that we had been subsisting off for centuries like barnacles, but the true and untainted tongue of our world, with its rivers of blue and its fields of green. I heard in her voice the stories my people had told one another. And it was glorious.

“Admitte Interpres.” I spoke to the ether and the ships system picked up on it and, using the fish as an unwilling conduit, broadcasted the intent and the meaning behind my speech to the woman in the cell, going from the translation chip lodged deep within my throat, through the fish and then into the loud speakers of the room. In a form that she could, hopefully, understand. “Can you hear me now?”

“Y-yes.” She seemed more afraid now that the words were spoken in her own tongue and, seemingly, coming from simultaneously all over and nowhere in the room. I just flinched slightly as her words were broadcasted into my brain in the slightly hoarse and panicked tones of her shrill voice. It was so high-pitched, almost painfully so.

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“May I ask you some questions.” A pause and a glare. “What year is it?” We had long since lost track of time in our squalid little space favella, lost might be the wrong term for it, thrown away was better, when the elders could forget time they could delude themselves into thinking the world would be the same when they returned, it was easier that way. The only thing they remembered was the year our ancestors were first taken.

“Why should I tell you? And where the fuck am I?!” She asked, spite and fear mixed into an ugly and grating symphony in her words.

“Just… Please, I’ll answer whatever you want after you have extended the same courtesy. I… really need this.” Words were hard right now, this was a meeting I had ached for, and now standing before me was a person not tainted by the stain of our captivity, a free woman, the first I had ever known.

“2019, nearly 2020.” I did the math in my head.

“My god, 1300 years. Tell me, does the republic still stand?” She looked at me strangely, her head cocking quizzically despite herself.

“Which? Wait… are you from-“

“Rome! Did the city endure!” I roared the words, unable to retain composure as the subject of my dreams both waking and sleeping came to the fore. The city, the legend our people had talked about it for over a millennia, its walls having taken on a mythical sheen, its founders more gods then men in the eyes of its wayward sons.

“The Roman Republic? No that fell… Well a lot longer than 1300 years ago that’s for sure. Are you from earth, can you tell me what the fuck is going on?!” Her words hit my back as I turned and retreated quickly out of the cell, the door sliding closed behind me and allowing me to slide down it, to lay crumpled and broken in a heap on the floor.

It was gone, of course it was. Then I began to weep, for a city I had never known on a planet my feet had never touched fallen over a thousand years before my birth. It was our god, the guiding light of our petty, zombified corpse of a civilisation limping on into the ether, hanging onto the vestiges of tradition and knowledge from a land thousands of light years away. It was stupid, it was illogical and now that it was gone, I was broken. My north having been unceremoniously ripped away.

Time passed and eventually the font of tears I thought was bottomless ran dry, leaving my head pounding and my face soiled. I washed myself in a near by basin before returning to the cell which held the now far less combative woman. She looked at me as though I might explode.

“Look man I’m sorry if something I said upset you, but could you please tell me what is happening because I am freaking out!” Her hands were outstretched in an empty sympathetic gesture. She probably thinks I’m unstable. Good first impression Titus. I looked at her for a brief moment, taking in her hopeful eyes and hopelessly dishevelled hair before I sighed out the rest of the remnants of the now abandoned and defunct tradition I had held onto for so long.

“Ask.” I said with red and tired eyes.

“What’s happening!” She yelled, taking a step forward and then two back as if thinking better of physically shaking the words into me.

“The world was scheduled for destruction, destruction that took place 14 days ago.”

“I’ve been asleep for two weeks?!” She said, hands flying to her head and legs losing their strength, collapsing under her and leaving her a clump of limbs, torso and head haphazardly tossed together on the floor.

“You are correct.” She looked at me with eyes like dams after monsoon season.

“Why? Where am I?” She just sounded hollow now, as if all the wind had been stolen out form under her sails, a shell of a person, grieving.

“Because somebody in the Federation identified corruption on your planet and you are on my ship. Is there anything else?” She looked at me, fearful curiosity momentarily taking the place of grief as her foremost emotion.

“Are you… human?” I paused, not sure how to answer it, before this talk, I would have said yes but now, now I wasn’t sure. I had no connection to earth; I doubt I ever did. What the fuck was I even planning to do when I got here anyway, save it, save Rome?! Bullshit, it was the elder’s propaganda and I should be thanking her for unburdening me of it, besides it was scheduled for destruction anyway, even if it was worth saving there was nothing I could have done. The logic didn’t make it hurt any less.

“Somewhat... Now may I ask you a question?” She nodded, her head bobbing pitifully on a limp neck, eyes downcast.

“Do you know where I can find any water, apart from earth I mean.” She paused, seemingly grateful for the momentary distraction from her thoughts.

“I’m pretty sure there’s some ice on the moon. At least I can kinda remember a news report about it once.” At least the fish would be happy with how this conversation went.

“Thank you, if you have further questions direct them to the ship’s system, say them aloud and it should answer. I’ll release you from here after the ship has been decontaminated for your safety, it should take up to two days.” She didn’t seem to hear me, I walked back out into the decontamination unit and prepared myself to give the fish the news. We had a moon to catch.