Reel
The first thing that she really knew, as she clawed her way back to consciousness, was pain.
It was a slow climb. Her mind felt foggy and slow, like it was limping along through an unpowered corridor, blind in the dark. She knew, distantly, that she was laying down in a bed. Her muscles ached, and so did her head. With a tremendous effort of will, she forced her eyes open. There were lights on over her head, and she blinked watery eyes. Bright and sterile, they glared steadily down on her. Harsh, fluorescent light…Infirmary lights. A sense of muted relief washed through her, and tears threatened at the corners of her eyes.
Mom will take care of me, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut against the bright light. Mom will help me feel better. Levering herself up on one arm, she opened her eyes again, blinking hard, forcing the tears away and bringing the room into focus.
Instead of clean ceramic tiles, the lights hung suspended below panels of long, straight grained wood, painted white. She stared at them for a minute, confused, before realizing that she wasn’t on the Old Bug at all. The last few weeks came tumbling back in a rush, and she sagged back into the bed on which she lay. It creaked loudly, protesting her weight.
Still on earth, she thought, dazed. She’d been Stricken again, she knew that much; the head and muscle aches made it a certainty. She struggled to remember, to piece together shattered flashes of memory. Following Konrad down a flight of stairs, a jumble of mechanical pieces and wires, and then pain. Blinding, agonizing pain. Reel shied away from the memory, unwilling to risk triggering a second attack.
What was that thing? She’d had more than her fair share of Strickenings, and not one of them had ever been so brutal or so immediate. Whatever that machine was, her implant wanted nothing to do with it. No, that memory could stay where it was for now. Even thinking about thinking about it terrified her, and she didn’t know what to do with that emotion. When was the last time she’d been this afraid?
Another thought niggled at the edges of her mind, calling for her attention as she hauled herself into a sitting position. By the black, had her father tried to call her? Her cheeks flushed with heat: Had she called him “dad” over the Link, with someone else listening? He’d skin her alive for that. She should bring up a Link, explain what had happened, and try to…and try to what? Patch things over? Try to convince him that she hadn’t done exactly what they all said that she would do? He’d know the second she opened a Link that she’d been stricken, if he didn’t already.
Reel put her face in her hands, groaning softly. How had this all gone so wrong? A gnawing, aching vacuum clawed at her stomach. Physical hunger, and something more. She might have recognized it as homesickness if she’d ever been away from the Old Bug before. In that moment, listening to the Captain yell at her seemed like it would be worthwhile, if only to hear another Torellan’s voice. Hark or Yerry would talk to her, but they’d have to tell the Captain that she’d called. And then he’d be even angrier, because she hadn’t called him first.
It was time to go back, she realized. The condenser on board the lander probably had gathered enough dark liquid to get the transmission unit up and running. She could return to the Old Bug, her mission complete, and maybe avoid admitting to this latest Strickening. The more she played with the idea, the more sensible it seemed. Go back, earlier than they’d expected, and prove that she had taken care of the job, in spite of an unexpected setback. Yes, that was the key, to let her actions speak for her.
Fighting her way out of the bed made her head swim, but she pressed on with grim determination. Her mouth tasted like the underside of a deck panel, and her stomach rumbled. How long had it been since she’d eaten? She stopped, frowning at her wrists. They ached, and the scales were rubbed raw. How had that happened? How long had she been there?
She was halfway up when the door opened to reveal Konrad, standing wide-eyed in his stained white coat. He was holding a steaming mug in one hand, and the fringe of hair around his head was ruffled and uneven.
“Reel! You’re awake!” He hurried over to her and put the mug down on a nearby table, trying to push her back down. “Don’t try to get up, you haven’t been well.”
Fending off his hands, Reel half rolled, half stood up out of the bed. Her tail tingled, numb from her having laid on it for too long. “I need to move.” It came out as a croak; her throat was dry and scratchy. She needed some water–by the black, she felt like she hadn’t had anything to drink in a week. “Wait, give me a hand for balance.” She reached out, clutching for the hand that she had just brushed aside, the whole room spinning around her.
He grabbed her by the hand with both of his and barely kept her upright as she listed badly to one side. A small grunt escaped him, and his arm shook with the effort. “Sorry,” Reel gasped, squeezing her eyes shut. That helped a little, and she spread her legs wide to help keep her on even keel, the way that Argo did during jumps. The moment passed, the room steadying, and Konrad’s worried face came back into view as she opened her eyes.
“I’m alright,” she promised him, then paused. “Actually, could you do me a favor?”
“Of course.” His eyes searched her face, little wrinkles springing up around them as he squinted at her. “Anything you need.”
“Could you take a look at the back of my head?” The scales of her cheeks heated, but she ignored them. She needed to know. “Just tell me what color the lights are.”
Looking baffled, he did as she asked, ducking around behind her. “All green,” he reported. “Is that right?”
Relief flooded through her, and she sagged a bit further where she stood. How long can I keep getting away with it? “Yes, that’s right. Thank you.” As he came back into view, she offered him a weak smile. “Really, I’m okay. How long have I been…” She hesitated, thinking hard about what word she wanted to use. “Asleep?”
“A few days,” he admitted, and her breath caught. A few days? By the black, she was lucky to be alive!
“That explains how thirsty I am!” She said, forcing a laugh. It helped a little with the rising panic, but she was sure he could hear the frantic edge to it. “And hungry.” She added. “I’m going to get some rations off my ship.” And then I’m going to start getting ready to head home.
Konrad nodded. “We gave you a little water while you slept, but we didn’t know how much to offer, and we didn’t want to risk choking you or poisoning you with real food…Your ship is in the same hanger where we first parked it. I’ll go with you.”
She almost fell flat on her face when she took the first step, but caught herself on Konrad’s arm. The next was easier. She flexed her toes, the dull claws scraping in against the wood floor and making Konrad wince for some reason.
She had her balance by then, and let the human’s arm go as she shuffled out the medic bay door and down the hallway to the front of the building. Outside the sun hung high overhead, warming her scales and sending a comforting shiver up her shell. She turned her face towards it and let the light wash down over her. For a long moment she just stood there, basking in the sunlight. It just felt so good, she could almost let herself forget how much trouble she was in.
“Reel?” Konrad asked, prompting her. “Weren’t we going to the hangar?”
“We were.” She agreed, reluctant. She wanted to savor the light, not just walk through it and leave, but she knew she had to set things as right as she could, as fast as she could. They set off again, the grass tickling pleasantly at her feet as she stomped across it. She told herself that she could come back to visit again. Maybe.
Human workers, wearing tough belted coveralls not unlike her own uniform, clustered around the hangar that sheltered Reel’s lander. They hurried in and out of it, struggling under heavy boxes that they loaded into waiting vehicles idling outside. Intent on their work, they took no notice of Reel or Konrad until the pair was almost on top of them. The first one to see them did a double take, stumbling over his own feet as he twisted around to take another look at them, his eyes going wide. Dropping his box on the ground, he dashed off, kicking up bits of turf as he went. Reel watched him go, frowning.
“What’s all that about?”
“I don’t know,” Konrad replied, walking over to the box the man had dropped. “I haven’t been down here since…” he trailed off.
“What is it?” She started towards him, curious. She thought she caught a glimpse of wires and something smooth and white, but Konrad stepped in front of her before she got a good look at it. He took hold of her arm, tugging at her, and she realized that he was trying to steer her away from the box.
“Let’s go back to the office buildings,” he babbled, tugging at her. “The mess hall is serving something good today, I’m sure, and we can test it using your tools and see if you can try it.”
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She frowned and took another step forward, dragging him with her. It was almost silly how easy it was; he couldn’t have weighed more than half what she did. That a high race should be so small seemed weird. Were the Efreet any bigger? She didn’t know, since she’d never met one, but she’d always imagined them to be tall.
That course of thought shut down abruptly when she looked down into the box. Wires sat coiled in piles, trailing out from behind the smooth gray surface of a gravity panel. She gawked at it.
“What in the black?” she said. “These things take forever to calibrate when you pull them out of alignment.” Shaking Konrad loose, she rounded on him. He cringed away from her, putting his arms up in front of his chest as if to ward her off.
Something in that gesture stopped her; he thought she was going to hurt him, she could see it in his eyes. Spinning back away, she made for the hangar again, breaking into a lumbering jog. As she went, the men working began to point and shout, their voices raised in alarm, but none of them got in her way. That’s wise of them, she thought to herself, her temper flaring. I don’t know that I would stop for them.
The hangar doors loomed high over her as she barreled through them. Where was the lander? She’d brought it inside the hanger, out of sight at the human’s urging, easing it in and parking it…there, in the back-right corner. She caught sight of it and stumbled to a halt, flabbergasted. The staccato sound of human shoes slapping against the concrete announced Konrad’s arrival right behind her.
“I…I didn’t know,” he wheezed, clutching at his chest. “I didn’t, you have to believe me.”
She believed him. That didn’t make it any better. Lander One, her ship, hers, sat listing in makeshift moorings. The hull shielding had been stripped away, exposing struts and structural braces. Gaping holes yawned between some of these, marking places where the humans had dug away the inertial dampeners, providing a clear view into the ship's interior, and what she saw there was just as bad. Wires trailed out of access hatches that hung off their hinges, as though someone had forced them open. All four engine housings sat empty, the pods nowhere to be seen. And across the whole thing, humans swarmed, swinging wrenches and spanners so like her own tools that at any other time she might have found the similarity funny.
But there was no place in her mind for humor, not when confronted with the skeletonized remains of her ship, and her only way back home. “What,” she bellowed, fury cracking her voice like a dried-out eggshell, “do you rot shelled idiots thing you’re doing?!?”
Her voice echoed, a booming reverberation that her father would have been proud of. Every human in the hangar froze, grinding to a stop like gears jammed with a bar of iron. Wide eyes stared at her from every direction, and silence fell in the echoes of her shout, broken only by Konrad’s tiny groan. Any other time, having all those eyes on her would be discomforting. For a brief, absurd moment, it reminded her of her outburst during the chief’s council. But this time there was no stopping; these people were not her people, they were not her chiefs, and she owed them nothing. Beyond that, the rage boiling in her gut wouldn’t have allowed her to stop even if she’d wanted to.
“This will take days…weeks to fix!” She waved her hands over her head, wanting to scream. “Get off of there, blast you all to dust, stars, you’ve even pulled out the power matrix. It’s a miracle you haven’t blown yourselves to pieces!” She made to shoo the humans working from the scaffolding away from the gutted ship.
“Do not stop! Keep working,” another voice rang out. She whirled, every scale on her neck spiking straight up. Lusser strode across the hangar towards them with a scowl on his pinched face, flanked by two men in crisp uniforms. “Who let her in here?” He didn’t even look at her as he spoke, glaring around at the men as they hastened to obey his commands. His eyes flashed in the broken light coming through the hangar door, like polished steel discs.
“I let me in here,” Reel retorted, snarling and stomping towards the scrawny man until she loomed over him. He did look at her then, his eyes widening as they traveled up over her thick arms and spiked-up scales to her bared teeth. Scuttling backwards away from her, he put his hands up in a placating gesture.
“We weren’t sure when you would awaken, and we needed to proceed. As was discussed in the deal we made, we-”
“There was nothing in that deal about gutting my ship!” she cut him off, scraping her arms against each other. The scales there rasped loudly, threatening violence. “And you haven’t even held up your end of the deal yet!”
“Just relax,” he said, and Reel felt a vessel in her brow pulse. “These things take time, you understand, and we really needed to see how everything goes together. I assure you, we have taken the utmost care in our explorations–”
“Utmost care? You’ve ripped it to pieces!” She shook her head. “No, that’s it. I’m calling for my crewmates to come pick me up. We’ll fix the transmission booster, and you can discuss the deal with the Captain.” They had to have Lander Two fixed by now. She focused on the Captain, preparing to open a Link to him.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Maybe she thought that Lusser would plead, or apologize, or simply accept it all with a smile. Instead, he pointed at her with one long, thin finger, his face hardening. “Take her,” he spat.
The soldiers who’d come in with Lusser advanced on her, slipping stout batons free from their belts. She let the Link dissipate before it could form and faced them, snarling and scraping the scales of her arms again. The rasp was loud and threatening in her ears, but it did nothing to deter the men coming for her. They were tough looking, thicker of arm and body than the humans she’d spent the most time with. They split up as they drew near so that there was one on each side of her, forcing her to glance back and forth between them.
She was looking at the one on her left when the second one came for her, swinging hard. She turned, catching the blow on her arm. The dense wood cracked against the bone, shockingly painful, and she roared. Lashing out with the same arm, more by reflex than anything else, she tossed the man away screaming to land in a heap on the concrete floor.
Something smacked into her shell, stinging the tough scales there, but it didn’t hurt as badly as the strike across her arm had. She whirled on the first man, growling, and his eyes widened in surprise as she swung at him. She would catch hold of him, she would shake him like a rag, she…
Missed. Her hand closed on empty air, the man worming back out of the way just ahead of her claws. He brought the baton down on her hand, sending searing fire across her knuckles. Fast! He was so fast! And the first one was picking himself up, holding his stomach and coughing, but still rising.
She turned and ran, shouts echoing after her, and caught a single glimpse of Konrad as she bulled past him. He stood dithering, his mouth opening and closing stupidly, his eyes bulging in shock. He could do nothing for her, so Reel left him behind, pounding towards the hangar doors, her feet slapping hard against the concrete floor, claws scrabbling for good purchase on the smooth surface.
The Captain. She needed to call Captain Arcturus. It was hard to focus while she ran, and the Link slipped away from her twice. On the third try she finally felt it take. The emotions came first, a tangled wash of relief, concern, worry, and urgency. She ignored them all, screaming down the Link. “Captain! Captain Arcturus!”
“Reel! You’re okay! I tried calling you and got no response-”
She talked right over him, an unthinkable rudeness that did not stop her for a second. “The humans betrayed me! They’ve destroyed the lander, you have to come get me,” she gasped. The shouts behind her were growing louder, calls for her to stop mingled with curses.
“What?” Alarm and fear pulsed down the Link, feeding her own growing terror. “By the black, this can’t be happening. Are you safe?”
“No!” she panted, looking around. The land was open, flat and brightly lit. The base offered her no place to hide, and a blaring siren sounded, loud enough to call every human on the base to alert. “No, they’re chasing me!” Saying those words out loud awoke a primal terror in her, and she felt an immediate, almost overpowering urge to tuck into her shell and pretend that none of it existed. Except that would be as good as giving up, so she put her head down and kept running, her arms pumping. Maybe she could fight them off if they caught up with her, get out of the base, and then…And then what?
Her heart sank as she realized that she couldn’t even make it that far. More soldiers appeared, summoned by the wailing alarm. They swarmed out of the buildings all around her, pointing, yelling, and joining the chase. They formed a ring, a tightening cordon that she could not escape. Reel stumbled to a stop as she saw it, her head swinging from side to side to take them all in, hunting for a gap in the line and finding none.
Arcturus broke in over her thoughts. “I’m coming Reel, just hang on,” he said desperately. “Just hang on, okay? I’ll come get you.”
Her heart sank. If they’d repaired the lander, and if they’d trained someone to fly it, and if they left that very instant, it would still be days before he got here. She spread her legs wide to brace herself and bared her teeth at the oncoming men.
“Hurry!” she begged, but she knew it was useless. He couldn’t help her.
The men threw themselves at her. They caught hold of her arms, her legs, the ridge of her shell. Each one was a clinging, stinking, claustrophobic weight. She thrashed, and succeeded in throwing off a few, but there were two more ready to jump on for every one she dislodged. Someone kicked at the back of her knees, and all that weight of flesh bore her down the ground, pinning her, trapping her.
Her will broke then. “Please!” she cried, out over the Link and out loud, her resolve dissolving into pleading. “Please dad, please come get me! Save me!”
He didn’t answer, but she thought she felt him yelling. Commands, maybe? Setting the crew to work? They’d come for her, they wouldn’t leave her here.
“That thing in her head is a communication device.” Lusser’s voice cut through the tumult, cold and pitiless. “Remove it.”
“NO!” she screamed, bucking and thrashing wildly, but there were too many men and they had too great a hold on her. One caught hold of her head and she twisted, biting hard on his arm. Bones crunched between her teeth, and salty blood washed over her tongue. He yanked away, screaming, and someone struck her hard across the skull. She never even saw the blow coming, just felt it. The baton left her head ringing, and it fell again, and again, and again until she fell limp, barely conscious. She felt cruel hands clutch her skull, holding her still, and then fingers scrabbling at her implant.
“No,” she croaked, struggling weakly. “Don’t.”
She managed to get it out in German, but the humans paid her no mind. Boots braced themselves on her arms, and someone pulled at the back of her skull with horrible force, wrenching at the implant. A tremendous ripping, a tearing sensation ran through her, all the way to the core of her being, lighting every nerve in her body afire. The soldier on her back redoubled his efforts, his heavy boots crushing the scales on her arms, and fresh agony savaged her. She felt something give way in her head, and the Link with her father cut off.
She screamed. It was all she could do.