Chapter 3
First Contact
It was so bright. It was so perilously, painfully bright.
Bright, loud, and somehow colder than the cryopod.
Every fiber of her body ached with a deep pain that made sitting upright a struggle, so she stayed prone.
This room was bigger than the belly of the destroyer she was in when she last closed her eyes.
These things happen. Likely moved to a new vessel to await deployment. Just breathe and take stock. If I unravel, I’ll set off a ripple through the Chorus.
“Well … uh … hello?”
Her eyes flicked towards the sound. It came from a dark outline in the bright haze of the room above her. It was a human voice, speaking English. Not Teelish. Possibly one of the newer recruits who hadn’t adopted their language yet.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
That voice again. It was a pleasant voice. Soft, but low, and it had an odd resonance she couldn’t quite place. Again, speaking English, which was unfortunate. She preferred languages that had a more predictable cadence, but English was fine enough. She could understand the stranger all the same.
This is a stranger.
Her adrenaline spiked, and she felt her heart roar in her chest as she searched through the blinding glare to take in all the detail she could.
The priority of keeping quiet in the Chorus fell by the wayside.
The bright haze bled away to reveal the fuzzy outlines of the structure she was in.
Utilitarian, spacious, high ceilings. Crate anchor points.
A gantry. A wide ramp leading to an airlock.
This was a ship’s cargo bay of some sort.
Civilian grade, by the look of things. And quite dilapidated.
A green flare of light nearly blinded her, and she recoiled to hide her face behind her hands.
“Sorry! Just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Well, okay is probably a bit much to ask right now, but I want to make sure you are not imminently dying.”
She risked opening her eyes to glance towards the voice, and this time she could recognize more than just a blur.
The figure was that of a human man, judging by the timbre of his voice and his frame.
The edges of his form were still faint, but he had dark waves of hair around his face, and skin like the beautiful ochre sands of her long-lost homeworld.
She blinked, and the line of his smile came into focus.
He must have scanned her with something, as there was a sudden cacophony of beeps and whirs from the little contraption the man was fiddling with.
If it was a scan of her vitals, it likely did not look great.
She needed to do something. Usually, there was a technician to help pull you out of cryo. What was she supposed to do again?
She patted down her suit until she found the pouch containing the vials she had packed earlier that morning.
Or at least, the last morning she had remembered.
There was an ample delay in coordination between her brain and her fingers.
Uncapping the vial was more of a struggle than she had been expecting.
“Need some help?”
A calloused hand inlaid with lines of silver metallics reached out, and she tentatively offered him the vial. Her fingers brushed against his palm as she handed it over, and the heat of his skin made her keenly aware of how deathly frigid she was.
The man examined her vial with a cocked brow before he gave the cap a turn. The crisp click of the seal breaking was sweet relief. It hadn’t been compromised, even after twelve years of cryostasis. She watched with growing amusement as he leaned in to give the vial a curious whiff.
“Augh!” he grunted, clearly regretting that decision as he handed the vial back to her. “What is that, and how fast would this ship go if I poured that into the reactor?”
She let out a hoarse chuckle before she took the opened vial between her teeth, tossed her head back, and slugged down the acrid and viscous post-cryo treatment in a few pained gulps.
“Very fast,” she rasped, with one eye shut in a grimace that mimicked his.
She spied the corner of his mouth quirking in another smile, and she caught herself mirroring the grin.
It might be the fact that her brain had only recently thawed, or that she had just swallowed enough neuro-stimulants to kill a reasonably healthy juvenile, but she was finding the fluttering fear of her predicament easy to keep at bay. For now.
I had asked for excitement. The universe is delivering.
“Do you think you could stand?” he asked, holding a hand out towards her. “With help, of course. You’re freezing cold. Which isn’t shocking. But, you know, this is not the coziest place to thaw out.”
She accepted his offered hand as he pulled her upright.
He let her lean against him for support, and she relished the wave of warmth radiating from him.
The urge to coil around those broad shoulders to sap the heat into her achingly stiff body was strong, but her Human Relations training was stronger. For now.
Integrating humans into the Fleet had been fraught with several instances of confused signals as they all learned how to work together. Being curious and casually touchy with the newcomers was strongly discouraged. Which was a shame. They were perfect little hand-warmers. Especially this one.
This one was also quite sturdy, considering he only came up to her shoulders.
Despite that, he helped her walk across the cargo bay towards a corridor at the far end with ease.
She could feel the strength in his forearms as he guided her carefully through a doorway, towards a room that looked like a cafeteria.
One much narrower than she was used to. Enough room for a squadron of ten, at best.
“Welcome to the mess hall, slash med bay, slash conference room of The Argent,” the man said as he helped her sink into a chair.
The absence of his heat was a cruel loss, but the comfort of a chair with decent padding was an acceptable trade-off. She was starting to regain feeling in the tips of the tendrils framing her face, and breathing the warm air of this room was much kinder on her dry, raw throat.
She watched him bring out the scanner again. He made a few gestures on a handheld interface while it surveyed her a second time. This time, she remembered to close her eyes before it blinded her.
“Damn, woman. You’re a mess.” He paused, then gestured at her with an apologetic expression. “Woman? I don’t want to assume, I don’t work with Icthians a lot.”
She pursed her lips and held back a chuckle.
The nuances of Icthian gender expression and the even larger question of how to translate that sentiment into English was a task too ambitious to attempt while she was just trying to get her bearings.
It was a close enough description. So, she just nodded.
“Alrighty, woman-lady who was dead until five minutes ago. According to this readout, you are … direly dehydrated!”
He immediately bolted into a small side room. She could hear some clattering before he returned with an armful of hydration pouches. He opened the first one and offered it to her, and she accepted it with a gracious tilt of the head.
“You must have been in there for a fuckin’ eon. You’re just a sea of pretty red numbers on this datapad. How long was your stint on the ice set for?”
She clutched at the hydration pack and gulped down the slightly sweet and salty drink with a happy sigh. The electrolyte-balanced liquid was not enjoyable itself, but the relief was immediate, and she almost forgot he had asked a question in her happy haze.
“Mmm … twelve years?” she said, squinting at her surroundings.
She sought any sort of date readout, but gave up the search as she found little in the way of displays in the narrow room. No screens, but plenty of pictures and drawings printed and affixed to the walls. It was quaint, but frustratingly outdated and lacking anything useful to reference.
Her estimates may have been off. The travel time may have been inaccurate, or perhaps her squadron had been re-deployed elsewhere. It wasn’t the first time she had been in cryo for longer than expected, and likely would not be the last.
“Only a smidge over a decade? That’s not too bad, my brother’s down for almost fifty.
You should be all right. Nothing deadly on the readout, so long as we get some food in you.
I can do that, at least. One thing I can’t mess up today.
” He peered closer at the interface in his hand and let out a weary laugh.
“Honestly, I wish more women came with an annotated list of their needs. Would make everything so much easier.”
She was glad she had finished her first hydration pouch, because otherwise she would have choked on her laugh.
“Love life troubles?”
“More like the significant lack thereof. But unlike my love life, you have magically risen from the dead. Let’s focus on keeping you that way, Miss … what’s your name?”
“Sentu Leucifia Almenes,” she stated.
The anglicized version of her name came out clunky and bereft of the gentle flow of her native tongue, but it would suffice.
“Sen-too-loosy?” he attempted.
Apparently, it would not suffice.
“Lend me your interface?” she asked as she held her hand out towards the object he had been using to review her scan results.
“Interface? What backworlds corner did you crawl out from?” he said with a laugh as he offered it to her.
“Your … cargo hold.”
It was difficult to talk, but she found the grating ache in her throat worth it.
She hadn’t had many opportunities for lighthearted conversations with humans in the Fleet.
Not that lighthearted conversations with Icthians were not pleasant, but there was a rare ease in talking with someone who could not feel your every errant emotion.
It was a sweet relief she hadn’t been expecting to wake up to, not having to force her fluttering anxiety and rogue feelings into a palatable, ineffectual state.