13: Just Desserts

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“So you’re queen-captain of an alien starship?” Keith asked. “That’s super cool! Derek, we can be astronauts on Mum’s crew!”

Derek twitched his shoulders and bobbed his head in an aljik gesture of enthusiastic assent.

“What?” I said. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Space is dangerous. We’re going home.”

“You didn’t manage to get home before now,” Kate pointed out. “Do you think it’ll be easier with four of us?”

“Yes. Obviously. You guys stole one ship off a fucking shyr and used it to capture this other ship. Between the four of us, I bet we can find some way to offload all these aljik onto one ship and pilot the other one back to Earth. My crew are going to be clingy because they’ll want to hold me to my promise of saving their species from a slow extinction, but aljik are easy to outsmart; we can – ”

“Wait, what? Hold pup.” Kate lifted one hand in a ‘stop’ gesture. “What’s that about extinction?”

“The aljik are facing some kind of population crisis. It’s not important. Learning how to fly one of these damned ships is going to be the – ”

“A species of sapient, spacefaring people are facing extinction and it’s not important?”

“No, it’s not fucking important. Because they abducted me, and took me away from all of you, and then they abducted you and ruined your lives as well. They put your lives at risk and they traumatised you and they did alien fucking brain surgery on Derek to pull us all into their stupid little monarch slap fight. They don’t fucking deserve our help and I won’t be rewarding that kind of behaviour by giving it to them. Let them die out for all I fucking care. I am taking my children and my sister home, safe, where they can’t get killed or injured or further traumatised or neglected or tortured or just generally hurt by alien bullshit between a bunch of people who think our planet is such a fucking problem that they built an Empire specifically to quarantine us from the universe.” My voice was trembling, my face was wet. Kate drifted over and wrapped me up in a hug.

“It’s okay now,” she said softly. “You don’t have to be scared any more.”

“I’m not scared, I’m pissed off! They treat us like shit and now we’re supposed to save them?”

“Of course you are, Champ.”

“I’m not scared!”

“Of course not, Champ.”

“But you have to admit, we can’t drag the boys around out here. We have to get them home as soon as possible.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s going to happen when we all get back to Earth?”

Good question. It had been simple, when it had just been me. Get there by whatever means I could, destroy or hide all alien tech, and just show up like ‘hey, I’m not dead’. I could lie about what had happened to me or I could tell the truth, it wouldn’t really matter so long as I didn’t sound dangerous enough that they’d try to take my kids away. Fill out whatever paperwork you fill out when you’re incorrectly declared dead, try to scrape a life back together.

The boys… complicated that. A woman walking out of the desert after going missing for ages is a news story for a while. Coming back with two young boys, one of whom had clearly had something unusual implanted in his fucking skull and no records with any surgeon of doing it? That’s a different story. Unless we had an absolutely ironclad story of being abducted long-term by a sadistic surgeon, my boys become wards of the state. Best case scenario, a lot of careful scrutiny by whatever government body oversees these things to ensure that I’m a fit parent, and no story I could tell would hold up to that much scrutiny.

I’d found my boys. And when we got back to Earth, I was probably going to lose them.

I looked at the boys. I looked at Kate. I took a deep breath.

“We still have to do what’s right for them,” I said. “It’s not safe out here.”

“Earth isn’t safe either,” Kieth said. “Dad dies on Earth.”

“He had a heart condition! That’s not – bad things happen everywhere, sweetie, but much worse things happen out here, a lot more often, than they do at home. We – ”

“I want to save the aliens.”

“You don’t know what you want! You’re six years old!”

“I’m eight!”

“Eight?”

“Nearly nine.”

More than two years. It had been more than two years since we’d been separated. Nearly nine? Nearly a third of his life…

“I’m eleven,” Derek said, “and I want to stay and help, too.”

“After what they did to you?”

“Yes! Just because some aliens did bad things doesn’t mean they should all die! The aliens on this ship haven’t hurt us, they’re nice. Some humans do really bad things, so should all humans die?”

I glanced at the metal on his head, peeking out from under healing skin. Did that translator influence him, make him unreasonably supportive of the aljik? No; a stupid thought. I’d seen people do that before, jump onto people who are mentally challenged or less educated or less experienced than them and decide that if those people disagreed with them then it must be because they were stupid or brain damaged or whatever and not a real opinion. I had no reason to believe that the translator did any such thing, especially given how the humans in the Singers in Light legend had acted. Maybe being able to communicate with people better made him more empathetic towards them, but was that a bad thing? Surely understanding someone better gave an opinion more weight, not less.

Besides, even if the operation had done some strange magical scifi thing to influence him to like the aljik more (again, no reason to think that it had, or that such a thing was even possible, and plenty of evidence against it), that was my son now, as much a part of him as my nonworking arm was a part of me. It would make no sense to decide his opinion didn’t matter any more because he’d changed over time. That’s what people did. If I decided that my time eating horrible alien foot jerky meant that I now hated jerky, was that not a “real” dislike because I’d changed as a person to reach it? A stupid proposition.

No; what mattered was the point he was making. Should all humans die, due to their worst atrocities? My children wanted to save an entire species, a sapient species, a people, and I was talking about, what, letting them die out?

I looked at Kate. She shrugged. “I’ll back you up if you want to get your kids out of here,” she said, “but for the record, I’m a biologist who recently learned that extraterrestrial life exists. I’m going to help save them.”

I looked back at the boys. Keith, arms crossed, glaring. Derek, neither making nor avoiding eye contact.

I sighed.

“Okay,” I said. “You can save ONE intergalactic alien species. As a treat. One species, and then we’re going home. No arguments.”

———————

I couldn’t operate the gun from the bridge, of course. It was full of crew, and there are limits to even my stealth. But there are many ways to fire a weapon.

The route I took down to the orbital gun was fairly roundabout. It had to be, to avoid the carefully guarded manual shutdown switches. I slipped into the storeroom I’d been hiding in, fished my last functional space suit out from under a crate of food (all of my spares had been aboard my ship, abandoned to those humans), and headed for the rear engine arilock. Unguarded, of course; why wouldn’t it be?

Weapons, like everything, are fundamentally mechanical. I’m no kel, but I don’t need to be. Understanding how to manipulate and take things apart is what I do. Understanding how to take apart a compromised ship by manipulating a few servos? Easy.

With the weapons on my suit’s arms, I peeled back the insulation over the long arms that controlled the weapon’s aim. A few jumps through space and some descents and ascents through an atmosphere would cause some serious damage without that insulation, but I didn’t care; I didn’t need to do any of that. My enemy was right there, within the narrow directional range that the weapon could be manipulated to point at.

As I expected, everything was still powered on. The crew had apparently assumed that their shutoff switches would depower everything and not bothered to manually check every weapon. Unsurprising. If they had depowered it, my job would still be possible, but a lot more complicated; as it was, I just manually triggered the servos in the control arms one by one until the gin was lined up with the ship. Now, to fire.

Firing was a lot more complicated. This was a weapon designed to shoot through all sorts of atmospheres; it was very powerful. It was also mounted on a ship designed to move through atmospheres, so it was very well protected. If the protections on the control arms fail and the motors melt, that’s an annoying fix but not a fatal one. If the power and firing systems of the gun itself are damaged? That’s an explosion waiting to happen.

So there was no way to access anything that could trigger the gun to fire by simply cutting away a bit of insulation with a hand tool.

The gun’s internals were, well, internal, housed in the bulky casing of the weapon. The casing surrounded a pressurised chamber that housed the actual firing mechanisms. I was going to have to get through that casing, almost as thick as the hull of the ship itself, to fire the weapon.

Which was easy. There was a small airlock on the side, designed for kel. Weapon parts need to be accessed to be repaired.

I slipped into the chamber. It was a wide, short tunnel, smooth and cylindrical. I couldn’t feel it through my space suit, but I knew that the air would be hot and smelly. Breathable, technically, but unpleasant; I elected to leave the suit on. (These guns are enlarged versions of weapons initially designed for ground combat on the very first aljik world, before we went into space. It’s easier to replicate the atmosphere that the weapon was designed to operate in than to redesign the weapon.)

In the middle of the tunnel, a long rod of red crystal lay suspended on several metal pipes, holding it in the centre of the room. It was long enough to reach almost from one end of the chamber to the other, the back nearly touching the wall and the front nearly touching the huge crystal lens that separated the chamber from space and, out in front of us, the human-contaminated ship.

One shot, and my people would be free of this threat once more. Humans would once again be confined to their planet, lacking the technology to escape and wage war on the galaxy.

The mechanisms for activating the crystal were easy to access. I got to work.

And then the lights went out. The whole gun powered off.

Had I broken it? I am not, as I said before, a kel. Mistakes were possible. But that was fine; I was sure I could figure out how to reactivate the –

It was no mistake. I hadn’t depowered the gun. Somebody else had.

That became very clear as several loud thumps came from the direction of the gun’s control arms and the whole gun, with me trapped inside it, jerked away from the ship and began to drift off into space.

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