Sam’s first clue that something was not quite right was the smell. He lifted his head, his nostrils flaring to draw in the elusive scent. What was that? Why did it make him think of thunderstorms? Damp earth, ozone and something else. What was that? It tasted faintly metallic. He frowned, scanning his boards, thinking a component was near to frying but no warnings popped up on any of his screens. Nothing.
Some sort of partial system failure would not come as a surprise. He had been running his scans full out for more than ten cycles, with everything working to the edges of the safety protocols in hopes he could crack the mystery of what lay under all that ice on the planet down below.
He expanded a series menus and started a system analysis. Thus distracted, he could be forgiven, then, when he did not at first feel the chilled breeze. It was the soft susurration of cloth moving against cloth that brought him out of his reverie. Too late, he noticed the icy draft and realized his danger.
He spun, reaching for the pistol under his jacket but froze as the edge of the silver sword slid across the skin of his neck.
“Tsk,” murmured a voice, “Hasty human. Leave the iron weapon in its place, please. Already you have felt the bite of my long tooth. This is all the warning you should require.”
Sam forced his eyes away from their fascination with the highly polished silver blade. It was the blade, in that moment as the adrenaline burst into his brain, that he would remember in every detail, later. Its freshly honed metallic smell, the way the light glinted along it’s length, the alien runes embedded in the scrollwork near the haft, the deadly promise of the well sharpened edge. He knew it was razor sharp because the cut on his neck did not sting, yet his blood trickled freely down his neck, hot in the too cool air.
Sam eased carefully away from the blade until he could see its tip. The tip did not waver. The wielder was obviously determined and not to be underestimated.
He looked up into her face and trembled. The face was like the sword, beautiful in its perfection, yet cold and unnaturally pale and like the sword, he had to squint past the play of light around its edges to see what lay beneath.
“Hnghh,” he said. He stopped and licked his lips. His mouth was paper dry and his heart beat painfully in his chest. He resisted the urge to fall down on his knees and declare his eternal loyalty to her. The insanity of that thought frightened him more than the blade in front of his eyes. He took a long, slow breath, steeling himself for battle, and tried again.
“How did you get in here? There are a thousand security protocols between this room and the outside.”
She smiled a small amused smile. He fell in love with that smile and thought about devoting his life to seeing it as often as possible. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to look away from that devastating face.
Soft flowing folds of pale cloth the color of her flesh frustrated his attempts to see the rest of her body, revealing only the faintest of hints of a feminine curves. He wanted to believe that body was as perfect as her face. The idea took his breath away. Desperate for a distraction, he checked the door behind her. The security panel showed it had not been tampered with.
She watched his eyes and shook her head.
“No lock can stand against me. No wall can keep me out. It is futile to try. I go where I will and I will to be here, so here I am.”
“Why?” Sam asked, desperately confused. “I mean, what do you want?”
“That is my question, human. What are you doing here? What do you want from me that you disturb my dreams and call me away from those who love me?”
“I did not call you,” Sam denied, racking his brain to some hint of what she was referring to.
“And yet here I am. What kind of nefarious endeavors do you work at, hidden as you are, in the heart of this metal coffin?”
“Nefar…. I am doing nothing wrong,” he insisted. “I was merely doing my job.”
“You were looking. I could feel your eyes. Hard, calculating eyes, staring down from the heavens, bursting into closed rooms, ransacking the contents and leaving unsatisfied, unmindful of the damage left behind.”
This was not a bad description of the purpose of this room from a primitive’s point of view. What he did here was a secret known only by a few on this ship. Sam stared at her, his mind running away with his imagination, leaving only suspicions behind. “Who told you that? You are from down below.” That was not a question. He knew, suddenly, implicitly, that he was correct. “Who brought you up from the surface? This ship is not a god’s cursed cruise ship. Get out.” He tried to put some bite in his voice but to his ears it sounded like a plea.
“No. You get out. This is my territory. These are my people. You are not welcome,” she hissed, drawing near again. The sword whispered across the skin of his cheek and he averted his face. No blood ran there, so she had been careful not to slice him this time, thank the gods. What had she said? Territory. But his ears had heard something else. The word ‘people’ had also had the same dissonance. She was not speaking Pangalactic and the translator chip in his head was having difficulty translating. That meant she was not speaking any of the two thousand plus languages in its database. Translations were usually seamless and unnoticeable. The dissonance was a sign that program had not heard her speak enough to recreate her language entirely, so it had supplied an approximate replacement for the term it did not recognize.
“The planet is empty,” Sam protested faintly, unable to make it sound like he believed in what he was saying. “A frozen hunk of stone.”
“What? Are you blind? Infinite is my domain and endless are the beings who live there. Turn off your death rays and leave this place!”
“We mean no harm. Nothing sentient inhabits the places we scan. If you would show yourself to our scouts or open your shields to our scanners perhaps we could initiate a dialog. We wish only peace with your people,” Sam stammered.
He felt unclean, repeating this old lie. They knew. They knew what they did. They knew the damage they caused. He had seen the scan reports. Life teemed on this planet, against all odds and despite the extreme environmental conditions. Even now, somewhere in Galactic Central, the ownership of this ice planet was being brokered amongst the high stakes players who would turn around and sell it again and again, in whole or in parts to mining interests and colony developers. But the planet would be stripped bare of all its most precious commodities long before the first ore ship arrived and the planetary ecology would be decimated in the process. The existence of any sentient life who could claim prior ownership was merely an inconvenience and easily remedied.
The Pangalactic bureaucracy, the people who insured that the gears of government were always well oiled, the statisticians and the accountants, the clerks and the record keepers, the diplomats and the janitors, all of whom worked tirelessly behind the scenes of public political theater, these people who seemed harmlessly innocuous if considered singly, as a mass took on a sinister character. They were a mindless, headless hoard that seemed to operate under its own rules of sentience. This bureaucracy had only one urge. To consume the universe. The smart and the ruthless exploited this inexorable drive. If one fed its ego and stroked its hubris, the bureaucratic beast would lay on its back and purr, offering up all its secrets.
That was why he was here. Sam, soldier, technician, deep scanner of planets, laying bare the treasures of the universe, to the eyes of those who could pay the price and reap its rewards. Rape and pillaging on a planetary scale. Sam knew what he was. He had admitted it to himself long ago. He was a whore and his Admiralty was his pimp.
He looked into her eyes, desperately unhappy that she was angry with him.
She cocked her head at him, like a dog straining to hear beyond the edges of sound. It occurred to him, then, that her ability to translate his words must be as equally garbled as his.
“Are you damaged?” she asked gently. He knew that tone. He flashed to his mother, long dead now, picking him up in her lap and asking him if he wanted her to kiss his hurts. “Your heart and your mind and your body are in conflict, and words are falling like stones from your mouth.”
Sam flushed, feeling ashamed of himself, a feeling he had not felt since he was three and he had been caught stealing cookies out of his Aunt Sadie’s cookie tin. This creature, this wonderful, exquisite, alien being had caught him in a lie and it was obviously a new experience for her. Instead of being angry, she was confused. He felt sick with regret, knowing he was destroyed her innocence and tainting her reality with his own darkness. Emotions roiled inside his head. It was as if he had just killed the last butterfly in existence. Somewhere, in the last sane corner of his mind, that part of him that was still a highly skilled soldier and not someone’s emotional rag doll, he realized she was pulling memories and emotions out of his mind and looping them back on themselves, making them stronger and more devastating. ‘The worst part was, he did not care.
“I’m sorry,” he cried out. “I am so sorry. I cannot tell you how sorry. Forgive me. I was not being completely honest. Truth be told, the machines controlled by these computers are doing a deep earth assay. The process is highly destructive. The wave front vaporizes all organic matter and causes cataclysmic earthquakes. I am sorry, really and truly. But I cannot stop this. If I refused to do my job they would throw me in the brig and replace me with someone new. You could keep coming back but eventually they would find someone you could not influence.”
She looked at him sadly. Sam choked back a sob. She let the tip of her sword fall to the floor as she bent and brushed his cheek with her lips. He shuddered at the overwhelming pleasure that flooded his mind.
“Not to worry, dearest Sam,” she whispered in his ear. “I will save you.”
She rose. Before he could react she lifted the sword above her head, both hands on the hilt and with a great downward thrust she spun, slicing the blade through all his terminals as effortlessly as a hot knife slicing through butter. Alarms and buzzers went off everywhere.
Sam gasped and spun around. He rubbed the tears from his eyes, not sure of what he was seeing. The hardware, the screens and the keypads and their housings were unscathed. Yet every screen flashed a warning. Minuscule trails of smoke drifted up through the heat exchange vents, telling of fried circuits and fused metal.
“What did you do?” he cried in dismay.
“Dearest Sam. Come to me when you can,” she said from very far away.
An icy wind gust swirled through the room, blowing snow around his ankles. Sam turned in time to see the sword morph in her hands. Did she grow bigger or had the sword grown smaller? She lifted the sword and placed it amidst others of it kind embedded in the crystal crown on her head. For the life of him, he could not be certain that the crown had just appeared or if it had been there all this time, hidden in the light and he had just not noticed.
“Wait,” he cried, lifting his hand to catch at her robes. The cloth shifted under his hand and suddenly he was touching long silky fur, instead. She shook him off or perhaps she was shaking her body to clear the heavy frost that gathered on the tips of her fur and along the points of her diadem. But it was not a diadem anymore. Ivory antlers grew from her head, the frosted points sparkling in the starlight that bathed the frozen plane behind her.
“Stay, Sam, my love. You are not ready, yet.” said the thing, now more animal than human. She smiled one last smile before the lips turned into a muzzle that blew clouds of hot breath into the bitter cold air, the moisture in them turning instantly to a sparkling haze of frost. She danced on hooves the same color as her horns, hidden under feathers of ivory fur. They appeared split and splayed wide to spread her weight on the dry, fine snow that billowed around her feet like clouds of dust. He looked into her pale eyes and tried to think of something that would make her stay.
“But, I think I love you,” he whispered tragically.
Again the animal shook the gathering frost from its antlers or perhaps she was shaking her head, denying him his right to such feelings. He could not tell. He could feel her mind turn away from him, becoming more alien, more wild.
She threw up her head, bugling a wild call to anyone who chose to hear her and with a quick motion, as graceful and as powerful as her human self had been beautiful, she reared on one hind foot and pivoted, launching her new body into motion in a ground eating lope that took her inexorably away from him. Her hooves threw up clouds of snow and her breath trailed in a long streaming cloud down her back. Frost glittered in the air around him, falling like fine snow, to dust his face and gather on his eyebrows. He stared after her, refusing to be distracted by the haze of white that threatened to obscure everything.
Things moved, along the horizon, white against white. Nearer at hand, a herd of similar animals raced to catch her. She slowed, allowing them to catch her, but then surged forward, the herd raced alongside. He thought for a moment that he had lost sight of her amidst the chaos of so many moving bodies but as he kept watching, he became certain that he could tell which one was her, even from a distance, even through the clouds of breath and snow.
Sam stared, eyes watering, refusing to blink, knowing with absolute certainty that if he looked away the vision would be gone and he would be alone, in a room full of smoking hardware and wailing alarms. Tears blurred his vision but he kept looking. He lost sight of her, eventually, behind a haze of wind driven snow, as she ran somewhere on the planet under his feet, on a frosted plane, glittering palely, under the deep night sky with only starlight to guide her way.
