Page 10 of The Alien's Major Dilemma

There was something in his voice that made her want to get a better view of his face but she couldn’t move enough. She hated the thought that her questions hurt him and she didn’t know why she was certain they had.

They drove in silence for a while longer until she blinked at the shimmer in the distance. It gave her vertigo when she tried to focus on it.

“You’re going to want to close your eyes for this part,” he told her. “It can be unpleasant if you’re not used to it.”

It was already unpleasant so she closed her eyes and concentrated on taking deep breaths until the nausea went away. A sound so discordant that she pulled her hands out to cover her ears rang through the cab of the truck then disappeared. It left an eerie silence in its wake that made her grit her teeth, until it was replaced by the sound of the truck tires rolling to a stop.

“What the hell was that?” she demanded, her eyes still screwed shut.

“Security system,” he said. “You can open your eyes now. It’s only like that from the outside.”

Marissa opened her eyes and stared at the giant egg sitting in front of her.

“What’s that?” She couldn’t bring herself to point but she wanted to. It felt like the appropriate reaction to the giant, pale green, egg.

“It’s my ship,” he said. “Well, it’s my ship with the security system up and blaster barriers in place but I think it looks nice like that. What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s an egg,” she said. “Why is your ship an egg?”

“Because a curve on the blaster barrier is more effective, with less power, than a flat surface?”

“How effective is it against bullets?”

“More likely to deflect and send them off at an angle than directly back at the person who shot it. Which is a pain in the ass, really, because if someone is shooting at my ship, it would be a lot less complicated if they shot themselves at the same time so I didn’t have to track them down to create and then dispose of a body.”

He said that with such nonchalance that she had to see if he was joking.

“Seriously?”

“Enemy territory,” he reminded her. “If my ship falls into the wrong hands or is damaged beyond what I can repair, I’m in a lot more trouble than just being stuck here for a few months. And so are you if you think about it.”

“I get the feeling that ‘the wrong hands’ means something different to you than it does to me,” Marissa said.

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But maybe not. There are a lot of people on your side who could do a lot of damage if they had unfettered access to my ship.”

“And the security system keeps people away from it until you take it down. How long will it stay active?”

“Until the power systems on the ship fails,” he said.

“I thought you were already out of fuel.”

“Different systems. The power runs on a different type of engine than the propulsion does. That means that, if I run out of fuel, the ship will remain intact and traveling on its original trajectory until pulled into the gravity well of a large star or planet. Conceivably, I could live the rest of my life comfortably as long as all the other moving parts continued working and die of old age lost in space.”

Marissa shivered. “How long would that take?”

“A couple hundred years,” he said with a shrug. “Longer if I decide to hibernate. Which would increase my chances of being rescued, but would also increase the likelihood of waking up completely insane.”

“Really?”

Cooper nodded. “There have been studies. As solitary as my people are, social interactions are necessary for our physical and mental health. Messing with that causes problems.”

“How old are you?”

He looked like he was in his mid-twenties, maybe pushing thirty, but that might be part of his disguise. She needed to see him without it and didn’t even want to think what that might mean.

“That’s a complicated question for interstellar travel,” he said. “My planet’s cycle is more than a little different from yours, and they did not choose me for maturation early in my cohort.”

“I am so confused,” she said.

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