Page 37 of Across The Stars
“I’m hailing the sons of bitches.”
“To beg?”
“Fuck no.”
“What…”
I silenced myself as soon as a sound wave showed up on the screens. I snapped my lips shut and stared wide-eyed as the sound waves began to undulate. A voice came through, deep and slightly gruff. Only problem was that it wasn’t speaking English. It said something in a rather aggressive, demanding tone that made me regret everything I’d done in the past few days. Mainly, volunteering to get on the freighter.
“Hey, dick-heads!” Quinn said. “Release my damn ship!”
The alien voice barked irritated sentences through the channel and Quinn just kept barking back like they were two dogs yelping on opposite sides of a fence. When the alien voice chuckled, I felt reality like a punch to the gut. We were a joke to them.
I kept blinking rapidly, trying to wake up from whatever messed-up nightmare I’d fallen into. The shuttle was being tugged closer and closer to the arrowhead ship and I thought for sure we were about to meet some nasty, green, cone-headed lizard people or something of the like. Maybe we really would become slaves. Maybe we were about to die. No outcome I came up with in my head was pleasant.
Then, the barking stopped and the whole ship jerked again. I felt a pulse ride through the walls. Through the floor. I felt it make the hair on my arms stand and suddenly the ship wentdark. Even the digital windows had gone offline so we couldn’t see outside.
“Fuck!” Quinn yelled. “They shut us down.”
“Are we… seriously being pulled into an alien ship?” I asked.
“Guys?” Sam mumbled, her voice queasy.
I looked back at my friend and frowned. “Heeeyyy, Sam. Yeah, we’re about to die. Or get probed. We don’t know yet.”
“No. No, I don’t like that. Get your pilot friend to do something.”
Quinn glared back at Sam between yelling matches with whoever or whatever was on the other end of the call.
“Look, I’m not a fucking wizard,” she said.
“Well, then what are you good for?! We need a wizard!”
“I’m a pilot! Let me see you fly this thing, science geek!”
“I’m not a science geek! I’m a poser! A fake! An imposter and I don’t want to die!”
“Now is really not the time to have an identity crisis.”
“It’s not a crisis. It’s all a lie!”
“What the fuck?”
Quinn eyed me. “Space sickness,” I said with a shrug.
She narrowed her gaze. “Am I about to not like you guys?”
“Is this really the time?”
“Wizard lady! Get us out of here!”
Quinn tilted her head, flipping her middle finger. “I hope they probe you first.”
“Guys! We need to calm down. Are there weapons on a passenger shuttle?”
She shrugged. “Anything is a weapon if you use it right. You guys should find something.”
I stood again and Quinn, shouting a few more insults to the aliens despite the coms being down, stood to follow me. Sam, unstable and disoriented, got up from her seat and started heading for the cargo area near the back of the shuttle with us.Just as the three of us began rummaging through the sparse amounts of supplies stored in the back, the ship jerked again, nearly throwing us all off balance.
