Rogue Colony (Galaxy Mavericks Book 6) Page 3

  Michiko’s feet burned. She'd worn comfortable tennis shoes with gel inserts but even they couldn't stand up to nine hours on her feet. She desperately wanted a chair to throw herself into. Her stomach growled and she was hungry, tired, and slightly cranky.

  “I don't care what they are serving today,” Michiko said as they walked toward the cafeteria. “I am going to destroy my plate.”

  “But if you do that, how are you going to put food on it?” Hassan asked.

  “Ha. Ha,” Michiko said. “Don't pick on me right now. I'm hungry.”

  “Don't pick on me,” Hassan said. “I haven't had my tea today, and that's not a good thing. Oh, the things we do for student loan deferment, eh?”

  A crowd of people were gathered in the hallway at the rounded door entrance to the cafeteria.

  A shimmer illuminated the tops of the crowd’s heads. Someone was screaming.

  “Get away! Get away! You did this to us!”

  Michiko, Ashley, Rudy and Hassan looked at each other.

  A floating yellow obelisk hovered in the center of the crowd. It was as tall as a man, and dark ink blot-like markings swirled across the surface of its golden shell. It flashed from gold to white to red, and it moved around within the circle frantically, as if it were looking for a way out.

  “Get out of here!” someone screamed again. “Damn you aliens!”

  Michiko pushed her way through the crowd.

  “Hey!” she cried. “Everyone, stop it!”

  But the noise continued.

  “Stop it!” Michiko shouted at the top of her lungs.

  A shrill whistle cut through the uproar and the area quieted.

  Rudy had jumped on top of a nearby milk crate, his fingers in his mouth.

  “Everyone. Back off. Now!” he shouted.

  Slowly, the crowd dispersed.

  A lone man remained. He was a younger man with a swarthy face and short black hair. He wore a maintenance uniform. He looked like he'd just gotten off work. His clothes were wrinkled, as if he'd slept in them. When he saw Michiko, his eyes went down to her Galaxy Corps uniform, and then his face wrinkled in anger and disgust.

  “Who approved letting this thing onboard?” he asked.

  The obelisk shimmered red at the man’s words.

  “It's not a thing,” Michiko said. “It's a Crystalith, and its harmless.”

  “Did you screen it like you screened us?”

  “Everyone on this ship goes through a vetting process,” Michiko said.

  “And do you think it's right to let an alien onboard when it was aliens that destroyed our planet?”

  What an asshole. Michiko didn't have patience for assholes. And she was hungry and tired.

  “Last I checked,” she said, “The Crystalith didn't swallow your planet.”

  “How do you know that?” the man asked, raising his voice. “How do you know they aren't working with the enemy?”

  “Hey, dude,” Hassan said. “Let this one go. You sound like you need a beer.”

  “I don't need anything!” the man shouted. “I won't stand by while my taxpayer dollars aid terroristic aliens!”

  The man took off his backpack and heaved it at the Crystalith.

  Michiko threw herself toward the Crystalith.

  The backpack hit her in the head and she cried out.

  She bounced off the Crystalith’s hard surface. Then she fell to the floor and landed on her face.

  Hassan pushed the man against the wall.

  “Dude, what the hell is wrong with you?” Hassan asked.

  “Screw you,” the man said, pushing Hassan away. “Screw all of you!”

  The man ran down the hallway and disappeared.

  Ashley helped Michiko up.

  “Are you okay?” Ashley asked.

  “Bastard,” Rudy said, pulling out his phone. “I'm going to get him kicked off the ship.”

  “Don't,” Michiko said, rubbing her forehead. A patch of skin was swelling just above her eye.

  “If he's going to be violent, then he's out,” Rudy said. “No exceptions.”

  “Rudy, stop!” Michiko said.

  But Rudy didn't listen; he walked away and talked to someone on his phone.

  Ashley rubbed Michiko’s shoulders.

  “You hit your head on the floor,” Ashley said.

  “I'm tough,” Michiko said.

  “That guy was a maniac,” Hassan said. “Blaming the Crystalith for this? Total nutsoid.”

  The Crystalith shimmered in response and turned from red to pink.

  Michiko bowed to the Crystalith.

  “I am sorry that happened,” Michiko said in Japanese. “That person is not an ambassador of our race.”

  “Why are you talking?” Ashley asked. “It can't hear you.”

  “Quiet,” Michiko said. “I studied xenobiology in college. I know what I'm doing.”

  She turned to the Crystalith. She lowered her voice and kept her tone neutral.

  “My hope is that you are okay,” she said.

  She remembered the basics of Crystalith communication.

  Keep your tone neutral. Speak softly. They couldn’t hear, but they could pick up on vibrations and subtleties in your voice that betrayed your future actions.

  The Crystalith hovered toward Michiko. Its ink blot surface rearranged itself into a series of pictographs.

  She couldn't read it. No one could. You needed an app to translate.

  She pulled out her phone and activated a xenolanguage app that she had had on her phone since college.

  She pointed it at the Crystalith’s surface. Hazy words appeared over the blots.

  Thank you for the help. I was terrified.

  Several pre-programmed responses appeared in bubbles on the screen, with a screen-width piano just below them.

  Michiko picked one.

  How do you interpret recent events?

  Then, she remembered her limited piano lessons and picked out a slash chord on the piano. The sound rang out, and the Crystalith shimmered from pink to its normal color of yellow—a good sign.

  Not good. But good. Violence is understandable.

  “Bear with us just a little longer,” Michiko said via the app. She played two more chords: a minor ninth and a major seventh. The Crystalith shimmered brighter.

  Are you a musician.

  Michiko smiled.

  “No. But I understand tones.”

  Your choice in chords is beautiful. I am glad you helped me.

  Michiko played an introduction to an old folk song her dad had taught her, one by a distant ancestor and one of the dozen songs she could play on the piano. A song called “Evolution” by Ivan Lins. A song about progression, regression, and facing the cold hard truth about humanity. That even though we progressed thousands of years and traveled light-years into space, we were still the same. The lizard brain primal instinct was still there.

  She picked out the melody and indicated a diminished chord.

  The Crystalith changed from yellow to blue. A peaceful state. It was listening to her and it respected her.

  It was a pleasure. Are your friends going to communicate.

  Michiko reached out and touched the Crystalith. Its surface was living tissue, and it pulsated beneath her hand. It reminded her of a time she touched an elephant—its skin was hard, but it had a pliableness to it that she didn't expect.

  The shimmering enveloped her and she leaned into its warm light.

  “Guys, touch it,” Michiko said.

  Rudy, Ashley, and Hassan shook their heads. Their facial expressions were a mix between curious, awestricken, and scared.

  “It's okay,” Michiko said. “It wants to thank you.”

  “I'll take the verbal thanks,” Ashley said. She cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted “I'm glad you're safe!”

  “Ditto,” Hassan said.

  Michiko shook her head.

  You weren't supposed to yell at a Crystalith.

  But the alien di
dn't mind. It flashed from blue to yellow and its blots rearranged themselves.

  Farewell, fellow chord traveler. And be careful. There is not balance in this place. May your life bode you well. Always remember.

  “Always remember,” Michiko said via the app. Always remember was the alien’s form of a blessing, a tribute that bade one farewell while also honoring those in their race that were slain hundreds of thousands of years ago when their planet was destroyed.

  She watched as the Crystalith floated down the hallway, disappearing around a corner.

  The hallway darkened back to its regular light.

  Michiko sighed.

  “Can you believe that guy?” she asked.

  But Rudy, Hassan, and Ashley didn't reply. They were still dumbfounded, staring after the Crystalith.

  “What's wrong?” Michiko asked.

  “How the hell did you do that?” Rudy asked.

  Michiko shrugged.

  “I have no idea what happened,” Hassan said, grinning, “but that was awesome!”

  “English, Japanese, Portguese, and now Crystalith,” Rudy said. “What language can't you speak?”

  “I don't speak any Thai,” Michiko said, tilting her head. “Or Argus.”

  “Wow,” Ashley said as they started toward the cafeteria. “Just, wow.”

  “I studied xenobiology in school,” Michiko said. “It was very basic communication, really. It helps that I have a musical background.”

  “Yeah, to say the least,” Rudy said. “I didn't know some of those chords you played even existed. Hell, and I played piano for two years as a kid.”

  “Jazz rules the world,” Michiko said, skipping along with the group.

  5

  The rest of the night was a blur.

  Michiko only had three drinks. Or four. It was hard to tell.

  But after eating dinner in the cafeteria, mum among the displaced survivors of Refugio, they migrated upstairs into a conference room that the other volunteers had converted into a bar. The only rule was that you could drink all you want, but you couldn’t get drunk.

  Michiko sat on a leather couch nursing a glass of plum wine, listening and laughing to the others tell their stories.

  Hassan’s family roots stretched back to Earth, to a little country in Central Asia called Azerbaijan. Michiko, Ashley and Rudy couldn't pronounce it no matter how many times Hassan said the name, and after the fifth try, they gave up. He was a recovering engineering student thinking about making a left turn into a television career. Behind the scenes, of course.

  “I’d write the scripts,” he said. “Put me on the screen and my career will be over before it starts.”

  Michiko told him to do it. “Follow your passion,” she said, “And don’t regret it like me.”

  Hassan asked her what she meant, but she sipped her wine and changed the subject.

  And then he told them how terrified he was of going out into the real world. He had loans like you wouldn’t believe, and his parents had sacrificed a lot for him to go to school. He didn’t know how he could ever repay them.

  “Just do the best you can,” Ashley said, raising her glass of Prosecco. “One morning you’ll wake up and they’ll be on their death beds. And in that moment when it’s all over, you’ll realize just how much you honored them.”

  Everyone stared at her.

  “Please tell me that isn’t from personal experience,” Hassan said with a long face.

  Ashley looked bewildered that no one else saw things from her point of view.

  Michiko laughed and poured Ashley another glass of Prosecco and told her she wasn’t being forward enough. Then Ashley quieted down, and it took quite a bit of nudging to get her to open up.

  “Oh come on, don’t shut down on us,” Michiko said. “If you’re going to give, you’ve got to receive, right?”

  “That’s what my last girlfriend said,” Hassan said. “God, why did I agree, why did I agree.”

  “Gross!” Ashley said.

  Rudy choked on his beer.

  “What about you, big guy?” Hassan asked.

  And then Rudy took his turn. He’d never been off his home planet of Gargantua until joining the Galaxy Corps. He didn’t really like travel and preferred to be in a classroom, among kids. He talked about his teaching career and how he got tired of pubescent teenagers strutting around the classroom thinking they ruled the world. All in all, he loved it. But it didn’t pay the bills.

  “Several hundred years of civilization and you’d think teaching would pay the bills,” Rudy said, crumpling his can of beer. “But I can barely pay my student loans. If I didn’t coach tennis after school, I would've been in some real trouble.”

  “You gonna go back home after this is done?” Hassan asked.

  Rudy shrugged. “Probably. Knowing my luck, I’ll probably end up teaching at the middle school I went to.”

  “God, that’s so depressing,” Ashley said.

  Rudy looked offended.

  “No offense,” Ashley said. She looked down at her wine glass and said “I better stop drinking.”

  And then Rudy told her he wanted to hear her story but said he had to pee first. He climbed over Hassan and Michiko and went to the bathroom. When he came back, Ashley had already told her story. That she was obviously African and could trace her roots back to Mali. She grew up on Provenance and worked hard to rise to the top of her class. Her dream was to be the CEO of a company some day. No company in particular—just any place that would take her and give her all the perks.

  “I want golden handcuffs and stock options,” she said. “I wonder what that would be like.”

  “I told you to wait before you told your story,” Rudy said.

  “Nobody tells me what to do,” Ashley said.

  “Strong woman thing?” Rudy asked.

  “No,” Ashley said. “Very strong woman thing.”

  Rudy plopped down on the couch.

  “Got it,” Rudy said. “But question: would a future CEO drink Prosecco? You strike me as a cabernet sauvignon woman.”

  “Let me show you how to drink in style,” she said.

  “Ha! Another round!” Rudy said.

  And then Ashley nudged Michiko.

  “Your turn, cowgirl,” Ashley said.

  “There’s not much to say about me,” Michiko said.

  “Should I start the therapy session then?” Ashley asked.

  “What?” Michiko asked. “No, don’t say anything about—”

  “Michiko dropped out of nursing school,” Ashley said.

  “That's it?” Hassan asked. “Lame story.”

  “And she hasn’t told her parents yet,” Ashley said.

  “Whoa, mama!” Hassan said, downing his drink. “I knew it!”

  “Knew what?” Michiko asked.

  “You’ve got a little crazy in you,” Hassan said.

  “What?!” Michiko said.

  “You’re wild,” Hassan said. “Only a wild one would do that.”

  “I’m not wild,” Michiko said. “It’s complicated.”

  “We’ve got most of the night left,” Hassan said. “I’m dying to hear this.”

  She told them about growing up half Japanese and half Brazilian on a planet where the culture is breezy, but everyone watches everyone and society has expectations.

  The Brazilian side of her learned to be carefree and fun; the Japanese side of her kept her mellow, with respect for others and duty.

  “Like two sides of the same coin,” Michiko said. “A coin about to crash to the bottom of a wishing pond. I wouldn’t trade my heritage for anything. It’s just hard to find my place.”

  “What do you want to do?” Rudy asked, folding his arms and stroking his chin. “Nursing obviously isn’t your thing.”

  “I have no idea,” Michiko said. “And I’m totally okay with that.”

  “She’s an aimless wanderer, with no place to call her own,” Hassan said in a low, movie narrator voice, “And she’s coming
to a town near you.”

  “My mom would take it pretty hard,” Michiko said. “My dad would support me, I guess. I just don’t have the courage. It’s difficult…”

  Michiko blushed. Then she said “You guys can’t tell anyone about this.”

  “Secret’s safe with me,” Rudy said. “Hell, come tomorrow I may not remember anything about tonight.”

  “And that’s my cue,” Ashley said, rising. “Probably the last drink we’re all gonna have for a while.”

  Hassan finished his beer and yawned.

  “Yep,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your room. Don’t want you to get swallowed by a space whale.”

  “There's no such thing,” Ashley said.

  “Yet,” Hassan said. “You can't tell me that genetic engineering isn't a thing. If they can engineer neon carrots, a space whale is the next logical step.”

  Rudy threw his beer in a nearby trash can. He held out his hand and Michiko stumbled up. The room spun around her and she giggled.

  “I guess I passed my limit, huh?” Michiko asked.

  “Better walk straight in case the principal is on her night patrol,” Hassan said.

  Michiko looked at him in fear, and then he laughed.

  “Totally kidding,” Hassan said. “We’re all adults here.”

  They walked back to their rooms, laughing.

  As Michiko shut her door and stood in her dark room, she realized she hadn’t had that much fun since…well, before nursing school.

  These were going to be fun people to be around.

  That would take her mind off things.

  She didn’t know what was in store for the volunteer work, but she didn’t care. As long as she was surrounded by friends, it didn’t matter.

  She collapsed face-first onto her bed and fell quickly to sleep.

  6

  Michiko waited in a conference room with Ashley, Rudy, and Hassan along with a group of other volunteers. The conference room was next to the airlock and they were using it as an intake room.

  They spent the morning setting up tables and hooking up tablets to the Galaxy Corps network. Michiko hated device hookup. The tablets never seemed to connect, and whenever they did, there was always some technical issue that resulted in her calling IT. She was on the phone with a service rep for an hour trying to figure out how to get the app to connect to the Galaxy Corps Assistance website.