The alien police officers led us to a large stateroom with grand chandeliers above and smooth marble below. Well, they looked reminiscent of the Earth equivalents of chandeliers and marble. Behind us, more police officers carted Aaron’s spoils of war in some sort of gravitonics-enhanced crate. It floated a foot off the ground, the bottom glowing neon green.
There were nine of them in advanced armor and six of us in winter jackets. Not great odds. They locked all the doors and stood in a ring around me and my terrified friends.
The team leader took his helmet off. Or, well, he seemed like the team leader and he appeared male to me, so I’m going with that.
“Hello. I’m Squadron Leader Tarash. Could you introduce yourselves before this all starts?”
I felt obligated as my team’s leader to introduce everyone. “Um, I’m Claire. This is Bobby. The skinny one is Jack, that weirdo is Mark, the buff one is Cole, and the one in pink is Ren.”
Tarash nodded and the nine other aliens took their helmets off. Some looked almost human while others stretched the meaning of “humanoid.”
“We’re terribly sorry,” Myren said. “Though honestly, I’m not sure where that stuff came from. We just got here ourselves.”
“We are aware,” a female humanoid with violet hair said. “But your leader seems to have extensive knowledge of our systems. Where would one from your species get such information?”
My breath caught in my throat. “I… I don’t actually know anything about your storage facility. It was Aaron who did everything, and he is no longer with us, sadly.”
“Sad indeed,” Tarash said. “Why did you guys do this?”
“We were bored,” Mark said suddenly. Okay, maybe Robert wasn’t the one I should be worried about.
“Bored? Elaborate,” the gruff-voiced humanoid insisted. “Why did you decide to infiltrate and undermine a foreign government just because you were ‘bored’?”
I sighed. How was I supposed to explain my writer to a group of aliens without inducing more breaches? It was a rule among the protected not to talk about these things with the unprotected, and I had already broken that rule way too many times. Granted, Jack, Nathan, and Robert were protected, but the aliens were most likely not. What should I say?
My writer was too busy to respond. I hoped they weren’t being too hard on Nathan. He was too cool to be mercilessly erased. Perhaps my writer will have one of us duel him to the death. Actually, that’d probably just be bad news for us.
“Well, we’re kids. What do you expect bored kids to do? Cure malaria?” I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. I hoped the translator translated a sufficient equivalent for malaria. Otherwise, that comparison would come out very weird.
“We don’t understand your logic clearly, but the council has decided an appropriate punishment for your crime,” Tarash said. One of the officers brought him a thin piece of glass-like material with words scrolling on it. Aaron had hacked the storage facility with a similar device.
“Lord, have mercy,” I heard Cole whisper.
“Two days in confinement, six days of reform, and finally, you will be sent home, banned from returning to this colony,” Tarash read.
I sighed. Why hadn’t my writer erased this disastrous incident? It was just like Aaron’s death: unnecessary, unexplainable, and traumatizing. It was such a shame, too. He would absolutely love it here, even with the jail time and the reform, which sounded like a Gulag. Too bad he was dead.
“How long is a day?” Cole asked. He was the only other theoretical physics nerd here, but he was nowhere near Aaron’s caliber. Sigh.
“Thirty-six hours and five minutes, roughly,” an officer with gold skin responded. “And before you ask, yes, the translator automatically converted that to your most familiar unit of time.” It was hard to look at her in the bright light of the chandeliers reflecting off her, but her metallic epidermis was most intriguing.
“But first,” Tarash cut in, “We will serve you a meal. A tricorder will determine what forms of nutrients you require and your meal will be synthesized.” One of the humanoids standing by our loot fished out a thin cylindrical tube and attached it to an electrograv sphere. He controlled the sphere’s movement using the thin, glass-like device and the tricorder’s readings scrolled down the tablet’s surface. If only I had one of those tablets while in the storage facility. Who knows what else we could have accomplished.
“Hey, the girl, Ren, you’re up,” the humanoid with the tablet said.
“Hey, I’m a girl, too,” I argued.
Jack eyed me critically. “Um, but…”
“Tomboys are girls, idiot,” I pointed out. “But you don’t think I’m a boy, either, so don’t get me started on that.”
“Claire, you’re next,” Tablet Man said. I stepped under the electrograv sphere and watched it as it flew around my body. The tricorder beeped and Tablet Man frowned at me. “Are you human?” he asked.
I smirked. “What? It tells you that I am, right?”
“It’s just that… Well, your body’s incompatible with most of the proteins that your companions can digest.”
“I have a lot of food allergies,” I shrugged. “Bite me.”
Tablet Man’s expression didn’t change and I suspected that there probably wasn’t a good translation for that colloquial expression. After a moment, he asked Jack to go next.
Once they scanned the rest of us, most of the police officers walked out of the room along with most of our loot, though they set up two electrograv spheres with cameras to watch us. Four officers stayed behind, two to guard each door.
“We’re totally screwed, aren’t we?” Myren whispered. “Two days in jail? Six days in ‘reform’? What are we going to do?”
“It always works out in the end,” Robert said. “I trust Claire.”
Well, things usually worked out. But right now, my writer was busy dealing with Nathan. They wouldn’t have time to deal with every stupid little thing we did. Well, I guess going to jail wasn’t that small of a thing. In fact, they probably planned this part, so there was most likely an end game.
Jack tapped my shoulder lightly. “Hey, Claire. They left one of those glass things behind,” he whispered.
A mischievous smile spread across my face. My crew huddled in a circle while I explained my plan. When the spheres weren’t looking, Robert, who was the closest, grabbed the device. We got back into a huddle, anticipation blooming like ice on the surface of a cold lake. Robert tapped the glass and the face of the violet-haired humanoid popped up with some weird symbols that read “Larça” after a momentary blur. Probably some sort of translation latency. Robert improvised some gestures and eventually brought up some sort of camera application. It showed two video streams, one from each sphere. There was also a panel on the right side with controls.
“This. Is. Awesome,” Cole whispered. “Let’s–”
Suddenly, the violet-haired humanoid from the tablet, presumably Larça, stepped into the room from the smaller, less ornate door. Behind her, a table suspended by gravitonics floated into the room. A variety of multicolored cubes in multicolored sauces in glass bowls covered its surface.
“Dinner is served,” she announced. In the corner of my eye, I saw Robert slip Larça’s glass into his jacket pocket. Slowly, we walked up to the table and began eating the synthesized human nutritional requirement.
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