Star Side

Chapter 19

I might have been afraid to touch it if I hadn't dragged it here with Levi. It's skin had been tough and leathery and hot to the touch.

First I leveled the X-ray at its shoulder, beneath the wide collarbone, where Levi had hit it last. Despite the wound piercing the chest, it seemed to have stop bleeding, somehow, and when I checked the X-ray I couldn't find the bullet for the life of me, despite there not being an exit wound. But, then, these alien bones could be doing anything to the picture, and I wasn't exactly trained in human anatomy. The missing bullet was weird, to be sure, but there was nothing I could do about it. Levi certainly wasn't going to give his opinion on it and it'd be wrong to ask Naomi back in for her professional opinion. I should probably sign it off as good as I could do that the wound had at least stopped bleeding, so I set to work gluing and bandaging it up. Being at the shoulder junction, there would be more moving and chance for the glue to be undone, thus double protection.

I manually cleaned away the blood and applied the blood coagulant against the chest shot too, just in case. Then I put it to the thigh wound, which hadn't stopped bleeding. The alien didn't so much as twitch as I touched its wounds. It did, however, seem to come to a bit when I brought the X-ray down again to take a picture of its leg. It was lucky. The bullet had gone clear through the flesh of its thigh, which looked surprisingly normal in the X-ray. I hadn't exactly been trained to be a surgeon, or any sort of medical aid. The only reason I knew how to use the X-ray and other basic tools of the medical bay was because of the user friendly interface of the control panel and Naomi walking me through it on a boring afternoon for something to do.

I was half-surprised, when I checked, to see that the coagulant had worked. The blood seeping out of its wound was a strange mix of bright red and a dark, purple blue. It didn't look human enough to work.

After sealing the entry and exit wound with anti-bacterial and glue (hoping I hadn't just applied something that might be poisonous to him—it), and moved up to its face to glue the gash on his cheek shut.

And it was looking at me again. Its pupils had distended into hourglasses, like that of a goat's.

I clenched the glue bottle.

"I'm going to seal up the cut on your face," I said.

"You actually expect it to understand?" asked Levi bitterly.

"It might get my intention," I said. "It did get that I was afraid back there."

"How do you know?"

The eyes held onto me unnervingly still as I dabbed the brush in the bottle and gently set to brushing the clear glue on the purple-red gash.

"I told you it was, like, telepathic, right? It was sending me a sense of safety, or the feeling. I know it wasn't just me. It even rolled onto its back and, like...purred at me or something." Then again, it was an alien, so I could have just misinterpreted all—no, no, too late for that.

Levi grunted, but didn't continue the conversation. He just held the rifle at ready.

Glue applied, I stepped back. The alien watched me go, rather sleepily. Out of the corner of my eye I saw its tail, hanging off the side of the table, slowly wag its tip.

"It's weird," I said, mostly to myself. "Its wounds don't seem bad enough to have knocked him down, let alone unconscious. And he seems sort of...sleepy."

"Maybe he's dying from lead poisoning," said Levi blandly, and maybe a bit hopefully.

I couldn't help but sigh at that. The first intelligent alien humans had ever seen and it just had to land on a space station with the few humans who could care less.

"That gun still has lead bullets?"

"Most guns still have lead bullets. If the tech ain't broke, don't fix it."

"But I thought there'd be, like, laser guns, like they have on Earth."

Levi gave me a familiar bland look.

"You know how expensive that crap is? Do you think they'd spend the money on a waste like this place?"

I let that slide, my gaze brought back to the drowsy alien looking at me from the table. I felt anxious for no reason. If it died, it would be for the best, right? Naomi and Levi weren't about to let it wander around on station, and we'd most likely kill it sending it back to the surface unless we could somehow teach it how to work a life boat.

But at least I had the sense enough to be curious, and the humanity to see it had meant me no harm. And, well...it wasn't like I had much to live for anyway.

But it wasn't just my life involved.

I turned towards Levi. "Give me the gun."

He looked down right offended. "No way."

"I know how to shoot."

"So? You'll probably let it kill you first."

I rolled my eyes. "Levi, if you're regretting letting me have my way this much you should have just ignored me."

I half expected him to say, 'You know what? You're right,' and lift up the gun for the killing shot. I hadn't even thought of what to do if he did. Really, I shouldn't have said that at all.

But he stayed still, looking at me. His frown was just as cutting as his eyes.

"If you were going to regret stopping me, you shouldn't have done it," he said. "Hold fast to the impressions of your heart. Heaven knows I've experienced a lifetime of what happens if you don't."

I had to let that sink in for a minute before I could believe it was Levi, took down a man with his favorite ball-point pen Levi, who had said that.

"Gracious, man, that was beautiful," I said. "You going to make a poster out of that?"

He snorted. His expression softened just a tad.

"Careful. It's the comedic relief that gets killed first," he said.

"Guess you thought Josh was funny then."

Probably insensitive to mention Joshua at this point, with his possible murderer more or less asleep before me. But Levi had never been one to lecture about the finer points of emotional sensitivity and political correctness.