Star Side

Chapter 21

Naomi wanted the alien gone.

"Especially since its body absorbed the bullets," she said. "We don't have any energy weapons on here."

"The bullets still wounded him, he isn't, like, super healing—"

"It's been three days and he's already healed. That's super healing. Point is, I've had my time to think and it's just all wrong. We aren't equipped to handle it. We've passed the message on to Earth that there's intelligent life here. In a few years someone who is will get here, but all we risk by keeping it here is death."

I stared at her profile as she sipped something fragrant from a mug and read a novel from a lightpad. She'd always been fair skinned, but she'd become almost bloodless now, with deep circles under her eyes. Losing one's spouse could do that.

And, frankly, she was being more than reasonable, giving the circumstances.

I bit my lip. My argument from the start had been to spare the alien because he wouldn't know how to work the lifepod enough to get back to the surface alive. I hadn't wanted to kill something so aware, so...

Unbidden, the memory of it purring at me and emitting waves of safe, safe, safe, warm as spring waters, made my heart shiver.

"Okay," I said slowly. "How do you suggest we go about it?"

She sniffed and finally looked away from her book. "What's to figure out?"

"It's twice as tall and wide as all of us with a tail and now wings. I don't think it will take too kindly to being shoved around and into an airlock."

"It likes you, doesn't it?"

I wrinkled my nose. "How'd you get that?"

"Levi talks sometimes." She looked back to her book, shifting her legs beneath her hand-knitted afghan. "Convince it to follow you, somehow, and lead it into an airlock. Big it may be, but nothing short of a bomb can break through the airlock doors."

I understood the words. I understood that she was right. This would be the safest course for us. Something like this alien had already killed one of us.

But ugly, acidic repulsion still filled in around my lungs.

I remember how it had rumbled at me on the bay table, strange, heavy-brow expression somehow soft as it allowed me to touch its wings and bandages. Its eyes had never left me, half-lidded and warm. It was contrary to the rock-rumbling growl it'd given Levi the moment he'd stood up. Even now I worried about leaving Levi alone with it while I'd met up with Naomi. She'd refused to come anywhere close to medical bay. Not as long as the alien was there.

"Naomi," I said, slowly, rolling my lip around her name. "Don't...don't you feel...like it's just a little bit wrong?"

"I don't get how you do," she said lightly, though there was a sharp tang to her voice.

"He's sentient. He has emotions, like us. His face is even similar, I recognize his expressions—"

"You think you recognize its expressions. It's an alien, Jo, and where are you getting off calling it a 'he'?"

"I...I don't know. It's just the feeling—"

"You're going a lot off feelings. That's unlike you, and you know that's stupid, right? Everything we know could be upside down with aliens. They could have three genders, act nice when they're actually being aggressive, reproduce like starfish," she was looking at me again, this time with eyes as hard and cold as Levi's. "You should have let Levi shot it's head when it was down. I should have let him. I'm repenting of that now."