She didn’t think she’d fallen asleep, but must have, because she woke to the sound of arguing. It took a moment for everything to filter in through the haze of sleep — memories of where they were, of fixing parts of this ship, and fighting with Bain. Bain who was still speaking in a very angry voice, but to whom?
There was a fuzz in her brain, like cotton batting filtering everything. She’d gone too long without sleep and now that she’d gotten some, her body wasn’t ready to quit. But she forced herself to focus and heard the familiar grunting noises that made her eyelids fly open.
One of the guards was back, standing in the doorway, pointing his weapon at Bain who kept lobbing insults and demands at him.
“Your entire pathetic ship will be nothing but dust once my mother hears about this,” Bain said, venom spewing forth. Lina glared at him; he had no way of making good on those promises — by all accounts, Mabnoa had no weapons capable of such a thing — and he was just making matters worse.
She stood up quickly, feeling a little dizzy as she did, but shoved that feeling away, racing to Bain’s side, stepping between him and the Fibbun guard.
“What is going on here?”
“He just came barging in with that thing and went for you,” Bain said, practically growling. “Still think they’re so harmless?”
She huffed and turned away from him, meeting the strange yellow eyes of the guard. She couldn’t be totally sure, but she thought this was the same one who’d been with her in Quarantine.
“What’s happening?” she asked him, trying to read his expression. It wasn’t easy. But the guard at least lowered his weapon, gesturing around the room as he said something in his garbled language. The gestures seemed random, but then Lina realized he was pointing to her repairs, trying to say something about that. She remembered the condition the rest of the ship was in and nodded.
“Yeah, I did that. I can help in other places too,” she said.
“Are you out of your mind?” Bain roared from behind her. She just shot a fierce glare over her shoulder.
“You can help me or shut up, but those are the only choices,” she snapped at him. He was being utterly ridiculous and she couldn’t do this with him working against her.
He seemed to choose ‘shutting up’ as his option. Whatever. As long as he wasn’t getting in her way.
The guard jerked his head toward the doorway, seeming to tell Lina to come with him.
“What about him?” she asked, pointing to Bain. The guard grumbled something and sneered at him, practically foaming at the mouth.
Lina sighed, her shoulders slumping with resignation. “Yeah, fair enough.” Whatever the guard wanted her for, she’d have to do it alone. Bain had proven himself to be an obstacle and until he saw reason, she just couldn’t risk having him around.
“I guess I’ll see you later,” she said to Bain, stepping towards the doorway as the guard backed out.
“Lina! Lina, stop! You can’t go with him. What if you never come back?” Suddenly, there was desperation in his eyes, total fear taking over. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me.”
“I’ll be back,” she said, hoping it was true. She expelled a heavy breath and went back to him, cradling his jaw in her palm. “Please trust me. I know this seems crazy, but I really think it’s our best option.”
He closed his eyes, leaning into her palm, and finally nodded. “Okay. If you think this is what you have to do.”
She smiled, a sad little grin that tugged at her heartstrings and made her second-guess this. But then she just kissed him quickly and pulled away before she could change her mind. “I’ll be back before you know it,” she said, backing out of the room.
The door closed behind her, locking Bain on the other side. He flattened his palm against the window and with his eyes begged her not to be wrong. She tried her best to look assured as she turned away from him, but the whole time she followed the guard down the hallway, her heart was in her throat.
The guard led her through the ship again, and Lina tried yet again to memorize the path they took, but it was too winding, too confusing. She wouldn’t have been surprised at all to find out that they’d crossed the same hallway multiple times just to throw her off. Once she lost track of where they were in her mental map, she switched to cataloging needed repairs. A leak here, a broken vent there, no power down that corridor, that kind of thing. By the time the guard stopped, Lina had a mental list a mile long.
He turned to her, pausing before a closed door, and seemed to be trying to communicate something with her silently. There was a look in his eyes. A plea, perhaps? But what could he possibly want from her? She was the one trapped and kidnapped.
She shifted on her feet and the Fibbun turned back to the door, his back swelling with a deep breath as he placed his sticky hand on the keypad.
The door whooshed open, then stuck three-quarters of the way up with a grinding crunch. The Fibbun guard looked up and grumbled, ducking his head under the stuck door. Lina frowned at it, not needing to duck, though she craned her head to look up, trying to see past the door to the mechanism that had broken. Of course she couldn’t see anything, but she added it to the list in her head and followed the guard in.
Once they were both inside the room, the door slammed shut again.
She’d thought the guard might be taking her back to the bridge, but this room was unfamiliar. It wasn’t much more than the room that she and Bain shared, though it was done up in muted greens, grays, and browns, rather than white. The walls weren’t so bare in this room. There were screens covering almost every surface, displaying what looked like diagnostics from the ship, judging by the diagrams next to the foreign symbols.
And in between the screens, covering every inch of free wall space, there were pictures. Pictures of a foreign world, pictures of other Fibbuns, even pictures of Fibbuns and what appeared to be tiny humans — people like her.
Lina swallowed. She was right, wasn’t she? She squinted, trying to see the expressions of those people more clearly, but she couldn’t tell if they were happy or in distress.
The guard grunted something, loud enough that it wasn’t for her, and another voice called back, another grunt.
Her guard gestured and Lina frowned, not sure what he wanted from her. Then, a large table and four chairs rose from the floor and she took a seat, earning a satisfied nod from the guard.
Her growing suspicions were confirmed when the Captain entered the room. He didn’t have his guards with him this time, but that made him no less imposing. He was huge, even by Fibbun standards, and looked perpetually angry. Possibly murderous.
He took a seat opposite Lina and dropped a translator box in the middle of the table.
The Captain grunted, and the box said, “Go ahead.”
Lina frowned, shaking her head, confused. “Go ahead with what?”
His expression grew somehow, impossibly, angrier. “Goblak says you want to talk. Talk.”
Goblak? She turned to face the guard and he shifted from one foot to the other. “If I may?” the box translated as he spoke in his native tongue.
“What?” the Captain said, his tone unmistakably sharp despite the level tone of the translation.
“She is not aware of—” The translation began, but the Captain switched the box off as they fell into what seemed, by all accounts, to be a heated argument.
“Um… Can I say something?” Lina asked, clearing her throat while they shouted at each other. Both stopped for a moment, turning to her, seeming surprised to find her still there.
Hesitantly, the Captain reached for the translator and turned it on again.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, her voice shaking under the oppressive glare of these two aliens. “But I know that you guys could use some help. This ship is falling apart. It’s only a matter of time before something related to life support fails and then you’re really in trouble.”
“This is what I was trying to explain, Captain,” the guard, Goblak said.
The Captain leaned across the table, his stale breath making Lina wrinkle her nose as he spoke. “You think you can fix these things for us?”
She nodded, something in her gut starting to feel uneasy. “I know I can. Without the proper tools I’ve already fixed most of the problems in the… room I was in.” She felt like implying they were keeping her in a cell, keeping her as a prisoner — even though they were — would insult the Fibbuns. She wasn’t entirely sure how they operated, but she’d gotten enough of a feel for it to know that she should tread lightly.
“And what of your companion? The prince.”
Now, Lina shifted in her seat, twisting her fingers together nervously. She could only hope they weren’t experts in reading her body language.
“He was under the influence of the medication you provided and was speaking nonsense,” she said carefully, skirting around outright denying his claims.
“So he is not the prince?”
Lina swallowed, her throat thick with worry. “What are you going to do with us? I’m willing to help, but only in exchange for our freedom.”
The Fibbun Captain’s face twisted and he let out a strange sound that startled her. A loud bellow of sorts. She looked back to Goblak for any clues, but he didn’t seem concerned, or fazed at all, really.
“You think you’re in any position to bargain with me?” the Captain made that terrifying sound again and Lina realized it must have been a laugh. She shuddered. No wonder the Mabnoans thought these creatures were scary and dangerous. Everything about them was foreign and different.
She sucked in a breath, steeling herself. “I think I have valuable skills and you’d be a fool to turn your nose up at them because of some silly war that hasn’t been active for centuries.”
The Captain shot to his feet, roaring, but another voice came from an adjoining room. A softer voice saying, “She’s right, you know.”
Lina froze. Every cell in her body seemed to stop what it was doing, her heart stopped pumping, her lungs stopped breathing. There was someone else on this ship that could talk to her. Her eyes darted again to the photos on the wall, then to the doorway the voice had come from.
The door to the other room, which had been slightly ajar this whole time, now slid open completely — after a hearty shove from the other side — to reveal a woman like Lina. The same height, the same size, even the same buttercup yellow hair piled on her head in a knot. She wore a simple white jumpsuit, with thin-framed glasses perched on the end of her nose.
The two Fibbuns also stopped and turned toward the door, but neither seemed to raise their guard around this woman. Neither seemed surprised to see her.
She smiled as she walked into the room. “How are you?” she asked sweetly, sitting in the seat next to the Captain’s, on the opposite side of the table.
Lina nodded, her tongue too heavy to talk, just ogling this woman. There was something about her that seemed familiar. “Fine,” she choked out, realizing the woman was waiting for an answer.
“I’m sorry for all of this. No one even told me we’d intercepted a ship until an hour or so ago. If I’d had any idea… They can be a bit abrasive, can’t they?”
The translator was still running and both Fibbuns bristled at her comment, making affronted noises. She turned with kind eyes toward the Captain and rested a hand on his arm, patting it gently.
Lina’s frown only grew deeper, something about this whole thing seemed… off. What was she missing?
“What’s going on?” she finally asked, her throat dry, her breath hard to find.
The woman’s expression fell and she sighed, removing her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose. “It’s quite a long story, to be honest. So I suppose I’ll start the only way I know how. What do you think of our home?” she asked, extending her arms, gesturing all around.
“It’s… fine,” Lina said, more confused than ever.
“No, no. Tell me what you really think,” she said, reaching to the translator cube and turning it off. She gave both the Fibbuns a hard look that clearly said ‘don’t worry, I’ve got this under control.’
Lina wasn’t sure she liked that look. It only made her realize how much of what was going on she simply didn’t understand.
“Well…” Lina said, nibbling on her bottom lip. “It seems in dire need of repairs. A ship this size… you must not make it back to home base often, which means you have people living here full time, living out their entire lives — maybe entire generations? — and there are clearly some big red flags that are going to be catastrophes if they go ignored.”
The woman nodded. “And what do you think of our… hosts, here? You can be honest with me, dear.”
Lina’s brows pushed together, suspicion mounting still. What did she want her to say? What did she expect? It almost seemed like she was trying to bait her into saying something defamatory about the Fibbuns. She took a measured breath to steady her nerves. If she was walking into a trap, she was going to do it with both eyes open and with careful steps.
“I’d only heard of them recently, but they’ve not been what I expected… The hospitality I’ve been shown is beyond what I could have imagined.”
The other woman laughed. “Are you sure it’s your boyfriend who’s the prince? That was a very royal answer, my dear. Very tactful.”
Lina just frowned, unable to hide her confusion. “I’m sorry, but I really have no idea what you’re getting at here.”
The other woman grinned and nodded. “I know,” she said, flipping the translator back on. “But in order to tell my story, I had to confirm a few things I suspected. You see, I was brought up, knowing about our mortal enemies. I knew of the fearsome creatures that terrorized our kind and forced them to do their bidding.” Both Fibbuns grumbled under their breath, but it wasn’t enough — or perhaps it was too much — for the translator to pick up.
“So, when the ship I was on was captured… You can imagine my reaction. Probably similar to your reaction — fear, panic, grief, maybe even some resignation. I was sure I’d never get off this ship.”
Lina didn’t point out that it seemed like she never had.
“But I also noticed the things you did. I noticed a ship falling into disrepair. And I noticed my captors — the monsters I’d been warned about — didn’t seem as bad as I was led to believe. Where you’re gifted with mechanical problems, my area of expertise is more related to… anthropological mysteries. I saw the inconsistencies with the established narrative and my own first-hand observations. I couldn’t leave until my curiosity was sated.”
“But… You’re still here.”
A sad smile answered, and the woman nodded. “I am. There were those who thought I’d been tainted… That I’d been brainwashed and would try to lead the enemies back to our home. I wasn’t allowed to go back. Still, I had work to do here. I realized that this war… this conflict that has been going on for ages, is being perpetuated by cultural misunderstandings and a lack of communication. You’ve no doubt noticed the differences between us. How hard it can be to communicate at times. And when I came on board, we didn’t have these handy translators. I helped with the translations, though we haven’t had much cause to test it before you arrived!” she said, clearly happy with how the ‘tests’ were going so far.
Lina shook her head, feeling like it was stuffed full of information that she couldn’t sort through. And still, like beacons shining in her mind, there were so many questions.
“So… you’ve been their prisoner all this time?” she asked, her chest tightening. Even if they did let her and Bain go, would the Mabnoans react to Lina the same way this woman’s people reacted to her? When Lina tried to tell them of the generosity and misunderstandings, would she be labeled an outcast? A traitor?
Did it even matter, though? She never planned on going back to Mabnoa. Bain could go back; he didn’t buy into her theory. Besides, she couldn’t believe that the queen would turn her back on her own son, even if he had disobeyed her direct orders. They were still family.
The woman laughed — a musical sound that filled the room with warmth — and the lines around her eyes became more pronounced. She was a fair bit older than Lina, but she still looked healthy, young, and vital. Living on this downtrodden ship certainly hadn’t hurt her, it seemed.
“Oh, my dear, prisoner is hardly the word. I could have left any time I wanted. No one’s keeping me here against my will.”
Lina nibbled her bottom lip. She wished she could say the same. But then she looked from the Captain, to Goblak and over her shoulder toward the door. Could she? If she told them she wanted to leave, would they let her?
“And you… never wanted to?” she asked, edging toward the question carefully. The translator was still on, and the two Fibbuns were still watching them closely. If the woman did have any qualms, who was to say she’d feel comfortable speaking out about them now?
The woman sighed and her face fell, making her look much older than she had while smiling. “That’s not entirely accurate. There were times when I wished… when I thought that maybe I’d made the wrong decision… But I had work to do here. With my help… I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, but perhaps easier to communicate with others. My people… though they don’t welcome me back have seen that our so-called enemies wish us no harm. There have been no hostilities between us for nearly a decade. And, of course, there’s the matter of my gift…”
Lina frowned, trying to work out the cryptic message, but then the woman wiggled her fingers and it wasn’t so cryptic anymore. “You mean… with the plants?”
“Yes, of course. You were right in your assumption that this ship has housed generations. The Fibbun homeworld…” She shifted in her seat and Lina noticed the two aliens tensing. “It’s dead. It was dying when the conflict started, they’d hoped to find a way to save it.”
“And they failed?” Lina asked, her throat tightening. She knew what it was like to be without a home in the Universe. To feel adrift without roots. This was a whole species that felt that way, that suffered like she had — more than she had — and would never find the solace that she did on Mabnoa.
The woman gave her a sad, solemn nod. “Yes, they failed. The air is toxic, nothing can live there, no plants, no creatures, even the ships… The atmosphere corrodes everything. Any ships that have tried to go in for survivors quickly succumbed to the effects and crashed. We can only assume now that no one remains.”
Lina swallowed at the thought. They’d known there were people suffering. They tried to send rescue ships and every one of them failed. How many did they send before they gave up? And how difficult must that decision have been?
Suddenly, she was irrationally angry with the Mabnoans for hiding out, for keeping their gift secreted away while a whole planet died. Her hands balled into fists, her nails biting into the fleshy part of her palm, leaving divots in their place.
“So this ship is…”
“Everything they have left, yes,” she finished with a stiff nod. “Their hydroponic farms weren’t doing so well when I arrived, but in time, I’ve helped them to flourish. There’s no shortage of food now,” she said proudly.
Lina nodded. “I’d noticed.”
And almost instantly, the other woman seemed to deflate. “That doesn’t mean we’re without our problems though, as you’ve noticed. We’d love to have your help.”
Lina sat back in her chair, trying to put some distance between the woman who looked so familiar and herself. She needed to think, and those kind, shimmering eyes only made her want to jump and agree to anything she could.
“There’s something I still don’t understand… If there haven’t been hostilities for over a decade, why were we shot down and captured?”
“Ah,” the woman said, pressing her lips together firmly. “That… may have been my fault.”
“I thought you’d only just found out we were even here,” Lina said, suspicions rising as she narrowed her eyes.
“Well… I did, yes.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Lina’s eyes narrowed and unease crawled up her spine like a spider. Something was missing from this explanation and she didn’t like it.
The Captain grunted angrily, his hand slamming on the table, rattling the translator cube as it calmly said, “Tell her now.”