It took forty-six Galaxy minutes to get from Caden’s hub to Xondux, and only ten of them had passed. This was the longest inter-system flight she’d ever taken. She kept looking out the ship’s windows expecting to see that they’d actually circled back to her hub, or gotten caught in the atmosphere of a planet. The cyborgs in her dorm were fond of pranks, and once they’d convinced her that her weekly mission had begun without her in her sleep. No matter how often she checked, all she could see was the inky blackness of space, dotted with pinpricks of light and occasionally interrupted by a gas giant or a belt of asteroids. She tried to remember her parental unit’s words--- Evan and Willow were all about logic: close to one hundred percent of cypeople make it through a flight vessel catastrophe. Their fatality rates in common accidents were far better than most other organisms, but this statistic never did anything to stop the ice rattle of anxiety from coiling around her heart.
Reflexively, she tapped her right index finger against the cuff of her left sleeve, activating the projection screen in her suit that allowed her to access the ships data as well her own. Caden brought up the map of their flight path, letting her cold gray eyes move over the bright blue trail for what must have been the tenth time. Thirty five more minutes, no stops. Thirty-seven if they allowed for possible interceptions of the Ridley Asteroid Belt around the gold sector. The belt was a nuisance, but it was more effective at keeping out pirates than any other method the Intergalactic Council had come up with thus far, so no one could object to its continued existence. Caden didn’t mind, because that meant fewer incidents and therefore fewer reasons to have her pulled from regular patrols---but her regular patrols seemed to be at an end now, anyway. She always felt more daring on pirate missions, and those were often the times she liked to pretend she was a caped crusader, or a masked vigilante.
“Nervous?”
Caden spun her chair around so forcefully that she did a full revolution and had to come back around again. She placed her heeled boots on the ground to stop herself, facing the Hyppo accompanying her while she wrangled her pulse under control. The tall alien was sitting about fifteen feet away in his straight-back chair, his slim face an expression of calm and understanding. She fought the urge to drop her gaze and cut off her projection screen with another sharp tap of her finger. “No,” she lied, crossing her legs at the ankle in an attempt to appear more relaxed. “I just want to see if we’re getting ahead of the asteroids.”
Umi nodded, flashing all of his brilliant white teeth at once. “Can you control that kind of thing?”
“Well…no,” Caden answered, straightening the zipper on her onyx suit as her anxiety flared to life again. “The ship’s path is automated. But I like to see how we’re doing, anyway.” She bit back the snide remark she actually wanted to make, reminded herself that she really was just nervous about this new assignment. It’s just a new mission, she kept telling herself. Would Catwoman flinch because she was in new territory?
Umi nodded again, blinking all of three of his calm blue-green eyes in unison. “Please don’t take offense at my asking; I only ask because of course I pick up the energy signatures of the creatures around me, and I have to be especially in tune with yours.” His fingers adjusted his short green kilt nervously, flashing the tops of his strong thighs as he pulled on the material. It was the closest thing to a tic he seemed to have; besides other cyborgs, Caden had never seen someone sit so still for so long.
“I understand,” Caden said quickly. She wanted this conversation to be over very badly, and she started to turn back toward the wide front window of the ship, but the Hyppo spoke again.
“Forgive me, but I don’t believe you do. I fear I’ve made you uncomfortable, and that is my very last intention.” Umi’s voice had been low and soothing from the moment she met him, but somehow his placid tone seemed condescending. She knew it was probably her nerves, but she bristled at his words.
“Pointing out my discomfort won’t help any,” she snapped, and the smile slipped from Umi’s face. He dropped his chin forward, and the dark green hair on his head tumbled across his forehead to conceal his third eye; for a moment, he looked like any number of beautiful humans from earth, albeit one with a constant subtle glow to his golden-brown skin at times. Caden felt a distant stab of remorse, and for once she was grateful that her empathy board hadn’t been activated naturally, like some of the other cyborgs---it would have made the exchange far more awkward.
Caden sighed, and the simple motion of drawing oxygen into her body made her feel more relaxed. She relaxed her shoulders and tried to smile. Just be an alter ego, she thought. Make him feel safe. Make it believable. “I apologize,” she said softly. She waited for Umi to straighten in his chair before continuing. “I am nervous… about this mission, and about the fact that you can read me so well.”
“I don’t mean to,” Umi said carefully, keeping his tone light. “Hyppo receive energy signatures from the environment constantly, so I can only block you out if I shut out all sensation completely.”
“I know!” Caden heard her voice rise, and took another breath to steady herself. She decided to focus on the nearly imperceptible movement of the ship and uncrossed her legs, trying to give her sinewy frame some sense of stability. “And I also know that you’re supposed to help keep me calm. I even know that you’re probably going to help me activate my empathy board later in the trip.”
Umi didn’t look surprised. “How did you find out?” he asked, his tone curious.
It was Caden’s turn to drop her gaze. “I overheard my dorm station manager talking about it before he sent out the rest of the Minders. They called me in first, to tell me the…good news.” Caden swallowed, remembering walking into Commander Dorne’s office only two days before.
He was already standing when she entered, so she had to lift her chin to meet the seven-and-a-half-foot human’s gaze. The Commander had been her personal mentor for nearly her whole career up to that point, so being called into his office wasn’t the special event it was for most other cypeople. He was the only human she interacted with regularly, so she knew his facial expressions far better than most, but he still managed to blind side her. Caden remembered laughing when he told her she was being deployed long term, and that she might not see the orbiting station she called home for months; it was something she’d never dreamed of hearing without first being told of the presence of an all-out war. Then she saw the Commander wasn’t joking, and she stopped laughing.
She had expected to be told she was being discharged for Earth duties; Caden had been doing protection detail for other cyborgs on the Earth’s surface once a month for four out of her six years of service. Like the other cypeople in her dorm, Caden had been grown for guarding and combat duty. Since the age of sixteen, she’d spent ten hours each week working on marksmanship, ten hours per week working on strength, and twenty hours per week doing a variety of missions that all required her to protect other living bodies from wild animals, space pirates, and even debris.
Her first two years were filled with patrolling school shuttle routes between planets to keep the area clear of aggressive creatures, radioactive space slugs, and the occasional escaped criminal; after that, Caden’s incredible power and accuracy finally got her noticed by the higher Council---particularly due to her small stature. She was two inches over five feet, while most Minders tended to be at least five foot ten. It surprised most of the people who worked with her that it had even taken two years for her to be pulled aside for more dangerous missions: everyone on her team had quickly become familiar with what they affectionately referred to as Caden’s Blue Screen. Caden herself loathed the name, but the curious phenomenon allowed her to dispatch of obstacles with astounding speed and ferocity. Commander Dorne told her when he observed her in training that she was tapping into her warrior spirit and simply needed to learn to control it, and her parental units assured her it was a mix of talent and coding; Caden at first believed it was an ill omen and refused to even think about it until she learned the truth about her brain.
Umi was watching her ponder all of this with an intense interest in his azure eyes; Caden would have been uncomfortable, but she was used to being looked at that way. “Are you nervous about activating your empathy board?”
“No,” Caden said truthfully. She tightened her metallic headband around her red hair, straightening her shining ponytail out of habit even though she knew it was secure. “I’ve been experiencing some sensitivity anyway, and Commander Dorne says it should actually help with some of the problems I have.”
“Problems?”
“Yes.” Caden turned her chair back toward the window; the conversation had taken a turn toward the more intimate, and she wasn’t interesting in pursuing it. Unfortunately for her, Umi seemed happy enough to converse with her back.
“I heard that you’re ranked top of the Minders---even the long-range marksmen.” His voice was dripping with congeniality, and the pleasant tone needled under Caden’s skin. “What problems could you have?”
“Take a guess,” Caden snapped. She tapped her left wrist cuff again, bringing up the shining projection screen and tracing their flight path with her steely gray eyes again. “What’s a cyperson’s worst nightmare?”
“Something is overwhelming you,” Umi said softly. “You’re experiencing bursts of emotion.” He paused as Caden fidgeted in her seat and dropped her eyes. “You’re not decaying, or they wouldn’t have sent you on a mission. You’re having something go off in your empathy board, something severe enough to trouble you deeply…but if that were true, how could you be so good at your job?” Despite the hypnotic quality of his voice, the words dug into Caden’s brain like hot knives.
Twenty-five minutes, Caden thought, squeezing her hands into fists to keep them from moving. Just twenty-five more minutes. “You know all this, but no one told you the details? Nobody thought to tell you about my Hulk mode?” She swiveled away from the screen and locked eyes with Umi again, squaring her shoulders.
Umi blinked slowly and let out a noise of bewilderment. “I’m not familiar with the term,” he said. “Can you explain?”
Caden leaned back in the plush seat, surprised that there was any sort of gap in the Hyppo’s knowledge. She assumed all of his kind would know everything about Earth; their lifespans were much longer than humans even now, and many of them took up Earthling studies as a kind of special interest. “The Hulk is an old-world figure from Earth media. He was a human scientist who was trying to replicate the traits and abilities of another superhero---you know that term?” Umi nodded. “He was messing with some chemicals, and he accidentally made himself radioactive.”
“So, he died?” Umi’s face frowned up, turning his handsome features into a mask of confusion. “What made this heroic?”
Caden laughed and shook her head. “He didn’t die. This is media, remember. Films and comics.”
“Comics,” Umi repeated slowly. His eyes blinked shut again, and Caden realized he was trying to locate the word in his memory bank. Hyppo people didn’t have a collective consciousness, but they could store massive amounts of information and memories in a bank-like area of their minds that they had evolved to access at will. It was, humans assumed, the reason they appeared to have such extraordinary powers; their bodies had been evolving for so long that what looked like simple harmony with the universe was actually just incredible control over their own biology and environments, right down the quarks in their electrons.
“Comics were still images of scenes, put together to form stories. They often had text over the images to help tell the stories,” Caden explained, suppressing the urge to laugh again. I’m teaching something to a Hyppo who is at least three times my age. “Everyone has been all about motion for so long that I’m not surprised you haven’t had a reason to learn about it.”
“I see,” Umi said. He leaned forward and propped his arms on his bare thighs, and Caden noticed the definition in his powerful frame for the first time. At first her was gaze was purely for pleasure---he was all long lines and compact muscle wrapped in a beautiful shade of light brown, like antique brass. Then her training kicked in a millisecond later. Almost instantly, she found two ways to disable him: by attacking his eyes and taking out his knees, which were a weak spot on his otherwise strong body, or jabbing through the bone surrounding his delicate system of organs to squeeze his heart until it stopped beating. Focus, she reminded herself. You’re supposed to protect him, not assess him as a threat.
Umi pressed on. “So, in these comics, the radiation didn’t kill him?”
“Right. It gave him powers, so that whenever he was angry or became threatened, he would turn green and swell up. He became this massive, muscle-bound beast who could beat all of his enemies into the ground as easily as you or I might swat a fly.” She watched Umi process all of this, his face slowly smoothing out as he worked through her speech.
After a moment, he smiled gently and sat up straight again, and there was an undercurrent of pride in his speech at having figured it out. “So, your Hulk mode is what happens to you in a stressful situation? You also swell to an enormous size and possess incredible strength?” His smile faltered when Caden laughed again.
“Not exactly,” Caden chuckled. “I get a lot stronger and faster, but as far as I know, I don’t bloat or change color.” She sighed, then felt a sliver of dread slip into her bloodstream when she realized what she’d said. She hoped the Hyppo wouldn’t notice, but it was a vain hope. He wasn’t as slow as the humans who had surrounded her for years, and he didn’t have the same hesitancy a cyperson knew at the idea of being rude or insensitive, so he pounced on her phrasing immediately.
“As far as you know?” His broad shoulders squared, and he gasped softly. “You’re not aware of your actions during these…Hulk moments?”
Caden closed her eyes and gritted her teeth as an icy tide of regret and shame washed over her body. “No,” she said weakly. Deep breaths, that’s how you do it. Just keep breathing. Would Selina Kyle let this break her cover?
“But isn’t that dangerous?” The concern in Umi’s voice was palpable. “You could hurt yourself, or someone else. Why do they let you keep doing this?” There was barely a pause between the end of his question and the moment he found the answer. “They don’t know. The humans don’t know.” Umi’s eyes widened in shock, and this his face settled into a sober expression that made Caden’s body go numb with despair.
“Please don’t tell them,” Caden begged, fighting to keep her vitals under control as fear spread through her body. Not now, she thought. Not now!
“The other cypeople know they would suspect me of decaying or corruption,” she gasped. “I would be destroyed as a precaution.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and her vision grew blurry, but she needed to make him understand. I need to be strong. “So, the first time it happened…the first time I blacked out, I came to after killing a dozen meteor crabs, the two-hundred pound ones, like it was nothing. My team just stood back and stared at me, and none of them asked what happened. They all knew. It’s the same every time. No cyperson ever asks how I do it, because they all know that I don’t know.” Caden remembered the terror in their eyes---identical to the burning anxiety she felt after washing the slime of the meteor crabs from her body. It seemed like it would never come off. There had been bone and gristle, too.
She kept talking, unable to stop now that she had begun. “They know to stay out of my way, but that first time, I nearly ripped a teammate’s arm off. If it had been a human...” she shook her head roughly. “We just patched her up, and when the Commander asked how we’d gotten the job done without discharging any weapons…” her lungs seized up, and Caden shut her eyes, willing more coolant into her system to try to stop her impending collapse. Deep breath. Bands of tension were constricting around her body, and she was trembling like a leaf. “When he asked…”
“You lied,” Umi said softly. She heard him remove his safety belt and wondered why.
She realized why as soon as she slumped forward, sagging against the straps in her chair so the cloth bit into her neck. A long moment passed, and she wasn’t aware of any sound or motion. Then she felt two strong hands on her shoulders, and the next moment she was being pushed upward, and it was as though a knife had torn through the rings of rubber closing her airways down. She took a great, shuddering gasp, and then another, and a third; after a few more lungfuls of air, Caden’s body had cooled and her pulse was back to normal. She opened her eyes to see Umi’s face looming inches away, his brilliant blue-green eyes glowing as he poured a cool, healing energy into her body.
“Are you all right?” Umi asked softly, and his breath washed over her like a warm breeze; it was oddly sweet-smelling, as though he’d been eating something sugary. Caden nodded weakly, and Umi slipped the safety straps from her shoulder. “This should help you breathe a little better. The straps tightened because the ship got knocked around a bit by some debris.”
Caden wondered why she didn’t feel it, and then she felt her cheeks grow warm with embarrassment. She must have blacked out, but because there had been nothing to target, her body just succumbed to the darkness. Damn. What’s wrong with you?
“You were out for several minutes,” Umi said, confirming her suspicions. “Not very long. You twitched around a bit. Is that normal?”
Caden shrugged and looked around the ship, wondering how close they were to the destination now. When they got to Xondux, Caden was supposed to take him directly to his planet’s Hall of Meetings to be officially debriefed on her new assignment. The time couldn’t come soon enough; Caden was starting to feel antsy having only the stars and a beautiful alien Council member to gaze at. She was about to tap her wrist to check their progress again, but the ship lurched violently to one side, and she collapsed on to the floor, feeling her skull collide with the steel of the ship as it turned.
Umi toppled into her, and their heads knocked together painfully. Her vision went white for a moment, and then the cabin was filled with the screeching sound of static; her body vibrated from the force of it, but it wasn’t painful at all. The reinforced ceramic of her teeth was emitting a gentle hum, and she looked up to see Umi gazing at her with all of his eyes wide with astonishment. Then she noticed the red spot of a planet rapidly approaching the window of the vessel.
“Umi?” Caden felt herself speak, but she didn’t hear it---she didn’t hear anything anymore, in fact. The ship was still wobbling, and the realization swept over her as soon as the sparks began to rain down from the ceiling.
Caden crawled over to Umi and dragged him over to the back of the ship with one hand. She still couldn’t hear, but she was shouting anyway, trying to tell him what she was doing while she performed the actions so he wouldn’t be afraid; it was part of her training she couldn’t unlearn. The entire ship started to vibrate as Caden dug her fingers into a steel panel and ripped it away from the wall, showering both of them in sparks. She reached behind her and grabbed Umi’s shoulder, flinging him into the escape pod she hoped would still work while the ship was breaking apart. Umi covered his face as she sailed in behind him, and he peeked at her from between his golden-brown fingers as she pulled the hatch door shut, plunging them both into darkness. Please work, she mused internally, not even sure who she was praying too. Odin’s son, please let this work.
Caden slammed her palm into the top of the pod, and there was a second where it seemed to do nothing. Then the pod flared to life, illuminating all the system displays and dousing them in soft pink light.
Eject? Asked the glowing screen in front of her. Y/N.
Caden hit the Y button and threw her body across Umi just in time for the pod to shoot away from the ship. The vessel exploded in a massive cloud of fire. Caden thought she saw another asteroid hit its side as it was engulfed in flames, and then there was a second impact as the spherical pod broke through Xondux’s atmosphere and crashed into the ground. Caden’s last action was to curl her body around Umi’s, hoping her five feet of super-reinforced steel and hyperplastic foam would be enough to save them.