Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,2

metal drips from the ceiling into bright orange globs.

I sit up.

Where the fuck am I?

I look around. I’m sitting inside some kind of chamber. The glass cover is raised up like the cockpit on a fighter jet. I’m also wearing some kind of sci-fi pajamas, and there are more chambers all around us, in long rows. Those chambers are closed. The glass on the chambers is foggy, but sleeping human faces are visible through the glass.

I remember when my sister died. How they froze her. How I thought it was insane. I remember telling myself I’d have the “gift” my uncle gave us revoked. I didn’t want to be frozen when I died. My life had sucked anyway. When I died, just bury me. Or burn me to ashes. But there was a lot of paperwork involved, and I’d procrastinated.

“What year is it?” I ask him.

He’s still staring at the gun like an idiot.

“Oh, God,” he says. “When are you from?”

“2022,” I say. “You?”

He rolls his eyes so far back into his head that I think they’ll get stuck there.

“You’re useless,” he says. “We’re fucked.”

“Tell me what’s happening,” I say.

I climb out of the chamber. As insane as whatever this is, I’m at least partially relieved I probably won’t have to bother breaking up with Thad.

“Why do you need that gun?” I ask him.

“The ship has been infiltrated,” he said. “We’re months from our destination, and we were apparently the only two it could wake in time. Some technical shit about cycling core temperatures.”

“We’re on a ship?” I ask. “Like a spaceship?”

He looks at me as if I’m the most useless, dumbest person he’s ever seen. It’s a look my tech bro ex used to give me when I said I liked my MacBook Air and didn’t need anything fancier.

“Okay,” he says. “So, here’s the plan. I’m going to shoot whatever comes through that door. We saw what it did to the ceiling. It should be able to kill even a Cygnian.”

“A Cygnian?” I ask.

“Big alien,” he says.

“What do I do?” I ask him.

“I don’t understand how all this shit works either. I’m just a botanist. The ship told me it will be an hour before the ‘defense grid’ is up. Until then we just have this pistol. Unless you think you’re a better shot than me…”

I shake my head. “It’s yours. What’s your name?”

“Jason,” he says. “Now come on, follow me.”

I follow Jason for a few hundred feet until the row of cryo chambers comes to an end. There’s a set of screens and control panels, as well as some chairs and tables, which are bolted to the floor. On the other end are even more rows of cryo chambers. There must be thousands of chambers in total.

“We take cover here,” he says. “This door is the only way in here.

He gestures toward a door about twenty feet away from us with his gun. He shoots the bottom of the table with the gun, melting the bolts away. He kicks the table over, forming a barrier between us and the door. We crouch down behind the table.

“Keep your head down,” he says. “This might get messy.”

4

Krakon

I reach a door which I’m pretty sure leads into the cryo chamber core. I’ve been relatively careful with every door I’ve opened so far, but there is no indication I’ve been detected yet, or that the ship’s defense grid is active.

Still, after I hack the door’s control panel, I raise my fist toward the door. My suit has an autocannon on the wrist. I have it set to “auto-fire,” which will immediately destroy any target recognized as a hostile threat before my own brain can even process what I’m looking at.

That setting felt right before, but now that I’m entering the cryo chamber core, I decide to add a one-second delay onto the cannon. If I give a mental override signal within one second, it won’t kill anything that moves.

I press the button to open the door. I don’t go in right away. I wait several long seconds, and then I risk a peek.

The moment I peek, I see a purple flash of plasma. I dive back behind the doorway. The plasma doesn’t come anywhere near me, thankfully.

“Drop your weapon!” I shout, not looking through the door again.

I saw a man. A human, of course. He was holed up behind a metal table. All I need to do is set my auto-cannon to fire, and--

“I’ve got a hostage!” the man shouts.

“What the fuck?”