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I’m dreaming that I’m on a distant icy planet hunting a dangerous alien murderer. I know it is a dream because surely, I would never be that stupid in my waking life. I’m a much more sensible person than that. I have a job and a house to make payments on. I have a fiancé.
Just before I open my eyes, I remember that’s not true anymore. I don't have a job or a house or a fiancé or a dog. That was my old life. My good life. My gone life. Now I have a spaceship, and a target.
“Wakey wakey,” a resonant voice lulls me out of the last of my slumber. I feel warm, which is strange because my last memories were of being very hot and very cold all somewhat at the same time. I think I am the first person who might simultaneously burn and freeze to death at the same time.
I open my eyes and find myself looking into a big, handsome face. It’s him. Man1k, though it is usually translated as Manik. We use numbers in place of some letters because the aliens all laughed at us when we showed up to the big intergalactic meet and greet with an alphabet containing a measly twenty-six letters. A lot of people said we should have gone with Chinese instead. There are over fifty thousand Chinese characters. Then someone pointed out that we might be expected to know them all ourselves, and so we defaulted to English, or what passes for English in 2150. For a lot of people back on Earth, it’s enough to be able to grunt and interpretative dance. At any rate, there are over ten thousand symbols in pure galactic tongue. That’s why I stick with a translation device clipped into my ear hole. Looks like a chic piercing, but it lets me seem like a smart person while remaining an idiot.
My thoughts are racing into irrelevance because I am shitting myself. Not literally, but certainly mentally. I am looking into the eyes of the most wanted alien on the most wanted alien list. I’d prefer to be meeting him at a distance and through a scope. He’s dangerous. The list of his crimes goes scrolling through my head quickly, most of them being murder.
Then my mouth says something incredibly stupid. I refuse to take credit for such a statement. It is almost like my vocal cords are trying to get me killed.
“You’re under arrest.”
Manik laughs at me. He is big and alien, as one might expect. His skin is a blue hue, and his eyes are a bright gold. He looks exactly like his pictures did, except now he’s larger and more directly in front of me. His face is a work of cold alien brutality, cast in scales and hues of blue. His brows are dark and his lashes are long. You might almost call him pretty except for the rough cut of his broad jaw. He has the mandibular construction of a pure carnivore. His species, the Manid, have a particular construction to their faces that allows their heads to change shape depending on their mood. They can go from friendly smooth face to carnivorous saw-toothed monstrosities in the blink of an eye.
When he laughs, I can see several sets of what we would call canines as well as large flat grinding surfaces. He’s an apex predator and consumer. I imagine he could eat anything from a bison to a building. The way he is looking at me, it occurs to me that shortly I might be on the menu myself.
“I’ve saved you from several deaths in quick succession, you have woken naked in my lair, and your first instinct is to hope I submit to your general lack of authority?”
“Worth a try,” I reply.
He laughs again, treating me to another sight of terrifying teeth. I am handling this all wrong. If I had my suit and my weaponry, I might be able to threaten him, but I suspect I could be holding the biggest gun in the known universe and he would laugh just as hard at the notion of being under arrest. He has a reputation for madness of a violent and creative kind that I should not risk forgetting.
“I’ve taken you in out of the cold, girl,” he says. “Now I know you fancy yourself a bounty hunter, but by the way you conduct yourself, I’d bet you’ve never turned a single bounty in.”
“You’d be wrong. You’re not my first bounty.”
“Second, then.”
“Third, actually.”
He laughs. “They must be so desperate. You had no chance of ever taking me, human. I was evading authorities before you were born. How old are you?”
“Old enough to not want to answer that question.”
“I am a hundred and forty-two years old.”
For his species that makes him a young buck. If he had a human equivalent, I’d put him at about mid-thirties. In his physical prime and with the life experience to know how to use it. I feel a pull of attraction toward him, and it’s not just because he is attractive. It is because I not only owe him my life, but because he continues to hold my life in his rough, scaled hands.
“Then you have a hundred years on me,” I say. He has a few more than a hundred, but I don’t want him looking down on me for my age. He is already physically looking down at me because that’s how I happen to be positioned.
“I knew you were young. I took one look at you and saw inexperience and ambition written all over you. Actually, that’s not true. I looked at you and I saw that you were covered in flames.”
“Yes. I thought I was on fire, now you mention it.”
“You were until the ice and snow put it out.”
“Right. That would have been the part where I started to freeze.” I look down at my body, finding it thoroughly naked beneath a furred blanket. “I think I should be dead.”
“Probably. I pulled you in here and mended your injuries.”
“You saved me? Why?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I was bored.”
Not exactly an encouraging response. I can imagine that being holed up here for months on end would lead to boredom. I can also imagine what he might do to me in order to relieve some of that boredom.
A lot of realizations are sinking in all at once. This cave has effectively become my world. I no longer have my suit, and that means I can no longer step outside without dying a swift and painful death. He’s got me trapped here with him, and if he only saved me on impulse, it is very possible he’ll hurt me or worse, just for the fun of it. Everything I know about Manik tells me he is sadistic in the extreme.
