AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Twenty Eight
Tayla
During the night, I heard the airlock hiss open, and then the tromp of heavy boots down the hall. I resisted the urge to go to my door, knowing that it was Adreax and Herod returning from wherever they’d been. Before bed, Alec had urged me to lock the ship up tightly, just in case, but after he’d gone to sleep, I’d unlocked the door, hoping that the two men might return. It was foolish of me, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving them outside to die or get caught up with the Patrol again. I told myself this was a compromise I could live with.
Days passed, and each morning when I awoke, I found Adreax’s bed empty and my ship quiet. Each evening, I would crawl into bed and wait for the sound of his return, wishing him safety on his way back. But I would not go to see him, and he would not come to me, so we were in a standoff.
I spent the time in between concerning myself with contacting Earth. There was still little help from the lab, and no government agency was in a hurry to aid us. Instead, we received countless platitudes and excuses, sometimes interspersed with suggestions for negotiating with the Patrol. By the end of each day, I was close to banging my head on the console with frustration, trapped in some kind of interplanetary bureaucracy that was a functional nightmare beyond my wildest imagination.
Failing to make progress on that front, I went back to my instruments and began gathering new data. My tests were limited, but I could take some elementary readings and transmit them back. Using just the equipment I could salvage from outside, my colleagues at the lab and I created a list of priority data points I could gather while I waited. The tests were simple, but they ate up some of my time and made me feel a little better about our situation. At least this trip wasn’t a total loss.
After a full week of successfully evading Adreax , I was getting the hang of our new routine. In fact, it was almost possible to forget that they existed at all, as long as they didn’t wake me when they came in. Alec, on the other hand, was vocally unhappy with this arrangement, and continuously chided me about locking the doors. But as far as I could tell, it wasn’t hurting anything to have them here at night. They might even come in handy if the Patrol tried to make a midnight raid, so I ignored Alec’s complaints and continued telling myself that I was being pragmatic, not hopeful.
On the eighth night, I fell asleep early, exhausted by a long day of radioing back and forth with people who simply couldn’t understand my plight. And why should they? When I collapsed into bed, I groaned with relief, rubbing at my temples to ease the pounding headache that made my eyes feel like they were throbbing inside my skull.
Some time later, I heard a radio signal coming in. I listened, waiting for Alec to answer it, but all was quiet. The radio call came again, and I sat up. If someone was calling at this time of night, it had to be important. I dragged myself out of bed and hurried down the hall, only half-dressed and half-awake. I made it to the cockpit and picked up the radio, calling back a quick confirmation.
“Tayla? You out there?”
“It’s me.” My shoulders tensed involuntarily.
“Tayla! Thank goodness we were able to get ahold of you. We just got an update from the Department of Defense.”
“Is it good news or bad news?”
I was grinding my teeth now, clenching and unclenching my jaw as I waited impatiently for the man on the other end of the radio to get to the point already.
There was a long pause, and my heart sank. A long pause never preceded good news.
“Bad news, then,” I answered myself.
“It’s not all bad,” he corrected, and I could hear his nervousness.
In my mind, he was like the boss who tells you you’re being let go, but you’re an outstanding employee, and he knows you’ll land on your feet. I could preemptively tell that whatever good news he offered was not great, but merely less bad than all the other news he had to present. I thought longingly of my bed. The least they could’ve done was wait until morning to pass along whatever additional troubles I had.
“Get it over with,” I cut in, resting my head on one hand and closing my eyes, bracing myself for whatever it might be.
“I don’t know how to say this, other than just laying it all out there, so here goes. Some of the top-ranking officers in the Department of Defense have had contact with the group you know as the Patrol. They have had dealings with this organization for some time, but they have never revealed this information to the public for fear that it would cause a panic. The men you’re looking at outside your view screen are the Elite Guardsmen of the Space Patrol.”
This was a lot to take in. The government had some kind of contact with an entire alien organization and had successfully managed to keep it a secret? I thought back on all of the wild conspiracy theories I had heard about aliens growing up and wondered which ones held a grain of truth.
“And what are they still doing here?” I asked testily, bringing myself back to the more pressing matter at hand.
“That’s the good news! It appears that after discovering your Orb, they were quite intrigued by what you have accomplished, and they called in their top scientists to investigate. They are currently hanging around waiting for the scientific exploration fleet to arrive.”
“And then they’ll leave?”
I had a million questions. Chiefly, whether or not these new scientist aliens were going to pose a problem for me, whether they were trying to steal my research. But first, I wanted those guardsmen to leave. The way they marched back and forth, day and night, filled me with uneasiness.
“That’s the thing. The Guards will remain until the scientists leave. For their protection, of course.”
I took a deep breath, forcing my shoulders to relax and drop from around my ears. I was not liking the sound of this.
“And what about us? When can we leave? If they will not get out of my way, then I’m going home to wait this out. I’ll come back to take new readings when I’m free to run this station the way I see fit.”
There was another long pause.
“The Department of Defense has agreed to keep you on site as long as their research team is there to answer questions.”
