Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 5.12

"It was humans that abducted us, Lucas."

What?

It was sad that I had wasted my metaphor with spitting out water on Layla because it fit here even better.

It made so little sense. Sure, it explained why Kira's dropship had a poster with a human Zodiac sign and an English word below.

But humans couldn't execute a plan of such magnitude. Humans didn't have the technology to traverse interstellar space. Humans couldn't build invisible UFOs. Humans couldn't build singularity stones.

"You won't elaborate on that, will you?" I asked.

"Only after you've helped me with Layla."

"Are you at least gonna tell me about all the other weird stuff like the singularity stones? You can heal and restore missing memories. Layla can somehow produce forcefields. How does all that stuff work?"

Kira folded her arms. "Pff. As if I told you about the biggest advantage we have."

Trees under us shrunk to the size of matchsticks, the mountains to heaps of rock. We broke through the cloud cover. Now that we had reached terminal velocity, the acceleration became more bearable.

We drifted through the void in silence.

Crick's compound eyes lazily stared through the windows. Funny, how without any frame of reference, it looked as if the universe stood still outside. Only when you looked through the mirror and saw the clouds drifting away did you know that we were moving.

I knew Crick could occupy themselves forever with such observations. It was common practice for us not to communicate during hour-long trips.

But Kira? She wasn't sleeping, assuming she even needed to. For the most part, she stared at the ground.

While the box was still between me and Crick, no robot fit between me and Kira. Given the circumstances, I expected her to speak more.

The less we talked, the more I had to think of Helix and my failure on Eden.

The acceleration stopped. The invisible force pulling us down got replaced by the very tangible force of belts tying us to the waterbed.

"Have you ever been in a rocket before?" I asked.

"Well, I somehow had to go to the planet down below."

"I know, but I mean, consciously. I was unconscious in my dropship."

"I wasn't."

I finally met someone even less talkative than me who wasn't a Seizer.

As seen through the windows, the Dragonfly grew from finger-sized to filling our entire field of view.

"Stuff like this was my childhood dream," I said. "Being an astronaut and all."

The Dragonfly came close enough for me to discern the habitat module.

Kira meanwhile continued pretending that I was air. Was what I said this dumb?

"Did you also have one?" I asked. "A childhood dream, I mean?"

"Medicine, psychiatry," she said, "I think I already told you that much. It's okay if your memory is poor."

Forget it. Crick was right about how communication should only be used for pure information transfer. Why did I even feel the need to talk to her? To distract myself from the looming task of fighting the Firefly?

There was one question I could certainly ask though. "What are you expecting from all of this? You want to see Layla again, but how?"

"You'll take me to wherever she goes, won't you?"