December Page 4

  *

  Nearly an hour later, Dr. Hio came over to check on Ted. “Ted, could you... do me a favor, as I believe you say?”

  “What do you need?”

  “Would you go down to the storage units and get a sikurba? The one in the lab is out of power, and Erpha has injured her hand.”

  Ted nodded without a second thought and strode out of the room. A sikurba was a medical instrument the Drevi used to heal wounds. It was a marvelous device that artificially sped up the body’s natural healing process. It also utilized low-power lasers that destroyed any foreign bacteria to prevent infections. Ted had always wondered how many human lives throughout history could have been saved by such a device.

  Ted had long ceased trying to decipher the signs in Drevi that lined the walls of the compound, but he knew the way to the storage lockers by heart, as it was part of his job to be an errand runner for the research crews. The corridors of the research station were gray and monotonous, but relatively easy to navigate.

  The storage lockers consisted of three large rooms, filled with dull yellow containers of all shapes and sizes. As he understood it, nothing was really organized in the storage areas since the Drevi hadn’t had much time to unpack and properly catalog anything that wasn’t directly related to new research findings.

  Ted’s knowledge of the Drevi language was especially helpful in the storage bay. It wasn’t a difficult spoken language to learn, but when written, it was a whole different story. There were so many confusing lines in each symbol that stood for a word, as if a toddler had drawn it with a box of crayons. Color was important in their written language too—a line in a symbol could mean one thing in one color and another in a different color. Nevertheless, he had learned what the labels looked like for the items he usually had to fetch, and the sikurba had been one of the first. He opened the container, dug through it for a minute, and found exactly what he was looking for. Having completed his errand, he locked the doors behind him and began to make his way back to the labs.

  He decided to take a different route back, just to see them. A right turn down one hallway, and another right at the next, and there they were. On his left, through an enormous glass window, they stood tall, the dim overhead lights gleaming off the shiny metal hulls. Starships, two of them. The November and the December. The November was the smaller of the two. It had triangular engines on either side of a pointed main section. The engines looked like they had wedges cut out of their centers, like the flag of the old Earth nation, Nepal. The December was huge, with two massive engines that curved downward in a U-shape that hugged a section of the ship that was shaped like an oval. That oval attached itself to the front of the ship, which was a huge disc that rested on top of the ovular section. Some of the last examples of human ingenuity.

  A few years before Ted had been born, scientists had succeeded in creating a ship that could break the light barrier. Then about two years ago, the Twelve had been built, all named after the months of the calendar year, all with faster-than-light travel. The ships had been built by a private corporation and sold to those who could afford them, and had been the last ones to roll off the assembly line before the Drevi had come. From what he knew, most of the ships had been destroyed in the invasion, and the two before him were possibly the only ones left.

  Ted sighed. Neither of the ships had been used since the Drevi had taken over Earth. The Drevi hadn’t any use for them, so the magnificent ships had been left to gather dust in the hanger once the Drevi technicians had been over them thoroughly. How he wished he could just take one of those ships and fly out of there...

  The sound of footsteps jolted him out of his fantasy. He turned, terrified that he would be accused of laziness and punished.

  But the two creatures who approached were not Drevi, and certainly not human. They were small in stature, and seemed almost delicate to Ted. One was slightly taller, and appeared male, but both were almost half a foot shorter than Ted. The other was definitely female. At first glance he thought they were wearing masquerade masks, but upon closer inspection, he realized the feathers that made up their eyebrows and extended to their temples were attached to their skin, which was also covered in a sheen of smaller feathers. The male’s feathers were a deep blue color while the female’s were a fiery red. They both had small yellow beaks, and from the look of it ostrich-like legs, covered by lightly-woven pants. Each also had a small pack strapped to their backs.

  “Who are you?!” Ted cried, his heart leaping into his throat. Who were these people? What were they doing there? Why were they coming towards him?

  The woman raised a hand and placed it over her mouth, almost as though she were laughing.

  “Please, be quiet,” the man said in strangely accented English. Ted couldn’t even begin to place the accent, but the English was flawless, if a bit unconfident. “We want to...” he searched for the word, “help you. I am Trell. This is Alana. We are Kolean.”

  “Ko-lee-an?”

  “We’re from the planet Kolea, in a star system relatively close to here,” Trell explained.

  “Why are you here?” Ted whispered skeptically.

  “I’m from Kolean Intelligence,” Alana spoke up, her English much better than Trell’s. “Trell is a scientist specializing in space travel. My assignment is to assess the situation here on Earth...” Loud footsteps came from down the hallway. “Kurash,” she hissed. Quick as a cat, she made for the door to the hanger.

  “That door’s locked,” Ted started to say, but Alana had already pulled what looked like a gun from her holster and shot the locking mechanism, producing an almost ear-shattering bang. Sure enough, the door opened with a hiss, and Alana grabbed Ted by the upper arm and pulled him into the hanger. Trell followed them.

  “Whose ships are these?” Alana asked, pointing to the two starships.

  “No one’s,” Ted sputtered. “The Drevi don’t want them.”

  The corners of her mouth on either side of her beak twitched upward, as if in a grin. “Perfect. Let’s get out of here.”

  Without a word, Trell slipped past Alana and Ted and ripped open a small panel on the hull of the nearest ship. He pressed a few buttons that bypassed the locks the Drevi had put in place and the boarding ramp lowered. “Too easy,” he muttered to himself. “The Drevi military’s really going to have to change their codes.”

  Alana pointed her weapon, which she had not re-holstered, towards the doors. “Hurry, get on,” she said, nudging Ted in the ribs with the weapon to get him to move. He didn’t need more urging. In a daze, he trotted up the ramp as Alana followed.

  The door whooshed open and a dozen or so Drevi soldiers barged into the hanger, shooting at the intruders and their plus one. Alana managed to fire a few shots—projectile bullets, just like human and Drevi guns—before the ramp shut, shielding them.

  Alana rushed him through the corridors to get to the bridge, where Trell had already gone. A loud whirring and humming noise began coming from everywhere, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, which scared the jittery Ted so much he jumped and plastered himself against the wall.

  “It’s just the engines,” Alana said with a bit of humor in spite of her gentle tone and genuine sympathy for him.

  Ted nodded and started forward again cautiously. Within minutes, Alana stopped in front of a pair of doors. Without fanfare, she reached over and punched a button on the wall, opening the doors and revealing what was behind them.

  II