124 Light-Years from Home

From the moment you leave your cabin, you know you have exactly 15 minutes until The Advocate makes his way back to your section. You are going to have to move quickly if you hope to get any answers to what’s happened in the last 24 hours. Carmine is in sick bay, and hasn’t been seen since the away team was retrieved from a reconnaissance mission on planet K2-18b.

At least a hundred scenarios are playing in your head as you run your fingers along the cold, titanium wall in the hallway leading to sick bay. You could navigate the halls of the ship with your eyes closed at this point, after four years in the service. But tonight, your eyes are wide open with hypervigilance. All you really want is to hold Carmine in your arms again, tell her you’re going to take care of her, and gently kiss her forehead. Carmine loved forehead kisses.

You knew there were things happening that the Captain’s Board were desperate to keep hush-hush, but you aren’t the type of person to accept orders and follow them blindly. It’s a personality trait your mother had encouraged you to cultivate prior to your deployment.

“They’re going to try and put out that fire in you,” she had said, “Don’t you dare allow them to dim your spark. Nurture it, keep it safe, and it will do the same for you.” She had seen what the service produced; cold, unfeeling, ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ robots, ready and willing to jump into action at a moment’s notice. For the cause. The problem is, nobody can clearly explain what the cause is. If you ask an Advocate, they give a vague, heavily rehearsed response, “We do what we do for the progression of humanity, and intergalactic exploration.” But this isn’t enough for you. What are you really doing here, 124 light-years from home?

Your thoughts are a scrambled mess by the time you round the final corner to the double doors leading into sick bay. Through the small glass panes, you can barely make out Carmine’s silhouette in the dark room, the only light coming from the numerous monitors, beeping and displaying figures that you don’t recognize. In a moment, you lose all reservations and throw open the doors, rushing to Carmine’s bedside.

“What have they done to you?” you whisper, tearfully. As quickly as the words leave your lips, Carmine’s face becomes distorted in pain. Her eyes shoot open, and she looks up at you with pleading eyes. “Kill me.”

The desperation in her voice is palpable. You gaze back at her; the shock fully displayed across your face. “What the fuck happened, Car?” you say. Before Carmine can respond, the alarms begin blaring over the loudspeaker, alerting other residents to a soldier gone AWOL. The Advocate must have made his rounds back to your empty room. The flashing red light in sick bay intermittently illuminates the shadows on Carmine’s face. She scrunches her nose as you know she does when she’s struggling to articulate her thoughts. You know your time together is not only becoming limited, but dangerous. You’re sure Carmine feels this, too.

“They’ve been lying to all of us,” Carmine says. “The surface is fully terraformed and colonized with an entire species. Non-human.” Her eyes dart from you to the double doors and back. You can see the panic building within her as she rubs her hand across her chest. “There’s a treaty. Earth’s resources are dwindling. There’s only enough water to sustain the population for another seven years, and even less food—” she halts as you hear the militant marching of five to ten Advocates heading toward sick bay. “K2 has what we need to prolong life on Earth for hundreds, if not thousands of years.”

Attempting to process this new information as quickly as possible, you manage to clear the lump in your throat, and say, “What did we give them?” Tears begin to stream down your face now.

Carmine turns her head from the double doors she’s been monitoring back to you. She’s crying now, too. “The species is dying,” she says. “If the species dies, the planet becomes a war zone. If the planet becomes a war zone, our resources become compromised. The species must be preserved for Earth to survive.”

You both look back to the entrance to sick bay, the stomping boots echoing louder through the halls. You know you’re out of time. Your eyes spring to Carmine’s in an instant. You ask again, louder than even you expect, “What did we give them, Car?!” Carmine closes her eyes, echoes growing louder outside the double doors. “Biological incubators.”

She pulls down the white sheet covering the lower half of her body, revealing a distorted, distended abdomen. You look in horror as large lumps roll within Carmine’s petite frame, weaving between her ribs and thrashing against her sternum. You spring into action, removing the cables, stickers and IVs from Carmine’s body. She responds quickly, helping to remove anything keeping her anchored to the bed. She puts her arm around your neck, and you glance around the room. About ten feet away, you spot the long storage compartments above the imaging table and, as quickly as Carmine can move, you all but carry her to the imaging table, and help her up onto it. She pulls open the door to the storage compartment, scoots sideways from the table into the enclosed space, and you close the door, securing the lock so as to not draw attention to it.

You can hear the marching Advocates, drawing ever closer as you rush across the room to find somewhere to hide yourself, and spot a small square-shaped door above the med supply closet. You move a nearby stool in front of the closet door, and step up onto it. With one foot on the door handle, you hoist yourself up enough to release the latch on the compartment door, and pull yourself up into the tiny box, just large enough to sit in, hunched over. As you reach out to pull the door shut, the echoes in the hallway stop abruptly. You secure the door closed, and peer out between the metal slats.

The double doors crash open as the Advocates arrive on the scene. Weapons drawn, the empty hospital bed before them, they scan the various detached tubes and IVs stretched across the bed to the metal tray adjacent to it. From the safety of your small hiding place, you hear the click of a button, “Captain, this is AD-6743. Sick bay is empty, target is still at large,” one of The Advocates is speaking into a walkie-talkie clipped to his shoulder. Brief static emits from the speaker until the silence is cut with a stern voice, responding with, “Find them, and kill on sight. We need them intact, not breathing.”

Through the slats, you look out across the room to the compartment above the imaging table, where Carmine is hidden, and you reluctantly wonder if you’ll ever have the chance to hold her again.