Page 7 of His to Worship

“Well, let’s get a move on,” Amari butts in following after the rest of us. “We have to do something before it’s too late."

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that computer told us we are hurtling towards our delivery point with no stop. Gotta hustle ladies,” Sabrina says as she exits the control room.

With that, I walk out behind everyone else. The first few feet of our walk are single-file, but at some point, the ship begins to branch. We stop at a fork and turn to each other.

“We should all be able to move around fairly easily. There’s no way this ship is as big as the last one,” I begin. “But if anybody gets lost, just ask the computers for directions.”

“Everyone, be smart and keep an eye out for additional guards or techies,” Renata instructs.

“Got it. Let’s do this ladies.” Sabrina gives us all a determined smile before walking away with Amari. Renata and I separate without any further words. I head straight and she veers to the right.

The walk through the ship is kind of eerie. I find myself wishing I’d thought to bring one of the mantis’ guns just in case we had an extra interloper on the ship. The thought of that has me checking over my shoulders and turning corners extra carefully. I pass by what appears to be a crew’s kitchen. When I stop in though, I grimace at the sight of small larvae and refrigerator containers of what appear to be purple ants–this kitchen is definitely not stocked for humans. Another issue that we will now have to contend with. This self-rescue mission is getting more and more complicated.

As I turn a corner, I finally find something interesting. It’s a pocket door, very different from the control room sliding door. Without hesitation, I reach for the smooth metal handle. The door flings open easily, revealing a room bathed in an ethereal blue light.

I step through the entryway and come up short when I see two rows of shipping crates lined across the outer edges of the room. Curiosity gets the best of me and I make my way down the line, trying to see if any of the units are open. None are until I finally get to the last one—the only one with an orange light instead of blue over the top of the door.

Carefully, I push the large screen next to the opening of the unit. When it opens, my breath catches. The inside of the unit is covered in high-tech equipment, tubes, and monitoring screens. But, as I walk the short length of the crate—close to the size of a small classroom—I catch my breath when I get a closer look at what I first thought were some kind of weird storage containers. There are eight of them, four opened. But the other four are what make me clutch my heart.

There are women in each of them, all seemingly asleep.

Oh my god, they’re stasis pods. I remember seeing things like this in movies and always thinking the science to support them had to be shoddy, even for science fiction. But there they are—four women suspended in time, in unrelenting slumber. I stand in front of each pod and I watch every chest give a soft rise and fall, so I know, thankfully, they are all living.

When I inspect closer, I realize that all eight pods are numbered fifty-two through sixty. My blood chills as I determine that the other matching crates must hold additional women just like this. But the four empty pods make me queasy as I realize that there is only one logical answer for who those were for.

I stumble out of the crate, out of the room, back into the hallway, and begin walking up and down the corridors, calling out to the others. Before too long, I’ve gathered everyone in the control room, at which point I lay it out for them.

“So, there’s eight in our crate, and our pods—I’m assuming the four empty ones are for us—are labeled up to sixty. I think the closed shipping crates are more pods with more people.” I nervously chew at my lip, looking between the other four women.

“What do we do with them?” Amari asks, looking at each of us wide-eyed. “I mean, do we wake them or let them sleep?”

“Well, I don’t know how we would get to the pods in the other shipping crates because I have no idea how to even go about opening one of those things.”

“What does that matter?” Sabrina looks at us incredulously. “There is no way we can leave them asleep. It’s life or death, and they deserve to know what’s happened to them. We have to at least try to get them open”

“We can barely handle four women on this ship. What the fuck are we going to do with sixty?” Renata counters.

“Also, we could do something wrong in waking them up. Is it like a sleep-walking thing where you shouldn’t wake them quickly?” Amari bites at her thumbnail nervously.

“Besides,” call me selfish but I really don’t want to wake all of those girls, “what do we do, just open the pods and go, ‘Hey, you’ve been kidnapped by aliens, we broke the ship, and now we’re all hurtling towards almost-certain alien slavery?’”

“Also, we don’t know for sure that there are human women in all of the pods,” Renata points out. “They could have other aliens or animals. There could be anything in those pods.”

Sabrina gives us each a glare. “So, you’d want them to just die never knowing what happened? Regardless of what they are, they’re probably still sentient. If things go wrong, they should know what it is and have the chance to face it.”

“Let’s just vote,” I interject, “before this gets heated.”

Everyone else voices their agreement, and I’m just about to open my mouth to give my vote, when the ship lurches violently, throwing us off balance. We stumble and tumble around the control room. My arms flail as I grab for nearby handrails, alarms blaring through the chamber. My heart nearly beats out of my chest as I listen to the computer’s loud ass warning.

“WARNING! ASTEROID IMPACT DETECTED! NAVIGATION SYSTEMS COMPROMISED! COURSE REDIRECTED! EMERGENCY SYSTEMS ACTIVATED!”

“Computer,” I yell out over the alarms, “Where are we headed now?”

“NAVIGATION SYSTEMS COMPROMISED! COURSE REDIRECTED! SEARCHING FOR LOCATION COORDINATES!”

Another obstacle to overcome, and no easy solutions in sight.

“So, we can’t be completely screwed. Let’s think this through.” Part of me is getting sick of Renata’s eternal determination. Another part of me is grateful for it since it’s helping keep us all from hysteria.

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