Page 7 of Alien God

CHAPTER THREE

Torrance

“Shit.”

My rock hammer glanced off the crystal, sending a too-small jagged chunk thudding into the deep snow around my shins. I blew out a frustrated sigh. My breath seeped into my face and neck warmer, hot and damp against my skin. I risked a glance over at Major Corey. He stood nearby in his US Army winter uniform, a parka and snowpants with a pale grey and white camo pattern. It contrasted with the snowsuit I wore – pure white – marking me as a civilian. Luckily, it didn’t look like he’d noticed I’d fucked up. Again.

“Don’t get frustrated. It makes it harder.”

Suvi’s calming, Finnish-accented voice drifted quietly over to me. She was doing the same thing I was just a metre away to my right, her own rock hammer in her gloved hand. When I looked at her, it was almost like looking at myself. All the civilian women looked the same in our snowsuits. Covered head-to-toe in white, with white-framed protective dark goggles. It was only the nametags we wore, and the voices I’d grown to know so well, that differentiated us out in the field like this. But beneath her snowsuit and goggles, I knew she was looking at me with kind, dove-grey eyes, white-blonde hair under her hood.

“I don’t know. When I get frustrated, I find it actually makes the job easier.”

That remark came from Min-Ji, who was on my left. The three of us had been ordered to work together in this small patch of snow-drenched forest. The rest of the crew, and the other women who’d been dragged here with us, were doing similar work closer to the ship that had brought us to this planet and now served as our home base.

“The trees are lucky you don’t punch them, then,” Suvi teased. I couldn’t see her smile under her white neck warmer, but I could hear it in her voice.

I heard a similar smile in Min-Ji’s reply. She dropped her hammer into the soft, deep snow, and raised her fists to her face, pretending to jab at the tree she’d been working on. She’d been a boxer back on Earth. Before.

Before we’d been taken.

“Fists down and back to work, Park!” Major Corey barked from his post.

Min-Ji dropped her hands, but her fists didn’t unfurl for a long moment.

“I’d love to get one good hit on him,” she muttered before bending to retrieve her hammer. She had to dig a little, since the snow was up to our knees.

“You too, Harju!”

Suvi let out a short sigh at the command then turned back to her work.

“And you, Hayes!”

“It’s Torrance,” I hissed to myself. I hated when Major Corey and the rest of the military crew – the crew who’d abducted us – called me by my last name. Like we were soldiers to be commanded. We weren’t their soldiers. We were civilian academics, most of us scientists.

But maybe it’s better that way. It’s not like any of them really know you, anyway. They hadn’t earned the right to use my first name. That right was reserved for the other women here who were in the same shitty situation as me. Knee-deep in snow on an alien planet none of us had signed up to visit.

I turned my attention back to my tree. It still felt weird to call this a tree. It was a monolith of glittering facets, more crystal than plant. It was generally conical in shape, a massive but slender mountain made of shining, emerald-green stone. But according to Suvi, the botanist of the group, these massive crystalline structures really were alive. And they filtered carbon out of the atmosphere more than two hundred times more efficiently than trees on Earth. We were supposed to be carefully chipping away chunks from the trees to be studied on the ship.

Min-Ji had no trouble with the task. She was a geologist and was used to hacking away at rocks and gems, plus she had impressive upper-body strength from her boxing back home. Even Suvi, with what I knew were delicate hands and willowy wrists under her gloves, had mastered the technique. She had the unique knack of finding invisible fault lines in the trees that meant her hammer struck gently but efficiently, sheering away perfect crystal chunks.

But me? I wasn’t a geologist who could punch through a wooden plank or somebody’s nose, or a botanist who was basically an alien tree whisperer. Nope. I was an astrophysicist. I was used to looking at charts and computing mathematical sequences and stargazing.

“Hayes!”

I jumped, startled from my thoughts by Major Corey’s irritated call from nearby. I glanced back, eyeing the machine gun slung across his torso. I wonder if they’d actually shoot one of us if we fucked up bad enough?

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