Page 4 of Possessed By the Alien Guard
CHAPTER THREE
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Jillian
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“DAMMMN!”I SHOULD have been quiet, but it slipped out before I could help it.This place was nice.I’d been happy that my guard post was made out of new material instead of being battered and worn.But this place...
The main room was almost as large as my entire building, giving the space an airy, open feel.Yellow light glowed from the ceiling, as warm and welcoming as sunshine.The sloping, light-green walls looked strange compared to the right angles I’d grown up with, but pretty.There were even comfy chairs arranged in a circle around some kind of silver cylinder.
And was that...?I bypassed all the closed doors and hurried to the kitchen area stretched across the back wall of the main room.Packet after packet of ration blocks filled the cabinets.My stomach growled.Food had been tight in the fleet lately, not that it was anything new.We never seemed to have enough.
I snatched up one and peeled open the silver foil.I didn’t care what it was—it had to be better than the yeast-cultures I had back at base—and the aliens were supposed to be biologically compatible.
The dark red-brown substance was dry and really solid.My teeth dug into the corner, and I rocked the block from side to side, trying to break off a piece.Did the aliens have super jaw strength or something?They were bigger and stronger, sure, with special spines and joints and stuff, but this seemed ridiculous.
Then a chunk broke free.Salt and a rich savory flavor coated my tongue, and I moaned.God, it tasted so good!Was it meat?I’d never had real meat before, and none of the flavored substitutes we ate in the fleet came close to this.
I shoved a few more of the blocks into the pockets of my jumpsuit and made myself turn away from the kitchen.Remember why you’re here, JJ.You need to find something a lot more useful than food.
The first door opened on a bedroom with the largest mattress I’d ever seen.I imagined that large, well-muscled body stretched across its length.
Next came a room that looked like a bathroom, even though all of the fixtures were different.I turned on something that might have been a sink, and a pulse of sound vibrated over my hand, lifting away the dust gathered in my hike.Now that was cool!The fleet sure could use something like this to cut down on the amount of water we needed to recycle.
Finally, I hit the jackpot—a room filled with consoles and displays of some kind.
“Yes!”
I hurried forward, pulling out my tablet so I could vid everything.Tapping at the displays activated them, but the glyphs of the alien language meant nothing.Dammit!The Varool’s advanced tech let them speak English fluently, but our linguists hadn’t gotten anywhere with Varoolian.I think we had only a couple of specialists in the whole fleet, and they studied languages as a hobby, since everyone had to work more practical jobs.
I’d come all this way and gotten so close to so much information, and it wouldn’t do any good!
You didn’t really think this through, did you, JJ?
Why did the snarky voice inside my head always sound like my drill instructor?
There had to be something!A thread of panic ran through me, my heart kicking up a notch.I tapped at panel after panel, panning the camera across it all.Even if I couldn’t decipher it, maybe someone else could, eventually.But for all I knew, I’d just called up the equivalent of Aunt Evelyn’s recipe for mushroom stew instead of anything with any real tactical value.
Maybe I could take one of these displays?Access to advanced varoolian tech could give us a needed leap forward!They had better ships and translator chips and all kinds of things we needed.
I stowed my tablet and crouched, running my hands across the underside of the console.But if there were any seams or latches or anything, I couldn’t find them.
Huffing out a breath, I rocked back on my feet.Think, JJ!
I snapped my fingers and leaped to standing.Back in the main room, I shoved through the circle of chairs and dropped to my knees beside the device.When I touched the surface of the silver cylinder, a picture flashed into the air above it.A forest scene with lots of different trees that weren’t exactly like Earth’s or this planet’s.This must have been Varool, the alien’s lost home world.
It was beautiful and about as different as you could get from the industry-ravaged Earth humanity had fled over a century ago.Maybe there was something to the Varools’ insistence that they knew how to manage a planet better.
