Sayuri 3 - Words on a Screen

When he was pretty sure his legs wouldn’t buckle, Eric gripped the handle of the truck door and slammed his shoulder in it so it popped open. Stupid thing always stuck. Clambering out of the truck, he staggered around the hood of the Chevy to stare at the place where the—meteor? asteroid?—had hit the ground. The dusty fog still hid most of the desert from view.


"What just happened?" He muttered.

Suddenly barking madly, Wendy leapt out of the truck, racing past Eric, and squirming under the barbed wire out into the desert. He quickly lost sight of her in the haze. He could still hear her barking though.

"Wendy!" Eric yelled, slamming the truck door and racing toward the barrier of barbed wire. "Wendy, get back here! Wendy! Stupid dog!"

Pausing at the wire, he tried to figure out how to get past it without ripping himself to shreds. At least it wasn’t barbed razor wire. Carefully he ducked beneath one of the strings of wire and tried to slip through. A hook caught on his shirt, digging into his skin, and gouged a chunk of flesh. He jerked instinctively and got caught on another hook. By the time he managed to wrest free of the wire, blood ran in tiny rivulets down his cheek and soaked his shirt in a dozen different places.

"Wendy!"

Grateful for the hiking boots he always wore to work, he set off across the stretch of desert and into the clearing haze of grit. Eric swore under his breath as cholla thorns snagged his shirtsleeves, but was grateful when they didn’t catch in his skin. Dodging around mesquite and acacia trees and carefully avoiding the paddle cacti, he stopped at the edge of the still-swirling but slowly calming storm. Putting two fingers to his lips, he whistled for his dog. Wendy barked in the depths of the dust.

"I'm going to kill that dog when I get her out of here," Eric muttered. Yanking his t-shirt over the lower half of his face, he squinted and stepped into the wind and grit. Dust stung his eyes and coated his mouth despite the shirt. He choked and coughed, yelling, "Wendy!" The dog continued barking. There was something about it…she sounded panicked. Afraid. "Wendy! Here, girl!" More barking.

A low grinding whine, so low it made his teeth ache, began building at the heart of the impenetrable dust cloud. The temperature, already uncomfortably warm, ratcheted up. Sweat dripped off Eric's face, mingling with dust and blood. From far off he heard a shrill beep. Then the dust began to clear. A shadow barreled out of the haze and rammed into his legs, knocking him to the dirt. Sharp stones bit into his hands as he landed.

"Ow! Jeez, Wendy!" Eric wiped his hands on his jeans and reached for his dog, but she danced back from him, barking frantically. It was panic he was hearing, he realized. She was upset about something. "Whoa, what?" He asked, getting to his feet. "Wendy, what?"

She bounced and lunged toward the clearing dust, barking and whining, before racing back to Eric. She planted her head hard against the back of his knees and shoved with her whole body, propelling him across the scrub and dirt. Then she darted back in front of him. Barked again.

"Okay, okay," Eric said, trying to soothe her. "What is it? Is someone hurt? Is there somebody over there?" Wendy lurched up onto her hind legs and barked again. Eric nodded. "Okay, show me. Show me where, girl."

Wendy took off into the fading haze and Eric took off after her. Barely dodging barrel cactus and cholla, he ran deeper into the dust. Someone had to be hurt. How had Wendy known? Well, he'd read on the news lots of times about dogs knowing weird things like that. Somehow she'd known somebody needed help. Eric thought of the girl he'd saved a couple days ago. His lip was still busted from that little fight. His dad had always told him that his penchant for saving people could get him into trouble one day…but he'd never been able to walk away from someone who needed help; that was one reason he'd wanted to become a doctor. So he kept running.

He nearly ran face-first into a metal rod sticking straight out in the air. Only a last-minute duck kept him from breaking his nose. Wendy barked, popping up on her hind legs again to paw at the air. Eric stopped and stared at the metal…was it a pipe? It looked like a piece of studded pipe as big around as his forearm floating parallel to the ground.

Eric stared at it. It wasn’t attached to anything. It just hung there, floating about five and half feet off the ground. It didn’t look like lead. The late autumn sun caught on the silvery-white metal, giving it a pearlescent sheen faintly tinged with icy blue. Wondering if he were out of his mind, wondering if he were about to lose a finger, he poked the floating pipe.

A series of computerized beeps chirped at him. The pipe twisted in the air. Eric scrambled back from it with a startled yelp as one of the inch-tall, square studs circling part of the pipe suddenly cracked at the top. A small, circular hole opened up at the center.
Reflexively tilting his head sideways like an owl—what was this thing? What was it doing?—Eric watched as a small blue light appeared deep within the tiny tunnel that had opened up in the square stud. Before Eric could do anything except tense up, there was a brilliant flash of blue that left spots dancing across his vision. He blinked them away as Wendy came to stand next to him. She wasn’t barking anymore; she just wagged her tail. Eric rubbed his eyes to try to clear his vision.


Wendy stepped forward. Eric lunged for her and dragged her back by the collar from the floating pipe. She barked and twisted out of his grip, jumping at something on the ground. Eric frowned and stared at it. Smoke drifted up into the air. Molten sand glowed a sullen red from the sandy desert ground. It took Eric a moment to realize the cooling sand spelled something. It was upside down; he had to squint for several seconds before he could process it.

WE NEED HELP.
PLEASE HELP US.
PLEASE HELP HER.
THERE'S NOT MUCH TIME.

Eric stared at the upside-down words etched into the sand and dirt for several long seconds while his brain did a quick reboot. He blinked once, then looked at Wendy. Wendy, who'd barked as if someone was in trouble. Wendy, who always barked when someone dangerous tried to break into the apartment but wasn’t scared of…whatever this thing was.

Slowly, Eric got to his feet again. He stared at the pipe-thing, then dropped his gaze to the message scorched into the ground. "Who's 'us?'" He asked without thinking. "What is this thing?"

And then the air to the right of the pipe rippled, like movement spreading across the surface of a pond. Slowly the desert, the washed-out blue sky, everything to the right faded away, and a silvery-white thing the same color as the pipe shimmered into view. Eric stumbled back from it, swearing. His eyes bugged as he stared at the massive metallic whatever lying on the scrub grass and dirt, shining in the sun. It took him a long minute to realize the pipe was attached to the thing and that a name had been etched into the metal.

The North Wind.

"It's a ship," he gasped out. Childhood memories of Star Trek and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica flooded his mind as he stared at the thing. "It's a freaking spaceship!"

A spaceship in bad shape, he realized. Rips in the hull marred the reflective surface of the metal. Carbon scorch marks made the ship look like someone had smeared soot across its once-shiny hull. Cracks and warped metal made it look that much worse. Eric let out a whistle.

"What the heck happened to you, huh? Whoa, what?"

Darkness spread in a line across the hull, appearing without warning maybe fifteen feet above Eric's head. The line of blackness widened until it was the width of a set of double-doors, then it shot downward. A metal ramp slid out of the darkness and touched the smoking ground a few feet away from Eric's boots.

"No way, man," he whispered. "You gotta be kidding me."

And then Wendy uttered a short, sharp bark and raced up the ramp. Eric growled an obscene word and took off after her. His feet clanged hard against the metal ramp as he chased his dog into the ship. The hatch shut the moment he was inside.

"Perfect," he grumbled, trying to swallow the cold lump lodged in his throat. Now he wasn’t thinking of Star Wars and Star Trek. Now he was thinking of Aliens and Predators, and hostile things that wanted to do experiments on him. "Just perfect. Wendy, wait!"

But the golden retriever hustled down one dimly lit corridor. Eric followed. What else could he do when he had no idea how to get off the stupid ship in the first place? Besides, if this was a trap or something, the aliens might have been on their way to find him. He wasn’t going to wait around by their front door.

And Wendy was all he had left now, anyway, now that his parents were gone and Mrs. Ramirez was leaving. He couldn't just…leave her.

He thought of the message again.

WE NEED HELP.
PLEASE HELP US.
PLEASE HELP HER.

THERE'S NOT MUCH TIME.

Help who? Not much time until what?
Despite the dim lighting, Eric could see that the corridor was very neat—almost military-neat. Walls of that same silvery alloy with the ice-blue undertones rose up over his head. The damage extended to the ship's interior, though. Sparks and crackles of electricity erupted from damaged panels along the walls as he made his way down the hallway.

At the end of the hall was a double-door that zipped open with a hiss of hydraulics when he got within a couple feet of it. He stared at it, at the rows of navy blue buttons in a silver panel against the far wall, and realized it was an elevator. No way was he getting on an alien elevator when he had no idea what was waiting for—


The floor suddenly tipped, like the ship had pitched forward onto its nose. Wendy yelped and slid across the metal floor into the elevator, her nails clicking and scraping as she went. Eric cried out as he tipped into the elevator after her, slamming his bad shoulder into the wall with the control panel. He hissed as fire lanced his shoulder and spread through his arm. Wendy whined and pressed against his legs as the elevator jerked into motion.
Eric tried to take stock of the situation. They were in an elevator on an alien spaceship in the middle of the desert that clearly had somebody at the controls because someone had had to leave that message about needing help—which might or might not have been true. And he had no idea what was waiting outside the elevator doors when the thing finally decided to spit them out.


Another jerk signaled a halt to the elevator's journey. The doors swung open and Eric peered into a room illuminated by flashing red lights, a small and dying fire burning amidst a nest of wires inside a control panel, one flickering white light overhead, and a massive pale blue screen at the front of the room which gave off a dim glow. Wendy whined, took two hesitant little steps, then launched herself into the room. Eric knew, though he wasn’t sure how, that whoever needed help was in this room. So he followed his dog.

He twitched away whenever something popped or cracked or sparked. The place was a wreck! What had happened here? An alien battle in outer space? Had the ship crash-landed on Earth somehow?

All thoughts of aliens and spaceships and intergalactic battles fled Eric's mind when he saw the bleeding girl lying unconscious on the floor.

Eric ran to her, dropping to his knees next to her. She lay on the floor next to a padded metal chair. Her gunmetal-gray jacket, open to the waist, was scorched and charred in several places, spattered with blood in others. Her black shirt was torn, revealing ashen copper skin lacerated, burned, and bruised. Black hair spilled in a small halo around her head. A deep gash over her right eyebrow seeped blood. More blood oozed from a long slice across her forehead. Bruises mottled one side of her face. Her arm lay at an awkward angle. When Eric peeled back one eyelid, her pupil contracted sluggishly at the sudden influx of light. She looked very young lying there.

Wendy suddenly barked. Eric's head shot up and his mouth dropped open at the words typing out slowly across the large screen in front of him.

I am Boreal of the łyzør'vÿnðe.
She is my captain, Sayuri.
Can you help her?

"Uh…duh…um…uh…"

A sharp whistle emanated from somewhere in the room.

Please! She is injured.
Before our landing dislodged the spine-jack,
she lost a great deal of blood and suffered a concussion.
I think she has broken ribs and a broken arm from the impact. I can't help her. Please!

Eric swallowed and stared down at the bleeding, unconscious girl. She looked younger than him, he realized. Twenty, maybe twenty-one compared to his twenty-five. He couldn’t just leave her here.

"I…can you hear me?"

Yes. Speak.

"I can take her to a hospital. My truck's just out there. Is anyone else hurt? The rest of…of the crew?"

She and I are the crew. She is my pilot.
What year is this?

"What year?" Eric blinked, baffled, but told him.

We have come so far back…

You can't take her to a hospital.
We are not from this place or this time.
She has technology in her body that your medical authorities do not and cannot understand. If anyone from your government discovers this technology,
there's no telling what might happen.

"Wait, you're not from this time? What do you mean, you're not—"

Can you lift her?
If you can get her into that chair,
I can run a diagnostic on her bio-sensors.
I will know how badly hurt she is.

Eric hesitated for a fraction of a second. Explanations could wait. This girl—Sayuri, Boreal had said—might be bleeding into her skull for all he knew. A diagnostic or whatever would be perfect. Scooping the girl up, he carefully deposited her in the chair. He noticed a pin in the shape of a pair of golden wings glinting on the lapel of her jacket. There was a small hiss, a snick sound, and then the girl took a deep breath. Her eyelashes fluttered. Her head lolled on her slender neck before she went limp again. Eric turned to the screen.

She has four cracked ribs, but none broken and no splinters. Her left arm has a green fracture.
She has a concussion, but nothing fatal.
She will awaken on her own in perhaps eleven or twelve hours; our journey has put considerable strain on her body. First degree burns on her lower left arm.
Various lacerations on her face and arms.
She has lost a great deal of blood but won't need a transfusion if the bleeding is stopped in the next two hours. She will be all right if you can tend to her injuries. Can you take her back to your dwelling?

"To my apartment?"

Eric stared at the screen. Then he looked at the girl. So basically this Boreal was saying that if he didn’t take her back to his place and patch her up, she could bleed to death. Which of course meant Eric had only one choice. But what about…

"Where are you? Don't you need help?"

I am capable of self-repair if given a few days.
I cannot care for her in my current state.
Please, the ones who did this are tracking us even now. They will be here in less than three of your Terran revolutions.

Terran revolutions…the ones who did this…self-repair…his brain snagged on that last part. Wait. Wait, wait, wait. "Dude," Eric whispered. "Self-repair? Who…what are you?"

I am Boreal. I am The North Wind.

"I…I don't get it," Eric said. His mind refused to process what he thought the guy was saying.

I am the ship, and the ship is me.
Now please—will you help her?
She is my family. You must help her. Please.

Looking at the girl in the chair, Eric realized that the doctor in him wasn’t really going to give him much of a choice. And she was the guy's family? Eric knew what it was like to lose your family. He nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll take care of her."