Sayuri 4 - Planet-Side

"Your child's training begins between the ages of four and six, and can end anywhere between eighteen and twenty-two, depending on how well a potential pilot does in his or her classes. Now remember: not everyone is pilot material. Your child has to want to be bonded with a łyzør'vÿnðe, or Polaris Corporation unfortunately cannot take them. Some other trade-companies and military branches will, and that is always an option, but Polaris knows the best and strongest vÿnðe'oðr bonds come from willing, happy children. Before registration begins, three specialists will interview your child to ensure he or she truly wants to be a part of the Polaris family."

Your Child Wants to Be a Pilot!
From the Polaris Corporation

ØØØ

Five-year-old Sayuri Asbjørnsen clutched her mommy's hand and kept an eye on her daddy, as a blond woman in the black and silver uniform of Polaris Corporation led the Asbjørnsens down the black-and-chrome hallway. Special reinforced view-ports every few feet showed the little girl glimpses of radiant diamond stars sparkling against black velvet space. The big blue marble of Zephyr II, the only planet people could live on in the entire star system where Polaris had its base, seemed to glow against the backdrop of black.

Sayuri stopped to press her face against the view-port. Cold crept into her nose and forehead and the part of her chin that poked the estel-glass plate. She knew all about estel-glass. It was okay to touch, but only for a few minutes. Whatever it was made of kept the cold from space out of the stations and transport ships. If someone touched it for too long, though, they could get frostbite.

But she wanted to eat up the sight of that ginormous, glowing sapphire ball with her eyes. She could've stared at it forever. It wasn’t the same as when her daddy had showed her holograms of the different star systems. This was real. And it was beautiful.

Her mommy gave her hand a tug. "Come on, Sayuri-chan," Mommy said. Sayuri shot one last longing glance at the sight of Zephyr II and all the twinkling stars before she let her mommy lead her away.

The lady in the uniform had paused politely, waiting to get Sayuri's attention again. She smiled at Sayuri and nodded to the view-port. "You like outer space?"

Shyly, she nodded. Outer space was so cool. There were stars and planets that glowed because of the light bouncing of dust in the air and nebulas that looked like clouds of neon cotton candy and the ships…She'd seen the łyzør'vÿnðe a million times, and they always looked so beautiful, gliding through space like big, sleek, silver whales. The łyzør'vÿnðe were awesome.

The lady smiled at Sayuri's parents. "That's typical of potential pilots," she said, turning and starting down the hallway again. "They love looking at the stars. They find space fascinating, even when they're young."


Daddy laughed. "I wanted her to be an astrophysicist like me, but all she can talk about at home is going out with a łyzør'v
ÿnðe and going to the Horse Head Nebula or Pavonis Mons. I didn’t even know she knew what Pavonis Mons was!"

"Is a volcano," Sayuri whispered. The lady looked back over her shoulder at the child, nodding encouragingly when the little girl pressed herself against her mother's pant-leg. "On Mars. In Tharsis."

The lady's gray eyes widened. She actually grinned, showing teeth. "Very good, Sayuri! Do you know what kind of volcano?"

Sayuri shook her head. "Is like this." She held up her arm straight, then tilted it upwards a very little bit. "It's tiny." She looked out the next view-port as a comet streaked by, thin as a pencil because of the distance but blazing pink and yellow like a streaking birthday candle-flame nonetheless. "I like space."

"And you want to be a pilot when you grow up?" The lady called back, keeping one eye on her. Sayuri's lips twitched and she nodded. She wanted to smile, but she still felt shy about this pretty lady in her cool uniform asking her all these questions. She was glad her mommy and daddy were there. They made her feel brave enough to talk a little. She thought maybe she could open her mouth and talk some more when the lady said, "Here we are."

Tall, chrome doors slid open with a hiss of hydraulics and the lady led the Asbjørnsens into a cozy room with plush, cream-colored carpets and six dove-gray chairs, three of them facing the other three. A small, white bookcase with only two shelves stood between two of the chairs. The books were all for children. Sayuri's fingers itched to go look at them; they probably had pretty pictures inside. But she wouldn’t, she didn’t dare, because three grownups were sitting in three of the chairs next to the bookcase—a man and two women wearing the same uniform as the blond lady.

When Sayuri and her parents entered the room, the three new grownups stood up. The man, who had gray hair and nice brown eyes, held out his hand to Sayuri's daddy. Daddy shook the man's hand.

"Dr. Asbjørnsen, it's an honor to meet you, sir. Mrs. Asbjørnsen. And this must be Sayuri," the man said, smiling down at her. He held his hand and she held out hers because she knew she was supposed to. He shook it very gently. "I'm Dr. McGeorge. This is Dr. Edsel," he added, gesturing to a woman with pretty silver hair cut close to her head like a pixie. "And this," pointing to the other woman, whose auburn hair only had a few white threads, "is Dr. Taylor. We just want to ask you some questions, okay?"

Sayuri nodded. She knew they were going to ask her questions. Her mommy and daddy had told her they'd want to. They had to make sure she really did like outer space and ships and really did want to be a pilot, so she would be happy. She knew she would. If she could just have a łyzør'vÿnðe of her very own, a best friend, someone who would always love her, she'd take good care of it and love it and be happy.

So she hopped into the chair Dr. McGeorge told her to sit in and folded her hands in her lap so they'd know she was being polite. She smiled at the grownups, showing her teeth. Her mommy had made sure she brushed them before they got off the transport ship that had taken them from Neo-Tokyo Station to Polaris. Mommy and Daddy sat on either side of her.

The grownups all smiled. Dr. Edsel asked, "So, Sayuri…how long have you wanted to be a pilot?"

Sayuri started to relax. This was going to be easy.

ØØØ

Clawing through choking blackness, sweat pearling on her skin like beads of liquid ice, Captain Sayuri Asbjørnsen jolted upright with a gasp that was half a shriek. Memory-flashes flooded her mind, lightning-strike recollections of smoke suffocating her, shooting sparks burning, claxons deafening, crimson warning lights piercing…

"It's okay," a firm but impossibly gentle voice cried. Strong hands gripped her right wrist, squeezing them just enough to get her attention as she sucked in panicked gasps of air. A sheen of white had spread across her vision as she braced for impact, braced for the savage blow of gravity slamming her and Boreal into the planet's surface with merciless fury. Her brain screamed that they were about to hit, that the engines couldn’t compensate for the gravity, that the heat of hurtling through the atmosphere was eating away at Boreal's hull, burning him. But that voice repeated, "It's okay. You're safe now. It's okay. Take a deep breath. Just breathe. Everything is all right."

Sayuri sucked in air. The cool slide of it spilled down her smoke-raw throat, filling her lungs. She forced the iron bands of panic to ease the pressure on her chest so her lungs could expand properly, but taking deeper breaths sent hurt echoing like a vicious drum down through her left side, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. Air escaped her in a rush.

"Take shallow breaths," the voice said through the roaring in her ears, laying a hand on her shoulder and one on her back as if he could control her diaphragm with his touch. "You've got cracked ribs. No deep breaths yet."

Her next breath was soft and shallow. Sayuri found the air didn’t hitch in her chest and threaten to snap her bones this time. She let it out, drew in another. Forcibly suppressed the nearly overwhelming urge to panic. Boreal. Where was Boreal? Where was she? Who was the owner of the voice? A man, she knew that much. How had he gotten her out of her ship? Boreal had to have been hurt by the crash, so where was he?

The fresh oxygen allowed the whiteness to fade from her vision. Her head didn't stop spinning, though. A dull ache throbbed through the back of her skull and behind her eyes. She blinked to bring the world into focus and found herself staring into a familiar pair of dark eyes.

It was the man she'd seen with her æspÿrøn just before they'd entered the wormhole. His dark gaze held concern and a promise of safety. She'd seen him once. Did that make him an ally? A future friend? Or had her æspÿrøn been warning her of a potential threat?

"Do you remember anything?" The man said. He loosened his grip on her wrist, drawing his hands back but holding them up and out as if to show her he meant no harm. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Though it made her head pulse with pain, she managed a nod. It felt like the pain was swelling at the base of her neck and flooding her skull, ready to split her head wide open. She tried to raise her left arm. Hollow, black, wicked heat raked across the side of her arm, biting to the bone. A small cry of pain caught in her throat. She raised her other hand to her forehead and her fingertips jerked away from a butterfly bandage and a stinging zap of hurt. The man snagged her fingers.

"Don't touch that," he said with the stern compassion of a medic. "You're hurt. You have a concussion and some deep lacerations on your forehead. I got the bleeding stopped, but they're gonna be tender for awhile. Would you like some water?"

The man reached for a small cup made of what looked like cloudy estel-glass, but people didn’t use estel-glass to make dishes. It looked like…what had her history book called it? Plastic, right. It looked like the all-purpose substance from a few centuries ago called plastic. Transparent liquid filled the cup half-way.

Water. As soon as the word flitted through her head, Sayuri realized how brutally thirsty she was. She opened her mouth. Tried to speak. The words rasped in her throat. The man understood, though. He lifted the cup, helped her to hold it with her right hand—the one that didn’t feel hollow, trembling-weak, suffused with icy needles burning her to the very bone—and helped her bring the cup to her lips.

The first drops of water touched her lips. Stung in the cracks she hadn’t known were there. Cool water spilled past her lips into her mouth. Saturated the dried husk of her tongue, soothed the dust-dryness of her mouth, eased the raw smokiness in her throat. She coughed. Winced. Sipped some more.

"Slowly, now," the man—the medic? He spoke like a medic—murmured. "Easy. Small sips. Don’t overdo it. You've been unconscious for almost twelve hours and you're dehydrated, but don't drink too fast. You can make yourself sick. You okay?" He added when she lowered the cup. "Can you try to talk?"

She swallowed. It didn’t feel like swallowing shards of glass and bits of wire this time. Taking a small breath that still managed to flick her ribs with pain, she whispered, "Yes."

"Okay. I'm Eric. Eric Waverly," the medic said. "You're in my apartment. And you're Sayuri, right? Captain…I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to pronounce your last name."

Sayuri licked her lips. "Asbjørnsen—Az-bee-yorne-senn," she managed to murmur.

"Captain Asbjørnsen. Right. Do you know what happened?"

She nodded. "Where's my ship?" Boreal's absence gnawed at the back of her mind like a neurological toothache. She could just barely feel the faintest edge of the depths of his agony as his body slowly knit back together. But where had this man, this Eric Waverly, left Boreal? How had he even known how to get onto the bridge and get her off-ship?

"Yeah, your ship," Eric mumbled. "Boreal. Right? Like borealis. North." Sayuri nodded again, very carefully, feeling the pieces of her skull sloshing around near the top of her spine. "I left him at the crash-site. You crashed into our planet. My dog found you. Sort of." At the mention of a dog, a dash of brilliant coppery gold zoomed into the room. A dog barked once before dropping its head onto the knee of Sayuri's wrinkled, dirty, and torn uniform pants. Æspÿrøn tickled the back of her mind as she looked into big, brown, canine eyes. "That's Wendy."

When Sayuri tried to move her left arm again, this time instinctively to pet the dog, the pain shooting up and down her forearm was almost nauseating. She gasped. Her torso spasmed as her cracked ribs shrieked in protest. Eric gripped her shoulder, pressing his hand to her back. The heat from his palm through her shirt soothed her.

Her shirt…

"Where's my jacket? Where’s my…" She whispered, looking around as fresh panic tried to claw at her throat. It subsided when she glimpsed her uniform-jacket on a wire hanger on a doorknob. Her captain's wings glittered in the pale light from a single overhead light. Underneath the jacket sat her gray, canvas ready-case. There were weapons in there, emergency rations, water, some supplies…and the six-million terabyte jewel-chip they'd picked up from an æsÿn'jähär space-station out near Alpha Centauri. Everything she needed was right there.

Her gaze drifted toward a window; she noticed the darkness of night beyond the glass, darkness streaked with toxic city-glow. She was in a city. Not a big one like Tokyo or New York City, but not a village or a town. Somewhere in a city's outlying suburb. In an apartment.

A quick look around told her she'd come farther back into the past than she'd first imagined: on the tiny but very clean kitchen counter sat a microwave, something she'd only seen in museums and history books. Scientists had discovered a replacement for the mid-twentieth century device in the tail-end of the twenty-first century.

"So here's the deal," Eric said, breaking into her thoughts. She flicked her gaze to him, and for the first time compared the æspÿrøn-vision of him to what she saw now. His hair was longer than it had been when she'd first seen him—his chocolate-colored scalp didn’t show through the short, black curls—and in the vision, he'd had a thin scar running along his jaw. A deep scratch or cut had taken its place. So whatever she'd seen had occurred after that cut had scarred over.

Eric cleared his throat. She blinked, startled. Stared at him. He'd been talking. She hadn’t noticed. Everything seemed…distant just now. A bit floaty. The after-effects of shock? Or a result of the concussion banging through her skull?

"I'm sorry," she mumbled. "I…where am I?"

"You're on Earth."

She bit back a sigh as more ouch kicked her in the back of the head. Every species called its planet "Earth" in their language. The concept of home-earth was what made people call Terra "Earth" to begin with. She had no idea if she was on Terra or another planet with a bipedal species. There were a few planets scattered across the explored parts of the galaxy that boasted colonies of æsÿn'jähär, Nĵörðunn refugees from their arctic planet that had escaped during the bloody civil war during what had been the Cro-Magnon period on Terra. She spoke two dialects of Nĵörð fluently—it was a required course at Polaris's flight academy because of the war—but her head ached so mercilessly, she couldn’t focus long enough to figure out if Eric was speaking English or Japanese or Icelandic, her three native Terran languages, or Nĵörð. He could’ve been speaking Drókvæðä for all she knew. It hurt too much to concentrate.

But then she realized she'd automatically spoken to him in Japanese, her mother's native language, and he'd responded. She blinked. Stared at him as if dazed. He knew Japanese? She was on Terra, then. Had to be. Earth-Prime, as some called it. She was on Terra in the Sol System. But where? What continent? What country? Japan? There was no way Boreal could’ve taken a nosedive all the way from Pluto's orbit into Terra in a country as small and densely populated as Japan without being noticed. So where…?

"You're in the US," he added. "Pattou, Arizona. The desert. You crashed out in the desert. I got you into my truck and drove you back to my place. Your ship said a hospital was a bad idea."

Nodding, she pressed her right fingers against her temple. Winced. Realized the headache from the concussion wasn’t so bad, but that it had decided to mix with the throbbing from the cuts on her forehead, the knot on top of her head, the bruises on her face, and Boreal's pain feeding through their vÿnðe'oðr bond.

Three small things were pressed into her good hand. She looked down and saw they were little, brown tablets. The number stamped on them told her exactly what it was—painkillers. She looked up at Eric.

"Now that you're awake, we can risk giving you something for the pain. Here's some more water." He helped her to swallow the pills one at a time, then got to his feet. "You're going to need to eat something with that. I don't have much, but there's some hotdogs."

Sayuri nodded, offering a tight smile. "Thank you. Something to eat would be—"

A high-pitched, rapid beep echoed off the apartment walls. A small light flashed red inside her ready-case; she could just catch a glimpse of it sticking out of a half-closed pocket. She reached for it, but Eric got there first, handing her the shrilling mini-sensor she carried whenever she was planet-side. She stared at the two-by-two-inch view-screen. Swallowed.

"What's wrong?" Eric asked, crouching down beside her. Her good hand shook as she clutched at the mini-sensor. "What is it?"

Everything was wrong. Everything. Because somehow, even though everything she'd ever been taught told her it was utterly impossible, something was approaching Terra's atmosphere. Something extraterrestrial. A handful of somethings that shouldn’t have been there.

Nĵörðunn ŧrø'ayłe—war-cruisers. The same ones that had chased her through the wormhole.