Princess of the Void

“Remember the 90% of your training?” Drake parks himself in a folding chair across a card table from Grant. “You’re about to get the last 10. But it’s time to sign another NDA. This is the big deal NDA.”

He pushes a novella across the table. “Read that.”

Grant takes it gingerly, like it’ll burn him. “Is this something I can, uh. Could I take it home, have someone read it for me?”

“You can’t take it home. You can’t go home, until you’ve read it and signed it. Take your time.”

He sits back. What if I don’t agree to it? Grant wants to say. Instead he picks it up and reads.

Ten minutes later he lowers the page and looks up. “This part.” He flips the packet around. “Section 11 subsection F. Liquidation. What’s liquidation mean?”

Drake doesn’t reply.

Grant realizes after 30 seconds of silence that he isn’t going to. The page in his hand trembles. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

Drake shakes his head. “Yes, you did.”

“This is fucking bullshit. This is. This is insane. Is that a person in there?”

“Keep reading, and sign it,” Drake says. “And then I’ll brief you.”

Grant’s stomach sinks into the floor as he goes through the rest of the agreement in a fugue state. Nothing sticks. It’s all just contingencies and penalties and liquidation keeps going through his mind. Liquidation, liquidation.

Drake’s hand at the edge of the paper is a jump scare. Its broad finger taps a vacant line of typed underscores. “Sign that,” he says. “And initial every page.”

“I don’t want to. I need to talk to someone. Can we get a supervisor down here?”

Drake stands up. He walks to the door and stands in front of it. His hands fold in front of him. “Sign it and initial it.” His voice is a droned monotone.

Drake’s moving on procedure, Grant realizes. He’s gone automatic. This is what people do before they shoot other people. A dizzy dread animates his hand. He signs the page. He moves back through the sheaf of papers and lays his initials on each of them. With every scratchy pronouncement of the pen, Drake’s humanity returns, in visible increments.

The document’s done, and the big security guard slides it into a manila folder as he takes his seat again. “I didn’t think we’d have to do this, Hyde. And I’m sorry we do.” He drums his fingers on the table. “All the serious stuff happens during the day. It’s never shown itself to a night shifter. What I want you to do right now is breathe with me, all right? Deep breath.” He demonstrates and Grant tries shakily to imitate him. “The thing to remember: you’re gonna be okay. There is nothing it can do to you from where it’s at, and night-shift security is a button press away. We’re relying on you to be the eyes on Batty. The rest of us are here to contain it.”

Grant is not worried about what the creature can do to him. He’s worried about the gun on Drake’s hip. “Batty? That’s her name?”

“Its designation,” Drake says, “is Subject B-31. We call it Batty for short, on account of it hangs like a bat. And the eyes and the teeth and the ears. B-31 was discovered at the crash site of what we thought was a meteor. Then we found the ship.”

“The ship.” Grant’s ears are ringing. “It’s an alien.”

“Yep. Came down on a vessel shaped like a bullet, the size of a rowboat. Made of alloys we don’t even have names for. And B-31 was sealed inside, in either restraints or a life-support system. There’s disagreement on that. It breathes our air, it can eat our food. On MRIs, its brain looks human, almost, but it has an enlarged frontal lobe with a protuberance around the part on humans we call Broca’s area. That controls speech production and articulation.”

“What does that all mean?”

“Fucked if I know, cause it sure don’t talk. Our psych people have run it through tests and put it at around orangutan level intelligence. It doesn’t communicate in anything like a language. Just grunts and growls.”

That wasn’t a grunt or a growl Grant heard. That was syllabic.

He stays silent.

“More important for you—since you’re never gonna talk to it—it has the strength of a human many times its size, it can climb around on walls like a freaky little monkey, and it has optical camouflage.”

“So she can go invisible?”

“It’s imperfect, especially at speed. But yes. Listen, though, newbie. Listen good.” Drake holds up a finger. “Never, ever, ever call it a she. We shouldn’t have called it Batty, to be honest. But it’s faster than Subject Bee Thirty One. Psychological resilience is gonna be key to doing your job right. Batty is not a person. You can’t think of it like that. You can look into its eyes and see something in them. You can assume a lot about what’s going on up there. You can think it’s cute. You think it’s cute?”

He says nothing.

“I think it’s cute. Three-foot tall nudist with a Hollywood rack, running around swinging on a jungle gym. But you know nothing about it. Not the first thing. The social cues you’ve developed, we don’t know how they apply to it. That thing is a black box. You ran into it outside that room, who knows what it would do to you. Eat you, maybe. Its fangs have a potent neurotoxin in them. The eggheads think it evolved to suck blood. Like a goddamn space vampire. Do not communicate with it. Read nothing into its body language. Go nowhere near it. Stay in your room, play your guitar, cash your checks, go home to your family.” Drake gives him a tight grin. “And you’ll be okay.”

I don’t have a family, Grant thinks. You know I don’t.

One week passes. B-31 makes no further appearances. Grant punches in, sits in his box, and does his job. Now that he knows what’s happening in there, and the role he has as captor, every anomaly he sees brings a flinch of guilt.

There are flashes. He knows to look for them now. A distortion around the monkey bars or on the edges of the enclosure.

He never sees her eat. He presumes they feed her during the day. Most of the time he’s here, he must be watching her sleep.

She doesn’t have a bed. She’s sleeping on the floor, or on that jungle gym.

It, a voice that sounds like Drake insists. And you don’t know if it even sleeps.

If enough time passes, he thinks, he’ll forget the beautiful woman with the sad red eyes. She’s clearly decided not to trust him. All he has to do is keep doing what he’s doing, and his qualms will fade. If he does nothing, he’ll learn to live with it.

He makes his decision on day 12.

He waits for a fifteen minute window of zero activity, and engages the loop function on the cameras. Then he opens the CHAMBER door and pushes the swivel chair out, to the front of the glass enclosure. He sits in it and rests his head on his chin.

“You are a dumb fucking dumbfuck, Grant,” he says to himself.

He reaches out and knocks on the pane of glass.

A shimmer in the air, at the top of the jungle gym. Grant knocks again.

The hair is what appears first. The rest of her flickers back in little scale-shapes, from the crown of her head to the tip of her tail. She’s laying atop the monkey bars, curled like a cat, staring warily at him with those bright red eyes.

“Hi,” he says.