Season 3 Episode 05: Awakening

What happened to Helona?

Helona Chubbuck awoke to a cheerful, brightly lit room. Gone was the noise and fear of battle. She last remembered feeling multiple weapons hits on her body and her life ebbing away as she lay on the cold steel floor of the alien destroyer’s landing bay.

Her sore throat and a headache told her this couldn’t be any sort of afterlife. So where was she?

She reached up to touch her head and found her braids missing, and the edge of her hair only reached her shoulders. Someone had cut her hair!

Anger boiled inside her. She also couldn’t find the feather she wore or the hairpipe bead that had held it above her braids. She looked down at her left hand, and the engagement ring Carl had given her was also gone.

She attempted to sit up but fell back down, surrendering to the weakness, light-headedness, and pain that stabbed her all over like a half-dozen knives. She arranged her pillow to lift her head and folded the covers aside, only to find that she was wearing a hospital gown. A slow, closer self-examination found that her several wounds on her legs, ribs, and torso had mostly healed and were lightly bandaged. A bruise and bandage on her hand told her that she had recently been on an IV.

She moved and stretched until she had awakened more, then rolled over onto her belly and turned until her feet and legs could slide off the bed and onto the floor. Her head swam with dizziness, and she had to grab and pull on the bedsheets to keep the rest of her from sliding off.

Eventually, she pushed herself up onto her feet and stood there wobbling. Bracing against the bed, she shuffled carefully over to the wall and then along the wall to the window. Once there, she slid the curtains aside, only to find herself staring at opaque glass and a door to the outside.

In a nearby closet, she found an array of jumpsuits in the exact same style, in various colors, and all exactly her size. They slipped on with no fasteners, having a sewn-in and pleated elastic in the waist, ankles, wrists, and upper chest. She chose a blue one and then found an array of simple, slip-on sandals, all identical but in various colors. She chose light brown, pushing the remaining color choices to the back and, fearing hidden cameras, climbed inside the closet to get dressed.

Once clothed, she limped back to the door and found it led to a wide, ensconced balcony.

Before her eyes stretched the inside of a domed habitat with numerous buildings arrayed within it. She refrained from looking down; from that vantage point, she could see that she was hundreds of stories off the ground, and she wasn’t sure how her already dizzy head would react.

“Danger,” an automated voice sounded in her ear when she touched the rail.

“Oh, shut up,” she replied with a twist of her head, but could find no source of the warning.

A brisk wind tugged at her hair, so she slid up her sleeves and reached her hands over the rail to feel its full force blow over her bare arms. Then she heard a sound behind her and turned quickly. Too quickly, she realized with a wince, as stabbing pain and dizziness reminded her again of her injuries.

In the balcony doorway stood Gary Smith, all six feet eleven and three hundred something tightly muscled pounds of him, dressed exactly as she was, except in green.

“Hello, Helona,” he said.

She stared in shock at him for a few seconds.

“Gary, you look good and healthy,” she said. “Where are we?”

“Where in the galaxy, you mean? I don’t know. The rest is, well, a bit complicated. How is Sherry and my daughter?”

“When you didn’t come back, I sent them home to Earth,” Helona replied, sliding her sleeves back down. “I wasn’t sure how safe she would be on Alsephina.”

She carefully turned to faced him, leaning backward against the balcony rail.

“I’ve known Sherry for a long time,” she said. A smile leaped to her lips at the joy she felt thinking about the child Gary and her friend had named after her. “She and little Helona will be fine with her mom.”

Gary stepped up to the balcony’s edge and leaned his elbows on the rail, which creaked in objection to his weight. Then he looked annoyed and tapped something in his ear before resuming his lean.

“What is this place, Gary?” Helona asked.

Then, she heard a distant knocking.

“Come inside with me,” said Gary with a sigh. “A guest just arrived who’ll explain it all. You’re not going to like it.”

She followed Gary through the room where she’d woken up and out through a doorway she hadn’t noticed earlier. The room was just one in a spacious apartment that seemed to occupy the entire floor, and Gary walked to near the center of it as they heard more knocking at the entrance.

He opened the door to a thin, red-haired man in his mid-twenties wearing a white lab coat. Helona watched him, struggling to remember where she had seen him before, since he looked strangely familiar.

He marched inside as if he owned the place, then turned to her and held out his hand.

“I’ve been very eager to meet you, Miss Chubuck,” he said. “You are quite important, and I’m elated that you survived your injuries.”

His voice also seemed familiar.

He gazed in wonder at her face and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, but I have to ask now that you’re awake. Are you Navajo? What percent are you? Quite high, I imagine, from your appearance.”

She squinted back at him.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, still offering to shake her hand. “Where are my manners? I’m Doctor Remus Thadfield, the thirty-eighth, Genetics Scientist.”