By the third week, Erin was speaking a sometimes hysterically funny jumble the men had dubbed “Erant.” A mix of English and Beyant, she fluidly slipped back and forth between languages as she talked and didn’t know a word in her new language. She was the only female on board. While she suspected in some cultures this might be a bad thing, she felt one common emotion from the nearly one hundred men—they felt responsible for and protective of her, like a sibling or a child. Every male greeted her with friendly affection that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her in a good way.
They had welcomed her as one of their own.
It wasn’t until her fifth week on the B’autachia, as she learned the ship was called, that she found out why. “My sister used to serve with us,” Yanna explained over dinner one evening. He could now speak mostly in Beyant to her. Erin found it helpful to be immersed in their language at this point. If she didn’t understand something, she asked him to repeat it. For the most part, she comprehended. “She was a healer,” he said.
“A doctor?”
“Not exactly. Pachya, he can heal a body or run tests to find out what is wrong physically. A healer, in our culture, they work on the why, not the how.”
She tried to feel his emotions for clarification. She’d learned from the men it wasn’t a common ability, but a highly respected one. “A…psychologist?”
He frowned, not understanding her English word. She reformed the question in Beyant. “A healer focuses on the mind and emotions instead of the body?”
He smiled. “Aha! That’s exactly it. They can also heal bodies, but they do more than that.” A brief wave of sadness trickled from him. “You remind us all very much of her.”
“What happened to her?”
He frowned. The dark expression didn’t fill her with fear, but grief tinged with anger. “She was killed in an unprovoked attack by raiders. She had long wanted our people to sign the treaties, but we had always held back, afraid to get pulled into other planets’ conflicts that were not our concern. Her legacy is that we fulfill her wish to sign the treaties and join the Interstellar Treaty Coalition and become stronger so no one else hopefully dies by these lawless animals.”
Raiders.
Erin felt a twinge of fear of her own. He set down his utensils. “What is it, Erin?”
She shook her head. “I thought I was remembering something.” It fully slipped away the more she tried to focus on it. Erin finally looked up at him and smiled. “So I’m a little sister, huh?”
He returned her smile. “A very cherished one.”
Two months after her arrival, Erin rarely needed to speak English standard anymore other than the lessons she gave to the crew. She worked side by side in the labs with Pachya, learning Beyant physiology and teaching him what she could remember about hers. They had discovered a tiny electronic chip in the back of her neck, just under the skin, near her hairline. With her permission, Pachya gently removed and preserved it for closer study. She felt she should know why it was there and what it was for, but as with nearly everything else in her past, she couldn’t remember.
She couldn’t recall any useful information like that, although the periodic table of elements popped into her head one day while they were testing more food for her.
Her hair had completely grown out in the new color, a darker shade of blond than the men, almost honey-colored, but much lighter than it had been when she arrived. She kept it cut short enough it wasn’t in her way, but not so short it looked strange to her in the mirror. Yanna, Pabo, and Pachya approved when she did it, telling her it looked good.
They would reach their rendezvous point in three more months. While part of her looked forward to the event, part of her felt nervous and scared. She listened to the recording every night before she went to sleep. The mysterious Ford’s voice soothed her.
Is he my husband? She had dreamed several times of three men, handsome men her heart seemed to ache for. One very large, almost as tall as Yanna, with shaggy blond hair and playful green eyes. One shorter, slimmer, with dark hair and blue eyes. The third, in the middle height-wise, with brown hair and sad, brown eyes.
One thought always accompanied those dreams. Aaroncaphford.
She wished she could figure out what that meant. Was one of those three men the Ford in the recording? Were any of them? Was he, or they, alive or dead?
Did the fact that she called the man Ford in the recording match with the mysterious Aaroncaphford word?
Nearly three months after her arrival, she caught herself thinking in the Beyant language. She had finally mastered their alphabet and while not totally fluent in the written form, she could now read and write well enough in it to help with status reports.
That was when her sense of safety shattered.
An alarm sounded while she was on the bridge with Yanna. Yanna, the ambassador, who was a retired ship commander, and several guards raced through the ship to the engine room. Erin followed. In the tangle of orders and information exchanges, she realized an electronic relay had overheated and short-circuited, causing a flash fire that burned two crewmen. Before they could shut down the electrical panel, a small explosion rocked the room, sending a computer section tumbling onto the ambassador.
He screamed with pain. Erin ran to his side. His leg was trapped, but a jagged piece of metal had sliced through his thigh and into a vital artery.
“Move this! Now!” she screamed at the men as she pressed her hand to the wound. They freed him, and she kept her hand on his leg, trying to staunch the bleeding as they carried him to the sick bay.
Erin felt something instinctive kick in. She barked orders to the men without hesitation, ordering implements, supplies, and other needed items as she had Pabo rip the ambassador’s trouser leg open. Pachya gave him anesthesia while she immediately started repairing the wound. It wasn’t until an hour or so later, after she’d completed the emergency surgery and while she sat in a chair next to the bunk and watched the ambassador’s vital signs, that she realized the other Beyant men stared at her in awe.
“What?” she asked, suddenly feeling extremely self-conscious.
Despite her being covered in his father’s blood, Yanna grabbed her from the chair and nearly crushed her against his chest. His immense feelings of gratitude threatened to overwhelm her. “You saved him!”
“I’m a doctor. That’s my job.”
She froze as she realized what she’d said. He looked down at her, a grin on his face. “And now you remember!” He laughed. “Doctor Erin, the medical healer.”
Amazed, she realized she did remember, but not how she got those skills. “I knew what to do. It felt instinctive. I don’t remember anything else, though.”
He whirled her around before crushing her to his chest again. “You were amazing, a’tein!” A’tein was, she’d learned, the affectionate Beyant term for sister. Yanna had started calling her that a few weeks earlier.
“How are the others?” she mumbled against his chest.
He finally set her back on her feet.
Pachya nodded at her. “Minor injuries. They will recover.” He studied the ambassador’s leg. “I doubt I could have done a better job. That was very skilled and extremely impressive. Will you please teach me how you repaired the nerves?”
She nodded. “I’ll try.” She looked down at the front of her shirt, which was stained dark rust by dried blood.
“Go,” Yanna told her. “Clean up. We will wait here.”
She returned to her cabin and stripped off the soiled uniform. After a quick shower, she dressed and returned to sick bay. The ambassador was already sitting up and talking.