Wed to the Alien Prince by C.V. Walter

Chapter 22

Serogero fought the surge of panic about the bio-nanos.

"How long will it take to track down the issues?" he asked Mintonar.

"I don't know," his cousin said with a sigh. "I'll start on it right away but there's no way to know where the code is and just how deeply it's written into the bio-nanos. It could, realistically speaking, take years."

"Years is not a good timeline," Serogero said calmly.

"I know that," Mintonar snapped. "Probably better than you do."

"Is there anything we can do to help?" Kaelin asked softly. "I know it's a lot of pressure to put on you."

He shook his head. "The ability to gather data from you is the best thing I can think of right now. I don't think it's going to cause any problems with the other humans but you might warn them that I might be turning off their bio-nanos if the evidence gets too strong that they’re causing problems."

"I can do that," Kaelin said. "I need to go meet a bunch of people anyway, right? That's still on the agenda for me?"

"Yes," Mintonar said. "And report back here if there's any problem. If anything causes you pain, I need to know. If you get sick I need to know faster."

"We can do that," Serogero said. "Is there anything we can do for her eyes right now?"

Mintonar shook his head and Serogero could feel his frustration welling up. "No, they're in flux too much. Anything we did would just cause more problems. Honestly, standing and looking at things is probably the safest thing she can do right now."

"Looking at things?" Kaelin asked.

"Forcing your eyes to focus on an object or person," Mintonar explained. "Some of them while moving, some while standing still, so you can exercise your vision."

"At least half of the issue with my vision is in my brain," she told him.

He nodded. "I suspect that's where the first changes have been made. I'll be digging through that information as well."

Kaelin shivered but nodded.

"We'll leave you to work, then," Serogero said. "And I will take Kaelin for a tour of the ship that she didn't get when she first got here. Let us know if there's any changes."

"Depending on the nature of the changes, you might know before I do," Mintonar said wryly. "But I will certainly tell if you if I notice anything important."

Serogero took Kaelin's hand and helped her stand up from the chair. He noticed the trembling in her fingers even as she gave him a very big grin. She was steadier on her feet than the last time he'd helped her up from the same chair. It was a small thing but she moved with slightly more confidence.

The door opened and he turned. A very panicked Molly was rushing through and he stepped out of her path just before she threw herself into Mintonar's arms. She didn't speak, instead she just wrapped her arms around his neck and he pulled her into his.

Kaelin tugged on his hand and nodded towards the door. He agreed and they turned as one to the door Molly had just come through. This was not the time for them to be there.

They were down the corridor before Kaelin squeezed his hand. He looked down at her and smiled.

"Where are we going?" she asked. "Or are we just taking a walk? We can do that, too, if you want. Just take a walk and see where things take us."

"I didn't have a specific place in mind but we're close to the kitchen and chow hall, as I think your people call it, and it's been some time since we've eaten. Would you like to stop there first?" He hadn't planned on taking her there. In fact, he hadn't planned on taking her anywhere just yet. Getting out of the Medical Bay had been the most important thing right then.

"I'd love to," she said. "Is it near a meal time? Or do you guys have set times for things like that? I guess I should probably ask that second one first, right? I don't even know what time it is but you obviously have some way of tracking that, as well."

"There are traditional meal times," he told her. "But they're not enforced on the ship. The lighting mimics day light and the transition times to give people a chance to follow regular patterns but they're not required to follow them. Work shifts tend follow the ones on the planet because that's what everybody was familiar with when they came on board."

"And you have places with green and growing things, right?"

"Yes," he said. "How did you know?"

"Longer term studies on humans show they need to be around green things, specifically plants, every now and then to avoid psychosis. Particularly when they're going to be confined in what can feel like very tight quarters," she shrugged and squinted at the hallway. "I figured your people are probably similar."

"We are," he said. "And for similar reasons, though most of my people won't remember the stories about what happened in our first forays into space flight."

"You do?" she asked. "I thought it was a while ago for you guys."

"It was," he nodded. "Long enough that the first experiments have passed out of memory and into myth. When this journey was first suggested, I went and looked into what we knew about long distance space flight. It was more than I thought and the reasons we stopped were..."

"Stupid?" she suggested, her voice bright. "Probably political too, right?"

"How did you know?"

"Humans were the same," she said. "We'd do something awesome, start making strides forward, then all the little would-be dictators wanted to be part of the awesome so they'd make rules that had to be enforced by their departments and hold up progress so they could say they had a hand in it."

Serogero thought about it for a minute. "Our people are remarkably similar."

"This does not fill me with confidence," Kaelin said with a laugh.

"Maybe it should," Serogero said. "Knowing that we did not get here through one continuous path of success but instead did so in fits and starts and in spite of the bureaucratic nonsense means there is a great deal of time for your people to get here."

"Yes," she said. "That makes sense, but I kinda hate it. I'd rather keep moving forward."

"And so you will," he said. "That part is inevitable. My people have had to rediscover space flight six times over the course of our known history. And there have been times when we didn't know about what had come before and thought we were the most advanced we'd ever been."

"What happened?" she asked.

Serogero shook his head. "Hubris, I believe, is the word for it. We thought we knew everything and could conquer the known worlds. Sometimes literally, sometimes not, but we've always been a species with a slow reproduction cycle so we've worked on making our lives longer. Which we have, mostly, and we've made it possible for the things we do to be more important and have a bigger impact."

"Which can be good when they're good," Kaelin said. "And disastrous when they're bad."

"I'm afraid my people are going into another decline," he said, the weight of the realization that his people were dying hit him all over again. "I don't know that there's a way to stop it but I do know that there's a chance we won't recover from it this time."

"Are you sure?" she asked. "Because, in the immortal words of one of our greatest philosophers of the modern era, life, uh, life finds a way."

He looked down to see her grinning at him. "I get the feeling I'm missing a joke," he said.

"Maybe a small one," she said. "But there's nothing wrong with that and the statement isn't wrong. Life finds ways to carry on. Your civilization had re-discovered space flight six times before you got here to this point. And this is the farthest you've ever traveled, right?"

"That's right," Serogero said. "And you've barely left the planet that we can tell."

"We have a permanent outpost in space that is being studied and prepped for long-term missions to another planet. It's not exactly jumping through long-range portals or however you all got here but it's a start."

"It is," Serogero nodded. "It also means, unless you have a long history that's been forgotten, that you're a very young species and civilization."

"Yep," Kaelin agreed. "Though if we have a forgotten history, I'm okay with it staying forgotten for now. We need to make our own way forward and what worked for our ancestors might not work now."

"They might have knowledge you haven't discovered yet," the Prince protested mildly. "Surely you'd want that."

She shrugged. "We'll find it again. Or we won't and we'll find new things. You found us, after all, and nobody knew about us."

"You weren't supposed to exist," Serogero said.

"And yet we do," she said and smiled. "And we're compatible, as far as we can tell. Unless the bio-nanos changed something about Molly's fertility beyond repairing the parts for it."

"Oh," Serogero started. He hadn't thought of that. "Do you think so?"

Another shrug. "I don't know. I don't think Mintonar does, either. I guess we'll find out...with...me...."

Kaelin's breathing became erratic and she gripped his hand tighter. His comm flashed him a warning that her heart was beating far too fast for the activity and he turned to look at her.

"Kaelin, cherna, are you all right? What's wrong?"

She buried her head against his chest and gripped the side of his shirt. "Fine," she gasped out. "I'm fine. I just need a moment."

"You are not fine," he said, gripping her shoulders. "What's going on?"

"Panic attack," she said and rubbed her head against his chest. "You smell good. I'll be fine."

Serogero wrapped his arms around her and held her close. He kept an eye on the alerts being flashed up by his comm and her heart rate did start slowing. With a few more deep breaths, she brought her heart rate back into what the comm said was normal. She squeezed her arms around him and rubbed her nose into his shirt.

"Are you well?" he asked, rubbing his hands over her back.

"I'm fine," she said. "I just don't want to let go of you yet."

"You don't ever have to let go of me," he told her and meant it. As far as he was concerned if she wanted to hold onto him like that for the next week, he'd find a way to make it work. Longer might require some adjustments but he would hold her as long as he was able.

"Thank you," she said. "And I'm sorry for being difficult. I know I've caused more than a few problems dragging my feet on some things and not knowing how to handle-"

He changed his mind. With a hard grip on her shoulders, he pushed her back until he could see her face. When she focused on his shoulder rather than his face, he used her chin to tilt her head back.

"There is nothing to apologize for. You are not being difficult. Waiting to make a decision about your health until you had more information was the right thing to do. And you made the best decision you could with the information you had."

"But I'm-"

"No," he said. "There is nothing to apologize for. Nothing. You were right to be cautious. I'm honestly a little upset that we pressured you to make the decision you did. Everybody thought it would make things better."

"It might," she said. "And that's part of why I was dragging my feet. And it still might, in the end. And I'm not upset about that. Which means I'm just incredibly selfish. This could have been causing problems with your children, impacting your people's fertility, and I'm just glad it took the decision to fix me out of my hands."

"Kaelin," he breathed, unable to find the words to express all the emotions raging through him.