Chapter 1: Warrior

== Kiris IV, Kiris Retrieval Station ==

When he woke up this time, Ed could tell right away that something was different. He saw a wall in front of him, and when he looked down, a floor at his feet.

He saw his feet!

He decided that they felt like his feet. The perspective was right, but the feet looked bigger and rawer somehow than the feet he remembered. That one grungy toenail on his right foot that seemed to suffer permanent contamination from some sort of fungus looked clean as a whistle. Ed wiggled his toes, and the ones he was looking at moved. 'Yup, they're mine', he thought.

Ed tried tilting his head a little further down to see the rest of his legs, but when he did, a wave of vertigo hit him, followed by a surge of nausea. His stomach rebelled, and he felt the bile rising in the back of his throat. He was vomiting a few seconds later, and couldn't seem to turn his head enough to keep it from collecting in his mouth, he spat, and vomited some more, and the vomit seemed to collect where it would do the most harm. He began to choke on his own ejecta, and again panic rose, followed by the fog again and then the strangely comforting blackness.

The third time's the charm, they say, and for Ed, at least this time, it proved true. He woke feeling clear-eyed and alert. Again he saw a wall in front of him, and his feet beneath him. When he moved his head, he saw legs, and with a quick movement that didn't nauseate or panic him, pulled an arm around in front of his eyes. He had arms and hands. He touched nose, lips and ears in a quick trinity of reassurance. Then, being a man, reached down between his legs for that little moment of reassurance. Phew! There was a dick there, thank God! He thought, before suddenly re-examining the plumbing.

There was definitely something wrong here! This was not his dick! Ed knew how much of his hand the penis he had been born with filled, and this filled that with some left over. He looked at his hand again, focusing this time on the details of it rather than on the mere existence of it. This wasn't the hand he remembered. It was larger and younger!

Suddenly he was aware of himself standing in a room. He was naked and he was young, and had dark, reddish brown hairs everywhere that he had once had dull brown or graying hair. The legs holding him up looked powerful, as did the arms he held out. He made a muscle.

Yeah, then he laughed as he caught himself standing there primping!

Ed's awareness soon shifted from the body to the room. The wall he was facing was blank, white and featureless. He turned, and behind him found a slender clear tube that ran from ceiling to floor, with two smaller tubes of some silvery metal running alongside it. He could see a bubbling clear liquid moving down through the clear tube. He reached out to touch the tube, and a cloud of tiny clear filaments reached out to meet him. They touched and penetrated the flesh of his hand, writhing, as if seeking with seeming inquisitiveness, then, finding the hand was something unexpected, retracting to sink back into the clear column. Ed looked at the palm where he'd seen the filaments sink in. He had felt nothing, and there was no mark left behind. The entire column chose that moment to retract itself into a circular spot in the ceiling above him, leaving only a shiny metallic spot. There were a half dozen other spots on the ceiling where columns like his might be lowered.

Beyond the column, the far wall of the room appeared to have two windows, and Ed walked over to them. He touched the surface of the first one, thinking it might be a painting at first. There was a glassy-feeling surface, slightly cool to the touch, but behind it, or beyond it, maybe in it, all that could be seen were stars. Not the blinking, wavering stars he was used to seeing in the night skies of Texas, but what even he knew enough to recognize as the hard, unblinking light of stars as seen from space.

While Ed stared at what he still wasn't sure was a window, a soft musical tone sounded, and as he turned towards it, saw a door open silently in the wall to his left. In his mind he silently added the sound from all the old Star Trek TV shows. You know, the 'SHWEET!' sound that the doors made when they opened?

Ed was in space, he knew it, and if he hadn't already been thinking it, the wide, squat, oily looking body with the mottled skin and the face full of tentacles would have gotten him thinking it. He remembered panicking over this creature, or someone like it back when his brain was working on a much more basic level, anyone from Earth could understand why he was bothered. That face full of tentacles was kind of creepy.

They stood, a dozen feet apart, staring at each other. Well, Ed was staring. He could only assume his host, or whatever it was, was staring. Those tiny blue eyes were all facing him. There were a couple dozen of them, in three soft crescents clustered around a common center. The cluster of tentacles below the cluster of eyes began to move, and shortly afterward, the room spoke in a soft, soothing voice.

"Hello. My name is Trugar. I am the medical technician in charge of your care."

A translator of some kind? Ed couldn't tell where the voice came from exactly. Somewhere overhead.

"Hello, my name is Ed Bell. How are you doing?"

There was another slight pause, as whatever had translated for it did the same for Ed.

"I am fine, Ed Bell. More importantly, how are you feeling?"

"Please, call me Ed." He answered. "I feel pretty darn good, to be honest. I can't say I've ever felt this good in my life. You are definitely an alien, so I can assume we are on a space ship?"

The tentacle waving took a while this time before the reply began.

"Yes Ed. We are aware of the use of familiar addresses, such as first names, but did not want to presume. You are on a space station, permanently stationed in orbit around a planet called Kiris. As your people are called Humans from the planet Earth, I am a Penod from the planet Demelor."

"How is it I can't hear you speak, but your names can be said using words I can hear? Is that a hard translation to make?"

"The names we are using for these places are the transliterations of the names they have been given by the Skafti, the beings who have brought you here."

"What has happened to me?" Ed asked, the floodgates opening. "How did I get so young, and in such a different body? How far from Earth are we?"

"I cannot tell you how far away Earth is. The Skafti have not shared that information with me. The body you had when you were brought aboard the craft that retrieved you was inadequate to the purposes for which the Skafti retrieved you, so a new body was grown, using optimized genetic material from you species. Your current body's age is within the optimal range for your species, and should provide for maximum stamina, endurance, healing and adaptability."

Well, that explained a lot, in an 'I-still-don't-know-shit' kinda way, Ed thought.

"Who are the Skafti?"

"The Skafti are your employers and mine." Trugar said. "However, as a member of an unrecognized species from a primitive planet, your status is somewhat fluid. If the Skafti wish to use you in any public capacity, they will have to treat you as an intelligent being, and that gives you certain rights. The fact that I was allowed to treat you and the other humans suggests that you will be given those rights. I am bound by my oaths as a healer to report it if you are not, if I believe, as I do, that you meet the intelligence requirements."

"So I"m not a slave?"

"You are not. Slavery is one of the things the Rift Conventions abolished, many, many generations ago. Not that it doesn't still exist here and there. Those who still engage in the custom are remote societies, and insular. The Skafti are too much into trade and politics to risk dabbling in slavery."

"You said there were other humans. Did you mean the people who were with me when I was 'retrieved'?"

"Some of them, yes Ed. But others as well. The Skafti's retrieval procedures are not harsh, but the process is not without its dangers."

"How many other humans are there here? Where are they?"

"There are forty seven humans who have been successfully retrieved aboard this station. They are all in another location, and you will get to see them once you are done here. They have been awake and functioning a bit longer than you. You are the last to be brought back to full consciousness, as the medical efforts required for you were the most extensive. You were the oldest, and had the most significant health issues."

"Okay, so what's next then?"

"You have passed all the medical requirements for release, but the Skafti have a standard set of requirements in cases like yours, so you must pass a few physical tests. Nothing too strenuous."

With those words a foggy blur of light seemed to coalesce beside them, until it resolved into a more or less human form with a bald head and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts.

"This is a holographic projection based on your species. It will conduct some drills designed to test your physical status. Please put on the clothing in the drawer."

As Trugar said this a drawer slid out of what Ed had thought was a seamless wall, and sitting in the drawer it revealed was a pair of shorts similar to those worn by the holograph. Putting the shorts on was no different than any pair of shorts he'd ever stepped into, but once these were on, Ed could feel the material seeming to readjust itself to him until the shorts were a perfect fit. Perhaps too perfect, as they were form fitting and left little to the imagination.

'Oh well', Ed thought, 'I have nothing to complain about in that area any more, let 'em look!'

Trugar excused itself for the moment, off somewhere to monitor Ed remotely, he assumed. He made a mental note to ask it about gender the next time they were together. Then he was busy, as the holographic gym teacher ran him through his paces for over an hour. Most of it was pretty familiar stuff — sit ups, push ups, jumping, bending and stretching. Ed had no problems with any of it, and it felt good to be in a body that could do these things so easily and so well. He hadn't had that kind of body since he was an eight year old. In the end, he felt good, was barely sweating at all, and finally felt truly at home in the new body.

Trugar returned, and his holographic companion disappeared at the same time.

"You did very well." Trugar said. "The extra time required may mean you will have an easier time than some, in the end, but you are performing as well as could possibly be expected. Are you hungry?"

Ed swore his stomach grumbled the minute it asked. He was starving!

"Yes, I am." He said.

"I will escort you to the other retrieved humans now, and you will be able to have a meal there."

"Thanks Trugar. By the way. Are you a she or a he, or do those gender terms apply?"

"I am a he, as my species defines it. Gender is important to you?"

"Only because of some language issues. Whatever is doing the translating for us is doing a very good job, by the way."

"There will be some issues to resolve shortly with how you humans are allowed to deal with languages." Trugar said. "Translation devices such as this one are essential when it comes to differences such as ours, or when dealing with races that do not have a verbal speech component at all. Still, for the most part, the prominent races do communicate within the same basic parameters, and learning the major languages is advisable. Yours will have an easier time of it than most races, I expect. I have been told that your home planet is already multilingual, and most of the retrieved speak at least two languages already, I've noticed."

"I'm not what you would call fluent in anything useful besides English, but you don't live where I did without speaking good 'Tex-Mex'." Ed said, which was something of a lie. He was fluent in Spanish, having studied it, once he decided it was worth knowing on its own merits, during high school and college.

What he was also pretty fluent in was Yaqui, or Yoeme Noki. Yoeme is how the Yaqui call themselves. Your guess as to how that evolved to Yaqui was as good as Ed's, but his personal opinion was that it had something to do with the Rio Yaqui, the big river in the Sonora state of Mexico. There had been a lot of Yoeme in old Sonora. Ed's thoughts returned to his childhood.

The Escalante's, Anselmo and Herminia were the family's handyman and housekeeper respectively, and Ed grew up with their son David, who was a year older. David Escalante tried hard to be an American boy, and that eventually meant, in his mind, rejecting his heritage at the same time Ed was becoming fascinated with it. His parents weren't Pascua Yaqui tribe, the American Yaqui, but immigrant Mexican Yaqui from Sonora.

David learned English and baseball and cars and rock and roll while Ed was learning Yoeme and the mix of mysticism and Jesuit catholicism that passed as their religion. The Catholic aspects, particularly their emphasis on Lent and Easter fit in well with the practices of his parents. The Escalante's Yoeme nickname for him was Allea, which means happy. Ed was happy, as a child, sedentary - but happy.

He came back out of his thoughts as they came to a door and stopped.

"I will leave you here. The others are through this door, and they will be able to show you where the food dispenser is."

'Food dispenser huh?' Ed thought to himself as he watched Trugar trundle away on the dozen or so large, lower tentacles that he used for moving about. 'Maybe I could ask it for some Romulan ale.' He thought, grinning at his own silliness over that one. The grin was still on his face when he stepped towards the door and it opened silently in front of him.

Forty six people, Human people, met Ed inside the door. He knew four of them. Kristy James, Peter Lewes, Sammy Cruz and Fred Delgado.

Kristy looked almost unchanged and he recognized her immediately, though Ed's eyes had a hard time moving back up to her face once he realized she was wearing a pair of shorts and something like a sports bra, and nothing else. Peter Lewes was changed very little as well, but he could see that Peter was now a physical specimen like he had become. Sammy and Fred were older looking than he remembered, slightly more mature, but they had both been sixteen or seventeen, if Ed remembered correctly. The change was noticeable, but not huge.

He scanned their faces and the faces of the other people he saw in the room. They couldn't have all been from the Melliza, but he saw no spark of recognition in any of their faces. Ed Bell just didn't look like Ed Bell any more. A man he didn't recognize approached as the door closed behind me.

"Hi there!" He began, holding his hand out for a shake. "I'm Gordon Truitt. We had heard there was one more person undergoing treatment. It looks like we're all here at last."

"Guess I'm glad to be here, considering the alternative." He answered shaking the offered hand. "I'm Ed Bell."

"Captain Ed!" Came the cry from Sammy, Fred and Kristy. "Oh my God!" came Peter's comment a second later.

"He was the captain of our boat!" Fred called back to the rest of the crowd. Ed found a dozen people later who had also been aboard the boat, but didn't get a chance to see their reactions at that moment, because he was swamped by a group hug from his four former shipmates.

"Palo didn't make it?" Ed asked.

"No." Peter said. "We don't know if they tried to take him and he died, or if they left him. They didn't take any of the children aboard or any of the children's parents."

"We've done a survey of those aboard, and everyone taken was either unmarried or with their spouse or significant other." Gordon Truitt said. "The Skafti were able to be pretty selective."

"We seem to be from five different groups." Kristy said. "Our twelve, taken from the Melliza in Laguna Madre; eight from the sea of Japan; nine from a bus near Bergen, Norway; ten from a ferry near the Greek Island of Skopelos; and eight more from a small village near Boende, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

"That seems to be a pretty diverse group. How's the communications working?"

"The translation capabilities of these beings have saved us." Peter said. "It would have been a lot harder for us, especially with the Congolese. Everyone else had at least some working knowledge of English, but they all spoke only something called Lingala."

"I was told there was food here, and I'm starving. Any chance of getting a little chicken fried steak or something?

"Of course!" Kristy said, grabbing his arm. "The food dispenser is over here, allow me."

"How long has everyone else been awake?" Ed asked.

"Almost a month for most of us. A little less for a few, but everyone but you has been awake for at least three weeks."

We stopped in front of a small counter built into the wall. A smooth voice, from nowhere, asked. "Service or query?"

"Service please." Kristy said loudly.

"Attending." the voice answered.

"Go ahead and ask it for whatever you want. If it can't make it, or doesn't know what it is, it'll tell you."

"Chicken fried steak and gravy, cottage fries and buttered toast please." Ed said. There was a momentary pause.

"Processing."

"You are probably going to benefit from being such a late comer." Kristy said, "and from Fred and Sam being such chow hounds. They've probably waged all the culinary battles with the food system that you might have, unless you stray away from the standard Texan and Tex-Mex menus."

There was a pleasant dinging sound, and suddenly a large plate with what looked like a fine chicken fried steak and potatoes breakfast appeared on the counter top.

"Coffee?" Kristy asked.

"Oh yeah!" Ed said with some enthusiasm. "Sounds great."

"Cream and sugar?"

"Black for me."

"Two coffees please!" Kristy said.

Kristy and Ed sat at one of the small tables that clustered around the dispenser and she watched him eat while she sipped her coffee. Gordon and another man, along with a woman from the Norwegian contingent came over after he was close to finished.

"Mr. Bell, there are a few things we'd like to ask you if you don't mind."

"Not at all." Ed said. "Pull up a stump."

He was introduced to Ken Itokawa and Berit Schau. Berit was almost as distracting as Kristy, Ed thought.

"We've checked with Pete and the others from your ship that remembered you, and while the rest of us are all still looking pretty much like young, healthy versions of ourselves, it appears you bear no resemblance to your old self. Do you know why?"

"According to Trugar, my body didn't make it through whatever process was involved in getting us all here. On top of that I had some genetic problems, including a bad heart valve. A new body was created for me, using ... how did he say it... 'optimized genetic material from my species.'"

"Trugar?" Kristy asked.

"That was the name of the Penod medical technician who got me squared away after I woke up."

"Are those the ones with all the eyes and tentacles?" The woman asked in heavily accented English.

"Yea, pretty unsettling at first, but once I got used to it I decided I liked Trugar. He had a good bedside manner as they used to say."

After Ed finished the last few bites of his breakfast, he decided it was his turn to ask a few questions.

"Kristy says that you all have been awake for at least three weeks already, and most of you have been here a month. What have they had you doing?"

"Not a damned thing." Gordon answered.

"We exercise every morning." Berit said. "There is a holographic instructor."

"Other than that, they've left us alone, as if they're waiting for something." Kristy said. "Maybe they were waiting for you to be ready?"

"Your guess is as good as mine." Ed said. "Maybe better. I've been awake and aware for less than a day. Have any of you seen our Skafti keepers?"

"Once." Ken answered. "We saw a bunch of them at the very beginning."

"What do they look like?"

"Short and stocky." Gordon said. "Faces that remind me of a badger more than anything else."

"Snouts and teeth, but the hands were almost human looking, and they have soft, hollow voices, when you listen to them instead of the translation."

-oOo-

The speculation that they Skafti were waiting for him proved to be just as wrong as all the other speculation. They sat on their hands for a couple more weeks after Ed joined the group. Beyond finding out where the bathrooms were, and finding one of the small but comfortable sleep surfaces in the 'sleep chamber', as everyone called it, Ed learned nothing new.

He had a small problem with the sleep chamber at first. They employed a 'sleep field', at least that was how he thought of it. You got very little time after your head hit the pillow, and then you were asleep. There was no laying in bed ruminating over the days events, pathetic as they were. Sleep was automatic and unavoidable once you lay down on the sleep surface.

This bothered Ed, mostly because he didn't like the feeling of loosing control, and it interrupted a lifelong ritual of his. It wasn't that the Yaqui influences of his youth had carried over to his adult life so much, or even that he was a lapsed Catholic, which is what his parents had considered him. He liked to spend a little time at the end of each day considering the four facets of the world as they related to him.

The Yoeme divided the world into four aspects: animal, people, flowers and death. Ed had borrowed that concept, greatly twisted from the meanings the Escalantes had tried so hard to share with him, and made it his own. At the end of each day he considered his animal aspect — how he dealt with the urges and passions felt or encountered during the day; his people aspect — how he had dealt with people, and how he had presented himself to people. Those two aspects of the world were pretty concrete. But the worlds of flowers and death he approached more abstractly. Ed asked himself at the end of each day if he could accept death, if it came for him. He had always felt that death was not a horrible fate waiting for him at the end of his life. It was the fate of every living thing, so why fear it?

The world of flowers was another story entirely. This was the spirit world. The Yoeme blended a lot of their original beliefs with the Catholicism of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries that came to them, but Ed didn't borrow the trappings of anything, Yoeme or Catholic for his purposes. He used the framework of that origin to examine his own soul at the end of each day.

How do you examine your soul? How do you survive a daily crisis of faith where you convince yourself that you are not yet evil and that your beliefs are true? Or at least true to you?

A good question, and one Ed thought he might never answer. His ex-wife, in a period of evangelical fervor had condemned him to rot in hell for his lack of faith. Ed saw her faith as a blind subordination of will that he wasn't willing to consider. Her fervor barely lasted as long as their marriage, he heard.

So to be able to keep his routine, Ed took to spending a little time each evening before he went to the sleep chamber sitting, cross-legged in a corner of the main room, eyes closed and following his usual end-of-day routine. Most everyone thought it was meditation, but it wasn't really, at least not in the traditional sense. Even so, a few people began to join him. Gordon Truitt had been doing something similar from day one, according to Kristy, but he was always off in a corner by himself, and claimed that what he was doing wasn't meditation either.

Ed tried a couple times to explain what he was really doing to Kristy and a few others that had joined, but nobody really seemed to understand, always reading more into it than was there. It was really more like a nightly self-evaluation and mental inventory. He often thought of a line from an old movie that he used to love called Innerspace. Dennis Quaid's character, Lt. Tuck Pendleton looks at himself in the mirror, decides everything is fine and declares -'The Tuck Pendleton machine: zero defects.', followed by his trademark big, goofy grin. His nightly mental self exam was like that. He looked for defects and flaws, and hoped he could end the exam with a statement like Tuck Pendleton's. Ed rarely made it, but took pride in coming close most of the time. Well, as long as he'd ignored his growiing wasitline.