“Fists down and back to work, Park!” Major Corey barked from his post.

Min-Ji dropped her hands, but her fists didn’t unfurl for a long moment.

“I’d love to get one good hit on him,” she muttered before bending to retrieve her hammer. She had to dig a little, since the snow was up to our knees.

“You too, Harju!”

Suvi let out a short sigh at the command then turned back to her work.

“And you, Hayes!”

“It’s Torrance,” I hissed to myself. I hated when Major Corey and the rest of the military crew – the crew who’d abducted us – called me by my last name. Like we were soldiers to be commanded. We weren’t their soldiers. We were civilian academics, most of us scientists.

But maybe it’s better that way. It’s not like any of them really know you, anyway. They hadn’t earned the right to use my first name. That right was reserved for the other women here who were in the same shitty situation as me. Knee-deep in snow on an alien planet none of us had signed up to visit.

I turned my attention back to my tree. It still felt weird to call this a tree. It was a monolith of glittering facets, more crystal than plant. It was generally conical in shape, a massive but slender mountain made of shining, emerald-green stone. But according to Suvi, the botanist of the group, these massive crystalline structures really were alive. And they filtered carbon out of the atmosphere more than two hundred times more efficiently than trees on Earth. We were supposed to be carefully chipping away chunks from the trees to be studied on the ship.

Min-Ji had no trouble with the task. She was a geologist and was used to hacking away at rocks and gems, plus she had impressive upper-body strength from her boxing back home. Even Suvi, with what I knew were delicate hands and willowy wrists under her gloves, had mastered the technique. She had the unique knack of finding invisible fault lines in the trees that meant her hammer struck gently but efficiently, sheering away perfect crystal chunks.

But me? I wasn’t a geologist who could punch through a wooden plank or somebody’s nose, or a botanist who was basically an alien tree whisperer. Nope. I was an astrophysicist. I was used to looking at charts and computing mathematical sequences and stargazing.

“Hayes!”

I jumped, startled from my thoughts by Major Corey’s irritated call from nearby. I glanced back, eyeing the machine gun slung across his torso. I wonder if they’d actually shoot one of us if we fucked up bad enough?

“Sorry,” I mumbled, keeping the sarcastic bite out of my voice. I tucked my hammer under my armpit and rubbed my gloved hands together. “Just gotta warm up and get back into it.”

Major Corey clomped closer. I stumbled back against my tree, suddenly afraid he really was about to get physical with me. No one had gotten shot on this mission, but I’d seen other women get roughed up and put in the ship’s brig. And, of course, we’d all been drugged and violently taken from Earth in the first place. Abducted and taken to an alien planet. Isn’t it supposed to be aliens doing the abducting? Not your own fucking people!

My jaw worked, my heart pounding as Major Corey came to a stop before me. I stared at the American flag stitched onto his military parka. Our particular mission was largely run by the US military, but governments from all over the world were apparently in on this project. Hell, Suvi had been taken out of her bed in Finland, and I’d been snatched from Northern Ontario. Min-Ji had lived in Vancouver before this.

I could sense Min-Ji tensing up nearby. From the side, I saw her gripping her hammer harder, weighing it in her hands, as if figuring out if she could throw it hard and reliably enough to knock Major Corey out.

Don’t do it, I begged silently. The last thing I wanted was to see her in cuffs thrown into the brig. Just let him be an asshole and be done.

“Don’t like the cold, Hayes?” Major Corey sneered. “Maybe we send you to the sand planet next time.”

I shivered, and it wasn’t from the chill in the air. The higher-up military liked to keep a tight wrap on what was going on with other missions – other missions just like ours. Ships of abducted scientists being sent out all over the cosmos to try to find resources we could study to use on Earth. But we all knew what a threat about the sand planet meant. There had been enough whispers, enough snatches of gossip, to know that the ship to the sand planet had been destroyed by alien monsters the moment it had landed. The crew had all been killed, and the women had been taken prisoner by violent alien male hostiles. I didn’t know what had happened to them after that, but it was pretty easy to assume they’d been raped, maybe even murdered. It was a stark reminder of why the military only used female civilian scientists for these projects.

Honestly, getting shot is probably a better fate than that.

“I’m fine. It’s fine,” I said. I was speaking more to Min-Ji and her hammer than Major Corey, but it did the trick. He made an unconvinced noise, then trudged back to his spot to watch us like he’d done all morning.

“Alright everybody,” he snapped, hand resting on his gun. “No more stupid shit. Get back to fucking work.”

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER FOUR Torrance

“Man, weather like this makes me want Korean food so bad,” Min-Ji moaned as she bent to retrieve a crystal shard she’d just sheered off her tree. “I’d kill for a bowl of my mom’s kimchi-jjigae right now.”

“That sounds good. What is it?” Suvi asked, aiming her hammer precisely and striking off an impressive hunk. Unlike my green tree, hers was a pale lavender colour. Min-Ji’s was pink. We’d been working tirelessly on our trees since Major Corey had snapped at us a couple of hours ago and had been largely silent until Min-Ji had just spoken.

“It’s amazing is what it is,” Min-Ji replied. She tossed her crystal into the bin we were all using. “Like a stew basically. With pork and spicy fermented cabbage. It’s so good on a cold day.”

“I’ll take a bowl,” Suvi replied wistfully. “Along with a cup of glögi. Spiced mulled wine,” she explained before we had to ask what the Finnish word meant.

I smiled behind my neck warmer. This was a game we often played to pass the time. The game didn’t have a name, or rules, but it was something we all instinctively gravitated towards. Talking about the things we missed, the best parts of our lives back home. Living on military rations on the ship meant that the game often revolved around food.

“Maybe I’m boring, but I just want a really good burger, you know?” I said.

Min-Ji groaned in agreement.

“Fuck yeah. Burger. Kimchi-jjigae. Wine. Sounds like a perfect, balanced meal. I could eat that forever.”

“No salad?” Suvi teased.

“Hey!” Min-Ji shot back. “Aren’t you supposed to be a friend to the plants? You love them so much I figured you’d want me to eat less salad, not more. Besides, the kimchi counts. And throw some lettuce on the burger and you’re golden.”

“It’s precisely because I love the plants and study them so closely that I know how good they are for you,” Suvi laughed. Her chuckle was punctuated by the tinkling sound of her next crystal shard falling into the bin. I tried to ignore the fact that the bin was mostly full of sparkling purple and pink, with only a few bits of dark green peeking out.

“Nah, I’m sticking to my guns on this one. Salad can fuck right off,” Min-Ji said. “Meat. Kimchi. Booze. That’s all you need in life. The three essential food groups.”