Forward March

Being marched down featureless corridors with your hands held firmly behind your back isn't the most fun of experiences, I can tell you that much.

Each of the elf-eared men in yellow shirts had me by the hand and by the shoulder and were roughly shoving me along so that I kept in step with the woman who had ordered it all.

"Hey, could you at least tell me where you're taking me?" I asked, wincing from a particularly hard shove.

[Bad move bud,] A voice rang in my ears, like a whisper on the wind.

The woman shot a disgusted look over her shoulder, "I'm taking you to the brig so you can be interrogated. No human should-"

She stopped mid-sentence and mid-stride so abruptly that my handlers nearly ploughed me straight into her back.

"You've got to be kidding…" The woman said as she glanced at me again with just as much venom as the first time, "But a human? Ugh… Fine."

The woman looked me up and down, sighed, and gestured for the two guards to let me go.

I rolled my shoulders back and rotated my wrists as they were dropped by the guards behind me, eliciting some disturbingly loud cracks out of the joints.

"We're… letting him go, Officer Niva?" One of the two guards asked, the confusion was clear as day in his voice.

"Not my idea," The woman, Officer Niva apparently, said, "My…. father… has given me orders to bring him up to the command deck to speak with him personally. Apparently, this simian is supposed to be in this section of the station."

"A human? In the security-" The other guard started but was cut off by the sheer menace in the woman's glare.

"We don't have time for these questions, and I don't have the answers for you anyway," She sighed, "You're free to go back to your duties. I'll escort… this one… to my father."

I felt the two of them hesitate behind me as if they didn't want to leave their commander alone with me for some reason. Was I really that… scary?

[You'll find out why she's being harsh with you later.]

There it was, that internal voice again. It sounded like my own thoughts but it was just different enough in tone and cadence that I could tell it was something else altogether.

I couldn't focus on it right now though, as much as I wanted to.

If it was just offering snarky commentary then for now it could be ignored, it probably had something to do with the whole system initialization that had popped up in my vision before.

[Oh, so he's not as dumb as these memories are making him out to be after all,] The voice snarked, seemingly agreeing with the logic that I'd come up with while insulting me at the exact same time.

"Well, what are you just standing around looking into space like that for?" Niva asked, "Follow me or I'll bring the guard corpsmen back to drag you along like you deserve."

I rolled my eyes at that but fell into step slightly behind her all the same.

"I'm not sure what it is I've done to offend you, but whatever it is, I'm sorry," I said.

I wasn't necessarily being truthful. I knew I hadn't done anything to offend this woman. I'd only just appeared in this universe.

Nevertheless, I was about to go and talk with the big dog on the space station who just so happened to be her father, so I figured clearing the air would probably be the best move.

From her snort of laughter, I could tell that she wasn't exactly keen on the idea.

"Yeah, okay, as if you don't know why I'm being so cautious around the sudden appearance of a human in the barracks," She said as she pushed a button on the wall and came to a stop at the end of the corridor.

It was clear that she had some kind of major issue with the human race in this universe, and considering I'd just arrived here I had no idea if that stance was a valid one or not.

"Well, from where I was standing I'd just woken up from a good night's rest," I said with a shrug, "Then you guys came barging in while I was taking in the sight of the station from my window. I hadn't exactly done anything wrong."

She didn't respond to me that time.

Instead, she just stepped into the lift, which had arrived moments earlier, and waited for me to do the same.

The lift ride was painfully awkward with neither of us willing to say a word to the other.

That did give me a chance to marvel at the technology of the universe I'd ended up in, though.

The lift wooshed upwards, but inside the capsule, I didn't feel the telltale jolt or the downward pressure of vertical acceleration. The ride was smooth and silent, both from the mechanism and from Niva.

It was also incredibly quick.

I had no idea how much distance had been covered from the barracks corridor, but within what felt like only a half a minute at most the doors had swished open once again.

They opened up onto a wider and more ornate hallway, with two large wooden doors directly across from the elevator entrance.

Now that was a status symbol all right.

It would have been difficult to get wood ferried all the way up to a space station, at least it would have been back in my home universe.

It was very fitting for big intimidating wooden doors to be used as the entranceway to the most important room on the station.

"All you do is dawdle," Navi stated, striding out of the elevator ahead of me, "Come on, my father isn't the sort of man you keep waiting."

I swallowed hard as I followed. The intimidation tactics were definitely working on me.

[Good luck,] Whispered the system in my head.