The medical wing had never been sealed like this before.
Two rings of soldiers stood around the bed, weapons raised, visors down. Behind the reinforced glass, David watched without blinking. Veronica stood beside him, arms folded, her eyes fixed on the stranger lying motionless under the monitors.
Machines beeped steadily. Too steadily, considering the state he'd walked out of the portal in.
The medic came to David and said
-His vitals are stabilizing. Though his anatomy is much different from ours I think we can keep him alive
David replied
-What do you mean by different
-His body both internally and externally, is quite different. The oxygen consumption rate, the blood cells, internal organ resembles very low to ours. But one interesting thing is his body tends to heal too fast, faster than it should be.
David didn't look away from the glass.
-Keep monitoring him. And get Paul down here.
Paul arrived within minutes, still in half his gear, the Wegen machine already looped over one shoulder out of habit. He'd worn it enough times now that carrying it felt less like a precaution and more like part of the uniform.
He stepped into the outer chamber and looked through the glass at the man on the bed.
Even unconscious, the stranger looked like he'd been dragged out of something enormous. His clothes were torn in places that didn't look accidental cut, burned, one sleeve missing entirely. What remained of his equipment hung from a belt in pieces, half of it scorched beyond recognition. A deep gash ran along his collarbone, only just closed by the medics. Bruising, old and new, layered over most of his visible skin.
-He didn't get like this falling through a doorway, Paul said quietly.
David agreed,
-No. He got like this before he ever reached it.
Paul had seen soldiers come back from bad places before. He knew what that kind of exhaustion looked like on a face, even a sleeping one. This wasn't a man who'd stumbled into danger.
This was a man who'd been living inside it.
For over an hour, nobody in the room moved much beyond routine checks and the occasional glance at the monitors. Then, without warning, the stranger's eyes opened.
Every soldier in the room tensed at once. Rifles rose another inch. The stranger didn't move. He lay there for a moment, blinking at the ceiling, as if he needed time to remember which version of consciousness he'd landed in.
Then he turned his head. Slowly. And found himself surrounded.
He didn't flinch.
Paul had expected panic, or at least confusion. Instead, the stranger studied the weapons pointed at him with something closer to patience. Like a man reading a room rather than fearing it.
His mouth moved. Words came out low, urgent, unmistakably a language, but not one anyone in the room recognized. Not a single syllable matched anything human. The soldiers exchanged glances.
The stranger tried again, slower this time, watching their blank faces as understanding failed to arrive. Frustration flickered across his expression, not at them, Paul thought, but at the wasted seconds.
Then his eyes moved past the soldiers. Past Paul. And landed on the object hanging from Paul's shoulder.
He went still.
Then, with visible effort, he raised one hand, not toward a weapon, but toward the Wegen machine itself. He tapped two fingers against his own collarbone, near a small burned socket in what remained of his gear. A universal enough gesture. He was pointing at where his own had been.
Paul understood immediately. He ordered one soldier to bring his Wegen machine. One soldier brought it from his gear and hand it over to Paul. Then Paul slowly stepped forward to him to handing the Wegen machine over to the stranger.
David hesitated only a second.
-Do it. Slowly.
Paul approached the bed. Three rifles tracked him without lowering, watching the stranger the entire way. Paul crouched beside the bed and held the Wegen machine up so the man could see it clearly before setting it against his own ear.
The stranger's eyes followed the motion closely, almost hungrily, the way a drowning man watches a rope.
The moment the device activated, the room's silence broke.
-...finally, the stranger said, his voice rough, dragged over something jagged. -I thought I'd have to wait until you found one of my people's translators buried somewhere in your ruins.
Paul kept his expression neutral.
-Who are you?
The stranger tried to push himself upright. Immediately, every rifle in the room clicked in unison. He stopped, halfway raised, and lifted both hands slowly, palms open.
With a calm voice, he said,
-I'm not armed. Check yourselves. You already took everything I had.
-Answer the question, Paul said.
The stranger's eyes moved past him, toward the glass, toward the voice he couldn't see a face behind but could sense was in command.
-Where am I? he asked instead.
-You'll get answers when we do, David said through the intercom.
A pause. The stranger studied the room again. The machines, the reinforced walls, the sheer number of weapons aimed at one badly wounded man. Something in his expression shifted. Not confusion anymore.
Rather, it was recognition.
He said, quietly, almost to himself.
-This is Earth. It's real.
-You already knew that, Paul said.
The stranger corrected
-I hoped. Hope and knowing aren't the same thing.
Veronica stepped closer to the glass.
-He's stalling, she said.
Watching the stranger's face, David said slowly
-No. I think it's more like he's relieved.
The stranger lowered his hands an inch at a time, watching the rifles the whole way to make sure none of them followed the motion.
-My name is Averon Khael, he said finally.
The name meant nothing to anyone in the room. But the way he said it, like it was supposed to carry weight, like he expected some flicker of recognition and got silence instead, told Paul this man came from somewhere that already knew Earth existed. Somewhere Earth had never heard of in return.
Khael in a bit of a rush in his voice,
-I need to speak with whoever commands this world. Now. Not after your procedures. Right now.
-You're not exactly in a position to make demands, Paul said.
Something tightened in Khael's jaw. For the first time, the calm cracked, just slightly, at the edges.
-You don't understand. Every hour you spend deciding whether to trust me is an hour that matters somewhere you can't see.
-Somewhere you won't name, Paul said.
-Not yet. Not like this. Not surrounded by weapons I don't know the range of, talking to people I don't know the rank of.
-Then convince us you're worth listening to.
Khael's eyes moved slowly around the room again. The soldiers, the glass, the quiet authority radiating from behind it. He seemed to be measuring something. Deciding how much a room full of strangers deserved before they'd earned more.
-I didn't come here by accident. I didn't fall through that portal. I crossed it. Deliberately. Do you understand the difference?
Nobody answered. Khael continued,
-Then understand this instead. Whoever built that gate, whoever keeps it appearing over the same patch of ocean every time they didn't choose this world randomly. And neither did I.
David's voice returned through the intercom, harder now.
-Why you?
Khael hesitated. For a moment it looked as though he might actually answer. Then his breathing changed, grew shallow, and the effort of holding himself upright finally caught up with the rest of his body. His head tipped back against the pillow.
-Khael, Paul said sharply.
-I'm fine, Khael muttered, though his eyes were already losing focus. -I just need... time. Then I'll tell whoever leads this world everything they need to hear.
-Why should we believe you'll still be saying the same thing when you wake up?
A faint, exhausted breath that might have been meant as a laugh escaped him.
-Because I didn't survive what I survived, he said, -to lie to the first people who found me.
His eyes closed. This time the monitors confirmed it wasn't collapse. Just sleep, sudden and total, the kind that comes from a body that had spent everything it had left simply staying alive long enough to be believed.
Paul lowered the Wegen machine slowly and looked toward the glass.
David was already turning toward Veronica. David in a commanding voice,
-Full lockdown on this wing. Nobody in or out without my authorization. I want a report on every language database we have, cross-referenced against whatever he just said. And Paul…
Paul looked up.
-Stay with him. If he wakes again, I want that translator on before anyone asks him a single question.
Paul nodded once and pulled a chair beside the bed, the Wegen machine still resting in his hand.
Outside the glass, the room slowly emptied of everyone but the guards and the silence. Nobody spoke about it directly, but the same thought moved through everyone who had stood in that chamber.
A man had crossed an entire war, alone, wounded, and stripped of nearly everything he carried, and the first thing he'd done upon reaching Earth wasn't run, or hide, or fight.
It was ask for whoever was in charge. That wasn't the behavior of someone who had simply escaped something. It was the behavior of someone who had been sent.
To be continued...