“You know, I was a doctor once,” Colt Tyson spoke aloud to the guns he was cleaning. It was a story he’d told no one many times. “I worked in a top secret facility designed for studying extraterrestrial activity. Unfortunately, funding got pulled pretty drastically long before I ever showed up, so it wasn’t properly equipped when we actually found an alien.” He set down his latest work and picked up a Thorlinthian repeater for disassembly.

“I’m still not sure if it was a male or female,” he stopped as he said this, looking forward for practiced dramatic effect. “I never could get it to answer that question, and it was such a foreign creature that I couldn’t figure it out by conventional means. In any case,” he said, removing the firing rail, “I think it was female. The voice was too light to be male, in my opinion. So let’s call her a ‘she’.” He set the firing rail on the workbench and pulled out his soldering iron.

“Her name was Kahlisa. She was from a world long dead, apparently. Last of her species…” He trailed off as he fiddled with the more complex bits of circuitry in the repeater, setting it for a lower rate of fire to improve accuracy. “She was the Guardian of our galaxy. A Kuli…” The soldering iron came down again, and his voice trailed off to allow him to concentrate.

“The first time I went in to see her, one of the other doctors had already gotten his hands on her. He wasn’t quite as stable as I am, and I’m fairly certain he crossed his fingers when he took the Hippocratic Oath. He did so many horrible things to her. I didn’t have the heart to say what he did to her eyes, though I’m sure she knew.” He slid the rail back into position over the cooling electronics.

“It wasn’t even just her eyes. He took massive samples of all sorts of different tissues. It all ended up being useless, anyway. We couldn’t isolate her genetic code, and we couldn’t figure out why she was able to do the things she could do. Her brain was incredibly small compared to our own, and we couldn’t get to it on account of some sort of metal intrinsic to her bones. We couldn’t drill into it without producing enough heat to cook her brain. Not only that, but anaesthetics just didn’t work.”

He finished reassembling the modified repeater and pulled out an old assault rifle. “Whenever we thought we were making a breakthrough with finding her genetic code or analyzing a tissue sample, the sample would just fall apart. It was like she knew, and she just disassembled it from her cell.” He pulled off the mounting rails and chuckled. “Even now, it sounds crazy, but I’m sure it’s what was happening. It was always literally right before a breakthrough.”

He finished removing the barrel. “She healed from everything, too. Even the eyes came back after a few weeks. There were scars, but everything healed. I ended up blindfolding a creature I had met with no eyes. That’s actually kind of cool when I think of it…” He ran his brush over the carbon deposits on the glossy metal.

“But it all came to an end rather suddenly.” He started to oil up a rag to clean the barrel. “One day, my boss just came in and said they were shutting down our research. No progress except a few notes on Xenopsychology was hardly impressing the few investors we had left. They decided to shut us down and convert the facility to a prison. I wouldn’t stand for it, of course. I had my standards. I had sworn to take care of my patient. I said I would stay as long as my name was Doctor Colt Tyson, so they had my license revoked and my degree annulled, which I didn’t even know you could do.” He began cleaning out the barrel.

“They told me that I was the one who had to tell her they were going to stop feeding her, just to get to me, I suppose. Just to rub in the fact that I was no longer ‘Doctor’ Colt Tyson, they sent me back to Kahlisa one more time to sentence her to death.” He started putting the rifle back together.

“But when I spoke to her, she wasn’t even surprised. She said she already knew and that she was prepared for it. She made me swear not to tell anyone, but she apparently didn’t need to eat to stay alive. She could do this super meditation/sleep thing that completely halts her metabolism. Her brain would just operate on fumes until the Phoenix rose.” He snapped the mounting rails back on.

“I didn’t know what that meant at the time, of course. I just figured she was being all mystical about her death or something. I left and joined up with a mercenary group that didn’t particularly care if its doctor had had his license revoked over some political scandal. I did my best to forget. I told myself it didn’t matter anymore. But that was a lie.”

He set the reassembled rifle back on the workbench and leaned back in his chair. “Then, one day, the Tees came. Drigondii Sheii’Cronell showed up, and the Phoenix rose. I thought maybe she was still alive, somehow, for that moment I saw that man speaking on the television. I headed back to the facility. But it was gone.”

He picked up the rifle and pressed the stock into his shoulder, aiming down the iron sights just like his friends had taught him all those years ago. “I got there and it was all gone, blown to pieces. T
hey must have blown the facility when they heard aliens were here in some vain attempt to cover up what they’d done. She’s gone now.”

“She’s not gone, Texan.” A second voice came from the door behind Colt. It was the voice of Summer Ayling. She must have been listening the whole time. Colt set down the weapon and turned around.

“How do you know that, Summer?” His eyes expressed a desperate need for knowledge that his voice refused to betray. Summer smiled back, understanding.

“I know because I’ve met the Kuli, Kahlisa of Fehmadad. She’s about five feet tall on four haunches, six and a half on two?” Colt stood at the description. She was telling the truth. “Kahlisa lives in Texas now, in the town where I grew up. The same town where Drake Kendrick grew up.” Colt’s face didn’t react the way she had anticipated. Instead of donning an expression of realization, his face had adopted a more confused look. She tried again. “It was the same town where Drigondii Sheii’Cronell grew up.” There was the look. She knew she had a lot of explaining to do now.

“Wha–? He grew up here? He’s not a–? But the Thorlinthians…” Colt was totally befuddled. Summer gestured for him to join her in the main cabin, and she waited until he had entered to close the door behind her.

Summer knocked gently on the door to the cockpit, where Angus and Michael were playing an old-fashioned game of Go Fish. “Angus? Mickey? I need you two to come out here.” When they had, she said, “Angus, it’s time we told them what we know. Colt knew Kahlisa.” Angus’s eyes widened, and he nodded. He got everyone to sit down at the low table in the center of the room and waited for Summer to join them.

“Well, everyone,” she said as she said on the couch beside her husband, “This is probably going to take a while, but it all started when two Valkyries came to Earth over thirty years ago…”