Page 11 of Enslak

The transformation was instantaneous and deeply unsettling.

I looked down at my hands and saw gray-green skin, thicker and rougher than my own. My fingers were longer, the joints slightly off.

And there were six instead of five.

I pulled out the small mirror from my pack and nearly dropped it.

The face staring back wasn't mine. It was Ulkommenian, with broad features, skin the color of old bruises, eyes too large and set too far apart, a nose that was basically just two holes in the middle of my face, and thin black lips. The hologram was perfect, seamless, showing me exactly what anyone else would see.

But I could still feel my real face underneath, my human skin, my human features.

The disconnect between what I saw and what I felt made my stomach lurch.

I forced myself to breathe through the disorientation, to accept the alien reflection staring back at me.

This was me now.

This was who I had to be.

Next came the voice modulator, smaller than the cuddwisg, just a thin strip no larger than a band-aid that adhered to my throat. The moment I pressed it into place, I felt it activate, a subtle vibration against my skin as it calibrated to my vocal cords.

"Testing," I said in English.

The words came out in guttural Ulkommenian. The translator inserted behind my left ear converted it back so I could understand myself, but the sound was all wrong, alien, nothing like my voice.

I tried again. "My name is Niki Nguyen."

The modulator transformed it into harsh syllables that bore no resemblance to English.

Perfect. Terrifying, but perfect.

I settled into my hiding spot behind the thorny vegetation, making myself as small as possible. The pack went beside me, within easy reach. My hand found the small weapon they'd given me, a blaster that fired energy pulses instead of bullets, and I checked it for the third time.

Charged. Ready. Hopefully unnecessary.

Then I waited.

Waiting was something I'd done plenty of as a cop, stakeouts, surveillance, the long hours of watching and listening and staying alert while nothing happened.

But this was different.

This wasn't some suspect's apartment in Queens or a drug corner in the Bronx.

This was an alien planet, a criminal hub, a place where I didn't belong and couldn't afford to be discovered.

The suns, two of them with one larger and redder than the other, beat down on my hiding spot. Sweat trickled down my back despite the climate control of my tactical suit. My legs cramped from crouching. My eyes watered from staring at the landscape, watching for any sign of movement.

An hour passed. Maybe more.

Time felt strange here, stretched and compressed all at once.

I thought about Danny, about how he'd died in an alley not so different from the streets I'd patrolled for fifteen years, about how I'd become a cop because of him, because I wanted to make the city safer, to stop other families from losing their brothers and sons and daughters.

And now here I was, light-years from that alley, crouched in alien scrubland, waiting to rescue someone I'd never met from captors who'd been torturing him for a century.

The absurdity of it should have been funny.

Should have made me laugh or cry or something.