by Alyx X
Chosen by the Riexian Prince
Alyx X
Market Street Books
Text Copyright ©2020 by Alyx X
The Series, characters, names, and related indicia are trademarks and © Alyx X.
All Rights Reserved.
Published by Market Street Books
No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For Information regarding permission, write to:
Alyx X at [email protected]
Production Management by Market Street Books
Printed in USA
This Edition, May 2020
Contents
1. Nora
2. Nora
3. Kyel
4. Nora
5. Kyel
6. Nora
7. Kyel
8. Nora
9. Kyel
10. Nora
11. Kyel
12. Nora
13. Kyel
14. Nora
15. Nora
16. Kyel
17. Kyel
18. Nora
19. Kyel
20. Nora
21. Nora
22. Kyel
23. Kyel
Now Cumming By Alyx X
About the Author
1
Nora
Thousands of bodies were packed together in the long hall. Sweaty, filthy bodies that were pressed together like those tiny fish you buy in cans. The smell was just as bad as those fish when you couldn’t afford them fresh, too. Gross, wet, slimy bodies that slid against each other in their attempt to reach the front.
To reach what was the last chance to get off this dying planet.
Years of sweat and feces, hard work and starvation filled the air around me, the smell lingering on those long forgotten bodies in an aroma so strong that if I hadn’t grown up in the Dranks, where water was so rare it could only be used for drinking, it might have bothered me.
The tightly bound space however, did bother me. I was used to an endless desert, to the sun burning my skin and the hot wind tugging at my hair. I was used to mountains and plains, not high walls and ceilings that trapped in stale recirculated air. Even the lean-to's I had grown up in had more safety than this. I half expected these walls to fall down at any time. They were just soldered bits of cars or metal that they had scraped after the fourth world war.
The one that fried the earth.
“Welcome Humans. If you have been selected by the TerraLink Program for relocation please make your way forward, we are happy to welcome you aboard as we begin your off-planet transfer.”
People jostled as the buzz of an announcement ripped through the chatter, everyone pushing forward in an attempt to reach the loading dock and hopefully beg or bribe their way on board the next departing ship. A heavily tattooed man and a woman with a screaming child were flanking my sides, making it so that I could scarcely move. I couldn't even raise my hand, even though they were yelling for me.
“Welcome Humans. If you have been selected by the TerraLink Program for relocation please make your way forward, we are happy to welcome you aboard as we begin your off-planet transfer.”
The sweet feminine voice was obviously AI, the same phrase having been repeated every few minutes. Every time it did the crowd screamed, erupting in frantic cat calls and pleas, everyone desperate to be chosen, desperate to leave what was left of Earth and hopefully find a better life on one of the hundreds of planets that made up the TerraLink.
I had been lucky enough to be chosen for today's transport. I never thought I would have been. No one in my community ever had been. We were too work worn. At least that's what the elders said. No off-world species wanted anyone from the Dranks. Not for work, and certainly not for breeding. I had been on the list since I was five, the youngest they allowed to sign up, seventeen years later my band had lit up and I was trucked here - by some divine miracle.
I was going to leave this dried up rock. If only I could get to the registration tables before they took off without me. I wasn't about to start yelling that I was here to be transported, either. The last guy I had seen do that in his desperation to reach the front desk had been swarmed by men attempting to rip the ident implant from his wrist.
The blood covered thing had made its appearance moments later, flung through the air by the victor while the man it had once belonged to lay dying underneath the feet of the mob. No one even came to save him either.
I wasn’t about to let it go down like that.
Not that I wouldn’t fight trying, but even I couldn’t fight against a mob.
“Welcome Humans. If you have been selected by the TerraLink Program for relocation please make your way forward, we are happy to welcome you aboard as we begin your off-planet transfer.”
The shouting picked up again, bodies jostling and pressing against each other and I took my chance, weaseling between the young mother and an old man like a greased pig. I stole as many steps as I could, careful to keep the old jewelry box that contained all of my belongings tucked underneath the filth covered remains of my coat. I wasn't about to lose that. I made it at least fifty steps ahead, before the hole closed up again.
I had hunted enough that I knew how to move, of course, this was different than a burned out forest, although some of the people seemed just as dead. I chanced another step, just as the crowd shifted and I was shoved into a girl about my age. Well, about my height, anyway. Her face was slender, clean and vibrant thanks to her bright indigo eyes and perfect grey skin, both a clear indicator that she wasn’t from around here.
I didn’t even need the black skin-tight uniform of TerraLink to figure that much out.
“Wrist.” The woman said without so much as a hint of a smile.
Her long fingered hand stretched forward as she waited, ident scanner already in place.
Crap. I needed her to know, I needed her to get me on that ship. But every eye turned to me with her loud demand, each and every one of them hungry for something I had and they did not. My heart rattled like the paws of a desert elephant, I knew I didn’t have another choice.
TerraLink personnel were as powerful as the members of Earth Military, the members made up of trained warriors from every planet that was part of the alliance. One simple mistake and I could find myself back in my scrap metal hut near the foot of the Calif Mountains, doomed to stare at the Pacific Desert until the day I died. My one chance to get off world gone.
At least this girl had enough power under her belt to keep her safe from the mob.
I hoped.
Clenching my teeth, I extended my wrist, letting the tattered edge of my thread-bare coat fall away and reveal the dull green glow of my implant. The read out was still flashing with my image, the TerraLink logo, and the countdown to when I needed to arrive. It was the universal sign for reporting, reading was something only available to the High Nobles that lived in the Golden City, after all.
“Congratulations, Nora Highmountain.” The young woman spoke with the same dull tone, her wrist tight around mine as she read the readout on her scanner. Everyone in the immediate vicinity perked up at her announcement, their hungry eyes flashing to the imagery that flashed on my wrist. “You are in tier B, shuttle 42A, destination Ariex.”
I nodded, as if that meant anything to me. There wasn't any formal education system in the Dranks, so any stories I had heard about the off-world safe havens came from the traveling salesmen who passed through from time to time. Ariex didn’t ring any bells.
Of course, where or what Ariex was didn't matter if I didn't g
et there, and with the muscular man to my left licking his lips as though my wrist was a major prize, I was starting to question my survival.
Him I could take, I had fought enough to know how to take down a guy as big as him.
The mob that was joining in in the crazed hunger stalking, however, they were the ones that would kill me. And that was even if I could do so without losing my spot. Violence wasn’t permitted unless you were enlisting to one of the warrior planets, and I had no idea if Ariex qualified as that.
If my mouth wasn’t already dry from dehydration, that would have sapped the last of it. I tried to pull her wrist away, ready to run or fight, or something, but the TerraLink worker held on, lifting her scanner high above her head as a single pulse of green shot off, sparking above the filthy heads of the cast-offs like falling stars.
Great, because we needed more people to know where the fresh meat was.
"Do you think that was the best idea?" I asked, sure a desert elyphant was running our way with how my bones had begun to shake. The alien woman said nothing, however, she only stared ahead, as if she was waiting for something. Meanwhile, the crowd around them was closing in, more and more hungry eyes staring at me.
Clinging to my box, I stepped closer to the woman, as if the few old photos, a broken necklace, and few melted craw-yns were the real prize they were after.
“Get as close as you can,” the woman said, her violet eyes still pointed skyward, “Sometimes it misses.”
"Misses what?" I started to ask, but the question hadn't been able to fully form before the woman grabbed my wrist and plunged it into the sky, only to have a metal bulb grab onto my hand like a fishing line that had a built in a torture chamber.
Painful barbs dug into my skin, blood flowing down my arm as the mechanical fishing lure lifted me into the air. I would have lost my box with the jolt if I already wasn’t clinging to it for dear life, holding myself into a tight little ball thanks to the ripples of agonizing pain that was now shooting through my arm.
The woman below me moved to the next person as if mechanical people lures were nothing more usual than the weekly blood letting that happened at the water drop. Everyone that was huddled around both the alien and my former stable footing screamed in anger and cheered for joy, more than one jumping into the air in an attempt to grab me. I don't know if they were trying to pull me down, or go along for the ride. I wasn't interested in finding out.
Panicking, I lifted my legs, even though the arm was moving so fast they couldn't reach me anyway. The crowds fell away, the arm pulling me over them and past the makeshift wall toward where I had assumed the check-in table would be. Instead, it was a massive stretch of cement and steel, the sky hidden by a stretch of ceiling I didn’t know was possible to make. It stretched as far as the desert, and was full of the humongous starships that I had seen soar into the air since I was a child. They were stacked one on top of another, lines of them pulling toward the sunset, strings of people trailing into them as they too prepared to leave Earth behind.
The pain that was shooting over my wrist suddenly didn't matter. I was leaving Earth. I was going to survive. Even if I had to clean someone else's night-bucket for the rest of my life I would be alive. Not burned by the sun on a flare-day, not starving to death.
The miracle that everyone had teased me about became real as I looked over the ships glimmering in purples, greys, browns, and a million other colors that I didn't know had names. I brushed the tangle of pale red curls out of my face, trying to figure out where I was going, or even if I could tell what ship was mine.
Knowing nothing of Ariex however, I couldn’t be sure what I was even looking for.
I didn't even really care anymore. As long as they were oxygen-based planet, and my placement wouldn’t take too long to pay off, I was set. Getting off planet was expensive enough, and if the job paid well enough I wouldn’t be indentured for long.
It was one of the reasons I had clicked the tiny box next to ‘mating/bride’ on my TerraLink registration when I had come of age a few years ago. The option wasn’t there when I had first signed up, but the second I had been old enough, I dived in head first. Everyone said you could pay off your TerraLink debt faster that way, and from what I had heard you were treated the best.
They wanted you to feel good when they fucked you, or so I had been told.
I couldn't hope for that though. Not with my sun-bleached red hair and leathery, worn skin. Night-bucket cleaner. That would be me.
My shoulder ached as the machine swung me wide, now aiming toward a large elevated platform where many other fish-hooked humans had been dropped off. My feet had scarcely touched the ground when the machine dropped me, sending me to my knees and my box of precious things to the floor. It hit the corrugated metal with a bang, the sound masked by the impact of my knees, what was left of my pants ripping and staining with more blood.
“Careful,” a girl about half my age said as she ran to help me pick up my things. The girls long greasy hair framed an equally greasy face, but her smile was kind. “If they see this they will take it away.”
There was a reason I was holding it so close. I had thought about sewing it into the lining of my jacket, but I couldn’t scrounge up enough to trade for thread, not even the sticky stuff the old women in my community made from their spit. Besides, if part of this included them taking and burning my clothes then I would be equally as screwed.
“I know that." My snap was much rougher than I had meant and she recoiled as though she had been slapped.
“You don’t have to be so rude,” the girl said, obviously affronted. She made to move away, but I reached out to stop her, my hand tight around her wrist.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, meeting the hazel eyes of the unfamiliar girl for the first time. “I’m just nervous.”
Those simple words seemed to put the girl at ease, a smile playing around her lips as her shoulders relaxed.
“Don’t worry about it, we all are,” she said, handing me the now intact box. “I’m Liddia.”
“Nora,” I whispered in reply, finally looking at the others who stood on the platform. The majority of them were female, and all of them were looking terrified. “Where are you headed?”
“We are all going to Ariex,” Liddia said, waving a hand to the others that milled around her. “That man over there said it’s an ocean planet.”
“Ocean?” I gasped, the word familiar and foreign at the same time. I had heard of oceans, the elders told of a time when the desert near the Dranks used to be one, but some of the stories they told were so fantastical that I often thought them a bit addled, from the fallout possibly.
The idea of a planet made up of stretches of water seemed strangely foreign.
“Yeah, have you ever seen one?”
“No,” I was quick to respond. Only the high born saw the last ocean on earth, after all. Their massive cities guarded it.
Once I had seen a spot of blue when I was high in the Calif Mountains hunting the grey bears, but it could have been a speck of sky peaking from behind the smog for all I knew.
Both were rare.
“I hope it’s true,” Liddia said, pulling me from my thoughts. “I guess the planet is new so no one knows for sure – that old lady there said it's desert. But she’s going to be a cleaner in the Embassy so it’s not like it matters to her, she will have enough food. I’m going to a textile factory in a city near the capital, so I’m not sure I’ll be so lucky.”
“You know where you are going?” I asked, my stomach flip-flopping as all thoughts of the ocean were forgotten in a torrent of heart thundering desperation to know what was in store for me.
“Yeah,” Liddia smiled, “it’s on your ident…”
Liddia held out her hand to show her, but before either of us could move the platform shifted, lowering itself down toward the rows of starships, right toward a green-grey beast that looked brand new, its engines already glowing gold.
Lines of people s
treamed in and out of each ship, the aliens of the planets herding their new possessions into cargo holds or who knew where. Foreign voices screamed commands and what were probably profanities given the anger behind them. The sounds grew louder the closer we came to the ground, the rough handling of the humans becoming more obvious as they came into view.
They were tossed about by red skinned monsters, yelled at by a human looking aliens with grey tinged skin. Thrown into the ships as though they were nothing more than baggage. Watching the scene unfold was grinding uncomfortably in my stomach. I had never questioned my decision to sign up for the TerraLink, every one did it after all, it was the only way to get off planet.
I was starting to feel like I had made a terrible mistake.
“Humans,” a calm feminine voice called over the huddled group as the platform made contact with the ground with a loud thud. “Welcome.”
Forcing myself to look away from the carnage, I looked up, surprised to see the same almond face and violet eyes of the TerraLink employee who had scanned my ident before. The woman looked over each of us with a smile that didn't seem to match the violence that we were surrounded by. Her frosty look from before had gone, although I could still see it, hidden just under the surface.
Ready to crack, just like the whip I heard in the distance. The sound was the same as when we were taming desert elyphants. I hadn't seen any elyphants here.
I was going to be sick.
“You have been selected to transport to a new planet in our catalog: Ariex.” She paused as if waiting for applause, but no one moved beyond the nervous side glances to their neighbor. One little boy moved closer to his mother legs, as if he was trying to move into them. When it was clear no one was going to respond, the woman continued, the frosty look creeping back into her eyes. “Ariex is a water based planet in the Rose Galaxy that features a mild climate and oxygen based atmosphere. We will be traveling at Light2 and arrive in approximately thirty days. In that time you will be able to prepare for your new posts, attend trainings to familiarize yourself with your new home and what will be expected of you there. We have three Riexian Ambassadors on board who will be available to answer any questions you may have.”
