by Elin Wyn
“J-Jeline,” he stuttered, nibbling on her neck as he began picking up speed.
“Kogav,” she bit her lip. “If you do that—”
“Yeah,” he nodded frantically as he clenched his jaw.
Not about to be left behind, Jeline tucked her arms around his neck and used him as leverage to roll her hips. Kogav hissed at the motion, but it wasn’t until she’d met him going down that she felt it, too, and finally went over the edge.
“I’m—!” she gasped, giving in to the sparks racing up and down her body as the heat in her stomach exploded.
“Shit, Jeline,” Kogav growled. It was the only warning she got before he slowed his thrusts to grind inside of her, sending one last wave of delicious pings through her spent muscles.
“Believe,” Kogav panted, “me now?”
“What, that we’re bonded?” Jeline replied lazily, resting against him as he leaned them both against the wall. Kissing his cheek, she bit his earlobe and whispered, “I think you’re going to have to work a lot harder to convince me.”
“Oh?” he smirked. “Before, or after our stop at the lab?”
“How about I just sit in your lap and give you some piloting lessons on the way there?” she suggested.
Kogav was only too happy to comply.
Stranded with the Alien
Lyra
This day was definitely not turning out the way I thought, Medic Lyra Conrarson thought, arms crossing over her chest.
Not only was she in an alien pod, her fellow crew members separated in five different directions in a race to get a sample of bio-toxin back to a secret resistance lab to be reverse engineered in the hopes of developing an antidote, but her partner for this mission was an alien himself.
Sholan ch’Rhare sat in the pilot’s seat of their small, two-person cockpit. He was hunched over the control panel, reading incoming messages and filtering through incoming sensor data.
Lyra had to admit he wasn’t hard to look at. Raven black hair, contrasting milk pale skin and soulful black eyes.
Lyra had always been a career woman. A hard worker. It took a certain kind of personality to excel as a medic in the jump service: stubborn, dedicated, and utterly focused on the job. Lyra took her duties seriously. But watching Sholan work... she found herself distracted.
“You’re scowling,” Sholan said.
That, of course, made Lyra’s scowl deepen. “If your next words are anything close to ‘you should smile more, it’ll make you look pretty’ I’m kicking you out of this pod.”
Sholan turned to her, his eyebrows raised. “It is my pod.”
“Which will make me happier when I kick you out of it.”
She caught a flash of emotion in his dark eyes. There and gone again too fast for her to register. Amusement, perhaps?
“I wasn’t going to tell you to smile,” Sholan said, “I was going to ask if there was anything wrong and if so, what I could do to help.”
‘Great, he’s a helper’ she thought sarcastically, but knew that was unkind. There was no reason to take out her frustration on the man.
She looked down. “I’m worried about my Captain,” she admitted.
“Why?”
“Because she has a history of pushing herself too hard. She doesn’t know her own limits. I’m the medic and I have a stack of files this thick to back it up.” She held her fingers apart to prove it. “The others can take care of themselves for the most part.”
Even the new girl, Sherre, she thought. In Lyra’s opinion, she had the stuff to make an excellent crew member. She just needed a little confidence to get her through rough patches.
Sholan cocked his head. “I see what you mean. She sounds a lot like my captain.”
“And they headed off in a pod together like dumb and dumber. Great.”
“There is nothing dumb about Kanthi B’halli,” he said. “He is the most courageous of us all.”
“So is my captain. That’s what gets her into trouble.”
Unexpectedly, a smile broke over Sholan’s face. “Ah, I see what you mean now. Well... no one can guarantee the safety of another, but if anyone could keep their partner safe, it would be Kanthi.”
There was no sarcasm or humor in his voice. Just simple fact.
It occurred to her that Sholan trusted his Captain as much as she trusted hers.
Even if she did want to wring Taryn’s neck for constantly putting herself in danger.
Her arms tightened across her chest as she looked down. “I just hope everyone makes it to the alliance lab okay.”
He nodded. “I do, too. You need to have more faith in your teammates—”
She stiffened. “Excuse me?”
“—I’m more worried about us,” he finished.
Lyra turned to look over the alien control panel in front of her. Even though the nifty comm unit in her ear translated Sholan’s language into perfectly understandable English, it did not do the same for the written language. There were certainly lights blinking, and something started to beep with urgency, but that’s all she understood.
“What’s going on?”
His hands danced across the control panel, flicking on and off switches and pausing to read a new status report.
“It appears we’ve been spotted. A Thagzar battlecruiser has come out of warp and is on our tail.”
She cursed. “What about the others? Are they being pursued as well?”
Sholan shook his head, but said, “Impossible to say. Their pods are already out of the range of my sensors.”
Wonderful, she thought again. Either they were very unlucky to be one out of the five spotted... or they all had battlecruisers on their tails.
Sholan’s hands didn’t pause over the control panel for one moment, flicking and tapping faster than Lyra could keep track—even if she could understand the language.
“They’re firing,” Sholan said.
Suddenly, the pod shuttered as if physically struck. Lyra held her breath, waiting for the hull breach alarm—assuming that this alien vessel even had one of those—or the explosive decompression that would follow. The icy airless cold of space.
They continued to breathe.
“Their weapons missed,” Sholan said, unnecessarily. “Barely. Hold on, I’m about to start evasive maneuvers.”
He swiped his hand in a wide circle. Suddenly, the floor of the pod seemed to shift underneath them, as if the vessel were moving too fast for the artificial gravity controls to keep up. The holographic starfield in front of them swooped and spun on a dizzying erratic axis.
Lyra closed her eyes, swallowing against her rolling stomach.
Damn it, she hated feeling useless.
I’m a medic, she reminded herself again. Not a weapons expert and not an engineer. I can’t even properly use his control panel.
She was a woman of action, and it gulled her to the bone, but she was pragmatic enough to know that this was Sholan’s battle. The best thing she could do was to stay calm and not get in his way.
And maybe patch them up afterward—assuming they survived this.
The control panel beeped frantically. Lyra’s eyes shot open in time to see Sholan punch the air in victory.
“Yes! I think I shook them.”
“Really?” She had not realized how certain she was that they were going to be blown to bits until she registered her own surprise.
He turned to her, his grin wolfish on his handsome face. “They deployed their small fighters—I think they wanted to board us instead of blasting us out of the sky. Well, I managed to maneuver us into a spin that caused two of them to crash into one another. I think the debris jammed their sensors from noticing our escape—”
A new siren went off. He turned back to the control panel, but not before the pod shuttered again.
Without warning, artificial gravity seemed to flip everything on its head.
Lyra tumbled forward and to the side, both trying to stop her own fall and trying not to touch the contr
ol panel—the last thing she wanted to do was toggle an ‘eject’ button.
Sholan’s strong arms caught and held her. The pod lurched up and then down. She fell roughly against his chest, nearly into his lap.
Their gazes met, his dark eyes were full of surprise and concern. Lyra felt a heart-deep jolt of... something.
In the next second it was gone, to be replaced by dizziness she assumed was from the gravity flipping back to normal.
“Are you all right?” Sholan asked.
“Yes, I...” she stammered and looked away, fighting down a blush. She was practically in the man’s lap. Carefully, wary of the uncertain artificial gravity, she stood and returned to her seat.
“I suppose these ships don’t come with seatbelts,” she muttered to cover her embarrassment.
He flashed another grin. “Seatbelts? No. Safety harness? Yes. Go ahead and press the red button over your head.”
She did and a four-point harness snaked out of unseen slits in the seat to clip itself securely around her.
That would have been useful to know earlier, she thought, but then again... Sholan had been busy, and she hadn’t exactly asked.
“What happened? Did they shoot at us again?”
He shook his head. “That wasn’t a shot—we wouldn’t have survived a hit from that range.” He tapped some more and then nodded as if to confirm something he already suspected. “We got nicked by a piece of debris from the two fighters.” More tapping. “I’m powering us down. Some of the wreckage around here is pretty large, and if we play dead for a few minutes the Thagzar’s may assume we were caught in the explosion.”
Lyra nodded. Within the next few minutes, the lights in the pod dimmed, except for emergency life support.
There was no need to keep quiet. It wasn’t like the pursuing craft would hear them if they spoke, but Lyra remained silent. They were hiding. Psychologically, it made sense.
Every few minutes, Sholan powered up just enough systems to check the status of the ship.
Finally, after the fifth repetition he said, “They’re moving off. I’m powering on all systems.”
The control interior lights came on, as did the control panel.
At least half of it was bathed in red.
“That’s... not good, is it?” Lyra asked.
Sholan muttered something and shook his head. “It looks like that last hit blew one of our auxiliary engines. We don’t have enough power to make it to the lab.”
Lyra blew out a breath. “Okay, what’s our next step?”
“Find the next habitable planet and pray to whatever gods you humans worship that they have the technology to repair my pod.”
Again, Lyra closed her eyes to absorb that. It was bad luck on their part, but this was a risky mission to begin with. That was the reason why they had split into separate teams—in case some didn’t make it.
Hopefully the rest of her crew had better luck.
Opening her eyes again, she realized Sholan was looking at her. He was waiting for her input.
“Well,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “I’m not seeing much of a choice. Are you?”
“No, not really.” He tapped again, grimacing as his control panel relayed more bad news. “We have enough juice for one good warp jump. There is a planet inside our range—just. The warp will let the Thagzar know we’re not a piece of debris, but we should be able to drop out of warp again before they pursue.”
“All right,” she said. “Do it.”
He pressed a green flashing button and they went into warp.
Sholan
Either this human woman, Lyra, had the ability to remain incredibly calm in stressful situations, or she had not truly realized the danger they had been in.
Sholan was a weapon’s expert—a gunner by trade. He’d been through more space battles than his crew had fingers and toes, and even he had been on the edge of heart palpitations.
Yes, they had deceived the Thagzars long enough to get away, but it had been by the skin of their teeth—or whatever the snake equivalent was.
Yet, throughout the battle Lyra had remained calm and in control. She had not gotten in the way of him doing his job, and her questions had been both perceptive and intelligent.
... And the way she had felt pressed up against him as he caught her...
Sholan had felt the strength in that slim form.
From then on, he was certain Lyra’s calm had not come from ignorance, but of steely will.
He wanted nothing more than to hold her again. See what other delights her body held.
And those eyes of hers were such an unusual amber color…
Focus, he told himself sternly and kept his eyes on the control panel. He would need all of his expertise to complete a controlled landing.
But again and again, his attention was drawn to his copilot’s seat.
To Lyra.
The control panel emitted yet another warning: The engines were failing. They were red and orange across the board. If the engines continued to overheat at that rate, they’d turn to slag before they entered the atmosphere.
Sholan cursed under his breath and switched the coolants on and off. If they were very, very lucky the overheating alarm was tripped by a faulty sensor.
The heat alert went off and stayed green... but he didn’t trust it.
“This is going to be a rough landing,” he told Lyra. He couldn’t help himself: He reached over and double-checked that her emergency harness was still properly fastened.
He had done nothing more than test the strap over one shoulder, but was stopped by her baleful look.
She slapped his hand away. “I’m perfectly capable of putting on a seatbelt by myself. Focus on getting us down to the surface in one piece.”
He grinned at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
Luckily for them both, the overheat sensor did not trip again. The planet loomed large, blue and richly green in the holoscreen in front of them. Sholan tapped in the commands to nudge the pod into smooth descent to the atmosphere.
Although, again, he found himself distracted.
Lyra was a beautiful woman with snapping amber eyes in a shade he had not seen before in his own people. But she was also looking distinctly green. A sheen of sweat bloomed over her forehead.
“Are you all right?”
She started to nod, and then stopped, frowning. “I feel... airsick?” It was almost a question. “Strange. I haven’t been airsick since before I was a cadet.” She paused to press at her own wrist, counting her pulse silently.
A sudden surge of protectiveness tinged with real fear cascaded through him.
The bio-toxin, he thought in horror.
The precious sample of the toxin the Thagzar had used to all but wipe out the females in his generation. They had been carrying their one-fifth of it in their pod.
What if it had broken?
Lyra was not Eiztar. It only affected their females in pregnancy, but there was no telling how it would affect her.
Sholan was out of his seat before he could think better of it, rushing to the back of the pod.
Lyra yelped in surprise. “Hey, get back here! I thought you had to land this thing?”
“One minute,” he called over his shoulder. “Stay right there!”
His long strides took him to the tiny storage area. The vial sat unobtrusively in the container he’d rigged for it. There were no visible cracks, but the toxin worked on the cellular level. He would have to do a scan to be absolutely sure.
He felt a touch on his shoulder and whirled around to see Lyra glaring up at him, her lips in a stubborn line.
“Hey,” she said, “We’re entering the atmosphere and I can’t fly this pod, remember?”
Her hand wrapped around his wrist, tugging him back to the cockpit...
... And it was as if sanity swept through him once more.
What was he doing?
Why had he been so taken with the idea that Lyra could be sick and in
danger from the bio-toxin?
Crashing the pod would definitely put her in more danger.
He glanced back at the vial, focusing on the readings from the unit. It was green all the way across. Despite all the shaking around and the shifts in gravity, there had been no breach of containment.
The vial was fine. Whatever had been ailing Lyra, the toxin had not been it.
“Of course. This is... I thought it was important,” he said, feeling utterly foolish. Ducking his head, he returned to the cockpit.
Just in time, it seemed. The ship’s auto-navigation system had just indicated that they should make their final descent.
However, Sholan had learned the hard way not to trust sensor readings after a near catastrophic space battle. The computer systems could be faulty and not show it until the exact wrong moment. He had to land this craft manually.
“Good thing I got top marks in blind landing scenarios,” he muttered to himself, glancing again at Lyra. “Make sure to strap in.”
She sent him an annoyed glare, though the color had returned to her face. She did not seem as ill as before.
“Make sure you strap in yourself,” she said and rose from her seat to hit the button over his chair. He let out a snort of laughter as the harness snaked out to secure him.
With an arch look, Lyra returned to her seat and strapped in.
While she is sitting next to me, she is safe, Sholan reminded himself.
He turned to the control panel, and, with the discipline forced through a generation of war, he forced himself to concentrate enough to land.
Sensor readings were... spotty at best. He could confirm there was at least breathable air and drinkable water on the surface. There was also, it seemed, a civilization.
Hopefully a friendly, technologically advanced one that was also part of the alliance. The computer system gave errors when he tried to compare it against the dictionary of known habitable planets.
Oh well, he and Lyra would find out all about their new friends soon enough.
He picked a likely continent and swung the pod into a bumpy—if not somewhat graceful, arc.
