Last Call (Stranded in the Stars Book 1)

by Naomi Lucas

  If Jack based his assumption on her reaction to the monster– the fact that she was desperately trying to deny its presence, her eyes closed tight, her face creased in fear– that this wasn’t the first time she encountered the creature. It had been focused on her, it wanted her, it had stared at her like it had finally won.

  Like hell it had.

  He was going to hunt the creepy piece of shit down and carve a trophy out of its saggy skin, if not for frightening the girl but for sneaking up on him.

  After he had relit the fire, he reconnected his transmission lines to the intergalactic network, searching the grid for its description in angry silence. Uploading his images of the creature to run a diagnostics for similar matches. There was always something out there to learn. Nothing new existed that wasn’t a part of the network, at least not for long.

  His results were worthless speculations, crazed reports, random folklore and all of it originating from Earth, the homeland. No facts, no science.

  What he had accumulated was mythos from archaic religions and so he decided that the thing must be native to this planet and was from no such fairytale. It was the most logical assumption. Demons my ass.

  The most unnerving part though was that it didn’t exist on his radar. He couldn’t scan it, read it, analyze its strengths and weaknesses and even now, searching for it, nothing blipped on his trackers. It had appeared in their cave as if out of nothing and it remained that way. A Nothing didn’t inhabit this infested planet.

  All he had to go on was his gut reaction and he didn’t want to admit it, his sixth sense. If he hadn’t laid his eyes on it, he would have never believed that it existed.

  He looked over at Allie, now dressed in his under armor, sipping from a water canister. His thoughts changed direction. It was only an hour after the sun had risen, her skin was still painted in a rosy flush and the smell of their sex still perfumed the air.

  She had approached him last night like it was her only link left with her sanity. He could sense the quiet, desperation in her to connect with him. He wasn’t surprised that she needed the contact so badly and his chest tightened uncomfortably by the thought. He had never been needed, not at an emotional, physical, individual level and her need had been heady for him, he wanted to harness it; keep it in a bottle and lock it away someplace where he could covet and protect it.

  It could become an addiction.

  When he had taken her over the ground earlier, he had been coming off a high. He had been useless to anything else at that moment, losing himself was all he could do. Even now he wanted to take her again, to reclaim that need and her body.

  But he couldn’t, at least not right now. He strapped his guns on, one across his back and the pistol belted on his waist. He watched her get up and come over to him, the water canister in her hand now depleted. He pulled out one of his spare daggers and handed it to her.

  “Take this. Stab anything that moves that isn’t me.” He warned her as she took it from him.

  “I will but I don’t think it will help.” She responded. Jack knew what she meant.

  “I have a .44 pistol. You can carry that instead if you like.” He teased, trying to lighten up the mood.

  She looked at him strangely, “I don’t think that will help either. I don’t know how to use a gun. I would most likely shoot you.” She smiled.

  “Oh, sweetheart, you’re breaking my Cyborg heart. When we pick up the metal and my ship is repaired, I’m going to teach you how to shoot every gun in my armory.” He sighed.

  “If you trust me enough not to kill you, I would like that, although a gun wouldn’t be useful here. There’s nothing to shoot at but rocks and dirt.”

  “There’s always something that needs a bullet in it, and trust me, you’ve got bloodlust in that body of yours, you’re going to love it. I’ll even let you keep your favorite one.” Jack offered.

  Allie gave him a pointed look, “I don’t think I agree with you about the blood.”

  His grin widened. “If you weren’t so damn sore and if we didn’t want to get this little adventure behind us so badly, I would take you up on your lusty offer.” He laughed, feeling his cock twitch in anticipation.

  “Who says I’m sore?” She asked sweetly.

  His grin faded and he squinted his eyes at her in suspicion. “I know you’re sore and I know you’re stalling. Let’s just get this over with so I can lock you up in my cabin, preferably by tomorrow night.” He added, “Now let’s go.”

  He watched her face drop.

  “Nothing will happen to you. I won't let it. Like I said, stab anything that moves that isn’t me and don’t leave my side. I mean it, Allie, aim to kill.” He picked up the pack and hefted it onto his back. Unconsciously, reaching over and taking her hand.

  ***

  Allie matched his stride and walked beside him. They would be at their destination by mid-morning and she felt strangely calm about it, Jack seemed assured and that made her feel better.

  He would retrieve what he needed and then they would leave. She would be heading back through here this afternoon, knowing she would never see the ominous ship again. The thought was liberating and she felt a wave of giddiness take her over.

  By tonight she would be on her way home, she would be with Jack again, and in several days she would have her supplies– her soap– and be able to go back to her daily routine. She would take him up on his offer to learn how to shoot if it still stood.

  He would repair his ship. He would leave.

  She would be alone again, looking over at him. Could she be able to cope, being alone again? Imagining her days without him shot a dart through her heart. She would try to manage the loneliness and when enough time had gone by she would accept his absence. Everything would be like it had been. Like it had been a week ago.

  Allie would be a moment in his life and he would be a moment in hers. She just wasn’t sure if a moment was long enough for her. Their hands were still clasped and she squeezed his in reassurance of her feelings. She felt his fingers threading through hers and squeeze her back

  I don’t want to be alone anymore.

  The thought of her old life was painful. The endless, unchanging days, the constant worry of starving, getting hurt, being buried alive. The nights and the darkness that followed. Maybe instead of supplies, she could ask for passage to some other place, some place safe.

  That alternative frightened her too because she wasn’t sure how to reintegrate into a society. Even the draped armor mesh falling around her form felt foreign. And she was fertile, if she returned to society she would be expected to join with an Earthian or Trentian male and reproduce. Both species were still struggling to rebuild after the war.

  She focused on their linked hands. She wanted Jack but she would not place the burden of her wants on his shoulders.

  Allie knew very little about Cyborgs, only that they were created during the war, for the war. That they were not a species of their own, only a finite number of them were in existence. Would it be possible for a relationship to form between them? When he was on a different level of existence than she was.

  Jack was now holding her hand, a very human thing to do.

  “We’re getting close.” He interrupted her thoughts, squeezing her hand before letting go as if he knew she was just focused on it. “We’ll make this quick. I’m going to harvest some metal plating and any palladium circuitry. I’ll have to get to the atomic reactor if it is still there, turn it on and see if there is any power left. The power will help me identify where the circuits are.” He continued, “If that doesn’t work, we’ll move onto plan B.”

  “Plan B?” She was curious, missing the connection.

  “Dig for the circuits, it would take longer.”

  “There’s no other way?” Allie didn’t want it to take longer.

  “I could send out a distress signal but we could attract unwanted visitors or no visitors at all. This place is so fa
r out of the normal space sectors, those that would see my signal are more likely to be my enemies than not. I could send a transmission to my brethren but it may take weeks, months for one to get here.” He finished, “I don’t have time to wait.”

  Allie wanted to ask him to elaborate on why he was in a hurry but they crested a hill and found themselves on a plateau, overlooking the ship. The conversation dropped.

  The ship hadn’t changed.

  It was exactly how she remembered it the last time she had been here. The only difference was that it appeared to be sinking into the hole it created upon impact and that it was covered in thick layers of sand and dirt. Time itself was trying to bury the monster.

  It looked like a shipwreck but it felt like a nightmare. The monochrome metal was now shades of pasty grey, like a corpse. There were large plates of metal peeling away like sun burnt skin. Those plates extruded out from it as if they had a mind of their own and that mind wanted to be away from the main vessel as much as she did.

  The entirety of it stuck out of the ground in a sloping angle. It was a bruise amongst the golden landscape. The ship didn’t belong and it never could even with the camouflage of sand that adhered to it.

  The ground around it was littered with debris from the impact, large metal plates that had fallen off to entire sections of the ship that had detached. She remembered many of the forms from long ago. Unlike the main perversion, the debris looked like unwanted cast-offs; not part of the land but also not part of the ship. They were orphans to two dangerous entities.

  And the smell…

  Allie couldn’t understand how it was possible that it still reeked of the same burned flesh, rotting bodies, and tang of rust from when it first crashed here. Even from a distance the smell was strong, as if the structure had been suspended in time.

  She wanted to vomit up the water sloshing in her belly, thankful now that she had not bothered to eat any rations earlier.

  Jack was a statue next to her, the sun glinted off his guns. He stared daggers at the ship, not moving to hurry her up to get this ordeal behind them like he had urged all morning. She knew he was stuck in his head, analyzing what was before them and solidifying his opinion.

  She wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the dagger that was now tied to her waistband and pulled it free.

  A weapon was better in hand.

  The metal cooled her clammy palm and was a small sort of comfort as her connection to Jack faded and the connection to the ship before her strengthened. The dagger was a physical reminder that she wouldn’t be alone.

  Leaving Jack where he was standing, she carefully descended into the valley below, scaling the rocky ledges and loose sand. She didn’t need to form an opinion, she already had one.

  As she made her way toward her past, the ship became unsettlingly bigger, blacking out everything around it as it filled her vision. The air was heavy with memories. The oppression of them building, weighing down on her shoulders as she got closer and each step felt like coals beneath her feet.

  Allie noticed that the sand and dirt changed color as she got closer. What had been golden brown was now muddied streaks of dark grey mixed with black; webbing outward like an infection in the bloodstream. It continued until everything she stood on was black.

  Could this place get anymore diseased?

  She was at the bottom now, looking up at the ship instead of looking down. She moved around it, sizing it up, at the same time making her way to her destination.

  Off to the side from where Jack and her had come from was a colossal rock. Her feet sank into the sand as she approached it. The rock was a giant gravestone to all the mangled corpses she had buried there. The ground below her a gravesite.

  She knew the bodies were long gone, that only bones remained but the ever-present smell of death was incredibly strong here. She could barely breathe, looking down, all she saw was the darkened sand.

  She was struck with a wave of guilt, a wave of sadness. How come everyone had died but she had lived? How was that possible? She had walked away from the destruction with barely a scratch when everyone around her was broken and burned.

  Her friends had perished, the innocent crew had perished, the noble captain that saved their lives had perished. Better people had died and she had lived and it hurt her heart.

  Being alone on this planet was her punishment for defying death.

  Allie kneeled down in the dirt and grabbed fistfuls of it into her hands, desperately seeking forgiveness– knowing it would never come. It didn’t want forgiveness, it wanted revenge. She could feel its anger beaming into her, weighing her down.

  Jack’s familiar presence approach behind her. His hand covering her shoulder. She picked up the dagger she had dropped in the dirt and stood up, brushing the sand off her legs before turning around to face him.

  “This is where I buried the bodies.” She confessed numbly, “At least the ones I could find.”

  He folded her into his arms. “It’s not safe here.” He said as he led her away from the grave pit. She didn’t turn to look at it again.

  ***

  Jack understood why he was unable to get a feel for the place before. The ship was pulsating dangerously strong magnetic ripples and it screwed up the reads on several of his systems.

  He had yet to find an explanation for the strange waves but it was obvious to him that a very strong, mystifying force surrounded the ship. And if he wasn’t careful, his cybernetics could be irreversibly affected. Luckily, so far nothing within him screamed at him in warning.

  The dirt that Allie had grabbed, that now clung to her fingers and palms, had been dyed from the old metal plating. The color appeared to be melting off and into the immediate environment.

  There was no other logical explanation and he refused to believe that anything was unexplainable. There will always be an explanation, as long as you had the right knowledge, the right resources.

  Jack was grasping at straws. Why would the metal change the color of the sand?

  When the ship had come into view, he hadn’t expected to find a battlecruiser, not unlike the ones flown during the war, but had expected to find a transporter vessel, one that may have been modified with foreign enhancements. He was very familiar with this ship, the mechanics, the design, the parts. He would find what he needed here to repair his own.

  The cruiser was slowly sinking into the ground.

  Even now he could feel the shift of sand beneath his feet as it was being pulled under by the caverns of old wurm tunnels below, resulting in a large but rather slow pit of quickening sand.

  He held onto Allie as he approached the exterior where a large triangular hole had broken open. The tough metal split outward as if something had violently forced its way out.

  Stopping in front of the gaping hole, he peered inside and saw a corridor of debris that outstretched into a tunnel on the opposite end, leading deeper into the ship. Long, metal tubing hung limp from the walls and ceiling. The tubes no longer vital to the ship’s life like they had been at one point, operating on electrical currents, controlled by the ship’s core.

  Jack pressed his free hand on the dingy plating, trying to make a connection with the vessel but found only silence. His nanobots rejected by the lifeless structure in bringing it alive. It had been inert for over half a decade.

  The girl had been alone longer than he originally had thought based on the ship. He looked down at her, “how old were you when you crashed here?” He asked, curious about her past.

  She looked at him in confusion. “Based on the colony’s planet rotation, I was seventeen cycles.”

  The cycles on this planet were longer than an average Earth day, he estimated that she was in her mid-twenties. “This ship crashed here about seven cycles ago, standard Earthian time six and a half years. You’ve been here a long time.” Jack was proud of her survival instinct before but now he was impressed. She had been here for a quarter of her lifespan.
One mystery solved.

  Allie let go of him to run her hands through her hair, her eyes wide and sad with the knowledge. He fell silent as she processed the information.

  “There’s no seasons here. I knew I had been here a long time but I was never able to accurately track it. I tried at first but I stopped when it didn’t seem to matter anymore. No one was coming,” she continued. “Eventually the days began to blur together.”

  “I came.”

  She looked at him sadly. “Not by choice.”

  “Maybe not by choice but instead by fate. If I knew you were stranded here, I would have come by choice. I would have been here years ago. If I knew you existed, I would have slaughtered your Warlord before he ever laid eyes on you and gifted you with his head.”

  Allie stood before him awkwardly and obviously unsure about how to respond to his omission. “He was never my Warlord.” She eventually stated.

  Jack turned back to the ship, “I’m going to harvest the palladium first. It will be abundant near the core. On our way out I’ll retract the metal since that can be taken from anywhere.” He stepped into the dank corridor, hearing the girl quietly follow him in.

  The atmosphere abruptly changed and he would have likened it to the strange magnetic fields surrounding the area but that would have been impossible. He felt like he was in a pressurized bubble. A chill clung to the air where just steps back he had been enveloped in warm direct sunlight.

  The temperature shouldn’t have plummeted so dramatically and he knew the girl would be uncomfortable as it was uncomfortable even for him. He pulled out her cloak and draped it around her shoulders, securing it in place.

  “It smells terrible in here. It was foul outside but this…” She trailed off. Jack couldn’t smell anything. Just the sweat on their bodies and the waning scent of sex from earlier; her essence dried over the crotch of his pants.