They had only taken a few steps from the safety of the tree line when a roar went up among the green-skinned aliens, their bulbous heads turning, their eyes the size of dinner plates back on Earth and all black.
“Uh oh,” Sarah said as five of the beings moved more swiftly on their tentacles than she had figured they could, closing the gap between them quickly. They appeared unarmed, which was good thing, and held up ten or so feet short from being able to touch Fib or Sarah.
“Who are you?” one of the aliens asked.
“I am Fib, this is Sarah,” the Zaytarian said. “We have escaped a faulty ship and landed on your planet. We seek aid.”
The tentacled aliens didn’t speak for a moment, and then the one which had greeted them in such a brisk manner turned to look at another. They spoke quietly together, so that the girls; and their translators could not hear them.
“We will feed you,” the first alien said at last, turning to look back at them. “And then you will go.”
“We need a ship,” Fib said rather brazenly, and then something hit her and her mouth fell open. “You speak Zaytarian?”
This pleased the aliens greatly, and they shook with laughter. “We speak all languages,” the leader, as Sarah had come to think of him, said. “We are scholars. The premier language learners of the galaxy.”
“Do you speak English?” Sarah asked, and the aliens gasped.
“What is that?” the alien asked in its own language.
“English,” Sarah said.
There was a sudden commotion. The leader called back over his shoulder and the rest of the aliens, which had stayed around the fire, came running. The leader spoke to them.
“A new language!” he said. “We must learn it! We must study it. You must teach it to us.”
“Teach you a language?” Fib asked them, since they could not understand Sarah, wondering how long that would take.
“Yes, please. We refuse to use translators like the one you have stuffed into your ear. The spoken word, it is the most magical of the gifts bestowed to us by the universe. It is the one we love. We must learn this new language. Your friend must teach it to us. We are quick learners. In less than a galaxy standard week, we could learn the basics and go from there.
“We don’t have a week,” Fib told them. She was anxious to find her way back home, to see her sister, and she knew Sarah was anxious to see Gar.
“Three days. Please. Allow us this, we will give you everything.”
“Are you space-faring?” Fib asked the leader. He had a great laugh at that.
“How could we learn so many languages if we were not?”
“We require a ship.”
“Done. Three days of her time and a ship will be yours, stocked fully.”
Fib looked over to Sarah. “That’s a good deal. Three days here, and then we’re gone. Back to Gar. Back home.”
Of course Sarah’s home was a lot further than Fib’s, and it was a home that didn’t have a place for Gar, the alien she had fallen head over heels for.
“Fine,” Sarah said with a nod, and Fib relayed her answer, leaving the tentacled aliens to cheer.
Chapter Twelve
The citadel proved even larger on the inside than it had appeared on the outside. After they had landed, the four person group had searched for hours and found nothing besides room after room that had been stripped of any furniture, but was filled with paintings, often of that same alien being with the mark on his face.
“We need sleep,” Bo said finally on that first night, and they all agreed. They chose a small room with only one entrance, easily defended, and hunkered down together, keeping a look-out awake and switching every two hours.
There was no morning or night on the asteroid, no sun near enough to create such a thing, and the group just moved on when they were awake, and made their way through room after room once more.
They lay together again after at least twenty hours of searching, when they were all running on empty, on the verge of exhaustion. They set up a look-out, and went to sleep.
Bo took the first shift, and he was staring tiredly at the entrance to the circular room they had chosen when the door swung quietly open.
Bo tensed in the darkness, pulling his handgun slowly up.
A Destune stood in the doorway, there was no mistaking it. It was humanoid in appearance, two legs, two arms, but covered in white and gray scales, like a lizard. Half of its face was gone, replaced by dingy metal, the eye a red glowing orb. Its right arm was metal from the elbow down, and there was a stretch of its torso which was also a machine.
Bo didn’t hesitate. He fired. The bolt booming in the small room, catching the undead android in the chest and sending it flying backward, and waking his companions.
“What is it?” Gar was asking, reaching for his rifle.
“Destune!” Bo said as he pushed his bulky frame to its feet. Char was up as quickly as Gar, and Yelia right beside him, all with weapons aimed at the door, which had creaked back closed. The Destune having been holding the handle when he was rocketed backward.
For a moment Bo had to wonder if it had been a lone creature, for nothing else came through the door, but then it was opening, and there were others. All as garish and frightening as the first.
The small room was alive with the sounds of gunfire. The Destune without firearms, but weapons of their own, including a sharp spear thrown in through the door, which caught Char in the shoulder and sent him to the ground.
“Char!” Yelia screamed, dropping to her knees to make sure he was okay. The wound was deep but had missed anything of importance, and he urged her to get back to fighting. She did so, and soon the Destune threat was extinguished, leaving more than twenty of the undead creatures now firmly dead, shredded by energy and plasma bolts, and Gar’s metal slugs.
“There will be more,” Bo said needlessly. “We need to find that machine.”
“We have no idea where it could be,” Yelia groaned. “It would take a year to search this whole place. What are we going to do?”
“We take a year then. I don’t know what other option we have,” Gar said.
But it did not take another year. It was Char who found it, or at least figured out where it might be, walking past one of the rare windows in the citadel, which looked out over a massive courtyard in the center of the structure.
“Look at that,” he said to the others, pointing. From the center of the courtyard rose a metal spike, with wires hanging all around it. “Looks almost like an antenna, doesn’t it?”
“Worth checking out,” Bo said. They had made their way to the courtyard.
“Here!” Yelia called after a few minutes. There was a rusted iron door built into a small stone hut nearby, and Yelia pulled it open as the others gathered around her. Inside the hut, a stone staircase led down into the asteroid itself.
“Looks right,” Gar said. Yelia nodded and stepped down.
A blaring scream went up in the courtyard, and red lights began to flash from atop metal poles in each corner of the courtyard.
“Oh, no,” Char said, turning to see Destune streaming in from all sides.
“This is it!” Bo said. “Yelia, get down there, we’ll hold them off. This is a good choke point, and they don’t have guns.”
“I can’t leave you!” Yelia argued, worried that Bo was going to get killed.
“Take her and get her to the machine!” Gar told Char, and then Char was moving, taking Yelia by the arm and tugging her down the stairs.
There was a long hall at the end of the steps, which led to another closed door. They ran for it, and burst through the door. There was the machine. It was spindly and made of metal, humming with energy. There was a chair inside the machine, and Yelia ran for it. She looked around and sat down. Immediately, her body was rocked with electricity, arching her back, making her nails dig into the arm of the chair. Yelia screamed, and then she felt her sister.
“Fib?” she called, and then everything
around her went black.
Chapter Thirteen
Fib gasped. Yelia!
She could feel her sister, inside her own mind.
The citadel. Destune.
Things that didn’t make sense, all slamming into her brain.
It was night time, the end of the second day. Sarah slept next to her, tired from her day of English lessons, the tentacled aliens were voracious in their desire to learn her language.
As suddenly as Yelia had entered her mind, she was gone, and Fib was left on her cot in the dark, trying to catch her breath. The bot was hovering nearby, buzzing almost silently, beeping every now and then. There was a substantial wireless information network in the town, and the bot was learning what he could about the green aliens.
“Wake up,” Yelia said to Sarah, reaching over and shaking the girl.
“What is it?” the Earthling asked.
“We have to go. I know where my sister is. I think she’s in danger.”
“It’s only been two days.”
“Let me handle that,” Yelia said, climbing off her cot.
The two women dressed in the dark as Fib considered her options. She could ask the tentacled beings to let them go early, or she could steal the ship. She had seen it, once they had been led to the small town they currently found themselves in. She knew they had stocked it already, for she had helped.
“Do you think they will let us go?” Fib asked Sarah.
“No. They are… serious about learning. If we promised three days, they will take three days.”
“Then we are stealing the ship,” Fib said.
“Is that a good idea?”
“My sister needs me. Gar needs you. I could… sense things. She reached out to me somehow, and I could sense that she was in danger. I could also sense that Gar was with her. I don’t know what is going on, but I think they are trying to save us. I don’t know what they are doing at the citadel though.”
“What’s the citadel?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know much. I thought it would be empty. An extinct race built it. But something is there, because I could feel fear. Something was attacking them.”
“We have to go,” Sarah said, convinced. “We have to take the ship.”
Fib nodded, and she led the way outside.
*****
Bo, Gar, Char, and Yelia had taken refuge in the room with the machine. The long hallway was the perfect funnel point, and someone was always kneeling by the open door, taking shots at any of the Destune that attempted to enter.
Yelia had entered the machine hours ago, but she was still groggy and in pain. Reaching out to her sister had taken a toll.
“You know where she is?” Gar asked for the tenth time.
“Yes. I could take us there right now.”
“Sarah was with her?”
“Yes. I know everything Fib did at that moment. I can feel her. I know how to get to her.
“We have to go!” Gar said.
“There are thousands of those things. You saw them before we ran back here. We go out there, they will tear us apart,” Bo said.
“We cannot just stay here,” Gar argued.
“We will think of something,” Bo said. “We have to.”
*****
Taking the ship had been easier than either woman thought. No one came to stop them, not until the ship was powered up and lifted from the ground. Sarah looked down through the viewport, suddenly ashamed of going back on her promise to the aliens. Maybe she could come back and teach them her language.
“We are on the right side of the galaxy,” Fib said. “It won’t take long to jump to the citadel.”
“Do it,” Sarah said as the ship slid into the blackness of space, away from the green planet.
Fib busied herself with inputting the jump into the navigation computer, and then looked to Sarah. “Here we go,” she said, as she pressed a flat button on the dash. The ship jumped.
*****
“Go!” Bo called as the Destune surrounded him, their hands and teeth ripping into his flesh. But Gar wouldn’t leave him.
“Get to the ship!” he yelled to Yelia and Char as he turned to fight off the undead androids, tugging a bloody Bo forward.
Yelia was faster than her lover, and she was only ten feet away from the Patchwork Lady when it exploded.
“No!” Bo yelled as Yelia was lifted off her feet and thrown backward into Char, knocking him down to the hard ground.
“There!” Gar said, pointing up. On top of one of the towers stood a Destune, this one with a rocket launcher on his shoulder.
“They do have guns,” Bo said grimly as the Destune turned to aim at them.
There was nowhere to run. They could not escape the explosion that was sure to come any second. Gar stared at the Destune as the other creatures closed in behind him, snarling and gnashing their teeth.
Boom!
The Destune with the rocket launcher exploded as an energy bolt ripped through his body and gun, setting off the rockets inside.
“Fib!” Yelia screamed, raising her fist as she stood up, pointing to the ship swooping down toward them. It hovered a few feet off the ground and a ramp extended. Sarah stood at the top of the ramp, her eyes wide as she took in the Destune horde, the man she loved and his friends. The bot floated beside her.
Gar helped Bo forward, pushing him up the ramp, then turning and helping Char and Yelia board. The ship was pulling away immediately, and the ramp was sliding back in. Gar turned and there she was. Sarah. He took her in his arms and they kissed.
Chapter Fourteen
Earth was a large blue and green orb in the viewport.
Sarah’s heart leapt at the sight of it. Her home.
There had been so many times that she didn’t think she was going to ever see Earth again.
Gar was piloting, and he left the small ship to float just outside of Earth's atmosphere. They were alone on the ship that Fib had stolen from the green-skinned aliens with tentacles. The others were back home on Zaytaria. The war was over. The Aeon’s that had survived the destruction of their planet pushed to the far reaches of space.
All that had been left was to get Sarah home.
“I love you,” Sarah said, turning in her chair to look at Gar.”
He smiled. “I love you too,” he said. He stood then, reaching for her, taking her hand and pulling her from her chair, wrapping his strong arms around her. She knew they would make love, one last time, she wanted it, needed it, and she pulled from him and took his hand, leading him to the back of the ship, where a small bunk was built into the wall.
She sat him on the bed and undressed, her eyes burning with tears, not wanting to leave him, but knowing that her place was at home, on Earth.
As he watched her she undressed, pulling her shirt up slowly, letting him drink her in, wanting him to see her, to touch her, to feel her, one last time. He saw her as if with new eyes. Her large round breasts, her nipples pink and hard. She pushed her pants down. His gaze drank in her trimmed pubic hair, the swollen lips beneath, shining with her moisture of desire.
When she was nude, it was his turn. He kissed her, dipped his head to take one nipple and sucked on it lovingly, then the other nipple received the same attention. He slid his hands all over her body, then pushed one thick finger slowly between her legs. He groaned when he felt her arousal coat his finger. His other hand found her rear, gripping her bottom.
He stood and undressed, his body hard and tough, his muscles well-defined. She touched his abs, slid her hands up over his collar bones, framing his face, running her fingers through his long hair.
His cock was large, hard, and throbbing. She slid her fingers over the shaft, circling the tip. She smiled seductively when she felt his erection pulsing at her touch. She needed him, wanted him desperately.
She lay down on the small cot, and spread her legs for him. For Gar. He pressed one knee on the other side of her body and lowered himself on top of her.
Sara
h reached between their bodies and guided Gar into her body. They both gasped and moaned at the warm, intimate contact. Gar kissed Sarah hungrily, devouring her mouth. They were savoring every delicious moment. A rhythm quickly forming. He was pushing into her, rocking back and forth, sliding in and out, their lips together, their tongues dancing, their moans becoming one. Their bodies in sync.
Sarah moaned loudly as she felt her stomach tightening, orgasm imminent. She thrust harder against Gar. His pelvis thrusting into her and grazing her clit.
“Come with me, Gar,” she gasped out loud.
He groaned and thrust back into her.
Sarah felt his cock expand inside her as the first clench of her orgasm tightened through her body. Her body fluttering intensely around Gar as he pulsed inside her, filling Sarah with his seed.
They lay there a long time, side by side, their eyes staring into one another’s, and then there was nothing left to do but for her to leave. They dressed in silence and took their places in the cockpit once more.
He took her home. Zooming down to Earth so things could be seen that couldn't be seen from space; roads, houses, vehicles. It was hard for her to find her home from the air, but she did, eventually. She spotted her father's home, and she found herself as excited to see him as she was sad to leave Gar.
He hovered over the home, twenty feet or so, the ship with a cloaking device that turned it blue, like the sky around them. Almost silent, it would be hard for anyone to notice the ship.
“I would stay with you. I would give everything up for you. My home. I don’t need my home. I only need you,” the alien said to the Earth girl.
“I couldn’t ask that of you,” she said.
“You did not ask it. I offered it.”
She smiled, reached over and took Gar’s hand.
*****
Her father was in his study, hunched over his desk When his daughter had disappeared he had put everything he had into finding her. Money. Time. It all went to one thing. Finding Sarah.
Aeon Ending Page 6
