Table of Contents
Simply Aliens
Alien Desire
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Ashley's Guardian
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Astral Ascension
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Saved by the Alien
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Galaxy's Edge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Solaris
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Soldier's Desire
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Star Crossed
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
Stranded with the Alien
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Alien Warrior's Wife
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
BONUS STORIES
Gravity
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Equilibrium
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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Simply Aliens
The Alien
Collection Romance
By: Fiery Desires Publishing
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Alien Desire
Chapter 1
Mila took a breath. She had to admit he didn’t have the odor she had expected. There was a kind of mystery about him though. It unfortunately didn’t make her hate him any less and it certainly didn’t improve her mood about his presence on her ship. She tried not to dwell on it, keeping herself busy with the many repairs that still needed to be done. This didn’t work, however, as it was becoming clear she was going to need to use precious resources to synthesize several machine parts.
Rex, to his credit, was following Mila’s rule about keeping to his side of the cabin. In fact, he had not spoken a word since coming aboard. He was just as unhappy about being on her vessel as she was to have him there.
She looked at the clock. Six standard days and fourteen hours since the dive. Stolen moments. She had gotten extra time thanks to a glitch in her navigation system. She had been ready to plunge into the black hole and end her existence—taking the plunge was preferable to being captured and autopsy-interrogated. But her ship had apparently had other plans.
To that end, she had done as she had seen many of her comrades do and positioned herself with the Human Fleet ship between her and the black hole. Then she latched onto the ship with her docking clamps. It had taken her a moment to find the right angle and get a good hold on him. He had tried to maneuver away, of course. In the end, she had gripped his hull like an old Earth boa constrictor.
She had set her ship’s engines on full blast, pointing straight toward the black hole. The enemy had tried to counter her actions, but his ship had quickly expended all its fuel trying to fight against the power of her thrusters working in conjunction with the black hole’s gravity. As the black hole’s event horizon approached, she’d said a prayer and closed her eyes taking one last deliberate breath.
Her ship’s inertial dampening and artificial gravity systems prevented her from experiencing the immense tidal forces as they approached. That buffer would not hold for long though. It would break down within a fraction of a second after she passed into the event horizon. Then, in an instant too fast for her to perceive, every particle of her body would be pulled apart before finally dropping to the singularity at the heart of the black hole. All in all, not the worst way to go.
Despite its painlessness, Mila did not welcome this death. Until the moment she had decided to make the dive, she had still held out hope that she was going to survive the battle. Then she would have survived the war. She would see victory announced and return to her family’s farm in the colony’s beta dome.
All that hope had twisted into fear when the battle had turned against them. The Human Fleet’s reinforcements had pushed through the blockade and entered their system just in time to give their friend’s the upper hand over the colonists.
At that moment, fear became resolve. Being captured was not an option. It seemed surviving the battle was not one either. Her training kicked in and she enacted the dive maneuver as if on autopilot.
Thankfully, death had not come. Mila had opened her eyes to find that she and her vessel were intact. An examination of her sensors showed that her ship was now in an ultra-high velocity orbit around the black hole, maintaining a position just outside the event horizon. She had not wanted to move at first for fear that anything she did could through off the orbit and cause them to slip off the razor’s edge. She didn’t care how unreasonable the fear was, she wasn’t taking any chances.
The ship’s logs provided her with information on what had occurred in that final moment. All the ships in the Colonial Fleet were supposed to be preprogrammed with the dive maneuver to be used as a last resort. Unfortunately, the programmers had failed to completely disable older software that contained safety protocols. Unaware that the dive was deliberate, the computer had enacted these protocols and “saved the day”, leaving her locked in orbit around the black hole, still hugging her enemy. She had laughed when she imagined the other pilot. He also had every reason to believe death was imminen
t. Had he soiled his suit? She chose to believe he had.
She had then found herself in an awkward position. The black hole did not have a very thick dust cloud around it, but it did have one. And although thin, this debris was enough to cause a good bit of chaos as it spiraled into the black hole. It effectively wiped out her communications with the fleet or command. She was left with no idea what was happening with the battle or what her orders should be.
Her ship had expended a great deal of energy to reach this orbit. She quickly realized there was nowhere near enough power for her to pull free of the black hole’s gravity well. Even fully fueled, her ship probably wouldn’t have been able to free itself. For the time being, she was trapped and alone. She certainly didn’t think of the pilot on the Human Fleet ship as “company”.
Mila had immediately gone to work trying to figure out a way to dislodge her ship from the enemy’s. She was certain that the separation, timed just right with a few thruster shots, would maintain her orbit while sending the other ship slipping past the event horizon.
The simulations quickly showed her that it would be easier said than done. In the majority of virtual trials, her own ship would dip too low toward the black hole. Once any part of her crossed the event horizon, she was done. That immaterial boundary marked the point at which escape velocity was greater than the speed of light and therefore impossible for her ship.
About two standard days later there was a temporary break in the ionic chaos around her ship. In that brief moment, she received a garbled message from her Commander. It took the computer several minutes to reconstruct the message. When it was finished, Mila wished it had failed. The data-burst gave a summary of the events that had transpired since the battle. The Colonials had lost not only the battle, but the entire war.
Her people had been forced to surrender to the Human Fleet and would be integrated into the United Human Territories. She had cried. She hated herself for that, but the tears came anyway. Her people had been fighting this war for six years now and it had all been in vain.
When the Human Fleet had first arrived in their system, they had had made many promises about noninterference in their colony’s internal affairs. Within months, the leaders of her world had seen through their lies. Her people refused to surrender their sovereignty and the war had begun.
The five inhabited worlds of their star system had put aside their internal conflicts and joined together to repel the Human Fleet. The enemy was formidable. The Human Fleet’s empire stretched across nearly a hundred systems and gained more power with every old earth colony they absorbed.
Despite the odds, the colonies had fought with all the voracity with which they had once fought one another. For years, they managed to stave off the Human Fleet's incursions. Each time the UHT opened a wormhole, they quickly swarmed and destroyed it.
And then the UHT's sub-light drones emerged from the interstellar vacuum, turning the war in the Human Fleet's favor. Her people stood a fighting chance when all they had to do was block wormholes, but when the drones started flying in from outside the system, they couldn't keep up against the invasion.
That was when things had turned desperate. That was when their ships stationed near the black hole had received programming for the dive maneuver. A “kamikaze” move, the programmers had called it, harkening back to some archaic military tactic from old earth.
Her superiors must have figured out what her ship had done. The message implied that they were not certain that she was still alive, but they could see that her ship was in an ultra-high speed orbit. They assured her that they were planning a rescue, but that it would take time. In fact, they were not even confident it could be done with any ship in the system.
What followed was the worst order she could have possibly imagined, even worse than the order to perform the dive maneuver. They had detected a distress signal from the enemy ship she had in tow. As a sign of cooperation with the Human Fleet, she was ordered to bring the pilot aboard her vessel.
The distress signal told them that he was losing life support and would soon be dead even if she didn’t jettison him into the black hole. She considered that a good thing, but her Commanders were clear. If she was alive and had working life support, she was ordered to bring the enemy aboard her vessel. Her sorrow at her people’s defeat quickly turned to anger at their willingness to pander to their new overlords.
She briefly considered telling them all to go to hell, rewriting the safety protocols on her navigational computer and finishing the maneuver she’d started. But she was no programmer. She was a farmer forced to be a soldier. Besides, as each day passed, she found that she wanted to die less and less. And now that the war was over, taking out one Human Fleet pilot would be symbolic at best.
It would not be a physically difficult task. Her ship had equipment for spacewalks and her suit was reinforced to protect against radiation. Her people also had an assortment of drugs to combat radiation exposure. Mother necessity had forced their ancestors to develop these drugs when it became clear to them that the radiation storms they were detecting yearly were courtesy of a local black hole and would be a regular occurrence. She could spacewalk to the enemy pilot’s airlock and retrieve him with little real risk to herself.
Which brought her to the present arrangement. As a good soldier would, she obeyed. With more reluctance than she had ever felt in her entire life, she put on a suit and entered her airlock. Her docking port was latched to the other ship’s hull like a parasite, but it was positioned nowhere near the enemy’s airlock. She could not detach and correct this, so her only option was to do a spacewalk to his airlock and lead him over to her ship.
She thought of all the times her mother had taken her hand and walked her through a busy corridor as a child. Now she was about to do something similar for her enemy. Her mother had died last year when a research station was attacked. She had quickly suppressed that thought—it would not make it any easier for her to follow through. She focused on it as a mission. There was a living being on that ship and she had been assigned to rescue that person. Who that person was had to be irrelevant.
Chapter 2
Rex had been barely conscious when she’d entered his airlock. She’d sent his ship several radio messages to let him know she was coming. He had not replied, but her sensor equipment told her there was still a living person aboard the ship. When she got to the airlock, she got a look at the interior though a porthole. Frost was forming on every surface. A man was huddled in a corner. She couldn’t tell if he was conscious at first.
When she sent another message, she saw it pop up on his holo-console. It must have given an audible sound because the man stirred. He slowly turned toward the console and in doing so caught a glimpse of her at the porthole. He rubbed at his eyes, apparently not believing what he was seeing. Mila surmised he was probably oxygen deprived and wouldn’t be surprised if he had been hallucinating. The man slowly got to his feet. A puff of white haze rose with each breath he took.
The man tapped the holo-console, presumably to stop the chime, then looked back in her direction. That was when he really saw her for the first time. Recognizing her uniform, his eye grew wide and he fumbled for the plasma pistol attached to his belt. Once he had a handle on it, he pointed it in her direction. Mila did not flinch. She tapped out a message on the tablet screen attached to her suit:
I wouldn’t recommend that. This airlock is still in vacuum.
She saw him glance at the holo-console and the message. Thankfully he slowly lowered his weapon. Mila sent another message telling him to check over the latest orders on his computer system. Dutifully, he did so.
After a minute, he looked back, regarding her with suspicion. Then with reluctance that appeared to match her own, he tapped the console. Mila drifted to the floor of the airlock as the artificial gravity came on. A few minutes later the room had pressurized and she was able to take of her helmet.
The interior door hissed open. Mila’s military inst
incts kicked in and she braced for an ambush. But the man just peeked into the room cautiously. They stared at each other for the longest minute, neither sure what to say.
Mila could kill him. The thought had come fast and strong. It was what she was trained to do. She had come armed. But he had his pistol too and he might be able to draw it faster, since he was not wearing a bulky suit. She could turn around and act like she was fiddling with the spacewalk equipment that had brought her to his ship, then fire on the exterior door and blow then both into space. Unsuited, they’d only last seconds before the vacuum, radiation and tidal forces killed them both.
Order. I have orders. This enemy soldier was not to be harmed. She wrestled for a moment with the idea that her government technically no longer existed, so perhaps the chain of command was no longer really active. Then she sighed and resumed her mission.
“Mila,” she said, pointing to herself. She knew very well that the Human Fleet pilots did not speak English.
“Rex.”
She’d had no interest in conversation beyond his name and the trip to her ship had been in silence. He had followed her nonverbal instructions with no resistance, attaching himself to the spacewalk equipment. The only hiccup in the transit had occurred outside of her airlock when she had pointed to his pistol then out to open space. Your people may be in charge of the world beyond the black hole’s orbit, but I am in charge here. He had hesitated, but eventually tossed the gun.
Once aboard they removed their suits and she had laid down some ground rules. The computer translated her words. With a few tweaks to the internal controls she bathed one half of the ship in blue light and the other half in red light. He was to stay to the red side and not come anywhere near her or anything in the blue area.
She felt silly using the same methods her mother had employed to keep Mila and her sister from arguing as children. At the same time she got a hint of satisfaction in treating the enemy soldier like an unruly child. To enforce this rule, she told Rex that if he crossed the color boundary the computer was programmed to initiate the ship’s anti-boarding weaponry and fire on his ship automatically. Her ship did not actually have anti-boarding technology, but Rex had no way to know that. She was rather proud of herself for coming up with this lie on the spot and Rex did not call her bluff.
Romance: Alien Romance: Simply Aliens: A Ten Book Alien Romance Collection (Paranormal Scifi Interracial Romance) (Fantasy New Adult Alpha Short Stories) Page 1
