My Alien Lover: An Interracial Paranormal Romance Story

by Lionel Law

  Katrina stared at him, her fists clenched into balls, aware the entire time of the pistol on his left hip. She had read up about Rodriguez, and knew he was not only a good officer, but one of the best shots on the ship. “Yes, Commander,” she seethed instead, trying not to let the spit fly from her lips. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. Instead of walking, I’m giving you a bit of a break. Hovercraft four in the cargo bay is tasked for my quarters. Ride with the Dirts to the setup position, help them unload, and then fly the craft back here. You and I can enjoy lunch together instead of field rations.”

  “Yes, Commander. Thank you.” Katrina held her temper in check until Rodriguez walked off, before walking back into the ship. The cargo bay had ten hovercraft, which would serve as both cargo transports for the ship initially, and later as patrol and work vehicles. They could be fitted with weapons, she knew, although she doubted Rodriguez would trust an armed hovercraft to a bunch of Dirts, especially after the events prior. Five of the colonists had already been shot by armed guards, all for seemingly being insubordinate to Peers.

  Hovercraft four was close to the entrance, it’s back already loaded up with the flat panels that would snap together in order to make the majority of Rodriguez’s private quarters. All of the Peers were getting their own houses, some larger than others, while it had been put out that the Dirts were expected to construct their shelters from materials “on hand.” What that meant, of course, was that the Dirts would live in shantys. The crew, four men who looked both bored and scared, were waiting for her. “You’re the XO’s personal girl, right?” the driver asked, checking a tablet by his leg. “We just got orders to bring you along with us.”

  “No problem,” she said, falling into the relaxed language among Dirts. It wasn’t their fault she had been picked by Rodriguez, and she took no offense at the driver’s phrasing. “You got room for me in there?”

  “We can squeeze you in if you want,” one of the passengers replied. “But it’ll be tight.”

  “Think I’ll just hang onto the side rails then,” she replied. “Did that often enough growing up, I don’t think I’ve lost the touch.”

  The run to where Rodriguez’s house was to be built was short, no more than three miles at most. Iova City was to be built in a configuration very similar to old aristocratic plans, with a central town that would house the Peers, surrounded by the shantys of the Dirts, with the agricultural fields and other land, all owned by the Peers, beyond that. It would take months for surveys and large plots of land to be divvied up, so for now the focus was on the main portion of Iova City itself.

  Landing, the hovercraft settled on what passed for grass in the new colony, although Katrina wasn’t sure how photosynthesis worked with grass that was naturally reddish. Whatever the systems involved, the grass didn’t stand a chance against the panels of the shelter, which first used built in proton blasters to obliterate the underlying vegetation and dirt until it was smooth, before sinking plasteel tendrils down to drill into the underlying bedrock (or one hundred meters deep, whichever came first). From there, the walls were carried and snapped into position in two meter wide sections, before the roof was laid on. Once in place, the crew took out their tools to finish sealing and weatherproofing the structure. “You know, if you want you can take the hovercraft back,” the driver, who Katrina had learned was named David, said. “I think they wanted to get another twenty or thirty of these things up today. I’d rather the other crews have crafts to use instead of having to haul all that shit by hand.”

  “Okay. Thanks guys.” Katrina jumped into the driver’s seat of the hovercraft, watching for a moment as the four men went back to work. Staring at the sky, she made a split second decision, and fired up the engines. She had used hovercrafts like this one before on both Earth and Luna, and knew exactly what to do. Punching the throttle, she rocketed off, hanging a sharp left turn as soon as she could, taking off across the fields. She only hoped the hovercraft didn’t have any sort of tracking device on it, but even if it did, she didn’t care. She was either going to live free or die.

  Chapter 4

  Katrina was surprised it took the ship as long as it did to contact her. She had assumed any vehicle that would be entrusted to a Dirt would come with all the bells and whistles when it came to security, including tracker and even an electronic shut down signal. Instead, it was a half hour before the communications console flickered on, and Commander Rodriguez’s face appeared. “What the hell do you think you are doing?”

  “I didn’t leave Luna behind in order to become a slave to a sadistic asshole,” she replied, giving him the finger. “Especially not a sex slave. You want to go fuck someone, Rodriguez, you can either find someone willing, or just go fuck yourself. Not really caring either way.”

  Rodriguez turned a shade of pink Katrina thought was rather funny. “I swear that if you do not turn that hovercraft around and return to the ship right now I will make sure you are hunted down and punished severely. You do not want that.”

  “Maybe you didn’t listen to what I just said,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “So I’m going to put it very clearly, in very small words. I will not be a slave. I will not be a servant, I will not be beneath anyone. So before you start the whole ‘Dirt’ stuff, realize that every time you mention anything degrading or offensive to me, the greater your chances of not recovering your precious hovercraft intact, but instead destroyed at the bottom of some cliff or something.”

  “You can’t, the hovercraft has a deadman system.”

  Katrina laughed. “This is a Mitsubishi-Daimler C-312 hovercraft, Rodriguez. I’ve used these things for years, and I know exactly how to get around your silly deadman systems. Or did you think when your Qual friends on Luna were assigning me to work out on the surface by myself, that I was actually stopping the damn craft ever kilometer in order to pick up chunks of rock?”

  The Commander had no answer to her question, but stayed on the line. “Well, if I can’t get you to do that, I can at least keep this line open. You don’t have the ability to turn the communications off, I know that much.”

  Katrina laughed and shook her head. Ignoring him for a bit, she worked her way over and around the low hills, searching for a place she could abandon the hovercraft. She had no intention of leaving it undamaged, that was for sure. If anything, she wanted to make sure she took the emergency kits and other things she was sure the ship would have made standard issue on any vehicle, and see if she could strip the craft for anything else that was useful. She doubted there were any weapons, but she hoped she could find something she could at least fashion into a weapon. It would be important.

  “Katrina,” Rodriguez began again, catching her attention. She looked down at the console, and balled up her fist. “I’m ordering you again to….”

  He never got a chance to finish his sentence, as Katrina brought her gloved hand down into the center of the screen, cracking it and turning the whole thing black. It was satisfying, but the result of her actions was that she took her eyes off of the ground in front of her. The dip in the terrain was unexpected, and the pointed rock in the dip even more so. She winced as the rock tore at the underside of the hovercraft, shrieking as it ripped through sensitive fans and levitators. The dials and gauges on the ship started immediately braying their deafening buzzes and growls, and she fought with the craft to get it out of the depression, before it scraped again along the ground, losing power.

  It took her about a hundred meters to drift to a stop, she had been going pretty fast. She bounced twice, but thankfully the landing was pretty soft, and she didn’t hurt anything. Muttering to herself, Katrina climbed out of the cockpit to assess the damage and gather supplies. It only took seconds to determine that she couldn’t fix the hovercraft, and unless the ship recovered the vehicle it would never fly again. Walking around, she found the emergency kit, which had exactly what she hoped, a canteen of water, two ration packs, a first aid kit and most importantly, signal
lasers. While she didn’t want to use the flares for their intended purpose, the lasers could be focused and combined into a pretty decent fire starter. She also found the tool kit, which she used to take apart the seat belt assembly on the driver’s side, giving her a three meter hunk of webbing she could use as rope or for many purposes.

  Looking at her assembled riches, Katrina sighed. While she had some interesting things, she didn’t have what she most needed, a knife or other cutting tool. “Well, it’s just going to have to do the job,” she said, pulling out the longest screwdriver. With all of her supplies, she needed a bag of some sort, which she fashioned from taking the fabric cover off of the back of the driver’s seat, and tied the webbing to the corners to fashion a pack of sorts. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but she thought she could transport it reasonably well. She didn’t know if the hovercraft had a tracking system, but she did know they could have gotten her position from the commlink she had with Rodriguez. It would give them an area to start searching in, and she wanted to be as far away as she could. She was just glad the ship didn’t have any dedicated flyers yet. It would take them at least an hour to reach her position, she hoped, provided Rodriguez hadn’t sent the other hovercraft after her as soon as they noticed she was missing.

  Looking around, Katrina was glad she had been raised in the Australian outback. While it had been a few years, she still remembered her survival skills, and knew her first priority was water and food. With the planet having more water than Earth, she didn’t think it was going to be too much of a problem, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Throwing her bag over her shoulder, she started off towards what she thought were some low lying hills in the distance. While the hills themselves were misty and unclear, she could see that there were forests in between, starting in just a few miles of where she was.

  An hour later, Katrina was thankful for the fact that the Glorious Enterprise had landed towards the south pole of the planet. Despite the drugs and the electrical stimulation, her body had forgotten what hard labor felt like, and her mind was tired as she slogged her way through the strangely hued grasses surrounding her. If the ship had landed anywhere near the equator, she was sure she’d have dropped of heat exhaustion by now. When the first trees came into view, she stopped, kneeling in the dirt near one of the trunks, hoping to recover her breath. Taking a deep swallow of her canteen, she sloshed the bottle around, concerned she had only half a liter left. “Then again, I don’t even know if the water on this planet is actually good to drink,” she muttered to herself. “For all I know, this planet rains down hydrogen peroxide, in which case I’ll make a very fresh, very bleached blonde corpse pretty damn soon.”

  After resting for a bit, Katrina headed off into the woods, looking for anything that looked like a familiar sign of water. As she moved, she kept her ears open, letting herself take in the sights and sounds of her new home. Overall, it was breathtaking, and she was glad that even if she was going to die on an alien world, it was going to be one this beautiful.

  The first trickle of water she found could barely be called a stream, it was so narrow, but the banks on each side said that during spring melts or rains, she was sure it led to something. Following the water upstream, she heard the river before she saw it, emerging from a small thicket in the woods to find a small pool being fed by a short, maybe one meter tall waterfall. The vegetation surrounding it was thick and lush, and Katrina could see something that looked like fruit hanging from vines. She started to reach for one before she remembered she wasn’t on Earth any longer. Although the bright orange fruit may have looked familiar, they weren’t oranges, and could be poisonous.

  “There’s gotta be something here I can use to check if this is any good,” she muttered to herself, unslinging her bag and rooting around for the emergency kit. “I am not going to just caveman the damn thing.”

  Katrina was so lost in her bag that she didn’t hear the rustling of the bushes until it was too late, and the startled squawk made her jerk her head up. On the other side of the pool, an alien stood. He was about her height she thought, and amazingly muscular, almost to the point of looking like an anatomy poster. The thing that stood out most to her at first though was his skin, which could only be described as golden, topped by a combed back shock of dark green hair. His eyes were also greenish, she thought, and were a bit larger than what she would think of as human eyes, although she was pretty sure her own eyes were bugging out. “First contact,” she thought to herself, “I’m the person who ends up with first contact with an alien species.”

  She thought back to all of the stories she had read as a child, or all the movies she watched. In none of them was the person making first contact a tired, sweaty fugitive, and in none of them did they just wander into the first contact scenario. “Guess it could be worse,” she thought, looking at the alien. “He looks kind of handsome, and he hasn’t pulled out a weapon to shoot me yet.”

  In fact, Katrina thought as she kept her eyes on the alien, who still hadn’t moved, the alien was more than just kind of handsome. His clothing covered his groin area, but the rest of him was semi exposed, except for some foot coverings that looked a lot like low boots. Keeping her hands very slow, she showed him her empty hands, and tried to smile. “Hi.”

  The alien cocked his (was she sure it was a male? Was she even sure this species had genders? Well, he looked masculine) head to the side, and brought his own hands up. “Hi?”

  Katrina’s smile came more easily, and she waved. “Hi. My name’s Katrina.”

  The alien shook his head, clearly showing he didn’t understand. Katrina took a deep breath, and placed her hand on her chest. “Katrina. Ka-tree-nah.”

  “Katrina,” the alien said, a slight reverberation in his voice that sounded good in her ears. His voice was a pleasant tenor, not at all what she would have expected to be paired with the reverb, but it was exciting to listen to.

  Katrina nodded and touched her chest again. “Katrina,” she said, before pointing at him. “You?”

  The alien tapped his chest, and spoke again. “Da’al.”

  Katrina tried to repeat the sound. “Day-oh?” A snippet of a very old song came to her head, and she wondered if she had to tally any bananas.

  The alien shook his head, and repeat himself. “Day-al,” he said slowly, then repeated himself at normal speed. “Da’al.”

  “Da’al,” Katrina said, rolling it around her mouth a few times. “Da’al.” Sitting down, she pulled her bag in front of her, opening it and taking out part of her ration pack. Da’al watched her cautiously for a minute, before semi ignoring her in order to take out his own container to gather water at the pool, capping it with what looked like a normal screw on cap. She took a few bites of her food, watching Da’al sit down and take a deep drink of his water, and refilling the container before getting to his feet. He looked at her for a moment, the gestured with his hand, clearly inviting her to follow him. Grabbing her bag and her ration cube, she followed, grateful when he paused at the edge of where he had come from to allow her to cross a path of stepping stones that stretched across the small creek.

  The woods Da’al led her to quickly arched upwards, and Katrina was soon gasping to keep up. Da’al on the other hand seemed to have little difficulty scaling the steep hill. Finally, on the third time she slipped, she sagged to the dirt, exhausted. “Wait,” she called up to Da’al, who had kept going. “Please, I can’t keep up.”

  Da’al stopped, looking as she struggled back to her feet, leaning forward and trying to scrabble up the hill. He turned and came down next to her, placing his hand on her shoulder. When she stopped, he took the bag from her shoulders, slinging it around his wide back before starting back up the hill, taking his time, making sure she was close behind. It was still a tough climb, and by the time she reached the top she was exhausted. The alien led her over to a small cave in the sheer rock face of the hill, carrying her bag and setting it at the entrance. Katrina was too exhausted to say any
thing else, and she sat down next to her bag, her head dropping into her chest within minutes, asleep.

  *****

  “Good morning, Katrina.”

  The voice cut through Katrina’s dream, a pleasant higher tenor that sounded somewhat familiar to her. Where had she heard that voice before?

  “The sun is coming up, I suggest you wake up now.”

  Katrina yawned and opened her eyes, blinking twice before she realized it was the alien who was speaking to her. Startled, she rolled back, knocking her head on the wall of the cave before remembering where she was. “What the fuck?”

  The alien held his hands up, smiling, and Katrina noticed that in addition to golden skin and dark green hair, he had monotone electric blue eyes that were actually very beautiful. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Startle me? I follow you to a cave yesterday, after exchanging what I think are our names, and this morning wake up to you speaking perfect English to me. I think that calls for a ‘What the fuck?’”

  The alien stepped back and sat down, leaving his hands on his knees. “I guess this will take some explanation. First of all, yes, my name is Da’al. I have what you call a last name, but I do not think your vocal cords can reproduce the sounds involved. I was using some of them yesterday, and you didn’t react like you heard me.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how it is you’re speaking English.” Katrina opened her bag and reached inside, searching for her long screwdriver. It may not have been a great weapon, but the situation was just getting weird.

  “While you were asleep, I was able to read a lot of your thought patterns. Included in that were your engrams for language. My people are what you might call psychic. It’s a useful trait, at times. For example, among ourselves we cannot lie to each other.”

  “So you can read what I’m thinking right now?” Katrina asked, fear in her voice. “I don’t know what all you read, but humans tend to enjoy having their privacy.”