Dante’s Command: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Science Fiction Alien Romance) (Survival Wars Book 1)

by Hana Starr

  “I hope so,” she said quietly. “And actually, could you grab a little bit of everything else that I might not be familiar with? If you could? I’m going to have to adapt the plans to work with heat, but I’ll have to do it in two stages: one based on what would be available on Earth, and the next would be converting it to what’s available here. That’ll go faster if I can do some small experiments.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding again. “I will do this, and grab you some more assistants along the way so they may help me carry it. And if you have any questions, even the smallest child here could answer them. This is where we live, after all.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone else,” she pointed out. “It looks like you and the Queen are the only ones who have bracelets left.”

  Dante blinked a little, and then waved his hand in the air at waist-height as if to get her attention to something he’d just thought of. “If I have spare time, might I make you a bracelet? You will be able to communicate with anyone, anywhere.”

  She was relieved. “That sounds great! Thank you so much, Dante. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  The alien turned away with a pained little laugh, his shoulders slumping. “You would still be happy and successful on Earth.”

  He hurried away, looking as though he was afraid she would touch his butt.

  I’m trying to be happy here, but you’re not making it very easy.

  Chapter Eleven

  Despite what she had thought, the next long while was the happiest she had felt in a long while. Working like this was what she had always done best, steadily plugging away at new information and delighting in every single accomplishment –whether or not it was a failure. She filled endless leathery pads with scrawling information, keeping them separated into piles. One for observations, and the other for possible combinations she could utilize.

  Some of the materials, the work sent her back to daydreams of high school and college. Her hands moved by themselves, running through familiar motions for the thousandth time. Others, they delighted her with their strangeness.

  This really was her element, poring over every aspect of their existence right there in her hands.

  The first few days, she grabbed Dante and taught him how to make solar panels. Ever since then, he had been teaching her two other assistants the same thing so that they could continue to recreate the project. As soon as they had a grasp on it, he would return to her side. As it was, he was never far away and she constantly paused to ask him a quick bit of question. He answered quickly, always proving that his brain was nearly as sharp –if not sharper- than hers.

  And she had discovered that Venus obviously did not operate on any sort of day-night cycle. That was perhaps the most surprising, though it made sense in line with everything else they did. They worked until they were tired, ate when they were hungry, and slept as long as they needed to, and then rose again to follow the pattern once more. This ensured that no matter what, someone was always awake and busy somewhere; in fact, though they never planned for it, there were often entire groups whose lives simply happened to follow the same pattern. It was beautifully simple and unique, a far cry from the impossible structure on Earth.

  As far as she knew, no one ever complained. Dante certainly didn’t.

  And that meant she was truly able to work as long as possible, sleep enough to recharge, and then tackle the problems again. Not even during her freest years of live had she been able to do what she pleased without certain restrictions. There were no shops to close, no dates to catch, and absolutely no time restrictions.

  Only occasionally did she spare some thought for her fellow scientists and exactly what they must be thinking of her disappearance back on Earth, but when she did, the sadness was maddening until she forced herself back into her work.

  One “morning” she rose from her bed and headed out down the tunnel. It was a fairly quiet time, and when she passed by other rooms she heard the distinct sound of deep-sleep breathing. There were a few others out and about, mainly miners returning to their homes, and their replacements about to head out, but otherwise she was alone.

  Dante wouldn’t be awake yet, she knew. He had stayed at the lab later than her, working on the last pair of solar panels even after the two other assistants went home.

  “Are you sure?” she had asked. “I just don’t want you to burn yourself out.”

  He shrugged and flashed her a glance. “Do humans ever experience an emotional state where they do not wish to sleep?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, thinking of herself. “They certainly do.”

  “Well, I do not wish to sleep, so I shall finish these. I will get them installed up on the surface afterwards and begin laying out the Grid to get their power flowing.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Just be sure to leave an extra or two for me to experiment on.”

  “Of course.”

  And then he went back to work as though she wasn’t there. She did stay around to watch his muscles moving for a moment, but when he started to falter and become self-conscious, that was when she went to bed.

  I wonder how much later he was up, she thought. Part of her really wanted to catch someone so that she could see where he slept, but that would be an invasion of his privacy.

  And she was hungry, anyway. Drone food wasn’t too bad now that she’d gotten used to the realization that the “pet” rabbit creatures everywhere were actually a much-inbred wild species too dull-witted to realize they were food. She only wished there were more options other than meat, but the rabbit creatures made up a majority of their diet, now. There was no way to get around the fact that they no longer had the freedom to harvest other sources of food as they wished.

  Hopefully, she would be able to change all that. Dante had told her they used to have the equivalent of greenhouses, but they were destroyed and the materials repurposed.

  This was too soon after waking up to be thinking about such things yet. Mariella stopped by the meal hall and picked up a cooled plate of salted meat and a carved mug of water. She was turning around, scanning the tables for where she wanted to sit today, when someone burst through the entrance on the other side of the hall.

  Concerned, she looked up to see why one of the normally-calm Drones was running around like this, and then her heart surged to a stop.

  It was no Drone, and it was not alone.

  There were three of them pressing into the room, about half the height of a man and extremely pale. Even compared to her, they were pale, nearly colorless. Their joints were odd and insectile, and their heads were bulbous. Each had a pair of enormous, bulging black eyes and clacking mandibles.

  And she saw, as one climbed on top of a table rather than going around it, that they had no hands or feet. They walked on curved appendages, the tips of which were knife-sharp.

  Mites, she thought, in the instant before Hell broke loose.

  The Drones around the meal hall had also looked up at the disturbance, their faces puckered with disgust. Their expressions changed to horror and fear. They burst out into the sort of frantic, high-pitched buzzing that she only ever heard when they were agitated. Mariella screamed with them, but she knew there was no time to waste.

  There was no time to do anything, before one of the Mites launched itself at her and knocked her onto her back. All the air went out of her lungs and she gasped painfully, struggling, but the little creature was incredibly strong for its size and held her down with its sharp appendages. Pain lanced through her skin where the appendages pierced her skin, and she stared up in horror at the blank eyes of the Mite as it lunged its pincers down toward her neck.

  And she saw in this thing’s eyes that it was intelligent, and knew exactly what it was doing. They knew exactly who she was, and they meant to take her out.

  Not only that, but if they were inside the Hive, it was over.

  The siege had broken.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the rounded shape o
f something she knew well. She flung her arm out, fingertips just barely brushing the handle, and she grabbed it. Bringing the stone mug up and around, she bashed it against the side of the bug’s face and watched in horror as its skull crumpled in bloodlessly on itself.

  Shoving it away with a scream, she looked around and saw that the other two had been incapacitated, though the Drones who had taken care of them were bleeding and scuffed with dust. But, the entrance burst open and more and more began to spill in.

  Dante! she realized. Where is he?

  The entrance was lower than this point, and she suspected Dante had either been overrun, or had escaped up to the lab. No matter what, she also needed to get to the lab.

  Turning on her heel, she headed out the nearest tunnel mouth and started running. Chaos reigned in the halls, shouting and thumps and the sound of rending flesh. Mites were fighting, pouring in. They were in her way, hordes of them, and she had to turn around and run in the wrong direction cutting through some unfamiliar side tunnels to try and correct herself.

  She could only desperately hope that her general sense of direction was enough to keep her on track even with all the twists and turns she had to take.

  Her breath rasped heavily in her lungs, and her stomach was a twisting mess.

  “Mariella!” someone shouted. It could only be Dante, and she turned to find him slamming his shoulder into a Mite. With a crunch, its chest collapsed inward and he skidded the rest of the way to her. “Are you hurt?” he gasped breathlessly.

  “I’m okay!” she reassured him, despite the puncture wound in her leg. She raised one hand to touch the bloody scrape along his cheek. His expression tightened, but he didn’t move away. His agitated humming increased in volume, though. “Dante, what’s happening?”

  He growled irritably, and gestured her on with him to run while they talked. “I am not sure how they broke in, but they have. Worry not,” he reassured her, like always. She frowned at him but let him keep going. “Worry not, for this will not be the whole of them. This is a warning, a message. They want to kill you.”

  She gasped out, “You can understand them?”

  “We share a similar dialect,” he grunted, “but that is not the point. You are so important to us, as well as your experiments. We must secure the lab.”

  “That’s where I was headed.”

  In a few minutes, she started to recognize where they were by the specific and unique ridges of the tunnel’s surface. And then she saw the entrance to the lab, absolutely covered in a crowd of Mites so thick that they were piled up on top of each other, kicking and squirming. She heard their thick skin rasp together and squirmed uncomfortably at the sound.

  “Stay back,” Dante spat.

  She was too slow to listen, and took another step forward. The alien shoved her back roughly, making her stumble and fall.

  When she looked up, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  All this time, she’d never seen Dante be angry. But, he was frenzying now. She looked at him and saw for perhaps the first time that despite his bashfulness, he was strong. But, it wasn’t merely the strength of his muscles that she’d noticed so many times before. This was the strength of his fury, and it was out of control. He moved too fast to see, limbs a blur as he grabbed and hit, throwing the small assailants around and bashing them against the wall. Pieces of their bodies flew as he smashed them against the ground, or dashed their heads together. And his face was twisted in a terrifying mask, teeth bared, as he grabbed yet another attacker with his bare hands and ripped it clean in half.

  There was no telling how long she sat there, eyes wide, watching him destroy. When he disappeared inside the lab, crashing began. Each crash hurt her heart. She could feel jagged splinters digging in her lungs from the fear that her work, or the man defending her work, was hurt.

  When everything was done and she heard no more, Mariella painfully pushed herself to her feet. “Dante?” she called softly, and immediately regretted it. The taste of rot filled her mouth, and she could already see the bodies littering the tunnel were turning black and putrefying.

  There was no answer.

  Holding onto the wall, she took wobbling steps through the mess of chaos and poked her head around the corner.

  Dante sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by death and broken solar panels. There were pieces of Mite everywhere, and she saw so many instruments cracked open on the floor that she would be surprised if any were left unscathed.

  “Dante?”

  He didn’t look up, but he did speak. “I am sorry you have to see this, Mariella. It isn’t a sight that any woman should have forced upon her.”

  She approached, still picking her way through before she could crouch down in front of him. Something squished under her leg, but she held back her grimace. “It’s okay. I’m just glad that you’re okay.”

  “Yes,” he sighed, and then lowered his head more. “I accidentally broke your experiments. I could not stop myself.”

  Stroking his scraped cheek again, Mariella repeated, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. We’re both still alive, right?”

  She waited until he nodded. It was a long time in coming.

  “Good, so, as long as we’re still alive, we can make more of anything that was broken Okay? The only way this would be bad is if we were dead, but we’re not. So, right now, it’s just a setback and nothing more.”

  He continued to not look at her. “I feel as though I have failed you.”

  “No!” she protested. “If anything, I’m glad it was you who broke my stuff. I really like you. If anyone else did it, I’d be really mad.”

  After a very long moment of quiet, he laughed.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was impossible to believe that after all she had gone through, the biggest challenge was suddenly a lack of inspiration.

  In the time it took to clean up the remnants of the Mites after fighting them back, Mariella and Dante, and her two assistants, managed to rebuild nearly everything that had been destroyed. The room still stank a little but at least it looked immaculate again.

  But, now that the preparations of the Zenith Grid Junior –the name amused her, though Dante simply didn’t get the joke- were nearing completion, she’d run into the issue of exactly how she was going to ensure that they didn’t simply short out from prolonged exposure to the heat. Actually, they were already having the same problem with the solar panels on the surface, too. Technically, they worked flawlessly. She couldn’t have been happier about how efficient they were, and the Drones seemed to be wandering around in a better mood than before, but they were constantly having to send out teams back to the surface to unhook the panels so they would cool down.

  Back on earth, there was a period of no solar activity for the Grid to cool off during, but up here, there was nothing.

  And down in the lava vents? Forget about it.

  But, nothing she had tried so far was working. It was maddening, nearly infuriating to be stuck so close, but she knew that sitting there in a fog would only make things worse. There was only one thing to do, and that was to go for a walk.

  If she hadn’t been here all along, she would have noticed the difference. The lights were a fraction brighter. The Drones walked a bit slower through the tunnels, as though they were no longer hurrying quite as swiftly from one place to another. In fact, they no longer spent forever in the tunnels.

  Her walk took her out to the main cavern, where she saw some children scampering after each other under the watchful eye of their male keepers. Some others were speaking, buzzing to each other in muted, calm tones. And others were by themselves, some eating, and the rest just tilting their heads back to look up at the ceiling.

  Mariella wondered what they thought about, but she had no way of asking.

  Suddenly, one of the children fell. Mariella turned to watch a female alien leap out from nowhere and start buzzing and growling at the keepers, who backed away submissively. The child was already up an
d running around again, but the furious scolding continued.

  And then the female smacked one of the hapless males. Anger surged up in her stomach, her hand balling into a fist, and she started forward.

  “Don’t,” a voice said from behind her.

  She stopped, looking down to see Dante’s warm hand wrapped around her wrist. An instant flush came over her body, tingling down deep inside her. “Oh,” she said, startled that he was staying so close to her. “How…how long have you been here?”

  “I just arrived,” he said, and it was an obvious lie. She knew in that instant that he’d been watching her, maybe even following her. The warmth inside her deepened, but it was strange and not quite attraction. Was it affection?