Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance

by Juniper Leigh

  “What?” I finished off my plum wine in one large gulp and abandoned the glass. But when I was about to urge her to speak a second time, I saw that she wasn’t looking at me. I followed the line of her gaze and I saw what she saw: a man, a human man, and his female Galatean companion.

  “There’s a man here,” she murmured, rising slowly to her feet.

  “Do you want to go talk to him?”

  But she was already on her way. And the man, short and thin like most human men, with a mop of dirty-blond hair and a scraggly goatee, brightened immediately upon seeing Ara.

  “Hello!” he said in English, and she laughed her delight. I helped her move toward the couple, who seemed to share in Ara’s excitement.

  The man was wearing a traditional Galatean tunic in green and yellow, and his companion—a lovely bronze-skinned creature—wore white satin. As we approached, I could see that her belly was swollen with child, like a sail that grew full-bellied with the wanton wind.

  “Hello!” Ara called out, extending her hand even before she had reached the human and his Galatean friend. Partner? Had they themselves had a commitment ceremony in this very square? “I am Dr. Araceli Cross,” she said, and she and the human man shook hands.

  “Dr. Cross, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I’m Robert Welsh, and this is Ayla vel’Myracalf.”

  “It’s such a pleasure to meet you both. I hadn’t expected to see another human in this village.” She was glancing between Robert and Ayla, before she remembered herself and gestured to me. “I’m so sorry, this is my friend Danovan tel’Darian.”

  “Hello,” Robert said, and Ayla smiled her own greeting.

  “Forgive me for being so bold,” Ara said, and I could see her scientist’s eyes twinkling as she spoke, unable to stop herself from asking a series of questions anyone else would find rude and obtrusive, “but… the baby.” She gestured to Ayla’s belly, and Ayla rubbed it affectionately with one hand. “Is it yours?”

  “Oh, yes,” Robert confirmed, slinking an arm around Ayla’s waist. Ayla was petite by Galatean standards, but she was still nearly a head taller than Robert. It would have been exceedingly awkward for him to try to put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Tell me,” Ara went on, leaning forward as she spoke, “what doctor assisted you in this conception? Was it Dr. Willis, at the GenOriens base?”

  Robert and Ayla exchanged glances, chuckling quietly. “Ah,” Robert went on, “we didn’t exactly require a doctor’s intervention to conceive.” He grinned, and I could see his cheeks reddening if only just slightly. “All the equipment is working just fine, thank you very much.”

  “But…” Ara’s expression was beginning to shift. Slowly, at first, then all at once. “But humans and Galateans can’t conceive naturally.”

  “All evidence to the contrary, Dr. Cross,” Robert said, his tone losing some of its warmth.

  “Ara,” I interjected, “maybe we should get back to the party.”

  “No.” She shrugged me off. “I’m sorry… Mr. Welsh, was it? But… I’ve built my career trying to fuse human and Galatean genomes in order to usher in a hybrid species. And all of my research suggested that it was not something that could happen naturally.”

  “Then you have bad data, Dr. Cross,” Ayla chimed in. Her tone was as serene as her words were direct. “I’m not the only Galatean woman who bears a hybrid progeny.”

  “What about a human woman carrying a Galatean child?” she asked, ever the scientist. “Have you seen that?”

  Ayla and Robert exchanged glances, and he hesitated somewhat before he responded. “We knew one such woman,” he said. “But she perished in childbirth.”

  Ara nodded somewhat sadly, as though she had half anticipated this response. “And the Galatean women—have any of them successfully lived through a live birth of a hybrid? Have any of their babies lived?”

  Ayla smiled then, her face lighting up with what she was about to disclose: “We will be the first.”

  Ara gave a quick nod of her head and thanked the couple before they excused themselves to go back to the dance. We could see them, two dark silhouettes against the glow of the firelight, one round with new life.

  “I don’t understand,” Ara was muttering, drawing my attention back to her. “In all our clinical trials, we were not able to get a human and a Galatean to procreate naturally. I personally oversaw over a hundred couples before I developed my treatment.” She looked up at me with wide and desperate eyes. “This isn’t supposed to be possible. GenOriens spent a fortune because this wasn’t supposed to be possible.”

  I crossed my arms in front of me and looked back at the couple, now swaying in unison to the music. I wondered what they knew of GenOriens and the treatments Dr. Cross had been developing. Probably very little—Robert Welsh was probably some rich tourist who had decided to set up shop in a small Galatean town, fallen in love, and let nature take its course. He didn’t know that what they had done was supposed to be impossible.

  “Well, it’s good news, then, isn’t it?” I asked, trying to draw Ara out of her scientist’s brain a little. “To see that it is possible.”

  “Yes, yes,” she agreed, but her tone was almost absent, like she was simply trying to silence me. A sigh caught itself in the back of my throat.

  “At any rate,” I went on, taking her by the elbow in an effort to direct her back to the party, “I’m sure Christian will have all the answers you need when you see him.”

  This snapped her back to me in an instant, and she pressed her hands against my chest. “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Danovan,” she said. “Before. I wanted to tell you that I don’t want that life anymore. When I see him again, I’m going to—” She stopped dead and looked at her hands. One was covered in my mother’s painted vines, the other bore no decoration at all. “My ring.” She peered up at me with a panic in her eyes. “My ring!” she repeated, and staggered back toward the house.

  I turned on my heel and caught her by the arm, helping her to move across the cobblestone. Snaking an arm about her waist, I essentially lifted her up the steps to the front door, and she burst in, her eyes darting furtively around the room. “I hope I didn’t lose it at the bonfire,” she was saying as she crept over the wood floors. Then something occurred to her and she pointed up the staircase. “Would you help me?” she asked, and I went to her side and lifted her into my arms.

  “Your mother put all these wonderful oils into the hot water,” she was explaining as I climbed the flight of stairs. “Maybe it slipped off while I was bathing.”

  Sure enough, there it was, against the metal grating of the drain. She plucked it out of the basin and held it in the palm of her hand so that it glimmered in the low light.

  “I’m going to give it back to him,” she murmured, clutching it in her curled fingers. “When I see him again. I’m going to give it back.”

  “Why?” I asked, my voice a hushed whisper. “Don’t you love him?”

  I saw those piercing blue eyes grow glassy with the onset of tears, and she could only shake her head. “I don’t know,” she choked out on the crest of a sob, and I gathered her to me and squeezed her tight.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. I just held her and let her cry against the fabric of my tunic. After a few moments, she pulled away, and I could see smears of gold across her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, self-conscious as she wiped at her eyes. “The wine…”

  I grinned a little, chuckling under my breath. “It’s fine, Ara. Why don’t we go back to the party?”

  She peered up at me, and I saw her make a decision. Her expression softened and she stepped back, unclasping the golden belt around her waist and letting it clatter against the stone floor. Then she tugged the gown up over her head and tossed it onto the counter. She was wearing nothing underneath it.

  I allowed my gaze to rove hungrily over her exposed form, and I felt myself salivatin
g at the sight of her.

  “Be careful,” I warned her. “I won’t be able to stop myself.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t want you to.”

  Chapter 14:

  Dr. Araceli Cross

  Everything I knew, everything I had come to understand as truth, had been duly undermined in the course of the last several days. My work, my relationship, my friends, colleagues, my home—everything. When I spoke with Ayla and Robert in front of the blazing bonfire, I knew one thing unequivocally: someone had been tampering with my work. Someone had fixed my sample selection; someone had misreported the findings. Somewhere, something had been purposefully sabotaged, because there was no other explanation. Unless there was some unknown element planetside on Galatea which made hybrid conception possible—a highly unlikely possibility, given what we knew about the planet already—then someone had been destroying my work from the inside out.

  And Christian was alive, and looking for me. Was Cat alive, too? My colleagues on the Leviathan, were they with him? My test subjects, all of the souls for whom I cared so deeply—it was too much to keep in mind at once. My brain was an unkempt cutting room floor, and I couldn’t escape the flashes of their faces across the cinema screen on the backs of my eyes.

  But then there was Danovan, and there was plum wine, and dancing, and sweetmeats, and celebration, and I wanted to be possessed by him. I wanted to feel his strong arms around me, and I wanted him to fill me up and make me forget everything else. He was the only sturdy thing in the chaos of my life, and I wanted to take him inside of me and feel what it was like to have him.

  The wine had made me bold when I tugged the gown off over my head and let my adornments fall to the floor. He looked at me for one long, silent moment, eying me like a predator might eye its prey, before he swept me into his arms and carried me silently out of the wet room and into his chambers.

  I forgot about the pain in my leg as he laid me down on the bed, a nest of down pillows and handmade quilts. He stared down at me, the intensity of his eyes boring into me, before he tugged his tunic off over his head. He was chiseled, as it from stone, and the muscles of his abdominals rippled as he bent to tug off his pants.

  I watched with wide, expectant eyes as his sizable member sprang free, rigid and ready. He was a remarkable specimen, the tribal paint on his face a temporary echo of the dark tattoos that climbed up his thigh and around his hip: designs in repeating, boxlike patterns.

  He didn’t give me much more of an opportunity to gaze at him before he dropped to his knees and pried my legs apart with his hands, his fingers fiercely gripping my flesh. He trailed a flurry of kisses along my uninjured thigh before spreading the delicate petals of my sex wide and lapping at the pith of my desire with the tip of his eager tongue.

  A moan emanated from my parted lips as I ran my hands over my breasts, my hips moving of their own accord along with the rhythm of Danovan’s ministrations. His tongue moved lower, lower, until it was probing at my entrance; the sensation sent a shudder down my spine. “Please,” I groaned, “Please…”

  “Not yet.”

  He kissed his way up my pubic mound and along the valley of my belly, up the curve of my breasts, until he flicked his tongue playfully over one of my nipples, hardened with my wanting.

  By the time his mouth reached my mouth, I could feel the head of his turgid cock pressing insistently at my wet entrance. I arched my back and curled my hips forward, wanting to feel him pass the threshold and fill me utterly. His tongue was an intrepid explorer in the cavern of my mouth, and his hands curled around my wrists, pressing them down and holding me in place against the nest of pillows.

  I couldn’t take it—I needed him. I felt frenzied, possessed, and I tried to thrash my body beneath him, but he was so heavy, and the air was so heavy, and all I could do was wait. He smirked down at me as he locked his eyes on mine. “Tell me what you want,” he said, his voice a husky grumble in his throat.

  “I want you to fuck me,” I begged, admiring how his silver skin all but glowed in the moonlight. I could still hear the music and the crackling of the bonfire outside, but the world had nearly fallen away. And it fell away completely when he finally thrust himself deep into me.

  I cried out, filled to capacity by his probing phallus and pleasantly surprised by the presence of a small ridge at the base of his pubis, perfectly positioned to stimulate my clitoris as he moved in and out of me at an increasingly fervent pace.

  “Oh, God,” I shrieked, wanting to grip him, to hold on to him, but he was still pressing my wrists down. He plowed himself into the center of my desire, and I was shocked to find my climax starting to build already. My orgasm broke like waves against the rocks of my wanting, and I called out his name while he rode me to completion, the muscles of my internal wall clamping down around the intrusion of him.

  He grunted, murmuring something in breathy Galatean, before pulling out of me and releasing my wrists from his grasp. Then he circled an arm around my waist and turned me over, lifting my ass into the air before he thrust himself back into my dripping wet orifice. He gripped me fiercely by the hips and I could do nothing but curl my fingers around the blankets and hold on for dear life as he had his way with me.

  His hands traveled up my sides until they came around to the front of me to cup my breasts as he fucked me from behind, and I let myself go, allowed myself to revel in the pure sensation. One of his hands abandoned my breasts and traveled south again, and he began to rub at my sensitive clitoris as he plowed into me. “I want to feel it again,” he said, his tone low but urgent, “your climax. I want it again.”

  I pressed myself back into him, more than happy to oblige his request. I grew tense with the onset of orgasm, lost to the feeling of him deep inside of me, his fingertips on my most sensitive place. I thought of his impending release and experienced my own, again, at the thought of him coming inside of me. And with a cry of his own, that was precisely what he did. His hands came back to my hips as he thrust finally into me, pouring out his seed. We were both sweating, panting, in the aftermath of it, and he teetered on his knees behind me as I felt his enormous cock began to soften. After the span of a few heartbeats, he pulled out and I could feel his emissions running, hot, over the lips of my sex and down my legs.

  Danovan collapsed next to me and tugged me toward him. I settled in to rest my head against his chest, our bodies sticky with our efforts. He fell asleep there, with me curled in his arms. But I couldn’t rest. We would be leaving Hiropass in the morning, and I didn’t have the words to ask him if this was merely the result of too much stress and too much wine, or if I could have him again, and again, and again.

  Part 4: The Bloodletting

  Chapter 15:

  Dr. Araceli Cross

  I was dreaming a sweet something when the sleepy hum of a man emerging from the depths of his slumber roused me from my own. We were warm and calm beneath a pile of handmade quilts, atop a mattress of down pillows. Nothing hurt; I was a blissful blank slate, and I knew only that this warm, snoring form next to me was a welcome presence. I smiled when he reached out in his sleep and slung an arm over me. My response was to scoot back so that I was pressed against him, and I was all but entirely enveloped by his considerable stature. His skin was unimaginably soft, and warm, smooth, and hairless, and I loved the tender way he hugged me close.

  I hadn’t yet opened my eyes, but I could see the skin of my eyelids glow a dark orange with the morning light that was seeping in through the window. Unwelcome thoughts began to invade our bubble, and I pushed them out, out; I wasn’t ready to face the day. And maybe the glowing orange was just the first break of dawn. Maybe we had hours still left to us before we would have to wake.

  I turned over to face him and snuggled up close so that I could rest my cheek against the pillow of his torso. My left hand went wandering over the continent of his skin, traversing the chiseled tributaries of his abdomen that led to the well of
his belly button. As I touched him, I envisioned him in my mind’s eye: that skin, like polished silver, that I had last seen smeared with the tribal paint that accompanied his celebration garb. No doubt mine was in similar disrepair: I had been painted in stunning gold, and I’d probably ruined it. I opened one eye just a bit to peek at him, and I could see streaks and smears of black and gold where we’d run together. I smiled, relishing the idea of our passion being written so clearly on our bodies.

  I tilted my chin up then so that I could look at his face, and I saw that his eyes were already open and he was gazing down at me. There were flecks of gold around his mouth, and when I reached up to press my fingers against my mouth, they came away black and gold. We grinned at one another, the ridge of his brow casting a shadow over his eyes, and we laughed, our mirth ringing out in the silence.

  “We’re a mess,” I murmured. “I hope we haven’t ruined your mother’s blankets.”

  “They can be washed,” came his low reply. “And so can we. Come on.” He climbed out of our nest, and I gave an audible groan of protest. He smiled down at me as he planted his feet on the floor, allowing the blankets to fall away. And I got my first good look at him, unabashed, in the light. My God, but he was a fine specimen, looking as though he were chiseled out of granite. His hairlessness gave his silver skin the look of being shined, and his lack of pubic hair left his most sensitive area utterly exposed for my viewing pleasure. I sat up on the bed and reached out, trailing my fingertips over his muscled thigh and along the front of his pubis. I felt the slight ridge just above his shaft which I had noticed before and which, no doubt, had led to the ease with which I had climaxed. Intelligent design, indeed.

  The more time I spent with Danovan, the less alien he looked to me, even with the shelflike ridge of his brow. He and his family were not some other species; they were my friends. They were quickly becoming my loved ones. And while I had always had respect for the Galatean people, what I was experiencing now went far beyond that.