by Hana Starr
Rornak’s Command
By Hana Starr
Copyright © 2016 by Hana Starr – All rights reserved.
The author holds exclusive rights to this work. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior permission of the publisher.
WARNING: This book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language. It may be considered offensive to some readers. This book is intended for adults 18+ ONLY. Please ensure this book is stored somewhere that cannot be accessed by underage readers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are used in a fictitious manner and not to be construed as real. Similarities to real people, places or events are entirely coincidental.
Message from the Author:
Thank you so much for downloading my book! I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did writing it. After reading, please give the book your honest feedback by submitting an Amazon review. It would take just a few moments and will mean the world to me to hear my reader’s feedback. I hope to deliver many more books and truly thankful I’m able to write for my audience. Please visit my website and subscribe to my newsletter where I announce new books coming out and give out free promotions/books (I do not spam and have total respect to my subscribers). Read more about me at the end of the book.
Download my next book for FREE: http://hanastarr.com
After reading my book, please consider leaving an Amazon review: click here to go to Amazon
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
About the Author
Prologue
Nelly Pierce was a child prodigy, blazing through all her schooling. As a result, she was able to assist with the construction of the International Space Station at only 17 years old, and she has never looked back. Her works of space architecture and engineering are envied all across the scientific world.
But very early one morning after she has worked overtime in her lab, something happens to change her entire world quite literally. Rornak Frozeneyes is a dragon-shapeshifting alien from Pluto, desperately seeking any assistance for the last hidden remnants of his civilization. Nelly is his only chance, so he takes her back with him against her will. Now, all she wants is to get home again. The only way to do that is to help build them a spaceship.
However, not everything is what it seems. The invaders who took over Pluto may not be as strange as they seem. A traitor mingles amidst the dragons, waiting for his chance. And Nelly can’t help but to start falling in love with Rornak. In the end, will she choose to stay or head back to earth where she belongs?
Chapter One
Her father wanted to name her Neil, after the first man to walk on the moon. He was an astronomer and grew up being labeled as crazy by his peers. Of course, her mother called him the same thing but it was full of affection rather than distaste.
“A noble name,” her mother said with tasteful disagreement, or so she was told. “But how about something more appropriate for a little girl?”
Here, she was told her father’s face fell with disappointment but he quickly brightened again at the idea that he might not have lost the battle yet. “Well, what’s the feminine version of Neil?” he asked, fondly stroking her mother’s dampened hair. It was in the aftermath of birth, in the strange peace where parent and child stare at each other and wonder where their lives go from here; it might have been the last conversation spoken in a normal manner that her parents had for years, actually.
A quick survey of the nurses brought up some sort of Italian name that just wasn’t their style at all, but the doctor suggested one which was perfect: he once knew a girl named Nelly. From the moment it was spoken, her parents loved the name and thought it quite the suitable compromise.
Those were the first words her parents ever said in her presence, but they were defining. Her child’s mind was too young to understand it at the time, but her mother’s deft tact were part of her life ever since that moment.
Her mother was but a florist, running a small business all on her own without a degree in sight, but she could have easily been an agricultural scientist or anything else she wished to be. Both her parents were intelligent and accomplished in a variety of ways, from her father’s groundbreaking observations to her mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of any plants known to man, so it was a guarantee that their daughter would be the same way.
Their only question was which would capture Nelly’s mind: exploration of the skies, or a grounding upon the earth? Both were noble missions, and they waited with bated breath.
Nelly chuckled a little as she bent over the half-finished sketch of her latest project. No one, especially not herself, could have predicted what she would eventually become. Her parents always proudly told friends and family, anyone within earshot, that she was a prodigy from day one but she knew it wasn’t like that because of the journals her mother kept and photographs in the baby- and scrapbooks. Up until about five years old, she developed just like a normal child. Reading, writing, mathematics –it was all average except a slightly higher grip on art than her peers.
No one knew quite what caused it, but she’d come to find that was just the way of things. For all that she knew, there just weren’t answers sometimes.
For some reason or another, she began to unbottle. That was the word that came out during the first of many, many visits with a counselor. Everything suddenly leapt out of her at once and quite suddenly, she was grades ahead of the other six-year-olds in her class. She devoured textbooks like her bookworm mother consumed novels, and absorbed everything else even faster; by nine years old, she had already passed all the assessments necessary to graduate eighth grade. She could nearly recite all the mandatory novels word for word, her grip of rudimentary Spanish was phenomenal, and the computer lab monitor once mentioned that only if her hands were bigger, Nelly would be a world-class typist.
Everything shown to her, she grabbed onto immediately.
There were tests, of course. However, there was nothing wrong with her aside from some understandable stress about the happenings around her which any other person not yet at double-digits wouldn’t be able to fathom. It certainly wasn’t autism, as her parents feared. Her absorption of knowledge didn’t run in a pattern of current obsessions, and she wasn’t merely learning facts by rote. Nelly knew, and applied what she knew.
High school was more difficult, and only in part because she’d been pulled into the education system of a private school that prided itself on a challenging curriculum. No, it was the stress of being tested, the unwanted attention and pressure, and the varying attitudes placed on her shoulders. After all, she was still only a child even if she talked like an adult.
It all paid off in the end very quickly, as she slid into college at 13. Four years later and she already had an Engineering degree in a field that was still relatively new to the world: space architecture.
For all that she was clever and bright, everyone around her see
med to consider her choice in degrees one of the stupidest things she’d ever done. But, she was the one laughing when NASA contacted her to ask if she would like to be an intern at their latest project. Because Nelly was who she was, she accepted, packed her bags, and headed for Washington. It was the first time she’d gone anywhere by herself, and it was the choice which defined her future.
Quite obviously, as she currently sat in her private lab with a design of her own making scratching to life beneath a pencil worn down to dullness.
At that time, it was 1998 and the International Space Station was in the late stages of development. With an estimated mass of over 400 tons –and growing ever since- there was simply no way that the ISS could be assembled on earth and then brought up to atmosphere, so it was devised that the parts would be brought up and assembled piece by piece. It took over 40 missions, and Nelly was part of it the whole way. Though she was called merely an intern, she was allowed to pilot several of the robots which completed the assembly; she hadn’t meant to learn, but she only had to watch it twice to be aware of how it was done.
When the current operator suffered a stroke and dropped the control, it seemed as though the mission might have to be abandoned but Nelly grabbed the controls and continued to input the commands like she was made for it.
The following day, she was offered a permanent position and she accepted it readily.
That had been more than 18 years ago. More than half her life had been spent within these walls, slaving away at her passions, and it was hardly unrewarded. Money and fame didn’t matter to her so much as progress. The stars was full of her own creations, designed and built by her hand. Nothing in the world was better than that.
And now, this project would change everything. This much-restarted drawing beneath her graphite-stained fingers was no mere capsule engine or little roving robot capable of performing simple tasks in outer space. No, this was going to be her legacy. It would put the name Nelly Pierce on the map.
This megastructure beneath her hands didn’t even have a name yet, though funding had already been thrown her way by any number of organizations. Her ambition had turned towards the stars, as her father’s had. She had been mulling over this design for eons now and had only recently voiced her intentions: she wished to design a station which would dwarf even the enormous ISS, the beginning of a highway across the stars. It would hold far more people and materials, and since the ISS was already in place, shipping the materials would be that much easier.
What purposes her creation might have were hanging in the balance, which was why so many voices were all clamoring for her attention. The fact of the matter was that she harbored secret intentions, a desire to eventually find someone who bid the highest and gave her the most amount of leeway. Such a creation like that would never belong simply in the atmosphere –at least, not earth’s atmosphere. Perhaps it could be left to simply drift in the blankness of empty space, with enough materials inside to create waystations as it went. She didn’t know much, only that the state of the world left her with even more of a want than ever to leave this all behind. So much agony and strife here. If the problems were too large to be fixed, perhaps a new avenue was best. By redirecting the flow and lessening the bulk of the issue, a solution could be found.
Noble intentions, and far too idealistic, but she could allow that at this point in time. Nelly was too smart to get caught up in such things, but she could brainstorm, couldn’t she? There was nothing wrong with that, after all. In fact, hadn’t some of the greatest and most important discoveries been made while daydreaming or simply playing with a train of thought? She knew it to be so, and that was why she had been spending a month drawing the same architectural specifications over and over again. Each idea was much more grand or stylized than the last, but in different avenues. One of them would strike just right, and then she would go from there.
Nodding to herself, Nelly pushed back from her desk with a bit of a sigh. She stuck her pencil in her mouth and then raised her arms up in the air for a good stretch, before glancing down at her watch. It was nearing 1 a.m., and the headquarters was very nearly silent. Not entirely, for she was not the only dedicated mind hard at work, but almost. Occasionally, footsteps and a murmur of voices passed outside her door but otherwise the only sounds were that of the building itself. Humming air conditioner, the whir of thousands of computers, the occasional purring of static high up in the lights when everything else faded out for a moment.
Maybe I should get home, she thought but sighed to think of her dark apartment tucked away in D.C.’s suburbs. It was as much of a home as she’d ever had, to the point where she could hardly remember the house where she grew up, but she didn’t feel quite settled in yet even after so long. Rather, it was like she was a guest in her own rooms. Her bed, but not quite. The darks were too dark, making her feel wary of the corners and gaps between light switches.
She knew it was because she spent so much time at work, that home would feel like such a strange place, but she couldn’t help it. She had become an adult here, with these people, in these halls. These rooms and labs were her equipment, and the other scientists had always been her playmates.
They were the only people who never treated her as an oddity. They never scorned her like other teenagers had, or worried for her as teachers and health professionals did, or even stood back in awe from her like her own beloved parents. These people respected her for all that she was, and that made all the difference.
If that meant she’d missed out on all the partying and drinking, the fumbling, awkward socialization of her peers, then so be it. She was a virgin, and figured that she always would be. Pleasuring herself was no strange occurrence but the few occasions when she tried to pair up with anyone at all, she found herself overanalyzing everything. Anxiety, certainly, but she simply couldn’t relax and during moments of stress, her habit was to gather the facts. And no matter how patient a man might actually be, he was not going to stick around for long after finding out that she was mapping out his genomes from the color of his eyes and hair.
Still, that was certainly no big loss. Her craft was her lover, and gave her far more satisfaction than any bout of sex ever could, she was certain of that.
Resolving to work just a bit longer, Nelly bent over the sketch once more and admired the sleek design and the wrap-around walkway which paid homage to the ISS and its flatter section which was often used for spacewalks. She placed the tip of the pencil flat against the paper and prepared to add a bit of reinforcement to an area of wall which looked particularly structurally weak, when her hand slipped away from the instrument and she dropped it.
“Damn,” she swore, and started to look around for where it might have fallen. Her ears strained to hear the tiny roll of its angular body.
There was nothing. Nothing but a strange tugging sensation on one of her sleeves. That must be Harry again, she thought. Harry was a self-proclaimed dwarf –a term which had otherwise fallen out of common use- and one of the most charming men she’d ever met, partly because of his endearing childishness.
He wasn’t there. Instead, the fabric of her sleeve seemed to simply be suspended outwards as though someone was actually there and pulling on it.
With a flicker of yellow, she watched as the lost pencil spun through the air and disappeared into nothingness.
A little startled, she immediately started trying to think of explanations for both of these oddities when it opened.
She had no idea what it was, but open was a good word for what happened. As though an invisible door in reality were being pushed out from within, and a splice of color appeared and began to unfurl in a spiral of fluorescent and indescribable colors. Blue seemed to be at the forefront, but it was a shade she had never seen before and didn’t even know how to describe. It hurt her eyes and hurt her mind, until she had to look away.
All her clothes were standing forward now, straining for the spiral. Some of the papers on her desk fluttered away and di
sappeared inside, too. The trashcan rattled, and pieces of garbage began to fly out past her. And she felt it now, a tugging at her long hair and skin.
It’s like some sort of portal, she thought deliriously. That was all she could think of to describe it.
Then, the direction changed and everything was pushed away. She stumbled backwards, tripping over her chair and falling against the table. And when she looked up again, there was a man standing in her lab where the spiral of colors had been. It was gone now, and so was the tugging and pulling sensations.
“Who are you?” she asked stupidly, trying to recognize him. In the moment before he spoke, it registered that she didn’t even know what to make of the sight of him. This man was unlike any she’d ever seen before.
He was pale as a vampire, with a strange shiny cast to his skin; she might have thought it was her lights acting strange, but then he moved and his arm passed through shadow. His skin stayed the same silvery color, which should have been indicative of some kind of disease but she could think of none. Albinism? No, his eyes were dark as coal. Not only that, but he looked somehow thicker than the average person, as though professional-wrestler proportions had been forced upon an ordinary man.
