After a few seconds my eyes flicker open and...
***
...I’m awake again. What the fuck was that? I’ve never had a dream as vivid as that. Plus it feels like I have actually come a few times. It must be something to do with the stress and fright I’ve been through, some kind of defense mechanism the brain’s got to keep you sane under pressure. But...why was it an alien I was with, and why can I recall every second of the fantastic time we had together?
The room’s changed since I’ve slept. I look around and see Deakins sitting on an oddly sloped platform which might serve as a bed.
“Morning, sleeping beauty,” he grunts at me. “Nerravin wanted to wake you, but I thought you needed the rest.” I shake my head, not understanding and still confused by the dream. “When these things grew from the floor and the walls...well, it all changed quite fast.”
“Where is she?” My voice is hoarse, my throat dry from – orgasm – lack of water. Deakins nods to a separate room at the same time as a hatch opens and three bowls are pushed through to my right. Deakins gets there first and sniffs the bowl.
“Some kind of porridge by the looks of it, but it’s got bits of other stuff in. Might be meat.” He dips his finger in and lifts it to his mouth.
“Don’t eat that shit, man!” Nerravin shouts from the other doorway. “It might be poisoned, eh, and don’t use the head either. Man, that shit’s fucked up!” I go and take a bowl, suddenly ravenous.
“What would be the point of poison?” I ask dipping my fingers into the warm mix. “If they wanted us dead, they could have left us on Erenius three.” I brace myself for what this might be as I suck the food from my fingers. My mouth explodes with flavor, and I dip my hand in, bringing the bowl up to my lips and stuffing myself with the sweet, spicy goop. Deakins follows suit when I don’t immediately die, but Nerravin won’t touch it, which means Deakins and I can have half of her bowl each too.
“Listen up, I want you to keep your eyes and ears open for any chance we got to escape, okay?” Nerravin stares at us. “Anything that can be used as a weapon, man, you give it to me.” I glance at Deakins, who shakes his head at me, rolling his eyes.
Once we’ve eaten and scraped every last lick from the bowls, I go into the new room to find it sectioned off into cubicles. Some are obviously toilets from the general shape and size while a couple of the others look as if they’re empty. I open one of the doors and step in, squealing when a spray of warm water hits me. My luck must be in, there’s a shower! I make sure the other two can’t see and strip, going back in and standing beneath the water. The warm liquid running over me brings back memories of the dream I had, and I can feel my body heat up from the recollection of it.
Realizing I haven’t got a towel, I swear and try to open the door to leave but find it locked. Before I can begin to panic, the water stops, and warm air puffs out from every surface, drying me fast.
Once dressed, I look around, even though the light is dim and we are held in some kind of cell, we have been fed and our sanitary needs have been taken care of. Now all that remains is to see what will happen to us.
THE END
Desired By The Alien Boss
You might think being aboard what is technically a living spacecraft, shooting through the depths of space, and living among a group of aliens, who you don't quite understand, would drive you crazy. I’ll get there.
After the accident – they said it was an accident, I think we were attacked – on the third moon orbiting Erenius, three other humans and I were the only ones to make it aboard this ship. Now, even though we are allowed to move around a bit more, I still feel like a prisoner. My eyes flicker open to the gloomy interior of the room the three of us share, and I look around to see if either of the other two have woken yet. Both are snoring softly, like babies in the crib. We are the only survivors from the Erenius Three Research Station. The whole staff was only ten people, but every last one of them perished, friends and enemies alike, except us. I really don’t think that makes us special, maybe lucky, but nothing special. After all, we are the three who were sent to find out what the hell this thing actually was.
So there was Parry Deakins, a communications engineer and linguistics expert, who is a natural choice to investigate in case there were any linguistic clues, writing, or live aliens (yeah, right!). Sierx Nerravin is supposed to take care of security. You know, shoot stuff and keep us all safe. She doesn't feel all that great right now, for obvious reasons. Then there’s little old me, Hetty Vorgies, exobiologist, and I got chosen to see what this thing was because initial scans indicated there was a biological element inside. If only we'd known!
I rise and cross the room on silent feet, go into the other room we’ve been assigned and try to clean my teeth as best I can. In desperation, I have to try and use the insane contraption, which serves as a toilet on board the thing, and even though we've been aboard for about four days, I still can't get used to the feeling of having something attach itself to my genitals and gently suck the waste from me, especially as I’m not completely sure which bits of the ship are alive and which aren’t. (I know what you’re thinking. Some exobiologist she is!) Once that little adventure is over, I make my way back into the main room, where I see Deakins woken up.
“Morning,” I say brightly. “How you doing today?”
Deakins runs his big hands through his thinning hair and over his face and looks down as if thinking about my question.
“Why do you feel the need to ask me that just when I've woken up, Hetty?” he asks me. “I've only just opened my eyes. How the hell should I know how I'm doing?” His deep, grumbling voice seems to lighten throughout the day, until he comes fully to life just before we’re ready to go back to bed. He’s got graying hair, which he keeps cut short and, for some reason, wears a pair of antiquated wire rimmed spectacles to correct an eyesight problem the medic could have cured in a matter of seconds. Deakins’ square face levers up to look at me, and a little grimace crosses his face.
“We’re still really aboard this thing then?” I nod back at him with a sympathetic look on my face. “Shit. Thought I might have been in the middle of a nightmare,” he adds grumpily.
We’re past the panic and fear of the first day or so. People can only go on like that for so long after all. I think it was Deakins who calmed down first, coming to the conclusion we weren’t in any immediate danger of being eaten, dissected or used for some other nefarious project. I felt the tension drain from me after about fifteen hours, exhausted and weak. Whoever, whatever, these creatures are, they feed and water us and haven’t shown any ill intent. When you actually take everything into consideration, we invaded their ship, and they saved us from the awful fate the others shared.
I can see where the other two are coming from. They might have saved us, but we are in some kind of captive state and have been here more than long enough to be taken back to the nearest human settlement.
We both look over as Nerravin whimpers in her sleep, waking herself up.
“What you two looking at?” she says grumpily at Deakins and me.
“Nothing,” I tell her, making a face at the older man. “Nothing at all.”
“Good,” She swings her legs from the odd beds we have been assigned. These tilted ever so slightly toward the headend, increasing blood flow during sleep, even if you turned around so your feet were lower. It adjusted while you slept. “Cos I want you two to keep your eyes open now we’ve got some access to this bird.” Nerravin's military style of speech makes her sound as tough as she probably is. “Look for anything we might be able to use to our advantage. We can still get back to human space. We just have to find a way.”
I shake my head. “I’ll get right on that,” I tell her with a more than a little sarcasm. “Just as soon as I overpower the crew of this...this...whatever this thing is, Deakins here can figure out their entire language, and we can pilot it all the way home.”
Deakins snorts a laugh.
; Nerravin looks from one of us to the other. “Yeah, laugh it up while you can cos when the shit hits the fan, you two are gonna be looking to me to save your sorry asses,” Nerravin lectures.
I roll my eyes in Deakins’ direction, and he laughs again, heading for the bathroom.
Nerravin fixes me with a glare as she stretches, her lithe, muscled body a complete contrast to my own. “Seriously Hetty,” she says, while squatting and placing both hands flat on the floor. She grimaces, her face turning into a mask of abject disgust. “This fucking floor’s warm,” she spits, standing back up and abandoning whatever calisthenics she was about to do. “You need to make sure you know who your friends are.” She casts a glance in the direction Deakins just left.
“Oh, I’m fairly sure I know who my friends are,” I tell her. “What about you?”
Nerravin looks at me with daggers in her gaze. I had been keeping an eye on her since we came aboard, tried to talk to her a couple of times, feel her guilt and pain at failing to keep those people safe like she was supposed to. She pretty much rebuked me at every turn in the first couple of days, and I’d left her with it.
In the last couple of days, her concentration turned to somehow taking over the ship we were on or stealing some kind of space-faring craft and escaping back home. I think Deakins and I have a better grasp of the situation. We’ve been taken away from our former lives, willingly I admit, by a species of alien we had no idea existed. Whether that is a kind intervention or not remains to be seen. However, neither of us is under the illusion we will be able to escape.
“My friends died on Erenius 3,” Nerravin says shortly. Her face changes, her expression becoming one of guile and sneakiness. “You’ve been keeping company with them haven't you?” she queries, meaning the alien species whose ship we had escaped aboard.
“What do you expect? I'm an exobiologist this is like...I don’t know.” I feel the familiar excitement welling up inside me, “Every little girl's dream, every Christmas present, every hope, dream and wish I could ever have, granted at once.” She frowns at my obvious enthusiasm, but I continue. “I’m going to make every effort to communicate with our hosts, learn every single thing I can about them, history, culture, biology, everything,” I shake my head at her. “See this as the opportunity it is rather than working off a base of obvious mistrust.”
Nerravin coughs a bitter laugh. “You’re fucking deluded, man! You got no clue what these animals are going to do to us. Experiments...fucking probes up the ass or some shit like that, man.”
Deakins comes back from the head – it probably gave him head – and stares at Nerravin as if she is some kind of alien herself,
“Ah, the eloquence of the ex-marine at work I hear,” he says, turning to me. “Beautiful is it not?”
I smirk. Deakins could be really funny at times, as miserable as sin others.
“Observant too,” I mutter. “As I’m a woman.”
Nerravin spikes her middle finger up at the pair of us and storms off into the bathroom that wasn’t quite a bathroom. “What do you think, Deakins, about all this?” I wave my hand about the room.
“All this?” he retorts sarcastically. “That’s a succinct way of looking at things. What do I think about all this?” He thinks for a few seconds or pretends to at least. “I think we boarded an alien space craft of some kind, living, of course, watched as everyone we'd known for the past four years got obliterated by...something big and now we're here.” He looks at me like I am stupid. “That’s what I think. Oh, and I also think I want a computer with a few million terabytes of space, a processor which can handle light speed calculations and some of my translation programs, so I can start to figure out what our hosts are actually saying.”
“Jesus, dude, there's no need to chew my head off!” Deakins looks like a man who didn’t care, and I decide to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.
***
Commander's Log, Sentient Ship Acrulla
The three strange life forms we took aboard have begun to exhibit signs of extreme stress and are beginning to argue with each other. One of the team, assigned to monitor them, suggested we allow them some freedom to explore Acrulla and get to know him. I authorized such action and instructed Acrulla to make sure all security sensitive areas were tightly sealed to the life signs they emit. Although this has given them some time to be alone, expanding the amount of room they have to utilize has made little difference and ever more aggressive behavior has been recorded. Strangely, it is the smallest of the trio, who is also female, who displays the most aggression, shouting at and behaving in a threatening manner towards any crew she has encountered. The other female merely seems inquisitive with regards everything and has made several attempts at communication with members of the monitoring team although with limited success. The male is prone to mood swings due to several chemical imbalances the monitoring team is attempting to correct. However, it seems as if his demeanor is somewhere between the two females, not as aggressive as the smaller one and not as passive as the larger.
Our present course and speed will bring us back into Intrellian space in the next five cycles, at which time the three can be turned over to the Royal Institution for examination. End.
I tap the arm of my chair with my middle talon as Acrulla cuts communication between my thought center and his, ending the recording of my log. I can hear the proboscis being pulled back into his structural matrix and know my thoughts are now my own. I have to make sure the connection is gone before I allow my mind to relax. It would be difficult for me if Acrulla knew of my true thoughts and feelings.
What is wrong with me? What is this incessant, desperate need to see and hear the larger female? As soon as I laid eyes on her four cycles ago, she invaded my mind with her presence. I long for her in a way I have never done for an Intrellian female. She is soft and curved with some kind of long substance growing from the top of her head. My hands ache with the need to touch that fur-like, shimmering, golden mass, to glide them across her skin, which looks so soft and inviting. I would gaze into her large brown eyes until the Final Day and be happy to go into the darkness knowing she was there with me. Is she some manner of test from the Gods, sent to test my will, or is she, as I choose to believe, a gift from the heavens, a token of the delights to come? One thing only do I know, I must make her mine.
Neither the crew nor the ship can be allowed to understand the depths to which I have fallen for this creature, for them to do so would mean my complete undoing, loss of my ship, loss of my life and, worst of all, loss of her.
The pull was too much. I had to see her again.
***
Temporary Log – Hetty Vorgies, Exobiologist
I have finally managed to communicate to these lifeforms that I needed something to write on. It took more than half an hour, by my watch, of almost endless charades in which I attempted to mime writing and reading, through a sealed door with a sheet of something like glass set into it. Whether these beings do not have a written language or if it is so otherworldly different to ours is still unclear. Eventually, they seemed to understand something of my wishes as they began offering things from our supply kits. Luckily for me I have always kept a pad and pencil with my belongings and the excursion on Erenius 3 was no exception.
***
That was an interesting half hour! At least now they've allowed me to have something to write with. I can keep some kind of record in case we end up getting back to Earth. The other thing I managed to communicate was my hunger, which was rewarded with a bowl of the same substance we've been served since our arrival here. Astoundingly, for a deep space going vessel, the bowl appears to be fashioned from some kind of wood, and we have no utensils, having to rely on fingers to scoop out the mass, which has a texture somewhere between rice and porridge with a sweet and hot flavor I can't compare to anything I've had before. Deakins appears from wherever he’s been as soon as he catches scent of the food and grabs himself a bowl from the tray (wood again) then
stalks off to eat alone.
Nerravin won’t eat anything they give her, even though she’s seen me and Deakins are fine after eating it. I just hope there’s some variety to the menu at some point.
Once finished, I try and look through the window, which leads to the rest of this weird ship, but I can’t make much of anything out. It’s made from something like fingernail material, hard and plastic with a little give to it and only a little easier to see through than something completely opaque. It has been enough for me to communicate my needs through so far, and I’d managed to get both food and my journal, but seeing through to anything beyond was impossible.
I looked to the left of the odd window to the slide and slot system, which they put things through, mainly the food so far, and take the bowls back through. A gentle push confirms it’s locked, which I pretty much expect, and it feels like it’s made from the same hoof or nail-like material as the window yet completely opaque this time.
The scream erupts from me before I can’t even register what is happening. Then I can feel the laughter at the relief in my chest as I realize it is one of our hosts, peering at me through the window. I can barely make out any features, just a vague outline through the keratin, and I approach the window to get a better view. Without any warning, the door slides silently up into the ceiling, and I’m face-to-face with a sentient alien species!
Even though this is a moment I’ve fantasized about since childhood, it’s one I never thought would happen. Extra-terrestrial life has so far been confined to a few species of bacteria, some unusual plant life and one planet which seems only to be populated with nematode worms. No one ever actually believed we would ever come across another sentient species, certainly not within the next few millenniums anyway.
MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance) Page 108
