When she stepped off of the gangplank, her knees threatened to buckle.
She told herself that was mostly because she just wasn’t used to the planet’s gravity and pressure which was close to Earth’s but certainly not identical.
She knew that had little to do with it in actuality but lying to herself seemed to work best to calm her frayed nerves.
Pretending she was ok and she was going to be fine.
Pretending she was just practicing playing soldier like she had hundreds of times in hundreds of different scenarios back on Earth when they’d been preparing the colonists for settlements in alien and potentially hostile environments.
Nothing was going to happen.
Nothing was going to go wrong.
She took up a position at the rear of the shuttle in sight of the real soldier, Sgt. Adam Johnson, standing so that she could see him in her peripheral vision and scan a 180 degree of her surroundings.
Drs. McNeal and Hobbs marched down the gangplank as if they had a battalion guarding them, loaded down with equipment, their own weapons holstered.
Sam followed them shakily carrying a case of sample jars.
He looked like an owl, his eyes as wide as saucers and bulging with terror, as if they would pop from his head and roll on the ground if anything jumped out, his head swiveling around further than it would seem natural or possible.
His uneasiness didn’t help Monica’s feelings.
She supposed the confidence exhibited by McNeal and Hobbs should have reassured her, but she thought they were too focused on scientific discovery to allow the possibility of horrible death to cross their minds.
Nevertheless, they settled close to the ship to collect samples.
Because Nunn had told them he fully intended to dash to safety if there was a hint of a threat and if they weren’t inside when he raised the gangplank they wouldn’t be getting in.
For many minutes after they got outside, Monica was so tense she wasn’t certain she could trust her senses. She didn’t see anything living beyond her fellow travelers, but she was too unnerved to really focus. Her gaze flickered from one alien object to another so quickly she couldn’t have recalled what she’d seen if her life depended upon it.
Sheer terror was too intense an emotion to maintain for any great length of time, however, whatever the provocation. She began to relax because she was too tired to maintain, not because she was convinced there were no aliens close by.
When she finally spotted one it was because she’d been staring hard at a mottled patch of colors only a handful of yards from where they’d landed. Something about the pattern snagged her attention, however, and she stared really hard, sifting things in her mind in an attempt to identify.
Finally, she realized that she was looking at a pair of eyes.
The moment she did, she froze as if she’d been dropped in a vat of nitrogen. Even brain function was suspended for endless moments.
It flickered through her mind, though, that they were hidden.
She should just act natural and quietly alert the others.
Or maybe dash up the gangplank and call out when she was safely inside?
She couldn’t move.
She couldn’t even breathe for several moments.
It was a flicker of movement that finally penetrated her shock.
She managed to swivel her eyeballs far enough to see Sam throw his sample carrier in the air and take off up the ramp.
Hobbs and McNeal, clutching their instruments in a death grip, were trying to shove him out of the way and beat him inside.
Something about her posture must have alerted them to danger!
She flicked a hopeful look at Johnson. Almost simultaneously, she saw another flicker of movement and then something hit her so hard mid-section that she blacked out for a handful of seconds.
The perception of pandemonium her shock had held at bay pierced it abruptly and she was bombarded by so many things at once that confusion dominated and fear took a distant second place.
She felt like she’d been caught in a blender.
A very loud blender.
There was screams, cursing, pounding feet, gun blasts, males bellowing completely incomprehensible sounds that might have been words—darkness, light.
Abruptly, her feet hit the ground. She had a split second to realize the creature in front of her had slung her over one meaty shoulder and made off with her and then he slammed her bodily against something very hard and sandwiched her between it and an equally hard body.
His hand was so huge that when he clamped it over her mouth that he covered most of her face.
That circumstance instantly redirected her to the need for air and she began to struggle.
He shifted his hand off of her eyes and nose, narrowed his cat-like eyes at her and growled low in his chest.
Monica felt like her eyeballs were going to pop out of her head.
Dizziness assailed her.
She clamped her eyes closed, struggling to recover brain function, to assess her situation, to think of a way to escape.
Abruptly, a brilliant idea popped into her mind, prompted by the dizziness.
She began to slump heavily against him, feigning a faint.
Just about the time she realized he was alien and might not have any familiarity with fainting, she felt his hand close over one breast and squeeze, pinching the nipple that instantly leapt to attention.
She sucked in a sharp breath. Her eyes flew open and she began to struggle against him.
Something rose between them that jolted her into a state of suspended animation.
It felt a lot like a penis.
Abruptly, a fist impacted with her captor’s shoulder, shaking both of them.
“What the hell, Kaelen?” Dar growled.
Kaelen pulled away reluctantly, but he retained a grip on the female’s arm. He glared at Dar for a moment and finally relaxed. “Which?” he asked finally, wry amusement threading his voice.
“Both!” Dar snapped without pausing to consider it. “There will be no trying to make friends now. What possessed you to snatch their female?”
Reminded of their earlier discussion, Kaelen felt irritation gain the upper hand again, but this time it was directed at himself. “Come on!” he drawled. “When is the last time you got close enough even to get a whiff of a female?”
Dar’s lips tightened. “Tell me you did not just fuck up our only chance of getting off this god forsaken rock.”
“I did not fuck up our only chance,” Kaelen growled irritably, searching his mind for a way to make the capture an advantage. He felt his anger wane as he thought it over and realized, impulse or not, he had probably done exactly what needed to be done. “I saw an opening and I seized it. Yes, it was impulse—and I will freely admit my dick was doing a lot of the thinking. I saw the pose she struck when she spotted you and my mind—everything inside of me reacted to it. And if that was not a mating posture then I do not know one when I see it! But if you will stop to think about it, you will see it was the right thing to do, the only thing that will give us a chance.
“They were frightened even to come out and bolted back inside the minute we were spotted. They will not talk and if they will not talk, we cannot negotiate with them. With her, we have something to trade.”
Dar glared at him and shook his head, but when he had flicked a brief, searching look at the female, he moved away and crouched down to think.
They had camped close to the alien vessel for the better part of two days, waiting even after everyone else had given up and wandered off in search of food and water, trying to think of a way to utilize the unexpected boon of having a craft from another world drop virtually in their laps.
It had taken a while to arrive at the conclusion that their best chance of survival was to try to convince the aliens to take them to their world.
In the first place, they did not know the aliens and therefore they could not trust that they were benign in
any way or would be friendly or sympathetic to their situation.
In the second, they would be leaving all that was known to them behind.
They would not even be with others of their own kind as they would have been if they had been able to finish their ark and leave with the others.
But they had to accept that they were not likely to survive much longer on their home world. They could try to leave Ducran and perhaps live. Or they could stay and most likely die. Their world was simply too devastated for any kind of recovery in their life time. Maybe in two or three, but not in one, not when so few had survived.
They were facing extinction as a species.
“I believe you do not know a mating pose when you see it,” Dar muttered after some time had passed. “That did not look like stunned appreciation to me. It looked like … terror.”
Kaelen, who had released the captured female and moved to guard the only exit visible, turned to study her. Truthfully, he could not see anything to support his original argument beyond wishfulness, desire, and hope.
She was a strange looking creature compared to their own females—or what he recalled from days gone by because he damned well had not seen a female since well before the Great Dying—but she was a pretty little thing for all that.
The thought made him wonder how she perceived him—and Dar.
He placed his hand over his heart. “I am Kaelen.”
She turned her head to stare at him wide-eyed when he spoke, but she gave no indication that she understood him.
“Kaelen,” he repeated and then pointed to Dar. “That is my bond-brother, Dar.”
Dar looked from Kaelen to the female and got up. “They may come to find her or send the warrior. I should go and take a look around to see if they have tracked us.” He glanced at the female. “And maybe she will not be so frightened if I leave.”
“I am not certain I follow your reasoning, brother.”
Dar gave him a sardonic look. “You are the handsome one. If you cannot seduce her then I damned well cannot.”
Kaelen gaped at him and shifted uncomfortably. “You are the one that she fixated on! She looked right past me!”
“See what you can do to persuade her that we mean no harm,” Dar said as he pushed past Kaelen and left.
Kaelen turned to study the female after Dar had left. “And just how in the hell am I to do that when I am as certain as I can be that we have precious little time and I do not even know her tongue?”
* * * *
Monica’s panic began to subside after the cat-like alien released her and moved away.
Well, both of them put distance between themselves and her.
She sat down, mostly because her knees were too weak to hold her up, but she discovered the more relaxed posture also seemed to help her relax.
Or possibly her thoughts, because it was hard to feel threatened, despite being kidnapped, when they seemed so unthreatening.
They wanted something but that something didn’t seem to be her.
After a few minutes, when it seemed they had some sort of stalemate situation, she glanced around at the place where they had taken her and decided this was not some place that they had been living. It appeared to be a collection of debris piled together to form a makeshift hut. Possibly some of it had been another structure at one time and they’d simply dragged up debris to close it in. Regardless, there was nothing to suggest that it had been lived in—no personal possessions and no household items—no food and nothing to contain water.
So—it was a temporary shelter—but it was something they had put together before they had taken her so did that mean they’d planned to capture her?
She frowned and decided after a moment that that didn’t really make sense. They couldn’t have known about her until moments before the taller, more slender of the two made like a football player and made off with her.
Lean, she decided.
He was either down to bone or he was very muscular because he’d felt hard all over and since he was next door to naked and she could see next to everything, she decided lean more accurately described him.
Either both of them had tribal animal tattoos or that was the shading of their skin.
They looked … striped.
Maybe furry.
She wasn’t sure even though she’d had a very up close encounter. She’d been in no condition to record anything her senses picked up.
But she did remember the rippling of hard muscles.
And the size of that … log that rose against her.
She wasn’t certain which impression dominated. Their black, black hair and brownish red skin with the black markings made her think ‘American Indian in war paint’, particularly in conjunction with their features. But it also shouted cat-like.
She’d relaxed just enough to nearly jump out of her skin when the one who’d grabbed her suddenly spoke directly to her.
He was trying to communicate, she realized instantly.
His name was Kaelen.
His voice was so deep and almost purring that it did strange things to her belly.
He pointed at his massive companion and told her his name was Dar.
Should she let them know she’d understood?
Did she have anything to gain by playing dumb?
She couldn’t think of a single advantage there might be in that so she put her hand on her chest and pronounced her name. “Monica.”
“Munka?”
She gave him a deadly glare. That sounded way too damn close to monkey and she’d endured that teasing chant enough to go ballistic when she was a kid. She looked away, struggling with the urge to throw something at his head.
“Mun-ee-ka?”
Doubt and then discomfort flooded her. “How about Meeka? Can you say that?”
He looked puzzled. “Meeka?”
Pleasure filled her. He wasn’t trying to make fun of her name. Stupid! He was trying to make friends. “Yes! Call me Meeka,” she said, touching her chest.
He looked puzzled for a few moments and then touched his chest again. “Kael. Call Kael.”
A jolt of pure amazement went through Monica.
Surely, she was wrong? He couldn’t have caught on that quickly, could he? They were like … well they were primitives, weren’t they?
They were next door to naked. They had very long, unkempt hair, and they both carried primitive lethal weapons.
And, she hated to even think it, but neither smelled particularly lovely—not actually beastly, but more ‘ripe’ than someone who’d missed a single bath.
The horrible stuff they gave her to eat some time later seemed to have been preserved in a fairly sophisticated packaging, but that didn’t mean they had preserved it. They seemed to be nothing more than scavengers.
No doubt intelligent, but could the meteor strike explain such primitive living conditions when it had been barely a year, Earth time, since the impact?
Was it actually more likely that they were primitives? Or was that just a preconceived notion she’d brought with her, a suggestion planted by the leaders of the expedition without any sort of evidence one way or another to back up that assumption?
Chapter Four
“They are scientists,” Dar stated in as neutral a voice as he could muster as he re-entered the makeshift shelter they had put together.
The alien female looked at him as if he was some kind of monster, with eyes so wide they looked as if they would pop from her head. Her skin turned from white to blazing red and then to white again.
Irritation flickered through him.
He had never been accounted particularly handsome, but he was not by the ancestors a horror! Her reaction to him seemed excessive—particularly when it was Kaelen who’d plowed into her like some sort of barbarian and hauled her off!
“This makes sense and explains much. People of knowledge would have a desire to study a world such as ours.”
Dar grunted. “Yes, this explains their rush to retu
rn to the craft when they saw that this one had spotted something that could potentially be a threat.”
Kaelen frowned. “You think that Meeka could be a scientist, as well?”
Dar studied her. “She is called Meeka?”
Discomfort flickered across Kaelen’s face. “Actually, it is something like Mun-ee-ka, but she seemed … displeased with my effort to pronounce it and said to call her Meeka.
Dar considered that as he studied her form. She was small but rounded in all the right places. Nothing about her shouted warrior to him. “They set her to guard their backs so it seems indisputable that she is trained to protect, but she is nothing like the warrior who guarded the other one. I am baffled. You have managed to speak with her?”
Kaelen flushed uncomfortably. “I would not call it that. The language seems very different from ours—not that she seemed terribly anxious to communicate.”
Dar considered for a moment and finally approached the female, crouching in front of her and extending the offering of food he had brought. “You will no doubt find this as disgustingly horrible as we do,” he said with a touch of amusement, “but beggars cannot chose.”
When she finally, haltingly, accepted the offering, he caught her face in one hand, forcing her to look at him so that he could study her more closely. He felt a stirring inside of him when he did so that he had no trouble recognizing—his man-root rose to say hello. “We mean you no harm. The idiot over there just could not resist snatching you up and making off with you.”
“Asshole,” Kaelen muttered. “Good thing for you she does not understand or I might feel compelled to let you beat me senseless for punching you.”
The comment surprised a chuckle out of Dar.
It felt good.
He could not recall the last time that he had even felt like laughing.
The look on the female’s face when he returned his attention to her wiped out the amusement immediately and replaced it with something far more … dangerous.
He released his hold on her face instantly and put some distance between them.
Exodus: Extinction Event Page 3
