* * * *
Major Amber Trujillo had wanted to be an astronaut as far back as she could remember. She couldn’t honestly say that she’d never wavered from her conviction that that was what she was destined to be. She’d gone through phases of having other aspirations, other interests, but she’d always come full circle and back to astronaut.
She’d never regretted that decision.
Until now.
She’d had too many shocks since she’d left Moon Base, though, and way too close together.
Despite all of her years of training, she was dealing with something she had never expected to encounter.
It had been bad enough when they’d imprisoned her in the hold of their ship.
When they came to get her, she was certain she was facing execution and she managed to completely lose her cool, hyperventilated, and passed out.
The reprieve was woefully brief. She thought it likely that she’d only lost consciousness a matter of minutes or maybe seconds—long enough for her body to regulate itself, but not long enough to actually feel normalized.
When awareness returned, she found herself tied to … well, it seemed to be a seat pretty much like any seat one might find on a transport—on Earth—train, plane, or bus. It hadn’t been made for comfort. It was designed for safety.
And of all the bizarre things she’d seen since her capsule had been captured, the creatures seated in front of the control panel topped everything previous.
She hadn’t been in any condition to question where the creatures might have come from—particularly when they clearly weren’t the ‘pets’ of the alien beings they ripped to shreds. They damned sure weren’t from the Moon!
But she’d still been thinking—when she was able to process any rational thoughts—that they were connected to the other aliens in some way. That maybe the aliens had captured them as they had her.
Well, that theory had held up right until they’d dragged her kicking and screaming from the capsule and then .... Just left the hanger and took flight on an airless world and carried her to a ship that was as clearly alien as they were and inside of it.
They didn’t look like anything she would think of as intelligent beings.
They looked like animals—something one might find in a jungle habitat—on an alien world.
But they weren’t just animals.
They were clearly intelligent beings.
She just couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around it.
And, if everything else weren’t traumatic enough, they proceeded to make war on what was left of the aliens that had snatched her out of the sky.
Actually, wreak annihilation on the aliens that had captured her.
Ruthlessly and systematically they destroyed the tiny ‘fighter jets’ that swarmed out of the alien base/or ship like a dark cloud of bees.
Inwardly, she shrugged, accepting that those might have been nothing more than unmanned drones.
But then when they’d destroyed all of them, they left the ship and went back into the base/ship of the other aliens and were gone a very long time.
Well, she wasn’t certain of how long because as soon as they took off, she began trying to get loose.
It was the chance she’d hoped for, she told herself.
Although she was less than enthusiastic about it, she knew it was the only thing she could do to save herself.
She actually felt a touch of triumph when she managed to get the ropes lose enough to wiggle out of the seat. The search for the door out and then some way to open it was nerve wracking. She kept pausing to look to see if the alien beasts were heading back yet and checking her gauges to see how much air she had left.
Not that there was a lot of point to it.
She had what she had.
She was either going to make it back to a pickup point.
Or not.
She lost more time trying to get her bearings. Finally, though, she managed to gather her wits sufficiently to make the calculations based on her guesses of speed and direction and she struck off toward the deadline at her best speed.
Moon walking wasn’t easy.
Moon running was just an accident waiting to happen.
She spent more time scrambling along the ground, she was sure, than upright, but she was clawing her way to freedom, making serious progress, she was convinced, when she was grabbed from behind and levered to her feet.
She whirled on the thing and fought.
For all the good it did.
The beast hauled her back to the ship.
Which wasn’t actually far away at all.
She decided that they must have moved it, returned, found she’d escaped, and then come after her.
It was just too damned depressing to think she’d used up most of her oxygen trying to escape and she’d only gone—maybe—the equivalent of a city block.
Her oxygen levels were low enough by the time she was dragged back into the ship that she couldn’t focus on anything but the struggle for air. She began to fight the grip of the beast with the mindlessness of a drowning man, trying to reach the helmet release even though she knew in the back of her mind that it wasn’t likely to save her. She knew they were alien and it was improbable that she would be able to breathe the same atmosphere that they could.
Hell they had shown they had no need to breathe any kind of atmosphere!
But she had to get the helmet off.
She finally managed to break the seals in spite of their efforts to stop her and snatched the helmet off, sucking in a deep breath the moment she did.
Fully expecting horrible pain to follow, she was stunned when she discovered she’d sucked in a lungful of pure, clean air.
Apparently, she wasn’t the only one that was shocked.
The grip on her vanished so quickly she nearly collapsed.
When she managed to catch her breath, she looked at the alien beastmen and discovered they were gaping back at her, so shocked they almost seemed frozen.
Then they did something that was more amazing than anything they’d done before.
They … changed. Between one blink and another they were completely altered.
The beasts disappeared and in their place stood three males that were so nearly human in appearance Amber was convinced, for a handful of seconds, that that was exactly what they were.
She’d lost her damned mind!
She’d been convinced she was surrounded by aliens, had been captured by aliens.
And they were human?
Then she felt that weird little flutter in her mind that she’d felt several times since she’d first seen them.
What are?
She instantly had a blinding headache. She wondered if she’d been wrong about the ‘air’ after all and if it contained some gas that was going to kill her.
No harm.
She divided a look between the three beasts.
The three of them exchanged glances that made her wonder if they were communicating with one another.
And her.
Had that been a direct response to her wondering if she was going to be poisoned?
Fine home.
Amber’s heart leapt with excitement despite the fact that she was convinced she must be hallucinating.
They looked human? And they were speaking to her telepathically?
The one who’d dragged her back onto the ship pointed to the seat she’d occupied before. She looked at it reluctantly, but she settled in it.
He seemed to hesitate, but instead of tying her as he had before, this time he secured a safety harness to hold her in and adjusted it to fit her. Then the beasts settled in the other seats and strapped in.
She had just a few moments to wonder what the others were going to think about the alien ship when it appeared on the other side of the moon then the ship left the surface of the moon and shot directly toward deep space.
Having braced herself t
o circle the moon, it took her a few moments to realize what they’d done and that the streaks of light outside were stars—blurred because of the speed they were traveling.
Away from Earth.
Chapter Four
Alaric’s beast vanished so abruptly he felt downright lightheaded. It was a circumstance that he had never experienced before and he found it deeply disturbing that she had that effect on him—later, when he was able to think.
At the moment of unveiling, all thought stopped.
He was almost certain that his heart did.
And perhaps that explained why his beast abandoned him so abruptly?
In a general way, he tended to summon his totem instinctively in response to a threat of most any kind and he had to work to banish the beast and resume his true form.
It was almost as if his true form became the dominant, the aggressor in that moment of recognition that this was no alien creature, unrecognizable, but a female so like those he remembered from his homeland that he was instantly riveted.
His thoughts were primitive, beast-like—as if the beast had retreated in form only and still held control of him.
He was aware, mostly, of primal urges and those played out in his mind in a series of images that dragged his IQ down to its lowest equivalent.
Fortunately, the shock froze his mobility to zero.
He felt more like a statue than flesh and blood and by the time the shock had thinned to allow some thaw, the mind had also kicked over and begun to calculate the results of yielding to his base impulses.
She had no family close or present to cut him to ribbons for such a desecration, but she would certainly see it as such and it was her opinion, he realized, that was a matter of life or death to him.
Or, more accurately, life or mere existence.
* * * *
It would have been a stretch to say Amber didn’t feel just a flicker of panic when that realization sank in. But she’d been skating the fringes of panic, fighting it with every ounce of grit she had, since the other aliens had captured her ship.
She’d been homeward bound—before.
She’d had mixed feelings about it.
She had friends and family there. Some she considered herself close to. Others, not so close. But people she knew and things to do, tasks and responsibilities.
She hadn’t looked forward to those.
Truthfully, she’d lost the only person that really mattered to her to death a little over a year earlier—her grandmother.
She loved her grandmother, her abuela.
Had loved the woman who’d raised her after her mother had died and her father had abandoned her and then gone off to jail.
Her grandmother been her whole world.
But the person she’d known had fled the body she recognized many years ago now.
She’d tried to convince herself for a long, long time that it was like a coma—her abuela was still there, but trapped.
But she’d finally had to accept that her grandmother just wasn’t there anymore.
She didn’t know why she kept going to the nursing home even after she’d finally accepted the harsh truth. She supposed it was the hope of a miracle. One day she’d walk into her grandmother’s room and she’d find the person who once lived in that slowly deteriorating body.
She’d never thought that would be a comfort to her—knowing her abuela had been gone for a very long time—long before death had finally claimed the shell that had housed her.
But it was now.
She almost felt a sense of release.
She might never make it home again, probably wouldn’t, but the only person that really mattered to her, that mattered most to her, had gone away long ago and left her alone.
She would miss the cousins, aunts, uncles—the people that she’d grown up with that she’d considered friends or even best friends. She thought they might miss her, but they’d get by just fine without her.
She wasn’t crucial to their existence.
She could focus on her problem and not feel guilty that she was.
Because she couldn’t do anything else.
And actually, beyond kissing her ass good-bye, she thought ruefully, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to focus on doing for herself.
She felt oddly calm all things considered.
She was afraid it wouldn’t take much to break through that to the ugly she was holding behind the barricade in her mind, but the tranquility that enveloped her at that time made logical thought processes possible.
And she needed that.
Because she thought it was probably her only chance of survival.
She didn’t believe the aliens who’d taken her were a threat to her survival, at least not consciously a threat.
They had, to all intents and purposes, rescued her from the real threat.
She thought.
She certainly hadn’t gotten the impression from the others that they had kind intentions towards her.
These … very strange beings on the other hand ….
She had the impression that they thought they had rescued her, that they’d meant to out of concern for her welfare.
She wasn’t dumb enough to think they’d attacked the other aliens on her behalf. Clearly, they’d had no notion she was inside the capsule. She’d startled them as much as vice versa.
But once they became aware of her existence, they had made it a point to see to it that she was safe while they wiped out the other aliens.
She supposed she should consider that a threat in and of itself.
But it had seemed like war.
It had seemed like an uneven fight, in fact—that the other aliens were the aggressors and certainly they’d appeared to outman and outgun the odd creatures who’d taken her.
She emerged from her thoughts to study them with a good bit of confusion.
They looked … well, almost human, close enough that they might be thought to be another race of humans.
They didn’t look anything like they’d looked when she’d first seen them and that blew her mind that they could change like that.
And made her wonder if the form they had assumed had been to make her feel less threatened.
Like when their leader had changed to look like a man in a spacesuit.
She’d been next door to hysterical when she’d seen that little trick, but, looking back now she thought the intention had been to make her less afraid, not more.
So was this form more of the same?
Or was this their ‘natural’ form?
And how in the world could they have evolved to change forms at will?
It was amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Of course, there were creatures on Earth that had the ability to drastically change their appearance to avoid predators, or to use it to capture food.
But they didn’t actually change shape.
They changed the coloration of their skin.
She thought about that and realized that that was just as amazing in its own way as this. It was just easier to accept because it was an Earth creature and known.
If she put this into perspective, she realized that they hadn’t changed as radically as she’d first thought. They were still the same height—mass.
They’d changed the facial features pretty radically and vanished the wings, but otherwise the transformation was along the lines of the skin coloration changes of the Earth creatures she’d compared them to—fur and feathers in place of the smooth skin she saw now.
The ‘thing’ they’d transformed into was tattooed on their backs, she realized.
Or, she would have identified it as that if she’d seen them before they changed and had no idea that they could assume that form. She didn’t actually know what it was—just what it looked like based on her knowledge and experience.
It was almost as bizarre to her that they wore something that looked like a kilt or a loincl
oth—and nothing else.
It looked … primitive, made them look like … well, Indians or maybe wild people would be more accurate. They didn’t look like modern native Americans. They looked like the primitives who’d peopled the continents before modern civilization in their choice of dress.
And yet they were piloting a space craft that was so advanced it seemed like something out of a science fiction movie than real.
Was it all a hallucination? Had something happened to her to make her mind crack?
It felt real.
They seemed real.
Why would her mind conjure something like this?
How could it?
She was almost inclined to think she had lost her mind, or that she was in a coma, maybe, when something caught her attention outside.
Mars.
Her pulse leapt when she spotted the globe in the distance, but it was easily recognizable.
She’d seen so many pictures of it.
It was the next stop for a base, the next project on NASA’s agenda.
She’d hoped she would get to participate in that mission if she did well on the Moon Base.
It took her a few minutes to free herself from her safety harness.
Ignoring the expressions of the alien men, she moved to an observation window and stared out.
Mars had passed the closest point in its orbit to Earth, she realized when she’d cast around her mind for the information for a few moments. It didn’t just look small because they hadn’t gotten close enough yet. Their trajectory was carrying them past it at a significant distance.
Damn it!
But she thought they must be almost as close as the moon to Earth.
It looked about the size of the moon just as it crested the horizon on Earth.
She stared at it thirstily, wanting to absorb anything she could observe about it—first hand.
A thrill went through her at that thought.
She was the first human to get close enough to Mars to see it with the naked eye.
Dis home?
That time the words were so distinct inside her mind that Amber thought someone had spoken aloud. She whipped a look around for the speaker.
All three of the aliens were staring at her almost expectantly, as if awaiting an answer. But that made it impossible to determine which had spoken to her telepathically.
Alien Touch Page 4
