by Presley Hall
Her Alien Prince
Voxeran Fated Mates #1
Presley Hall
Copyright © 2020 by Presley Hall
Edited by Arra Boles
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
1. Charlotte
2. Charlotte
3. Droth
4. Charlotte
5. Charlotte
6. Droth
7. Charlotte
8. Droth
9. Charlotte
10. Droth
11. Charlotte
12. Droth
13. Charlotte
14. Droth
15. Charlotte
16. Droth
17. Charlotte
18. Droth
19. Charlotte
20. Droth
21. Charlotte
22. Charlotte
23. Droth
24. Charlotte
25. Droth
26. Charlotte
27. Droth
28. Charlotte
29. Charlotte
Epilogue
Also by Presley Hall
1
Charlotte
In ten seconds, I’ll be leaving Earth. Thank God.
My heart pounds out a fast rhythm as I check the straps that secure me tightly to my seat. I didn’t sleep at all last night, tossing and turning until my alarm finally blared at six o’clock. As one of a small number of civilians chosen to be part of the US government’s first attempt at alien contact, I’m very aware that I’m about to make history.
The Foreigner II is a hulking behemoth of a spaceship, three stories tall and shaped like an arrow, wider at the back and tapering to a point at the front. I couldn’t help but stare at it in awe when I arrived to board the vessel this morning, and now that we’re about to take off, my awe is mixed with an overload of adrenaline and nerves.
The voice barking through the speakers overhead continues to count down the seconds, the sound almost drowned out by my heartbeat clapping in my ears.
“Five.”
The ship shudders.
“Four.”
I don’t close my eyes.
“Three.”
Every launch has risks.
“Two.”
We may die.
“One. Liftoff.”
The vibrations of the ship increase as the force of our launch presses me into the seat beneath me. My gaze darts around to the other passengers in this section of the huge spacecraft, all of whom are strapped in just like I am.
“Holy shit. Holy shit. Okay. Okay. Nope, nope, nope, we’re fine. Everything is fine. Safe. So, so, so safe.” The woman beside me is muttering to herself, her eyes squeezed shut. “The ship is fine. So fine. Not going to fall apart. Alien technology. Good technology. Good stuff. Totally safe. Oh, fuck.”
Her stream-of-consciousness litany almost makes me smile. I think the things she’s murmuring are meant to comfort her and calm her down, sort of like a mantra. But I can tell it’s not working. With every word she utters, she seems to get closer and closer to a full-blown panic attack.
I try to think of some way to help her relax—not that I’m perfectly calm myself.
“Hey!”
I have to shout past the engines. The woman’s eyelids snap open as she turns her head a little to stare at me. Her eyes are so wide that her lashes brush her eyebrows, her dilated pupils nearly overtaking her light gray irises.
“What’s the difference between a hippo and a zippo?” I shout. I don’t know why that’s the only thing I can think of, but it is.
The woman’s eyes widen even more, then her brows furrow. “What?”
“A hippo and a zippo! What’s the difference?”
The ship lurches, and instead of answering my dumb riddle, she screams.
It jerks again. This time, I scream, along with almost everyone else in the cabin. Another lurch, and I almost lose my breakfast.
And then, suddenly, everything is still.
The voice comes through the speakers again. “We have breached the mesosphere and are now in the thermosphere. We’ll be entering the exosphere in one minute and twelve seconds. Trajectory is optimal, and cloaking devices are fully activated. Please do not exit your seats until the red light above the threshold turn green.”
I stare at the woman next to me. She stares back. “One’s really heavy, and the other one’s a little lighter,” I whisper.
The woman doesn’t answer for a moment. She blinks at me, the shocked expression still plastered on her face. Then her mouth drops open in a laugh. It’s not so much a joyful laugh as it is a slightly crazed one—but I guess we all must be a little crazy to have agreed to this mission.
“Are you all right?” I ask when the last of her chuckles dies.
The woman slumps down in her seat, her cheeks flushed. “Yeah. I will be.” A small smile tilts the corner of her mouth as she cocks an eyebrow at me. “Oh, and by the way? That was the worst joke I’ve ever heard.”
I shrug. It is a terrible joke. My husband said it to me once, long ago, when things were easy between us and none of his secrets had come to light.
“It distracted you though,” I shoot back. “So it did what it was supposed to.”
She blows out a breath, smiling ruefully. “True. Thank you for that. I didn’t expect to get so freaked out. I mean, I’m a doctor, for God’s sake. I should be better in a tense situation. I can keep my hand steady in the operating room, no problem. But this? It felt like the first time I rode a roller coaster, except a thousand times worse.”
I chuckle. “No kidding. After leaving Earth’s atmosphere in an alien spaceship and surviving to tell the tale, I’ll never complain about air travel again.”
Her gray eyes light with humor, and she turns awkwardly in her seat and sticks her hand out. “Doctor Elizabeth Banfield.”
I grasp her palm. “Charlotte Navarro.”
“Oh!” Her eyebrows shoot up. “I thought I recognized you. You’re Joseph Navarro’s wife, right? The senator from Illinois?”
Releasing her hand, I nod. I’m not surprised she knows my face. Not all politician’s spouses become household names, but Joseph and I both got a lot of press in the aftermath of his scandal.
When your husband is photographed in a hotel room with a male escort, it’s not the sort of thing the media moves on from quickly.
The whole thing almost derailed his career. I agreed to stay with him as he weathered the storm, to keep playing the role of loving wife so that his political star could continue to rise. But we both know it’s an act. Maybe that’s part of why I applied for this mission, and part of why he pulled strings to get me accepted. We need a break from the lie we’ve been living.
Elizabeth doesn’t mention the sex scandal, and neither do I. Maybe she doesn’t know about it, although she’d have to have been living under a rock to have missed the headlines. Either way, I’m grateful when she lets the moment pass.
A loud click echoes through the cabin, followed by a shrill beep. When I look up, the red light above the threshold of the doorway has changed to green. The voice overhead rings out, crisp and sharp.
“The artificial gravity has been activ
ated. You may unbuckle your safety harnesses. You will be notified when we are approaching our landing location in approximately twelve days. We ask that you please report to your assigned cabins now.”
I undo buckles on the straps around my chest and get to my feet. With the artificial gravity turned on, it feels completely natural to stand.
Elizabeth stands up beside me, stretching a little too. She has an elegant bearing and is a bit taller than I am, with light brown hair that falls down between her shoulder blades in a sleek ponytail.
It doesn’t surprise me that she mentioned she’s a doctor. Besides the captain and crew, who were obviously chosen for their experience with space travel, everyone on board the Foreigner II was selected because of what they can bring to the mission. We each have a particular set of skills that will hopefully, when combined, help us navigate our first contact with alien species.
There are doctors, scientists, scholars, and engineers. My training as a linguist feels a little pitiful compared to some of these people’s skills and knowledge, but I remind myself that it’s bound to be useful.
The other passengers start to filter out of the seating cabin, and Elizabeth and I follow them. The corridors are wide and cool, the walkway padded by rubber. The interior of the ship has been so thoroughly repurposed that it’s almost easy to forget I’m on a spaceship originally designed and built by aliens.
The Foreigner II crashed on Earth over a decade ago. Our government found the crash site, hid the ship, and spent several years and billions of dollars restoring it to working order. Our mission is highly classified. It hasn’t been covered by the media, and none of us were allowed to talk about it publicly. Among other advanced alien tech the ship came equipped with, it has a cloaking device that kept our launch from being picked up by any international satellites.
Several people walk along the hallway with me and Elizabeth as we head toward the back of the ship. All of the spacecraft’s essential staff are designated by the maroon jumpsuits they wear, and there are a good amount of them.
After several minutes of walking, we turn right into a corridor with a bright number eight painted on a glowing overhang.
“Well, this is me.” I point to the second door on the left. “Chamber eight-zero-three.”
Her face lights up. “Oh, that’s a nice coincidence. We’re neighbors. I’m in eight-o-five.”
I grin at her. It’ll be nice to have a friendly face so close.
As Elizabeth walks to her cabin, I key in the code on my door’s entry pad. The door whooshes to the side, and I step into my suite, which is bigger than I expected. It’s plain and sparse—just a small bed, a dresser, and a mirror—but it’s enough, and someone has already set my luggage on the floor next to the bed. The thing that really catches my attention is the window. Well, not so much the window itself, but the view I can see beyond it.
It’s beautiful.
Breathtaking.
Hypnotizing.
I don’t even realize I’m moving until I’m right in front of it. I grab the lip of the small windowsill and stare out into the dark expanse beyond. All I can see are stars, glowing in the distance like gems.
Holy shit.
I’m flying through space. This is real. It’s happening.
I’m leaving behind everything I know and heading into uncharted territory.
2
Charlotte
Over the next several days, we all start to settle in on the ship, falling into an easy routine. There’s not much for non-crew members to do on the spacecraft, so I spend a lot of time in my cabin, reading linguistics journals on my tablet.
On our fourth day in space, I wake up a little later than usual. They brighten and dim the lights to simulate morning and evening, but I’m still losing track of time with no actual sunlight to guide me.
Throwing on a robe over my purple nightgown, I slide my feet into my favorite pair of flats, wishing I’d packed a pair of slippers. The floors on this ship always seem to be cold.
I’m tugging the blankets up on the bed when a knock at the door draws my attention. I cross to it and press the button on the little side panel beside it. Elizabeth is standing on the other side, and I frown as I look at her. There’s something jittery and anxious in her bearing, and her gaze keeps darting back and forth along the corridor.
“Hey, Elizabeth. What is it?”
Grabbing my arm, she pulls me close and murmurs in my ear. “I saw something. Something really damn weird. I feel insane for thinking what I’m thinking, so I need you to come see it too.”
Before I can utter a word in response, she turns and begins pulling me down the hallway after her. I shake off the last cobwebs of sleep as I hurry to keep up with her long strides, trying to keep my robe closed over my nightgown.
“Wait! Elizabeth, slow down,” I hiss, keeping my voice low. Even though I have no idea what’s going on, the strange way she’s acting makes me feel like we shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves.
“Hurry up,” she counters.
My stomach twists into a knot of nerves. I haven’t known Elizabeth long, but we became quick friends after we bonded during takeoff, and I’ve never seen her act like this. She doesn’t look terrified like she did when we were leaving Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, she looks shaken and… pissed off.
I don’t say anything else. I just pick up my pace and fall into step beside her, trying to keep my imagination from going wild. As we wind through the corridors and tromp down a few sets of stairs, I run through different possibilities in my head. It could be anything, and besides her obvious sense of urgency, Elizabeth hasn’t given me any clues about what’s wrong.
Finally, her footsteps slow a little. Her grip on my hand tightens as we stride through a large doorway. The door is open, tucked into the wall, and I wonder if it’s supposed to be that way.
But as we walk farther into the space, I forget all about the door.
We’re standing inside a huge room deep in the bowels of the ship. It’s massive and long, easily half the length of the entire vessel. There are pods arrayed throughout the room in orderly rows, spaced a few feet apart.
And every one of them has a body in it.
I blink, my heart skipping a beat in shock. “Who… who are all these people?”
Elizabeth hasn’t let go of my hand. Instead of answering, she starts walking again and tugs me along, pulling me deeper into the huge room.
They must be personnel of some sort, I think. Maybe they’re a sort of backup crew? But why would they be in pods like this? Asleep like this?
We come to a stop between two of the pods. I don’t know if they’re human-designed or alien-designed, but they look like some kind of cryogenic containers. Stasis pods. Something like that.
But what are they for?
Elizabeth’s face is pale. She swallows hard before speaking, her gaze darting around the space before finding mine.
“I’m going to tell you something,” she says seriously. “And I need you to keep an open mind. I didn’t believe it at first, but after I saw this…”
She gestures at the hundreds of pods that surround us, and my stomach dips.
“What?” I press. “Believe what? What’s going on?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know, exactly. But I’ve been going on walks around the ship, just trying to get some exercise and clear my head. Yesterday, I overheard a couple of the crew members talking about something strange.”
“Strange how?”
“They were talking about checking on something in the cargo hold, and they kept referring to that something as ‘her.’ I just assumed it was terminology I’m not familiar with—like how ships are sometimes called ‘her,’ that kind of thing. But they were talking about how valuable the cargo is, how important. And one of them mentioned a word I didn’t recognize. Orkun, or something like that.”
“And you think these…” I gesture around me. “These women are the cargo?”
Elizabeth’
s voice drops. “Yes. I think they’re meant to be used for trade. We’re going to make first contact with aliens, and I think someone back on Earth thought it would go better if we had something to offer.”
“Fuck.”
My stomach clenches, and I glance at the pod nearest to me. The woman in it is young. Late-twenties, maybe. Pretty. So are all of the women around her.
And they’re all women.
Shit. Is Elizabeth right?
“We should tell someone,” I whisper, barely aware that I’m talking as I stare at the girl in the pod next to me. She looks so peaceful, completely unaware of what’s going on.
“Yeah.” Elizabeth’s voice is tight. “But who? And who already knows about it?”
“Let’s go,” I say thickly. “We need to go.”
We need to figure out what the hell to do about this, and we can’t stick around here while we debate about it. Moving quickly, I turn and make my way back through the sea of cryo-pods. Elizabeth follows me through the door, but as we step into the corridor, I freeze.
Shit.
There are two men walking toward us. Crew members, judging by the dark maroon jumpsuits they’re wearing.
“What’s going on here?” The taller man narrows his eyes at me. “You’re not supposed to be down here. Either of you.”
The other man flicks a glance at the open door, and his jaw clenches. I have the sudden unpleasant realization that these two maroon-clad men aren’t just crew members. They’re guards.
And they know we just saw something we weren’t supposed to see.
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