Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance Read online

  She understood why they were all so giddy to get inside. There were untold discoveries just waiting to made. Hell, she was excited too. This was her first mission and her commanders had given her plenty of chances to prove herself. Being excited was fine.

  But anybody who wasn’t also scared out of their mind was a damn fool.

  The scout team had just barely looked around inside, and even they admitted that they had no clue what the stuff inside was. Now Naeesha was walking into this place with a couple dozen nosy scientists who were going to mess with literally everything inside. What was going to happen when one of them found the security system? Or a grenade? Or a canister of nerve gas?

  So yes. She was afraid. And nervous. And stressed. And more than a little excited. But her hands were rock steady as she started down the stairs leading into the compound. The flashlight at the end of her rifle automatically turned on, even though the scientists were setting up chemical lamps as they went, leaving the entranceway more than light enough to see inside.

  So far, nothing was out of the ordinary. Bare concrete walls. Just a hint of local flora and fauna that had made its way inside.

  Up ahead, there was an awful clunking sound, the squeal of metal on metal, and a crash in front of them in the tunnel. A gentle breeze flooded past her from deeper inside.

  “Do you smell that?” Marko asked over the comm.

  She did. It was an old, familiar smell. One that she’d been known long before she’d learned to identify it. It was the smell of death, and it was powerful and pungent inside the compound. She double checked her rifle and felt for the sidearm on her hip.

  “What do you have up there?”

  The scientists were plodding along same as ever, chattering mindlessly, none of them aware of the lingering fog that hung around them. Naeesha had to take shallow, measured breaths just to keep from choking on the sickly sweet and earthy stench. It was, she thought, an old smell. The faint chemical trace on the air suggested that somebody had taken the time to clean up, but it was useless. Death had visited these halls, and had done enough damage that nothing would ever cleanse them of the lingering odor.

  She didn’t like that the useless pack of civilians stood between her and Marko. She didn’t like that he was the first soldier down into this pit, or that help was so far behind him.

  She liked him.

  He had always been around during combat school. Floating around the perimeter, sticking to the back of the rooms always near the door. Never too far away, but never close by. She’d seen him a hundred times during training, but hadn’t noticed him until after graduation.

  His high cheekbones and dark skin and deep eyes made him hard not to pick out of a crowd, but he had this reserved demeanor that always kept him from sticking out. It wasn’t until she’d started watching him more closely that she saw the way that he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. After that, he was impossible to get out of her head.

  She tried to keep worry at bay. They were safe, more likely than not. They were well trained, well equipped, and could handle any kind of emergency that came up. Marko was scrappy, and Marko was smart. She was thirty feet behind him, and he knew what to do if he ran into something that he couldn’t handle. He was fine. They were fine.

  “Made it to the first staging point,” he said. “Everything aces so far.”

  Naeesha let out a sigh of relief. The first staging point was a large chamber. According to the report it was a big room with thick concrete walls and two heavy doors that sealed, locked, and bolted shut. She and Marko would cover each of the doors while the scientists set up and the rest of her unit finished setting up the perimeter defenses.

  The chamber grew out of the darkness before her and she walked into the big room. The soft glow of the chemical lamps didn’t reach all the way up to the ceiling of the room. The space above them seemed to be an endless black void, hanging over their heads, waiting to swallow them. Naeesha shined the narrow cone of her flashlight up the walls and swept away the darkness, relaxing a little when she confirmed that the walls and ceiling were smooth, unbroken concrete all the way around. She went to her door, signaled her commander that they were in place, and waited.

  It was getting noisy in the chamber fast. Twenty five people moving and talking and setting up equipment with nowhere for all that sound to go. Naeesha focused her thoughts on the door in front of her, and on her earpiece. That’s where any trouble would come from, and that’s where her mind need to be.

  “Hey, can you give me a hand with this?” came a voice from behind her. It was Larsi.

  “You’ll have to get someone else, ma’am. I’ve got my orders.”

  There was a secret to using military coldness to dismiss unwanted distractions. Naeesha had learned and mastered it.

  “Oh come on,” Larsi said. “I know it’s your job to be paranoid, but right now the biggest danger we’ve got is reporting back to our superiors empty handed. Come help me out so that we can get this show on the road.”

  Larsi was right, but Naeesha stood fast on the matter of principal. She knew damn well that if she started taking orders from the research team now, they’d be running the show by dinner.

  “There will be an entire squad of soldiers down here in just a few minutes. I’ll be happy to help you then.”

  There was a short, quiet barrage of unkind words that Naeesha didn’t bother making out, and Larsi stormed across the room. A few seconds later, she heard Marko’s voice carry through the din. He was not an expert at dismissing unwanted distractions, so he got roped into helping Laris with whatever she needed.

  This provided a new form of distraction. One that Naeesha couldn’t dismiss quite as easily. Her motives for keeping close by to Marko weren’t entirely altruistic. She really liked him. He was funny. He was sweet. He had this sort of quiet personality that made her think he didn’t know how sexy he was. And it didn’t come at the expense of competence or confidence. He reminded her of the ocean like she’d seen it on Earth. Warm, calm, and unfathomably deep. He was a mystery, and she wanted to solve him.

  “Quiet!”

  The shout snapped her out of her daydream. The room went silent.

  “I thought I heard something by the door,” the voice said again.

  There was a stillness in the air as twenty five people held their breath and trained their ears. The silence remained unbroken for a moment, but when nothing happened, people started slowly returning to their work. Naeesha’s mind started to wander again. Larsi was right. There was nothing to worry about. She needed to relax, just a little. Being on edge like this, it wasn’t good for her. She could already feel the stress breaking her body down. She slept like shit. She was tense all the time. And damn was she getting jumpy.

  To top it all off, now she was hearing things. A scratching sound. No. More like a grinding sound. Just a scrape here or a scrape there. She could have sworn a vibration ran up her legs. Maybe she wasn’t hearing things. The sounds, if they were real, were coming from the other side of the door. Her heart jumped into her throat. She tried to swallow it, tried to calm herself. It didn’t do any good. Her feet carried her closer and closer to the door. Her body was tight, ready to move, ready to fight. She reached out a hand and touched the door. It was cold. Unmoving. Perfectly still. She leaned against it, put cupped a hand around her ear and pressed it to the door.

  Pain shot through her body. She couldn’t hear anything over the high-pitched drone in her head. She was seeing double, for what little she could see at all. Something grabbed her and pulled her across the floor. She reached out for her rifle, but her hands were numb. Three faces appeared over her head. It took a moment to realize that it was really only one face.

  Marko’s.

  Chapter Four

  An awful noise erupted over the background. It was like the dampened ring of something big and metal being hit by something big and hard. Marko turned around to see Naeesha drop to the ground. He ran across the room, sliding
to his knees at her side. Blood was trickling from her ears and her eyes flicked around, pupils wide and unfocused.

  Whatever hit the door wasn’t giving up. There was thud after thud, it was almost deafening. He dragged Naeesha back away from the door and looked up at it. Dust and crumbling cement rained down from the ceiling, but the door was holding tight.

  The scientists started panicking. Marko radioed for help and checked on Naeesha. She was concussed and going fast into shock. She was babbling, trying to tell him something but the words were coming out in a loud, jumbled mess. One of the scientists, a short, pudgy human with a patchy beard, knelt down on the other side of her.

  “I’m a physician, he said. “I’ll have a look at her.”

  Marko didn’t want to leave Naeesha, not like this, but first and foremost he had to secure the area. The door looked solid enough. Right now, their biggest problem was the herd of skittish scientists who looked like they might stampede through the hall towards the surface at any moment. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when they ran headlong into the squad of jittery rookie soldiers coming the other way.

  “Everybody quiet!” he shouted. Whatever was outside of the doors was still banging on them, and people were still chattering in hushed, hurried tones, but a small peace came over the room. He keyed his comm device so that his commanding officer could hear the instructions he was giving the crowd of scientists.

  “Leave what you’re working on, form a single file line, and proceed calmly down the hall. Stay to the right, stay quiet, and wait for further instruction.”

  The crowd began to coalesce, but not into an ordered line. There was pushing, shoving, the sort of skittishness that Marko had been afraid of all along. He started pulling people out of the blob and pushing them into a line near the hallway. The knot of lab coats slowly began to unwind, and after a few moments, there was a reasonably straight line of people headed out of the room. Marko stopped the doctor and had him stay. With the medic’s approval, they moved Naeesha further down the hall, away from the incessant echoing of whatever.

  “What do you think it is?” the doctor asked.

  “No idea.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Wait for backup.”

  Right on time, the noise of hurried talking faded into the thud of heavy boots on concrete.

  “Report!” shouted Bura as she came near.

  “Something big is hitting the left door. Started about two minutes ago. Naeesha is down with a concussion. She’s in shock.”

  Bura looked over the wounded soldier, sized Marko up, and turned around to address the rest of the unit.

  “Alright!” she shouted. “Proceed to the right side of the room and set up a firing line. We’re going to take care of this problem right now.”

  Then she turned to Marko.

  “The researchers are back in their ship. I want you to take Operator Naeesha and get her back to the shuttle autoclinic.”

  Marko didn’t waste any time. He sat Naeesha up, pulled her arm around his shoulders, and hefted her onto his back. He walked as quickly as he could down the long, dark hallway. The lanterns cast eerie shadows on the bare walls, and up ahead, brilliant daylight called him forward. He tried to ignore the sounds coming from behind him. Pounding footsteps. Shouted orders, and the awful banging.

  He carried Naeesha into the ship and lay her down on the autoclinic table. The machines would take over from here, diagnosing and repairing anything that they could, administering medication, and counseling her through her treatment when she came to.

  As for Marko, he didn’t have any orders, so he decided to make some of his own. He pulled a plasma repeater from the ship’s armory. The weapon was classified as an “anti-material” rifle, which meant that it was more suited towards blowing apart ships and shuttles than organic targets. It was the heaviest weapon that he knew how to use, and didn’t seem terribly out of line for whatever was waiting down in the darkness.

  He heaved the gun onto his shoulder and started towards the staircase. As soon as he hit the bottom, he heard the telltale sign of a blast door grinding open. There was a brief silence. Then gunfire. Then the screams.

  Chapter Five

  Naeesha woke to heavy-weapon fire. It was faint and distant but there was no mistaking the kachunk kachunk sound, or the smell of ionized air.

  She was on an autoclinic table. The chamber flashed back to her. She didn’t remember what had happened. Just that she’d been knocked out. The autoclinic’s robotic arms moved out of the way as she sat up and ripped out her IV. The room spun a little as she swung her legs off the table and stood up. Tried to stand up, anyway. After a little swerving and staggering, she got to her feet and started towards the egress ramp. The kachunk of the machine gun kept pounding the air. She could feel it in her chest. Whatever was down there, it was too big for guns. Thankfully, they’d brought along just the thing.

  After a quick stop at the armory, she was staggering down towards the compound entrance. The gunfire grew louder and louder and it was clear that there was only weapon sounding off. She looked down at her comm and saw that all but one of the unit’s status indicators was offline. That could only have meant one thing, and she prayed that she was wrong as she carefully descended the steps into the darkened tunnel.

  Up ahead, a small figure darkened the hall. It was silhouetted by an unbroken stream of high energy plasma, blinding green streaks of air that had been reduced to subatomic particles. Every single plasma round was more than capable of ripping straight through the hull of a light shuttle, but the soldier seemed to think that there was still a good reason to keep shooting.

  Past the soldier, she could see… something. There was movement in the darkness. Slow. Deliberate. Pressing closer and closer. It grew brighter as it approached the soldier and one of the chemical lamps, but Naeesha couldn’t make out anything specific. Just something big.

  Then, a lightning fast blur of motion. The shooting stopped, the soldier sailed backwards through the air. It was Marko.

  Naeesha shouldered the weapon she’d taken from the ship, sighted the shifting monstrosity, and fired. There was a blinding flash, a cloud of debris, and a rush of superheated air that carried an awful stench.

  She didn’t wait for the dust to settle.

  Dropping the weapon from her shoulder, she grabbed Marko and pulled him up over her shoulders. Fuck he was heavy. The sounds of collapsing tunnel followed her through the hall, but there was more than that. Movement. Was the thing still alive? Impossible.

  It didn’t matter. A blow like that meant that Marko was hurt bad, and that every second counted. Naeesha was still shaky, and her feet dragged behind her as she pushed towards the light, the awful sound of stone scraping against stone coming louder and closer with each step. She broke into a run, her legs burning under the weight of two people and all their gear. Sunlight blinded her as she reached the steps and took them two at a time. The ship was close, but whatever was behind her had almost closed the gap between them. She made it to the ramp of the ship and climbed aboard, ordering it to lift off. The sound of the footsteps behind her changed as the monster moved from concrete to vegetation.

  The ship picked up. Naeesha teetered towards the table, trying to keep her balance as the ship rocked gently into the air. A crash and a sudden jolt knocked her to her feet. Marko fell to the ground and the ship spun sharply, throwing him across the metal floor towards the open ramp door. Naeesha gave the telepathic command to the ship to close it, and only just in time. The ship recovered from its spin and continued to rise.

  She retrieved Marko from the back of the ship and lay him down on the autoclinic table. He was in bad shape. Broken ribs, a shattered arm, a collapsed lung, and a fractured skull. That was just the first page of the report that the computer generated for her. It gave him a “favorable” prognosis.

  Confident that she’d done all she could for him, Naeesha went about completing her mission as best she could.
She ordered the ship to circle the compound. Whatever was down there, she wanted a good look at it. While her education on Alderoc’s animal life had been incomplete, to say the least, there was nothing that could have stood up to the assault that she and Marko had put it through.

  The viewscreen showed nothing. A pile of rubble around the compound entrance. A path of uprooted vegetation. A few glistening black streaks that she figured belonged inside the shuttle or the creature.

  Whatever the creature was, whatever had just killed her entire unit, it was gone. She scanned the surrounding forest with every sensor on the ship, but found nothing. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t know where it came from. She didn’t even know what it looked like.

  All she knew was that it was loose.

  Chapter Six

  PRESENT DAY

  Marko picked up the pace as he worked his way down the rocky slope. It had taken two days longer than he’d planned to find a pass through the mountains, and he was going to have to move fast if he wanted to keep on schedule. And for everybody’s sake, it was best that he did.

  It wasn’t that anyone would be safer by moving closer to the Alderoccan capital, it was just that the danger there was less immediate. Even though they would still be more than a hundred and fifty miles from the capital, the Alderoccans would not take kindly to the Halians moving camp.

  He knew that this would be perceived as a threat. Knew that the people who had given him orders for twenty five years would be sending more men like him to neutralize this newest “aggression”.

  Ever since that first moment that the Halian and Alderoccan people came together, everything had been an aggression. The irony was that since then, there was no real threat. Just the echoes and after images of the day that the Wild found Alderoc.

  He’d done his part in keeping the cycle of hate and fear and violence going. He’d done as much as anyone to push it to the breaking point. But now he was trying to do something about it. He could only hope that it wasn’t too late. The pieces were set. The game had started. And if people didn’t play very carefully, there would be no winners.