Desired By The Alien
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Authors: Rosette Lex
Desired By The Alien
Rosette Lex
Copyright 2015 by Rosette Lex
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any way whatsoever, without written permission
from the author, except in case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews
and articles.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any
person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First edition, 2015
Chapter One
From the time she was a little girl, Vivienne had wanted to be a spy. Not in the way of a child just wishing to do something absurd, but in the way of someone who had discovered what they wanted to do with the rest of her life. She wanted to protect her country. She wanted to be part of those things no one else ever knew about. From the first time she tried on her grandfather’s oversized army cap and watched her father don his uniform, Vivienne wanted to be
important
.
After all of her time in the army, after everything she did to prepare herself, she really wasn’t surprised when she finally became a spy. Despite that, she had never imagined the actual mission she was assigned.
“What is this thing even supposed to
be
?” she asked through her communicator, as she ran her hands over the various monitors, buttons, switches, and the primary terminal of the cramped space pod.
“I mean, I get that it’s a space craft, obviously,” she added, considering she was in the process of rising through the troposphere and into the stratosphere. The pod’s thermostat dipped harshly as the craft passed into the tropopause and then leveled off once more as the pod entered the stratosphere. The pod’s auxiliary thrusters kicked in with a jolt to keep the pod going straight, rather than simply falling into orbit.
“But why so tiny?” It seemed a valid question, as Vivienne was not a particularly large woman, and yet she felt like she was being squeezed like a can of sardines.
She was an attractive woman, albeit in a somewhat unconventional manner. At 5’5”, Vivienne wasn’t amazingly tall, but she never
looked
tiny. Broad shouldered, broad hipped, and brimming with more confidence than a bull moose, she always seemed to fill up every room she entered. She had skin the color of coffee with cream, and amber eyes that could be as meltingly warm as a cup of cocoa or as harshly frigid as ice chips, and curly black hair that she kept cropped close to her head. She had high, prominent cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth that could smile or scold with equal dignity.
Once upon a time, on a few occasions, she had wished that her chest was not quite as large as it was, so that people would be more likely to look at her face as she spoke with them (nothing said ‘disrespect’ like being unable to meet her superior officer’s eyes because he was too busy eye-fucking her chest).
And then she decided that wishing to change herself was idiotic, and she switched to threatening to punch people if they didn’t look at her face. Considering her arms were corded with muscle, it was a threat that most people took seriously.
At that moment, though, she mostly felt like a foil wrapped TV dinner.
The pod was already cruising into the mesosphere when mission control deigned to answer Vivienne’s question, her voice crackling over the speaker.
“
It’s an emergency pod,
” mission control answered.
“
It’s for getting help up to the space station or anything else that might get launched into orbit in a hurry, without needing to worry about any extra baggage. This is just a test run to make sure it runs properly.
”
“Don’t I feel safe,” Vivienne drawled flatly.
“
I assure you, everything has been tested to the fullest extent
,” mission control replied dispassionately. “
Barring some sort of catastrophic malfunction, you are reasonably safe.
”
“Yep,” Vivienne continued. “Feeling safe.”
For a few minutes, all was quiet. In a surprisingly short amount of time, though, the pod was in the thermosphere.
Vivienne could understand the need for haste in an emergency, but the speed was only increasing, to the point that it was beginning to seem ludicrous.
On top of that, she was beginning to feel dizzy.
“I think something’s wrong,” she said, her voice slightly distant.
“
Report
,” mission control replied evenly.
“I’m getting lightheaded. And—wait.” She reached up to touch an open hatch that hadn’t been there before, and she could feel air, or some other sort of gas, flowing past her fingers.
“What—what’s this hatch for? What’s coming out…of…it?”
Her mind felt heavy and sluggish, like every thought had to first swim through a lake of jelly before she could process any of them.
Her eyes were slowly closing, and the last thing she heard was the pod’s automated voice intoning, “Destination locked,” and mission control’s quiet, “
Your mission is so much more important than you know. Good luck.
”
Vivienne awoke to a siren and an almighty thud as the pod rattled around her like it was trying to shred apart. Her eyes opened slowly, like peeling away a scab, and she saw a red light.
A warning buzzer droned incessantly, and the pod’s automated voice placidly repeated, “Atmosphere has been breached. Destination approaching. Please brace for deceleration and impact.”
It took Vivienne a moment to comprehend what it was saying, until the pod’s parachute expanded and with a thunderous jolt, the pod began to slow down as it chugged its way towards the ground below. Well, presumably the ground below. The pod had no windows. Vivienne could only hope that she wasn’t about to be stranded in the middle of the ocean somewhere.
She looked at the main terminal, and jerked in surprise when she realized that over two weeks had passed, and the memories of that last conversation with mission control flooded back into her mind. Quickly, she brought up the terminal’s map, only to find a star chart that was utterly foreign to her.
With a massive bump, the pod hit the ground, bounced twice, and finally skidded to a halt. Vivienne rode the rough landing out with her teeth gritted and both hands pressed to the sides of the pod.
The automated voice announced, “Landing successful. Passenger injuries: inconsequential. Pod status: stable. Sleep mode engaging.”
The entire roof of the cylindrical pod opened, but Vivienne didn’t climb out immediately, instead trying every panel, button, and switch of the pod to get some sort of reaction out of it. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t get it to wake up from sleep mode.
Reluctantly, she unstrapped herself and crawled through the roof hatch. She knelt on the ground beside the pod, and stared around with wide eyes. She knew immediately that she had not landed on Earth, as if the unfamiliar star charts hadn’t been proof enough.
Both her and the pod were in a shallow crater, and the dirt she knelt in was a deep, nitrogen red, but all around the crater she could see grass, though it was not the grass she knew.
It came in the glistening, ever-shifting black and brown shades of an oil spill, interrupted periodically by flowers that consisted of strangely fleshy spirals, coils of organic matter, petals like a porcupine’s quills and stamen like hypodermic needles, and all of them oozed a transparent, viscous orange fluid that Vivienne didn’t dare to touch.
She also realized that she felt like she was melting. It had to be at least a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and she quickly began stripping out of her space suit, leaving her in just a pair of form fitting shorts and her sports bra.
A few creatures stood at a distance, observing the crater curiously. Vivienne could see three different types, right off the bat.
One stood on two legs that seemed enormously long compared to the small, round body. It was covered in puffy green-ish brown fluff like a dandelion, with just its long legs, tiny arms, and round head sticking out, with an almost comically long, thin snout and enormous eyes. A thin, proboscis-like tongue darted out quickly and then retreated just as quickly as it stared at the crater, before it decided that there was no danger and it bounded off into the tall grass.
Another stood on four legs, crouched defensively like a ferret or a cat ready to spring, as its forked tail lashed through the grass flattened by its approach. Its legs gathered beneath it like a coil ready to spring, its gleaming eyes focused on Vivienne, shining mirror bright in the half-light.
Whether it was covered in fur or sand paper, Vivienne couldn’t tell, but it was striped in black and the same green-ish brown as the last creature, mottled so that it nearly turned invisible in the grass. Its large, flat head bobbed back and forth as it gauged the distance between itself and Vivienne, its jagged, ill-fitting shark-like teeth gleaming from its rounded jaws. After a tense moment, it too decided the situation wasn’t worth it, and it growled a final warning before it turned and scampered into the grass like a fleeing weasel.
It was the third creature that captured Vivienne’s attention the most, though. It stood on two legs, at least four feet tall at the shoulders, with a thin, swan-like, but muscled neck and a wedge-like head. The closest thing Vivienne could think to compare it to was some sort of raptor, but even that didn’t fit. It stared at her with four irate but curious eyes, and it impatiently fidgeted with four arms, each of them with claws fit to skewer a small child.
It was covered in sharp, quill-like feathers, and its tail fanned open like a peacock’s as it took a slow step towards the crater, only to pause once more. Its jaws opened as it let out a serious of bark-like noises, like a dog that had been crossed with a screeching bird. It turned its head to look over its shoulder, and it’s jaws further parted into quarters as it shrieked into the trees.
Finally, Vivienne scrambled to her feet, readying herself to run, as she could only imagine that it was calling its pack. But what came out of the towering, curling trees was a group of…men.
Vivienne tried to make sense of the unexpectedly normal sight, but she put that process on hold once she realized that the half-dozen men were armed and walking right towards her.
One of them paused only long enough to pat the raptor-creature companionably on the shoulder, but Vivienne didn’t wait to see anything else. She turned and climbed quickly out of the crater, and then she took off at a sprint, the tall grass flattening under her feet and rustling around her.
One of the men whistled sharply, and Vivienne could hear heavy footsteps quickly catching up to her. Within only a few dozen yards, the raptor-creature caught up to her and then passed her, and Vivienne ground a halt as it cut her off, lest she go charging straight into its claws.
She turned around as the half dozen men advanced on her, and her gaze darted around quickly as she tried to find a stick or even just a particularly spiky flower, but the beast brushed up against her back. Its feathers rustled threateningly as it peered around her, its jaws quartering once more as it growled at her. Vivienne fell very still, very quickly.
The men approached her, forming a semi-circle in front of her while the beast remained at her back, boxing her in.
One man towards the outside of the semi-circle took a step forward, but he quickly stepped back into place when the man at the center, apparently in charge, shouted something at him.
Even in the middle of a foreign environment, with no idea of what was going on, Vivienne couldn’t help but notice how utterly
gorgeous
he was. He was tall and broad, sculpted like all of the best athletic models. His skin was like bronze, and he had waves of golden hair swept back, away from his face, which had to have been hand crafted by some sort of deity.
He watched her with shrewd, steel grey eyes, his expression caught somewhere between curiosity and disdain, mixed with a fair amount of irritation.
The man who seemed to be in charge stepped towards her slowly, saying something in a language that mostly sounded like someone trying to aggressively yodel in Russian and German to Vivienne’s ears.
She stared at him uncomprehendingly, until he rolled his eyes emphatically and quickly advanced towards her. He seized her by the upper arm, the raptor-creature pressing close to her to keep her from bolting.
The man held up something that resembled a black, metallic, spiraling seashell, and in a quick movement, he forced it into her right ear. Vivienne yelped in startled pain and lashed out with her free arm, hammering ineffectually at his chest. Her ear popped loudly, sounds dulled, and with a noise like a vacuum cleaner, everything got louder once again.