Wrong Alien (TerraMates Book 6) (32 page)

"No," she said when she'd leaned back. "I'm
not angry. I'd have been angry if you were just trying to get me to come with
you because you need a queen to be king, because I hate being used, but you
wouldn't do that, I don't think. And you can't help what your uncle wants
apparently. We can deal with this whole admittedly weird thing when  we get
there, I guess."

It was as good an idea as any, and Asher was eager all over
again. He grabbed the extra fuel and went around to the back of the
transporter, topping it off before slamming the hatch shut with a note of
finality.

"Last chance to stay here," he said to her, and
though he was mostly teasing, he was also quite serious. He wanted to make
sure.

"I'm going," Mia said, nodding firmly.
"Goodbye, Earth."

With a little whoop, Asher kissed her cheek and hit the
button to close the door. The stairs folded up and smoothed out back into the
door panel which slid into place with a hiss and a click. He checked all the
dials and displays, making sure that there were no pressure leaks or cracks in
the craft. Everything read perfect, just the way his uncle had showed him to
read it, and with a deep breath, he hit the series of buttons to get them
moving.

"You'll want to sit down for this," he said over
his shoulder. "And strap in. This first bit is bumpy."

Chapter 10: Interlude

The device in his pocket trilled with a cheerful sound, and
a smile crossed Abon's face as he pulled it out and checked the screen. Even after
all of these years, it still showed him the things he wanted to see, and right
then and there it was telling him that his nephew was leaving Earth. Finally.

Finally Asher would be able to come home to his people and
things would start to be the way they should have been if the Shaddoc hadn't
attacked when Asher was but a child.

Abon found that no matter how much time had passed, he
couldn't forget that night. The sounds of his home crumbling around him, the
screams of his people as the Shaddoc killed without mercy. It had been the
night that the life he knew and loved had come to an end, and he knew that no
matter how long he lived, there wouldn't be anything that could stop him from
thinking about it and wishing that things could have ended differently.

The Nalyi had been set to prosper. They had been growing and
building and making their lives better, and in the span of one night, all of it
had come grinding to a halt.

Quite literally, in fact.

The Nalyi above all else were a peace loving people. They
had people trained to fight, as every clan must when there were creatures like
the Shaddoc prowling around, but they much preferred living in peace with each
other and the other clans. Their land had been verdant and bright, the palace a
testament to their skill at construction and art, gleaming in the light from
the sun with spires that seemed to stretch on forever.

The halls were made from marble and ivory colored stone,
polished wood and glass making windows and studding the walls. Other clans had
flocked to their corner of Qantari, their home planet, to learn their ways and
enjoy their land, but everything was different now.

Nothing was growing, nothing was thriving, and the palace
lay in rubble, half of the walls broken down and demolished in the Shaddoc
attack.

It made Abon sad to see it, and he paused when he reached
the palace gates, pressing a hand over his heart and then to his lips, sparing
a moment to mourn those who had been lost as well as the destruction of their
lives.

But it wasn't time to despair. Abon knew that the Nayli were
a resilient race, and that with the arrival of their king, they would thrive
once more.

First he had to check something, though.

He walked the halls, footsteps echoing on the scarred, dusty
stone floor. Nothing had been moving here for too long, but Abon still kept his
guard up. The Shaddoc raiders could be anywhere, lurking in case of his return,
and his fingers tightened around the brilliant silver sword that he had brought
with him.

If he got killed before he completed his mission, he was
going to be very upset.

The door to the tunnels was shut tight, just as it was
supposed to be, but there was enough authority in Abon's touch that it opened
for him easily. For a moment, he wondered if he had been wrong. The Nalyi
palace was meant to respond to the hand of the king and no one else, and if
he'd been right, then he wasn't the king anymore. He supposed he'd find out
once he moved further in.

The air in the tunnels was dank and stale, but that wasn't a
problem for the people who had been living down there for the last several
years.

Spread out before him in the winding tunnels under the Nalyi
palace were his people. No one stirred as he moved among them, and Abon smiled.

So it was true. He'd always believed in the legends, and the
one that said that when the king left in times of trouble, his people would
sleep until his return seemed to be true. Because there they all were.

Hundreds of Nalyi, sitting or laying on the ground, eyes
closed and bodies still in an enchanted slumber that would only be broken once
the true king returned.

The sleep kept them preserved exactly as they had been, and
it was hard to see that they were all so young still, so untouched by time,
while he was older than he'd been when he'd fled and sure that it showed.

A bright flash of brilliant red hair caught his attention
and his breath, and he moved towards the still figure.

His sister. Just as beautiful as she had been the day he'd
left with her son. She was leaned against the sloping wall of the tunnel, her
hair wild around her face and shoulders. Carefully, Abon stepped over a
sleeping child to get to her, crouching down and touching her face with gentle
fingers that shook.

"My sister," he murmured, voice loud in the
otherwise nearly silent tunnel. She gave no indication that she felt his touch
or even knew he was there, and he sighed. "Soon, my dear. Soon your son
will return and set all of this right."

He stood up and looked around at the people he had once been
in charge of ruling. "Soon you'll all be free from your sleep and life can
begin again."

In the dim light of the tunnel he checked the screen of the
device that showed him where Asher was. It would take a good couple of days for
him to get back here, once he passed the veil, and Abon closed his eyes and
wished him safe travels, hoping he wasn't coming back alone.

Chapter 11: Touchdown

‘Bumpy' had been a bit of an understatement, and actually
not the right word at all to describe what the first bit was. They'd risen
straight up, which had been thrilling to watch from the windows, but then
they'd tilted at an angle, which Mia understood because the nose of the thing
was probably pointed for a reason.

She'd been on enough planes that she'd assumed it would be
something similar, but she hadn't been prepared at all. Planes started off
slow, rolling down the runway to gather speed before they lifted off.

This didn't do that. It hovered above the tree line for a
moment, and Asher assured her that no one would be able to see them because of
the cloaking mechanism, and then it shot forward, picking up speed all at once.

It made sense, she supposed, since this craft had a lot
farther to go than an airplane, but she still screamed as it rattled along
through the air, thanking Asher for reminding her to buckle in because she
would have surely been on the floor if she hadn't done so.

"I don't remember this part much," Asher called,
voice loud over the sudden roar of the engines. "I was crying and being
held when we took off because I was too small to be buckled into the seats
properly. It's fun, though, isn't it?"

He looked at her, and Mia could see that his eyes were
alight with excitement. She couldn't be grumpy about the ride after that. Not
when Asher was so thrilled to be going home. Instead she smiled back at him,
and nodded, even though she had a white knuckled grip on the armrests of her seat.

Aside from the eventful nature of their takeoff, the rest of
the journey was almost dull. They cruised through space, going at a fast clip,
but she barely noticed how fast it was. The ship was level and she was able to
walk around and make food in the cooking machines once Asher showed her how
they worked. She slept on her cot when she was tired, since there was no real
difference between night and day where they were now.

Asher spent most of his time looking out the window with a
longing expression on his face, and she knew that he was waiting for the first
glimpse of his home. She couldn't even imagine having been away from it for as
long as he had, and he didn't even know what he was going to be coming back to.
Not really.

He told her stories in the quiet. About his uncle and how he
was king, about his nanny and how she'd had to chase him all over the place
sometimes. About how his people had taken things that weren't pretty by nature
and morphed them into works of art.

There was pride in his voice as he talked, and even though
he'd been no more than a little boy when he'd last been there, it was easy to
hear how much love and respect he had for his people. It made Mia's heart ache
to be a part of it.

She told him stories in return. Not about her parents,
because there wasn't much to tell there, but about her life since she'd moved
out of their house. About the things she'd wanted, the dreams she'd had. About
how she was something of an artist herself.

The idea of living and learning amongst a group of naturally
talented people, which was how Asher made his people sound, was thrilling, and
the more he told her about it, the more excited she got. Maybe she would fit in
better than she thought she would, better than she had ever fit in with her
family, who had been disappointed in her life choices.

The days passed easily, and then, three days after they'd
set out, a sound chimed from the console of the ship, and Asher looked up from
the soup he had heated up and his eyes went wide. "I think… I think we're
there. Almost."

He got up and went to check, and then it wasn't even
necessary because right there, looming in front of them was the planet.

Or at least Mia assumed it was the planet since she'd never
seen it before. It looked similar enough to the pictures of Earth she'd seen,
though the ground was much darker in places and there was less water spread
out. She had no idea where she was supposed to be looking for Asher's home, but
then they were preparing for descent, and she was more interested in throwing
herself into the nearest seat and strapping herself in firmly while Asher put
away the thing that would go flying once the nose of the transporter was
pointing down.

Breaking through the atmosphere here was just as rough and
terrifying as breaking out of Earth's had been, but she held on and soon enough
they were leveling out again and flying straight.

Amelia had seen plenty of nice sights in her life. She was
the daughter of a senator, after all, and they'd done a fair bit of traveling
when she was younger. She'd been all over the country and to a few others
besides, but she was fairly certain that nothing she had ever seen before had
prepared her for the wonder of space.

She was filled with questions. Like how come they were
moving so fast, and how come it wasn't going to take light years for them to
get there among other things. Mostly she was still reeling over the whole ‘Abon
wants you to be my queen' thing that had been dropped on her earlier.

Her? A queen? It was almost laughable, and she would have
laughed at it if she weren't so surprised at herself.

She'd decided that she was going to come anyway, even
knowing the whole truth. She wasn't happy with the way her life had turned out
on the whole, and a new start, even somewhere she would be so out of place,
sounded frankly amazing.

The image she'd had in her head and the image unfolding in
front of her couldn't have been more different. For one thing, most of the land
that she could see out of the tiny window was barren looking. She couldn't even
call it a desert because it was just hard, packed earth in a deep brown that
looked like it hadn't seen water for years.

None of the trees were flourishing, and they looked more
like rocks jutting up out of the land than anything that could be considered
vegetation.

All around was rubble. Houses and buildings crumbling in
disrepair. It was clear that there had once been structure here, the markings
of boundaries and maybe roads, though she didn't see anything that looked like
they might be the alien version of cars or vehicles. It was laid out like a
small city or a subdivision might have been on Earth, but there was very little
left of it now. There were no animals to be seen, and that made sense,
considering the fact that there was nothing around to sustain them. As far as
her eye could see there was nothing but hard, packed Earth and the remnants of
what this place once was.

It looked like a wasteland or a warzone, and Mia had to
wonder if she'd been misled. It occurred to her that she'd known Asher for a
matter of a few days, and that she hadn't seen Abon in years and hadn't really
known him before his disappearance. She'd been blindly trusting them not to be
con artists or killers or anything to that effect, but really, how did she
know?

Maybe they had conspired to bring her here and leave her.
Maybe they were always in league with the Shaddoc and their plans.

"I know it isn't much to look at," Asher said from
behind her, and she turned her head to see him looking out of the other window.
"I… didn't know it was this bad. They made me leave before I could see
what was happening."

The sorrow in his voice sounded real enough to Mia and she
swallowed hard. "Can you… can you rebuild it? I mean. Where are all the
others?"