Seized By The Alien
Aana Celestya
Copyright 2016 by Aana Celestya
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
character, person, living or dead, events, place or
organizations is purely coincidental. The author does not
have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for third party websites or their content.
First edition, 2016
Chapter One
A crash like thunder rent the air and filled it with a shower of ice shards, sparkling in the pale sunlight as they rained down on the frozen tundra. Astrid stared as the glittering cloud fell around the shoulders of the man above her, this creature out of a fairy tale.
He was impossibly tall, a living sculpture of powerful muscles rippling beneath copper skin, wrapped in a massive silver fur cloak which flared around his broad shoulders as the creature he was riding reared up in fear of the blast that had exploded near its eight clawed feet.
The rider, undeterred, his strong jaw set with concentration, leaned into the animal's motion, standing in his stirrups, his gray eyes steely as he aimed his weapon and loosed a bolt of blue light like a lance at his enemies, which sailed through the air and exploded a few feet away from them, filling the air with a thunderous noise once again and hiding the two of them temporarily behind a cloud of ice and dirt.
He let his weapon drop and turned at once, holding out a strong, calloused hand to Astrid where she lay sprawled and terrified in the snow. Her heart skipped a beat as he reached for her and she leaned away, frightened and overwhelmed. He spoke words in a rolling, fluid tongue Astrid couldn't understand. But, looking at his handsome, angular features, his long dark hair still settling around him, she imagined the only thing they could mean.
"Take my hand if you want to live."
Astrid had always been more in love with the stars than anything on earth. As a little girl, she'd lay in her backyard at night, surrounded by the scent of grass and damp earth, the glow of fireflies flickering in the corners of her vision, and look up at the sky, drunk on the beauty of the universe.
The richness of the night sky over her country home was intoxicating, a panoply of color seen nowhere on earth. The deep blue black that back dropped the stars melted into the bright cerulean and pale ivory of the Milky Way and shifted into the rich, saturated plum of the horizon, and all of it sparkling with a billion, billion stars, blue white and trembling against the dark. Like some careless god had crushed a diamond and scattered its remnants over the heavens. She would reach up then, her hands tiny against the infinite expanse, and imagine herself falling into it. To be surrounded by all that beauty forever was the most incredible thing she could imagine.
As she got older, she set her sights on the space program and threw herself after her goal with intractable determination. She had a tenacity rarely rivaled and a wit to match it, consistently excelling in her studies and topping her classes year after year.
And now here she was, only twenty one, finally going into space. Just not in the way she had anticipated.
She stood on the edge of the platform, clenching her fists to try and quiet the nervous butterflies crowding her stomach. The tight silver flight suit emphasized her generous curves and the glow of her tanned, silky skin. Her black hair was pulled back into a shower of braids, and her smoky eyes stared directly ahead at her target with steely focus that didn't betray how incredibly anxious she felt inside.
"Final checks?" She called back to Professor Brentwood.
The professor, a thin, bent old man with a sharp goatee and a sharper eye, leaned over his console, checking his readings again.
"Everything's clear for departure, Miss Carver," Brentwood replied, "You're about to change history, Astrid."
Astrid smiled, pleased by his pride in her. Astrid had admired Brentwood from the first time she'd read one of his incredible papers on astrophysics and the potential of traveling through wormholes.
"We're making history together," She promised, turning back to smile stiffly at him, her heart racing.
When she'd been offered a position as his research assistant, she'd thought it was too good to be true. She supposed, in a way, it was. She certainly hadn't signed up for this expecting to be the first human trial in a wormhole travel experiment.
"They're going to regret the day they ignored my research," Brentwood said, eyes shining with pride, "We'll show them all! Take your place, Miss Carver!"
Brentwood's experiments, Astrid came to discover once she took the job with him, were much further along than she'd been lead to believe. She had thought everything he was doing was theoretical. Imagine her shock when he had showed her not just proof of his theories, but a half finished machine that would make them a practical reality.
He'd chosen her for his assistant over older, more qualified applicants, because he'd seen her ferocious stubbornness, her refusal to let her dreams remain only dreams. Together they'd finished the machine, tested it. And finally they'd pointed it at Kepler-22b.
The Kepler-22 system was one of the closest star systems known to have earthlike planets possibly capable of sustaining life, and Kepler-22b was the most promising of those planets. Initial probes they'd sent through had reported land, and atmosphere.
But this test would reveal so much more. Because Astrid was standing in front of a massive portal, an artificial wormhole, that was going to take her there in person.
She climbed into the small, spherical pod she would be riding through the wormhole, taking a last deep breath as the aluminum silicate glass front of the pod lowered, sealing her into the tiny pod, which contained little other than a black, cushioned seat and a control panel. The rest of it was all reinforced environmental protection and the mechanism to create the portal again on the other side.
"Ready to launch," Astrid reported as she buckled in to her seat.
"Beginning launch sequence," Brentwood replied his voice muffled through the coms, "Hold on tight."
He began the count down and Astrid clutched the arms of the chair tightly, staring into the eerie, colorless rippling of the portal in front of her. She heard the pod humming to life and her stomach clenched. Just a second before it rocketed forward into the portal, she closed her eyes.
And opened them in a warzone.
Blinking in the sudden and too bright sunlight, Astrid stared through the window of her pod, the earth still smoking around the crater the pod had made, as full scale battle raged outside it. She'd landed on what appeared to be icy tundra, the flat, frigid plane extending towards the soft blue shadow of mountains in the distance.
And all that space was filled with two armies of what looked like humans, only much larger. The smallest looked taller than six feet, the largest over ten. Some were riding huge animals that resembled something between a horse and a predatory cat, with a long snout full of teeth and eight ungulate legs that ended in clawed paws rather than hooves.
The warriors on the ground were wielding long black staffs topped with electric blue spearheads, while the mounted men had strange black device
s which they held to the shoulders like javelins.
Astrid realized why a moment later as a lance of blue light blossomed from the device and was fired from it like a rocket. One exploded very near her pod, knocking it onto its side, sending Astrid tumbling with a scream.
She could hear Brentwood babbling over the coms, but she didn't have time to reply to him, as a large hand reached over and pried her pod's door off like it was made of aluminum.
A man, easily eight and half feet tall, with a long black braid and a deep scar across his nose, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the pod. He held her in the air easily, looking her up and down as she struggled against his grip, panic seizing her.
"Too small," He grumbled, reaching out to pinch at her hips, which made her shriek in surprise, "But you'll do for a concubine I suppose."
Astrid, wide eyed with terror at what she thought he was suggesting, slashed at his wrists with her nails but, though he grimaced, he didn't let her go, merely grabbing her other arm and giving her a good shake instead.
Before she could regain her bearings, she heard a high pitched, keening cry like an elk, and one of the blue light lances exploded in the shoulder of the man holding her. He flew back, dropping her hard in the snow.
And there she lay, the snow exploding with lance fire around her, as this strange, impossibly gorgeous man brought his charge closer in a single terrific leap, fired his weapon a second time, then turned to offer her his hand.
Astrid didn't know what his words meant or what was going all. All she knew was that she wanted off this battlefield, and something in those stormy eyes told her she could trust him. She reached out, and felt his hand close tightly around her own.
He smiled, and with an easy pull, dragged her up behind him on his mount and threw his cloak around her. She clung to his broad, bare back, her heart racing, as the beast bounded off across the tundra. She looked back at the pod she was leaving behind and wondered fearfully if she was making the right decision.
As the man who'd picked her up turned his strange steed towards the mountains, his army rallied around him, retreating from the battle with a chorus of triumphant shouts.
The other army didn't follow, though looking back Astrid saw the scarred man who'd pulled her out of the pod standing amid his men and staring after her. Somehow she sensed he would never let it end this easily.
Chapter Two
They rode for what must have been more than an hour, long enough for Astrid to begin putting together what had happened. Most miraculous of anything was the fact that she could breathe.
This planet didn't just have an atmosphere. It had an atmosphere of breathable oxygen. Stars only knew what the radiation of this planet's sun was doing to her insides, but she could breathe and that was more than she'd expected.
She and Brentwood had never prepared for the possibility of Keppler-22b being inhabited. They had hoped to discover life, but they'd expected it to be microbial, maybe some less complex plants like algae or moss. They had never anticipated a thriving, warring civilization of intelligent humanoids.
They had no contingency for this. And now that Astrid had been separated from her pod, she had no way to even tell Brentwood what had happened. She'd just have to get back to it somehow, hopefully when it wasn't at the center of a battle.
In the meantime, she had a scientific duty to learn as much as she could about this new intelligent species. First contact, she realized, dizzy with the implications.
She was not only the first person to stand on a planet in a different solar system, she was the first to meet a non-human civilization! She was touching an alien right now!
She ran a curious hand down the familiar structure of his back and felt the muscles twitch under her fingers. Aside from the size, he seemed so much like a normal human that for a moment she could almost doubt she wasn't on earth, until she looked out at the horizon and saw the dizzying way it curved up towards the sky, indicating she was standing on a planet much larger than the earth she was used to.
She'd felt heavier and slower since she'd got here as well. This place's gravity was obviously a few fractions higher than earth's, but less than she'd expected. Perhaps it was less dense in addition to being larger. She was still touching the back of the man who'd rescued her as she thought, gently squeezing at his shoulders, pressing at his ribs to determine if she could find any differences.
He made a low, throaty sound that it took her a moment to realize was laugh. He said something in his strange fluid tongue, then grabbed her hand and dragged it around in front of him.
She was confused, straining to reach without falling off of the strange horse creature, until he pressed her hand to his crotch and she felt the distinctive shape of his cock, thick and intimidating beneath the fabric of his pants.
She cried out in offense and disgust, yanking her hand away and retaliating with a swift jab to his kidney. He gave a shout of pain and glanced back at her over his shoulder, a threat in his eyes, which she returned, and glaring back at him dangerously.
Did this one want to make her a concubine too, she wondered? In that case maybe she should have stayed with the one that could speak English. Why he could speak English she couldn't begin to guess. That was just one more of the many baffling mysteries here that had her torn between scientific euphoria and certainty that the portal must have killed her or put her in a coma and this was just a heady fantasy created by her dying brain frantically firing its last neurons.
The man who'd picked her up ignored her after that and she did her best to ignore him as well as the war party galloped on towards the mountains.
They grew closer and clearer all the time, filling the horizon. As they got closer, Astrid could see structures rising out of the peaks. Towers and spires, spilling down between the slopes into a magnificent city, glittering in the pale light of the small, white sun.
The city sprawled all along the mountain range, rushing up the slopes and pooling in the foothills. The peaks crawled with life, structures carved into the living stone. The highest of these peaks held a massive palace, an incredible structure that awed Astrid even from this distance.
It's myriad towers were capped with onion shaped domed cupolas in a thousand shining colors, banded by a kind of rosy colored metal that shone like gold.
As they entered the outskirts of the city, the army paraded down a wide street past rows of colorful, boxy buildings. Their basic structure seemed made of the stone of the mountains, a kind of iridescent alabaster, accented by the blue green of oxidized copper, the vibrant orange of rich clay, and the same rose gold of the metal that banded the roof of the palace.
Their architecture favored simple structures heavily embellished with pillars and arabesques and little towers. There was always something new to catch and delight the eye.
As they passed down the street, people hurried out of the way or stood on the sides of the road to shout and cheer and wave, welcoming their heroes home. Astrid noticed that, somewhat puzzlingly, every person she saw was, at least as far as she could tell, male. She didn't see a single person who was feminine by earth standards.
The discrepancy left her a little unsettled. She'd felt the equipment of the man in front of her, and the first man had called her a concubine. They had to breed at least somewhat in the same way humans did. So where were all the women?
The procession carried on through the city, passing through several guard walls as it began winding its way up the mountain. But men began peeling off, trickling away, Astrid could only assume, as the procession passed by wherever they lived. The higher they went, the smaller their party became, until there was only Astrid's companion and two others, climbing slowly all the way up the highest peak.
Gradually, Astrid realized they were heading for the palace, and the pit of worry in her stomach grew. Perhaps they were bringing her to meet their leader? That would make sense. But she wasn't certain she was ready for the responsibility of representing the human race to the so
vereign of the first non-human intelligent race ever discovered.
It didn't take as long as she'd expected, before a pair of enormous, colorfully painted doors were opening to allow the three riders through into the courtyard of the palace.
It was a beautiful space, the floor a mosaic of rich colored tiny tiles describing the images of powerful warriors in battle, fighting great beasts, building great works. At the heart of the courtyard was a wide, ornate fountain decorated with the first feminine images Astrid had seen.
Three women carved of the strange shining alabaster stone stood in the center of the fountain, pouring water from their hands, hearts, and eyes. The walls of the courtyard were decorated with a froth of green plants and white flowers despite the cold. Peering closer as they passed, Astrid saw the inside of the flower beds were lined with some kind of light, and she could feel the warmth radiating from them when they drew close.
At the other end of the courtyard, the men dismounted their steeds. The man in the silver fur cloak held up his arms to help Astrid off, but Astrid ignored him, climbing off easily on her own.
This thing was a bit taller than the horses she'd ridden growing up, but not enough to change the basic method. The man looked offended and his compatriots were carefully looking anywhere but at the two of them.
He snapped something at them without taking his eyes off Astrid and handed one the reins of his mount and both men hurried away, taking the horses with them. Astrid crossed her arms; staring right back at him challengingly until he finally turned away with a steely glare and headed towards the ornate engraved doors of the palace, which opened to let him in.
She contemplated staying here in the courtyard just to spite him, but she could see men lingering in the scalloped archways at either side of the square, staring at her and murmuring quietly to one another. Their eyes made the hair stand on the backs of her arms and she hurried into the palace just to get away from them, chasing the silver fur cloak of the man who'd brought her here.
Alien Romance: Seized By The Alien: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Alien Romance, Alien Invasion Romance, BBW) (Celestial Protectors Book 1) Page 1