by Tarkin, Mika
Alien Avatar
MIKA TARKIN
To those who know that love always wins.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter One
Naeesha turned up the bottle of whiskey, cursed at it for being empty, and threw it across the room. It landed behind the chair in the corner, thudding against the drywall before landing with a clink among others that had come to similar fates.
Empty bottles presented her with two choices.
One: get more whiskey. Two: get sober.
Option one meant putting on clothes. Going outside. Presumably, talking to people. It also meant spending money, and due to a particularly cheerful week, she’d already drank most of it away. This presented another set of choices. Buy shitty booze, or go a little hungrier than normal until her next check came in. This wasn’t a particularly hard choice to make. Life is too short for cheap booze.
Naeesha never got around to considering option two. She hadn’t given it much consideration at all in the three years since she’d finished her service.
Her military pension didn’t cover much, but it would keep a roof over her head and a bottle in her hand for however long she had to keep playing this bullshit game called life.
She went around her cramped apartment, stumbling in the dark as she looked for something that would at least pass as pants. In the end, she settled on a pair of heavy khakis that had been part of her field uniform, long ago, and a matching pair of combat boots. As much as she’d hated that part of her life, the clothes were too good to let go.
Cash in hand and a cautionary scowl on her face, she walked out of her apartment and down to the busy street below. It was a nice enough day. The suns were out. Even though she’d been born on this world, the twin stars never seemed natural. She figured it was some leftover aspect of her human biology, still attuned to Earth. The rest of Alderoc seemed natural enough, even the shapeshifting alien race known as the Watchers who ruled this planet.
The air was warm, people were leaving her alone, and there were no signs of anything that would impede her mission to spend the rest of the day in a drunken stupor.
But good things never seem to last.
“Matron Naeesha!” somebody shouted from down the street.
She kept walking. Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, she didn’t care. Anyone calling her by her old military title was not somebody she needed to talk to.
“Matron!”
On the other hand, if they called her Matron one more time, she’d have to stop long enough to strangle them to death. She kept walking, hoping that if she continued to ignore her pursuer, then she wouldn’t have to murder anybody before lunch.
No such luck.
A pair of footsteps caught up with her. She kept walking while two men in military uniforms came up on either side of her. They were walking fast, out of breath. The man on her left spoke first.
“Matron Naeesha?”
“I’m going to tell you exactly once. It’s just Naeesha now.”
“We need to speak with you,” the other man said.
Both of their faces were red and they were skittish about something.
“It’s going to have to wait,” she replied.
“I’m afraid it can’t,” the first man said.
She started walking faster. Both men kept up.
“There isn’t anything on Alderoc so important that this conversation can’t wait until I’m nice and liquored up.”
She caught the men exchanging nervous glances with each other. The one on her right ran out in front of her and stopped. Naeesha tried to walk around him, but he grabbed her by the shoulder, not letting go even when she jerked away.
“It’s about Marko.”
Naeesha froze. Just for a fraction of a second. That name still held powerful sway over her. She snapped out of her momentary trance, broke the man’s hold on her shoulder, and continued sauntering down the street.
“Like I said. Nothing that can’t wait.”
The two soldiers kept following her to the one corner market where she still had some credit left. She walked inside, tipped her head to the man behind the counter, and walked to the back of the cluttered, colorful store.
“Hey, if you’re going to be following me like lost puppies, make yourself useful and ask where they keep the Halian whiskey.”
When the Halians came to Alderoc twenty-eight years ago, they’d brought exactly two things. Bloody war and the best liquor in the galaxy. As far as Naeesha was concerned, the two evened each other out.
While the soldiers went to the counter, she slipped out of the store and started for home. She got about a quarter mile up the street before she heard shouting and crowd noise as they both sprinted to catch up with her.
“What the hell, Naeesha? We know where you live. Why’d you walk all the way over there if you weren’t at least going to get anything.”
She reached into the Precept’s bag and pulled out the two bottles of whiskey she’d stashed there while she they were back in the store.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Hey!” the other man shouted. “You can’t go around stealing things, not even with your title.”
“I didn’t,” she said, holding one bottle under her arm while she cracked the seal of the other and took a long draught straight from the bottle. “He did. And I’m serious, you can have the title back. I don’t want it.”
The soldiers didn’t bother her with any more conversation until they slipped in behind her as she walked back into her cramped apartment.
‘You’ll have to stand,” she said, slouching into the sole chair, reaching for one of the few unbroken rocks glasses that she still had.
“Naeesha, we don’t want to waste any of your time. Believe me. Both of us know what you did for this city, for this planet, and we--”
“This sounds like you wasting my time.”
The Precept swallowed and took a deep breath.
“Look. We aren’t supposed to be here. But we both thought you deserved to know what was happening.”
“Pretty obvious what’s happening,” she said. “You’re going to tell me something
I don’t want to hear, and then you’re going to get the fuck out of my home before I have to waste my whole night getting rid of your bodies.”
The other soldier spoke up. If her little joke had unsettled him, he didn’t show it.
“One of our assets has reportedly found Marko.”
“Didn’t know he was lost.”
“He walked off of his last command. That was almost three years ago. I thought you knew.”
Naeesha swirled the whiskey in her glass, picking a fleck of plaster from the crumbling ceiling above her out of the shimmering caramel liquid.
“Haven’t talked to that bastard since I retired. Walked off you said? That’s rich. Where’s he hiding out? I’d love to go and give him a piece of my mind.”
“Our reports are that he’s taken up residence with a small band of Halian fighters about two-hundred miles up the Anoanda River.”
The whiskey must have been stronger than she’d thought.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you right,” she said.
“Yes you did. Apparently he’s been working with one of their combat groups.”
“Good Gods,” Naeesha said. “What did you do to make him do that?”
The Precept shook his head.
“We don’t know. It was just out of the blue. Command thinks he’s gone native.”
‘Well,” the other soldier said, “we think it has something to do with what happened at the Dynasty compound.”
“That’s your best idea? What was that, twenty-six years ago now?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Naeesha looked down at the whiskey in her hand. Maybe the time had gotten away from her.
“Okay. Still. Not exactly my problem. Why do you think I need to know, or care?”
“Because you’re close to him.”
“Did you not hear what I said a minute ago? We didn’t exactly split on good terms.”
“But before that--”
She tipped the glass up, emptied it into her mouth, and hurled it at the Precept. The other soldier went to draw his sidearm, but he was too slow. She was on top of him, his arm pinned under her knee, her forearm on his throat.
“Stand down, Agent.”
The soldier stopped struggling and Naeesha got up to go look for another glass.
“Compared to anybody else on this world, you are close.”
“Go talk to Emir.”
The absolute silence in response told her anything.
“When?” she asked.
“About a year ago.”
“Shit.”
That was one less friend in the word. One less person to trust.
“Matron--”
“Dammit, quit calling me that. I’m not a soldier anymore.”
The two men traded nervous glances. The Precept spoke.
“Actually, Naeesha. That’s why we’re here. Tomorrow morning, two officers are going to come here and ask you to reenlist.”
“Ask,” she said sarcastically. Asking implied that she’d have a choice. She wouldn’t.
“They’re going to give you a mission, I don’t know what they’ll tell you officially, but the purpose will be to locate Marko and bring him back by whatever means necessary. If you fail to do so, they’ll flatten the entire jungle just to make sure he doesn’t cause any more problems for them.”
Naeesha felt her heart rise to her throat, pounding. Her fists tightened and her eyes narrowed and her blood ran cold.
“I don’t care,” she said. “Let them come. They can lock me up. Let them bomb Marko into oblivion. I don’t care. I’m finished. With the military, with Marko, and most of all, with both of you.” She abandoned her search for a glass and sat back down, drinking straight from the bottle. “Now kindly get the fuck out of my house.”
Both soldiers put their hats back on their heads, tipped them respectfully, and left without another word. Naeesha went to the window and watched them go. She waited there for five minutes, just staring out at the street.
When she was sure that they’d gone, she locked the door behind her, and went to the closet. Tucked away in the back corner, behind all of her clothes and the cluttered boxes of things she’d never had the heart to throw away, there was a bag.
Inside the bag was a canteen and enough dehydrated food to last for a month. A long forgotten roll of tightly folded banknotes. Two changes of traveling clothes. A fire starter. A six inch half-serrated blade, and a plasma pistol.
She slung it over her shoulder, climbed out of the alley window, and went to find the man that she had once loved.
Chapter Two
TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
The transport shuttle circled over the landing site. On the viewscreen, Marko saw a clearing where a landing pad had once been. It was now overgrown with thick vegetation. There were deep cuts in the earth, scabbed over with bushes and vines. There were no signs of buildings or machinery, nothing to suggest that this had been the site of an enormous operation just months before.
The cramped shuttle landed in the middle of the clearing. As soon as they touched down, the eleven other soldiers in the shuttle with him made their final equipment checks. Marko did the same. As he waited for his rifle to charge, he glanced up and looked for Naeesha. His eyes caught hers for a moment. Just long enough to see that she was nervous.
He was glad he wasn’t the only one.
A little more than a year ago, Watcher command learned that Dynasty, offworld company, was digging up exotic forms of matter from deep inside the planet’s surface. The mining process poisoned the atmosphere and nearly made Alderoc uninhabitable. A band of human rebels had stopped them just in time. Everyone called the it ‘the Fall’, even though it had never actually happened.
The Dynasty base of operations on Alderoc had never been found. Until one month ago.
Marko’s unit was being sent to assist a team of scientists and engineers as they investigated the newly discovered facility. An exploratory team had already been through the site and declared it safe. As far as his superiors were concerned, Marko and his friends were just here to babysit the eggheads and help them with the heavy lifting. A walk in the park, they said.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling in his stomach.
The ramp at the back of the transport shuttle lurched into motion and swung open. A sheet of sunlight burst into the dark cabin, and Marko looked out into the jungle. He was facing into a wall of trees. A barrage of sounds spilled into the shuttle, so loud they were almost deafening.
They were the sounds of the wilderness. He’d grown up listening to them in the distance. Then, they were soothing. A pleasant reminder of a world outside his slum. Now that they were so close, he was starting to think that his world might have been the safer option.
The unit rose to their feet and filed out of the ship, moving quickly to establish a perimeter around the clearing. As soon as the last soldier (one of the two veterans in the unit) was off the ship, it lifted off to clear the landing pad for the research vessel.
The unit was left surrounded on all sides by dense jungle. It only took a matter of minutes for the heavy, wet air to start sinking into Marko’s clothes. It weighed on him, close and thick, like the wild growth all around them.
Marko looked down his rifle into the depths of the jungle. The sun could not penetrate through the thick canopy a hundred feet above their heads. Only little slivers of light broke through and made it all the way to the forest floor. The animal sounds stopped. He imagined all sorts of wild animals lurking in the darkness, staring back at him.
A gust of hot air rushed from behind him as the research vessel approached for landing and dropped down in the clearing. Just by listening, he could tell that the scientists were disorganized and sloppy. It took them five minutes just to get off the ship, twice that to get their gear together. Marko’s comm alerted him that, just over fifteen minutes after landing, the research team was ready to enter the compound.
He broke out of his position and turned to
find the head of the research team. He found her standing with Bura, one of his trainers from the academy.
“Alright Larsi,” she said to the scientist. “Operator Marko’s going to take you and your team inside. Stay behind him and in front of Operator Naeesha. Wait at the staging point until the rest of our people can join you inside. Remember, this is still an unsecure location.”
Marko shifted in his boots and tried not to betray just how uncomfortable he was with the idea of going into the compound without Bura.
To make matters worse, he would have rather had any other partner besides Naeesha. She was like fire to him. Enticing. Enchanting. He was always falling under her spell. It was only a matter of time before he got burned. He couldn’t explain it. She was a human. He was a Watcher. He’d always made fun of the Watchers who fell in love with humans. Could never understand what the saw in their weak, squishy bodies.
But Naeesha, with her skin like twilight and her eyes like the sunrise. He didn’t need an excuse or an explanation for the way he felt. It just was.
Larsi wasn’t nervous at all. “Relax Agent Bura. It’s just dust and cobwebs inside. We’ll see you in a few minutes.”
The rest of his unit would get to work securing the perimeter while the research team set up inside. Logically, they had the most dangerous work. The jungles in this part of the world were full of things that could kill in a heartbeat, whereas the compound had already been checked, sealed, and declared perfectly safe. That didn’t make him feel any safer as he pulled back the heavy metal grate from the tunnel entrance and stared down into the darkness.
Chapter Three
Naeesha watched from the back of a chattering group of researchers as Marko descended into the ground. One by one, each of the clueless scientists followed in behind him.
They were having fun. This was exciting for them. The reports from the first scout team to go through the facility had been… unusual to say the least. Their conclusion was that the compound had been built by an organization with technology that was radically different from - and in many ways superior - to what the Watcher had, and apparently, the compound was still full of their toys.
That’s what the scientists were so excited about - all the strange and mysterious tech. It’s also what had her on edge. Nobody knew what any of the gear did, or if any of it was dangerous.