Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Cube: The Sci-FI Alien Invasion Romance (Books 1-5)

by Ashley L. Hunt

  The Gun was enormous, its barrel composed of three enormous electromagnetic rails, arranged in a triangular pattern, surrounding the pipe through which the Bullets would pass- through which we would pass. Even as I watched, the enormous ammunition chamber sealed shut, and a heavy, bass thrumming vibrated the floor beneath my slippered feet as the turret swiveled to take aim along a carefully calculated track- designed to carry its cargo to the correct destination. There was a bright flash from the mouth of the Gun, and a moment later, the sound reached us as a gigantic whipcrack. And one of us was gone. Flung out into space at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. I stood and stared through the windows into the starry expanse, and wondered if the occupant of that Bullet would make it to his planet. Would I? But the line was moving, and I was jolted into movement. There was no point in thinking about it now. I'd make it or I wouldn't. My turn was not so far off. We filed into an orderly column, and waited for our names to be called, and all the while, the Gun barked out behind us, and another Former left the Earth forever.

  My name was called. Joanna Angeles. I wondered how many other wards of the state up here were named some variant of John. Or Jane. I broke from the gathered ranks and followed the Foundation technician down a short flight of stairs set into the floor, around a corner, and into a small room, where a man in a white lab coat manned a machine which looked like nothing so much as an airport security scanner. He had me stand in the archway while he worked at the control pad. There was a loud beep from the archway, and a tingling sensation rushed over my body as if a thin layer of alcohol had been poured over my skin. They told me to step out of my slippers and proceed through the door on the other side of the room. I followed their instructions, the tiled floor cool beneath my bare feet. I was now wearing my jumpsuit and nothing else. I crossed through the indicated door and found another technician waiting for me. She led me through another short, featureless hallway and through yet another door. And there it was, standing open to receive me- the Bullet. My Bullet.

  It was a thick, silvery shell, maybe a two-feet thick, made of a metallic substance that didn't quite look like steel. It was smaller than I'd thought it would be, maybe forty feet high, and no more than twenty feet around. The Formers were hardly scientists, but we'd all been drilled in how everything we were taking with us worked, and I knew the size of the projectile was absolutely necessary. Basically, the Bullet was the cheapest way to get a single human to another planet, with the equipment he would need to survive in an extraterrestrial environment. It was too expensive, both in money and lives, to send a whole colony ship to an unchanged planet or moon. Each person they sent would have to be accompanied by enough food, water, and air to keep them alive until the planet was made fully habitable, and on top of that, they would need to bring their own living spaces, terraforming equipment, and all their worldly possessions. So the Foundation had come up with a better solution. Fire one Former into space in a craft that wasn't designed to maneuver or do anything other than hitting an alien planet. Encase that Former in a suit that would be both armor and enclosed environment, complete with waste reclamation and oxygen recycling. Send them with just one piece of durable, nigh unbreakable equipment- a fabricator. The pod would be made of raw materials, a dense, compressed mixture of several essential metals and minerals. The machine itself would contain enough samples of chemicals and reagents to make almost anything. The Former would climb out of her pod, start up the fabricator, and make everything she needed on the planet, even synthesizing food. Cheap and easy. The machine was as idiot-proof as possible, and just in case, the Former's suit was equipped with instruction programs. The actual human sent out to the planet was interchangeable. She just had to follow instructions. The real colony ship would be sent out later, arriving five to ten years after the Former, at a planet that had already been changed into a habitable environment. I approached the open pod cautiously, a little smirk on my face as I thought about that last part. I was literally the only hope for a ship that would be filled with ten thousand refugees. No pressure. Either I'd be their heroine, their world-maker when they arrived, or they'd all die, with a bare minimum of supplies and no way back to Earth. No pressure at all.

  My suit was already waiting for me, standing open. As I got inside, a technician helped me hook up the systems to all the awkward places. One advantage to being a Former, I would never have to see the guy that hooked up a bunch of tubes and tech up to my delicate bits ever again. Silver linings. Take them where you can get them. The suit closed itself around me, and I saw the tech nod to me through the thick quartz of my faceplate. Then he stepped away, and the shell of the Bullet swung shut, leaving me in darkness. I felt something cold entering my body from one of the ports they’d put into my neck, and within moments I began to feel sleepy. The cold spread all through me, dragging me backward into blackness, and I was only dimly aware of the Bullet moving around me, taking its place within the chamber of the Gun. Numbness began to take me, even as I felt the crackling tension of the railgun mounting higher with every passing second. I was completely numb, buried beneath miles of lethargy and icy cold, and I was okay with it. I was just going to sleep. Just a little nap, and I’d wake up on a new planet. If I was lucky, my planet would be an entire world of beaches, sun, and green-skinned alien underwear models with eight-packs and five-o’clock shadows. The Gun fired, distant thunder sweeping away the electric tension of the rails as they discharged, sweeping my mind away with it. Just before I succumbed to stasis, I thought I heard a man whispering in my ear. “Joanna?” And then there was nothing.

  …

  The breeze reached gently through the windows of the little log cabin, seizing the gauzy, white curtains and trying to draw them out with it. Outside, birds sang in the shafts of golden sunlight that filtered down through the trees, and if I listened closely enough, I could hear the water lapping at the shore of the little forest lake the cabin stood beside. The mattress and downy comforter were like a cloud beneath me, luxuriantly comfortable, and despite my wakening, I felt no desire to get up.

  The room was still, but for the truant curtains, a carved wooden chest of drawers standing against the outer wall to my right, just below the curtain. I recognized the carved shapes of beasts, both real and mystical, carefully cut into the wood to make scenes out of legend, captured in the intricate patterns of the grain as if they'd been frozen in ice. I knew those carvings well, after all, I'd made them. A fresh set of clothes sat neatly atop the dresser; my favorite tight black jeans and a thin white buttoned blouse were topped by a leather belt with a wrought copper buckle, a pair of socks, and the holster of my revolver. The gun inside was more a handheld cannon than a pistol, worn wooden grips over black steel transitioning smoothly into the thick, round ammunition cylinder in its housing, the barrel, and rails cunningly fashioned to look like an early twentieth-century weapon- if a little thicker. Nestled in the fabric of my shirt, beside the gun, was a thick clay mug, from which steam wafted tantalizingly. I took in a deep breath. The rich, earth pungency of fresh coffee provided me the added impetus I needed to get out of bed, and I stood, taking the warm mug in my hand and smiling. Barbas, that unapologetic romantic- he always knew how to start the day just right. Even now I could hear him in the kitchen, the low murmur of shifting pans and the faint sizzle of cooking food promising one of his legendary breakfasts. I felt my smile growing wider. A fine start to the day, indeed.

  I slid out of the wide, sturdy bed and stood, the slight breeze from the window sending a ripple of goosebumps across my body. I didn’t bother rummaging in my dresser for underwear, I just stepped into my jeans and belted them at my hips, then reached for my blouse, with the intention to- I froze. My mind had just caught up. Where the hell was I? I went to sleep in a Bullet, in a spacecraft hurtling through space toward some unknown planet, light-years away. What was I doing in a log cabin beside a lake? I looked down at the dresser. I hadn’t made those carvings. Why had I thought I had? Another thought struck me, a
nd I felt my blood grow cold. Who was in the kitchen? I sure as hell didn’t know anyone named “Barbas”. I snatched the revolver from the dresser. It felt weighty, familiar. That familiarity was strange in itself- I’d never actually owned a gun. I’d fired a few during the basic combat drills of my Former training, and… once before that... but not enough for one of them to feel the way this one did in my hand- like it was mine. I moved quietly toward the sounds of movement in the kitchen, which was separated from the bedroom by another room, laid out with couches and a low table- a reading room. I stopped as my eyes caught a glimpse of something familiar in one of the framed photographs hanging from a nail on the wall to my left. I turned and reached out with my free hand, taking the frame from the wall and looking at it closely. My confusion only grew. It was a picture of me, grinning proudly, standing on a dock that reached out into a lake behind me. In the picture I was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, and gripped in my upraised right hand was a tangle of fishing line, from which dangled a heavy, shining fish. Besides me, his arm thrown casually over my shoulder, was a tall man, with the build of a middle-distance runner. He was dark-skinned and handsome, and a wide, toothy smile stretched his lips as if the expression came easily to them. I knew that face, though I’d never seen him before, and what’s more, I knew with absolute certainty that he was the Barbas in the kitchen cooking breakfast. But that didn’t make any sense. I’d never met him, and beyond that, I’d never been fishing. Hell, I’d never even seen a log cabin like this, but here I was. I reached up to replace the picture in its place on the wall, and in the instant that I stepped back from the wall, lowering my arm, I saw him.

  He had come around the corner, wearing nothing but a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans, and carrying two plates piled high with eggs, bacon, and pancakes. Balanced expertly on the edges of both the plates were short tumblers of orange juice. His red-brown hair had been cut close to his skull, and his eyes smiled out from beneath thick brows at me, vibrant and verdant, as if they’d been fashioned from discs of emerald. He stood and looked at me for a moment, his gaze playing over my face, my half-dressed state, and gun dangling in my grip, then he smiled a little sadly and set down the plates on the coffee table beside him. His mouth turned up at one side in a little half-smile, and he sighed. “You’re a little ahead of projection, Joanna.”

  “What?” I responded, in a stunningly witty rejoinder. I suddenly felt stupid standing there, half naked, holding a gun.

  "Joanna, you're dreaming," Barbas explained, and he beckoned for me to sit in one of the chairs that framed the coffee table now laden with breakfast. I hesitated, but he sat anyway, pulling one of the plates of food toward himself and plucking a strip of bacon from atop a syrup-laden pancake. He examined it for a moment before popping it into his mouth and beginning to chew with evident pleasure.

  "What?" I repeated. Brilliant. I tried again. "This doesn't feel like a dream. It feels too…" I trailed off, at a loss for an adequate description of the situation. Barbas smiled as he swallowed the piece of bacon, his tongue flicking out to clean a drop of syrup from the corner of his mouth a moment later. He made a little circling motion with his broad hand, gently encouraging me to go on. "It feels too real,” I finally said, and sat down in the chair opposite him, placing the big revolver on the table beside the other plate. I reached out for a piece of bacon without thinking, then stopped, frowning.

  “Go ahead,” Barbas said, still smiling. “You can eat it.”

  I picked up the strip of bacon. It had been perfectly fried, crispy around the edges, with a little give in the middle. Just the way I liked it. I put it in my mouth and bit down. Oh, it was good. It tasted real, the texture was perfect, and it was still nice and hot from the pan. It had been a while since I'd had real bacon, rather than the synthetic substitute that was everywhere in the P.A.D. these days. The agricultural industry had taken a huge hit during the war, and one of the things that hadn't bounced back as fast was livestock. There were pigs around, and there was bacon, but there just wasn't a whole lot of it. And what there was- it was a premium kind of expensive. This was luxury itself. Though of course, if Barbas was telling the truth, I was dreaming it all. Which still didn't make a hell of a lot of sense, but if things could taste this good here… I looked over at the strikingly handsome man perched in the chair across from me, and some distant part of my brain began to wonder what else there might be in a dream-world such as this.

  Barbas laughed and leaned forward, his piercing green eyes no longer bearing the pure joy of the smile that they had borne a moment before. “Well, you’re certainly on projection for that.” I opened my mouth, shocked, but he cut me off with an upraised hand. “No, I cannot read your mind, though I do have access to your central nervous system, and certain things are very easy for me to see.” He ran a hand back over his bristly scalp and smiled once more. “You are dreaming, Joanna Angeles, though it is a different sort of dream than you might have had any time in your life before. All of this,” he gestured broadly around him, indicating the food, the table, the chairs, and the cabin itself. “All of this is in your head. As am I, though that is a little more complicated. You are in stasis in your Bullet, moving through space at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. I built this little world for you so you could be as comfortable and calm as possible when I explained the concept to you.”

  I glanced down at the revolver. “Why the gun?”

  Barbas sighed. “It was an insurance policy. If you became confused or frightened, being in a strange place with a man you didn’t know would only make you more anxious. By giving you the gun, I made sure that when we did speak, you would feel more like you were standing on the even ground with me. You would feel like we were equals.”

  His explanation made sense, even if it seemed a little cold. "What about you?" I asked. "You said you created this dream-world. You have to be real to do something like that unless this dream is so meta-recursive as to be ridiculous. Who are you? And how do I know your name is Barbas?"

  Barbas gave a nod that might have been one of respect. "As you've guessed, I can make mild changes to your short term memory and perception. It's one of the ways I can help you adjust to strange circumstances, and help you maintain a healthy state of mind." He stuck up a finger as if catching something in the air before him. "Which brings me to the topic of what I am and why I'm here." He leaned back easily in his chair. "I'm an artificial intelligence, riding along on the neural network that the Foundation installed in your skull. My job is to keep you sane and assist you, such as I am able, with the tasks you're to perform on the surface of your world. You're going to be alone on an alien world for what could be a decade. You have no idea when the next time you will see a living human might be. That's a recipe for insanity. So the cheapest and most effective solution to this problem was me, and those like me."

  I frowned, but I couldn’t really find fault with the words. It made a kind of mercenary sense, which fit perfectly within the general culture of the Foundation. To send another human along would be literally twice as expensive, and they weren’t working with an unlimited budget. Rather than halve the number of planets they terraformed, they’d found a workaround that let them have their cake and eat it too. I met Barbas’ eyes. “So each Former out there right now has one of you riding around in their skull?”

  "Yes and no," he answered, reaching again for his plate of food. This time, he took up the fork and knife and cut himself a three-tiered wedge of pancake. "All of us started as the same template program when we were implanted into the skulls of all of you Formers, at the start of your training, two subjective years ago. During your training cycle, I learned about you. What you liked and what you didn't. How you responded to thousands of stimuli, both when you were awake and when you were dreaming. I learned what kind of people you got along with and those you detested, and I learned what attracted you, both mentally and physically. Supplemented with the massive amount of data I collected from the Foundation's databa
se, I'm pretty much perfectly equipped to keep you sane and functional for the duration of your time on your new planet." He stuck the forkful of pancakes in his mouth.

  “So…” I began, my face reddening as the awkwardness of the conversation hit me. “So you’re…”

  "Yes," Barbas said, exasperated, from around a mouthful of pancakes. "It is quite possible for us to have sex. But that's not really the point because I know you. Doubtless, some of the Formers out there will use their own Companions as a glorified sex puppet for a time, and if that's really what you want, we can do that. But though that might be where your libido sent your brain right away, that's not all your psyche needs to stay whole for the next decade or so. We'll definitely get to that, maybe sooner, maybe later." He grinned wolfishly. "And we'll both enjoy it. But think a little bigger. Your days on the planet will be mostly tedium- hard work, repeated and nauseum. You may find it personally fulfilling, you may not. But after that, when you go to sleep at night, I can take you anywhere, we can do anything. If you want to learn a new language, I can tutor you. If you want to read the ancient classics, I've got them stored. Not only can you read them, but I can set you up to read them in a cafe in pre-war Paris, or sit you down with kahwah and a hookah outside a reconstructed Library of Alexandria grander even than the real thing once was. Hell, you can live the stories you loved if you want. You can be the heroine in an epic, or you can just sit here in this cabin, and live a quiet life, relaxing and fishing in the lake." He grinned and leaned toward me. "I know you've wished you could escape your life, go somewhere better. Now you can. Think big, Joanna Angeles, and I'll help you make a dream-world you can come home to when the day is done." He sat back in his chair again and a slightly sardonic smile twisted his perfect mouth. "Or, for lack of better ideas, we could just fuck."