by Maia Starr
As I was led away, she stated, “Don’t put him in with the others. This one is the captain of this ship and I want him in a separate cell. I will question him later.”
I looked at her with shock. How did she know I was the captain? I had not said so. I could be a lieutenant for all she knew. I would have to ask her once we were alone. That was what she had just said, after all. She wanted to be alone with me. I wanted to be inside of her. If I were to die, then I would die knowing what it was to be with her.
Chapter 7
AMBASSADOR AVERY JONES
I had to admit that it felt good to be in charge, even though I actually wasn’t. But talking to that Kalazaron captain like I was in charge made me feel powerful.
It had all happened so quickly and I could not wait until the prisoners and the Kalazaron ship were secure so that I could give Captain Holt a piece of my mind. Why the hell had I not been let in on this damn secret mission? It was MY mission, after all! I was beyond pissed off. If it weren’t for the fact that having Kalazaron warriors captive made for easier data collection, then I would be transmitting a call of mutiny back to Earth.
“What the hell, Jamie!” I shouted to him once he entered my office.
“I am reporting that all prisoners are secure, Ambassador Jones. With your permission, I would like to give the order to head back to Earth.”
“My permission? You didn’t need my permission before!” I shouted at him as I stood up and got in his face. Well, in his chest because he was so much taller than I was.
He sighed and smiled at me then went to the intercom panel and pressed the button, “Ambassador Jones says all systems go. Coordinates set for Earth. Get us the hell out of here, Pilot, as fast as we can.”
“Roger that, Captain Holt.”
Then he turned to me. “I did not say that!”
“I know, but would you rather hang out here and argue with me while more Kalazaron come, or get out of here as fast as we can?” he said, crossing his arms.
Damn it. He was right. For all we knew, the Kalazaron ship could have sent a distress signal and more ships could have been launched for their rescue. So I changed the subject. “Are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about now? I think I have a right to know. Since it was my orders that you needed in order to take prisoners, I want to know exactly what I’m going to be in trouble for when we get back to Earth.”
“You won’t be in trouble. It was in self-defense,” he said.
“What? No, it wasn’t. They didn’t even fire on us!”
“Yes, they did. They missed and we engaged. End of story,” he said, throwing a report on my desk.
“You want me to lie?”
“No, I want you to know that this was part of the plan. You won’t be lying. You will be going along with the plan. This is the council’s doing. They sent me to complete this mission. To commandeer Kalazaron prisoners and a Kalazaron ship to finally get some answers. That’s the real mission; not your random data collections. This is a successful mission and the first of its kind. You should be proud.”
“But lying and taking prisoners is wrong!” I shouted.
“Yes, that is why we are stopping them from doing it. I bet you that those warriors in there were in the process of targeting our ship! Now you have to get on board with this. Do you want answers or not? REAL answers from their own mouths? I know I do!” he shouted.
“Why are you doing this? What did they do to you?” I asked. Jamie’s face changed. He was thinking about something. Then he turned to me and said, “Let me know when you want to schedule interview sessions with the Kalazaron and I will provide guards.” Then he walked out.
I knew then that this was personal for him. The Kalazaron had done something to him or someone he loved.
Twenty-four hours had passed since the capture of the Kalazaron warriors and their ship. I could not get Captain Holt's betrayal out of my mind. I could not get the Kalazaron captain out of my mind. I was anxious to talk to him. I was anxious to question him. But in truth, I did not know what to ask. I was not prepared on this mission to talk directly to a Kalazaron. I thought we were simply going to be on the trail of the missing ships.
This was a whole new mission. It felt wrong, but there was nothing that I could do about it. The damage was already done. We were already headed toward Earth. And if what Captain Holt said was true, the council had granted him permission to capture a Kalazaron ship. This is what they wanted. Now that it was done, I had to make the most of it. This was how I found myself walking toward the prison cells. I did not contact Jamie like he told me too in order to give me a guard to protect me. I wanted to go alone.
I pressed my hand against the electronic panel lock and the door slid open. I walked in to the isolated holding cell hallway. There, at the end of the hall, was the hybrid Kalazaron warrior behind a glass wall. In his cell was a bed, a chair and table, and a washroom behind a privacy screen. He was lying on the bed with one strong arm behind his head. His long form and attractive looks caught me off guard as I stopped in my tracks. I forgot how stunning a creature he was. He turned his head and looked at me, and then looked at the ceiling. He was not interested in my presence. I grabbed a chair and pulled it in front of the glass wall separating us. I sat down.
"My name is Ambassador Avery jones. This is my mission. I do not mean you or your warriors any harm. I only want information," I said.
"Then what? You will let us go? That does not seem likely to me," he said coldly without looking at me.
"No, I suppose you are right. You probably would not believe me if I said I had no idea what the next steps would be. It is very complicated. However, since you are here, I do have questions."
"Ask them if you wish. I will not answer any," he said.
"There was a human female that was taken by the Kalazaron many years ago. I want to know what happened to her," I asked.
This got his attention as he turned and looked at me. He sat up and stared at me and said, "What is the human female called?"
"Her name was Dr. Jade Roberts."
He was silent for a few seconds before he said, "I have heard the name. I have heard that she was a very happy human female on our planet. She was married to a Kalazaron in very high power. That is all I know. I did not live in the same place that she did," he said.
"Happy?!" I said as I stood up from my chair and paced back-and-forth in front of the glass wall. "How could she have been happy? How could you say such a thing about someone that was taken against their will? Taken and then probably forced to be a mate to a Kalazaron of high-power," I shouted in anger.
"It is what I heard. I do not know the details. Why do you want to know all of this, human female?" he asked. "There have been many human females on my planet of Kaethon. Why do you ask of this one?"
"I knew the woman that sponsored her mission that sent her into space. Once she was in space on a research mission, she never returned. I had heard about her over and over when I was young. I have made it my life’s mission to get answers."
"I have told you all of what I know about this human female. If you wish to know more, there is only one way to find out that information. To find out if she was truly happy, and what became of her."
"And what is that?"
"You must go to planet Kaethon for yourself to the city of Konthos. There you will find the buildings of order where the Kalazaron of high-power lived, where she lived. There you will find archives of information and find out what she knew. How she was treated."
"Kaethon?! That is out of the question. I would never go there. Humans that go there never return. I will never be one of them."
"Now that I have answered your question, you must answer one of mine," he said as he stood up and walked toward the glass to me. My breath caught in my throat as I watched his tall form come toward me. He was menacing, and it frightened me a little, but also made me excited and thrilled. He was beautiful, and he was dangerous.
I swallowed hard a
nd said, "That is not how this works. You are the prisoner. You do not get to ask the questions. You must only answer them," I said, trying to remain confident and stern, but I don't think that I was.
He pressed his hands against the glass and asked me, "How did you know that I am hybrid? What is it about me that gave it away?"
I gasped as I said, "You are a hybrid! I knew it. I was doubting myself. How can it be true? We have never heard of such a thing. Human females cannot become pregnant from a Kalazaron warrior. It is just not possible."
"And yet here I stand before you. How did you know?"
"If I tell you, will you answer more questions?" I asked him.
"Only for you, not the other. The male human," he said. I was surprised that he had changed his tone. At first he was very adamant that he did not want to answer orders from a female when we captured him. Now, he only wanted to speak to me. I wondered what had changed.
"Very well; only me. It is a long journey to Earth and I do have many questions. I only want to understand the Kalazaron. That is all I want from you."
He nodded his head in understanding and waited for me to answer his question. I moved closer to the glass and looked his body up and down. "First, it was your eyes. I noticed the color blue was not what I had seen in the depictions of the Kalazaron that I had seen thus far. The blue in your eyes is more human than Kalazaron," I said as I locked eyes with him, feeling suddenly uneasy with our closeness even though there was glass between us. We were only an inch from each other. I hated that glass in that moment because, for some reason, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to run my hands over each feature as I talked about it. Having the glass between us, and he a prisoner, made him forbidden fruit. It was enticing.
"My eyes. What else, human?" he said as his voice grew lower and he was staring at me, up-and-down, caressing my body with his eyes.
"Your hair. There is blond in your hair. It is a human blonde. The Kalazaron have silver-white hair. That sort of blond color is only seen in humans."
"My hair. What else?"
"That is all, except for…."
"For what? Tell me," he said.
"A feeling. It is hard to describe. But it is a feeling that I got when I came near you. Your humanity perhaps? I really don't know what it is."
"A feeling? You can feel me," he said as his lips slowly turned into a smile that surprised me.
"Get away from there! He is dangerous! I told you not to come here alone!" a voice roared from behind me. I jumped back from the glass and turned to see Captain Holt coming toward me.
"Captain Holt! What are you doing here? I am in the middle of an interview. Please leave us," I said as I turned toward him.
He grabbed me by the arm aggressively and yanked me toward him. "I told you not to come here."
Boom!
We both turned to see that the Kalazaron warrior had punched the glass wall. He was angry, and he was staring down Captain Holt. It almost seemed as if he did not like the fact that the captain had grabbed me in such away. He was breathing heavily as he stared at him. Captain Holt squared his shoulders and turned toward the Kalazaron warrior as though they were in some sort of duel.
"Got something to say to me, freak?" Captain Holt shouted at him.
"Don't call him that!" I shouted as I moved between them. "I am leaving, all right?" I said, putting my hands on the Captain’s chest and pushing him in a backward motion. He wouldn't budge. I knew it was his ego, because the Kalazaron warrior was calling him out. Men.
"Captain, I said I'm leaving," I said, looking up at him. It was only then that he looked down at me and broke his stone-cold stare from the Kalazaron warrior. He grabbed my hand and led me out of the room. I was disappointed. I was getting somewhere with the Kalazaron. I did not get his name. I did not get the details that I wanted. But I knew that I was in a position to get them because we were in space together for a few months before reaching Earth. There was time. Now I just needed to defuse Captain Holt.
"Why did you go there? I specifically said for you to let me know and I would assign a guard. You do not know how dangerous they can be!" Captain Holt shouted at me as he led me towards my room.
"Neither do you! You don't know if there is even any harm that he can do to me behind that glass. No one does," I said arguing back.
"Yes, that is precisely it. We don't know. That is the whole point. That is the whole point of protecting you. That is the whole point of this mission: to find out more so that we can better protect ourselves. Will you never listen, woman?" he shouted as he opened my door.
I stood in the doorway and narrowed my eyes at him. "I am of higher rank than you. Don't you forget it. And you can say goodbye to the privileges that you had before we captured this ship. I regret it already," I said, moving inside and closing the door.
I missed regular doors only so that I could slam them and make a point. There is very little satisfaction in an automatic door closing. It had no feeling. I moved back-and-forth in my room and knew that the captain understood what privileges I was talking about. I would no longer be flirting with him and giving him access to that side of me. He had sampled that once, and although I did not regret it—in fact I really enjoyed it and wanted more—he was being a complete jerk. He needed to be punished.
I pulled out my journal tablet and typed in my passcode. I began typing in everything that the Kalazaron warrior had told me. I did not want to forget any details.
What he had told me about Dr. Jade Roberts was unsettling. The entire time growing up, when I thought about her disappearance, not once did I ever think that she was in a happy state of mind. Never once did I think that she could adapt to living with the Kalazaron, or even fall in love with one. It just did not cross my mind. It did not fit with the tone and mood of the story about Dr. Jade Roberts. Her story was one of a frightening disappearance and a captive life. It was a story of becoming a slave to an alien warrior race. Not once did I ever think that she was first on a foreign planet, and then later learned to like it and adapt. Did she experience Stockholm syndrome, or was her experience one of truth? Did she really fall in love with a powerful Kalazaron warrior and become part of their society? I needed to know more.
But the hybrid’s response as to how I could get more answers brought chills through my body. He said I had to go to planet Kaethon in order to get answers. As soon as he said it, it felt like there was truth to it. As though it was in my future. I did not want to believe that. I never wanted to go to that planet. Humans that went there never returned. I did not want to become one of the statistics that I had studied all my life, yet when he told me, it was like I was looking into my future.
After I wrote down all the details of my first meeting with the Kalazaron warrior, I thought about my next visit with him... for research, of course. I was excited and ready to see him again. I would have to go by Captain Holt’s rules and take a guard with me.
Now, sitting in front of my journal, I began to write out questions that I wanted to ask him. The more that I thought about asking him these questions and spending time with him, the more excited I became. There was something about him. I saw a tenderness that I was not expecting. Was it due to his human side? Or was it a side of the Kalazaron that we were not expecting to find? We thought of them as a cruel brute alien warrior race for so long that it was shocking to see that emotion when he spoke to me.
Then I remembered that he had punched the glass. I did not think he did it because he was trying to escape. In fact, I thought he did it because of the way Captain Holt had grabbed my arm. He didn't seem to like that. But why? I was his enemy. I had captured him. He should not care how the Captain grabbed my arm or yelled at me, yet it was obvious that he did. It was an intriguing response.
The next day, I did things the proper way and set up a time and reserved a guard to protect me. But first I had the guard lead me somewhere else.
"I want to see the other warriors," I said to the guard.
"Captain Holt did
not authorize me to do—"
"I am of higher rank than the captain. Do you understand that?" I said to him in a stern voice.
"Yes, Ambassador Jones, right this way," he said as he led me to the other side of the ship where the large prison cells were located.
As we moved in, I realized that there were less warriors than I had thought. There were only twenty, yet in the heat of the siege and excitement it felt like there were so much more simply because I was frightened. I walked down the hall, peeking into the cells making sure that they were being taken care of properly. Each cell had two beds, a privacy screened washroom, and a sitting area. I noticed one thing in common about every single warrior as I walked down the hall peering into the glass: they were in the middle of working out. They were doing pushups, they were doing pullups on pipes in the ceiling, they were doing crunches or running in place.