by Leslie Chase
Bound to the Alien Barbarian
A Crashland Castaway Romance
Leslie Chase
Starr Huntress
Bound to the Alien Barbarian
Copyright 2020 Leslie Chase
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences. All names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Contents
About Crashland
1. Tessa
2. Zarkav
3. Tessa
4. Zarkav
5. Tessa
6. Zarkav
7. Tessa
8. Zarkav
9. Tessa
10. Zarkav
11. Tessa
12. Zarkav
13. Tessa
14. Zarkav
15. Tessa
16. Zarkav
17. Tessa
18. Zarkav
19. Tessa
20. Zarkav
21. Tessa
22. Zarkav
23. Tessa
24. Zarkav
25. Tessa
Epilogue
The Crashland Series
Are you a STARR HUNTRESS?
About Leslie Chase
Sci Fi Romance by Leslie Chase
Paranormal Romance by Leslie Chase
About Crashland
Bound to the Alien Barbarian is the first book in the Crashland Castaway Romances, a trilogy of books that follows on from the Crashland Colony Romances. You don’t need to read Colony to follow the Castaway books, but if you want to find out more about how humans came to crash on this planet, that’s where to look!
Crashland Colony Romances
On the trip to Arcadia Colony carrying a cargo of human colonists in suspended animation, the Wandering Star is attacked by Prytheen pirates. The muscular blue alien warriors want the terraforming equipment aboard and will stop at nothing to get it.
Auric, a Prytheen alpha, decides to protect the humans, racing ahead to warn them. And when he arrives, he recognizes the ship’s engineer Tamara as his fated mate.
Trying to save the ship, Tamara jumps the ship into a forbidden system inside the Tavesh Empire. Now, stuck on an unknown planet, humans and Prytheen must work together to survive on the planet they call Crashland.
1
Tessa
I didn’t sleep a wink the night before launch day, too wired and excited. Today I’d board the Wandering Star and take flight for Arcadia Colony to start a fresh life away from the ruins of Old Earth. A lucky win on the colony lottery got me a ticket that some passengers paid a fortune for, the first lucky thing that had happened to me.
“Into the stasis tube, dear,” an attendant said with a smile. I blinked, realized I’d zoned out, and felt my face heat. She shook her head and added quietly. “You’re not the first to come through here without enough sleep. Don’t you worry, I’m sure you’ve heard all the briefings a hundred times. Just lay back, relax, and I’ll close the tube when it’s time.”
With a grateful smile, I climbed inside my stasis tube and lay back. The poorly padded tube — why bother with more? I wouldn’t experience any time once it activated — felt like the most comfortable bed imaginable. The safety briefing droned on and I slipped into a dream of Arcadia.
I’d seen the pictures of our destination, lush and green. Tall trees, colorful birds, no predators that would trouble a human. Air not thickened by pollution. It wasn’t Earth’s only colony, or our best one, but compared to the planet we were leaving behind it looked like paradise. And that was before I considered the aliens I might meet there.
As a communications engineer, I’d had my AI companion loaded with alien language files, as many as I could cram into the memory banks. I wanted to meet aliens, speak with them, get to know them.
My dream shifted direction at the thought of aliens, and my heart beat faster. Instead of standing alone in Arcadia’s forest, I ran through it, pursued by someone close behind. Not someone I feared, though. As weird as it sounded, I wanted to get caught.
He overtook me easily, tackling and bearing me to the ground. Before I knew what was happening he’d trapped beneath him, his weight pinning me. I gazed up at the tall, broad shouldered man, at his sharp teeth and intense eyes. His strong, rough face, deep blue skin and a hungry snarl on his lips.
An alien, a warrior, his bare chest rippling with muscles, hands squeezing my wrists and pinning them to the grass. Pulse racing and panting for breath, I squirmed against him and felt the powerful heat of his body as he lowered himself for a passionate kiss.
Above us, something eclipsed the sun. No, that wasn’t right. It was the stasis tube’s lid swinging shut. I did my best to ignore it, trying to hold on to the dream. The tube clicked shut—
—and popped open to the sound of wailing sirens and a pall of acrid smoke. Instantly awake, eyes watering, I tried to sit up but the gravity was wrong, and I lay at a strange angle. It took several tries to untangle myself from the safety straps and when I did I fell out of the tube.
Dark gray smoke filled the air, leaving me choking as I stumbled out into the main hub of the colony pod. The good news; the air was clearing fast. The bad news? That was because a giant hole in the hull let the smoke billow out. The port wall was gone. Torn edges showed where the pod clipped something on its way down from orbit, sheering off half of it.
The half that held most of the passengers. Dizziness overwhelmed me at that thought and I sat down hard. A dozen people, gone, dead. I’d only survived by luck. Only two of the stasis chamber doors were still there: mine, Mr. Fanwell’s, and then that awful hole; if we’d hit whatever it was at a slightly different angle…
I knocked on Fanwell’s door. No answer. I swallowed, hammered again as hard as I could. The man was far from my favorite crew mate, but he’d be better than nothing.
Still no answer. Hands trembling, I told myself the tears running down my cheeks were from the smoke. Had the impact crushed the inside of Fanwell’s room? Torn it open, dumping him into space? Or had the door to his stasis chamber failed to open? The harder I tried to avoid thinking about his fate, the more terrible scenarios flitted through my mind.
Trying to control my fingers I fumbled at my wrist, activating the wristband communicator and hoping for a useful update, something to tell me what had happened. There ought to be news from the Wandering Star or from the Arcadia authorities. Someone would tell us what was going on, where to go, what to do.
A loud meow of distress greeted me instead as my holographic interface materialized. Kitty Fantastic, tall and proud and white as snow, looked up at me with confusion in her bright blue eyes.
Who the fuck thought a hologram cat was a good interface? The irrelevant thought passed through my head like scrap paper tossed into a hurricane. I’d pondered it often enough, and today wouldn’t bring me an answer.
“What’s happening?” I asked her, but she just yowled at me. A series of error messages appeared above her head and I scanned them quickly. No connection to the hub’s datanet. Okay, that wasn’t a surprise with half the pod missing. No connection to the Wandering Star either. Fine, we’d made landfall so we’d lost contact with the ship.
No contact with Arcadia’s planetary network? That shouldn’t be possible. My wrist unit had
come through the crash undamaged, and Arcadia might be a colony world, but it wasn’t some primitive hellhole with no comms. Even if no connection was possible, Kitty ought to see the datanet.
Things must have gone wrong in worse ways than I’d thought possible. Nothing worked. My first instinct was to curl up, cry, and hope against hope that I’d wake up from this nightmare when the stasis tube opened. There’d been warnings about hypersleep nightmares, hadn’t there? Was it too much to hope I’d fallen prey to one?
“Tessa Ward,” I said aloud, using the name mom always did when I was in trouble. “Don’t you dare give up. If it’s a nightmare, you’ll wake up eventually. If it isn’t, you’ve got to take stock now.”
Okay. First things first, the fire. Kitty pointed me to a hatch which I pried open to find an old-style red fire extinguisher. The incongruity of that aboard a spaceship got a choking laugh from me, but I knew why it was here: more modern extinguishers needed power. Under the circumstances, I had to admit whoever packed it chose wisely.
The source of the smoke was easy enough to find: the remains of the air recirculator burned merrily, pumping smoke throughout the ship, until I covered it in a thick layer of foam. A horrid chemical stink filled the air and I backed out again to let it settle. There was nothing worth salvaging in the burned-out engine room, anyway. This colony pod would never fly again.
I tried to take stock as I made my way back to the living area. We kept our personal possessions in our sleep chambers, which was both good and bad. Good: I still had everything I’d packed. Bad: everything the others owned vanished along with them.
That thought left a sour taste. My fellow colonists were dead and gone, and here I was mourning their luggage. But there were so many useful things to miss. Mr. Al-Rashid was a surveyor and brought his own scouting drone, the Durchwald twins were keen hikers, and Mrs. Cole? She’d been paranoid enough to pack a full survival kit of her own.
Not paranoid enough, I thought with a deep sigh. At least none of them saw it coming.
That might be better than my own situation. The others just lay back in their stasis chambers and — that was it. Over in a moment they didn’t even experience.
“While I’m left here alone to die slowly,” I muttered, looking out at the forest through the hole torn in the hull. I didn’t rate my chances alone against the wilderness. I’m a city girl — none of the others had been rude enough to comment, but they’d helped me through the wilderness survival training. Without them, I doubted I’d last a week.
No. With a firm shake of my head I tried to banish that negativity. I worked hard to qualify for a useful trade, lucked out and won a colony ticket, made it through training (with, yes, a little help). So what if I’ve hit a bad patch now? I’ll make it through this too. Somehow.
Assets: my gear, mostly useless. I’d brought a good toolkit, and aside from that most of my money had gone on an upgraded companion AI. Kitty Fantastic had all the optional extras I could afford, some of which would be useful. Like her mapping function which would keep me from getting lost as long as I kept her battery charged.
Apart from that, I had the contents of the cargo hold. Whatever was left of it after the belly of the pod scraped across the ground in the crash, anyway. We must have left a trail of cargo for miles behind us. I just had to hope some of it survived the crash, because without food supplies I wouldn’t last long.
My jaw clenched and I hesitated, chewing my lip. If I went down to the cargo hold and nothing survived… then I’d know I was doomed. As long as I stayed up here, I had hope.
A crash and a thump startled me, and I whipped round to look at Fanwell’s door. Beside me, Kitty Fantastic bared her fangs, though what good she thought they’d do was beyond me. The hologram companions had forcefield projectors to give them the illusion of solidity, but not enough for a bite to hurt, let alone break skin.
The door slid open with a hideous grinding noise, getting stuck halfway. Loud, colorful curses preceded Orson Fanwell as he squeezed his way out of the chamber.
Tall, balding, his figure giving way to fat, Fanwell was, he’d assured us, a famous name on the London stage. Maybe it was true, but his glory days were far behind him. Not that he’d ever acknowledged that, or entertained the possibility that he wasn’t the most important person in whatever room he graced with his presence.
Not that actors were in high demand on Arcadia — his official role was hunter, as shown by the laser rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Tessa? Where’s everyone else? Where the fuck are we?” he said, staring out of the ruined hull and wiping tears from his eyes. “This is too fucking much.”
I hardly knew Fanwell, but I’d established one thing early on — when his range of swearwords contracted to a simple ‘fuck,’ things were serious. Minor irritations he cursed out much more expansively.
“Thank god you’re alive,” I said. He might be my least favorite crew mate to spend time with, but it was better than being alone. “Everyone else is—“
He cut me off with a sharp, slashing gesture. “Dead? Yes, I can see the obvious. Never mind that, what the fuck is wrong with the trees?”
What’s he talking about? I peered through the gap in our hull and frowned. I hadn’t taken a proper look outside yet, too many other things to focus on, but now I paid attention to the trees tumbled by our crash and frowned. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
“Kitty can’t contact a planetary datanet,” I said, changing the subject to cover up my unease. “Have you tried yet?”
Fanwell grunted, switching his own wristband on. His hologram companion shimmered into existence. He’d chosen an enormous wolf, unconvincing and see-through. The holoprojector had to be straining to project something that size, and the effort brought the resolution down.
“Well, Killer? Can you find a signal?”
I winced at the name. Most of us had given our AI companions names cute, friendly names — not Orson Fanwell. The wolf whined and shook his head.
“Figures.” Fanwell snapped his fingers and the wolf dissolved. “I wonder if any of the other pods had the same trouble, or if this is just another example of destiny shitting in my fireplace.”
I should have expected him to make it all about himself. Nothing was small about Orson Fanwell — not his vocabulary, not his gut, and certainly not his ego.
“There’s nothing broadcasting in orbit, no satellites to relay signals,” I said, trying to think of something constructive to do. “If we raise the antenna we might manage direct connections to the other pods, though.”
Anything to not have to think about the hole where a dozen people ought to be. Fanwell looked at me, scowled, then nodded. “I suppose I ought to try.”
“I’m a communications engineer,” I reminded him, trying not to let my annoyance show. Why would he be the one to fix things? Except, of course, he was a man, and to Fanwell that was enough. His casual assumption stung but I didn’t want a fight, not when we were trapped alone together.
His face darkened, but then cleared, his smile reasserting itself. “Well, yes, of course you are. I’d forgotten.”
No apology. Of course not. At least he accepted my claim of expertise without argument, which was more than some men I’d known would have done. A low bar to clear, that.
My anger had one positive effect — it brushed the mental cobwebs aside and got my brain working. If there was anyone else on this planet, getting the antenna working was the only thing that would help find them.
A hatch in the central pillar gave access to the pod’s communication system. Which wasn’t working at all — apparently the half of the ship that was missing contained the emergency power supply.
In a way, that was good news. This was a colony pod, designed to be self-sufficient, so this problem was easily solved. It’s half a colony pod, anyway, I corrected myself. Hopefully the right half. “Hey, Orson? Can you go see if any of the solar panels survived? I’d like to have t
hem up before nightfall so we can get some charge on the batteries.”
“Fine,” Fanwell said with poor grace. “Sure, I’ll clamber around outside and see if I can get into the stores. Killer, ultrasound on, just in case.”
Killer whined, the pitch quickly rising out of range of human hearing. It was a sound designed to keep away Arcadian wildlife, not that there was much to fear. As soon as it was active Fanwell dropped out of the side of the pod, his holowolf leaping after him.
Kitty Fantastic sniffed and licked her paw pointedly. She didn’t like Fanwell any more than I did.
“I know, but be nice,” I said. “It sucks but we’ve got to work with him, okay? He might be the only human in a hundred miles.”
It’s amazing how expressive a hologram of a cat can be when it’s communicating disdain. Kitty ostentatiously cleaned her ears, letting me know how much she thought of our traveling companion. But a little mrrew of acceptance made me breathe easier. She wouldn’t pick a fight, which was what I cared about right now.
The communications system had taken a lot of damage in the crash. Enough to make this a complicated repair job even if we got the batteries charged. I decided that was for the best — it’d keep my mind off the horrors of the situation. Diving in, I checked circuits and tracked damage. Kitty helped, displaying the schematics above her head for me to refer to and make notes on.