by Calista Skye
We all applaud.
“Wonderful,” Emilia states. “That’s a great beginning. But I think the ‘cappuccino’ part should be exchanged for ‘mocha latte’.”
“Are you kidding me?” Aurora exclaims. “No fucking latte in my constitution! It’s a travesty.”
“Aren’t those pretty much the same thing?” Tamara says carefully and sits down.
“Yes,” Emilia says. “Yes, they are. If you’re a freaking space alien who’s never had real coffee before! No, give me a mocha latte or give me death.”
“Great,” Caroline sighs. “We have political parties now. The latte party and the cappuccino party. But who’ll speak for the macchiato people? We demand representation!”
We all laugh, and Aurora embraces Emilia. “I love you girls.”
“This Actually Isn’t So Bad: Living On an Alien Planet with the Best Girls in the Universe,” Emilia replies.
“I’d co-author that article.” I get to my feet and walk over to Brax’tan, who’s been in the jungle and is returning with his arms full of not-sheep and turkeypigs.
“You been hunting, warrior?”
“Oh no. Not at all. I’ve only been practicing my vivaciousness,” he says seriously, dumping the dead animals on the ground. “I find it’s better to do it in the woods than among people.”
I get up on tiptoes to kiss him. “You like to practice in secret. You’re secretive sometimes.”
“Am I?” he says innocently.
“You are. You never told me you had a special relationship with Bune. You kept it secret from me.”
“And from myself,” he reminds me. “I didn’t even know about it.”
“That’s right,” I agree and kiss him again. “So secretive. Even keeping secrets from yourself. Actually, I like a man with a little mystery to him. You can be secretive if you want. Sometimes.”
“I’ll work on that, too,” he says. “The passionate thing is coming along fine. How about you? What are you working on being more of?”
I sigh deeply. “Oh, where will I start? I don’t even know.”
“Start with being happy.”
I laugh out loud. “My love, I think that’s a given. As long as I’m with you. No, try again.”
“Spontaneous?”
“Huh. Yeah, that’s a good one. I should work on that. Sure. More?”
“Careless?”
I slap his chest. “You’re really picking out all my weaknesses, aren’t you? But that’s fine. You’re my husband. It’s kind of your job. Yes, I’ll be more careless. Sometimes. If it’s prudent.”
“Obedient.”
I just laugh. “Yeah, we’ll see about that, warrior. We’ll see.”
“I think that’s it. But my love! I don’t actually think you need to change at all.”
I embrace him, hard. “And I don’t think you do, either. It’s just a silly game. Don’t ever change, you hear me?”
“I hear you. In truth, I did more than practice being vivacious. I walked almost all the way to your spaceship.”
“Our spaceship.”
“Very well. Our spaceship. All the way over on that plain. Anyway, it’s still there. But it’s far. What are we planning with it?”
“Nothing yet. I’ll go there once in a while. Nobody else can get in. Actually, we’ll both go there once in a while. We haven’t inspected all the levels of the garden yet.”
He smirks. “And when you say ’inspected’, what you mean to say is ’mated on’.”
I wave my hand dismissively. “Oh, it’s the same thing.”
“You will try to make it work again? To take you home to your planet?” He’s calm, but there’s a soreness in his question.
“Maybe. It’s more for the unmarried girls. They should be allowed to go home if they want. We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll ever leave Xren.”
Saying those words would have stung me hard just a few weeks ago. Now, it’s just true. I still want to go home. But the way things are, and with the welcome I think we can expect on Earth, it will probably never happen. And I’m actually pretty okay with that. This life on Xren is much more interesting than my life back home. I’m so much more alive here, it isn’t even funny.
And I have this caveman. My husband.
“I will never leave you,” I add.
He embraces me hard, sniffing my hair. “I love you, my wife. Anyway, it’s natural to miss your home.”
“I do miss it. But not nearly as much as before. What about your home? Your tribe?”
“I’m still the chief. I will go there soon and straighten things out.”
“Our two tribes will be friends again.”
He laughs. “More than friends, I think, if the two chiefs are married. It will be interesting to see how my tribe handles that. Your tribe seems to handle anything with ease.”
“It’s a good tribe,” I agree modestly. “And with you here, it’s much better.”
“With us here,” he corrects mildly and strokes the hair away from my forehead. “One of us isn’t much good without the other.”
“I know. We’re better together. Especially when we… you know.” I’m feeling tingles again. Just being close to him does that to me. His scent, his heat, his muscles, his eyes.
He frowns. “When we drink ubru?”
“No! I mean, when we—”
“Walk through the jungle?”
“No. Good grief. When we—”
“Make your mortar?” There’s a glint in his eyes, and I know he’s playing with me.
“You’re coming close to being terrible,” I warn him. “You don’t want that.”
“Oh! You mean when we mate?”
Just the word sends more hard tingles to my pussy. “You got it.”
“Ah.” A bulge has appeared at the front of his kilt. “I’m still getting used to the idea that such a thing is possible. Perhaps we should make sure that it still is?”
“Yes,” I agree. “We really should. Just to make sure.”
“I know just the place,” Brax’tan says and lifts me onto his shoulder, making me squeal. “A mysterious spaceship, just sitting there. It’s far, but we have time.”
He starts walking back into the jungle.
I know he’ll let me down soon, but for now, being carried like this just makes my tingles harder. Hey, he is a caveman. I don’t mind him acting like one. Sometimes.
“We have time,” I agree. “Forever, in fact.”
© Calista Skye 2018
To be continued in early 2019 with Part 7, which is Tamara’s story.
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- - -
Meanwhile, try my completed Fire Planet Warriors series! Here's an excerpt:
Fire Planet Warrior's Captive: Part One of the Fire Planet Warriors series
Chapter 1
- Harper -
“I'll never get tired of that.”
Harper stroked an errant wisp of hair out of her face and took a breath of thin, dry alien air. The sky was dark, but the planet Bry was clearly visible as a crescent right above her head. Half of the planet was in darkness, and the other half was lit up by the white sun. On the dark side of the planet a thin, yellow line of light was clearly visible as it pulsated erratically along its length.
Ava glanced up at the sky. “Looks like it's picking up steam.” She opened the door to the biodome. “Must have hit a dry area.”
Harper squinted. Ava was right – the huge wildfire that circled Bry's one continent was brighter than it had been the night before. Seen from Gideo Station on one of Bry's moons, it was just a jagged yellow line, but even so it was obvious to everyone who saw it that it had to be an enormous fire.
The blaze never went out. Bry's single continent was a rough O, with a giant lake in the middle. The fire raged around and around the continent like the minute hand on an antique clock, and the vegetation just had time to regrow before it was burned again as the
fire completed one more lap.
It was one of the most mysterious things in the universe, and being able to look at it every day from pretty close was one reason why Harper had volunteered to go into space to set up Gideo Station. Maybe one day she would even be able to go to Bry itself and see the blaze from even closer ...
Ava kicked the dust off her boots, stepped inside the biodome and held the door open for Harper. “You coming?”
“Just a moment. I've never seen it this intense before.”
“Suit yourself. I'm not staying out here on pizza night.” Ava let the door slam shut and Harper was alone on the sand outside the station. She couldn't hold back a happy smile. Outside the station on an alien moon many light years from Earth. It still blew her mind every time she thought about it.
It was hard work being a space colonist, with many sixteen-hour days and a multitude of problems that had to be solved every day. But it also let her see things that no Earthling ever had before. Like that eternal fire that just went around and around, once every four hundred days, and no one knew exactly why or how it was even possible. That was why they were there in the first place, monitoring the strange fire planet from this base on the planet's moon. A moon with an atmosphere, even. The opportunity to establish a base here was too good to pass up for Earth's Space Expansion.
A thin whirring noise reached Harper's ears and she glanced behind her. The main telescope was adjusting its angle slightly to get the best possible view of the fire. It was controlled by a computer, but still there were four humans here to set up the station and then take care of the equipment until the computer could handle everything on its own.
It was the best job Harper had ever had, even though she had been skeptical when first she learned that by coincidence, this base would have an all-female staff. There were only four of them, but they had great chemistry and they were all good friends by now. Base chief Ava was the oldest of them, and she made sure that everyone was included in everything. She would not tolerate any infighting at all. That woman was just born to be a leader. Just like Charlotte was born to be a shuttle pilot and Lily was born to be a computer nerd. Harper herself probably wasn't exactly born to be a biologist, but she loved it. They were a great team-
She frowned. One of the stars in the sky above her was moving. No, it couldn't be a star. It moved fast across the night sky. It got brighter, too, as if it was coming closer. It was very white.
A shuttle? No, that didn't look right. And there was no sound, either.
Harper took a step towards the biodome door and grabbed onto the door handle. Now the light went back and forth across the sky, like it was searching for something. It moved insanely fast, then suddenly grew much larger. It had to be coming right for her!
She pushed the handle down and opened the door, ready to dive inside if something threatening were to happen.
Something more threatening, she corrected herself. Because that thing there wasn't just a light. It was something big and dark that totally obscured the stars behind it. It had to be huge.
And suddenly it had many lights! In all kinds of different colors, blinking and flashing and rotating and twirling in a pattern so splendorous that Harper had to gasp at the impact it had on her senses.
She realized that she was gawping, but she found it impossible to take her eyes off the thing. It hovered silently in the air above the sand, and it had to be the size of an apartment building. It was very beautiful and the lights were extremely friendly.
Harper slowly let go of the door handle and just stood there, staring.
Yes, friendly. It only wanted what was best for her ...
- - -
She came to and immediately knew she was in big trouble. She was tied on her hands and feet, and she was lying on her side on a metallic floor.
She knew she had been asleep. Or unconscious. But now she was awake, and she felt no ill effects. She wasn't even drowsy.
She got up into a sitting position. Yeah, this wasn't the inside of Gideo Station or any other place she had ever been. This was ... alien. But not alien in any way she had ever expected. The metal floor was rusty in patches, and the dim light was yellowish. There were uneven walls with strange-looking consoles and lights and technology that had to be advanced, but still managed to look old and even dirty.
But the most alien thing was the aliens themselves.
There were four of them, standing around her in a circle, just silently staring at her in a way that was so creepy it sent shivers down Harper's spine. The were roughly human-shaped, with two legs and two arms that were so long they reached almost all the way to the floor when they stood upright. Except they weren't really upright – they were all hunched over in a way that made them seem unhealthy. Their skin was a yellowish pale that was translucent in places, showing greenish internal organs inside. Their heads were small and pointy on top, and there was no hair, just brownish scales that grew down the sides of their faces.
They had six muddled, dirty white eyes each, on short stalks that hung limply from their low foreheads. That more than anything else made Harper want to shrink away from them. That and the obvious fact that they were clearly aroused. They had dirty loincloths on, but they were all clearly pitching tents in them. Not huge tents, but there was definitely something going on there that Harper really didn't want to know more about.
There was an unpleasant smell in the room and the whole situation just felt unhealthy to her. Very unhealthy.
She cleared her voice. “So if you could take these ropes off me right now, that would be great.”
The aliens looked at her impassively. She noticed that they had some kind of yellowish drool running from their tiny mouths and it almost made her retch. Their hands had two long, pale fingers and no thumbs.
She struggled against the wires binding her. “I'm not kidding. Let me go or there'll be hell to pay.”
Harper felt panic bubbling up, but she was getting angry, too. She had been taken in by the light display from the UFO, probably hypnotized by it, and then somehow she had ended up here in a not too clean spaceship with aliens ogling her. What the fuck did they think they were doing?
“Hey! I'm talking to you!”
They were looking at her. Maybe. Their milky eyes hung down and had no irises, so it was hard to tell. Maybe they were blind. But they did move, so they weren't dead. Still they reminded her of zombies. Alien zombies, sure, but there was something dead about them.
And they were definitely aliens. That in itself was huge. No one had ever met aliens before. She was the first. She groaned inwardly. So of course they had to be the crappy kind of alien. No beautiful elf-like beings with wisdom and extraordinary technology for Harper, like she had sometimes dreamed about in her fantasies before she actually went to space. No, these were dirty beings with knock-out-lights and drool and loincloths and probably hard-ons.
Still they didn't react, and Harper went through the contents of her jump suit in her mind. Maybe there was something she could use to cut the wires. They looked like plastic fiber of some kind.
Okay. She had chewing gum, she was pretty sure. A couple of spare tampons, probably. Her comms unit. A stylus, maybe, unless she had misplaced it like she always did. Chapstick. Medkit.
She glanced down at her utility belt. Oh yeah. And a little ceramic trowel for the plants that they were growing for food in the biodome.
That was it. No knife, no gun, no pliers. Just all kinds of stuff that was useful in their own way, but not for escaping from ties while being maybe watched by aliens that might be blind but probably weren't.
They hadn't tied her that tightly, but the position was awkward. She really had to keep her anger seething, because right underneath that lurked panic.
Harper took a deep breath. “Okay. This is your last warning. Take these wires off me or I'll report you so hard you'll think you died and went to hell- hey, stop that!”
Two of the aliens took clumsy steps towards her and lifted her up. T
heir arms were so long they didn't have to bend down to grab her and pull her to her feet.
“That's bet- uurgch,” Harper said, because right then the stench from the aliens hit her and she couldn't suppress the dry-heaves. Her mouth filled with saliva and her eyes filled with water, and she had to fight to not just throw up right there.
The aliens didn't loosen the wires that held her. They grabbed onto her upper arms and dragged her over to some kind of contraption crudely made from shiny metal bars. Harper had to concentrate to breathe through her mouth to not feel the sewage-like smell they exuded, but when she had blinked the nauseous tears from her eyes, she noticed that the thing had straps on it and that the aliens were clearly adjusting it to her size. She saw a metal tray with some rusty-looking tools on it that vaguely reminded her of surgical equipment.
“Hey,” she yelled, “what the hell do you think you're doing!” She struggled against the grips the aliens had on her, squirming like a worm, but they were surprisingly strong and held her easily.
They loosened the bindings on her wrists and ankles, but they held on to her so securely with their hands that she couldn't move much. “Let me go, you fuckers!”
One alien crouched down and held her leg, then fastened a strap around it. Another one did it to her other leg, and now she was tied with her legs spread pretty far apart.
Shit. In a flash she realized that the contraption was a rack for holding her securely while they- she didn't want to finish the thought. But she couldn't ignore the fact that they were clearly aroused behind those loincloths. “Stop that! Stop that now! I do not agree to this!”
Harper was dimly aware that there were more people in the room now, more aliens with long arms and a hunched posture. The stench intensified, but now she was too concerned with her immediate future to care much.
She yelled and squirmed and yanked her arms to get them loose, but nothing helped. And now the anger was giving way to real panic. These beings clearly didn't have her best interests in mind if they had to strap her to something.