Shalia's Diary Book 4

by Tracy St. John

  I watched Betra’s face as he climaxed. His beautiful face was more beautiful still caught up in those glorious moments of realization. The euphoria made him like an angel hovering over me, a sweet, vulnerable angel.

  For a moment, I felt my heart open in invitation. Betra was simply too wondrous to not love. Then terror over what I was feeling washed over me, and I closed down the urge just as he came out of his ecstatic trance. No, no, no. I would not fall in love with Betra. Not that way. We are friends and nothing more.

  I am determined I will not give in this time. I have put myself in the position to be heartbroken too many times to be that stupid again. Betra can be dear to me, like an adored companion, like a best buddy, like Candy. That’s all. I will not fuck myself up over him.

  When he’d pulled his senses back together, I was recovered from my moment of insanity. I smiled up at him and stroked his hair back from his forehead. “Now that’s a good morning,” I teased.

  He grinned at me. “I’m so glad you approve. I like waking up this way.”

  Betra showered in my quarters and took his leave, still smiling and happy. I’m glad. I’ve also calmed from my momentary panic, knowing things are just as they should be. All I have to do is remember not to fall in love until the right time has come. I’m an adult and I can be mature about the way things are. Come on, how hard can that be?

  February 7

  Woohoo, shore leave, here I come!

  It turns out Oses won’t be able to meet up with me today. He’s got to work the shift, so I don’t have my big, bad Nobek to keep me safe. However, Betra is accompanying our group to Xniktix, so I’m feeling pretty good about things. He even told Candy, Katrina, and me he’d escort us to the dance club. He has stated flatly, however, that he does not dance.

  “Let me maintain some dignity, ladies,” he sighed when we tried to talk him into shaking that fine butt with us. “Other Kalquorians from this ship will go to the club, simply because we enjoy watching the various women that will be there. We do not dance however, except in demonstration of some ancient tribal rituals. I will never hear the end of it if I join you on the floor.”

  Katrina fixed him with a steely stare. “You would bow to peer pressure, Betra? Are you that insecure about how others see you?” She sounded just like a lecturing mom.

  He shrugged. “Yes.”

  With that, he refused to discuss the issue any further. Betra won’t dance with us. Period.

  As a joke, I brought it up to Oses that maybe he would like to show off some moves. The weapons commander looked at me as if I’d just suggested he take out his cocks and wave them around in public. He didn’t say a word, just stared. Well, excuse me. I guess Kalquorians really don’t like to dance.

  Wallflower Kalquorians aside, we are looking forward to trying out some of the moves we’ve learned by watching the feeds from the dance club. Candy is really, really good. She looks like sex incarnate when she dances. The Plasians, who have the steps we like to emulate most, are going to be blown away by her. Katrina is not bad either, though she is a little self-conscious.

  “I’m not exactly a young woman,” she sighed. “I feel like I’m trying to pass myself off as one. I don’t want to be totally ridiculous.”

  “Stop worrying,” I advised. “It’s all about having fun, right? So have fun and to hell with what anyone else thinks. Besides, how many of these people are you going to see again?”

  “Just all the Kalquorians on our ship,” she snorted, but she did relax after that. After all the carrying on she’s done with our alien fellas, I can’t see what Katrina has to worry about.

  They tell me I’m pretty good at dancing too, not that I care. Dancing like the aliens do is a blast. You just sway to the beat for the most part, doing what makes you feel good and even sexy. I’ve learned a few moves that translated as pretty darned fierce when it comes to naughty play. Betra sure didn’t complain the other night.

  I’m all ready, and the first shuttle scheduled to go to the station leaves in half an hour. All our group will be on it ... I think. Katrina commed me to say Candy was still freaking out over what to wear.

  “Avoid her. That’s what I’m doing,” Katrina advised. “Otherwise, she’ll rope us in to go over her outfit choices and we’ll never get out of here.”

  She’s right. Candy gets a little crazy over stuff like this. She’s been trying to decide what to wear since we found out about our field trip.

  For now, I’ve kept it simple with a short-sleeved blouse and a knee-length skirt. They’re pretty, a black-and-emerald ensemble, but the outfit isn’t as racy as what the majority of the club-goers wear. In fact, I’m overdressed, though it’s the most salacious clothing I possess. The plan is that we’ll see if anyone in the market has clothes for sale that we Earthers can wear and blend in with the crowd. Yep, I’m ready to spend some of my Kalquorian allowance. I can’t imagine that I will wear as little as what some do – the Plasians in particular might as well be running around naked in some cases – but I do want something that says not-repressed-Earther. I don’t want to look like I’m ringing the dinner bell either though. Can someone be modest and sexy at the same time?

  This is so exciting! I feel like a little girl going to her first circus.

  February 8

  Oh my gosh. I am so sore. My everything hurts after yesterday and last night. Between dancing and other stuff, I can barely move. But it was such fun that I can’t complain too much. Besides, pain inhibitors will fix me once I drag my poor carcass to see Dr. Tep.

  So much to tell first though. Obviously, the dance club was awesome. The shopping was amazing. Other parts of shore leave ... not so much. There was some weird in there.

  Candy just barely made it to the shuttle our group took to the space station, having hemmed and hawed over her outfit just as we feared she would. In fact, the hatch was closing when we heard her yelling, “Wait for me! Please wait! I want to go with my friends!”

  Betra sighed and called to the Imdiko tending the passengers. “That’s one of mine. Can she board?”

  The Imdiko attendant was good natured about her tardy arrival, getting the hatch back open to let a flustered Candy on the shuttle.

  “Oh thank you, thank you,” she babbled at him. “You’re such a sweetheart, really. Aren’t you cute! What’s your name?”

  Betra, sitting across the aisle from me, snickered. “Sit down, Matara Candy. You’re holding up take off.”

  “Oops, sorry. Gee, thanks for waiting up for me, Betra.” She stuck her tongue out at him as she joined me and Katrina. “You knew I planned to go.”

  “The shuttles are running on a schedule. I couldn’t keep us grounded for one young lady who can’t figure out which dress to wear.”

  Candy collapsed in the seat beside me and gave him an insulted look. “Betra! This is a big deal for us Earthers. I’ve never been to an alien space station before. I want to represent my people appropriately.” She smoothed out the skirt of her dress, a cute ruffled thing that made her adorable and sexy all at once. I wish I could pull off a look like that.

  Betra grinned at her. “A lovelier ambassador has never been seen, Matara.”

  Candy’s pique with him was instantly gone. “Oh, you are too nice. Do I really look okay?”

  “Beautiful.”

  I could hear the laughter in his voice. Candy amuses Betra to no end, and he forgives a lot of her quirks because he knows there is no real ugliness to her. Of us all, she gets away with the most when it comes to being late to consultations, training, or anything. Even Oses overlooks it when she dashes into blaster training a couple minutes late. If I showed up five seconds late, he’d probably put me over his knee.

  Hmm. Note to self: show up at blaster training late next time.

  The Imdiko attendant put up a vid of the outside view as we left the transport’s bay. Katrina, Candy, and I had already seen the station through our research, but we still murmured with the others as it showed up on the wall pr
ojection.

  “It’s big,” Katrina said. “That’s a long haul from the dock to the marketplace.”

  “It’s got those travel tubes,” I reminded her. “Pneumatic, right? It goes pretty fast from what I understand.”

  “So fast that it has g-force stabilization buffers,” Candy confirmed. “Otherwise, we’d show up with our cheeks meeting at the backs of our heads.”

  It’s easy to forget sometimes that as bubbly and giddy as Candy acts, she’s really got a good head on her shoulders. She usually knows more details of what we’re up to than I do, and I have Betra and Oses keeping me informed.

  By the time we docked at the space station, we were just about bouncing in our seats. Even though our group got off before Betra, we waiting in a small knot for him to disembark while others dashed off to the waiting tubes. He smiled to see us all there, excited but a little overwhelmed.

  “All right, ladies. Everyone has a communicator, right?”

  We nodded, automatically checking our pockets or belt pouches to reassure ourselves we hadn’t forgotten our coms. I was pretty sure everyone had Betra’s frequency keyed in so we could talk to him with only one click. We were thrilled to have a little adventure, but we also were cautious. None of us had ever been off Earth before and had little to no experience interacting with aliens other than the Kalquorians.

  “Good. I’ll send you off in the tubes. It will take you straight to the market and trade area. I’m only a shout away, so have fun.” He smiled, encouraging us like a parent sending his children off to their first sleepover.

  We approached the clear tubes behind Betra, letting him lead us on this first step to our long-awaited shore leave. What I supposed one would call a car waited for a passenger at the open end of the tube. It was shiny silver, shaped like a bullet, with a reclined seat within it. The seat looked made of padded black plastic, with a cushion obviously meant for a head.

  “Holy shit,” one of the other women said. “It looks like a bullet-shaped coffin.”

  It did. No one looked particularly inclined to get into it.

  “Who’s my bravest Matara?” Betra asked, giving us an encouraging look.

  No one volunteered at first. Then Katrina took a deep breath. “I’m the oldest and therefore the most expendable. I’ll give it a shot.”

  Betra laughed at the way she moved forward, as if going to her execution. “Katrina, these things are perfectly safe. You’ll be fine, my sweet.”

  She grimaced, not convinced in the least. “Candy and Shalia, you’d better be right behind me. I’ll need you to hold my hair at the other end, so I can barf if I survive this nightmare.”

  Betra shook his head and helped her into the car. Katrina lay down in it. The padded lounge suddenly closed around her, cushioning her like a Ming vase. Only her face remained visible, and she looked more uncertain than ever.

  “Hey, hold it—” she started to say.

  “You’ll be climbing out in five seconds,” Betra assured her. Then a hatch slid over Katrina’s body, hiding her from view. The next second, the car disappeared in a streak of silver down the tube.

  “Next?” Betra smiled at me.

  I scrambled for an excuse. “Um, you do remember I’m pregnant, right? Has this been tested on expectant Earther girls?”

  He patted my back and pushed me towards the next coffin-car, which was already in position and awaiting its next victim. “I checked with Dr. Tep to make sure you could use the tube. He said you and the baby will be perfectly fine.”

  I stepped in reluctantly, but it occurred to me that as protective as the Kalquorians are of women ... to the point of being damned ridiculous about it ... they wouldn’t let us take this mode of transportation if they thought it had any risk. That did little to ease my mind, however. I really didn’t want to be inside this bullet that traveled like one.

  I lay down, still trying to figure out an excuse why I shouldn’t be doing this without sounding like a big wimp. The padding was nice and soft. I managed not to scream when it closed all around me like it had Katrina. It was like being hugged by a gentle teddy bear.

  “See you soon,” Betra said cheerfully.

  The hatch closed, shutting me in perfect darkness. I tensed and waited for the big rush of movement, of feeling my stomach jolt into my throat, of ... I don’t know what. The seconds ticked by as I clutched my hands into fists.

  Then the hatch opened and the padding retreated, leaving me free to move. I blinked at the featureless ceiling overhead.

  “Betra? Is something wrong?” I warbled in the most pitifully scared voice you ever heard.

  “Need a hand up?” It was Katrina who appeared to stand above me. She grinned. “Nothing to it, was there?”

  “Holy shit, I never felt a thing,” I said, letting her help me up and out of my little capsule. As soon as I stepped out, it zoomed forward and around a curve, disappearing from sight.

  “No wonder Betra had his ‘I’m laughing at you on the inside but trying not to show it’ face on,” Katrina snorted. “What a bunch of babies we must have looked like.”

  There was a whisper of sound, like a breeze through pine trees, and another car arrived. It opened to show Candy, her face all squished up with her eyes shut tight.

  “And here’s the third of our merry trio,” I announced.

  Her eyes flew open. “What? I’m here? Are you kidding me?”

  We helped her out, letting her have a few seconds to exclaim over how ridiculously easy the ride had been. You would have thought we were pissed off that we hadn’t been tortured and come near death during our rides.

  There was a short tunnel-like corridor that led one way from the tube. It was all white and featureless. We headed down to see what was at the brightly lit end.

  We gasped as one as we came to the station’s main concourse. Think of a round football field times one hundred. Okay, so it probably wasn’t that big, but damn, it was huge. We couldn’t even see the other side of the market area. Plus, it was like fifty levels high.

  I’m going to have to borrow from the vids we’d looked at to describe this thing. There’s the main floor, which is where Candy, Katrina, and I came in. This is where the main trade area is. This is where exporters and importers from various systems do their business, buying and selling goods in bulk.

  Below this level are about five others, which are the command center, engineering, maintenance ... you know, the guts of this station. We saw nothing of that part since they aren’t visible from the public part of the station, where we were. The floor of the main trade area covers all that up.

  The levels above us were arranged in golden circular tiers, like balconies hanging over this main floor we were on. The first five levels consist of shops from all over the cosmos, where we planned to do our shopping. The next ten levels are the entertainment section, where we would find our dance club. Further up was dining for every palate and budget except ‘free’. At the very tippy top of all those levels were alien versions of hotel rooms, where those not bunking on the ships they came in on could catch some sleep.

  Arching over all this was a clear dome. It showed space of the most unfathomable blackness, with only pinpricks of stars and distant planets to interrupt its vast expanse.

  Katrina was the first to speak in an awed voice. “If you’ve never felt tiny and insignificant before, this should do it.”

  Candy and I nodded in agreement. We’d never been in such an immense, wide-open structure.

  It was Candy, our effervescent gal of adventure and fun, who got us moving. “Come on. Let’s see about some shopping.”

  That’s right; we were brave and didn’t wait for Betra. You go, bold girls. Our liaison was taking too long and we were too excited. We decided he could track us down via the coms.

  You could tell the station wasn’t used to much of an Earther presence. Of all the signs in so many different languages, not a single one was in ours. We wandered for a little while around the edge of the trade fl
oor before we finally discovered the in-house transport. We crowded onto it with aliens of nearly every stripe once we made sure there were no Tragooms or Bi’isils in it.

  Our riding companions spoke in their various tongues, telling the transport where to let them off. Since we three didn’t have much of a clue about where to direct the car, we simply stood amongst the rest and waited, hoping to be dropped off at a good spot. We disembarked at the very first opportunity, since the shops were on the lowest tiers. It seemed reasonable to believe we’d get where we wanted to go that way.

  We found ourselves on the second level in a wonderland of treasures more amazing than anyone could imagine. Bright lights in various languages dazzled us over the holo and vid windows of each store. Clothing and jewelry and furnishings and art beguiled, luring us to each exhibition with siren songs. Personal shuttles and hovercraft could be bought here, some even spaceworthy. The three of us wandered the concourse, stumbling a little like drunks, our eyes and mouths gaping in wonder.

  Back on Earth, only the rich got to see such things. The poorest neighborhoods had only secondhand shops and grocery stores not even half full. People like me, middle-income, ordered all our goods from warehouses that delivered to our doorsteps. It was those with money that got to go to stores where clothing was custom fitted and people waited on them, ready to fulfill their whims.

  “I bet we can’t afford any of this stuff,” I told the others.

  “No, but we can look,” Katrina replied.

  “And note down what our future clans can buy us,” Candy giggled. “Wow, look at that dress!”

  She rushed over to a window display that had several holograms of dresses rotating around so one could see them from all angles. The featured gown was a slinky see-through number that would be too long for me, the tallest of us three. It was made for someone with elongated, slender proportions. It was probably meant for a Plasian, was my guess. It really was gorgeous, dark blue and filmy with a splash of glitter. It looked as delicate as a butterfly’s wing.