The Million Miles High Club (Scifi Alien Romance) (Celestial Mates)

by Suki Selborne

  Scorvan still stands tall, his fists by his sides. “Greetings, Captain Plinaro.”

  I already know I don’t like Captain Plinaro, from one look at his sneery face.

  “You didn’t need to ask these men to call me, Scorvan. I was already making my way down here when I heard we had—” He looks me up and down contemptuously. “An infestation of vermin. Human vermin, if I’m not mistaken. The very lowest of the low.”

  I fold my arms and raise my eyebrows. Vermin? This guy is pretty rude. “Yeah, I’m a human. But I didn’t even want to board your damn ship. This whole thing has been a mistake.”

  “It certainly is a mistake. A serious one. We’ll need you to come with us.”

  Scorvan’s eyes blaze at this Captain guy. “You cannot take this female to the cells.” His voice is muted, but firm.

  The atmosphere is tense. My skin prickles.

  “Cannot?” Captain Plinaro stamps his feet and narrows his eyes at Scorvan. He reminds me of an immensely tall toddler on the brink of a tantrum. “How dare you tell me what I can and cannot do?”

  “This human has done nothing wrong!” Scorvan half-shouts. “I have contained the threat, and no more action is required.”

  “Silence!” yells Captain Plinaro. “This is intolerable insubordination. Troops, seize that human.”

  And that’s when the room descends into chaos.

  Soldiers swarm toward me from every direction and try to grab me. I adopt a martial arts pose, ready to defend myself.

  But I don’t get to use my moves. Scorvan fights every one of them off before they reach me.

  With nothing more than his fists to help him, he flings back scores of men. Still more keep on coming. There are so many soldiers.

  I know Scorvan has no chance of protecting me from all of them, especially as they are armed. They seem reluctant to use their weapons on him, which is fortunate. But he can’t take on hundreds of people at once, even though he’s making a damn solid attempt.

  At last, eleven soldiers managed to pin him down to the floor. Eleven. He’s still kicking and shoving, but they have him on lockdown.

  A soldier grabs my hands and cuffs them with what looks like bangles made of silver light. The restraints look as though they can’t be real, but I can’t move my wrists even the tiniest distance apart.

  “You will be detained until we can locate your Intergalactic Record,” Captain Plinaro tells me with a nasty smile. “You had better hope for your own sake that the process does not take too long.”

  Fuck.

  I say nothing. Of course, I have no Intergalactic Record. Some humans do, but they’re the ones working as freelance mercenaries for the Gromalf Alliance. They control this part of the universe.

  See, I don’t do that. I’m part of the underground rebel force. I fight to keep peaceful human-alien settlements safe from Gromalf takeovers. I don’t help the big guys in charge. Big difference.

  Knowing which side the Yolcadians are on, I can already sense the danger I’m in. Being a rebel fighter means I’m automatically an enemy combatant.

  And if they find that out, the Yolcadians won’t just send me on my way with a full tank of fuel and a cheery wave. They’ll kill me instantly. Or else they’ll fire me into deep space to perish alone. I’m not sure which is worse.

  So this Scorvan guy is going to be in deep trouble. Either way, I expect he’ll be severely punished for trying to protect me.

  How I would love for us to save each other, and ourselves. But we’re both screwed right now. We’re so outnumbered, it isn’t funny.

  I watch as Scorvan is dragged out of the loading bay, yelling and struggling. Even though there are still eleven people holding him down, he almost breaks free several times.

  They’ll lock us both up, and that’s if we’re lucky.

  If we could be imprisoned in the same cell, that’d go a long way toward making up for my shitty day. Hell, yeah. I could stand a little forced proximity with sexy seven-foot Scorvan.

  But I know that’s never going to happen. They’ll keep us as far apart as possible.

  It suddenly occurs to me that they’ll search my ship next, and possibly check my flight records. That could put my rebel friends in danger.

  “Lola, launch full shutdown,” I call out in English. The last thing I want is for my over-friendly onboard computer to give out rebel information to Gromalf allies.

  “Well, alrighty,” says Lola. There’s a bleep, and all the lights on my ship go off. God bless Lola. She just made sure she can’t respond to any voice commands until I personally reset the interface.

  The last thing I see before I’m dragged from the room is a Yolcadian kicking the side of my ship. He must be feeling pretty pissed that it didn’t respond to his request for a voyage history.

  Too late, asshole.

  As I’m snatched from the room, I hope this isn’t the last time I ever get to see my ship. I’m really going to miss talking to Lola if it is.

  4 Kalia

  I’ll really miss Lola.

  I’m aware how tragic that would sound to someone else, because Lola is not a real person. She’s just my on-board computer. But she’s loyal, and funny, and she’s always there when I need her. And you can’t ask for more than that in a friend.

  And Scorvan? Oh, Scorvan.

  If I’m honest with myself, I’m disappointed I didn’t get a chance to get to know him before we were torn apart. He’s the first alien I ever felt a connection with like that. Those few minutes really weren’t enough.

  I crumple a little to think that I’ll probably have plenty of alone-time to relive the memory in a Yolcadian prison. Or when I’ve been blasted into space to float until my oxygen runs out. Great.

  A Yolcadian guard pushes me into what looks like a silver walk-in closet with three walls. He activates a force field where the fourth wall would be. Before I can stop him, he rips my Wixer off my wrist.

  “Hey,” I protest, feebly.

  “Do not attempt to leave this holding cell,” he says. “I shall now illustrate what will happen if you do.”

  He throws the Wixer directly into the force field. It immediately vaporizes and vanishes.

  I groan. “Aw, man. Not my Wixer.”

  The Yolcadian doesn’t answer. Instead, he switches the force field off just long enough to cross to the other side, then re-activates it. I hear his footsteps fade away into the distance.

  I’m all alone in this shiny aluminum foil box.

  “Use the time for quiet reflection, human,” comes another voice from the corridor outside. Then that voice fades away too.

  Quiet reflection. Just the one skill I don’t need to practise. I spent most of the last year alone in space with just Lola to talk to. Quiet reflection is all I ever do these days. Don’t these Yolcadians realize I’m already a pro? How about letting me go, since I already have my quiet reflection bachelors?

  I sweep my long hair off my face, and stretch out my arms and legs as far as I can. I have to extend my arms horizontally in front of me, because the ceiling is not much higher than the top of my head.

  Right now, there’s nothing I can do but accept this.

  Maybe the strange cherub will come back, I muse. At least then I”ll have someone to talk to.

  I sit on the floor and rest my head on one of the three solid silver walls, humming softly to take my mind off my predicament.

  Please let Scorvan be okay, I find myself thinking.

  The cell is hot and cramped. My ankle aches from a stumble in the corridor, while two hulking Yolcadians dragged me on me by the elbows.

  I have no idea how a Yolcadian prisoner would fit inside here. At five foot eight, I have to stoop a little to stand up. If I take two steps forward, I cross the entire space. It’s even more compact than my ship’s control room, and that’s saying something.

  Thinking of my little ship makes me glum. How I miss it already. Not just because of Lola’s geeky babble, although I do miss that a lot. It
’s also because it represents freedom.

  I’m trapped in a strange spacecraft, owned by an Alliance-supporting enemy. I’m hurtling away from my home galaxy at unimaginable speed. Things are pretty gloomy right now.

  As a special bonus, my stomach is growling like a wolf. Will they even feed me? I have no idea. I might just faint with hunger one if somebody doesn’t order me a bacon double cheeseburger, like now. My mouth waters at the thought. Although I bet Yolcadians probably eat some super weird shit, instead of good honest rehydrated American space food like I’m used to.

  The force field that seals the cell is more or less invisible from my current angle on the floor. Because I can’t really see it, it seems to promise me that I could just walk out of here any time I like. Unfortunately, I know that isn’t the case. I saw my Wixer zapped to oblivion in its rays. Freedom is just an illusion.

  I rub my bare wrist, missing the feel of my Wixer already. Why couldn’t he demonstrate the force field using his own damn wrist device? I feel isolated and anxious without it. Stupid, maybe, but I’m reliant on technology at all times.

  That isn’t a bad thing, in my normal life. Solo pilots have to use any tool we have at our disposal. My Wixer may have had an irritating pixie voice, but over the last year or so, it’s been like an assistant who came with me wherever I went. Between my Wixer and Lola, I could almost kid myself I had a little crew of my own.

  It occurred to me that thinking of a bunch of circuits are your friends is a little tragic. But there it was.

  I probably wouldn’t have a lot of opportunity to make friends from now on either. Everything changed the moment I crash landed onto this ship. What had Super-Hot Scorvan called it? Oh yeah, the Qualfigon.

  This is not a good situation to be in. I use my pilot training to sift through all the possible eventualities, making a careful analysis so I can plan my next move.

  It’s pretty likely that I’ll be killed by my captors, one way or the other. But I’m not convinced that they’ll do it directly. The Yolcadians don’t look like a particularly bloodthirsty species, despite their guns and bravado. They didn’t hurt Scorvan. He was being pretty harshly disciplined back there, but they didn’t actually hurt him.

  Maybe my instincts are wrong. But I have a feeling that if they were planning to kill me any time soon, they would have done it already.

  That leaves option two. Option two is that they send me out into space without fuel. That’s a regular punishment for criminals of all kinds out here in space.

  Then it dawns on me that there is an option three. What if they keep me her on this ship indefinitely, or take me back to their planet as a prisoner? And maybe they… ugh, maybe they might find a use for me?

  That doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Cards on the table, I reason with myself: I have nobody to go home to, and nobody much to miss me. My best friend Cresta is used to checking in with me on an intergalactic chat app every Sunday, but Cresta is on Earth and has a social life. She’ll notice if I don’t buzz her, but she’ll soon get over the loss of one friend’s conversation. She’ll assume I’m on a mission. Other than that, approximately nobody will even notice I’ve gone.

  So I’m stuck here on a Yolcadian ship with no English-speakers, no fun Cresta chats, and no Earth chocolate.

  Man, I’d do almost anything for a square of old-fashioned chocolate right now. Do Yolcadians even eat chocolate? I bet they don’t. They look like the kind of guys that consider basic sensory pleasure to be a weak indulgence.

  My stomach grumbles at her again. It’s been a long time since breakfast. No wonder I’m suddenly fixated on the idea of chocolate.

  Panic grips me for just a second. I’m going to go crazy in this cell. I just know it.

  I use every ounce of strength I have to stay calm.

  Sitting with my back straight and my eyes close, I begin to hum a tune. It’s an ancient folk song from the twenty-first century. It soothes me just enough to quieten down my inner turmoil.

  5 Scorvan

  Now that I know this female exists, being apart from her is intolerable.

  This separation cannot continue.

  The female has been away from me my whole life. Yet, now we have met, things are different. We have been separated again for just a fraction of a sun-turn. Already I feel as though I have been banished from the one source of light and heat in my universe.

  I am ready to tear down planets for her.

  There is no reason and no explanation for my strength of feeling. It just is.

  The human is mine. I must claim her.

  I will kill anyone who harms her. Hell, I will kill anyone who even stands between us.

  With a mighty roar, I rip my arm away from the soldier who is holding it. I shove him so hard, he slides across the floor at high speed and hits the opposite wall.

  There is another soldier holding me on the other side. He looks alarmed. “Be reasonable, Scorvan Zi’Draalcay. You must see this behavior is foolishness.”

  And he must see I am no longer interested in being ‘reasonable’.

  I do not care at all if the rest of the crew thinks I have lost my mind. I will keep fighting until the human is returned to me, or die in the attempt.

  She is mine. I have never been more sure of anything in my life.

  If anyone tries to stop me reaching her, they will pay the price. Nothing will prevent me from having her. Nothing.

  Of course, the fact that I am not supposed to mate at all is one difficulty.

  But screw the rules. I will insist that Captain Plinaro makes an exception for me. The human will marry me, and we will bring many magnificent children into the world on Yolcadia.

  Either that, or I must demand to be honorably discharged. Then I can make a new life with the human on some other friendly planet. Anywhere in the universe would suit me, as long as she is mine. Even somewhere as backward as Earth. Just as long as we are together.

  Mine.

  I catch myself in the middle of this thought. Incredible how fast my attitude to life has changed in one single sun-turn.

  I have never taken any interest in humans until now. They are such an ill-disciplined, messy species. And yet here I am, certain that this human is my destined mate.

  Could meeting her really have happened just today? I already feel as though she and I have been together for lifetimes.

  An image of her long black hair and delicate features swims into my head. My hearts begin to pound in unison. I feel a tell-tale swelling beneath my gun belt, and try to think of something else.

  It is a done deal, as far as I am concerned. I will claim her. And she will be mine.

  She is already mine.

  “Scorvan, do not force me to use restraints,” warns one of the remaining soldiers. “It is not dignified for a Yolcadian warrior to be shackled like a slave.”

  “As if,” I bellow. “You could not restrain me, even if you tried.”

  “Do not be ridiculous,” laughs Breelfan, who has been observing us the whole time. He is by far the oldest Yolcadian in the room. “I was disciplining idiotic young men when you were still in a training suit. Believe me, it will be easy.”

  I square up to him, but I back off when I see the senior officer’s soft, kind expression.

  It isn’t Breelfan’s fault that I am on the verge of sabotaging my own military career. Breelfan is just trying to protect me. I may feel rage at the way my captain and fellow Yolcadians are treating the human. But I know in my soul that it would be wrong to use the strength of youth against my senior colleague. Breelfan is a good person. He is only trying to calm the crisis.

  I sit down on a cool glass bench for a moment. With difficulty, I harness all my willpower to speak calmly. It’s either that, or I bring down a world of pain on their heads, as my instincts demand. I battle my instincts and win, for now.

  “What you all don't seem to understand is that the human did nothing wrong,” I say. “She was no threat to us at all. Surely you
can see that?”

  Breelfan shakes his head. “The human had no business coming on to our ship in the first place. We do not know whether her intention was to harm us or not. Even more importantly, how did she get here? She seemed to open a direct wormhole portal to our ship. That has never been seen before. The technology is unknown to us. To us, Scorvan. We’re at the front of technological advance in this part of the cosmos. How on Yolcadia did a lowly human get her hands on technology like that? Humans can barely work out which end of a quark transmitter is which. She must be working with a more powerful ally.”

  “That’s right,” another soldier says. He shrinks back a little when I glare at him, but he keeps talking. “Will others follow this human through whatever highway has been opened? Are we allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to invasion? Or war? You answer that question first, Scorvan. Then we shall consider matters of whether the human intended harm.”

  I know that there is no excuse I can offer that would make any sense. I fall silent again.

  That side of things does still concern me. I can think of no explanation for the odd incident either. One minute I was running around the loading bay, warming up my muscles in preparation for a long, dull sun-turn on duty. The next, my hearts nearly leaped out of my chest. A ship crashed in, from nowhere, causing no damage. And that was when my beautiful human appeared.

  If only I had some kind of explanation. But even she didn't seem to know how she had gotten in. She could be lying, but I believe her.

  Could I be mistaken? Could she really be an enemy combatant, sent by an enemy to infiltrate their ship? Or has she really traveled through a rogue wormhole, as she claims?

  Even more mysterious, I can’t explain why he I know she is destined to be my mate either.

  I just know in my soul. I know in my very bones.

  I know in the raging hardness that surges in my lap the second I picture her beautiful face, and the curved, soft flesh of her human body.

  None of that would convince the rest of the crew, however. So I resolve to stay completely quiet on the subject.