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

by Suki Selborne

  I have no idea exactly how badly we’re going to crash-land onto the Joadah colony. It’s impossible to know what we’ll hit. All I can see from my control panel is that the terrain is mixed, with some mountainous areas, and some water. Water would be good. We could use a little water as a crash pad.

  But we don’t know what part of the planet we’re heading toward, and my instruments aren’t coded for this part of the galaxy. Plus, the planet is shrouded in thick purple cloud. I’m going to be flying blind, even after we break through the upper atmosphere.

  There could be trees on this planet as well. But unless it’s a dense canopy, like the Amazon rainforest on Earth, then it might not provide enough cushioning to save us.

  If we hit a mountain, or the pure ground, it’s game over.

  So it’s really down to pure luck. I offer up a silent prayer as I monitor our trajectory.

  We’re being drawn into the planet’s gravitational field. I switch the engines so they’re pushing us in the other direction. It doesn’t move us upward at all, but it slows our descent.

  Lola calls out coordinates at regular intervals, and adds any information she can pick up from the cosmonet. But there’s nothing much out there about this place. It’s obviously some kind of cosmic backwater.

  I flick through the apps on my Wixer, in case I already have something to help me map out this part of the galaxy. Nope. Nada.

  I sigh, beginning to lose confidence.

  “Let me help.” Scorvan loads the cosmonet on a side screen and rifles through it at breakneck speed. “I’ll see if I can find a tracer program to tell us exactly what part of the planet we’re headed toward.”

  I leave him to it, and adjust my boots. They feel cold and oddly loose. Oh, wait. I seem to have put them back on without my socks. Too late to worry about that, though.

  With a rushing sound, the outside of the ship catches fire.

  “We’re going through the outer atmosphere,” I tell Scorvan, as the cockpit heats up rapidly. He nods.

  The fireproof panels on the outside of our ship keep the fire from engulfing us completely. It’s standard re-entry stuff, but it never loses its capacity to scare a pilot. Or maybe that’s just me.

  As we reach the inner atmosphere of the planet, the fire goes out. We both exhale at the same time.

  From the navigation screen, I see we are in a thick bank of cloud. There is no way to see exactly where we are going, though we can feel how fast we are plummeting toward the ground.

  “Is that a forest?” Scorvan says.

  I squint at the navigation screen. The patch of land ahead of us does look dark, and green. But that could be what water looks like on this planet. Or rocks. Trees could be orange. Or indigo. Or neon pink. There’s no way of knowing. We’d need information about the chemical composition of the environment to know for sure. And that’s not information I have access to.

  We hurtle downward, faster and faster.

  “I’m starting to think we aren’t going to make it,” I say, with a note of desperation in my voice. “Sorry to bring you into this, Scorvan. This is my second crash landing in two days. I’m starting to think I need my pilot’s licence revoked. Not that it matters now, if we’re falling to our doom.”

  Scorvan reaches over and takes my hand. “If we die, beloved, I am content. To die by your side would be a privilege.”

  His words remind me of some twentieth-century pop song. I’m just trying to puzzle out which one, when I see land through the navigation screen. Rocks and hills, it seems. It’s flying toward us at top speed.

  I shut my eyes, because it really makes no difference now.

  “Five seconds to impact,” Lola says. She sounds nonchalant as ever.

  I screw up my face, bracing myself for the crash.

  When it comes, it’s the loudest thing I ever heard.

  We bounce like a rubber ball, while the loudest noise in the world happens right outside.

  I grip tightly onto Scorvan’s hand. He had been whispering quiet words of encouragement and calm, but even he shuts the hell up when we begin to touch down.

  It’s impossible to tell what we’re falling onto — or into. I open my eyes, but it’s too dark and blurry for me to see through my tiny windshield, and the navigational screen is useless. I shut my eyes again.

  Lola has remained really quiet since all this started as well. I really hope she hasn’t blown a circuit.

  It feels like forever, but it is probably only a few minutes of falling and bouncing. Finally, we come to a stop.

  “We don’t appear to have crashed into a mountain and smashed into tiny chunks,” I say. “I’m counting that as a win.”

  We look at each other. My hair is floating straight up above my head. Scorvan grins.

  “I think we’re upside down,” he says.

  “Yeah, I got that,” I say, laughing with relief. “Oh well. At least this planet has some decent gravity going on. Did I ever tell you the time I floated away on Quinta 19? The gravity there is, like, ten per cent of what I’m used to. And—”

  I notice that I’m babbling. I do tend to do that when I’m stressed.

  Holding onto the arm of my seat, so I don’t fall on my head, I unclick my seatbelt. It’s a little cramped, but I swing around, while clinging onto the edge of it. Then I drop down to the floor, which is actually the old ceiling.

  Scorvan opens his seatbelt and executes a perfect backflip maneuver. In half a second, he’s standing right next to me on the ceiling.

  “Nice moves,” I say. “Next time, give me some warning so I can check out your butt while you’re doing it.”

  Scorvan salutes with three fingers. “All right, captain.”

  The windshield and navigation screen are totally blocked. Everything just looks dark.

  We don’t know what we’re going to find out there, but there’s no way we can stay in here either. Somehow, we need to find fuel for the ship.

  I ask Lola to open the door. She does so, without any wisecracks at all.

  Lola always goes quiet when we drop below a certain fuel percentage, so it’s not unexpected. She does it to preserve energy for the ship. I still wish she’d say something though. The silence just makes me more freaked out about what we’re going to find outside the ship.

  The telescopic steps are now on the upper edge of the doorway, so we can’t use them to get down. Scorvan leaps down first, before I can stop him.

  “It’s solid ground,” he says. “Well— kind of solid.” He holds up his arms to help me and I let him carry me down by the waist.

  We’re standing in the middle of what looks like a kid’s picture of a forest made from green Fuzzy Felts. Everything is velvety-looking and lush.

  I bend down to pat the ground under my boots. It is super springy to the touch, and even soft.

  “What is this place?” I say, looking in all directions.

  Scorvan places an arm on my back. It feels good. “It looks like a verdantarium.”

  “A what now?”

  “A verdantarium. That’s the Yolcadian word. I don’t know what you would call it. You know, like a field where a farmer grows giant mosses, and land-sponges, and glinterberry bushes. The kind that is used for the state feasts on Chronos Day.”

  I shake my head. “Major lack of shared cultural references, man. And what the hell is a land-sponge?”

  “It’s half-plant, half-animal. You don’t have those on Earth?”

  “I think we have something similar in the sea. Wait a second.” I put my hands on my hips and do my best strict face. “We’re getting too sidetracked, and I need us to find fuel so we can leave.”

  “What kind of fuel does your ship take?” Scorvan breaks open the stem of a navy-blue plant and sniffs its sap. “Biofuel or battery?”

  “Biofuel is okay for half the power source. It needs liquid hydrogen as a secondary source, or it can work entirely with that if necessary.”

  “Hydrogen?” Scorvan sounds as incredulous as
if I told him it ran on Kool-Aid. “You are not serious?”

  “Of course I am.”

  He’s going to say something mean about my ship, I just know it. Yeah, okay, it’s a piece of tin. But it’s mine. It’s the only thing I ever owned, and I’m pretty attached to it. Not just because Lola’s my virtual friend, but because my ship has been with me since I first started in the rebel corps. We have some history together.

  He rubs his perfectly-angled jaw, looking thoughtful. “I thought using hydrogen as flight fuel was banned under the Quinta 9 treaty?”

  I exhale sharply, irritated. “Oh, probably. God knows. I don’t keep up with all the laws the head honchos make these days. I’m more about saving ordinary people’s lives.”

  I immediately feel bad about snapping at him. The guy was just trying to help.

  “Sorry, Scorvan. I’m just getting tired, and I could sure use a snack.”

  Scorvan wisely says nothing more about the hydrogen. He pats the ground around the ship. “This is a giant moss bloom. We were incredibly lucky to land on one of these. It cushioned our fall perfectly.”

  I check out the bouncy lifesaver. Sure enough, we’re positioned right in the centre of what looks like a huge semi-circular ball.

  “You know, if you’re hungry, there are plenty of things we can eat growing here,” he says. “This is a farm. A verdantarium is a kind of farm.”

  “You’re sure about that?” I eye the navy-blue plant in his hand. It looks about as far from food as it’s possible to be. “You wouldn’t accidentally think something was edible and it’s actually poisonous?”

  He plucks a purple leaf and sniffs it. “This landscape is very similar to Yolcadia. Perhaps a little less stormy. I’m confident I can identify some familiar foodstuffs, yes.”

  I have no choice in the matter, unless I want to starve.

  Taking my hand, he leads me to a little clearing, about a hundred yards from the ship. We settle on another one of those giant moss things, and I lie down on it with my head in his lap. The moss is like the most comfortable bed I ever slept on. So soft. I feel myself start to zone out as soon as I stretch out my legs.

  “Sleep, if you wish to.” Scorvan strokes my hair, combing it out with his fingers to its full length. It feels so heavenly, my eyes start to close.

  “I’m just taking a little rest break here,” I murmur.

  There’s a light breeze and it’s warm. I’m drifting away in my mind to the long summer vacation from school, spending June helping my aunt and uncle with their boat hire business. Even in those days, I dreamed of visiting the stars.

  I ignore the growling in my belly, because I’m just so darn tired. Suddenly, all the worries of the day have gone. I’m floating into calm, safe sleep.

  I don’t know how long my nap lasts, but the next thing I know, I’m lying on a bundle of thick leaves staring up at three pink moons. Three. It’s so beautiful. I’m confused only for a moment, and then I remember where I am.

  I reach up to pat Scorvan, to ask him about the moons. But my hand only touches velvety leaves.

  “Scorvan?” My voice sounds suddenly wide awake.

  I sit up, a sense of dread creeping over me.

  There’s nobody here but me. I can’t see Scorvan anywhere.

  “Scorvan?” I call, a little louder this time. Maybe he went to gather plants?

  I’m all alone, on an alien planet, with no Scorvan, no knowledge of what I can and can’t eat, nowhere to shelter and no friends.

  “This is turning into a really shitty day,” I say, with tears in my eyes.

  Then I realize that isn’t all. Something else has happened to make everything twenty times worse.

  My ship is gone too.

  11 Scorvan

  The three pink moons shine their rose-colored light onto Kalia’s face as she sleeps. I wedge an extra mound of moss beneath her beautiful head, to replace my legs.

  While my beloved sleeps, I switch on Lola and have her autopilot the ship behind a large glinterberry bush. I place cliffle tree branches all over it, to disguise it. There’s no point acting as though this planet is uninhabited. It’s a Joadah colony, and that means we’re likely to be spotted pretty soon. They are a very territorial species.

  When the Joadah patrol arrives, we need to make sure we are not seen. It is lucky that there are so many large shrubs and plants in this verdantarium. If we had landed onto a flat smeek-field, we would be visible for a long way all around. Thank Chronos we landed here instead.

  Of course, the Joadah could approach us in their shapeshifted form. There’s no way of knowing if we would see them as reptilian or walking on two legs. I keep my eyes trained on all sides of the verdantarium, but I can’t see any sign of movement.

  The device on my wrist appears to be flashing with a blue light. I don’t understand the primitive technology, so I ignore it. It probably wants me to download something. A device this basic would probably require user input for software updates. Who knows. I don’t have time to figure it out, so I just leave it to flash away to itself.

  I continue arranging cliffle tree branches all over Kalia’s ship.

  Once the ship is completely concealed, I head back to Kalia. She will be very hungry when she wakes. It would be good to have a selection of edible foods with me on my return.

  I pick a large leaf and fold up the edges, pinching and folding them in each corner to form an open box. This is a trick my mother showed me as a young boy. We used to gather indigo fruits from the banks of the orange stream, and we would stash them in leaf boxes just like this.

  The moment of nostalgia makes me long for my family. Even more, I long to take Kalia home to meet them. I have not seen them for so many sun-turns. A knot of homesickness turns over in my stomach.

  My mother would love Kalia. Even if Kalia does have head-hair, and even if her skin is not turquoise. My mother would never judge a person on superficial differences like that. She raised us to see all people as equal, no matter what galaxy they came from.

  I would be proud to introduce Kalia to my family. So proud, of all of them. I hope with both my hearts that I can do so one day soon.

  As I glance over the landscape of the verdantarium, I notice a dark-red plant, with cream-colored buds all over it. It is a boodge shrub. We have those on Yolcadia.

  With elation in my soul, I remember the botanical profile of the boodge shrub. One of the byproducts of its photosynthesis is hydrogen! Hydrogen is one of the fuels we can use for Kalia’s ship. I am overjoyed.

  The hydrogen from the boodge shrub is emitted in gas form, and we need liquid. So we will need equipment that can remove heat energy from a gas to make it liquid. Even the least fancy space ship will carry that. We will have to take precautions to make sure it does not ignite, as hydrogen is very flammable. But even a schoolchild could achieve this.

  I cannot wait to tell Kalia that we have a source of fuel for the ship. There is easily enough boodge shrub around here to get us back into the air, even if we filled the fuel tank up to the brim.

  As well as this, my leaf-box is half-full with delicious sweet foods. This is a well-stocked verdantarium. I estimate that my current load will be more than enough for a hearty breakfast for us both.

  Feeling pleased with myself, I set off to take them back to my beloved. She will be so proud that I have found a way to solve all our immediate problems. I smile to myself as I run to wake her.

  When I return to the spot where I left her, my hearts sink.

  This cannot be happening.

  Kalia has vanished.

  I run back to the spot where I can survey the entire verdantarium.

  Kalia is not visible in any direction.

  I walk faster, pushing back branches and plants to see behind them. I am reluctant to call Kalia’s name, in case it attracts the attention of the Joadah. They could be patrolling this area at any time.

  “Kalia!” I whisper, as loudly as I dare.

  It is no use. She cannot hea
r me.

  I break into a slow run, still toting the box of food under one arm. She cannot have walked far. She has human stamina and delicate human legs. I do not believe she would have been able to cross the entire verdantarium in the brief time I was away.

  A terrible thought hits me right between the eyes. What if the Joadah found her and abducted her?

  The world seems to both darken and sharpen in focus, all at the same time.

  This is all my fault. I should not have left her alone while I hid the ship.

  I run all over the verdantarium, calling her name with ever increasing volume. My poor beloved, trapped on an unknown planet with no way of contacting me.

  If only we had a way of contacting each other. I lean against a cliffle tree and wipe my face with a voog leaf. As I raise my hand to my face, the blue flash of my wrist device catches my eye again.

  Like a bolt of Yolcadian forked lightning, a thought hits me. Surely even wrist devices this old-fashioned can contact one another?

  I touch the screen to prod it into life. It does not switch on. “On,” I shout at it. I do not expect this to work, because I am speaking Yolcadian, and not Earth-ian, or whatever my beloved’s language is called.

  But to my delight, the device switches on.

  “Message received,” it says, in Yolcadian.

  “Open message,” I say, breathless with anticipation.

  “Message received from Kalia Fenwick,” it says.

  I almost backflip with relief. The voice pauses.

  “Go on,” I say.

  Kalia’s voice rings out in the gloom. “Uh… I’ve fallen into a hole. Don’t know where I am. Activate the trace function on your Wixer, and it’ll lead you to me. It’d better. Please get me out, because something in here really stinks, and I’m starving. Also don’t fall into any holes yourself. Thanks, babe.”

  The message cuts out.

  I leap into motion at top speed. “Activate trace function,” I bellow at the Wixer thing, while I run.

  “Trace function activated,” it says, agreeably. “Proceed forward.”

  The tracer’s navigation bar cannot keep up with me, but it guides me to Kalia as fast as it can. Bushes, trees and giant moss mounds are a blur in my side vision as I rush to my beloved’s rescue.