by Maia Starr
"Dr. Elmore launching escape pod number three!” I heard Dr. Elmore's voice say over the intercom. He had made it to an escape pod. I wondered how many more had made it there. Would I be the only one left on the space station? I hated the thought of it. I looked around the room for a weapon of any kind, but I knew that it would be no match against Corillion weapons. I stood up and tried once more to run down the hallway, but just when I got some traction, the ship would jolt again, knocking me off of my feet. My best bet would be to hide somewhere, and hope that they did not find me before finally leaving. I crawled into a cabinet and awaited my fate.
I knew taking this assignment aboard the space station was a risky move. But I never thought that we would be attacked in such a way. I never thought that I would find myself in such a terrifying moment waiting for the dominant alien male warriors to take me into deep space, never to see Earth again. But how could I have known that when I first started on this mission?
It all started when I, Dr. Shia Heton, joined the space station mission in order to conduct my sound experiments. I studied deep space sound. I recorded all kinds of activity that traveled across deep space. This space station was going into incredible depths of deep space in order to gather information that could help Earth understand and find out more information about the Corillion race. My studies fit with that agenda because I would be able to pick up any transmissions that the Corillion aliens would be making that crossed our path. Therefore I was granted permission to participate in the research mission.
Joining us were one other female scientist studying astronomical gases, Alexis Scott, and Andrew Diaz, who was studying space biology. There were two more general scientists on board, and the rest of the crew were astronauts that managed the day-to-day needs of the space station. A few of them also had their own science experiments, but they were astronauts first and scientist second. Together, we had set off from Earth a year before and were taken to the space station just outside the solar system. Then once aboard, the space station was set into a spin motion to spin into the far reaches of space toward the asteroid belts.
It was an unknown area that was rarely studied. That was until the Corillions appeared in our lives. It had been complete chaos since they did. At first, it was a peaceful interaction, but once Earth refused to share human females with them willingly, the Corillions became hostile. That was when a war eventually broke out. It inspired many people to suddenly become interested in the sciences. It was as though science was now a military defense against the alien warrior race.
No one knew where the Corillion came from. They just appeared out of nowhere. It was said that they had spawned from an asteroid in deep space, but those were just rumors. That seemed highly unlikely to me, but they were a very mysterious race of males. All kinds of rumors surrounded the alien warrior race about their powers and incredible fighting skills. They were beyond mysterious, and I found myself drawn to their mystery.
I had seen a Corillion warrior before, but only once many years before. But that one time was enough to have his image burned into my memory forever. I remembered seeing the warrior with blue scales on half of his body. I remembered the long, dark hair, dark eyes, and extremely tall, muscular physique. I had never seen a male like it before. It stunned me. It intrigued me. That was how I became fascinated with these creatures from deep space. It was after I saw one that I wanted to know as much as possible about them. But I wanted to do it from afar, not to have any immediate interaction with them. I wanted to study them from a distance and not interact or be in their world. So I applied for and was accepted to conduct my studies on the space station mission.
“Dr. Shia Heton, your field of studying sound in space is very intriguing to us. Only a few scientists are doing what you are doing. We think you might be the perfect candidate for the space station missions,” the Earth Science Council said to me as I stood in front of them with my red hair pulled into a bun and a black pantsuit covering my petite body.
“Thank you. I am grateful to be considered for the opportunity,” I said while smiling at the fact that out of five thousand scientists, I had made the final rounds.
“The next round is not academic in nature; it is physical training. You and your competitors will go through two months of training to see if your body can withstand the rigors of space.”
“I am excited to be able to do the training,” I said, knowing that the other scientist studying sound that I was up against at this stage were almost ten to fifteen years older than me. After being turned down so many times by the academic world because so many others had more experience simply because they were older, it was refreshing that my young age finally gave me the advantage.
So when I passed the training and others and others did not, I was delighted to join the mission.
That is how I found myself on this space station in the far reaches of space, past our solar system, searching for signs of the Corillion warriors in order to gather data and study them. It was a mission that would allow us to understand why they had suddenly appeared in our solar system and taken a liking in human females. It was not just a simple liking: they were abducting them from Earth. It had grown completely out of control, reaching almost two hundred women at this point. No one understood what was going on. Why only the females and not males? We theorized it had something to do with mating, but we could not be sure. Through the Corillion peace years, in the beginning, the Corillions were very tight-lipped about what they were, what they wanted, and what the future held for them. So we knew very littlele
"Dr. Shia Heton, we are ready for radio frequency experiment number 46," Lieutenant Marksman had said to me earlier that day, the day of the attack.
I was sitting in the common room of the cafeteria of the space station having a hot cup of tea and thinking about the first and only Corillion warrior I had ever seen. Was he still out there somewhere?
"Thank you, Lieutenant, I’m on my way,” I said, setting down my cup of tea and following him out of the kitchen through the space station and into the experiment lab area. I had set up an experiment to receive and record transmissions in space. It took a long time to move the satellite on the space station into the correct direction for an experiment. Now it was all set up and ready to go.
"What exactly are you looking for?” another scientist Andrew Diaz said to me. He was the biologist on the space station. He was interested in the beginnings of the Corillion race.
"Anything and everything,” I said to him.
"But do you really expect to be able to hear the Corillion warriors? We don't even know what they use for communication transmissions.”
"Are you really expecting to find spawn pods of alien beings?” I said playfully to him.
He looked at me with a dead stare and said, “Well yes.”
"Well, since we are not landing on an asteroid, I think my experiment might be a little bit more realistic as far as results go,” I said to him with a sense of arrogance. This is how it was on the space station between scientists. Each of us thought that our work was more important than all others. But in reality, it was all important. We all needed each other, and we all had the same mission: to find out as much as we could about the Corillion and use that information to stop them from abducting human females from Earth. It was a high-priority mission that the entire world was working on. It was unlike anything Earth had ever encountered, and the fact that the tension ended up sparking a war was not a shock.
But the war was a series of random battles because we never really knew where the Corillion lived. They would just appear on Earth and Earth’s military would engage in battle before the Corillion would leave. But it was war, and this mission was a part of that. Earth had declared war on the Corillion, but it was a hard thing to do when we did not know where they lived. All we could do was play defense when they came to Earth and push them away.
"Good luck. Buzz me if you find anything," Andrew said to me before walking out.
"You kno
w you just want me to buzz you because you want me,” I said playfully to him. This is how I and the other female onboard treated the men. We playfully always teased them that they wanted us because we were the only females on board. It was a running joke. But besides this joke, I also considered myself to be quite an attractive scientist. I had pride in my looks. My long red hair was pulled high into a bun on top of my head and I never wore any makeup, especially not out here in space; what would be the point of that? My light-green eyes and full pink lips gave the illusion of color and makeup on my face. I was fit and petite at only five feet tall, but I considered myself strong and I made it a point to work out every day; we all did. Out here in space, it was a necessity to keep your muscles out of atrophy.
I sat down at my workstation and put on my headphones. I twisted various knobs and typed on the computer, searching the area of space that I had chosen to search the day before for sounds. This was how I did it. Space was infinite and vast, and so I studied section by section each day, which hardly covered anything. I had long hours ahead of me, but I was glad to have the experiment room to myself. We mostly took shifts so we did not get in each other's way. Now I would have the room for ten hours.
I began my long process of listening and recording data. It was mostly just pulsating sounds. Some of them were from stars and pulsars, but others were very different. These were the ones I was interested in. They were transmissions, and they were to be recorded and analyzed. I looked for patterns. Then I would send them in compressed files back to Earth for the military to decipher. It was almost like the decoders of World War Two that intercepted enemy transmissions and decoded them. I was the receiver in deep space.
It was better than the work I did on Earth. Back home, I worked at large satellite stations, but out here we did not have Earth’s atmosphere to deal with.
After seven hours, I took a small break from work, and when I returned, I listened once more. But for some reason, I fell asleep. I woke up when I heard a loud burst of sound hit my ears. It jolted me, and I sat straight up. I looked around, confused for a second, not really sure what exactly had alarmed me to the point of waking up.
"You fell asleep, Shia? You never fall asleep,” I said to myself. I turned up the volume and fine-tuned the frequency, and then I heard a large amount of static. I turned the knob again and then my eyes grew wide at what I heard.
"We have the Earthlings in sight. Be prepared to use magnetic pulse freeze. Fire,” the very deep, reverberating voice said.
"Holy crap,” I whispered. I was completely stunned, and at the same time, I felt a large jolt to the space station that knocked me out of my chair. It had all happened so fast that I did not have time to warn anyone. I crawled on the floor to my desk to stand up and use the intercom.
"We are under attack! I repeat we are under attack!” I shouted into the intercom letting everyone know in the shortest terms possible that we were under attack because I was the only one that had heard the transmission. For all they knew, at this moment, there was an internal problem on the space station. My warning would let them know that was not the case. We had not blown a wire or unhinged an airlock; we were under distress from outside forces. Once everyone understood that they wouldn't spend time trying to find the problem with the space station; instead, they would go into emergency evacuation procedures. It was what I needed to do as well.
But I would never make it. Instead, I would come face-to-face with the fierce alien warrior race that we had feared for so long. I would come face-to-face with their ruthless Commander, Commander Duron Spaunok, and nothing would ever be the same. His image of a fierce shirtless warrior with metallic blue scales down his right side, piercing blue eyes, dark long hair, and eight-foot tall, muscular form would forever be burned into my memory. My destiny would forever become intertwined with his.
Chapter 2
COMMANDER DURON SPAUNOK
If our leader Baradur Spaunok did not mate soon, we would all die.
It was my mission to find the perfect human female for him to mate with, and that would not be easy, considering we were at war with the Earth humans. They had every right to be at war with us; we were trying to conquer their planet and replace their species with our own. We would do this in time. For now, we needed to keep this species alive and the only way to do that was to procreate with human females and create a hybrid spawn of Corillion. If a warrior did not do this after being alive for twenty-two times around our sun, then he would die. Our leader was very close to this time, and his previous attempts to secure a human female had failed. They were scarce and went to other leaders of Corillion tribes.
For one hundred years, we had spawned off of the asteroid belt and had established various bases on several moons and on asteroid rocks, but now the Corillion needed more. After a great leader had discovered Earth, we had decided to conquer it. It was a superior planet and the Earthlings did not deserve it. They were inferior to the Corillion, and we were going to remove them, or at least the males of the species. The females would be kept in order to mate with our own. We needed them. We wanted them.
I, Commander Duron Spaunok, was a spawn of the Spaunok tribe of Corillion. Each Corillion warrior had a second name; mine identified me as a spawn of the asteroid known as Spaunok. All Corillion that came from this particular asteroid had the same second name. It was how each tribe was identified. The asteroid was one asteroid of thousands in the asteroid belt outside of Earth’s galaxy.
It is not known what activated the first spawning of our generation, but we knew that it was not the very first. We knew that our species had spawned thousands of years before, only to die out eventually. Now, this was a second spawning, and we did not mean to disappear so quickly. We were here to conquer; it is what we were destined to do.
So my mission was to be the Commander of the Retriever Battleship. The Retriever was the best that the Corillion technology had to offer. It was my ship, and the sole purpose of it was to retrieve human females and bring them back to the asteroid belt where they would find a match to mate with from the Corillion race. The Corillion were monogamous, and once matched, they did not stray from their partners. We were a fierce warrior race ready to do whatever it took to stay alive.
"Commander Duron Spaunok, an Earth vessel is coming into range,” my lieutenant said to me as I stood on the flight deck of my ship.
"Show me, Lieutenant,” I said, walking over to his monitor. On his radar screen, I could see a large vessel.
"Silent mode! Prepare to disable and attack ship!” I shouted orders to everyone. My warriors went into a flurry of action following the procedures to get ready to do battle and board the ship to retrieve human females.
Taking the Earth vessel was quite easy. It turned out that it was not a military vessel at all. But to my disappointment, there were only two human females aboard. Still, two was enough to take back to my leader.
"These are the only two human females aboard the vessel. The rest of the humans are male,” my lieutenant said as he pushed two human females in front of me. We had boarded the Earth vessel, and we were in the process of pillaging its goods, including the females.
"Take your hands off me, you pig!” a feisty female shouted at my lieutenant. I was surprised by her appearance. I had never seen a human female with her color of hair. It was the color of fire. Her eyes were a piercing green and she was small and delicate even for a human. I stepped to her and pulled the band off of her tightly wrapped hair. It fell down her back.
"How dare you touch me!” she sneered at me. She was strong. She was brave.
She was stupid.
"Do not speak unless I allow it!” I shouted at her. I loomed tall over her. She was breathing hard and her mouth shut. Her lips were quivering with fear, but she was not going to show it. She was stubborn.
"That is better. If you want to stay alive, you will do as I say,” I shouted at her.
I stepped to the other female. This one had yellow hair and brown eyes. Sh
e was taller and thinner than her companion. She was quiet, and she was shedding tears from her eyes. She did not look up at me. This one was docile and obedient; she would be good for our leader. The other one looked as if she would kill him in his sleep. Best to keep an eye on her.
"Lock them up in holding on our ship!” I shouted to my warriors.
"No! No!” The fire-headed female shouted and struggled as she was carried away. She was a fighter. I admired that in anyone, but I had never seen it in a human female.
"Commander Duron Spaunok, we have discovered that a few of the escape pods have been jettisoned. Should we go after these humans?” my lieutenant reported.
I was quiet as I thought about priorities. Then I ordered, “No. We must get Baradur Spaunok his mate as soon as possible. That is our priority.”
"Yes, Commander. And what about the human males aboard?"
"Lock them up on their vessel."
Minutes later, I was back aboard the Retriever. The fiery female was causing a lot of problems, screaming and kicking my warriors—not that they couldn't handle it. But I wasn't going to have her causing a lot of problems and distractions on my ship.