Duke: A Paranormal Scifi Alien Romance: Albaterra Mates Book 2

by Ashley L. Hunt

  “What happened?” Ei’tan demanded. He was not panicked, as my warriors were well-trained in maintaining their composure during a crisis, but his hands had tightened around the directional levers, and he seemed ready to pull the brake at a moment’s notice.

  “I expect that spontaneous combustion is not something we will consider,” Dane said darkly, pressing his nose against the window and scanning the wide, open expanse of space for any clues.

  Furious, I slammed my fist into the wall. “It was the humans!” I barked. Rage and grief coursed through me for the A’li-uud lives that had just been taken. “They must have mobilized!”

  As though to prove my theory, Ei’tan turned the ship slightly to the left and revealed a line of human spaceships holding their positions and creating an impenetrable barrier. Dane’s expression became hostile and focused, and I felt myself becoming hardened to my surroundings as I always did before battle.

  “Prepare the missiles,” I commanded. My voice carried through the command center like Vi’den’s did in Forum: clearly and firmly. “They have taken the lives of our brothers. This is their declaration of war, and we will fight.”

  There was instantly a flurry of activity, but it was regimented meticulous activity. Everyone moved to their stations with purpose and without questions. There was thick intensity in the air and merciless determination on all faces. My dream flooded back to me as our ship turned toward the barricade of humans, but I was not shaken. This time, I was ready.

  “Fire!” I shouted.

  A loud boom filled the room, and the entire ship seemed to vibrate as we shot off our first missile. Under normal circumstances, I would have waited to see its impact, to see if it not only blew up its target but also the neighboring spaceships. Now, however, I wanted decimation.

  “Fire!” I bellowed again, slamming my hand against the window.

  The ship vibrated again, and I continued yelling out the order six more times. I watched as the first enemy ship exploded just as the ship in our fleet had, hitting each of its neighbors as they were so close to one another. The second ship to burst was the one to the left of the first, and the third was the one to the right. There was an open pathway now for us to get through, but I wasn’t ready to stop just yet. Others in our fleet were firing as well, and I saw missiles plowing past us toward the wall of human ships. A massive pop in the distance made my body slam against the window to see what had happened, and I saw another A’li-uud spacecraft become enveloped by hungry flames.

  Dane leapt across the command center in one jump and knocked the crewmember in charge of the missiles out of the way. He slammed his hand on the release button over and over again, sending the ship into a series of violent tremors. To Ei’tan’s credit, he righted the ship while he continued turning us to the necessary direction for the missiles to meet their targets.

  One by one, the human ships were eaten by our bombs. The warrior in me wanted to continue plowing them until there were no more left, but the Elder in me was wiser than that. I turned around to face my crew.

  “Forward!” I hollered to Ei’tan.

  He pressed one of the levers forward with such force that the ship jolted, and I felt myself tottering unsteadily as we approached the human brigade. A split second later, several others in our fleet pulled up alongside us. We catapulted through space, shooting past the human ships at incredible speed. I watched them twisting in mid-air to follow us, but I knew our crafts were significantly faster than theirs, and they didn’t have a chance at catching us.

  “Contact the Campestrians,” I growled to Takro. He was my Communications Officer, and he immediately snatched the small bead that would allow him to speak with other ships from the soundboard in front of him. “I want to know how many casualties there are.”

  As he spoke with the Campestrian Communications Officer, I turned around again to stare out the window. I could see human ships in the distance on either side of us, but they were too far away to be of any danger. A’li-uud ships flanked ours like a loyal guard. I tried to count how many there were left, but too many were behind us and out of sight.

  “They are not certain,” Takro said aloud, capturing my attention again. “They believe the first loss was the Finibans.”

  I roared with fury, raking my pale hands through my tied dark hair. The Finibans were Vi’den’s warriors, a rather peaceful group with such a small amount of warriors in the kingdom that they only accounted for one ship—my warriors, on the other hand, required three. I had been of the opinion prior to beginning the mission that some of the Elders need not acquire warriors, Vi’den being among them because they were the least war-inclined of our race. However, it had been the agreement of the Council that all Elders would contribute their best to the cause. Now, it felt much like the humans were the bullies targeting the weakest in the group, and the injustice of it enraged me more than I could handle.

  “Humans are in pursuit,” Takro continued, pressing a finger to the bead in his ear to hear better what was being communicated to him. “They are losing ground.”

  “Of course they are,” I said ferociously. I turned to Ei’tan. “Get us to Earth. We are going to exterminate these beasts.”

  4

  Emily

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake Madame Dubreaux’s words from my mind.

  “These aliens will bring death and destruction. We will soon be at war.”

  I had always taken anything she’d said with a grain of salt. Too many times, I’d watched her put on her voice of mysticism, stare at nothing with a faraway look in her eyes, and tell people they would meet their true love or a new career opportunity right around the corner. Even now, I didn’t believe she was a real psychic; I just took her as a skillful con artist. What she’d said about the aliens, however, had stuck with me like glue. I wasn’t sure if it was because some part of me had finally come to believe in her “gift” or if it was because what she said was actually a fear I had brewing deep down inside of me.

  Either way, I had been feeling a thick knot of anxiety in my stomach ever since that day.

  It was now several weeks later, and I was in my car with my art supplies packed in the backseat. This was the first day off I’d had in eight days. I’d woken to the sun shining brightly and a strong desire to paint, so I’d gathered a lunch, my brush pack, a portable easel, two blank canvases, and as many paints as I could fit into a duffel bag. Then, I’d hopped into my car and driven off with one destination in mind: the Mojave Desert.

  It was about two-and-a-half hours from my apartment to the Mojave National Preserve with traffic, so I cranked up my radio and let my thoughts float idly. For the first half hour, I imagined the landscape I would paint and the possible artistic twists I could put on the work. Against my will, however, my mind began to wander back to the aliens, and I found myself thinking intently about them as I drove.

  The first news report I’d watched about them had been right after the return of the latest space exploration fleet. NASA had informed the public it would be a space expedition lasting two years in search of valuable resources for our consumption—, particularly fuel. After only a few months, though, the fleet had returned with one less ship and a wild tale that nobody had expected to hear. One of their ships had crash-landed on a foreign planet, and they had made contact with alien life forms.

  If I was being completely honest, the confirmation that aliens did indeed exist thrilled me much more than it frightened me. Perhaps it was my creative side, but I’d been riddled with wonderings and musings about the creatures. I’d even started sketching what I imagined they looked like based on the descriptions given in several press conferences. Every person who spoke about them said the same things; they had skin in various shades of blue, and they were generally rather tall. They had white irises and were humanoid in shape and form. Gone were the days when I would idly doodle big-headed green men with blank, black eyes.

  I didn’t necessarily want to meet one, but I
couldn’t help wondering what it would be like if I did. Would we be able to understand each other? It seemed foolish to think aliens would speak English, but I couldn’t rule the possibility out. I also didn’t know if they were hostile, reserved or friendly, but I was inclined to believe they wouldn’t be anything less than aggressive with us—a notion only aided by Madame Dubreaux’s prediction. After all, we had sent hundreds of ships into space as a defense against them, something very costly and risky. Clearly, there was something to fear from these creatures, but I didn’t know what it was specifically because everyone who spoke during the press conferences about them remained fairly vague, only going so far as to describe their appearance and their location. I, for one, was left with tons of questions, some borne of curiosity and others of fear.

  The remainder of my drive wasn’t nearly as peaceful as the beginning, thanks to my insistent musings over the aliens. When I arrived at the preserve, I was pleased to see that the sun was still shining brilliantly. Natural light was my favorite lighting to use when I painted.

  “Are there a lot of people here today?” I asked the ranger as I pulled up to the entrance booth to buy access to the preserve.

  He snorted. He was a beefy man with flabby cheeks and eyes that sat too far apart from each other, but he wasn’t unpleasant. “Nah,” he answered with a shake of his head. He handed me a ticket to place on my dashboard. “That’s the way it goes, though, got a full staff and hardly any visitors.”

  I nodded. “I know how that goes.”

  He waved me forward, and I thanked him as I drove slowly past. Frankly, I was pleased the public wasn’t all that interested in the Mojave today because it meant I’d be able to find a nice, quiet, isolated location and concentrate on my art without distraction.

  Swinging my car into one of many empty parking spaces, I turned it off and started stowing some of my valuables away in various hiding places. Just as I was about to clamber out and collect my things from the backseat, however, my phone rang from inside the center console, where I’d placed it for safe keeping. I snatched it back out and checked the screen to see who the caller was. It was my mother.

  “Hey, Ma,” I said absently, jamming the phone between my ear and my shoulder to free my hands as I twisted in my seat to wrench the duffel bag of paints into my lap.

  “They’re coming!” Her voice, cracked with age and too many years of smoking full-flavor cigarettes, was a high-pitched, panicked growl. “The aliens are coming!”

  “Ma, what are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “They’ve lost contact with a bunch of the ships,” she said in a rush. “There could only be one reason for that.”

  I sighed and leaned my head back against my seat’s headrest. “How do you know they’ve lost contact?”

  “Terry knows someone whose cousin’s brother-in-law works at NASA,” she explained simply.

  I rolled my eyes. Terry, my step-father, was as about backwoods redneck as you could get. When the news about the aliens had first come to light, he’d actually made a tinfoil hat and refused to take it off for days. He was the ultimate conspiracy theorist, and I wasn’t about to take his word for it—especially since his word was coming from a “he knows someone who knows someone” source.

  “Ma, first of all, you don’t even know for sure whether it’s true that they’ve lost contact or not,” I said, trying to inject reason into the situation. “Secondly, they’ve got ships all over the Milky Way. That’s a lot of distance. They’re bound to lose contact now and then.”

  “I do so know it’s true!” she snapped heatedly.

  “Because Terry’s friend’s cousin’s brother-in-law said so?”

  She sniffed. “Well, it’s more than you know about it,” she said.

  “Okay, Ma,” I replied, shaking my head to myself. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “I’m about to sit down and paint. I drove out to the Mojave.”

  She sniffed again and said, “Well, wear a hat. And put tinfoil in it.”

  “So the aliens won’t control my brain?”

  “You know, you’re going to be real sorry when they suck you up into their spaceship and do experiments on you!” she barked. Before she finished talking, she broke into a coughing fit, and I took the opportunity to hurry the call along.

  “I don’t have tinfoil on me, Ma, but I’ll tell you what. If the aliens come, I’ll blind them with paint and run for my life, okay?”

  “It’s better than nothing,” she wheezed.

  I said goodbye and hung up the phone, shoving it back into the center console. As I did, I shook my head again. The aliens frightened me to a certain extent, mainly because I didn’t like the unknown and I didn’t have as much information on them as I would have liked. But I definitely wasn’t worried by my mother’s frantic ramblings. She’d always erred on the side of insane paranoia, and I’d learned over the years to just be amused by it. This time was no different. In fact, I felt more relaxed about the whole alien situation than I had since Madame Dubreaux’s prophesizing.

  Clambering out of the car, I opened my back door and started heaving things out. I’d brought more than I could carry, but there was a great open expanse with a beautiful horizon just in front of the parking lot where I could paint. So, I began carrying items out and dropping them on the sandy, dusty ground. Finally, I’d gathered all of my things together, and I was ready to begin.

  “Damn,” I said, realizing I’d forgotten to snag a chair. Sighing with frustration, I jacked my easel up several feet and resigned myself to standing.

  The landscape around me was exquisite. I had my back turned to the parking lot, which was about a hundred feet away from where I’d set up my materials, so the only thing I could see around me was nature at its finest. Rocky hills of muted reds, browns, and grays burst from the ground and unapologetically penetrated the silky blue skyline. Joshua trees dotted the flattest spaces of the expanse with scraggly arms lifted to the heavens above. The ground was a neutral blend of beige sand and gray-green foliage and smoky stones, marbled like droplets of paint on a surface of water, swirling together to confuse the eye.

  I plucked my palette from my duffel bag and squeezed some appropriate colors into its divots. Relaxation coursed over me as I extracted a thick, coarse-haired brush from my collection, resting the others on the easel tray. If there was one thing in the world that could bring me peace and help me recede into the recesses of my mind, it was painting. Even the knot in my stomach I’d been feeling for several long weeks had loosened considerably. It seemed to disappear altogether as I dipped the bristles of my brush into a pale gray hue and started flicking it over the canvas.

  There was a delicate wind that caught the tresses of my dishwater blonde hair and sent them cascading around me. I smelled something sweet, floral, and earthy as the breeze wafted over my cheeks; it was almost like being in a spa. Everything in the world seemed to melt away as I stroked my brush, leaving only me and my surroundings to engage in our intimate romance.

  Suddenly, there was a noise of such deafening volume that I slammed my hands over my ears, accidentally streaking my hair with the brush’s paint-covered tip. It was a horrible grinding sound, gritty and unwavering, with an undertone simultaneously so deep that I felt it in my gut and so shrieking that I actually believed my ears would start to bleed. I dropped to my knees, involuntarily screaming against the soul-crippling noise, and then I saw something I never would have in my wildest dreams expected to see.

  A huge ship was descending to the ground.

  I had seen the spaceships of NASA fleets online and on TV, but this looked completely different from those. Its very structure seemed to glow a pale turquoise blue, not from lights but from its actual construction. Windows of a strange glass I had never seen before made a band all the way around the craft, yet I couldn’t see into any of them. There were no recognizable engines or exhausts within sight, though it was clearly mo
ving as it eased nearer and nearer to the ground. It wasn’t tall and thin like the rockets of old, but it also wasn’t as flat and disc-like as the UFO drawings everyone was familiar with. Its shape was rather oblong and round, almost like a misshapen ball.

  Sand was kicked up in massive billows as the ship finally touched ground, and, seconds later, the sound stopped entirely. I held my hands to my ears for another moment before tentatively dropping them to my sides. All I could hear now was intense ringing, which I knew was the product of such a horrendous volume followed by utter silence. I stared, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, at the spaceship. It was within sight, but it was also far enough that the heat of the day made it seem a little hazy.

  Part of me wanted to draw closer, but my feet were rooted to the spot. I realized in shock that, for once, my mother’s paranoia had been spot on. The aliens had come.

  5

  Duke

  “We have landed.”

  I stared out the window without responding. There were no longer stars and blackness as far as the eye could see. In their place, there was what appeared to be a landscape much like Dhal’at; the sandy, barren desert kingdom of Albaterra. This Earth desert, however, was different from Dhal’at in its sheer lack of vivid color and rather dirty overtones, and my mouth turned down in distaste just from looking at it.

  “Are the Campestrians nearby?” I asked Takro.

  He pressed his finger into his ear and reiterated the question aloud. A moment of silence passed, and then he said, “They do not believe so. They have taken ground in a village. The humans are already in chaos, and they are preparing to disembark.”