Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance

by Juniper Leigh

  Ara blinked, and I could feel her bristling. Lucille, for her part, just gave a low, baleful chuckle. “Oh, come now, dear,” she continued, stepping further into the med tent. “By now you must have determined that the attacks staged against the Leviathan, the GenOriens base, the villages… you must know by now that they could not have happened if someone on the inside had not orchestrated them.”

  “The attack on the Leviathan,” Christian stammered, his weapon freezing in midair where he held it, “that was you?”

  “Oh, Christian, not you, too,” Lucille said, rubbing at her temple with a delicate finger as though her son’s idiocy had given her a migraine.

  “How could you—”

  But she didn’t give her son the chance to continue. “Give me the gun, Christian,” she said, her voice stern as though she were commanding him to go to his room. He did not obey, and I saw fire spark in her eyes.

  “No,” he said levelly, “I want some answers first.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you all do. But standing around like this is making me nervous. So, Harris, if you wouldn’t mind.” On cue, the hulking bald man came forward and took three long strides toward me before he trained a gun at my head. I held my hands up instinctively, very much not wanting a bullet in my brain.

  “Shall we all adjourn to the Carpathian, then? The gravity on this planet.” Lucille gave a shake of her head as though she found it distasteful, like a cheap wine or a sour cheese. “It’s just awful, don’t you think?”

  Christian, who had been staunchly on his own side, decided to assist his mother in getting us where he wanted us to go by wrapping his fingers around Araceli’s arm and pressing the gun to the side of her head. I gritted my teeth, having to physically restrain myself from saying something that could very well have gotten us both shot.

  “Don’t try nothin’ now, boy,” hulking Harris growled into my ear before tapping the nose of the pistol to it to urge me forward. Begrudgingly, I obliged.

  ***

  We were ushered onto a shuttle which shot at top speed into orbit to join its mother, The Carpathian. I couldn’t see the ship, but I had heard of her in the past. She’d been something of an interstellar shuttle, taking long, languorous trips from Earth to Galatea and back again. More of a pleasure cruiser than anything else. But we weren’t invited to the upper decks; we were relegated to the belly of the beast.

  Harris kindly escorted us to our seats, our wrists bound in front of us. Christian stood idling by the door, rubbing at his chin with the muzzle of his gun. Lucille and her assistants brought up the rear, and the mouse closed the door behind us.

  “Thank you both for joining me aboard the Carpathian,” Lucille said, as though she’d extended a gilded invitation. “I’m feeling much more comfortable already. Can I get you two anything?” She glanced between us; all we offered her in return was stony silence. “Very well. Timothy, please fetch me a sparkling water.” The lanky boy turned on his heel to do his mistress’s bidding.

  “Mother, I want to know—”

  “All in good time, dear boy,” Lucille said, turning to lift a hand to his face. She rubbed his cheek, then dropped her hand before she moved to sit on the corner of the table in front of us. The room was sparse: metal tables and chairs, windows with the shades drawn at the front and back of the space, fluorescent overhead lighting that buzzed and flickered, giving the room an ominous quality.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning,” Lucille said, “as I imagine you have questions that need answering.” I looked over at Ara, but she had her eyes trained on Lucille. She was trembling, from cold, from adrenaline, from terror. I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and keep her safe. I strained my wrists against my bonds, testing them. They were zip-tied.

  “Yes,” Lucille began, “I chose you for Christian. When I stepped down from GenOriens, I was well aware that my son had rather a… playboy, devil-may-care reputation, and I needed the board to approve him taking over my role as CEO of the organization. I promised them that within two years, he would become engaged, married in three, and I presented them a list of vetted options from within the GenOriens ranks. You, Araceli Cross, were our very first choice. Then, it was just a matter of putting you in the right place at the right time, ensuring that your paths crossed, building in leisure time in your otherwise ridiculously busy schedules. And my son is handsome, isn’t he? And charming. And you were Cinderella at the ball.”

  I turned to look at Ara and saw her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. She cast her gaze down to the floor and pursed her lips. Lanky Timothy slipped back into the room with a tray that carried a bottle of Perrier, a bucket of ice, and a tall glass garnished with a wedge of lime. He poured it for her and placed the glass in her hand.

  “And he did love you, eventually, I think,” Lucille continued, sipping delicately from her glass.

  “Yes,” Christian interjected, “I did. Ara—” He took a step toward her, and she ventured to look up at him. “I did love you—I… do love you.” But his words were met with silence.

  “Then, as to the matter of your Nova Genus project, Dr. Cross, that was an internal sabotage orchestrated by the Cleansing.” Ara jerked her head up to look at Lucille, and Lucille’s red, red lips broke into an almost obscene smile. “Ah, you have heard of them.”

  “Only just recently,” Ara confirmed, her voice monotone. “They were the ones rounding up the mothers of the hybrids.”

  “Just so.”

  “But why?” Ara demanded.

  “Why else?” Lucille crossed her arms in front of her. “Money, my dear. Lots and lots of money.”

  Ara furrowed her brow, and Christian downright rolled his eyes. Me, I wasn’t surprised. She seemed to fit the supervillain role pretty well, and given the quality of her attire, I had assumed there was something monetary to be gained by her depravity.

  “Oh, don’t look at me that way, Christian Ward,” she hissed at her son, who averted his eyes. “I didn’t do it for my own personal gain, though by your expressions, that’s clearly what you think—no. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a corporation like GenOriens? Trillions upon trillions of dollars, in and out, each year. And do you know what the primary focus is? Hm?” She glanced between us. “Any guesses?”

  Ara and I were on the same page about being disinterested in playing her game—we just wanted answers. So I set my jaw and stared her down. “Vaccinations,” she said, “medicines and medical devices. We eradicated cancer. There were a large number of pharmaceutical companies that had it out for us after we did that, did you know? And they stopped developing our drugs, so we had to start doing it ourselves.”

  Lucille rose from her perch on the edge of the table and moved to stand directly in front of Araceli. She hooked a finger beneath her chin and forced her head up, dared her to meet her gaze. And she did. “I’m in the business of saving lives, darling. Human lives. That’s what I do. So go ahead and paint me as the bad guy, but you’ve got me all wrong. I did this, all of this, for the greater good.”

  “If you care so little for the Galateans,” Ara asked, “then why did you fund my program? Why did you bring my team here, if your plan was simply to slaughter us?”

  “I needed a reason to get planetside that wouldn’t draw too much attention. We came here for the Quaridium Drolide. That’s what we were after.” Lover’s Gold. Of course. “And we’re a scientific corporation, with a focus on medical developments. Breeding seemed the logical cover, despite the controversy that surrounds it.”

  “But… the attack on Hiropass. Rounding up the mothers of the hybrids…”

  “Out of my hands, I’m afraid,” Lucille said to Ara. “I enlisted the assistance of the Cleansing, since I didn’t actually want the program to succeed, and needed to obliterate all traces of it. But I admit they got a little… out of hand.”

  “Out of hand?” I spat. “They murdered my mother.”

  “Apologies, darling,” Lucille said to me
and circled me like a bird of prey. “It was never my intention for innocent lives to be lost.”

  “What do you call the life of a child, if not innocent?” Ara demanded.

  “Dr. Cross, you’re a scientist,” Lucille said. “Certainly you’re aware of what a valuable resource the corpse of a once-living hybrid is for our research.”

  “So, you’ll study them, dissect them like…. like aliens, and, what, keep it off the books?”

  “Darling, they are aliens.”

  “No,” Ara protested, “not here. Here, we are the aliens.”

  Lucille grinned again, showing us her white, white canines. “Quite right,” she conceded. Lucille laced her fingers together and glanced between us. “So,” she went on, “obviously, I can’t have my son marry some… some harlot carrying a hybrid baby, so we’ll have to do something about your situation.”

  “My… situation?” Ara looked desperately over at me, and I locked my eyes on her, guessing Lucille Ward’s meaning before she had to articulate it.

  “We’re not going to kill you, if that’s what you think. No, you’re too brilliant a mind. If you make the right decisions here, in this room, I can get the program of your choosing up and running in no time at all.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “The termination of the pregnancy, or, better still, the donation of the fetus to medical research.” I watched all the blood drain out of Araceli’s face, and I couldn’t help it: I rose to my feet and advanced on Lucille. In an instant, I had her delicate throat in my fist. And I squeezed.

  But Harris, for such a large man, had catlike reflexes, and he’d fired on me before I could snap Lucille’s neck. He’d set his pistol to stun, and I dropped like a stone to the floor, convulsing as the surge of electricity wracked through my body. I tensed like a spring wire, my jaw locking shut until everything went black.

  Chapter 22:

  Dr. Araceli Cross

  They took him. They took him away. I didn’t see where they took him, so I didn’t know how to get back to him. I think I must have screamed when Lucille’s hulking bodyguard shot him, but I don’t know for certain. All I remember is the wave of relief that swept over me when his body began to convulse on the floor in front of me. Not dead, then; stunned. But then Harris took him out of our little interview room, out from beneath the buzzing of the overhead light, away from the cold metal of the table and the chairs and the walls and the floor. They just took him; they took him away. The mousy assistant and the hulking bodyguard. And I was alone in that room with Christian and Lucille Ward, alone in a room full of enemies.

  “Now,” Lucille said, “it’s time to bargain.”

  “I won’t give up the baby,” I said. “I won’t do it. Do you have any idea what kind of… monstrous thing that is to ask of me?”

  “Please,” Lucille said with a roll of her pretty green eyes, “we’re feminists, Ara. We believe in a woman’s right to choose.”

  “And I choose to keep this baby, but that isn’t even what I meant. This baby represents the culmination of years of work.”

  “Hardly,” Christian scoffed from his place in the darkest part of the corner. “You didn’t know she was sabotaging your work. Turns out all you had to do was spread your thighs for Galatean cock and, boom, success.”

  “Let’s not be vulgar, Christian,” Lucille said with a wave of her expertly manicured fingers. “But he does have a point. You didn’t work for this baby. It isn’t the product of your genetic findings. It’s nature, pure and simple. You give it up, and you can go back to living the life you had last week. We’ll even get you a glittery new diamond, how about that?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Let me put it another way, sweet pea: if you don’t do what I tell you, if you don’t terminate, if you don’t put that sparkly rock back on your finger, if you don’t marry my son, if you don’t spread your legs and push out my heirs, then I will kill your precious Galatean boy toy. Are we quite understood?”

  “Danovan…?”

  “If that is his name. Why do you think I’ve kept him alive up to this point? Bargaining.”

  My heart dropped low and I thought I might be ill. I was with two of the most rich and powerful people in the galaxy, and they were forcing me to decide between the man I loved and the life of our unborn child.

  “But…” I swallowed hard and tried to wet my lips, but my mouth was a desert. “You… you aren’t supposed to be the bad guy, you said. You’re not supposed—”

  “Priorities,” Lucille interjected. “I’m working for the greater good.”

  “So, I give up my baby, marry your son, and continue to do my work, and Danovan lives. That’s the deal.” I lifted my tethered hands and rubbed at my eyes with my fingers, trying to clear my vision, trying to clear my mind.

  “That’s the deal,” Lucille confirmed. “We eradicate all the remnants of your project, and I put some resources into shutting the Cleansing down, and then it’s business as usual, except all of our many underfunded programs will finally get the resources they deserve.” Lucille smiled broadly and threw her arms out to the side. “Big picture, darling.”

  I looked over at Christian, who had never, in all of the time I had known him, seemed so very small. And from the look on his face, he felt it, too.

  “Can I have some time to think?” I asked, squinting up at Lucille.

  “Sure thing, sweetheart,” she said, and headed for the door with a gentle sway of her hips. “Take the night. We’ll come for you in the morning.”

  She paused by her son, and tugged him forward by the collar so that she could plant a dark red kiss on his cheek. “Escort Dr. Cross to the cell, would you, baby? Then join me in my suite.”

  And with that, Lucille Ward was gone, leaving the vapors of her perfume to trail behind her.

  We sat in cold silence for a long, tense moment before Christian shifted where he stood and heaved a long-suffering sigh.

  “Come on,” he said, his tone as flat as his mood.

  “Christian, wait,” I said, rising to my feet. “You don’t have to do this. You could help me.”

  “Just… follow me, Araceli.” He didn’t untie my wrists, but he did open the door and walk out. Not knowing a thing about the layout of the Carpathian, I had no choice but to follow him.

  “You are supposed to be in charge,” I said in an urgent whisper as I followed him down the brightly lit hall. Everything was silver and blue and white, the GenOriens colors, bright and new. The hall was lined with heavy metal doors, all of them with little windows that granted me a glimpse inside. I moved as slowly as his pace would allow, and I glanced into all of them. “You’re supposed to be running things,” I repeated. “She stepped down. GenOriens is yours now.”

  “All evidence to the contrary,” he said sourly, and I wondered just how much of this he had known before our little audience with Lucille.

  “You can do something,” I continued, darting around to stand in front of him, to level him with my pleading blue eyes. “Please,” I said. “Please. I know you. I know you. You don’t want to be responsible for the slaughter of hybrid babies or their parents. Choose to be the man I know you are. Choose to do something.”

  He hesitated for a moment, and I saw the wheels turning behind his eyes, but he exhaled sharply and grabbed me by the arm, spinning me around and marching me down the hallway. “Think long and hard about your choices, Araceli,” he said, using his key card to unlock one of the cells. “I’ll be back to fetch you in the morning.”

  “Please, Christian,” I said, gripping him by the sleeve of his dress shirt. “If you ever loved me at all, even for a moment, help me now. Please.” But he didn’t say anything, he simply shoved me through the open door of the cell and slammed it shut behind me.

  I stumbled into the darkness, and directly into the heavy, lifeless heft of a body on the floor. No, not a body. A man, a living breathing man. Danovan.

  I dr
opped to my knees in front of him and shook him gently. “Danovan,” I pleaded, “Danovan, wake up. Please. You have to wake up.”

  I heard him groan in protest, his pronounced brow furrowing as he came back to himself. I imagined that his muscles were aching: the after-effects of the stun. “Danovan,” I said and scooted closer, scooping his head into my lap and gently stroking the top of his head, a strange gesture for a man without hair. But it seemed to rouse him, and he even proffered a faint smile.

  “You’re petting me now?” he asked, his voice scratchy and low, but the same jovial Danovan I knew and loved.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” I said and bent forward to press a kiss to his forehead.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he grunted, trying to push himself into a more upright position, but even sitting, he was swaying from side to side.

  “Take it easy,” I murmured, my hands at the ready to steady him should he topple.

  “What did they say to you,” he asked, “after they hauled me out?”

  “They made me a deal.” I picked absently at the bed of my nails, having already made up my mind that I would not—could not—lose him. Everything else, it seemed, was negotiable.

  “Get rid of the baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Your life.” There was no sense beating around the bush. I’d long since lost track of time and I didn’t know how many precious hours we had remaining to us. I needed him to know how things stood. And he seemed to understand. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw him nod his head slowly.

  “So, we’re agreed, then,” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “We’re agreed.”

  “Good.” He tugged me toward him and hugged me close, and I could feel his muscles twitching from time to time as the effects of the stun wore off. “If it’s a boy, name him Leoch, for my uncle. And if it’s a girl—”