Alien Message_Alien Romance

by Amelia Wilson

  Janelle stifled a sob. She had promised herself that she was going to remain strong in their parting. She stepped forward, embracing Maslar first, careful of the young, and then Andar second. She stooped and kissed the bald head of Andar’s young and then the ridged cheek of Maslar’s.

  “I love you, sweet babies,” she said brokenly. The tears came then and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.

  “Oh, Janelle. You have a whole life waiting for you back on Earth,” Andar encouraged her. She could see in his eyes the sorrow in his own heart. It matched hers.

  “I know. I’ll never be able to forget you. I’ll always wonder if my young are well and what they look like. How you both are. If you’re well and happy.”

  Maslar nodded. “As we will think of you. Don’t let that stop you from living a full life. This was a moment in time that we all needed to heal. Destiny brought us together for a reason. We can’t fully know it now, but you will in time.”

  Andar gently reached out and stroked Janelle’s cheek. She knew she had to go soon. The pods would be leaving and she was expected back at the cave to be washed and dressed in her own clothing and sent on her week-long space journey back to Earth.

  “We will always be with you in your dreams and in your heart. If you focus on us, you will feel us. You will know that we are alive and well, and that we are thinking of you often and that we carry a part of you with us also. That connection is strong and can never be broken. You will always have these memories, and these young will always be a part of you.”

  “Yes, Janelle. That’s right.” Maslar nodded. “If you focus hard, you will always know that we are with you. Never forget that.”

  Maslar and Andar held out their arms and she stepped into the ring, holding tight to the young that could never fully be hers. She felt safe and protected and loved. Part of a family for the first time in her life. She finally understood that had been the reason she was sent here. That Andar was right when he said that everything in her life had prepared her for this moment.

  Janelle went to step away, and in that moment, the ground below her feet trembled. She felt the quake like a tingle in her feet and legs. She pulled out of the hug and glanced up in shock to see if Maslar and Andar had felt it as well.

  “What was that?” Janelle asked, her worry and fear apparent in her voice.

  “Nothing.” Maslar shook his head.

  “Our planet trembles from time to time,” Andar said. “Not unlike what happens on Earth.”

  “But that can be dangerous!” Janelle protested. “Are you sure it was nothing?”

  Maslar and Andar glanced at each other and something passed between those purple eyes that she was not privy to. In the next instant, though, they were smiling and nodding.

  “It’s nothing,” Maslar said again. “You don’t need to worry about us or the young. We are safe and we will be well. Klaskar has been our home for generations.”

  Janelle had to ask the words she had been needing to voice all morning. She didn’t want to, she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stop herself. “If there had been no law stating that I couldn’t stay, if your lifetime wasn’t so much longer than mine, would you want me here with you? Would you love me?” Her voice trembled and tears threatened again.

  Maslar and Andar’s faces were tender.

  “We will love you the same Janelle,” Maslar assured her. “Despite our long lifetime and the miles between us.”

  “Just because you are not here beside us and we are not beside you does not mean that our bond will ever be any less,” Andar said.

  Janelle nodded. She knew what their answers would be before they asked but she had to say the words. She couldn’t spend a lifetime wishing she had, regretting that she hadn’t.

  She filled her gaze with one last look at Andar and Maslar and their young. She would never forget the sight of them standing beside that tree, holding those two precious little bundles in their arms. She smiled once and they smiled back. She would remember their faces for a lifetime, cherish the memory like one cherishes photographs.

  Bonus: Awakening

  Awakening

  Phoenix Rising

  By:

  Amelia Wilson

  J. A. Cummings

  Table of Contents:

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  END

  Copyright © 2017 by Amelia Wilson/J.A. Cummings

  All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Prologue

  The jungle was hot and oppressively humid, but Theyn could not stop to rest. He had encouraged the local native population of this green planet to help him construct his isolation chamber, allowing them to also build a tomb they felt was appropriate for a god. He did not have the heart to tell them that he was not in need of a tomb and was not a god, but he doubted that they would be very impressed to know that their mysterious guest from the stars was only a botanist.

  He hesitated at the mouth of the stone construct they had built for him, taking one last look up at the sky. The stars were brilliant and beautiful, but the constellations were not the ones he had come to know. He was filled with the ache of homesickness and stabbing grief. Somewhere out there, far beyond this solar system, his world was in flames, and he would never see his home again.

  He and his Companion had escaped the destruction of their world in a borrowed research probe that was never meant to carry lifeforms this far from home. It had been a desperate act, but both Theyn and Beno had a strong will to live. They were the last survivors of Ylia, and they meant to carry her legacy into the future somehow.

  Near the fourth planet in this system, an inhospitable red-colored rock, their probe had encountered an asteroid field. There was no propulsion capability on the probe and no way to avoid a collision, so they were knocked off course and forced to jettison in separate escape pods when they reached the outer atmosphere of this world.

  Theyn counted his blessings. Neither of them were navigators, and they had done a blind launch. If it hadn’t been for the asteroids, they most likely would have ended up flying straight into Sol, the yellow sun at the center of this system. They were fortunate to have landed on a world with life, a compatible atmosphere, and gravity slightly lighter than their own. If they had to find a new world, this one was acceptable.

  Theyn’s escape pod had landed here on an isthmus covered in jungle and populated by bipedal intelligent life. They had taken him to be a god, which is how he found himself here today, about to be sealed into a hibernation cell in the bottom of a stone pyramid.

  He hoped that Beno, wherever he had landed, was having better luck. He hoped that Beno’s escape pod had also included the specifications for the construction of the hibernation cell. Otherwise, he would be very, very lonely when the cell finally released him, nine hundred standard orbital time units from now.

  He took a deep breath, possibly his last b
reath of fresh air for a very long time. He would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t a little afraid.

  The natives were watching him, the young woman that they insisted on bringing with them leaning on the shoulder of one of the warriors. She was inebriated and unable to stand on her own. The warrior shook her gently, and her eyes rolled back into her head, a thin line of greenish drool escaping from her lax mouth. Theyn shuddered. He did not understand these primitive ways.

  The escape pod had been designed to be converted into a hibernation cell so that anyone in need could afford to wait for help to arrive in safety. There was never any way to know what sort of infectious diseases or parasitic life forms might exist in a new biosphere, so it was better to be safe than sorry. Once he was sealed into his cell, he would be put into decontamination and a deep sleep. His cell would be linked to Beno’s, assuming that Beno’s cell survived his landing. When one of them awoke, so would the other, and then they would find each other again. Ylians were social creatures; they could not exist in isolation.

  The natives helped him climb into his hibernation cell, obeying his direction on how to encase it once he had sealed it from the inside. Once it was activated, his cell would require very little power, but what it needed it could obtain through the soil beneath the stone floor of the chamber. He had placed the array himself. He would be all right, he was certain of it. He hoped that somewhere out there, Beno could say the same.

  He closed his eyes and took one last breath as he lay down. The native chieftain spoke to him, but Theyn could not understand the words he said. He only smiled as gently as he could as he closed the lid.

  Chapter One

  Dr. Sera Cooper adjusted the lamp on her helmet and crouched next to a stone panel in a subterranean passageway. The corridor she was in had been hacked out of bedrock by hand tools over five hundred years ago, and the chisel marks still stood out in places on the low ceiling above her head. Above her, a stone pyramid reached a thousand meters into the sky, only recently rescued from its green jungle cocoon by weeks of back-breaking work.

  In the dim light from her headlamp, Mayan glyphs danced across the stone, eroded by the slow trickle of water that flowed through the cavern. Several of the stone glyphs were covered with thick, clinging moss that obscured the characters. She gently scraped some of the moss away with the edge of her trowel and peered closer.

  She squinted her blue eyes and blew a stray blonde curl out of the way as she read the ancient writing. As an archaeologist specializing in the Mayan culture, she was able to read glyphs as well as she could read an e-mail from her best friend, but this inscription was defying all of her efforts.

  “This makes no sense,” she muttered. “‘The god came from the jaguar star and...green jade...mushrooms?’ What the hell?” She scraped the stone again, trying to clean it more thoroughly.

  One of the glyphs moved. It pressed in like a button on a machine, and a low grinding noise filled the corridor. The stone panel she had been examining shuddered and slid backward into the cave wall, moving with a soft hum. It receded, moving to the right until it was completely swallowed by the stone around it, almost like a pocket door in a modern house. An opening gaped in front of her now, and the darkness beyond it was absolute. Air rushed back at her, stale and smelling of earth and dank, wet stone.

  Sera swallowed hard and adjusted her head lamp again. Her heart thudded in her chest in wild excitement. A hidden chamber! She wanted to run inside, but her sense of self-preservation overrode her eagerness to explore. She picked up her walkie talkie and contacted her assistant, who was on the surface in the artifact tent.

  “Joely,” she said. “I need you. Bring your brightest flashlight.”

  Her voice came back immediately, responding to the quivering excitement in Sera’s tone. “Are you all right?”

  “Perfect. Just… bring some light and get down here.”

  She put the radio away and shone her light into the darkness. From what she could see, the chamber she had just opened was fairly large. She could see more glyphs carved into the walls. There was a large object in the center of the room, and from where she crouched, it looked like a sarcophagus. Beside it, a human-shaped bundle of textiles, wrapped with rope vines and lying on its side, rested on a low stone platform. A thrill shot through her, and she shivered. She had just made the greatest discovery of her career.

  Joely clambered into the chamber, crawling forward through the claustrophobic tunnel where Sera had been working. She had two battery-powered lamps in her hands, and when she reached Sera, her mouth dropped open.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “What is that?”

  Sera took one of the lamps. “We’re about to find out.”

  She turned on the lamp on its highest setting and pointed it into the chamber. The room sprang into view, illuminated at last, and she crept inside. Once she made it through the doorway, she was able to stand again. Joely followed behind her, her dark eyes wide.

  “Oh my God,” Joely said again.

  Sera went to the object in the center of the room. It was a sarcophagus, and it was covered with the same garbled glyphs that had graced the door to this chamber. She leaned closer to examine the carvings, and she could hear a low hum emanating from inside the stone coffin.

  “Get the team,” she said. “This is now priority one.”

  ***

  It took them weeks to properly record the glyphs from the doorway and the sliding panel. After a good deal of inspection, they realized that the door was attached to an ingenious hydraulic system utilizing rainwater and an intricate system of stone counterbalances to shift the panel. The chamber contained a sarcophagus, firmly sealed, and lying beside it was the wrapped body of an adolescent female, likely some sort of sacrifice. The poor girl had probably been entombed alive to accompany the tomb’s occupant, who was obviously a very important person. There were no grave goods to speak of, but the sarcophagus was extremely long. Sera was willing to bet that there was a cache of burial objects inside.

  The interior walls of the chamber were covered in an elaborate creation myth she had never encountered before, something about gods from the sky. She had read it twice to make sure she understood what it was saying, and she still couldn’t quite believe her eyes.

  Joely was setting up the laser scanner to record a 3-D image of the chamber for closer examination back in the lab. “I don’t know, Sera,” she said, shaking her head. “If those Ancient Aliens people get hold of this, we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “Tell me about it,” she groaned. “Do you think we can publish without including a translation?”

  Her assistant laughed. “Not on your life.”

  They started the scanner and let a laser light grid pass over the entire interior space of the tomb, careful to stay out of the way of the beams as the machine slowly rotated, taking readings and downloading the details of the space. Sera stood with her hands on her hips, watching the readout as the data was recorded.

  “This is so much better than having to draw all of this by hand,” she said. “Can you imagine what the first archaeologists went through? They must have all had art classes.”

  “I took art classes,” Joely said.

  Sera was surprised. “Really? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Yep. Art was actually my minor. I specialized in charcoal illustration.” She grinned. “It was great when the frat boys came in to do nude figure modeling to earn beer money.”

  She snorted a laugh. “That was probably the only reason you took the class - a little free peek.”

  “Nothing wrong with being young and alive,” Joely quipped.

  Asa Brunner, one of her graduate students, ambled into the chamber, ducking to avoid the laser. He was a former rodeo cowboy who had turned to archaeology after a career-ending injury. The damage to his leg gave him a strange, looping stride. In his thick Texas accent, he said, “Dr. Cooper, there’s a man from the Mexican government here to talk to you.”


  Sera and Joely exchanged a knowing look, and she sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Asa.”

  The young Texan tipped his hat to them and left, and Joely said, “That didn’t take long.”

  “Predictable. Government agents at important digs are like flies to shit.”

  She left the chamber and clambered out into the open air. The pyramid they were excavating was a tiny one, and it had been utterly swallowed by the jungle before Sera and her team had started their work. Now they had cleared one entire face of the structure and a good part of the paved courtyard in front of it, revealing the precise joinery of the stones and the excellent masonry for which the Maya were rightly known. Tents had been pitched in the square, and the artifacts were examined and conserved there before being shipped back to the University of Austin, which was where Sera had tenure. Predictably, now that they had found something more interesting and potentially more valuable than a bunch of inscriptions and broken pots, the Mexican government was trying to get in on the action.

  It was hard to blame them, really. The Maya were their ancestors, and Mexico City had already paid for the armed guards that stood over their work, protecting them from drug cartels and thieves. She should have been more grateful, but this was her dig. She had fought for six years to convince the authorities and the university that the pyramid was valuable enough to be the focus of their efforts. It stood in the direct center of a complex of larger pyramids, three of which had already been excavated. She thought that its positioning in the center of the other construction indicated that this one was special. She’d worked on this for years. It was the subject of her doctoral dissertation and would be the basis of her entire career. She would be damned if she let some elected official take the glory away from her.

  She followed Asa, who led her to man in a white linen suit and a flat Panama hat. He had a handkerchief that he was continually using to wipe away his sweat. She walked up to him and offered a handshake.