Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (16 page)

An uneventful fifteen minutes turned into an uneventful hour, turned into an uneventful night. The entire tribe made it down into the tunnels, guards made it into position, and the night went by peacefully. There was no sign of danger whatsoever. At least for now, it looked like they’d made the right choice.

Marko woke up in a panic. It was dark. Too dark. Unnaturally dark. A flashlight clicked on and the world spun and flipped and warped around him as his brain tried to make sense of why it had awoken in a small, dark box.

His senses came to him and he settled, although his heart continued to pound and the bitter taste of adrenaline still lingered on the back of his tongue.

Naeesha was curled up in front of him, and he laid back down and held her close. They’d been relieved from guard duty as soon as the tribe was settled in and come back to get some rest. Marko was feeling very rested.

It occurred to him that with no sight of the sun, he had no idea what time it was. He’d gotten out of the habit of carrying a comm device, or anything else with the capacity for timekeeping for that matter.

He decided that other parties could be responsible for keeping the tribe on schedule, and he tried to let his mind go so that he could be fully present with Naeesha. She was so warm. So soft.

Her leaving - his thinking that she’d left, rather - gave him a new perspective. He'd felt the cold sting of loss again and knew that it was too much to take again. When she came back, he told himself that he was never going to let another moment with her go by without appreciating it to the fullest. But it was hard. If he
tried
to appreciate her, it just didn’t work. It took him out of the moment. It was like an out of body experience. He was touching her with somebody else’s fingers, watching her through someone else’s eyes. It was cheap, and it was hollow.

No.

He had to live in the moment. It wasn’t something he could think about, like a riddle or a math problem. She was an experience.

But sometimes when he let go of all the little things that kept him grounded, he got lost. And when he got lost, he took her for granted. It was a vicious cycle.

All he could do was all he could do. And he would do his best.

Tonight - or this morning, whenever it was - he was going to lay with her. Feel her chest rise and fall, hear her breath soft on her lips, feel the heat of her body against his chest. He was going to be with her, and he wasn’t going to let anything come between them.

Another light clicked on. Naeesha stirred. He clung to each fleeting second, afraid that it would leave. More lights came on, and the entire tribe began to rouse from their sleep. Whatever time it was, it was time to get up, and get moving.

***

              Marko sat with Rakkan and Jintak. Apparently, they were concerned about the lack of sun as well. It was possible that the tribe would be spending the next two weeks underground, and they feared what effect the lack of light might have on their psyche.

The concerns were numerous. Aside from loss of morale, there were practical issues. Apparently, Marko learned, if left in complete darkness, Halians could go into a sort of hibernation, sleeping until they’d made up for all the sleep that they’d missed over the last several days.

It was no secret that nearly every member of the combined tribe had been short on sleep for a long while. They both feared that if a strict rotation of guards was not kept, that the entire tribe could fall - and stay - asleep for a stretch of days. Long enough, they thought, to die of dehydration.

Then there were the other concerns. That every minute the tribe spent on Alderoc was a chance for the military to catch up with them. That they might not be able to get off the world before the Wild destroyed everything. That they would run out of food or water. But then, maybe it was better if they didn’t dwell too much on those things. They certainly weren’t going to make anything better.

Marko started to wonder what they could do if things did get bad. They were, he figured, not all that far underground. The walls of the tunnel would no doubt be thick, but he could probably get through them. If push came to shove, he should have been able to dig his way back up to the surface in his combat form, especially with the Halians to help get rubble and debris out of the way.

It crossed his mind that digging a few escape holes might be a good idea no matter what. He and some of the warriors would march ahead, dig a tunnel to the surface, and when the rest of the tribe arrived to set up camp, they could go to the surface to scavenge supplies and get some sunlight. Plus, they’d have ways to escape if they needed, and the dirt and cement from the dig could be used to make barriers in the tunnel. One of Marko’s biggest concerns was that if the military trapped them down in the tunnels, there would be nowhere to run. Plasma bolts will fly for as far as they can go uninterrupted. The tunnels were long and straight enough that a good shot could hit a target miles away. The only limitation, it seemed, was the curvature of the planet.

A few dirt and stone walls would go a long way to minimize that problem.

They had plenty of hands, and plenty of time to do it. It would be something to keep everyone busy. Something to keep their minds of off things. Marko decided to bring it up during the next circle.

***

              That day’s march was awful. Naeesha stayed back with the tribe to help the medics. A small handful of people had come down with food poisoning, and they were a little overwhelmed and in need of a hand.

Marko ended up marching out in front of the group with three of the Halian warriors.

He was eager to learn a little more about them. His interactions so far had been short on words and terribly brief. That was, he learned, because Halian warriors are, by nature, not terribly verbose individuals.

Over the course of the entire day, he managed to scrape together enough information to get a sense of why.

Being highly emotional creatures, the Halians avoided conflict at all costs. Sometimes, the use of force was necessary, and in these rare instances, it was important to have emotionally resilient troops.

One panicked soldier was enough to route an entire unit. The first warrior gets scared, and their fear pushes the next scared person over the edge. A chain reaction goes off, and all of a sudden your entire fighting force is reduced to nothing. All because one person lost their cool.

So when the Halians trained soldiers, they trained them to be rock solid, completely in control of their emotions. Cold. Calculating. Completely unfeeling. That sort of emotional mettle was useful in combat, but it made it impossible to have a normal life. The warriors were fundamentally disconnected from the rest of tribal life. Halian culture is an emotional experience, and their warriors simply didn't have the capacity to participate.

They were simply most comfortable sticking to themselves, and Marko had no trouble understanding.

After all. He was a soldier too. He just had the good luck of living in a world where the civilians were as emotionally stunted as the people who fought their wars for them. But that was their cultural legacy. They’d built a system that robbed
everyone
of their feelings, not just the warriors.

That was the only way for it to work. How else could ten billion people live in one big city that was as full of suffering and pain as the capital was? If anyone, Halian, Watcher, or human, tried to walk through the streets of that city with an open heart, they’d be dead of heartbreak before they made it down the first block.

It had only gotten that bad because people learned to numb themselves to their own cruelty towards their fellow people.

He hadn’t seen it when he lived among them, but it only took a few weeks with the Halians to open his eyes. Once he’d seen how it
could
have been, the illusion was shattered. The suffering, the sorrow, the crushing rage. It was too much. He knew there was no way to go back to that world.

If he’d have known how much his new world was going to look like the old one, he probably would have just become a hermit.

But that was life on Alderoc. Sometimes you just had to put your head down and try to forget all the awful shit. It was the only way to survive. To live, and try to go on another day.

Naeesha was glad to be helping, but she wished she’d have known what she was getting into when she volunteered to help the healers. Something bad had gotten into the food, and there were about three dozen very sick Halians who needed near constant attention.

Thankfully, she wasn’t responsible for carrying their stretchers, just keeping them fed and watered and helping them, well, dispose of their various forms of waste.

It wasn’t her idea of a good time, to say the very least.

But it
was
enlightening. She’d spent about half her time in the military as a field medic, and she was more than capable when it came to putting people back together. Most medics only knew as much as it took to keep someone alive until they could get to an autoclinic, but Naeesha had learned her chops during the Fall. There
were
no autoclinics where she learned to fight. If you wanted to keep a wounded soldier alive, you did it with your bare hands.

It wasn’t always a compassionate process. Your patient was a problem, and the only concern that you had as a medic was solving whatever problem they had.

              But the Halian healers had a different way. Their job wasn’t to fix their patients. It was to make them feel better. Naeesha couldn’t help but wonder how effective that would be on a life threatening injury or a chronic illness, but for a little food poisoning, it was a hell of a lot more effective than sticking an intravenous solution into their arms, giving them a bedpan, and telling them to tough it out until they felt better.

              It wasn’t that the kind words and gentle laughter were making the food poisoning go away, it was just that it made it a little more bearable. She wondered what other problems could be addressed the same way. What else could kindness and compassion achieve?

At the very least, all these people wouldn’t be stuck underground, endlessly shuffling through the dark. They would have a lot more of their friends and family still with them. Hell, they wouldn’t even be on this planet. The world would look completely different, for the Halians, for the Alderoccans, for everyone.

How did all of this get started? What events had put this into motion? Once the first shots were fired, they were all but doomed to this situation. But that first massacre in the Dynasty compound twenty-five years ago wasn’t the first act in this hellish play. She didn’t know what
was,
and none of the Halians were telling. It was hard to imagine that they had been responsible for it, though.

Especially when the other party involved was the Dynasty Corporation. The same shadowy organization that had conspired to run the Watchers off this planet, and then proceeded to steal the planet’s riches in the process.

After the Fall, Alderoc had all but forgotten about Dynasty. There was never any new information about them, so nobody had any reason to care. There wasn’t somebody to pin the problem on. No nucleus for their collective hatred to coalesce around.

In fact, there were more than a handful of Watchers - and even humans - who blamed the Halians for what Dynasty had done. There was not a single piece of evidence to even
suggest
that the Halians were involved with the ploy to destroy Alderoc, and all indications were that they had simply been another victim.

But some people needed a place to put their anger. They didn’t know how to let it go, so they held on to it, clutching it tight, just waiting for a convenient target to unload it onto.

And the Halians had appeared just in time for all those people to dump all that anger on them. Their only crime was existing.

But violence creates violence, and each attack on the Halians resulted in Watcher casualties, which fed further violence, which created more casualties, and so on. The cycle wouldn’t end. Not until the Watchers put down their guns, or until the Halians were all dead.

And it looked like it was going to be the latter. Naeesha took some consolation in knowing that she was on the right side, even if it meant dying with the Halians. Anyway, she didn’t want to live on a world that would threaten its own existence just to destroy something as beautiful as the Halian people.

Too stupid to save themselves,
that’s what the Watchers were. They were ready to shoot themselves in the head just to get rid of a headache that could have been fixed with a little bit of love.

Marko was caught in a strange place. On one hand, he’d felt like he’d been marching for an eternity. With nothing to distract him, nothing to pass the time, and no frame of reference, he was just marching into the abyss.

On the other hand, when Rakkan ran up ahead to stop their march, he hardly believed that an entire day had gone by. It was beyond explaining.

He started back down the tunnel to meet the rest of the group. Someone had already brought out an instrument, and a beautiful melody echoed down the hallway, calling him back to the tribe. Another instrument joined in, and then a third.

It was a small departure from the norm, typically the musicians spread out around camp and played their own songs. Marko guessed that in the tunnels, there wasn’t room for three separate melodies. So they all joined into one. The instruments sang out in a gleeful chorus, carrying harmonies, running off onto improvised phrases, tweaking the song just a little, gradually, so that you never noticed a change, but after a few minutes, they were playing a totally different song.

He missed the smell of cooking food. Nobody thought that it was wise to start a fire in the tunnels. With nowhere for the smoke to go, it seemed like a recipe for a thousand dead Halians. They had enough food to go around. Nobody would starve. But a hot meal does wonders for the body, and it would still be weeks before anybody had a chance to eat one.

Unless the tribe liked his idea.

Marko was excited to share. It seemed completely feasible, and all indications were that it would solve a number of problems all at the same time. Problems seemed few and far between. They hadn’t seen any animals taking shelter in the tunnel where they’d entered through the collapsed section. There seemed to be so much surface area that flooding didn’t seem like an issue either, and if that was a concern, then it shouldn’t be hard to create drainage ducts in addition to the escape tunnels.

He tried to anticipate any problems, formulated possible solutions so that he would be as fully prepared to address them as he could be.

All in all, he liked the idea, and hoped others would like it too. Marko was used to roughing it, and he didn’t need many luxuries to remain happy, but a glimpse of the sky and a campfire would go a long way to keeping his spirits up through the duration of the journey.

Then again, as long as he didn’t have to spend many days apart from Naeesha, he simply wouldn’t need all that much cheering up. She was more than enough to keep him happy, no matter how cold, hungry, or tired of the dark he got.

He spotted her walking down the tunnel and swept her up in an embrace, giving her a big kiss before setting her back down.

“Missed you,” she said.

“Let’s not do that again.”

“Agreed.”

“Do you know how soon they’re going to start the big circle?”

“No, why?”

“I’ve got an idea that I want to share.”

“Yea?”

“You can hear about it when everyone else does,” he said with a coy smile.

Naeesha gave him a gentle push before pulling him back, holding herself close.

“What, you’re not going to treat me special?” she said. “Maybe I should stop treating you so special.”

The last, she said in barely a whisper, leaning in so close that Marko could feel her breath on his cheek. He suspected that the way her thigh pressed between his legs was not an accident. His breath caught in the back of his throat, and only came out as a raspy sigh.

“No, I don’t think I would like that.”

She slid her hand down from his back, around his waist, and into his robe, her fingers inching slowly downward, in no particular hurry to get to any particular place.

“So tell me, what
do
you want?”

He swallowed hard.

“I want…” he leaned forward and whispered into her ear “I want you to climb on top of me while everyone is asleep, and I want you to fuck me absolutely silly.”

He heard her laugh, felt her cheek pressed up against his turn into a smile.

“Okay,” she said. “Now let's talk about what
I
want from
you.
”

Marko glad that it was so dark in the tunnels, or the entire tribe would have been able to see just how excited he was for Naeesha to continue on that subject. Unfortunately, Rakkan announced that it was time to gather for the circles before she had a chance to do so.

He shuffled awkwardly towards the wall, taking a seat near the center of the big circle next to Naeesha.

It had been his plan to spent the first few minutes of circle thinking about what he would say. He’d already rehearsed a number of times, but he wanted one last chance to go through his proposal. Naeesha had other plans. Her hand kept wandering into his lap, touching him in ways that made thinking - among other things - terribly hard.

When Rakkan turned and indicated that it was his turn to share, he just about choked.

With a nervous cough and a poorly concealed erection, he hastily stumbled through his suggestion for digging tunnels up to the surface after the tribe stopped moving each day. He went through his talk on autopilot, and when he sat down with burning cheeks, he could hardly remember what he’d said to the group.

He looked around, hoping to gauge their reactions, but it was too dark to see their faces and their ears were already turned to another speaker.

“How’d I do,” he whispered to Naeesha.

“Mmm, delicious as always.”

“I… what? I meant on the speech.”

“Darling, I don’t speak Halian, I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”

Marko had hoped for a different answer. He didn’t feel great about it, and he seriously needed some affirmation that he’d made his case well and that it would be well considered.

He couldn’t help but feel a little resentful of Naeesha for distracting him with her poorly timed romance.

By the time they sat down to eat, the seed of resentment had blossomed into an ugly tree, and he could hardly sit next to her without a burning pit lighting up in his stomach. She didn’t seem to understand that he was upset, much less why, which only made him feel worse. Every passing moment intensified the feeling. Nobody was even talking about his proposal. They were all concerned with more prosaic concerns.

He went to bed angry, giving Naeesha a perfunctory kiss and nothing more. It took him ages to get to sleep, his mind stewed in his rage, and he spent an hour - maybe longer - thinking of what he should have done or said differently.

But he must have fallen asleep at some point, because that seemed like a necessary precursor to being startled awake.

There was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. He remembered what he’d told Naeesha earlier.

“No,” he muttered, his body still shaking the last threads of sleep.

A leg slipped over his lap, and another hand settled on his other shoulder.

“Stop, I just want to sleep.”

The hands slid up his chest.

“Naeesha,” he sighed, the night’s frustration seeping back into his voice.

“Yea baby?” she groaned, as though just rousing from sleep.

Her voice came from his side, as though she was lying a few feet away. The hands slid further up his chest and clamped around his neck, tight enough that he couldn’t breathe. He grabbed at them, finding a pair of wrists too small to be Naeesha’s. His heart started to pound and he tried to scream but words wouldn’t come out. He struggled to sit up, but whoever was on top of him was stronger than he was.

“Marko?” Neesha cooed again. “What’s wrong?”

He reached up, trying to find some part of his attacker to grab hold of, but he couldn’t reach past their arms. He reached out to the side and found a flashlight, flicking it on and casting a bright beam across the ground, in the face of several sleeping Halians, and then up at his attacker.

Whoever -
whatever
- it was, he’d never seen anything like it before.

Naeesha thought she’d heard Marko say something, but she must have been imagining things. She rolled over, got comfortable, and tried to go back to sleep. A few feet away, some inconsiderate asshole flicked on a flashlight and started waving it around. They managed to shine the light right into her eyes, leaving her just about blind.

She cursed softly to herself, wondering why the hell somebody needed a light, and couldn’t have the decency to keep it out of sleeping people’s faces.

And then she heard struggling. Nearby. Something a few feet away from her lit up in the still-waving beam of the flashlight, but she couldn’t make it out. It looked like a person kneeling over somebody’s sleeping body.

Marko’s sleeping body.
She strained her eyes to get a better look at whatever was happening, there was still an after-glow of the light burned into her vision, but it was starting to fade.

It was definitely a person, but it didn’t look like a Halian. Their arms were too long, the color of their skin more brown than red. And no tell-tale third eye, as far as she could tell.  Her heart started pounding as she realized that whoever it was, they were attacking Marko. At least, that’s what it looked like. The stranger’s arms were extended, and it looked like they had their hands around Marko’s throat.

Naeesha pushed herself upright, blinking back sleep and trying to make more sense of the situation. She could see Marko flailing, trying to reach out and hit his attacker. He couldn’t reach.

But Naeesha could.

She grabbed her own flashlight from beside her bedroll. The body of the light was cast from one solid block of aluminium. It was far larger than necessary, but that was because a light like this was made for more than illumination. Holding it by the wrong end, she drew her arm back and swung the light with a hard backhand.

The two-foot long metal handle hit the attacker in the shoulder with a commanding thud. She held back on the blow. Her intention wasn’t to kill whoever this was, merely get them off Marko.

And it worked. The person - surprisingly thin, bald headed, and very possibly not wearing any clothes as far as she could see - fell to the side, clutching their wounded arm, and hissing . Marko shined the flashlight up at Naeesha, blinding her again. She could hear his heavy, ragged breathing as he gasped for air. Another flashlight clicked on and swept across the room. Then another, and another, all of them flicking around the hallway before eventually settling on the injured attacker.

The feeling that swept through the Halian camp was a strange one. It was a mixture of fear, of curiosity, and of barely restrained horror. She felt the bite of adrenaline on the back of her tongue as a thousand Halian’s fight or flight responses kicked into high gear.

Naeesha rubbed her eyes with her free hand, trying to massage her vision back to life. She still couldn’t see much. Light and shadow, blurred by the streak of white across the middle.

Gasps and whispers spread through the camp. Although she couldn’t understand the words that the Halians were saying, she recognized the scared tone. She could hear their worry. Feel their uncertainty. And as her vision slowly returned, she understood why.

The person who attacked Marko was, well, not any kind of person that Naeesha had ever seen before. They were tall and lanky to the extreme. Their limbs suggested someone who was damn near starving to death, and their eyes were sunken and hollow to the point that she couldn’t see their eyes at all, just black sockets.

And the way that they moved as they tried to climb back to their feet, fleeing from Naeesha and the other thousand Halians, it was… uncanny. Like a robot with a dying battery, or a drunk with a broken leg, all its movements disjointed and simultaneous jerky and listing.

That alone was unsettling, but it as her vision improved, the terror of the creature only got worse. Naeesha realized that the reason she couldn’t see its eyes was that it didn’t have any eyes at all. And its body was so unwieldy because so much of it was broken. At least one of its ankles was completely shattered, its foot bent at an impossible angle and dragging behind it.

But no. That wasn’t the worst of it at all.

Naeesha couldn’t have begun to speculate what color the creature’s skin had been originally, but now it was a sickly yellow-brown of desiccated meat. Its skin was dry and leathery, split and cracking at its joints.

It had all the hallmarks of being long dead and partially decaying, much like the soldier they’d seen earlier. Except, of course, for the fact that it had been trying to kill Marko, and was still shambling away.

Not to escape, Naeesha realized, but in order to find another victim to attack. It turned to an older Halian, one of the musicians, and started grabbing at her with one arm. The one that Naeesha had hit was still hanging limply at its side.

Naeesha jumped over Marko and hit the creature again, low, in the back. It hunched over and hissed again, louder than last time, and turned around. It reached out and grabbed onto Naeesha’s robe. She was surprised by how strong it was when it nearly pulled her over.

She brought the flashlight down hard on its arm, just above the elbow. The blow didn’t faze it. She hit it again, this time in the side of the head, but the creature was completely unaffected. Naeesha kept swinging the light, the heavy club-handle smashing into the creature’s bony head over and over and achieving nothing. It craned its neck towards, her, it's jaw dropping to reveal a mouth of rotted and broken teeth, as though it intended to bite her.