Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (2 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS EARLIER

              The transport shuttle circled over the landing site. On the viewscreen, Marko saw a clearing where a landing pad had once been. It was now overgrown with thick vegetation. There were deep cuts in the earth, scabbed over with bushes and vines. There were no signs of buildings or machinery, nothing to suggest that this had been the site of an enormous operation just months before.

The cramped shuttle landed in the middle of the clearing. As soon as they touched down, the eleven other soldiers in the shuttle with him made their final equipment checks. Marko did the same. As he waited for his rifle to charge, he glanced up and looked for Naeesha. His eyes caught hers for a moment. Just long enough to see that she was nervous.

He was glad he wasn’t the only one.

A little more than a year ago, Watcher command learned that Dynasty, offworld company, was digging up exotic forms of matter from deep inside the planet’s surface. The mining process poisoned the atmosphere and nearly made Alderoc uninhabitable. A band of human rebels had stopped them just in time. Everyone called the it ‘the Fall’, even though it had never actually happened.

The Dynasty base of operations on Alderoc had never been found. Until one month ago.

Marko’s unit was being sent to assist a team of scientists and engineers as they investigated the newly discovered facility. An exploratory team had already been through the site and declared it safe. As far as his superiors were concerned, Marko and his friends were just here to babysit the eggheads and help them with the heavy lifting.
A walk in the park,
they said.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling in his stomach.

The ramp at the back of the transport shuttle lurched into motion and swung open. A sheet of sunlight burst into the dark cabin, and Marko looked out into the jungle. He was facing into a wall of trees. A barrage of sounds spilled into the shuttle, so loud they were almost deafening.

They were the sounds of the wilderness. He’d grown up listening to them in the distance. Then, they were soothing. A pleasant reminder of a world outside his slum. Now that they were so close, he was starting to think that his world might have been the safer option.

The unit rose to their feet and filed out of the ship, moving quickly to establish a perimeter around the clearing. As soon as the last soldier (one of the two veterans in the unit) was off the ship, it lifted off to clear the landing pad for the research vessel.

The unit was left surrounded on all sides by dense jungle. It only took a matter of minutes for the heavy, wet air to start sinking into Marko’s clothes. It weighed on him, close and thick, like the wild growth all around them.

Marko looked down his rifle into the depths of the jungle. The sun could not penetrate through the thick canopy a hundred feet above their heads. Only little slivers of light broke through and made it all the way to the forest floor. The animal sounds stopped. He imagined all sorts of wild animals lurking in the darkness, staring back at him.

A gust of hot air rushed from behind him as the research vessel approached for landing and dropped down in the clearing. Just by listening, he could tell that the scientists were disorganized and sloppy. It took them five minutes just to get off the ship, twice that to get their gear together. Marko’s comm alerted him that, just over fifteen minutes after landing, the research team was ready to enter the compound.

He broke out of his position and turned to find the head of the research team. He found her standing with Bura, one of his trainers from the academy.

“Alright Larsi,” she said to the scientist. “Operator Marko’s going to take you and your team inside. Stay behind him and in front of Operator Naeesha. Wait at the staging point until the rest of our people can join you inside. Remember, this is still an unsecure location.”

Marko shifted in his boots and tried not to betray just how uncomfortable he was with the idea of going into the compound without Bura.

To make matters worse, he would have rather had any other partner besides Naeesha. She was like fire to him. Enticing. Enchanting. He was always falling under her spell. It was only a matter of time before he got burned. He couldn’t explain it. She was a human. He was a Watcher. He’d always made fun of the Watchers who fell in love with humans. Could never understand what the saw in their weak, squishy bodies.

But Naeesha, with her skin like twilight and her eyes like the sunrise. He didn’t need an excuse or an explanation for the way he felt. It just
was.

Larsi wasn’t nervous at all. “Relax Agent Bura. It’s just dust and cobwebs inside. We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

The rest of his unit would get to work securing the perimeter while the research team set up inside. Logically, they had the most dangerous work. The jungles in this part of the world were full of things that could kill in a heartbeat, whereas the compound had already been checked, sealed, and declared perfectly safe. That didn’t make him feel any safer as he pulled back the heavy metal grate from the tunnel entrance and stared down into the darkness.

Naeesha watched from the back of a chattering group of researchers as Marko descended into the ground. One by one, each of the clueless scientists followed in behind him.

They were having fun. This was exciting for them. The reports from the first scout team to go through the facility had been… unusual to say the least. Their conclusion was that the compound had been built by an organization with technology that was radically different from - and in many ways superior - to what the Watcher had, and apparently, the compound was still full of their toys.

That’s what the scientists were so excited about - all the strange and mysterious tech. It’s also what had her on edge. Nobody knew what any of the gear did, or if any of it was dangerous.

She understood why they were all so giddy to get inside. There were untold discoveries just waiting to made. Hell, she was excited too. This was her first mission and her commanders had given her plenty of chances to prove herself. Being excited was fine.

But anybody who wasn’t
also
scared out of their mind was a damn fool.

The scout team had just barely looked around inside, and even they admitted that they had no clue what the stuff inside was. Now Naeesha was walking into this place with a couple dozen nosy scientists who were going to mess with literally everything inside. What was going to happen when one of them found the security system? Or a grenade? Or a canister of nerve gas?

So yes. She was afraid. And nervous. And stressed. And more than a little excited. But her hands were rock steady as she started down the stairs leading into the compound. The flashlight at the end of her rifle automatically turned on, even though the scientists were setting up chemical lamps as they went, leaving the entranceway more than light enough to see inside.

So far, nothing was out of the ordinary. Bare concrete walls. Just a hint of local flora and fauna that had made its way inside.

Up ahead, there was an awful clunking sound, the squeal of metal on metal, and a crash in front of them in the tunnel. A gentle breeze flooded past her from deeper inside.

“Do you smell that?” Marko asked over the comm.

She did. It was an old, familiar smell. One that she’d been known  long before she’d learned to identify it. It was the smell of death, and it was powerful and pungent inside the compound. She double checked her rifle and felt for the sidearm on her hip.

“What do you have up there?”

The scientists were plodding along same as ever, chattering mindlessly, none of them aware of the lingering fog that hung around them. Naeesha had to take shallow, measured breaths just to keep from choking on the sickly sweet and earthy stench. It was, she thought, an old smell. The faint chemical trace on the air suggested that somebody had taken the time to clean up, but it was useless. Death had visited these halls, and had done enough damage that nothing would ever cleanse them of the lingering odor.

She didn’t like that the useless pack of civilians stood between her and Marko. She didn’t like that he was the first soldier down into this pit, or that help was so far behind him.

She liked him.

He had always been around during combat school. Floating around the perimeter, sticking to the back of the rooms always near the door. Never too far away, but never close by. She’d seen him a hundred times during training, but hadn’t
noticed
him until after graduation.

His high cheekbones and dark skin and deep eyes made him hard not to pick out of a crowd, but he had this reserved demeanor that always kept him from sticking out. It wasn’t until she’d started watching him more closely that she saw the way that he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. After that, he was impossible to get out of her head.

She tried to keep worry at bay. They
were
safe, more likely than not. They were well trained, well equipped, and could handle any kind of emergency that came up. Marko was scrappy, and Marko was smart. She was thirty feet behind him, and he knew what to do if he ran into something that he couldn’t handle. He was fine.
They
were fine.

“Made it to the first staging point,” he said. “Everything aces so far.”

Naeesha let out a sigh of relief. The first staging point was a large chamber. According to the report it was a big room with thick concrete walls and two heavy doors that sealed, locked, and bolted shut. She and Marko would cover each of the doors while the scientists set up and the rest of her unit finished setting up the perimeter defenses.

The chamber grew out of the darkness before her and she walked into the big room. The soft glow of the chemical lamps didn’t reach all the way up to the ceiling of the room. The space above them seemed to be an endless black void, hanging over their heads, waiting to swallow them. Naeesha shined the narrow cone of her flashlight up the walls and swept away the darkness, relaxing a little when she confirmed that the walls and ceiling were smooth, unbroken concrete all the way around. She went to her door, signaled her commander that they were in place, and waited.

It was getting noisy in the chamber fast. Twenty five people moving and talking and setting up equipment with nowhere for all that sound to go. Naeesha focused her thoughts on the door in front of her, and on her earpiece. That’s where any trouble would come from, and that’s where her mind need to be.

“Hey, can you give me a hand with this?” came a voice from behind her. It was Larsi.

“You’ll have to get someone else, ma’am. I’ve got my orders.”

There was a secret to using military coldness to dismiss unwanted distractions. Naeesha had learned and mastered it.

“Oh come on,” Larsi said. “I know it’s your job to be paranoid, but right now the biggest danger we’ve got is reporting back to our superiors empty handed. Come help me out so that we can get this show on the road.”

Larsi was right, but Naeesha stood fast on the matter of principal. She knew damn well that if she started taking orders from the research team now, they’d be running the show by dinner.

“There will be an entire squad of soldiers down here in just a few minutes. I’ll be happy to help you then.”

There was a short, quiet barrage of unkind words that Naeesha didn’t bother making out, and Larsi stormed across the room. A few seconds later, she heard Marko’s voice carry through the din. He was
not
an expert at dismissing unwanted distractions, so he got roped into helping Laris with whatever she needed.

This provided a new form of distraction. One that Naeesha couldn’t dismiss quite as easily. Her motives for keeping close by to Marko weren’t entirely altruistic. She really liked him. He was funny. He was sweet. He had this sort of quiet personality that made her think he didn’t know how sexy he was. And it didn’t come at the expense of competence or confidence. He reminded her of the ocean like she’d seen it on Earth. Warm, calm, and unfathomably deep. He was a mystery, and she wanted to solve him.

“Quiet!”

The shout snapped her out of her daydream. The room went silent.

“I thought I heard something by the door,” the voice said again.

There was a stillness in the air as twenty five people held their breath and trained their ears. The silence remained unbroken for a moment, but when nothing happened, people started slowly returning to their work. Naeesha’s mind started to wander again. Larsi
was
right. There was nothing to worry about. She needed to relax, just a little. Being on edge like this, it wasn’t good for her. She could already feel the stress breaking her body down. She slept like shit. She was tense all the time. And damn was she getting jumpy.

To top it all off, now she was hearing things. A scratching sound. No. More like a grinding sound. Just a scrape here or a scrape there. She could have sworn a vibration ran up her legs. Maybe she
wasn’t
hearing things. The sounds, if they were real, were coming from the other side of the door. Her heart jumped into her throat. She tried to swallow it, tried to calm herself. It didn’t do any good. Her feet carried her closer and closer to the door. Her body was tight, ready to move, ready to fight. She reached out a hand and touched the door. It was cold. Unmoving. Perfectly still. She leaned against it, put cupped a hand around her ear and pressed it to the door.

Pain shot through her body. She couldn’t hear anything over the high-pitched drone in her head. She was seeing double, for what little she could see at all. Something grabbed her and pulled her across the floor. She reached out for her rifle, but her hands were numb. Three faces appeared over her head. It took a moment to realize that it was really only one face.

Marko’s.