Alien Romance: Caged By The Alien: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Alien Romance, Alien Invasion Romance, BBW) (Celestial Mates Book 4) (4 page)

"We should try not to assume anything."

Penny was running her hands over the strange hexagonal white cells that made up the walls of the room they were in, wondering what it was made of. It felt rigid as metal, but with a waxy texture.

"We have to do our best not to let preconceived notions cloud our perception of them. If we start regarding them as military or families before we know for certain, we'll attach incorrect emotions to things and there will be misunderstandings. It's vital we keep an open mind."

Rivera frowned, balancing her chin on her closed fist in the way she always did when she was anxious.

"But if we don't draw any conclusions," she asked, "If we dismiss every interpretation as 'it could mean anything,' how will we begin to understand them? And more importantly, how can we be prepared if they become genuinely aggressive?"

Penny laughed, a little high-pitched with nerves.

"None of us signed up for this because it was an easy job," she shrugged, leaning back against the waxy wall, "No one has ever done this before. The best we can do is try to find common ground and figure out the language."

"They seemed noticeably startled by us speaking," Cho mentioned, scraping at the wall curiously and examining the waxy residue under her fingernail, "I mean, if their startle response looks like ours, that is. I think that buzzing might have been them communicating with each other. Of course, with them not being mammalian they could be communicating any number of ways we can't actually perceive. Vocalizations might be a completely new concept to them."

"That would certainly make things more difficult." Penny ran a hand through her hair as she thought about how they would deal with such a situation.

"If they allow us back to our ship," Salome offered, "I could possibly use the ship's sensors to detect certain kinds of communication. Or at the very least get some screens of their written language. Writing back and forth is better than nothing."

They talked a while longer, discussing how they would handle the situation. Considering how little they knew, they couldn't plan much beyond stay together and try to communicate. And if things went south, they would book it for the ship and try to get back to Earth.

They were still talking when the door opened, surprising all of them. Penny stood first, taking point in front of her team, as the leader of the squad that brought them here (or someone in identical armor) came inside.

Behind him followed several other beings so dramatically different that Penny was momentarily stumped. The alien in the black armor stepped aside to allow the others in, tipping his head back to bare his throat in what Penny assumed was a gesture of respect. The three creatures that followed him were, in many ways, shockingly human.

They had the basic appearance of human men, tall and graceful as elves in a fantasy and breathtakingly beautiful, their night black skin glittering with iridescence. Their eyes were compound, throwing colored light like huge gemstones. Their hands were strange, with long narrow palms, and Penny realized they had only three fingers plus a thumb.

Their hair, long and black shot through with gold, had a feathery texture and rustled strangely even when they weren't moving. Most spectacularly, huge, shimmering wings hung behind them, long enough to trail the ground, translucent and pearlescent and mesmerizing to look at.

They were narrow and double layered like a dragonfly and, as the alien men examined Penny's team, looking at her down their elegant flat noses with what Penny did not want to assume was disdain but certainly felt like it, those wings hummed and vibrated, perhaps in some secret communication between them.

"Hello," Penny greeted them, hoping they might have a better reaction than the black armored individuals, "We're honored to meet you."

All three froze at her words, their wings standing out stiffly. A moment later, they were buzzing more rapidly than ever, their gem stone eyes narrowed at her suspiciously as all three of them made a gesture with their hands near their mouths. Penny's fell silent quickly.

Speaking out loud was clearly not acceptable here, if she was reading their expressions correctly as being offended. But if she couldn't talk to them, what could she do?

She scrambled for an answer and remembered the touch pad built into the arm of her suit. She opened it and located a note-taking program intended for the explorers to jot down their observations.

If she couldn't communicate, she'd show them math. She held out her wrist to them and, as she'd hoped, all three leaned closer to see as she drew on it with her finger.

"Okay," she murmured to her team, "Let's see if these guys have ever heard of
Lingua cosmos
."

She started with pulses. First one, then two, and so on, demonstrating them on her hands and on the screen until she reached ten. Unsure they had understood, she started over, taking it slow, but soon she could hear their wings buzzing in time with her silent counting.

She smiled, delighted, and moved to the wall, tapping each side of one of the hexagonal panels and counting out pulses to six. The aliens observed, but whether they were taking note or understanding at all, she couldn't tell. She was at least demonstrating that she was intelligent, she supposed. They wouldn't be mistaken for mindless animals.

She went on for hours, slowly defining the meanings of mathematical symbols like greater-than and equals, going over everything multiple times to try and make sure they understood. Whatever she did, the aliens observed, unresponsive, aside from occasionally counting along with her.

They only reacted whenever she slipped up and spoke out loud, naming a number or expressing her frustration, recoiling and occasionally hissing in what she assumed was annoyance or offence.

Finally, as Penny was beginning to become exhausted, one of them gestured to the pad on her arm and held out his hand. Penny, hoping it would pay to be trusting, offered him her arm. With a long, tapered finger, he pointed at himself, drew the greater-than symbol with its open end towards him, and then pointed at her.

Penny, fairly certain she'd just been insulted, could only stare as the alien dropped her arm, wiped his hand on his flowing robes, then turned and left, the others following him.

The black armored alien had stood by the door this entire time, waiting. He paused now before following the others, to stare at the still stunned Penny for a long moment. Then he exited, closing the door behind him.

"What was that?" Rivera asked. The entire team had been waiting in tense anticipation behind Penny for hours as she struggled to communicate. "What did that mean?"

"I don't think they like us." Penny replied, staring down at the symbol written on her touch pad and wishing she could interpret it some other way. '
We are better than you
' was not an encouraging first communication.

They were left alone for another several hours. All night, Penny would have said, but she was fairly certain this planet had a longer day/night cycle than Earth-standard 24hrs.

Going by the size of their sun, they might be anywhere between 48 and 96 hour days. Penny really hoped they weren't ignored that long. They were all already getting hungry and thirsty. Staying close together, they slept in shifts, no one comfortable sleeping entirely unguarded after the message earlier that day.

Penny was starting to worry they'd been forgotten when the door opened again. Penny got to her feet immediately as the rest of the team gathered themselves. Cho, who'd been asleep, yawned and rubbed her eyes in confusion.

The black armored alien, if he was the same as the previous two times, stepped in alone and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a strange device, hexagonal in shape (of course) and about the size of a microwave.

The inside of it was golden and webbed with tinier combs. He ignored the humans at first, crossing to a wall and wedging his long, dangerous looking claws in between the edges of one of the panels.

He pulled down and it opened out into a surface, a table jutting from the wall. He set the device on it, and then pulled two more, smaller panels out closer to the ground, creating seats like barstools.

He turned to Penny, and then gestured at one of the seats, sitting in the other himself. Penny, unsure what was happened, sat down. As she watched, the alien reached under his chin and she saw him pressing at strange latches.

There was a hiss of decompression and he lifted off what she now realized was a helmet after all, not an exoskeleton. Penny's eyes widened as she saw the man underneath.

Like the glittering winged men who'd visited before, he was very close to human, enough so that Penny was caught off guard by how attractive he was. His skin was just as dark as theirs, but matte and smooth rather than iridescent.

His eyes weren't compound jewels, but seemed to mirror human construction, although when Penny looked closer she saw the iris was composed of tiny compound panels, their color a startling blue-purple shifting as it caught the light.

His long, black hair tumbled out of his helmet and down his shoulders, fluttering and stretching like it was alive. The thick strands seemed almost like micro braids. He had a powerful jawline and regal features that looked like they had been carved out of ebony. Penny couldn't help staring.

His hands, she noticed as he set his helmet on the table, also lacked a fourth finger, but were not as weirdly elongated. He was definitely the same species as they were, but also undeniably different, unless he was hiding wings under that armor too, and somehow she doubted it.

Was it merely a cosmetic difference, like skin colors on Earth, or sexual dimorphism perhaps? She could hear Cho behind her furiously taking notes, presumably wondering the same things.

Then the alien took a deep breath, tapped the device so that is glowed, and spoke.

"Speak." he declared.

"So they can talk!" Ian gave a surprised bark of laughter, "Were those guys yesterday just being assholes, then?"

The alien stood up abruptly, hissing and buzzing loudly. Ian shut up and sat down. Slowly, the alien returned to his seat, and looked at Penny.

"Speak," he said again, more gently, and gestured to the device.

"I think he only wants me to speak," Penny hazarded a guess, "Maybe they're assuming I'm the leader?"

As Penny spoke, she saw the device move, bringing up a screen. On it was a grid like the ones from Cho and Salome's research on the written language. With every word Penny spoke another cell on the massive grid was filled in.

"I think they might be building a lexicon," she hazarded a guess, leaning closer in amazement, "They must have some kind of advanced translation technology. He wants me to talk so they can learn more of our words. We're going to be here a while, buddy, there's over a million in the English language alone. Of course, only about 170,000 of those are currently in use, but still. You're going to need a bigger grid."

If there was one thing Penny could do, it was chatter. Chatter was a necessary skill for a diplomat. Being able to politely fill space at state functions and make small talk with important figures was ninety percent of most ambassadors’ jobs. So she talked.

She tried to vary the subject and her vocabulary to cover as much as possible, talking about anything she could think of, from the last movie she'd seen before they left to an awful teacher she'd had in middle school, to a vacation she hoped to take when they got home.

The team, only occasionally whispering to each other, waited patiently through Penny's monologue. The man in the black armor folded his hands and simply watched her with curious intensity.

After a time, he held up a hand for her to stop. Penny cut off in the middle of describing an Earth mountain range as he turned to the device, turning combs and pressing cells in an esoteric series of manipulations until it produced two, smaller devices. He handed one to her, and took the other himself.

It was a white, hexagonal shape the size of a poker chip, made of the same waxy substance as the walls. A golden light glimmered in the center. The alien pressed the chip to his temple and Penny imitated him, holding it to her helmet, curious what this would accomplish.

"Tone of inquiry," the alien spoke, his voice low and controlled, "Do you understand me?"

Or rather, Penny heard him saying words in an alien language, and a moment later seemed to hear them repeated in her head in English. She let go of the chip and it stayed in place.

"I can!" she replied with growing excitement, "I can understand you! How is this accomplished? Is it some kind of telepathic transmission? This is amazing! May I show my friend? Salome, you have to see this-"

"No." the man spoke quietly but with undeniable firmness. Salome, who'd been starting to stand, sat back down. "Tone of certainty. They must not touch the translator. They must not speak."

"Why?" Penny asked curiously, "Forgive me if I'm being rude, but nearly everyone on our planet speaks this way. We don't have another way to communicate."

"That is why this exception is being made," the man explained, his expression carefully neutral, "As Queen Regent of the invaders, you have been permitted the Queen's speech."

That opened up a host of new questions, but Penny was most focused on one.

"Invaders?" she repeated, "I'm not sure your machine caught the context of that world. We're not invaders. We're explorers. Diplomats. We only want to learn about you."

"False," his captivating eyes narrowed in anger, "You invaded. Lives were lost."

He said several other things, but the chip didn't seem to know enough yet to translate it. Penny's expression fell from delight to horrified confusion. Lives were lost? How could lives have been lost? They'd only been in this room since they'd arrived. If they'd already hurt someone, chances for peace seemed slim.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I don't understand. We didn't mean to hurt anyone. Who have we hurt?"

He said nothing, simply stared at her for a long, silent moment, like he was gauging her honesty. Penny felt stripped naked by those glittering eyes, which seemed to see all the way through her.

Then he stood, picking up his helmet and turning to leave.

"Wait!" she called, standing to follow him, "Before you leave, please, my team and I need the food and water on our ship."

"It will be retrieved," he said after a brief pause. He turned back to them, opening his hand and, after a moment, Penny realized what he wanted and put the translator chip in it.

"My name is Penny," She threw in as a last hope of making a connection, "Penny Allyn."

He frowned at her, the most dramatic emotion she'd seen on his face so far.

"Aiten Tau," he replied after a long moment, looking at her strangely.

"It's an honor to meet you, Aiten Tau."

Penny smiled, feeling like she'd made some progress, and let Tau leave, replacing his helmet as he closed the door behind him.

"What the hell was that?" Cho asked in a low, anxious voice, creeping closer, "What did he say?"

"He told me his name," Penny replied, still staring after the man. Then she shook her head to clear it, focusing on Cho and the others, "And more importantly, he promised to get the supplies from the ship so we won't starve."

"That's very good news," Rivera sighed in relief, "Maybe when he comes back, you can negotiate for some beds."

"That language is fascinating," Salome came closer to examine the translating device Tau had left of the table, "It wasn't like anything I've ever heard."

"Do you think it's still recording?" Ian asked, looking at the machine suspiciously.

"That would make sense," Penny peered at it curiously herself, "Collecting more words for the lexicon. There were clearly some gaps in what their translator could do. It kept tagging on tone indicators."

"Fascinating!" Cho looked ecstatic, "We gathered that tone was very important to them from the written language. There must be an aspect of it to the spoken as well."

"He called it the Queen's speech," Penny said thoughtfully, "And he seemed very protective of it. I think only certain members of their society are allowed to communicate verbally. That's why they got so upset at hearing us speaking."

"A taboo against verbal speech," Cho sank onto the stool Tau had vacated, looking like she might faint with delight, "Can you imagine? What could have caused that? What kind of cultural, environmental influences..."

They went over every line of Penny's brief conversation with Tau, wondering what they might have done to cause the aliens to think they were invaders.

A few hours later, the door opened again and Tau entered once more, carrying a cardboard box full of things from their ship. He handed Penny her translator token again.

"Tone of formality," Tau said as he presented it to Penny, "We collected anything that registered as organic. Tone of inquiry. Is your food present?"

Penny took the box and set it on the table to sort through it. The food packs and water bottles were there, but also many of their personal items and some potted plants and mealworms from the lab.

Penny was glad they hadn't brought along any rats or mice for testing. She held up the silver foil food packet and the water bottle to show Tau with a smile.

"Here they are!" she said brightly, "Thank you very much, Tau."

He flinched a little as she said his name and frowned again.

"Tone of politeness," he said a bit stiffly, inclining his head, "May it complete you, Penny Allyn."

He hesitated then, looking at her like he wanted to say something else. Penny waited expectantly, not sure what she wanted to hear from him. But then he took her chip, turned and left without another word.

Penny watched him go, feeling oddly disappointed. She shook it off, turning back to where the rest of the team was already digging through the box.

"Oh hey, they brought my books!" Cho said with a grin, lifting out a stack of paperback novels with scifi titles.

"I don't know how you read that stuff," Salome shook her head, "The science is terrible."

"Some of the concepts are really cool," Cho pouted, "The world building in the leather goddesses series is spectacular."

"At least, it's something to do while we're stuck in here," Rivera picked up Leather Goddesses and flipped it over to read the back, "Did you bring the first one in this series?"

"More importantly, is it safe to take off our helmets?" Ian asked, frowning.

"I think so," Cho answered, picking out a food packet, "The atmosphere is pretty similar to Earth's. The only real concern is potential pathogens and allergens. But since we've had such limited contact with the aliens and they're keeping us isolated and indoors like this, it's probably okay for a little while."

Rivera went first, pressing the button under her jaw to withdraw her helmet and taking in a few experimental breaths.

"Seems breathable," she said, "A little thin, like being up in the mountains."

After a few moments watching Rivera for a reaction, they all slowly removed their helmets as well. The room smelled strange, like sugar and warm plastic, and the air tingled on Penny's skin, a little too cold to be comfortable.

There was another long, uninterrupted period of waiting. Rivera calculated how much food they had and planned how they would ration it, assuming this planet wouldn't have food they would be able to eat. After all, if the human body could have fatal allergic reactions to perfectly edible plants from their own planet, what were the chances it would react well to food from a different solar system?

Luckily, the mission had planned for that and given them a surplus of food. As long as the aliens kept bringing it over from the ship, they'd probably be fine. Probably.

After prying at the walls some more, they discovered panels like the one Tau had produced the table from and found narrow, almost cradle like furniture which they took to be beds. They also found something which, with a little experimentation, they discovered to be a toilet, which was a relief to everyone.