Unexpected

  Unexpected: An Alien Romance

  Pippa Jay

  Published by Pippa Jay, 2017.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  UNEXPECTED: AN ALIEN ROMANCE

  First edition. October 17, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Pippa Jay.

  Written by Pippa Jay.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Unexpected: An Alien Romance

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  Also By Pippa Jay

  With thanks to:

  With thanks to my fellow crewmates at Spacefreighters Lounge for their support and the inspiration, and to my editor Diane Dooley and my proof-reader Laurel Kriegler for their sharp eyes and infinite patience.

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  Unexpected: An Alien Romance

  Warmth seeped into her as she stretched. Winter was over. The shift in temperature, no more than half a degree, had been enough to trigger her waking and set her metabolism going at a marginally faster rate. Which meant she now needed to feed. She needed the light.

  She vented some of the waste gases that had built up inside as she lay dormant, losing heat with it but conscious of sunlight filtering through her shell. She pulled in the moisture of melting ice crystals from the surrounding earth, and expanded. Under the steady pressure of her increasing form, the crust of dirt, ice, and her own dried secretions cracked into a thousand fragments like the eggshell that had birthed her so long ago. Relieved to have survived the cold months of darkness, she rolled herself from the depression she’d dredged for herself in the soft valley bottom, and spread herself across the sun-warmed rocks. Inside she hummed. Light bled over her surface, taking away the chills, and the photosynthetic cells in her skin drank it up and fed energy throughout her body. Nothing was as sweet as that first kiss of sunlight after winter.

  She basked until the soothing warmth became a prickle. The light was too strong now. Her body sang with energy, and the familiar itch of restlessness. Time to move. To explore. To reacquaint herself with the world she loved. Within moments she was far from her hollow, delighting in the fresh flavors of the surface where storms and the odd traces of star fall had stirred up the dirt and dust or added bursts of new elements to savor.

  She hesitated as she crossed recent trails in the rock made by two more of her kind. Each going its own separate way as was their habit, and the urge to follow either one of them tugged at her. She forced herself to let go of the desire. Her fellows preferred their solitary lifestyles unless the need to mate drew them together. Or they needed her help in particular. Memories of those brief unions kept her comfort during the long cycles spent alone. None of them would ever stay, and she had long since given up asking any of them to, finally realizing her own unwanted peculiarity regarding company.

  As she undulated across the rock, her skin picked up trace elements and nutrients essential to her survival. Strength flooded her. Then something odd stopped her in her travels, and she quivered at the sudden uncertainty.

  A strange thing lay in the valley, tasting of metal and fire, of alien energies and auras. The rocks around it had been scorched and blackened. It was bitter and raw, unsettling. She turned all her senses on it and sampled every bit of it.

  Ancestral memories—passed down from her progenitors for time uncounted—remembered unexpected arrivals like this. The taste of that particular metal and the rare elements on its surface. The acrid fluids that had combusted. Unusual energies that produced a kaleidoscope of aural patterns she couldn’t make sense of. Once, long ago, a similar object had fallen from the sky and taken soil, air, and water samples before leaving, and the inherited memories had kept her watching the skies for a possible return. But in contrast to that ancient visitor, this new thing felt broken. Energy and substances bled from it as if its very life source spilled out, only to be wasted on the ground and poison its surroundings.

  Curiosity possessed her. A new phenomenon for her to taste. To investigate. She rolled across the valley floor, shying from the heat and bitterness of the burned rocks but moving ever faster toward the alien visitor.

  The outside of the object curved upward, mostly smooth, unfamiliar metal with the odd protuberance, hairline seams, and a thin veneer of atmospheric elements that she hadn’t encountered for a long time. Not since the last star fall many winters before. While all the others of her kind had avoided the area with revulsion, she’d spent every sunlit moment that season analyzing and exploring each atom and molecule, memorizing them. Wondering what it was, where it had come from, what it might have seen if it had been sentient. What it might be like out among the stars, or if there were new worlds beyond them. She poured across the top of this newcomer, eager to learn it, and touched a gap in the visitor’s shell that was venting gases.

  Hmmm... The escaping vapors were richer in oxygen than her planet’s atmosphere, but far less complex. Perhaps losing these and ingesting the thinner, complicated gases surrounding it were something that had hurt it and prevented it leaving again?

  Despite the less than pleasant flavor of the fumes, she eased herself inside through the gap, hesitating at the vast space that opened beneath her. This strange creature either wasted much of its bulk on emptiness, or perhaps it was some kind of egg like the one she had hatched from.

  She extended herself downward until she could touch the bottom. As an afterthought, she detached a small portion of herself to seal the gap she had entered through in the hope it would help this visitor. Inside, more unfamiliar objects and flavors. More excitement. And in the center, something that pulsed with life, but also with pain. A living being. A wounded one.

  She moved toward it, slowly, testing as she went. Despite its odd form, the obvious damage, and the strangeness of its thoughts in a miasma of auric colors, she felt a link. This was a sentient being, something that could feel and think as she could, though in ways unknown to her. She sensed its pain, how its life-force faded with each passing moment.

  A dying sentient being. Sadness rippled through her. She couldn’t let it die, not without trying to save it. She crept forward, extending a few sensitive cilia to analyze the creature’s surface. Soft, yet far more solid and inflexible than her fluid form. Warmer too. It had a kind of skin like hers, but as her tendrils thinned enough to penetrate its outer coating, its internal composition was far different. Hard calcium support structures, iron- and oxygen-rich fluids. Complex proteins. Fewer nerve endings than her super-tactile structure, but all flaring urgent pain messages that jolted into her. She shuddered, but kept the physical link. Unlike her kindred, there could be no merging of forms to heal this being. She must adapt her methods and go cautiously to save it.

  Steeling herself for further contact, she wrapped herself around the being. Instantly pain flickered and stung her skin. The creature shuddered in her embrace, a large part of its upper body heaving in and out in a desperate, irregular fashion. Something vibrated inside it, and deeper within another strange structure pulsed rapidly with an odd falter.

  Where do I begin? A moment of uncertainty and panic swamped her. Nothing about this being was familiar. She cradled the broken body of the entity, strangely rigid and yet so fragile. She could feel its life energy bleeding away into the ether, crimson fluid seeping from gashes in its physical structure. Pain flared, red and white-hot bursts of aura that burned her.

  I need to know more. She reached for the being’s mind, and a flood of unfamiliar, frightening images flamed through her mind. An explosion, sudden agony
, the hard yank of gravity that had pulled the craft from space to crash onto this planet. Panic. Hopelessness. Desperation.

  Dying... She shuddered. It was more than the damage this being had sustained. Something was slowly poisoning it. She probed through its thoughts, trying to find an answer. What was harming it more than the injuries alone?

  The escaping gases... She extended more fine cilia into the creature, and reached for a gap in the creature’s upper body. Air moved in and out in ragged gasps. This being needed the gases that had been bleeding from its craft, and what had entered from outside was toxic to this form.

  She had already sealed the gap, but now she tested the atmosphere of the craft. The levels of gases from outside were minimal—it was the amount already breathed in by the creature that was harming it. She extended her reach farther inside its body, finding the fatal elements throughout its system.

  She focused, and drew the toxins from it, absorbing them into herself. Once removed, the residual poisons in the atmosphere should do no further harm, and she could retain the ones she was removing until they could be safely expelled outside.

  As she worked, the being wrapped in her embrace relaxed and its breathing smoothed out. It was working! Its heartbeat—the thunder inside its chest—slowed to a less frantic rate. But even with the poisons purged, she could still sense the terrible pain and ever-fading essence of the being. Still so much to do.

  Every part of her analyzed the creature, using the thoughts and memories taken from its head. The fluid leaking from it was blood, an essential substance. She felt the gaps in the creature’s skin from which the blood came, and used more cilia to close those wounds to stop the loss. Then she tasted the blood. A simple enough biochemical substance. She drew a sample deep inside herself and replicated it, pumping it back into the being’s vital pathways.

  The ragged flare of his aura softened and reformed. She hummed to herself. It was working. She threaded herself deeper through the being.

  Yoran. My name is Yoran...

  A tremor ran through her. The being had spoken to her. Just a faint thought connecting to her own, but the first sign that it could communicate with her.

  Rest easy, Yoran. You are safe. I will heal you. Elated, she set to work repairing the shattered calcium structures within his body and the organs leaking blood, sealing wounds and fixing tears with renewed hope.

  I WILL HEAL YOU... The voice, soft as starlight, caressed his thoughts and held the pain at bay. He floated in golden light, warm and comforting. The terrible agony and fear had faded to dim and distant aches, as if it had been nothing but a nightmare. He’d never felt so at peace or so safe. This was heaven.

  The thought stabbed into his mind, jolting him from the calm. He remembered his ship rocking under weapons fire, shaking him in his seat like some helpless creature in the jaws of a predator. The blare of emergency sirens, and the irresistible yank of gravity pulling his ship downward in a crazy, out of control spiral. The impact that had shattered every bone in his body and left him choking in a toxic atmosphere.

  Cold bled through him, and yet even facing those memories didn’t shake him out of the euphoria. Damn it, I must be dead. I was dying. And now I don’t care about any of it. That wasn’t normal. If he was alive he should be in pain, his craft a wreck around his equally broken body. He should be panicking over being stranded on an alien planet, while at the same time terrified his family would catch up with him. Especially dad. Yoran shuddered. Oh, frick. If he wasn’t dead, his father would surely kill him.

  Relax. The voice that wasn’t really a voice poured more warmth and reassurance over him, and what little fear he’d felt through the fog clouding his mind disappeared.

  Why worry? I’m dead. Nothing else can hurt me now. Except he was still thinking and, judging by faint twinges in his body despite the soothing warmth, still feeling. Remembering. Conscious.

  Yoran opened his eyes, and white moonlight shone through the fractured plazglass of his front screen. Craggy spires of dark gray rock rose to either side of his view. The landscape was a stark, unfriendly monochrome, with no sign of possible civilization or help.

  The euphoria sank into cold, gray despair. He hadn’t dreamt it. He’d crashed into that lifeless lump of rock he’d been trying to avoid as Chevelle’s siblings had pursued his ship and shot him down. Hell knew if he could take off again.

  He groaned and closed his eyes, wanting to sink back into that sweet cloud of ignorance he’d surfaced in.

  Wait a minute. If I crashed and was in so much pain, why am I okay now?

  His eyes crept open again, and he dared to look down, half expecting to see the mangled mess of his body that somehow hadn’t woken him in agony. Instead, something the color and consistency of mercury wrapped his body like a skin suit, the soft gleam of moonlight undulating over it as it pulsed in time with his own heartbeat.

  “Seksumi!” Yoran leapt to his feet, ignoring the sudden rip of pain through his body as his legs threatened to give under him. But the strange wrap of silver simply moved with him. Worse, he felt it creeping up his neck, warm but smothering.

  “Get the hell off me!” He swiped at it, scattering globules of it across the spaceship. He backed away, heart pounding, still trying to swat it from his body. As he retreated, the globules reformed into domed beads on the floor and ran together, forming a larger and larger puddle of metallic liquid that kept coming for him.

  “No!” Yoran yanked the weapon from his belt, and fired repeatedly into the silver mass. Parts of it exploded, scattering splats in all directions that simply ran down the walls like water to rejoin the mass. But now it had stopped trying to approach him, forming itself instead into a defensive huddle.

  “Get off my ship! Get away from me!” His hand shook as he kept the gun aimed at it. It rolled a few centimeters toward him, and he fired again. This time the silver menace, in a frightening burst of speed, shot up the wall of the ship and squeezed through a hole in the ceiling to disappear.

  Yoran collapsed, his shaky legs no longer able to hold him up. Panting, he leaned back against the wall and tried not to throw up.

  HER SKIN STINGING FROM the painful energy the being had shot into her, she scuttled from the ship, still leaving a fragment of herself to block the hole. Only when the ship was far from her senses did she stop, quivering, the horrible burning energy still prickling across her surface.

  She pulled into herself until she was nothing more than a tight, dull ball of misery. Why did he hurt me? I was helping him. He wasn’t angry before.

  Sorrow turned her dark and cold, and she rolled back and forth in her distress, aching.

  He hates me. Why was he so afraid of me? She wanted to shrivel up and die. No one had reacted to her like that before. He had been so repelled and shocked by her, as if she was some horrible monster. Was that how he’d seen her? Everything had been fine until he’d looked at her. Appearance meant nothing in her world, where all contact was touch and taste and the shifting colors of auras. Her shape, her form, had been irrelevant.

  But this new creature is visual. And you thought him as strange in form as you no doubt are to him.

  Her emotions flickered. Yes, she had thought him very odd on their first meeting. But not hideous or repulsive. Just different.

  Alien. Totally alien. She tried to analyze his thoughts and feelings from the instant he’d become conscious and responded to her presence so violently, breaking their bond. He had no idea that she’d been helping him. All he’d been aware of on waking was some unexpected, unfamiliar thing wrapped around his body that, to his mind, could only be hostile. How could she possibly convince him otherwise when she could only communicate with him by touch? He’d never let her near him again.

  Maybe if I looked more like him, he’d be less afraid. She continued to ebb and flow in the confines of her hollow as she considered the idea. Her fluid form meant she could assume any shape, fit through any space, and test her surroundings in ways this human could n
ot understand. Surely she could approximate his shape?

  But he was male, as she’d found from his memories, and she was most definitely female. True, a human form was alien to her whatever the exact gender, but something within her rebelled at the idea of taking a male form. She sifted through his memories some more. There were beings he identified as female, and feelings of affection, sometimes frustration and irritation, were associated with them. She kept looking, until a female that sent a flare of associated heat and euphoria overcame her. This one had such strong emotions attached to it: longing, something deeper and stronger than affection. Desire. The human had longed for this female more than life itself.

  He would surely accept someone in her image? Doubt set her quivering. If she got this wrong, he would hurt her again. Yet without her, he might not survive, and all her effort would have been for nothing. Failure was unacceptable.

  She analyzed the memory of the woman, the curves of her form and the flowing tendrils from her head. A warmth grew inside her. While taking another form scared and repelled her in some ways, she could almost feel the pull of attraction to this one that echoed what she’d taken from the human. There was an alien beauty to her unlike anything she had encountered before. Soft, rounded curves that drew her more than the harder, almost angular planes of Yoran’s form.

  I can try... She drew herself in and then up, expanding into a tall column. But as she grew, she felt the tug of gravity increase the farther up she went, until at last her upper section collapsed and she fell back into herself. For a moment she swished around her hollow in the stone, frustration a prickle over her skin. Her form was too fluid to keep such a tall, elongated shape. At best, she could maintain a shape perhaps a fifth the height of the human, and somehow that would not do. If she was taking this form, she wanted to match him for size, to be at his level.