Read Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance Online
Authors: Mika Tarkin
Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance
MIKA TARKIN
To those who know that love always wins.
Naeesha turned up the bottle of whiskey, cursed at it for being empty, and threw it across the room. It landed behind the chair in the corner, thudding against the drywall before landing with a clink among others that had come to similar fates.
Empty bottles presented her with two choices.
One: get more whiskey. Two: get sober.
Option one meant putting on clothes. Going outside. Presumably, talking to people. It also meant spending money, and due to a particularly cheerful week, she’d already drank most of it away. This presented another set of choices. Buy shitty booze, or go a little hungrier than normal until her next check came in. This wasn’t a particularly hard choice to make. Life is too short for cheap booze.
Naeesha never got around to considering option two. She hadn’t given it much consideration at all in the three years since she’d finished her service.
Her military pension didn’t cover much, but it would keep a roof over her head and a bottle in her hand for however long she had to keep playing this bullshit game called life.
She went around her cramped apartment, stumbling in the dark as she looked for something that would at least
pass
as pants. In the end, she settled on a pair of heavy khakis that had been part of her field uniform, long ago, and a matching pair of combat boots. As much as she’d hated that part of her life, the clothes were too good to let go.
Cash in hand and a cautionary scowl on her face, she walked out of her apartment and down to the busy street below. It was a nice enough day. The suns were out. Even though she’d been born on this world, the twin stars never seemed natural. She figured it was some leftover aspect of her human biology, still attuned to Earth. The rest of Alderoc seemed natural enough, even the shapeshifting alien race known as the Watchers who ruled this planet.
The air was warm, people were leaving her alone, and there were no signs of anything that would impede her mission to spend the rest of the day in a drunken stupor.
But good things never seem to last.
“Matron Naeesha!” somebody shouted from down the street.
She kept walking. Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, she didn’t care. Anyone calling her by her old military title was
not
somebody she needed to talk to.
“Matron!”
On the other hand, if they called her
Matron
one more time, she’d
have
to stop long enough to strangle them to death. She kept walking, hoping that if she continued to ignore her pursuer, then she wouldn’t have to murder anybody before lunch.
No such luck.
A pair of footsteps caught up with her. She kept walking while two men in military uniforms came up on either side of her. They were walking fast, out of breath. The man on her left spoke first.
“Matron Naeesha?”
“I’m going to tell you exactly once. It’s just Naeesha now.”
“We need to speak with you,” the other man said.
Both of their faces were red and they were skittish about something.
“It’s going to have to wait,” she replied.
“I’m afraid it can’t,” the first man said.
She started walking faster. Both men kept up.
“There isn’t anything on Alderoc so important that this conversation can’t wait until I’m nice and liquored up.”
She caught the men exchanging nervous glances with each other. The one on her right ran out in front of her and stopped. Naeesha tried to walk around him, but he grabbed her by the shoulder, not letting go even when she jerked away.
“It’s about Marko.”
Naeesha froze. Just for a fraction of a second. That name still held powerful sway over her. She snapped out of her momentary trance, broke the man’s hold on her shoulder, and continued sauntering down the street.
“Like I said. Nothing that can’t wait.”
The two soldiers kept following her to the one corner market where she still had some credit left. She walked inside, tipped her head to the man behind the counter, and walked to the back of the cluttered, colorful store.
“Hey, if you’re going to be following me like lost puppies, make yourself useful and ask where they keep the Halian whiskey.”
When the Halians came to Alderoc twenty-eight years ago, they’d brought exactly two things. Bloody war and the best liquor in the galaxy. As far as Naeesha was concerned, the two evened each other out.
While the soldiers went to the counter, she slipped out of the store and started for home. She got about a quarter mile up the street before she heard shouting and crowd noise as they both sprinted to catch up with her.
“What the hell, Naeesha? We know where you live. Why’d you walk all the way over there if you weren’t at least going to get anything.”
She reached into the Precept’s bag and pulled out the two bottles of whiskey she’d stashed there while she they were back in the store.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Hey!” the other man shouted. “You can’t go around stealing things, not even with your title.”
“I didn’t,” she said, holding one bottle under her arm while she cracked the seal of the other and took a long draught straight from the bottle. “He did. And I’m serious, you can have the title back. I don’t want it.”
The soldiers didn’t bother her with any more conversation until they slipped in behind her as she walked back into her cramped apartment.
‘You’ll have to stand,” she said, slouching into the sole chair, reaching for one of the few unbroken rocks glasses that she still had.
“Naeesha, we don’t want to waste any of your time. Believe me. Both of us know what you did for this city, for this planet, and we--”
“This sounds like you wasting my time.”
The Precept swallowed and took a deep breath.
“Look. We aren’t supposed to be here. But we both thought you deserved to know what was happening.”
“Pretty obvious what’s happening,” she said. “You’re going to tell me something I don’t want to hear, and then you’re going to get the fuck out of my home before I have to waste my whole night getting rid of your bodies.”
The other soldier spoke up. If her little joke had unsettled him, he didn’t show it.
“One of our assets has reportedly found Marko.”
“Didn’t know he was lost.”
“He walked off of his last command. That was almost three years ago. I thought you knew.”
Naeesha swirled the whiskey in her glass, picking a fleck of plaster from the crumbling ceiling above her out of the shimmering caramel liquid.
“Haven’t talked to that bastard since I retired. Walked off you said? That’s rich. Where’s he hiding out? I’d love to go and give him a piece of my mind.”
“Our reports are that he’s taken up residence with a small band of Halian fighters about two-hundred miles up the Anoanda River.”
The whiskey must have been stronger than she’d thought.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you right,” she said.
“Yes you did. Apparently he’s been working with one of their combat groups.”
“Good Gods,” Naeesha said. “What did you do to make him do that?”
The Precept shook his head.
“We don’t know. It was just out of the blue. Command thinks he’s gone native.”
‘Well,” the other soldier said, “we think it has something to do with what happened at the Dynasty compound.”
“
That’s
your best idea? What was that, twenty-six years ago now?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Naeesha looked down at the whiskey in her hand. Maybe the time
had
gotten away from her.
“Okay. Still. Not exactly my problem. Why do you think I need to know, or care?”
“Because you’re close to him.”
“Did you not hear what I said a minute ago? We didn’t exactly split on good terms.”
“But before that--”
She tipped the glass up, emptied it into her mouth, and hurled it at the Precept. The other soldier went to draw his sidearm, but he was too slow. She was on top of him, his arm pinned under her knee, her forearm on his throat.
“Stand down, Agent.”
The soldier stopped struggling and Naeesha got up to go look for another glass.
“Compared to anybody else on this world, you
are
close.”
“Go talk to Emir.”
The absolute silence in response told her anything.
“When?” she asked.
“About a year ago.”
“Shit.”
That was one less friend in the word. One less person to trust.
“Matron--”
“Dammit, quit calling me that. I’m not a soldier anymore.”
The two men traded nervous glances. The Precept spoke.
“Actually, Naeesha. That’s why we’re here. Tomorrow morning, two officers are going to come here and ask you to reenlist.”
“Ask,” she said sarcastically. Asking implied that she’d have a choice. She wouldn’t.
“They’re going to give you a mission, I don’t know what they’ll tell you officially, but the purpose will be to locate Marko and bring him back by whatever means necessary. If you fail to do so, they’ll flatten the entire jungle just to make sure he doesn’t cause any more problems for them.”
Naeesha felt her heart rise to her throat, pounding. Her fists tightened and her eyes narrowed and her blood ran cold.
“I don’t care,” she said. “Let them come. They can lock me up. Let them bomb Marko into oblivion. I don’t care. I’m finished. With the military, with Marko, and most of all, with both of you.” She abandoned her search for a glass and sat back down, drinking straight from the bottle. “Now kindly get the fuck out of my house.”
Both soldiers put their hats back on their heads, tipped them respectfully, and left without another word. Naeesha went to the window and watched them go. She waited there for five minutes, just staring out at the street.
When she was sure that they’d gone, she locked the door behind her, and went to the closet. Tucked away in the back corner, behind all of her clothes and the cluttered boxes of things she’d never had the heart to throw away, there was a bag.
Inside the bag was a canteen and enough dehydrated food to last for a month. A long forgotten roll of tightly folded banknotes. Two changes of traveling clothes. A fire starter. A six inch half-serrated blade, and a plasma pistol.
She slung it over her shoulder, climbed out of the alley window, and went to find the man that she had once loved.
