Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (10 page)

“Nobody wants to play anymore. They’re all too sad,” Kiran said.

Of course they were. They’d just lost hundreds of their friends, and it was Naeesha’s fault. She could have at least warned Marko and the tribe, but she’d said nothing, thinking that things would just work themselves out. When did they ever?

“They just need some time. They’ll be better soon,” Naeesha said.

“Will you play with me?” Kiran asked.

She envied the child and their ability to carry on in spite of everything. She wished that she could have borrowed just an ounce of their courage to keep living life to the fullest, no matter what terrors lay in lurking.

Much to both of their approval, the crowd in the combined camp was starting to liven up. A jaunty tune sprung up from the noise of a camp, and more melodies soon joined it. People began to drift towards the joyful sounds, already moving to the quick, springy beat.

Kiran did not drift, so much as fly.

Naeesha tried to keep up as the child wove through the crowd and found their way to the front of a makeshift stage where a Halian musician was warming up a stringed instrument that she’d never seen before. Their lithe red fingers danced across the polished wooden board that the strings were stretched over, and the musician plucked light, ringing notes that started to blend together into one unbroken song, like water trickling through a brook.

She stood entranced, awestruck by the beauty of the music and by the lilting sway of the crowd.

The smell of fresh cooked food began to fill the air as the kitchen fires began to burn. It would be a short celebration. If her sense of time was any good, the camp would soon go to the circles to meet, exchange news, and talk about current events. And hopefully, she thought, decide what to do once the sun came up.

All the same, people threw themselves into the revelry with abandon. If she could learn to be half as grateful for the joys of life as these people were, she didn’t doubt that she could live a happy life.

Naeesha couldn’t even begin to remember the last time she’d had that thought. A long time ago, maybe, when she’d imagined leaving the military with Marko and settling down together. But neither of them had ever entertained those fantasies seriously, and before too long, she stopped having them altogether.

But why not start again? Why not start living for the future, wondering
what could be?
After two days, she already felt welcome and at home with these people. It was impossible not to. There was no way to deceive herself into thinking that she was unappreciated or unwanted. She could feel every flicker of gratitude and affection and warmth that every single Hala felt towards her. It made her want to cry. Each and every one of them held her in higher regard than she could ever remember holding herself.

She wanted Marko. Wanted to tell him how she felt about him, to make sure that he didn’t have to go on wondering. If he still wanted to see her, of course. He was right. She could have stopped the massacre on the Halian camp if she’d just told him that the military knew where he was and was going to come for him. She wondered if the Halians would still dote their affection on her if they knew…

The suns finally went down and the stars came out. It was a beautiful night. The sky wasn’t quite dark yet, but she could still see a thousand stars. The faint disk of the galaxy stretched from horizon to horizon, a milky band that glittered with spectacular starlight.

She turned her attention back to the stage and the music and the dancing Halians. Kiran was lost in the crowd, whirling around, as happy as ever, she imagined.

Something in the sky caught her attention. She looked up, but didn’t see anything but the stars.

Again, she tried to let go of all the fear and worry and just enjoy the moment. To let the beauty wash over her. To surrender herself to the
here
and the
now
and let everything else go. It was behind her. There was no knowing what lay ahead. All she could do was open her hands and take whatever the universe gave her.

A dark blur crossed her field of vision again. She was sure of it this time, but she still couldn’t track anything against the night sky. Maybe it was a wisp of a cloud, or a small swarm of bugs or birds.

But there was a sense of lingering unease in her stomach. It didn’t belong to her, it was a discomfort that was shared by hundreds of Halians who must have noticed the same thing as her.

The metallic taste of adrenaline filled her mouth, though she didn’t know why. Her heart started racing.
What was this feeling?
It had been years since she felt it, and it seemed utterly out of place until she remembered the Halian soldiers.

It was battlelust.

A burst of light shot into the sky, streaking towards the horizon. And then another. She watched the brilliant green orb zip over the camp, and saw a nightmare frozen in the night sky. The plasma blast only illuminated it for a second, but that was long enough to see the cruel claws and curved fangs.

Wolfbats.

More shots rang out and she realized that the sky was boiling with them. Some of the soldiers connected with their targets, and the flying nightmares fell to the ground in crumpled, smoldering heaps. Gods, there must have been a thousand of them. With only fifty guns and fifty soldiers, there was no way that the camps would be able to defend themselves against the hungry swarm.

Back when she was flying strikes against Halian camps, she’d been sleeping in the barracks when she heard a scream. It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds between the first cry and when she made it outside, but by the time she got there, the only thing left of the Watcher on patrol was a few a handful of bones.

The Halians rushed to the center of camp and huddled in a tight knot. The soldiers formed a tight perimeter around them, shooting as fast as they could into the churning skies above them. Their plasma weapons were poorly suited to the task. It took a few seconds for the capacitors to recharge after every shot, and the wolfbats moved in fast, erratic arcs. Couple that with the fact that it was too dark to see what they were shooting at, and each soldier was lucky to bring down one bat a minute.

And with each passing minute, the bats were getting bolder. They started swooping so low that Naeesha could feel the gusts of their wings as they flew by. She drew her plasma pistol out of her bag. It had a better fire rate than the rifles, at the cost of its punch. But one shot should still have been enough to take out one of the gnashing monsters.

Her theory was confirmed on the first shot, when a brilliant green blur connected the barrel of her gun to a bat that had taken a dive at her. She kept her right eye closed tight, opening it for a fraction of a second at a time to keep her night vision strong. The world around her moved like a slideshow. She’d get a glimpse of soft black shapes against the stars, just a notion of a target really, and then a second later, it would be somewhere else. She tried to pick out targets in the middle of a glide and shoot ahead, anticipating their path.

The strategy was producing good results, but she was still missing more shots than she landed.

No matter how many bats seemed to fall from the sky, the swarm appeared to be just as strong as ever. And they were turning their attention to the huddled masses. A few of the soldiers turned their focus inward, picking off the bats that swooped in to try and rake at the frightened civilians.

The plasma fire came in so low that it was hitting the treeline, just barely clearing the heads of the soldiers on the other side of the pack. The bats were coming in closer, and so was the rest of the plasma fire. Before too much longer, the sky above the survivors was just a tangle of green streaks. Bats started swooping down and clawing at civilians faster than soldiers could pick them off. The tight crowds kept them from swarming anyone too fast, but the screams and the feelings of agony and terror told Naeesha that things were not going well for the people inside the circle.

One scream in particular stood out among the crowd. It was small and shrill. That of a child. Naeesha saw a bat rising up out of the crowd. It was pounding its wings but barely making any gains towards the sky. It was carrying a child.

“Heeeelp,” the child cried.

It was Kiran.

She lined up carefully and fired. The bolt went just high of the bat as it cleared the outside of the mob. Two more plasma blasts ripped by, also high. The bats were small targets to begin with, and trying to get a good shot while avoiding Kiran.

With the next shot, she cut things a little closer. The bat was approaching the treeline fast, and if nobody stopped it, the kindest thing that anybody could do for Kiran would be to kill them now.

The plasma blast went wide as the bat cut left. She had a window for one more good attempt, and then maybe a couple wild-ass prayers.

Another bat swooped down and started clawing at a woman next to her. Naeesha cursed, turned, and put a burning hole through the bat, taking a shot she couldn’t possibly miss over the long shot. She turned back, saw the faint black outline of the bat carrying Kiran away, and took a deep breath.

She exhaled slowly, steadying her hands, and sighting the black shape. She watched as it sank, then rose, sank, and then rose again with the steady beats of its wings. It sank again, she squeezed the trigger of her pistol and watched and listened for some sign of success. It took a moment for the green contrail to fade enough that she could see.

The bat was still flying. She could see Kiran kicking and flailing in its claws.

Then, a flash of red light, like a falling star. It tore through the bat and turned to the camp. It was a phoenix.

The huge burning bird swooped in low near the circle, and Naeesha watched as a small red figure tumbled to the ground, got up, and ran back into the crowd.

In a fiery flash, the Phoenix was back in the air, cutting through the sky in jagged streaks, tearing wolfbats out of the sky, ripping them apart, and letting their charred bodies fall to the ground. With its help, the soldiers pushed the bats off the survivors and back into the sky. Their numbers thinned, and just a few seconds later, the few remaining bats beat wing and fled with a salvo of plasma fire chasing after them.

The Phoenix crashed to the ground in the middle of camp and erupted like a supernova, the brilliant white blast temporarily blinding Naeesha. The world came back into a fuzzy focus, and she saw Marko’s darkened figure kneeling in a pile of smoking ash.

Reviving from his Phoenix form was without a doubt the worst thing that Marko had ever experienced. It didn’t work like other shifts. It harnessed the same power that allowed Watchers to self detonate and burned it on a slow fuse. The shift was over when the inferno had consumed the last bit of fuel, and, if everything went the way it was supposed to, Marko would shift back to his natural form among the spent shapeshifted body. If things went wrong, then there would just be a loose mound of ash. No Marko. But it was a risk he had to take. If the wolfbats swarmed him, they could bring down any of his other forms - even his dragon. Any attempt to attack a Pheonix, however, would be less successful.

But even when things went well, it was still an unpleasant experience. To make a long story short, it basically meant using every scrap of energy that he had, being lit on fire, dying from aforementioned blaze, and being dragged back to on the molecular level.

Not fun.

And while he was sure that Naeesha meant well when she ran across the camp center and threw her arms around him, he really wished that she hadn’t. His skin, his muscles, his bones, they were all freshly made and terribly sensitive. Just the slightest touch was like fire. Her inescapable vice-grip was unbearable.

She caught on fast and released him. He fell forward, coughing and choking up a bit of ash that he had inhaled with his first breath of new life.

“Are you okay? Are you okay?”

He realized that the deafening noise all around him had just been Naeesha trying to get his attention. His brain was still reprogramming itself, and it was having a hard time with sounds. He held up his hand, imploring her to stop, and thank Gods that she got his message.

Coughing up the last bit of ash, he struggled to his feet and promptly fell onto his ass, earning himself another jolt of pain. He rose again, this time, managing to stay up on both feet. Naeesha was standing in front of him looking very concerned.

He tried to speak, but his tongue and his brain weren’t quite on the same page. It took him a few tries, but he eventually figured it out.

“Is Kiran alright?”

Naeesha turned and he looked past her to see the child laid on their back with two healers working to patch up their wounded body. After a tense moment, Kiran started to toss and cry and do everything that a hurt child should have done. They had a nasty set of wounds on their shoulders from where the wolfbat had grabbed hold, but they would be okay.

“What about everyone else,” Marko asked.

“Okay, I think. Some people are pretty dinged up, but I think everybody made it.”

Marko looked around. There were dead wolfbats - or bits of wolfbats - everywhere. You couldn’t throw a godsdammed stick without hitting a dead godsdammed wolfbat.

Naeesha caught his gaze and gave him that look that she always gave him when he had a bad idea.

“No.” she said.

“What?”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Come on,” he coaxed.

“Marko. No.”

“Fine. More for the rest of us.”

He walked over to the crowd and went looking for somebody who knew how to cook up bat.

***

              “I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Naeesha said.

Marko scooped up another mouthful of the dark, rich stew with a piece of flatbread and devoured it.

“It’s really good.”

“I don’t fucking care. I’m not going to eat it.”

The cooks had really outdone themselves. Apparently the other tribe had been forced to do some creative cooking on their journey here, and this wasn’t the first time they’d had the opportunity to supplement their food stores with fresh wolfbat.

“Oh well,” he said, sopping up the last bit of stew from his bowl and setting it back down in front of him. “I hope there’s enough for seconds.”

There was plenty left for seconds. And thirds. And fourths, although Marko had the wisdom to stop after just two bowls of wolfbat stew. The cooks had several ingredients that were about to go bad, and obviously there was no shortage of bat meat to go around, so they’d made enough to feed the camp about a dozen times over.

“I told you Naeesha. The Halians really know how to make the most of a bad situation. You know that a bunch of Watchers just would have complained and griped and whined about how they had to clean up this whole big mess--’

“Ugh, Marko, please stop.”

“But no, the Halians just throw a barbeque and get on with their nights. I’m telling you.
This
is life.” Naeesha apparently didn’t like the idea of ‘life’ involving quite so much scavenging.

When he wasn’t tormenting her, he was keeping an ear to the conversation going around the room. In circle, he’d learned that the other tribe had been following the Wild as it swept across the planet and headed towards the capital. The way that they figured, it would wipe out everything, and then, with nothing left to destroy, lose steam and disappear.

They wanted to be there when it happened, to start rebuilding right away, and to do anything they could to help the survivors - if there were any.

The people from Marko’s tribe asked questions about how things had been near the portal. Answers varied. Some reported that there was still a great deal of danger there, mostly from Alderoc’s wildlife. Others said that it was clear and empty and that there was no reason to think that the plan wouldn’t work.

Unfortunately, nobody knew what things were like back on the Halian homeworld. Nobody had dared go back through for fear that things were just as bad as when they’d left.

Marko couldn’t get specifics on that. He knew that things on Hala were bad. Bad enough to justify living like
this
. But the Halians were reluctant to speak on it. As far as he knew, it was the
only
thing that they weren’t willing to talk about, and that scared the shit out of him.

All the same, if his people were willing to take the risk, then he trusted them.

Armed with new information, both tribes talked excitedly, weighing their options, reconsidering their previous plans. A few people seemed to have come firmly upon a decision, but most of them were still up in the air.

Either way, they would have to make a gamble. By the time anybody knew if they’d made the right call, it would be too late to change their minds.

Jintak and the leader of the other tribe stood and the room went silent. They wasted no time getting to the issues at hand.

Anyone who wanted to go back to Hala could go with Jintak. They would leave in the morning, and could expect at least two weeks of hard travel. There were no promises that they would make it to the portal, and no promises of what they would find if they did.

The other Hala would be headed for Alderoc. His promises were the same. The leaders said no more.

Over the next few minutes, every Halian in the dining hall shuffled around, separating themselves into two camps. The groups were mostly the same as they had been when both tribes marched into the camp earlier in the day, but both groups had gained and lost a few members.

The room turned bittersweet as people said goodbye to old friends, and greeted new ones. Kiran was among those that Marko would have to say goodbye to. Naeesha, true to her word, would be continuing onward to the portal.

Farewells were sweet and short. Just a few minutes later, the dining hall was emptying out, and everyone was returning to their tents to prepare for the next day’s journey, and to rest.

“Know any secret hiding places around here?” Naeesha asked.

Marko turned back to her with a smile.

“I’m afraid not. What about you?”

“Nope. I’m new here.”

“Well, I don’t think we need to go off hiking in the woods,” Marko said, pulling her into the darkened space between two tents. “There are plenty of places to hide right here.”

Naeesha’s hand settled on his chest, crawled down his stomach, and kept going. A small group of Halians walked by, chattering excitedly. One of them turned and caught Marko’s eye as they walked by.

“Maybe this isn’t the best place after all,” he said.

“Maybe we ought to rest up anyway,” Naeesha added. “I’ll have you all to myself tomorrow.”

They went back to the tent and packed their bags. Space inside the huge tent was at a premium, so they pulled their sleeping nests together and set their packs outside to make space for others. Once they were ready to head out as soon as the first sun came up the next morning, they lay down together and watched the fire.

Marko was amazed at how perfectly Naeesha still fit into his arms, how her curves seemed to lock against his.
This
was what he wanted.
This
was what was worth living for. He breathed in her scent and drank in the moment. The way that the orange firelight danced on her dark skin produced a color that he would never see again in his whole life. The sound of her breath - distinctly hers, but something he would never hear exactly the same way after this.

If this moment couldn’t last forever, at least the memory could.