Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (19 page)

Naeesha woke up on a Watcher ship. A transport shuttle, by the sound of it. She was gagged, bound, blindfolded, and strapped down to a seat. Whoever had got hold of her wasn’t taking any chances with letting her get the best of them.

They weren’t airborne for long.

The shuttle touched down and right away, she heard the cargo ramp lower and somewhere between four and six soldiers climbed aboard and made their way towards her. They unstrapped her from the chair and pulled her up, carrying her by the arms and legs like a prize stag.

They dumped her unceremoniously onto a patch of hard dirt and left. She struggled to get up to her knees, but the task was impossible with her arms and legs both tied.

She took deep breaths and tried to keep calm. She had no idea what exactly was going on, but as far as she could tell, somebody had ambushed her in the hills outside of camp, took her to an airstrip, and flew her.. somewhere.

There was no way of saying how long she’d been out, which meant that there was no way of saying how long she’d been in the air, or where she could be. That didn’t really matter right now.

Because it also meant that the military knew where Marko and the tribe was. It meant that they had aircraft within operating range of their camp. And it meant that she needed to find a way to help them.

And that started with getting herself out of her immediate situation. She didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what she would do if she
did
manage to get escape, but she didn’t worry about that. Everything was out of her control until she got out of her bindings and had a chance to take her bearings.

The easiest place to start would be her wrists. She was reasonably certain that she was cuffed with standard issue restraints, and that was a point in her favor. Once, during a particularly foolish affair, she’d had Marko handcuff her as part of a little role play. Halfway through the fun and games, the base commander stormed into their barrack looking for a grunt to order around.

Marko had the good sense to throw a blanket over her, but not the foresight to undo her cuffs. The commander, who had been working with soldiers for nearly fifty years, didn’t bother asking why Marko was standing around ass-naked, he just asked how soon Marko could be ready to fly a sorty.

Being a clever man, Marko told him he needed five minutes - a lie - but one that would have given him time to fix her situation.
Would have,
if the commander had left the barracks instead of standing at the door watching Marko get ready.

He was gone for six hours.

Naeesha was only cuffed for twenty-two minutes. She was clever too, and after eighteen minutes of looking for something to disengage the cuffs with, and four minutes of fumbling, she was free.

Ever since then, she made a habit of keeping a few hair pins clipped to her clothes.

She pulled her feet back until she could reach a pin from her sock, and got to work. Unfortunately, the military had done something that it rarely did, and upgraded the cuffs. Naeesha swore under her breath as she tried to figure out exactly how the restraints were put together, and what it would take to break them.

After four minutes of fumbling, she wasn’t any closer to picking the lock.

Thankfully, that wasn’t her only plan.

Just as often as the military keeps old hardware around long after its heyday, it also has a terrible habit of replacing the old gear with cheap, ineffective alternatives.

Naeesha rattled the chain links of her cuffs, trying to jostle them into position. If she was lucky, she’d be able to get a little kink in the chain and get one of the links stuck in the others.

It just so happened that she
did
get lucky (and it was about godsdamned time, if you asked her), and with a good torque of her wrists, the kinked link snapped open and her wrists were free.

Her captors had the good sense to take away the knife the knife on her belt, but they were too hasty or too stupid to check her boots. The blade that she kept against the inside of her right lower leg was small, but it was sharp, and it only took a few seconds to be free of the rope around her knees and ankles.

She put the blade back in her boot and felt around her neck to see how her captors had done the hood. As she feared, it was belted around her neck and padlocked, and would be a proper pain in the ass to remove.

Of course, she didn’t have to remove the belt, because she could cut the thin canvas loose and be completely functional. She’d have a ridiculous piece of jewelry until she got a hold of some bolt cutters, but that’s the price you pay for getting caught with your pants down.

Naeesha reached back into her boot and grabbed hold of her knife.

“You can stop right there,” said a familiar voice.

Someone walked to her side and undid the bindings around her neck and pulled the hood over her head. It was the base commander from the destroyed forest.

“Precept Naeesha,” he said. “So good to see you again.”

              They left without Naeesha. Marko tried not to worry. She was perfectly capable of following the trail that they would leave. This was, of course, assuming that she was
able
to get back to camp, but Marko would not allow himself to believe anything to the contrary.

Of all of the things that he did not allow himself to think, there was one possibility that scared him the most.

While he was waiting all night for Naeesha to return, he had plenty of time to think. And one of his thoughts had been of the Husks, specifically the cells where they’d been kept, and even more specifically on the claw marks on the walls of those cells. The way he figured, the poor creatures must have been trapped in those cells for a long time.

So how did they get out?

One possible answer was that the medical compound was automated and for some reason decided that the best response to living creatures around was to unleash thousands of murderous monsters, but it seemed like there was a more likely option.

It seemed possible to Marko that somebody knew that the Halians were down in those tunnels, and didn’t want them to get out. Someone who didn’t want to start a fight themselves as long as there was somebody to do their dirty work for them. Someone like the Alderoccan military.

There was a small flaw in his plan. If the military were here, looking for them, and trying to kill them, then why didn’t they? The tribe was more vulnerable now than ever and they were getting closer to escaping Alderoc with each passing second. Why wait to launch an attack?

No. It seemed more likely than not that the military just wanted the Halians gone, and wouldn’t risk losing more soldiers and equipment trying to stop them if they were already on their way out. It didn’t serve their best interests. It didn’t make sense.

The simplest - and most likely - explanation was that Naeesha had simply gotten lost. After all, she was on strange terrain, and didn’t have a compass or any other navigation equipment to speak of. The hills and the jungle can be confusing, and it’s not hard to get turned around.

Also, if that were the case, she’d stop wandering and try to get back to the first place she realized that she’d been lost. That’s what she’d been trained to do, which meant that’s what she
would
do.

And as soon as Marko had seen the tribe safely to the compound, he would go back and look for Naeesha. She wouldn’t be alone for more than a day. He would fly over the area around the camp in his dragon form - that would get her attention. Then he’d shift into a hawk and watch for her attempt to get his attention.

It was a good plan, and it would work, and the worst case scenario was that he’d see her no later than the next morning.

At least, that’s what he told himself.

The mood in the tribe was high and happy. Marko couldn’t remember the last time that it had felt so good just to be around them. Certainly since the massacre back after Naeesha had joined them, and possibly for weeks before that. He only wished that she could be here. To share the feeling, and so that he could stop worrying and start enjoying himself.

To keep his mind off of things, he walked with Kiran and Rakkan and listened to one of the elders tell stories about Hala. She spoke plainly about the dangers that lay ahead of them. Blistering heat in the day, freezing cold nights. Food and water was scarce, and the tribes moved often to keep in good supply of what they needed.

But, she said, on Hala, there had not been a fight between tribes in as long as anyone could remember. When there was need, others helped to provide. Although they moved often, they always knew where they were going, and they never feared that they would walk all day, only to find nowhere to camp.

She warned that life on Hala would not be easy. It was a cruel and uncaring world, and the planet was not as giving or forgiving as Alderoc. But uncaring is one thing, and hateful was something else entirely. And for everything that Hala was, it was never hateful. And that, she said, is why they were going back, and why they would be happier there.

This news was bittersweet to both Marko and Rakkan, who had gotten used to the bounties of Alderoc’s natural world, and learned to live with the realities of their destructive neighbors. But neither of them felt it as hard as Kiran. The child was heartbroken to imagine a world without trees and birds and fish and grass. They were almost beyond consoling. The three adults took turns trying to comfort Kiran, telling them about all the good things they could expect on their new home, but none of it helped. Finally, after expending most of their tears, Kiran looked up and caught their breath, holding back their sobs long enough to ask a question.

“Is Naeesha going to come with us?”

Marko looked down at the small child, wondering the same thing himself.

“Yes,” he said. “She’ll be there.”

One thing was immediately clear. The Alderoccan bastards were just as smug as ever. The big difference between now and ever, was that they had every reason to be. They knew where the tribe was, they knew its size, they know how many fighters had how many weapons.

The commander smugly told Naeesha this with his smug face and his smug attitude and probably would have died from acute smug poisoning if that was a real thing that could happen to people who were such smug assholes.

The Alderoccans refitted Naeesha with new restraints and thoughtfully disarmed her, even taking most (but not all) of her hair pins. The fact that she still had her hairpins was of little consequence, since she couldn’t use them to pick the locks anyway. But with as little shit as she had going for her, it seemed prudent to count what she
did
have, even if that was only the clothes on her back, a few loose pins, and a desire to strangle the commander that could not be contained by any mere mortal.

Everything else, she had to admit, fell neatly into the Alderoccan’s column. She didn’t know what their plan was, but she the sense that they had one. She didn’t know exactly how big their forces were, or what kind of equipment they were using, but it wasn’t hard to tell that they had bigger guns and more people behind them.

The only hope she had for Marko and the tribe was that they were smarter, more agile, and more driven. Of course, all of those attributes are only good as consolation, and aren’t widely known for winning fights. When you hear about the “small scrappy bad that stood up against greater forces” it’s usually followed by “and fought valiantly before succumbing to their inevitable defeat”.

She didn’t mean to be such a downer about it, but she was good at finding the problems and attacking them. Only problem was that she saw a lot of problems and not a whole lot of points of attack.

But she knew she’d find them. After all, it was that or certain annihilation. Maybe not for her, literally. But almost certainly for Marko, and almost certainly for the Halians. If she knew the military as well as she thought, she figured that they would keep her around long enough to make an example of, and might even lock her up for life instead of killing her, just to show how kind and merciful the high command was.

Of course, she’d prefer if they killed her, just not before she had a chance to kill them first. And she just knew in her heart of hearts that if she was very patient, and looked very closely, her chance would present itself. What she did with it was all that mattered.

***

              It turned out that she didn’t have to wait as long as she’d thought. A buzz swept through the Alderoccan camp and told her that their attack was imminent. The commander saw this as an opportunity to come back and wax philosophical about the nature of conflict, by which she really meant “talk shit and give her more reasons to rip his still-beating heart out of his chest”.

He informed her that “the savage Halian scum” was walking right into the military’s trap. That he would take “every last red-skinned man, woman, and child prisoner without firing a godsdamned shot” and after that he’d “let the Gods sort them out”.

That was a little expression that state-sponsored murderers like to use to distance themselves from the horrors that they commit. Naeesha had no doubt that the sorry excuse for a man before her intended to kill her friends, in the commander’s own words “starting with your traitorous boyfriend”.

She kept her mouth shut. It was the only way that she could keep her cool. That was one of the few things she could control right now, and she couldn’t afford to give it up just to spar with the shit stain of a Watcher.

He grew bored with her soon enough, and she turned her attentions towards the base, looking for any sign of weakness that she could take advantage of. Not that she knew exactly how she was going to get out of the restraints. She’d been casually testing them since the second the guards put them on her, but she’d found no hope of getting them off just yet. Still, she held out hope.

Chiefly, because one of the first unwritten rules of warfare is this: if you cannot defeat your enemy, keep moving, stay alive, and they will defeat themselves.

And true to life, not twenty minutes after the troops started mobilizing, a low-ranking guard came over and began to undo all of her bindings except for her wrist and ankle chains. It wasn’t much, but it was a good start. Just as she was starting to wonder what the occasion was, the command reappeared.

“Follow me,” he said. “We’re going to go give you back to your friends.”