Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (4 page)

Naeesha took her time breaking camp. She was getting slower. Her fault for pushing so hard the last few days. That, she thought, and three years of slowly killing herself with booze. Five days of forced sobriety were taking their own toll. She went through vicious cycles of sweats and chills. Simultaneous restlessness and exhaustion. She didn’t want to eat, in spite of throwing up most of what she’d tried to. And the damn headache.

It had been a bad few days, but it was getting better. Or at least she was getting used to it.

She checked the map as she was pacing back and forth across the small clearing she’d camped in the night before. The easy part of the trek was over. A fishing boat had taken her the first hundred miles. Or, she should say, “a fishing boat”. She didn’t ask the man what he was doing so far from the capital, just as he kindly refrained from asking why she was looking to go so far up river. It wasn’t either of their business, and besides, the less they both knew, the better.

After the day-long boat ride, she’d walked for four days along the river. The wide, flat floodplains had provided a good path for her to follow. The weather had been on the cool side of comfortable and aside from a brief rainshower a couple of days ago, she’d stayed warm and dry. But the flat forest ground was giving way to foothills. She’d watched the sun rise over the tips of the Andar Mountains that morning, and knew that she’d be climbing into them sometime tomorrow.

It would be downhill from there, which was not to say it would be easier. The Andar were a sort of line of demarcation. This side was under Alderoccan control. Not even the animals crossed the mountains. To do so was to risk the fierce and unmerciful hand of the military.

But once she went over the top, things were different. Untamed. Unpredictable. And it wasn’t just the animals. There were Halians there. Halians, and the horrors that they’d brought to this world. She tried not to think about it. Alderoc was a big planet, and after nearly thirty years of fighting, there weren’t a lot of Halians left.

Then again, if her source was right, then she was
looking
for the red skinned bastards. Well, she was
looking
for Marko.

It didn’t make any sense. They’d fought the Halians for so long. And when retirement came up and she’d gotten out, Marko decided to stay on.
He’d
chosen to keep fighting. That was only three years ago. What the hell happened to make him change his mind? The two Watchers from the military didn’t know. That was obvious. Neither did her source.

He’d had a theory, which he didn’t hesitate to share. He said that Marko had been captured. Lost his mind. Caved to the brainwashing and the torture and thought he was one of them now.

She didn’t believe it. Marko was stronger than that. And anyway, the Halians didn’t take prisoners.

They were formidable warriors, even by Watcher standards. Cold, cruel, and vicious. They’d been the ones that annihilated her unit back at the Dynasty compound so many years ago. Her friends hadn’t stood a chance. The Halian warriors were unstoppable. Once they tasted blood, they kept fighting until everyone was dead. Even their own people. They were volatile. Dangerous. And they had Marko.

Naeesha wasn’t completely sure what had driven her to make this trek. Wasn’t quite certain what she’d hoped to get from it. Her and Marko were done. Had been for a while. He’d made that clear when he chose the military over her. Made it clear with every day that he didn’t try to get in touch.

But she couldn’t stand the thought of him dying out here. Not before she could say goodbye.

There were parts of her that wanted things to be over between her and Marko. Parts of her that wanted to let him go and move on. She couldn’t. When the Precept and his assistant had come to her apartment and said his name, something reignited inside of her. She didn’t know what it was, but she wasn’t going to let Marko die before she had a chance to figure it out.

She was going to find him, and she was going to get some answers.

She had no idea what she would say when she did find him. It occurred to her that she might try the truth, but truth was always messy.

Unfinished business.
That was what she’d call it. She wanted to know why he’d left. Why he’d kept fighting. Why he’d stopped. And maybe, if it came down to it, she’d find a way to ask if he still thought about her. They’d spent twenty-five years together. Their relationship in that time had been… unstable, to be generous, but it
had
been something. And then, overnight, it was over. She thought about the last time she saw him, at a hotel in the capital. She’d fallen asleep beside him and woken up alone. His last words to her had been, “did you see where my comm went?”. They didn’t even tell each other goodnight.

If nothing else, she wanted to give him a piece of mind for that.

But Marko wasn’t the only thing bothering her. If the agents that had shown up at her apartment were telling the truth, then she wasn’t the only person looking for Marko. No, looking isn’t the right word.
Looking
didn’t really match with the military’s strategy of “blanket a hundred square miles of wilderness with high explosives and shoot anything that’s still moving when the dust settles”.

She didn’t know how long it would be before that happened, but she sure as shit didn’t want to be there when it did. Get in. Get what she wanted. Get out. It was a good plan, provided that she wasn’t too late.

The morning fog was settling as she picked her way over the increasingly rocky riverside. The world around her was still and silent. It didn’t extend any further than she could see, which was hardly past her arm. It was an incredible feeling. She’d forgotten what it was like to be alone. Even with as much as she’d drank, she’d never really been able to shut out the rest of the capital, always buzzing around her.

Being alone was one thing. Being alone and sober was something else entirely.

For one thing, the voices in her head wouldn’t shut the fuck up. It was always so noisy in her head. Some of the voices belonged to her. The mocking refrains of doubt and failure and shame. They pursued her doggedly, but they weren’t half as bad as the voices that belonged to the others. Those of the people she’d killed, still very much alive in her own mind. Those of her friends, long gone. Those that belonged to nobody in particular, just the collective consciousness of the world around her that seemed to be everywhere, but disappeared as soon as she tried to pin them down.

It made her remember why she’d ever started drinking, and why she’d never stopped.

She’d tried everything she could think of to keep the voices at bay. Singing or talking to herself worked for a while. But it was only a matter of time before the silences between words let in a thought that grew and grew in the back of her head until there wasn’t room for anything else. She had seen a Halian prisoner meditating a few years back, and she tried that too, but it didn’t work either.

The only thing that
did
work was to try and take it all in. To feel the humiliation and the rage and the profound sorrow and simply let it be. She did it as much as she could bear.

In the still morning silence, she could let her guard down. She didn’t have to keep distancing herself from the pain. She let it in. The only problem was that it took over. Completely. And it blinded her to the world around her.

And out here, that could be lethal.

Marko stared down at the river beneath him. The forest floor had been rising up to meet him for hours now. It was so much closer, the mountain peaks now towering above him. But the morning fog created the illusion that he was still high above the clouds.

He came to a small stream. The water was crystal clear and ice cold. It was, in part, the same river that ran through the forest below. Here, it was small and shallow. He could clear it in one jump. He wouldn’t even need a running start. Down below, it was fifty feet wide. And that was just a start. As the river flowed closer to the ocean, it would grow wider. By the time it reached Alderoc, it was nearly a mile across. It never ceased to amaze him how such small and simple things could grow into so much.

There was a long ridge that looked shallow enough to walk straight down into the foothills at the bottom of the mountain. He hopped over the stream and crossed the crumbling mountainside, climbing onto the ridge and starting down. The footing was good, the grade was shallow, and the view was incredible. He stacked a few flat stones to mark the path, and kept moving. The fog rose up and met him as he descended, then the treetops. The morning sun filtered in, light and airy. It was a beautiful morning, and a beautiful day. The hard part of his journey was over. All he had to do now was find a place to make camp. There were big plains further down the river, and they would do in a pinch, but the flat ground and lack of vegetation there was a nasty deception.

A little bit of rain was all that it took for the winding river to break its banks, and when it did, those plains would find themselves under three feet of coursing water.

Still, if they could find nothing else, the floodplains would work as a temporary home. They could clear the forest by hand. They would have to sooner or later for fuel and building supplies. It would just be nicer if they had somewhere to call home before they started the enormous project of building a new city.

How long would they be able to stay at this one? Weeks? Months? He didn’t even dare think that they’d see their first year. It was increasingly hard to imagine that anybody would. His new family had told him as much, and he believed them. The hatred that they fled had been with them for millennia. It was part of who they were, and it was unavoidable.

After many generations, and much loss, they’d found a way to coexist with it, and they’d enjoyed a century of peace and balance.

But the hard-won peace was easily toppled. Strangers had come to their home, and without knowing, had awoken the Wild. The Hala tried to tell them what they had done. They tried to stop it. But the invaders to their world had not listened, and only made things worse.

And then Marko and the Watcher soldiers unleashed the Hala and their nightmare onto Alderoc. And then he’d spent twenty-five years fighting the wrong enemy, every minute of it making the situation worse. He fed the Wild for two and a half decades. Him and every single person on Alderoc.

With so much damage already done, survival seemed impossible. But he wasn’t going to give up. As long as the Halians were still struggling, he would fight with them. They knew how to live with the Wild, and they were willing to show the people of Alderoc how to do the same.

There would be suffering. The time to prevent it had long passed. But there could be hope, too. It wasn’t too late. Not yet. But time was running out. As the Hala pushed closer to Alderoc, the people there would grow restless. The calls for violence would grow louder. The Wild would eat its fill, and there would be no sating its appetite for destruction. Not until everything on Alderoc lay in the stillness of death.

One way or another, there would have to be peace.

That’s what kept Marko moving. When the truth had found him three years ago, he wanted to give up. The weight of his wrongdoing crushed him. He woke up one morning feeling so, so small. Unable to pick his head up off the bed. So he lay there for days.

On the verge of starvation, half dead, and hallucinating vividly, he had an epiphany.

The past was behind him. There would be no undoing it. No going back. The world he lived in now was the only one he had. He could either lay in bed and watch it die, or he could get up and do something about it.

And that’s what he did.

He reported for duty, loaded as much gear as he could into the back of a transport ship, and flew it to the site of a small Hala village that he’d helped bomb just weeks before. This time, he brought them medical supplies and food, and weapons instead of death.

One thing lead to another, and three years later, he was one of them. He learned their songs and dances. He sat with children in their schools. He helped build their homes, made their clothes, grew their crops, and helped to keep them safe from the Alderoccan military.

They accepted him, and in time, he learned to accept them as well. It had not been without pain or suffering or fear or loss, but gradually, he freed himself from those struggles, and immersed himself in a new one.

A branch snapped off to his right. He stopped, dropped into a crouch, and looked around. The fog was still thick enough that he couldn’t make out much through the trees. He watched closely, looking for movement, but saw nothing.

His heart pounded. It was probably nothing. A seed or a stick falling out of the canopy. There weren’t many animals at all this close to the city. Especially not big ones.

But recent affairs had started to change things. If the Hala felt as though it was safer for them near the capital, certainly other creatures would feel the same.

There were no more noises for a few minutes. The second sun was rising fast and the fog was thinning out. Taking advantage of the increased visibility, he scanned the treetops for big cats, and he searched the underbrush for everything else.

He moved on, his attention still fixed on the nearby treeline, his ears cocked and his body taut, waiting to snap around and face whatever threat he had missed. There were no new noises, but the wilderness was full of things that knew how to move silently.

The next noise that he heard came from the wrong side of the river. It was not a breaking stick or a snarl or a roar. It was a voice. It told him to freeze. Being a smart man, Marko obeyed.

He did not dare turn his head to see who had joined him on this lovely spring morning, but he got a sense that whoever it was, they weren’t the type to fuck around. Something about their voice. Something about the little bit of them that he managed to catch out of the corner of his eye. It was funny, even though they were nothing more than a small grey blur, he could feel their commanding presence. He knew who was in charge.

“Put your weapon on the rock in front of you. Slowly.”

Even though he could hardly hear them over the sound of the river, he could tell that the voice belonged to somebody who knew how to convey their authority without resorting to shouting and posturing. Somebody who didn’t need to make themselves look bigger to scare off threats. Somebody dangerous. He’d known someone with a voice like that once.

“I’m not armed,” he said, responding in the same tone that he might have used to answer a neighbor wishing him a good morning.

“And I’m not stupid. Lose your weapon or I shoot.”

An Alderoccan, no doubt. They feared these woods. They feared everything. They saw the world around them as an adversary, and believed that their only choices were to conquer, or be conquered. But there was always another choice. The path of collaboration.

With his arms held out away from his body, he turned slowly to face his unexpected companion.

Although a haze still hung over the river and they were far apart and they had both changed considerably since the last time they’d crossed paths, the recognition was mutually instantaneous.

“Marko…”

“Naeesha.”