Dante’s Command: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Science Fiction Alien Romance) (Survival Wars Book 1) (8 page)

He hurried away, looking as though he was afraid she would
touch his butt.

I’m trying to be happy here, but you’re not making it
very easy.

Despite what she had thought, the next long while was the
happiest she had felt in a long while. Working like this was what she had
always done best, steadily plugging away at new information and delighting in
every single accomplishment –whether or not it was a failure. She filled
endless leathery pads with scrawling information, keeping them separated into
piles. One for observations, and the other for possible combinations she could
utilize.

Some of the materials, the work sent her back to daydreams
of high school and college. Her hands moved by themselves, running through
familiar motions for the thousandth time. Others, they delighted her with their
strangeness.

This really
was
her element, poring over every aspect
of their existence right there in her hands.

The first few days, she grabbed Dante and taught him how to
make solar panels. Ever since then, he had been teaching her two other
assistants the same thing so that they could continue to recreate the project.
As soon as they had a grasp on it, he would return to her side. As it was, he
was never far away and she constantly paused to ask him a quick bit of
question. He answered quickly, always proving that his brain was nearly as
sharp –if not sharper- than hers.

And she had discovered that Venus obviously did not operate on
any sort of day-night cycle. That was perhaps the most surprising, though it
made sense in line with everything else they did. They worked until they were
tired, ate when they were hungry, and slept as long as they needed to, and then
rose again to follow the pattern once more. This ensured that no matter what,
someone was always awake and busy somewhere; in fact, though they never planned
for it, there were often entire groups whose lives simply happened to follow
the same pattern. It was beautifully simple and unique, a far cry from the
impossible structure on Earth.

As far as she knew, no one ever complained. Dante certainly
didn’t.

And that meant she was truly able to work as long as
possible, sleep enough to recharge, and then tackle the problems again. Not
even during her freest years of live had she been able to do what she pleased
without certain restrictions. There were no shops to close, no dates to catch,
and absolutely no time restrictions.

Only occasionally did she spare some thought for her fellow
scientists and exactly what they must be thinking of her disappearance back on
Earth, but when she did, the sadness was maddening until she forced herself
back into her work.

One “morning” she rose from her bed and headed out down the
tunnel. It was a fairly quiet time, and when she passed by other rooms she
heard the distinct sound of deep-sleep breathing. There were a few others out
and about, mainly miners returning to their homes, and their replacements about
to head out, but otherwise she was alone.

Dante wouldn’t be awake yet, she knew. He had stayed at the
lab later than her, working on the last pair of solar panels even after the two
other assistants went home.

“Are you sure?” she had asked. “I just don’t want you to
burn yourself out.”

He shrugged and flashed her a glance. “Do humans ever
experience an emotional state where they do not wish to sleep?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, thinking of herself. “They
certainly do.”

“Well, I do not wish to sleep, so I shall finish these. I
will get them installed up on the surface afterwards and begin laying out the
Grid to get their power flowing.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Just be sure to leave an extra or two
for me to experiment on.”

“Of course.”

And then he went back to work as though she wasn’t there.
She did stay around to watch his muscles moving for a moment, but when he
started to falter and become self-conscious, that was when she went to bed.

I wonder how much later he was up,
she thought. Part
of her really wanted to catch someone so that she could see where he slept, but
that would be an invasion of his privacy.

And she was hungry, anyway. Drone food wasn’t too bad now
that she’d gotten used to the realization that the “pet” rabbit creatures
everywhere were actually a much-inbred wild species too dull-witted to realize
they were food. She only wished there were more options other than meat, but
the rabbit creatures made up a majority of their diet, now. There was no way to
get around the fact that they no longer had the freedom to harvest other
sources of food as they wished.

Hopefully, she would be able to change all that. Dante had
told her they used to have the equivalent of greenhouses, but they were
destroyed and the materials repurposed.

This was too soon after waking up to be thinking about such
things yet. Mariella stopped by the meal hall and picked up a cooled plate of
salted meat and a carved mug of water. She was turning around, scanning the
tables for where she wanted to sit today, when someone burst through the
entrance on the other side of the hall.

Concerned, she looked up to see why one of the normally-calm
Drones was running around like this, and then her heart surged to a stop.

It was no Drone, and it was not alone.

There were three of them pressing into the room, about half
the height of a man and extremely pale. Even compared to her, they were pale,
nearly colorless. Their joints were odd and insectile, and their heads were
bulbous. Each had a pair of enormous, bulging black eyes and clacking mandibles.

And she saw, as one climbed on top of a table rather than
going around it, that they had no hands or feet. They walked on curved
appendages, the tips of which were knife-sharp.

Mites,
she thought, in the instant before Hell broke
loose.

The Drones around the meal hall had also looked up at the
disturbance, their faces puckered with disgust. Their expressions changed to
horror and fear. They burst out into the sort of frantic, high-pitched buzzing
that she only ever heard when they were agitated. Mariella screamed with them,
but she knew there was no time to waste.

There was no time to do anything, before one of the Mites
launched itself at her and knocked her onto her back.  All the air went out of
her lungs and she gasped painfully, struggling, but the little creature was
incredibly strong for its size and held her down with its sharp appendages.
Pain lanced through her skin where the appendages pierced her skin, and she
stared up in horror at the blank eyes of the Mite as it lunged its pincers down
toward her neck.

And she saw in this thing’s eyes that it was intelligent,
and knew exactly what it was doing. They knew exactly who she was, and they
meant to take her out.

Not only that, but if they were inside the Hive, it was
over.

The siege had broken.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the rounded shape of
something she knew well. She flung her arm out, fingertips just barely brushing
the handle, and she grabbed it. Bringing the stone mug up and around, she
bashed it against the side of the bug’s face and watched in horror as its skull
crumpled in bloodlessly on itself.

Shoving it away with a scream, she looked around and saw
that the other two had been incapacitated, though the Drones who had taken care
of them were bleeding and scuffed with dust. But, the entrance burst open and
more and more began to spill in.

Dante!
she realized.
Where is he?

The entrance was lower than this point, and she suspected
Dante had either been overrun, or had escaped up to the lab. No matter what,
she also needed to get to the lab.

Turning on her heel, she headed out the nearest tunnel mouth
and started running. Chaos reigned in the halls, shouting and thumps and the
sound of rending flesh. Mites were fighting, pouring in. They were in her way,
hordes of them, and she had to turn around and run in the wrong direction
cutting through some unfamiliar side tunnels to try and correct herself.

She could only desperately hope that her general sense of
direction was enough to keep her on track even with all the twists and turns
she had to take.

Her breath rasped heavily in her lungs, and her stomach was
a twisting mess.

“Mariella!” someone shouted. It could only be Dante, and she
turned to find him slamming his shoulder into a Mite. With a crunch, its chest
collapsed inward and he skidded the rest of the way to her. “Are you hurt?” he
gasped breathlessly.

“I’m okay!” she reassured him, despite the puncture wound in
her leg. She raised one hand to touch the bloody scrape along his cheek. His
expression tightened, but he didn’t move away. His agitated humming increased
in volume, though. “Dante, what’s happening?”

He growled irritably, and gestured her on with him to run
while they talked. “I am not sure how they broke in, but they have. Worry not,”
he reassured her, like always. She frowned at him but let him keep going.
“Worry not, for this will not be the whole of them. This is a warning, a
message. They want to kill you.”

She gasped out, “You can understand them?”

“We share a similar dialect,” he grunted, “but that is not
the point. You are so important to us, as well as your experiments. We must
secure the lab.”

“That’s where I was headed.”

In a few minutes, she started to recognize where they were
by the specific and unique ridges of the tunnel’s surface. And then she saw the
entrance to the lab, absolutely covered in a crowd of Mites so thick that they
were piled up on top of each other, kicking and squirming. She heard their
thick skin rasp together and squirmed uncomfortably at the sound.

“Stay back,” Dante spat.

She was too slow to listen, and took another step forward.
The alien shoved her back roughly, making her stumble and fall.

When she looked up, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

All this time, she’d never seen Dante be angry. But, he was
frenzying now. She looked at him and saw for perhaps the first time that
despite his bashfulness, he was strong. But, it wasn’t merely the strength of
his muscles that she’d noticed so many times before. This was the strength of
his fury, and it was out of control. He moved too fast to see, limbs a blur as
he grabbed and hit, throwing the small assailants around and bashing them
against the wall. Pieces of their bodies flew as he smashed them against the
ground, or dashed their heads together.  And his face was twisted in a
terrifying mask, teeth bared, as he grabbed yet another attacker with his bare
hands and ripped it clean in half.

There was no telling how long she sat there, eyes wide,
watching him destroy. When he disappeared inside the lab, crashing began. Each
crash hurt her heart. She could feel jagged splinters digging in her lungs from
the fear that her work, or the man defending her work, was hurt.

When everything was done and she heard no more, Mariella
painfully pushed herself to her feet. “Dante?” she called softly, and
immediately regretted it. The taste of rot filled her mouth, and she could
already see the bodies littering the tunnel were turning black and putrefying.

There was no answer.

Holding onto the wall, she took wobbling steps through the
mess of chaos and poked her head around the corner.

Dante sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by death
and broken solar panels. There were pieces of Mite everywhere, and she saw so
many instruments cracked open on the floor that she would be surprised if any
were left unscathed.

“Dante?”

He didn’t look up, but he did speak. “I am sorry you have to
see this, Mariella. It isn’t a sight that any woman should have forced upon
her.”

She approached, still picking her way through before she
could crouch down in front of him. Something squished under her leg, but she
held back her grimace. “It’s okay. I’m just glad that you’re okay.”

“Yes,” he sighed, and then lowered his head more. “I
accidentally broke your experiments. I could not stop myself.”

Stroking his scraped cheek again, Mariella repeated, “It’s
okay. Don’t worry about it. We’re both still alive, right?”

She waited until he nodded. It was a long time in coming.

“Good, so, as long as we’re still alive, we can make more of
anything that was broken Okay? The only way this would be bad is if we were
dead, but we’re not. So, right now, it’s just a setback and nothing more.”

He continued to not look at her. “I feel as though I have
failed you.”

“No!” she protested. “If anything, I’m glad it was you who
broke my stuff. I really like you. If anyone else did it, I’d be really mad.”

After a very long moment of quiet, he laughed.