Alien Touch Read online

  Would they have taken the same two?

  Or two different because they were going in the opposite direction?

  Or did the wormholes actually exist as a feature/landmark of space?

  Or were they created by the ship?

  She thought they must be a feature of space. Otherwise why would matter where they were when they entered? And left?

  But that just made it more difficult to figure out.

  Eventually, thankfully, she saw a landmark she recognized, though—Neptune.

  Of course, it was possible it was just another giant planet that was blue, but she was convinced it must be Neptune.

  And that meant that they were only a matter of a few days or maybe hours from home.

  She slipped away to her cabin to celebrate in isolated splendor.

  And cried until she couldn’t breathe, or see, or even remain conscious.

  Her great adventure was over.

  She would never see them again.

  She was home.

  She was so happy!

  She didn’t realize until she woke from her crying jag nap that she hadn’t given any thought at all to her actual arrival home. She supposed, in the back of her mind, she’d had this notion that they would just stuff her back into the capsule and drop it off where they’d found it—which certainly wouldn’t be a good thing for her.

  But depositing it close to moon base would probably be the best case scenario all the way around.

  They wouldn’t have to face any unpleasantness from a close encounter with humans and she would be in as good a position as she could get.

  Not great, by any stretch of the imagination, but she’d be alive and safe and ….

  God only knew what would happen when she was debriefed about her absence, but there was no avoiding that—wouldn’t have been at any point after those bastard spider things captured her.

  In any case, that was her problem.

  But she was going to have to convince the guys to leave her at moon base.

  With that in mind, she got up and went to bathe and then got her suit together and wrestled into the trousers, boots, and the tunic—minus the power pack.

  There was no point in putting that heavy thing on. She’d depleted the air supply trying to escape, she recalled, but there was an extra pack on the capsule.

  And she knew where the capsule was.

  She debated briefly, but decided to carry the helmet once she recovered it and just put the bonnet on for the time being. She couldn’t wear it until she had the new power pack, but she didn’t want to have to walk all the way back to her cabin once she was fully loaded down.

  There was gravity on the ship and the suit was made for zero gravity conditions.

  It was heavy.

  She considered as she headed down to the hold if there was any way she might just ‘jump ship’ when they got close enough so that she wouldn’t have to try to explain, and possibly argue, with the guys.

  Nothing came to mind, unfortunately, because of the limitations of the capsule, but when she got to the hold she carefully studied the situation and searched for a small crane or towing machine she might be able to use to get the capsule to the hanger doors anyway.

  Nothing.

  Dismissing it with a great deal of disappointment, she climbed into the capsule for a replacement pack.

  She’d set it up and backed into it when Alaric damned near gave her a heart attack. One minute she was alone, the next Alaric was standing in front of her.

  She screamed.

  He yelled and whipped a look behind him, then turned back and glared at her. “Startle,” he growled, rubbing his chest.

  She almost laughed.

  She would have if she hadn’t still been so shaky.

  “You startled me!” she snapped irritably and just a little guiltily. “Why did you sneak up on me?”

  He frowned. “No sneak. See what doin’.”

  She studied him uncomfortably, partly because she expected an argument about the capsule they seemed damned attached to, but mostly because she didn’t want to fight with him when she was never going to see him again.

  A lump formed in her throat at the thought that made her feel like she was choking.

  “Getting ready. I figured it would be best for all of us if you guys just leave me and the capsule on the moon—at moon base. I can get home from there. And there won’t be … uh … unpleasant questions to be asked and have to answer.”

  She lost him at some point in the speech. She could see that.

  “No leeb. Take home.”

  Dismay flickered through her. “But ….”

  She could see he was struggling with something. “Mate,” he said finally. “Amber home, we home. First make war wid Dragon clan. Din come back.”

  Amber gaped at him, struggling to translate, although she was already starting to have a very bad feeling about what he seemed to be saying. She thought, at first, when he moved closer and settled a hand on her cheek that he was trying to speak to her telepathically. But even as she looked up at him questioningly, she saw the descent as he bowed his head to match his lips to hers.

  Her lips tingled with sensation even before he made contact.

  Chapter Twelve

  The purposeful contact as he covered her mouth with his created an explosion of sensation inside Amber. Heat flooded her entire being almost instantaneously as if she’d been caught in an avalanche of molten want. The warmth that flooded her was the heat of desire and of tenderness and affection. It contained all of the excitement of a homecoming and a grand holiday celebration together.

  Because that was what it was—what he was, she realized despairingly.

  Home.

  How had that happened?

  When had it happened?

  He gathered her close, moved.

  Actually swayed.

  Well … everything did.

  There was a dull thud that she was too far gone to translate, at first, but realized when the concussion reached them was an explosion that had rippled through the ship.

  Alaric broke the kiss abruptly, jerking his head upward as if listening intently.

  “Stay!” he barked at her. “No move.”

  Amber didn’t know what or how she would’ve responded. He simply vanished before her mind had time to come up with a response and that shocked her so thoroughly that it took moments more for her brain to kick in again.

  It was another jolt that shook her back into action mode.

  She looked around frantically for the helmet she’d set down and grabbed it up when she spied it. Dumping the gauntlets into the seat where she’d set her helmet, she lifted the helmet over her head as quickly as she could and gave it a twist to secure the lock. Then she grabbed the gauntlets and drove her hands into them and locked them to the tunic.

  She’d just managed to get the second one on and twisted the lock when Alaric abruptly reappeared behind her.

  Almost as if it had followed him, there was a huge explosion virtually simultaneous to his reappearance and then everything around them began to shake as if a giant had caught the ship and begun shaking it.

  Alaric grabbed her tightly against his length, curling his arms around her like steel bands, and moved.

  A kaleidoscope of light and shadow and blurred colors engulfed them.

  Everything around them seemed to be moving in slow mo and, at the same time, as if it was moving almost faster than her brain could assimilate.

  And then they were surrounded by a maelstrom of swirling debris.

  They were outside the ship, Amber realized finally so gripped by horror for many moments that she couldn’t fully grasp what she was looking at.

  But then she realized the ship had simply disintegrated around them.

  It had hit something or something had hit it—that was the source of the explosions and the rattling she’d felt.

  Earth was far, far b
elow them.

  And they were falling.

  Oh god! Ohmygod!

  Two winged beasts ‘swam’ into her view.

  They were on fire. Flames and smoke were trailing from every part of their bodies and their wings.

  She looked down and discovered flames were licking at the arms gripping her tightly. She tried to turn to look at Alaric, but she couldn’t move enough to see.

  And then she realized she didn’t want to see.

  They were on fire.

  They were all going to die horribly.

  And it was her fault!

  She’d showed her ass about coming home and they’d given in and now they were all going to die!

  She blacked out at some point.

  She had no idea how long she was out, but when she came around she discovered they were still falling.

  Well, actually they didn’t seem to be falling anymore.

  They seemed to be … floating?

  In formation.

  Because the two beasts she’d seen were on either side of her and Alaric.

  And finally her brain managed to throw off her shock sufficiently to click and connect the images with her memories and she realized it was Luki and Serge beside them.

  They’d shifted into the forms she’d seen when they’d attacked the aliens who’d captured her, the ones they called the Basinini.

  And they were falling toward Earth—or flying ….

  Oh god!

  Because NORAD had shot their ship to pieces!

  She had to fight a round with her stomach when that realization hit her. It was a hard fought battle, but she finally managed to master it with grim determination—nothing was worse than puking in one’s helmet.

  Unless you were at zero gravity and puked.

  Considering the shocks that had been battering her, she doubted she would have thought about NORAD until much later except that the damn fighters abruptly appeared and then they were trying to strafe them.

  “Oh my god! They’re going to kill us!”

  She’d barely made that announcement when another kaleidoscope of light and shadow and blurred colors engulfed them.

  Amber squeezed her eyes shut at the dizzying swirl and fought another battle with her stomach. When she opened her eyes again she discovered they were on the ground.

  Well, sort of.

  They were on the roof of a building in the middle of a city.

  The jets swooped low—as if intent on strafing the roof or dropping a bomb--and then shot off and disappeared.

  Amber frowned.

  There was something really weird about the jets. She just couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  She shook off the uneasiness.

  They had bigger fish to fry at the moment.

  The Furians were now trapped on Earth with her and had no way to leave even if she could have convinced them to go.

  And she wasn’t sure that was an option.

  Thankfully, she discovered when she turned to the guys that they had shifted back into the forms she was most familiar with.

  Unfortunately, now that she looked at them against the backdrop of Earth, she realized they really weren’t going to blend in particularly well.

  Maybe with Earth clothing …?

  And she was wearing a damned space suit!

  Of course, she was going to have to report for a debriefing, but she needed to figure out what to do with the guys first!

  “We need … uh … to dress like the people around here if we don’t want to stick out—and believe me when I say we don’t! Plus we need to move. The military will be sending out people to get … pick us up and we don’t want to talk to them right now.”

  She discovered she had the guys’ undivided attention, but they didn’t actually look like they’d caught much of that speech.

  “Make war?” Alaric growled, his voice a threatening rumble.

  Ok. So he’d definitely grasped that they hadn’t been welcomed.

  “No! NO, no, no! They’ll hunt us down if you try to fight—even if we managed to escape. We can talk about that later. Right now, we need to get out of here.”

  “Leeb?”

  “Yes. Leave this place.” It actually didn’t take a lot of thought to figure out where to go. Her grandmother’s place was still caught up in litigation and still hers, for the moment anyway. More importantly, it was home, and her first instinct was to head there.

  Was that the best idea, though?

  Unfortunately, she didn’t have another one and, thankfully, it occurred to her fairly quickly that the military hadn’t identified her—yet. They wouldn’t know to look for her previous places of residence.

  “We can go to my grandmother’s house,” she said quickly. “We’ll be safe there until we can figure out what to do.”

  They made it almost two blocks before they were surrounded by military vehicles and armed soldiers.

  Amber wasn’t surprised that they were captured. She was surprised it took the military that long to respond.

  They’d landed in a fireball on the roof of a tall building in the middle of a city—she wasn’t certain what city—but she thought at a distance they’d probably at least appeared to be a large, single object rather than four individuals. So they’d probably been identified as a falling meteor or a crashing space ship.

  And she’d thoughtfully put on her, still pristine, blinding white and easily identifiable space suit—plus helmet.

  She didn’t realize until the soldier in charge ordered them to stop where they were that the guys had decided the best camo was to appear to be dressed like her. When she glanced back at them and saw spacesuits, she did a double take.

  But Alaric had tried that before—when they’d first met.

  She realized she should have expected it.

  Because, poor things, they didn’t know a damned thing about who they were dealing with.

  “Remove the helmets!”

  Uh oh!

  * * * *

  “I told you. My name is Major Amber Trujillo, United States Air Force. Serial number ….”

  “We got that. Unfortunately, none of that is in our system—not the name and rank, or that number.”

  The men studied her with expressions of impatience and accusation. “And you’re not entitled to an attorney.”

  Anger flooded Amber. “If I’m not military then I’m an American citizen and I damned well do have the right to an attorney!”

  “So … you admit that you aren’t who you claim to be?”

  “You said I wasn’t who I said I am! I told you ….”

  The elder of the two interrogators lifted a hand to stop her from repeating what she’d already told them dozens of times.

  That she was on a mission to complete moon base when she was captured by alien entities and managed to break free.

  Even she thought the watered down version was too wild to be believed, but there just wasn’t anything that she could tell them that they would believe.

  She’d still been on the moon when she’d lost contact with them. It seemed certain, in this length of time, that they would be convinced she was dead.

  And then, after being missing for weeks or months, she’d fallen out of the sky—free fall—and she was still alive.

  She would’ve been willing to claim something else entirely if she’d managed to get rid of the spacesuit and into civilian clothing before they took her into custody.

  But how was she to know that in itself would get her into deep do-do?

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t considered, once they’d landed, that the spacesuit would make her stick out like a sore thumb or that it might be better not to wear it if she could find a change of clothing.

  But she’d thought, actually, that it would be better for her to be wearing it to identify her as an officer in the Air Force.

  She hadn’t expected to be called a liar and have her entire story
dismissed as a pack of lies!

  She doubted the guy’s stories were going to help them—if they felt like talking and were able to explain they were Furians, that is.

  She’d tried her bestest to communicate with them telepathically after the capture and to prepare them as much as she could, but she thought that had probably been a waste of time except to occupy her mind for the duration of the trip.

  Naturally enough, they weren’t allowed to talk.

  Not that that would have been particularly helpful.

  It wasn’t just their grasp of English that was the problem, either, though that damned sure didn’t help!

  It was their ignorance of life on Earth, the American culture, and the U.S. military that was the real problem.

  They grasped, she was sure, that they were all in trouble. They just didn’t understand why they were in trouble.

  They didn’t understand that trying to ‘blend in’ by appearing to be wearing spacesuits that belonged to NASA—a government agency—impersonating military personnel was tantamount to being spies.

  What she didn’t understand was why they seemed to think she was a spy!

  They had to be lying about not being able to find her military record.

  They had to be.

  But why?

  She could see them accusing her of impersonating an officer if they thought she wasn’t Major Amber Trujillo, but swearing she wasn’t even in the system?

  And why had they looked so shocked when she’d told them she’d been on the moon mission? It certainly wasn’t a military secret. Everybody in the world knew about it—literally.

  But this wasn’t going like any debriefing she’d ever experienced and it was damned impossible to dismiss the suspicion that it was actually an interrogation.

  They hadn’t in point of fact mentioned any particular charges, but when they decided they needed to let her stew a while, she was escorted to the base jail and shoved into a cell.

  As worried as she was, she was relieved.

  She hadn’t really had more than a handful of moments since the ‘incident’ to try to bring any sort of order to her mind, to figure out what had happened or to figure out what they could do.

  There had to be something, but she was damned if anything came to mind.