My Hero Is An Alien: A Science Fiction Romance

Chapter 1

Myrdok

The shuttle slips out of the Pacific Ocean a hundred miles away from the United States shore line, glistening in the fading sunlight as a million droplets of water catch and refract the daystar’s brilliance. Captain Pyke shifts in his seat beside me, looking out on the ocean’s majesty.

“It’s been a long time since I was on an ocean dominant world,” he muses. “Is it not beautiful, Myrdok?”

“It is indeed, Captain,” I reply. “But with all respect, I much prefer the tides of Novaria. The waves on this planet struggle to reach a height of thirty meters. Not good for proper surfing.”

“But more than sufficient for the weak  humans,” Pyke says. “I tell you, Myrdok, sometimes I wish we’d been sent back to a different sapient species’ past. It is difficult to keep them and their flow of history safe when they are so, so very reactionary.”

“Indeed,” I agree with a nod. “Though they are weak and soft, they are also quick to anger, and even quicker to fight. Their societies are steeped in military culture even if they decry its necessity. Truly, they have much in common with the Ataxians.”

“Perhaps,” Pyke mutters. “But they have one thing that separates them very much from the Ataxian Coalition’s zealots.”

“And what is that?” I ask with a puzzled frown. We’ve already established humanity’s weak physical forms in this conversation.

“They are not opposed to the Alliance,” Pyke finishes with a firm clap on my shoulder. “How far are we from the Ring of Fire headquarters?

“About two hours out, at current speeds.”

“Two hours?” He curses, but restrains himself from spitting. I ask for a certain level of decorum in the cockpit, even from my commanding officer. “Can we not go faster?”

“Yes, but if we do so we risk being picked up by Earth tracking stations, or worse, the Grolgath.”

“Bah. After their most recent bloody nose, they will be licking their wounds and lying—“

The shuttle shakes with the impact of weapons fire. Lights flash all over my console as systems begin to fail.

“What was that?”

“The aforementioned Grolgath, sir. I guess they’re done licking their wounds, and now they want to lick US.”

Pyke curses and starts punching keys on the comm console.

“I can’t get through to our people,” he growls. “The bastards are jamming us.”

I check my sensor array, and see that it’s two Crucible class small cruisers chasing us. That’s not good. They’re both more heavily armed than we are, and far sturdier. The Grolgath managed to reach the Earth’s surface with more effective combat craft than we, but so far they’ve yet to show their hand like this.

Apparently Axul’s success stung more than a little.

The ship rocks again, the lights dimming for a moment, and Pyke swears again.

“Evasive maneuvers,” he barks.

“I’m trying, Captain,” I say, my fingers dancing all over the control console. “But there’s just not any cover out here.”

I take us into a steep climb, and the Grolgath follow. A bit heavier and more massive than we, they slow down, but their light based energy weapons know no velocity. Our aft thruster array suffers a devastating direct hit, and my console goes dark.

Our nose, the heaviest part of the craft, causes us to dip forward toward the teeming, crawling sea below. Pyke straps into his crash webbing.

“Inertial dampeners are off line,” he shouts. “If we hit that water dead on, we’ll be smashed into jelly.”

“Then we’d both better hope I’m an ever better pilot than I think I am,” I say, gripping the controls. “Hang on, Captain. We’re not dead  yet.”

Without consciously thinking about it, I swivel toward the operations console and check our status. We lost our secondary plasma conduit powering the cockpit. I swiftly re route the power from the tertiary, which will be able to handle the load—I hope. My pilot’s console lights up again, and I spin back to face it.

The air fills with an awful, droning whine as our shuttle plummets toward the teeming sea below. Our Grolgath adversaries aren’t content to let the ocean to their job for them; they’re coming back around on a wide arcing crescent. Sensors show they’re attempting a target lock.

As soon as I get the thruster array active again, I pour on maximum speed. Combined with Earth’s gravity, our velocity increases to the point where they can’t hope to gain a target lock. Unfortunately this means we’re plummeting toward the sea at maximum velocity, with little margin for error.

“I got the inertial dampeners back on line,” Pyke shouts above the din.

“Not a moment too soon. Brace yourself, Captain, even with inertial dampening this is going to be rough.”

I’m more worried about the shuttle holding together on this trick. It was never intended for open battle, but transport and evacuation. But we don’t have any choice. My ancestors are dreaming of me. Now is the time to make sure I live up to their high standards.

Gritting my teeth, I grab the control stick and change our thruster vector. Muscles strain, tendons pop all along my arms, but I manage to force it into proper alignment.

The shuttle pulls its nose up, just missing the undulating sea by a dozen feet. As soon as our thrusters are reasonably horizontal, I shut down every non critical system and reroute all power to the sub light engins.

Our thrusters blaze hotter than the surface of a blue star, turning the ocean water into a cloud of billowing steam. Though it’s far from hot enough to damage the Grolgath cruisers’ hulls, I hope it will buy us at least a few moments by fouling their visual and sensor input.

I shout with triumph as one of the Cruisers fails to pull up from its power dive in time and hits the ocean hard. It slips beneath the waves entirely with a tremendous splash, then bobs back to the surface—some of it, anyway.

The remaining craft makes the turn and gets right on our ass. I spiral the aft facing Ion cannon into position and fire, but it’s only effective against star fighters with their much weaker hulls.

“You’re not even scratching their pigments,” Pyke shouts.

“I’m open to suggestions, Captain. I don’t think my steam cloud trick is going to work twice, and anyway this shuttle is barely holding together.”

“I have an idea,” Pyke says. He unstraps his crash webbing, which causes me great concern.

“What are you doing, Captain?” I blurt in alarm.

“The Inertial Dampeners should keep me from being sucked out,” Pyke says.

“Wait, sucked out? What do you mean sucked out?”

Pyke grabs one of the two person seats and twists his broad torso. The seats rip right out of the floor with a snap and groan of metal. Pyke awkwardly staggers toward the rear of our cabin, and then manually opens the rear doors.

“Have a seat, boys,” he shouts. “We’ll be right with you.”

He lets the seat go, and it flashes back too quickly for the eye to follow. The seat frame is pure trimantium, and smashes right through the glassteel cockpit panels like they aren’t even there.

I’m not certain what happens to our foes after that, other than they drop out of both visual and sensor range. Maybe they can hold themselves together long enough for a crash landing.

All I know is, our thrusters are giving out. As Pyke closes the rear doors and clambers back into his seat, I give him the grim news.

“We’re going down, Captain.”

“We can’t make it to shore?’

“Negative. We’ve been making half our thruster array do all the work of moving the shuttle, and they’ve, they’ve melted sir.”

“How long do we have before they give out completely?” Pyke asks.

The thrusters sputter, and die out. We plunge toward the sea like a stone.

“About that long,” I quip. “Rerouting all power to inertial dampening.”

“At least the sea doesn’t look as rough,” Pyke says. “Myrdok, in case we don’t get out of this, I want  you to know you’re a damn fine pilot.”

“Thank you, sir,” I say, puffing my chest out a bit. “And I’d like to say that out of all the commanders I’ve had in my military career, well….you were one of them.”

He glances sharply at me, but then we hit the water. The glassteel canopy holds fast, but the rest of the shuttle isn’t so lucky. We lose half the chassis upon impact, and we’re inundated with a sudden deluge of green water.

Pyke struggles to free himself from the crash webbing. I swim over and cut him loose with my hook knife. Then we make for the sundered rear as the shuttle plunges deeper into the dark depths of the sea.

We swim  madly for the surface, both able to hold our air for much longer than a puny human might. But we’re hundreds of feet down, and my lungs scream for a breath by the time I finally break through the choppy surface.

Instantly I suck in a great gasp of air, only to take a ten foot swell to the face. I bob out on the other side, sputtering and blinking the stinging salt from my eyes. My gaze lands on Pyke, and I motion toward the only safety I can find—a human drill ship capped with a large wrought metal tower, towing a barge full of tarp covered crates.

It’s a rough swim, and humans would probably have drowned. We Vakutans are made of sterner stuff, but it takes every last ounce of strength I have to pull myself up onto the bobbing barge and shelter beneath one of the canopies.

“Are you all right, Captain?” I ask between pants.

“I’m alive,” he answers in a strained tone. “The sea water has temporarily shorted out our image inducers, though. At least, I hope it’s temporary.”

I look down and see that I indeed appear as  my red scaled normal self.

“Then we’ll have to stow away here until they dry out,” I say confidently. If they dry out. If not, I’m not sure how we’re going to keep our alien nature secret from an entire ship full of humans.

But we’re alive, and as long as we’re alive, there’s hope.