The Watcher [Alien Nation #1]

Chapter 14

Avery's memory of the shuttle crash that killed her mother and put her in a body that was not entirely her own was hazy at best. She remembered alarms, and wind, and screaming, but her own cries had blended with her mum's over the years until the whole event was just a blur of heat and noise.

Waking, though, that was what she remembered.

They'd crashed somewhere cold and remote-she'd always imagined it as the side of a distant mountain, but she couldn't be sure. She'd woken on her back, a bloated grey sky bulging with snow above her.

The sky above her now was crystal-clear, but the wind that stirred her hair-then brown, now greenish-blue-gave her the same goosebumps. It wasn't quite as bad as the ride down, though. Now that had been panic-inducing, though she thought she'd hidden it well.

She leaned in to Erri, resting her head on his shoulder. His arm tightened around her, and she wished she'd brought a coat. Not just for the cold, either, but for padding. She had a fully-armoured ghraal next to her, and a cold brick wall behind.

"Any reason why you're in combat gear?" she said, craning her neck up to look at him. He'd even put the visor down on his helmet, so his eyes were obscured by a black panel.

"We could be ambushed," he said, but his shoulders tensed up in a way she knew far too well.

She nudged him with her elbow. "That's not all, though, is it?"

Erri sighed. "I just feel bad for Josh, you know? When the ghraal invented space flight, the first people we met were the folna. They look like they walked right out of all the worlds we covet most, green and leafy and full of life. The first extracted humans met the folna first, too. Humans have said they look like something out of one of your...'fairy tales'. But Josh...his first introduction to alien life will be a ghraal. I thought maybe if I left my helmet on until we got into the Phoenix, it'll be too late for him to run by the time he notices the fangs and the talons and the spines and my resemblance to your prehistoric lizards."

"That's what's bugging you? Erri, it's not your fault us humans are all soft and squidgy." She unclasped his helmet, and he didn't resist as she pulled it off his head. "Josh is going to be around a lot of ghraal on the Hub. If he doesn't like your spiky bits, he'll have to learn to deal with it." She pulled him in for a kiss. The fangs and the lack of soft, malleable lips did make it a challenge, but Avery had always loved a challenge.

Even through his armour, she could feel the deep, rumbling purr that he'd told her was reserved only for her.

XxX

"You know, I could probably install a heads-up display on this," Avery said, turning Erri's helmet over in her hands. It was surprisingly low-tech-she'd have thought there'd at least be some way to monitor vital functions, but nothing. She began designing it in her mind, overlaying a compact interface over the face plate, all while keeping an eye on the bar at the bottom of her vision. A stream of data flowed along it, too small and too fast for the average human to read, but she'd set aside a tiny portion of her considerable RAM to analyse it. Terrans loved their social media. The nanosecond there was a change in Earth's precarious situation, she'd know about it.

"Do I need one? Why do I need to know if my heart stops beating? I will feel it. An alarm blaring in my ears will only make it more stressful."

She sighed, gazing up at him. It was hard, since he had his chin resting on top of her head. "You know, for one of the founding members of an interstellar pseudo-empire, you guys are pretty technophobic. Not as bad as the mu'ka, but still."