Ark: A Scifi Alien Romance (17 page)

It was amazing to watch him work. I couldn’t help but admire the singular focus that he was able to apply to whatever he was doing. He was able to shut out the rest of the world and just do the task that was right in front of him, and for that I admired him, and I was more than a little jealous too.

We hiked all day, as long as there was light out. We took breaks every couple hours to take a bite of food, and sit down for a few minutes, but it felt like as soon as I was starting to get comfortable, Ark would pull me back up and we would be back on our way. I couldn’t imagine how explorers back on Earth during the old times did it. I mean, I had a particular goal, and I knew it was a certain distance away from my current position, and we vaguely knew which direction to travel in.

What must exploring have been like when all of those were unknowns? I shook my head each time I thought of it. I enjoyed a journey as much as the next gal, but that was not the life for me.

Of course, as I was starting to realize, any life could be the life for me as long as I got to spend it with Ark. Sure, he was gruff, sure he sometimes came off like a willfully petulant child, but at the same time, he had this way of looking at me, that just made me crumble.

And the sex, I could barely get started on the sex. We would hike all day, taking breaks to eat, and at night we would assemble the portable shelter, which was basically a super technologically advanced tent on steroids, and we’d lie in it and have incredible sex. We tried to keep it quiet and not too energetic so we could rest up for the next day, but most of the time once we got started that went right out the window, and Ark fucked me hard, and I moaned at him to give even more of himself.

It was fucking hot, what we were doing.

And each morning we would wake up, roll out of the portable shelter after having a little slow and sensual morning sex, and we would start our day all over again, moving toward the power source. Ark had a device tracked our position relative to where we were going, and he was satisfied that we were making a good pace.

If was being honest with myself, I was having a blast just traveling with him like this - if we could have continued doing this for a lot longer, I might have been OK with that, even if we didn’t have the immediate goal of getting off this planet and back to our respective homes.

That last part stuck in my head each time I thought about it - our respective homes. My home was on Earth, and Ark’s was somewhere in the vast Kreossian Empire, wherever they wanted to send him next so he could pillage and conquer planets.

It struck me as strange each time it came up, but I couldn’t really escape the truth - I was more or less dating an intergalactic warlord. I laughed to myself each time that title came up, and I wondered what my mother would think if she saw me now.

Walking all day, having sex all night before we collapsed into deep sleep. This was the life. Who needed civilization, responsibility, stress, all of that nonsense? I had everything I needed right here in the tent with me.
 

I lay in Ark’s arms, hearing him sleep, and wondering when daylight would come again. It was the morning of the 4
^th
day since we had left the crash site.

We got up and broke camp, getting off to a good start - Ark had noticed that the jungle was starting to get less and less dense as the mountains that we needed to get to started to loom closer in the distance. That was a good sign.

We started moving faster and faster, and the ground stopped being littered with blue and yellow leaves and started showing more and more gravel with each step.

By that afternoon the trees around us grew sparse and the wind picked up, pushing us close together as ground began to angle upwards into the foothills below the mountains. We took a break and ate before continuing our trek upwards.

It was almost nightfall and we were deep in the mountains, alternating between climbing up and down as the temperature dropped. Luckily, our survival suits were equipped to handle cold as well as warmth, and aside from our heads, didn’t bother either of us much.

We were walking between large boulders when Ark hissed and stopped. I almost collided into him and barely stopped myself in time. “Watch out, Melissa,” he whispered back to me as I looked at him.

“Why, what’s up? What do you see?”

“We are not alone here. There are signs of other creatures around. We must be careful.”

“More of the same beasts?” I asked, leaning against him, suddenly terrified for the first time in days. We were all alone and so far from the crash site, what would we do if we were attacked? Ark had been able to take one of them out, but what if there were more than one?

What if they hunted in packs, what would we do then? We had nowhere to run, except back toward the shuttle and that would take days.

We stood behind the rock, and I peeked out from behind it, under Ark, to see what I could see. The coast looked clear, but I wasn’t taking any chances, not when Ark thought there was something up.

After a minute or so, Ark let out a long, deep breath and whispered. “We can continue. More slowly, though. We do not know what is ahead.”

“How far are we from the power source?”

Ark pulled out his tracking device and consulted it. The screen lit up, and he shielded it with his hand so that it wouldn’t alert anyone looking in our general direction. “The readings indicate,” he said, still focusing on the screen, “that the power source is ten minutes in front of us.”

“Let’s go,” I whispered back, and Ark put the device away and nodded. He look the lead, his blade in his hand. I took my own blade out for good measure, but I knew that in a fight I would be as much a liability as an asset, if not more.

We moved more slowly now, taking our time and avoiding making as much noise. The boulders grew more numerous, and luckily we had many places to hide. We still couldn’t see any actual creatures around, but at the same time, signs of their presence grew more numerous. We were now traveling across paths that existed before we got here. That was a first.

And then we started seeing the bones. One or two at a time at first, but soon we were passing near full-skeletons worth of bones with no flesh left on them. It became impossible to tell how old they were, but we could see one thing - the creatures who had owned these bones were gigantic, even bigger than the wolf-life beings that we already knew about.

That was not a good sign. We had hoped that the ethereal glowing wolves were the largest form of life on this planet, but clearly we were wrong. At the same time, though, the glowing wolves might have been the top of the food chain.

If that was the case, and we were walking right into their lair…

With another hiss, Ark pulled me to the side, behind another rock, just as we came around a corner. He looked at me, and whispered as he held me back and close to him. “They are here, Melissa. Do not make any sudden movements.”

I gulped, terrified. I searched Ark’s face for comfort and strength and while I could tell that he had both of those in spades, it did not make me feel any more at ease. “What is it?”

“It is the wolves. This is where they live.”

“What?” I almost gasped out loud. “They’re the source of the energy?”

“We must watch and see. I do not know, but this is the location of the energy source. We must find it.”

I nodded and Ark leaned over against the rock, looking around and gathering the lay of the land. He looked back down the path we had used to get here. “We must move, we do not want to be in the way if anymore use the same path.”

“Good idea. Where do we go?”

Ark looked around, and focused on a rock about 30 yards away, still in a ring around the path moving inward toward the source. “That is where we go,” Ark whispered, pointing toward the rock.

I nodded, and took Ark’s hand. We quickly ran toward the new hiding place, and as we did I looked to my left through the clearings in the rocks as we passed by.

I wished I hadn’t. At that moment, I wished we were back in the shuttle at the crash site, and I wished we had decided to just live out our lives in peace. I wouldn’t have minded a lifetime’s worth of peanut butter flavored nutritional supplements if they would have gotten us out of that place and back to the shuttle right in that instant.

We were in some sort of amphitheater, concentric circles of rocks that had been set up. They weren’t carved like chairs or benches, but they were arranged so that someone could sit or lie on them and face what must have passed for a stage. I didn’t get as good a look as I wanted since we were moving so fast, but at the same time I did know one thing.

There were more of the ghost wolves there. Many more. Dozens, if not a hundred. And they were all chanting. I realized in that moment that the chanting had started earlier, but it had grown in volume so slowly that I had subconsciously thought it was feedback from the power source itself.

That was incorrect. “They’re chanting,” I whispered to Ark as we got into place behind the new rock.

Ark nodded. “I heard it as we approached. It sounds like they’re performing some kind of ritual.”

“A ritual to what?”

“We must investigate, Melissa.” Ark looked down at me, then kissed me on the forehead. “We will both look now. Do not make any sudden movements, and if you see any of them looking at us, do not move, just pull on my arm and I will get us out of sight. Do you understand?”

I gulped, trying to steel myself for what I was about to see, then nodded. “Let’s do it.”

“You are so brave, my mate,” Ark said as he kissed me again, and my heart jumped out of my chest. In that moment I knew that whatever happened, we would be alright.

We both crept out from behind the rock so we could get a better look. Almost without realizing it I started counting the number of ghost wolves I saw gathered around, but as they moved, I quickly lost count somewhere around 50. That wasn’t a good sign.

It was almost like a theater in the round - there were rows of rocks behind the stage, and rings of stone arches that traveled above it, with more rocks on them. All in all it must have been possible for hundreds or thousands of creatures to sit and watch whatever was on stage.

When my eyes finally turned to the stage itself, I drew in a long and deep breath. I knew right then that we were in trouble. It was clear to me that what we had come looking for was right there on the stage itself.

The power source. It was glowing yellow, a large gold-looking urn, almost like a giant chalice. Waves of energy and light crackled around it, and the ghost wolves chant got louder and louder as the energy seemed to get more and more powerful.

In the center of the chalice was a sphere that was clear, but had a definite boundary, like it had sealed something inside it. Inside were floating nuggets that glowed and sent off charges of different colored light. It was almost like a fireworks display back on Earth, but confined to a small volume, maybe the size of a poker table.

That was definitely the power source we were looking for. Ark watched it with grim determination, and we both leaned down back behind the rock at the same time. “That’s what we came here for, right?”

Ark nodded. “Indeed, that is the power source we seek.”

“They’re not going to just let us walk away with it, Ark.”

“We should consider asking them nicely. That has a chance of working, in my experience.”

I wanted to laugh at his increasingly good grasp of gallows humor, but this seemed hardly the time nor the place for it. “We need a solution here, Ark, not more jokes.”

“I know. I am thinking of one.” Grasping the rock with his huge hands, he leaned upward to get another look. I didn’t join him - I had seen enough for now. Those animals scared the shit out of me, and that was when there was only one of them.

“What’re they doing to it?”

“It appears they are conducting the ritual around it.”

“You mean…they’re worshipping it?”

“That would appear to be correct, yes. They are worshipping it.”

“I dunno about your experience, but in humanity’s past, no one gives up something they worship easily, and certainly not without a fight.”

I saw Ark nod almost imperceptibly. “The Kreossians have seen this before as well. They will not give it up without a fight.”

“Your species is religious?” It seemed like the complete wrong time to ask, but it occurred to me right then and there that I had no idea what the Kreossians believed in.

“We are not. We believe in ourselves and what we can accomplish. That is all we need.” He glanced down at me. “It is the other species that we have met along the way who believe in supernatural things.”

I nodded. “So, what do we do about it? We don’t need all of what they have, but I have a feeling the language barrier is gonna make trading for even a small part of the stuff in that giant cup thing really difficult.”

“I agree. My universal translator is not giving me any insight into what they are chanting. It is possibly not a structured language.”

“Universal translator?”

“How else could we speak to each other? I do not understand your language and you do not understand mine.”

“I guess…I guess I hadn’t thought about that yet.”

Ark laughed mirthlessly. “Now is a good time to think about such things, Melissa.”

I shoved him lightly at the waist. “Shut up. I’ve never been involved with an alien before. Hell, I’d never even met one until a few days ago.”

“Judging by how frequently you attack me, I have no difficulty in believing that.”

“You’re really taking to making jokes at the wrong time, aren’t you?” I smiled. “Guess I’m having a positive influence on you already.”

“Let us figure out how to get off this planet before we discuss influences and whether yours is positive or negative.”

“Good plan. Any ideas coming to mind?”

Ark lowered himself down behind the rock and turned to press his back against it. “I am still considering that.” He looked like he was thinking hard, but then he seemed to make up his mind. “I will attack them directly, head on.”