Page 32 of Alien Prince’s Fake Bride (The Tentacle Throne #1)

- Umbra -

I fight to stay in the pleasant, dark depths, but to no avail. I’m pulled back up to reality, and it’s one I’d prefer not to be in.

“Vera,” I groan as I come to, “what is happening?”

“ Hi, Umbra. Welcome back. You blacked out for a moment there. We are in an escape pod from the Khavgren warship Gladiux . We were shot out into space from the ship when you fainted and fell onto the big ejection panel you can see right beside the hatch.”

I slowly get myself into a sitting position. My back and shoulder hurt, but the rest of me is weirdly numb. “Did I hurt myself?”

“ After you accidentally launched this pod, the acceleration slammed you into the wall. I don’t think your head hit it. Are you feeling dizzy?”

The escape pod is a big cylinder, maybe a hundred feet long.

Its inner walls gleam of a shiny, utilitarian metal, pristine and unused.

Blue emergency lighting makes it all look cold.

Restraint harnesses line the curved interior, as thick as my wrist and secured by complex, unyielding mechanisms. The air is stale and sour, and I suspect that’s mostly from those terrifying Vyrpy aliens that suddenly burst out of here.

My skin creeps. Those were some terrifying creatures, sleek and deadly. And one of them came in here after me with murder in his reptilian eyes.

“Not really,” I reply. “But I’m feeling numb all over.”

“ Oh? Can you move your toes?”

I wiggle my toes easily. “It’s not a spinal injury. I think it’s just because I tossed that attacker out using Syntrix and it really took it out of me.”

“ I have no experience and very little data about Syntrix, Umbra. I can’t confirm your hypothesis.”

I check out every part of my body. There are bruises, but nothing bad. “Uh-huh. It happened mostly by itself. I didn’t really decide it. Like it was an instinct of some kind. I think that’s what made me black out.”

“ That would seem possible. The effort must have been colossal. The Vyrpy you ejected was about three times your own weight.”

It’s very quiet inside the pod. There’s two windows, one in the hatch I came in and one in the other end.

I get to my feet and stand on the flat floor, just getting my bearings. “Why is there gravity here?”

“ It’s not centrifugal force,” Vera says. “ The pod is not spinning. It must be artificial gravity of the same kind as in the ship itself.”

I peer through the round porthole in the hatch. There’s only blackness. “Not much going on behind us.” I slowly walk the length of the pod to the other side. It takes a while because of all the harnesses and stuff in the way. “Oh. What do you make of this?” I hold the AI up to the window.

“ That appears to be a planet ahead of us,” Vera chirps.

“ Green and red and purple. It’s not Earth, I regret to say.

Nor is it Grefve. I cannot identify it. There are oceans and large landmasses.

I will guess that it’s about the size of Earth, maybe a little smaller. Certainly an Earth-like planet.”

I put my hands on the glass, shielding my eyes from the blue glare in the pod so I can see out properly. The planet is gradually coming closer. “That’s what I thought. Are we going to crash on it?”

“ I hope not,” Vera says cheerfully. “ There’s definitely an atmosphere, and I don’t know if this pod can handle the entry without burning up. Wait. I’ve just been able to befriend the main AI in here. Yep, it’s trying to crash on that planet.”

It’s mostly my mind that’s numb, I realize. This really terrible news doesn’t rattle me much. “So I’m going to burn up?”

“ The AI claims not. The pod is clad in some kind of hyper-advanced material that will shield you, it says. It recommends you strap in. It will deactivate the gravity. It has to brake hard before the pod touches the atmos— ah, okay.” The view out of the window vanishes as some kind of plate slides down across it.

“ That looks about right. I was wondering how that glass would stand up to four thousand degrees of friction heat.”

I grab hold of a harness and start trying to put it on. “So we could make it?”

“ There’s a tiny chance you will survive the crash. I have little data about what might happen later. The green color of the planet is a good sign that there might be plants that do photosynthesis, which would mean oxygen. Whether or not you can breathe the air there is a different matter.”

“Thanks,” I tell her, struggling with the stiff, unused harness as the artificial gravity suddenly goes away and I start to float in the air.

“ My pleasure. No, that’s the wrong way, Umbra. Take that loop and bring it around your waist. Yes, like that. Now tighten. Good. Now take this next strap…”

- - -

The crash is loud, drawn-out, confusing, and terrible.

I’m tossed here and there in the harness, feeling like a ragdoll in a furious washing machine.

The screech of tearing metal and the sickening crunch of impacts vibrate through my bones.

But the harness holds, biting into my flesh, and I don’t get crushed under my own weight when the pod finally comes to a shuddering, grinding stop.

The smell of burning electronics mixes with the already stale air.

“ We’re here,” Vera says. “ The pod’s AI didn’t make it, though. He’s only giving me gibberish. Do you want to open the hatch and exit?”

I fight with the mechanism to come loose. “Do I have a choice?”

“ Not in the long term. I suppose you might survive for about a day in here before the CO2 builds up enough to kill you. I would recommend trying the atmosphere outside before then.”

The locking mechanism opens with a sharp click, and I drop to the ground. “Oh, I’ll do it right away. No reason to wait.”

“ The hatch is unlocked,” Vera says. “ You can just open it and look out.”

I check the windows. They’re still closed from the outside. “I guess I have to. We’re not in an ocean or a lake, right?”

“ I think we’re on land. The sensations I felt during the last part of the crash are consistent with landing in a dense forest, crashing through treetops and breaking trunks before bouncing between several sturdy trees.”

It’s obvious how to open the hatch, so I take a deep breath and turn the handle.

The hatch opens with a sharp hiss of pressure being equalized.

Immediately the smell in the pod changes, from stale and dusty to extremely organic, with rotting vegetation as the main note.

It’s a thick, cloying stench that makes my stomach churn.

The air from outside is hot and humid, and the inside of the window immediately mists over.

I push the hatch open on screaming, unwilling hinges. Then I stand back and look. “It’s a jungle.”

“ Can you breathe?” Vera asks.

I take a deep breath. “I can. But I may not want to. It smells like a compost heap that’s been left in a foot locker along with a ripe cheese for a year.”

“ Ah. From your tone I gather that’s not good?”

“It stinks,” I tell her as I stick my head out the hatch.

There are tree trunks and bushes and dense undergrowth.

Sticky stuff drips from above, and I have to lean way out to look up and see the treetops.

The canopy of branches and leaves is at least three hundred feet above me.

It’s incredibly dense, and barely a thin ray of sunlight reaches the forest floor.

I can see the trail of destruction the pod made as it crashed.

It flattened trees and dug a deep groove in the ground before it hit a tree trunk so hard it dug halfway into the wood, leaving a gaping, white wound in the otherwise deep green trunk.

Sap oozes from the broken wood, adding a sickly-sweet note to the already overwhelming smell.

“What do I do now?” I ponder, the weight of my isolation pressing down on me. “Should I stay with the pod?”

“ Staying with the lifeboat is the conventional wisdom,” Vera lectures. “ If you expect a search and rescue operation being mounted, it will be easier for the rescuers to find this pod than one camouflaged woman in a jungle.”

“I’m not sure what to expect,” I admit as I gingerly step out of the pod and onto the alien planet, the strange, spongy ground feeling unnervingly alive beneath my boot. “I feel like Mareliux would try to find me. But he had his hands full last time I saw him. I don’t even know if he’s alive.”

The realization hits me and pierces the strange numbness like a spear of ice. Mareliux might be dead!

“Shit,” I mutter. “There were a lot of Vyrpy in that hallway-”

A sudden movement makes me freeze. I stare into the jungle, heart rate going wild. “Did you see something?”

“ I’m not facing the right way,” Vera chirps.

I slowly raise my arm. “Do you have IR vision?”

“ Yes. I spot six living creatures in my field of view. Not counting you, Umbra. One of them is big. It moves slowly, but evenly. It could be a predator. Cold-blooded, but it registers slightly above the ambient temperature. My recommendation now is to get back into the pod and close the hatch.”

On knees that feel a little wobbly, I step back into the pod. I grab the handle and try to pull the hatch shut, but it won’t move. “Damn it!”

“ The hinges appear to have been knocked out of alignment during the crash,” Vera explains. “ I’m surprised you were able to open it in the first place.”

I use my full weight to try to pull the hatch shut. It’s not budging.

“ You may have to push it closed from the outside.”

“That might defeat the purpose,” I hiss as I try again, leaning back and stemming my boots against the wall. “I want to be on this side.”

“ Ah. Yes, that makes sense. Do you want updates about the predator?”

“Sure, if you— oh, fuck!”