Page 3 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid

All three of them sat in stunned silence.

A moment later, the text flickered, and a strange, incomprehensible script began to scrawl across the screen.

“What is that?” Eunha was leaning forward, frowning at the screen.

The ship rattled violently, nearly throwing them all to the floor.

“What the hell!” Nyx cried.

Fear burned through Cordelia’s veins like a lit fuse. “Strap in,” she shouted. “Now, now!”

They fumbled with the straps of their chairs as the ship continued to shudder.

The automated voice that Cordelia dreaded blared over the loudspeakers.

“Warning: extreme turbulence. Please strap in or return to your pod. Warning: extreme turbulence?—”

Something else came over the loudspeakers then—a language Cordelia had never heard before, deep and lyrical. There was urgency behind the words, meaningless as they were to her.

“Nyx?” Cordelia barked, flicking a sidelong glance at Nyx as she ran another round of diagnostics.

“They’re splicing into our communications channel,” Nyx said.

“Who is?” Eunha asked, leaning across Cordelia to look at Nyx’s screen.

Nyx laughed, the sound edged with hysteria as she read her screen. “There’s no way!”

“Who is it?” Cordelia echoed, snarling at her screen as it gave her nothing to go off but detected turbulence. It wasn’t coming from the ship itself; as far as the computer was concerned, nothing was acting unusually.

“I have no idea.” Nyx cast her a wild-eyed look. “Commander, I’ve never seen a language like this before. I-I think it might be alien.”

The ringing in Cordelia’s ears grew so loud it drowned out the chaos around her.

“—not possible,” Eunha said as the world came back into focus. “There is no other sentient life in any of the explored galaxy! Everything is still crawling around in the mud!”

A huge shadow fell over them, obstructing the light bouncing off the planet. Nyx’s laughter grew louder, more unhinged.

“Not anymore!” Nyx sat back in her seat and abandoned her attempts to make sense of the communications streaming across her screen.

A ship so big it seemed to go on for miles took over the scene before them. It was sleek in design, all gleaming, golden metal and geometric black lines. There was text scrawled along the side in huge, glowing letters in the same incomprehensible alien script that was flowing over their comms screen.

“Fuck this,” Cordelia whispered. She leaned forward and kicked the lever to release the manual flight controls, yanking them toward herself. “Eunha!”

Eunha cast her a startled look, but then her face hardened, and she followed suit.

“Ohh-ho-hoshit!” Nyx cried, gripping the arms of her seat and plastering herself back against it.

There was a rumble and a violent jolt as the thrusters powered up.

“We need to land,” Cordelia said, leading them directly toward the ship that was blocking their path.

Eunha swore under her breath, bringing up all the readings available to them—readings that would have been nothing but superfluous information if they were landing on Lapillus, guided down by the telemetry provided by the settlement and the ship’s AI.

Cordelia dipped the nose of theCassandra, skimming them along the belly of the larger ship like a pilot fish trailing a shark.

The alien voice over the loudspeakers grew more urgent, biting off something that sounded like a swear before going silent.

They had nearly made it past the nose of the ship when theCassandrafroze, stalling out.