Page 4 of Scars & Starlight (Of Blood and Conquest #1)

TARA

I wake up to three alien males hovering above me. They speak to each other with sounds I can’t decipher, and though I can’t understand their words, the looks in their eyes – swirling with galaxies and nebulas – and the smirks on their lips tell me all I need to know. I’m in danger.

When one of them reaches a hand to my chest, I push away the confusion and try to escape.

Whatever sedative the aliens had me under is slower to leave my body, and I end up rolling off the medical bed I was lying on, almost taking one of the males down with me.

Groaning, I scramble to put my hands and feet under me, but my limbs shake too much to obey my commands.

Instead, an alien pulls me up, my back to his front, the other two males approaching with a leer and a curious gaze respectively.

Judging by what I can feel through the uniform of the alien behind me, they’re shaped roughly the same as humans.

A thought that isn’t comforting right now.

Not with the intent I can see on their faces.

Under normal circumstances, I might feel a pleasant surprise at how handsome these new extraterrestrials’ features are.

Faint neon lines glow on the side of their faces and branch out from a circular port at the sides of their necks.

Their skin is smooth and ageless, their features perfect and androgynous.

Are they even alive? Maybe they’re some kind of androids?

The one who tried to grab my boob pulls his lower lip into his mouth, biting into it with impeccable white teeth. How do they look so human? Down to the sleezy leers of the many, many human rapists now walking over our emptier planet.

One of the males, his hair the same color as quicksilver, takes a step back and says something to the male observing me from way too close.

I hold my breath as they all but sandwich me between them.

The redhead in front of me sneers something back before pressing his crotch against my lower stomach, pushing me onto the other alien’s hardness.

When I whimper despite trying to be brave, the third male shouts something.

A moment later, his hurried footsteps retreat.

One down, two to go. Two tall, strong, unpredictable aliens. I’ve dealt with human scum more times than I’d like to count, but this is different. How am I going to get out of this? I’m clearly on one of their ships, and God knows how many of them there are.

As the alien in front of me grabs my top and rips it down the middle, I feel the adrenaline pushing the last of the fuzziness away.

I’m not going to just stand here and let this happen.

Looking down, I see a medical tray with foreign instruments.

When the lights go from a soft white to an angry red, I take the opportunity of the aliens’ momentary distraction to grab the longest, sharpest-looking one I can see.

With as much strength as I can muster, I stab upwards, aiming for the alien’s neck.

The sound of pain he makes is universal; a scream and a gurgle that I don’t have time to feel guilty over as he releases me and I pitch forward into the other alien’s arms. This one throws me away with an angry growl, and I hit the side of the bed I just escaped from, the air knocked out of my lungs.

My ears are ringing. Through the high-pitched noise, I can hear the alien who ripped my clothes yelling.

When I push my torso off the ground, my stomach roils.

I try to hold it in, but in the end, nausea wins and bile splatters over the clean, white tile-like floor.

By the time I muster the strength to lift my eyes, more people are in the room.

One of them is a woman, or female rather, with long black hair braided down her back.

Her eyes are an indigo galaxy, and they bounce between me on the floor and my alien would-be rapist. He’s still shouting and indicating between me and his buddy, also still on the ground.

I glance at the prone alien and see he’s unmoving.

Blood pools around his head like a halo, only a couple of shades lighter than human blood, but oddly sparkling. I think I killed him.

The other newcomer is taller than the rest and is wearing a sort of military dress uniform.

His hair is either the darkest of browns or black, gleaming under the lights, now back to a medical white.

His eyes are purple; a galaxy with new stars, swirling around a black hole.

It’s the eyes I saw before I passed out earlier.

They’re also gazing down at me with as much concern as the woman in the red uniform.

Are they going to kill me now? I did take out one of their own – surely the first of my kind to have done so.

The aliens exchange what sounds like succinct words in their language, a rapid-fire exchange of information.

I crawl to the edge of the narrow bed and pull myself up.

When my top gapes open, exposing the sports bra underneath, I try to pull the two pieces of fabric together in vain.

The woman gasps and rushes over, her rapid approach making me shrink back.

Her arms come up in a wordless show of harmlessness, and it makes me wonder about the similarities between our races again.

Not only physical, but behavioral too? She pulls the silky-looking sheet off the table and hands it to me.

I hesitate for a moment before taking it. But I guess if they meant to kill me, they wouldn’t be thinking about my modesty. As I cover my chest, I look at the alien who tried to save Micah and see him averting his gaze, his beautiful eyes aimed somewhere at the level of my knees .

The female then moves to the male I stabbed, looks at the side of his neck and the bleeding and ravaged port-like opening I hit with my improvised weapon, and calls out an extremely fancy Rubik's cube.

One moment, her palm is empty, and the next, she holds the instrument, the rows and columns of the cube perpetually moving like a Mobius strip.

After consulting whatever it shows, she turns to the alien in the dress uniform, likely the person in charge here, and shakes her head.

I killed him. The guilt comes now, not as strong as what I feel over not saving Micah, but as strong as if I had killed a human attacker, something I’ve been forced to do several times over the years.

The other alien who tried to rape me begins gesturing and raising his voice again, pointing at me with a sneer.

Dress-uniform alien turns to look at someone behind him, and when he does, I see the third assailant, the one who left when things got hairy.

More words are exchanged, and the aliens become increasingly agitated, until the one I saw during the attack on my compound materializes a cube like the medic woman had.

He stares at it, and his eyes flash red like he’s the freaking Terminator.

His mouth tightens into a furious sneer.

With a wave of his other hand, the cube creates some sort of holographic projection.

I see myself sleeping on the medical bed, then the three aliens coming closer, trying to touch me, herding me until I was stuck between the two.

And finally, my stabbing the now-dead alien and the other one pushing me against the bed.

With each sequence of events, the snappily-dressed male looks angrier.

When he clenches his fist closed, the cube disappears.

Three steps are all it takes for him to reach my attacker. For a moment, I think he’s about to embrace his colleague, the way he places his hands on the sides of the other male’s head. But then that now-familiar whoomph of energy sounds, and the male falls down, along with my jaw.

“W–why?” I ask, too confused to consider the language barrier. Is this male the judge, jury, and executioner of the species? Why slaughter one of their own over a… well, an alien. Especially one who ha s already killed their kind. Do they have a zero-tolerance policy? Am I next?

When the male turns on me, I can’t help but cower.

It’s easy to be brave when you don’t have time to think, when you’re not staring death in the face, as angelic as it may be.

Noticing my fear, those galactic eyes widen.

One sharp command later, a storage door of some kind opens, and a shiny white ball rolls out.

I jump back, hitting the side of a tray with my ass, making the contents spill over and clatter.

The ball starts unspooling, and I see it’s actually two balls: a head and a torso, perched up on two digitigrade mech legs, like a space robot chicken.

The little robot beeps, and the tall alien starts giving it what sounds like short commands. At some point, everyone turns my way: several pairs of otherworldly eyes and one pair of mechanical lenses. Just as I start to feel incredibly awkward, the robot starts speaking to me. In English.

“You’re safe here,” it says in a pleasant, very human-sounding voice.

I open and close my mouth a few times, trying to get over the shock of a machine not made on Earth speaking to me. Then its words penetrate.

“Safe?” My voice sounds shrill, so I clear my throat. “My first experience with wherever here is was extraterrestrials trying to rape me!”

The little guy beeps a few more times before it starts speaking in an obnoxious Valley girl accent. “Oh my god, like, don’t even worry about that happening again. The Avaren? Yeah, they’ve got, like, crazy strict laws about that kind of thing. You saw what happened.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Why are you talking like that?”

More peeps and chirps, followed by the whirrs of focusing optics.

“I’m sorry about that. The commander only gave me seven and a half of the measuring units you call seconds to learn the local language from data provided by Avaren ground teams. It seems they have stumbled on a cache of social media influencer videos. ”

A hysterical giggle leaves my lips, and I cover my mouth. Uncanny valley. For a moment, I don’t know which part to address first, then decide to prioritize gaining some information about the newcomers.

“Avaren?”

The now-quiet aliens observe my interactions with the robot, the doctor tilting her head curiously, the commander’s purple eyes levelled at me with laser focus.

“Inhabitants of the planet Avaris,” the robot answers. “According to data provided by the ground teams, humankind named the galaxy in which the planet resides NGC 1300.”

I cringe. I was an engineer in a hydro plant, not an astronomer. “That means nothing to me,” I admit.

The robot’s head does a one-eighty spin like an owl – if owls’ movements were accompanied by the sound of gears and hydraulics.

“It’s located in the Eridanus Cluster. Would you like me to show you?

” it asks eagerly, then doesn’t wait for my reply before its eyes turn into twin projectors.

I gasp, finding myself surrounded by twinkling galaxies.

The point of view zooms in on a beautiful spiral galaxy, then moves closer to one arm.

Countless stars zoom past my head, faster and faster, until everything slows down again.

We’re sailing past planets now, moving closer to the solar system’s star. Finally, we stop.

“Avaris,” the robot says, almost with a hint of pride in its voice.

The planet is dark green, obviously lush with growth, even from space.

Shining blue and purple rivers bisect the continents, already glowing with scattered clusters of what appears to be bioluminescence.

It reminds me of the glowing lines on the aliens’ faces and the robot’s armor.

Three moons orbit the emerald world, each a slightly different hue of white with gold, purple, and blue.

“It’s stunning,” I say, awed by the beauty of something I never thought I’d see: a planet in a galaxy so distant it’s unfathomable to me, one teeming with life.

When a hand lands on my shoulder, I jump up and shriek. I was so mesmerized by the foreign planet that I forgot where I was, who I was with. The projection around us disappears, but now I have to fight the hypnotic power of this alien’s eyes.

His voice is deep and husky, his lips forming words I don’t have the slightest chance to comprehend.

“The commander is asking if you’ll allow him to share some of his nano robots with you so you can understand the Avaren language,” the robot translates.

“He wants to what ?”