Page 9 of Rizzed Up By My Alien Neighbor
I grunt, or try to. The sound that comes out is more whimper than war cry. I immediately hate myself for it.
The pain is... operatic. Not a clean, sterile kind of injury—a slash here, a cracked bone there. No, this is the slow, relentless symphony of nerve endings unraveling beneath a dozen layers of trauma. My ribs feel like shattered glass tucked beneath my skin. Something wet and warm leaks under my armor near my hip. My left arm... I don’t want to look at my left arm.
But I do.
And I wish I hadn’t.
The skin—what little isn’t covered by the buckled remains of my gauntlet—is blackened. The scales are curled back in some places, revealing the gray subdermal layers beneath. Burned. Deep. My forearm’s a tapestry of ruin, from elbow to palm. The scent—oh,gods, the scent—is wrong. Too organic. Too... cooked.
Vakutan physiology is tough. We’re bred for war, for endurance, for surviving what kills most species three times over. But this?
This is going to take time.
I reach for the emergency medseal pack on my belt and almost scream. I manage to drag it free with my good hand, teeth gritted, vision swimming in and out of black static. The synthfoam inside stings like acid as I slap it onto the wound, but it knits fast, flooding the tissues with numbing agents and coagulants. Better. Not good. But better.
I sit up slowly, groaning as my back complains with every vertebral segment.
The cockpit is a grave. My grave. The panels are slagged beyond recognition. The AI core—what’s left of it—sits in the middle of a melted crater, one eye still flickering dimly like a child’s nightlight refusing to surrender. Sparks leap from exposed wiring overhead, cascading down like fireflies in mourning.
The jump drive is... well, calling it a drive at this point is generous. It looks like someone fed it into an industrial compactor and then microwaved the remains for flavor. The outer shell is ruptured, the primary and tertiary coils fused into a lopsided mess of glassy black metal and dead energy. Itsmellsruined—ozone, insulation, the sour stench of burned fusion gel and liquefied neutronium.
I put a hand on it anyway. Just in case.
No pulse.
No hum.
Dead.
“Damn you,” I whisper in Vakutan. “You brought me across the stars, and now you diehere, on this backwater ball of mud and meat?”
No response.
Just silence, smoke, and the gentle hiss of dying systems.
The power core is cracked. I can see the fracture line running straight through the casing, a jagged fault line like the ones that tore up the Gaelin moons. Any more stress and it’ll blow a hole through this hillside big enough to cook a cow. Which, judging by the faint bovine odor on the wind, might be considered a war crime here.
I drag myself out of the cockpit, every movement scraping against the ragged edge of pain. My boots hit dirt—realdirt. Earth. Not the sterilized gravel of a Coalition base or the glass plains of Thunari Prime. This isorganic. Loamy. Moisture-rich. It squelches slightly underfoot, giving way in that uniquely human way that makes me feel suddenly too heavy, too sharp-edged, toowrong.
The air tastes... thick. Not just breathable—lush. I inhale deeply, lungs burning, but the oxygen hits like a drug. It's not recycled. Not stripped of smell and spirit. This air has character. It carries hints of pollen, grass, a trace of something tangy and metallic on the breeze.
A field stretches out before me—green as envy, stitched with the golds and rusts of midsummer. The horizon rises and falls in soft, rolling bluffs, and somewhere below, I hear the faint growl of ground transports—cars, I think they’re called. I know the word. I’ve studied ancient Terran files. But the reality of it islouderthan I expected. Clunkier.
I’mreallyhere.
Earth.
Year 2025.
Centuries out of sync, marooned in a place where humanity still watches reality television and thinks suborbital flight is cutting-edge tech.
I stagger down the incline toward a nearby patch of shade, dragging my burned arm close against my chest. The world tilts slightly on its axis—not the planet’s fault, just my own equilibrium trying to reconcile gravity with trauma. I pass a shattered wing segment from the Starfighter embedded nose-first in the hillside like a warning.
From up here, I can see rooftops below—small structures, squat and unassuming, painted in soft pastels and earth tones. One of them has a huge red bottle mounted on its roof, which Irefuseto investigate until I’ve had at least sixteen hours of unconsciousness and a drink.
I’m not dead.
But I might as well be.
