Page 29 of Possessed By the Alien Guard
Billy stood in the doorway, his small body pressed to my calf as he stared out into the bad weather without setting a hoof outside.
“Spoiled already, I see.”
He looked up at me.
I waved him back inside.“Go on then.”I had tasked one of the cleaning bots to monitor him and take care of any messes.One more mattered little.
Remaining in the doorway, I strained to detect any sign of movement from Jillian’s base, but there was none.It seemed my mate was as sensible as Billy and had decided to stay out of the rain.
Not for the first time, I wished we had some means to communicate.Yet even if we could hide the signal from her people, I knew nothing about how to do so from mine.
A restlessness kept me from being able to relax.I shut Billy in the bedroom and reconfigured the main room into a practice space.My yedral blade sang as I pulled it from its sheath.It had been too long.I took up an opening stance in the center of the room and fell into the first moves, letting long years of practice and muscle memory take over.The blade swished through the air, each strike true, yet the peace I usually found eluded me.At the end of the sequence, I re-sheathed my sword and hung it again on the rack by the door.
I longed for Jillian—not just to mate her, but also for her company.
Nothing else would do.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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Jillian
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ITOOK ANOTHER bite of yeast ration and made a face.It was salty, but that was about all I could say for it.I picked up the package to check the name again—Beef Bolognese.I laughed.No human in existence has ever tasted real beef, but we always named everything after something lost when we left Earth.
We did it as soon as we found Sagittarian One, too.Oh, sure, the scientists went around naming all the plants and animals using some new system.But everyone else just slapped together two words that seemed to fit best, and those were the ones that stuck.There’d even been competitions, with everyone watching old vids from Earth to find the things that fit best.Aiko had been the one to find a vid of something called an antelope with long horns like Billy would have once he got older.Hopefully, someday I could introduce my new pet to my best friend.
I forced myself to eat the rest of dinner, but it was hard after all the yummy meals Fin brought me.And if Varool ration blocks were the best thing I’d ever eaten, what was their real food like?Far better than anything the mess hall ever made on Chandra Station, I bet.
The comms system blared an alarm.Dropping my fork, I bolted for the control room and activated the connection.“This is Lieutenant Jones.”
“You’re being evacuated,” a man said.“Be prepared for oh six hundred hours tomorrow.”
“Evacuated!Why?”
