Page 2 of Protected By the Alien Warmachine

Set into the doors were four large earthenware jars. I’d missed them in the gloom and with the alien to look at, but now they pulsed with an inner light, they couldn’t be more obvious.

They could containanything. Antimatter, hostile nanoswarms, mind-controlling insects? All were possible in Ancient sites, and careless xenoarchaeologists risked more lives than their own. I backed up hurriedly, bumping into Jules.

“Is that…are those hyperwaves?” she shook her scanner as though that would make the readings make sense. It didn’t help. “Okay. Fine. He’s connected to whatever’s in those jars through hyperspace. That totally makes sense. Yep.”

I looked over her shoulder. What she said was crazy, but it wasn’t wrong. Somehow, the alien was generating hyperspace channels to the four containers. That ought to be impossible, even the smallest generator was six foot long. The alien was big, but notthatbig.

Warily walking forward toward him, I tried to understand. I’d hardly taken a step when I stopped with a shrill yelp.

Jules was beside me at once, a small pistol appearing in her hand as if by magic as she looked around for the threat. “What? What is it?”

My finger shook as I pointed at the ‘dead’ alien resting on the stone, and my mouth wouldn’t work right. I’m not sure I said anything in any intelligible language, but Jules swore and swung the pistol around to cover him.

His fingers twitched again. No longer as still as the stone slab beneath him, tremors ran through him, muscles coming back to life after thousands of years. Jules kept her weapon pointed at him, though I wasn’t sure that tiny weapon even qualified as a threat to the massive warrior.

“Tell the others,” I hissed at her. “Go, they need to hear about this.”

“Yeah, sowe’lltell them all about it.” Juliette’s voice hardened to a growl. “I’ll cover him. You get up the ladder and I’ll follow.”

“Fuck off, you know how slow I am at climbing. One of us should stay and document this, right? You’re the athletic one, you go first.”

The alien’s hand lifted from its place on the bier, trembled, and dropped back down. Juliette swore under her breath, thenscrambled up the rope to the tunnel above, taking a quarter of the time I’d need. I kept my eye on the alien, my heart pounding as his chest rose and fell, his already powerful body hardening, muscles flexing as he stirred. Lying motionless, he’d looked like the sexiest man I’d ever seen.

Moving, he was fast becoming the sexiest god I could imagine.

“Hey! Talia! Don’t stand there drooling over your Ancient boyfriend, get your ass up here before he skins you alive.” Jules never was one to pull her punches, verbal or otherwise. I moved back to the foot of the rope ladder but shook my head.

“No way I’d get up there before he catches me. I’m going to watch and take notes.”

“Fucking idiot academics,” Jules snarled, as though she wasn’t a xenoarchaeologist post-grad, same as me. “Fine, I’ll cover you from up here.”

“No, you get to safety. We can’t both stay here and risk our lives, or no one will know what happened to us.”

Somehow, Jules’s silence was more profane than any amount of cursing could have been, but she went. A scramble of feet on stone, running footsteps, and she was gone. I was alone.

Alone, apart from the blue-skinned mountain of muscle and crystal rising from his bier.

I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake.

2

KAL’VA

Ido not know how long I rested in the embrace of death, consciousness hovering on the brink of Darkness Eternal, that final ending to which I’d consigned so many. In that dreamlike state, time passed without me registering it. My body lay still on its bier, dead but waiting. My mind dreamed in the walls of my tomb, stored by the cunning arts of the Makers.

I’d woken five times since the Makers placed me in this crypt, and each time I’d destroyed those who came to plunder the inner sanctums of their tomb. This was the sixth. A pulse of vital energy reached me, a living being touching me and calling me from my sleep-death. An unfamiliar being, an intruder. The creature was not from this world, nor from any species in the Makers’ database, and the tomb required a guardian’s services.

I should have woken earlier, when they entered the tomb. That they had reached my crypt without triggering the tomb’s defenses was worrying.

Status reports edged into my consciousness, knowledge pouring into my mind. None of the news brought me joy. Large sections of the tomb complex reported damage, and most of therest were dark, reporting nothing at all. The auto-repair systems failed, as did the comms and most of the storage.

I should receive updates from the entire tomb, but I only had full access to my crypt. A few alerts trickled through the system to me, far fewer than expected. They spoke of unexpected air movements, breaches of the outer walls, changes in the atmosphere. Old damage, not the fault of the current intruders. Whoever caused it, they were long gone or long dead.

A warm hand on my shoulder brought my focus back into the chamber. I didn’t react to the intruder’s touch. I couldn’t. My body lay dead, drained of all vitality, and the resurrection protocol took time.

Some of my senses had returned. Sight would come last, but touch gave me valuable information about the creature. A warm-blooded species with an internal skeleton. No different to me, in that regard. Oxygen breathing. Inquisitive. Pleasant.

Wait. Pleasant?That wasn’t a word which should appear in my analysis. Nor was it strong enough. Delightful? Wonderful? Amazing? None fit.Perhaps it has been too long since I felt touch,I thought. I might not know how long I’d lain here, but it was clearly far longer than I’d ever been dead before.

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