Page 59 of Holiday with the Aliens

Stella may be snowed in with an alien beast, but she soon finds that he is the monster that she wants at her side, and she’ll do anything to keep him there.

Chapter One

Lights flashing.

A crash.

Sound blasting in one ear and then eerie silence.

Weightlessness.

Black.

The weight in her limbs was the first thing Stella felt as the black faded into the dim light of consciousness. She tried to lift her arm, but the seat wouldn’t surrender it, caught as it was by the emergency restraints. She relaxed fully back as something trickled into her eyes and her nose caught the metallic scent of blood. Hers? She didn’t know. Everything hurt.

It should have been louder. She couldn’t hear anything. And when she tried to call for help, her voice scratched, but all else was silence.

Her shoulders sagged and suddenly Stella could move her arms. The restraints had given way and the dim light on her ship plunged back into darkness. But this time she clung to consciousness and moved, despite the pain. As she stood, her leg buckled and she clutched at the cramped muscles, fingers questing for any serious wounds. But as she moved, the musclereleased, and Stella could walk with barely more than a limp. On her face, she found blood, and she winced as her fingers scraped over torn flesh on her scalp.

Not good.But it could be worse. She had to keep moving. A nasty chemical smell invaded her nostrils and she didn’t want to be around, breathing it in, for long. Wind whistled through her ears and with it came a dull clanking noise as her hearing began to return. Stella wanted to sag in relief, but the path before her was strewn with debris and her feet were unsteady. When she kicked something soft and meaty she bit back a scream.

Was she the only survivor?

The thought danced havoc in her head and she wanted to curl into a ball and cry, wait to be rescued, and sleep until this was all over. She couldn’t be the only one, shecouldn’t. Space ships didn’t crash land. Not after hundreds of years of human flight. That had been the first thing they’d told her when she joined the civilian fleet.The safest place in the universe is on a ship in peace time.

Her flight from Earth’s Lunar base out to K147, a sparsely populated mining colony 9 light years away, should have dealt with nothing more than a little turbulence.

Get it together, sister.She marshaled her thoughts. There’d been a moment of weightlessness as the grav simulator failed, but she was on two feet now and it felt normal. Normal like Earth, or maybe a little lighter. Stella bounced from foot to foot and tested the resistance of the air around her. They’d landed somewhere with gravity. And it had air, too, since she was breathing. With the lights gone, not even emergency sensors lighting her path, she knew that the ship’s power had completely failed.

She should have been able to hear the whirring of engines or the thumping of the thrusters. Instead, only silence confrontedher, with not even the moans and groans of pain from her ship mates.

Though she wanted to run, Stella knelt down and felt for the person she’d accidentally kicked. Maybe he was only unconscious. She didn’t think she had the strength to carry anyone out, but if she could find survivors, she might have something like hope to cling to. But the flesh she found was cold as ice, and what felt like a limb terminated with a torn piece of cloth and a jagged, meaty end that should have been connected to the rest of the body.

Bile rose in her throat and she turned her head at the last moment, vomiting to the side of the path to avoid desecrating the corpse and befouling her escape route.

How she made it through the rest of the passenger hold, Stella wasn’t sure. She found the escape door and opened it, bursting out into the bright blue sun of some desolate alien planet. The light streamed in through the door and she knew that if she cast her eyes back, she’d see what had happened to her fellow passengers. So she looked straight ahead and jumped down to the hard ground. The ship had crashed down lopsided and she cleared a height that was almost as tall as she was. The sting radiated up past her knees, but after a moment she found her feet again and walked, taking her time to step carefully through the snow slick ground.

Her breath frosted in the air and her nose threatened to turn blue. Bright white snow fell from the cloudy sky, the sun lighting up the crystals inside and casting a strange blue hue over the whole scene. Stella wore a sweater over her pants and light top and was glad that for once she’d been wearing shoes during the journey.

She stumbled away from the ship, falling to her knees on soft snow once she no longer lurked in the shadow of the hulking monstrosity. It hadn’t seemed so huge, so dangerous, when itdocked at the Lunar Base. But now it sat in the clearing, as big as a smashed skyscraper and threatening to fall to pieces. A crash dragged her eyes up, and she saw fire spouting from windows dozens of meters above her. Stella looked around. She’d been lucky that her door was so close to the ground. Though most of the ship was made of engines and storage for food and water, there could easily be surviving passengers trapped in places where it was too high or too dangerous to get out.

Something snapped, and she scuttled back on her hands and feet as a piece of the ship little bigger than her fist fell right in front of her. A more sinister crack snapped through the air, and she crawled to her feet and ran before anything else could break off the ship and crush her to pieces.

She shivered as the cold of the planet sunk into her bones. Stella turned her attention away from the ship to try and figure out where she was and if there was any hope of help coming her way. Wind whistled through tall trees, and she spied broken limbs and branches in the wake of the ship’s crash zone. But it could have been worse. Either the pilot or the autonav had gotten them close to the ground before the systems failed. She wouldn’t have survived a crash from space, especially with little more than a few cuts and bruises.

Off in the distance, Stella spied hills that rose beyond the trees. And though she knew that it could have been her eyes playing tricks on her, they seemed close enough that she could make it before nightfall. If this planet had a night. The sun hung high overhead and in the minutes that she’d been outside, it hadn’t seemed to move. She hoped the days were close to Earth length. With the air as cold as it already was, she wasn’t looking forward to the night’s temperature drop. She needed shelter before then.

Sucking in experimental breaths, she decided the airseemedfine. Her lungs filled and she didn’t get dizzy. She had to hopethings remained that way. All the survival kits were still inside the ship, and she hadn’t thought to grab one. An inventory of her pockets revealed two bags of candy and a protein bar. Not much, but it might see her through a few days if she could find water.

If this planethadpotable water.

The trees all around looked a lot like the pine trees back home, but on the top, something like palm fronds exploded out, soaking up sun. Unlike palms, she didn’t see any coconuts. And unlike pines, no pine cones littered the ground. But trees meant CO2, she hoped. And CO2 meant oxygen.

Stella set her sights on the hills. There had to be water there, or something to collect the snow to let it melt. At the very least, she could get a little higher and survey the damage. And see if there was any hope of survival.

Another jolt from the crashed ship made her jump and scurry further. Anything was better than staying in this burning graveyard.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeep.

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