Page 30 of The Alien's Major Dilemma

“So we’re waiting for another hit or a visual confirmation that your perimeter has been crossed.”

“Basically, yes.”

“Might as well eat breakfast, then,” she said with a nod.

“My feelings exactly.”

They ate in silence while the drone reading scrolled by. As far as he could tell, everything was quiet. As the drones continued their patrols with no anomalies, Cooper started to get nervous. He put the dishes in the cleaner and got them both another cup of coffee.

“Do you think it was a fluke?” Marissa asked. “There are enemy combatants between us and the base. Maybe they were shooting at them and it just hit nearby?”

“If you call the Base Commander, would he tell you?”

She considered the question and shook her head. “I don’t know, actually. Maybe, if he really was shooting at them and he wants to get me there faster. If he knows where we’re coming from, he can keep them from shooting at us.”

“But if he was aiming at us, we might just help him dial in their targeting.”

“True. No way to know until we try, though. Do you have your phone?”

Cooper pulled it out and handed it to her. He’d seen something about needing to keep your communication devices from your significant other but he didn’t see the point. Anything top secret wouldn’t be on his phone and he wasn’t going to go out of his way to hide things from her. Especially when she would eventually be able to read his emotions by thinking about them.

The call had started to connect when the ship rocked with another explosion. None of the drones showed anything out of the ordinary but the explosion had been much closer this time.

“Shut it off,” Cooper told her.

“They can’t have gotten enough off the signal to do that,” she protested.

A voice on the other end of the call asked something that Cooper couldn’t hear over the third explosion. The sinkingsuspicion that he’d been looking too far out for their attackers hit him and he changed the screens to a live feed of the exterior of the ship.

“Sir, we’re under attack,” Major Ozark said into the phone. “If it’s our people, tell them to cease fire. Cease Fire!”

Cooper knew the order would come too late if it was her people when the ship rocked with the fourth explosion. He’d been looking in the wrong direction and could only watch with horror as the dirt around the ship crumbled away with the next explosion.

“Ship, secure passengers,” he shouted and felt the control chair he was in wrap around him. Marissa shouted in surprise in the middle of her angry conversation with her superior officer. If she was in the kitchenette chairs instead of the on the bench, her ass was going to be sore by the time they stopped moving, but she’d be safe. He hoped.

The ground sensors on the ship started their probe but he knew it was too late. He’d run the sensors as deep as he could when he landed and found nothing but a deep aquifer with seasonal underground rivers. Everything he’d expected in a desert.

Cooper sent the commands to secure the interior of the ship for launch and reinforced what he could on the blast shields and waited for the next explosion.

It came and he watched on the monitors as the Earth fell away from beneath his ship and they hung suspended for one awful, heart-stopping moment. Then they fell into the deep, dark void that had opened beneath them and the world shifted.

Chapter 14

Marissa expected them to tumble when the ship started to fall. Instead, it stayed mostly upright, turning and bouncing off rocks as though they were moving through a tube that was only slightly bigger than the ship itself. Every hit off the wall slowed their descent, but they still dropped at an alarming rate.

Straps sprouted from the chair and pulled her snug against it while she struggled to keep hold of the phone.

“Major Ozark,” the Commander called over the phone. “Major Ozark, respond.”

“Good news, sir,” she shouted. “I think we just left a big clue about where to find me. Just look for the big fucking hole in the ground and follow it to the fucking center of the Earth.”

“Major Ozark, we do not copy. Repeat, Major Ozark, we do not copy.”

“Dammit,” Marissa grumbled just before the call disconnected.

Another bounce had the ship turned abruptly. She didn't scream, though the sound stuck in her throat. The chair padded her more than she expected and made the whole thing feel like the most terrifying roller coaster she'd ever been on.

They eventually stopped moving and the momentary silence made her wonder how much of her hearing she'd lost in the fall. Then the pounding started.

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