Page 51 of Alien Prince's Fake Bride
“Thatwas stupid,”Bellatriz says casually, her blade dripping with black Vyrpy blood. “Do you want me to tell you why? There are many reasons.”
“I think I already know them,” I groan as I start to notice all the pain from the fight. I break open a first-aid locker and grab all the stuff inside, strewing it on the floor before I sag down andstart to deal with my injuries. “But if you know anything about what might happen now, I’d be happy to hear it.”
“I sincerely doubt it will make you happy. Well, this pod is still in one piece,”my sword says. “Although I do hear it creaking. Its systems are normal, and its small sensors do detect a planet nearby. The AI in charge will try to change our course to get there, but this thing isn’t a spaceship. Its engines are feeble, and actually getting close enough to that planet to crashland on it will be a stretch. There’s a good chance you have doomed both of us. In a day or so you will die from carbon dioxide poisoning, and I will be locked inside this cylinder for eternity as your skeleton slowly turns to stone. Granted, I’ll have superbly intelligent company of the highest quality, but there are limits to how many ways I can find to entertain myself. I estimate that I will exhaust them all in six years. Shall I go on?”
I wince as I clean the wound in my thigh. Vyrpy blades are often dirty. “Not right now, Bellatriz. Can you say something helpful?”
She thinks about it. “Not right now, Prince.”
I prod the wound. There’s something hard inside it. “Will Umbra fare better than we will?”
“I sincerely have no idea. We can hope, though. I try not to speak too highly of organics, but if you were to actually marry Umbra, I mean for real, she’d be one of the best princesses the Khavgren Empire has ever seen. That’s my projection, anyway.”
I hiss between my teeth as I pull a nasty piece of Vyrpy blade out of my leg. “I have had that thought myself. But now it seems it won’t matter at all. This could be the end of all three of us.”
21
- Umbra-
I fight to stay in the pleasant, dark depths, but to no avail. I’m pulled back up to reality, and it’s one I’d prefer not to be in.
“Vera,” I groan as I come to, “what is happening?”
“Hi, Umbra. Welcome back. You blacked out for a moment there. We are in an escape pod from the Khavgren warshipGladiux. We were shot out into space from the ship when you fainted and fell onto the big ejection panel you can see right beside the hatch.”
I slowly get myself into a sitting position. My back and shoulder hurt, but the rest of me is weirdly numb. “Did I hurt myself?”
“After you accidentally launched this pod, the acceleration slammed you into the wall. I don’t think your head hit it. Are you feeling dizzy?”
The escape pod is a big cylinder, maybe a hundred feet long. Its inner walls gleam of a shiny, utilitarian metal, pristine and unused. Blue emergency lighting makes it all look cold. Restraintharnesses line the curved interior, as thick as my wrist and secured by complex, unyielding mechanisms. The air is stale and sour, and I suspect that’s mostly from those terrifying Vyrpy aliens that suddenly burst out of here.
My skin creeps. Those were some terrifying creatures, sleek and deadly. And one of them came in here after me with murder in his reptilian eyes.
“Not really,” I reply. “But I’m feeling numb all over.”
“Oh? Can you move your toes?”
I wiggle my toes easily. “It’s not a spinal injury. I think it’s just because I tossed that attacker out using Syntrix and it really took it out of me.”
“I have no experience and very little data about Syntrix, Umbra. I can’t confirm your hypothesis.”
I check out every part of my body. There are bruises, but nothing bad. “Uh-huh. It happened mostly by itself. I didn’t really decide it. Like it was an instinct of some kind. I think that’s what made me black out.”
“That would seem possible. The effort must have been colossal. The Vyrpy you ejected was about three times your own weight.”
It’s very quiet inside the pod. There’s two windows, one in the hatch I came in and one in the other end.
I get to my feet and stand on the flat floor, just getting my bearings. “Why is there gravity here?”
“It’s not centrifugal force,”Vera says. “The pod is not spinning. It must be artificial gravity of the same kind as in the ship itself.”
I peer through the round porthole in the hatch. There’s only blackness. “Not much going on behind us.” I slowly walk the length of the pod to the other side. It takes a while because of all the harnesses and stuff in the way. “Oh. What do you make of this?” I hold the AI up to the window.
“That appears to be a planet ahead of us,”Vera chirps. “Green and red and purple. It’s not Earth, I regret to say. Nor is it Grefve. I cannot identify it. There are oceans and large landmasses. I will guess that it’s about the size of Earth, maybe a little smaller. Certainly an Earth-like planet.”
I put my hands on the glass, shielding my eyes from the blue glare in the pod so I can see out properly. The planet is gradually coming closer. “That’s what I thought. Are we going to crash on it?”
“I hope not,”Vera says cheerfully. “There’s definitely an atmosphere, and I don’t know if this pod can handle the entry without burning up. Wait. I’ve just been able to befriend the main AI in here. Yep, it’s trying to crash on that planet.”
