Page 11 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid
“As best I can.” Haerune canted his head. “I’m not sure we have the biometric data for her species, and she doesn’t seem fond of me.”
He took another testing step toward her, his tendrils reaching up, and Cordelia slid behind Rentir. Something swelled in his chest as one of her hands fisted in the back of his shirt. She spoke in a low tone, her breath ghosting over one of his sensitiveears. The hair at his nape stood on end. He fought the urge to shiver. His hand came up in warning, urging Haerune back. Haerune tilted his head and frowned.
“Elten, you’re with me,” Thalen said. “We’re going to take the hovercraft and help the others pick up the female’s other passengers.”
“Cordelia,” Rentir said. She looked up at her name. “Her name is Cordelia.”
Thalen nodded sagely, meeting her eyes. “You’re safe now, Cordelia. We will find your crew.”
“As safe as anyone can be when caught in the crossfire of a doomed liberation movement being barraged by air strikes,” Elten muttered, with his lower hands on his hips.
Elten was perhaps the most pessimistic among them about their odds of survival. It was likely a side effect of how closely he’d worked alongside the auretians as one of the teserium processors. He knew firsthand how advanced their technology could be. Rentir understood that better than he’d ever admit.
Thalen shot him a withering look. “Not helpful.”
Elten shrugged with both sets of shoulders. “It’s the truth—not that she can understand it, anyway.”
“I believe I may be able to help with that,” Haerune said. His big, blue eyes took in the female with a scrutiny Rentir knew was scientific in nature, but it rankled nonetheless. “The Aurillon have a program for making first contact with a new language. If she’ll cooperate, we should be able to communicate with her in short order.”
“Good, get it handled,” Thalen said. “Elten, let’s move out.”
Rentir stepped away from the hovercraft, and Cordelia followed, though she let go of her grip on his shirt. She sidled away as Thalen skirted past her and bowed his head to slide into the hovercraft they’d just vacated. The door slid shut behind him, and the familiar whine of the engine filled the hangar.Rentir pressed a hand to Cordelia’s back, urging her out of the way before the propeller blades began to spin in earnest.
“We have to move,” he said over the engine’s growing noise.
She nodded her head as though she understood him, allowing him to rush her toward the door on the far side of the room.
CHAPTER 4
Cordelia allowed the alien—Rentir—toguide her out of the hangar by the small of her back. Once they were clear of the heavy door, she shrugged his touch off, trying to ignore the lingering heat on her skin.
“Where are we going?” she asked as though he would understand.
They entered a cavernous hall. The whole facility seemed to be only dimly lit by strips of soft white lights set into the walls. Doors lined the halls, labeled in more alien text she couldn’t make sense of. The air was cold and crisp with a faintly metallic bite to it. It smelled wet to her, like a cavern dripping with stalactites rather than some state-of-the-art alien facility. The stone floor was like ice beneath her bare feet.
Rentir said something to her, catching her elbow as she almost walked straight through a four-way intersection in the hall. He tugged her to the right, guiding her down a narrower hallway. She shook him off again; it was becoming a reflex. The alien was seriously touchy.
She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the other alien following them.
He looked so much less human than Rentir, though there were similarities in their bone structure, and they both shared the same scaled tail. His eyes were more ovoid, too large in his face to be mistaken for human, with huge irises and a horizontal slit for a pupil. He had long, black hair that would have done a metalhead proud, but somewhere beneath were tentacles that seemed to move with their own will, poking out from beneath the curtain of his hair like snakes tasting the air. Where his ears poked through his hair, they resembled spiked fins, the membrane thin and iridescent where the light poured through it.
He met her gaze without glancing away in awkwardness, studying her without any reservation. There was a keen glint in his eyes, something shrewd and calculating that turned her stomach over nearly as much as his writhing tentacles did.
One of those tentacles rose up and wagged at her as she stared, and she tripped over her feet. Rentir caught at her arm again, this time pulling away faster than she could shrug him off. The corner of the other alien’s mouth tugged up, and she got the distinct sense he was mocking her.
“Very cute.” She turned away, grinding her teeth.
Rentir said something over his shoulder to the other alien in a tone that sounded reprimanding.
Good.
They stopped at last, and Rentir held a hand up to a black square in the center of a door. A robotic voice chirped something, and then the door before him whispered open.
It was clearly a medical facility. There was some kind of huge pod along the back wall, and all around were various pieces of gleaming white equipment. Holographic posters on the wall depicted different kinds of anatomy, sifting slowly through some kind of slideshow that emphasized different organs and systems.
Pandora would have a stroke when she saw this place. No doubt it was decades ahead of anything she had handled on Earth.
Worry twisted Cordelia’s gut. Where were the others? Had their pods worked as they were meant to? Had they landed close enough to each other to find one another?
