Chosen by the Alien Above Part 3: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance Serial (4 page)

Astro growled and flashed a red eye at me. Her mangled mouth of parts gnashed the air. She started toward me.

“No Astro!” Noah yelled.
 

The she-monster went back to her place by the door. A low growl echoed in her metal throat.

Still no red print emerged. Noah’s wasn’t a normal face. Mainly because it spewed lies offering hope where none existed. Where it was better off not to go looking.
 

False hope was a soul splinter I didn’t have the strength to endure.

I raised my hand to slap him again. Rage vibrated my arm in the air. He didn’t move an inch.

He offered himself to me. A lamb for the sacrifice. More like a bull.
 

His calm acceptance stayed my hand.
 

“How dare you!” I shrieked. “You have no idea what I go through just pushing forward. How impossible it is to simply live. My life is a black sky and still I struggle for breath.”

“I know exactly how you feel.”

“Shut up! You don’t know shit!”

“Meristatic Cranial Cystosis,” he said.

The floor dropped out from under me. My stomach fell three hundred miles down to the surface. How did he know?
 

“Right, you hacked my medical records. Asshole.”

“I apologize for peeking into your personal data, but my intrusion may save your life.”

“Stop saying that!”

It was like he enjoyed stabbing a blunt club through my heart.

“I know how you feel,” he said.

My fingernails seriously wanted to drag furrows through his cheeks.

“I had the same condition,” he said. “I, like you, was given a short window for life.”

My stomach felt like it dropped through the surface and further still to the core of the rocky ball below.

“What are you saying?”

My brain wasn’t working right. His words couldn’t mean what they said.

“I was in the same exact situation you are in now,” he said.
 

“When?”

“Ten years ago.”

“Why aren’t you dead then?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.

“If you go cryptic on me now, I swear I’ll claw your eyes out.”

“I prefer my eyes where they are,” he said as his glance dropped to my chest.
 

How could he be thinking like that right now? Ten years alone in space indeed! My eyes narrowed and claws raised.

“I was diagnosed. Told I had less than a few months before the rapidly growing cyst in my brain would either choke off all other functions or explode. Neither outcome offered a chance at life.”

I’d heard all the same information. Great. I was no closer to living
and
I got to parade my doom before the world.

I snarled and flexed my claws. The cat scratch fury was about to be unleashed.

He sped up his delivery. “I faced exactly what you face. No known cure. No hope but the doctors simultaneously saying I was doomed while also saying we were going to beat it. To give it our all. Easy for them to say when their asses weren’t on the line.”

I knew exactly how that felt. It was my daily reality of the last several weeks.

“Despite all my billions, despite almost limitless resources, I found no answer. All of my effort couldn’t cure the richest eighteen-year-old in the world. I didn’t find a cure, but I did find a possibility.”

A possibility? What possibility? Why was he still alive, looking distractingly gorgeous?

My claws wavered.

"I built this space station, or its progenitor, and moved here. I moved heaven to escape earth and the death it promised."

"Why? Why did that help?"

He sounded like he was selling space snake oil.

"Microgravity allows for a slowing of the system. The pull of gravity and all the accompanying stressors are diminished. Combine that with an oxygen-deprived environment and you have the perfect conditions for a kind of suspended animation."

"You froze your head and woke up cured years later? You expect me to believe that?"

"No, not exactly. That's cryogenics, and it's yet to be proven useful in extending life. What it's great at is creating human popsicles. No, I merely slowed down. Really slow. I floated in microgravity in a darkened, stimulus-free environment, with extremely low levels of oxygen. The end result was much like time slowing down for my body. For me, a month was a day."

"Are you fucking with me?"

"No. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't all champagne and bubbles. I had limited cognitive capacity. It was a coma. Artificially induced to prolong my life."

"Prolonging a fatal disease doesn't cure it."

If he was wasting my time, I'd kill him before I died.

"Right you are. That's when my story took an unexpected turn. As you have already observed, the coma was no real solution. It was simply my best to avoid the inevitable. Years passed in that miserable state. It was torture. A dream limbo where my mind continued but my life didn't."

"That's your fucking cure? You want to torture me until I die?"

"No, I want to save you. Let me finish please."

"Yes, do. So I can stop wasting my precious few hours remaining on this!" My spit freckled his face.
 

The low rumble continued from Astro's malformed direction.

"Then something happened. The cure. It changed me. It transformed me." He traced the line of his bulging bicep.

"You weren't seven feet tall back on Earth, were you?"

"Six-two."

"I knew it."

"I was moderately lanky as well."

"So how did you turn into He-Man? You befriend a master of the universe?"

I laughed at the ridiculous reference to a campy kid's cartoon from decades ago.

"Something like that."

"Stop wasting my time," I shouted. "What is the cure? Why haven't you given it to me already?"

I didn't believe in any cure. I just wanted the conversation to be over so I could crawl into my, his, restoration pod and float away on warm waves of forgetful bliss.

"This is going to sound crazy," he said.
 

"Then stop hemming and hawing and round out my existing view of you."

He paused and looked away. He returned his gaze and gingerly took my claws in his paws. His strength soothed me. Spoke to me in a language you didn't learn at school.

"I need you to mate with me."

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About the Author

Nora Lane dreams of exploring beyond the wonderful home we call Earth. For now she lives on our planet, and shares a home with her wonderful husband, children, and two dogs that act more like alien overlords than obedient mutts.

She writes science fiction romance about what could, and likely will, happen as humanity continues to push beyond the confines of our ancestral home. If she's not writing, she can usually be found reading or dreaming of other worlds, usually ones with hot alien races that love human women!

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