Tamed By The Alien Barbarian by Celeste King
Jaxil
My offices on Mars were bland. The walls were bland. The lighting was bland. The view was bland. A mountain in the distance, but closer to the eye my view was just of a too-shortly mowed terraformed lawn. The red Martian dirt and the natural green of the grass merged to form a brownish color. So even though a remarkable feat of engineering had made Mars livable, the grass that lived there kind of looked like shit. Literally.
Even the Martian tea I was sipping was bland. Getting coffee to Mars cost a fortune. Even for me. So tea had to do. The tea brewed on Mars was a hybrid leaf made from an Earth tea leaf and a leaf from Sanax. It grew very favorably in the terraformed air.
But it was still fucking bland. Bland, bland, bland.
I guess I was having a shitty day. Poor Dae’ish had already received several reprimands that he didn’t deserve. I knew I should probably apologize to him. But thinking of apologizing to Dae’ish put me in an even worse mood. Which just made me want to yell at him some more.
It’s a really bad day when you want your assistant to fuck up to give you an excuse to be more enraged at him.
Of course, what I was really angry at was Candi.
No, that wasn’t quite right.
I was angry at her goddamn genes. I’d been sure she was my fated mate. The connection that we had. The sex. All of it. We seemed no less compatible than Heather and Xxuric. The strong attraction was there in everything but, it seemed, our cells.
Not that being genetic mates was the be-all and the end-all. Obviously not. We could still screw. And, yeah, maybe we could even still have a ‘relationship’. There was nothing required about being genetic mates. Plenty of Sanax, and definitely plenty of humans, didn’t find their exact genetic mate.
Besides, just look at Xxuric and Heather, I thought now. That’s not necessarily an ideal situation, is it? They ache for each other. Can’t stand to be apart from each other. How annoying is that? And then when they are together, they can’t keep their hands off each other. And you know how annoying that is.
Point was, it was probably good we weren’t genetic mates. Took a weight off, really.
So then why did I still have this crushing feeling in my chest?
And why was my chair shaking? Surely that wasn’t a result of –
Shit.
The shockwave of the explosion had hit my building before the eruption caught my eye. I leapt from my office chair and pressed my face as close to the windowpane as my horns would allow. There had been a huge explosion at the next mountain over.
The mountain where…
My chest tightened more.
Dae’ish burst into the room.
“What is it?” I shouted.
“Terra Firma’s mining operation just exploded,” Dae’ish said. He smiled at me. The poor bastard thought he was relaying me good news about a competitor.
“And you think that’s fucking funny, Dae’ish?” I shouted in his face. Though I was not, in this case, thankful for the opportunity to yell at him.
I shoved past my assistant, ignoring the dumb and confused expression on his face, and hastened for my building’s landing bay. I threw myself into the nearest company shuttle and pressed my thumb against the keypad. They were all programmed to respond to me.
In another moment, I was airborne, racing over the local Martian town and toward the mountain. Tons of dust and dirt were still floating about it, hanging in the slightly thinner air and lighter gravitational pull of Mars. It was almost pretty, the way the dust caught the sun’s rays and colored them.
But beyond the dust was the destruction. A major rock slide was in progress, the larger boulders smashing against temporary shelters and offices that Terra Firma had established at the mountain’s base. Meanwhile, along the mountain, I could see mangled and broken escape stairs and machinery.
From an entryway in the side of the mountain, flames were roiling. Anyone in there was in trouble.
I circled the mountain once, seeking some sort of suitable landing spot. Each time I thought I’d found one, the shuttle’s computer told me it was unsafe.
“I know it’s unsafe, that’s why we need to land!”
“Unsafe,” the computer said back to me, stupidly.
I hurriedly glanced below. Emergency vehicles were arriving, but there was no way they could quickly get from the ground to levels of the mountain where the explosion had caused the most damage.
Polit’s balls, I swore to myself as I hurriedly set the computer’s autopilot and leapt out of my seat. I rushed back to the shuttle’s rear bay door. I over-rid the computer’s safety mechanisms here and forced the door to open. Hot, dusty wind whipped at my face. I could feel the fire that raged not too far below me.
There was no time to waste. I leapt.
I allowed myself to free-fall for a few hundred feet. Then I extended my wings and glided into the smokey, dusty haze around the entrance where the fire burned.
My lungs began to burn almost immediately. The heat and the dust stung at my eyes and made them water.
I pushed on, closer to the mountain. I flew close to the entrance I’d seen the fire roiling out of. There was a ledge in front of the entrance. A sort of funicular was meant to travel from several hundred feet below to this entryway in order to transport people and equipment. The explosion had destroyed the funicular track. The carriage itself was, I imagined, smashed to bits somewhere down below.
Fortunately, with my wings, I was able to alight on the ledge and hurry for the entry. The flames leapt out at me. I took a few steps back. The flames receded a moment and I rushed forward. Just as I crossed the threshold, however, the flames attacked once more.
There was no getting in this way.
I strained to see through the smoke and flames, to see if I could make out any sign of life inside. It was impossible to see.
Dammit, there must be another way in.
I leapt from the ledge and took flight again. My throat was raw from the fiery air. I’d singed the hair on my arms. I didn’t care about any of it. I needed to rescue Candi.
If she’s still alive.
Somehow, I knew she would be. Knew it… in my bones, as the humans say.
That can’t be, I had time to think. She’s not your genetic mate.
Yet something was drawing me forward. Making me risk my life. I, who barely ever stuck my neck out for someone I held as dear as Xxuric. Let alone for a human woman.
She’s not your mate. In fact, she’s your competition.
I didn’t care. I was going to save her anyway.
I flew around the mountain at the same level as the entrance I’d been kept out of, looking for any way in. A third of the way around the mountain, I discovered that her company had actually carved out another landing. Here, they’d installed their main offices. The explosion and fire had torn through it, as well.
Circling, it seemed to me that the structure was mostly intact, which gave me hope.
The problem was, the entire area looked unstable. The rock slide had unsettled the structure’s base, making it look like it could slide down the mountain at any moment. All around the structure, there was a tremendous amount of flaming or smoking debris. Landing would be, as my shuttle might say, ‘unsafe.’
I kept circling, trying to come up with a play that would allow me to help Candi if she was in there (somehow, I knew she was) without killing myself.
Then, the structure’s roof collapsed. I tucked my wings and dove.
