Ark: A Scifi Alien Romance by Lucy Snow

behind me. I turned and saw her standing just behind my chair, leaning over it and surveying the panels. I must have looked surprised. “Oh, I can’t read any of this stuff,” she said, gesturing toward the panels. “But it’s not hard to tell that they’re not giving you good news.”

    “No, they are not.”

    “What’s the damage? Give it to me straight.”

    “Propulsion and communications. Both are out of commission given our power reserves.”

    Melissa sighed. “And life support?”

    I tapped a panel nearby. “That is holding strong, actually. As long as we can stay in one piece-“

    “-We’ll stay in one piece, is that it?” Melissa finished my sentence.

    “Yes.”

    “Earth is close by, we should at least head in that direction.”

    I almost laughed. “No chance of that. The Admiral needs help. We go back to the Kreossian fleet.”

    “How far is that?” Melissa sounded skeptical, and I knew she did not want to go to be around my kind, but there was no way I was going to take Kaalax to a backward planet like Earth when he needed medical care.

    “As far as your Earth.” She looked doubtful. “This is not a discussion or a negotiation, Melissa Crane of Earth. We are going back to my fleet.”

    Just then I heard a sound coming from the back, and I knew it was Kaalax. I stood up and pushed Melissa out of the way in my haste to get back to see my mentor.

    Kaalax lay still on the floor, but had propped himself up to look at a nearby panel. “We are in trouble, Ark,” he said, grimly, not looking at me.

    “Yes, Admiral. Let me get you up.”

    I leaned over to help the Admiral into an extended seat at the wall, but he waved me away. “We do not have time for that. You need to get this ship to-“

    I didn’t hear the rest over the sound of the siren that went off right that moment, cutting the Admiral off. I whirled around and ran back to the cockpit, seeing warning signs all over the place. Melissa was sitting in the copilot’s chair. “I don’t know what’s going wrong!” she shouted at me, the fear clear in her voice, and her face matching that fear. “I can’t read any of this stuff!”

    As I sat down the panels reoriented to show me what I needed to know. “Energy reserves. We were hit, and it didn’t register on the diagnostics because the leak was too slow at first. It has gotten a lot faster now.”

    Melissa gulped. “What do we do?”

    I looked forward, tapping the necessary buttons on the panels. “We land.”

    “Land? What? We’re barely holding it together in space! How are we going to land this bucket in this shape?”

    I grimaced. “Either very carefully or not at all.”

    “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

    “Why start now?” I tried to wink at her.

    Melissa grinned. “So you do have a sense of humor after all.”

    “Kreossian humor is something a human wouldn’t-“

    “Understand, right, right, I’ve heard that one before. It was about something else, though.”

    “You are mocking me again.” I didn’t turn to look at her, I was busy reorienting the ship. The nearest planet, a virtually unexplored one, loomed in the view screen in front of us, getting bigger by the second.

    “Me? I wouldn’t dream of it. You’re the one making sure the three of us don’t die.”

    I did not reply, just took the ship in. As we entered the atmosphere I could feel the stress impacting against the shuttle’s hull. The land below was covered in green forests and mountains, a jungle world that the Kreossian Empire had yet to fully explore beyond space surveys. No life signs that we could see, but it was tough to trust the instruments when they were so damaged.

    “Brace for impact!” I shouted, hoping that the Admiral had gotten himself into a safe position for landing. I looked over to my right and saw Melissa strapping herself into the chair that was built for someone much bigger than her.

    She reached out her hand toward me. I did not