Page 3 of Protected By the Alien Commander

3

Olivia

What the hell had happened?

I gingerly raised my aching head. The lounge was a mess. Chair pods had broken out of their restraints and were in a pile against the wall, which was now the floor. Why was the ship tilted? I didn’t think ships could tilt in space.

It was also dark in here. The only light was an odd purple glow coming in from the windows on the ceiling. There was no emergency lighting, no announcement of what was going on, and that loud pitched whine was finally silent. Oh, how I missed those noisy engines.

A scraping sound from the pile of chair pods grabbed my attention. I groaned as I raised myself off the floor/wall. Ava crawled out from under an overturned pod.

“I’m so glad someone else is moving! Are you okay?”

Ava opened her mouth and heaved, but thankfully, nothing came up. Ugh. Come to think of it, I wasn’t feeling so hot myself. I stumbled over to the chairs and helped her stand. Then I saw Miranda under a chair pod, holding her head. I pushed the chair up high enough that she was able to crawl out.

“Where’s Emma?” I didn’t see her anywhere.

I cajoled Ava into helping me, and we moved all the pods because Emma was under the last one. And not awake yet.

“What cheap crap,” said Miranda. “These chairs are from the beginning of the space age.”

Ava nodded. “What did you expect with the cruise only costing us three thousand total?”

I glared at her. I had found several budget booze cruises, but they had all picked out this one. I still felt guilty. And Emma had yet not moved or made a sound.

“We need to get Emma into the ship’s medpod. She should have woken up by now.”

“Why haven’t they told us what’s going on yet?” Ava frowned up at the lounge door.

“They’re probably busy trying to fix the ship from whatever happened.”

Thank you, Miranda, for your voice of reason. I did not want to get into it with Ava right now.

“Uh, guys…”

I had Emma partially sitting up in my arms, but the odd tone Ava used had me setting her back down in a hurry and standing. “What? What’s wrong?”

Ava held out her shaking arm and pointed up at one of the lounge’s windows. Spikes of fear shot through my chest. Oh lord, what was it? I was too scared to go look, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to know what we were facing.

The view out the window was not the black of space with millions of stars that I had expected. It wasn’t the Moon or the arrival hangar concourse of the InterPlanetary Space Port either. It was orange dirt with some big orange rocks and nothing, absolutely nothing else as far as I could see.

My mouth dropped open as I tried to figure out how we ended up back on Earth in the only section of Utah that still looked like this. But I frowned when I realized there was no dome as there should have been over a National Park.

And the last time I checked, Utah didn’t have purple skies.

I turned slowly to Ava, who shared my shocked look. We were most definitely not on the Moon. Or Earth.

“Where the hell are we?” Miranda cried.

I dazedly shook my head and stumbled back to Emma, still out cold on the ship’s floor/wall. “I have no idea, but I do know she needs to get in the medpod and stabilized in case she’s really hurt. Can someone help me carry her?”

Amazingly, Ava also helped, along with Miranda. By using the chair pods as steps, we carried Emma out of the lounge and up the hall to the small dining and medical room. There was a medpod in the corner. I sure hoped it was of higher quality than anything else on this ship. The medpod couldn’t heal her, but it could monitor a few things and keep her stable until rescue came.

If it came.

I shoved down that fear, way down deep. Otherwise, I would be curled up in a ball in a corner, rocking back and forth and crying. And space was no place for weak-ass bitches. Or wherever we were.

“Where do you think we are?” Ava voiced my very thoughts.