Alien Arsenal pre-order live! Sneak peak inside!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07956YXPK

The road to Alien Arsenal hasn't been a bed of roses, but it has been awesome. I've enjoyed writing this book more than anyone I've done previously. There is something really exciting about getting to this point in the character where who they are is well formed. Amelia is who she is going to be, and while she will course correct now and again, we know how she thinks and feels at this point. She's a real person to me now and I'm a little sad coming to the end of this arc. However, there is a bright and strange new future in store for her! To wet your whistle here is the first chapter (Rough Draft mind you) of Alien Arsenal, out Feb. 28th! Pre-order it now to make sure it is in your Kindle at 10 pm Pacific time on Feb 27th!


CHAPTER 1

(Insert apropos quote here).

The light fades and I can see again. I blink several times to clear the afterimages and give my heart a second to stop doing its level best to blast out of my chest. The creature before me looks nothing like Matahal. Where he had a flat face and oversized limbs, this alien could pass for a human. Albeit, one with an impossibly thin waist and narrower body in general. She’s beautiful in a ‘work-of-art’ sense. I assume she’s a she since despite her otherworldliness she clearly has breasts and hips… her eyes are too large for her head and they shine with an inner light like the sun during an eclipse. She’s dressed in a white one piece skin tight tunic with a yellow starburst over her right breast that runs down to her feet. The tunic stretches from her neck and wraps around her whole body, feet included, like a glove. Long golden hair flows down her back and it complements her light brown skin.
She says something I don’t quite catch. My heart is still hammering away and my adrenaline is making every little detail stand out. Her eyes go wide and she lifts her hands up in a too human gesture. She makes sounds no human could ever hope to copy. A mixture of bells and chimes and somehow… light?
“I don’t understand you,” I tell her.
Not that I think she will understand me but maybe she’ll realize I’m trying to communicate with her. She gestures toward me in a ‘come here’ motion with her hands.
I don’t even know if she understands human gestures, that could mean anything but I try to make her understand by pointing at my legs and shaking my head back and forth.
She cocks her head to the side, eyes narrowing. Okay, she doesn’t understand. At least she has an excuse, being alien and all.
“My legs don’t work,” I explain. Lifting up one, I drop it back to the deck and then do the same to the other. It isn’t like they look like healthy human legs. Even with my physical therapy and the induced exercise my armor gives me, they are still far smaller than proportional. Of course, an alien might not realize that. My demonstration seems to have explained it to her though.
She walks toward me, hands out, palms up and slides her arms under me. I wince for a second, fear coming back to me as she lifts me up off the ground with no more effort than Luke would have exerted.
Oh God. Luke! He’s got to be freaking out right about now. I wish there was a way to contact him. She says something to me that I still don’t understand but I take the hint. I put one arm around her shoulder to stabilize myself as she carries me out of the cell… room… I’m not sure yet.
We’re on a spaceship, I can tell that much. The air is dry and cold, the deck is flat but the walls curve in. If I had to guess, it is a small ship. I’m not sure how aliens would classify vehicles, but maybe a scout ship of some kind? The metal in front of us just flows and forms a doorway into the cockpit. I need to study that. Flowing metal? That means molecular instability in a structurally dense material. Rearranging molecules with nanites maybe? Or electrical frequency? I almost miss the room she carries me into I’m so busy examining the door as it flows closed behind us.
I turn my head back forward and the view of Earth takes my breath away. We’re in high orbit and I can see almost the entire planet from the view screen. The moon hangs in the distance on its speedy journey around my home.
She motions with her head and a chair forms out of the deck for me to sit in. She places me gently in the new chair, it slides around under me as it conforms to my shape. I giggle from the tickling the dull metal gives me as it strives to fit perfectly. My head is spinning at the possibilities. I could have armor that flowed around me like a liquid. It would be much lighter, or maybe a second skin under the armor?
She sits down opposite me in her own chair and leans toward me. Her eyes glow fiercely in the dim cockpit casting an orange hew on everything. The light of her eyes warms my skin where it touches me. The light grows even brighter and I try to close my eyes but I can’t. Panic grips me for a second and I start thinking she’s going to eat me or something and then the light vanishes.
The alien’s skin flows like the metal, her body reshaping and when it finishes… she’s still a work of art, beautiful golden hair, sun kissed skin, and eyes so blue I could mistake them for colored LED’s. She looks more than a little like me, or an idealized version of me. Small, pert, thin, but with features a lot like my own. For a heartbeat, she’s naked, perfect as a painting and anatomically correct before her uniform returns to cover her now shapely body.
“Hi,” I say with a smile and a wave.
Her mouth opens but her perfectly formed lips just flap up and down for a second. She clears her throat and opens them again…
I take a deep breath and breath out as I speak in an exaggerated manner. “Hello. My name is Amelia.”
She breathes in deeply through her nose, “H—hello… M—my name is… Aaaah-meeeel-yuuuuh,” she says with a smile. Her voice even sounds a little like me.
“Very good. But that’s my name,” I point at my chest. “What is your name.” I point at hers. She mimics my movements for a moment. I’m still marveling at how she changed her shape. Matahal had done something similar but I’d assumed he’d used tech to do it, not that he’d been an actual shape changer.
“Ahhhh-gaaaaah-steeeeen-aaaaa.” She says as if the sounds are foreign to her. She’s a quick learner. Maybe it has something to do with taking our shape? I know the sounds she made before were nothing like human speech. Or at least very little like it. There was sound but also light, and I’d really like to know how she pulled that trick off.
I rolled her sounds around in my mind for a second before I tried repeating them back to her. “Augustina?”
She nods emphatically a smile spreading on her lips. “Augusteeeena.” She says again, frowning. “Augustina!” She smiles. “Augustina.”
“Okay,” I chuckle, “Augustina.”
She nods. “Augustina Looo-seee-aaaaa-nnnn-aaaa.”
I think about it for a second. “I’m Amelia Lockheart and you are, Augustina Luciana?” She nods again, smiling even bigger than before.
“Augustina Luciana Maaaa-xiiim-maaaa.” She says again then pointing at me.
“Augustina Luciana Maxima?”
She nods.
“Okay, well we’re getting somewhere but at this rate, it could take a while. Can you understand me at all?” She nods a little, her smile slipping somewhat. “That’s what I thought. Okay, I guess this is going to take a while.”
“Take a while…” she says almost perfectly.
And it does. We spend I don’t know how long but the fact that I hadn’t eaten since I left for Texas earlier this morning starts to become an issue about the time she puts whole sentences together. She learns exceptionally fast. I just can’t go through every possible word or sentence and their meaning with her. I don’t know how big my vocabulary is but teaching English to an alien isn’t one of my skills.
“Augustina? Can you turn off the…” She has ECM of some kind but I’m not sure what her people call it… I take a swing, “Shields? My friends could find me then and we could do this a lot quicker.”
“Sheeee-iiiiilds.” She plays with the word for a moment.
“Yes, the thing around your ship hiding you.” I assume it’s hiding her otherwise Kate would be here in a New York minute and I’d already be home watching Star Trek and having a make-up make-out with Luke!
She shakes her head, pointing to the screen. I shrug. “I don’t understand.”
A control panel flows into existence in front of her and she carefully hunt and pecks commands like she only just learned to fly this thing. The screen flickers and the moon is much larger now. She points again.
“Uh, you can’t turn off the shields because of the moon?”
She brightens for a second then deflates. Her head moves around in different directions like she’s trying to figure out the right gesture to tell me something.
“Wait… something behind the moon?” I ask. I try and mime circling the moon. I must have done a good enough job because she nods enthusiastically.
“Beee-hiiii-nnnnn-ddddd.” Her speech patterns are somewhat painful to endure. Not painful, just really dang annoying.
“Show me.”
She presses a button which immediately sounds and an alarm and she frantically presses another then another until it shuts off.
“Do you know how to fly this thing?”
She looks at me sideways as if she were evaluating my words. “Fuuu-liiiie.”
I shake my head, “Never mind. Just show me.”
She presses the right button this time and the ship starts to move out of orbit. I open my mouth to object when it swings wide to come back around the dark side of the moon. My mouth stays open in shock.
There are dozens of craft behind the moon. I can easily make out the drones. Pointing at one I start to ask her a question but the screen surprises me when it automatically zooms where I point. A glance at her says she’s as surprised as me. I move the screen around, there are seven more drones, two larger ships that look more like cigars than what I imagine advanced starships look like. Dozens of smaller craft, maybe screening elements? And a few boxy ships that could be transports. No wonder NASA didn’t see them coming. They’re already here. If so then, what are they waiting for?
“You can’t turn off the shields because they will see you?”
“Yes.” She seems as surprised by her perfect pronunciation as I am.
“And I take it you’re not with them,” I look to her. She shakes her head, frowning.
“Th’un.” She points at the screen. “Lux.” She points at herself.
I glance once more at the fleet. “I’m going to need a bigger suit,” I say with a sigh. “Augustina.” I turn to her, “I need to go home. My people need me.”
“My people need you,” she replies.
“No. I mean, my people need…” Oh. I get it. “What do you mean your people need me?”
She turns back to the panel, hunting for the right buttons before she pushes one, then another. A screen pops up with my picture. Well, Arsenals picture then underneath it is an image of me. I don’t recognize the language but the file is obviously a negative review. The words are in red and there is a bright red symbol over me.
“Warrant,” she says. Then she shakes her head and tries again, “Death-warrant.” She smiles.
“That isn’t something you smile about. Did the Th’un make this?” I gesture toward the screen.
“Yes. Supreme Commander signed your death warrant. Spies gave me information. I come to get you to save my people.”
A death warrant huh? I guess I’m doing something right. “I can’t leave my world defenseless to go help yours. I have to save my people first. Can you help me do that?”
“Help me,” she says. I sigh.
“Augustina, I can’t help you. I need to stop them,” I point at the enemy fleet in orbit behind the moon. There are days when I miss my biggest problems being White Rhino and Vixen.
“Help you. Stop them. Help me?” I think I know what she’s saying.
“Yes, I’ll help you once I’ve stopped them. Okay?”
“Oooo-kaaaay,” she smiles as she says the word. I guess it is kind of fun to say.
“I need to go home, though. I can’t do anything without my armor or my friends.”
“I can’t go home,” she says.
“No, I need to go to my home… oh. I’m sorry, I just realized what you mean.”
“Okay.”
“Can you take me to my home? I have friends and my weapons. We can stop them. Then we will all go to your home and stop them there. Deal?”
“Du-eeel,” she says. I hold my hand out to her out of instinct. She holds hers out but doesn’t touch mine. I grasp her fingers and squeeze lightly.
“Deal.”