Page 10 of Stripped By the Alien

“No, no,” I whine. “That was really--”

I open my eyes again to find out who’d do such a mean thing, just stopping–

Huh. This is a weird room. Am I lying on a table?

I lift my head and squint. There’s someone standing there, at the end of the table.

Someone big. Other Space Force personnel, I’m sure.

“Can you just… not stop?” I ask as I lie my head back down. “Because that was really…”

I wake up fully. Wasn’t there a fire? All the alarms… And Lucius giving me a formal goodbye…

My hands shoot down my body. I’m naked!

I open my eyes again.

Shit. This is no space station I’ve ever seen. This is…

I raise my head again. This is alien.

The guy at the end of the table puts a sheet of fabric over my lower half. There’s a lot of light behind him and I can’t really see much, but he seems to be wearing a suit of armor or something like that.

Suddenly all my memories hit me at once. The Intrepid 21! The minefield! The explosions! The fire! And… the Bliss Pack.

Shit. Am I dead? Is this the afterlife? I don’t remember being expertly eaten out as one of the things to expect, but I’m happy to be wrong.

“Lucius?” I try, my mouth and throat still dry. “Are you here?”

There’s no response.

The figure at the end of the table tilts his head as though studying me.

For a moment I focus on the light behind him. It shines through parts of his silhouette and makes it difficult to judge what I'm seeing. As my vision clears, more details emerge. The ridges around his shoulders don't move like armor. The shapes along his arms don't appear attached to a suit.

A cold feeling settles into my stomach. Those ridges belong to him.

I push myself upright despite the dizziness and force myself to look properly.

The creature is enormous. Even standing several paces away, he has to be close to eight feet tall. The broad shoulders and powerful limbs would look imposing on a human. On him they look almost absurdly strong, as though strength is simply his natural state.

The colors catch my attention next. At first I mistake the iridescent plates for armor, something worn, something strapped on. Then he shifts his weight and the colors shift with him, blue bleeding into green, green into violet, gold and crimson chasing each other across his body like light moving through deep water, and I understand that every shimmering plate is him.

Not worn.

Grown. A part of him.

My gaze travels upward to his face, and something in my chest goes very still. Two dark, almond-shaped eyes look like pieces of carefully polished emerald, with some kind of inner light to them.

Long antennae rise from his head and move in small, almost thoughtful adjustments, as though he's tasting the air between us. Below all that, sharp black mandibles frame a mouth that looks better suited to dismantling machinery than holding a conversation.

Then he moves again and something unfolds behind him, enormous, translucent, veined with the same shimmering rainbow that runs through the rest of him: Wings.

They catch the light for one brief moment before folding back, and the colors that ripple through them look less like pigment and more like something alive, moving through the armor the way a thought moves through a mind.

Everything about him should look monstrous. Instead, my mind keeps circling back to a different word: Magnificent.

That realization rattles me almost as much as the fact that he's obviously a Locust.