To love an Alien - Sholan Alliance 1

Chapter 1

Due to that she was both captain and crew though that wasn't really saying much since the vast majority of the ship functions were automated. The normal crew of three had plenty of crew comforts. The beds were large and comfortable, the showers had hot jets to help dry their fur. The food was pre-processed but fairly decent comparatively speaking. If you were feeling brave you could even cook it and add spices as well. They had plenty of story teller shows, books, and music to fill the down times also. Since it was only her she had more space than needed. Some days it almost felt like she rattled around in the scouter currently.

All this went through her mind as she checked the readouts built into the ceiling above her head and freaked. Something was wrong with the navicomp and that was not good. She rolled out of bed and yelped as her head hit the ceiling above her. Satasha didn't bother pulling on her heavy uniform since it was an internal fault and not an air leak. Instead she grabbed it and would pull it on in the cockpit.

By the time she hit the bridge the alarms were about to give her a headache and that was the first thing Satasha dealt with. After killing the alarms, she started reviewing the diagnostics to see what else might need to be done. She also verified the captain's log was rolling to document what was going on. While waiting for the additional diagnostics to finish she worked on localizing a source of electronic emissions. She had been tracking them for several weeks. There had been traces of hyper jump capability though what she had picked up was rather primitive.

After sending in the report on the emissions she had been instructed to localize them. Once localized, evaluate the culture to see if they were the Others. If not see if they were advanced enough to open communications with. She had started picking up video emissions a number of light years away. Satasha had picked up primitive radio signals from even further out. The hyper signals had been much closer since they tended to fade much faster.

Thankfully the navicomp survived long enough to get a basic course set before it finally melted down. The worst part was her communications were routed through the navicomp. It was used for directional control of the communication links. She had tried to send a distress signal but wasn't sure it had been successful. She wouldn't know since once the navicomp went down so did her communications. Unless it was broadband she couldn't receive anything. Satasha could try it on the broadband but it was possible the civilization she was checking was the one that attacked them. She didn't want to chance alerting them if that was the case. If it was the case she would have to activate the self-destruct.

They didn't know much about the enemy other than they came, attacked one of their ships and then vanished. There were obvious blaster burns, laser burns, and missile strikes. The entire crew had been killed and inspection also showed boarding and the killing of ones who were trying to surrender. That was the reason they were stretched thin, the Others had killed for no obvious reason.

There had always been more small ships than crews since they kept the scout/fighters in a heavy cycle of maintenance. That was one of the reasons why she was alone on the ship. With the heavy automation only one person was really needed. They had three to take care of the mental health of the crew members.

Once they had been attacked they had moved to a much higher deployment schedule and now crews were either one or two people instead of the normal three. In her case her second had managed to break his leg the day before they were scheduled to leave. It had been close enough to the departure they didn't have another crew member available. That had really sucked since she would have enjoyed the company as well as the bed play.

Command knew better than to forbid relationships on long haul scouting trips since it was rather pointless. All female Sholans could control their fertility and monogamy was not a problem due to that. Sholans did have bonding contracts for conceiving cubs but they were normally 3 or 5 years. Getting pregnant outside of either a bonding or life mate carried heavy social consequences. For the senior Sholans most of them did a life bonding ceremony but again monogamy was not expected. The only expectation was that any cubs only come from either the bond-mate or life mate.