Isolation

By Jade Black

Leah has one goal in life: to find a new planet for the humans ineligible to be Alphan mates. When the trading ship she purchased a berth on docks with a scout ship, her lack of ability to tell the difference between Alphans and Xyrans gets her into trouble.

Unwilling to leave the human with the vulnerable trade ship, Nalan immediately offers her a new place with them, knowing this chance to bond with a human woman might be their only one.

As captain of the Zyzan, Gelar’s primary concern is making sure Xyran pirates can’t flank Alphan space, along with enjoying the year alone with his mate Nalan. To find a human this far out should have been impossible, and yet her ability to survive on the poisonous ship just to make a living intrigues them both. Humans aren’t allowed to leave Earth without an Alphan mate. Will her dreams doom the three of them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evernight Publishing
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780369501387

Jade Black

Jade Black is an American author whose career in law enforcement is used to fund a profound penchant for all things macabre. Prior to working in law enforcement she was an archaeologist.Sign up for her mailing list (http://eepurl.com/hhxD05).

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Published by EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ® at Smashwords

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2020 Jade Black

ISBN: 978-0-3695-0138-7

Cover Artist: Sour Cherry Designs

Editor: Audrey Bobak

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

For my parents, who taught me that any path was possible. And for Charlie, who encouraged the extraordinary one.

ISOLATION

Planet Alpha TM

Jade Black

Copyright © 2020

Chapter One

Leah slid the door shut behind her and sighed in relief. Her fingers pressed the correct sequence of keys on the door panel and she heard the door lock and the seals inflate.

Only a few more minutes now.

The vents in the tiny antechamber to her quarters slowly hissed as sulfurous air was pumped out. Her suit tented slightly away from her skin in the negative atmosphere before it relaxed as oxygen seeped in. The light on the wall lit up blue, indicating she was now safe to take off her helmet. She did, feeling her shoulders relax as her mounting claustrophobia melted away. Her environmental suit followed the helmet, leaving her in a slightly damp, malodorous skinsuit. At least she was free to move, and she did so, stretching as far as she was able to in the airlock.

An inner door slid open, allowing her entry into her personal quarters. They weren’t quite as small as the antechamber, but it was close. The standard Vagnashian quarters had almost had to be cut in half to install the airlock that allowed her to survive outside of an environmental suit, and it left her with barely enough space for a twin bed and desk. She was the only human on board so at least she didn’t have to share, but it was still a tight squeeze.

A hint of sulfur still hung in the air and she winced. The air recyclers were never going to be the best, salvaged as they had been from a dead Xyran ship. While they let her survive in her small room, it seemed to perpetually smell like rotten eggs from the sulfur that never quite cleared out of the air in the antechamber.

Leah briefly considered sleeping in the envirosuit again just to be able to wake up without a headache, but one whiff of the silken undersuit that she still wore convinced her otherwise. It reeked, and she would need time to air everything out if she didn’t want to get a fungus in interesting places again.

At least without a roommate, she could be naked as she pleased, and she took full advantage of that, skinning out of the black wicking material and dumping it into the small ’fresher capsule in the corner, along with her spare skinsuit. It would clean and disinfect them but it took a lot of time with how little water she had to ration. Unless she wanted only the outer suit made of plastic and metal between her and the almost Venusian atmosphere that the Vagnashians needed to survive, she’d have to remain in her quarters.

But God, she was so sick of being confined to this tiny room! As she was the only human on board, it was only fair that her quarters had needed to be retrofitted instead of the entire ship. She couldn’t survive in their sulfurous admixture and the ideal Earth atmosphere that consisted mostly of nitrogen and oxygen would cause death in twenty minutes to a Vagnashian. Her only solace was that the standard temperatures on their planet were similar to a modern Earthian winter in the upper hemisphere: somewhere in the low seventies. If she’d had to live in that suit while outside her room and deal with heat like she had in Louisiana, she probably would have thrown herself out the nearest airlock that separated them from actual space.

The Vagnashians outnumbered her twenty-to-one on the trade ship, so this was the only acceptable option. And acceptable here far outweighed what she would’ve had to deal with had she stayed on Earth. After her parents died in New Orleans when the levees fell again as the seas rose, she’d been left with a pretty tidy sum of money. However, submitting herself to the Alphan bride lists or remaining in a vulnerable area to Xyran raids had seemed like suicide, so she’d taken the only option left to her.

Neither Alpha nor Xyran seemed especially appealing once you factored in the fact that all the literature she had read made it sound like women were passed around like pieces of meat, so she just settled for traveling among the stars instead. She didn’t want to be some magical charging station for their sex batteries, and when the Vagnashians had shown up, looking for items to trade with the other races that were in no way compatible with Earth life, she’d quickly bargained with them for a place on their ship. The Alphans offered gems when they bartered at all, and the Xyrans seemed to specialize in weapons. Earth was running scantily low on goods, but what Leah did have was an entire warehouse of Navajo and Persian blankets from her parents’ old trading post that no one had wanted since the temperature never got cold enough to use them.

The geometric patterns and bold colors had appealed to the Vagnashians, and they’d quickly struck a deal with her for passage. It meant that she was sleeping on a mattress made of stacked blankets instead of foam, and her entire block of personal space in the hold consisted of nothing but carefully stacked woven wool. The entire situation was such a gamble, but she was willing to see if it paid off.

And there was always the chance that they would discover an Earthlike planet that wasn’t inhabited by a race of sexy humanoid creatures that seemed to thrive on sex and had too few women. Her personal reasons for leaving Earth might be selfish, but overall, she thought her goals sounded noble. Earth was dying and both Alpha and Xyran were exceedingly selective on who they brought to live on those planets. She didn’t want to save just a few people who the aliens found attractive, she wanted to save all of them. Earth was unsalvageable, and people were dropping daily from pollution-related respiratory issues and cancers.

Or floods, she thought, blinking furiously to clear her eyes. Mom and Dad had wanted her to go to college, find a better place to live than the Louisiana coastline. You couldn’t even go near the beaches anymore with all the dead fish that washed up, and even miles from the ocean it stank of rotting kelp. They’d retreated to New Orleans, hoping to find people there who still wanted to buy American cultural items from the twentieth century, and they’d died for that mistake.

The levees that had been repaired in