Cosmic Connections Cruise #1
The newest adventure in the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency! Year 10 of the Intergalactic Dating Agency Alien Mail Order Brides starts now!
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It’s just a three-sunset cruise around a few pretty moons. What could go wrong?
Welcome to the launch of the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency Cosmic Connections Cruise!
Captain Ellix Nehivar has signed on for the shakedown cruise of some ridiculous “alien date-and-mate” scam. As if love is just hiding out among the stars. Ehrm, kind of like how he is hiding from the excessively cheerful Earther in charge of the evening’s entertainment? They might be sharing a ship for the night, but she’s too small, too fragile, and too happy for the dangers of space—or for him.
Cruise director Felicity Rowe is so excited for her first extraterrestrial job, she can’t even sleep. Probably just those peculiar spaceship sounds. And maybe she’s just slightly terrified of her grumpy boss. The towering, glowering Kufzasin with an eyepatch and scars under his golden fur looks like a lion-pirate who might abduct and devour her… Which she did not footnote on the secret page of her to-do list! She’s determined to make this maiden voyage extra-super fun for everyone—even for growly Captain Never-Smiles.
The Cosmic Connection Cruise is a chance for lonely hearts to find each other in the vast emptiness of interstellar space. See, it says so right on the brochure. Too bad this ship has other ideas…
- Haunted love boat—in space
- Eccentric found familyIll-advised workplace romance
- Grumpy/sunshine!
- He falls first (even tho there’s no gravity!)
- Anxiety rep
Chapter 1
It was just a three-sunset tour. Captain Ellix Nehivar had accepted the gig from the owner of the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency while morose and semi-spiked on Alferian ale, but certainly he could sling one old cruiser through a long evening’s jaunt around this uninhabited system without any problems.
He glared across the command module of the Love Ship I—who named their ship such nonsense?—at the likeliest source of trouble he’d identified in his pre-launch assessment of this inaugural voyage.
“It’s going to be so much fun!” From her position in front of the main viewscreen, cruise director Felicity Rowe beamed at his handful of crew members, like a sun that never set.
She was the first Earther he’d met, but Ellix would’ve thought that such a little, fragile, bare-skinned creature with frankly pathetic defensive adaptations and no previous interstellar experience would be more guarded in her expression. Instead, she smiled, even laughed, all the time, with everyone. He’d reviewed the standard expressive contortions, bodily gestures, and pheromone secretions of the various species on board, so he knew she was being genuine. She was actually happy to be here.
Even if he might’ve doubted her—which he did, despite the evidence, because how could any being be so… sunny?—everyone on the Love Boat I had been issued a “feelings button” to attach conspicuously to their silver-gray uniforms. About the size of a larf’s enucleated eyeball, the buttons signaled the emotional state of the wearer.
“The buttons facilitate empathy and connection when our guests are interacting,” Felicity had told them at the first all-crew briefing. “They’re also a wonderful opening for curiosity and dialogue as they change hue, tone, and vibration when comparing emotional states. For example, if I’m near an Elnd and I say ‘love’, the button displays symbolic Elnd sensory cues along with the word in the Elnd language, which translates literally as ‘I am melodiously irradiated even in your silence’. Isn’t that fascinating?” She smiled across the deck at the tall, columnar Elnder who was the ship’s chef.
Styr flared the wavy, black-veined phonoplasts along the perimeter of its body. “Because we subsist on acoustic energy, to say we are nourished by someone’s mere presence is very much”—despite everyone being inoculated with a universal translator, it deliberately oscillated the flexible phonoplasts to approximate the Earther word just as Felicity had pronounced it—“love.” Styr tapped its feelings button which displayed a warm pinkish hue and emitted a gentle hum. “I am happy to join this crew that is unfurling an opportunity for such glorious connections across our wondrous universe.”
Ellix’s irate glower was only sharpened by the patch over his missing eye. The irreversible damage was a reminder that the universe wasn’t all wondrous and fascinating—no matter what certain suspiciously effusive brochures might claim.
Happiness. Love. Connection. Seemed as questionable as hiring a cook who ate only sound waves.
Although, what did that say about him being captain?
While the Earther director continued her briefing on the arriving passengers and the night’s itinerary, Ellix shifted restlessly in the center chair, grimacing when his thigh banged on the control arm. During his initial walkthrough, the young Monbrakkan deck tech, Griiek, had woggled her four webbed forefeet, apologizing profusely, and offered to fabricate a bigger seat, but Ellix had declined.
He wouldn’t be here long enough for the confines to chafe through his fur. This was just a brief, bemusing detour. When he squirmed again, the small message cube in his hip pocket (the cause of the moroseness that had landed him here) dug into a muscle that hadn’t healed quite right; another reminder that he hadn’t escaped unscathed.
No matter how far a ship might take him, the reminders of what he’d left behind would always find him.
“So, just to review.” Felicity brandished her datpad, as if they could all see it even though the amount of data on the screen made it too miniscule for even a dozen eyes to decipher at any distance. “Once our guests are aboard, we will all assemble in the Starlit Salon for a few inspiring words about this maiden voyage from Captain Nehivar—”
“Nay.” The rejection burst from him before he could temper it for the little, fragile, bare-skinned creature.
She blinked at him. Her Earther eyes were a bit smaller than a larf’s, without the grotesque bulge. But they were somehow more unsettling to encounter on a ship under his command. Maybe it was the color—a shiny blue ringed in white that he associated with ruinous electrical arcs. Or maybe it was just because those eyes were attached to a little, fragile, bare-skinned, smiling, laughing, sweet-smelling female.
When she tilted her head, the tight, upward twist of her hair—as yellow as her native star—wobbled despite a confining loop of ribbon. Even with the distance between them, her scent reached him, teasing him. “No?”
Yea, she was sweet-smelling—impossibly, mouthwateringly so. His incisors ached with the devotion hunger. But this was not the time nor the space. Worse than impossible, slag it.
He gritted those teeth. “Nay. I have no inspiring words for the passengers.”
“Or for anyone else.” The mutter from the chief engineer emerged through the empty engineering console. As usual, the reclusive Ravkajo had refused to leave the impulsion chamber. Suvan Adrakh hadn’t even bothered to come to the screen. Only his pet goblhob appeared in the hologram, its toothy, undershot jaw even more distorted by the too-close projection. It chittered into the viewer, angling one orange eye even closer until the hologram was just a blur of the bioluminescent lure bobbing at the end of its anterior antenna.
Ellix narrowed his remaining eye at the ugly creature. It didn’t have the cognition to mock him…probably?
Felicity smiled though her feelings button flickered. “You are the ship’s captain. You really should—”
“Captain the ship,” Ellix finished. “While Delphine pilots, Griiek maintains the decks, Styr cooks, Ikaryo serves intoxicating beverages, and you”—he stared hard into her unnerving Earther eyes—“make the passengers fall in love.”
Echoing the Elnd chef, Ellix bit off the Earther word love between his aching teeth. Yea, their translators would’ve understood his native language. But he refused to say it. The message cube—inscribed with the same glyph—weighed in his pocket like a chunk of neutron star.
Felicity clutched her datpad to her chest, covering the feelings button pinned there. “But it’s right here on my tour schedule: a message from the captain.”
He waited a beat, aware the whole crew was watching, listening, and otherwise absorbing his message. “Tell them no one can lead them to love.”
After another fraught pause, Delphine raised her hand. “Eh, I could if we had the coordinates.” The rest of the crew responded to the Tritonesse pilot’s quip with species-specific expressions of tension relieved.
Not Felicity, though. With her feelings button still concealed, the shine in her Earther eyes dimmed in a way that needed no translation. “All right. If that’s what you want.” Her datpad chimed, a warning countdown to launch. But it had an odd ominous overtone.
What he wanted? Sure as a black hole sucked, he wanted to taste her, to see if her flavor was as intoxicating as her scent. He wanted to bite her, to see if she was as fragile as she looked. He wanted…
He wanted.
But he was captain of this ship, if only for a three-sunset tour.
And the course he’d set long ago had left him on a trajectory with no chance for anything else.
When she straightened, even with her spine stiff from rejection, the top of her sunny hair twist wouldn’t reach his feelings button if it had been pinned to his chest. Which it wasn’t, because he would not be sharing his wants with anyone.
Definitely not with a sunny, sweet-smelling closed-worlder female shining with delusions of fun.
