Read Online Your Planet or Mine? by Susan Grant - Free Book Online Page B

traveled slowly. She wanted to drive even slower than they were, but she remembered the threat of Cavin’s boot over the accelerator. Jana drove as fast as she could stand it until the visibility became so poor that she could see no more than a couple of car lengths ahead. She lifted her bare foot off the gas pedal.
    “Don’t slow down,” Cavin ordered.
    “I can’t see.”
    “I can.”
    “How can you see?”
    He tapped on his visor, which he’d pulled over his eyes. “With this I can see for miles ahead. Fog, darkness, no problem.”
    “No problem,” she muttered, imitating him. “How do you speak English so well if you’re an alien?”
    “A universal translator brain implant.”
    “You have something lodged in your head?”
    “Yes. I have several bioengineered, enhanced features throughout my body. All soldiers do.”
    “Enhancements, huh.” Jana’s mind went wild with possibilities as she ran her gaze from his head down to his big…thick…hard…platform boots. Then she forced her attention back to the road. “But how did you get access to the language?” She was a self-avowed intellectual geek; she loved asking questions to satisfy her curiosity. But now she asked as much to cling to sanity as to learn. Lose her anchor to reality, and she feared she’d dissolve into a useless, trembling puddle. “Do you know other languages, too?”
    “Not know . Ability to access is a better description. Most of Earth’s dialects are available via my translator. Not all, because unfortunately, we were limited to those dialects we could harvest from the communications signals leaving the planet. Your TV, music and radio radiate out into space—think of a pebble dropped in a still pond. The Coalition captured the ripples.”
    Again, intellectual fascination battled with a primal fear of something far more powerful than anything on Earth. “Say something in your language.”
    He spoke a few words that reminded her of her mother’s Russian. It was a blessedly normal-sounding language, devoid of weird buzzing noises and the insect-like clicking sounds one would expect from an alien language, if one actually spent the time to ponder alien languages. She knew she never had. Until Cavin, Jana assumed the concept of aliens visiting Earth was the invention of really bored people with low-quality cameras living in remote parts of New Mexico and Nevada.
    “It is the official language of the Coalition,” he said. “The queen’s tongue.”
    It seemed very Buck Rogers to actually have a queen of the galaxy. “What’s she like?”
    “Queen Keira? I saw her only once, at a distance during her coronation. She was very young. She’s a grown woman now, and said to be quite beautiful, but somehow she’s resisted taking a consort. She almost killed a man who tried to take her by force.”
    You go, girl . “Almost killed? Why didn’t she finish the job?”
    “Once she had sliced off his male parts with her plasma sword, I suppose she felt that killing him at that point would have been considered an act of mercy. He lives on as a palace eunuch as a reminder for those suitors who would attempt to force themselves on the queen.”
    Man trouble. Jana felt a certain kinship with the young queen. She wondered if Brace Bowie could benefit from similar treatment. “What did you say, by the way, when you spoke in your language?”
    “Concentrate on your driving.”
    She made a face at him and focused on the road ahead. Suddenly, the visibility shrank to fifty feet or less. Ahead was a solid, white blanket of fog. A bare minimum of reflector bumps kept her centered in the lane. “I can’t see. Help me out here.” Her foot came off the gas.
    “No! Do not slow. Go…go right. Right .”
    She swerved into the right lane—and moaned as they narrowly missed a late-model Volkswagen.
    “Left!”
    She veered left. Another car swept past in the fog. Focus on the reflector lights. Stay between the lines. She saw no more than a few