Ajos: The Restitution - A Sci-fi Alien Romance, Book 1, стр. 4
That was expected.
Their planet knew not of life outside their world.
They were like lost infants.
Terrified and unsure.
The code pad below his fingers flashed but nothing happened.
Punching in the code once more, Ajos frowned, urgency making something akin to fear tingle in the pit of his spine.
The code pad flashed again.
Something was not right.
Small five-fingered palms hit against the inside surface of the pod and for the first time, Ajos’ gaze moved to the being trapped inside.
Trele!
His life-organ ceased thumping for a few seconds.
Terrified light-brown eyes stared back at him as the female slapped her palms against the pod’s transparent lid.
She was shouting something he could not hear, but he didn’t need to hear her words to know exactly what she was saying.
Ajos!
Please! Get me out of here!
Please! I can’t—
I can’t breathe!
It was just like that time.
This was a level of, ixfre—deja-vu—that he had never experienced.
There was fear in the human’s eyes.
Raw, unfiltered, terror.
It wasn’t over.
In an instant, he was there once again, staring down at Nama.
She’d had that same look in her eyes.
The coincidence…
No.
This was no coincidence. The similarities were too stark.
In the few seconds that passed by, the female before him began to change to a rosy color, her eyes watering.
Losing air.
She was suffocating.
A deep chill settled through his nefre as he punched in the code again, his forefinger trembling.
X—△□.
Denied.
X—△□!
DENIED.
“V’Alen!” Ajos’ voice carried over the commotion of the newly freed humans, but he did not hear nor see them. Vaguely, he was aware that the rebel fighters that had been stuck on the outside had managed to breach the stasis hold and were also stepping inside to calm the terrified humans.
But he couldn’t focus on that.
The only thing he could see was the light-brown eyes of the female before him.
Pleading.
She was pleading with him just as Nama had on that horrible day.
This female didn’t know him. She’d never seen his kind before. Yet, in her shock, he doubted she even realized that she wasn’t looking at a human.
The need for survival overrode all of that. This female was begging him to do something to save her.
“V’Alen!” he shouted again.
V’Alen was taking too long.
If he had to smash the pod to bits just to get inside, then so be it.
He didn’t know this female, but he couldn’t let her down.
Clasping his hands together, he made a double fist that he brought down with force against the pod.
“V’Alen!” Ajos repeated the action, lifting his arms to bring them down in a punch that should shatter the transparent surface.
The female’s gaze locked with his, and her eyes became glassy.
As her hands stopped pounding against the surface and fell limp by her sides, time stood still as he watched her eyes close.
No.
“Hold on!” The words tore from his throat.
But her eyes remained closed.
By the Shum’ai gods of Tonvuhiri…NO!
Not again.
2
Ajos wasn’t even sure when V’Alen arrived and began interfacing with the stasis pod.
He’d seen him do it before, override circuits with his own input, so he knew the cyborg could do it.
But he could focus on nothing else except the female dying before him.
She was limp…lifeless.
“Hurry!” His voice did not sound like his own.
It sounded like the young male he’d been many moons ago—the one who had let his sister die like the helpless Shum’ai he had been.
Painfully slow seconds passed as he looked down at the female. He pressed his palm against the surface, staring in, and the pod’s cover slid partially open.
The mechanism stirred, jerking a little, but the hatch would open no farther.
Qef.
He couldn’t let that deter him.
With all his might, Ajos braced his entire weight on the lid, pushing against it.
The muscles in his arms screamed and the tendons in his neck tensed with the effort. With a roar, he pushed the lid fully open.
Without a pause, Ajos reached inside the pod to take hold of the female. His life organ was hammering against his chest as he reached in, and at that first contact, the organ skipped a few beats before regaining its rhythm.
She was soft…so incredibly soft. He hadn’t expected that.
He noted immediately that she wasn't as small as the humans he’d met before—this one’s limbs were longer—but she was not nearly as sturdy as a Shum’ai female either.
Even in the urgency to have her regain consciousness, he could feel how delicate she was in his arms.
Breakable.
He could feel there was no strength in her bones—as if one wrong move and he could snap her in two.
Someone handed him a breathing apparatus, he wasn’t sure who, and he slipped it over the female’s face and activated the device.
The seconds that ticked by felt like hours, and in that time, there was no change.
She was still limp.
Still lifeless.
Moving quickly but with care, Ajos lifted the female from the stasis pod and into his arms like something he was afraid to hold too tight.
Stooping to the floor, he held her against him as he placed a palm to the back of her neck.
What was he thinking? She had no nefre.
He knew nothing about human physiology, so he had no idea how else he could check the female's life force.
Seconds ticked by as he held his breath, searching her neck for the pulse of her life-organ.
Nothing.
He could feel nothing, and even with the breathing apparatus, she wasn’t stirring.
Panic gripped him, Nama’s face swimming before his eyes, and Ajos gripped the female tighter, willing her to wake up.
Still nothing.
He was just about to remove the breathing apparatus and perform resuscitation on his own when V’Alen spoke.
He had forgotten his comrade was there. He had forgotten everything that was happening around him.
The stasis hold…the screams and cries of the other humans…it had all melted away.
“She is breathing,” his comrade said, but even to Ajos, who was so close to the female, it didn’t seem that way.
“You are positive?”
“Yes. I can sense her airflow.” V’Alen paused. “Initial scans tell me the female is in a state of unconsciousness, possibly as a result