Chapter 1: An Alien Tongue

Lena leaned back in her office chair, the back support creaking as she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. It was getting late, she had planned to go back to her apartment hours ago but this last translation almost seemed to be purposefully evading her. Perhaps it would be a better idea to call it a day and take another crack at it tomorrow, a fresh perspective might help her solve the problem.

She rested her elbows on her desk and cradled her face in her hands as she pored over the data readout, reaching forward occasionally to swipe at the touch screen as her tired eyes scanned the display. She hit the test icon, and the computer’s speakers loosed a low rumbling sound, half way between the growl of a lion and the roar of an elephant. It was loud, she could feel the vibrations in her bones, but it wasn’t ... right.

Something massive stirred across her cramped office in the yellow light of her table lamp, a monstrous shadow raising its long snout to peer at her with its amber, reptilian eyes. It opened its jaws wide, its lipless mouth lined with rows of protruding teeth.

Sleethe yawned conspicuously, the alien blinking at her with his nictating membranes.

“I know you’re tired,” Lena complained, “but just hang on a little longer. I swear I’ve almost got this.”

The alien loosed a series of huffing sounds, settling back into his curled up position on the floor of her office like a giant dog. He was fourteen feet long from nose to tail, weighing in at close to a ton. He was so large that he occupied almost the entirety of Lena’s modest workspace with his bulk. He was a Krell, hailing from the planet of the same name, an amphibious reptile of enormous scale. Standing upright he was eight or nine feet tall, even with his hunched posture, and he had enough strength to flip a car like it was a toy. For all intents and purposes he looked like a giant alligator, the spinach-colored, armored scales that lined his back tapering into beige on his fatty underbelly.

Despite their fearsome appearance, Krell were inhumanly friendly and easygoing. The slow, plodding aliens wouldn’t hurt so much as a fly. At least until their friends were put in harm’s way, and then they would go into an anabolic frenzy until the threat was eliminated, expending an enormous amount of energy. That, coupled with a leathery hide that made them almost impervious to damage, made them ideal auxiliaries for the UNN.

Sleethe was a former linebreaker, Krell units tasked with acting as living tanks to defend their comrades from danger, but now he was her research partner. In more ways that one...

Lena was not accustomed to male attention. While her peers were off chasing boys, she had concerned herself with academics, rapidly becoming the foremost xenolinguist in her field. Once she had found the time to court however, she had quickly discovered that she lacked the social skills of her prettier, more experienced friends.

She didn’t think of herself as unattractive, but she was meek and unassuming, a wallflower by every definition. She could hold a conversation in both Elysian and Polar, but she had no idea how to do her hair, and she had no sense of fashion. She had published dozens of papers on the subject of linguistics, but when it came to approaching boys, she found that she couldn’t utter so much as a ‘hello’. It was a cruel irony, and so she had dedicated herself to her work, foregoing male company in favor of her studies. There had been a boyfriend or two, but nothing lasted very long. Her work always took priority over her relationships.

That was until she had met Sleethe. A few months prior she had been tasked with solving a Krell-related problem on the Pinwheel, the giant military space station upon which she now lived and worked. The all-male population of aliens had begun to inexplicably reproduce, their exploding numbers threatening the safety of the station and its inhabitants. Along with several colleagues from various fields, she had discovered that the Krell could spontaneously change their sex when there was a severe gender imbalance, leading some of them to transition into females and begin breeding.

The aliens lacked the necessary vocal apparatus to reproduce human speech, and their own language was an enigma. Much of it was only intelligible underwater, and some of the deep, rumbling tones that they used to communicate were completely below the range of human hearing. Despite that handicap, they always seemed to end up where they were needed, following orders and completing their assigned tasks despite being unable to speak. It was just another one of the many mysteries associated with the enigmatic species.

During her attempts to parse their odd language, Lena had met Sleethe, and the two had hit it off. For all her linguistic skills, the two hadn’t needed to utter a single word during that first intense, passionate encounter. She still got goosebumps when she thought about it. She remembered how his low, rumbling mating call had reverberated through her body like the massage of an invisible hand, how he had lifted her off her feet as if she was no more than a doll and had thrust her against the wall. He had been so frighteningly powerful, yet so gentle and considerate, pushing his inhumanly long and dexterous tongue beneath her skirt and-

Lena shook her head, dispelling the thought as she realized that her heart was racing, returning her attention to the data readout on the monitor in front of her. Now was not the time to be getting riled up, she had work to do.

For the last few months of her life she had been completely engrossed with trying to create translation software that could accurately interpret what a Krell was saying, in order to reproduce it in English and vice versa. She had encountered innumerable hurdles however. Not only did Krell communicate in completely different frequencies to humans, but their very thought processes were alien and strange. They often came off as slow and simple, leading some people to write them off as being unintelligent, but that wasn’t the case at all. The Krell almost seemed to experience time in a completely unique way, their lifespans potentially indefinite as far as xenobiologists could gather.

The aliens simply kept living and growing until some external factor killed them, and being that they were Krell, there wasn’t much that could do that. They thought in time scales that humans could scarcely comprehend, and so there was no point of reference from which to begin deconstructing their language. It was unlike anything that she had studied before, truly alien.

Lena had made some progress however, assembling a small dictionary of basic verbs and phrases, but the issue now was getting the computer to reproduce the sounds in the correct frequencies. Because much of their communication happened below the range of human hearing, she couldn’t ascertain if the resulting synthesized speech sounded right, which was where Sleethe came in.

“Tell me if this one sounds right,” she said, leaning around her monitor to watch the giant alien as he lazily wound his oar-like tail across the floor. It was almost half the length of his body, packed with fat and enough muscle to propel him through the water like a torpedo. She tapped the test button, and the speakers emitted a sound. She couldn’t hear this one, but she could feel it in a way, the low tone making the desk vibrate beneath her hands.

Sleethe raised his head again, listening intently, Lena watching hopefully as his reptilian pupils dilated with interest. He grumbled affirmatively, nodding his massive head, the loose skin beneath his jaw flapping.

“Yes!” Lena exclaimed, making a note of the frequency. “I knew that it had to be somewhere between twenty eight and thirty two hertz. Not that you guys only communicate at one frequency, that would make things too easy for me ... but it’s a start.”

Sleethe returned his head to the floor, closing his eyes and exhaling loudly. He was a cold blooded creature, his metabolism about as slow as one could get without being dead. His favorite activities included lounging on any available surface, lounging in any available body of water, and lounging beneath any heat source that he could fit under. Pretty much lounging in general. In the months that she had known him, she had never once seen him eat. It had alarmed her at first, but if he was anything like the large reptiles back on Earth, he might only need to eat a meal once a year.

Lena heard a click as her office door opened, Sleethe turning his head to get a look as one of her colleagues entered the room.

“Oh, Miss Webber!” The woman exclaimed, seeming surprised to see her. She was clad in a similar white lab coat to the one that Lena was wearing, holding a tablet computer in her hands. “I didn’t realized that you were still working. It’s gone midnight, I was going to close up.”

“I’ve made a breakthrough on the Krell translation software,” Lena replied, “I guess the time got away from me. You go on home Helen, I’ll lock up when I’m done.”

Her colleague nodded, glancing at Sleethe before closing the door behind her.

“Looks like everyone has punched out,” Lena mused, her reptilian companion peering at her with his yellow eyes. She was never quite sure if he understood her in the way that another human would, but he always seemed to pay attention to what she was saying. They were able to convey so much through body language that anything more was hardly necessary.

She was pretty tired, and she was about ready to finish her work and head back to her apartment, but the prospect of being alone with the alien filled her with a kind of mischievous excitement. Although Sleethe frequently visited her apartment, it was built with humans in mind, and so it was not the most comfortable or the most convenient place for him to live. He usually returned to the heat lamps and the shallow pools of the Krell barracks when their work was over, to sleep in a pile with his own kind.

The Pinwheel was the largest space station and Naval dock in UNN territory, but it was still crowded with personnel and tourists, which meant that getting some alone time with the sixteen foot long alien was often prohibitively difficult. She saw her chance, and she was going to take it.

“Sleethe,” she whispered suggestively, the alien opening one eye to gaze at her. “Want to have some ... fun?”

The Krell huffed, blowing air out of his snout as he rolled over onto his back, exposing his pale belly and stretching sleepily.

“Come on, don’t play coy.”

He deliberated for a moment, the gears in his head turning slowly, and then he pushed himself back over onto his segmented stomach and slithered closer to her. He was too lazy to stand up, and the room was small enough that he could easily reach her by shuffling along the floor.

The cumbersome Krell pushed his snout under her desk, his head alone almost as large as her five foot, four inch frame. She brushed her dirty-blonde hair out of her face and adjusted her glasses, leaning back and looking down at him as his nostrils blew warm air up her black pencil skirt.

She reached down a hand and ran her slim fingers along his leathery snout, his dull green scales tough and thick, yet oddly yielding. She slid her hand under his chin and felt the softer scales of his underbelly, far smoother and more pleasing to the touch, the layer of fat beneath his skin giving him a chubby feel. He was like a walking slab of hard muscle and armored hide, with broad shoulders and massive arms, but his vulnerable underside was sensitive and he enjoyed being stroked. Lena liked to curl up in his arms and push her face into his chest on the rare occasion that they were able to sleep together, probing with her fingers in search of the rock hard muscle that lay beneath.

As large and as heavy as he was, he was a gentle lover, always conscious of Lena’s human limitations. He opened his jaws as if he was going to swallow her up, like an alligator basking on a shore, his sharp teeth jutting out at odd angles. He lacked lips, and so kissing was a clumsy affair, but he made up for it with a tongue of monumental proportions.

Lena watched as the long, azure organ snaked out of his mouth, a clear foot of slimy muscle. The mucous membranes in humans were pink, but in Krell they were varying shades of blue due to the hemocyanin that their species used to transport oxygen to their tissues. Cut a Krell, and it would bleed blue instead of red.

Her cheeks reddened as his agile organ brushed her thigh through her pantyhose, leaving a smear of viscous saliva. Sleethe knew exactly what she wanted, he was an intuitive creature.

She waited for a moment, listening for any lingering employees, but it seemed like the coast was clear. Her heart was thudding in her chest, butterflies fluttering in her belly as she anticipated the touch of his warm tongue, Sleethe’s nose disappearing from view as he pushed his snout beneath her long skirt.

The hanging flesh beneath his throat inflated, and he loosed a low, reverberating roar that shook her to the core. The deep baritone sounded like the rumble of some ancient dinosaur, and while it was undeniably intimidating, she knew it to be a mating call. The sound seemed to penetrate down to her bones, making her very flesh vibrate as she sat in her chair. It was like sitting atop a subwoofer, the oscillations tickling her senses, teasing her in ways that transcended touch. It felt as if a thousand tiny fingers were caressing her from within, or like someone had thrust an invisible vibrator inside her without her knowledge and had cranked it up to the highest setting.

It was this resonating mating call that had been the catalyst of their relationship. While clandestinely observing a Krell breeding frenzy for research purposes, she had been hit with wave after wave of their vibrating solicitations, leaving her wanting and confused. When Sleethe had stumbled upon her, frustrated after having lost his recent bid to mate, the two had found a solution to their shared problem. It was as if he could smell the arousal on her, sense her tension, and despite knowing the Krell words for ‘no’ and ‘stop’ she had let him take her. What followed had been the most intense experience of her life, and what’s more, she had discovered that the burly alien was a model lover.