Earth Fathers Are Weird

  EARTH FATHERS ARE WEIRD

  Lyn Gala

  Earth Fathers are Weird

  Copyright © March 2019 by Lyn Gala

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Image/art disclaimer: Licensed material is being used for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted in the licensed material is a model.

  Editor: Sue Laybourn

  Cover Artist: Lyn Gala

  Published in the United States of America

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning

  This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. This e-book is for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Lyn Gala

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  Further Reading: Claimings, Tails, and Other Alien Artifacts

  Also By Lyn Gala

  Dedication

  So often my imagination darts off into wild directions. Through all the weirdness, my readers put their faith in my ability to create a story out of insanity. Thank you for that. Thank you to everyone who supports me. I have to give special thanks to Susan who supported me with my first unpublished stories, reading them and encouraging me no matter what and to my mother who doesn’t like my genre, but who never fails to tell me that she’s proud of what I’ve accomplished. Thank you to Mandy who has commented on every single story I’ve ever written and my Patreon crew including Beth, Alexis, Emma, Sarah, and Maryam who have supported and inspired me. And then there are the wonderful readers who read early drafts and helped me chase down every error from misplaced commas to bizarre continuity mistakes. Thank you Annie, Elf, Janelle, Tracy, Marnie, Amanda, Jean, Vonn, Anna, Haru, Amelia, Htet Htet, Anna, Maryam and Ellie. I appreciate that you don’t let me publicly embarrass myself. I save that for Patreon where you see all my mistakes. And to every person who purchases my titles... thank you. You make it possible for me to live in these worlds of my imagination and share them with you.

  Chapter One

  The belly of the enormous alien ship pushed down through the cloud cover, lightning dancing across its surface of gunmetal gray. Max’s stomach twisted in terror, but he focused on his instruments. The invader was as large as a battleship, but Max worried more about the even larger craft NORAD was tracking right behind it. It was large enough to carry an invading army. If Max had to fly his jet up their equivalent of a tail pipe, he would to protect the planet.

  Dozens of smaller flyers dropped into the air below the ship. Max could see three different designs, and then all hell broke loose. The ships might have been alien, but Max recognized weapons fire. The tail of Dan-Dan’s jet burst into flames, and he punched out, his parachute engaging seconds later.

  “Engage bogeys!” Ground One ordered. “Engage! All ships engage!” Fuck. Even the guys on the ground sounded panicked. Despite the fact that none of the jets had opened fire yet, one of the alien flyers exploded. A huge chunk went through Dan-Dan’s parachute, and Max watched... helpless... as a pilot he was responsible for sped toward the ground.

  Max wanted to tear off his oxygen mask and scream, but he had a job to do. The fear and horror transformed to fury.

  He took his F-35 into battle formation and lined up with an alien ship, only to have the damn thing pull impossible Gs as it went straight up into the atmosphere before diving back toward Earth. It was like watching a dolphin doing underwater acrobatics.

  “Nose cold. No lock on radar. Negative lock!” Max reported. As the officer in charge, he had to stay cool, so he bit down the more desperate words that clawed up his throat. A new cluster of alien flyers closed on them from two o’clock, and Max barked orders for the wing to adjust formation.

  “Ditzy! Bogey at your six! Increase thrust!” Max called. Dee must have punched it because her F-35 pulled away from the cigar-shaped flyer pursuing her. At least for a second, but then the alien accelerated so it passed Ditzy Dee so fast that it made her jet look like a fucking WWI Fokker Eindecker. The alien then shot past Piddle’s jet, and he didn’t have time to fire.

  “Radar is bent. Radar is bent,” someone called out. Max pushed his jet toward the deck when his own radar showed one of the larger alien shapes on his six.

  “Bells 2, maintain Angels 3.”

  “I’m punching out!”

  “Who has eyes on VJ?”

  “Zippy is on the bug; weapon system down.”

  “Patriot missile inbound. T-minus 45... 44... 43...”

  The radio barked out orders and warnings. Max ignored all of them. Below, Earth was a patchwork quilt of fields and Iowa farms. A damaged jet spun toward the ground, crashing in a fiery explosion that sent black smoke into the air. Max didn’t even know whose jet that had been, or whether the pilot had punched out safely. Worse, Max hated himself because his first thought was gratitude that his own family lived far enough away that the fire couldn’t touch his parents or his little brother.

  Max pulled the nose of his F-35 up and the g-forces pushed him toward losing consciousness. At this point, part of him wished he could. Then he wouldn’t have to see his world invaded by ships he couldn’t hope to fight. He levelled out. Since his computer couldn’t lock onto the enemy, Max broke every regulation by opening fire manually.

  He must have hit his mark because the alien ship faltered.

  “Bells, bogeys closing on you. Firewall that bitch.”

  Max’s heart jumped at the warning and he opened the throttle. His on-board computer warned him as a half dozen ships moved on his position. For a half second, Max froze. He’d never done that, but his brain couldn’t decide between punching out or trying to take a few of the enemy with him. He thought of Daniels and the way the aliens had taken out his parachute. If Max was going to die, he didn’t want his life to end like that. Not like that.

  Ignoring every warning light on his board, Max turned his jet toward the enemy.

  He woke on his back in the center of a small room. His body ached, and the sound of that last explosion still echoed in his head. He scrambled to his feet and reached for his radio. And found it gone. Everything was gone. Someone had pulled off his flight suit,
and Max was insanely grateful that he’d put it on over his uniform when the alarms had gone off. He couldn’t handle captured and naked.

  Fear made Max’s mouth dry, but he called out, “Hello?” The walls deadened the sound. When Max touched the wall, it was smooth, warm metal. The ceiling was covered in what might have been alien pipes or intestines or electrical conduits. He had no way to judge.

  An archway appeared on one wall a half second before the crack of light turned into a full door that slid away. Max slipped into a fighting stance. His heart beat against his ribs and the edges of his vision turned gray. Then the alien appeared.

  It was short—four and a half to five feet—and the violet mouth reminded Max of his Great Aunt Velma’s crazy lipstick. However, the alien’s wide face was ringed with the same color, with stripes of purple pointed at her broad nose, and her nostrils were set wider than the corners of her lips.

  Max breathed heavily. He braced himself for anything from vivisection to questioning, but instead the alien opened her mouth and wailed. The sound was like an opera singer mimicking fingernails down a chalkboard. Max cringed as shivers ran up his spine.

  “Ahh. Okay, I didn’t understand that, assuming you were trying to say something to me.” Max’s chest hurt. He wasn’t sure if that was from pulling too many Gs or if he was on the verge of a fear-induced heart attack.

  She wailed again, and the sound was so bad it made Max’s mouth water, and he had no idea what the hell would cause that. Apparently frustrated with his inability to communicate, she grabbed his arm and jerked him forward so fast that he didn’t have time to defend himself or counterattack. He stumbled after her, struggling to keep his feet under him to avoid getting dragged. The ship reminded Max more of a submarine than any aircraft carrier he’d been on. The corridors were narrow with heavy doors separating the sections. If they were in space, that probably made sense.

  “That’s my planet down there. What are you people doing?”

  She dragged him through a door into a corridor with deep bronzy-red walls. Max stopped. Every six or seven feet, a tiny alcove created enough space for one... individual. Many of them were humanoid, but far too many had tentacles or lacked heads. Or both.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. Next to insectoids, tentacles were on his list of worst nightmares. He hadn’t even been amused when one of his boyfriends had wanted to play with a tentacle-shaped dildo.

  The short female stopped near an alcove and wailed. A second later, another humanoid appeared. This one was taller and more bulky. The alien’s upper lip was huge compared to the lower one, making it look like the victim of a bee sting attack. The alien turned his head, and a half dozen nostrils went up the bridge of something vaguely nose-like. He wailed at the alien holding Max hostage, and she wailed back.

  Max said, “I want to go back to my people.” He wanted that, but he wasn’t sure anyone cared. “Who are you people?” Max demanded. The pair holding him hostage, and probably discussing his painful death, were joined by a third alien. It was shaped like a pith helmet with a curtain of tentacles hanging below. Max shivered in horror.

  The lavender alien shrieked, and the helmet wrapped a tentacle around Max’s leg. Terror made Max jerk back, but the tentacle held firm. When Max lost his balance, he tried to recover by grabbing lavender alien. That was a mistake. The boss alien shoved Max, and he fell to the ground hard enough to lose his breath. Luckily the floor was the consistency of a wrestling mat, so he didn’t injure anything beyond his dignity. He used his new freedom to scuttle toward the door.

  Alien bogey one wailed, and Max got his feet under him. He threw himself toward the exit when tentacles wrapped around his knees. Max punched and kicked in every direction. Aliens chittered and bellowed and sang and wailed, using every note on the piano. Tentacles caught Max’s wrists, and soon Max could only thrash as the helmet-tentacle alien sat on him. Max might have bitten the nearest tentacle except he did not want that in his mouth and he wanted to retain a grain of dignity. He was a military officer. They couldn’t strip him of that honor or that responsibility.

  A tentacle punched the air next to Max’s head, and he flinched away. The tip of the tentacle unfurled to reveal a crystal. A hologram of a tiny television set appeared above the bluish stone. The tiny screen showed television broadcasts. The image switched from one station to another every few seconds, but they were all talking about the same thing—the repelled invasion.

  Repelled.

  Max’s muscles turned watery, and he stopped struggling. Earth was safe. They had repelled the alien invaders. Except Max knew that wasn’t true. He’d been in the air, and nothing Earth owned had touched the alien fighters. But in the end, Max didn’t care as long as the planet was safe.

  After all, his unit had given him the call name Bells after Mr. Belvedere. They’d hoped to insult him by calling him a servant, but Max had always focused on the service part of military service. If his planet was safe, he could handle whatever aliens could dish out until his body failed.

  Chapter Two

  The pith-helmet, tentacle alien Max had named Spaceballs led Max down a mundane ramp and onto an alien world. In the distance, a city was partially obscured by a greenish, grayish haze that might have been pollution or a poisonous atmosphere that would kill Max. During his days on the ship, he’d discovered that the alien computers had absorbed very little English, so his ability to ask about anything that mattered was extremely limited.

  Spaceballs patted the ground with a tentacle. “Here. Here. You seek others here.”

  Max walked the aisle of the bustling port. George Lucas did not have an imagination this vivid. Aliens of all sizes hurried past one another. Stacks of cartons rolled through the crowd on automated sleds that buzzed in high tones when some tentacle monster stopped too long in front of it. And then the alien in question would wave half its tentacles in the air while the other half carried it clear of the freight’s path.

  Tentacles, tentacles everywhere.

  Okay, that wasn’t fair. Only most of the aliens had tentacles. The others had some combination of more leg-like limbs. And several individuals were the same species as the first alien Max had seen. They had a center tentacle that undulated like a snail’s underside with two narrow legs on either side. One ran past, her two outer legs lifting the body and flinging it forward to land on the center leg, over and over. Max was developing a killer headache. Maybe the atmosphere was poison and he could look forward to an agonizing death.

  “Here, where? Where do I go?” Max asked. In the Air Force, he’d resented how the military dictated every aspect of his life, but right now, he would appreciate a few rules.

  “Here. Here.” Spaceballs tapped the ground again. The translation computer was particularly fucked today... or Spaceballs hated him. Either was possible.

  “Where do I go?” Max illustrated by pointing first in one direction and then the other.

  “Here.” Spaceballs turned and fled back up the ramp. Max tried to grab him, but the helmet-like top half was too smooth, and his tentacles moved him far too fast for Max to keep up, especially with his stomach churning. He still wasn’t sure if that was a symptom of stress or a sign that alien food was killing him, and he was reaching a point where he didn’t care. Totally fucked was total and fucked, and whether the level of fuckedness was multiplied by two or ten didn’t matter.

  The ship door closed behind Spaceballs, and Max was left alone. With nothing better to do, he started wandering toward the city. On Earth, most of the cities he’d seen had a central island of high rises with a wide ring of smaller buildings. However, this city filled the skyline with towers of all shapes and angles. Several grew larger at the top, which seemed like a rather unstable shape for a tower, but Max had to assume aliens understood their own architecture better than he did. To his human eye, it made the city look wrong.

  “Human.”

  Max turned and a ten foot tall alien stood in front of him. “Human. Question.” The words ca
me from the translator bracelet on the thing’s wrist, but the actual voice came from gill-like slats on the sides of its huge, muscular neck. And it was humanish with two legs and two long arms that hung down past the knees. Of course the arm had a short upper half with an oversized forearm that ended in a four-fingered hand. Or a two-fingered two-thumbed hand. The alien had enough humanlike features that it was more disturbing than tentacle monsters.

  “Yes. I’m human.” Max studied the triangular underside of the alien’s chin, but then the neck sort of folded like a snake bending into an s-shape, and two oversized eyes gazed right into Max’s. Max’s stomach nearly revolted. The shape of the neck looked too much like it had been broken.

  “Designation Heetayu,” it said. Given that the translator didn’t alter the sound, Max assumed that was either a name or a title, but he was grateful that at least some of the aliens could communicate without screeching.

  Max smiled. “Nice to meet you Heetayu. I am...” Giving his full name and rank would probably confuse the alien since Max couldn’t explain what the different parts meant. “I’m Max,” he offered.

  “Mass.” The head raised back up. “Come.” He strode off.

  Max hesitated, but in the end, he didn’t have any other resources, so followed Heetayu. They threaded through the crowd. Max tried hard to avoid touching any of the aliens. The occasional alien was terrifyingly large, and a few had bright colors that, on Earth, would suggest the species was poisonous.

  None of them paid attention to Max. Either they had seen humans before, or the variety of life forms was so great that no one cared about one more. Max assumed it was the second. It was that or the government had been keeping one hell of a secret. While Max didn’t put it past the military to do exactly that in the name of national security, he had to assume that the alien dogfight over middle-America would have caused far less panic if anyone in the chain of command had had a clue.