This week I'm giving readers a sneak preview of my new chick lit/sci fi romance book, My Planet or Yours. This excerpt is from Chapter One. Space traveler Triskam is from the planet Darvanius. He's just crash landed his pod on planet Earth.
Damn. Who would have thought an ordinary space traveler would end up flat on his back staring up at the sky of a world millions of light years from his own? With no way of returning, he might add.
The crew on the Sheloni would monitor transmissions and finally conclude the pod had crashed, but for now they were keeping on the other side of this planet called, he remembered now, Earth. They wouldn’t know he'd managed to safely land. There were those among them, primarily Garrick, the ship's second officer, who’d consider him a coward for pushing that stabilizer button. Technically he hadn’t pushed it. One of his limbs had hit the thing while he’d tumbled about the pod’s cabin. But, he admitted to himself, he'd made the decision to survive and would certainly have stabilized the craft and deployed the landing system on purpose if he could have.
Eventually he pulled himself to a sitting position. He had no serious injuries, though he was banged up from the wild tumbling about in the pod. He pulled his Personal Pilot out of the pouch strapped around his waist and ran his fingers over its smooth, silver-colored surface. It appeared unharmed, thank goodness.
He flipped it open. "Pilot, what is my whereabouts?"
"Earth, Commander."
"I have told you before. I am not a Commander. My rank is Lieutenant."
A brief hesitation and then the pilot's voice replied. "You are my commander, sir."
"Right." Pointless to argue with a machine. He wasn't the one who'd programmed the thing. "Why are you speaking in an Earth language? It is permissable to speak Darvanian. There are only the two of us here."
The pilot had understood what he'd said in Darvanian, but it had replied in English. Triskam had studied that language and, being that he was his ship's language specialist, had more or less mastered spoken English. His people had been monitoring this planet’s transmissions for as long as the planet had the technology to transmit.
"One of my circuits was damaged when you crushed me with your posterior region against a panel of the pod before stabilization. I cannot reach my other language boards."
Triskam blew his breath out sharply. Not good. He hoped the pilot was otherwise undamaged. He'd need it to survive.
"Sorry. The crushing with my posterior region was unintentional. Where on Earth have we landed?"
"United States. Arizona. Mostly an area of uninhabited desert. Why have you landed, the craft, Commander? Landing is a clear violation of Space Service directives. You have committed a grave crime."
"We will discuss that later. Right now I have to think."
"Violations of Space Service directives are very serious and should be discussed now."
Triskam rolled his eyes. "What are you, my nanny? Get busy performing diagnostics on yourself." He snapped the pilot shut and returned it to his pouch.
