you're too young & eager to love

I didn't get to go nearly as in-depth or cover as much as I would have liked with this piece since I'm at work. But it's a start! I also have no idea what I'm doing in this genre. I'm fumbling around in the dark without a flashlight. Or a handy-dandy wand that has a glowing tip like in Harry Potter.

Anyway, here is my introduction(?) to a sci-fi alien doctor character. Yup.

-

The captain is a rough, aged man, and he eyes her wearily. Distrust shapes his eyebrows, and he runs the back of his hand across his dry mouth. He’s met his fair share of species, and it isn’t the blood difference, he thinks, but the silver-blue of her eyes. The way she never blinks.

Although the hiss of the doors opening signals his entrance, his voice booms out welcomingly anyway. “Priam.”

The human-shaped female’s back straightens. She drops a scalpel onto a tray and turns her head.

“Interesting name.”

“Chosen by the cataloguing system, sir.” Her voice is not monotonous but a subtle combination of tones. As though her tongue and teeth work precisely for each pronunciation. When she was taken aboard the ship, the captain was told that she spoke fourteen major languages and thirty-four dialects. He heard her once conversing in a series of shuddering clicks and gurgles – the type of noises that, he thought, needed mandibles.

He makes a noncommittal sound, sucking on the end of a fat cigar. “Just stopping by to see if there’s any news.”

She flexes her fingers and for a moment they look too long. Her nails, briefly, seem too sharp. More like talons. “The subject is a variety found in the third region of mercurial star hexes.” She isn’t wearing any gloves but her skin is pristine. There’s a blue tint to her, just barely, noticeable more in the length of veins running up and down her arms. She taps the surgery table for emphasis where a hulking foreign frame is half dissected.

The captain snorts. “That’s not possible. All those colonies were extinguished.”

Priam’s human guise is lithe, blade-slender, but he swears she grows before him. A thunderous, oppressive shape, the shiver-stretch of her flesh that encompasses her anger. But he blinks, and the guise is there, has not changed, while the alien clicks her tongue impatiently. “If you doubt my professional judgment, Captain - “

“No, no.” He chuckles even though nothing is funny, running his hand over his mouth again before taking another pull on the cigar. “I’ll report the finding to the home front.” Turning to leave, he swears he hears it again, that stretch of joints reshaping, of limbs being molded and released, once the doors close behind him.