Rizzed Up By My Alien Neighbor

Chapter 1

RYCHNE

Vacuum roars through the holes in my ship like a starving animal.

Not the real sound—there’s no air out here, no medium to carry it—but the pressure differential is something my internal translators register as a scream, primal and enraged.

My Starfighter lurches again as a plasma torpedo misses me by less than a ship’s breath and detonates against the husk of a derelict cruiser.

The blast shudders through my bones. My molars crack together.

I bark a laugh. It’s not humor, not really. More like the sound madness makes when it has too much room to stretch its legs.

“System integrity at twelve percent,” the ship tells me in my mother tongue.

The console, what’s left of it, is an open wound of warning glyphs blinking in rhythmic agony—red, amber, red again.

Life support is fluctuating. Hull stress at catastrophic levels.

One more direct hit and I’ll be vapor, just another drifting smear in this cold, unending theater of death.

“Shut up,” I grunt through gritted teeth. The words are for the console, for the war, for the entire doomed Trident Alliance if I’m being honest.

I jerk the stick hard right, banking between two spinning chunks of slagged metal that might’ve once been an Alzhon carrier.

My ship groans in protest. The starboard wing trails smoke—black and bitter, like burnt blood and scorched regret.

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the cracked canopy glass.

Gold eyes wild. Scales singed. I look like a beast cornered in a cage too small to die in.

One of the Grolgath cruisers lurches into view ahead, its green hull glinting like oil on bone. It’s too close. They're always too close. Their weapons lock on—three red dots painting my cockpit in a triangle of inevitable death.

“Shoot first, think never,” I mutter. It’s an old Vakutan saying. A creed. A joke passed between warriors with more muscle than sense. I used to wear it like armor.

But now?

Now the words feel hollow in my mouth. My fingers tighten on the stick.

My thumb hovers over the eject trigger, though it won’t help.

There’s nowhere to go. My oxygen is down to fumes.

My coolant system died fifteen kliks ago.

And worst of all, my translight core—my jump drive—was shredded by that last barrage.

I’m trapped. Snared in a graveyard built from centuries of mistakes and the bones of better men.

I am going to die.

“Negative,” I hiss to no one. “Not yet. Not today.”

Then I see it.

A cruiser, larger than the rest, its gravity well destabilized by damage.

Shields fluctuating. Its jump core is primed and humming, bright as a miniature sun.

If I can get close—just close enough—I can latch on with my mag clamps.

Ride the bastard through its jump window like a parasite on a blood-slick beast.

It’s suicide.

It’s also the only plan I’ve got left.

“Computer,” I growl. “Prep mag latch. Boost engines. Target vector: forward belly of that cruiser.”

“Warning,” it chirps with maddening calm. “Jump window unstable. Probability of successful traversal: less than—”

“—Do it.”

The ship doesn’t argue. It’s dying too. We might as well die on our feet.

I slam the throttle, every servo in the console screeching.

The ship surges, bleeding atmosphere and fury.

Pulse fire erupts from the enemy, tracer lines of plasma burning too close, too fast. One clips the undercarriage and I feel the jolt in my spine.

Pain flares behind my eyes, white-hot. My ribs are bruised or broken. Doesn’t matter.

The cruiser’s jump ring expands, a halo of iridescent blue—unstable, flickering, pulsing like a dying heartbeat. It’s close. So close.

The mag clamps engage with a bone-deep thunk, and I’m slammed against my seat as we hit the grav field. I’m on the cruiser now. Half a second later, the jump initiates.

Time warps.

Space folds.

And then everything goes wrong.

The jump window collapses—premature, explosive, tearing open with a sound that isn’t a sound at all but a sensation, like being peeled apart at the quantum level and smeared across realities.

The jump window collapses—premature, explosive, tearing open with a sound that isn’t a sound at all but a sensation, like being peeled apart at the quantum level and smeared across realities.

My vision fragments.

No, not just sight—consciousness.

I am every version of myself at once: bloodied and victorious atop the wreckage of a Grolgath dreadnought; cradling the head of a comrade whose name I can’t remember but whose dying breath fogged my visor; standing before the Assembly Tribunal, dishonored, or maybe revered—I can’t tell.

All of it flickers through me like static-wrapped flame. And then it gets worse.

Places I’ve never walked. Voices I’ve never heard.

A woman’s laugh, high and unguarded. A child calling my name with fierce joy. The smell of fried grease, ozone, and earth after rain. Rain. I have never felt it fall. But here it is—soaked into the marrow of my hallucination, cold and strange and real.

The illusion ends not with clarity but with heat.

White-hot, atmospheric drag howling against what remains of my hull.

The air tears at the seams of the cockpit, plasma shearing off in molten curls.

Everything rattles. The canopy glass turns orange, then a deep, demonic red.

The temperature climbs beyond tolerable; my scales singe despite dermal plating.

“Impact imminent,” croaks the onboard VI, barely functional through the system’s hemorrhaging data stream.

“Where?” I demand, slamming my hand against the console.

The answer appears in crude planetary glyphs:

EARTH. COORDINATE GRID: NORTHWEST SECTOR 38-42. TEMPORAL INDEX: A.D. 2025.

My heart hammers. Earth. Not in the present. Not during the war. A.D. 2025. Ancient, primitive, still riding the fumes of its last global mistake.

The ground comes fast.

I don’t get to think, or brace, or pray.

I crash.

The sound is like reality being ripped in half.

Earth does not receive me gently—it rejects me.

The Starfighter gouges through trees and soil like a divine meteor, carving a wound into the landscape.

The impact punches the breath from my lungs and drives me down into the pilot seat so hard I feel vertebrae shift.

Screams of tortured metal swallow me whole.

Branches snap, stones explode into shrapnel.

We hit something concrete—manmade—then flip. Once. Twice.

The world stops spinning, and I hang upside down in a coffin of fire and carbon stench.

Smoke fills the cockpit. Not synthetic coolant or plasma venting—real smoke, from real fire.

I cough. Pain ricochets through every nerve cluster.

One eye swells shut. My fingers twitch, seeking purchase on a melted harness buckle.

Every breath is agony, and not just because of injury—there’s something wrong with the air. Too much particulate. Unfiltered.

The windshield is a cracked spiderweb of soot and dying systems. Through it, I glimpse sky—gray, roiling with storm front and smoke, but not war smoke. Natural smoke. Trees, I realize. Trees are burning.

I punch the release.

The canopy doesn’t open.

I punch it again.

This time, the locking mechanism gives. The glass hisses, then shatters outward, scattering bits of shattered cockpit like broken teeth into the air. A gust of wind slaps me in the face, thick with burnt pine, diesel, and wet earth.

It is so loud.

Crickets scream. Birds shriek. Somewhere, a dog barks with panicked insistence. This world breathes, and it is alive, and I am no longer in space.

I unbuckle and fall onto the ship’s ceiling—which is now the floor—with a meaty thud. Something in my shoulder pops. My head reels. My tail drags uselessly behind me, numb. I crawl.

Outside is chaos. Not war-chaos. Nature-chaos.

I stumble out of the husk of my once-proud Starfighter into a world that has no idea what I am.

My boots sink into grass and dirt, still slick from the scorched path of my descent.

The bluff overlooks a scattering of rooftops below, too symmetrical to be wild, too careless to be military.

Human dwellings. Primitive architecture.

Water towers. That enormous red bottle—I realize with stunned clarity—it’s a monument.

A local tribute to some tribal condiment, perhaps.

A sign sticks out of the hillside rubble near the crash trail. Painted in English.

Welcome to Collinsville, Illinois. Home of the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle.

I stare at it.

A bubble of manic laughter claws up my throat.

“Of course,” I croak aloud. “Of course the gods spit me into a sauce-themed village.”

Something groans behind me. The ship. Systems shutting down. Power conduits sizzling into silence. The core is dead. Nothing left but emergency auxiliary and the backup fusion cell that could barely power a toaster.

I touch the side of the fuselage. “Rest, old beast,” I whisper in Vakutan. “You brought me through Hell.”

And I collapse. Onto scorched grass, shoulders burning, eyes dry as bone. I want to sleep. I want to dig a hole in this soft, humid dirt and disappear. But I can’t.

They’ll come looking.

Grolgath, maybe. Coalition scouts if they trace the anomaly. Hell, even a rogue Trident vessel, sent to confirm my death.

And I am not dying in a sauce bottle town in the middle of pre-Fusion-era Earth.

Not yet.

I reach into the suit’s inner lining. Pull out the image inducer—a sleek little piece of Vakutan engineering the size of a plum, humming faintly. Still operational. Good.

I slap it against my sternum.

The transformation is instant.

My red scales flatten into human skin—tan, sweaty, slightly scarred. My claws retract. My tail vanishes. My height drops by a head and a half. The image isn’t perfect, but in a world where humans wear pajamas to public shops, I doubt anyone will notice.

“Rychne is dead,” I say to the open sky. “Richard… begins.”

And with the smell of barbecued forest still hanging thick in the air, I stagger toward the treeline—toward the scent of electricity and motor oil and human civilization.

Wherever the hell that leads.