An Alien's Guide to Handjobs

Chapter One: Incursion at Greasy Joe’s

“Balls!” Chief Royal Scientist Cynathox announced. “They call them balls!”

She turned from the ship’s viewscreen, all four arms gesticulating in excitement. The troops who were gathered under the teleporter stared at her, faces blank. Dressed in battle armour and hefting laser bazookoids over their shoulders, they were itching to leave. Another scientific lecture was not on their agenda. As far as they were concerned, that agenda comprised of chasing squishy aliens, fighting squishy aliens, and killing squishy aliens. With any luck, there would be some time left over to torture squishy aliens too.

Commanding Officer Zerkhox glanced up from the teleporter controls. The Chief Royal Scientist looked at him for an acknowledgement. Technically, she outranked him, so he relented and forced himself to abort the teleporter’s countdown to indulge her.

“They call what balls? Madam Scientist?” He squinted his central eye, readying himself for a confusing scientific explanation. His areas of expertise were murder and mayhem, not in-depth discussions of alien biology.

She scuttled over to him. The tip of her tail tapped him on the shoulder as she spoke; he hated it when she did that.

“The appendages that contain the elementium!” she spat between her fangs. “The filthy slugs have two of them, hanging between their pathetic, little legs.” She hopped back now; green tail recoiling. Her four webbed hands brushed the scales lining her thorax as she regained composure. “Your weapons will make short work of their bodies, but this is a science mission. It is why you are going down to a sparsely populated area first. Bring me back at least one pair of balls. And bring them back intact!”

Zerkhox groaned. Trust the science department to complicate things. This would have been a fun day out, hunting dirty slugs. Now they had to be all pernickety about which body parts to blow off.

His troops were fidgeting behind him as he recommenced the teleporter countdown.

“Yes, Madam Scientist, we’ll bring back these balls of elementium. By the Queen’s honour!” He raised the two arms not holding his bazookoid, in the standard royal salute.

“Be sure you do! I must study this new source of the divine elixir. If it is as pure as the computer scans suggest, we’ll be rich!”

Zerkhox was about to remind her she had just declared it a science mission, not a treasure hunt, but at that moment a shimmering dome enveloped him and his nine troopers. In the next instant, they were gone.

***

The diner’s only customer, Stanley Cooper, had seen some strange things in his thirty years hauling freight— but the sudden appearance of ten lizard people in Greasy Joe’s beat them all. He glanced down at his coffee cup for any signs it had been spiked; it looked like the same ole black coffee that lovely Wendy always poured him. Maybe the decades of diesel fumes had finally taken their toll. He blinked and shook his head. Nope, the lizard people were still there. And they had guns. Big guns.

Stan rubbed his grizzled chin and calculated the distance from his booth to the exit and out to his rig. The lizards had materialised over by the register. If they didn’t turn around, they might not notice him making a dash for the door.

He exited the booth as quietly as he could and was about to make a run for it, when the nearest lizard trooper noticed the movement. The trooper spun around on his webbed feet and fired the laser mounted under his bazookoid.

The scorching blue beam burned a neat hole the size of a quarter through Stanley Cooper’s chest. He slumped to the floor in front of the booth, smoke drifting up from his red-checked shirt. The first human victim of the alien invasion.

Waitress Wendy screamed from behind the counter, and dived back into the kitchen, miraculously avoiding the laser fire that followed.

Zerkhox growled orders at his troops to fan out and cover all exits. He sent two troopers slithering outside to ensure no retaliation was forthcoming from planetary defences. Shouldering his bazookoid, he strode over and focussed all three eyes on the dead native. Yep, dead as a Zynslug. He activated the comm implant in his left fang and reported in to Cynathox. “We’ve killed one. Lasers go right through them, armour and all. There is at least one more hiding somewhere in this structure. We will get that one too. Though this location is not a rich hunting ground.”

Cynathox’s voice hissed from the comm implant, “Never mind your hunting. Just bring me its balls!”

I am a highly decorated combat soldier, not a biologist, Zerkhox lamented to himself as he bent over the strange being that had only two arms and two eyes.

He ripped the ridiculously thin armour off it. Sure enough, inside some kind of pouch were two small ball things. Accompanied by a short proboscis. With a quick yank he separated the whole arrangement from the body. He may as well take it all back in case it was any use. Maybe there was elementium in the proboscis thing too.

But here I am thinking like a scientist already.

Disgustingly warm, red blood splashed all over his battle glove as he shoved the parcel of flesh into a pocket.

***

Wendy made it ten paces back out of the kitchen, with a shotgun raised, before Zerkhox detected the movement. He spun and fired within a split second. Piercing laser-light entered Wendy’s left eye and exited through the back of her head. The blonde perm she had been so proud of, caught fire. Zerkhox shook his head and blinked all three eyes in bemusement.

These slugs are hopeless. It is almost dishonourable to face them in combat.

He stamped out the fire and ripped the armour off the second body, opening comms with Cynathox again. “Got one here with no balls. Not even the proboscis thing I grabbed from the first one. It has something that looks like an aquatic gill between its legs instead. Do you want that?”

“No,” Cynathox replied. “I’ve been doing more research. They have two sexes. That’s the other sex; it doesn’t contain elementium.”

Zerkhox, wanting to show off his skills of observation, offered more information, “There are two swellings higher up its body. Could they be bigger versions of the balls?”

“No! They are not related. Stop messing around and get back here.”

Zerkhox sighed, cutting the communication channel and opening a new one to his troops. He issued orders to patrol the area while he returned to the ship with the specimen.

***

Sarah Morgan sat in the passenger seat of the red pickup truck cruising along Highway Ninety. She scrolled through the songs on her phone, well aware that the driver kept trying to sneak a peek at her legs. Tony, he’d said his name was when he picked her up. He seemed harmless enough— as long as all he did was look; but she wondered again if her short crop-top and tight jeans were the best choice of outfit for hitchhiking across the country.

As they sped past a sign advertising gas and food a mile ahead, a blue laser beam penetrated the windshield. It passed between the two front seats and out through the back window.

“What the hell was that?” Tony yelped, snapping his head around.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said, looking up from her phone. “Maybe some kid with one of those laser pointers?”

***

Back at the diner, Zerkhox’s comm plant hissed with a report from his trooper outside. “Boss, their vehicles have glass refraction shields. My shot didn’t stop them.”

“Okay, hit it with kinetics. See what that does.”

The pickup was better at refracting lasers than deflecting a molten titanium round travelling at five-thousand feet per second. It hit above the front-wheel arch, travelled effortlessly through the engine block and blew the other wheel clean off. The resulting super-heated shock wave melted everything in the engine bay.

Sarah screamed; her calm demeanour shattered. Tony jammed his foot on the brake and turned the wheel hard to the right. He needn’t have bothered— the truck was grinding to a halt anyway.

He jumped out and ran around to Sarah’s side. He had to heave on the door to wrench it from the buckled frame and extricate her. Everything beyond the dashboard was a crumpled mess. They stood on the side of the road, staring in bewilderment at the smoking wreck.

Up at Greasy Joe’s, the successful shooter bared his fangs in triumph and reported in to Zerkhox. “Yeah, slow metal takes them down. Can I go hunt the slugs now?”

“No, wait till I’m back from the ship. We need this perimeter secure.”

Zerkhox double-checked his pocket for the specimen, then locked onto the homing signal of the cloaked ship in orbit. A shimmering dome descended over him, and he disappeared.

Re-appearing on the bridge, he had to fend off the enthusiastic Cynathox, as she raided his pocket for the loot.

“I need to get back soon. We’ve exchanged fire with the enemy.”

“Yes. Yes,” she hissed. “Just let me see what we have here.” She held up the long tubular piece of meat. “Does this look ball shaped to you?”

“Well, no. But it was joined to the balls. I wondered if it had any elementium in it,” Zerkhox said.

“Humph... maybe leave the science to the scientists!” Cynathox slid over to her desk and placed the bloody mess into her scanner. A few seconds later, results flashed across the main view screen. The data scrolled over the image of the blue and white planet.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “The two balls are carrying elementium.” She read further through the data. “Not a huge amount though, it seems to be a small fraction of the overall mass. That is a shame.”

Zerkhox was eager to return to his troops. Although he did not fear they were under any real threat from the native slugs, they were likely to get bored and laser each other.

“I should return, Madam Scientist. The balls are easy to harvest from the dead slugs. I will gather the troops and then we will teleport to a more populated area.”

Cynathox did not turn from reading her data. “No, bring me a live one. After some study I think we can yield more elementium from them if we keep them alive.”

“What!” Zerkhox spat.” You want a live alien on the ship? That is against regulations. And they are not even slave class. Our job is killing, not farming!”

“May I remind you, Commander Zerkhox, this mission is to investigate sources of elementium. Your mindless rampages are secondary to that. Now go get my slug!” She waved him off with three of her arms, the fourth still operating the scanner’s controls.

***

“Set your bazookoids to stun!” The commander’s order came over the open troop channel.

Nine troopers hissed and spat with disgust. It would not be a fun slaughter after all.

Sarah and Tony had nearly reached Greasy Joe’s on foot, when two bolts of energy dropped them both to the ground like sacks of potatoes.