Amazons on Planet Nine Read online

  Amazons on Planet Nine

  By Davina Lee

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2019 Davina Lee

  ISBN 9781634869430

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  Amazons on Planet Nine

  By Davina Lee

  I step up onto the porch of a well-maintained bungalow in one of the nicer areas of town and lay my finger atop the glowing doorbell that beckons in the fading light of afternoon. The autumn air has turned cooler and I hug myself to conserve warmth as I wait.

  I hope this isn’t some spoiled rich kid expecting me to write their term paper. That had become a problem lately with this internet consulting thing. But on the bright side, at least it got my nose out of a book and me out of my apartment for a change.

  The door is opened by an attractive young woman about my age, or maybe a little older. As I stand there trying to take in her features without being too obvious about it, I think about how I just might be able to work up the motivation to ghostwrite one more term paper.

  Her hair is kept short and neat, framing a face with a warm natural glow that she was smart enough to realize looks good without makeup. Not bad.

  “Julie Jones,” she says, extending her hand. “Are you my astrophysicist? Guru.com?”

  “I am. Angela Knight.” I’m treated to a firm handshake. “I have to say it’s nice to have a gig that’s local instead of over Skype for a change.”

  “Well, come on in, Angela.” Julie moves aside and waves me into the living area, that is tastefully decorated to fit the style of a house that probably rents for way more than I can afford.

  “I just need to finish up one thing and then we can get started,” she says.

  I nod as I look around. The living area looks like a small television studio with a trio of light stands, a couple of expensive-looking digital cameras mounted on tripods, and various microphones all wired into some kind of bulky computer system.

  “Can I get you a beer? Wine?” she asks, winding her way through the maze of gear.

  “Hmm?” I’m still trying to figure out how someone who appears to be a college student just like me can afford this place and all this hardware. “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  “Probably best. Can’t have my subject matter expert all tipsy on camera.” She hands me a bottle of water. “In case you need hydration.”

  Oh God, I think momentarily. I hope this isn’t some kind of internet porn studio I just wandered into. But why would she need an astrophysicist for that?

  “About the camera,” I say. “What exactly am I supposed to be doing?”

  Julie takes my hand in hers and looks me in the eye. “Astrophysicist stuff,” she says, as if that explains it all.

  I shudder. I don’t know why. I guess there’s just something about the casual way she touches me, like we’ve known each other for years, that throws me off balance just a little bit.

  “Sorry,” Julie says, frowning as she sees me shivering. “It’s a nice place, but I don’t think the furnace has been updated since it was built. Can I get you a sweater or a fleece?”

  I shake my head. She’s mistaken my nervousness for a chill and she wants to get me a sweater. That’s so adorable. And I find myself relaxing just a little bit.

  Julie drops my hand and wanders over to the area that I assume was originally designed to be the dining room, but is now crammed with more lighting rigs and electronics. On one end of the table is another camera on a short tripod, and a big professional-looking microphone, all cabled into some kind of box connected to a laptop.

  As I’m mentally tallying up the price of all this gear, Julie sits down, leans into the microphone, and begins speaking. “So the question that remains,” she says. “Could it be that what appears to be a Pacific atoll is not really a chain of islands at all, but rather an extraterrestrial landing strip that has fallen into disrepair and since been reclaimed by the sea? And if so, shouldn’t the next logical question be, when will the original builders be back to make renovations to their spaceport? Until next time, I’m Julie Jones, and don’t forget to subscribe and hit that Like button.”

  “Um, you hired me to talk about aliens?” I frown. “I don’t really believe in that stuff.”

  Julie gets up and walks over to where I’m standing. She takes my hand in hers again. Why does she keep doing that? It’s just going to make it harder when I tell her I don’t want any part of her crackpot scheme.

  “I don’t really believe it either, but my audience sure eats it up.” She gestures to a rectangular plaque on the wall, a low-relief casting of a triangle pointing to one side. “The Gold Play Button. One million subscribers. That was last spring. It’s grown since then.”

  “You’re a YouTuber?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She hasn’t let go of my hand yet.

  “I still don’t believe in extraterrestrials.”

  Julie smiles. “Planet Nine, Doctor Knight. You know it?”

  “Of course, I wrote my graduate thesis on the methods used to predict its orbit.” I pause. Julie’s obviously done her homework. I wonder briefly what else she knows about me. “I—I don’t have my doctorate yet. Just started on my research proposal, actually.”

  “But Doctor Knight sounds so much cooler than Miss Post-Graduate Degree Holding Doctoral Candidate Knight, don’t you think? I think we can fudge just a little.”

  I allow myself a small smile. And people wonder why you can’t trust what you find on the internet.

  “Have a seat Doctor Knight.” Julie leads me to a high-back leather club chair and sits me down. She then proceeds to fiddle with the laptop that’s hooked up to the box with all the cables before looking at me with a frown.

  “What?” I say.

  “I’m getting a glare off your glasses. Do you mind if I take them off?”

  Julie doesn’t really wait for me to answer before plucking my glasses off of my face and setting them on the side table.

  “Can’t really see without them.”

  “That’s okay. Just look at me.” She glances at the laptop screen and then back to me. “You have nice eyes.”

  “Um, thanks.”

  She’s back over and she’s got her fingers in my hair now. I shiver.

  “Sorry, can’t have my expert’s hair sticking up all over now, can we?” Again, Julie doesn’t wait for me to answer, she just continues smoothing.

  I feel like a kid on school picture day with my mother fussing over me. Except I don’t mind it as much when Julie does it. And I definitely never got goosebumps when Mom
had her fingers in my hair.

  “I’m just going to slip your top couple of buttons.” She’s got her hands already working on my shirt before I can even open my mouth. “Most of my demographic is adolescent boys followed closely by middle-aged single or divorced men. The ratings go up exponentially whenever I have hot subject matter experts on the show.”

  Wait a minute, did she just call me hot? “Um, I thought you needed an astrophysicist. That’s what the email said.”

  “Oh, I do.” Julie winked. “A hot astrophysicist. You’ll do quite nicely.”

  Is this woman serious?

  She ran her hands over my shoulders, presumably smoothing out wrinkles in my shirt, but at this point who really knows? Maybe she was coming on to me. Nah, I told myself. She’s just a crackpot. An overly-touchy film major with a YouTube channel and a tenuous grasp on reality.

  But cute. I stared at her smiling face for a few seconds more than what was probably considered polite. Definitely cute.

  Julie clipped a microphone to my lapel and I swear I felt her fingertips brushing my neck. The whole maneuver made me shiver all over again. I was about to ask her if she was doing it on purpose, but before I could form the words, she stopped and moved over to the laptop.

  “Tell me about Planet Nine, Doctor Knight.” Julie tapped a few keys on the laptop and then gestured at me in a way that said the camera is rolling.

  “Um, yes. Well, Planet Nine is what we astrophysicists call an Extreme Trans-Neptunian Object, or ETNO, which means its orbit is beyond some of the farthest planets in our solar system. In fact, it’s so distant that we can’t see it with our current crop of telescopes, but we can speculate as to its existence from other clues, like its gravitational effect on…”

  “So, there’s alien life on this planet?”

  “Um, I think that’s highly unlikely. Planet Nine is very far from the sun. And as I said, we haven’t actually observed it with any of our current…”

  “But it’s not impossible, right? You said yourself that you haven’t actually seen it. So, in reality, you have no evidence to say there isn’t life on Planet Nine.”

  “Yes, but…” I shift in my seat. Cute Julie, whose fingertips make me shiver whenever she brushes against me, had taken her leave, and crackpot alien theorist Julie was back at the helm. “That’s not how the scientific method works.”

  Julie ignores my comment. “So, these extraterrestrials could be using Planet Nine’s distant orbit as a way to hide themselves from us? Sort of like how the Amazon women hide themselves away in the jungles of South America?”

  “What? No.” I stand up, unclip the microphone from my shirt, and drop it on the table before buttoning myself back up. “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this.”

  “Angela, wait.” Julie is over in an instant. She’s holding my hands again, but her smile is gone and her eyes seem to be fixed on the floor at my feet.

  Once again, I shiver at her touch.

  “Sweater?” she asks and raises her eyes just a little.

  “No.”

  “Angela, listen,” she says. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. Just hear me out, and then if you still want to go, I won’t try to stop you.”

  I nod slowly and wait.

  “Angela, I really don’t believe this stuff either. It’s just entertainment. In the beginning I just did it so I could fit in with the intellectual crowd, even if it was with a bunch of alien conspiracy theorists.” Julie took a deep breath. “The truth is I like smart girls, but most of them only want to hang out with other smart girls, or worse yet, smart boys.”

  I squeeze Julie’s hands in mine. This was beginning to make some sense. Twisted sense, but understandable.

  “With the show, I get to rub elbows with smart girls all the time. Granted, I have to pay them to appear as subject matter experts, but…That just sounds sad and a little creepy, doesn’t it?” Julie is looking at the floor again. “You sure you don’t want a fleece or something? It’s going to be chilly at the bus stop.”

  “Dinner,” I say.

  Julie looks up from the floor, but still won’t quite meet my gaze. “Excuse me?”

  “Dinner,” I say again. Why not? She’s polite, she’s cute, and maybe just a little bit vulnerable. A Girl could do a lot worse these days. I cup my hand to Julie’s cheek to let her know I’m sincere. “You buy me dinner and I’ll be your subject matter expert. What happens after that is up to you.”

  “Great!” Julie is all smiles again.

  I sit back down in the high-back chair. As she makes her way over with the microphone, I slip three buttons on my shirt and toss my hair back with a flip of my hands. I swear I hear Julie purr.

  “It’s just for your target audience,” I say, and smile.

  “Of course.”

  “Start from the beginning again?”

  “Nah,” she says. “I can fix all that up in post-processing. Let’s just keep going from where we left off.”

  “You got it.”

  “The existence of life on Planet Nine,” Julie says.

  “Yes, well, we haven’t actually seen Planet Nine, so we’ll just have to theorize.” This was probably going to come back to haunt me later in my career, but for now it was just plain fun and that was something I definitely didn’t get enough of these days.

  I sat up a little straighter. “It would be very cold on Planet Nine, being such a great distance from the sun, so they would need to find a way to keep warm. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced technology they could generate heat with some sort of planetary fusion reactor.”

  “Or they could huddle together for warmth until the planet got close enough to the sun to warm up again.”

  “They could do that I suppose, but they would also need some sort of artificial light to grow food. A simple vat-grown algae system could theoretically supply both oxygen and nutrition, assuming of course they’re carbon-based life forms like us.”

  “They’re Amazons.” Julie said it straight-faced without missing a beat. “Zeus sculpted them from clay.”

  “Um, okay. So yes, they would have needs similar to us humans on Earth.” Oh my, this girl is certifiable. But fun. Definitely fun. I miss fun.

  “Doctor Knight, would Planet Nine’s orbit ever bring it close to Earth?”

  “Um, well, that depends on what you mean by close. In astronomical terms close could mean…”

  “Close enough to beam down and mate with the men of our planet?” Julie is winking and pointing to the gold play button hanging on the wall. I took that to mean that this was all for the benefit of her predominantly male audience.

  “I don’t think that the theoretical inhabitants of Planet Nine would ever be close enough to beam down as you say.”

  “So, what then? They’re lesbians?” Julie is leaning over the laptop and tapping some keys. The lights on the stands all dim to half power.

  “Um.” I watch Julie stroll over to where I’m sitting. “Are we done?”

  “Don’t worry, I can fix the rest in post-processing.” She holds out her hand and a grin spreads across her face as I take it in mine. “I did promise you dinner for this,” she says.

  I stand up, and before she can protest, I spin her around and push her into the high-back chair I just vacated. I’m straddling her thighs before she even knows what happened. “You pick,” I say with a grin. “As long as they deliver.”

  “You know my furnace is crap, right? You want a fleece or something?”

  I take Julie’s face in my hands. “We’ll just have to huddle together for warmth.”

  “Like the Amazons on Planet Nine?”

  “Mm-hmm.” I lower my head and touch my nose to Julie’s. Her nose is cold, but her lips are soft and warm as I give her a little peck.

  I reach down to slip another button on my shirt. “You’ll keep me warm ‘til the food gets here, won’t you?”

  Julie wraps her arms around me and smiles. “Or longer, if you need me to.”

  I p
ress closer into Julie’s embrace and feel her fingers in my hair again. As she mashes her lips to mine, I think about how I could learn to survive here on Planet Nine—maybe even like it.

  THE END

  ABOUT DAVINA LEE

  Davina Lee is a writer of sappy lesbian romance and erotic fiction. A resident of Wisconsin, Davina can be found enjoying a local micro-brew, squeaky-fresh cheese curds, or a good protest march down at the capital.

  ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC

  JMS Books LLC is a small queer press with competitive royalty rates publishing LGBT romance, erotic romance, and young adult fiction. Visit jms-books.com for our latest releases and submission guidelines!

 

 

  Davina Lee, Amazons on Planet Nine

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