Desired By The Alien by Rosette Lex Page A

eyebrows rose. “How so?” he asked, sounding distinctly skeptical.
     
    Vivienne scratched her head with one hand, short hair rustling between her fingers. “A leader needs to have regard for the people they’re leading,” she supplied.
     
    “You can’t just slap a crown on any available head and hope it works. It would be a disaster.” She shook her head briefly.
     
    “A leader needs to be able to take criticism and to recognize when someone else is right. A leader needs to question their decisions. Not to the point of inaction, but at least enough that they know they’re capable of making a bad decision.” She was quiet for a moment before she continued.
     
    “A leader needs to be able to command and be taken seriously, but they also need to be able to recognize that someone below them has had a good idea—maybe even a better idea—and not let pride prevent them from acknowledging it.”
     
    She shrugged and dragged one hand over her hair. “I understand that your dad’s advice was important to you, and he had a lot of big plans he wanted you to gun for, but that doesn’t mean he was one hundred percent right about everything. You need to form your own opinions; you need to do that to be a leader, anyway.”
     
    They lapsed into silence, staring at each other blankly for a few slow moments, until Que seemed to stutter back into motion.
     
    He took a step back, towards the door back into base, and managed to get out, “That’s…fascinating. I need to go do something,” before he turned and fled at a brisk walk.
     
    Vivienne turned her attention back to the sulking crawler, though Bai immediately stopped sulking the moment Vivienne began petting him again.
     
    “This is not how I pictured my day going,” she informed him. “Even with all the ‘held hostage on an alien planet’ nonsense.”
     
    Bai crooned at her sympathetically.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter Eight
     
     
    Vivienne never actually expected to find her pod. She looked for it, now and then, while she wandered Fort Mallimae, but she looked for it in the idle, listless way of one who didn’t actually expect to find it. Like children growing bored with leprechaun hunts as they grew older, each subsequent hunt for the pod had less energy.
     
    So it came as a surprise when she found it. She hadn’t even been looking for it at that point.
     
    It was blind curiosity that led her to shadow a maintenance worker through the halls. It was dumb luck that the worker didn’t see her when she snuck into the storage room behind him. It was a miracle that he didn’t notice her on his way out of the storage room, leaving her to explore it as she pleased, unobserved.
     
    The pod was partially dismantled, with all of the grace of a twelve-year-old dismantling a microwave, but it was reparable. More importantly, being in pieces meant that it was entirely offline, rather than in sleep mode, which possibly meant that Vivienne could wake it back up. Stealing a serviceable space suit would be easy compared to smuggling the pod into a hiding spot where she would be able to work on fixing it.
     
    The possibility of escaping was right in front of her, and yet she found herself feeling conflicted.
     
    She backed away from the pod and sat down cross-legged on the floor, her hands resting in her lap and her gaze locked on the pod.
     
    It would take work and a near psychotic amount of luck, but the means to go home was in front of her.
     
    But did she really want to?
     
    She knew what sort of organization she had been working for. If she just crashed back down on Earth after they had clearly and purposefully abandoned her, they weren’t going to just let her go about her business and live a quiet life.
     
    They would never leave her alone. They would never let her live peacefully. They would make her life miserable in a trillion tiny ways until she agreed to just let them do whatever they wanted with her.
     
    Que, as much of an asshole as he could