WIP Wednesday - Clans of Kalquor 9: Alien Indiscretions

                Cissy gripped hands with her identical twin sister Tasha.  She tried to appear cool and calm for the Kalquorian attendants on board the shuttle.  They didn’t need to know how her heart raced or that her palm was sweating as freely as Tasha’s.  They didn’t need to know that she felt as much nervousness as anticipation right now.

                The shuttle that had brought them from the transport that had taken them off Earth had landed within a cliff.  To Cissy’s surprise, the interior bay did not look like it was within a great rock jutting on the pink-sanded shore on the planet Kalquor.  The vid viewer to the left of the hatch the Salter twins waited on to open showed them a thoroughly modern landing bay with soft illumination glowing from the walls and ceiling.  Other shuttles and transports dotted the large area.

                The vid also showed them the large number of people waiting for their arrival.  Cissy thought there were easily fifty people out there, if one didn’t count the red formsuited guards standing at attention all over the place.  Most of them were the dark-skinned, black-haired Kalquorian race and male.  Unabashedly masculine and muscular men.  Judging from the robes that predominated the group, they were also politically powerful men, the ruling elite of the Kalquorian Empire.

                Cissy swallowed against the rush of nervousness that flooded her.  She’d known her cousin had clanned with the emperors of Kalquor.  She'd been treated with deference that bordered on embarrassing, but the status she’d gained through family hadn’t made a real impression until this moment.

                Tasha sounded just as breathless as she felt.  “Wow.  It looks like a quarter of the Royal Council showed up along with the Imperial Family.  You’d think we were important.”

Tentatively scheduled to release September 2014