I've been raiding my carefully hoarded stash of vintage futuristics in hopes of another Sky Pirate. No such luck. :/The premise is interesting - aliens far more advanced than us have a colony inside our planet. The beginning looked promising too - heroine and others on charter boat sucked down when aliens were sending something along to their home world(s). Then it fell apart.I'm not fond of utopias. I…find them creepy, mostly because they always seem to subvert free will to some extent. At least people were allowed to have less than perfect genetics BUT… in the past, that wasn't always so.So our h and her fellow victims are given a speech, manuals, etc., and told they're stuck here. They're also considered second class citizens though that part is left out (they're earthlings after all). Heroine is not happy about it. Heroine is the only one not happy about it. Everyone else thinks she's nuts. She draws attention to herself by looking at files that are, while not classified, at least not something that just anyone looks at. H gets all hot and bothered.They enter what amounts to a mating heat, but she's earthling so forbidden. Earthlings have not come up with way to blow away planetoid (shades of Armageddon here), so he and she go to surface to talk to scientists. Bad guy (there has to be a bad guy you know) finds out he's not earthling so has him snatched, he's rescued, they go to his home planet, and are Joined. The end.So…the whole utopian thing - people who rebel get reprogrammed - bothered me more than a little. The h didn't like what was going on, so one was left wondering if, had she not been his soul mate, that might have been in her future.Too many threads in the first half. I wondered briefly if I was reading a soap opera. Really - I didn't need to read his assistant and occasional lover getting busy with another castaway - with details, anymore than I needed to read about the first bad guy or his informant.Which leads to another gripe - the H/h had enough difficulties with the whole inferior earthling angle without having to drag bad guys in the form of a sociopathic drug dealer and an overly ambitious earthling into the mix.And it was way too convenient that she had a drop of alien blood so therefore his people had no objection to their Joining.
