“Five men to one breeding female?” he asks. “Cygnus and Aegus spoke highly of the fertility of human females –so I can only assume your men are weak and infertile.”
“Excuse me?” I snort. “A breeding female? I don’t know what kind of fucked up society you come from, but I am not just for breeding.”
He yanks me close into his body and sniffs deeply into the crook between my neck and shoulder. “Then why would you have this scent? You smell like strong breeding stock, you–”
“Listen,” I interrupt him. “There are four assholes on the other side of the door. Are you going to do something about them, or do you just want to sniff at me and creep me out?”
“My faction wants to destroy all humans,” he says, “but I’ve been sent here to kill one of my own kind. Where can I find Great Brother Cygnus? Is he still on the red planet?”
Great Brother Cygnus. An alien from the invading fleet who–along with his brother–purportedly arrived ahead of the others and started some kind of cult on Mars. I had dismissed this story about the brothers as rumors, but standing here hearing about it from a real live alien who is sniffing my neck, I start to believe the rumors might be true.
My first instinct is to lie, but his jade green eyes peer deep into mine, and I’m worried he’ll snap my neck if he decides I’m not telling the truth or can’t be useful to his cause.
“The rumors say he’s still there,” I say. “We don’t have hard intel to confirm it, though.”
He lets go of me and pulls himself along the handrails toward the door leading to the turret room.
“Wait,” I say. “What are you going to do? I thought you were only here to kill Cygnus? Take me back onto your ship, and I’ll help you get to Mars.”
He looks back at me. “My ship is gone. I am permitted to kill any human I need to in order to reach my target. Can you pilot the ship?”
His tone makes me think that if my answer is “no,” he might just kill me on the spot.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s operated using manual controls, and I–.”
“Are any of the males on the other side of this door critical to operating the ship?”
I owe these assholes nothing. And they just destroyed a ship carrying civilians...including women and children. I’m not the judge and jury, but they should be tried according to Imperial law.
“They’re all critical,” I lie. “It takes all of us to–.--”
“You’re lying,” he snarls. “You must be emotionally attached to these men who have attempted and failed to impregnate you. And even after they imprison you like this? You are softer and weaker than they are! I will show them no mercy!”
4 Fenrir
I turn away from the woman in disgust. Her scent still lingers in my nose, and its powerful effect is still tingling in my head. I understand now how Aegus and Cygnus were deceived and trapped by such weakness, but I’m stronger than them. I have a mission to carry out, and a mountain of shame debt to clear away.
I check the door, and find that it’s unlocked. I jerk it open and pull myself through into the cockpit.
I grasp the blade in my hand, and the moment I turn the corner I see the four of them. They are gathered around the captain’s chair at the far end of the room. None of them appear to be armed.
I hit the wall, and while they are still staring at me with their mouths hung open in shock, I kick off the wall and launch myself straight at them.
Two of the men scatter, but two stand still in disbelief.
I have just seconds before impact, but I focus on the two who scattered. One has grabbed a gun, and the other is pulling a bladed weapon from racks on the wall.
The ones who stood still are weaklings, but killing them first will cost me but a moment.
I raise the blade in my hand and will my other hand to form a sharp point. I slash the blade and cut open the first man’s neck, while my hand pierces straight through the other man’s forehead. When I feel the pointed biosuit penetrate into the center of his skull, I will it to flare out in all directions, mincing his brain to mush.
I feel heat trying to penetrate the back of my armor–it must be from a laser-based weapon–but my armor reflects and converts the beam to harmless light.
I fling the bloodied blade at one of the other men approaching me with an axe, but he blocks the blade in mid-flight with his own weapon. It clinks against his axe and floats uselessly away through the cockpit.
The heat on my back fades away, and I feel fingers wrapping around my neck.
I will the armor on my back to transform into a lance, and I shove it through the attacker’s gut. I hear him gag, and the warm wetness of his blood splatters across my neck.
“I’m Captain Manta!” the axe-wielding man shouts. “We can negotiate! I speak for the Empire!”
“Tell me,” I say, feeling the perverse urge to torment my prey before I kill him. “How a man who cannot even impregnate such a fertile breeding female as the woman you have imprisoned in the crews’ quarters can consider himself worthy of being called captain?”
And then I smell her scent filling the room, and I see Manta’s eyes widen.
The clothes on his arm burn away, and his skin melts down to the bone.
“You fucker!” the female shrieks behind me.
I will my armor to snap back. It forms a long tendril that slaps the gun out of the female’s hand.
It reaches back around and coils itself around her waist. I hold her in place with the tendril, as she has shame-debted me for interfering in business between males.
“You fucking bitch!” Manta screams, clutching the gaping wound on his shoulder,as blood seeps out forming shimmering spheres.
I’m worried this so-called leader will bleed out and die before I can interrogate him, so I reach out with a new tendril and grab the laser from his grasp.
I place it into my hand. Checking the weapon, I see it has a knob, and I turn it to what looks to be the lowest setting.
“I will cauterize the wound,” I say, “and then you’ll tell me everything you know about Great Brother Cygnus.”
I aim the gun at the wound. “Move your hand away from it!”
He obeys, and I pull the trigger.
His entire arm melts away, and he grunts and wails in agony. The arm floats through the cockpit.
“Ah,” I say, looking down at the knob with furrowed brows. “I seem to have set the weapon to maximum power. My mistake.”
The laser cauterized the wound on both ends, and there’s no longer any more new blood floating up into the air from his wound.
Manta twitches violently, and I see thick, black bile beginning to seep out of his mouth.
“Female!” I say. “Is he really so weak? This killed him?”
“You melted off his fucking arm! Of course you killed him!”
“You shot him first,” I remind her, releasing the tendril from the gun and turning to face her.
“I was mad at him! He had just brutally murdered a bunch of innocent women and children! I was just giving him a little burn to punish him.”
“So you desire revenge,” I say, “but yet you are too cowardly to fully act on your convictions?”
Her skin flushes red, and she kicks herself off the wall, floating in the direction of the pilot’s seat. “Out of my way!” she lashes out at me.
I move aside, and she stops herself when she reaches the pilot’s seat. She presses some buttons on the control panel, and I hear the hiss of air leaking out.
“You’ll kill us both,” I say.
“I’m venting out all the blood,” she says in a neutral voice, pointing at the man whose throat I slit.
The blood starts to float up toward a vent, and I switch the knob on the laser to the low setting. I’m sure I turned it in the right direction this time.
I burn the severed skin to cut off the blood flow.
She shuts off the vent. “We just lost a lot of oxygen from that,” she says, scowling at me.
I lick my l
ips absentmindedly as I watch her. She’s bent over the seat so she can reach the buttons, and her butt is large and shapely. Her anger accentuates her soft features, and even her smell becomes sweeter.
“I minimized the blood as best I could,” I say, “but your interference made things difficult.”
She straps herself into the seat and hits a switch, causing the engine to rumble.
The acceleration throws me back. I feel as if I’m falling, and I slam back first into the tail end of the ship. I’ve set my armor to low consumption mode. This setting fails to brace me against any non-lethal damage, so the air is knocked out of my lungs.
Just as I begin to gasp for breath, she cuts power to the engines, and I float back into the center of the room.
“You arrogant bastard,” she says, her eyes narrowed at me in fury.
I catch myself smiling at her outburst, and force myself to look away from her. I force a neutral expression on my face and hope that she didn’t see me smiling at her.
5 Fiona
I cut the engines, and the cocky asshole alien floats back off the wall. I accelerated at over 1g, and he hit the wall hard. It would have knocked out a human, but he’s...smiling?
He looks away just as I catch a glimpse of his shiny white teeth, and he looks back at me with his same smug and superior look he’s been giving me all along.
“I now control the ship,” he says, grabbing hold of a handrail on the wall.
“I’m pretty sure I’m in the pilot’s seat,” she sasses. “Or would you like me to slam you into the wall again?”
He smiles again, but this time he doesn’t try to hide it. I feel myself blushing, and my stomach churns with frustrating and annoying….feelings. I grit and grind my teeth at the stupidity of feeling anything but utter hate and disdain toward this murderous monster.
“I control the ship by proxy,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
Another freaky teal tentacle shoots out of his armor, and it rips me out of my restraints. It pulls me toward him, and when I’m just inches away, it melts back into his armor.
“I control you,” he says, “and thus the ship.”
I roll my eyes. “What if I refuse to fly it?”
“You will obey me,” he says. “And in return, I will spare you.”
“I thought you wanted to kill all humans?” I challenge.
“After my faction wins against the race traitors, we will arrive and destroy all of you. I can spare your life until then. It changes nothing.”
“Wow,” I say. “That is sooo generous of you. I will be sure to obey you soo much more now, master.”
His grin stretches from ear to ear, and his ears pop up until they’re standing perfectly straight. “Excellent. Though you can call me Captain Fenrir.”
“Captain…” I say slowly, deliberately drawing out the word. “You seriously want me to call you Captain?”
“Captain Fenrir,” he says.
“What are you going to call me? Breeding female?”
“Is this what they called you?” he asks.
No. They called me airwoman, which was almost as bad.
“Fiona,” I say. “You can call me Fiona.”
“I see,” he says. “I know your language has many dialects, but I am not familiar with this one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Human Fiona!” he barks. “Guide the ship to orbit the red planet.”
“It’s just Fiona,” I say.
“What do you call this ship?” he asks.
“The Broom Closet,” I say.
All the low-tech ships have names like this, but I withhold the information that we’re using lower tech ships. I don’t have a lot of loyalty left for the Empire, but when dealing with an alien who wants to destroy all of humanity, I’m still going to side with humanity.
“This name is not suitable,” he says. “As Captain Fenrir, I rename this ship Cygnus’s Bane.”
I bite my lip. Fenrir really seems to have it in for Great Brother Cygnus. If the rumors are true, Cygnus and Aegus are fighting against the invaders who want to exterminate humanity. I used to think their faction just consisted of the two Great Brothers, but from the way Fenrir spoke, it sounds like there are more of them, and they’re dispersed among the invasion fleet itself.
I decide it’s best to obey Fenrir for now. He’s so arrogant that he may continue spilling useful information like this. If I somehow manage to escape unscathed, I could give everything I figure out to Mars-Venus...or to the Great Brother himself.
“So,” I ask, “what is your plan once we are in Martian orbit? You know this ship can’t enter the atmosphere or land, right?”
“Of course I know this,” he snaps. “I have everything planned out, you need not concern yourself with this. How far to the red planet?”
“Twelve hours or so,” I say.
Through the window, Mars looks about as large as the moon does from Earth’s surface.
“So take us there!” he shouts, looking through the cockpit’s window. “It looks close, it cannot take twelve of your hours to reach it!”
“We’re at war with Mars,” I say. “I’ll need to boost us hard and fast, just enough to get us moving, then cut the engines. We’ll have to float into orbit to get there undetected.”
“This sounds like a cowardly approach,” he says.
“We’re one garbage gunship against the full defense forces of Mars. Do you want to be cowardly and alive, or brave and dead?”
He starts to grumble under his breath in an alien language, but he finally says, “I agree to the cowardly Fiona plan. Another small amount of shame debt pales to my great burden.”
The cowardly Fiona plan. The nerve of this guy! I pull out an ancient tablet from the main console and start programming in the stealth orbital approach. It’s a very delicate maneuver, and there will only be one chance for us to do it. If our thrust vector is off by even a single degree, we’ll miss the Martian orbit entirely. And if we make an adjustment burn near Mars, they’ll see it’s an Imperial ship and blow us apart.
I finish the calculations, and the computer starts to run its proofing algorithms. It will spit back any possible wrinkles and a percentage margin of error. With the Broom Closet’s--no, Cygnus’s Bane’s--shitty computer, it usually takes two or three polishing runs to get a safe flight path.
From looking over the report it prints out, the main issue with this flight path is the intense g-force required on initial burn. It will use up most of our fuel, and I’ll have to use an acceleration couch, as the pilot’s seat isn’t rated to handle anything above 3gs for more than a few seconds.
Fenrir’s shadow looms across the console. “What is a thrust vector?” he asks.
“You can read?” I ask, taken aback.
“Yes, your writing system is primitive, just like everything else about you.”
“Okay,” I say in disgust, shoving the tablet into his hands. “If you’re so damn advanced, you do it!”
He takes one look at the screen, then jams his finger into it.
The engines rumble.
Oh, shit.
The burst is huge, and Fenrir’s armor launches tendrils in all directions in response.
The long projections grasp tightly to the handrails on both sides of the ship, and they hold him in place like some big, purple and ripped-as-hell spider.
The tablet flies out of his hands and shatters into hundreds of pieces when it lands against the back wall.
My seat is facing backward toward Fenrir, and it locks in this position as a “safety” precaution against the intense g-force.
The restraints tear into my skin as my body pulls against them, and as the acceleration intensifies, I hear the straps begin to tear. If they break open, I’ll slam into the back wall and be mashed into a pulp.
Fenrir launches out a tendril that grabs hold of my seat, spinning it to face toward the window. I catch a glimpse of him grinning wildly at me jus
t before my seat starts spinning back toward the window.
My vision blurs and turns blood red under the intense g-force. With the seat locked forward, I’m at least getting pulled back into it rather than out of it. The restraints are no longer cutting into me, and there’s a smaller risk I will get pulled into the wall and die.
Though, maybe the acceleration will just squash my organs against the back of my ribcage instead. What a lovely thought.
My eyes water, the salty tears streaming back across my face. My jaw rumbles, and I clench my teeth together to avoid biting my tongue off.
The chair starts to vibrate, and I worry it’s going to rip off the floor.
Would Fenrir grab me with his tendrils before I died? He at least turned my seat around when he saw the restraints tearing.
He’s protected me –in a very roundabout and frustrating way–twice now. Though this second time I only needed his protection from a situation he created through his stubborn arrogance.
My vision narrows to a small pinprick, and I begin to feel light-headed.
There’s a loud, violent jerk, and suddenly I’m weightless. The chair has torn off the floor.
My vision floods back in a rush, and I see Fenrir zipping across the room, dozens of tendrils connecting to the handrails. He darts out of my way just before I slam into him.
Great, he’s done with me. I’ve plotted the course for him, and he has no use–.
His armor stretches out into a thin, teal membrane, and I slam into it.
The membrane stretches out as it surrounds me, and I pull through it. I still see myself dropping down, farther and farther, Fenrir’s tall silhouette disappearing above me.
Just before I hit the ground, the membrane pulls me back up toward him. It tugs against the acceleration, but it’s wrapped itself entirely around me now, and it’s somehow insulating my body against the intense g-force.
And now Fenrir is inside the membrane, as well, being pulled toward me. And he’s totally fucking naked.
Did I die already? Or am I hallucinating? Because his dick is just as big as the “ornamental” crotch armor hinted it would be, and it’s fucking teal.
Marauder Fenrir: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars) Page 2