Vox slapped the male on the back. “That was fantastic! Do you want to have the next emergency landing or can I go again?”
Chapter Three
Carrie
The great thing about unemployment was rolling straight out of bed and getting to work. Carrie saw no point in showering or dressing. Pajamas were just fine. And she didn’t have to answer her parent’s phone calls. No distractions. No Justin asking her to make a tweak to another engineer’s work or assigning her a new project. She did it but begrudged the time it took her away from her baby.
Her special project, Sly Fox, was a truly stealth fighter that was nearly invisible to the eye and emitted no signatures in space. No energy trails. No waves. Monitoring systems would be unable to detect the fighter, making it the perfect vehicle for scouting.
At least that’s how it worked in theory. All the computer models worked flawlessly.
In actuality, the fighter was plagued with problems. Faulty parts. Bad code. Carrie wanted to climb into the beast and actually inspect it but the fighter was currently on a Mahdfel battle cruiser, the Judgment. She had to rely on the flight data recorder and reports, all second-hand information. At least now that she was unemployed, she could play the flight data and audio reports from her test pilot without interruption.
Her security codes still worked on the West and Hunt system, giving her access to all her research. Hooray for lazy tech support or her father not believing she really did quit.
Carrie pressed play and leaned back in her chair, letting VX-417’s warm, rich voice roll over her. She turned off the translation overlay on her computer, so there was no stiff digital voice speaking, it was just him. His voice. She had no visuals of the Mahdfel male but she loved his voice. It was perfect, just the slightest accent and a deep baritone that played so nicely in her headset, reverberating down her spine and settling right between her thighs.
So, it was a little weird. She knew that. The unknown Mahdfel’s voice alone got her hotter than Tucker ever did. But it wasn’t weird that she kept replaying the recordings. It wasn’t. She had to listen carefully — for science — and careful listening meant repeat listening.
It wasn’t weird.
Before, while engaged, she scolded herself for finding the stranger’s voice attractive. She was engaged. She shouldn’t be fantasizing about an alien with the sexy voice. Definitely not while in bed with her fiancé. And definitely not while touching herself…
She was just listening. It shouldn’t have felt so forbidden, so hot. But she was single now and there was nothing forbidden about listening. And it wasn’t weird.
The downside of unemployment was that Carrie got too caught up in her work of carefully listening to her test pilot and only remembered to eat when her stomach rumbled. Given that she often forgot to manage the basics of hygiene and feeding herself, she was taken completely by surprise when the military showed up at her door.
Yes, in her underpants and listening to a voice that got her all hot.
It so wasn’t weird.
“Carrie West?” The soldier, dressed in fatigues and armed with an impressive gun, raised an eyebrow when she answered the door.
“Shit, it’s my birthday.” How did she lose track of three days? And why did she answer the door wearing nothing but an old tee shirt and panties?
“You need to report for testing. Now.”
“Um, sure.” Carrie wrapped a protective arm over her chest. “Can I put on pants first?”
“Afraid not, ma’am. Flight risk.”
“I’m not going to run but I’m not leaving this house without pants.”
The soldier sighed. “Fine, but you have to be accompanied.”
Carrie dressed quickly into jeans with the solider standing in the doorway, eyes tactfully averted. She paused, grabbing a hoodie because government buildings were always cold, and scanned the rest of the room. What did she need to bring? Clothes were replaceable. She had no knickknacks or sentimental items. Her apartment was sparsely furnished, holding the basics. She didn’t really live there, it was just a place to sleep and shower.
She swept her tablet and notebooks into a backpack. Those were the truly irreplaceable items. Shouldering the bag, Carrie announced her readiness for departure.
“Is that all?” the soldier asked.
“Possessions are temporary.”
“I ain’t a philosopher, ma’am, but you might consider shoes.”
Blushing furiously, Carrie jammed her feet into a pair of black ballet flats. There. Now she was ready for anything.
The soldiers loaded her into a white van. She was the only occupant. The man sat across from her, gun resting on his lap.
“Is that necessary?” she asked, gesturing to the gun. She wasn’t fighting or resisting. She wanted to be tested. Keeping a gun between them was far from friendly.
“Protocol, ma’am.”
“You get a lot of fighters?”
“Panic makes people do crazy things.”
Her comm unit rang. Justin’s worried face took up the entire screen of her tablet. “Where are you? Is that the van? Shit, they got you already.”
“It’s fine—”
“Listen, you don’t have to go,” he said, speaking over her. “We can apply for an exemption. Women who are vital to military operations are exempt. We just need a judge and a senator to sign off and we make plenty of campaign contributions so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I’m not in the military.”
“You only design our spaceships. That’s pretty damn vital. We can get a judge to issue an injunction and—”
The soldier snatched the tablet from Carrie’s hands. “Communications are prohibited from this point on.”
“You can’t do this,” Justin shouted from the screen. “Do you know who our family is? Do you know who you have in your custody? Her brain is worth more than all your—”
The soldier powered down the tablet before handing it back to Carrie. “Keep that off now.”
“Communications make your passengers panicky, too?”
“Most of the ladies are pretty damn calm. It’s their families who have the meltdown.”
Sounds about right.
Carrie turned her attention out the window, watching the Florida coast roll by. She might never see the ocean again. She grew up in Cocoa Beach, lived within eyesight of the water even now. The notion of being away from the familiar backdrop to her life should have unnerved her but excitement vibrated in her body.
Behind two layers of security and on the edges of the old Kennedy Space Center, the testing facility was a squat, ugly building. She’d been here before, not to the genetic matching facility but to the space center, in a professional capacity. She stood on the tarmac, sunglasses and roasting in the humid heat, and watched her baby launch into space. She’d never been to the testing facility before.
A tired looking nurse handed Carrie a clipboard and instructed her to join the others in the waiting room.
A cluster of four women stared at Carrie as she sat down. Feeling the weight of their gazes, she busied herself with the form, filling in next of kin and signing that she read and understood the rights and responsibilities of being tested. All those women—
Carrie realized they shared a birthday. Every year the same group of women arrived, took the test and waited. Maybe next year the crowd thinned, maybe not. They knew each other, held hands while nervous minutes ticked by and every single one of them knew that Carrie was too old for this to be her first year to be tested.
“We don’t get many of your kind here,” the curly blonde said.
“And what’s my kind?”
“Rich girls. Don’t you have an exemption or a loophole? What happened? Daddy forgot to pay the right person this year?” The other women snickered. Any hopes of finding camaraderie within the crowd vanished. Carrie was on her own.
“I had a fiancé.”
“Bad time for a break up.”
Carrie opened
her mouth to reply but a nurse called her name.
Hustling her back to an exam room, the nurse took a cheek swab and then placed the entire container in a table-top machine no bigger than a toaster.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“It’ll run through the data base. Sometimes it takes a few minutes before we know.”
Right. The genetic match needed to be 98.5% or better. Matches that fell below that threshold were risky for the women's health. “Once it eliminates the top one and half percent, it keeps running?”
“Your unique genetic profile is compared to every registered Mahdfel in the database,” she said, almost bored. She must repeat that a hundred times a day.
The machine beeped. Carrie’s posture perked. Beeps were encouraging.
“Congratulations. You’ve been matched.”
A flurry of forms needing signatures were shoved in her face, followed by a monotone lecture from the nurse about her rights to refuse sex. She was a bride, not a sex slave. Sex happened when she was ready. Then the sting of a translator chip being implanted behind her right ear. Then, finally, two armed guards marched her to the teleporter.
This was really happening. She had a match. She was going to marry an alien. Wait, already had. One of those forms was a marriage license. She was married. To an alien. To a stranger.
“Wait,” Carrie said, a step away from the teleporter pad. “What’s my husband’s name?”
The nurse checked the clipboard. “Vox Karey.”
A technician positioned her on the teleporter pad, then handed her a cellophane wrapped mint. “For the nausea.”
A veil of white surrounded her and then she was scattered across the stars.
Vox
He was blindfolded when lightning struck. Typical.
Vox listened for his opponent’s footsteps. The sand of the arena floor muffled nearly all hints of his location except for the soft hiss of shifting grains.
A fist flew toward him. Vox moved his head back an inch to avoid the blow. He ducked and dodged, raising an arm to block, anticipating his opponent's moves by sound alone. He had the idea from an old Terran film Daisy loved watching. If he could demonstrate that this method to hone his senses and reflexes were sound, he would move up from hand-to-hand combat to weapons. Then he would truly be one with the Force.
A blow to the center of his shoulders sent him staggering forward, but he did not fall. No, he spun around, listening for his opponent. He blocked a series of blows aimed for his abdomen. So focused on blocking, he completely missed the low kick that swept him off his feet.
A large hand gripped his throat. “Do you concede?”
Vox nodded, rubbing his throat. “I believe that was an excellent experiment, even though you cheated.”
“I did not cheat,” Mylomon said. “Your skills are inferior to mine.”
“You barely hit me.”
“I hit you plenty.” He tossed Vox a bottle of water and a towel. The big brute barely broke a sweat. “But I do think your idea has merit. We will try again.”
“Agreed. I will even tolerate your cheating.”
He dried off and placed his comm unit back on his wrist. It blinked with an incoming message. Probably Daisy or Meridan needing a baby guard for Estella.
Vox read the short message. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he tingled all over. His tattoos burned. Amazing. They burned just at the thought of his mate. It was as if lightning truly raced through his veins.
“Vox? Are you not listening? My mate requests your presence for evening meal.”
“I can’t,” he managed to say. “I have a match. She’s on her way.”
Vox jumped to his feet. “I have a match! She’s on her way. There’s so much I need to do.” Shower was at the top of the list. And he had to prepare his quarters for his mate. What would she want after her journey? A drink. Food. Females liked food. And flowers. Food and flowers. And furnishings. Females enjoyed soft, comfortable furnishing. Vox had slowly been decorating his quarters in a female-friendly manner, suffering through the indignity of comfortable chairs, knowing that it would please his mate one day.
First, a shower. He smelled. Terran females had sensitive noses. Then flowers and food.
Carrie
The white light faded but spots remained in her vision. Carrie blinked, eyes adjusting. The room was a basic gunmetal grey and utilitarian. This could be any military base or ship. The male behind the console panel, however, was nearly seven foot tall, horned, and purple. Yup. That was an alien. She was on a spaceship full of aliens.
Her mental perspective shifted. This was a Mahdfel ship. She was the alien here.
Her legs wobbled like jelly and her stomach turned. Almost as an afterthought, she shoved the mint in her mouth. Instantly the turmoil in her stomach ceased.
“Name?” the male asked, reading off a tablet.
“Carrie West. I’m here for--”
“From West and Hunt?”
“Um, yes?” A quick glance at her comm unit informed her she missed a hundred plus calls, mostly from her mother. Not even the depths of outer space could stop Eleanor West.
“You’re here to repair the ship.”
“My baby is here? This is the Judgment?” The male gave her a curious look, as if asking where else she would be. “Take me there,” she said, ignoring the missed messages on her comm unit.
The male took her to a large hangar and all thoughts of her brand-new marriage to a stranger vanished and was replaced with her prototype. She hadn’t seen the Sly Fox in person since it left Earth months ago. All reports were sent directly from the flight data recorder. If she could see the faulty parts in person perhaps she could determine if the defects were in the design or in the manufacturing process. It all worked in the computer models but there was a huge gap between the computer model and reality.
“I need you to crack open the engine compartment,” she said to the nearest male.
“And you are?” he asked.
“I designed this beast,” she said, patting the side of the ship. Up close, the propriety paint didn’t look like anything more special than a sparking grey but she knew tiny mirrors were embedded in the paint. In direct sunlight, the ship shimmered, bouncing back light waves. In the blackness of open space, it vanished.
“You’re the designer?”
Carrie took out handkerchief and tied back her hair. “Yes, and I’m here to fix my baby.”
Chapter Four
Vox
This was the day he finally met his mate. Nothing went as planned.
“What do you mean you lost her?!”
Seeran, head of security, struggled to keep Vox separated from Aden, the disorganized male.
“She’s is one Terran female! How could you lose her?” White hot rage poured through him. This could not be happening. He could not lose his mate before he even had her. Lightning did not strike him. Lightning incinerated him.
Seeran grabbed an arm and twisted it behind Vox’s back, bringing him to his knees. “You will remain calm,” Seeran ordered, “or I break this. And you, check the logs.”
“My mate—”
“You,” Seeran repeated with a twist to Vox’s arm to focus his attention, “will remain calm.”
“My mate is—”
“Your mate is on a ship with your clan. Your brothers. There is nowhere safer for her to be.”
Vox focused on his breathing. In. Out. Calm. Patience. The ship was not under attack. The transporter did not fail. She was one female. They would find her.
“Two Terrans have arrived in the last hour,” Aden reported. “One is female.”
“And what happened? Or did you just let a single female wander off?” Seeran asked.
The male checked the tablet. “She was the mechanic West and Hunt sent to repair their equipment.”
“She is my mate!”
Seeran increased the pressure. Vox’s shoulder burned in agony, feeling like the muscles would shred.
This was his fault. Vanity made him shower and change clothes. From the moment he learned of his match, he should have waited by the teleporter. Food and flowers could have waited. His mate’s safe arrival was paramount and he already bungled that. A sloppy technician let a single female wander off. She was far from home and disoriented from the teleporter and she was alone on a huge battle cruiser.
Seeran kept a level head. “Where did you take this mechanic?”
“To the hangar, sir. She demanded to see her infant.”
“Then we will go to the hangar.”
Vox stumbled to his feet. Seeran relaxed his grip but marched the male down the halls like a prisoner. Passing warriors gave Vox a long look but said nothing when he growled menacingly. The transport officer’s misplacement of his mate was unacceptable. If anything happened to her—
“Quit growling. You’re not impressing anyone,” Seeran said.
“Maybe if you would walk faster and not act as if this is a casual stroll in the park.”
Seeran laughed. “I like that. Did your Terrans teach you that?”
“I am not in the mood for jesting,” he grumbled.
“Good, because we are here and I do not wish to monitor you. If I release you, will you conduct yourself like a warrior with honor?”
“I will secure my mate’s safety.”
Seeran huffed. “Good enough.”
The hangar was a large, cavernous space filled with smaller ships of various functions. The boxy transporters were to one side. He often flew them to planetary surfaces on missions. The fighter ships were lined neatly on the other side. He flew those on patrol and occasionally into combat.
Vox was unsure what he searched for until he found Rohn, chief mechanic, standing by the prototype ship and handing tools to an unseen person.
Vox: Warlord Brides (Warriors of Sangrin Book 4) Page 3