by Maia Starr
"Dr. Shia Heton, we are ready for radio frequency experiment number 46," Lieutenant Marksman had said to me earlier that day, the day of the attack.
I was sitting in the common room of the cafeteria of the space station having a hot cup of tea and thinking about the first and only Corillion warrior I had ever seen. Was he still out there somewhere?
"Thank you, Lieutenant, I’m on my way,” I said, setting down my cup of tea and following him out of the kitchen through the space station and into the experiment lab area. I had set up an experiment to receive and record transmissions in space. It took a long time to move the satellite on the space station into the correct direction for an experiment. Now it was all set up and ready to go.
"What exactly are you looking for?” another scientist Andrew Diaz said to me. He was the biologist on the space station. He was interested in the beginnings of the Corillion race.
"Anything and everything,” I said to him.
"But do you really expect to be able to hear the Corillion warriors? We don't even know what they use for communication transmissions.”
"Are you really expecting to find spawn pods of alien beings?” I said playfully to him.
He looked at me with a dead stare and said, “Well yes.”
"Well, since we are not landing on an asteroid, I think my experiment might be a little bit more realistic as far as results go,” I said to him with a sense of arrogance. This is how it was on the space station between scientists. Each of us thought that our work was more important than all others. But in reality, it was all important. We all needed each other, and we all had the same mission: to find out as much as we could about the Corillion and use that information to stop them from abducting human females from Earth. It was a high-priority mission that the entire world was working on. It was unlike anything Earth had ever encountered, and the fact that the tension ended up sparking a war was not a shock.
But the war was a series of random battles because we never really knew where the Corillion lived. They would just appear on Earth and Earth’s military would engage in battle before the Corillion would leave. But it was war, and this mission was a part of that. Earth had declared war on the Corillion, but it was a hard thing to do when we did not know where they lived. All we could do was play defense when they came to Earth and push them away.
"Good luck. Buzz me if you find anything," Andrew said to me before walking out.
"You know you just want me to buzz you because you want me,” I said playfully to him. This is how I and the other female onboard treated the men. We playfully always teased them that they wanted us because we were the only females on board. It was a running joke. But besides this joke, I also considered myself to be quite an attractive scientist. I had pride in my looks. My long red hair was pulled high into a bun on top of my head and I never wore any makeup, especially not out here in space; what would be the point of that? My light-green eyes and full pink lips gave the illusion of color and makeup on my face. I was fit and petite at only five feet tall, but I considered myself strong and I made it a point to work out every day; we all did. Out here in space, it was a necessity to keep your muscles out of atrophy.
I sat down at my workstation and put on my headphones. I twisted various knobs and typed on the computer, searching the area of space that I had chosen to search the day before for sounds. This was how I did it. Space was infinite and vast, and so I studied section by section each day, which hardly covered anything. I had long hours ahead of me, but I was glad to have the experiment room to myself. We mostly took shifts so we did not get in each other's way. Now I would have the room for ten hours.
I began my long process of listening and recording data. It was mostly just pulsating sounds. Some of them were from stars and pulsars, but others were very different. These were the ones I was interested in. They were transmissions, and they were to be recorded and analyzed. I looked for patterns. Then I would send them in compressed files back to Earth for the military to decipher. It was almost like the decoders of World War Two that intercepted enemy transmissions and decoded them. I was the receiver in deep space.
It was better than the work I did on Earth. Back home, I worked at large satellite stations, but out here we did not have Earth’s atmosphere to deal with.
After seven hours, I took a small break from work, and when I returned, I listened once more. But for some reason, I fell asleep. I woke up when I heard a loud burst of sound hit my ears. It jolted me, and I sat straight up. I looked around, confused for a second, not really sure what exactly had alarmed me to the point of waking up.
"You fell asleep, Shia? You never fall asleep,” I said to myself. I turned up the volume and fine-tuned the frequency, and then I heard a large amount of static. I turned the knob again and then my eyes grew wide at what I heard.
"We have the Earthlings in sight. Be prepared to use magnetic pulse freeze. Fire,” the very deep, reverberating voice said.
"Holy crap,” I whispered. I was completely stunned, and at the same time, I felt a large jolt to the space station that knocked me out of my chair. It had all happened so fast that I did not have time to warn anyone. I crawled on the floor to my desk to stand up and use the intercom.
"We are under attack! I repeat we are under attack!” I shouted into the intercom letting everyone know in the shortest terms possible that we were under attack because I was the only one that had heard the transmission. For all they knew, at this moment, there was an internal problem on the space station. My warning would let them know that was not the case. We had not blown a wire or unhinged an airlock; we were under distress from outside forces. Once everyone understood that they wouldn't spend time trying to find the problem with the space station; instead, they would go into emergency evacuation procedures. It was what I needed to do as well.
But I would never make it. Instead, I would come face-to-face with the fierce alien warrior race that we had feared for so long. I would come face-to-face with their ruthless Commander, Commander Duron Spaunok, and nothing would ever be the same. His image of a fierce shirtless warrior with metallic blue scales down his right side, piercing blue eyes, dark long hair, and eight-foot tall, muscular form would forever be burned into my memory. My destiny would forever become intertwined with his.
Chapter 2
COMMANDER DURON SPAUNOK
If our leader Baradur Spaunok did not mate soon, we would all die.
It was my mission to find the perfect human female for him to mate with, and that would not be easy, considering we were at war with the Earth humans. They had every right to be at war with us; we were trying to conquer their planet and replace their species with our own. We would do this in time. For now, we needed to keep this species alive and the only way to do that was to procreate with human females and create a hybrid spawn of Corillion. If a warrior did not do this after being alive for twenty-two times around our sun, then he would die. Our leader was very close to this time, and his previous attempts to secure a human female had failed. They were scarce and went to other leaders of Corillion tribes.
For one hundred years, we had spawned off of the asteroid belt and had established various bases on several moons and on asteroid rocks, but now the Corillion needed more. After a great leader had discovered Earth, we had decided to conquer it. It was a superior planet and the Earthlings did not deserve it. They were inferior to the Corillion, and we were going to remove them, or at least the males of the species. The females would be kept in order to mate with our own. We needed them. We wanted them.
I, Commander Duron Spaunok, was a spawn of the Spaunok tribe of Corillion. Each Corillion warrior had a second name; mine identified me as a spawn of the asteroid known as Spaunok. All Corillion that came from this particular asteroid had the same second name. It was how each tribe was identified. The asteroid was one asteroid of thousands in the asteroid belt outside of Earth’s galaxy.
It is not known what activated the first spawning of our generation, but we kn
ew that it was not the very first. We knew that our species had spawned thousands of years before, only to die out eventually. Now, this was a second spawning, and we did not mean to disappear so quickly. We were here to conquer; it is what we were destined to do.
So my mission was to be the Commander of the Retriever Battleship. The Retriever was the best that the Corillion technology had to offer. It was my ship, and the sole purpose of it was to retrieve human females and bring them back to the asteroid belt where they would find a match to mate with from the Corillion race. The Corillion were monogamous, and once matched, they did not stray from their partners. We were a fierce warrior race ready to do whatever it took to stay alive.
"Commander Duron Spaunok, an Earth vessel is coming into range,” my lieutenant said to me as I stood on the flight deck of my ship.
"Show me, Lieutenant,” I said, walking over to his monitor. On his radar screen, I could see a large vessel.
"Silent mode! Prepare to disable and attack ship!” I shouted orders to everyone. My warriors went into a flurry of action following the procedures to get ready to do battle and board the ship to retrieve human females.
Taking the Earth vessel was quite easy. It turned out that it was not a military vessel at all. But to my disappointment, there were only two human females aboard. Still, two was enough to take back to my leader.
"These are the only two human females aboard the vessel. The rest of the humans are male,” my lieutenant said as he pushed two human females in front of me. We had boarded the Earth vessel, and we were in the process of pillaging its goods, including the females.
"Take your hands off me, you pig!” a feisty female shouted at my lieutenant. I was surprised by her appearance. I had never seen a human female with her color of hair. It was the color of fire. Her eyes were a piercing green and she was small and delicate even for a human. I stepped to her and pulled the band off of her tightly wrapped hair. It fell down her back.
"How dare you touch me!” she sneered at me. She was strong. She was brave.
She was stupid.
"Do not speak unless I allow it!” I shouted at her. I loomed tall over her. She was breathing hard and her mouth shut. Her lips were quivering with fear, but she was not going to show it. She was stubborn.
"That is better. If you want to stay alive, you will do as I say,” I shouted at her.
I stepped to the other female. This one had yellow hair and brown eyes. She was taller and thinner than her companion. She was quiet, and she was shedding tears from her eyes. She did not look up at me. This one was docile and obedient; she would be good for our leader. The other one looked as if she would kill him in his sleep. Best to keep an eye on her.
"Lock them up in holding on our ship!” I shouted to my warriors.
"No! No!” The fire-headed female shouted and struggled as she was carried away. She was a fighter. I admired that in anyone, but I had never seen it in a human female.
"Commander Duron Spaunok, we have discovered that a few of the escape pods have been jettisoned. Should we go after these humans?” my lieutenant reported.
I was quiet as I thought about priorities. Then I ordered, “No. We must get Baradur Spaunok his mate as soon as possible. That is our priority.”
"Yes, Commander. And what about the human males aboard?"
"Lock them up on their vessel."
Minutes later, I was back aboard the Retriever. The fiery female was causing a lot of problems, screaming and kicking my warriors—not that they couldn't handle it. But I wasn't going to have her causing a lot of problems and distractions on my ship.
"I demand to know where you are taking us!” she said, stomping toward me.
"You demand nothing of me,” I said back to her. “You will do exactly as I command; is that clear?” I snarled at her.
"No! It is not clear! You do not have the right to do this! You can't simply take us! We are not property! We are human beings!” she shouted at me. Her lips were trembling and her face was flushed red. She was in such a rage that she was practically trembling all over her entire body. My eyes went directly to her perky breasts as they jiggled.
"How dare you look at me that way! I am not yours to look at! When will you learn that? All of you!” she shouted. “You cannot simply come to Earth and take what is not yours! You cannot steal humans anymore. It is wrong!”
We all laughed a hearty laugh at her. She did not like this one bit. She reached up and slapped me across the face. I’d had enough. I turned my head back to her with a snarling growl. She took a step back in fear. I wrapped my hand around her arm and squeezed as I pulled her over to the window.
"Just for that, you have caused this! Fire!” I shouted. Just then the Retriever shot several laser cannons straight into the space station. Boom! Bam! Boom! It exploded into one million pieces.
"No! No! How could you?!” she cried, and then fell into a ball on the floor.
"You did that. Defy me again and we will kill your human female companion," I said to her in a threatening way. Of course, the threat was a lie; we needed both of these females alive. But she did not need to know that. As soon as I said it, she looked over to her female companion and became quiet and docile. She picked herself up off the floor and walked directly to her companion and stood there in obedience. Had I known those were the magic words to get her to be under my control, I would've said it first thing. Now I knew.
"Lock them up,” I said to my warriors.
Then I left them. I moved to the flight deck, ready to take command of the ship. We had a mission, and we were halfway finished with it.
"Chart a course for Altid. Inform Baradur that we have two, healthy human females aboard and we are bringing them to him on Altid,” I said to my lieutenant.
"Yes sir, Commander Duron Spaunok,” the lieutenant responded.
Altid was a barren moon just outside the asteroid belt. It was a solid rock that had the perfect flat terrain to build a base. Of course, it was not as good as Earth, but it did well. It was on the outskirts of the asteroid belt, almost a million miles away from the nearest Corillion civilization. It was the first line of defense and the first landing port before going into the asteroid belt where the rest of the Corillion civilization lived. Altid was where I lived and trained. It was where the leader of the Spaunok tribe, Baradur, lived and ruled. Now we were heading there, bringing gifts.
The journey there would take a couple of days, even with our super speed battleship of the best technology. During that time, I went about my duties as commander, but I found myself doing something that I had never done before: I was spying on the human females. I was watching them when they did not know it. We had surveillance monitors and I was one of two warriors that had access to them. I sat in my commander’s quarters of the ship watching the two young women interact with each other on my monitor. The redheaded female was obviously the stronger of the two. She was often consoling the other woman. She was brave.
But I found myself watching them as they slept, and on the day we allowed them to bathe. I could not take my eyes off of the redhead. Her soft, pale skin and rosy-pink nipples made me very aroused. I found myself completely turned on and hard. This was a good thing. If they had this effect on me, then they would definitely have this effect on Baradur. That is what we needed.
As we grew closer and closer to Altid, I found myself reluctant to hand the females over, but I had to. It was my duty. My responsibility was to ensure the survival of the Corillion species, and the first to need that attention was our tribal leader.
"We will be arriving in a few hours. You must put these on,” I said as I walked into the prison living quarters of the human females. I normally was not the one to do such an errand as this, but I wanted to. I carried two fine gowns for the females to wear.
"Why? Why must we change?” the fiery redhead said as she stood up and stepped toward me.
"You will not ask questions. You will change because I am ordering you to. Or do I need to renew my
threat of what I will do to your friend if you continue to disobey?” I said to her.
Her green eyes narrowed at me in anger. Her breathing grew hard and her chest was pumping up and down vigorously. She was so angry, I thought that she might explode at any second. She grabbed the dresses from my hand and yanked them. All I could do was laugh at her.
"Make sure that you are fresh, bathed, and put together by the time we land. You are to look your best for him," I said, walking out of the room and locking it behind me.
"For who?” I heard the redhead shout after me.
Chapter 3
SHIA HETON
I could not believe what had happened! I felt like this had to be a dream. That insufferable jerk, Commander Spaunok, was a cold-blooded killer! He had no empathy at all for humankind. He made me watch while they destroyed over ten humans on a priceless space station. I didn't know how many had escaped in escape pods, but I hoped it was many more than I originally thought. It was true what they said: the Corillions were ruthless animals. I hated every single one of them, but I especially hated their leader, Duron Spaunok.