Warrior's Fate: Grahf of the Ezrok - SciFi Alien Romance (Bonus Book included!)

by Vivian Venus

  A group of them descended on me and I barely dodged in time, one of their tendrils slashing my arm. I felt a sear of pain. I couldn't lose. I couldn’t let them get her.

  I dispatched another one of them, back flipping in the air and blasting my beam staff off mid jump, but it barely seemed like it made a difference in their advance.

  Then I heard it – the whine of a shuttle engine, and the Veldarians noticed too. They recoiled as an Ezrokian shuttle burst overhead, its hatch opening and two warriors leaping out. I grinned. It was Cayd and Grenlok, two of the warriors stationed here with me! Cayd, a master with the repulsor, lifted two of the creatures and smashed them together, pulverizing them.

  “Looks like you could use some help,” he said.

  Grenlok, master of the Ezrokian broadsword, dispatched three of the monsters in one go. “We find ourselves in battle together once again,” he laughed eagerly.

  Then the sky flashed, and the Ezrok warship Kahran Prime burst into the atmosphere, completely dwarfing the Veldarian infiltrators. Energy beams lanced out from its hull, incinerating the enemy craft. Keylar, master of the energy knife, emerged from the house, and I saw Casey standing in the door way, looking up at the sky in awe.

  “You lucky bastard!” Keylar shouted as he joined us in battle, dispatching more of the creatures. “I wanted a female!”

  “On me!” I shouted to them, taking command. “Take the Tezlar Dragon formation!”

  The men bellowed a grunt of acknowledgement and fell into line with me creating an attack formation, and we charged head on to meet the remaining Veldarian scum.

  ***

  Smoke drifted up from the sath fields, the scattered remains of the defeated Veldarians lay across the ground like blast marks on the hull of a battleship. I stood next to Casey, her small hand in mine as the two of us looked out over the devastation. Dark smoke trails rose off in the distance where other infiltrators had landed. Jenny and Kenji had arrived shortly after the battle was over, thankfully their home had been spared attack. Jenny jokingly flirted with the Ezrok warriors who had come to our aid, laughing as Kenji rolled his eyes and covered his face with his hand. Notch buzzed around holding a tray of Mars Standard and water. Up above, the warship Kahran Prime floated high in the atmosphere like a watchful guardian.

  “I was afraid I was going to lose you,” I confessed to Casey.

  “No way,” she said. “Nothing will separate us. We’re soul mates.”

  “Soul mates?”

  She laughed. “Another human thing, I guess. People who are fated to be together.”

  I nodded. It must be true.

  A day after the battle, the Kehran Prime sent down a formal envoy to debrief me and my fellow Ezrok warriors. I was surprised to be greeted face to face with the high General himself, who had flown in from the front lines.

  “I’d like to offer you a promotion, Grahf Vel Dien,” he told me. “A return to the front lines, the title of high commander. Three legions under your command. All the glory and honor of taking the Veldarian capital itself.”

  It was an honor that I had dreamed about for years, but I knew the price it came with, and it made my decision an easy one to make.

  “I’m afraid I must turn down your offer, sir,” I told him. “I would like to retain command on Mars.”

  “On Mars? Warrior, we need more of your kind on the front lines.”

  “With due respect, sir. The Veldarians will return in an attempt to cut off our resource routes. We need a strong defense here.” I gestured to the rag tag team of warriors who had come to Mars with me. “And they need a leader.”

  And so the Mars command was mine. I was tasked with building a new warrior training facility and military outpost on the red planet. The most important thing that I was with her, and that she and I could start our life together.

  Casey and I were soul mates.

  No glory or honor could take me away from her.

  Epilogue

  Casey

  Things had boomed for all the farmers on Mars ever since the Ezrok established a greater presence here. With them they brought brand new technology allowing complete automation of the farm, which normally I would’ve protested against because I liked working the earth with my own two hands, but with the birth of our son, Vel, I needed the time away.

  I sat on the porch, sipping on a Mars Standard and enjoying the view. Grahf spun his staff in the air and then turned, and Vel, growing extremely fast for a child his age, watched his father and did the same. Grahf looked up at me, smiling. His face had taken on a softness over the past few years that had never been there when we first met. He was still the intense Ezrok warrior I had fallen in love with, but now especially since the birth of our son, I felt a new side to him.

  Behind them, the sath fields glistened in the sunlight, the massive forms of the autofarm machines hovering over like grazing beasts. It was another fantastic harvest.

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  Reylar Ven Erz is a powerful warrior of the Ezrok, the alien race who conquered humanity, and his kind is at galactic war. Tasked with hunting down an elusive and deadly assassin hiding in the human colony on Mars, Reylar is lead to the doorstep of the human female who he believes is its primary target – and he’ll do everything he can to keep her safe.

  A brilliant scientist, Doctor Liliandra Cast may hold the key to ending the war that plagues the galaxy. Now she’s on the run from an alien monster who wants her dead, and a whether she likes it or not she’s got an Ezrok bodyguard who won’t let her leave his sight. He’s stubborn, brooding, and intense – but there’s something about his fierce protectiveness that Liliandra finds herself helplessly captivated by.

  Thrust together to defeat a common enemy, they’re the most unlikely pair on Mars – so why do the flames of desire enthrall them both?

  Warrior’s Desire is the standalone sequel to Warrior’s Fate! Find out what happens next in the story of the Ezrok warriors stationed on Mars!

  I ran through the checklist in my mind as I suited up to enter the research lab, a quarantined clean area that required the strictest of protocols to prevent against any cross contamination of our very rare Veldarian specimens. Pressurized under-suit was secured, atmosphere maintenance module was in place and activated. Outer shell was properly connected and donned in the proper order. Repulsor manipulator gloves fully operational and calibrated. I held out my hand and felt the neural connection between my mind and the gloves, a very strange sensation that had taken me a very long time to get used to. It felt as if I had a second set of limbs that I could feel but couldn’t see, and I reached out with them and grasped the helmet of my suit and floated it onto my head. I then reached up with my real hands and tapped the engagement button, and with a hiss the helmet pressurized and sealed to my suit.

  “Doctor Cast?” my assistant, Gina, said as she poked her head into the changing room. She was already fully suited up.

  “Coming,” I said, and I joined her in the airlock.

  “Excited?” she asked, and hit the button to seal the room. The airlock was the size of an elevator with glass doors on opposite sides of the room, and as the door.

  “More like a nervous wreck,” I admitted. Up until today most research had been performed on only fragments of Veldarian bodies sent in from the front lines, with varying ratings of preservation ranging from “okay” to “barely usable”. The way Veldarians were made up – their natural bodies a strange viscous jelly like substance which could morph and change and take the form of other beings – meant a fast decomposition, near instantaneous after death. They would lose form and collapse, basically into a puddle, unless they were quickly taken into a special preservation chamber. The few complete specimens I’d had a chance to research were collected after the Invasion of Mars,
and were in terrible shape.

  But today. Today my team had the fortune of examining a perfectly preserved complete specimen that had just arrived from the Ezrok high military command. We had already made such progress in our research with what we had, coming the closest that any researcher – Ezrok or human – had come to cracking the secret of the Veldarian’s greatest ability and weapon: the shape shift. We humans may have been behind our Ezrok overlords in practically every way, making our defeat during the war against them two generations ago inevitable, however something about our human way of thinking allowed us to excel in one field: biological research. The Ezrok could make ships that warped across universe and had developed sufficient technology to heal their soldiers…but after mankind gained access to Ezrok technology we easily surpassed them in our research of our common Veldarian enemy.

  And now the next breakthrough was in my hands.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Gina said. “Just do what you always do. You’re Doctor Liliandra Cast, after all.”

  “I’m just a scientist, Gina,” I said. “You need to stop thinking of me as some superwoman.”

  She laughed. “Well, that’s easy for you to say, Lily. But you’ve already single-handedly come up with the three biggest breakthroughs in Veldarian research. I think you’ve earned the reputation.”

  “Not single-handedly,” I reminded her. “You and the rest of the team were there too.”

  The airlock beeped and the door hissed open. “Well, let's do this.”

  We walked down the hallway, the walls glowing and bathing us in a green light – a thranium radiation bath which would further sterilize our suits. Through a long rectangular viewing window in the hall, several technicians sat checking to make sure we hadn’t carried in any contaminants. They gave us a thumbs up and smiled. One of them mouthed the words “good luck.”

  The door at the end the hall slid open to reveal the research room, a large laboratory with rows of research equipment on one side and an operating table setup on the other. Several scientists, all wearing the same suits as I, were sat at the equipment, peering into microscopes waving their fingers in the air as they prodded and touched microscopic organic material using their finely tuned repulsor manipulator gloves. As I walked by, each one of them looked up from what they were doing and nodded in greeting to me.

  “Doctor Cast.”

  “Good luck today, Doctor.”

  I smiled and nodded to them and walked to the operating table where my team stood. Doctors Richard Howardson and Elsa Marquand both turned to me and smiled. “She arrives,” Richard said.

  I’d known Richard Howardson since my time as a young researcher just barely hired at EzRan. Richard was already a senior assistant then, my superior. As I found myself quickly rising up as a respected researcher, I also found that Richard’s eye admired me for more than just my abilities as a scientist. He was handsome, a talented scientist and a kind man, but I wasn’t much interested in him in that way. I wasn’t much interested in dating in general, actually. There was no time for relationships, and besides, I hadn’t met anyone who really made me feel like making an effort would be worthwhile.

  When I had explained that to Gina, she told me that I was probably being unrealistic in my expectations. But I just didn’t get it – what was the point of doing anything if there was no passion behind it? When I thought about my work, passion drove me to succeed and to move on. That was the kind of feeling I wanted if I were to dedicate myself to something as consuming as a relationship.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Gina said cheerfully. “Doctor Cast, maybe you should say a few words before we get started? This could be a historic day, after all.”

  “Sure,” I said, unsure of what to say. I wasn’t the best public speaker, and even though it was my team I tended to feel some anxiety when the spotlight was put on me. Never was able to fully get over that, even despite all the speeches and lectures I’ve given, and it was always harder with a smaller group. “Attention everybody.” The researchers around the room stopped what they were doing and turned around. “Today marks a significant milestone in the effort to understand the Veldarian enemy. Thanks to the efforts of the Ezrok Warriors fighting in the Veldarian system, we’ve been able to finally get ahold of a fully preserved, fully in tact Veldarian which will hopefully bring us a complete understanding of their camouflage mechanics and how to finally bring an end to this war. Let’s uh, get started?”

  There was a light applause and a few nods, and everyone went back to work. “Well said,” Richard said.

  “Thank you.” I woke up the holo-display and inputted my credentials, and then called for the computer to unload the specimen from its containment vessel. Behind the smooth, white wall next to the operating table came the sound of machinery whirring and humming.

  “Lily,” Richard said, leaning close to me. “What are you doing tonight after work?”

  He was persistent, that was for sure. “I don’t know, Richard. Probably settling down with a glass of wine and whatever new information we discover today. You know there’s no after work for me.”

  “Okay. Sure. Well, that’s why I wanted to make a proposition to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “If we make a big discovery today, then allow me to take you out for a drink somewhere. Say, a bottle of wine at a nice restaurant. To celebrate.”

  “Richard…”

  “You were already planning on the wine, so why not some company?” He grinned hopefully.

  I couldn’t help but smile. I must’ve rejected him a hundred times by now. “Ask me again after, okay?”

  “Fantastic,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Fantastic! Did you hear that, Elsa?”

  “Don’t start celebrating yet, lover boy,” Elsa said. “You’d better have your A-game on. Specimen is coming out!”

  A light panel on the wall blinked red before holding a solid green, and then a door unsealed and slid open. The four of us stood tensely, waiting for the specimen to emerge, and I realized that everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing to look. There was feeling that the entire room was holding its breath.

  A buzzer sounded. Slowly the pale grey form of the Veldarian carcass emerged, floating silently through the air towards the table. All eyes were held on it, and my heart was beating so hard I could hear it in the dulled containment of my suit. It was my first time seeing one intact, in person. It was like a pile of congealed opaque gelatin, like a gigantic amoeba. It was hard to believe that something so far departed from what we were familiar as being self-aware could possess interstellar technology. The thing looked like something you would expect to find haunting the swamp of some planet, not waging war against the most advanced civilization in the universe.

  “I’m having this irrational fear that the thing is still alive,” Gina said.

  “There really is no visual physical difference,” Elsa pointed out. “When kept from decomposing the thing looks exactly the same dead as it does alive...”

  “It’s dead,” I said, not so confidently. I mean, I knew it was, but I couldn’t help but feel my flight reflex acting up. These things were the most terrifyingly dangerous creatures in the whole universe. I activated the computer’s bio systems scan, just to reassure everyone.

  “Vital signs negative. 2% decomposition, held status. Time until necessary re-storage: six hours, forty-nine minutes.”

  “There you go,” said Richard. “Well Doctor? Shall we begin?”

  “You heard the computer,” I said. “We have less than seven hours to complete our work for the day, let’s make the most of it.”

  We set to it, first taking computer measurements of the body and doing a visual examination and then a electron pulsar scan to get a detailed computer model of its insides before we dissected it. Once that was done, Richard did a phase ray analysis to try and determine if the Veldarians could access other dimensions using their bodies.

  “No alter-phase activity detected,�
�� he said. “But that doesn’t rule it out. It could be because it's dead.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Alright, let's begin repulsor dissection. Let’s open this thing up.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Gina said. She went over to the counter and picked up a tray with a small transparesteel cube on it, which inside contained a tiny thranium diamond – an extremely sharp mineral which could only be handled using manipulators. I engaged the neural connection in my gloves and felt my brain take control of my invisible hands and I used them to open the cube and remove the diamond, which glinted faintly in the overhead lights of the operating table.

  “Going for an incision,” I said. The atmosphere control fans in my suit whirred quietly, working hard to control the sweat that was gathering on my forehead. I touched the diamond to the side of the carcass. Typically, we would state for the record where exactly we were making the incision, but there was no way to know up from down on this thing… It was all the same gelatinous mass…