Taken by the Alien Dragon

by Stella Cassy

  Taken By The Alien Dragon

  Galactic Alpha’s Conquest: Book 5

  Stella Cassy

  Contents

  Free Prequel!

  1. Esmerelda

  2. Moddoc

  3. Esmerelda

  4. Moddoc

  5. Esmerelda

  6. Moddoc

  7. Esmerelda

  8. Moddoc

  9. Esmerelda

  10. Moddoc

  11. Esmerelda

  12. Moddoc

  13. Esmerelda

  14. Moddoc

  15. Esmerelda

  16. Moddoc

  17. Esmerelda

  18. Moddoc

  19. Esmerelda

  20. Moddoc

  21. Esmerelda

  22. Moddoc

  23. Esmerelda

  24. Moddoc

  25. Esmerelda

  26. Moddoc

  27. Esmerelda

  28. Moddoc

  29. Esmerelda

  Epilogue

  Chapter One Preview – Conquered By The Alien Dragon

  Free Prequel!

  Taken By The Alien Dragon

  Free Prequel!

  Cosmic Collector delves into the past, offering a glimpse of Tarion as a hatchling after the death of his birth mother. Through the alternating perspectives of Tarion's sire, Silea, and Alana, a human woman that captured his heart, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the Hielsrane dragons, from their possessive tendencies to their battle-hardened exteriors.

  Click here to download your FREE Prequel, Cosmic Collector, by signing up for Stella Cassy’s Insider Club!

  1

  Esmerelda

  “Stellar haul, Captain Esmerelda Black.” Wrigo nodded and his lips tilted up on one side. My right-hand lieutenant only said my whole name when he was ecstatic. He tapped the cargo bins with his comms device. “Every containment cell has a body and the cargo bins are three-quarters full.” Tapping the stack of crates at the front of the last bin, he said, “Full of credit chips.”

  “All five of them?” I grinned at Wrigo. Enough to keep our main ships and at least two of the secondary ships in a few luxuries for a year. “We should inspect them personally.”

  On our way to the cargo bay, I reached behind my back and pulled out two packets of moolai floss from my emergency pouch. He took the blue foiled one, and I ripped open the pink. We munched on our paltry breakfast, dehydrated grains from twenty planets, calorie and nutrient-rich, but flavorless. As we walked by the containment cells, he rapped his taser wand across the bars, catching a few claws and talons.

  A Sientcae stumbled back but grasped the bars again immediately. None of our temporary guests liked the back of the cell’s transparent walls, which overlooked the flight-cargo bay, a twenty-foot drop. No one could survive the fall without injury if they managed to break the silicate glass.

  In the next cell, a Luhap stuck its claw and trunk through the bars. “Let us go and we’ll help procure more than what you have.”

  “Please. I have heard of your conquests and hoped to meet the little human captain who appears from nowhere and is gone as quick as a dream.” The Sientcae fell to his knees and looked up with his greedy holes for eyes. “Captain, we can join your crew and—”

  I guffawed along with Wrigo and rubbed the scar behind my ear that disappeared into my hair. “You’re ready to abandon your own after a single day?”

  “It is practical.” The Luhap pushed aside two other species, all of which I could name but the tiny one scrambling back against the glass.

  “Stab us in the back at the first opportunity,” I said. It was what I had done and would do again to avoid becoming a slave on one of those pleasure planets. “Tried that before, didn’t we, Wrigo?”

  “That situation will never be repeated,” Wrigo said, baring his four rows of teeth.

  “I have many skills,” the Luhap yelled.

  I tuned out his raspy voice, turned my back on them and then continued past the cells to the floor-to-ceiling window next to the lift. Down in the flight bay, two small but nimble fighters we had recently acquired were already being divested of their yellow stripes and blue diamonds and replaced with a discreet spatter of my fleet’s signature black with gold stars.

  I put a hand on Wrigo’s shoulder and whispered, “What is that small one with the russet and cream fur in the back of the Luhap’s cell?” I cast an eye back at the little creature, who could be no more than three feet tall, trembling against the glass. It looked like a gigantic teddy bear with a lion’s mane of reddish-brown hair in a big ponytail.

  “I don’t recognize the species, but it looks well cared for.” Wrigo glanced over his shoulder. “They’ve all been logged and catalogued along with the rest of the cargo. There should be some information on it.”

  It looked like my last foster mother’s Pomeranian, if the dog could stand on two feet and had hands. This creature’s tiny fingers weren’t that useful. It was as cute as the dog and probably just as mean.

  Just then, a high pitch caw sounded behind us. The Luhap had the little guy by the shoulders and was shaking it. It kicked his stubby legs and feet.

  “Inanimate cargo is preferable.” Wrigo let out a long breath and rolled his eyes, then instructed the Luhap to release the little one.

  “The small one might be more valuable than all the others,” I said. As soon as it was released, it scampered to the opposite side of the cell.

  “Is it a young one?” Wrigo asked in the same tone he used during our daily meetings about humdrum stuff like inventory.

  I rubbed a hand over my head, pricking my finger on one of the jeweled pins that I had arranged from ear-to-ear. It was my lucky style, and I wore some variation of it every day. Wrigo referred to it as my captain’s crown.

  He continued to stare at me as if my limited knowledge of human children transferred to all young beings in the universe. It wasn’t as if we encountered many in our line of work. But then I was supposed to be a mother of two. It had been a convenient lie, and I’d been telling it so long, sometimes I almost believed it.

  Usually, Oyna was around when this topic came up. She supplied any information about children, and I remained silent.

  “It is short and...” How did an alien child act? I grasped for any tidbit from my childhood when I was under four feet, when I was—five years old? Seven? The longer I spent away from Earth, the more I forgot, and the less human I felt.

  I did what I always did: said little and stared off into space with an expression I hoped was appropriate for a mother whose two kids were back on Earth being raised by a heartless rich ex-husband, also nonexistent.

  Wrigo laid one of his three fingers on my shoulder. I closed my eyes briefly. “We should move it to a separate cell, right?”

  He nodded for a long while, his frown flattening out enough that I knew my answer was within an acceptable range for a mother. “If we had one free...We will have to double them up. What are we going to do with them, Captain?”

  “We’ve never had so many at one time. Let’s have the doctor look them over. Don’t want to lose any.”

  “Sensible.”

  “How far are we from the next trading station?” I asked.

  “If we deviate course, we can backtrack. Otherwise the next one on our current course is about five rotations out,” he said.

  “Expend five rotations of resources or backtrack one and profit early? What a dilemma.”

  “Ha.” He laughed in his dry humorless way and opened a comm link. “Enziji, we are altering course to Quadrant 3, trad—”

  Red light bounced against the glass from the ceiling. Our comms units chimed at the same time. “Multiple incoming.” Oyna’s voi
ce reverberated.

  “Who are they and what are they transporting?” The words leapt out of my throat. Good thing we were heading straight to the trading station. None of our ships had room for much more. I rubbed my hands together. The best kind of dilemma to have.

  “I’m checking their identity,” Oyna said.

  I jogged back by the containment cells with Wrigo at my side. A caw sounded behind us and we both looked back. The little puff ball stood at the front of the cell clasping the bars. Its round cherry lips puckered, and its round, amber eyes stared after us. It extended its mitten like paws. Its eyes reminded me that I hadn’t had an ice-cold lager in a decade, probably never would again — malted barley, eh, everyone’s liver could do without.

  With a last glance at the cells, I said, “We’ll deal with them later. We have more company.”

  “They are Drakon!” Oyna shouted through the comm link. “An entire fleet of them.” She chortled.

  Wrigo and I exchanged glances and broke into a run back up to the bridge.

  Mopping my sweaty forehead with my sleeve, I plopped in my chair. “Full cloak.”

  We were near Thirren, but why would an entire fleet Drakon be headed this way? They were vindictive assholes and I had killed one of theirs, a low-ranking fugitive who was on the run for some treasonous act. “They couldn’t have detected our small fleet and identified me already,” I said. “Surely they wouldn’t send an entire fleet after me. I did them a favor by turning him into space debris.”

  “Unlikely,” Wrigo said.

  “How far out are they?” I asked.

  “They will be here within two solars.” Wrigo’s voice and gray eyes lit with excitement. His slate gray body switched to cucumber green from the top of his shiny head to his triangular feet.

  “Is everyone invisible?” I called out as soon as I stepped onto the bridge.

  “Yes, all cloaked,” Oyna said.

  “Yes, Captain,” my lieutenants called out one by one. Their eager faces stared back at me from the central battle screen.

  Thanks to a crew as diverse as the galaxy, our cloaking signature changed almost as much as we did locations. We could remain invisible longer and more often than most. I hoped that with a fleet of fire breathing Drakon headed straight for us that the universe was in our favor once more. It would tax all our abilities and resources to withstand a confrontation with them, but the Drakon lacked one thing we had in abundance: a wealth of experience.

  2

  Moddoc

  I switched Almordae’s pictures to transparent mode so that she was among the starlight from the cockpit’s windows. I glanced at the empty chair beside me, where she should have been learning rudimentary skills of space flight as every Hielsrane did. As her clone should have.

  She never tired of sitting here. She would not have been one of the grounded Hielsrane like me, but one of its space-bound commanders living among the universe’s galaxies.

  Her white mane, the color of her mother’s and the opposite of my own, flitted across the screen. Her tiny body tinged with pale blue inherited from her maternal line floated silently.

  My only daughter.

  Almordae’s image disappeared from the center viewscreen and was replaced by Commander Tarion’s scowling face.

  “Where in the fucking verse are you going?” He growled down at me. Underneath his red face, veins bulged in his temples and upper neck. His coloring alone had to have helped him rise to one of the highest Drakon positions, commander of the entire Hielsrane operation. I could almost feel the heat of his anger on my skin.

  “Back to inner orbit, sir.” I flicked off my peripheral screens. Almordae’s pictures vanished and my heart chambers constricted as they always did but more so now that these images were the only ones I would ever have.

  Commander Tarion pushed his face so close to the camera that I could see sweat popping out of his pores. “The fuck you are,” he bellowed.

  My fingers tightened around the box and the lid snapped shut on the tip of my talon. I freed it and it clattered to the floor. My caudal coiled around it. I rubbed the spot until I broke the skin.

  “All you had to do was sound the alarm on time, before Thirren was blown into another galaxy by the Pax Alliance.” His face was splotched with darker patches of red. I was sure one of his neck muscles would rip apart, or his Dragon would emerge and begin breathing actual fire through the viewscreen.

  He could not know that I had been paid to delay the alarm.

  I tugged the top of my flight suit constricting my neck like a noose. “Commander, sir, if I can get back on the ground and—”

  “No! Hang back like the rest of the fleet—”

  “But I’m useless up here, as a ground commander, my skills—”

  “Which you have failed to utilize, if you still possess any.”

  I fell back in my seat heavily. After what I had done, what else had I expected? Incompetence was nearly as bad as treason. If he had been in this cockpit, I was certain I would have been bleeding all over my command console.

  “Because of you we are homeless —”

  I slapped a palm on the console. “I sounded the alarm late, yes. I admit that, but the Pax takeover did not result from just my delay —”

  “Remain space borne.” His tone had chilled to ice. “Can you follow that order?”

  “Yes, I am sorry,” I said. He spun his chair around, snubbing me further. The screen went black before I could utter, Sir.

  The intership monitors filled with fleets of gray Hielsrane ships retreating. Running. I should keep going just like I’d planned if anyone found out how I got the money to clone Almordae. All I could do was run like the rest of the Drakon from our home planet.

  How was I to know that a minor delay would lead to this mass exodus? It should not have. Our forces were superior to the Pax’s.

  Tarion Hielsrane was a father with multiple heirs. What would he do if his only heir had been Matilda and he did not have the funds to clone her after her death? He could not understand because as commander of the Hielsrane operation he could clone his entire family and never miss the credits.

  I slumped back in my flight seat. If the clone procedure had worked, none of his words or actions would matter for more than a second. But the clone had been unsuccessful and now my best option would be to die, taking out as many Pax as I could to redeem my honor. All because I wanted to see her face again, a replica with her genetic makeup. But now I would never have that. My mate had been right: a clone could never duplicate all that made up Almordae.

  I flipped my craft to auto pilot and set it to orbit farther away from Thirren. Our home planet was overrun with Pax ships, partly because of my actions, so for now I would wait out of the way until the commander sent further instructions.

  Maybe it would be better to just drift until I built up enough nerve to inhale the case of inebriant ether stored in the cargo hold and then send the ship back to Thirren on auto pilot after I slipped out of the airlock. It was the choice my mate had made when she could not live without Almordae any longer. I, alone, was not enough to tether her to Thirren, to life, to me.

  With my caudal, I flipped the box up sitting in my lap up into my hand. It was empty of the last scale that belonged to my daughter. The last of my line.

  I released my safety straps and dropped to the floor between the flight chairs on my back with my head in the doorway, wings spread from one end of the room to the other. The metal safety tread bumps dug into my neck and back.

  “Switch to emergency lights only. Resume image show of Almordae Hielsrane.” The pictures of her with me, and especially her mother—my mate— were too much. I could not bear both at the same time.

  The ship’s computer beeped, and the lights lowered. The frozen images of my daughter’s three-foot body dissolved and rearranged, one after the other as image after image floated before me. From the first picture to the four hundred ninety-eighth, I did nothing but stare. When it cycled to the b
eginning again, I still did not move.

  3

  Esmerelda

  Wrigo’s and Oyna’s voices drifted from the bridge into the war chamber, the door of which was cracked open. Other than me, no one spent more time keeping our fleet running efficiently than those two.

  I sat up and kicked the other chair back in place. Then I fluffed the red plush fabric on the seat I’d purchased in Tylooa. I was particularly proud of that one. I’d spent a sizable chunk of the loot from our first big raid on the chair eight years earlier. The material felt like a cross between crushed velvet and silk, and it seemed to massage my muscles even through clothing. I wiped the drool from the side of my cheek and stretched.

  “She is a mother too,” Oyna said.

  “She never mentions them,” Wrigo replied. “She is over the loss. They are her past.”

  You deserve a pay increase, my friend. I checked my reflection on the lelkone walls. The tip of one of my wing extensions stuck out. I twisted my upper body while I yanked at the manual lever at my side beneath the belt until they were as flat as pleated fabric again. After lunch, I would go down to Enziji’s station so that he could check them out. I didn’t like the upgrades he had made on the others. This version was my favorite and it didn’t hurt that the fall-leaf colors complimented our black and bronze uniforms better. As always, Enziji couldn’t resist hiding some blue in there. The crusty marshmallow claimed he wasn’t trying to match my eye color, but I knew better.