Marauder Fenrir: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars) (4 page)

Fenrir’s eyes bulge. “They had their breeding Fiona operate a weapon?”

“Did you seriously just call me ‘their breeding Fiona?’ For real?”

“It’s not your fault you couldn’t bear them a child,” he says. “These men were weak. Whoever arranged these flawed pairings owes you great shame debt for having wasted your fertility on them.”

“You’re lucky I can’t turn this primitive kinetic weapon around so it’s facing into the ship so I can blow your cock off,” I screech angrily.

I push off the wall and head toward the door leading to the sleeping quarters. I pull the door open, and then turn back to him, willing myself not to look at his chiseled body or his massive cock. “You sleep in this room. I will sleep in the other room.”

Before he can spit out some other pigheaded insult at me, I pass through the doorway and slam the door shut loudly behind me.

T
he female–no
, the
Fiona
–slams the door before I can order her to bring food to me.

I still cannot understand why she calls herself a Fiona. When we first pieced together the scattered radio waves from Sol, we realized that the humans had only one language. There were some regional variations depending on where the speaker came from–remnants from old, dead languages–and some words would change in certain dialects. Female...Femelle...Frau...I remember these variations of the word, but not “Fiona.” This dialect is unfamiliar to me.

My penis twitches when I think of her slamming the door. She was angry, and her face was red, but her eyes clung to me. My heart pounds in my chest, and the taint and corruption of her Seraphic Form tempts me.

I bow my head down and mutter a silent prayer to Phyria. I focus on what matters, pushing the temptations of the Fiona’s alluring scent and body from my mind. Her shapely hips, her large breasts, her slightly asymmetric smile. Why should such imperfections draw me even more to her? This whole race is a corruption, a trap laid down for us. A test. If the blasphemers Cygnus and Aegus have their way, we’ll take this bait, and our race will perish along with the humans.

My stomach rumbles. The biosuit has shrunk down to the size of a pinhead and attached itself to my back. Dampening the acceleration drained the last of the suit’s power. And my stomach.

I push off the wall and float toward the cockpit. There are several compartments lining the walls on either side of the pilot’s chair, and I pull each compartment open one by one in search of food.

The first compartment contains a tablet, and it floats out. I grab hold of it to stuff it back in, but when I touch it, the screen comes on.

Filling the screen is a fully naked human female. My eyes bulge and cock twitches. I shove it back into the compartment and slam the door shut.

Yet the image is burned into my mind. The woman on the screen was not as attractive as the woman on the ship. She was too malnourished, and though her breasts were large, she seemed somewhat artificial, while the ship Fiona is...
real
. Yet the hard nipples and the look in the screen woman’s eyes made me wonder what the woman on the ship would look like with her clothes removed.

“No,” I say to myself in Marauder language. “It’s best that her clothes stay on...I must order her to remain clothed.”

If I saw the Fiona like this, it might be too difficult to control myself. To stop myself from giving into the worst temptation. I would be no better than Cygnus or Aegus.

I open the next compartment and a bar-shaped object floats out. I sniff at it, and from the compelling scent, I know it’s food.

I jam half of it into my mouth and chew it eagerly. At first, the bar’s texture feels harsh on my tongue, and it has no flavor. But then, beneath the outer skin covering the bar, the most delicious thing I’ve ever experienced explodes within my mouth.

I spit the skin out, then pull the bar out of my mouth. The skin shimmers like metal, but the bar itself is black like the starry void, and it melts onto my fingers.

The taste explodes across my tongue, and the sensation is so powerful that it fills my nose, as well. My ears jolt erect and upright, and my mouth hangs open. Some of the godly elixir drips out of my mouth. I catch it with my finger and lick it off.

I swallow the entire bar and the taste stays in my mouth long after. I can taste hundreds of other flavors from that one bar as the taste in my mouth changes moment by moment.

I tear into the bar again, forgetting to first peel away the skin.

The door slides open behind me, and I turn to see the Fiona tilting her head at me.

“I was going to give you this,” she says, holding up a bag. “Dehydrated pork substitute.”

Then she squints at me, her face breaking into a smile. She laughs so hard that she curls up into a ball, spinning in zero-g as she laughs.

I stop chewing, and the skin from the food hangs from the side of my mouth as I study her.

“You found the chocolate,” she says, still laughing. “And you ate the wrapper.”

I pull the skin out of my mouth and shove it into the compartment. “The skin is not appetizing, but the fruit itself is...there are no words for how good it tastes.”

I’m holding the rest of the bar in my hands. It’s melting onto my skin. I should eat it before it completely melts–I need every last calorie–and I want to savor every last bite.

I look up at the Fiona before I bite in, and she’s no longer laughing. She’s gazing at the fruit–she said it’s called chocolate–the same way she gazed at my erect penis. She must want it as much as she wanted my penis inside her before.

I could not give her my penis, but perhaps I should give her the chocolate? I still need her in order to reach Mars, and building goodwill with her might be worth sacrificing the delicious food.

I hold what remains of the chocolate bar out to her. “Here, you eat it.”

“Really?” she says, her eyes bright. “You’re going to share it with me?”

“Eat it!” I say. “I order you to. And don’t forget this gesture of goodwill!”

She laughs again, though I don’t know why, and she snatches the chocolate fruit from my hand.

She holds it by the skin, not touching the fruit itself with her hand. She squeezes the skin just enough to press the fruit out, and she takes a bite of it, avoiding the skin.

Ah, so that’s how it’s done.

She closes her eyes as she chews, and a smile fills her face. I feel satisfied, but for the wrong reasons. Instead of knowing she owes me for this, I feel glad that I was able to provide her with this happiness.

“Go back to your room!” I command her.

“Why?” she asks, opening her eyes and staring at me in confusion.

Because you’re corrupting me! Because the Seraphic Form should never be attained, only held as a divine ideal. She’d not understand any of these explanations, so I do not speak them aloud.

“Give me the food,” I say, pulling the bag out of her hand.

“I have what I need,” I add, “so I have no need of you.”

I shove her lightly on the shoulder, and she starts drifting off toward the door.

“Did you just shove me away?” she says, grabbing a handrail and propelling herself right back to me.

“I’m stronger than you,” I say. “And you were not obeying me.”

“Why should I fucking obey you?”

“Because I’ve chosen not to kill you,” I say. “But I could easily change my mind.”

She grabs hold of the pilot’s controls to stop herself just short of reaching me. She reaches out and shoves me.

She’s weak, but anchored to the controls and in zero-g, her weak attack pushes me slowly toward the wall. I bounce gently into the compartments, and the top one slides open.

The image of the naked woman floats out of the compartment and as it floats in her direction, it spins around so that the image appears directly in front of her face.

Her face turns bright red with embarrassment, and she swats it away.

“So you were in here looking at porn? Seriously?”

“Porn?” I ask.

She grabs the tablet from mid-air and sticks it in my face. “This!”

“This malnourished woman is a mother?” I ask.

How could such a small woman have had a child and earned her mother’s name?

“I see,” I say. “You are upset that this woman, Porn, despite being much smaller than you, was still able to bear a child.”

Her face turns as red as my birth star, and though it shouldn’t matter to me, I find myself struggling to calm her.

“Calm yourself!” I shout. “Porn is less fertile than you!”

I point to the screen, running my fingers along the weak curves of her backside.

“She must have been paired with an especially fertile male, and been lucky even then to be impregnated. The men I killed who attempted to breed with you were–.”

“I did not fucking breed with them!” she hisses.

She slaps the screen out of my hand and raises her boot to attack me. She rams it into my stomach, anchoring herself on the control console with her hands for greater effect.

She attempts to squash me against the wall, but I feel no pain.

“I realize the breeding was not successful,” I say, “but–”

“No!” she shouts. “I didn’t… Jesus! Why am I even talking to you about this?”

I know the answer. She wants me to breed with her, and she’s seen me effortlessly slay the men who could not get her with child. She knows I could succeed where they failed, but some form of shame debt prevents her from asking me to do it.

“You should know this,” I say. “I will not breed with you. I believe, with great conviction, that breeding with human Fionas means the end of my race. I will not contribute to that.”

Her boot moves down, and it slams roughly into my balls.

Now I feel pain.

I
’m back
in the sleeping quarters, and I’m fuming mad. The nerve of him! Thinking I want to...
breed with him
. Not only does he think I want to fuck him, he thinks I want to have his weird alien baby?

I check my tablet and see that we’re a few hours from Martian orbit. I’ll have to go back into the cockpit soon to monitor the instruments.

Maybe I’ll just make him stay in here while I run things. It’s probably the smart move, considering how bad he screwed us over when he launched us into full thrust before I could double-check the trajectory.

I keep a close eye on the margin of error as we approach Mars. It was at 5% margin of error shortly after launch–already much higher than normally acceptable–and it’s climbed steadily toward 20% as we get closer.

By the time I’m able to suppress my anger and go back in to face
Captain
Fenrir again, it’s risen to 30%.

I take in a deep breath, open the door, and head back into WHERE to face him.

When I enter the room, I see his feet hooked into the handrails. Even though there’s no gravity–meaning no up or down–he’s oriented so that he looks upside down from my point of view. With his pointy ears and purple skin, he looks almost like a bat hanging from the ceiling. Though no bat I’ve ever seen has the body of a Greek god or such a frustratingly perfect face.

“Human Fiona,” he says. “I have not changed my mind, I will not breed–.”

“Shut up!” I shout. “Look at this!”

I shove the tablet in his face.

“40%?” he says. “Your chances are much lower than–.”

“Shut! Up! This is the margin of error. It keeps going up. Your hasty launch has probably doomed us.”

“We will not orbit the red planet?” he asks. “Our women control the fleet, while our men fight. It seems that your men are poor fighters and your women are poor pilots.”

“No,” I say. “You idiot. You started the acceleration burn before I was finished, you’re the one who is a poor pilot!”

“I never claimed to be a good pilot,” he says. “It shame debts me to even imply I could pilot a ship.”

“ “Let me explain the situation we are in,” I say. “There’s still a chance we will enter a stable orbit. It’s a 60% chance as of now, but it keeps getting lower. The longer we wait, the more fuel we need to make a corrective burn. In the next ten minutes, I guess this is going to hit 50%, and that’s our point of no return.”

“So fix it now,” he says. “Or are you too poor a pilot to do so?”

“If I make any burn at all now,” I say, “the Martian defense grid is going to see us. We’ll no longer be in a stealth orbit, and we’ll no longer be able to get smuggled down onto the surface.”

“A 50% chance is high,” he says. “We will risk it. I have decided. If we fail to enter orbit, where will we go?”

“We’ll slingshot off,” I respond, “and slowly fly out of the solar system. The life support will shut off within a few weeks, and we’ll die.”

A smile engulfs his face. I hate myself for thinking how insanely gorgeous he looks when he smiles.

“Why the hell are you smiling?” I say, shoving at him.

“I told you I’d not breed with you,” he says. “But there’s now a 50% chance.”

“What?” my eyes widen and I shake my head in disbelief. “Who said anything about breeding?”

“If it works and we enter the stealth orbit, then I can succeed in my mission.”

“And if we don’t, we both die. You understand that part, right?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, his smile growing wider. “I cannot breed with you if there’s any chance we will survive. However, if we both will die, and if there is no chance of producing offspring, I can give you what you want.”

He looks down at his cock and my eyes follow. It’s hardening.

“Who said I wanted to have sex with you?” I say, redirecting my eyes to avoid looking at him or his big teal cock.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he says smugly. “I know it.”

“Hmm,” he says. “It seems there’s now a 70% chance I will know you from the inside.”

What? Fuck!

I grab the tablet from him and look at the screen in panic.

The margin of error has climbed faster than I expected, and we’re almost sure to die now if I don’t make the burn immediately. I’ve already mapped out the thrust vector, and without giving it a second thought, I shove Fenrir hard, propelling me toward the control console.

I input the thrust vector and slam down on the button.

The engines shake the ship and the slight acceleration throws me backward.

The back of the ship feels suddenly like it’s down—like the floor—and Fenrir is already waiting there for me.

I fall into him, and he catches me.

He holds me tightly against him as the engines burn. Again I feel his hard cock pressing into me, but this time it’s pressing right up against my ass.

“It cannot happen now, human Fiona,” he says. “For we both may survive. Do not tempt me with your large backside.”

I want to backhand him for that comment, but he lifts me and holds me up above him.

I grind my teeth and decide to just ignore him. It’s completely pointless arguing with him. I remember–before the Marauder fleet had been spotted–reading various speculations of first contact.

The first theory indicated that if we were to encounter an alien race, the most likely outcome would be that they would be so different from us that we could never understand them. They might be so far advanced that it would be comparable to an ant trying to understand a computer.

The other theory implied that evolution likely would produce similar outcomes across the galaxy, and that whomever we encountered would mirror us closely.

Seeing Fenrir in the flesh, my first reaction had been that aliens mirrored us
quite
closely. If anything, they had evolved better than us, as I’d never seen a human man who looked as gorgeous and perfect as Fenrir.

It seems now, though, that the truth lies somewhere in-between both theories: aliens evolved similarly to us, but we can never understand them. It’s not that they are too alien or too advanced from us, but simply that they are so fucking cocky and full of themselves that true, meaningful communication is impossible.

The engines cut off, and I start to float out of Fenrir’s hands.

I look over to him, and he’s holding the tablet.

“What’s it say?” I ask.

“We now have a 0% chance of mating with each other,” he says.

I breathe a sigh of relief. Yet I do feel a tinge of disappointment. To have sex with Fenrir would be...complicated. He wants to wipe out my entire species, so it would have to be the ultimate hate fuck. And the size of his ego already rivals the size of his cock; I could only imagine how much worse he’d be if I admitted that I actually am curious what it would be like to do it with him.

Whether it’s the Empire, the habitats, or Mars-Venus who gets their hands on me, my best case scenario is life in prison; the worst case is execution. To the Empire, I’m a traitor, to the habitats I’m surface scum, and to Mars-Venus I’m a war criminal.

Drifting off into oblivion, and fucking Fenrir until we ran out of air was–in some ways–the easiest and most comfortable outcome.

But it was the coward’s way out, and I’m not a coward.

The console starts to flash.

“We’re being hailed,” I say.

“This is New Copenhagen,” a voice crackles over the intercom. New Copenhagen is one of the orbitals. “A Martian frigate is on an intercept course with you. They’re saying you’re a war criminal.”

Fuck.

“Fenrir,” I say, “let me handle this.”

Fenrir grabs the tablet and jabs it with his finger. “Hello!” he says in greeting.

No. No!

“Fenrir! Give the tablet to me!”

He grins up at me. “I am ready to negotiate,” he says. “We have four large guns, and I am a powerful warrior. Bring us aboard your orbital or we will destroy you.”

I kick myself off the console as hard as I can, shouting into the tablet before they end the connection.

“Ignore him!” I say. “He’s...a Marauder. I have a captive Marauder on board. Get the Martian ship to stand down and grant us safe passage, and we can talk.”

There’s a brief pause, and then the voice says, “Jettison all your arms and make sure the Marauder is fully restrained. If you’re lying, we’ll hand you right over to the Martians.”

The channel cuts off.

“We had the upper hand,” Fenrir says, “and you surrendered it! Foolish Fiona!”

“You realize the orbital is out of range of our turrets? And you being a powerful warrior does nothing if you are hundreds of kilometers away from them and trapped on this ship.”

“I didn’t realize we were out of range,” he says. “But it’s never wise to avoid a show of force.”

“Yes,” I say. “It
is
wise. Now listen. I’m going to start jettisoning all of our
primitive kinetic weapons
and you need to let me tie you up.”

He grins at me. “You’d like that. If I’m fully restrained, you could finally have your way with me.”

“No,” I say, “I’m subhuman to the orbitals, and you’re…”

“Better than human,” he says.

I shake my head, but I realize he’s right.

“Yes, fine, you’re valuable to them. This was our only choice, okay?”

“You use me as a thing to be traded?” he asks.

There’s no malice in his voice, but I feel immediately ashamed. “I’ve...been shame-debted. But yes, using you was the only way to stop us both from getting blown up.”

“What do they want from me?” he asks. “Do their females want to breed with me?”

“The orbitals don’t want war,” I say, “and you want to destroy us all. If you care about saving yourself–at all–you might want to consider negotiating with them. And I mean giving something up, compromising, that kind of thing. If you are as stubborn with them as you are with me, you’re as good as dead.”

“I understand,” he says. “You are wise.”

My jaw drops open. It’s the first legitimate compliment he’s given me. I’m not fertile; I’m
wise
.