Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5)

“
F
elicia
,” I say, shaking my sister by the shoulders. “You
have
to stay awake.”

Felicia’s eyelids flutter, but she groans and pushes me away, keeping her eyes tightly closed.

“Up!” I shout, shaking her more forcefully.

Felicia’s face scrunches up into a scowl, and she rolls away from me.

The cold is seeping into my bones. We’re dying a slow death, but I have to keep her awake. There’s
still
a chance.

I slap her face, my smack against her chilled skin shocking enough to force her to open her eyes.

She snaps awake and takes a swing at me. “What the fuck! Kara, you –”

“Stay awake, sis,” I say, looking her straight in the eyes. “You don’t want to die out here, do you?”

“You were always an optimist,” Felicia says, rolling out of bed. She floats down lazily in the barely existing gravity, and slowly positions her feet beneath her before standing up and yawning.

We’re on a planetoid a little bit farther out than Pluto’s orbit. What we’re stranded on is not so much a planetoid as it is a big, ugly rock; but it’s full of big, juicy pay dirt: gold, platinum, cobalt, iridium – the list goes on.

“We’ll be rich, Felicia,” I say, shivering from the chill consuming my body.

Felicia nods her head, but says nothing.

Our mining drill blew a fuse. When it did, it fried not just only the mining drill, but also our engines... and the heat regulator.

Our fusion reactor and oxygen supply is still good to go. As is our distress beacon. The only problem is that we have to manually flip the heat on every few hours.

“We’ve got a lot of good things going for us still,” I remind her. “I’ll do it this time.”

“It’s not your turn,” Felicia says.

“Just relax,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

She sighs heavily, but doesn’t object again. Two weeks. We’re almost out of food. We can synthesize water and oxygen from the materials on the rock, but we can’t synthesize food. If my optimism turns out to be wrong, we’ll die of starvation.

I step into the suit, and Felicia helps secure me into the suit. She locks the arms into place, and then I put on the helmet.

When the ship is working properly, the waste heat from the reactor is converted into microwaves and beamed out into the cold of space. A tiny amount of that heat is reserved and used to keep the ship’s interior at a nice, comfortable temperature for my sister and me. But that’s when the heat regulator is working properly.

Now that it’s not working right, it’s one or the other: either all the waste heat pumps into the ship and roasts us, or it all beams out into space and we freeze. There is no in-between. We can still toggle the switch back and forth, but it means suiting up, going through the airlock, and bolting a bunch of hoses on and off.

When I’m outside the ship, I hold up my big wrench and get to work bolting on the first hose. Once all of the hoses are in place, I’ll flip the switch. Within five minutes, the icy cold ship will be nice and warm. In ten minutes, it will be a sauna. In fifteen minutes, we’d be dead.

I bolt in the last hose, and then I double-check all of them to make sure they are fastened tightly and securely.

I hit the switch, placing my gloved hand onto the hose to feel for vibrations. I press my faceplate up against the window to look inside the ship’s cabin, and I see Felicia huddled up against the heat vent. She gives me a thumbs up and flashes a wide smile.

I start the timer embedded on my suit’s wrist.

At around the twelve-minute mark, I need to kill the heat. By the time I get back inside and take my suit off, it will still be slightly toasty, but the temperature will quickly drop back down below freezing over the next hour or so. Then it will be Felicia’s turn to put on the suit and work the heating hoses.

We’re both exhausted from this routine. Exhausted, sleep-deprived, and starving.

While I wait for the ship to heat up, I keep looking up into the void, hoping to see a ship on the horizon. I’ve hallucinated seeing one so enough that I don’t believe it when I see the light in the distance. Could it possibly be a ship, or is it just another hallucination?

I squint at the light in the distance, and it
seems
to be moving. Yes. It really
is
moving. But it could just be a small piece of debris – or a distant comet.

I don’t even want Felicia to see it. False hope would be the worst thing for her right now. I move in front of the window to block her from seeing it and start making stupid faces at her as a distraction.

She rolls her eyes at me, but I see that she’s smiling. And soon I see sweat beads starting to drip down her forehead.

When my watch hits the ten-minute mark, I turn away and check the sky again. It
is
a ship.

If it’s a ship, it must have heard our distress beacon. Real hope is in sight.

But I still have to remove the hoses or Felicia will cook.

I try to ignore the ship as I work, but my mind is racing.

Best case scenario is that the ship is carrying a perfectly upstanding crew – maybe it’s a Martian military craft on a scouting mission or patrol. Second best case is that it’s another mining ship, and they would be happy to rescue us if we hand over most of what we mined. We’d be broke, all our hard work for naught, but we’d be alive.

After that, the less optimistic possibilities start popping into my head. It could be pirates. They’d likely take our haul and leave us for dead. And if it’s particularly nasty pirates, we’d
wish
they’d left us for dead.

Worst case...what is the worst case? Darkstar Marauders. No one knows for sure where Darkstar is. It could be about as far out as we are now, or it could be halfway to the Oort cloud. Some people think it’s even
in
the Oort cloud. One thing is for sure, though: Darkstar Marauders hate humans, and we’d be lucky if they gave us a quick death.

I attach the wrench onto the third hose and start to turn the washer hooking the nose to the socket, but it doesn’t move. I try turning it a bit harder, but it
still
doesn’t budge.

I calm my breathing and try not to panic. I check my watch. Eleven minutes, thirty seconds. Plenty of time...as long as I don’t lose my cool.

I re-adjust the wrench for more torque, pull both gloves firmly on, and pull.

My feet slip out from under me as the wrench finally moves, and a pressurized blast of heated air shoots out from the socket.

It blasts the wrench out of my hand, and it flies through space away from me. I watch as it gleams and floats in the beam of floodlight glowing from the ship, and then it disappears into total darkness. The gravity is so slight that – while the wrench will land, eventually – it might not land for several hundred meters. Maybe even a kilometer.

Twelve minutes, thirty seconds.

I don’t even know which direction to look. In this suit – and with such little gravity – even if I knew where the wrench landed, it would take me twenty minutes to reach it and twenty more to bring it back.

Too long.

I look up toward the incoming ship, and confirm that what I see
is
a ship. It’s closer now, and it’s definitely coming toward us.

“Please don’t be a Marauder,” I whisper to myself as I continue struggling – hopelessly – to remove the hose with my gloved hands.

D
arkstar
.

I never thought I’d have to go back there. I felt – for the first time, however faintly – the sun on my skin on Atlantis, the frozen planet. And then I traveled to Venus, where the sun’s energy is trapped by the thick atmosphere, and I felt warmer than I’ve ever been.

Darkstar. The sun’s rays barely reach it. A barren rock, cast out from the sun’s inner circle. My former home.

All the other Darkstar Marauders sent with me to Atlantis were killed. Including my father. I killed over half of them with my own hands – but I didn’t kill my own father – I couldn’t. That was a shame debt I could never take on, even if my father was a genocidal monster. I couldn’t pull the trigger to end his life.

I’ve betrayed Darkstar and become a peacekeeper. My first assignment? To go back there. To pretend I never changed.

The computer beeps.

“Kain,” it says, “there’s a distress beacon from a nearby planetoid. We should ignore it.”

“How close is it?” I ask.

“It’s close enough to reach, but we’re too close to Darkstar now. You need to maintain your cover.”

“I can reach it and get back on course to Darkstar, can’t I? Do we have enough fuel?”

“Yes, but –”

“Do it,” I say. “Change course.”

“But –”

“Do it!” I order.

The computer goes silent, and I feel the ship slow and start to rotate, then change trajectory.

“Mining vessel,” the computer reports. “Two humans requesting evac.”

My ship could hold two humans, but what then? On Darkstar, humans are sterilized – so the disease of humanity will not spread – and then they’re used as hard laborers or sex slaves. If I rescue these humans, I can’t bring them to Darkstar.

But I can’t just leave them to die, either.

Maybe I could fix their ship. Or give them enough supplies to survive until a human vessel can rescue them.

I sit back and wait. There’s no use making plans with such limited information. I’ll save my energy until I know what I’m dealing with.

After more than an hour has passed, the ship’s display shows me a magnified view of the planetoid. It zooms in further and shows a ship. It’s a mining ship, and the drill is still embedded deep in the rock. The ship’s floodlights are turned on, and there’s a suited figure standing outside the ship. It’s...struggling.

“Zoom in more,” I say.

“We’re at maximum zoom,” the computer says. “We’ll have to get closer to see more.”

The ship is already slowing itself down as it nears the planetoid, preparing for a touchdown.

As we get closer, I see that the human is trying to remove some kind of pipe or hose from the side of the ship. But they have no tools, and the pipe is not coming loose.

“Why is the human outside the ship?” I ask.

“Analyzing,” the computer says. “Hmmm….”

“Don’t ‘hmmm’ me,” I grunt. “What is it?”

“It’s a thermal distribution hose that’s connected to the tokamak reactor via the heat regulator.”

“What?”

“It makes the ship hot,” the computer says.

“Then why is she trying to pull it out?”

“It seems the interior of the ship is nearing the limits of human tolerance, and another woman is still inside.”

“They’re
women
?” I ask, feeling my chest tighten.

“Yes,” the computer says. “And one is going to die if that hose is not removed.”

“Hard landing!” I shout.

“Kain,that will use up too much fuel –”

“Hard fucking landing! Now!”

T
he engines
of the ship closing in on us cut off.

“What? No...no...no...please!” I panic.

But then I realize that the engines were facing me. Meaning they were being used to slow it down. So if they cut off...it means the ship is coming even
faster
toward me.

I don’t know what to make of that, but without the engine burn, I can’t see the ship at all. I start to worry that I hallucinated it all along and it really doesn’t exist, except in my imagination.

I give the hose another good turn, but it still doesn’t budge. I feel the veins in my neck bulge as I tighten my grip even tighter and then give it everything I’ve got. My stomach flexes, my thighs burn – every muscle in my body goes to work, but the bolt securing the hose will not move.

“Fuck!” I shout, falling ever so slowly to the ground as I collapse from exhaustion.

I pant until I catch my breath again and my breathing evens out, and then I stand up to check on Felicia.

She’s chugging water and her skin is flushed red. Her hair is matted onto her forehead, soaking wet from the sweat.

Okay, she needs some hope. Even false hope is fine.

I tap on the window, and point up to the black sky.

She gives me an exasperated look that makes it seem as if she has no idea what I’m trying to tell her. She holds up two hands as if she is gripping a hose, and she rotates her wrists in opposite directions, mimicking a hose disconnecting.

I hold my hand up like I’m still holding the wrench, and then I use my other hand to mime an explosion, hitting the invisible wrench. I act out the wrench drifting away up, and up, and up.

She slams the palm of her hand against the glass, and her mouth moves.

I’m not good at reading lips, but it looks like she’s mouthing out three syllables.
Idiot
, maybe?

I point up again, and then I see the engines of the incoming ship flare once again. The ship is now right above us.

The light from the engine burn nearly blinds me, and I shield my eyes.

The ship is settling down only about one hundred meters away from me, and directly below it rocks are flying everywhere. The gravity is so low that small pebbles, and even larger chunks of rock, slam against our ship.

I check through the window and see Felicia slouched down against the wall. Her skin is bright red like a crab, and she’s not even sweating anymore.

“Shit...shit!” I slam my fisted hand against the window, but her eyes don’t open.

I look back and see that the ship has landed. It doesn’t look like Martian military, maybe it’s Venusian?

The landing ramp hits the ground, and one figure begins walking down.

His suit is tight, form-fitting and teal in color. He doesn’t even walk all the way down the ramp. He leaps from the top of it.

I see him floating through the microgravity, straight toward us. He floats through the air as if he’s flying – but really he’s just falling extremely slowly – for several seconds, and then his feet hit the ground just a few meters from the other side of our ship.

I try to get a clear look at his face, but he disappears behind my ship before I can see him.

Moments later, he comes around the corner. My God, he’s fucking tall.

His faceplate goes transparent, and I see that it’s a Marauder.

I hold my breath, maybe because I’m terrified, or maybe because he’s so fucking handsome. His cheekbones are chiseled, razor-sharp, and his eyes are vibrant green. There’s a kind of tortured darkness looming behind his eyes, but the worried look on his face communicates true empathy.

He’s the youngest Marauder I’ve ever seen. Marauders can’t mate with other Marauders; they can only mate with humans, which produces pink-skinned Seraphim. The Marauders entered our solar system just over 25 years ago, so most of them are pushing 60 by now. But not this one – he barely looks 25, so he must have been a baby when they arrived.

He points to the hose and steps toward it. I take a step back out of his way.

He grabs onto the hose with his gloved hand and twists. He pulls the hose right out.

Then he flips the switch.

Now all the waste heat is beaming out as microwaves, and
not
into the ship. If I had flipped the switch without removing the hose, the microwaves would have cooked Felicia just as badly as the radiated heat would have.

The Marauder narrows his eyes at me, and even though it’s hard to see through his faceplate, I swear I see him grin.

He reaches the airlock and starts to turn the handle. It takes me almost two minutes to turn the thing enough to open the first door, but he does it in just seconds.

He gets it open, but there’s only room for one of us inside. He looks at me, nods, and points inside.

I nod to him, and he shuts the door.

I exhale. Had I really been holding my breath that whole time? The look he gave me...it was like he was telling me with just that one glance that everything would be okay. And there was something else behind those eyes. Something I don’t dare to even think about.