Star Warrior: A SciFi Alien Romance (7 page)

“Battle technician!” I bellowed.

A warrior scurried down the hall and paused for a moment to look at the two humans I’d dispatched. The warrior was young. I didn’t know his name. I wondered what personal dishonor had prompted him to come on this mission at such a young age, but I didn’t pry. He placed a small explosive against the door and it started beeping faster and faster. We both ran to the end of the corridor and dove around the edge as it was rocked with a massive explosion that sent fragments of bulkhead crashing down.

I peered around the corner, fully expecting to be hit at any moment with more blasts from their puny energy weapons. Only I was met with nothing. I heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe this accursed human had finally realized that there was no fighting the Ascendency. That she’d been bested. She might have come out on top the last time we met, but this day was mine!

I realized just how wrong I was when I stepped into their command center. It was a mess, and not just from the explosive charge we’d set off. That was designed to explode out, not in, so it didn’t harm anyone on the other side. A bit of technology designed for rescue that I’d discovered was also very good for taking prisoners.

I didn’t know if there would be any prisoners to take. It appeared that our first salvo at the human ship had been enough to do far more serious damage than I would’ve imagined while making the trip over here in the landing ship. I stared in astonishment and wondered that any species could design a command center that would explode in battle like this. Several humans sat slumped over their stations with dangling sparking wires hanging out over them.

“Amazing,” the young warrior said. “These are the wily humans who you said we should fear so? I don’t see the reason for that fear.”

My backhand caught him before I could even think. He was insulting me by calling my judgment in to question, but that wasn’t the only reason I’d slapped him. No, I was slapping him as much for his insult to the human as I was for his insult to me. What had come over me? What was wrong with me?

The warrior came back growling, but several men behind him stopped him and he seemed to regain some measure of control. I nodded.

“Never underestimate your enemy, even in defeat,” I said. “I made that mistake once and it cost me much. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t made a mistake that was costly to you, and you would do well to follow my advice and make a truly regrettable mistake. Like correcting a commanding officer.”

The warrior nodded and stood at attention, but he was already forgotten. I moved into the command center and ran my eyes over the humans. My eyes glowed as I looked at each one in turn, and finally they came to rest on a large metal bulkhead that had collapsed over the center of the command room.

The center. Where the commander usually sat in these human designs. I jogged down a slope in the back of the command center and leapt over a railing, thinking the entire time that it was ridiculous that they would make their security person do this every time they needed to get to the command staff in an emergency, and I found her lying covered in that too-red human blood as she rested under the bulkhead.

“I need a medic with training in xenobiology,” I shouted.

I looked up to make sure my men followed the order. They were all speaking into their intercoms. Good. The last thing I needed was a repeat of that terrible day when my world was destroyed. I turned back to this strange commander. I didn’t even know her name, and yet she’d dominated my thoughts so completely since that day that there were times when it felt almost as though I had a mental link with her much the same as the one I’d shared with my wife.

I shook my head again. Those thoughts were not helpful in the current situation. I needed to concentrate on business. There was no way that I could let her know how thoroughly she’d been defeated if she wasn’t alive to know she’d been bested.

The bulkhead she’d fallen under was trivial to lift, and so lift it I did. Amazing that these humans could be so fragile that something so light would be enough to hold her captive. I just hoped I didn’t harm anything by moving it, but at the same time it would have to be moved eventually so there was really no choice if I wanted to make sure she lived.

I stared down at her. The warrior woman who’d defeated me twice over. The woman at the center of my thoughts for so long. And I felt a possessive streak run through me as I looked at her.

“This one is good looking enough,” the same young warrior said coming over to me. He reached out to kick her as he spoke. “I wouldn’t mind having her fixed up by the xenomeds so I could have a little fun. Good choice, General.”

I caught his foot before it could make contact with the human. They were so delicate that it was possible just the act of him kicking her in her current state would be enough to cause irreparable harm. I flipped him back and he went slamming into a charred piece of furniture that looked like it had once been the command chair. There was a human male lying underneath it groaning but otherwise not moving, though his groans grew louder as the warrior crashed into it.

“Take him into custody,” I said. “We do not harm prisoners once they are taken.”

Every warrior on the command deck paused to stare for a moment. I looked to each of them in turn, meeting the challenge in their eyes. True we weren’t supposed to do that, but it wasn’t unheard of for prisoners to be handled inappropriately. Particularly when the battle lust was upon a warrior. That would not happen now.

Each of them looked away in turn. None of them were in a mood to challenge me this day. Good. I didn’t want to leave the human female’s side.

After an eternity a xenomedic finally did arrive. They pushed me aside and I stood there worrying that this might all have been too much for the human. That she might expire before I had a chance to show her how thoroughly she’d been bested. Finally they lifted her on a hover stretcher.

“We’ve done everything we can for her here, general,” one said. “We’ll have to take her back to the ship to complete the process.”

“Very well. Make it happen. I will have the entire command staff of this ship. It’s important that we gather information about humanity’s defenses!”

The words sounded hollow as I said them, but everyone else seemed to believe them well enough. Good. I didn’t want any of them to know I had any sort of ulterior motive for saving the human commander. Especially when there was still a battle to win. I pulled out my sword as my men continued working on our new prisoners in the command room.

There was battle to be joined out there. I followed the sound of sizzling energy weapons and the clang of blades as humans screamed and died where they resisted us, but my mind was back on my ship where the human commander was.

For the first time in my long life I itched to be away from battle and back home rather than in the thick of it.

7: Captive

Talia:

Warmth. Inviting warmth. I felt myself bathed in a glowing light that seemed to envelop me and made me feel as though everything was right in the world. I don’t think I’d felt that way since I was young and staying at my grandmother’s house on the lesser continental mass on Vorath IX.

No, wait. That couldn’t be right. The entire lesser continental mass along with grandma’s house and grandma had been vaporized by a Livisk mass weapon. Which I’d later learned was a fancy term for the Livisk throwing a giant chunk of rock at the planet to do as much damage as possible with good old fashioned orbital mechanics and physics.

I still remembered the terror of lifting off through the cloud cover created by that impact. A beautiful world destroyed for all life in a matter of seconds. Though on the bright side it had provided invaluable scientific insight into the K-T impact for scientists who were into that sort of thing. Something about it being ethically suspect to throw a rock at a habitable world and the Livisk providing the perfect laboratory.

None of that mattered to me, though. I was a little girl whose home was destroyed. One of many millions of homes that had been destroyed in the back and forth between our two species.

Only how could I possibly be at grandmother’s if it had been destroyed? My eyes flew open and I found myself hovering in a strange glowing field of some sort. I felt the sort of weightlessness that came from being in free fall, and it wasn’t entirely pleasant. I’d never been a fan of zero-G, and regularly blessed the magnificent bastard who invented artificial gravity and made it possible for me to travel through space without losing my lunch every five minutes.

“Where am I?” I shouted.

No answer. I could see figures moving around out there, though they were all hazy and indistinct. No, all I could see was that they were walking on two legs. Could that be humans out there? I tried to think where I was. Or where I should be.

A flash of memory. Consoles and various bits of the command center exploding all around us. Honestly. What sort of idiot designs a command center on a battlecruiser that explodes at the first sign of getting fired upon? If I ever made it through whatever the hell was happening to me right now then I was going to have words with whoever made that design.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

More light. Something blinding flashed in front of my face and moved down. A good thing too. Something was preventing me from moving even though I was floating. This didn’t feel like any sort of human technology I’d ever seen, but I’d never been one for going to the doctor in the first place. Perhaps this was something new on earth.

Why did I have the feeling I wasn’t on earth? That light continued moving down as though it was scanning my body. There was something important going on here. There was a good reason why I wouldn’t be in human hands, but I couldn’t think of it, damn it.

Then it hit me. The bulkhead collapsing as I got a report that there were Livisk boarders moving in on the ship. A Livisk boarding party. Damn. Once they got on a ship they were like the once mighty cockroach. You either killed them all or they took over.

I struggled against whatever bonds were holding me in place. Only the struggle was made all the more difficult since there wasn’t much of anything to struggle against. No, the harder I tried to move the less good it seemed to do. Finally I gave up and gave myself over to the floating.

Something started beeping somewhere above me. Rather insistently, too. I tried looking around and remembered too late that I couldn’t move much of anything. Damn it. If this was a human medical bay then I was going to rip the doctors a new one.

The beeping grew more and more strident until finally the glow started to pulse around me. I felt a tingle running up and down my body as I continued trying to struggle and finally the glow started to move down and the blur preventing me from seeing out into the world beyond my prison was revealed.

I found myself wishing I could go back to not knowing where the hell I was.

Livisk. All around me as far as the eye could see. The ones here mostly wore some sort of strange tattoo that I’d never seen before that had a symbol that sort of resembled a pictogram of the Livisk Ascendency if you squinted your eyes as you looked at it. I could only hope that was their pictogram for alien medical personnel and not the torture department. I was good on the spoken language but terrible at reading it.

Though if they were trying to torture me then they were doing a piss poor job of it with that strange glowy chamber thing.

“So does someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” I asked. This time my voice carried through the room. I looked around and saw rows of chambers like mine. Some were filled with a glowing light much the same as my own, but others were empty.

I wondered how many of my crew made it off the ship.

“Hello? Is my accent not working here or something? I asked you to tell me what happened! Where’s my crew? What have you done with my ship?”

“I can assure you that your accent isn’t the problem. Nor is your ship going to be your problem any longer either. It’s floating in the cold space at the edge of your star’s heliosphere waiting for a rescue that will come too late. On the bright side not many of your crew wait with it.”

I felt a chill. That voice. That deep voice that caressed my body. Hearing it over a holoprojection was enough to drive me wild earlier in the day, but that was nothing compared to the pure delight that was hearing it caressing me. And he was speaking the good old fashioned mix of English and Mandarin that was Earth Basic. That made this place almost feel like home.

Well, except for all the strange aliens wandering around.

The light stopped at about my shoulders. I could see that much from leaning down. At least I had that much control of my body now, though it wasn’t nearly what I wanted.

“Why are you doing this to me? Why have you taken me prisoner?”

The alien general stepped into view and my breath caught. It was unfair for the enemy to look so beautiful. That was the only word to describe what I saw. In the lighting of a human ship which was designed to match the light of Sol the Livisk didn’t look quite as radiant as they did under the light of their weaker star. A weaker star that still supported their species because their planet was much closer in. His skin sparkled and the tattoos shone an iridescent blue as he regarded me. That regard was enough to send a shiver running through me.