by Cara Bristol
Just in case the appeal was successful, I shifted the conversation back to Andrea. “You were convicted of hacking?”
“Yes. Cyber robbery, actually. I was the best in the New Americas!” Her boast confirmed her guilt. She sighed. “I hear Dakon is quite primitive. No computer technology to speak of.”
“How did you get caught?”
“Greed. I returned to a site I’d previously hacked, and they’d installed a viral tracker. Busted!” Her eyes narrowed. “Who’d you kill?”
“Nobody. I’m innocent.” I’d continue to state that until the end of my days.
She barked out a husky laugh. “We all are. Haven’t you heard? There are no guilty people on the SS Australia.”
“She killed Jaxon Carmichael.” A brunette with a head of bouncy curls piped up with the identity of the “victim” I’d been convicted of bludgeoning to death.
Andrea whistled and eyed me with new respect. “Honey, you roll with the big boys, don’t you?”
The brunette shook her head. “How could you not recognize her from the pay-for-view gov-vids of her trial on the ’net? She’s a celebrity.”
Andrea sniffed. “As a general rule, I avoid the government sites.”
“Too risky?” I asked.
“No money there. Terra One World is damn near bankrupt. Why do you think we’re on this ship? First, they save money by not having to house us in prison, and second, they make money from the illuvian minerals the Dakonians are paying for us. It’s a double dip.”
“They sold us into slavery.” I stared at my hands. Carmichael “justice” had been swift. While others languished in prison for years awaiting a court date, I’d been tried, convicted, and sentenced in a mere two months. Rocket fast—a contrast to the appeals process which would be evolutionary slow. Sitting in prison waiting for an uncertain outcome didn’t appeal, but was this better?
“More like presented us with an offer we couldn’t refuse.” Andrea shrugged.
“What do you mean?”
“We could have finished our sentences. Instead we opted for immediate freedom via one-way shuttle to Dakon.”
“You had a choice?” I glanced between Andrea and the other woman.
“The application form spelled it out.” The brunette nodded. “The selection process was very competitive. Ninety percent of the women who applied didn’t get accepted.”
“Application form? I didn’t fill out any application form.”
Andrea’s gaze narrowed. “You didn’t complete a profile? Health history, activity levels, physical description…”
“No.” I pressed my lips together. Carmichael justice again, which was to say, no justice. They were sending me as far away as they could get me.
“That’s odd.” Andrea squinted.
Maybe becoming an alien’s companion wasn’t such a terrible fate. We could be friends with very limited benefits. Billions of miles between me and the Carmichaels couldn’t hurt, and it beat spending my life in prison. If the Carmichaels could have me wrongfully convicted, they could block my appeal.
But how would I keep track of the status? Since the planet wasn’t connected to the ’net, how would Maridelle update me?
“Well, we’re all here now. It’s kind of like being a ’net-order bride,” the brunette said cheerfully. “By the way, I’m Tessa Chartreuse. I ran an escort service for an elite clientele.”
“So why are you here? Prostitution isn’t illegal.” It had been decriminalized a long time ago.
“No, but money laundering is.” She shrugged.
Andrea laughed. “She’s an entrepreneur.”
I took a deep breath. “Any idea what the aliens look like?” I’d kept to myself, but I’d heard rumors our intended “mates” were scaly blue with long tails. Only recently had Terra One World made contact with Dakon. I’d been told the aliens “looked like us,” but I had little confidence in my government to tell the truth.
“I did a little ’net research before they transported me to the shuttle,” Andrea explained. “They are humanoid, genetically compatible with us, but they’re taller, much more muscular, and bigger.” She held her hands about a meter apart.
“Are you talking about their penises or their bodies in general?” Tessa asked.
Shit, I hoped Andrea was referring to their bodies. I eyed the span between her palms.
Andrea rolled her eyes. “Their bodies in general. I did not research their junk.”
“It would be proportionate, though, wouldn’t you think?” Tessa persisted. You could take the girl out of the escort business, but you couldn’t take the escort business out of the girl.
Andrea placed her index fingers to her forehead so they stuck up. “And they have—”
“Antennas?” My jaw dropped.
“More like horns.”
“That’s worse!”
“Vestigial horns. Mostly hidden by their hair.”
“So we’re the court-ordered brides of horned aliens who may or may not have big dicks,” I said.
“That’s the size of it.” Andrea snickered.
I got up and moved to the observation window. Without the filtering effects of a planetary atmosphere, stars in space didn’t twinkle. They appeared as solid points of light. We’d traveled far enough that none of the constellations were familiar anymore.
“Dakon must be very far away.” We’d been on the ship for two months with thirty days left to go.
“It’s hyper speed compared to the three-year round trip the first contact took. Thanks to the illuvian ore, we’ll do it in three months,” Andrea said. “The Dakonians have been waiting a long time for their mates. After the first contact ship returned to Earth, it took a year to set up the program and recruit the first group of women.”
Tessa giggled. “They’re going to be really horny by now. In more ways than one.”
“What happens if they don’t like the brides they receive?” I asked Andrea. She seemed to be in the know.
“Then we’ll be sent back to serve out the remainder of our sentence,” she replied. “With credit for time served on Dakon.”
In my case, that still meant life without the possibility of parole, not the usual sentence for second-degree murder, but my attacker hadn’t been the usual victim. Fortunately, despite the Carmichaels’ influence, they hadn’t been able to charge me with first-degree murder because security vids showed Jaxon’s laser pistol falling out of his pocket. But the jury hadn’t bought Maridelle’s self-defense argument. Excessive force, the prosecution had argued and won. Two weeks after being sentenced to life in prison, I’d been shuttled to the SS Australia where a government agent deactivated the electrocuffs, shoved a duffel of my possessions into my arms, and announced I’d been inducted into the Terra-Dakon Goodwill Exchange pilot program.
Or, as I thought of it, Rocks-for-Brides.
“I don’t see them rejecting any of us,” Andrea said. “They’re desperate. They have a critical shortage of women.”
Tessa nodded. “An asteroid killed them.”
I moved away from the window. “Like the one that hit Earth and killed off the dinosaurs by causing a massive winter that destroyed their food supply?”
“Just like that. The planet is still suffering the winter it triggered,” Andrea answered.
“But how would an asteroid strike kill females and not males?”
“They think it carried a virus to which only women were susceptible, and it caused a genetic mutation. Each subsequent generation has produced fewer and fewer females. The planet is 90 percent men now. No worries, though. Everyone who got the virus died a couple of hundred years ago.”
I gawked in awe. “You had time to research all that?”
She shook her head. “It was in the orientation packet.”
I frowned. “Orientation packet?”
“On the little disk,” Tessa supplied. “Everyone got one in their cabins.”
; “Oh, yeah.” Vaguely I remembered seeing something like that. I’d found it when I’d boarded the ship but tossed it into a drawer. A depressive fog had engulfed me since the verdict. What difference did anything make? My future was out of my control.
However, Andrea and Tessa had sparked my curiosity. I would pop that disk into the vid player and watch. Horned? I still couldn’t get over that. Would the planet resemble Terra? An asteroid-induced winter sounded freezing. It couldn’t be that cold, could it? People lived there. Male people, anyway.
Terra had the opposite problem, although not as severe. Women outnumbered men with more than 10 percent more females surviving to adulthood than males. Another reason female convicts were expendable. “Ninety percent men, huh? That’s a lot of testosterone.”
“I know, right?” Tessa rubbed her arms.
“Assuming they produce testosterone. They might have alien hormones,” Andrea pointed out. “In fact, that’s pretty much a guarantee seeing how they are aliens.”
“But we’re still genetically compatible?”
“Theoretically, according to preliminary lab tests. We can’t be certain until we start producing children.”
Even though I’d been in the grips of an I-was-wrongly-convicted funk, I recalled a couple of blood draws. How could my life have come to this? Sent to a planet light-years away to become an alien’s bride. I hugged my midsection. I gave birth to an alien baby. It sounded like a story from one of those cheesy ’net vid-zines that focused on celebrity gossip—and sensational news items like my trial.
“I can’t believe that the first time we discover intelligent life on another planet, the first action our government takes is trading its female citizens for illuvian ore.” Space exploration had discovered alien life a couple of centuries ago in the 2200s, but they were single-celled jelly-like organisms and bacteria. Another planet had had heat-resistant insects, but that was about as advanced as it got.
“Terra One World has been quite civilized compared to what happened the last time Earthers coveted a particular metal ore they deemed valuable,” Andrea said.
She meant the quest for gold. A millennium ago, monarch and church-backed explorers decimated native populations in their avarice to acquire the Earth metal. I was aware of our planet’s ignominious history, even though I was nowhere near as knowledgeable as Andrea. The woman knew her business, and I suspected, everyone else’s. She was sharp—which probably wouldn’t serve her well on Dakon. I predicted that having no ’net access would be her biggest adjustment.
“You never ran across a single still or vid that showed what they look like?”
“Not a good one,” she said. “There was a still in the orientation vid.”
“You couldn’t see much because of the fur,” Tessa piped up.
“Fur? Good mythological gods, they’re furry?” Horns and fur?
Tessa and Andrea laughed. “No, they were wearing fur garments with hoods, so you couldn’t see their faces clearly,” Tessa said. “Just a chin and a nose.”
“How did those look?”
Tessa shrugged. “Like a chin and a nose.”
“Like a Terran chin and nose?”
“Uh huh.”
Be thankful for small mercies, anyway. If the dude looked too alien, I would focus on the lower half of his face.
Get Alien Mate from your preferred bookseller.
Other Titles by Cara Bristol
Alien Mate series
Alien Mate (Book 1)
Alien Attraction (Book 2)
Alien Intention (Book 3)
Alien Mischief
Dakonian Alien Mail-Order Brides
Intergalactic Dating Agency
Darak
Aton
Caid
Cy-Ops Cyborg Romance series
Stranded with the Cyborg (Book 1)
Married to the Cyborg (Book 1.5)
Mated with the Cyborg (Book 2)
Captured by the Cyborg (Book 3)
Trapped with the Cyborg (Book 4)
Claimed by the Cyborg (Book 5)
Rescued by the Cyborg (Book 5.5)
Hunted by the Cyborg (Book 6)
Breeder sci-fi romance series
Breeder (Book 1)
Terran (Book 2)
Warrior (Book 3)
Alien Dragon Shifters
Under Fyre
Under Fyre Prequel
Other titles
Destiny’s Chance
Goddess’s Curse
Longing
Naughty Words for Nice Writers (A Romance Novel Thesaurus)
Anthologies
Portals
Body Talk
Audiobooks
Stranded with the Cyborg
Mated with the Cyborg
Books in Print
Alien Mate
Captured by the Cyborg
Claimed by the Cyborg
Goddess’s Curse
Naughty Words for Nice Writers
About Cara Bristol
USA Today Bestselling Author Cara Bristol writes character driven science fiction romance with humor, heart, and heat. She loves introducing new readers to science fiction romance, and likes to say she writes sci-fi for readers who don’t like sci-fi. When she’s not writing (ha ha ha – she’s almost always writing) she enjoys traveling to exotic destinations and chillaxin’ with her favorite reality TV shows. Cara lives in Missouri with her own alpha hero, her husband.
Cara’s Website: http://carabristol.com/
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Acknowledgements
It takes a team effort to produce a book, and I’d like to thank the people who contributed to Under Fyre: Kate Richards, editor; Nanette Sipe, copy editor; Celeste Jones, proofreader; Jaycee DeLorenzo of Sweet ’n Spicy Designs, cover designers; and my beta readers, Lisa Medley, Fern Robin Manor, Michael Whitmill, and Ann Littell Mills.
