The Nine Realms of the Uti I: Warrior Prince

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  It was at that point that he realized that all of the ‘soldiers’ were female.

  They were all dressed as military—and all female.

  That fact alone was enough to boggle his mind.

  He was still trying to decide if it was a trick of some kind—to get them to let their guard down—when the relief crew arrived.

  Unfortunately, although he’d sobered somewhat, he wreaked of brew due to the circumstance of the arrival of the females startling him so that he spilled the last of his brew all over himself.

  Him and his crew—some of whom were still drinking—were relieved of their brew and immediately placed under arrest.

  He didn’t resist.

  What was the point?

  They never kept him locked up long anyway and the bed in the cell was at least as comfortable as the one in the barracks.

  His only regret was that he was removed from any possibility of examining the beautiful, pale invader more thoroughly, but he promised himself he would find that opportunity when he was sober enough to exhaustively enjoy the experience.

  Assigning two men to transport Damien and his squad back to base, the sergeant in charge rounded up the alien invaders, put in a call to HQ for an officer, and settled to collecting all of their weapons and then examining the backpacks they’d brought with them.

  Cheyenne wasn’t surprised when he found the diplomatic pouch, but she was dismayed when he opened it to examine it.

  She supposed that it was inevitable under the circumstances. No way would they allow it to be placed in the hands of their leader before it had been thoroughly examined for potential threat, but it would have been nice if there had been someone to at least note that it carried the official seal of the U.S. government.

  She couldn’t summon any sense of philosophical acceptance, though, when she saw that the officer that had been requested was none other than their late ‘guest’.

  “Oh god! Tell me that isn’t the guy they captured and tortured!” one of her squad members whispered unhappily.

  * * * *

  Unlike the soldiers who’d captured them, who’d never encountered a human of Earth, and were three sheets to the wind besides, Lucifer had no difficulty instantly identifying the uniform—which he was far more familiar with than he wanted to be—or the beings wearing them. It did send a jolt through him once he realized the squad was ‘manned’ entirely by females, but he was able to retain his façade of cool indifference and study them objectively.

  He stopped some distance from the group and waited for the sergeant to approach him.

  The packet he delivered had already been broken open, the contents examined, and then stuffed back in without regard to maintaining the no doubt pristine condition they’d been in prior to that point.

  It was, as the leader had claimed, a diplomatic pouch.

  Lucifer shrugged inwardly. He could think of no sane reason to send no more than a squad—and women at that—if the purpose was to start a war.

  He also could not rule it out entirely, given the species they hailed from, but he was inclined to think the offer genuine and not some sort of trap for the unwary.

  So he was mildly irritated at the discovery that the sergeant had rifled through the papers.

  He dismissed it and examined them until he unearthed what appeared to be the cover letter.

  The U.S. government extended their regrets for the misunderstanding that had occurred previously when an agent of their world had approached them requesting aid for a medical emergency. They trusted that the scientists who’d volunteered to help had succeeded in helping to end the global pandemic and were offering the volunteers who’d carried the packet to the people of their world in whatever capacity might be useful to their people.

  They were hopeful that the gift would serve to compensate for the previous misunderstanding and wanted to extend an offer of peace and cooperation for the future—the goal—to unite their worlds and bring about prosperity to both through trade.

  Lucifer read the letter over several times but he could not see a different interpretation that could be placed on it. Granted, they had clearly had some difficulty with the language barrier and written language itself, but it was close enough to correct that he simply couldn’t see any possibility that he’d misread it.

  He certainly hadn’t been prejudiced to interpret it the way he had.

  Shaking his head, he returned the letter to the packet and crossed the stretch of ground that separated him from their ‘gifts’ and examined each—their faces at any rate. The uniforms sufficiently disguised whatever was beneath them to make a judgment impossible.

  When he’d looked them all over, he returned to stand above the female who seemed to be in charge. “Your name, soldier?”

  “Captain Cheyenne Mortenson, Sir.”

  “You are the officer in charge of this squad?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  He nodded. She was young—all of them were—breeding age. He was almost as convinced that their government had offered them for breeding as he was that the females had no clue they’d been given to the people of Nardyl as a gift.

  And that it would be a very bad idea to allow their sovereign to know anything about the offer before he had had a chance to consider it very carefully and discuss it with their newly appointed ruling body.

  He turned to the sergeant. “Take these ….” He hesitated for a heartbeat. “…Soldiers to the base and see that they are housed in a secure location of reasonable comfort while we consider their offer.”

  The sergeant looked dismayed—as well he might since no place that fit both criteria came to mind, but he merely saluted his commanding officer and turned immediately to round the women up and herd them toward a transport.

  Volunteers my ass, Lucifer thought in disgust as he watched the Earth women trudge tiredly toward the skimmer.

  Alien Enslaved:

  Taken

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  Copyright ( c ) Kaitlyn O’Connor September 2017

  Cover Art by Eliza Black, 2017

  New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  www.newconceptspublishing.com

  Chapter One

  The thin, shrill, wail of a trumpet blast far into the distance pierced the joy of the celebration of renewal. As suddenly as if their revelry had been sliced with a knife, the happy laughter ceased, the drums, the lutes, the voices lifted in song, the flirtatious dance. Even the beasts and insects of the forest grew silent, seemed to hold their breath.

  It came again—closer this time, more distinct. Cutting through the swirling fog that had enveloped the forests at dusk, drifting lazily across the faces of the twin moons that had risen to illuminate the landscape, the sound eerie and threatening, it blew a chilling breath across bodies overheated by the wild dance and pebbled skin as it lifted the fine hairs.

  They were coming, it said.

  The sky demons—the Sheloni—that had already swooped from the heavens and wiped out villages up and down the coast in days past were coming for them.

  Coming for their tribe, their people as they had the other villages of the Hirachi, coming to take all that was precious to them.

  Just when they thought the demons had been appeased, and had gone away, and they believed it safe to celebrate the ritual of renewal of all things.

  The war chief’s expression hardened. “They come!” Niles bellowed. “Weapons, warriors! Take your places! Be ready! Watch for the light! That is their weakness! If we put it out, we save our people!”

  He hoped.

  They could only try with all that they were—to the death if necessary.

  As if his voice had broken the spell that held them, the elders and the young--all of those not trained to fight or no longer capable of it fled toward the safety of the sea. The budding warriors took up the rear to protect those unable to protect themselves and fled with them, into the sea, below the waves and into the deep
where they hoped the alien horde could not reach them.

  Warriors took up their pre-arranged positions, waiting in tense silence, vibrating with menace and hatred for the sky people that had taken so much from them already.

  When the trumpets were blown again, they could see the ship skimming just above the tops of the trees as it raced toward them like a charging beast, sending scudding clouds boiling away from it.

  If generations had not already seen the approach, if they had still been innocent of the evils beyond their world, they would no doubt still have been unnerved by what seemed an unnaturally rapid approach of a storm.

  But they knew this beast well by now.

  Generations of Hirachi had disappeared into its maw—never to be seen or heard from again.

  And yet, according to the old ones, the first sky demons had arrived on their world as ‘friends’. In exchange for helping the Hirachi advance their technology, the Sheloni had asked for help in mining their precious mineral.

  Niles supposed it could be said that it was their own greed that had resulted in the downfall of his people, the destruction of the world as they’d known it, the breakdown of their society that had thrown them backwards much further than the technology they had so anxiously sought had taken them forward.

  The Sheloni were cold blooded bastards, but they were clever manipulators.

  It was disgusting how easily they’d turned the Hirachi kingdoms against one another, favoring one above another until they had them fighting among themselves and then handing them the technology to cripple themselves with. Once they’d killed off half their population, destroyed their cities, and lost the technology that supported their civilization, they’d had no recourse except to fall back on their instincts for survival. In three generations they’d gone from a civilized people to barbarians using sticks, and rocks, and clubs to defend themselves and their territory, struggling to merely exist where before they had lived.

  They had fought many battles.

  They had lost all.

  They had lost the battles with the Sheloni.

  And they had lost all that they were before the sky demons had come to prey upon them.

  They had lost their great civilization, their customs, their identity.

  Because everything that they were made them vulnerable and they couldn’t afford to show weakness when preyed upon by the merciless.

  With no way to throw off the yoke they’d allowed the Sheloni to place around their necks to enslave them, to use them to mine their precious mineral, they’d become grimly determined to thwart the Sheloni in any way they were able and those ways were pathetically few—in fact there was only one thing they had managed that had had any effect at all.

  And that one thing had taken the heart out of them.

  The women had begun refusing to mate and procreate—a handful at first and then more each generation, and fewer children with each spawning. They’d refused to provide more fodder for the Sheloni.

  There had been no more than a handful of babes from the last spawning.

  And now there would be no more at all. The women had united at last and had given that up for all, Niles thought grimly.

  He didn’t like it, but he understood the reasoning behind it when he came of age and realized that he could be taken at any time and if he had spawned, if he had fathered a child, he would know that it might be taken at any time.

  It was enough incentive to comply, but not enough to kill the desire.

  But of course, that did not stop them—the Sheloni. Still, they came. Still, they took.

  “Until now,” Niles muttered. “Tonight we win this battle.”

  They had finally discovered a weak spot.

  He had.

  Or believed he had.

  Niles was—almost—certain of it.

  The machine was shielded. They could not see the armor, but there was no doubt at all that it was there because it had repelled even their most powerful weapons.

  The flaw was that neither could they—the Sheloni—pierce it. They must lower it to capture the Hirachi.

  And when they did, this time, the Hirachi would strike a killing blow and bring the evil thing down!

  The last of the most vulnerable tribe members had vanished into the waves behind the army before the machine fully emerged within view and hovered above them. Immediately, the warriors closest to it began to lob their spears, hatchets, hammers and arrows. Not surprisingly, those bounced off and simply fell uselessly to the ground.

  The shields were still up.

  But then the blinding light appeared as the mouth opened.

  “That is the hole they use to suck up the warriors! That is the flaw—the blinding eye of light! Now!” Niles bellowed over the din of battle and the noise of the machine. “Now, warriors! Summon the ‘way’ and destroy them!”

  He heard the hum, rising, as if many at once had focused the ‘way’, the warding, on the devil in the air above them, but then, abruptly, before they had time to project the full force of it, the warriors caught fire and vanished into the maw of the beast.

  Frustration and fury filled him.

  “Focus! Do not waver! Do not wait! You must pour all you have into the warding! Together we will be strong enough to triumph!”

  The thing moved closer to him.

  He gritted his teeth and held his ground as another half dozen warriors disappeared.

  And then it was directly above him and he found himself staring up into the throat of the beast. He began the vibration, built it as rapidly as he could, directing it at the center of the throat, at the place where the blinding light emerged.

  The area around the light began to glow. It turned red and then blue. The heat spread outward.

  He ignored the beams that lapped warriors up like ethereal tongues and sucked them away.

  He began to feel as if he was on fire himself, but he ground his teeth and pushed harder.

  Abruptly, the blinding light vanished, exploded with a strange tinkling sound. The edge of the ‘mouth’ below was blue and white with the heat he had focused upon it.

  A sense of defeat began to envelop him.

  Even as his mind began to accept the unacceptable, though, he noticed a vibration.

  The ship suddenly darted away, back toward the trees as if it could escape its fate.

  It did not make it.

  The explosion was so abrupt, so powerful, that it spread out from the disintegrating craft like a saucer and laid everything in its path on the ground—warriors and trees and the stones of their sacred grounds.

  Niles blacked out.

  When he came to, he could hear nothing but a ringing in his ears. His skull felt as if it would explode. His body felt as if some giant had seized him by the ankles and slammed him into the ground repeatedly. Above him, a cloud of acrid, black smoke drifted, obscuring much of the sky. He could see, though, that the twin moons had not traveled far and that meant he had not lost consciousness for many minutes.

  It took several tries, but he finally managed to sit up. He looked around. Perhaps a third of the warriors sprawled on the ground around him were still in death. The rest were struggling to get up or already upright.

  Bile rose in his throat.

  He swallowed with an effort and, like an ancient one, he rolled onto his knees and then struggled to get to his feet.

  The forest was on fire, he discovered when he had managed to gain his feet, the blaze set by the explosion of the ship—which now lay in broken pieces across the torn landscape. He stared at it for many moments, absorbing the truth of it, disbelieving, feeling none of the things he had expected to feel—no sense of relief. No triumph.

  “We must see if we can find anyone who was taken before we brought the monster down!” he bellowed, unable to hear his own voice clearly for the ringing in his ears.

  The command seemed to register, however. The survivors staggered toward the wreckage and began trying to peer into it.

  Frowning
, struggling, it took Niles a few moments to organize his thoughts and then he summoned the youths who’d taken shelter in their city beneath the sea to bring water to put out the fires.

  The entire village emerged, began to voice their excitement and jubilation. The Hirachi warriors had brought down the flying machine of the evil Sheloni!

  Niles knew they were simply venting their relief, but he was not in the mood to celebrate. They had lost too many warriors in the battle to bring it down for him to feel like celebrating.

  He accepted the praise with as good a grace as he could muster, therefore, and focused on putting out the fires to dig out whoever might be saved.

  They removed bodies.

  And the jubilation died and the weeping of the elders began.

  Slowly but surely, they dug through until they had counted every warrior—lost or found injured but alive.

  They dragged their enemy from the wreckage and tossed them into a pile—living and dead—and set them on fire.

  And then, just as dawn broke, they came upon something that stunned them.

  * * * *

  There was a reason Cara didn’t have pets.

  She didn’t need the company in her busy life and she damned sure didn’t need the financial drain or the aggravation!

  But it was the very fact that she didn’t have a pet that seemed to inspire her friends and co-workers to think she was the perfect sitter for theirs!

  And she was a pushover.

  In general, everyone that knew her knew that if they pestered her long enough she was going to buckle. It didn’t matter what it was that they wanted or how determined Cara was not to do it or give in, unless she could somehow avoid them long enough for them to give up, she caved.

  That was how she’d ended up sitting for Duke—the Great Dane.

  And if Peggy knew just how badly she wanted to kill the bastard she would have found someone else to watch her darling!

  The bastard had shit piles all over her damned apartment—because he was bored and pissed off that she didn’t have time to walk him three times a day. He’d chewed up every pair of shoes she owned and strung the kitchen garbage from the kitchen to her bedroom, where he’d polished off his reign of terror by squatting in the middle of her bed for one last poop, and then wiped his ass on her sheets.