Tiny and Fierce
Her Alien Crew Book 1
Margo Bond Collins
Eli Constant
Dangerous Words Publishing
Contents
About Tiny and Fierce
1. Tommelise Klein
2. Alder Regulus
3. Evik of the Chilchek
4. Morpheus Madagar
5. Tommelise
6. Alder
7. Evik
8. Morpheus
9. Tommelise
10. Alder
11. Evik
12. Morpheus
13. Tommelise
14. Alder
15. Evik
16. Morpheus
17. Tommelise
18. Alder
19. Evik
20. Morpheus
21. Tommelise
Epilogue: Blue
About Margo Bond Collins
Books by Margo Bond Collins
About Eli Constant
Books by Eli Constant
More from the authors
Bound
Bound: An Excerpt
Entered in the Alien Bride Lottery
Tiny and Fierce
Copyright © 2020 by Margo Bond Collins and Eli Constant
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.
Published by Dangerous Words Publishing
Cover by Wilde Book Designs
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.
Created with Vellum
About Tiny and Fierce
In a galaxy where humans are considered the least of all races, she’ll build a crew that adores her strength and style.
When Lise Klein took over her family’s deep-space salvage company, she never expected to stumble through a wormhole into a whole other galaxy full of strange alien races ruled by a cruel empress.
She learns she’s not the first human to wind up there—but the others were captured and sold as slaves. She’ll have to fight to survive.
All she wants is to find a way home. But when she takes on a crew of alien conmen, she finds something truly worth fighting for.
Now, to stay alive, they may have to free the entire system. Luckily for all of them, Lise may be little, but she’s tough.
Her Alien Crew is a slow-burn sci fi reverse harem romance featuring a fae prince with a giant ego and a smart mouth, an insectoid Chilchek warrior with a sensitive soul, and a mysterious, brooding fighter with the wings of a dragonfly—plus an illegally enhanced AI ship captained by one tiny human with room enough in her heart for them all.
Fans of Grace Goodwin, Ruby Dixon, Anna Zaires, and Rebecca Royce will love this hot new whychoose sci-fi romance .
Scroll up and one-click Tiny and Fierce now!
1
Tommelise Klein
“You’re a cheat and a liar!”
I didn’t turn to find the source of the voice. It had nothing to do with me.
After a heartbeat, I realized the translation running from The Bluebird to the communication device implanted behind my ear didn’t come with its usual delay.
“Way to go, Blue,” I whispered. “You’re getting better at this.”
My ship’s AI snorted in my ear. “I didn’t translate that.”
Frowning, I spun around on my too-tall barstool, designed for creatures much larger than any human. In the corner of the spaceport bar, a Chilchek warrior unfolded himself to his full height—easily seven feet, not counting his pincer horns. Those added at least another three feet to his height.
Even in the dim lighting preferred by most of the bar’s patrons, the royal blue of the Chilchek’s chitinous body gleamed, the color a sure sign that he was male. The facets of his eyes twirled in shades of blue and green. He lifted all four of the legs—arms?—attached to his thorax and pointed them at the man he was facing off against.
Man. As in human male.
I gasped, my eyes widening. No wonder Blue hadn’t had to translate his speech.
A series of clicks and snaps came from the mandibles around the Chilcheck’s mouth. A heartbeat later, Blue’s translation came through. You dare dishonor my colony name? I will squash you like the tiny bug you are.
Bug? That was a bit rich, coming from a Chilchek. I bit down on a giggle and leaned in closer to watch the drama unfolding before me.
The Chilchek leaned forward over the table, looming over the man, who glanced around nervously before taking a step back, giving me a clear look at his face.
And oh, my hot, heavenly stars, he was gorgeous.
Not just because he was the first human I’d seen in months and months.
No, he was flat-out handsome. Dark hair, wide luminous eyes, full lips, high cheekbones.
Quit it, Lise, I scolded myself. No matter how long I’d been stuck here, I wasn’t in this freakshow of an alien bar looking to get laid. I needed a crew.
The Chilchek dropped all four forelegs onto the table, scattering the cards and currency that presumably made up the game they had been playing moments before.
Taking another step back, the human finally replied, raising his own arms as if to ward off the alien warrior. “Fine. If you say you weren’t cheating, then there’s no problem. I don’t want any trouble.”
Most of the players had pulled back from the table and were now, along with the rest of the bar’s patrons, focused on the confrontation.
Any second now, one of the two combatants would lunge for the other and the whole place would erupt in fighting. Time to get out.
I tossed some coins on the table to pay for my drink—Blue had translated its name as a Galactic Blaster—and dropped off the stool to stand on the sticky metal floor beneath. But just as I turned to leave, I noticed one of the players step in closer to the table. This one looked more human than not, but built on a bigger scale. And with beautiful, multicolored metal wings on his back. He wore an eyepatch over one eye. With his single good eye, he shot a glance at the human, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.
What was going on here?
With an audible screech of his mandibles, the Chilchek scuttled across the table, employing all six of his appendages as legs, his pincer horns snapping closed inches from the man’s face.
Cursing, the human picked up a nearby chair and swung it toward the Chilchek.
The rest of the bar exploded, everyone drunk and itching for a fight.
The butterfly guy, though, took advantage of the distraction and swept all the currency off the table and into a bag.
Another alien staggered back from a blow someone had landed on its face and bumped into me, almost sitting in my lap. I pushed it off me and focused on the two who had started this bar brawl. They were still lunging, but neither had made contact.
This was a setup. They planned it all.
Without stopping to second-guess myself, I ducked and wove through the reeling crowd until I reached the back-entrance butterfly guy had slipped out through.
If my guess was right, I might have just found the crew I’d been looking for.
The exit led to the delivery corridors running throughout the station. Unlike the bars, these were well lit. Also less sticky. The walls and floor were a boring, uniform gray.
I glanced in each direction. To my right, I caught a glimpse of the butterfly guy as he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. Easing the door shut behind me, I moved as quickly and quiet
ly as I could to follow him.
A few minutes later, I came around another corner in time to see an exit to the main concourse as it swung shut. I caught it an inch before it closed, holding the heavy door open enough to watch my quarry slide into a seat at the concourse-facing counter in what I would have called a coffee shop back home. Not that they served anything like coffee.
God, I miss coffee.
I let the thought fade away as I watched. A moment later, the Chilchek warrior lowered his bottom half into a crouch at the counter next to the butterfly guy. And not long afterward, the beautiful human took a seat on the other side.
I couldn’t see them communicating, but I was sure they were about to split their take and go.
“It’s now or never,” I murmured.
“What is?” Blue demanded.
I ignored the ship’s query and pulled the door wide, stepping through with a confidence I didn’t feel.
I never intended to end up on a space station full of aliens in some distant corner of the universe. Hell, before I got sucked through a wormhole and landed in the middle of this godsawful galaxy, I didn’t even know aliens existed.
No. I’d lived happily enough in my own galaxy, where I’d worked in my parents’ space salvage business, scavenging whatever we could find in abandoned asteroid mining camps and old shipwrecks floating in the void. All the flotsam and jetsam humans left behind in their desperate attempt to expand ever outward in the blackness of space.
That’s how I found Blue—officially The Bluebird—back when I was just a teenager. Her crew, a six-man outfit out of the Mars colony, had been drilling for water on a planetoid out in the Öpik–Oort cloud and contracted some virus that had been hiding in the ice for millions of years. They were still on the ship when I entered, their bodies flash-frozen when the AI vented the atmosphere after they all died.
Before they died, though, they set a plague-ship warning to keep other humans away.
They didn’t count on the determination of a teenage space junker looking to bring in a haul.
Blue had been half-crazy by the time I found her, alone in the inky dark for more than sixty years—a virtual eternity in computer time. I’d managed to jettison the bodies and interior items, decon the ship, and take her over. My parents wanted me to sell her, but I refused.
We’d been constant companions ever since.
Then, two months ago, Blue and I had been out past the Öpik–Oort, when we stumbled into an uncharted wormhole. It pulled us in and shot us out not 500 light-years from this hellhole of a space station. Then it closed back up, leaving me stranded.
I’d managed to trade some of the junk I had on board for a translator and a docking berth for Blue. We spent our days out searching for a way home. But I was running low on provisions, fuel, and stuff to trade. It was time to start figuring out how to make a living here.
And to do that, I needed locals. People who knew how the local system worked.
I needed a crew.
And a crew that could con the locals? Perfect for a junker like me.
The concourse was always busy, aliens of all descriptions moving through their daily tasks, hawkers calling out in a multitude of languages, so many that Blue didn’t even try to translate for me. As I stepped out of the hallway and headed toward the not-coffee shop, the Chilchek’s mandibles moved and the human’s head snapped up. As his gaze met mine, his eyes grew wide.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself, picking up my pace.
I came to a stop in front of them as they all three stood as if to leave.
“Wait. Don’t go.” I held my hands in front of me as if to show them I was unarmed—not that it would mean anything to anyone except the human.
He muttered something out of the corner of his mouth, and they all paused.
Even though all four of his lower legs were on the ground, the Chilchek’s horns still brushed the ceiling. He’ll have to crouch just to walk through the corridors of The Bluebird. I brushed the random thought away.
“Well?” the human asked after a long, silent moment.
“I want to hire you,” I blurted out. “I’m looking for a crew. And I want you three.”
2
Alder Regulus
“A crew?” I quirked an eyebrow as the cochlear language translator worked its magic. Not that I needed the implant to tell me what she’d just said; the nobility on my planet was well-versed in the three main ancient Earth languages. English, a variation of which my people typically spoke. Mandarin Chinese. Spanish. I even knew a few phrases in French, though France was culturally absorbed in the twenty-seventh century during the fourth world war. Not long after countries started sending ark ships into space.
I had a fondness, though, for historic Paris. I’d tried to talk my parents into building an Eiffel Tower replica in the palace garden some years back.
“Yes, a crew,” the woman repeated, tapping her foot as her gaze darted around. She was obviously used to being on guard, accustomed to sussing out trouble. She cocked her head, squinting slightly as if listening to something intently.
She was human, a full-blood and a late-generation off-worlder, and she was using the dialect lilts of what we’d call junker pirates. I wouldn’t be surprised if she dropped a bit of salvager slang and tossed back a pint of starshine, a barely potable beverage fermented in big copper reservoirs that was so potent it was basically an illegal substance across the known universe. Junkers excelled at making that particular poison.
I tossed Morph and then Evik quick glances. We worked well together, but only because we made a plan, executed said plan, and then we ‘got the hell out of Dodge’, as they said in Old-Earth-speak.
“We’re not exactly the types.” I smiled at her, knowing my mouth would spread just a little too wide to look exactly human. And if she peeked behind my ears, she’d see the three small, sharp lines. Flaps, opening and closing gently. A mutation, after years of interspecies breeding. The air on my home planet had a higher concentration of carbon dioxide than Earth. Adaptation came with the territory.
No. Evik made a single click, agreeing with me. I tried to ignore the accompanying scent wafting from the Chilchek.
Morpheus said nothing.
The girl crossed her arms and frowned, a little wrinkle forming between her perfectly formed eyebrows.
“Blue, just wait a minute.” The woman bit her lower lip, shuffling her feet uncomfortably. Then she squared her shoulders and tried to look tough. She’d have managed it too, if she wasn’t shorter than literally everyone around her and had the kind of face you program into a pleasure unit to get your space rocks off to. Nebula-blue eyes, pink pouting lips, and long sunrise-gold hair swept over her shoulder in a tight braid. It took all my willpower not to stare at her hungrily, given that the tight black suit left little to the imagination. If her breasts were that pert beneath the Kevlar…
Maybe I wouldn’t mind being on a ship with her. Close quarters. Only so much to do. Eventually, we’d run out of things to talk about. And then, I might see exactly what she looked like underneath the tight suit.
I shoved my hands into my pockets, fingers playing with the miniature atomizer sewn into the inner seam. Even the best security officers typically missed that hidden dandy. It had gotten me out of a fair few scuffles. I didn’t think I’d need it now; the woman seemed like she could hold her own in a fight, but not against three of us. Besides, I’d rather see her cuffed in my bed versus cuffed in a Galaxia police cell.
“Wait, listen. I can make it worth your while. Just hear me out.” Her ocean gaze passed over each of our faces, hope and hopelessness alternating in her expression.
“No crew.” Morpheus sat back down, his iridescent flight prosthetics brushing the floor with a cringey screech. Automatically, he raised them a fraction, tucking the lower two wings higher beneath the uppers.
“Blue, dammit, just hold on.” She pressed her index finger to her right ear momentarily, as if that could block out the noise
that was distracting her. She took a step forward, a taint of desperation seeping into her speech, though she quickly controlled herself again. “Look, I’m alone. I have no one. I can’t get back home, and I need to survive here. I’ve been making ends meet, selling enough to get by, but if I had a crew, I know I could turn a profit that would make your gambling take look like table scraps. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. I’ve got the chops and I’ve got one hell of a ship.”
“You’re trying to build your cocoon in the wrong tree, lady.” Morpheus didn’t even look at her when he spoke, two of his four jointed arms wrapped around a steaming mug of fish oil. He’d eat about anything smaller than he was, which opened up a wide damn world of cuisine, but he’d found aquatic fare to be his favorite. Which meant eating with him smelled like a fish market back home.
I shrugged, glancing away from Morpheus and back at the woman. Evik had been quiet since his singular ‘no’ earlier.
“Look, Morph’s got a nose for these things. If he’s not interested—”
She cut me off, taking another step forward so that she was so close I could smell her. Floral notes and spice. If she smelled like that, I couldn’t help but wonder what she tasted like.
“Well, I’ve got a nose for conmen and I know the way to the security deck.”
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