by Juno Wells
Alien Dragon's Mate: Braxan
Juno Wells and Luna Cassini
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
ALIEN DRAGON'S MATE: BRAXAN
First edition. September 12, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 Juno Wells and Luna Cassini.
Written by Juno Wells and Luna Cassini.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Alien Dragon's Mate: Braxan
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Epilogue
About this book:
Amelia Moore is in love with an alien.
His name is Braxan. He's drop-dead gorgeous, confident to the point of cockiness and he makes love like a god. And he's saved her life too many times to count.
Amelia lives on a human colony on the planet Belzon, but was kidnapped by the repulsive Pirgk aliens that want to destroy the peaceful settlement. Braxan saved her from them, and now they're running together on an alien planet that seems dead set on killing them both.
But Braxan isn't just any alien. He's the most fearsome and deadly enemy mankind has: an Ultra Draco, both man and dragon. And curvy Amelia is his Fated Mate.
Amelia doesn't know how lethal he is. She just hopes they will reach her home colony before the aliens wipe them all out. And before Braxan dies of the poisoned wound in his chest. A wound that Amelia gave him...
Alien Dragon's Mate: Braxan is a standalone full-length romance novel with steamy scenes, a Happy Ever After and no cliffhangers!
It is the first book in the Ultra Draco series of steamy standalone romance novels.
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1
- Amelia -
“Does this look weird to you?”
Battle raged outside, but inside the command center it was eerily quiet, and Amelia's voice sounded far too loud in her own ears. She zoomed in on a small part of the live map on the screen that filled one wall of the six-sided room. It showed the area around the base as seen from above, and something on it didn't make sense.
The alien attackers were visible on the screen as red dots, and the human defenders of the base were marked in green. On the live map it looked like a thin, sparsely dotted green line with an unbroken mass of red oozing slowly down the screen towards it.
Hanson glanced up from his console, then looked back down. “No. That's fine.”
Amelia zoomed in further. Now the defenders of the colony Belzon Base could be seen as living people, still from above, marked in green. They were entrenched with their guns, pretty safe behind metal cover. The aggressive Pirgk aliens were running towards them. They moved clumsily, but still just as fast as any sprinting human could.
She frowned. There was definitely something strange there. “It looks like they're coming slower than they have before. And their formation is unusual. As if they're waiting for something, ready to get out of the way.”
This time Hanson didn't even look up. “Let's not get jittery now, Moore. We'll beat them and send them on their way as always.”
Amelia looked around the command center. The dim red light was standard for when the base was under attack, and it made the tension stronger. They were six people in there, but none of the other five met her gaze. They were too busy with their own consoles, doing their best to keep the now overworked automatic defenses running. And they all knew that disagreeing with Hanson was not a great career move. He was the base commander, and he had close to unlimited power over all the six hundred people living on the planet Belzon fifty-one light years from Earth.
Amelia took a deep breath and emptied her mind, then looked back on the live map that filled one wall of the base control room.
Yep, that's wasn't right at all. It wasn't just jitters.
“It looks like they're ready to pull back,” she tried again. “Like they're going to use a new weapon or something-”
Hanson cut her off. “Moore, I know there are more Pirgks coming than we're used to. But this is not the time to lose your nerve. The guns can easily handle this many.”
Amelia tapped her lips with one finger. He had a point. Whenever Earth's Outward Expansion built a peaceful civilian base on an alien planet, they also gave it large automated guns placed strategically around it. Just in case. A portion of the colonists, all civilians, were also given basic military training to defend the base if aliens attacked. That happened rarely, but when it did, the Earthlings almost always won. It turned out that possibly the only good thing about Earth's violent history was that human colonists were much better at strategic thinking than most aliens, and would usually win against even large alien forces. Even if they had never been in the military.
Usually. Not always. Here on Belzon, the Pirgks had taken them by surprise the first time. And the consequences had not been pretty.
The red dots on the screen milled around, almost aimlessly. Amelia felt a hollowness in her stomach. The Pirgks were definitely not acting like they usually did, just running towards the base and trying to overwhelm it with sheer force of number. Why couldn't anyone else see it?
A point on the live map flashed white as a robotic drone fired a missile at a carefully calculated point in the mass of enemies and halted about a fifth of them in their tracks.
“Can't do much more of that,” Bheni said under her breath from the drone control console beside Amelia. “Five missiles left now. On the whole base.”
Amelia nodded. The ammunition stores were close to depleted. No one had expected an alien enemy as numerous or tenacious as the Pirgks, and the colonists had to spend almost as much time defending themselves as doing science and mining titanium and growing crops and making exotic alloys in the complex of various domes that was Belzon Base.
One whole dome and thirty colonists were permanently assigned to making ammunition for the guns now, and it ruined the finely tuned balance of work and services that remote bases depended on. They were supposed to be self-sustaining, but with five percent of their people doing something that didn't contribute much to the running of the base, everything else was thrown into disarray.
But Amelia was privileged. Her station during attacks was here in the control room, safe behind titanium airlocks and triple-strengthened walls. Before she shipped out from Earth to help mankind peacefully colonize space, she had been given a little bit of military training. But her experience with computers had made her more valuable here in the control room than out on the sandy surface of Belzon whenever the enemy attacked. Which they did a lot.
Damn. Those Pirgks were still not behaving like they should, and it was getting more and more obvious that they were ready to retreat at a moment's notice. There was no conviction in their attack.
She cleared her voice. “Sir, I recommend that all forces be pulled back and inside the fortified domes.”
Now it was out there.
A formal recommendation. Even Hanson couldn't ignore that.
“Second that,” Bheni said in support. “They're not moving right. They're definitely up to something.”
“Now you two just settle the hell down,” Hanson snapped. “You're supposed to be trained in this. Yes, they're more than we've seen before. No, we don't have unlimited bullets. But yes, we can and will push them back. One of us is worth a thousand of them in battle, you know what.”
Amelia clenched her fists and the fingernails bored into her palms. It was so obvious to her!
She zoomed in further, so everyone in the room could see the strange behavior of the Pirgks as clearly as possible. And now there were some concerned murmurs among the others, too.
But still Hanson looked down on his own screen, demonstratively refusing to even glance up.
Shit. That was it. Amelia couldn't give orders to the defenders outside. What could she-
Something flashed on the screen and caught her attention. A blue square that came and went. “Oh shit,” she muttered. That could not be good. And whatever had to be done about it should be done right now.
“Sir, request permission to leave Control and join the battle on the surface.”
“Granted,” Hanson barked before she had finished her sentence. “That's probably a much better place for you.”
Yeah, he was probably just relieved to get her out of there. Amelia ran to the exit, slapped the door controls, grabbed a medpack and a railgun and left the safety of the control room. The door slammed shut behind her and she took a lungful of sulfuric alien air.
“You better be right about this, girl,” she muttered to herself and ran across the pink sand, towards the place where she'd seen a blue square flash on the screen. “Return tickets to Earth are not cheap.”
The air was chilly and felt thinner than on Earth, but she knew it contained enough oxygen to be perfectly breathable. She'd lived on Belzon for seven months and hardly noticed the bad smell anymore.
The largest of the planet's three suns was setting, and it threw long and very dark shadows across the battlefield. She could see the Pirgks in the distance, moving in their own ungainly way. Whenever they attacked, she did her best not to zoom in on them with any cameras, because it gave her the creeps to look at them from close up. They were basically human-like, with two legs and two arms, but they looked like badly misshapen attempts at making a living being. They had yellowish, translucent skin that showed the organs underneath, dirty-looking tufts of yellow-gray hair everywhere and faces that were distorted and asymmetrical and full of revolting growths. Jumbles of brown teeth stuck out of their mouths at odd angles, and the little dark pinholes that were their eyes revealed no emotions. Their ears were simple, white skin flaps that hung down and probably kept sound out instead of amplifying it like a human ear. They were like horrific caricatures of monsters, usually were larger than the average human. The rags and skins they sometimes wore made them look terrifyingly primitive.
Amelia didn't want to get too close, and the point where she had seen the blue square was closer to the Pirgk front line than she wanted to go. But she had come this far, and there was no way for her to get back inside the control dome now.
She clutched the heavy railgun in her hand and cursed herself for not picking a smaller weapon. No one liked the railguns much. They were long, heavy, unwieldy and hard to use. They were extremely powerful, and one shot from it could easily stop a truck from fifty miles an hour to a dead stop instantly, her gun instructor had told her. But it was cumbersome to carry and it slowed her down. Still, the idea of being this close to the Pirgks without a gun in her hands sent a shiver down her spine.
And then she saw where to go. She ran for another few yards and then threw herself down on the sand beside a bundle of dirty fabrics about the same size as her. Brown hair stuck out of what had to be the head.
A blue square on the screen meant a human. An unarmed human.
“You alive?” Amelia hissed and looked around. She could see some Pirgks, and they were only a hundred yards away. Far too close.
A thin moan escaped the other person. “I think so.”
A woman?
Amelia put her arm around her and turned her slightly over. In the weird light from the alien sun it was hard to be sure, but it looked like the sand under the woman was darker than around it.
“Are you hurt?”
“Yeah ...” It came as a whimper, and it made Amelia worry. An injured unarmed colonist here on the battlefield, about to be run down by Pirgks and whatever they were waiting for ... it would not be good.
“It's okay,” Amelia said, completely against her gut feeling. “Who are you? Science or mining?”
“Biodome,” the woman groaned, and there was something familiar with the voice ...
Amelia gently took hold of the fabric covering the other woman's face and pulled it up. Then she froze. “Jean?”
“Hi, Amelia,” Jean said. Her face was so pale that Amelia started fearing for the her life. “Shouldn't you be inside?”
“You escaped? No, wait – don't talk. We'll get you inside the base. Can you walk?”
Jean pulled up a sheet of fabric around her stomach and Amelia had to suppress a gasp. It was soaked in blood. “I don't think I can.”
Amelia looked around again. The Pirgks were further away now. They were obviously withdrawing. Whatever they were expecting was about to happen. And the defenders were about to be taken by surprise because Hanson couldn't listen.
She ripped the medpack open and gently opened the layers of fabric that covered Jean's abdomen. There was an ugly wound in her stomach, and it was bleeding profusely. Amelia thought fast. That was much more than the little medpack was designed to deal with.
She dug down into the little pack and got out the burn sheet. It was not designed to work on bleeding wounds, but it had some properties that might work here. She opened the sterile vacuum pack and got out the sheet.
“Help me hold your clothing back,” she said, and Jean pulled the front of her shirt up. Amelia placed the thin sheet on Jean's abdomen, across the wound. Then she patted it close to the skin with fingers that were slick with cleansing nanogel.
“That should do it,” she said, making sure to sound more confident than she felt. But if the patient thought there was a chance, then that would often be enough for them to pull through even pretty bad situations that could otherwise kill them.
Amelia had no idea why those thoughts went through her mind. She wasn't even a medic.
The burn sheet looked like it was stopping the bleeding, and Amelia shifted her gaze to Jean's face. The other woman was staring right up into the sky, and for a second Amelia thought she had died.
Then the wounded woman blinked, and Amelia realized that she was staring at something up in the sky.
Amelia rolled around.
There were some large birds up there, right over the horizon.
No, they were larger than any birds could ever be. And they were coming closer very fast. They didn't look like airplanes or space fighters, because there were parts of them that appeared to be moving, like short wings beating slowly, majestically.
She frowned. Those things sure looked like ...
“Are those dragons?” The wounded woman had raised her head a tiny bit.
Amelia's hair had come loose and she stroked it out of her face. There were four of them. They were coming in low and they seemed to have different colors and flowing tails. Sure, there were many strange things in space, and most of them were hostile. Mankind had found that out as soon as the first alien attackers had come along a few decades earlier. But mythical beasts from ancient legends? Surely they couldn't be ...
As if acting on a command, all four flying things swooped down on the gun towers and defenders around the base.
Then they spewed fire. Piercing, hard flames, intensely bright and each easily as long as the being's bodies. The intensity of the light was such that Amelia had to look aw
ay, even if she was at least a mile distant. A new sun was about to rise, but even in the crosslight between the setting white sun and the rising red one, the light from the dragons' fire was so intense that it cast long shadows on the sand.
She saw gun towers explode, drones falling from the sky and she heard the short screams from human defenders as their armor was burned off them like paper and they were incinerated within a second.
She winced in sympathy and felt a block of ice settle in her stomach. That was ... bad.
But at least there was no doubt anymore. She grabbed her railgun and clutched it so hard she could hear the metal creak.
“Yeah,” she said with a mouth that was suddenly dry, and she could not keep her voice from trembling. “Those are dragons.”
2
- Amelia -
She got up and stood there, looking on powerlessly as the dragons swooped again and again, incinerating the now wildly fleeing base defenders. She saw some of them shooting at the dragons, but no one had expected the Pirgks to have air support. All the drones had been burned out of the sky, and the gun turrets had gone silent.
The dragons pulled further up in the air. But one of them, shining like gold, circled once over the battlefield where there were only a few defenders left. It was the most elegant thing Amelia had ever seen. No eagle had ever soared as majestically as this dragon did, no dancer had ever moved with this agility. It had a hypnotic quality, because it seemed to Amelia that it was just ... perfect.
Then it picked up its head and suddenly looked right towards her.
“Oh fuck,” she said and instinctively hit the ground again to be as small a target as possible.
The dragon lost interest in the remaining defenders and came zooming right in Amelia's direction. She winced. That could not be good.
It came closer and closer, lower and lower. At any moment it would blow its white hot flame at her and incinerate her and the wounded woman, burning the flesh from their bones in a heartbeat.
Damn. It looked like this was the end for her. She had never thought she'd die in Outward Expansion duty. Sure, some bases were risky, but it wasn't something she had thought much about. Most people who went into space as colonists had great experiences and interesting lives. Amelia had that, too. Until just about now. Because this ... yeah, this she hadn't seen coming.
