by Vi Voxley
Alien Warlords’ Baby
Warlords of Octava
Vi Voxley
Contents
A Little Taste…
Copyright
1. Riley
2. Harbor
3. Cole
4. Riley
5. Cole
6. Harbor
7. Riley
8. Riley
9. Harbor
10. Riley
11. Cole
12. Riley
13. Harbor
14. Cole
15. Riley
16. Riley
17. Cole
18. Harbor
19. Riley
20. Cole
21. Riley
22. Harbor
23. Riley
24. Cole
25. Riley
26. Riley
27. Cole
28. Harbor
29. Riley
30. Riley
31. Cole
32. Harbor
33. Riley
34. Cole
35. Riley
Epilogue
Alien Warlords’ Heir Excerpt
About the Author
Thank you for reading!
A Little Taste…
One by one, they scrambled into the cramped space of the ship and strapped themselves in. Riley came last, looking around in wonder, her sharp gray eyes taking in everything while the others seemed focused on the apparent danger.
"Miss Riley," Cole stopped her when she was about to climb into the ship.
The female stopped, a small smile playing on her full pink lips, a questioning look in her eyes.
"Yes, Commander?" she asked, unaware how very obvious her attraction was. "Is there something wrong?"
Nothing could be wrong around you, not now, not ever.
"No," Cole said, grinning, as the last of the other Terrans swept by them, leaving only the last seats empty. "I just wanted to make sure you got a seat next to me."
She covered her surprise well. Just for a moment, the smile widened, brightening her up in a way Cole didn't think he could ever forget. The image of her, shining in the daylight, was instantly embedded in his heart.
"I see," Riley said quietly. "What earned me the honor, then?"
"You ask good questions," Harbor replied for him, coming to stand beside them, his dark eyes eating her up.
The sight sent furious pulses through Cole. To see him look at his – their – fated like that was almost unbearable.
If Riley noticed, she didn't give them any clue of that. Giving them another long look, she let Cole help her into the ship. Her soft hand in his made his body roam with electricity. The commander wanted so much more, needed every inch of her to be his, but there would be plenty of time for that.
He had only just found her. They had all the time in the world to be together.
Until then, the way her fingers squeezed his was enough to feel her racing pulse and know she felt the bond too, even if she didn't recognize it yet.
Cole and Harbor were the last to board the hovership and it took off towards the reinforced station they'd picked for the refuge of the Terrans.
Both of them remained standing, towering above Riley as she sat, sneaking glances at them. Her hands were shaking a little.
Cole had never been so impatient to finish with his duties as in that moment. All he wanted was to hold her in his arms, to feel that gorgeous curvy body lean against his. The moans he'd tease from her...
"I'm glad I decided to come," Riley said, smiling, as the hovership sped away towards their future.
I am glad you came as well.
Copyright © 2017 Vi Voxley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Alien Warlords’ Baby
Warlords of Octava
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Vi Voxley. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
Cover © Jack of Covers
1
Riley
"You want me to go where now!?" Riley North bellowed at her editor.
Then she looked up from the dimly glowing tablet in her hands, ignoring the glare of the man seven star systems away, and listened.
"Hold on for a second. Real, important things are happening here," she told the man.
The superheated missile flew by one of the last standing buildings in the war-torn city of Hagel. Inside, Riley felt the foundation of the tower rock a little and the building threatened to topple. Like a man with one foot up in the air, ready to go, it swayed dizzily – a nerve-wrecking thing to experience in a thousand-ton weighing construction.
Riley looked out of the window, seeing the landscape shift as the tower fought hard against the lure of gravity and then toppled back to its initial position.
She imagined she could hear the collective sigh of the hundreds of souls in the building and the clenching of some assholes. That had been a particularly nasty missile there.
At the same time, they were all far too accustomed to it to really pay attention to it. That was the nature of their current predicament.
Then she turned her eyes back to the blinking tablet, which somehow managed to be a million times more annoying than the precarious warzone she was currently in.
"As I was saying," Rowan growled at her. "I want you to seek help for your clearly suicidal tendencies and work with the living for a change."
The editor of Objectively Terra looked like a shaved bear. In her heart, Riley had always suspected that to find someone crazy enough to want a middle management position in publishing, they went to the zoo, stole a grizzly and shaved it.
Stuffed into a suit, smoking a large cigar made of some tree about to go extinct, Rowan was perfect for the job.
Riley liked him. His no-bullshit attitude pushed her when she was reluctant to pick up a new story and kept her grounded when she wanted to chase something so fantastic it couldn't be properly written about.
"No, no," she protested instead, furious and angry, gesturing at her boss with chopsticks and a bowl of brown rice.
Everything was brown in Hagel.
"What you want," Riley went on, "is to take me away from a major conflict that affects billions of people all across the Alliance and stick me with a weepy, tear-jerking book about some damn fated bonds! Do I look like I write for a woman's magazine? I'm a war journalist, I'm a serious holojournalist, I–"
"Shut it," Rowan cut in, blowing a huff of smoke onto his own screen, obscuring his bearish image from Riley for a blessed second. "Also, go to hell."
"Gladly," Riley replied with the same level of aplomb. "There's probably something happening there worth reporting. Nothing is happening with the Gargons’ bonds. They've always been there. Now they suddenly started bonding with Terrans. That's the end of story. What is there to write about?"
Rowan stared at her, his dark brows frowning at her. He was very good at that. With a mane of dark hair that had probably never seen a comb and eyebrows as fluffy as a bed in a five-star hotel, Rowan was born to handle grouchy rep
orters. Such as her, Riley knew.
"Let me put it this way," the man said, leaning back on his enormous leather chair.
In the background, Riley saw the light of Terra. A tinge of bitter longing shot through her that she ignored. It had been a while since she'd set her foot on the birthplace of humanity. Nothing and no one waited for her there, yet the deep, existential pull stayed.
Someday, Riley promised.
"You write good books. Very good books. Engaging and all that shit. I even read your last one on the crapper, couldn't put it down. The missus nagged my ear off for that."
"You're a charmer of women, Rowan, don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise."
"I don't," the editor replied from somewhere inside the cloud of cigar smoke in his office. "Now, kid. Do you want to know what the readers thought of your good book?"
"I don't care about critics or statics," Riley said grimly, her attention shifting away from the screen for a moment. "It was a story that had to be written."
Of course she knew what the critics were saying. It was quite flattering, but the paycheck for it had been less so.
"Yeah?" Rowan asked. "And do you know how many people care about important things? Fuck-all, that's how many. The war could be in their front yard and they couldn't be bothered to look out of their window if some reality TV series about Gargon hunks is on. For god's sake, no one wants to read about cities being melted and people dying in droves. It’s depressing!"
"That's what's happening," Riley protested feebly, knowing she'd lost the argument a while ago. "The Eridons are destroying the outer rim of the Alliance. They're here. Kidnapping. There were ten thousand women lost last month. The Iron League is coming for us..."
"The Eridons are everywhere," Rowan said, and for once his voice was serious. "You know the difference between Hagel and Octava? Gargons don't get butchered. Gargons fight back. The medieval sword swinging barbarians are winning, which is a rare occurrence with the asshole Eridons.
"I thank the gods every day that Terra is in the center of the Alliance, although no alien would ever touch the missus if she's in one of her moods."
Riley considered it.
In that much at least, Rowan was right. Octava was the home planet of the Gargons and Gargons were the sword and the shield of the Confederated Alliance of Species, or simply the Alliance, which also protected Terra. The warriors there fought back against any threat to the security of the Alliance and they had made a habit of winning their wars against the League – the part of the galaxy interested only in fucking others over.
Gargons weren't bad. The story was bad.
"So send me there to write about the war effort," Riley prompted hopefully. "I can do that. Drop me on one of their warships and I can get to the front lines of this conflict, give you a real reportage..."
"As I said, kid, no one cares," Rowan said, shrugging. "You see, the attacks haven't reached Terra yet. You can cry "stupid, ignorant fucks!" all day but it's not our problem until it is. Until then.
"Maybe, just maybe I know what I'm doing. The Alliance is afraid. Go to Octava and write a nice book about the fated bonds and stuff it with however much reportage as you want, I'll cut out half of it anyway. Do that and you'll give people hope, something they actually want to read.
"And maybe then they’ll tune in when you let them know that the universe as they know it is ending. Again."
Riley looked at her editor, still staring at her with all the good humor of a wrecking ball as though he was preparing for a long fight. It wouldn't have been the first time. Her last boss used to order lunch in when he knew that he had to propose a problematic duty to Riley.
Another missile flew by and she glanced out of the window. It had been a while since she'd seen anything other than brown, gray and the occasional blood-red or… well, actual blood.
"Did you rehearse this speech?" she asked, turning her gaze back to the tablet.
Rowan grinned, showing two rows of brilliant teeth that spoke of his excitement, the very opposite of what Riley was feeling.
"I did," he admitted. "How did I do?"
"Pretty good," Riley said. "How long until you would have threatened to bench me on Terra, covering local politics?"
"Three paragraphs."
The editor waved a script in front of his camera feed and Riley laughed. It was good to know he didn't bring her any crap that wasn't worth either of their time.
"I'll go," Riley said, stuffing her mouth with rice, adding mumbling: "Don't expect me to like it though."
"I don't," Rowan said, beaming. "Knowing you are miserable somewhere helps me sleep at night. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go and crack open a bottle of the bubbly. The boys down in advertising owe me a hundred silvers. They said I wouldn't leave my office until the heat death of the universe if I offered this book to you."
"Bye, Rowan," Riley said with a muffled sigh, shutting down the call and leaning back on her hard, brown bed.
She ate her brown rice in peace, looking on as the tower swayed in the breeze of the war outside.
Octava, she thought. At least the houses there will be standing still.
2
Harbor
The commander picked his way through the wreckage.
As far as the eye could see, the border moon of Laeroc was a barren wasteland. That hadn't been the case just mere days ago when the battle began. It used to be a prosperous little world of its own, far from everyone else, a little haven.
Which, incidentally, was also the reason for its doom.
It was growing to be an increasingly common sight for Harbor and the commander wasn't amused. Gargons didn't wage wars to be satisfied with saving most of the people and killing most of the enemies they faced.
It had gone on for too long. The Eridons were the bane upon the existence of every species that believed in the simple truth of not killing unarmed civilians. As it stood, being killed was considered a blessing these days when it came to the Eridons.
Harbor's comm link beeped calmly, signaling a message that wasn't urgent but still important enough for him to be bothered with it.
He checked the caller ID and growled quietly. The absolute last person Harbor wanted to see or hear from.
Yet duty ran deeply in his veins, mixing with the dark silver ink on his skin, and duty demanded that he answer.
"Cole," Harbor snarled.
"You don't sound happy to hear from me," the other commander replied and Harbor could hear the laughter in his voice.
It made his blood boil. Only Cole would think the day had been anything but a devastating massacre for both sides.
"So you're still drawing breath," Harbor said grimly. "What do you need?"
Cole chuckled at the other end of the line.
"Send me your exact coordinates. I'm five minutes behind you and your damn captains won't tell me where you are," he said.
"As they should," Harbor replied, sighing reluctantly. "Relaying coordinates. Make it short, Cole."
The second the transmission was complete, Harbor shut off the call, not waiting for Cole's confirmation. The day hadn't been good despite the Gargon forces being victorious. He was anxious to finish it up and move on to battlefields where he could be more useful than there amongst charred corpses and ruined lives.
Laeroc was in ruins. The kind of ruins that could only be rebuilt with the assistance of the Alliance, the one that basically required starting from scratch.
The main reason for that was the wreckage in which Harbor walked. The air around him was growing hotter as he approached the cooling reactor that had wiped out the city beneath his feet and several others unlucky enough to be in range.
The truth was, Harbor didn't see any of the ruined city. All he saw was the carnage the orbital station had wreaked when it had been dropped.
He cursed Eridons to the deepest, darkest realms of the afterlife the gods had deemed fit for such monstrous crimes.
They hadn't needed to do it, not after t
hey had gotten what they wanted.
No, the League had ordered Eridons, their attack dogs, to make the hearts of every citizen in the Alliance quiver with fear. It was a common tactic when one was preparing for a large scale war. A part of Harbor wished they would already begin.
For years, the vicious Iron League had hidden in the dark, and explored stars. At first, they had been nothing more than rogue species that didn't have a merciful bone in their bodies. The Alliance, built of species that wanted to work together and further their goals, drove them away, into the dark coldness of the starless space. Until they had nothing left but the most desolate, harsh planets to try and survive, boiling in their loathing.
And then the Alliance had made the mistake of leaving them there, thinking they could do no more damage.
The Alliance had been wrong.
In the hatred-fueled, malicious hearts, the sense of revenge had risen like a tidal wave. The species that had never gotten along with the Alliance came together in their pursuit to destroy them. Clawing, biting, endlessly bickering for the leadership position, the League had been born with the single goal to destroy the Alliance or cause it enough pain to wither away on its own.
Harbor swore that he and his brother commanders would never let the League cross the borders of the Alliance.
A scream echoed across the desolate field. Harbor was ripped out of his thoughts by the inhuman cry and was moving before it registered in his conscious mind. The commander dashed over the sharp edges of the broken station, jumping over boiling pits of fire, and dodged the still-falling debris from the orbit.
Up ahead, he saw a squad of Eridons. For the first time that day, the commander's heart sang. It seemed some enemies were stupid enough not to know defeat when it looked them in the eyes.
There were hostages too, three men and a female. The Eridons were dragging the female away from the men hopelessly trying to shield her and Harbor roared so loudly the creatures turned his way. Their red armors fit tightly around long, wiry bodies and their yellow eyes burned cruelly in sunken pits of their dark gray skin.
