Ramu is watching me with his arms crossed.
“Lila” I ask, panting. “The ship has all human crew, right?”
“Bio scans give 95 percent certainty that their crew is fully human.”
“Good,” I whisper, still doing pushups.
After I feel sweat dripping down my face, I order Delphie to step off, and then I stand up.
“Get your weapon, Ramu,” I say, “and grab me the scariest looking thing you can find in there.”
“We’re gonna’ board their ship?” Ramu asks.
Delphie gives me a worried look.
“Just get the weapons.”
Ramu nods and heads toward the weapons locker. He grabs his own blade, which is a small blade with a toothed edge and a blunt blade on the end.
“No,” I say, “that thing looks puny; get a scary-looking one.”
Ramu scowls at me. “Puny? It won’t look puny when I cut through their throats and skulls!” The veins in his neck bulge again as he shouts.
“Perfect,” I say. “Now get a big, scary-looking weapon for both of us.”
He grabs two ceremonial swords from the locker. They have teeth on them like hacksaws, and they are stained with dried blood.
“You didn’t clean your blades?” Ramu says, looking down at them.
“Get one for Delphie,” I say, not answering his question.
“Kronos,” she says, “I just trained one time, I’m not – ”
I snap my fingers. “I’m the captain! Do what I say; we’re wasting time!”
Ramu hands one of the huge swords to Delphie, and then he brings me the second sword.
“Great,” Ramu says. “Now we all have big dumb swords. You ever fought on a ship in zero-g, Captain? Swords like this ain’t so good in cramped crawl spaces and halls.”
“I’m going to send them a message,” I say. “I want you all to look as scary as you fucking can. All right?”
Ramu’s face softens, and he smiles.
“No smiling!” I snap at him. “I want you fucking angry!”
“I got it, Cap,” he says. “I’m saving it all up. Tell me when.”
Delphie shakes her head. “This is ridiculous.”
“Do you want to fight?” I ask. “Or do you want to get paid?”
“I want to get paid,” she mumbles, her ears pulling back.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s all get shoulder to shoulder.”
We stand shoulder to shoulder, Ramu in the middle. I’ve got more defined muscles than he does, but he’s bigger overall, and his scars really sell the whole thing.
“I’ll do the talking,” I say. “You two just look angry and bloodthirsty.”
They nod.
“Begin recording, Lila.”
“Yes, Captain.”
We raise our blades, and I shout in a frenzied voice, flexing my muscles as sweat drips down my body. “This is Kronos of the Time’s End!” I point the sword toward the screen. “Power down your weapons and jettison your cargo, or we will board your ship, drink your blood, and grind your bones to dust!”
Ramu lets out a terrifying battle cry, and his muscles tremble as he roars.
Delphie slams the flat back of the sword into her chest, pulls her ears back, and bares her teeth. She hisses so loudly that spit pools on the sides of her mouth.
“This is your only warning!” I roar.
“End broadcast,” Lila says.
I let my body go slack and drop the sword. “Good job, Ramu.”
“What about me?” Delphie asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Are you a fucking cat?”
“Hissing is scary!” she snaps.
“We’ll see,” I say. “Let’s see how they react.”
4 Minna
I hear arguing coming from the command room.
I put my hand on the clear plastic. “Hold tight, Jerky.”
It seems like an appropriate name. Jerky likes to eat jerky, and it sounds pretty cute.
I walk carefully toward the command room, though the ship hasn’t been jerking back and forth as much lately. Or maybe I named him Jerky because of the ship’s movements.
“Get the lightsail out!” I hear Alderson shouting.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Get out of here, Minnie!”
“Minna.”
“Out!”
I start to feel heavier.
“Their laser is hitting our lightsail,” one of the crew says. “We’re moving faster than them.”
“And now they killed it,” another crewman says. “We’re slowing back down.”
“Get the company on the line,” Alderson says. “Ask them to hit our sail with a beam from Mars.”
A man with a scruffy beard says, “Captain, they aren’t going to spend money now….” He stops talking when he sees that I’m still standing there.
“Out, Minnie!” Alderson shouts.
“Why wouldn’t they spend money?” I ask.
“Bankruptcy!” the bearded man says, throwing up his hands. “You hired the wrong com – ”
Alderson backhands him. “Shut the fuck up! Get yourself together!”
“We’re getting a message from them,” someone says.
“Put it on-screen,” Alderson says.
I stay put, ignoring his order to leave. There’s a huge lump in my throat, and my blood feels on fire from fear and adrenaline. Real pirates.
The screen flashes on, and one of the biggest Marauders I’ve ever seen fills the screen. There’s a seraph standing on each side of him, one is male and the other is female. The male Seraph has a kind of dashing handsomeness about him, and his bulging muscles don’t hurt either.
What does hurt is the sight of the giant sword in his hand, and the horrible sound of his shouting voice.
“This is Kronos of the Time’s End!” His biceps bulges as he thrusts the sword toward the camera. I can see dried-out blood covering the sword. “Power down your weapons and jettison your cargo, or we will board your ship, drink your blood, and grind your bones to dust!”
The Marauder lets out a horrible, berserk shout, and his muscles bulge out as if he was lifting a car above his head. Every vein on his body pops out as he squeezes the sword and roars his threat.
The female Seraph flashes her teeth and hisses. She’s foaming at the mouth. Her body is sculpted with muscle, and she’s drenched in sweat as if she just got done killing someone.
The screen cuts off.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Alderson shouts. “Why can’t I just fucking retire in peace?”
“Wha-wha-what are we going to do?!” someone cries out. “We barely have any weapons!”
If I live through this and ever see my boss again, I will kill her myself for hiring such an incompetent and crumbling security company.
“Did he say he was gonna’...he was gonna’...grind our bones to dust?” the bearded man, still with a fresh red mark on his face, asks.
“Sanchez,” Alderson says. “Check my contract. See if I still qualify for pension if we lose the cargo while putting up a fight.”
“What?” I snap.
“Someone get her out of here,” Alderson says. “Lock her in the cargo bay.”
Everyone in the command room is scrambling around, but no one looks like they are preparing to fight.
“We’ll find a way to damage the ship, fire some rounds off into space,” Alderson says. “And we jettison Minnie out with the cargo so she can’t rat us out.”
“It would be safer to kill her,” someone says.
The bearded man grabs me by the wrist. “I agree,” he says. “Just make it look like one of those crazy-ass pirates did it, we can – ”
“No!” Alderson says. “I’m not killing an innocent woman!”
“But you’ll let those insane pirates capture me?” I shout.
“At least you’ll have a chance,” Alderson says.
“Whatever clears your conscience,” I spit back at him.
&nbs
p; “Take her away,” Alderson says.
The bearded man drags me back toward the cargo bay. I try to fight by shoving and elbowing him, but he just bends my arm back until I scream out in pain.
He shoves me into the cargo bay and says, “Good luck,” and then slams the hatch closed.
I hear a hiss as extra oxygen flows into the vents. Alderson’s doing his best to convince himself I will survive and that he’s not killing me. He doesn’t want to retire with an innocent woman’s death on his hands.
Jerky whines at me.
God, they’re going to take Jerky away and kill me. I just know it. The handsome one is probably a sociopath, and I’ll be lucky if he just kills me. Hopefully he’ll grind my bones to dust after he kills me.
The hiss of oxygen cuts off, and suddenly I feel a big vibration rumble across the cargo bay.
And then I’m weightless. I float up off the ground and I see Jerky float into the air within his cage.
They’ve ejected me. I’m floating through the space between Mars and Earth with limited life support and no propulsion. The only people who know I’m here are bloodthirsty, deranged pirates.
I float helplessly through the air, and it takes several minutes until I’m close enough to the wall to move myself through the cargo bay. I pull myself toward the big crate of jerky, and I grab hold of several bars.
I push off the wall and float toward Jerky’s cage. I toss all of the jerky down into the cage.
“I’m not going to let them just take us,” I say. “We’re going to fight them. Together.”
Jerky hums, but that’s most likely because I threw so much food into his cage. He extends a long limb out and presses it against the wall of the cage. The action moves him toward a piece of jerky, which he devours greedily.
None of the prototypes have gone through human testing yet. I’m going to have to test it myself, and if it doesn’t work, I might not have any bones left in me for the pirates to grind to dust.
“You won’t eat me up from the inside, will you?” I ask Jerky, as he chomps up the last of the food.
He hums at me and shakes back and forth.
“Still hungry?” I ask.
He hums louder.
I’ll feed him as much jerky as I can so that he won’t eat me alive when I suit up.
5 Kronos
“They’ve jettisoned their cargo, Captain,” Lila says.
I smile widely and twitch my ears back at Ramu and Delphie.
Delphie points at me. “You see? The hissing was scary.”
“Nice work, guys,” I say. “Now we get the cargo without doing any real work.”
“Is this what you mean by pirates with heart?” Delphie asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “We rob only those who are too lazy and inept to defend themselves.”
“That is so noble of you,” Delphie says.
“It’s fine,” I say. “No one got hurt. Everyone wins.”
“Yeah,” Ramu says. “Everyone except whoever paid to receive that cargo.”
“Maybe we can sell it back to them?” I say, grinning. “Then everyone gets what they want, but they just pay a shitload more.”
“Um, Captain,” Lila says.
“What is it?”
“There are two bio-signatures in the cargo bay.”
“What the hell?” I ask. “Two humans in there? Are they trying to fight us still? A Trojan horse?”
“It’s one human,” Lila says, “and one...other thing.”
I see Ramu narrow his eyes. “Want me to get my skull poker? I ain’t doing real fighting with this big dumb sword.”
“Yeah,” I say absently. “Get the skull poker. Lila, what do you think it is?”
“It most closely resembles a biosuit – ”
“Holy shit!” Delphie shouts.
“Fuck!” Ramu says, slamming the weapons locker. “I should have worked on commission instead of on a flat rate!”
A biosuit. Not even antimatter would be so valuable. This must be the luckiest first pirate run in the history of space piracy. Or I’m just that good.
“Wait,” I say. “You said it resembles a biosuit, Lila. So is it a bioglove, or – ”
“Neither,” Lila says. “I don’t know what it is exactly; it just resembles a biosuit.”
“Are we close enough for wide-spectrum?” I ask. “Give us a look inside.”
The screen flickers, and soon we see a black square filling the screen – the cargo pod – and inside it is a mix of infrared and UV spectrum image of the inside. There’s what looks like a human figure and another small thing, the biosuit.
“Doesn’t look like the human is armed,” Ramu says. “I can poke the skull out real easily – ”
“Look,” Delphie says, pointing. “I think it’s a woman.”
As we get closer, the image becomes sharper, and I can start to see the feminine curves of the human.
“Hmmm,” I say. “Nothing weaker at fighting than a human female. A curious choice for a lone defender. Is there any comms equipment on there?”
“No,” Lila says. “We’ll have to pull it in to talk, or board it.”
“Send me out there,” Ramu says. “You don’t want to pull something like this onto the ship. Too risky.”
I look at him and can see the greed in his eyes. If there is actually a biosuit on there, I can’t send Ramu in alone. Nothing would stop him from just putting the biosuit on and then double-crossing me. Never trust a mercenary.
“No,” I say. “We’ll pull it into our own cargo bay. Reel it in once we’re in range, Lila.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Ramu grunts, but doesn’t press the issue. I’ll have to keep an eye on him.
It’s reckless of me to pull the cargo pod onto my own ship, but at least Lila will have eyes, scanners, and all her other high-tech equipment pointed on the human and the biosuit. The other advantage – which relies on the idea that the human cares about saving her own skin – is that she won’t be able to unleash the full power of the biosuit on us without destroying the ship. The world record for a human wearing a biosuit is somewhere around 40 seconds, but 30 of those seconds are a slow and agonizing death.
“Shit,” Delphie whispers.
I look up and I see the small little cube shape melt down and reform into a sphere.
“Looks a hell of a lot like a biosuit,” Ramu says. “We’re sure she’s human?”
The woman touches the sphere, and it melts into her. From the infrared-UV composite view, she has become one single organism.
“Making logical assumptions,” Delphie says. “That is a totally standard Marauder biosuit, and that human has less than a minute left to live. We can just wait until she’s dead to – ”
“Pull her in faster!” I shout. “We can try to save her.”
“Save her?” Ramu scoffs. “What the fuck kind of pirates are you?”
“Pirates with heart,” I say, grinning widely.
I grab the big ceremonial blade just in case I need it, and I push off one of the handholds, floating myself toward my ship’s cargo bay.
“Come on!” I shout back to Delphie and Ramu. “I’ll need backup.”
“We could wait it out,” Ramu says behind me, as we float down the corridor. “Two, three minutes is all we need to be 100 percent sure. If it’s a human, she’ll be dead, and then we just peel the biosuit right off her.”
“No,” I say.
I don’t know why I’m feeling so charitable. I want that fucking suit, there’s no question about that, but if the woman fell for our ‘I want to grind your bones to dust’ ploy, and she felt forced to put on a biosuit – a painful death sentence – then I feel a certain amount of guilt. If we get to her in time, I can help her get the suit off.
“How do we get the suit off her?” Delphie says. “If she’s still alive, I mean.”
“Biosuits prefer Marauders,” Ramu says. “Just give it an alternative.”
That greedy fucker. I notice he
said “Marauders.” If both Ramu and I go for the suit at once, will it prefer his full-blooded Marauder genes over my Seraph ones?
“Cargo pod is on board,” Lila’s voice echoes through the corridor. “Sealing airlocks.”
“Start to equalize the pressure from her pod into the ship,” I order.
I can see the airlock now; it’s only about 20 meters away.
“Yes, Captain,” Lila says. “If there is a biological threat on the pod, then – ”
“I know,” I say, cutting her off.
Marauder and Seraphim genes are good at fighting off infections that eat humans alive. It’s the most minor of the risks I’m taking right now.
“Pressure equalized,” Lila says.
“Pop it!” I shout.
The airlock is right in front of us now, and I see the hatch wheel spin as Lila obeys my order. Then the airlock pops open.
I expect to see a suffering woman or a corpse, but instead I see only a radiant angel.
The most beautiful woman I’ve ever set eyes on, with raven-black hair floating down along her shoulders and pale green eyes staring up at me. There’s fear in those eyes, but also fierce determination. She’s floating in front of us, her body straight, and the biosuit wrapped around her is bright orange and skin-tight. Really skin-tight. I nearly let go my sword as I stare at her glorious body.
If it were a Marauder biosuit, she’d be keeled over in pain and suffering by now, but instead she looks perfectly healthy. What the fuck is going on?
She raises a hand toward us, and I hear Ramu let out a fierce battle cry, but I don’t think he’s doing it for show this time.
Fuck. The skull poker!
“Ramu! No!” I shout, but it’s too late.
6 Minna
When I reach out and touch Jerky, he melts and surges across my hand, up my arm and shoulder, and I even feel part of him press through my skin and into my spine. That sends an uncomfortable cold chill up and down my body, and my brain starts to feel like I ate a huge tub of ice cream in 30 seconds or less. I shudder as Jerky stretches across every centimeter of my body and begins to harden. Jerky, or the suit – I don’t know how to think of him now – begins to turn a bright orange as he hardens around me.
“How’d you know my favorite color?” I ask him, but he’s no longer just chirping and vibrating, he’s in my head. He’s part of me.
Marauder Kronos: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars) Page 2
