Star Warrior's Mate: A Scifi Alien Romance (Star Warrior Book 2)

by C. F. Harris

  “You could always back out,” Jorav said. “I could give the word and my men would bring the subject back to their home and they would have no idea that you were even the one they were supposed to meet.”

  He smiled. Not a pleasant smile. “The subject probably thinks they’re being escorted to a summary execution for one reason or another. It’s not unheard of for people in his position. I imagine he’d be quite happy to find himself turned around and taken back no worse for the wear.”

  I’m ashamed to say that I actually seriously considered the offer for a moment. I couldn’t imagine Commander Kehn would be very happy to see me considering everything that had happened. I’m sure he blamed me for everything that happened even though he was one of the first who told me to go easier on the crew. I could hear his words about how we were safe in the home system echoing in my mind now.

  I wondered if he thought about those words now that he was in a Livisk prison on their homeworld. He probably stayed safe in his cocoon where everything was my fault.

  Of course it was my fault to some degree. Kehn just didn’t strike me as the type to take responsibility for his actions. I’d long ago accepted that it was a personal failing of mine that I was in this situation in the first place rather than parading Jorav all over earth and getting on all the chat shows to talk about my brave showdown with the nasty Livisk raider in the home system.

  I sighed. That was still a nice thought even if things hadn’t exactly been terrible since I found myself here.

  “No,” I said. “I need to meet with him. I need to know how the crew is doing. It’s my responsibility to them as their captain even if it’s not a responsibility I particularly feel like taking on.”

  From the way Jorav smiled I got the impression that he approved of that choice. I hated that I found myself preening under that approval. He was the last person in the galaxy whose approval I needed. He might be good for a roll in the hay, but I was not going to let myself start judging my value based on what he thought of me, damn it.

  Still, there was a small part of me that enjoyed that approval. I ignored that small part of me.

  A beeping at Jorav’s side pulled his attention away from me, and not a moment too soon. I was on the verge of doing something really stupid like blushing. I hated it when my stupid body gave things away that I was trying my best to shield from Jorav.

  “It appears our guest is here,” he said. “This is your last chance to back out.”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “I’m not backing out of this one. I need to know how they’re doing. Like it or not, they’re my responsibility.”

  Jorav nodded again and this time there was no mistaking that he was pleased. The emotion came surging through my mind and I smiled before I brought myself under control. Damn it. He tricked me. He liked catching me off guard like that.

  “The burden of command is difficult, but it’s something you have to shoulder no matter what,” Jorav said, the approval rolling through the bond in waves.

  Great. I was about to meet with a former crew member who would probably as soon kill me as have a conversation with me and the only thing I cared about was the crazy alien in the room who thought I was making the right decision by doing something that very much felt like the wrong thing to me.

  I took a deep breath as Jorav tapped a button on his communicator. “Send the subject in.”

  The doors to Jorav’s study opened and in stepped Commander Kehn. He looked a little worse for the wear. Much worse than I’d made out in my time with Jorav. He was still in the uniform he’d worn on that day we were captured. Apparently they didn’t believe in providing their prisoners with a change of clothes.

  “Actually they leave him in his uniform as proof to the other humans that even your mighty Combined Fleet can’t save them,” Jorav said.

  Damn it. I needed to remember to be more cautious about keeping those mental barriers up. One of these days I was going to let the wrong thought through and really cause some trouble.

  “I’m hoping for that, actually,” Jorav said with a knowing smile.

  “Damn it would you get out of my head,” I snapped.

  I was losing control. The fact that Jorav was hearing more and more of the sort of thoughts I usually tried to keep from him was a testament to that. I closed my eyes and concentrated on pushing his thoughts away. It was difficult to explain exactly how I did it since it was all happening in my brain, but it was sort of like the same feeling I got when I tried to push away an unpleasant thought, and it was about as difficult.

  But so very worth it.

  Meanwhile Kehn was looking between the two of us as though we’d gone mad. Not that I could blame him. If I’d seen a human having half a conversation with a Livisk even a month ago I would’ve thought the human had gone insane as well. I was learning that there was so much we hadn’t learned about these strange aliens, and that worried me.

  Then Kehn’s eyes settled on me, and that look was about as unpleasant as I’d come to expect. No, he was not happy at all to see me.

  “Talia,” he said, his voice dripping with disdain.

  “I am your captain,” I said, drawing myself up and trying to invest those words with as much authority as I could muster. It was difficult to muster, though, considering I was standing here with the enemy dressed in nice new clothes while he was still in the rags of his uniform and obviously not having a very good time of it wherever they’d sent him for his work detail.

  “You were my captain right up until you allowed us to be captured,” he spat. “Now I understand why the Fleet put you on home detail. You couldn’t command your way out of a wet paper bag with the sensors turned up on full.”

  I felt the heat rising. He was accusing me? I mean sure there was a small part of me that acknowledge I was partly to blame for everything that happened. As captain it was my duty to find a way to motivate my people, and I’d failed in that completely and utterly which ultimately led to our defeat out at the edges of the Oort cloud. But how dare he. It’s not like I was the only one who was responsible.

  “You asshole,” I growled. I took a step forward and he took a step back. Right into the door that didn’t open behind him. So I continued advancing. All the anger, all the rage that I’d felt towards my crew but kept under careful control for fear of seeming unprofessional was boiling to the surface.

  I moved right up next to him and pushed him back. Not that it did much good since he was against the door which refused to slide open. The only thing I accomplished was sort of banging his head against the door. He winced, but held his ground.

  “You spent my entire command telling me that I needed to go easier on the crew. That I was being paranoid trying to get them ready for an attack, and now that an attack came and went and you’re captive you’re going to turn around and act like it was all my fault? How dare you!”

  Kehn looked away. Good. At least he felt some shame for his part in this. Not that it looked like he was going to admit to anything. He turned back to me and that fire was still burning in his eyes, but he kept quiet.

  Apparently he was going to hold onto his hate. Hold onto blaming me for the disaster even though he was as much to blame, if not more.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he asked. “Because if you thought it would be funny to yell at me in front of your new master I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”

  I bristled at him calling Jorav my new master, but I didn’t want to go there. Not right now. That relationship was complicated enough without trying to explain everything right in front of Jorav. He might not understand all the intricacies of the Terran language, but he knew enough that the conversation would get pretty embarrassing pretty damn fast.

  “I came here to see if I could help you,” I said, my voice quiet. Some of the anger draining. As I looked him over I couldn’t help but feel pity even if he was being an asshole.

  “Help me? Please. Is this part of some new propaganda video they have you making? I
didn’t want to believe what they’ve been broadcasting, you telling their emperor that the human fleet is weak, but I guess now it’s all true,” he said.

  I blinked. Well now that was interesting. I guess they had taken the recordings I was pretty sure they were making when I was in the presence of the emperor and turned them into a propaganda tool. I’d been mad enough to hope they’d do exactly that when I was in his imperial majesty’s presence. I’d been pissed off at the Fleet brass and still angry enough to do something about it.

  Now I wondered if that was really such a wise decision, though.

  “Everything I said there was true,” I said. I might be wondering if it was a wise decision, but I’d meant every word I said on that fateful day. “The admirals are part of the reason we’re here. They don’t care about defense, otherwise a Livisk ship wouldn’t be able to make it into the home system so easily. Wouldn’t be able to overpower a human ship so easily.”

  Kehn looked away again. Oh yeah. I didn’t need a mental bond to know that some of the shame of that day was still burning bright inside him. Good. Let it burn.

  “I’m not going to listen to the words of a woman who’s let herself become the trained pet of the man who destroyed our ship and captured us,” Kehn said.

  My hand balled into a fist and I had to remind myself that striking Kehn wasn’t going to do any good. It certainly couldn’t be much worse than whatever else he’d gone through wherever they were keeping him. Apparently I’d become the modern equivalent of the ancient Tokyo Rose to these guys, and there wasn’t going to be any convincing him otherwise.

  “Fine,” I growled. “If you aren’t going to let me help you then I’m not going to waste my breath trying to convince you.”

  “About what I’d expect from you,” he spat back.

  Then something odd happened. I saw stars dancing in front of my face and I felt a strange pain on my cheek. I realized the world was sort of moving in a funny way around me. I saw the ceiling and then the view of that stupid palace off in the distance. I saw Jorav rising and coming towards me and then I was on the floor staring at Jorav’s desk.

  He hit me. Kehn actually hit me. The bastard. And now it looked like Jorav was coming across the room with every intention of killing my former second in command. I was tempted to let him go ahead and do it. There was nothing to be gained here and I couldn’t believe he would actually strike me.

  But that wasn’t the right thing to do. As much as he might deserve whatever beating Jorav was about to deliver, and it felt like a good one if the anger simmering through the bond was any indication, I needed Kehn alive. I pulled myself to my feet but found I couldn’t talk, so I lowered those mental barriers I’d been so careful to keep up around my sparkly blue lover and hit him with the most powerful mental command I could muster.

  STOP.

  Jorav paused. Looked down at me in confusion. Looked back up to Kehn. His blue fists opened and closed as though he’d like nothing more than to wrap his hands around Kehn’s neck and show him what the consequences were for striking his mate, but that wouldn’t help anything.

  “Don’t hurt him Jorav,” I said. “He might not be ready yet, but we still need him.”

  I figured he would be confused or upset that I was sparing Kehn’s life, but oddly enough the only thing I got from Jorav was more of that approval that I loved and hated at the same time. Damn.

  “Very well. If that is your wish,” he said.

  He hit a button on his communicator. Didn’t even bother to say anything. I guess it was a signal that was understood on the other end, though, because no sooner had he hit it than the door slid open and Kehn went stumbling back. Luckily for him, or maybe unluckily depending on your point of view, there were two towering Livisk guards on the other side waiting to escort him away.

  The doors slid shut and I rubbed at the spot where his punch landed. I was going to have one hell of a black eye from that, but it was hardly the worst injury I’d gotten since coming to this world. My chest still hurt where that assassin had held me in a death grip a few days back.

  “That went surprisingly well,” I said.

  Jorav arched an eyebrow. “Is this more of that sarcasm you humans love so much?”

  “A little,” I said. “But a little serious at the same time. After all, he didn’t try to kill me.”

  Jorav shook his head. “You humans are so odd. To think you regularly have conversations with your officers where trying to kill one another is considered odd. Your chain of command truly is peculiar.”

  I didn’t even know how to respond to that, so I didn’t. Instead I stared at the doors Kehn had disappeared behind. He’d only hit me once, and I figured that meant there was still a chance of pulling him over to my side. Maybe that was a stupid hope, but it was all I had to cling to.

  I wasn’t going to leave my crew behind, even if they deserved it. That was my duty as their captain.

  10: Loyalties

  Jorav:

  I stared down at the Academy emblem. Rolled it over and over in my hands and traced my fingers along its contours as I had so many countless times before when I was lost in thought. The metal was well worn over the years from the spots where I’d traced the lines of the most sacred symbol in the entire Livisk Ascendency.

  The emblem of the emperor. Something that was given to all graduates. Mine was of solid gold because I’d been in the High Command track. The metals were less and less precious as they were given out to lower levels down to the grunts who made up the majority of our ground forces when we put our feet in the dirt.

  I sighed. Life had been so simple when this was handed to me upon graduation. I owed my loyalty to the emperor. We were going to defeat this strange new civilization at the edges of our explored space who was pushing back against their inevitable conquest. I hadn’t yet met my future wife at a social gathering designed to pair promising warriors with heirs to some of the more powerful houses.

  I hadn’t yet become brother by marriage to an emperor and uncle to a future emperor. I hadn’t yet been close enough to imperial politics to see the rot at the center of our system. To see how the reality of the emperor failed to come anywhere close to the vaunted ideals that were shoved down our throats while we were learning to serve and die at his pleasure.

  Life had been so much simpler then. There were times when I longed for the days when I could blindly follow orders and believe it was the right decision even if I knew I was well rid of those days.

  “War was so much easier when I was young,” I muttered.

  “What was that?” Talia said, looking up from where she sat in a corner with a screen in her hand reviewing Livisk script. She seemed to be having a difficult time memorizing our written language, but at the same time she was pursuing it with the same dogged enthusiasm she chased after everything else in her life.

  It was something that drew me to her in a way that I’d never been drawn to my former wife. I was starting to understand what some meant when they rallied against our system of marrying for convenience rather than attraction.

  “I was just thinking about how simple war was when I was a younger man,” I said. “Point your weapon at the enemy and make sure they were destroyed before you moved on to the next target.”

  “Sounds about right,” Talia said. “So what’s the problem?”

  “I’m in a war now where it’s not that simple,” I said.

  “Politics rarely are that simple, but it doesn’t mean the war isn’t worth fighting,” she said.

  The statement was simple enough, but it was loaded with dangerous meaning. For perhaps the thousandth time since I’d brought Talia to this world and been forcibly bonded to her I spun my chair around and looked at my view of the city. The view that included a view of the imperial palace far off in the distance. The palace that Talia had destroyed with such reckless abandon every time I allowed her to get into a simulator.

  I was starting to think she held something against his imperial majes
ty. A smaller more dangerous part of me thought she might have a good idea there.

  “Of course I have a good idea,” she said, coming up behind me and wrapping hr arms around me. “All my ideas are good ideas. It’s how I manage to keep beating you in that simulator.”

  I growled. “Now you’re doing it to me.”

  “I figure turnabout is fair play,” she said. “If you’re not going to hide your thoughts from me then I’m going to listen in on them. All’s fair in love and war.”

  I reached up and put a hand on hers. It always surprised me how my blue hands dwarfed her own. She was so small and so seemingly delicate in so many ways, but I’d learned the hard way time and again that assuming she was delicate just because she looked delicate was a dangerous game.

  “So which is this? Love or war?”

  I felt Talia shrug behind me. “Why can’t it be both?”

  I shook my head. Life really was far more complicated now. I couldn’t just point my weapons at the thing vexing me and destroy it because she was also the thing that made life worth living. I was pulled between the human standing behind me, a human I couldn’t be entirely sure wouldn’t destroy me at the first opportunity, and an emperor who also seemed like he’d be happy to destroy me and forget about me at the first convenient opportunity.

  I grinned. I’d never felt more alive than at this moment. It might be a difficult situation, but it had been so long since I’d been presented with a tactical puzzle this difficult. Odd how it took being so close to death to make me feel so alive.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on something other than conflicting loyalties. Talia was pressed against me from behind and it felt so wonderful. The thin material of that strange outfit she insisted on wearing at all times like an uncivilized barbarian did feel quite nice against my bare skin.