I shove her forward. “This is Aura. Welcome her. Please!”
They all start cheering and clapping, but Aura looks up at me with a bright red face. This is not the shame debt color of red, but rather the color of anger. I think hard, but cannot understand why she would be angry with me.
“Aura...Aura...Aura…,” they whisper in another chant.
“The introduction is over now,” I say. “I look forward to meeting the rest of you one by one. I also kindly ask that you be aware of my increased caloric needs as my bio-suit grows. Aura also will require extra food as she is eating for two. Please!”
I nod my head and pull Aura away with me. I want to go back to find Jin, but we are soon surrounded by people.
“What will you name the child?” a woman asks. “Do you have any cousins on the fleet? Do you think they’d like me?”
I’m tempted to shove everyone out of the way. To clear a path like I did back in the city, but those were strangers. These people are meant to be our friends, so I know I need to be less aggressive. Shoving will not do.
I grab the woman, lift her up, and place her down behind me. “Come, Aura.”
I whisk her through the door of the kitchen, and the kitchen door acts as a chokepoint, which Jin thankfully blocks off for us. He puts his back to the door and faces us.
“Okay,” he says. “Good job, I guess. Aegus had the same awkward and terse style when we first woke him from hibernation. You probably reminded everyone of that, which can play in our favor. Was that intentional?”
I feel very confused, and I tilt my head and waggle my ears.
“No,” Aura says. “He’s naturally abrasive and terse and awkward.”
I look at Aura, a perplexed frown on my face. Now I’m even more confused, but Aura won’t look at me, so I look to Jin for clarification.
“Aegus’s travelling to Earth,” Jin says. “He left me in charge of the Mars operation.”
“I trust his decision,” I say. “You seem to be a good leader. I ask for no special treatment aside from the extra rations for our child.”
“Cygnus,” Jin says. “I can’t be leader now. Not with you here.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
Aura scoffs and rolls her eyes.
“Did you see how they reacted to you? If I make a tough decision, or have to do something unpopular, they will go to you.”
“If I’m to lead,” I say, “it will be because I’ve earned it. Not because of my brother’s actions. I refuse. The Marauders do not have royal bloodlines.”
“It’s not your brother,” Jin says. “It’s your race.”
“Oh, that’s a whole lot better,” Aura says sarcastically.
“The whole point of this,” Jin says, “and the thing they all believe in, is peaceful co-existence with your race. Humans have been alone in the universe for our whole history. We’ve lived alone on one planet for tens of thousands of years, and only in the past few hundred years have we expanded to three planets—four if you count the moon—but we’ve still been just one lonely race. And no matter how far we expand, we’d still feel alone.”
“As soon as we fired our drives to break, you knew you weren’t alone,” I say. “It’s not logical to place greater importance onto me when there is a fleet of millions coming toward you.”
Aura cuts in. “Look, Cygnus. When those drives turned on, we were terrified. Thrilled, yes, but terrified. We had no idea why you were coming for us. We knew you were more advanced than us, that’s it. It’s why there’s a war between Earth and Mars-Venus. So seeing you here, in the flesh, with your goofy bear ears and awkward request for extra food, you put a face on the invasion. They know it’s not all bad now.”
“And you feel the same?” I ask her.
She grabs my hand, and I feel huge relief that she no longer seems angry with me. “I know you’re all good. But you’re the second one they’ve ever seen. If you don’t show that you’re strong, they may think your brother is a fluke. You need to live up to their expectations. You need to lead.”
If Aura wants me to lead, I will lead.
“I understand,” I say. “Jin, you will show me what is needed to lead.”
Leading humans is difficult. They are weaker and more fragile than Marauders, and much more needy. The humans have not discovered how to synthesize nutrients or convert antimatter to digestible calories, which means a huge quantity of labor and manpower is dedicated to farming.
“The intake fan is busted,” Jin tells me. “So the dome’s not going to get enough CO2 if we don’t fix it.”
I squint at him, and then at Aura. She shrugs.
“Well,” I say, “put a hole in the dome to let CO2 in.”
“Then the plants will freeze,” Aura says.
“Yeah,” Jin says. “Or we’ll use up half the power by keeping it heated with a leak.” He rolls his eyes.
“A small hole,” I say.
“Cygnus,” Aura says, hitting me. “Jin isn’t asking you for advice on farming, he’s trying to tell you that we need to authorize a trade.”
Jin smiles and nods.
“You’re lucky that Aura can advise me as I lead,” I say, “or we would all starve and perish.”
Jin laughs.
“You realize,” I say, “that if we were to simply raid some travelers, we wouldn’t need to farm a surplus. In ten minutes, I raided a whole field’s worth of weapons.”
“Cygnus,” Aura explains patiently, “then we risk becoming a target. And the pirates who want you dead are swarming all over the surface. Be smart.”
I’ve been in charge for one week now. They’ve tried to contact Aegus to let him know I’m here, but he’s gone dark, and it’s impossible to get a message to him.
There’s a loud pounding at the door, and Aura opens it.
Mira rushes in, then falls to the ground to bow at my feet. It feels less uncomfortable to me now when people bow to me. I work hard to rule, and it shows they respect me.
“Great Brother Cygnus,” she says. “The pirates have taken Rust Bucket.”
I stand up. I try to recall how many operatives we have in the city, and their names.
“Trang’s crew is there,” I say. “Eight of them?”
“Yeah,” Jin says. “They’re good, they can probably get out before—”
“No,” Mira interrupts, in a panicked voice. “They were captured.”
“Trang won’t give us up,” Jin says.
“We’ll send a rescue team,” I say. “I’ll lead it.”
They give me uneasy looks, and Aura grabs my hand. “I’ll go with you,” she says. “Trang helped me, and I owe—”
“You will stay safe here.” I say. “Great Brother Cygnus has spoken!”
I say that to anger her, and it works. If she’s angry, she’ll be less likely to make a sound argument for joining me.
“We’re getting a message,” someone shouts, running into the room to join us. “It’s for Great Brother Cygnus.”
We pull up a screen, and it’s filled by Scorpio’s scarred face. He’s taken to wearing an eyepatch.
“Hey, you purple fuck,” he snarls.
“Is this live?” I ask, when Scorpio stops speaking.
“Damn right it is!” Scorpio says. “I’ve got you by your teal balls now. What are you going to do?”
I wait for him to continue. I’m aware of this type of tactic. He wants to make me angry so that I will argue less effectively.
“Nothing to say?” he asks. “Well, actions speak louder than words, huh? I’ve got your trading crew here. They’re not gonna’ have a fun time with me. The whole city is going to have a bad time, in fact. Unless you turn yourself over to me.”
“I thought you wanted to kill me,” I say.
“Yeah, that was my first thought. But then I realized I’m already rich, and even though the bounty on you and your girl is quite fat, there’s something I want more.”
I wiggle my ears, waiting for him to get
on with it.
“I want to be able to transform into a fucking bear! My scientists think they can figure it out if they get you on the operating table. Give yourself up, and I’ll spare your girl.”
“I don’t like this deal,” I say. “I can keep my mate safe. Take your threats elsewhere.”
I turn off the screen.
“Jin,” I bark. “We will assemble a small team to rescue Trang’s crew. We’ll get in and out fast. We’ll need a second team to set up some kind of diversion outside. I will create the diversion, you will infiltrate the city.”
We begin planning. But an hour later, we receive a new message. It’s not live this time, it’s pre-recorded.
It shows Trang and his whole crew on what appears to be the top of a mountain. They are without masks, and handcuffed. The camera pans down, and I realize they’re on the top of the crater, outside the dome.
Scorpio pulls off his facemask long enough to smile, and then signals with his hand.
Several pirates shove Trang and each member of the crew. The camera points down, and I watch each one of our friends roll down the steep incline. Some die on rocks, others are badly hurt, and even those who survive the fall will eventually die from the lack of oxygen.
“Every hour,” Scorpio says, “ten more people are going down the crater. Get your purple ass over here if you want to stop it.”
21 Aura
I’m having intense morning sickness every day now. Cygnus and I have been going at it every night, but there’s no doubt I’m pregnant. I didn’t think morning sickness would come so soon, but there’s no guidebook for alien pregnancies. .
It took Jin, and a lot of the best fighters, to convince Cygnus we needed more than an hour to plan. In the end, it took five hours, which cost fifty lives.
But the plan is in place, and it’s dangerous.
An alarm sounds, signaling that phase one has begun: evacuation.
We have a few operatives on the habitats, and they kill the satellite uplinks. The satellites will probably only stay down for a few minutes, but it will be long enough for us to scatter. Every person in the base pours out of the underground bases and off the farms as fast as they can. We all carry as much as we can. Some carry packs laden with food, while others carry half a dozen guns.
I carry food and Cygnus carries guns.
We reach the surface and begin to scatter. All one hundred of us spread out over the surrounding two kilometers, and then we move toward Rust Bucket.
There are not enough buggies for everyone to ride, so the buggies form an outer perimeter that moves slowly enough so that everyone evacuating on foot can keep up.
Cygnus insists we stay in the middle and on foot. He doesn’t want me to be in danger, but as soon as the satellites come back on, an orbital bunker buster missile will most likely blow apart our base. So he has no choice but to bring me with him. The safest place for me and our baby is right at his side.
The orbital missiles will have a harder time hitting us while we’re on the move, and scattered out as we are, it would take dozens of missiles. We simply hope the pirates in orbit won’t have that kind of firepower.
As we roll across the rough terrain toward Rust Bucket, we attract attention. The wrong kind.
Raiders appear from all directions. Their buggies kick up dust as they close in on us.
They flank us—there must be at least three hundred of them—and we are forced to stop our forward progression.
Cygnus starts ordering our snipers to set-up, but a lone raider begins walking toward us with a white cloth held high on a stick.
“That means he wants to talk,” I tell Cygnus.
“People are dying while we sit here and talk!” he grunts.
Our people bring the raider into the center of our group, and he reaches out a hand to Cygnus.
Cygnus refuses to shake. “What do you want?”
“We want to help you with whatever you got going. There ain’t nothing to raid when Rust Bucket is shut down. So we can negotiate a way to—”
“Fine!” Cygnus barks. “Move out of our way and join us. We free the city now, not later. Now move aside! Please!”
He gets back on the buggy and orders us to start moving forward.
We continue on, and the raiders fall in with us. We’ve gone from a small circle of people to a wide wave, roaring across the Martian surface to free the city.
As we near the crater, I see two streaming objects in the dim, salmon-colored sky.
Cygnus grabs hold of me and shields me with his body.
From the edge of my vision, I see an explosion; moments later I hear it.
The far end of our wave is struck, and twenty-some raiders are instantly obliterated. Dozens more are thrown through the air like ragdolls.
The second missile hits the other end of the wave, and more raiders are blown apart.
We’re lucky that none of our own people are killed. We continue on, though some stay behind to tend to their wounded comrades. We watch the sky apprehensively, but either the pirates only had two orbital missiles, or they decided they weren’t inflicting enough damage to be cost-effective.
We form a semi-circle around the crater. Cygnus drives our buggy up to the road and points it straight at the gate. The watchtowers are manned now, not with guards, but pirates. They open fire, and raiders begin to fall.
Cygnus shields me with his body once again, and dozens of raiders open fire on the tower. The snipers dive down and take cover. Before they can even poke their heads back up, I see a stream of smoke and flames race from one of the raider groups. A rocket. It slams into the sniper tower and explodes. The wall crumbles open, and I see one of the snipers falling and screaming.
Cygnus is still holding tight to me, and he pulls my hair back. The contrast of this tender gesture amongst so much chaos and death touches me somewhere deep inside, and I feel my eyes begin to water. I try to fight back the tears, as I don’t want Cygnus to think I’m weak or to worry about me.
“Let me go in with you,” I plead. He’s refused me this request dozens of times, but I feel it’s worth one last try. “I have more contacts inside than anyone.... I’ll be critical to phase three—”
“You’re critical here,” he says, and points at my stomach. “This is the future. Our future.”
He looks back over his shoulder at the burning sniper tower, the towering gate, and the mountainous lip of the crater.
“It’s a siege in there. My race has evolved to thrive in that kind of hell. You not only have no race memories of such conditions, but you’re a female—”
“Human female again? Did I lose my name?” Cygnus can be so damn frustrating.
“You are, Aura,” he says. “I know what this word means. It means you project your presence and strength, so there is no need for you to be inside the walls. Your aura radiates through—”
“It’s just a name,” I say, grabbing hold of his arms. “You can’t read so deeply into a name, that’s an awful and illogical argument to keep me back here.”
“Human female then,” he says, waggling his ears.
Just before I smack him, he grabs hold of me. He dips me down, pulls up my facemask, and kisses me deeply. I feel his tongue in my mouth, and my heart races and aches for him. It’s foolish to go with him, but it’s even worse to let him go in alone. What would have happened back on Scorpio’s ship if I had stayed locked away, if I’d not gone back after him?
He embraces me, holding tightly to my lower back, and I drink in his lips and tongue and warmth. I nibble on his lips—if I bite him he won’t be able to pull away, and he won’t ever leave me—and I wrap my arms tightly around him so he can’t pull away from me.
Something explodes far in the distance, and gunfire erupts across the surface. We ignore it, lost in each other.
I start to feel lightheaded, and not just from the kiss. I’m not getting enough oxygen. I pull away from him, reluctantly, and re-affix my mask.
“I see you, Aura
,” he says. “And I will see you again.”
He turns away from me, and phase two begins. It’s the part I don’t believe will work because it relies on Cygnus’s bio-suit actually doing something. Everyone else has seen Aegus’s suit in action, and they show little doubt, but it all sounds too farfetched to me. Ever since Cygnus first showed me his bio-suit, it has remained latched onto his shoulder. I’ve never actually seen it do anything other than make him eat like a barbarian. It’s consumed hundreds of thousands of calories over the past week and done nothing to show for it.
Cygnus throws off his coat, revealing a bare purple chest. Everyone turns toward him, and the raiders especially seem fixated. They’ve never seen an alien before, and they likely had no idea one was leading this attack.
Then he drops his pants, and I see some of the women looking down with lust blazing hot in their eyes. I ball up my fists and elbow the woman nearest me, giving her a sharp look.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “He’s chosen you as his lifemate, I just didn’t know that the Great Brother Cygnus was so...great.”
I elbow her again.
Cygnus stands fully naked and purple, his height towering above everything, and everyone in front of him begins clearing a path. After a minute or two, the road in front of him is completely empty. It’s now a straight shot to the gate.
The followers pull me back, saying it’s not safe for me to be too close.
As they’re pulling me further away from my mate, I see him touch the black sphere on his shoulder. The bio-suit seems to transform to liquid, and it flows out across him like a black pool. It shimmers in the dim Martian sunlight, covering his entire arm. It passes his shoulder, covers his chest, and then accelerates out across him. After a few seconds—to my great relief—it’s covered his dick, and then continues flowing down to cover his legs and feet.
It leaves his head unmasked, and it ripples like a pond on a windy day. It begins to glow and harden, and finally it changes color. To teal.
I roll my eyes at that, as there’s only one reason I can think of that he chose teal for his fancy suit.
Marauder Cygnus: A Scifi Alien Shifter Romance (Mating Wars Book 1) Page 11
