Bad Boy Romance: Bad Marine (Bad Boy Military Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy New Adult Contemporary Male Stories) (28 page)

Julienne put her hand on her stomach where she knew that her child was slowly growing. She nodded and removed her dress. "It's only fair."

Julienne went over to Cecilia and kissed her gently, cupping her breast, and soon James joined them. Cecilia and James shed the glamour of their clothing and for the rest of the night the three of them pleased each other as well as they could, and when they woke the next morning, they knew that they had bonded as a unit and nothing save death would ever be able to tear them apart.

A month later, a new town was being built on the ashes of the old one. Someone had mentioned that this was fairly morbid, but Julienne, the dragons, and the new town elder declared that it would be a good reminder of where they had been and where they could go. The wealth of the dragons allowed them to build a better town than before, and while there was initially a mutual feeling of fear and loathing the townsfolk learned to love Julienne and her dragons. For their part, the dragons and Julienne didn't feel the need to carry weapons with them everywhere in case the townsfolk decided that would be the best course of action. When winter came, the dragons proved themselves invaluable, keeping the few townspeople who still had no homes of their own warm and safe from the various creatures that lived in the woods. There were some deaths, but thankfully, it wasn't due to anyone's hateful intent.

When spring finally broke and the town was finished, everyone celebrated the founding of their new town. By this time, Julienne was heavy with child, and Cecilia and several maidens of the town doted upon her. She had become well loved over the winter, and when summer came and Julienne felt that she the child coming, the midwife was there as quickly as Cecilia could move her. It wasn't an easy birth, and there were several times that everyone was sure that they were going to lose Julienne, but in the end two children were birthed.

"I don't understand," said Cecilia. "They look like normal humans. Are you sure these are yours, James?"

"They would have to be," he said. "Neither one of us have seen half-dragons before. Maybe the human blood is stronger?"

They both laughed at that, and then one of the children shifted forms before them. The other did, as well, and Julienne gasped. "Did you see that?"

"We did," said James. "That looked more real than what we do. Is that something they can do?"

"I guess so," said Julienne.

So it was that two dragons and a woman foundling were able to find each and a place to call their own. Over the years, the city and the children grew and had their own adventures and loves and battles, but those are stories for another time. Cecilia was as good as her word, and when Julienne passed, she raised the children to be like the woman that had birthed them.

THE END

Scifi Romance

G.P. Joyner

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When the distress signal came to her cabin aboard the
Aureole,
Reyna Talbot, lying in bed in her regulation underwear, was right in the middle of a news update on the Hypernet about the disaster relief efforts on Tau Eridani.  She had been following the story since it broke and had been wanting to help, as the situation on that planet was as critical as anything she had ever seen or heard.  It pained her to think of all those people in such a state.  But Stellar Guard Command had the situation in hand to as great an extent as it could for now, and there was still the need to maintain the Sector Patrols, especially in sectors bordering alien territories.  So the
Aureole
stayed put in the Morgan Sector to which it had been assigned until the next duty rotation, and Reyna watched the Tau Eridani situation afar and put in a request for a reassignment there when the next cycle came up.  And that was where she was in the Captain's quarters when the trilling of the Stellar Emergency Distress Signal came in.

              Sitting suddenly upright on her bed, she tapped on her private screen to switch from Hyperweb to the Guard Communications Relay system.  Part of her hoped for some complication at Tau Eridani that warranted an abrupt change in her assignment.  Another part of her recognized that hope as selfish, in light of the shock and suffering that the people there were experiencing.  It struck her as wrong to wish for their situation to become more dire just to give her a little more in the way of excitement than just cruising through space along a border where nothing was happening.  When the face of Commodore Holliday appeared on her little tablet of nanocrystal, however, the message was something else entirely.

              "Captain Talbot," said the recording of the Commodore, "you have an emergency, temporary change of assignment.  The
SS Niagara
is on its way to relieve you.  You're to redirect to the Xerxes Supernova Remnant in the Briareus Sector.  A prospecting ship has put out a distress call; they're under attack from the Space Urchins.  It's not the most attractive of missions, but your ship is the nearest one to that sector, so for the moment we're redistributing personnel to help.  You're to depart immediately and save as many of the crew of the
SS Morrow
as you can.  Transmit receipt and and acceptance of commands and set course for the Briareus Sector at once.  Holliday out."

              Reyna tapped the appropriate spot on her screen.  The piece of crystal chirped at her and the transmission ceased, leaving her with a tablet that she switched off, returning it to its resting state as a transparent quadrangle of silicon.  She laid the screen on her bed, shook her head, and stood up.  "The Space Urchins," she muttered, relishing this assignment as much as practically anyone would.  She pictured the creatures and what they were surely doing to that prospecting ship, and cursed the plasma-bodied bastards that were the bane of every space traveler's existence.  "All right, then, let's just get to it..."  She slid open her closet compartment, took out her uniform, and slipped into it. 

              Reyna was a woman of medium height, her hair a medium brunette shade trimmed to regulation length, no lower than just above her shoulders.  Curvaceous as she was, rigorous physical training had made her, like all Stellar Guard personnel, a tight and hard-packed mass of muscles; her bosom was the softest thing about her, and even her breasts stood at attention under her regulation T-shirt.  She found her physical training a particular benefit in her shore leave activities, of which the holograms studding her cabin walls made pleasing souvenirs.  She kept a scan of each of the men with whom she shared time in bed when she went planet-side.  Spending most of her time in space left her little time for a relationship, and she found relationships with fellow Guard members problematical.  A boyfriend in the Guard might well be assigned to a different ship than the
Aureole,
and a boyfriend aboard her own ship would be her subordinate, an idea that was frowned upon and which she would not have relished regardless.  This accounted for all the nights spent alone or jacked into a simulation program; and if Reyna were honest, she had always found simulated dates with collections of pre-programmed algorithms less than satisfying.  The technology created the sensations of sex with high fidelity, but knowing it was not real had always made it satisfying only in the physical sense.  She was not creative enough to custom-program a cyber partner for herself and she had never been willing to spend the creds to hire someone to program one for her.  So, since she joined the Guard, this had confined her sex life mostly to shore leave.  It was a condition that she accepted because it was a life that she loved.  She loved the uniform, the structure, the discipline, and she had been proud to rise through the ranks high enough to be the commanding officer of her own ship.

              Uniformed again, Reyna returned to her bed, picked up her screen, and addressed it:  "Stats on Prospector Class vessel
SS Morrow.
"  The piece of clear silicon flashed back to life and displayed the details on the vessel that Reyna had been assigned to rescue, including a scan of its Captain's face.  The head shot of Captain Ty Callum smiled out at her.  Reyna's eyebrows arched and her pupils dilated in a decidedly non-military fashion.  This prospector was a looker.  He appeared to be the same age as she.  His face was round, but not soft and doughy; his chin and jawline were cut in just the right way and, at least in this scan, he had a rakish growth of stubble.  His hair was short and dark, and his overall look was one of smoldering hazel-eyed handsomeness that never cooled off.  The form to accompany that face, she guessed, must be a very fine body of manhood indeed.  A face like that and a flabby or scrawny body never went together.  No doubt Captain Callum in his prospecting travels had laid claim to more than a few partners--the operative word being "laid".  But that could be of no concern to Reyna at the moment.  As of now the good Captain and his crew were in terrible danger, into which she and her ship were now duty bound to travel.  Though Earth had no official claim in the Xerxes Supernova Remnant, terrestrial law and interstellar treaty were clear on the obligation of official vessels like the
Aureole
to render aid to ships, stations, and planets in danger or distress, so off they'd go.

              She called into the screen, "All hands to duty stations.  Captain en route to the bridge.  Check your screens for mission details."  At once a high-pitched trilling reverberated through the
Aureole's
onboard comm systems.  Reyna slipped her screen into the pocket of her uniform top and made for the portal out into the corridor.

              Stepping out into the corridor and walking briskly, acknowledging the nods of crew members speeding past her to reach their stations, Reyna held the image of Ty Callum in her mind.  She knew what these prospector ship Captains were like; she had been to bed with a few.  They were generally opportunistic characters, never satisfied with their portion of the Terran Commonwealth, the collective fund that was established when humanity moved into space and freedom from poverty was declared a human right after the cruel inequalities of life on Earth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  They tended to be holdovers from the time when the pursuit of money, not inner, personal purpose, was the prime motivator of human life, when money was an end and a morality of its own.  They also tended to be charismatic and persuasive, able to convince people to follow them and believe that it was in their best interest to do so.  That was how such men gathered crews to their side and led them out into places like asteroid fields and supernova remnants, seeking fortunes that people no longer really needed in a time when a life without want was held to be every human's birthright. 

              Men like Ty Callum were the last of an old breed, the people who wanted
more,
always
more.
  Such men no longer did well on Earth or in human society in general because their way of life was considered to be a throwback to a cruel, harsh time when those with
more
used those who had less as disposable tools.  They were better off in space, leading their archaic life of mining gold, silver, platinum, jewels, and raw materials from the abundance of the galaxy.  They were forbidden to trespass in nebulae and on planets, asteroids, and moons where governments had laid claims to resources for the collective good.  They were most commonly found in areas like the Xerxes Remnant, which were the domain of no one planet or no one government under the terms of interstellar treaties.  They collected the treasures of space and mostly sold them on emerging planets that were not yet spacefaring or traveled in space only within their own star systems; planets still mostly ruled by the need for money.  Such an opportunist, Reyna thought, must be this Ty Callum.

              And yet, even such a man did not deserve to face the threat of the Space Urchins without help.  Stepping out of the corridor into the ship's internal translift and commanding it to take her to the bridge, Reyna could barely suppress a sickly frown at the thought of them.  The creatures were not actually the slimy or spiny parasites that their name and their reputation suggested.  They were actually a plasma-energy life form dwelling entirely in space.  They were believed to be non-sentient, possessing no more intelligence than any lower, planet-dwelling organism.  So little was known about them and they had been studied so little because of the way the creatures lived.  Their origin unknown, they had existed for longer than any known space-traveling civilization.  It was believed that the very first civilization in this galaxy to leave its home planet millions of years ago knew the Space Urchins, and that every species that had traveled in space since then had encountered them.  Wherever they came from, the Space Urchins were a menace to interstellar traffic and every civilized, spacefaring planet considered them to be the vermin of the galaxy and wished for their extermination.  They seemed to be attracted to anything artificial or technological, anything processed for the use of intelligent beings.  A vessel in warp space was safe from them; the creatures were not capable of faster-than-light travel and it must have taken them millions of years to disperse throughout the known galaxy.  Nor were the Urchins a danger to ships or beings in a planet's atmosphere; they never left space.  But upon finding a vessel in normal space, or any such matter or any such device as they craved, the Space Urchins attacked it and devoured it.  They fed on processed metals, plastics, carbon and silicon compounds--anything made by sentient hands, including space vessels.  They had been known to consume entire spacecraft like the piranhas of Earth's Amazon.  Ships were specially shielded to ward them off.  If there were any weakness or failure in a craft's shields when Space Urchins were in the vicinity, the vessel and all crew and travelers aboard were in jeopardy.  This must be what had befallen the
SS
Morrow.

              Reyna recounted what she had read on her screen about the mission specifics.  Callum and his crew were prospecting for rare and precious elements in the clouds of the supernova remnant, at whose center the Xerxes Pulsar spun, when they were adjusting their ship's shielding to allow for sample collecting.  The fluctuations of electromagnetic energy in space and the momentary flux of the ship's shields and sensors allowed a Space Urchin to pass through and attach to the hull of the
Morrow.
  That was all it took.  In moments, power had to be diverted to reinforcing the hull integrity fields, and when external shielding fluctuated further it allowed more Urchins to pass through.  At once the creatures swarmed the ship, and some of them got inside through breaches in the hull.  The crew of the
Morrow
had suffered casualties and injuries while battling the Urchins both inside and on the outer hull of the craft.  They had only partial engine control and the warp generators were off-line--and they were in danger of being caught in the hypergravity of the pulsar.  If they drifted too close to the center of Xerxes, it could put them beyond saving.

              "Not
too
precarious," she sighed to herself with irony as she stepped out onto her bridge.  Her fellow senior officers were already in place.  Between her seat in the center and the forward viewer at the front was her Helmsman, a short-haired man of African descent.  To the Helmsman's right sat the Science Officer, a gentle-looking young brown-haired male human.  To Reyna's right was Operations and Communications, where sat a pale blonde from Delta Orionis with the characteristic black circles around the eyes and the antennae rising from her temples that marked her species.  To Reyna's left, at Weapons and Tactical, sat the Ship's Gunner, a scaly, red-skinned Proximan.  The officers acknowledged their Captain as she took her seat.

              The Orionite reported, "
SS Niagara
is six AU away and closing, Captain.  We're relieved."

              "Very good," said Reyna.  "Helm, you have coordinates.  Full warp; let's be going."

              "Full warp, Captain," said the black man.  And with a smooth manipulation of controls, the
Aureole
veered onto its new course out of the Morgan Sector.