Marauder Cygnus: A Scifi Alien Shifter Romance (Mating Wars Book 1)

C
opyright
© 2016 by Aya Morningstar

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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

“
A
ura
! Aura! Wake up! You’ve got to see this!”

It’s Seth, the
Zephyr’s
on-ship computer. Even though he’s just a floating voice with no physical presence, he sounds excited.

I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and unzip the big glorified potato bag that I sleep in. It keeps me strapped to the wall so that I don’t float around in zero-g.

I kick myself off the wall and float to the ladder. In zero-g there’s no up or down, so I just pull myself steadily along the ladder, which runs through the ship like a spinal cord, until I reach the pilot’s seat at the front end of the ship.

The
Zephyr
is small, but it’s my home. The ship is shaped like a small high-rise building with four main stories. Each story is its own room, and each room can function in zero-g or under the artificial gravity of acceleration.

We’re not accelerating now though, so I buckle myself into the pilot’s seat and see what Seth has got for me.

My augmented reality lenses flood my vision with the full Heads-Up Display. The HUD shows me where we are in the belt, and it indicates there is a small spherical object flashing green up ahead of us.

“See? See?” Seth says. “Let’s go grab it!”

“It looks like we’ve got everything pointed at it? Full juice?” I ask Seth, pulling up the power distribution chart.

“The sphere is made of some exotic material,” Seth says. “It’s reflecting our pings, so I’m diverting all of our instruments toward it, but we’re still barely getting a reading! Anything less and we won’t get a reading at all. I can’t tell what’s inside, but I bet it’s exciting if it’s trying so hard to hide from us!”

I sigh. “Okay, we’ll ping it like this for five minutes, but then we need to get our guard back up.”

If I keep everything pointed on the sphere, a pirate ship can be right on top of me before I even know it’s there. The sphere is small enough to just scoop onboard into the containment bay, but the “exotic material” worries me. It could be radioactive, or worse, a biological weapon. Best to figure out what it is before scooping it up.

Bio signatures start to pan across Aura’s vision. “Shit! It’s alive?”

“Looks like it,” Seth says. “But the pulse is...barely there.”

I have Seth run a full gamut of tests, and within minutes he rules out any radioactivity.

“Test for known pathogens,” I say, yawning.

“How can you yawn? This is probably the most interesting thing we’ve ever found,” Seth says.

A composite image of what is within the sphere starts to fill in across my HUD and on various screens within the cockpit.

“The lifeform looks human,” Seth says. “Almost. It’s slightly different, look at the ears—”

The five-minute timer I set starts beeping. “Five minutes is up. Reorient the instruments and scan for hostiles.”

“We’ll waste so much time re-pointing the instruments, Aura,” Seth says. “Two more minutes, please?”

“No,” I say. “Reorient, now.”

It takes two or three minutes for the instruments to reorient for a full 360-degree scan, and I look at the data Seth has gathered so far while I wait.

“This...guy...looks to be seven feet tall,” I say. “Is that right?”

“I don’t think it’s a human,” Seth says. “It’s probably genetically modified. Some kind of super soldier.”

I lick my lips. “Sounds valuable.”

I’ve been a scrapper for two years, and I’ve gone on dozens of runs. After paying for fuel, repairs, maintenance, food, and water, I barely break even on each run. I have very little to show for spending two whole years on the outskirts of civilization. I spend time between each run hawking my wares on Mars, but there’s no time in that harsh place for romance. Seth is the closest thing to a man in my life, and that’s only because I programmed his voice to sound like one.

My HUD shows all clear, and I let out a big sigh of relief. “We’ll hold like this for a few more minutes, just to be sure, then we can figure out what’s up with this sphere guy—”

A klaxon rings and my HUD flashes red.

“Pirates!” Seth says. “They’ll be on us in...um, minutes.”

“Give me a way out,” I say. I’m doing everything I can to keep calm, but acid is rising in my throat and my hands are trembling.

“No chance of evasion,” Seth says. “If we scoop the sphere, we can stop them from blowing us up.”

“Uh,” I say, “how do you figure? I know it’s a big loss to abandon it, but I’d rather be broke than dead. Let’s just full burn out of here, and hope they want the sphere more than they do us.”

“Aura,” Seth says. “If they realize it’s a super soldier, or something of high value, they’ll chase and kill us so we can’t tell anyone what we saw, and
then
they’ll go back and grab the sphere.”

Every second I waste is making things worse, and knowing that a torpedo could kill me at any moment has me racked with paralyzing fear.

“Aura?” Seth says.

“Scoop it!” I shout.

Gravity surges back on at 1g as the thrusters ignite. My stomach churns and my cheeks vibrate. The green outline of the sphere grows larger as we begin to approach it.

There’s nothing for me to do but pray as we accelerate toward the sphere, and when we close in to 200 meters, the
Zephyr’s
grappling net launches. I fire it from the side as we zoom past the sphere. If my aim is off, we’ll be out of range for another attempt.

The net blasts wide-open a few meters from the sphere and wraps tightly around it. I let out a relieved sigh.

Nothing happens for a while, but when the cable runs out of length, I feel a jerk as the
Zephyr
starts to drag the sphere along with it.

“Reel it in,” I say. “Continue full 1g burn.”

I unbuckle myself from the seat and climb the ladder. The
Zephyr’s
engines jut out the side of the ship, and when we accelerate at 1g, the acceleration makes it feel like I’m experiencing Earth’s gravity. It helps keep my bones and muscles strong for the five-day trips back and forth from Mars to the belt.

I climb the ladder as fast as I can; I want to see this “specimen” with my own eyes. If I’m going to die, I at least want to see the thing that is responsible for getting me killed.

Capping off the front—or top, depending on how you look at it—of the ship is the cargo bay. While I’m cramped into a tiny four rooms, the cargo bay is twice as tall and twice as wide as the rest of the ship. If my living quarters is the handle of the hammer, the cargo bay is the hammer itself. The
Zephyr
is a scrap ship, so it needs to be able to carry a lot of scrap.

The net is reeling the sphere in toward the cargo bay’s airlock. It will need to pass through the airlock before I can get my hands on it.

I sit down in the cargo bay and focus on my HUD while I wait for the sphere to finish getting reeled in.

Seth has mapped out the situation, and the pirates are burning faster than me—at 1.5g—and it’s only a matter of time before they catch up to us. It’s not just a small asshole pirate ship either, but it’s one of their capital ships. It can hold a handful of smaller craft and dozens of crew members.

“We can threaten to destroy the cargo,” I say, “or offer to sell it.”

“Hmm,” Seth says. “Selling it might work—just don’t expect a good price—but they might kill us anyway after they have what they want from us. We have no real leverage here, Aura.”

I can see the sphere through the window now. The airlock is open on the top end, and it’s only a few meters from entering. The airlock is above me, like an attic, and there’s a built-in hydraulic lift to lower cargo down while under acceleration.

Once the sphere is reeled fully inside, the airlock closes. I watch the gauges.

“Fully pressurized,” Seth says.

“Open it,” I say.

The hatch opens, and the lift starts to lower down into the main area of the cargo bay. As soon as it reaches eye-level, I walk toward it, looking for a window or a hatch. The lift touches the ground, and I walk around it, examining it from all sides. There’s nothing at all but smooth metal. It’s windowless and seemingly doorless.

“Should we cut it open?” I ask Seth.

“That could kill whatever’s inside,” Seth says.

I shake my head. “Hail the pirates, tell them we want to make a deal.”

“They’re...not accepting our hails,” Seth said. “Oh my, they just launched grappling hooks. You might want to hold onto something.”

I rush to the wall and hook myself in. Moments later the ship jerks. I feel my stomach churn as the g-forces fly back and forth between zero and 1g.

“Kill the engines,” I say. “We’re not getting away.”

The engines die, and the g-forces start to drop. The pirate ship must be initiating reverse burn, breaking us back to zero-g.

I unhook myself, push off the wall, and start punching the shit out of the sphere. The stupid valuable piece of shit is going to get me killed. What’s the point of it being valuable if I never even get to sell it?

It feels good to hit it, but each time I punch the sphere, the force from hitting it makes me float back away and I have to push off the wall to strike at it again.

When my knuckles start to hurt, I rest my palm on the sphere and say, “You got me killed, you know that?”

And then, in an instant, the sphere changes from fully opaque to transparent. The sphere becomes so transparent that I’d think it had disappeared, if not for the fact that my hand is still pressing onto its hard metal exterior.

What I see inside makes my heart race—and for all the wrong reasons. I blush profusely as I gaze onto the specimen floating before me, seemingly suspended in mid-air. It’s not quite a man, yet it’s bigger and more masculine than any human man I’ve ever seen. Its skin is purple, and the ears are on the top of its head rather than on the side. The ears are not quite pointy, but appear more rounded, like a bear’s ears. It has medium-length, dark black hair, which is human-looking save for the ears poking out from it.

From the neck down, it’s all a man’s body. And what a man! The shoulders are wider than Saturn’s rings, the chest is as big and imposing as Olympus Mons, and the eight-pack abs are perfectly sculpted—and glistening—like Earth’s glaciers.

I look further down its body, and now I
really
blush. The dick is
almost
human, but it’s so much bigger than anything I’ve ever seen, and it’s teal-colored. The whole body is purple, but the cock is
teal
.

“What the hell,” I say, almot forgetting that pirates are about to kill me.

“I think it’s an alien,” Seth says.

“You don’t say?”