Marauder Cygnus: A Scifi Alien Shifter Romance (Mating Wars Book 1) (3 page)

I
laugh
at the thought of the female fighting alongside me. I’ve killed two males already just as they entered the airlock, and they’ve left it open. I do not want to give them time to plan, so I lunge through the air and out of the female’s ship with my gun held up and ready to fire.

As I fly through the air, I see four pirates surrounding the airlock door. They’re close to me, but are unprepared for my advance.

I take reflexive shots, and before I even land, I’ve shot two of them dead.

The remaining two aim their weapons at me sluggishly, so I hit the ground and roll.

Firing again as I’m rolling, one of my bullets blows a hole in the third pirate’s face.

The fourth pirate gets one shot off, and I hear the bullet ping on the metal floor a full Marauder’s span from me. I break hard from my roll, raise the gun, and fire, hitting him right in the heart.

I begin to survey my surroundings even as the fourth pirate falls. The cargo hold we’ve been pulled into is enormous, and there are smaller bay doors all around me. The female’s ship seems to be secured in a corner of the bay. On the wall behind me is a ladder, which leads quite high up. I wasn’t able to see this ship from the outside, but judging by the direction of acceleration, I assume the cargo bay is on the bottom of the ship. The ladders will likely lead up toward the main parts of the ship, which will hold all the men that I must kill to convince the female to help me get to the red planet.

The female runs past me, grabs one of the fallen pirate’s guns, and holds it up as if she’s preparing to fight.

“Cygnus, it looks clear, but more are probably coming.” she says, moving back toward me, her gun still held up high.

Where did she learn to mock a male soldier’s movements so accurately?

Rage bubbles up from deep in my gut that she would shame me like this, but I suppress it—for now.

“Get back in the ship, female!” I shout to her.

I let my inner bear rise up, and my hearing becomes more acute.

I hear a hiss from one of the bay doors to my right. I spin toward it and raise the gun, and the moment it opens, I fire a bullet through the small gap. I hold the gun there, waiting. I hear my own heart beating, and the female’s, as well.

Suddenly, I hear another clatter to the left. It’s hundreds of meters away, but the bear’s hearing is impressive. I spin toward the source of the sound, and pop off a shot before I can even see the target.

My sight catches up to my hearing, and I see a man falling with his hands holding his gut.

“Wow,” the female says from behind me. “You certainly weren’t lying when you said you’re good with weapons. You hit them before I even knew they were coming.”

I hold the gun ready to shoot again. I listen, but it’s silent aside from the female’s heavy breathing behind me.

I feel a gentle warmth on my back. It’s the female’s hand, and her skin...it’s impossibly soft. Marauders have calloused hands, but the touch from this human female’s palm is softer than the finest fabrics of Sanftar.

“Cygnus,” she says. “Now that we’re in the hangar, I got Seth to scan the ship’s layout. I can take us to an access point.”

I turn back to face her and shout, “Give me the map, woman, and
I
will access the point!”

I furrow my brows at her, shake my ears, and frown deeply. Perhaps I can scare her back to safety.

Her face scrunches up in a perplexing formation. I can’t quite figure out what it means.

She stifles a laugh.

“First you shame debt me,” I say. “And now you insult me?”

“The map is on my HUD,” she says. “I have lenses grafted to my eyes that link to the ship’s computer. Do you know how I can get that map onto your eyeballs?” She glares at me, with a daring question in her eyes.

I shake my ears profusely, and then narrow my eyes at the infuriating female. “Tell me the way, and I will go there.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll do that, but on one condition.”

“Speak,” I say. I’m tired of arguing with her. She seems hell-bent on endangering herself and shaming me, as well.

“When you reach...
the point
...how will you
access
it? What’s the plan?”

I’ve learned their language from Sol broadcasts, but perhaps I’ve overestimated my own abilities.

“I will point my gun at it,” I say, shaking the gun. “And gain access...through brute force!”

“The access point is a computer, Cygnus. I have to get Seth in there, and he can open the hangar door. Only I can get Seth in there, you can’t interface with him. Do you understand?”

“You insult my intelligence,” I growl. “I understand perfectly.” I don’t understand what she means, but no human female can talk down to me.

I grab her by the wrist and begin to march her back to the airlock. She resists, but my strength is far greater than hers, which further proves my point: I’m in charge.

I get her back into the airlock, and she begins hitting my chest. My penis starts to twitch and, to my amazement, it begins to vibrate.

Impossible! A penis can only vibrate when in the presence of a true lifemate. This woman is just…just what? She’s just a human female, isn’t she?

I look at her more closely. Her facial features are—at best—a 2.5-point deviation from the ideal Seraphic Form, which all Marauders must venerate in their breeding partners.

“Freckles,” I say, studying her face. They are imperfect...but they draw me in, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s my inner bear corrupting the purity of my Marauder DNA.”

“What?” the female spouts, but she stops hitting me.

I notice, too, that she has shifted her gaze and she is now looking down at my engorged and vibrating penis.

I make another realization: her face reddens more when she is angry, and seeing her angry pleases me.

I smile.

“
F
reckles
,” he says, completely out of nowhere.

“What?” I say. Why did I stop hitting him again? This insufferable bastard alien is….

Smiling. Again. Smiling at me.

My mouth drops open, and I look up at his obnoxiously charming smile and piercing green eyes.

“I was thinking,” he says, “that your eyes are several millimeters too far apart and your facial structure is too far deviated from the Seraphic Form. However, I was taken by your freckles...which should be a flaw. But on you...they are not.”

The blood rushes to my face flushing it in blind rage. Did he
seriously
just say my eyes were too many millimeters apart?

He turns his back to me and, without warning, he slams the airlock shut in my face.

I hear metal scraping, and when I try to turn the latch, I find it’s been jammed from the outside.

“Shit!” I yell, even if it’s only to myself. Trapped in my own damn ship.

Wait. Did he also just say that he...liked my freckles? And...his inner bear? Was he insane, or was he using the wrong words? He was speaking with a strange accent, and it was clear that Solarian was not his first language. In many dialects of Solarian, the slang term for ‘penis’ often references animals. Birds are popular, dragons, snakes...but bears? Maybe since his ears were bear-like, he called his dick his bear? But how would his dick force him to
like my freckles
?

I kick the hatch with my boot. “Seth! Help me open the door!”

“Deploying drones,” Seth says. “Please be patient.”

I point the gun up to the ceiling—no, the wall, which is now the ceiling—as if threatening to shoot Seth. “Don’t tell me to be patient! I’m pretty tired of men bossing me around.”

“I can be a woman,” Seth says, his voice turning completely feminine. “If you’d like.”

“I’d like you to unjam the door!” I say, shaking the gun at him.

I jiggle the handle. It clatters with each attempt, but nothing budges.

While I wait for Seth’s drones to do their work, the acceleration dies off, and I’m back in zero-g.

Finally, after what feels like hours, I hear a sliding sound, and when I try the hatch handle again, it opens right up.

“Our purple friend jammed a rifle through the handle,” Seth says. “Perhaps he is right, however, and it’s best for you to remain in the ship, if—”

“Not you too, Seth,” I say, floating through the hatch and into the pirates’ cargo bay.

“Sorry, Aura, whatever you think is best.”

As if in apology, a route draws itself across the map, and Seth starts explaining as I follow the route.

“This is the most likely way he’ll go because it’s the most straightforward and brutish approach” Seth says. “. I expect he’ll walk right past the access point, and I also expect there will be an army of pirates...here.” He points to a small hallway that flashes red on my map.

“Chokepoint,” I say. “Well, he seems well-versed in battle tactics, maybe he can figure it out. Good luck to him.”

I follow the map, and there’s a blood-splattered door open along Seth’s route. Seth was right, Cygnus went this way. I see a body floating through the hall, and I maneuver around it. When I reach the door to the access point, I find that it’s unlocked.

“Sloppy,” I say.

I run in and I find the access point. It’s a big black tower of computers covered with a variety of old-fashioned ports.

“Shit,” I say. “It’s ancient.”

“Sometimes obsolete equipment is the best security measure,” Seth says.

“That doesn’t help me,” I say.

“Check the dead pirate in the hallway,” Seth says.

I go cautiously back into the hallway and gently prod the floating body with my boot. It rotates slowly around, and when I see computer keys jangling on his belt, I carefully try to unhook them without touching the body itself.

I go back to the computer and try the first key. Seth tries to stop me, but it’s too late.

An alarm starts wailing the moment I insert the key..

“Okay,” I say. “So not that one.”

I try the keys, one after another. One brings up weapons systems, one brings up climate control, and finally, I find a key that controls the airlocks, hatches, and most importantly — the hangar doors.

I set the main hangar door to the unlocked position, and Seth confirms he can open it at any time. Then, for good measure, I unlock
all
the doors and airlocks, which gives Seth some serious control.

“Get back to the ship, Aura,” he says. “I don’t know how long it will remain unlocked. If their captain notices you’ve hacked in, he may be able to re-lock it.”

I nod, pull the keys out and keep them—just in case. When I get into the hall, I grasp hold of one of the handrails and prepare to propel myself into the main hangar and back toward the
Zephyr.
I hold tight to the handrail. The sweat on my palms feels cold against the metal.

“Aura!” Seth says. “Come on!”

“Cygnus!” I say, in what sounds to me like a panicked voice. “I can’t leave him here, can I?”

Seth makes a scoffing sound. “If you,
human female
, went to help him, you’d positively shame him! How dare you consider shaming him and making him lose so much face.”

I draw in a deep breath and hold it. I think it through carefully and realize that the best and smartest thing to do is turn tail and run before I die on a pirate ship. It’s the smartest thing to do...but it’s still shitty. I exhale, turn back around, and propel myself deeper down the hall, following Cygnus’ trail of floating pirate bodies.

“Aura…,” Seth whines, but I ignore him. He’s just a computer, and Cygnus is...insufferable? An asshole? Yes, he is those things, but he also saved my life. I try to imagine how long I’d have lasted holed up in the
Zephyr
with that one pistol and some scrapping drones to guard me while dozens of pirates flooded in to kill me. Cygnus saved me, and I couldn’t live with myself if I just abandoned him.

“This door will take you into the spine,” Seth says, stopping beside the door.

I open the door and see the spine. It’s lined with ladders and handrails. There are doors all along the spine. Having seen the ship from the outside, I know that all the doors will lead to spokes of rotating rooms. These rooms will be able to simulate gravity even when the ship isn’t under acceleration. Most of the ship will be comprised of rooms like this, and when the ship is accelerating, they can just kill the rotation.

Seth overlays directions onto my HUD. I follow them.

I kick off from one of the rungs and float down the spine until I hit the wall. I push off the wall and propel further and further down the spine, bouncing back and forth against the wall as I go. It takes me three or four minutes to get all the way down, as the ship is huge. At the end of the spine, I reach a computerized door.

“Can you open it?” I ask.

I know that the main command room is beyond this door. It’s at the front of the ship, and it’s where Cygnus would go.

“Opening on three,” Seth says. “3, 2, 1….”

The door opens, and I can’t believe what I see.

There are hundreds of dead and eviscerated bodies floating all over the command room, and floating orbs of blood float alongside the bodies.

The command room is the size of a hotel lobby, and there’s a bear floating through the air. Not just any bear, though. No. It’s a purple fucking bear, and its fur is blood-caked. It’s flying toward a man who is holding tightly to a handrail on the wall. The man has a knife, and he kicks off the wall to lunge toward the bear.

Just as he’s in range to slash at the bear with his knife, the bear transforms into Cygnus.

Cygnus grabs the man’s wrist, bends his arm back, and jams the knife deep into the man’s back. He kicks off the writhing body to propel himself through the air and toward the wall. He hits the wall and clasps one of the handrails with his free hand.

“Female!” he shouts to me. “You shouldn’t be here!”

“He’s still calling you
female,
” Seth says. “Do you regret going back for him yet?”

I roll my eyes, but my heart beats hard when I see Cygnus once again.

“I defeated all of them,” Cygnus says matter-of-factly. “There were only a few of them when I came in here, but dozens more flooded in. I killed every last one. Though I think their leader has fled.”

“Why do you say that?” I ask.

Cygnus is pulling his way down the handrails, getting closer and closer to me. I can’t help but stare at his big teal dick floating gloriously in zero-g. And his biceps bulge enticingly as he moves hand over hand across the walls.

“No one fought well enough,” Cygnus says. “No one was strong enough to merit being a captain of this ship.”

I laugh. “I think you’re going to find that humans are weaker than...whatever it is you are. You know that we also cannot transform into bears? When were you planning on mentioning that little detail?”

“I told you,” he says. “Before I shut the airlock in your face.”

His bear
. Oh.

“Okay,” I say. “But I think you’ll need to explain it to me a tiny bit better than that when we have some time.”

“I’ve killed every last pirate,” Cygnus says. “I have fought back the shame debt you have brought onto me. You may now access the point.”

The shame I brought onto
him
? The nerve! I could have left his ass behind to pilot this big pirate ship on his own, which is probably impossible for such a brute to handle.

“In
our
culture, you can thank
me
for helping
you
,” I say. “It goes over a lot better than blaming me.”

“Thank you?” Cygnus says, finally pulling himself up so he’s positioned right next to me and by the open door to the spine. “Never has a woman put me so deep into shame debt! You’re lucky I’m powerful enough to have paid it back. No, I’ll not be thanking you. Now come!”

He grabs me by the waist, and before I can say a word, he jerks the ladder and whips us down into the spine.

Unlike my previous attempt to propel through where I hit the wall a dozen times, we glide through perfectly straight. When my surprise dies down, I realize that Cygnus is holding me tightly his body. His muscles are hard, and his body is warm against me. His muscular arm is wrapped tight and solid around my waist, which feels positively miniscule in his giant hands. And I can feel his dick pressed into my back. It’s hot and thick and big. And it’s...
vibrating?

Before I can confirm that his teal alien cock is indeed vibrating, we hit the end of the spine.

The ship rumbles, and my stomach churns. We’re pulled down to the ground. The ship is accelerating again, which means we’ll have to climb all the way down to the
Zephyr
rather than just floating.

“Follow me, female,” he says. “Their captain must still live; he is controlling the ship.”

I follow him down the ladder. I can see the
Zephyr
way down on the ground. It looks like a small speck from this height.

Cygnus looks up at me as he climbs down. “My ammunition was depleted when I killed two dozen men,” he says. “Give me your gun.”

“Fine,” I sputter. “I get it, you’re just
so
amazing with a gun, and your bear claws, and whatever else you can get your hands on. Here!”

I tug on the shoulder strap and dangle the gun down toward him. He rips it out of my hand and straps it to his back before continuing down the ladder.

“When you ask for something,” I say, “and the person does it for you, you say ‘thank you.’ Maybe you can practice?”

“I asked for nothing,” he says nonchalantly. “I ordered, and you obeyed.”

“Regret it yet?” Seth asked in a smirking voice.

I roll my eyes and keep climbing down.

Cygnus reaches the ground. I wonder as I go down the last few rungs if he’s going to reach out his hand and help me down like a gentleman, or if—

Before I can finish my thought, he grabs me by my waist with both hands, tears me off the ladder, and then plops me down onto my feet. He looks me right in the eyes, wiggles his ears, and turns his back to me.

I look down at his perfectly sculpted purple ass, and I give up trying to figure out what the hell he is trying to do with me. I could almost swear he’s intentionally trying to piss me off, but that assumes a certain level of self-awareness or humor on Cygnus’ part. I’m convinced the man— or the alien—has no sense of humor.

“Ah,” Seth says. “Cygnus did not kill everyone, and he was right about the captain. Incoming.”

As we near the
Zephyr,
one of the bay doors begins to slide open.

Cygnus pulls the gun off his back and points it toward the door.

Just as I’m about to tell him what Seth said, he grabs me with one hand and tosses me over his shoulder.

“Hold on,” he says.

His arm is holding me tight to his body, but I swing myself around so that I’m clasping to him piggyback style. My legs wrap around his muscular back as he begins to run toward the
Zephyr
.

His left arm reaches back to hold me secure as his giant, seven-foot strides jostle me up and down. He continues holding the gun in his right hand pointing it toward the rising bay door.

I can barely see anything considering how much I’m bouncing up and down, but it looks like there’s some kind of robot standing in the bay. I can make out mechanical legs.

Cygnus fires a few shots, and I look up toward where we are going. I’m surprised that we are only about fifty meters from my ship. Cygnus runs fast.

Just as we’re close to the airlock, I hear bullets whizz past us. Cygnus opens fire.

When I look up, I see a giant robotic exoskeleton. In the center is a man holding a gun. He’s suspended by tangling hydraulics within the exoskeleton like a small insect caught in a spider’s web.

His gun flashes, and Cygnus runs faster.

I hear hot lead plinking on the metal floor below us, and bullets continue whizzing past us. I’m tucked with most of my body behind Cygnus, grasping his back, but I worry he might get hit.

He reaches the airlock, throws me inside, and slams it in my face. Again.