Alien Fighter's Baby (Captured Science Fiction Romance)

T
his book is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

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Copyright © 2016 by Kat Emm. All rights reserved.

Written by Kat Emm at
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F
rom the moment
Alpha-Force Lieutenant Bran Hayes saw the woman backed against the wall in the ascetic white chamber, he knew she was a civilian. He couldn’t remember how many years it had been since he’d seen a nonmilitary woman. The differences were striking.

But the alien Trak-Grub-Wald that guarded him from behind shoved him roughly into the center of the circular room with its coiled Wald-tail forced into the small of his bare back. He watched the woman try to retreat along the circular wall, but her bare feet faltered, and she didn’t get any further away from him or the massive Grub.

Fear was palpable in her startling green eyes. It was a color that he hadn’t seen on a woman before—blue, gray, or brown, but never living green eyes.

“Intercourse! Screw!”

The suddenness of the Grub’s screech wrenched Bran’s thoughts away from irises that could be the color of real grass, and he staggered, as the Grub shoved him toward the woman. The meaning of the creature’s shrill-sounding human words penetrated his mind.

Damn.

He’d thought many things could happen to him when he’d been captured by the enemy Trak-Grub-Wald. But not that.

“What the hell!”

Bran tried to turn as he cursed. He knew it was a mistake, but he was too disbelieving to stop. Predictably, a second later, he fell to his knees. The pain that sliced through his body was mild and only doubled him over. His body jerked with involuntary tremors as he clutched the immoveable metal collar around his neck, which produced the shocking pain.

Dirty Grubs would have to do better than that, he thought with fixed resolve as he bit back his yell of agony. Then as suddenly as it started, the spasm of pain that stabbed him from head to toe stopped.

The seven-foot-tall Grub shrieked again. “Intercourse! Screw!”

Bran didn’t move from his kneeling position. He’d been trained to withstand torture. He’d been indoctrinated into the military’s elite troopers. The alien Grub behind him didn’t know that … and it never would. It wouldn’t come from his lips. Any torture they employed, he would withstand. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to forcefully take an innocent young civilian woman.

Then the woman screamed.

The immediate sound was tortured and excruciating. Bran’s head snapped up. His metallic-silver irises expanded and he saw the woman as she thrashed naked on the smooth metal flooring. He knew she couldn’t withstand the intense pain of the collar.

Delicate Green Eyes was too fragile.

Her pain tore at him in a way that surprised the hardened soldier inside him. She was helpless beneath the torture of the collar around her slender neck.

“Death!” the Grub howled with piercing sounds.

“Bastard!” Bran sneered at the damned scorpioid, and then he realized the Grub was laughing. Bran jerked his muscular body upright. His voice rose to a sharp, but snarled agreement.

“Intercourse,” he shouted.

The Trak-Grub-Wald used one of its four underdeveloped forelimbs and curled it inward. It touched a place on its belt that strapped its distended belly from bloating outward. At once, the woman stopped screaming, to lie weeping on the cold metal flooring.

She was soft. Too damn soft.

She would never survive captivity, Bran thought.

Grimly, Bran realized it would be kinder to let the Grub kill her—or he should do it. He knew he could do it painlessly, once he was close enough to touch her. It would take him only seconds.

He approached the woman on silent bare feet, as he carefully watched the Grub back away. However, it was obvious the rancid Grub intended to stay and watch.

Bran nearly laughed.

Wouldn’t his Alpha-Force command love to discover that the scrappy Grubs were voyeurs? But where in the ninety-fifth nebula had the Trak-Grub-Wald race found a civilian woman, he wondered, as he lowered onto his hands and knees over the shivering, naked woman.

Starling tried to swallow back her tears as she gazed up at the black-haired man who knelt over her. She’d heard the seven-foot alien’s screeched command, and knew what the muscular man crouched over her intended to do.

The tears that spilled from her eyes were slow, but relentless, as she tried to stop shaking. Would it make any difference in the chain of horrendous events that she was untried?

“What’s your name?” The silver-eyed man lifted his square hand toward her and she flinched, anticipating pain. But he only clasped his wide hand over the pain collar, which was cinched around her throat.

His touch was surprisingly gentle.

“Starling,” she whispered, unable to stop the quivering in her voice.

The man looked startled by her name. His silver irises swirled with metallic, dark colors. She’d never seen eyes like his, but she knew from people in her past that he had to be an Alpha-Force trooper. Likely one of the highest ranked, and his eyes could see things that simple human eyes couldn’t.

“Beautiful,” Bran muttered.

He’d never heard a more unexpected and feminine name, and it fit her completely. For inexplicable reasons he released her slender throat and backed away from his intention to end her suffering.

“Screw!”

Starling flinched beneath him and she clutched his forearms in reaction to the Grub’s shrieked command, as he gazed down at her. He had never had sex with a real woman, and he’d only nailed a dozen or so sexual cyborgs over the years. Cyborgs that the military provided its troopers.

He’d certainly never expected to see genuine breasts the shape of large moons. He was so close he could have touched them, to feel their firm plumpness and the tightness of her thrusting nipple tips, which were the shade of dark rose.

Military women surgically lessened their chests to nonexistence, and not one of them had silky hair topping their petite mounds, as Starling had.

If Bran wondered whether it would be possible to take Starling under the circumstances he’d been forced into, he didn’t any longer. His shaft rose hard and long between his muscular thighs.

“You have to do what I tell you, beautiful,” he demanded, with a deeply rasped voice. “Can you do that?”

Bran thought the quickly used endearment was inspired on his part, and he was amazed with the way the foreignness of it had come so easily to his lips. Starling’s leafy-green irises, which showed fear and brittle surrender, abruptly changed when he called her “beautiful.”

Her green eyes darkened to moss with tentative hopefulness.

She’d toppled to his command under their circumstances.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Resigned, yet unaccountably aroused, Bran gathered his forearms beneath Starling’s bare back. He lifted her, while kneeling with his heels bracing his flanks. The tension in Starling’s body was at odds with the incredible softness of her shape.

The places where he could feel her creamy skin pressing against him slammed into him like a Mack tank. He’d never held anything as tempting. Sweat beaded his brow as his gaze traveled the length of Starling’s hair, which fell to the middle of her back. Its rich waves shaped and clung around the firmness of her voluminous breasts.

She was strikingly petite and delicately boned compared to his girth. Her small hands clutched his compact shoulder muscles and he felt her long fingernails dig in.

“Put your legs on either side of my hips, beautiful.”

Man, she was young, he realized as he felt her youthful ripeness fill his arms.

Starling felt the air leave her lungs as the black-haired trooper’s gaze lowered. Anxiousness made her gnaw her bottom lip, as she forced her shaking legs to do as he commanded.

She had no choice. The trooper’s calloused hands clasped around her waist and his hot grip seared her flesh. It felt so foreign to have anyone touch her there, and something fluttered deep inside her. She clutched the tightly rolled brawn across his shoulders, and she shuddered with the force she used not to jump up and run away.

Suddenly, her eyes popped open and she whispered against his temple with an urgent, wavering voice, “What’s your n-name?”

The trooper’s head lifted, and Starling realized with anxious panic that he was young and grimly attractive.

“Lieutenant Bran Hay—”

Starling cried out, and Bran saw the end of the Grub’s five-foot Wald-tail as it recoiled from lashing across her naked buttocks, making her lurch into his chest.

Damn puke Grub
, Bran thought.

He ought to kill that one, only there were fifty more on the other side of the hatch, and he didn’t want them to know he could work through their pain collars. He needed to save that little surprise for his escape.

“Intercourse! Female! Now!” the Grub shrieked.

A
long time after
, Bran had lain awake for hours in his cell, as he remembered with astonishment how he’d thundered, “No damn way!”

Never, in a million nebulas, had he thought the woman could be a virgin. By the darkest reaches of space, no one was a virgin any longer.

“Come! Now! Come now!” the filthy Grub had ordered.

Bran remembered as he’d seen the Grub’s Wald-tail coil around Starling’s neck, like a grotesque noose. It had forced Starling up and off him with jerky movements. She’d cried out, before he could barely catch his breath, much less think. Then the Grub had quickly pulled Starling away, while five more of the grubby aliens had lumbered into the room to surround him.

The last sight Bran had of Starling was of her being dragged from the room, naked and barely able to stand. She’d had a Wald-tail strangling her throat, while he’d knelt immobile on the floor. A muscle had ticked hard in his jaw as she’d disappeared through the opened hatch.

Then the five Grub guards had backed out of the room and left him a solitary figure, kneeling back on his heels.

Bran shook the memories out of his head and he stared at the ceiling of his cell. It was actually a hole, which was twenty feet deep and no more than two body lengths wide, with a surprising human-made, yet primitive, water spike coming out of the alloy wall, along with a drain on the floor.

He was naked except for the metal pain collar, and he lay on his back with his hands and forearms locked behind his head as a prop. What worried him and caused him grinding cynical discomfort, because he’d even felt the worry to begin with, was whether Starling was held in the same type of isolated, cold prison.

He couldn’t stop imagining her huddled naked in a corner, cold and afraid. She was soft … too damned soft. She didn’t belong out there, not in the middle of the rim war. It was like seeing a flitter-star in the middle of a holocaust nebula. The fragile flitter-star had no hope of surviving the harshness.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

Then, he flipped onto his stomach and started to pump push-ups. Twenty … fifty … one hundred. He collapsed with his sweat-soaked chest slick on the cold alloy flooring, and still he couldn’t get the innocence, vulnerability, and beauty out of his mind.

He was afraid that was the point.

* * *

S
even weeks later
, by Bran’s rough estimations in the world of the ascetic prison, he still wasn’t sure about the Grubs’ manipulative reasons for forcing him to be with Starling.

He hadn’t seen her since that one time, or anyone else but the Grubs, and they appeared to act as he expected enemy jailers to act. They tortured him daily, inventing new, innovative ways of trying to force him to speak anything but his name, rank, and serial number.

That day had been particularly rigorous, with excruciating attacks on his genitals. It was an attack that had broken him enough to gasp his Alpha-Force ranking—the highest, silver. That break had shaken him, even though it was insignificant information. Still, with his training, he felt he could go on for weeks, while giving them only little pieces of nothing information.

It was his duty to do so, to drag the enemy along, waste their time, and, in the end, not give the stinking Grubs anything they didn’t already have.

But at the moment when he’d hoarsely grunted his color ranking, he’d felt shameful relief that the pain would stop. If even for a minute. Then he was worried, nearly to the point of obsession, that at any moment the rancid Grubs would toss Starling into the chamber with him.

He’d been plagued by the idea that they would torture her and try to use her to force him to talk. It was sly … it was Grub-like thinking … and it was the only explanation he could come up with for what had happened weeks earlier.

Why else had they made him mate with her?

Bran clenched his eyes. He had been hanging for several hours, alone after he’d given them the color of his ranking. He hung by straps around his wrists, which were attached to the high ceiling in one of the Grubs’ completely metal rooms. He still had the pinchers attached, which they’d used for conduits of some type of charge. There were four of them attached on his limp groin area.

Gradually, he became aware of a change in his surroundings.

No, it was more as if it were outside of the room around him. It was a deep intuition, which, moments later, was aided by the radiant heat detectors that spiked in his eyes. There were some very high heat levels snapping within one click of the chamber where he hung.

He did a mental click, and then blinked his eyes. It shifted their focus to x-ray, which could only pierce the wall into the next chamber. Still, it was enough, because he could detect that the Grubs were in an uproar.

Then, for the first time in months, an audacious grin lifted his lips. Unless the Trak-Grub-Wald wardens were bombarding themselves, he was nearly certain they were under attack.

A moment later, the hatch to the chamber he was in began to melt beneath an antimatter bombardment. Bran guessed that it had to be at least five tack-rifles firing and centered on the hatch at once to produce that intensity.

It meant his entire Alpha-Force team was still intact, and showing off.

He’d not felt so relieved in years, and it was unusual for his normally hardened soldier’s conduct. He was afraid he knew where it came from. He was hard-bones military, but something had softened him. Like a dewy-soft virgin.

Damn, he thought in irritation … that was not good.

“Oh whew, son! Take a look at that fine white ass! This black witch has found herself a hanging slab of male, now.”

Bran scowled as he watched the body follow the sarcastic voice into the chamber, and his third-tail in command, Lee, sauntered in. She was tall, muscle-lithe, and a smartass. But she was good—and the best assassin trooper he’d ever trained.

“I told you he would be in here!” Jammer said excitedly, as he followed Lee into the chamber. Jammer was a whiz with techno stuff. “See, commander! I was the one that found you,” Jammer exclaimed.

“Good work, Jammer. Now, get me the hell down from here.” Bran snapped the order as if he’d not left his command for weeks.

Bran didn’t appreciate the helpless position he was in, not with Lee eyeing him. Then there was Cobalt, his second-tail, sneering sarcastically like a blond Hercules who was master of all around him.

Damn it, Bran thought, he would gut-punch Cobalt for that superior sneer. He and Cobalt were natural rivals, no matter how much, as the man’s commander, Bran tried not to be.

Jammer was about to take a leg up from Lee to laser-cut the straps around Bran’s wrists, when Bran heard the suction pop of an antimatter plug. He reacted with incredible swiftness the second he felt himself falling.

“Balls, Cobalt! That was rude!” Jammer yelled, after he’d managed rotating a body flip in the air and landed on his feet.

Bran wasn’t as lucky. He hit the floor on a roll and everything would have been fine, except for his fury at Cobalt’s tactics. However, he was still hooked to the four pinchers. A grunt ripped from his throat as he finished his roll. The force of his fall and roll had pulled the pinchers loose, and he clutched his groin.

“Hey ho, troopers and wannabes!” Wisetech’s electronically injected voice sounded in the chamber with a booming quality and too much bass. The sound bounced around the alloy walls, while Bran chomped down on the severe pain racking him, eating it back into his gut. “We got Grubbies massing for one counter attack,” Wisetech announced. “Only ten of the slugs down the hall, five clicks. The rest are scattering.”

With the end of Wisetech’s report, Bran went into action. He flipped in a tight leap onto his feet, faster than Cobalt expected. Because then he had Cobalt by his balls, and he squeezed them with a savage grip through Cobalt’s skintight spandex pants—using his wide hand, which was capable of killing in seconds.

“Balls! Sh-shit!” Cobalt roared, just as Bran snatched the tack-pistol from Cobalt’s holster-grip, then shoved Cobalt into the metal wall, where he released him.

“Get to work!” Bran ordered, glaring at Cobalt’s sneer.

“Sure thing, commander.” Cobalt slid his glacier-blue eyes to the side with scorn, and then he spat on the metal flooring, before he sprinted out of the chamber with the rest of the team following him.

Bran quickly used the tack-pistol’s laser on the pain-collar mechanism. He was grateful a second later when the metal collar snapped open. He tore it off, and then threw it aside with disgust. Now he didn’t have to laser-cut the collar later and sear his skin in the process.

Still staying back, Bran grabbed Wisetech’s one real arm and held him back. He saw the recruit named Cookie had joined the group, moving from where he’d been keeping watch in the outer chamber.

“Other prisoners?” Bran asked Wisetech, as they moved forward.

“Negative.” Wisetech slid his onyx gaze sideways and caught Bran’s eyes. “But I did pick up three heartbeats when I did the first scan from onboard the Skitter ship. Now, nothing.”

A snapping sound cracked ahead of them. Immediately, both men lowered to a crouch, but they continued to move forward.

“Woman or man?” Bran asked.

He ignored his nakedness, but at least his groin had stopped shooting fire from the pulled pinchers.

“Weird ones,” Wisetech said. They both moved to slap the wall with their backs, and then they watched Jammer, Cookie, Lee, and Cobalt continue to engage the Grubs ahead with rapid fire. “One woman, sure. And then you, but the other was weird. But human,” Wisetech finished.

Bran kept an eye on the corridor behind them, easily letting the team ahead of them take care of the Grubs in their way.

“You said the Grubs were scattering? Are they taking ships?” Bran asked.

“Yup.” Wisetech chuckled.

“How many?”

Bran watched Wisetech with only half his attention, as he kept their rear covered, and Wisetech pulled down his chest aero-com panel. Wisetech used one hand to access his link to their Skitter ship. “Um, appears … two’s all. One’s shielded, though.”

“Where?” Bran snapped, and it looked as if he’d surprised Wisetech with his intensity.

“Ah”—Wisetech pointed behind them—“two corridors, then all the way to the end.” Bran shoved away from the wall. “But hey, boss man, whatcha—”

Bran interrupted Wisetech’s yammering with a sharp command over his shoulder. “Wait fifteen, then skitter-split, old man.”

“Aye, aye, boss man!” Wisetech shouted.

But Bran had already turned the corner, and then he began to sprint.