Marauder Cygnus: A Scifi Alien Shifter Romance (Mating Wars Book 1) (11 page)

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.

The suit has covered his hands as well, and he raises them both up, pointing them toward the gate.

“Infiltration teams, get ready!” he shouts, his hands pointed toward the gate.

The gate is about two kilometers away, and I’m still incredibly skeptical that the suit is going to—

His hands glow purple. The glow intensifies, and even through my tinted mask I can barely look at his hands. I raise my hands to shield my eyes, but his hands begin to fade back to teal.

Nothing happens. It didn’t work? Our whole plan relied on this working, and if it doesn’t happen, we’ll be sitting outside this gate with a bunch of buggies and guns and no way in. We’ll—

All at once, a purple beam blasts out of his hands. It swells as it shoots through the air toward the gate. Within seconds, the beam slams into the gate, and that’s when I realize it’s not a beam of light, but plasma, or something resembling plasma. The purple material sloshes against the gate for a moment, and the beam expands. The gate crashes down, and the purple beam floods through the tunnel.

Cygnus keeps his hands held high as the beam completely fills the tunnel.

Buggies are racing down just off the road, steering clear of the beam, but moving in toward the lip of the crater.

As the beam begins to fade away, I make a reckless decision, one that will make Cygnus very angry.

W
hen the hunger
begins to gnaw at me, I scale back the flow of plasma. I need to leave something for the suit—and for myself—after I’m in the city.

The beam dies off, and I lower my hands. I see a clear hole through the tunnel and light at the end. Anyone who was in the tunnel would have died instantly. They’d have manned the tunnel with pirates rather than civilians, so I feel no guilt. With the beam gone, the buggies swerve immediately onto the road. Dozens of dust clouds merge together to form one red mass, which blocks my view of the tunnel.

I jump onto my own buggy and look around to find Aura, but there’s too many people running around and red dust everywhere. I saw my followers pulling her back to a safe distance, and I trust them now to keep her safe outside the city while we attack.

Jin jumps onto the buggy with me, and two of our best fighters load up onto the backseat. Jin drives the buggy down the road, and I have the bio-suit form a helmet to shield me from the dust.

I switch my vision to an infrared/UV composite, so I’m able to see through the dust cloud into the tunnel.

I zoom in as we approach and see gunfire flashing out from the end of the tunnel. Something explodes, and one of our buggies flips over. The pirates are fighting back, but with each second that passes, another buggy clears the tunnel and races into the city proper.

A minute or two later our own buggy passes the melted remnants of the gate. The tunnel is less dusty, so I switch back to normal vision and drop my helmet. There are some bloodied bodies lining the tunnel. I recognize the faces, and I make a note to mourn their loss after the battle has ended.

We clear the tunnel, and I see chaos everywhere throughout the city.

There are muzzle flashes lighting up along the upper stories of high rises, and our own fighters are pinned down against smaller buildings, taking potshots. Buggies are racing down the street, and gunners are letting loose with gunfire and rockets toward high-rises.

There are civilians screaming and running to get out of the way of the fighting, and buggies are flipped and burning everywhere.

I see one such civilian, she falls as she runs, and then I see a small child crying next to a pile of rubble.

I tap Jin on the shoulder and point, and Jin swerves our buggy toward them.

As we approach, I see a man with a rifle in ragged clothes pop out from the corner of a building and take aim at the woman.

I jump out of the buggy while it’s still in motion, and roll across the ground. I stand to my full height in front of the woman, just as the man fires.

I feel the bullets slam against my chest, but the bio-suit diffuses the impact of the first handful. One penetrates through, however, and I feel its sharp bite as it shatters one of my ribs.

Ignoring the pain, I raise my hand and blast a concentrated beam. The man has ducked back around the corner, so I just drag the beam into the corner. It melts off the edge of the building, and I see the beam cut into the shooter’s stomach. I drop the beam and see a hole cut clean through him as he crumbles to the ground.

Jin is moving toward me, and I quickly pick up the woman and inspect her for injuries.

“I didn’t get hit,” she cries. “But my daughter!” She points back toward the crying child, and suddenly I feel as if my heart has stopped beating. I see something that fills me with terror and rage.

Aura.

She’s running toward the pile of rubble and the child. I race toward her at full speed, raising my hands and scanning all angles. Aura is running completely exposed and with no cover, and there are dozens of buildings and hundreds of windows with an open shot on her.

I see a gun appear in one such window, steadied by a hand poised on the windowsill. Before I even see a face, I flood the window with plasma.

Aura picks up the child and cradles her. Seconds later I’m on her.

I scoop her and the child both up into my arms, turn around, and run back toward Jin and the buggy.

Jin has ducked down and taken cover behind a building just outside the tunnel.

I place Aura and the child down with Jin and the child’s mother.

“Aura,” I say. “Foolish human female! How did you—”

“I stuffed myself in the buggy’s cargo hold,” she says. “At least this time I was in there by choice.”

“Jin,” I say, ignoring her. “Take her back outside; see that she does nothing foolish again.”

Jin nods. “Sorry, Aura, Let’s get you—”

There’s an explosion behind us, and I feel the heat from it warm my face. I pull Aura in front of me and shield her. Moments later chunks of rubble slam into my back.

Jin has fallen down with the woman and child, and we manage to keep all of them safe.

I turn to face the source of the explosion, and see that the tunnel has collapsed.

My stomach groans, but I point my hands at the rubble and fire plasma.

The beam that comes out is barely wider than a flagpole. Though it melts only small holes in the rubble, more and more rubble falls down and covers the holes.

“Guess you need to eat more,” Jin says. “We’re all stuck in here.”

I look at Aura, and she’s smiling.

“Insufferable woman!” I roar. “Risking the future for your own ego!”

“Ego?” Aura says, eyes widening. “Great Brother Cygnus is calling me out on
my
ego? You purple bastard, I’ll —”

I grab her, pull up her facemask, and kiss her. It’s a brief kiss, but I try to channel all of my love for her into it. When I pull away and look at her face, I know I’ve succeeded.