Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5) (11 page)

“
M
ilo Stanopolous
,” I say. “Is he here?”

The Marauder narrows his eyes at me. “You should really speak with Araz. He is the head of the Agricultural Unit...Milo is a human slave.”

I stare him down, giving him a hard look.

I could mention my brother’s name, but I’d take a big risk that this Marauder would actually check–probably with Raius–that Adus had actually asked me to talk to Milo.

No, the staredown is the optimal tactic.

I look into the Marauder’s eyes as if I am a few seconds away from killing him, as if we were in a Marauder bar fight–not a human one. I hope he heard how I killed Senka with no warning–I hope he remembers well as I stare him down. And just as I am ready to speak again, he nods.

“Fine,” he says. “Go in and find him!”

He slams the button, and the door opens up.

I step into the warm, humid air. To save resources, most of the Darkstar facilities are kept extremely cold. The greenhouse, however, requires higher temperatures and humidity, and memories of Venus and the floating jungles flood back to me as the air touches my skin.

I walk down the rows of crops, under the powerful heat of the massive artificial sun atop the dome.

I spot a human harvesting potatoes out of the soil.

“I’m looking for Milo,” I grunt.

He looks up at me, shocked. I guess that few Marauders ever soil themselves walking through the fields.

“Uh,” the man says. “I’m...Milo. Please don’t kill me, I only gave him a little! I don’t know what it’s for–”

I grab his shoulder and kick his feet out from beneath him. He falls to the ground, hard.

I crouch down and pin him to the dirt. We’re both low down now, and no one will see us due to the tall crops obscuring us.

“Shut up,” I hiss. “You rat him out before I even accuse you? What’s wrong with you?”

Milo looks up at me with wild eyes; he can’t make sense of what’s happening.

“I, uh, what?”

“I’m the one who needs the fertilizer,” I say. “And if anyone–
anyone
–asks you again, or scares you slightly like I did just now, you pretend you know nothing. If I hear you ratted us out, I will kill you as slowly and painfully as I am able. Understand?”

He nods his head vigorously.

“Now,” I say. “Whatever Thorsten agreed to give you, you still get that. But in exchange, you need to give him twice the agreed amount of fertilizer. Every day. Understand?”

He doesn’t nod this time, just stares up at me with wide eyes. He finally summons the courage to speak. “Mr. Marauder, sir, I wasn’t being stingy with Thorsten, I’m just a coward. I don’t want to get caught! I don’t think I can sneak out anymore without risking getting ca–”

“I already caught you,” I say, voice full of menace. “Either you risk getting caught, or I kill you. Guaranteed. Sound like a fair deal?”

He nods this time.

“I will do my best to make sure you
don’t
get caught,” I say. “I can fudge the numbers, and if that asshole Marauder you report to gets too suspicious, I can rough him up. I don’t want you to get caught, Milo, so we work together to reach that goal.”

I grab him by the wrist and help him stand up.

“Thorsten will be back in the morning. Give him what he needs.”

* * *

T
he next few
days pass by quickly. I find time to visit Kara every night, and we spend time hashing out the finer details of our escape plan. Then I fuck her rough and raw until she screams and collapses.

On the night before the escape, her exosuit is gone, and I have to fuck her a bit more gently than I did before, but all the same, she is much stronger than when I first met her. I hope she won’t need to be so strong ever again for the rest of her life.

The morning of the escape is my last training session with Raius. He doesn’t know it’s the last session, of course.

“You want to avoid close combat against other biosuits,” Raius says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Well,” Raius says, “that’s not actually always the case. It’s a general rule. If you know for a fact that you are stronger than your opponent because you’re wearing a biosuit, then you’d want to engage within tendril range straight away. But this is rarely the case. At long range, you have a chance to feel out your enemy. How accurate are his plasma beams? How on point is he with his shield? Is he trying to move closer to you or back away? These skirmishes give you time to assess his skill. If he’s stronger than you, you don’t want to get closer.”

“I see,” I say.

I’m just about equal with Raius right now. I can tell by his frustration during training. Whenever I do something well, he tries to prove to me he can do just as good–and he most always can. If I had a week–or even a few more days–I could surpass him, but right now? We’re even. I see him watching me, daring me to ask.

What do you do if you and your opponent are evenly matched? Does Raius generally prefer close combat to ranged combat? I don’t want to ask him either of these questions, but I know I’ll need to fight him in just a few hours.

“Do you mind if we cut this short?” I ask.

“I don’t mind,” Raius says. “But why?”

He hates training me. He hates seeing me get better than him. He’ll take any flimsy excuse to delay me becoming stronger than him.

“I have a nice surprise for my Seraphim army,” I say. “I need to prepare.”

“Interesting,” Raius says. “Maybe I’ll come take a look.”

* * *

I
tell
the Seraphim army that training for the morning is cancelled, but to be on guard for a drill. The drill will be me blowing the shit out of the refinery. I order them to treat any drill as a real threat, and to respond accordingly. This will send them all toward the explosion, and away from me, when the bomb goes off.

I walk through the hallway in the direction of the refinery, and when no one is looking, I jump into the wagon. The fertilizer to make the last bombs is already packed in there, and I lay on top of it. It smells like shit–it literally is shit–and I know the smell will stick to me. But no one ever came out of a battle smelling like roses.

I will my biosuit to seal my helmet, and I have it begin converting antimatter to oxygen.

The top of the wagon is open, but no one will come and look inside it. I wait there for around 45 minutes, until finally I hear it whir on, and it starts to move.

I know that the mining crew, Kara and Felicia included, are inside the passenger area, but I can’t hear them. They are already suited and sealed up, and communicating with each other through comms links. I won’t be able to talk to them until I put my tendrils into their suits and adjust their comms.

When the wagon stops moving, I jump out with the bags of fertilizer in hand.

All five humans look up at me, and I shoot out a tendril for each of them. I sink the tendrils into their suits’ computers, and I reprogram the comms links to feed into my biosuit.

I hear their voices all crackle on at once.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Thorsten says. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”

I toss the fertilizer to his feet. “Where are the bombs?”

Eli starts to lift some rocks, but I shove him out of the way and throw the rocks up. Human males are nearly as weak as the females.

I see the bombs neatly stacked. They are in white buckets.

“Gruel buckets?” I ask. “Seriously?”

“We’re prisoners, man!” Thorsten shouts. “What the fuck dido you expect? Red wine bottles? Caviar tins?”

“It’s fine,” I say. “They are just bigger than I had hoped for.”

“Will they work?” Kara asks me with concern, putting a hand on my back.

Her suit’s thick glove cuts out most of the feeling, but knowing that she is touching me gives me strength.

“They will work,” I say. “It’s decent camouflage. They’re big, but we can hide them more or less in plain sight with the other rations.”

I load the bombs into the wagon, and I grab a pickaxe and start swinging alongside the miners while Thorsten works on building the last two bombs.

“Never thought I’d see a Marauder swinging a pickaxe like some big purple slave,” Andreas says.

“He’s not like other Marauders,” Kara says.

“Right,” Thorsten says. “He
cares deeply
for you.”

“You showed them my note?” I ask.

“Eli snatched it out of my hands!” Kara says.

Eli laughs. “I cared deeply about my Marauder woman...but not as deeply as I care for good fucking food and a soft bed.”

“You were
her
man,” I say. “She was not
your woman.
”

“What’s the difference?” Eli asks.

“She owned you,” I say.

“Like you own Kara?”

I scoff.

“What’s that mean?” Kara asks.

“I don’t own you. But you
are
mine.”

“Marauder logic is all fucked,” Andreas says. “Get us the hell off this rock. Take me back to the habs where you fuckers aren’t welcome.”

“I will take you to Sankt Petersburg,” I say. “You can make your way wherever you’d like from there.”

“Direct ticket to Sankt Petersburg,” Eli says, whistling. “Fucking nice.”

“No,” I say, carefully placing a boulder into the wagon so that it doesn’t crush the bombs. “It’s not a direct flight.”

“What?” Felicia asks.

“We have to go to Titan first,” I say.

“Titan!” Thorsten shouts. He jumps away from the bomb and runs toward me.

“Turn around!” I shout. “Fucking finish the bomb!”

He stops, looks at me for a moment, realizes he can’t do a thing to me, and turns back around as I directed.

“But Titan…,” he says. “It’s a dead fucking world. Dead as this one!”

“You’ll have to trust me,” I say.

Kara switches to a direct comm link with me. “Kain, what the hell?”

“I have confidence in this plan,” I say. “It
will
work...but I had to make compromises. I am still a peacekeeper.”

I hear her sigh.

“Trust me, Kara,” I say.

“I do trust you.”

I bump my head against her so our faceplates touch. “Saving you comes first, but saving the solar system is a very close second.”

She smiles widely at me, but then I see her face start to break up, and she bites her lip to stop herself from crying.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing’s
wrong,
” she says. “Except, like, almost everything.”

I squeeze her gloved hand. “At least some things are right.”

“It’s just...you’re eventually going to let go of me, and then I may never see you again. It’s terrifying.”

“You
will
see me again,” I say. “And soon.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

I force myself to turn away and climb into the wagon.

“Better not fuck this up, brother of Adus!” Thorsten shouts at me. “All our asses are on the line!”

“I won’t fuck anything up,” I say, “Except Darkstar.”

“That’s the spirit!” Eli says.

One of them hits the button, and the wagon starts to move.

I consider digging the bombs toward the surface while the wagon moves back to the refinery, but I worry that the white buckets on top of all the dark ore will trigger some kind of alarm.

Then I reconsider. Probably a big purple Marauder laying on top of the rocks would trigger
any
kind of alarm, so a few buckets of gruel will be the least of my problems.

I shift the ore around until I see the first of the buckets, and I start to pull them out and spread them out across the surface of the rocks. I find the two detonators, which are locked and not activated, and make my biosuit form a concealed pocket for them. One of the buckets has a red ‘x’ on it, and it corresponds to the red detonator. The blue detonator will blow up all the other buckets. I cross my fingers that the miners didn’t mess up the detonators or the red ‘x’.

I feel the wagon slowing down, and I peek out to see the refinery’s giant airlock opening up to let me in. The wagon rolls inside, and even before the airlock seals, it starts to scan the wagon with me inside.

“326 kilograms of ore,” a robotic voice says. “One Marauder and ten buckets of gruel.”