Rebellion (A Titan Romance Book 1) (2 page)

C
aptain Akyra Roux
gripped her shoulder straps too tightly as her armored troop carrier thundered down the long unpaved road. There wasn’t much else for her to do in the near complete darkness of her vehicle except occasionally check in with her squad leaders up and down the convoy. But she resisted the urge to do it too much. As a good commander, sometimes it was best just to let her team members do their job without her.

Instead, she did something she’d become increasingly inclined to recently: she thought about getting laid.

For purely pleasurable reasons. Just for the sake of getting it out of her system.

After all, she couldn’t reproduce. She wasn’t allowed to. Ever.

Twice in her teens, she reached for her dream of applying for The Church’s holy breeding programs. Twice they denied her. Poked and prodded. DNA mapped and coded. They rejected her, the administrators said, because within every one of the thirty trillion cells, she carried genetic traits no longer appropriate for the species.
Which
traits? she asked. But they had no obligation to tell her. Her DNA was a blight by church standards, that was all she needed to know. They would never allow her to infect that blight upon humanity.

That same day, administrators injected a birth control bolt into her shoulder that was never to come out. Not even knowing what her genetic sin was, Akyra had borne the secret shame of it ever since.

She could be a good
person
. But she could never be a good
mother
. Instead, she chose to be a good soldier.

Twenty-eight years old, Akyra was one of the most accomplished captains in the Security Operations Division, much of her celebrity within the division coming from her obsession to bury those emotional wounds under professional success.

And she planned on keeping it that way.

Except some days, like this one, all she could do was imagine herself making love to a man strong enough, passionate enough, to make her forget the shame and regret of it all.

She often wondered why the birth control bolts in her shoulder—also mandatory to everyone in the Security Operations Division—didn’t suppress the intense regular urge to jump in the sack. Which
did
happen now and then, after all. But that urge was too related to the hot-bloodedness she felt during fierce combat situations.
That
was something she never wanted to suppress.

Problem was, the hormones propelling everyone on her team, especially Akyra, to be a bad-ass on the battlefield were the same hormones that made her increasingly wish she wasn’t on forced birth control, deprived by her vows to The Church of a real man in her life—even if she wasn’t permitted to produce the precious babies she dreamed of her whole life.

At least thinking about getting laid by a big, handsome—and ferocious, why not—alpha male was the perfect distraction from her worries about the mission at hand.

Akyra’s team was on their way from the Orbital Trans Point to Outpost Zebra. And the route was way too hazardous to be on without their promised escort.

“Thirty-seven kilometers out from base,” Staff Sergeant Polliana Paxton said, Akyra’s driver in the adjacent seat. “Scanners show clear up and down the line.”

Despite the brightness of the day, they rode in the dark, Akyra ordering all troop carriers to ride with blaster shields up the entire way. At least until they met up with their curiously late escort. Instead of sunlight, their helmets and red battle armor were dimly lit by the orange glow of driving and navigation instruments.

“Squad leaders, please confirm
all clear
down the line,” Akyra said into the leaders' comm. Continual checking and re-checking of safety standards wasn’t so tedious when it came from Akyra. To every soldier on her team, it was an act of caring and deeply held responsibility. They never resented it. Not any more, at least.

There were two other armored troop carriers, one in front and one behind. Today they transported not only her entire team but also a parcel cube The Church contracted her to deliver safely to Bio-Teck Laboratories within the outpost on this planet. Whatever was inside the parcel cube must have been very, very valuable.

Each squad leader replied to Akyra over the comm in order.

“Roads clear. Skyline clear. Weapon systems ready,” replied Sergeant Rayeley Thomsen, Alpha Squad Leader.

“Roads clear. Skyline clear. Weapon systems ready,” replied Sergeant Emilsa Peeters, Bravo Squad Leader.

“Hey Captain! Are we almost there? I gotta piss.” That was Sergeant Jexica Crane, head of the sniper unit in the lead vehicle.

The entire leadership team laughed into their mics.

Except for Akyra. Something just wasn’t right about their mission. She
wanted
to laugh. “Shut the fuck up, Jex. Machines like you don’t piss.”

She glanced to the Bio-Teck cube in the storage cubby next to her, strapped down and plugged into the vehicle’s crucial environmental controls. She patted it twice. The Bio-Teck cube
could
have been placed anywhere in the convoy, and
some
commanders would have placed it in the care of the team’s first sergeant in the lead vehicle, but Akyra knew the success of this contract could affect the careers of every soldier in her care. Just as importantly, high level contracts such as this were the source of brutal competition among Sec-Ops teams, and every successfully completed contract was a vital step to gaining the next.

Akyra was a commander who’d learned the hard way not to take chances. Having it next to her own body simply made her feel better. That was that.

She didn’t know what inhabited the parcel cube, other than that it was probably alive. Alive by
some
definition. She didn’t know about such things. She didn’t need to.

However, she
did
know they headed toward an outpost manned mostly by the ferocious Titan Class soldiers. She knew these beastly “men” wouldn’t be stationed on this remote planet if the locals were friendly. Worst of all, much of the heretical insurgency was organized by a local chieftain named Xerxus—who had a nasty reputation around this arm of the galaxy. No matter how much intel assured her the route from the Orbital Trans Point was clear of infidel insurgents, she knew her own soldiers traveled in danger every minute of the way.

And that fact weighed on her a lot more than other commanders.

“Captain,” called out Sergeant First Class Valarae Klipssen, her second in command, over the comm from the lead vehicle. “I’m formally requesting permission to formally request that you formally relax the fuck out.”

They were ganging up on her.
Great. Even stoic Val is having a turn
. No doubt they’d heard the tension in her voice. As long as they weren’t in combat Akyra tolerated the ribbing from her noncommissioned officers. “Permission denied, Val. Thanks for showing us that you have some feelings.”

There was laughter again all over the comm channel.

Akyra looked over to her driver, smiling behind her helmet visor. Her driver, in turn, reached over and thumped Akyra on her chest plate.

Danger didn’t bother Akyra, of course. What caused the tension in her voice was the nagging feeling that this mission was somehow
not in her control
. For instance, where the hell was their escort, and why couldn’t her radio operator raise it over the radio?

And if there was one feeling that Akyra disliked more than seeing her beloved soldiers turned into casualties, it was the feeling of a situation
not in her control
. Because the one usually led to the other. When things went her way, they usually went
very
well.

This was exactly why, four years ago, she earned this Security Operations position, initially a lieutenant. She led well. She fought well. She
always
got the job done. And she maintained a strong—but not perfect—record of getting most of her girls home alive.

Women and men throughout the Security Operation Division fought hard to get accepted on Akyra’s team.

She looked down—yet again—at the Bio-Teck cube, checking its vitals. All good. Of course. This cube was reason enough for her anxiety, without the looming threat of Xerxus and his homegrown insurgency. She examined the green seal guaranteeing its medical integrity, tracing a gloved finger over them emblem printed on it: Sol’s Hand, the holiest symbol of The Church of Nova Sol, the open hand with the sun upon the palm. She turned off her mic and tried easing her nerves with words she’d known since she was an eight year-old orphan at Academy. She closed her eyes, calmed her mind, and whispered, “Glory to The Almighty.”

It was then, right on cue, that Captain Akyra Roux heard the sound of plasma blasts striking Valarae’s vehicle.

* * *

T
he rumble
of the wheels over the dirt road muddled the blasts, but Akyra was too familiar with the concussive CRACK of matter instantaneously phasing through various states of liquid and solid as plasma ripped over it. She instinctively pushed on the side of her helmet to better hear the headset at her ear.

“Plasma fire from six hundred meters, north,” a woman’s shout came through the comm. “Possibly two enemy units! Possibly three!”

Akyra’s vehicle lurched to a stop as a second round of twin explosions rocked the convoy. Akyra spoke calmly in reply. “Are they hitting us?”

“Yes. Yes, they’re definitely trying to kill us.”

“Copy.”

“Is this that Xerxus fucker?” a woman’s voice shouted through the comm. But no one answered. Akyra despised poor radio discipline during a fight, and no one wanted to piss off their captain when they needed her focused on coordinating their response.

Vehicle commanders of each armored troop carrier sounded off that they were intact. The last adding, “Yeah, we got two enemies on top of those foothills to the north. Looks like three-man blaster teams… confirmed, six hundred and fifty meters.”

Long shots for plasma blaster,
Akyra thought.
Who are these guys?

By then, Akyra had activated her helmet display, scanning the landscape via the multiple video feeds patched into her visor. To the north, two red triangles highlighted the enemy units atop a string of jagged rusty hills. She quickly zoomed in, but couldn’t make out any individuals. “Vehicle commanders, keep your shields up and sealed. We’re gonna move forward through this.” Another pair of plasma blasts exploded between the vehicles. “Get rolling. Gunners, put some suppressive fire on that ridge. And see if you can’t kill somebody up there.”

“Copy,” three female voices said in calm unison in her ear just before the three large-barreled turret guns roared to life down the convoy, one of them atop Akyra’s own vehicle, less than two meters from her head.

Akyra paused a brief moment to watch the first explosive rounds bubble up a dust cloud along the distant ridge line. She pivoted in her seat to Specialist Kudzu’s legs hanging down from the turret next her. She slapped one the armored thighs for good measure.

The troop carrier surged forward again as the convoy regained its momentum, pushing forward hard and fast out of the ambush.

Akyra pivoted her seat completely around to face Corporal Clarx Nilsson, her radio operator and vital link to the world outside—and one of the few young men on the team. He bounced ridiculously in his seat.

“Outpost Zebra, this is Banshee Leader,” he said on the other comm channel, beating Akyra to her next set of orders. ‘Banshee Leader’ was Akyra’s callsign, and Clarx’s primary job in life was to speak for her when she was busy. “We are thirty-five clicks out from base, sustaining light plasma fire six hundred meters north of our position.”

She gave him a thumbs up, switching back over to the the gunner and driver chatter of the team’s fire comm. She considered ordering the drones in the air, but she decided against risking them in this low-level contact. Until the situation changed or they drove clear from their assailants, there wasn’t much left to do but observe, letting her well trained squad leaders do their jobs.

That is, until a direct hit of something far more powerful than a shoulder mounted plasma blaster slammed into the side of her vehicle.

The force of
that
hit sent a shock wave through the wall of the carrier and pounded everything inside with a huge, shuddering wave of pain and noise. Akyra’s eyes went dark for a moment, her neck searing from the whiplash.

“Fuck!” Polli, her driver, shouted.

“Kudzu!” Akyra yelled for her gunner, even before her vision righted itself, reaching for the specialist’s legs. But they weren’t there.

“Fuck!” Polli shouted again.

Akyra tried regaining control within the vehicle, but the squealing ring in her ears and the pitching of the carrier along the uneven road kept her disoriented. She tried looking at the images within her visor to evaluate the situation, as it
had
changed, but her eyes wouldn’t focus. Already, blood ran out one side of her nose that she was required to ignored. “Polli, clear us out!”