Alien Conquest: (The Warrior's Prize) An Alien SciFi Romance Read online

  Alien Conquest

  (The Warrior’s Prize)

  By Scarlett Rhone

  2016 © Enamored Ink

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  Chapter One

  By the time the spaceship broke through Earth’s atmosphere and a crisp tapestry of stars stretched as far as the eye could see, Alaina Stafford could no longer deny the obvious: she’d been abducted by aliens. One moment she was climbing out of the ambulance at the scene of a car wreck, and the next she was coming around on the dingy metal floor of what she’d first thought was some kind of truck until she saw the porthole, and the vastness of space beyond it. Her mind raced through all the possibilities: she’d hit her head and was suffering some kind of fever dream. She was dreaming. She’d been drugged?

  And was hallucinating.

  She remembered the flashing lights of the ambulance overhead, and then a brilliant white light like the headlights of a car. Had she been hit by a car? She reached for every possible explanation, landed on the fact that she must have lost her mind, but she still felt like she was thinking rationally. Rationally? About being abducted by aliens?

  And there were, of course, the other aliens.

  That clinched it pretty quickly.

  She managed to sit up against the wall of the ship, and realized that her wrists were manacled, and so were her ankles. And scattered around her in the darkness she could make out shapes and figures, other...well, not people. Not human people. The shapes of them weren’t right. A bent spine here and the silhouette of horns there. She couldn’t see for sure in the darkness, but her brain made the only conclusion it could. Alaina was practical, always had been. She was used to having to make quick, hard decisions under crushing pressure, and her ability to act on instinct and skill with speed made her an excellent EMT. She saved lives. But even when she managed to accept that she was in a spaceship, surrounded by aliens, she had no immediate course of action available to her. So instead of trying to decide what to do, she focused on wrapping her mind around the reality of it.

  Aliens. Kidnapped by aliens. The manacles told her they did not intend to have any kind of diplomatic discussions. The collection of other prisoners told her it probably wasn’t personal. They didn’t have something specific against her. Whatever impulse had seen they take her, in particular, well, she couldn’t suss out on her own. Unless it was somehow random, and she’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Alaina hated randomness. She also knew she couldn’t escape without knowing more about what was going on. Manacles aside, it was space, and she’d need to take the ship itself somehow in order to get herself home. And though Alaina had lots of practical skills, taking a spaceship from aliens was not one of them. And she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to fly the thing even if she could get to the cockpit somehow.

  So, at a loss, she sat, and waited.

  And she watched the stars behind the little porthole. Already she couldn’t see any familiar constellations, any planet with a human name. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, they were all gone. So wherever the ship was going, it was far, far beyond the Milky Way.

  Eventually, overhead lights flickered on, revealing a set of blast doors at the far end of the hold where she sat wrapping her brain around the whole thing.

  She focused on those doors, and tried not to look at the other creatures stirring around her beneath the suddenly harsh lights. When the doors opened, however, she realized that it was very likely every moment of the rest of her life was going to contain something new, some surprise, a thing she’d never seen before, and they were all probably going to be horrifying. Four figures walked into the hold through those doors, and Alaina felt her heart rate kick into a gallop as she stared at them.

  Three of them were huge, hulking creatures. Shoulders massive like mountains, though they walked on two legs and had two arms, which was more than she could say for some of the aliens in the hold with her. These three wore what she could readily identify as military-ish dress, matching trousers and shirts conforming to hard muscle lines. They bristled with weapons, each with a strange kind of gun strapped to his back —— she assumed they were male, but they all wore gigantic helmets. Alaina realized even if she could see their faces, she had no idea what male or female might have meant to aliens. The helmets were reflective, their surfaces black and opaque and giving nothing at all away. But the fourth figure, smaller, walking between the three gargoyles, stopped Alaina’s heart right in her chest for a moment.

  He was human. A human man amongst monsters.

  He was older than her, maybe in his fifties, with dark hair streaked silver at the temples, a craggy face and piercing green eyes. He ambled between the three huge figures, stepping further into the hold, thumbs hooked onto a gun belt with a strange gun slung on his hip, and looked around the hold. He wore the same kind of military fatigues as his alien partners, a black t-shirt and a leather jacket. Of course he stopped, meeting Alaina’s eyes. She didn’t know what she expected, but he just smirked at her and then looked away again, addressing the room at large.

  “I’m Captain Rua, and I’m sure most of you have put together that you’re being taken to the Arena market. If you put up a fight, we’ll kill you. If you try to run away, we’ll kill you. If you present anything less than your best, we’ll sell you to someone who’ll probably kill you. So everybody just relax and behave, and maybe some of you will get through this alive.”

  One of the helmeted aliens stepped up beside him, and started talking. Well Alaina assumed he was talking, but the noises emanating from that helmet were so loud and discordant and terrible that she winced back against the wall and tried to cover her ears. She clenched her eyes shut, and her mind raced, trying to make sense of it all even as this awful alien language was trilling so loud that her head started to ache. When the alien finished speaking, no doubt just repeating what Captain Rua had said, Alaina opened her eyes and realized one of the helmets was coming towards her. With her wrists and ankles manacled, she had absolutely nowhere to go, but she thrashed as the alien’s huge gloved hands grabbed at her, lifting her off the floor.

  “Put me down!” she shrieked. “Stop! No!”

  “Put her in my quarters,” the captain said, and Alaina stared at him, eyes wide. The alien made a grunting noise and threw her fireman-style over his shoulder, walking her right through the blast doors and into the corridor behind. She watched the captain begin pacing around the hold, taking in, she supposed, his bounty, until the alien turned a corner and she couldn’t see the hold anymore. There was just the narrow corridor and the spaceship walls and floor above and around her. There were exposed wires and blinking lights everywhere, black metal and Alaina couldn’t make sense of any of it. There were strange markings on signs that labeled panels and grating and pointing down off-shooting corridors they passed, but none of it was in any kind of language Alaina had ever seen before.

  The alien turned again and Alaina heard a hiss of air, and what she imagined was a door sliding open, and then the alien carried her into a room that looked surprisingly like a bedroom on Earth. There was carpet on the floor, and a writing desk in the corner. A wide window showed her an expanded view of the space she’d been watching from the hold, and then the alien tossed her unceremoniously right onto a bed in the middle of the room. She struggled up to a sitting position as the alien turned and left the room, and the door slid shut again, no doubt locking her in.

  She took stock of herself, then. S
he still wore her uniform, so they must have taken her mid-shift. Standard black paramedic trousers, white t-shirt under black sweater, and steel-toed boots. Her long, blond hair was still in the ponytail she’d thrown it into when they got the call about the car wreck, though she could feel it was somewhat disheveled. They’d taken her jacket, but hadn’t otherwise messed with her clothing up to this point.

  Well, if this Captain Rua thought he was going to take advantage of her, he was going to get a surprise, Alaina decided. She was going to at least break his nose, if not every other bone in his body, if he tried to lay his hands on her. She realized she had very little power in this situation, but she would fight until she had nothing left if she had to. She was not about to be some intergalactic sexual plaything.

  She bent down, testing the manacles binding her ankles, but it was no use. Whatever mechanism locked them, she couldn’t find any locks to pick or any kind of joints to break. Just thick slabs of metal attached between her ankles, immovable. Even if she could have found something sharp to try and get them open, there was no opening at all to manipulate. She looked, anyway, for something sharp. But this was a spaceship, and there wasn’t so much as a letter opener visible. Bound as she was, she resolved she’d have to defend herself with her feet and her fists if it came to it. She’d set enough broken bones to know how to inflict them herself, and Alaina wasn’t squeamish when it came to violence. She’d never been a violent person, but she wasn’t going to just sit there and be victimized.

  The waiting was the worst. She actually looked at her watch, only to find it had stopped working. Of course it had; what kind of meaning did time have beyond Earth? Eventually, she scootched her way to the bed’s edge so she could stare out the window some more. The longer she gazed at those strange stars, the more real it became. Realer than the manacles binding her. Realer than that huge alien that had carried her, than the sound of his screaming language, than the other aliens that had been in the hold with her. Just watching the landscape — the spacescape? — beyond the window made it true, made it real. She was on a spaceship. She’d been abducted by aliens. This was really happening and she had to reconcile that if she was going to survive. She didn’t know what the future held, but Captain Rua had said the Arena market. And Arenas, as far as Alaina knew, were where people watched games. And something told her she wasn’t going to be playing on a competitive intergalactic bowling league.

  She looked away from the window at the sound of the door opening, and there was Captain Rua strolling in. He closed the door at his back by pressing the palm of his hand to a panel on the wall. Then Alaina saw in his other hand he had a device that looked like a combination gun and syringe.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, holding up the device.

  “Yeah, not buying that,” Alaina muttered, staring at him.

  “I know you probably have a lot of questions.”

  “Don’t you come near me with whatever that thing is, asshole.”

  The captain chuckled. “You’re manacled on my bed and you start name-calling right off the bat. Ballsy.”

  “Fuck you. You kidnapped me.”

  He shrugged, ambling closer to the bed. “A little, yeah.”

  “A little?”

  “Look, because you’re a human, and I’m a human, I’m gonna break it down for you.” The captain eased back, taking a seat at the writing desk across from Alaina instead of coming any closer. He set the device in his lap, throwing an arm across the back of the chair. “I didn’t pick you or anything, they did, the Ankaa slavers you saw me with earlier. I just work for them. They don’t take humans often but they do sometimes, just to fill a quota. You’re the quote, sweetheart, sorry. So now we’re gonna sell you at market, and if you play your cards right, it doesn’t have to be a horrific future for you. If you play your cards right.”

  Alaina scowled at him. “You said you were the captain. But you work for them?”

  He nodded. “I was like you, I got taken. But I proved my worth. So this is my ship and those are my crew, but I have a master like anybody else.”

  “And exactly what are my cards?” she asked.

  “Well.” Rua gestured at her with one hand. “You’re rare, to start. There aren’t that many humans where we’re headed. You can use that to your advantage. The high families will probably buy you just because they’ve never seen a thing like you before.” He pointed at her. “You’re a paramedic, right? Those skills will be useful in the Arena.”

  “And what is the Arena?”

  He smirked. “Just what it sounds like, sweetheart. Think Gladiators, eh? The fighters fight and the powerful watch and whoever wins gets glory and some political clout. But don’t worry, you won’t be fighting. If you work with me here I’ll pitch you at market as a healer.”

  “If I work with you?” She narrowed her eyes.

  The captain’s smirk sharpened. “You’re a very pretty girl.”

  “My name is Alaina and I’m not a girl. And I don’t give a shit if you think I’m pretty.”

  Rua arched an eyebrow. “Well, I do. And you can spend the next solar in here with me, having a nice time, or I can throw you back in the hold with the other slaves.”

  “Have a nice time.” Alaina frowned. “You want me to have sex with you?”

  Rua nodded. “Small price to pay, no?”

  “Fuck you. I’m not sleeping with you. You can put me wherever you want.”

  Rua scowled and rolled up to his feet, that device in his hand again. “I said I’d help you, sugar, but quid pro quo, only. I’m no rapist. You agree to sleep with me and I’ll see you sold as a healer to a nice, respectable master. You refuse, and you’re on the block on your own.”

  Alaina gazed back at him, jaw set.

  He wasn’t even an unattractive man, but she hated him. He was handsome in a rugged trucker kind of way, with his salt and pepper hair and bright eyes. Even the deep lines on his face did not diminish his good looks, only made it plain that he’d lived a hard life. But only a lecherous son of a bitch would hold a woman hostage like this, and she didn’t want his help. Even if she knew she needed it.

  “No.”

  Rua’s scowl lingered a moment, but then he sighed and his expression lightened, and he shrugged. “Your loss, love.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re in for. I hardly rate on the disgusting scale you’re about to face.” Then he held up the device. “Might as well get this done and then you can go right back to the hold.”

  Alaina’s spine straightened. “Don’t.”

  “Relax.” He came closer and she lifted her bound hands, balled into fists, but he just caught her by the manacle and wrenched her arms to the side, pinning her wrists to the bed. “It’s a translator microchip. Once it’s injected, you’ll be able to understand all the alien languages. Which will really help, I suspect, when your future master is giving you commands. Unfortunately, it can take a while to accustom itself to your body. So this may sting.”

  “Don’t!” she cried again.

  Captain Rua put his lips close to her ear. “While you’re writhing in pain, think about how much nicer it would have been to suffer through this in my nice, warm bed.”

  “Go to hell,” she hissed through her teeth.

  “I like that spunk. It’s gonna get you in trouble at the Arena, though. I look forward to seeing someone break you of all that spirit, Alaina.”

  “Asshole.”

  Rua put the device’s muzzle to her throat and pulled the trigger, and then Alaina couldn’t breathe. Pain flooded through her, stinging from her jaw all the way down to her toes. She felt like she was on fire, and black spots burst through her vision. She felt herself hit the mattress, flailing, and she gasped as her lungs burned. Then the pain was too much, and she passed out.

  Chapter Two

  When Alaina came to, she was back in the hold, just
like Rua promised. It was dark again, and when she struggled to sit up, she realized at least she was no longer bound at the wrists and ankles. But they’d stripped her of her sweater and her boots, so she was barefoot in her trousers and t-shirt, and she lifted a hand to her throat and found that they’d fit her with a collar. Like a dog.

  She couldn’t help it. Tears burned her eyes.

  She thought maybe a combination of shock and adrenaline had carried her through those first hours, waking on the ship and seeing the aliens, and then her encounter with Captain Rua. Now with none of those chemicals in her bloodstream, the crushing truth of it all hit her. She was actually kidnapped by aliens and going to be sold as a slave and be surrounded by strange creatures on strange worlds for the rest of her life. How would she ever go home again?

  Alaina would never have called herself sentimental. Her life until this point had not been easy, and she pushed through, certain at least of her own worth and what she wanted out of life. She always pushed through. She was orphaned as a teenager when her parents died in a drunk driving accident, and she’d pushed through the foster system and made it out of high school alive. She’d pushed through when she’d lost her college scholarship for field hockey because of a knee injury, gotten her paramedic license and paid the rest of her own way for an education. Then she’d worked as a paramedic, saving and saving because she wanted to buy a nice house and maybe get a dog. Family wasn’t really on her radar but she always thought some day she would meet the right guy and she’d have a kid and a family, and that was what she figured the future would eventually hold.

  All of that evaporated now.

  Alaina was tough. She was thick-skinned and gritty and it had been a long, long time since she’d found herself crying in the dark. Now she put her face into her hands and let the tears flow, because she didn’t know how to stop them, and there was no one to tell her to stop crying. Or that it would all be okay. She didn’t know how to step back from it all and make a plan, like she normally would, because there was no planning anything at the opposite end of the universe from everything she knew.