The Nine Realms of the Uti I: Warrior Prince Read online

  The Nine Realms of the Uti:

  Warrior Prince

  By

  Kaitlyn O'Connor

  © Copyright by Kaitlyn O'Connor, December 2017

  © Cover Art by Jenny Dixon November 2017

  Smashwords Edition

  New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  store.newconceptspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  Chapter One

  “Missiles --- Incoming,” the onboard AI announced with a complete lack of emotional inflection that was designed to calm the jittery nerves of humans!

  However delivered, the announcement itself did nothing to calm Lauren, though. In point of fact it sent an electric jolt of paralyzing shock along already frazzled nerves that literally blew her mind into hysterical fragments that scattered in every direction. Protected by the life-pod used to transport her via the drone, she couldn’t see a damned thing, but she was well aware that the drone carrying her pod wasn’t skimming the ground. It was high enough that death and or mangling could be the result if it was shot down.

  “What?” she gasped, trying to wrap her mind around a situation she had had no inkling she would be facing when she’d volunteered to be one of the Di-ore (pleasure women) the colony was sending out to collect vital DNA.

  They were shooting at her? What were they hurling at her?

  The colony leaders had negotiated the arrangements with the barbaric bastards! This UTI tribe of Flaxen had agreed to accept the offer, damn it—not with the enthusiasm they’d hoped, to be sure! They’d been damned reluctant and clearly suspicious. But, per their own customs, they’d agreed to ‘open the door to friendship’ and accept the ‘gift’ of a Di-ore for the customary seven nights of ‘delight’. What the hell? And what kind of missile could they have launched anyway when they were next door to rock throwing primitives?

  Rocks!

  “OMG! Evade!” she screamed—roughly 30 seconds after the drone carrying her shot upward so fast it felt like her stomach had fallen out of her belly and hit the ground below hard enough to knock the breath out of her.

  “Drone One to Command center! They’re trying to shoot me down!” she exclaimed when she managed to gather her wits to make the report.

  “Command center to Drone One. Stay on course, Drone One. We’re fairly certain that was just a … knee jerk reaction by the primitives to something unfamiliar to them. It was just one barrage of arrows.”

  “Just …?” Lauren echoed indignantly.

  It had sounded like rocks hitting her shielding.

  It was a good sign that they hadn’t continued shooting until they’d managed to knock her and the drone out of the sky?

  Well, she supposed she could see that interpretation if she’d been sitting in the control room back at the colony, but had they considered that maybe the barbarians had ceased firing only because the drone had flown out of range?

  Had they considered that she could be dead or dying now if the drone hadn’t reacted so fast?

  Because it damned sure flickered through her mind!

  Almost on the thought, the drone made a new announcement that rattled her when she’d just begun to find her moorings.

  “Discharging pod in five, four, three ….”

  “Wait!” Lauren exclaimed as she felt the damned drone swoop downward sharply. In the next instant, she felt the pod go into freefall.

  She sucked a breath in to scream and had it knocked out of her by the impact with the ground.

  The door of her pod popped open.

  Firelight dancing directly above her at the end of wooden torches blinded her momentarily. And then a giant, barbaric alien leaned close. Recognition was almost instantaneous as the king of Proushta, King Rama, the man referred to by his peers as the warrior prince, crouched beside her pod and stared at her as if he’d never seen anything quite like her.

  Which, of course, she realized, he hadn’t. The chances were that not a single one of the Uti people had ever actually set eyes on a human.

  Because even though their colony had been built on the sub-continent they’d named Atlantis almost a decade earlier, they hadn’t arrived until several years after that and they’d kept their distance from the dangerously primitive and war-like natives, dealing with them only through their avatars or androids.

  Of course, she had never seen one of the Uti in the flesh and actually damned few via surveillance vids or pics.

  And none that were more stunningly magnificent than this one.

  And he was even more amazing in the flesh—young and handsome, tall—the Uti were giants compared to humans—lean and muscular.

  And golden.

  He hailed from the Flaxen clan of the golden hair, skin, and eyes—a coloration that set them unmistakably in the category of alien despite their otherwise remarkable resemblance to humans.

  If she’d been fanciful rather than a scientist and deeply pragmatic, she might have thought of them as almost god-like in appearance/beauty—him anyway, and not purely from the standpoint of his dazzling appearance.

  King Rama of Proushta was remarkable in every way that she was aware of. He was referred to by the Uti as the warrior prince because, before his fifteenth birthday, he had taken his army and gone out to secure the borders of his realm from the hordes that had decided the assassination of his father left the realm vulnerable and the throne of Proushta up for grabs. It had taken him years and many battles to convince the neighboring realms that he wasn’t going to allow them to annex his kingdom and that was when he’d earned the nickname that clung to him still. Although, in truth, he’d been the king from the moment of his father’s death, and prince no longer.

  A shift in the glare from the torches diverted her attention from the main objective of this little exercise in insanity cooked up by the colony ‘leaders’ and that was when she realized she wasn’t just surrounded by Uti warriors with torches. She was the target of the weapons they were wielding.

  Not that she hadn’t been peripherally aware of being surrounded by aliens from the start, but she hadn’t realized they had weapons aimed at her.

  Clearly, one false move and she would be skewered a dozen times by knives and swords and wicked looking pikes before she could scream.

  Acting purely on the instinct for self-preservation, she found the button to retract the door blindly and depressed it.

  The door to the pod slammed shut, nearly catching hands and fingers in the process.

  Not hers.

  Fortunately, the King and his men leapt back at the movement.

  “Drone One to Command Center,” she gasped. “They’re hostile! I repeat, attack imminent. I need immediate Evac!”

  Dead silence except for the sound of the barbarians pounding on the door of the life-pod the moment they recovered from the shock of having the door slam in their faces.

  After a frantic mind search, she decided to try the drone’s onboard AI. “Drone One—life-pod under attack. Extract life-pod ASAP.”

  “Returning for life-pod extraction,” the AI responded.

  Relief so profound it left her weak washed through Lauren. She realized she was huffing so hard with fear that she not only couldn’t hear much of what was going on outside the pod, she was probably using up air she couldn’t afford to. She sucked in a deep breath and held it as long as she could to regulate her heart beat and then let it out slowly and slowly dragged in another.

  “Step away from the POD,” the AI com
manded via its speaker and then repeated the command in their dialect. Apparently, the barbarians didn’t comply or didn’t comply fast enough. The next sound Lauren heard was a blast of air shooting out in every direction followed by the sound of the POD tether being shot off.

  Lauren tensed, holding her breath and listening intently for a confirmation that Drone One had caught and secured the tether to retract the POD. Unfortunately, a split second after she heard the confirmation she’d been waiting for, she heard the reaction of the barbarians.

  Close by, someone bellowed a command and then she heard something huge and heavy slam against the door of the POD just above her.

  “Warning! You are at risk of serious injury or death. Get off the POD,” the AI commanded.

  “Oh my god!” Lauren gasped, realizing instantly that she wasn’t going anywhere if they couldn’t get the stupid bastard off of the POD.

  She’d hit the door open button before she had time to actually think through the action.

  Which was a pity, because the stupid bastard lying on the POD was so frigging heavy it broke the damned door opening mechanism and still failed to dislodge him.

  She felt the jerk of the drone struggling to lift the POD and then an ungodly noise she didn’t recognize and felt the abrupt cessation of movement.

  This was followed by a handful of moments of dead silence and then she could hear whoever it was on top of the POD as they climbed off.

  Instant take off wasn’t forthcoming, although she’d expected, hoped, that was what would happen next. The Drone had the tether. It should have taken off the moment the extra weight was dislodged.

  Instead, the POD was lifted awkwardly enough that she was jostled back and forth and then carried away with a sort of undulating movement that seemed to suggest multiple people moving at different speeds and with different gates.

  “Oh god,” Lauren muttered. The barbarians had her!

  * * * *

  Outrage most nearly described Rama’s feelings when his company of elite archers fired upon the strange flying thing that was supposedly delivering the Di-ore promised by the sky people—or the star people as many referred to them.

  He generally referred to them as the strange ones because the only glimpse he had ever had of them was of several very oddly shaped beings clad in shiny armor—one had a head, torso, and arms, but no legs. Instead, it rolled around on wheels. The two others he’d seen appeared to be headless, had four strange legs that almost looked as if they had been attached backwards and a torso that was completely flat along the spine.

  All of them were unnervingly strong, however—and their armor seemed impervious to any weapons the Uti had.

  And they could either breathe water as sea creatures could—or they could simply hold their breath longer than any creature he had ever known of for one of the four legged ones had fallen off of the dock and into the sea and it had taken a great deal of time and effort to extract it—hours. And yet, as soon as it was hoisted out of the sea and set down on dry land, it simply continued on its way as if nothing had happened.

  “Cease!” he bellowed, but he could see it was already too late to stop the first barrage before the command had left his mouth.

  Some rank coward had fired and that had been all it took to set off the entire contingent.

  He would have the bastard flayed alive if he could lay hands upon him!

  Despite that disgust, though, he watched the arrows fly to see what, if any, effect they might have upon the strange thing in the sky.

  None that he could see.

  Either every arrow missed its mark or the armor could not be pierced by their arrows.

  That angered him more.

  If they were in a position to observe, the sky people would now know that his archers were completely ineffectual against them—just as he did.

  He would not have admitted it for the world, but the discovery that the fucking thing was headed back toward them unnerved him sufficiently that it took grim determination to stand his ground instead of retreating to a safer position—which he was certain was the only thing that had prevented the majority of his warriors from instantly tucking tail and running.

  Regardless, he had time to consider whether it was foolhardy to stand his ground and trust there would not be a counterattack. He was, in point of fact, on the verge of calling a retreat in the certainty that the strange ones had ordered retaliation for the attack by his archers even though there had been no damage that he could discern, when the thing seemed to break apart. He realized fairly quickly, however, that the coffin-like thing dropping toward them was not in freefall. It was still attached to the flying thing by a long tail of some sort. And the flying thing was simply hovering in the sky, suspended like a cloud.

  Except it was making a strange sort of noise—almost like a growl—as it quickly lowered the casket in a controlled fall—much like a web-spinner except it looked nothing like that creature and was also gigantic by comparison.

  He had never seen the like of it … beyond the realm of the strange ones—who had things so fantastical it beggared the imagination to try to fathom them, made one question whether they were actually things of the real world or rather of the magical realm.

  The Spartans, despite their airs of superiority, did not have the like of it, or anything even close. Nor did the Darklings, who were widely believed to be magical beings capable of unimaginable things.

  Wondering if the thing had just dropped a weapon of some kind, he leapt back when the coffin-like thing touched down, the rope was reeled in, and the thing above them flew away.

  He had cause to be glad he was able to preserve his dignity by not taking to his heels. The top popped open almost the instant the thing settled and he could see there was a being inside—one he must presume to be the promised Di-ore.

  Disappointment settled in the pit of his stomach despite the circumstances as the torch light his men held illuminated the creature inside and he moved closer for a better look.

  He had certainly not had any sort of happy expectations of pleasure regarding the Di-ore.

  They were very strange creatures and very different from the Uti of any of the realms of Kali.

  This one seemed to be roughly the same shape as the Uti. It had a strange, round head devoid of any sort of features that he could discern—no eyes, nose, mouth or ears—two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet—all clad in some sort of silvery material that he did not think was skin, but that also did not appear to be armor.

  Well! They need not concern themselves that he would not be able to resist her womanly charms! She could not be talented enough to overcome such a complete lack of beauty in the eyes of the Uti.

  The top to the casket slammed shut almost as suddenly as it had opened, nearly catching him on the head. Fortunately, his reflexes were second to none. He managed to remove all body parts from danger without incident.

  He was so stunned, however, that it took him several moments to realize that he could hear a voice emanating from the inside—a very agitated voice.

  He didn’t understand what it was saying, but the emotion was certainly recognizable.

  Equally disturbing was the fact that he clearly heard a second voice that appeared to be responding.

  What the fuck? He had not seen more than one creature inside.

  He was still turning that over in his mind when he heard the flying thing returning.

  Then a voice from above commanded them to move away from the life-pod.

  It was a female voice and it sounded very much like one of the two he had thought that he had heard coming from inside the casket.

  His failure to respond instantly to the forceful command that was issued brought immediate retaliation. An icy blast shot out from the casket in every direction. Instinctively, everyone leapt back from it. When they did, the ‘tail’ that had been retracted, shot out and upward into the night sky. The flying swooped toward the end and grabbed it.

  The moment that
happened, everything fell into place in Rama’s mind. He launched himself at the casket and bellowed at his men to cut the tail from the beast before it took the casket into the sky again.

  It was just as well the command had everyone instantly leaping to obey. It took four strong men hacking at the thing repeatedly to break it. The moment the tail was severed, Rama scrambled off and ordered the men to grab the casket and carry it inside before the flying thing could try some other ploy to take it back.

  To their horror, the flying thing tried to follow. They rushed the casket inside and several men grabbed the heavy double doors and slammed them shut and barred them. A dozen men raced forward and braced their backs against the panels.

  Everyone stilled, listening intently, expecting the thing to begin to batter against the door. Slowly, when nothing happened, their shoulders slumped and the tension eased from them.

  Rama summoned several men with pikes to work at the top of the casket. It took the better part of an hour, but finally they were successful in prying the piece off. They lifted the lid off and set it on the floor.

  Again, tensions rose as everyone waited expectantly. Finally, the creature inside sat up. The strange round head seemed to rotate slowly as if the eyeless creature was not sightless. After a fairly prolonged hesitation, the creature rose and stepped out.

  When it did, the men seemed to take a collective gasp and step back.

  The creature lifted its arm and appeared to stare at its hand, or perhaps wrist for many moments. Eventually, apparently satisfied, it lifted both hands to its strange head, grasped it, and began to work it back and forth while the entire great room watched in confusion that turned to horror as it worked its own head loose and then lifted it off.

  Rama was chagrinned.

  It had not occurred to him for a moment that he was looking at a helmet—and it did not occur to him for many moments afterward, in point of fact.

  Because the face revealed was so far from repulsive that he was absolutely stunned—so astonished it took him many moments to remember to breathe.

  Chapter Two