Alien Warriors: Invasion Read online

  ALIEN WARRIORS:

  INVASION

  BY

  KAITLYN O’CONNOR

  ( c ) copyright by Madris DePasture writing as Kaitlyn O’Connor, 2021

  Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, 2021

  ISBN 978-1-60394-

  Smashwords Edition

  New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  www.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

  Leader duo, Taurin and Jurik, had been summoned to the bridge as soon as the alien craft was detected. By the time they arrived, the delizo Commander, Muck, had decreased the magnification of the viewer, leaving no more than a tiny dot visible on a twinkling backdrop of black velvet.

  Taurin stared at the screen, hard, until he noticed the faint movement the ship appeared to make at such a vast distance. As that came into focus, fortunately, he realized he had not simply tuned out the voices on the bridge, he had neglected to turn his translator/communicator back on.

  Surreptitiously, he lifted his arm and touched the button, pretending to adjust his helmet.

  Jurik flicked a glance at him out of the corner of his eye just as the Commander turned to look at them.

  Muck caught it.

  There was little that the bastard missed—and nothing that did not instantly make him suspicious.

  As well he should be for, if not for the constraints, Taurin would have taken his head off his shoulders with his blade long since. He was fairly certain the delizo in general and Muck in particular were universally hated, but theirs did not hold a candle to Taurin’s feelings.

  He had long since learned to submerge his hatred, however, and presented no more than the typical stone cold mask of a madrone warrior as Muck transferred his attention to him, since he was alpha.

  “What do you make of that?”

  “Prey,” Taurin responded promptly.

  Muck grinned, displaying a double row of needle sharp teeth.

  It was a stomach churning ugly thing to behold and not just corrupted by the reptilian face into a predatory distortion of amusement. The delizo were as cold blooded a species as his own warrior race, the madrone, were hot blooded.

  Taurin felt his belly tighten reflexively, as if instinctively bracing for a blow.

  “That quickly? At this magnification?”

  “You summoned us. You would not have if it was a delizo vessel. Everyone else is prey for the Delizo Empire.”

  Muck’s eyes narrowed—as if he was debating whether to take exception to the comment or not, but apparently he shrugged off his pique and decided to take it as a compliment.

  It was neither. It was merely a statement of fact.

  This time the grin was not quite as offensive. “True! We’ve detected heat signatures of two hundred bodies. Ready as many men as you think you will need to gain control of the ship and meet at the transporter for boarding.”

  Taurin instantly felt his fighting blood surge against the constraints—despite the fact that the delizo were careful not to remove them from their slave army until the last moment before they faced whatever poor victims had become their latest target.

  Dismissed, Taurin and Jurik saluted, turned and left the bridge, marching in sync purely by instinct or perhaps habit.

  They had been paired at birth as was the madrone custom for warriors—so that they could be reared and trained together to work as one nearly invincible fighting machine.

  Almost in sync, they both reached to flick off the translator/communicators they wore at all times with the exception of the sleep period since they suspected the delizo also used it to secretly monitor their conversations.

  Which meant they did not dare leave them off for any significant length of time.

  “Thoughts?” Taurin asked.

  “I heard nothing that suggested the vessel to be a war machine,” Jurik responded.

  Taurin frowned. “The comments I overheard did not describe it as a very large vessel—to be carrying so many. And two hundred would be a very small army.”

  Jurik shrugged. “Whatever the purpose, they will undoubtedly be armed.”

  Taurin was still frowning thoughtfully. “The men need a challenge. They have been idle far too long. Choose two dozen duos from among those who have been inactive the longest and meet me at the transporter.”

  “Affirmative,” Jurik responded, executed the madrone salute and left.

  Taurin flicked his device on again. “Be sure the men are well armed and at the transporter in fifteen sects.”

  Jurik followed suit. “Affirmative.”

  Taurin went to the quarters he shared with his duo, Jurik, and collected their weapons. The delizo provided ‘modern’ weapons, of course, but he and Jurik were more comfortable with their own ‘barbaric’ weapons—which they had trained with almost from earliest memories.

  Well, all of the men were. They took the weapons of the delizo, but they also carried their own.

  Because the delizo could not decide to turn their ‘primitive barbarian’ weapons off in the midst of a battle.

  Not that he objected to hand to hand combat when necessary, but he wanted something in his hands if his opponent had weapons and or were big enough, strong enough, and well trained enough to be any kind of challenge.

  He handled pain well enough, but he was not fond of it.

  He did not have to look around to see if the tiny blue eye of the delizo was upon him.

  It was—always—even when they slept.

  He supposed that everyone of any species had a tendency to judge by their own merits, because those were the only measurements they knew. In the case of the delizo, theirs betrayed the rot at the heart of their species—the dearth of any positive traits that Taurin had been able to discern.

  But of course the delizo were correct in not trusting in this instance.

  The madrone were not allies. They would have turned on the delizo and slaughtered them with extreme prejudice if they had been able to.

  Unfortunately, they were bound—mentally, physically, and by coercion.

  The brain ‘realignments’ never lasted long—but as soon as the reptilian bastards noticed the glint of mayhem in the eyes of the warriors, they were sent back for another conditioning.

  The electronic restraint device could not be removed and rendered them unconscious almost the moment the thought occurred to them to remove their captors’ heads.

  But the threat of total annihilation of their species and their home world were the true manacles they wore.

  Taurin suspected the one restraint that mattered most to them was no restraint at all. Years of slavery and many battles fought for the delizo had convinced him that the delizo never spared anyone—for any reason—if they were not useful in the near term.

  In their case, they were elite fighters from a world of warriors—where violence and the constant battle for dwindling resources insured the continuation of the species only through the strongest and most powerful fighters.

  It had appealed strongly to the delizo to enslave a standing army to do their fighting for them. But their world had offered little to nothing else and if the delizo had stripped it as they typically did, then there would have been nothing left to sustain the people.

  Taurin was fairly certain they all felt that that one thing that mattered most was long since lost to them, but none of them were willing to take a chance and so they had not made a real attempt to throw off their shackles.

  But they did not wear them with resignation or acceptance.
>
  They did as they were ordered, because they had no choice.

  And they bided their time.

  The men were waiting when he arrived at the transport—in half the time he had specified. He could feel the vibrations of anticipation in the air—the blood lust—and it set his own to jangling through him.

  Without a word, he led the way into the transport room and took up his position as alpha leader. Jurik moved to stand directly behind him, back to back, so that they would be transported as one.

  Six other duos joined them on the pads to either side and behind them, back to back, facing forward or to one side or the other so that there was no point undefended when they materialized at their destination.

  The process was started and Taurin gritted his teeth as he braced himself. There was a moment where the pain intensified as his atoms split—total blackness—and then abrupt awareness again as his body was reformed.

  Darkness broken only by the occasional tiny, blinking light greeted them but almost instantly all hell broke loose. White lights above them began to flash off and on in a strobe effect—red and blue lights alternated—in a pattern that distorted Taurin’s perceptions. A voice speaking a language he had not only never heard, but that the translator could not interpret, began emitting a message that was clearly of alarm even though he could not understand it precisely.

  “Proximity alert! Proximity alert!”

  Seeing there was no one in the area where they had materialized, Taurin signaled the men to fan out and search. The second group began to materialize behind them as they broke through a door at the back of the room and began to charge down a long, wide corridor.

  They were almost halfway down it when Taurin noticed that doors had begun to open on several of the pod-like compartments on either side of the corridor. He halted abruptly and turned to face the threat beside him, his sword lifted to strike down whatever emerged.

  Instead of swinging, however, he froze like a statue as the vapors escaped and he saw a tiny figure of a being very like his own people, the madrone, except in miniature.

  He thought, in fact, that she was a child just at first.

  But the breasts were not only unmistakably female, they were undoubtedly attached to the chest of a mature female.

  A naked female.

  Or close enough that he was temporarily concussed with the image that hit him like a powerful fist—blind, deaf, and stunned.

  Her gasp snatched him out of his stupor—reminded him that he was to take the ship. “Where are the warriors?” he growled.

  She simply gaped at him blankly, uncomprehendingly.

  Fury washed over him. Before he lost control of it, however, he recalled the voice he had heard. She could no more understand him than he could her.

  He grabbed her with his free hand and dragged her out of the box she had been in.

  As if she was made of rubber, she simply collapsed.

  If she had weighed anything at all above the weight of the air, he thought she might have thrown him off balance. She was light, though, light enough that he snatched her upward and caught her just beneath the breasts.

  He turned to the others—saw that there were five in all that had emerged—all female—and that his men had caught them as they did. “Search the others–pods—for the males,” he growled. “Then the remainder of the ship. Report back if you meet with resistance.”

  “What are we to do with the captives?” Goran of another duo asked.

  “Release them. Jurik and I will guard them.”

  The female he had caught began to struggle—weakly—but enough to draw his attention. She was cold to the touch and slimy from whatever she had been preserved in and she nearly managed to get loose from him.

  He sheathed his sword and caught her with both arms, although he knew it was dangerous in his situation.

  She managed to slither loose in spite of his efforts to hang on to her and hit the floor fairly solidly. Before he could dive for her, she scrambled away. He dove for her then anyway, landed half on top of her in spite of his best efforts to avoid it, and then wrestled with her until he managed to get a good enough grip to prevent her escape.

  By that time, the slime was beginning to dry on her—and him—and stick instead.

  He was scarcely aware of it, however.

  The wrestling match had switched his killing instincts to mating.

  Not that he was in any state to grasp that—particularly since he had not experienced it before, for he was snatched from his native world before he had reached first mating peak and there had been no females to trigger it since.

  All he was actually aware of beyond the throbbing of his cock when it came to attention so abruptly it nearly made him blackout was the heat setting him on fire and fogging his mind.

  It was not until Jurik challenged him for her that he came to his senses enough to get off of her and haul her up again.

  He punched Jurik on the shoulder to get his attention—and watched as his eyes reflected a return to sanity. He met Taurin’s gaze uncomfortably. “I forgot myself,” he muttered.

  Taurin jerked his head in warning. “We have found females,” he reported via his com unit, trying to speak over Jurik. “Searching the craft now for the soldiers.”

  “There was no resistance?” Muck demanded, clearly stunned.

  Taurin examined the thing the female had emerged from. “They were … asleep, I believe. In some sort of thing. Enclosed. Floating in liquid of some kind.”

  “All two hundred?”

  “We are searching now,” Taurin reminded him. “Jurik. Count the … pods. See if all are filled and report.”

  It was more to give Jurik something to do to distract his mind than because he needed it done.

  Not that he was as clear minded as he should have been himself.

  He had managed to submerge his urges sufficiently to regain enough wit to defend himself, however.

  “Two hundred,” Jurik called from the end of the corridor. “All female.”

  Taurin frowned, disbelieving, confused. “They are all here. All female,” he reported.

  “You are certain?”

  “Affirmative,” Taurin responded tightly. “You are certain there are not a like number elsewhere on the craft?”

  Muck was silent long enough to accentuate his displeasure in the question. “We will pull the craft in. Make certain that you have checked thoroughly and secured it before it reaches the hanger bay.”

  * * * *

  Commander Nicole ‘Niki’ Benet had seconds to assess her situation.

  It wasn’t nearly enough.

  The alarms set off a chain of events that were too paralyzing in and of themselves to make any kind of thought possible. All of her tubes were withdraw so rapidly it knocked the breath out of her, the tube feeding her both nutrients and the drug she needed to stay in an induced coma, shot adrenaline into her before it was snatched out. She rose toward consciousness with blinding, blinking lights, near deafening alarms, and a blaring warning over the com unit.

  “Proximity alert! Proximity alert!”

  And opened her eyes to discover a … figure was standing just the other side of the shielding to her pod. Virtually on top of her already, he whipped a hard look at her the moment she opened her eyes and moved closer when the damned door to her containment started to open almost before the tank had drained away the artificial amniotic fluids she’d been floating in.

  Mostly blind and deaf, still, when the door had opened, and weak from floating—she had no idea how long—she didn’t get the chance to gather herself before he yanked her out of the pod.

  Her legs—her entire body—was abruptly so heavy when he let her go that she sank into a pulpy blob on the floor. He grabbed her and hauled her upward again, that time locking an arm as thick as a tree trunk around her, just beneath her breasts.

  Her feet were easily dangling two feet above the deck, making it clear that it was no illusion that he was a giant.
/>   Thanks in large part to the artificial adrenaline booster, she began to regain some use of herself while he spoke to the others around them.

  She didn’t know what he said, but she saw as soon as he spoke that she was surrounded by others very like him—garbed in some sort of uniform, armed to the teeth and … just massive.

  Her primal instincts for self-preservation kicked in with another jolt of her own adrenaline, and she used her weight and the slime that coated her to slip from his grip a second time. This time, however, as soon as she landed she made a desperate attempt to evade.

  The effort was useless, painful, and brief. He landed partly on top of her when he dove at her to recapture her and nearly crushed the parts of her he landed on between himself and the metal decking.

  Ignoring the pain, she struggled to ‘swim’ out from under him, bumping against him with her chest and her hips in an effort to lift him.

  The effect on him was powerful and damned near instantaneous. He produced an erection that felt like he was growing another arm.

  Except for the placement.

  Which was right in her crotch.

  She went limp, playing dead—wondering if she was going to wish it was real and not playacting before much time had passed.

  Thankfully, he got off of her and picked her up again.

  She thought she was grateful.

  It eased the pain of having his weight on top of her, but ….

  “This is the U.S.S. Intrepid,” she ground out imperiously, “and I am the commander of this ship! You are all in violation of space law which states that invading a ship without first contacting the ship and stating your intentions and obtaining permission to board is to be construed as piracy or an act of war and will be dealt with accordingly!”

  He lifted her until she was nose to nose with him. “I have no fucking clue what you said, woman, but, if you have any wits, if you are not a total fool, you will keep your venom to yourself when you meet the Commander,” he growled.

  It was the growl in his voice that convinced her to shut her mouth, because she didn’t have a damn clue of what he’d said. But pissed off giant—she understood that—way better than she wanted to.