Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,1

He bumps my head against the door frame as he tries to get me in.

“Sorry,” he says.

It hurts, but not like the burning fire going through my veins and cramping up all my muscles.

He turns the key. “Uh, shit. We left the headlights on. Battery’s dead.”

“Call an ambulance,” someone shouts.

“Clear the drugs and shit out first,” Thad shouts back.

“Thad,” I plead. “They won’t arrest you. It will probably take an hour for an ambulance to get out here. Call. It. Now.”

He calls for an ambulance, but before he’s even off the phone, my breaths start to become more shallow. I can barely get enough air no matter how hard I try.

Thad looks at me with wild, nervous eyes. I get the sense he doesn’t really care what happens to me. He’s just worried what might happen to him if I die.

“Shit,” I hear him hissing to his friends. They’ve gathered around the truck. “This don’t look good.”

I see them all shaking their heads. One of the other guy’s girlfriends is crying.

“Cat,” Thad says to me, patting me on the shoulder like I was his acquaintance and not his girlfriend. “If you don’t make it through this...I just want you to know...it’s been real.”

Krakon

February, 2621. Just outside the outer rim of the Arcturus System.

My suit makes contact with the hull. The magnets engage and I stick to it like a barnacle.

No other pirates from the swarm wanted in on this mission. They thought it was too risky. Too stupid. They said I was letting my personal feelings get in the way of my judgment.

Maybe. I do hate humans, but shit, they are worth a hell of a lot of money.

The problem is that this ship is armed to the teeth, and every single human popsicle on it is already spoken for by a big important piece of shit on Cygnus or on one of the aristocrat habs.

If I take just one of these humans, those rich bastards won’t miss it too much.

I dump the termite bots onto the hull below me. It looks like black goo, but it’s really just millions of little robots. I spread it all around like a paste until it’s about three feet by three feet.

I activate it with a switch on my wrist and it starts to eat through the hull.

Air rushes out of the new hole in the ship, but the magnets hold me hard enough to the hull that the rushing air doesn’t blow me away. Once the air is all gone, I disengage the magnets and jump inside the ship.

I find myself in some kind of corridor that’s sealed itself off via airlocks. I hack into the control panel and open one of the airlocks, shut it behind me, and then get the other airlock open.

Once my suit tells me there’s air, I raise my faceplate. My suit isn’t bulky--it’s basically skin-tight. The helmet adds some extra bulk, but I’m not going to take it off. I might need to jump out into vacuum again at a moment’s notice if this all goes south.

I work toward the center of the ship. It’s a big interstellar one, and it’s full of one hundred percent pure humans, all the way from Earth. Those humans are all frozen near the center of the ship.

The whole ship is still asleep. We’re several weeks away from the outer rim of Arcturus, the Cygnian’s--my people’s--home star. The humans shouldn’t be scheduled to wake until a week or two. If I’m lucky, I can get in and out with a human in tow, and when the ship arrives on Cygnus, they’ll never be able to figure out what happened to the missing human. The perfect crime.

3

Catherine

Someone slaps me in the face.

I jolt awake.

“Thad?”

“Can you shoot a gun?” he asks me.

“What?”

I rub my eyes. I feel cold. So very cold.

The man standing over me is frantic. He’s got a gun in his hand, and he’s trying to pull the trigger, but it’s just clicking. The gun looks like some kind of prop from a sci-fi movie.

“I don’t think that’s real,” I say.

My vision snaps more into focus. The man is wearing a skin-tight suit with weird markings running all along it, also looking like something from a sci-fi movie.

I look down at my leg. There’s no wound.

“Are you one of Thad’s friends?” I ask him.

“Who the hell is Thad? Can you figure out how to--”

The gun fires. A purple blast of energy shoots out of it, hits the ceiling, and molten