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

Alien Conquest

(The Warrior’s Prize)

By Scarlett Rhone

2016 © Enamored Ink

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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. She 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.”