Silas: Imperial Warrior (A Sci-Fi Alien Warrior Romance) (7 page)

He knew the way back to Gathra, but before he could head in the direction he needed to go, a large blast knocked his tiny speeder askew, sending it careening out in the wrong direction.

Silas swore and held on, trying to get back on track.

“Oh no,” he whispered as he saw where he was heading.

A warp path.

Once a ship got caught on one of those, it was heading wherever the path led to. There was no turning around or getting off of a warp path until it ended.

He tried frantically to avoid it, but with a smoking tail and the momentum he already had, there was no way, and he was sucked right into the warp path. The emergency alarm was blaring in the cockpit, and he knew the ship was going to go down. The only question now was where he’d end up when it did.

Darkness.

So different from the blinding lights that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. His head ached, his body was sore, and his mouth was sand dry. When Silas opened it to try and say something, all that came out was a low rasp.

Whatever had happened, he’d over extended himself.

In his younger days, it had been nothing for him to go two or three days without sleep or to push himself to his absolute limit time and time again. He’d been used to it, then spending his days out making Gathra a safer, better place.

But now he was more used to being inside the fortress than being out in the field, and he felt like he’d been worked over with a mallet.

To make matters worse, when he blinked his eyes open, he had no idea where he was. It wasn’t the clinic in the fortress, that was for sure. It wasn’t even the infirmary in the pleasure district where he’d had to get patched up once or twice in his career. This place was infinitely more...what color even was that? It was purple-ish and light, and the window was open, letting in a light breeze. His back was resting on something soft and too short for him, so his feet hung off the edge. Bizarre.

He felt heavy and achy, and so very confused.

As he laid there, waiting to see if someone would come into whatever this room was, he cast his mind back over what had happened.

The Fremeri, the little boy who’d gotten drained, the chase. He’d been in his speeder, and then…

Oh.

Oh.

And then he’d been attacked. An ambush most likely. He needed to get back to the ship. He needed to get a message to the Empress. If the Fremeri had enough numbers to ambush him, to bait them and have him follow them right into a trap, then it was clear that they were underestimating what they were capable of and probably the size of their force as well.

But then he remembered. He’d crashed. He was...on Earth.

Yes. Now he recalled the woman, the one who’d screamed and then let him into her home. That had to be where he was now.

If his speeder had crashed, then most likely the comm system was destroyed. There was no way to get a message to the Empress or to the rest of HIMA letting them know that they could be dealing with a full scale invasion possibly.

Silas found voice to swear.

“
Oh
,” a soft voice squeaked, and he turned his head to see a woman watching him.

It was the same woman from the night before, the one who had let him into what he assumed was her home. Her green eyes were wide, and she was wringing her hands together as she looked at him.

Silas narrowed his eyes at her, wincing as he tried to sit up.

“What have you done to me?” he managed.

Confusion and then indignation flared in her eyes. “I didn’t do
anything
to you!” she snapped. “Except give you a convenient place to pass out after you scared the actual
crap
out of me.”

Now he was frowning again, confused once more. He supposed that if he were really on Earth, then humans wouldn’t have much knowledge about the life that existed outside of their atmosphere. What he knew about humans was very small, just that they were self-centered, crude, and always in the middle of killing each other.

This one, though. If she was to be believed, and judging from the look on her face, Silas believed her, she had helped him. She was also beautiful. Her hair was in a braid that was falling over one shoulder, and there were sun spots all over her face, making her look almost ethereal.

His head was fuzzy, and it was hard to focus, but he knew well enough to know that he owed this woman something for helping him. For, at the very least, giving him somewhere to stay while he was passed out.

“Apologies,” he said, struggling again to sit up and coming out more successful this time. He managed to push himself up onto his elbows, though the movement left him light headed.

“You shouldn’t be moving around,” the woman said, taking a step towards him. “I think you’ve lost a lot of blood. I patched you up as best I could, but...well, I’m not a nurse or a doctor, so.”

It was only then that Silas noticed he’d been bandaged up. The gauze and tape were archaic compared to where he came from, but he supposed he couldn’t expect humans to have laser healing tech here. They were still using crude weapons, after all, of course they hadn’t caught up with the latest in healing technology yet.

“Thank you,” Silas said sincerely. “I might have died without your assistance.”

She flushed slightly and waved that away. “How did you get so hurt, anyway?”

Silas considered for a moment, wondering if there was harm in telling her what had happened to him. It was not very likely that the Fremeri would have reached out to the humans and made some sort of alliance with them, so he deemed it acceptable to tell her. “My speeder crashed here,” Silas said.

“Your…
oh
.” Something seemed to dawn on her. “That was the thing that went streaking across the sky yesterday. You were on that thing? It looked like it was on fire.”

He nodded. “I was, and it was. I was shot down.”

“Holy crap. And you survived?”

“Apparently,” Silas replied, a hint of a smile playing around his mouth. “If I hadn’t I doubt we’d be having this conversation. Unless this is some elaborate after death vision or something. The Void is a strange place.”

“The Void?”

Silas shook his head. “We haven’t even been introduced. It’s not the time to start talking about the Void.”

“Oh,” she said again. “Right, of course. I’m Katia.”

“Katia.” Silas turned the name over in his mouth like he could taste it. It wasn’t a name he would have heard where he came from, but lovely all the same. “My name is Silas.”

“Silas,” she repeated. “That’s...well, to be honest it’s an oddly normal name for an alien. That’s what you are, right? You’re from another planet.”

She seemed remarkably calm about it, and Silas supposed she would have had time to come to terms with it while she was patching him up. Blue skin was obviously not something that humans had in common with his people, after all.

“Yes,” he replied simply. There was no use in pretending otherwise. “I am Silas Kerandron, Captain of the Left Arm of HIMA, Champion of the Battle of Fells Deep, and I hail from Gathra.”

“That’s a fancy bunch of titles,” she said. “You must be important on Gathra.”

He inclined his head. “Important enough that I should be there instead of here,” Silas told her. “I have to figure out how to get a message to my Empress. There are things she needs to know.” But how he was going to do that was anyone’s guess. It wasn’t like human technology was made to broadcast into space. Most humans didn’t even believe that there was anything to broadcast
to
beyond their planet. But if he didn’t tell someone what he had seen, then Gathra or some other unsuspecting planet was going to be invaded by a race of creatures that were definitely not dead.

Chapter Four: Quite a Disaster

"What do you
mean
you don't know where he is?"

Cress fought the urge to shrink back from the Empress' anger. He'd always known that getting on her bad side was a terrible idea. She was a strong willed woman, a descendant from the tribes who had first come along and settled on Gathra. Her people didn't shy away from hard work or from their anger, and right now Cress knew that he had to tread carefully to avoid invoking something he wasn't going to be able to handle.

There was a reason he had never angled for a promotion. Even after Silas had been promoted to Captain, essentially leaving him behind in the lower ranks, he hadn't tried for more. Because it was a terrible idea, fraught with responsibility and meetings like this.

The most he ever saw of the Empress ordinarily was the back of her head or he saw her from afar when she was giving some manner of speech to her troops. He had never been on the other side of her desk like this before, and there was a reason he had never wanted to.

"I...um." Cress cleared his throat. Just tell her the facts. That was what Hamara had insisted was the best way to go about this. And he could do that. He could. "We don't know where he is," he repeated. "He left in pursuit of the Fremeri, I received a transmission from him, and then nothing. I've tried calling him, but there's no response, and there's no sight of his speeder on any of the radars. For all intents and purposes, Silas--I mean, the Captain--has disappeared."

Cress swallowed hard when he finished. His voice hadn't shook once, thank the stars for that. His hands were clenched into fists at his side, and he forced himself to take deep, even breaths.

"And you have no idea where he might be?" Ammaline asked.

"No, Your Imperial Majesty. We can't find him on any of the radars or scanners, and the tracer on his ship is either down or damaged."

"What about the locator on his personal device?" she wanted to know.

"Tech is having a hard time locking onto the signal."

The Empress said nothing for a long moment and then let out a rough exhale. Her fingers were pressed flat on the top of her desk, and she looked like she was trying very hard not to explode. Cress appreciated the effort.

He understood how she felt, though. Silas was one of their best. For all he'd been surprised when the Empress had promoted him to Captain, it hadn't come as a surprise to anyone else. Silas was a natural leader. The kind of man who inspired loyalty in his people without trying very hard. He made people want to follow him, and honestly, not that much had changed when Silas was promoted. The Empress relied on him to solve problems like this, and with him gone, finding someone else to lead was going to be difficult. Especially since the first thing they were going to have to lead would be Silas' rescue mission of all things.

"We will have to assume the worst," the Empress was saying, jarring him out of his thoughts.

"The worst, Majesty?"

Ammaline inclined her head. "Yes. That he has been taken by the Fremeri."

Cress' eyes widened. He hadn't even considered that. Silas and prisoner didn't go together unless he was the one bringing prisoners in. For him to be one...

"You think that's what happened?"

She shot him a sharp look. "I have no way of knowing what happened, Corporal. As such, we will assume the worst. If they have one of ours, then that is as good as a declaration of war."

Well. That seemed rather...sudden. Cress had never seen a war before. Not a real one, anyway. He'd grown up the same as the other children, learning about the wars and battles that had shaped Gathra and the other planets nearby into the places they were now. He'd learned all about how the strong had prevailed and the weak had been all but annihilated. It was daunting to say the least to think about participating in something like that.

"What if..." he began, eyes widening in horror as he realized he was about to contradict the Empress of Gathra.

"What if?" Ammaline repeated, eyes on him.

"What if it's not that bad?" Cress asked. "What if he just...ran out of fuel on some other planet or something? Should we really declare all-out war for that?"

The eyes that hadn't looked away from his face from the moment he started speaking hardened. "You think I am being too rash." It wasn't a question, and Cress wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.

"That isn't what I said, Majesty."

"No, but I can see that it's true all the same. You think I am jumping to conclusions and using that as an excuse. But consider what the Fremeri have already done here. There are people who have been hurt and killed by them already. Is that not cause?"

Cress...couldn't really argue with that. "Yes, Your Imperial Majesty," he said. "It's cause."

"That was my thought as well," Ammaline replied. "I need to speak to the other captains. And I will need some of the left arm to volunteer to look for Silas."

"I'll uh. I'll facilitate that."

"Lovely. I trust that I don’t have to tell you to keep me informed. You are dismissed."

Cress had never been so pleased to be dismissed before, and he just nodded, saluted, and then nearly stumbled out of the office and then out of the fortress itself, head spinning. He'd seen a lot in the last few hours, and though it was very late at night, nearly morning, actually, he didn't want to go home and try to sleep. He knew that as soon as he laid his head down, it would be filled with images of children, pale as the grave, still and bloodless.