Star Warrior: A SciFi Alien Romance (3 page)

It was time to destroy before we were destroyed.

Moments stretched into an eternity. I recalled fighting my way through a group of humans who didn’t have that annoying power armor. Reaching a landing ship that had bored into the side of the human ship. Gathering what was left of my men as we retreated. That hurt, retreating like that, but it was necessary. I wouldn’t waste men needlessly when I destroyed the ship.

“I want all our troops pulled out from that ship. They are intending to destroy the station. Repeat, they intend to destroy the station. This cannot happen,” I said as I coordinated with my men.

“Oh but General, I’m afraid it’s already going to happen,” a familiar voice came through over the communications.

My eyes went wide as someone broke through and I found myself looking at the human captain once more. Her face shimmered in the holographic projection for a moment, and as she appeared I felt the bond with my wife on the station change even as it grew stronger as I got closer to my ship which had moved in close to the station to provide better protection.

Fear. This communication must be going out at full power and overriding everything in the area. This captain wanted everyone to know what was about to happen.

“Fire everything you have at that ship!” I shouted into the commlink I still had open with my own ship.

“But general, we have multiple landing ships in the line of fire!”

That moment of hesitation was all it took. I thought I’d trained my officers well. I thought I’d conditioned them to follow orders without question. It would become the greatest shame of my life that the one time those orders weren’t followed immediately like a reflex was the one time that it most mattered, but by the time I realized what had happened it was too late.

The human ship lashed out at my own. I saw shadows passing between the ships and realized that they’d given up on the energy weapons we’d knocked out and were using pure mass accelerated to great speeds. Crude, but very effective. The first hit the ship at what I could only imagine was an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and it caused a massive explosion that caused me to turn away.

My own ship opened fire, but it was too late. The damage was already done. Unlike the energy weapons the humans favored in combat there was no stopping something like this once it got going. It was a weapon of mass destruction usually reserved for planetary bombardment, but it appeared this human captain was trickier than usual.

My ship did its own damage to the humans, but I could tell it was already over. The ship exploded in a blaze of glory, the souls of my men sent on to the spirits of emperors past.

“The first part of this business is over with,” the human said. Funny that I would still be captivated by her beauty even as I was terrified of what she was about to do. That terror overrode everything, and it fed into my link with my wife causing her to feel an equal amount of terror that filled me with shame that her last moments would be thinking of me afraid rather than fighting to the death.

“Bring the landing ships around!” I shouted into my commlink. “Ram the human ship! Do everything you can to protect the station!”

Perhaps I was about to die, but it would be a good death. The pilot of my ship turned it around in a great arc and I was afforded a view of the station and the human ship. Which also afforded me a view of more of those massive hunks of metal being released from the human ship as they used their mass drivers to accelerate them.

Directly into the station.

“The Livisk Ascendency will not colonize worlds in human space,” the human captain said, her voice lacking any emotion. “This is the penalty for thinking we don’t leave our rim systems defended.”

I felt helpless as the station went up in a massive explosion as all the oxygen was used up and various reactors blew, and then it was swallowed by that vacuum as soon as the fuel was used up leaving nothing but hunks of metal. It was over in moments.

I was filled with rage as we approached the human ship, but there was one final insult left. The ship turned and started limping away from us. It was obvious it was severely damaged, I could see the marks in their armor where we’d landed hit after hit and disabled most of their energy weapons, but it wasn’t so damaged that it couldn’t limp away from the battle.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Come back here and finish this fight!”

The human captain had never left her holographic projection. She finally showed some emotion other than anger and battle rage. She smiled and bared her teeth to me. That was supposed to be a pleasant expression for the humans, but on her it looked threatening.

“The problem with that is I’m not quite equipped to take on prisoners. Besides, something tells me you just failed royally with some important mission, and I figure it would be better for you to live with that dishonor and have to go back and report your failure to your emperor or whoever your boss is.”

I fell back in my seat as others looked at me then looked away. I wondered if they could feel the dishonor settling into their bones the way I did. I felt the loss of my wife as well as the loss of that link that we’d shared since the day we were first bonded. I felt the loss of my honor more acutely, though.

I’d hoped to die crashing into the human, or perhaps to die at the emperor’s hand when he learned of my failure. Now my humiliation was complete, though. My force was so trivial that the human wasn’t even going to bother killing us as was proper.

My world, my career, my life as I knew it, was over.

And yet all I could think was how impressed I was at this human woman with a warrior’s spirit who had bested me where countless other humans and Livisk had failed. Truly she was a warrior to be reckoned with. The humans would do well to promote her as high as possible, and the Ascendency would tremble before her.

I sank down and stared at the floor of the shuttle and contemplated the enormity of my shame. This would be impossibly difficult to explain to the emperor, but it had to be done.

3: Complacency

Talia:

Two years patrolling the outer rim of the solar system. Two years in the backwater of humanity. Two years of chasing down smugglers trying to enter the system without the appropriate paperwork and arresting the occasional ice miner who was skimming a little extra off the top of the company books.

Two years since I truly felt alive. I knew this was my punishment for losing the Alemeraine. I thought I’d snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with that battle, but it turned out returning to the spaceport with a ship that ends up getting written off as a total loss because of battle damage went a long way towards convincing the admiralty I wasn’t worthy of another command.

At least not a good one. I suppose it could’ve been worse, though. It wasn’t the garbage scow I’d originally thought I’d be stuck with.

I felt the steady hum of the ship pulsing through my command chair. I closed my eyes for a moment and allowed myself the brief indulgence of enjoying that sensation, even if it wasn’t the same as my old ship.

It was still a ship, and it felt like a lover’s caress even after several years in command. I might as well enjoy it. It was the only caress I was going to feel all the way out here on patrol at the edge of the Oort cloud making sure no Livisk with crazy ideas managed to get their ship into the home system. Not that any of them had tried in decades.

The loneliness of command and all that. Though on this ship I was more than happy to remain lonely. Not for the first time the thought of that strange alien passed through my mind. He usually did when I was feeling particularly lonely. Odd that I would think of him and not one of my numerous dalliances with a human officer, but there it was.

I sighed. He’d probably been executed long ago for failure. Supposedly they did that sort of thing in the Livisk stellar navy. I suppose next to that getting assigned to this ship was almost a good thing.

Almost.

I opened my eyes and was thrust back into a reality that was a little less than what command used to feel like. On second thought the summary execution might’ve been the better option.

Navigation Officer Olsen sat on the other side of the command center from his station in a deep conversation with Communications Officer Nomura who was giggling and batting her eyelashes under the navigation officer’s attentions. That was the sort of thing they wouldn’t put up with in the Fleet proper, but of course floating around in a glorified cruiser that should’ve been mothballed before the Livisk war started was hardly the Fleet proper.

No, this wasn’t the fleet proper. At least not in the way I thought of it. We weren’t out running exploration missions in uncharted space. We weren’t dodging Livisk blockades to bring much needed supplies to colony worlds that had been cut off by orbital bombardment. We weren’t a massive battlecruiser slicing through the inky night between the stars looking for Livisk fleets to ambush and destroy before they did the same to us and ours.

That life was behind me now thanks to that encounter that I couldn’t get out of my head, though not because it had ruined my career. I shivered as I thought of that Livisk again. Why couldn’t I get him out of my head?

No, we were just a small borderline obsolete cruiser hanging out at the edge of the safest space known to man waiting for an attack that would most likely never come. No matter how bad the war went, our two civilizations were evenly enough matched that everyone knew there wasn’t any true existential threat to humanity.

“Lieutenant Olsen?”

He looked up at me and the irritation on his face would’ve gotten him sent to the brig on any other ship. The only problem was our crew complement was small enough that I couldn’t afford to get rid of critical officers. Something they knew just as much as they knew they’d pulled one of the cushier duties in the fleet.

Everyone on this bridge but me seemed to relish being this close to home. As though not being out there mixing it up with the Livisk was a privilege and not a career ending slap in the face.

“Yes captain?” he asked.

At least his tone was neutral. He had that much control. There was a fine line between resisting command and outright insubordination, and everyone in this command center was an expert at walking that line.

“I believe you have work to do at your station?” I asked.

“What, monitoring the hunks of rock and ice out there that were mapped centuries ago?” he asked. “Some job that is. Everything out there has been on the same path for thousands or millions of years. It’s not like their orbits changed or anything in the last ten minutes.”

I arched an eyebrow. That did come dangerously close to insubordination. They might walk the line, but everyone in this command center knew that I would come down on them with all the authority I had. It might not be much, but it would be enough to severely ruin their next week, at least.

“Right, I’ll get back to my station captain,” he said.

“You will,” I replied. “Monitoring your station is doing your job even if there isn’t necessarily anything out there. You never know when the universe might throw an unpleasant surprise your way.”

I knew a thing or two about the universe throwing unpleasant surprises around. Like finding a full Livisk battlecruiser with the imperial seal emblazoned on the side guarding what should’ve been a backwater station with minimal crew. I still wondered what the hell that cruiser was doing there. What the hell he was doing there.

I shook my head. There I went again thinking of things I couldn’t change, damn it.

I paused and looked at every officer in the command center in turn to make sure the lesson sank in. I wanted it to be absolutely clear that I was talking to all of them, and not just a wayward lieutenant who was more interested in getting his rocks off with the communications officer after his watch was over than he was in actually doing his job.

Everyone turned back to their screens. I knew from experience that it would last for maybe a half hour, tops, before they started relaxing their discipline again. I shuddered to think what the command center looked like when I wasn’t on duty and they really let loose. I wasn’t going to go so far as to check the recordings and reprimand them, though. There was only so far I was willing to go. Especially since doing that would likely leave me without a functional command crew which would have command breathing down my neck from Earth just for doing my job.

They’d done that a lot since I lost my ship. It made it difficult to maintain any sort of discipline when the crew knew I didn’t have any pull back home.

I sighed as I leaned back in my chair. At least that was comfortable. Sort of. It had probably been replaced in at least the past decade.

I looked down at the summary readout on my chair. Everything that was happening on or around the ship was summarized there, and it all amounted to about what it always did out here. Absolutely nothing.

That was the problem being out here in the backwater of the home sector. We were close to home, sure, but we were also paradoxically far enough out in the system that we weren’t anywhere near where the action happened. Closer in near the habitable zones it was all admirals and generals having high level meetings talking about how they planned on prosecuting the seemingly never ending war with the Livisk. That was the fast track to promotion.