Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5) (9 page)

I look at him with flushed cheeks as he squeezes me.

I probe his body with my eyes. “I wonder what’s behind that armor–”

He stands straight up without warning, letting go of me.

“Did I–?” I start to say, but then I understand. His armor– almost instantly– liquefies. I see it shimmer across his body as if it were a teal ocean, and then it all coalesces into a small sphere– but I’m not looking at the glassy sphere.

I’m looking at all that purple skin, those sculpted muscles, suddenly naked before me. My eyes drink him in, going down, down, down– past all eight rows of his abs, to a chiseled and deep v-cut, to a– holy shit.

His cock is standing rock-hard up against his abs. It’s as teal as his armor was against his otherwise purple skin, and it’s glistening wet as it twitches.

“Does it have its own heart?” I ask, wide-eyed. “Holy shit.”

He grins down at me. “I don’t know, why don’t you check for a pulse?”

I stand up off the bed, and the harsh gravity is still there, but the massage really did take away the worst of the soreness. I move transfixed toward his pulsing cock, and I grab hold of it. It’s huge and warm in my hand, and it’s vibrating wildly.

“Self-lubricating,” I whisper to myself. Then I feel again how wet I am. “Not really necessary when you’re so good at...giving massages.”

Kain laughs. “The other peacekeepers I trained with on Venus– the human ones– talked about ‘getting their dicks wet,’ and at first I thought it just meant they got hard...then I remembered the unfortunate reality of a human male’s biology.”

“Yeah,” I say, running my hand up and down his shaft. “You have some fortunate biology….”

I cup his balls and say gently squeeze. “Do Marauders have the same weak spots?”

“A kick to the balls will always hurt,” Kain says. “Human or Marauder.”

“I’ll remember that,” I say. “In case you’re ever not there to defend me.”

“I’ll always be here to protect you,” Kain says, his eyes dark and deep.

“I know,” I say. “The way you protected me before….”

“I’m sorry about that,” he says. “I should have...taken him out of the room before I killed him.”

“Is that your idea of being gentle?” I ask.

“Darkstar is a harsh place, Kara,” he says. “If I show myself as anything less than a Darkstar Marauder, we’re all at risk.”

“I know,” I say, stroking his cock sensually up and down. “I was mad earlier. But I’m glad now that you were there to protect me. I was so fucking scared.”

He moves behind me, and his strong arms wrap around me. He grabs my waist with one hand, while the other arm wraps around my breasts. He pulls my body tightly against his, and I feel his big hard cock pressing into my back.

“I’m sorry this all had to happen to you,” he says. “I’ll do everything I can to undo it–”

“Don’t undo
all
of it,” I say, running my hand up and down his strong forearm. “This place is hell, but at least I met you.”

“It can’t be worth it,” he says, resting his chin against the top of my hair.

“Our life before wasn’t so great,” I say. “Every time we filled our ship up with a haul like that, I knew it was only a matter a time before someone came to take it from us by force. And I knew that when that happened, we likely wouldn’t be left alive.”

“When I get you out of here,” Kain says, “I can take you to Sankt Petersburg. It’s almost as nice as the habitats.”

“Is there really a hanging forest?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “Though that is nothing compared to the floating jungles. I could take you there, too, though you’re not allowed to wear clothes.”

I laugh. “Not a problem.”

He lowers his body down, and his thick cock slides across my wet mound. I gasp.

“Now it’s time for me to truly claim you,” he says. “Unless–”

“Yes,” I say, my voice heated with arousal. “Fucking claim me.”

He laughs and pushes me down onto my back. I fall hard onto the bed, but it’s soft enough that the gravity can’t hurt me. Kain’s big, powerful body towers over me, and his long, steeled cock vibrates as he slaps it against my stomach.

“Stop teasing me,” I say.

He spreads my legs and pulls his dick back along my wet lips, teasing. I bite my lip and gaze into Kain’s eyes. He grins, and I grab his dick roughly with my hand.

I guide it toward my opening, and I tug when it’s in position. He slides himself into me without further hesitation. The head of his cock splits me wide open, and soon his warmth fills me. He slides further in, deeper, and I moan in ecstasy as he slides more and more of his full length inside me. His tremendous girth stretches me wider, but I’m so hot and ready for him that there’s no pain, just a tight and perfectly satisfying fit.

I feel his thick veins throbbing inside me, and the vibration from his dick hits my g-spot as he slides in even deeper.

“Mmmm,” I say. “Now you’re massaging me inside.”

“Oh,” Kain says. “You’re still pretending this is a massage?”

I punch his arm, but the movement just drives his cock deeper into me. “You asshole! You mean you weren’t really trying to massage me? This was your intention all along?”

His ears twitch back and forth. “I don’t know,” he says. “Does your back not feel better?”

“Well,” I say, “it feels better, but my pussy feels way better with that thick teal dick sliding into it.”

“Maybe
you
were the one who didn’t really intend on just a massage,” he says.

Before I can respond, he plunges his cock as deep as it will go. I moan aloud at the sheer depth of his thrust, and when I feel his balls resting against my skin, I finally relax and laugh.

“Okay,” I say, “I wanted a massage...but I was hoping for this kind of massage, too.”

“Then we
were
on the same page,” Kain says.

He bucks his hips, and his full length slides out of me, vibrating the whole way. I hear the slickness of our combined wetness as he slides in and out of me, and I wrap my legs around him and dig my heels into his chiseled back. I cling tightly to him as he thrusts in and out of my dripping wet hole, and I scream and laugh and cry as he lets me feel everything on this grey and barren world that is otherwise devoid of feeling.

I reach down and squeeze his perfect ass, and he starts thrusting faster, harder. He grunts as he thrusts, and when I pull him down against me, he licks and bites at my neck, and my ear, and then we kiss one another again deeply as we fuck each other raw.

Soon he pulls out of me, flips me over onto my stomach, and dips back into my hole from behind. His dick slides all the way back in from this new angle, and the pressure on my g-spot is more intense than ever. He wedges himself all the way in, and then he starts moving slowly back and forth across my g-spot. The vibrations send chills up my spine, and I feel Kain’s breath hot caressingly on my neck. He’s pushing me down flat against the bed and drilling me rhythmically with his vibrating cock.

I buck my hips back against him. It’s hard with his weight and the gravity, but I need to feel this. We start to move faster against each other, and I feel incredible heat building up inside me.

“Now I truly claim you,” Kain whispers into my ear.

My inner walls squeeze tightly against him, pulsing and dripping wet. At the same time, his cock throbs inside me, and as my body explodes with blinding and warm ecstasy, I feel his thick cum filling me.

He blasts load after load deep up into me as I come, screaming with abandon. My tears and drool stain the pillow, and I surrender completely beneath this powerful alien warrior who has claimed me for himself.

As the last of his thick release blasts inside me, the vibrations slowly fade, but the inner vibration and warmth of the afterglow fills me up instead. Finally, he pulls out of me and drops down beside me.

I smile over at him, and every hair on the back of my neck feels like it’s standing straight up on end.

“You’re sure you want to work tomorrow?” he asks, gently stroking my side.

God, why did he have to remind me about that? I
need
to stay with Felicia, to keep her spirits up. And aside from that, working will get me off the exosuit sooner. I can’t take any days off from working.

“You must have a lot of work to do tomorrow, too,” I say. “I can’t imagine all you’re having to go through. Could you really imagine taking a day off to just lay around?”

He sighs. “No, I can’t imagine it. I haven’t had a real day of rest in years. But I want to give you one.”

“I appreciate it,” I say. “I really do. But let’s not rest until we are free. Give me a nice day–or a week, or a month–once we are safe and warm on Venus.”

“Mmmm,” he says, smiling. “That sounds good.”

I ignore the fact that Venus is only safe for as long as Earth remains stable. Or for as long as Darkstar remains dormant. The human brain can only worry about so many things at once, however.

“What do I need to get these three guys ready to do?” I ask. “Do you have a plan yet?”

“Ask them if they’re able to make a bomb,” Kain says.

* * *

“
A
bomb
?!” Eli shouts

“Did you say a
BOMB
?” Thorsten roars into the intercom.

“Shhhh!” I admonish, raising a finger over my visor gesturing for their silence. “Quiet!”

“A bomb,” Andreas whispers.

“Could you?” I ask.

“I know a guy in agriculture,” Thorsten says.

“Agriculture?” Felicia asks.

“Yeah,” Thorsten says. “The fertilizer they use in those grow domes is powerful shit. Highly concentrated, packed full of ammonium nitrate.”

“That blows up, right?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Eli says. “But the question is how are you going to blow it up.”

“And where,” Thorsten says. “And when.”

“That’s three questions,” I say.

We all start swinging our pickaxes again to break the boulders. Every part of my body aches, but it’s not as bad as before Kain’s...massage.

I smile just thinking about it. He
is
a barbaric asshole, but he’s
my
barbaric asshole.

We focus on our job of mining and throwing more rocks into the wagon, without speaking. There’s a quota to meet, and we’ve more or less internalized it already. We talk only when we’re catching a breath, and the work hours are long, so it’s not like we’ll run out of time to talk the plan through.

When the wagon is full and it drives off, I point to it. “The bomb will go in there.”

“Ah,” Andreas says. “That’s smart. Mr. Kain think of that?”

“We thought of it together,” I say.

“Doing a lot of things together these days, are ya’?” Eli asks.

I scoff. “The bomb will go off in the wagon. And it will blow up when the wagon is back in the refinery bay.”

“So we need a timer,” Thorsten says.

“Or a remote detonator,” Eli says.

“Do they ever inspect the wagons?” I ask.

“Machine scans,” Thorsten says. “They get blasted by a scanner beam to see what type of ores have been mined and what not.”

“What will the machines do when they see a bunch of fertilizer?” Felicia asks.

“I don’t know,” Eli says. “Back in the day, the A.I. probably would have alerted an officer.”

“Back in the day?” I ask.

“No real A.I.s anymore after the Harmony thing,” Eli says. “The scanner is a dumb scanner. Maybe it will see the fertilizer and it will be reported on a screen somewhere. Maybe it’s not even set to detect non-minerals.”

“What’s the worst case scenario?” I ask.

“If they rigged it to, say, beep an alarm or something when there’s an unsortable material inside.”

“I think we want a remote detonator,” I say. “There’s too much that can go wrong with a timed fuse.”

“Good thing with a timed fuse, though,” Andreas says, “is that no one can catch you holding a detonator. Plausible deniability.”

“This isn’t a fucking habitat, dumbass!” Eli shouts, pointing his pickaxe at Andreas. “You think we’re going to get a lawyer who is going to smile all smug-like when he points out that there is no hard proof we planted the bomb? They’ll just fucking kill all of us if they even
suspect
it.”

Thorsten grunts. “My Maruader lady is coming to visit me next week. Or should I say, she’s visiting to
come
. Can we make sure this all happens afterward?”

I sigh.

“We’ll need at least a week to get all the materials together,” Eli says. “At least. How is the gravity treating you two?”

“Hard,” Felicia says.

“You haven’t given in and adjusted it again, right?”

“No,” Felicia and I say in unison.

“In a week, you can probably lose the suits. “So let’s aim this whole business to take place on the day after Thorsten fucks his lady one last time.”

“Are we seriously planning everything around
that
?” Felicia asks. Their looks in response to my statement answer my question.

“I’ll let Kain know,” I say.

I
take
to the biosuit like a fish to water. I’d never used one in the past because it felt like a crutch. I had been so concerned with how others thought of me–how strong a warrior they thought I was. I didn’t really care about efficiently achieving an objective with the most suitable tool. No, I had to do it in style and show everyone just how strong I was while doing it. So I got good with a sniper rifle. I could pick people off before they even knew I was there, and I didn’t need a biosuit to do it.

Everything is different now. I don’t care what anyone thinks, I just want to get Kara out of here. If all goes well, I’ll never see a single person from Darkstar again in my life. To hell with what they think of me.

The most effective way to rescue Kara is to harness the full power of a biosuit, and I’m learning it much more quickly than Raius–or my brother–expected.

“Now,” Raius says, “this is one of the most difficult maneuvers–even on weak-ass Martian gravity. On Darkstar, one small error and you’ll hit the ground so hard you’ll liquefy. But if you can do this on Darkstar, you can do it anywhere in the solar system.”

We’re standing on a huge cliff outside the base. It’s a sheer drop off of at least five hundred meters. The gravity on Darkstar is so high and the atmosphere so thin that a fall like this is more deadly than jumping out of a plane on Earth. On Earth, once you hit a certain fall speed, the air prevents you from falling any faster: terminal velocity. On Darkstar, the acceleration has no cap, and it happens a lot faster. You just keep falling faster and faster until you splat on the surface.

“This time you’re just going to watch me do it,” Raius says. “Take careful notes, and try to get a feel for how it works.”

I grin up at Raius.

He gives me a confused look, but his eyes widen when I jump off the cliff.

I do take careful notes: the first note says that Raius makes no effort to save me. He probably hopes I will fail.

I blast at least two dozen tendrils out, straight down.

The second note: the ground comes up on me way faster than I’d ever have expected. Raius did try to warn me about that. I must not have been listening.

The tendrils reach the ground when I’m about halfway from where I jumped off the cliff and the ground. I feel the tendrils bonding to the ground, and at this point, only the bottom-most portion is solidified, while the greater length is a mushy gel-like consistency.

All 24 tendrils are spread out along a 50-meter-wide circle, converging up into me.

I will the tendrils to harden more at the bottom, and they become straight and solid.

If I make them too solid too fast, they will simply shatter, and I’ll plummet to the ground. If I harden them too slowly, they will slow my fall to a degree, but I’ll still hit the ground at a fatal speed.

I have to do it just right. Like Goldilocks. There’s a lot of wiggle room on Mars, less on Earth, and almost none here.

I feel my descent slowing as the tendrils steel themselves. When I’m about 100 meters up, I ramp up the hardening action, and I feel my stomach churn as my descent rapidly declines. I can feel the pressure–if I had ramped it any harder the tendrils would have shattered apart, and I’d still fall too hard to survive. But I balanced on the knife’s edge, and I continue to ramp up the tensile strength until it feels as if I’m falling so slowly that I’m on Earth’s moon. And when I’m about ten meters from the ground, I’m barely descending.

The tendrils reach 100 percent hardness when I’m only two meters from the ground. I pull them all back in and fall to the ground in a low crouch position.

A score of tendrils slam into the ground beside me, and I look up to see Raius falling at their epicenter.

Less than five seconds later, Raius is slowly lowering down. He touches all the way down onto his feet, in a perfectly gentle landing. No two-meter drop like I had.

He narrows his eyes at me. “You didn’t stick your landing, little brother.”

I smile, but I’m mad at myself.

He can still control the suit better than me. He’s been using it for over a year, so it should come as no surprise, but I know–given time–I’d quickly surpass him. But I don’t have time. I need to surpass him
now
.

It’s clear now that Raius is reporting back to Adus about me. It’s the main reason he’s been assigned to train me. Adus is up on the High Command ship, and when my plan is set into action, he’ll be too far away to intervene. Raius, however, always seems to be right on my heels.

When it comes time to escape, Raius will be the one who tries to stop me. And I’ll have to kill him, using this damn suit.

The plan so far–assuming those miners can make a bomb–is to blow up a wagon deep in the refinery. I’ll order my inexperienced Seraphim army to rush in with guns blazing, hopefully creating more chaos. In the ideal scenario, Raius goes to the explosion as well, but I have a gut feeling that if anything blows up, he’ll come straight for me.

So the realistic plan is that I have to kill Raius first, and
then
I can hijack a shuttle. After that...it doesn’t get any easier, but at least I’ll have Kara off of Darkstar. Anything that goes wrong from there, at least she will be directly under my protection.

But I’m still a peacekeeper, and I need to figure out what Adus is planning. Saving Kara while failing my mission as a peacekeeper means that I’m bringing her back to an unsafe solar system.

I have a plan for getting this information, but I’ll have to face Adus again and risk raising his suspicions.

* * *

I
’m standing
up straight with my hands behind my back while I watch the Seraphim punch and kick the shit out of each other.

“Losers all have to do 100 pull ups!” I shout.

One hundred pull ups normally isn’t too hard for a Seraph. But in Darkstar gravity, it’s brutal.

I’m training them to drop the human notion of a fair or honorable fight. Human males especially have this strange notion of not fighting to win. I saw this firsthand on Venus, in bars on Sankt Petersburg. A man would look the wrong way at another’s girlfriend, and they’d soon be up in each other’s faces.

Marauders would stare each other down as well, but the first attack would be to kill. It would come suddenly and mercilessly. If both Marauders were of equal strength, this first attack might be blocked, and from there it would be a brutal fight to the death. Choking, twisting the opponent’s balls off, biting out their throat–all would be fair game.

But humans? The two men in the bar would suddenly back up and raise their fists. They would then fight in a way that makes no sense to me. Trading punches and not using their feet. Sometimes I even saw a much larger man not using his weight to his advantage. He would trade punches and not grab the smaller man and crush him to the ground.

And Seraphim, as it turns out, have adopted this human quirk of nonsensical fighting. I am trying to correct it.

“If you kill your opponent,” I shout, “then he wasn’t good enough for Darkstar anyway!”

And this training has the nice side effect of high casualties. Of the 3,000 Seraphim I started with, 400 have already died in training.

I watch as a smaller Seraph is pinned under a larger one. The smaller one punches the big one’s ribs, and judging from the big one’s face, his ribs cracked.

The little one head-butts him, and then bites out his throat while he remains still, stunned.

The blood oozes onto him, and the big guy’s lifeless body collapses and pins the smaller one to the ground.

He catches his breath and shoves the big corpse off of him, then jumps to his feet.

“Kain!” he says, smiling even though his face is covered in blood. “I guess that one wasn’t a real Marauder, huh?”

No, I think. The big guy definitely would have cut it as a Marauder, and I just denied Darkstar yet another soldier.

“Not compared to you,” I say. “Good work…”

“Jefa,” he says.

“Good work, Jefa. Throw his body onto the pile.”

I gesture toward the pile of bodies. There’s only six or so on it, but it will grow as training progresses.

Not all fights will end in death. Most won’t, in fact. It’s more common for a knockout blow, but the more aggressive Seraphim, like Jefa, always seem to end up in situations where a kill is needed to win.

“Kain, sir,” someone says behind me. He’s covered in blood, as well.

“Yes?”

“The bodies are piling up,” he says, panting.

I look over to where he was fighting, and there’s a lifeless body lying there.

“Looks like your opponent is dead. His body won’t pile itself up.”

“That’s the thing, sir, it’s not just a
body
, it was my friend.”

“You killed your
friend
?” I ask.

“You told us to, if it was needed to win….”

“If he was really your friend,” I say, “you could have found a way–”

“That’s the thing, sir,” he says. “He took what you said to heart, and he was trying to kill me. My instincts just took over, and now he’s dead.”

“Well,” I say, “good job. You’re a Marauder now. What’s your name?”

“Malcolm,” he says. “But sir, can I bury my friend?”

“The pile will go into the incinerator. Burying is for humans. Burying is used only to shame a Marauder.”

Malcolm bites his lip. “You said, sir, that anyone who dies isn’t a Marauder, so I guess my friend was a human. So I can bury him?”

“If you want to suit up and walk out onto the soil with a shovel carrying all that dead weight, you’re free to,” I say. “I do wonder what your comrades will think of that.”

“How do you mean?” Malcolm asks.

“A Marauder, respecting human traditions?”

He narrows his eyes at me. “Technically...we’re all half-human, sir.”

I’ve been fishing, and now he’s on my hook. I want to recruit some of these Seraphim to my side, but it’s dangerous. Malcolm is doing all the work for me, however.

“You could argue that the Marauder genes are dominant and that the human genes play a minor role in your anatomy,” I say.

He shrugs.

“When Earth is obliterated, and hopefully Mars and Venus as well, there will be so little left of humanity that the word ‘human’ will lose almost all meaning. You’ll be Marauder through and through.”

I watch his eyes. They widen just slightly, and his ears twitch, and then he forces a steel expression over his whole face. “Yes, sir.”

He turns and walks away.

I watch him as he carries his friend’s body out toward the airlock.

I should be able to recruit this one.

* * *

A
fter training
, Raius stops me on my way to see Kara.

“Going to visit your human?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Bring her to the hangar,” he says.

I narrow my eyes at him. This cannot be good, but I have to avoid overreacting or showing him that I actually care about her.

“The hangar?” I ask.

“Yes, that’s what I said. I’ll meet you there. Hurry up.”

I nod and continue on toward the prisoners’ quarters.

Shit. The hangar? They never bring prisoners to the hangar. It makes no sense at all. It’s safe to assume that this order is coming from Adus. The hangar...it almost seems as if Kara is going to be brought to High Command.

But why?

I shove my way through the gruel hall and down the hallway to her cell.

I’m tempted to duck into Felicia’s cell and let her know what’s going on–why her sister will be gone–but they’ll see I opened her cell. It will show I care.

I open Kara’s door and see her smile up at me, but her cheerful expression dies when she sees the look on my face.

“What is it?” she asks.

“I’ve been ordered to bring you to the hangar,” I say. “I don’t know why, but I expect that Adus wants to see you.”

“Me?” she asks.

“It’s not about you,” I say. “It’s about me. I was gone for a long time, and they don’t trust me yet. You’re...a weak link in my armor.”

“Did you seriously just call me a weak link?”

I pull my ears back. “If my armor is metaphorical for...coldness, uncaring, then you are–”