Mated to the Beast (5 page)

The doctor held out a matching set of smaller cuffs meant for my bride and I clipped them onto the belt at my waist. She’d don them and be free from the military immediately. To her commander, it was a blatant sign of her mated status, a symbol that she belonged to me. While simply taking her wouldn’t form a permanent bond—only fucking while the beast within was unleashed, with both sets of cuffs on our wrists would do that—the knowledge that she waited for me, that she needed me, that she could be under fire this very moment, made me impatient to claim her.

“Send me now, before I tear this ship apart.”

My mate was in constant danger as a fighter. I stalked over to the transport pad located in the far corner of the medical station and cracked my neck side to side as I waited for one of the transport officers to communicate coordinates with the main system transporters. Normally, nothing but biological mass was allowed through the transport system, but when transporting onto the front lines, everything went for safety purposes. Armor and weapons included. I patted the ion pistol at my side and checked the knife on the other. All good.

“Good luck, Dax.”

“I’ll be back.” I met Commander Deek’s surprised look then tilted my head in the doctor’s direction. “I see no reason to go home. Once my mate is secure and the fever is gone, I will settle onboard the Battleship Brekk with her and continue fighting, as the Prillon warriors do.”

An Atlan female would never consent to that life, a life surrounded by war, but I was not ready to stop fighting the Hive, and my mate wouldn’t be given the choice. She would be reassigned to caring for the children, or some other safe duty with the other women in the battle group. And me? I would fuck her every night and kill Hive every day. It would be perfect, as soon as I found her and fucked her into submission, fucked away the mating fever that boiled through my blood.

* * *

Sarah Mills, Sector 437, Recon Unit 7—Recovery of Freighter 927-4 from Hive scout teams

I stared down the scope of my ion rifle and watched as nine Hive scouts moved around the supply room with robotic precision. The Hive had invaded and taken over the coalition freighter two hours earlier, the crew’s distress call still played in my mind like a broken record. The small ship’s pilot had died screaming as I listened in the debriefing room. The eight coalition soldiers assigned to this small freighter were all either dead or transported to an integration station on a Hive outpost. We couldn’t save them, but we could keep the Hive from acquiring the weapon stockpiles and raw materials in this hold.

Lifting my eye from my ion pistol’s scope focused on the upper deck of the supply room, I motioned with two fingers for my team of twelve to split in three and move silently around the perimeter so we could surround them from above and pick them off like flies. We’d done this a dozen times in the last month and my unit moved like ghosts along the upper rigging in the room, their blasters at the ready.

It took a month of induction training to be ready to fight the Hive. All coalition recruits Earth sent to the battle battalions were required to have previous military experience—Earth military. It didn’t matter which country a person fought for, only that they had extensive training in tactical, physical, and other skills they would need to fight the Hive. There were no homemakers or car wash attendees in the coalition fleet. That reassured me, for I’d been in the Army for eight years. I didn’t need to be shot in the ass by a green recruit. Nor did I need to get killed because some inexperienced kid panicked at the sight of the silver cyborg soldiers.

The Hive made the old
Terminator
movies seem like bad 1950s sci-fi movies. Those cyborgs were slow to respond and more machine than human.

The Hive were much worse; streamlined and fast, they didn’t wear clunky metal chunks and stomp around in moon boots made of iron. No, they were quick, highly intelligent, and, if they had civilian clothes on, could pass for biological if one didn’t notice the silvery hue to their skin and eyes.

Hive cyborgs created from captured Prillon warriors were the worst I’d seen; big, mean and nearly impossible to kill without taking multiple shots.

But we had those gigantic Prillon motherfuckers on our side, too. Thank God.

I watched silently as Recon Unit 4, my brother Seth’s unit, sneaked around the perimeter on the lower level, mirroring our positioning to make sure none of the Hive could escape down the lower level corridors once we started taking them out from above. I recognized my brother’s movements easily, despite the armor disguising him. I’d been sneaking around the woods with him since we were old enough to walk and I watched, heart in my throat as he got close, too close, to one of the Hive who appeared to be scanning the inventory.

Seth stopped moving, blending into the shadows behind the scout, and I let the breath I’d been holding leak from my lungs.

It had taken me eight weeks to find my brother. A month of that I’d been in training, our assignments based on former military experience. Earth’s soldiers were sent to ships all across the galaxy to fight the Hive. For me, it didn’t hurt that in addition to my military service, I’d had eighteen years of
training
from my brothers and father in the swamps of Florida. They’d taught me self-defense and other skills I’d never considered useful—not until I faced the Hive. I could shoot better than most. I could fight dirtier than the others. Hell, I could even fly better than others. I was also routinely underestimated by both the coalition troops and the Hive. As I was the only woman in my recon unit, the men had thought I would crumble and cry in fear, but I’d more than held my own.

Hell, when I finally made it to the front lines—had it been four weeks ago?—three of my fellow new recruits had nervous breakdowns and had to be sent home before we saw our first fight. Taking on the Hive was
nothing
like what any of us had experienced on Earth and six recruits from my first unit had been killed in their first skirmish. Half the team. Dead.

None of my men questioned me now, for not only had I saved the other five with my marksmanship alone, we’d taken back that freighter from twelve Hive scouts and saved the ship and I’d flown the team home. Well, what was left of them. My analysis and battle strategies had made the commanding officers take notice. I’d been promoted my second day and was now in command of my own team, as was my brother. Unit 7 and Unit 4. Sarah and Seth. We took every assignment together we could, mostly because Seth and I each wanted to keep tabs on the other.

I held my dark, gloved fist up in the air, hand closed as the last of my men moved into place. When I opened my fist, I’d begin a countdown from five that would signal the start of our attack. If things went well, it would be over in less than a minute.

If not—well, I preferred not to think about that.

Seth lifted his own fist, mirroring me to his team who were out of my line of sight.

We were ready.

Small squadrons like ours were made up almost entirely of humans from Earth. We were small, mean, and could get into tight places the hulking Prillon, Atlan, and other larger warriors could not. We humans were also more fragile and not as able to survive ground combat on some of the more hostile planet surfaces. I was perfectly happy to sneak around killing Hive in tight quarters rather than facing down seven- or eight-foot-tall giants on the ground.

No, humans, for the most part, were placed in recon units; small, strategic forces inserted into high-risk zones near a battle where we could either merge with other units to form a larger fighting group, usually behind enemy lines, or missions like this where we sneaked in and took back what was ours.

My brother’s eyes met mine and he gifted me with a broad smile. My heart shifted with a painful twist in my chest. I’d missed him. His dark hair, the same shade as mine, was cut military short. While I’d gotten my father’s height, Seth was half a head taller than me. He looked fit, well rested. Besides the tension of battle on his face, the constant awareness of his surroundings honed by the military, he looked exactly the same as he had the day he’d volunteered for the battle battalion with Chris and John.

I’d found him. I’d done it. I’d fulfilled my deathbed promise to my father and found Seth. While I couldn’t take him back to Earth—both of us still had time left on our terms of service—I could stay near him, even fight beside him as I did today.

A loud blast sounded over our heads and I dropped to the floor and looked at the three soldiers hidden with me to see if they knew what was going on. They all stared back at me with blank, shocked expressions but maintained radio silence.

What the hell was that?

The Hive were running and shots were fired down below. Radio silence was broken as Seth issued orders. “Fire! Fire!”

The hissing sound of ion blasters filled the air along with cries of pain as some of our men went down. The screen inside my helmet listed off two of my men as casualties.

Shit. Shit. Shit!
All hell was breaking loose.

“Mitchell and Banks are down on the left. You two, go around to the left flank.” I pointed in the direction I wanted two of my soldiers to go. “Get them out of there.”

They took off and I turned to Richards, my right-hand man. “Head right but don’t start shooting until I give you cover fire. Find out what the hell just dropped in on us.”

“Yes, sir.”

Richards took off in a low crouching run and I lifted my head above the galley railing to try to figure out what was going on.

“Report. Everybody. Talk to me. What the hell is going on?” I checked my weapons as my team checked in. An unauthorized transport had occurred.

“Seth?”

My brother’s voice came through the clear. “Some big motherfucker just dropped in on top of us without warning. I think he’s ours, but it set off the Hive and they’ve got six more scouts down here. I’ve got three men down at three o’clock.”

I peeked over the railing, beyond furious that the coalition had transported someone in without warning us. My brother was right, he was
huge
. And completely insane. As I watched, he pulled the head off the Hive scout closest to him with his bare hands, completely ignoring an ion blast from one of the smaller Hive weapons.

Holy shit.
I’d never seen
anything
like that before.

The giant’s bellow echoed like a cannon blast in the small space and I winced.

“At least he appears to be on our side.” Was that sarcastic voice really mine? I’d just watched a giant alien rip off another alien’s head with his bare hands, and I was cracking jokes? My dad would be so damn proud.

“Roger that.” Seth sounded like he was amused as well. “He’s an Atlan.”

Wow. I’d heard of them, but never seen one in action. They were generally ground troops, huge, strong, fast, and brutally efficient killers. With Gigantor on our side, it was time to switch tactics. “Recon 7, shoot to kill, but try not to hit the giant. Let’s finish this.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ion blaster fire was so thick I could barely see what was happening as I rose from my hidden position and opened fire. I took out two scouts, the giant took out three more, and the rest of our teams took out the remaining few. We all wore our tactical gear—lightweight, basic black and brown armor that would shield a low-level ion blast. It wasn’t pretty, but I thought of it as space camo. Our helmets filtered the air and provided constant levels of oxygen and pressure optimized to our species. Our ion pistols were lightweight and computer assisted, but metallic armor could deflect a blast. Strapped to our thighs were two things we never left without: a blade—for close combat and things that got up close and personal—and a very human injector filled with a lethal dose of poison.

The injector was a personal choice offered to all soldiers who volunteered from Earth. The suicide injection was an option both Seth and I carried gladly. I’d seen what happened to soldiers who were taken by the Hive, and death was preferable to losing myself in their Hive mind, turned into something less than human. I didn’t know if other worlds offered their warriors that out, nor did I care. No one wanted to be taken by the Hive alive. I’d been told the injector was filled with the most deadly poison known to the coalition. There was no antidote, and death was certain within a few seconds.

Anything was better than ending up one of those silver-eyed automatons. One thing we’d learned quickly enough was that the Hive didn’t have any sense of honor. They rarely killed, preferring to take prisoners to their integration centers where they would implant Hive technology into the biologicals until they were no longer in control of their own bodies. They became one with the Hive. A drone. For all intents and purposes, a walking computer that followed orders from the Hive mind.

The Hive were merciless fighters and we had to focus on that. Do our jobs—remove the Hive from this freighter and get the hell out, transported back to base, a hot dinner, and sleep before another mission. Live to fight another day.
That
was the goal.

Not only did I have to keep my men alive, but my brother, too.

The sounds of ion blasts died down, the bright flares of weapon fire fading away. Fortunately for us, the freighter was full of supplies as rows upon rows of crates filled the cavernous cargo area, affording us a good deal of protection. Unfortunately, this meant the Hive had cover as well.

We’d meant to take them by surprise, corral the Hive into the center, forcing them into a smaller and smaller space, like an anaconda squeezing the life out of its prey. But the Atlan warrior had ruined our plans, crashed our party, and not in a good way. Fuming, I took stock. I had two men down, but the Hive appeared to be routed.

“Recon 7, report.”

I listened to my men as they checked in.

“Six is clear.”

“Three is clear. Two men down.”

I sighed, but let it go. Shit happened. Soldiers died. I’d think about it later, when I was writing letters to their families and crying my eyes out.
Later.
“Richards?”