Date: 2016-07-30 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Aliens; Paranormal; Romance; Science Fiction; Science Fiction Romance; Fantasy; Futuristic Romance; Shapeshifters
Description: I can run from danger, but I can’t run from him. When my father tries to marry me off to a man I don’t love, I buy a one-way ticket to Mars. But before I can even get out of orbit, a brutal alien warrior attacks. He says he wants our ship, but from one look in his eyes, I know he wants much more from me. I’m left with a choice: try to hitchhike to Mars--alone and penniless--through the empty cold of space, or accept this infuriating alien’s protection. And take him home with me. I’d always wanted a man to stand up to my father, I just never thought it would be him. He’s frustrating, mysterious

Marauder Aegus

Mating Wars

Aya Morningstar

Contents

1.
Anya

2.
Aegus

3.
Anya

4.
Aegus

5.
Anya

6.
Aegus

7.
Anya

8.
Aegus

9.
Anya

10.
Aegus

11.
Anya

12.
Aegus

13.
Fenrir

14.
Anya

15.
Aegus

16.
Anya

17.
Aegus

18.
Anya

19.
Aegus

Epilogue

Preview of Marauder Ramses

1.
Ramses

2.
Elise

Join Aya Morningstar’s Sexy Shifters!

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About the Author

1 Anya

The rockets cut off and I feel zero-g for the first time in my life. Free from the gravity of Venus, I pull off my safety harness and leap out of the seat.

“Hey! Sit back down!” Rikon, the smuggler captain, barks at me.

They’re used to this: being able to fly. But I won’t stay strapped down for this once in a lifetime chance to weightlessly drift around the cabin, totally free of gravity.

One of the smugglers starts unbuckling his harness to come restrain me, but Rikon grunts and waves him off.

“Let her do whatever, the spoiled brat,” Rikon shouts.

Kicking off the seat propels me through the tiny shuttle’s cabin, but I misjudged the trajectory so am heading straight toward a seat. With nothing to stop me from colliding with it, all I can do is hold my arms out, bracing for impact. I dampen the force with my arms, but I still bounce off the seat and hit the ceiling.

Rikon huffs and crosses his arms.

“I’m not spoiled,” I retort.

“There’s an old saying...” Rikon starts to say.

I push myself off the ceiling and fly through the air again. I feel my stomach churning from the weightlessness and excitement of finally being free.

“The grass is always greener,” Rikon concludes.

“What does that mean?” I ask. “The grass on Sankt Petersburg is plenty green.”

“Right,” Rikon shouts. “And Mars doesn’t even have any grass. You’re spoiled, and you’ll regret this.”

“You sound like my father,” I mumble to myself.

I catch hold of a handrail at the back of the shuttle and pause to look out the side window. The thick clouds of Venus block out the surface, and as bright as Sankt Petersburg and the other floating cities are, they can’t cut through the thick atmosphere enough to be visible from orbit. I start to wonder if I’ll ever see them again, but I stop myself. I’ve made a decision to leave everything behind. For Mars.

If my father hadn’t decided to marry me off to that pig, maybe I’d have stayed. But giving up my life and happiness to strengthen my family’s position with the empire is simply not my destiny.

“All right,” Rikon says. “You really need to strap back in now; we’re going to start maneuvering burns to dock into port.”

I hear and feel a low rumble, and go from floating gracefully through the cabin to ramming headfirst into the wall.

“Oops,” Rikon says in mock concern. “Guess I didn’t warn you in time.”

He laughs as I crawl into a seat and struggle with fastening the restraints.

2 Aegus

I enter the Venusian spaceport in disguise. My biosuit has concealed my purple skin with human tan, and I wear a pilot’s helmet to hide my pointy ears. I’m still too tall to pass for Venusian, Earthling, or Martian–but I’m not too tall to pass for a habber. What would someone from the habitats be doing in a pilot’s helmet–alone–on a Venusian spaceport? I hope that no one will ask questions like this, or if they do, that I’ll have already stolen a shuttle and be on my way to Sankt Petersburg by then.

I’ve been in the human’s star system long enough that my biosuit has adapted to their primitive computer systems. I approach a terminal and put my hand right onto it.

I’m not supposed to be doing this, but I act like I own the place. I don’t raise any suspicions and dozens of people walk right past and ignore me as I hack into the flight logs.

There’s a shuttle about to dock, and based on this shuttle’s fudged credentials, it looks like smugglers. Stealing from smugglers is ideal because they won’t report the theft.

The computer indicates they are docking in Terminal 12, so I walk toward it with purpose in my stride. As long as I move with purposefulness, I minimize the risk someone will ask me what the hell I’m doing on the spaceport.

General Bahamut–from the Empire–is still on Sankt Petersburg, so security on the spaceport is higher than normal. Anyone with ties to Mars is especially suspect...and my travel pass confirms that I just arrived on a long-haul rig from the red planet.

I suddenly notice a wide, stocky man planted directly in my path. I move aside, not slowing down, but he shuffles himself so he’s standing right in front of me. I’m forced to come to a stop in front of him.

My first instinct as a Marauder is to punch his nose so hard it jams into his brain, but I have to remember I’m supposed to be a habber. Disdainful, but not prone to violence.

“Excuse me,” I say, acting impatient.

“Yeah?” the man grunts, blocking me completely as I try to pass around him.

From his muscle mass, he must be from Earth or Venus. I’m guessing Earth. No one is more disdainful of habbers than Earthlings, and the hate goes both ways.

“Fuck this.” I shove him back by the chest, and walk right past him.

I only gave him a light shove–a mere fraction of my full power–but it sends him back hard enough that he loses his balance and falls flat on his back.

I keep walking toward Terminal 12, not bothering to look back at him.

If I hadn’t shoved him, I risked him asking for my credentials, and then I’d only be one weak lie away from being caught as a Marauder. The Empire has a huge bounty on my head—and on the head of any Marauder. Dead or alive.

With his ass on the ground, I hope he’s humiliated enough to just walk away before he makes things worse for himself.

When I near Terminal 12, I see through the window that the shuttle has already docked.

I find a place to sit tucked away in the corner of Terminal 13. When the smugglers enter the spaceport, they won’t even see me unless they look back into the corner. And even if they do, they’ll think I’m just waiting for another shuttle.

They start to enter the spaceport from the loading tunnel, and one look at them is all I need to confirm they are indeed smugglers–or at least men who operate outside of the law. They have scraggly beards, tattoos inked up their necks, and move like men who know how to fight.

Not one of them spares a look back at me, but then I see a woman.

She’s dressed like the rest of them, wearing a greasy jumpsuit, but she looks to be out of her element. The jumpsuit looks wrong on her, and she tugs at it as if she’s never worn something so dirty and utilitarian in her life. And she does turn around, and looks right at me.

My visor is up and I’m sitting with my shoulders back, but the piercing blue of her eyes and her striking features make me bolt upright.

She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and to accomplish my mission, I need to ignore her. Let her go.

I hit the switch on my helmet, causing the visor to fall down, covering my face from her view. But I can still see her, and though I know I should close my eyes or look away, I can’t make myself do it. I’ve always been drawn to human women…but not like this. It’s a magnetic pull, and it takes all of my willpower to not jump up and go after her.

She stares a moment longer in my direction, but then turns around when a bigger smuggler tugs on her arm. She starts walking away and I start breathing again.

“Not yet...not yet…” I mutter to myself. I have to finish my mission–my duty–before I can allow myself to find a mate.

But what if she was the only one for me? And what if I never see her again?

As if in answer, the whole group of smugglers stops dead in their tracks and I see them waving their hands up and down.

They start to look behind them, and finally I see someone pointing. Right at me.

It’s the guy I shoved over.

I stand up and raise my visor to get a clear look.

The woman has turned back around, too, and she frowns as she watches the smugglers start to step toward me.

I stand up hurriedly, realizing what has likely happened.

The smugglers fan out, their leader in the middle. The leader is a big man with a big, protruding gut, and a cunning look in his eyes. He still looks strong despite his heft and immense girth.

As difficult as it is, I let the woman fall to my peripheral vision and assess the threat before me.

Five men–six if you count the guy I knocked over earlier–all moving toward me. From the way they reach behind their backs, I assume they’re armed. Security here is tight, so at best they are packing shivs.

I grin. They may as well fight me with toothpicks.

There’s plenty of room behind me to run, but the shuttle I need is right here and I’ll have to steal it immediately after I kill these men–before they can lock down the port.

Terminal 12 and 13 are less populated than most of the other ones in the port, and after taking one look at the smugglers’ scowls, all onlookers start to scurry away from us. They know what’s about to happen.

3 Anya

The insanely handsome man lowers his visor.

Shit. Was I staring at him? Yes, of course I was staring at him. I’d seen habbers before, but they must have stepped up their genetic engineering because this one looked absolutely stunning.

Even from so far away, I could see his high cheekbones and the perfect symmetry of his face.

His visor had been down covering his face for many heartbeats now, but still I can imagine every line of that beautiful face through the thick-tinted glass. I may never forget that face. His nose was strong and his beautiful green eyes peered deep into my soul, despite the distance.

But I have a ship to catch–I need to leave everything here behind, including insanely hot guys who literally stop me dead in my tracks with one look.

Rikon elbows me. “Come on!”

I nod and follow Rikon and his crew through the terminals. The ship we are taking to Mars is waiting for us, but it won’t wait forever.

I can feel the man’s gaze on me as I walk, and with each step away from him, the urge to turn back to see him again grows. What if he was just a figment of my imagination? If I turn around, I may only see empty seats, but then it will be so much easier to leave.

But if I turn around and he’s still there, each step away will feel...wrong.

Just before I give in and turn around, a man runs toward us, shouting.

I see the smugglers reach toward their belts where their shivs are tucked away, but Rikon waves them down.

“It’s him!” the man says, as he stops in front of us, panting to catch his breath.

“Me?” Rikon says, pointing. “You don’t want to recognize me, and if you do, my boys will make sure you realize it was all a misunderstanding…”

“No,” the panting man says, huffing. “Not you. Him!”

He points behind us, and I know where he is pointing, or rather, at whom he is pointing.

I turn back around to see that the beautiful man is still there. He’s real, and now he’s standing up.

He raises his visor, and I feel my heart burn as I look at his face again. It’s as if it’s grown even more strikingly handsome in those few moments since I last saw it.

But now the smugglers’ hands really are on their shivs, and they’re all moving stealthily toward him.

“Who?” I ask. “Who is he?”

“It’s one of them,” the panting man says, “A Marauder!”

Suddenly the smugglers stop, leaving Rikon to move forward alone.

A Marauder? But didn’t they have purple skin, and–

The man pulls off his helmet and tall, bear-like ears pop up above his head. I see his skin begin to melt away, and I realize it’s not really his skin. Beneath the false, tan skin his body is a deep purple color. The Marauder grins, flashing gleaming white teeth at Rikon, who approaches him alone.

“Rikon,” Nate, one of the younger smugglers, says. “These guys can shoot plasma out of their hands and cut people open with crazy sharp tentacles. They got like...nanotech suits, and we just got these shivs…”

Rikon doesn’t break eye contact with the alien, but he speaks back in the direction of his men. “You got your balls, too, don’t you? If you don’t have any balls, feel free to run, but this alien, Aegus, has a bounty on him so juicy that–even split six ways–we’d all live like kings for the rest of our days. I’m too old for this smuggling shit, and the rest of you are too young to be that smart.”

Nate turns and runs. He sprints down the terminal at full speed, not looking back even once.

“If you believe everything you hear,” Rikon says, drawing his shiv, “these guys can even turn into big purple bears. Chances are that if the five of us bumrush him, we might just take him down. Even if he kills all but one of us, that’s a nice one in five chance at winning the fucking lottery…”

Rikon’s four remaining men pull out their shivs and follow Rikon’s lead.

The alien tears his clothes away, and the tan skin has hardened into a thick armor, which begins to turn teal the closer the smugglers get to him.

“I’m hungry,” the alien, Aegus, suddenly says.

The smugglers stop approaching.

“What?” Rikon grunts.

“I’m hungry,” Aegus says. “I don’t want to waste biofuel on you pieces of shit. So I’ll take you all down with my bare hands.”

“He can turn into a bear!” a smuggler shouts. “Fuck!”

“Bare hands. B-a-r-e,” Aegus says, balling his hands up into fists. “Shifting takes up a lot of calories, too.”

The smugglers all give each other looks, and I start to back away, one slow step at a time. I should turn around and bolt like Nate did, but I can’t take my eyes off this powerful alien warrior.

Suddenly, he rushes toward the smugglers.

One drops his shiv and flees, shoving into me as he runs past.

I fall to the ground, and when I look up, the fight has already begun.

Aegus has disarmed one of the smugglers, and he jams the shiv into his throat.

Two more charge him, but Aegus throws the dying man into them.

The dying man’s body knocks them flat on their backs, and Rikon throws his shiv at Aegus.

The weapon is heading toward his neck, but Rikon threw too low and the shiv bounces harmlessly off Aegus’s teal armor.

Aegus rushes the two downed men while another decides to follow in Nate’s footsteps and run away.

I’m still on the ground, too afraid to move, but when the smuggler begins running in my direction, I spring to my feet.

Rikon grabs the runner by the collar, whips him around, and slams him to the ground. He tears the shiv from the man’s hand and jams it into his neck.

He pulls out the bloodied weapon and looks me dead in the eyes.

I start to run away from Rikon, and behind me, I hear a man grunt as Aegus slams his head against the wall.

Rikon snatches me by the waist and pulls me up against him. The sharp end of the shiv presses against the soft skin of my neck, and as I fight against his grasp, the sharp point draws blood from my neck.

Aegus looks up, and he throws one of the smugglers back toward Terminal 13. The smuggler flies at least ten meters through the air before landing and then rolling and slamming into the wall.

Aegus’s green eyes are locked on me, and I think I see him exhibit fear for the first time.

“Ah!” Rikon says, laughing. “I didn’t think I could believe everything I heard about youse aliens, but I guess at least some of that shit had to be true. I guess you really do like human sluts!”

He pulls me harder against his body. I can feel his fat and sweaty gut pressing into me, and his bad breath blows hot on my neck.

“She means nothing to me,” Aegus bellows.

“All right,” Rikon says. “I’ll slit her throat then!”

I feel the shiv cut deep through my throat, and when I try to draw in a breath, it gurgles through the wide, bloody cut.

But before I can even draw in another dying gasp of air, I see Aegus’s armor melt away and he rushes toward me in a teal blur.

The last thing I see before his armor covers me is his naked purple body, tall and sculpted and perfectly muscular in all the right places. And I notice his cock is still armored...or is the cock itself teal?

My last thoughts as I suffocate and bleed out will be of teal alien cock. People have died thinking of worse things.

The armor covers me completely. I feel its cool liquid form rush into my neck as it encases the wound.

When I try to breathe again, I feel the air come blessedly out of my mouth and nose rather than gurgling through the hole in my neck.

The armor doesn’t just cover my neck, it blocks out all the light and completely enshrouds me. I can’t see a thing, but I can still hear.

“Fuck!” Rickon grunts.

And then I hear Rickon’s voice gurgling, and I know Aegus has slit his throat.

When the armor pulls away from me, my throat stays healed. None of the other smugglers were so lucky.

Aegus looks up at the blaring alarms and klaxons, and then those perfect green eyes shift in my direction. He peers deeply into my eyes as he holds out his hand to me and speaks to me for the first time. “Woman, what is your name?”

“Anya,” I say, mouth agape.

“Anya,” he says. “Take me to Venus.”

4 Aegus

“I...just left Venus! I’m not going back there!” she shrieks.

I notice then the gleaming ruby on her ring and realize she must have been someone important there. Rubies like that cannot be found on Venus.

I move toward the docking gate and order my biosuit to interface with the computer. It’s a simple hack and the door opens up.

“Are you coming with me?” I ask.

She’s followed me to the door, but she’s frowning at me. Her face is flushed with anger, which I must admit makes her all the more attractive to me.

“Why the hell would I come with you?” she snorts.

I point down the terminal corridor where I notice the slow advance of security robots in our direction. Behind them march the cowardly human guards, afraid to take on a Marauder without a shield of robots in front of them.

“They don’t want me,” she says. “I’m…”

Her voice trails off.

“Shit!” she shouts. “You idiot! I was less than an hour from freedom, and you ruined everything!”

I bow my head to her and say, “I owe you great shame debt, and if you help me to Sankt Petersburg, I will be even deeper in your debt.”

“What? Really?”

“Yes–”

“So, you owe me like, two favors?”

“At least,” I start to stay, “But we–”

She grabs my arm and starts tugging me into the docking gate.

“So you’ll help me?” I ask.

“I’m so mad at you,” she says, looking up at me. Her blue eyes betray something other than anger, and my chest tightens at the implications. “But I want those favors.”

I seal the door shut behind us, and she leads the way into the shuttle.

“I hope you can fly this,” she says, buckling into one of the seats, “because I can’t.”

I trained hard for every aspect of this mission, in orbit around Titan and later on Mars. Flying a simple shuttle like this is nothing.

“Yes,” I say, strapping into the pilot’s seat. “Will they have scrambled fighters to intercept?”

“No,” Anya says. “Not yet. Just drop fast into the ionosphere, that’s where my father’s territory begins. They can’t touch you after that.”

Her father? Anya...Anya Ivanov, daughter of the Tsar. The Tsarevna.

This was not the stealthy infiltration of Sankt Petersburg for which I had planned, but ever since my arrival in the solar system years ago, nothing has ever gone according to plan.

I detach from the docking gate and slam the throttle to reorient the ship. I scan through the windows to make sure no one is going to shoot us down, and then I burn hard to bring us into the atmosphere.

Venus’s atmosphere is the thickest in the solar system, so I can’t exactly nosedive into it without burning up, but at nearly the last moment, I dive hard and adjust for a shallower entry.

The alarms blare as I skid across the atmosphere, barely pulling the nose of the ship up in time.

“Shit,” Anya says. “You’re cutting it damn close.”

Sweat drips down my forehead, but I keep calm as the warnings begin to die off. I’ve entered into the ionosphere now, and neither of us died.

“So what was your plan?” Anya asks.

“Irrelevant,” I say, focusing on the view through the window. It’s nothing but thick clouds of carbon dioxide, and I can’t see more than a few hundred meters in front of me, and nothing but more and more thick clouds.

She laughs.

“Old plans must be discarded as the situation changes,” I say, trying to sound confident.

“And what’s the new situation?”

“As soon as word reaches Sankt Petersburg, they’ll think I’ve kidnapped the Tsarevna.”

From the corner of my eye, I see her bolt upright in her seat. “You know–”

“Yes,” I say. “Will you tell them otherwise?”

“Yes,” she says. “But once we are in the city, don’t forget that you owe me. Three times now.”

“My original plan,” I start to say, “was to steal this very shuttle. Without you here, I couldn’t have risked going straight to Sankt Petersburg, so I’d have located one of the great floating jungles and attempted to gain favor with the tribes.”

She scoffs. “Good thing you found me then, that plan sucks.”

“You’re quite confident,” I say, looking back at her. “For someone whose plan failed.”

She flushes with anger, and I can’t help but grin.

“It’s irrelevant!” she says, rolling her eyes. “I have a new plan now.”

“When will I learn of this plan?”

“Whenever I decide to tell you,” she says, crossing her arms.

“I will help you so much as I am able, and so much as it does not interfere with my greater mission,” I say.

“What is your mission?” she asks.

“To end the civil war.”

* * *

My HUD blinks, and I see I’m receiving a communications request from Sankt Petersburg.

I accept the request, and an angry man’s voice fills the shuttle.

“You fucking monster! Give me back my daughter, or I’ll–”

“Papa!” Anya shouts. “I’m fine! He didn’t kidnap me...nothing like that.”

“Anya…” he says. “Show me you’re okay. Prove it.”

I flick on the video, and I see a man with deep frown lines and bushy eyebrows. He looks at me with a snarling anger, but his face softens when Anya approaches the screen.

“Papa,” she says. “Meet Aegus, my fiancé!”

The Tsar’s eyes bulge, and then his face falls to a cold, simmering anger.

“Come home, Anya, we’ll...discuss this later.”

The screen cuts off and my anger flares.

“Fiancé?!” I jump out of the pilot’s seat and stare down Anya. My ears are pricked up tight in fury, but I don’t dare so much as raise my hand to her. “This is your plan?”

“You never even bothered to ask me why I was running away,” she says, looking up at me with those alluring blue eyes. “Did you even care?”

“I had other things on my mind, woman, like ending this war.”

She stares up at me, not backing down.

“So tell me, now that you’re deciding to tell me things,” I say. “Why were you running away?”

“Because,” Anya says, “my father wanted to marry me off to some old fat baron from Earth.”

I narrow my eyes and my ears pull back onto my head. “You had no choice?”

“No,” she says. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this...but it might help you, on your mission.”

I try not to lash out at her again. She might be a treasure trove of information that could be priceless to me, but she will probably only tell me things that relate to her forced marriage–things that will benefit her and her insane plan for me.

“Yes,” I say. “Please go on.”

“My father is sick of this blockade. It’s starving us out, and I overheard him mention he’s seriously thinking of giving into the Empire’s demands. Rejoining the Empire under some kind of ‘One Empire, Two Governments’ scheme.”

No. I’m too late.

“Anya,” I say. “There will be no ‘Two Governments.’ Your father will become a puppet, and under General Bahamut, there will never be unification with Mars.”

She starts to pace back and forth. “I know! You think I was running just because I had to marry the baron? It was my last real chance to get out before everything went to hell.”

My original plan would likely have taken about seven months, which is how long I have until the first Marauder warships arrive. The warships that are supposedly loyal to me. If they arrive to see a unified humanity, the likelihood of them staying peaceful is hugely increased. My plan was to slowly gain the Tsar’s favor by bringing the jungle tribes back into the cities, and by showing him my strength as a leader.

Now I have...how long?

“Anya,” I say. “When will your father surrender?”

“Well,” she says, “I was going to have to marry the baron in two weeks, so it would have to be before that.”

Two weeks.

“And Bahamut is in Sankt Petersburg,” I say to myself. “Will he kill me on arrival?”

“Not if you’re my fiancé,” Anya says, grinning.

I let out a huge sigh of relief.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Anya says. “Bahamut wanted me to marry the baron, so he’s still probably going to try to kill you, but he’ll have to be sneaky about it, which should buy you some time.”

“Great,” I say, staring out into the clouds.

5 Anya

I see the gleaming lights of Sankt Petersburg as we approach. I feel no real emotion other than dread: no relief that I am home again, and certainly no feeling of comfort.

Sankt Petersburg is a gleaming city floating through the Venusian clouds. In the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, oxygen floats like hydrogen or helium does on Earth, and the city’s ten kilometer-long oxygen tanks keep the city of two hundred thousand people afloat.

The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead, but this high up it feels like a chilly winter’s day on Earth. And the gravity on Venus is just a tiny fraction less than it is on Earth, which is why Venus is the Empire’s prime target for terraforming.

It’s why they want the planet back, and why they want me to marry the baron.

I shake my head. They’d ruin this planet just like they did Earth.

Royal fighter jets scramble from the city and begin to “escort” us toward the docking platform.

“He’s trying to make sure I don’t change my mind,” I say.

“I’m not used to Venusian customs,” Aegus says. “What is expected of your fiancé?”

I lick my lips thinking about it.

“It depends,” Anya says. “How mad do you want to get my father?”

“If he’s angry,” Aegus says, “will it make him more or less likely to change his mind about surrendering?”

“Okay,” I say. “So you don’t want him angry. You’ll have to try to charm him then.”

Aegus grins, and his ears flick up and down, “I’m almost as good at charming as I am at killing.”

“Please don’t use that line on my father.”

If Aegus’s plan sucked, my plan sucks even worse. I had about twenty minutes to think it out, but I’m committed to it now. There was a zero percent chance I would have been able to get to Mars from the locked down spaceport, and Aegus was the solution that had...presented itself.

The solution that also happened to be sinfully sexy, bulging with muscles, and–I hate to admit-–charming as hell.

“Speaking of killing,” Aegus says. “How do you think Bahamut will try to do it?”

“Well,” I say, “every time someone spoke out against him or got in his way, they were ordered quite suddenly on assignment ‘in the jungle,’ and a few days later they were ‘killed by savages,’ so getting sent to the jungle isn’t a good sign.”

Aegus nods. “I think I could make good progress with the jungle tribes...it would make sense for your father to send me there. To prove myself.”

I feel a tightness forming in my chest. My father is going to be seething angry, and it’s unlikely he’ll accept an alien husband for me. If he orders Aegus to prove himself in the jungle, I’ll be left completely alone, and Aegus will likely never come back.

“But don’t worry,” Aegus says. “I’ll protect you. I won’t let them separate us...it’s my fault you’re in this situation in the first place.”

The dread in my gut gives way to a feeling of flying freedom, like zero-gravity but with more...flying. Soaring.

“You protect me out of obligation?” I ask. “That’s it?”

Aegus looks down, but his ears perk up. “It doesn’t matter why. Just know that I protect you.”

I feel myself blushing, so I look down, too.

“What’s with your armor?” I ask, trying to change the subject. “It shielded me and healed me.”

I touch the place on my throat that had been cut open leaving me to suffocate and bleed out, but there’s not so much as a dull scar remaining.

“The armor will help me keep you safe, and it’s–for now–the most powerful weapon in the solar system.”

“What about the other Marauders?” I ask.

“Okay,” he says. “It’s a three-way tie with the other two.”

He stands up and slams his fist into his teal chest plate. “It can easily stop bullets, and I can form it into any shape I want. I can also fire plasma beams, though that uses up a lot of biofuel.”

“Biofuel?” I ask.

“Anything I eat is broken down to feed the suit. I eat...a lot. Though I’ve been scooping antimatter from Jupiter for the past year, and I brought enough with me to stay fully stocked for a year.”

“Show me how it can change shape,” I ask, putting a hand on the chest plate. It really is hard.

His fist begins to grow into a hammer shape, and his other forms into a large shield.

“Cool,” I say. “And can you make it arm me like that, too?”

I try not to laugh as I ask, and I bite my lip to hold back the smile.

Just as I expect, the armor starts to melt off his body and it rushes across my clothes, hardening.

As most of the material covers me, Aegus is standing buck-naked in front of me. I widen my eyes and look down at his big–really, really big–teal dick.

“I thought it was teal,” I say. “But I just wanted to make sure.”

The armor melts off me instantly, and quickly covers his gleaming purple–and teal–body.

He looks at me with burning green eyes, and I swear I see the faintest hint of a grin forming at the corners of his mouth.

Aegus moves back to the pilot’s seat as the autopilot disengages, and he takes hold of the flight stick.

“Look at you gripping tight to that flight stick,” I say, strapping myself back into the passenger seat.

“I see what you are implying,” he says. “But a flight stick and a penis are two different things.”

“Come on, Aegus,” I say, laughing. “If we’re going to pretend to be engaged, it only makes sense that I’ve seen you naked.”

“What about the other way around?” he says. “I have not seen you naked.”

I feel myself blushing, and though he doesn’t turn his head back to face me, I can just imagine the devilish smile on his face.

We pull into the docking platform, and the automated docking arms grab hold of the ship. They jerk the ship into the docking bay much more forcefully than usual. I’m sure my father saw to that–even the docking arms show how angry he is.

When the doors open, two of the royal guards are standing there with guns raised.

“Lower your weapons,” I shout. “Or is this how you greet my fiancé?”

They give each other hard looks, but finally lower their guns.

Aegus steps out onto the platform and reaches his hand back for me. The gap between the ship and the platform is only a few centimeters, and it’s almost comically chivalrous that he’d help me over such a tiny gap, but I don’t deny him.

I take hold of his hand, and I can’t help but smile at how warm and inviting it is, but it’s still hard and solid. His grip is like a rock, and I know I can depend and count on his protection.

He pulls me onto the platform and neither of us let go of the other. I continue to grip his hand and stare up at him. A movement in the corner of my eyes breaks my gaze, and I look over to see my father approaching, flanked by four more guards.

I’m still holding Aegus’s hand, and to my surprise, he doesn’t let go even when he sees my furious father–the Tsar of Venus–storming toward him.

“Two guards for me and four for you?” I ask.

My father stops a full five paces away from us and he looks down at me with crushing disappointment. “Anya, I’m glad you’re safe.”

Then he looks up at Aegus. “Mister...Aegus, do you have a surname?”

“No, your Excellency,” Aegus says, bowing down.

“So I shall just call you ‘Aegus,’ I take it?”

“Yes,” Aegus says, nodding.

“General Bahamut wanted me to execute you,” my father says to Aegus.

“Is that a question?” I snap. “Or an order?”

“Anya,” Aegus says, giving me a chiding look. He looks back up to my father. “I realize I’ve put your Excellency in a difficult position.”

“Difficult?” my father says, his high brows rising up toward orbit. “Yes, it’s been quite a fucking shit storm the past few hours. So let me see if I have this story right. Anya runs away like a child, goes into the spaceport, sees this...strong...man–alien–and somehow convinces him to marry her? Did you get cold feet, Anya, or–”

“Excellency,” Aegus cuts in. “She is my fiancée!”

My father stares him down. Aegus puffs out his chest, not giving an inch.

Father sighs, and looks at us both. “Well, come to dinner this evening. I’ve made it explicitly clear that General Bahamut is here as a guest, and he has no authority here...for now. This means you are safe as the General respects Venusian sovereignty. Interpret that as you will.”

“I understand,” Aegus says. “I’m used to protecting myself,” he looks down at me. “And those close to me.”

Close to him. Does he mean that I’m just centimeters away from him and holding his hand, or does he mean actually close, as in we’ve known each other–though it’s only been for a few hours–and he really feels something for me?

I check myself, remembering that I should be hating this guy for throwing a wrench into all my plans. If not for him, I’d be on my way to Mars now, and my father throwing away our legacy to the Empire would not be my problem anymore.

Aegus grips my hand and walks chest first down the platform and into Sankt Petersburg.

It would be a lot easier to hate him if he weren’t so damn hot.

6 Aegus

The docking platform is located outside of the city proper, and we enter through a large marble archway into Sankt Petersburg itself.

We exit the docking platform on a raised stairway that drops down into the city. From this height, I can see a full view of the city. I see its one hundred stories tall gleaming white towers with its one hundred-story waterfalls. Green parkways are lined with towering redwood trees, and in the center of the city stands a colossal statue of Tsar Nikolai IV, the founder of the city, towering above everything else. In his hands, he’s holding a sphere that represents Venus, but it’s a terraformed version with water oceans and continents. A vision of the future, but still under the rule of the Tsars.

The Empire will surely tear it down.

The great hanging forests of Sankt Petersburg make the sky appear green. They function on sunlight magnified by the dome above them and hydroponic feeding systems. The hanging forests feed the oxygen tanks, so very little oxygen has to be synthesized from the Venusian atmosphere itself.

I have read all about the workings of Sankt Petersburg, but I read it with an invader’s eye. I had wondered how I could infiltrate the city with a squad of tribal soldiers and move through the city undetected long enough to make contact with the Tsar.

But now I walk behind the Tsar, having officially and formally met him the moment I stepped foot in the city.

I expected him to hate me with venomous anger, but I get the feeling that–beneath his anger–he is partially thankful to me for bringing his daughter back to him.

I’ll need to use that to my advantage, and I’ll need to start working him fast. Time is almost up if I have less than two weeks.

There’s a car waiting for us, and the royal guards form a line as we step inside.

I’m so big that I barely fit in the seat and have to hunch down. Even then, my head is right up against the ceiling.

I’m sitting next to Anya, who tentatively takes my hand. I love the feel of her hand in mine, but I realize this feeling is dangerous. If I truly develop feelings for her, she’ll be in greater danger than she already is. And feelings for her will distract me and make it much more difficult for me to complete my mission.

“Aegus,” the Tsar says. “What do you think of our great city?”

“It’s almost as beautiful as an orbital,” I start, but quickly correct myself. “I mean it’s more beautiful than the orbitals, it’s–”

“No need to kiss my ass,” the Tsar says. “I know it’s not quite as striking as an orbital, but it’s the closest you can get without going full habby.”

The car takes off, quickly climbing up into the domed sky. We’re soon level with the skyscrapers’ twentieth, thirtieth and then fortieth floors. Lanes of traffic are formed at ten-story intervals, but the cars seem automated, as they move in uniform precision like rivers of colored pebbles.

“There’s the palace,” Anya says, pointing out the window.

The palace appears next to the statue of Nikolai IV, and it’s taller than the palace itself. The palace has domed parapets that look almost like colorful balloons.

“It’s styled after the old Kremlin in Moscow,” Anya says,

I have the Tsar alone in a car, but it seems too early to dump my plans on him. If I do it now, it might seem as if I’m using Anya to get to him. I’ll need to gradually earn his trust, but there’s unfortunately so little time. I may need to start pushing my plan on him after dinner tonight.

The car begins to descend as we near the palace. It parks on a docking ledge rather than landing on the surface.

Royal guards are waiting for the car to come to a complete stop, and one of them opens the door for us to exit. Anya and I exit first, and we must wait at attention for the Tsar to stand and lead us into the palace.

I stop and look out at the city again before we make our way inside the palace. We’re now in the center of the dome, and the city is all around us. There are massive, wide windows on the sides all around the city, through which the Venusian atmosphere and faint sunlight is visible. There are huge solar lamps hanging just below the forest that add to the dim light.

I’d considered blasting some of the windows open as part of one of my earlier plans. The pressure at this altitude is similar to that on Earth, and the oxygen wouldn’t rush out. The Venusian atmosphere would slowly leak in and eventually cause a serious emergency, but in the meantime, it would act as a sufficient diversion to let me and a small squad sneak through the city’s defenses.

“Aegus, come on,” Anya says, pulling at my wrist.

I shake my head, as the beautiful daughter of the Tsar is now my fiancée and I’m being escorted right into the palace by the Tsar himself. Much easier than blowing out giant, half-meter-thick windows.

* * *

As soon as we are inside the palace, the Tsar takes Anya by the hand.

“Anya, go to your rooms. I need to speak to Aegus alone.”

She gives me a worried look.

“You will be safe in your own rooms, yes?” I ask.

“Of course she will be safe under her father’s roof!” the Tsar snarls at me. “Go, Anya!”

Anya mouths some words to me, and I understand them as, “I will be safe.”

I don’t like the idea of leaving her alone, but seeing four royal guards following behind her puts me partially at ease.

“Come with me,” the Tsar says, motioning for me to follow him.

We walk across marble floors lined by ornate, gold-trimmed walls. Huge oil paintings depicting what seem like key events in human history and important looking historical figures adorn the walls.

The Tsar opens a door and ushers me inside. The royal guards remain standing outside the doorway, not following us into the Tsar’s office.

“Your Excellency trusts me enough to leave the guards outside?” I ask.

“Sit down,” he says, pointing to a chair.

I sit down as he begins pouring drinks from a crystal container into glasses. The liquid is thick and brown.

“No,” he says, passing a glass to me. “I don’t trust you. I trust the reports from the spaceport enough to know that the guards couldn’t stop you. I’d be dead already if that’s what you wanted.”

I nod.

“What do you want, Aegus? I know it’s not really Anya you’re after.”

“Your Excellency,” I say, stalling for time. “Your daughter is more lovely than all of the jewels in the–”

“Cut the shit,” the Tsar interrupts.

“I wouldn’t lie–”

“No,” the Tsar says. “I’ve seen the way you look at her. I know you’d bed her.”

I clench my jaw, and chug the drink to numb my anger. It burns as it travels down my throat. I can’t hit this man; too much is riding on his cooperation.

“But she’s not why you’re here. You arrived on the spaceport in Venusian orbit with some plan in your head; running into Anya just happened.”

“I want to end the war,” I say, clutching my glass.

The Tsar laughs, then takes a sip of his own drink. “Doesn’t everyone? I fully intend to end the war, at least between Venus and the Empire. Mars can do what it likes.”

“Surrendering to Bahamut will end nothing,” I say. “He controls the emperor as if he were a puppet, and he’ll string you up–”

“Watch yourself, alien!” the Tsar warns, leaning forward, face red. “I know what I do. You’re an outsider who knows nothing.”

“I have crucial information,” I say, “that will drastically change the course of the war...do not forget that the real war is coming when twenty million Marauders arrive. There will be one hundred warships, each one stronger than the entire imperial fleet. Do you think I really know nothing?”

“It will be Bahamut’s problem,” the Tsar says. “All of that, after I surrender to him. And if you end this farce with Anya, she’ll get to stay in this palace. Maybe she won’t rule for real, but she’ll have a good life, and if I can offer her a safe and comfortable life...I will. If I defy the Empire, and stubbornly stick to the losing side of this war, then she’ll be killed–at best.”

I grind my teeth. He wants to protect Anya, but he’s too short-sighted. I’ve seen this in the years since I’ve been among humans. They have a curious ability to ignore anything that is not right in front of them. Our warships are a few years away, and to people like the Tsar, they may as well be non-existent. They are a future problem to him, and he doesn’t understand how much they endanger his daughter’s future.

“I represent a faction of Marauders–no, I lead a faction of Marauders, ten million strong, who want to exist peacefully with humans. I need them to arrive to a humanity not at war with itself, or I may lose them. If even one warship changes their mind, millions of humans will die. I’ve made it so my faction will arrive earlier. They’ll have a few months lead-time, and–”

“So what do I do?” the Tsar says, cutting me off. “Tell Bahamut to end the blockade? The alien said it doesn’t matter? How does your ten million nice aliens arrival help the lives of my people?”

“Your Excellency,” I say. “Allow me to present my full case. I can show you things that will change everything. They will give you leverage over Bahamut, but you will have to trust me.”

“After dinner,” the Tsar says. “I need time to think on this. I’ll hear what you have to say, but I don’t know if I can trust someone who uses my daughter to gain an audience with me. Now see yourself out.”

He pours himself another drink and shoos me away with his hand.

I step outside the door, and the guards walk me down the hall toward the room I’ll be sleeping in. Anya and I are engaged—not yet married—so the room is mine alone.

7 Anya

“He’s my fiancé,” I say, “Let me through!”

The guard starts to open his mouth to protest, but I shove past him.

He refrains from letting me open the door, meaning he wasn’t explicitly ordered to prevent me from entering the alien’s chambers.

When I step inside, Aegus is buck-naked and reading a tablet. When he hears me enter, his armor begins to form across his body like teal liquid, but not before I get a good eyeful of his perfectly sculpted ass.

“Your father will be difficult,” Aegus says.

“Yes,” Anya sighs. “It seems you know him now.”

“He wants me to end the engagement.”

I frown. “Of course he does, but you fought him, right?”

“I’m going to make my case to him after dinner,” Aegus says. “I will include our marriage as a non-negotiable term.”

I smile. “Good.”

“Does that mean we will actually get married?” Aegus asks. “Or–”

“Of course we will,” I say. “I’ll take you over the baron. Marriage doesn’t mean a whole lot when you’re the Tsar’s daughter, we don’t have to...you know. Unless you…”

I’m blushing. I let my voice trail off, realizing I’m making an idiot of myself. I don’t know what I want from this frustrating alien. He can protect me, he can get me out of the marriage with the baron, but what does marrying him even mean? He’s a total outsider, and when his race arrives, what will that mean for us?

“Aegus,” I say, suddenly realizing something. “You’re not just using me, are you? I mean, I know you kind of are, to talk to my father, but you realize marrying me will give you serious standing here?”

“I do not have to marry you,” he says. “This was your idea, and my shame debt compels me to see it through.”

“Shame debt…” I say, not quite sure what to make of that. “If you can put that aside, how does marrying me make you feel?”

I bite my lip and watch for his reaction. I’ve seen the way he looks at me, and I know I’m really just fishing for some kind words out of him. But I also don’t want to force him to do this for me if his heart isn’t in it–if it’s not something he wants.

“I’ve not allowed myself to find a mate,” Aegus says. “The weight of leadership is too great...there will be time for that when I’ve fulfilled my purpose.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I say, taking small steps toward him.

“Not every question must be answered, woman,” he says, ears shaking.

Anger flares up from deep inside me, and I back away from him.

“Fine then,” I say. “You don’t have to marry me. Once you find a way to get both of us off this hellhole planet, you take it. That will absolve you of any debt to me. Shame debt...whatever.” I wave my hand dismissively.

“Anya,” he says. “I didn’t mean–”

There’s a loud knock at the door. An incessant and urgent pounding that doesn’t stop.

I give Aegus a quizzical look, and his muscular body tightens.

I shake my head at him. It seems serious, but there’s unlikely any danger. He stands back as I open the door.

It’s Donovan, one of the royal guards who is at least friendly to me. The others treat me like a very important and valuable sack of potatoes.

“Tsarevna,” Donovan says. “Your father would like to speak with you prior to dinner.”

“Why the urgent knocking?” I ask.

Aegus has come up behind me. He’s towering over Donovan, scowling at him, his ears pulled back.

Donovan lowers his head. “Please, I was meant to deliver the message. I don’t know anything further.”

“I’ll be just a moment,” I say, and begin to close the door.

Donovan stops me from shutting the door with his forearm, and Aegus grabs Donovan’s arm.

“Aegus, no!” I shout.

Aegus still clutches Donovan’s arm, and I wonder how many microseconds away he was from breaking it.

“Tell us at once what is going on,” Aegus rasps.

“I wasn’t told anything, I swear,” Donovan says, hesitantly. “But...no, I shouldn’t say anything.”

I take Donovan’s hand in mine, looking up at him with an earnest expression. “Donovan, if you know anything, you should tell me. I’ll personally see to it that you don’t get in trouble.”

Donovan looks down, afraid to face me.

I put my hand on Aegus’s chest plate and say, “And I promise this huge jerk won’t hurt you either.”

“Okay, Tsarevna,” Donovan says. “Your father, His Excellency, he seemed...the Tsar cannot be scared of anything, of course, but, he…”

“He was scared?” I ask.

Donovan gives an imperceptible nod of his head, then says, “Please come with me now, or I will be in trouble. You’re to come at once. Alone.”

I look back at Aegus, who is already taking a protective step toward me.

“The Tsar greatly looks forward to his meeting with you, Aegus,” Donovan says.

It seems to placate Aegus, though I know Donovan well enough to see he doesn’t believe the meeting will even happen.

I consider telling this to Aegus straight away, but I need to try to defuse this situation on my own before I pull him into it. Aegus is a blunt instrument, and some situations need a fine touch.

“Aegus,” I say. “You can wear your armor to dinner, if you’d like…”

He scowls at me. “That means I should not wear it.”

“And if you’d like to wear something else, I can send a tailor to you.”

Aegus waves a hand. “I’ll wear the armor underneath any ridiculous thing they put on me.”

“Fine,” I say, and I flash him a genuine smile.

I was angry at him before–and I still am–but I realize he’s just trying to do his best in a difficult situation.

I shut the door and begin to follow Donovan. I don’t dare ask him any more questions, as he’s already told me much more than he should have.

My father would never be scared to meet with me alone, which means this meeting must involve someone else.

We reach his throne room, and Donovan opens the heavy door.

Who could scare my father, other than…?

General Bahamut is standing tall next to my father, a smug and self-satisfied expression plastered to his face. He has jet-black hair pulled back into a bun, and he’s wearing a big bucket hat at a stupidly deep angle, the same way that all imperial officers wear their big dumb hats. He’s young for a general, but twice my age.

I notice an ornate scroll with real ink on it laying on my father’s desk. It’s weighted down on either end. They never use parchment and ink like that, except for the most official of agreements.

“Anya,” father says.

“Tsarevna,” General Bahamut says. “Thank you for joining us on such short notice.”

“I didn’t know you were in the palace tonight, general,” I say, trying to keep the disgust off my face and out of my voice.

“Yes, well,” he says, “I didn’t know there was a Marauder in the palace. No one thought to tell me.”

“But you found out anyway,” I say.

“I’m a general. I should be well informed, otherwise I’d not be good at my job.”

“So you’ve come to congratulate me on my engagement–”

“Anya!” my father shouts. “Please…”

“No,” Bahamut says. “It’s okay. I have come to congratulate you, Tsarevna…”

Before I can register what’s happening, Bahamut pulls something out of his belt and raises his arm to my father’s head.

My brain catches up just in time to register that he’s holding a gun, but Bahamut fires it before I can even open my mouth to scream.

My father’s body collapses onto the ground in a bloodied heap, and I realize my ears are still ringing from the gun’s blast. I hadn’t even heard the sound; it had been drowned out by my fear and anger.

“Or should I say,” Bahamut says, “Tsarina. Congratulations on your swift rise to the throne…”

I rush toward him, reaching for the gun.

Before I can grab for it, the gun fires a second time.

I see the muzzle flash, and I feel burning pain cut across my cheek. I stop moving and adrenaline courses through me. It feels as if time has stopped.

I’m not dead? The acrid scent of gunpowder hits my nose, and I see Bahamut smiling.

I feel a wetness dripping down my face, and when I reach up to touch my cheek, I feel warm, sticky blood.

“That was the warning shot,” Bahamut says. “The next one will hit you between the eyes.”

Aegus. I need to get to Aegus. He’s my only way out of this–the only way to avenge my father.

I try not to look down at my father’s body, but it’s there on the edge of my vision.

“Here’s what you will do, Tsarina. I will give you two of my best fighters, and you will go to the alien. You will get his guard down–convince him that everything is okay–and my men will kill him. This is your one chance. If you refuse or shy away from your first task as Tsarina, you’ll meet the same end as your father.”

I ball my fists, digging my nails into my palms. The cut on my cheek is still bleeding, but I don’t wipe it away. “No one will believe you. You assassinated the Tsar, you–”

“No,” Bahamut says. “He killed himself, just after signing this.”

Bahamut grabs the parchment off the desk. “He’s surrendered. Venus is once again part of the Empire, and you are my puppet. I’ve successfully bribed most of his guards so they will back up this story.”

“You fucking–”

“Go! Tsarina Anya Ivanov! Do what your master orders!”

Bahamut snaps his fingers, and the two soldiers he has appointed to escort me to Aegus rush in from a side room. He rolls up the parchment and gives me a wicked smile as the soldiers haul me from the room.

Once I’m in the hallway, the taller of the two soldiers grabs my chin and jerks my head to the side.

“Be still, Tsarina,” he says in a forceful whisper.

He presses something into the side of my cheek. It burns, and then turns icy cold.

“This will prevent scarring,” he says.

“You mean it will cover up what that monster did to me,” I spit.

The soldier ignores me, and jerks my chin back up to the light.

“So this is what it means to be a puppet, Tsarina? Manhandled by Imperial soldiers?”

“Go to the alien,” the soldier demands. “We’ll kill you first if you try anything. The General’s orders.”

8 Aegus

I put on a ridiculous suit over my armor. The tailor gushed about how good it looked on my ‘wide shoulders,’ but it makes me feel confined.

My armor fits my skin like a glove, but the suit hangs limply on my body like it’s a layer of dead skin.

There’s even a pointless piece of cloth I’m supposed to wrap around the collar and tie into a knot.

“The buttons on the shirt are sufficient,” I say, throwing the cloth tie to the floor. “I will not need this.”

“It will tie the whole outfit together,” the tailor says, laughing. “Pun not intended.”

“Pun?” I ask.

“Never mind,” he says, picking the tie up off the floor. “See, it’s teal, like your...armor...which complements your purple skin!”

He holds the tie up against my chest, and I start to understand what he means.

“Fine,” I say, “but I don’t know how to–”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I got you.”

He pops the collar up on my shirt, then starts wrapping the tie around it. He makes a number of strange loops, and suddenly it’s tightening around my neck. He pops the collar back down over it, and turns the mirror back toward me.

“See?” he nods, gesturing to my reflection in the mirror.

I grunt. It looks good, but I shouldn’t get used to wearing ridiculous clothes like this.

“Where is Anya?” I ask.

“Umm,” he says. “The Tsarevna will come back when the Tsar is done with her, I expect. I learned a long time ago not to expect royalty to be punctual. Our time is theirs to waste.”

“You can wait out in the hall, if you’d like. I’m done!” The tailor looks over my outfit one more time, and nods in approval.

I open the door and let him step out into the corridor first. He smiles as soon as he enters the hallway, but then a frown overtakes his face.

“Tsarevna,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

Anya? Something’s wrong?

I lumber into the hallway, shoving my big frame in front of the tailor.

Anya is smiling, but it looks fake. I haven’t known her long, but I’ve been around humans long enough to spot a phony smile.

“Wow,” Anya says. “Your outfit looks stunning.”

“Anya,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

When she ignores my question, I feel even more concerned. It feels as if the pressure in the hall is becoming suffocating, and my heart pounds in my chest. I know something is horribly wrong, but I can’t decipher what it is.

I look down toward the end of the hall, but see nothing unusual. I sniff, and I smell men, oiled weapons and gunpowder. All the guards here are armed, so that’s not too odd...but–

“Aegus,” Anya says, putting a hand on my shoulder. She grabs the tie and locks eyes with me. “This tie...and I’m wearing a red dress. Our outfits will clash, we’re meant to be engaged. We have to match!”

“Anya,” I say. “Something is wrong, the clothes don’t matter–”

“They do matter!” she says, eyes bulging. “They matter so much. I think I should wear something teal, too. The thing I wore in the spaceport when we first met–”

I hear oiled metal sliding down the hallway, and I know I have just moments to act.

My perfectly tailored suit tears to shreds as my armor blasts off my body and enshrouds Anya. I solidify the back first, and just as it hardens, I hear machine gun fire erupting down the hallway.

The tailor screams and dives back into my room headfirst.

I’ve put all my armor onto Anya, and the bullets are ricocheting off it.

I liquefy, pulling a small part of the armor back around my hand, and then I propel Anya’s shielded body back into the room with the tailor.

I throw the small chunk of armor down the hall and shift into bear form.

The armor breaks into dozens of tiny pieces, scattering across the hall. It rams into each incoming bullet, deflecting it away from me.

I release a ferocious roar and rush down the hall at full speed protected behind my temporary shield, and when I’m just a few meters away from their guns, I feel the first bullet penetrate my fur and lodge into my skin.

But it’s too late for them.

I swipe with my paws toward the guards’ arms, and I slash open one of the shooter’s main arteries.

His arm gushes blood as he crumples to the ground.

The second shooter’s barrel is too long to hit me from up close, so he pulls out a sonic knife.

I can hear it vibrating the moment he draws the weapon. He slashes quickly, giving me little time to react.

I shift back to Marauder form. His blade slashes the empty air where my huge bear’s body once stood, and I slam my fist into his jaw so hard that it cracks. I feel the jaw slide and break off against my fist, and I grab the gun out of his hand before he drops it.

I will the armor back to encase my body, and the dispersed fragments that deflected the bullets race toward me as if magnetized. Then I see a teal sphere–Anya inside of it–rolling out the door to my room and down the hallway toward me.

The armor melts away from her and attaches back onto my body.

It burns too much energy to keep Anya shielded remotely. I’ll be completely depleted before we can make our escape if I keep her enshrouded, and I need her to be able to see so that we can get away.

“What’s–” I start to say, but she cuts me off.

“We have to get out of the palace, now.”

“Which way?”

She looks both ways, hesitates for a few moments, and then points in the opposite direction of the shooters.

I form a thick, handheld shield, and give it to her.

“This will stop bullets, but only from the front. I will protect your back.”

She takes the shield and begins to lead the way.

I keep my ears and nose open as we move down the hall, and every few seconds I check our flank.

“My father is dead,” she says, voice quivering. “Venus is surrendered. Bahamut has taken over the palace, but it’s not public knowledge...yet. We have a short window of opportunity to get the fuck out of here.”

We turn the corner to find one of the guards standing right there in front of us.

I raise the rifle toward the guard, but Anya slams the shield into the barrel and pushes the gun away from him.

“Donovan,” she says, giving me a look that says I shouldn’t shoot this one.

I watch his hands nonetheless; any sudden movement and I’ll take him down.

“Tsarevna,” he says. “What’s–”

“Donovan,” Anya says. “You have to do exactly as I say. No questions.”

“But–”

“No questions!” she repeats. “Take us to a car, a fully automated one that isn’t part of the palace’s network.”

He nods and starts to move swiftly down the hallway, and we follow.

I begin to understand. This man has no real rank or choice. When Bahamut takes control of the palace, Donovan will have to do exactly as he orders. If he knew this, would he still help us? Anya isn’t going to risk finding out.

“All the private cars are on the ground floor,” Donovan says. “It will take a lot longer to reach–”

“No,” I cut in. “Take us to the nearest window.”

“Aegus,” Anya says. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Donovan turns sharply on his heels and takes us in the opposite direction.

I see a faint light pouring through a window as we turn the corner, and just as we near it, I hear footsteps stomping from the way we just came.

“Get behind me,” I shout to both of them.

Donovan ignores me and raises his gun toward the corner. I consider swatting him back, but the extra firepower may be useful.

A grenade flies out from around the corner, but before it can hit the ground, I form a long arm from my armor, grab the grenade mid-air, and toss it back around the corner.

I hear it bounce against the wall one time, and then surprised screams and grunts cry out right before the grenade explodes.

Dust and debris blast out onto the floor in front of us, and I see a few bloodied and severed fingers as well.

“They’re dead,” I say, sniffing to be sure.

“Who are dead?” Donovan shouts, turning the gun toward me.

I snatch it out of his hand before he can pull the trigger.

“Donovan,” Anya says. “My father was killed by the Imperials–by Bahamut–we can help you escape, or you can pretend you never helped us...it’s your choice.”

“I’ll stay here,” he says. “I assume you’re coming back? I can be your man on the inside.”

Anya starts to shake her head, but I cut in and say, “That is very useful. They won’t believe you didn’t help us unless you appear to have fought.”

Slow realization creeps across Donovan’s face, and I slam the butt of the rifle into his head before he can feel any pain.

“Aegus!” Anya says.

“The bruise will be proof enough,” I say. “No one saw him helping us.”

I slam the window with my armored elbow, shattering it open. I look out to see it’s about a forty-story drop to the ground below.

“The cars are down here, yes?” I ask.

“Yes,” Anya says, “That’s right near the parking–”

I grab her and jump out the window, clutching Anya tight in my arms.

My armor blasts hundreds of small tendrils downward at full velocity. They will hit the ground several seconds before we do. They harden, but not enough to become fully rigid.

The hundred tendrils press back up against me, beginning to slow my descent.

By the time we are a dozen or so meters from the ground, the tendrils have slowed the fall enough that I let them break away. I slam heels first into the ground, falling into a low crouch still holding Anya safely in my arms.

The tendrils pull back into my armor, but I begin to feel hunger tearing away at me.

I left the container of antimatter back in my room. I was going to show it to the Tsar after dinner, but now I’ve had no food or antimatter, and my suit is on its last legs.

Anya takes only a few seconds to register the shock of having jumped out of a forty-story window. She turns toward the garage and points.

When we near the gate, the guard leaps out of the guard post and holds his gun up at me.

“Stand down!” Anya shouts. “I order you.”

“You’re not in charge anymore,” the guard says, turning the weapon toward Anya. “I take orders from General–”

I fire a shot right into his heart, and he drops to the ground.

Anya’s eyes widen, but she runs through the gate and waves for me to follow.

I don’t know how to spot a car that is connected to the palace’s network, but Anya seems to know what she’s looking for.

“This one!” she says, pointing to a spherical vehicle with faded paint.

I put my hand to the door handle, and let my suit interface with the car’s computer. This uses much less power than physical attacks, but as drained as the suit is, it takes much longer than it normally would.

As the suit breaks into the car, I keep my eyes peeled, looking around the car in all directions, but no one is coming...yet.

Suddenly the doors open up, and the car’s engine starts.

We both jump inside, and Anya instructs, “Take us to the docking bay!”

“The docking bay,” the car repeats in a breathy woman’s voice. “You can dock your big equipment in my bay any time, Anton.”

“Why does the car sound like it is about to have an orgasm?” I ask. “And who is Anton?”

Anya rolls her eyes and laughs. “Anton is a creepy guy that gets turned on by his car, I guess.”

The car lifts off its base, hovering above the pavement before backing out and starting to move toward the gate.

“Mmmm, Anton,” the car says. “The gate is electronically locked. I can’t drive through it. Maybe I can talk dirty to you while we wait–”

I open the door and step out. I put my hand onto the console for the gate, while hefting the rifle in my other hand.

From the corner of my eye, I spot a guard. As soon as he spots us, he raises his weapon.

The rifle is meant to be fired two-handed, but I’m strong and raise it effortlessly with one hand. I fire off a shot, and the guard clutches his arm, the bullet only brushing his skin.

“Shit!” I say. “Wasting ammo.”

I fire again, and this time he goes down.

The suit finally hacks through the console, and tells me that the gate is now unlocked.

“Anton,” I hear the car saying as I get back inside. “Now I can take you anywhere you want to go. Mmmm, come back inside me, Anton.”

I jump into the car, and it starts accelerating through the gate. As soon as it passes through, it takes off into the sky.

I turn to Anya, and I see tears streaming down her face.

“I’m sorry, Anya,” I say.

I reach out toward her cheek, and wipe the tear away with my thumb.

“Anton, you brought a real lady into the car? You want to have a threesome–”

I punch the speaker with my other hand, and it breaks open. I tear the wires out until the voice stops speaking.

“I will protect you,” I say. “And help you get revenge.”

Anya looks at me, and though her eyes are glassy through the tears she’s shedding, I can see the solid determination on her face.

“Good,” she says. “Thank you, Aegus.”

I lean closer to her. My lips feel magnetically attracted to hers, and just when I am almost sure she will kiss me back, my stomach cramps up, and I double over in pain.

I grunt as the hunger consumes me, and I feel lightheaded and on the verge of unconsciousness.

“Aegus,” she shrieks with concern, putting a hand on the back of my head. “What’s wrong?”

“The suit,” I say.

I let it melt away, and it compresses into a small sphere barely larger than my knuckle. It attaches itself to my upper arm and becomes dormant, but the hunger barely subsides.

She looks down at my cock, just for a moment, but then locks eyes with me again. “Are you going to die?”

“I need food,” I say, my voice losing strength.

She starts rummaging through the various compartments in the car, and finally throws something back to me.

“Jerky,” I say, looking down at it. “Is that all you humans eat? My brother loves this stuff, but I’m not a huge fan.”

I tear into it, biting half of it off in one bite. I spit the wrapper out and nearly swallow half of the stick whole.

I savor the next bite more, letting the salty meat dance across my tongue as I chew, and then I tear into the last of the stick before I even swallow the previous bite.

When I’m done eating, I let out a sigh of relief. “This will hold me over, for now.”

She takes my hand in hers and strokes it.

She smiles “You were about to kiss me, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” I say, and then she’s on top of me.

Our lips crush together, and warmth floods through every last inch of my body. I’ve been years among humans and resisted every temptation for so long, and all the delayed gratification comes rushing back to me now, magnified tenfold.

I feel my cock begin to vibrate as it goes rock-hard, and since Anya is sitting on top of me and wearing a dress, it presses right up into her panties.

“Good God,” she says. “Your dick...is vibrating.”

“Yes,” I say. “Marauder dicks do that.”

I notice from a quick glance outside the window that we are descending.

“Shit,” I say. “The car didn’t tell us we were almost here?”

“You ripped out the speaker!” she says, squeezing my ass with her hand.

“We will do this again, Anya,” I say, but I push her off me and grab the gun.

“But we are about to land,” I say. “And I promised to protect you.”

She grins, and our car deactivates as it touches down. I open the door and step out.

“Yo’, man,” someone shouts. “You can’t–oh shit, that’s not a man! It’s a fucking Marauder!”

I rush toward him and grab him by the collar. I rasp into his face in my scariest voice, “YOU SAW NOTHING HERE! Do you understand?”

He squeals, then answers, “Yeah, nothing man, nothing!”

I let him go and he falls down onto his back.

“Come,” I say to Anya, reaching out for her hand.

We enter the docking platform, which is almost a separate entity from the main space of the city. It’s dark when we step inside.

The lights start to turn on once it senses our movement.

“No one was in here,” Anya says. “That’s good…”

“Is it?” I say, looking through the platform. There’s only one ship, and it looks as if it’s about to fall apart.

“Shit,” she says. “Your suit can’t hack into that thing, it’s too old. It looks fully manual…”

“Wait here,” I say, and I run back outside.

The man I knocked to the ground is now standing and dusting himself off, but he starts to sprint away when he sees me coming back for him.

I catch up to him quickly and snatch him off his feet.

“Shit, man, I didn’t see anything! Why are you naked? Jesus!”

“Quiet!” I say, pulling him toward the docking platform. “This is your ship?”

“Yeah, man,” he says, as I haul him onto the platform. “The Aerith, it’s named after–”

“I don’t care,” I say. “Take us away from here.”

“I just got here…” he says.

“You don’t want to be here. Trust me,” Anya says. “What’s your name?”

“Tomas. And yeah, I do want to be here!” he says. “I finally escaped the Empire. It’s been my dream to see Sankt Petersburg, and–”

“The Empire has just taken over Venus,” I say.

His face turns white. “Shit, man, I shot like–”

He puts his hand over his mouth, then says, “No, I didn’t shoot anyone, unless you two are enemies of the Empire, then maybe–”

“Just get us on the ship,” Anya snaps.

He nods, and fumbles through his pockets for the keys.

He unlocks the ship and we follow him on board.

He hits a bunch of switches as soon as we enter the cockpit, and the ship slowly starts to hum to life.

“You want to get off this platform as soon as possible,” I say. “General Bahamut is hunting us.”

“Fuck!” Tomas says, and he starts hitting switches even faster, before plopping himself down into the pilot’s seat.

“Sit down on those couches over there,” Tomas instructs, pointing to the side wall.

Anya and I sit down on one of the couches next to each other.

“There are no safety harnesses, Tomas,” Anya says.

“Yeah,” Tomas says. “Let me know you’re going to kidnap me and steal my ship in advance next time, and I’ll order some extra equipment for you.”

The ship powers up, and he hits the throttle.

We start to fly off the docking platform and head toward the bay door. There’s not an airlock here–the bay door just opens long enough for a ship to pass, so little oxygen is lost.

But Tomas cuts the throttle as we approach. “Shit, it won’t open,” he says.

“Food!” I shout.

“What? You want to take my food, too–”

“Give him food!” Anya urges. “Hurry!”

Tomas points to the back of the ship, and Anya rushes into what looks to be a small kitchen. She raids a cabinet, throwing dozens of sticks of jerky back to where I’m still sitting on the couch.

Jerky. Again.

I tear into it, devouring four or five sticks at a time.

“Holy crap, man,” Tomas says. “You’re a monster.”

My armor melts across me and begins to harden as I swallow the last of the jerky. I shove up next to Thomas in the pilot’s seat, and I pull open the side window.

I stick the top half of my body out the window, and I point my hand at the bay door.

I feel the hunger rip across me already as I charge up the shot, and I nearly pass out as I blast a thick beam of plasma into the bay door.

The door melts to liquid metal and drips away, and I fall back inside.

Tomas shuts the window before too much Venusian atmosphere can leak in, and he hits the accelerator and whisks us into the Venusian sky.

9 Anya

“Drop down two thousand meters,” I say to Tomas.

“My ship isn’t rated to handle that depth,” Tomas says, forcing a smile.

“When was your ship made?” I ask.

“Oh,” Tomas says, “a good eighty years ago. I inherited it from my father–”

“So when the ship was made, terraforming of Venus was eighty years behind now. You realize the pressure is much lower overall? Even the cities float lower than they did eighty years ago. And I thought you said you just arrived from off-world? How did you inherit the ship if you just arrived? This ship is only designed to fly on Venus.”

I don’t trust this guy, but it’s probably not wise to call him out on all of his lies like this.

“Ah,” Tomas says, wincing. “It’s a long story, if you sit back I can tell you a tale–”

“No,” Aegus snaps. “Do what she says. Or else.”

Tomas grins. “Okay then, dropping altitude to forty kilometers! I sure hope this doesn’t kill us all.”

“The jungles are lower down,” I say. “There’s more carbon dioxide the lower you get. And...this part was supposed to be classified, but the tribes are actually accelerating the terraforming. They’re doing something to the forests to make them more efficient.”

Tomas looks at me nervously. I don’t know if I believe his story about coming from off-world, and the way he looks at me makes me think he knows I’m the Tsarevna–no, the Tsarina–but he’s yet to admit any knowledge of it, nor has he addressed me in any way at all. He’s avoided saying my name or talking to me entirely.

Even though I don’t trust him, I do feel bad for putting him in this situation, and–should he be captured by the Imperials–if he wants plausible deniability that he helped the rogue Tsarina, I won’t deny him that.

“Okay, we’re at the new altitude,” Tomas says. “And the ship hasn’t been crushed like a tin can, so I guess you’re right. How do we find the jungles? How many of them are there even?”

“Thousands,” I whisper. “Just keep flying until your scanner picks up something.”

“Scanner?” Tomas asks. “You mean my peepers?” He points to his eyes.

“What?” Aegus says, nearly strangling him. “This ship has no sensors of any kind?”

“You might want to steal a better ship next time,” Tomas says. “Look, though, if there’s thousands of these things at this altitude, we just keep flying until we hit one.”

“How is visibility?” Aegus asks. “We will not actually hit it before you can slow down. Correct?”

“As long as someone keeps their peepers wide open, we should be able to stop in time. I’m going to go have a nap though,” Tomas says. “If you see one of the jungles, just holler at me, and I should be able to–”

“Show me which control,” Aegus says, gritting his teeth.

“Oh,” Tomas says. “If you see the jungle, just pull this lever all the way down, and you’ll come to a halt. The jungle will be moving, though, so make sure you wake me up quickly so I can get us onto it.”

“Go take your nap,” Aegus says, side-eyeing Tomas.

As soon as Tomas disappears into his cabin, Aegus shakes his head. “Human males are weak and inept! They can’t be relied on for anything!”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “What about Donovan? He could have escaped with us, but volunteered to stay back in the lion’s den to help me.”

“An exception,” Aegus says, crossing his arms.

“Well,” I say, “human men can’t rely on crazy jerky-powered armor that can do almost anything.”

“I don’t rely on my armor,” Aegus says. “I am a formidable warrior even with no weapons.”

“Yeah,” I say, “because you can turn into a giant purple bear. That took me by surprise, by the way. Why can you turn into a bear, exactly?”

“Evolution across all planets is very similar. We found this ‘bear’ animal on a planet millennia ago, and we incorporated it into our DNA.”

“So that you could transform into a big purple bear?”

“No,” he says, “so that we could hibernate on our trips across the stars.”

“And this is your last trip?” I ask, skeptical.

I’d heard what his faction believes. Marauder DNA in a child has always meant that it was impossible to interbreed among Marauders. The only way–for thousands of years–for Marauders to reproduce was to fly to new solar systems and find untouched DNA. But supposedly, humans are the end of the line. Human-Marauder offspring can reproduce with both Marauders and humans. They no longer need to travel from star to star; they can settle down.

“If things go my way,” Aegus says. “If my plan is executed successfully…”

“I guess this whole thing with Bahamut isn’t getting your plan off to a good start?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “But the solution will now be much easier than before.”

“What’s the solution?”

“I kill him.”

* * *

“There!” I shout, pointing.

Aegus has fallen asleep on the couch, and the floating jungle appears from through the clouds just in front of us. We’re suddenly on top of it.

I pull back the lever that Tomas showed me, and the engines cut to a low hum.

“Tomas!” I shout. “Aegus, wake him up!”

Aegus springs to his feet and starts pounding on Tomas's door.

The ship still has momentum, and it floats closer to the jungle even as it slows down.

Aegus is pounding on Tomas’s door like an animal.

The ship finally comes to a halt, and I see that the jungle is floating relatively close to us–floating toward us. It’s nearly as big as Sankt Petersburg, but instead of buildings, there are thick trees. The canopy reaches up to the air tanks, which are even larger than those of Sankt Petersburg. The trees suck carbon dioxide from Venus’s atmosphere, and then convert it to oxygen, which goes up into the air tanks–which keeps the jungle floating. There’s so much extra oxygen that the tanks have valves which slowly leak oxygen out into the atmosphere. With thousands of jungles doing this, Venus’s atmosphere is slowly losing carbon dioxide and gaining oxygen. In a few hundred years, we may be able to live in super-tall buildings many kilometers high in the sky. In a thousand, we may be able to walk on the surface.

“Tomas!” I shout.

I look back, and Aegus rams the door with his shoulder.

“He’s gone,” Aegus says. “There’s...a note.”

“Does the note explain how to pilot the ship?”

“No,” Aegus says. “It says he used the escape pod to hitch a ride with his friend. He didn’t want to get executed if he were caught. I think he knew you were the Tsarevna…”

“I am the Tsar now, Aegus,” I say. “The Tsarina.”

“Allow me to drive,” Aegus says, nearly shoving me out of the seat.

“No,” I snap back, trying to shove his massive, muscular body away. He doesn’t budge, of course, but he gives up on removing me from the seat.

“I think I figured these controls out...mostly,” I say.

“We’re going to hit the forest,” Aegus says.

His body is tense, he really wants to take over the controls and doesn’t seem to trust me. I guess men are the same across the galaxy.

I pull the lever in the opposite direction, slowly at first.

The engines whirr, and I feel a light jerk signaling that we are beginning to move backward.

“This one must be altitude,” I say, pointing to another lever. I move it down just a few notches.

The ship begins to ascend.

“Wrong direction!” Aegus says. “Of course it’s inverted!”

“Of course?” I say, moving the lever in the opposite direction. “You’re just saying that to sound like you were right all along.”

Aegus crosses his arms, and the ship begins to descend.

I adjust both levers, and soon we are slowly descending toward the jungle. We’re not moving fast enough for there to be any risk of a dangerous impact. If it looks like we’re close to hitting the dome, I can simply pull back the lever and stop within seconds.

“Luckily this ship’s controls are quite simple,” Aegus says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say, smiling.

He narrows his eyes at me, and his ears pull back.

“Do you know what a backhanded compliment is?” I ask.

“I will search the ship for any rations, and look for ways to store water,” he says, ignoring my question.

As he walks away, I shout back to him, “You’re really good at giving backhanded compliments, asshole!”

As I near the dome walls, I can clearly see the massive trees through the transparent dome. The top of the dome is nearly opaque, covered in condensation. When it reaches full saturation, it supposedly rains within the jungle. I’ve never felt rain in my life–the idea of water just falling out of the sky unnerves me.

“I found rations,” Aegus says, coming back to my side. He throws down a pile of vacuum-sealed food.

“No real food?” I ask.

“I already ate everything in the refrigeration unit,” he says, burping.

“Everything?” I ask. “So you eat the good stuff, and I eat the vacuum-packed garbage?”

“Not everything,” Aegus says. “There was very little left in there. Some eggs, some milk, and some chocolate.”

“Chocolate?” I say, taking my hands off the controls. “You bastard, you–”

He holds up a bar of chocolate, unopened.

“Saved it for you,” he says, plopping it down on the dashboard.

He walks away before I can thank him.

“Wait,” I say. “I didn’t hear you cooking. How did you eat the eggs?”

“I bit into the shell and sucked out the innards,” he says. “Delicious.”

“It’s almost a good thing that you never sat down to have dinner with my father,” I say.

I feel a pang of pain and anger when I think of my father. It still doesn’t feel like he’s really gone. I haven’t had time to even think, let alone grieve.

“I can force myself to eat with human manners,” Aegus says. “I just prefer not to. It’s pointless.”

“Manners separate us from animals,” I say, lowering our acceleration even further as we approach the docking bay.

“No,” Aegus says. “A few hundred thousand years of evolution separate you from animals, while tens of millions of years separate Marauders from animals.”

“Didn’t you transform into a giant bear?” I say. “Like, just a few hours ago? Tens of millions of years, my ass.”

Aegus grunts and walks away.

10 Aegus

Anya manages to operate the simplistic controls well enough to bring us successfully into the docking bay. The jungle has already started overtaking the bay. There are thick roots and vines spreading through it, and the docking machinery itself is even covered in grassy vines and leaves.

We manage to anchor Tomas’s ship to the bay, and when I plug in the thick power cord, it seems to charge successfully.

“We think the tribes maintain these,” Anya says.

“Think?” I ask. “Didn’t you create these jungles?”

“We created them, yes,” she says. “And it used to take huge amounts of resources to maintain them. We had to send teams of highly educated scientists to the jungles–paying them hefty salaries–just to make sure the ecosystems were perfectly balanced. At first, entire jungles would die off from the smallest errors or neglect.”

My ears perk up, and I connect the dots. “I see, but over time these scientists became ‘the tribes,’ and they do this work for free now.”

Anya nods. “But in exchange, they get autonomy. We haven’t had any control over what the tribes do for nearly a century.”

“Now I am here,” I say. “I will compel them to act, with your help.”

“I told you,” she says. “I can’t compel the tribes to do anything. I have no control over them.”

“Things have changed,” Aegus says. “If the Marauders who want to obliterate humanity have their way, it will only be a matter of time before they eradicate the tribes. They will not look the other way as your father did.”

Anya is still wearing a dress, which clings to her body in all the right places. It’s easily the worst thing she could wear to be traipsing through a jungle environment, but there is nothing else on the ship for her to wear.

I am, of course, naked. Normally this would feel quite comfortable, but not with Anya’s wandering eyes. She acts like she can’t stand me, but I will not forget that we kissed, nor can I ignore the way her eyes roam across my body.

My biosuit is fully exhausted, and it will take a great deal of food to power it up again. Much more than we found in Tomas’s ship, and more–I fear–than we can find in the entire jungle. I should have no real need for the suit in the jungle and among the tribes, but if the Imperial forces track us down and my suit is not powered, it will be a difficult fight.

Anya finishes loading up her satchel with rations, then slings it onto her back. The strap presses down between her breasts, making them extremely prominent and visible.

“You will regret wearing this dress into the jungle,” I say. “It’s best to follow my lead,” I add, looking down at my naked body.

“You want me to walk around naked with you?”

I grin.

Her face reddens, and she raises a finger at me in anger. “I’m the Tsarina of Venus. I will not walk around naked in the jungle. Forget it.”

I try to hide my smirk, but fail miserably. I will get that dress off of her one way or another.

We step out onto the docking platform, where the humidity hits me like a wall. My highly evolved body begins to adapt, raising its internal temperature to cool me down, but still I sweat.

Anya’s thin dress immediately begins to become translucent. I notice this especially over her breasts, as I can easily make out the outline of her nipples. I pretend to double-check my satchel, which allows her to catch up to and pass me, and then I enjoy a new view of her body curves through her dress from behind.

As we reach the outer wall of the dome, the forest fully overtakes everything. The door to the airlock is barely visible. It’s permanently open, I realize, and filled with vines. The ground is thick with grass and roots, and I take Anya’s hand to guide her through it. It will be difficult for her to walk through the forest with her human woman’s shoes. Fortunately she is not wearing the high-heeled style shoes, but her flat-bottomed shoes are thin and not at all durable.

I feel the vines and roots beneath my bare feet, and though I’ve never walked in a jungle, my ancestors have, and my instinct takes over.

Anya trips, but I catch her before she falls.

Her dress is wet with perspiration, and I can feel every curve of her beautiful body beneath the thin cloth. I smile at her, and make no hurry to put her back on her feet.

Her face blushes as I maintain a grip on her body, and I realize she’s holding tightly to my arm.

I set her back on her feet, and we walk on. I take special care to warn her of thick foliage so she doesn’t fall a second time, though I long to hold her against me again.

We exit the other end of the airlock, and step into the full space of the forest.

It’s raining when we step in. The water is falling in thick sheets, and it’s difficult to see too far ahead. The trees are as tall as the buildings in Sankt Petersburg, and the canopy blocks out the sky.

There are flowing streams of water on the ground, and I hear animals hooting from the treetops. The buzz of insects is thick, and combined with the rain, the sound of the jungle is nearly deafening.

“Wow,” Anya says, holding out her hand.

Water pools in her palm, and she slurps it into her mouth.

I do the same. “It’s very fresh and crisp,” I say.

Then I look down at her. Her dress is completely soaked through. I can see the hardened points of her nipples pressing against the soaked cloth, and I can see the full contours of her panties outlined through her dress.

My eyes widen, and I can’t help but gawk at her in awe.

When she realizes I’m staring at her, she puts her hands over her breasts to cover them, and I see them press together, arousing me even further.

I feel my cock begin to vibrate as it hardens, and then I realize she’s looking down at me. Her eyes are even wider than mine.

“The dress...” I say.

“I’m not taking it off,” she says. “And stop doing that!”

“What?” I ask.

She looks down at my massive cock, shakes her head, and shudders, “That!”

“I may as well ask for your nipples to stop pointing then. It’s not something I can control,” I say.

“Then stop staring at my nipples!” she shouts, shaking a fist at me, causing her hand to fall away from where it had been covering her breast. It exposes her left nipple to me, which jiggles as she shakes her fist, giving me a nice view.

“Then stop looking at my penis,” I say.

“Fine!” she shouts, shaking her head in disgust. “Let’s go.”

She turns to lead the way, which I realize immediately is a mistake. Luckily I reach her just in time to catch her before she falls once again.

I grab hold of her wherever I can, not wanting her to be covered in mud, but I just so happen to feel her perfect breast mold into my hand. I feel the hard pressure of her nipple graze into my palm, and as I stabilize her, my erect cock presses into her backside.

The moment I feel her ass up tight against me, my dick vibrates faster and my cock starts swelling, becoming larger and larger.

We hold each other like this for what seems like forever, and though she’s been pretending not to want me–to be frustrated by my advances–she makes no effort to push me off her.

Just when I think she will finally push me away and yell at me again, I feel her ass press harder against me, rubbing against my cock.

I squeeze her breast in response, and grab the other one hungrily in my other hand.

The scent of her overtakes me, and I press my lips against her neck to drink in her fragrance. We’re both rain-soaked and wet down to our skin, and her body heat warms me like the summer sun on a winter’s night.

“Aegus…” she moans, and I move my lips against her ear, pressing my tongue gently against her earlobe.

And then, far behind us, I hear the distinct vibration of a ship’s engines. It’s just on the edge of my ability to hear, which means there’s no way Anya can hear it.

I savor the taste of her for another blissful moment, but then force myself to pull away from her.

“Anya,” I say, wishing more than anything that the moment could last longer. “We’ve been followed. They’re here. We have to move fast.”

Before she can reply, I snatch her up into my arms and start running through the jungle, carrying her drenched and beautiful body close in my arms.

“How do you know?” she asks.

“I hear better than you do,” I say. “We need to get away from here as fast as we can.”

I race forward, keeping on the balls of my feet and taking care to step on vines and roots rather than leaving footprints in the soft mud. I need to leave as little trace as possible that we’re here.

“What type of tracking devices would they have?” I ask.

“Everything,” she says. “Heat scanners, bionic ears…”

“Are they trained to fight in the jungle?”

“No,” she says. “They never come in here, it’s probably our only advantage.”

They’ll be slow and awkward as they try to navigate through the unfamiliar terrain. If it was just me alone, I could hunt them in bear form, but I won’t be able to protect Anya like that.

“We have to find the tribes,” I say.

I run faster, heading toward the center of the jungle.

“They probably won’t be happy we brought the Imperials here,” she says.

“Good,” I respond. “They’ll see that the threat is real, and be more likely to help us.”

“Or they’ll help the Imperials,” she says. “Just to get them to leave them alone.”

I push that thought from my mind. I know Anya is right and that it’s a distinct possibility, but there’s no use dwelling on it. If the tribes refuse to help us, we are dead. All we can do is plan on them helping us and do everything we can do to reach them before the Imperials catch up to us.

I’m moving fast, but I hear the low drone of machinery about a half kilometer behind us.

I keep running–while still trying to leave no trail–as fast as I can, but the machinery is getting closer and closer.

“Drones,” I say, setting Anya down. “I need to destroy them.”

The human soldiers are nowhere near. They probably hope these drones will do the job, and if I keep running, they’ll eventually get the drop on us.

I point up to a large branch protruding from the tree in front of us. “I will put you there while I hunt the drones,” I say.

“Shit,” Anya says, eyeing the tall tree.

“I don’t know what kind of weapons they have,” I admit. “I need to disable them before they get any closer to you.”

“All right,” she says, “but I can’t climb up there–”

I grab her securely around the waist and leap onto the tree trunk. There are no branches, but I grab hold of the trunk, and channeling my sheer brute strength, climb and shimmy my way up the tree. I move Anya onto my back. She grips me tightly, her legs pressed closely against my body. It feels incredible feeling her there, but I cannot lose myself in the pleasure because her life is on the line. I must focus.

I reach the branch and help her grasp hold of it in such a way that she will be safe. It’s almost twenty meters high, so she’s effectively stranded up here, but hopefully she’ll be safe from the drones.

The branch is wide, so she’s able to rest comfortably atop it.

“I will not let them near you,” I promise.

I slide down the tree, clearing the twenty meters in seconds. The moment I hit the ground, I shift to bear form.

My senses intensify, and I can smell the oil of the approaching machines. They are close, and getting closer by the second.

I rush toward the smell of the drones at full speed. I’ve never moved through such terrain in bear form, but it feels as if I’m at home in my natural environment. I move effortlessly across the foliage, and I make little to no sound.

But the drones must have sensitive equipment, as I can hear them closing in on me even as I run at full gait.

I let out a ferocious roar, hoping to draw them all to me and away from Anya.

The trees thin out as I come upon a wide stream, and I see the first glint of one of the drones. It’s a six-legged machine that looks like a mix between a dog and a spider. It’s barely visible, as the colors on its body shift and change, camouflaging it with the surrounding jungle. It’s visible only as a long-legged shimmering shape, and I’m able to track it primarily through smell and sound.

It turns toward me, but does nothing. I must be out of range of its weapons.

Something opens from the top of it, and fist-sized, sphere-shaped machine flies out.

Shit.

The machine rushes toward me, and before I can react, I feel something penetrate through my fur, and then a sharp, painful prick. Something is lodged into the skin on my paw. I spare a look down and see a dart.

I leap into the water and dive deep down.

Holding my breath, I swim swiftly through the steam and toward the cloaked machine.

I can’t smell or hear anything from underwater, but I remember where the spider-dog machine was, and if I get there fast enough, I can get a jump on it.

Just as I begin to run out of air, I hit the other side of the stream.

I swim as hard as I can, and break through the surface, leaping onto the muddy bank.

I sniff and can still smell the oiled machinery. Behind me, I hear the whirring engines from the hovering drone.

I need to strike quickly.

I rush toward the smell of oil. As I approach, the spider-dog begins to scurry away from me, while the flying thing whirrs closer and closer.

The machine can’t run as fast as me, but the flying thing is much faster.

Just as I close in on the spider-dog and start leaping toward it, the flying drone dives in on me, firing more darts.

I feel two or three prick into me, and I knock the spider-dog to the ground. I tear at it with my paws, ripping its limbs off as I bite into the center of its body. I rip out circuits and wires, and suddenly I hear the flying drone crash to the ground behind me.

I waste no time, as I can smell a second spider-dog back on the other side of the stream. I realize this one is not going for me, but for Anya.

I dive into the water again, but I’m feeling sluggish. The darts must have dosed me with some kind of tranquilizer or sedative, but my Marauder immune system is breaking them down–mostly.

I cross the stream again, and once I reach the other side, leave the water and rush back toward Anya. I do the mental calculations, and realize I can intercept the spider-dog a few hundred meters from the tree, but I don’t know what I can do about the flyer.

I spot the spider-dog just as it’s deploying the flyer, and I can smell Anya’s fear from high up in the branches.

Faster! Go faster! Destroying the spider-dog will disable the flyer. The darts could contain a deadly poison for all I know, and Anya may not survive if any of the darts strike her. Even if it simply knocks her out, it will make it infinitely more difficult to escape the oncoming soldiers.

The spider-dog deploys the flyer, and it rushes full speed away from me.

I run as fast as I can under the numbing haze of the darts. I leap toward the spider-dog, but it dodges me.

I roll through the mud as it scurries farther away. “No! Get up!” I tell myself.

Back on all fours, I chase after it, but I realize it’s moving in a wide circle now. It must be at the maximum range for controlling the flyer, and it can no longer run straight away from me.

I predict its circular path, and am able to successfully cut it off. I spare a glance backward and see the flyer approaching the tree–approaching Anya.

Using all of my energy for one last burst of speed, I leap directly into the spider-dog. I go straight for its heart and tear out its power-cell.

I look back and see the flyer plummet to the ground and break to pieces. I let out a sigh of relief, but waste no time in running back to Anya.

I shift to Marauder form at the tree trunk and leap against the bark. The haze is thickening, but I scale the twenty meters in less than thirty seconds.

“Anya!” I shout.

I see her, and her eyelids are drooping. There’s a dart in her neck. I panic. No!

I’m nearly on her, but suddenly her body goes limp and begins to slide off the branch. I won’t reach her in time.

I jump off the tree trunk just as her unconscious body drops from the branch. I grab hold of her in mid-air, and we finish free falling together.

I flex my body, forcing myself to be positioned beneath her to break her fall. I hit the ground hard, but I hold her up, absorbing the impact for her.

The force of the fall knocks the air from my lungs, and sharp branches cut and dig into my skin, but I feel Anya breathing in my arms and against my chest.

Thank the Seraphim–she lives.

But the soldiers must be close behind us, so I shake her gently and call her name. She doesn’t wake up.

I remove the dart from her neck, but I know the tranquilizer is already circulating in her blood. It may be hours before she can wake up.

I hoist her body over my shoulder and start to move at a swift pace deeper into the jungle.

I can’t move as fast as before, as the tranquilizer has numbed me and hindered my coordination. It’s a struggle to get and maintain my footing against the thick foliage, and if I move any faster, I risk falling over and dropping Anya.

After trudging through the vegetation and undergrowth for twenty minutes, I catch the first scent of human males. It’s coming from behind us.

I try to push myself to move faster, but hunger tears at me.

Soon I can hear the Imperial soldiers’ awkward footsteps plodding through the jungle, and I know that I will have no option but to make a stand and fight.

I continue moving for now, but I search out straight, sturdy branches as I go. I gather as many branches as I can find, holding them in my free hand, while I clutch to Anya’s warm and soft body with my other.

I start to look for a position to fortify, and soon I reach a raised ridge. The ridge forms a rough convex semi-circle, so that when I look up at it, it’s surrounding me on all sides.

This is the spot.

The ridge extends beyond the maximum range of my vision in either direction, which will be good once I am up on the ridge, but for now it means I’ll need to scale it while holding Anya

I have to leave the thick, heavy branches I’ve gathered at the bottom of the ridge–for now–and I begin to scale the ridge with one hand and two legs. Through the drowsiness, hunger, and exhaustion, my body aches as I climb, gripping to roots and rock as I go, but I push on. If I fall or give up, Anya is as good as dead.

I reach the top of the ridge out of breath, sweat-soaked and panting, and I place Anya against a tree. I prop her head against the trunk of a tree and begin descending the ridge to gather my branches.

I expect the climb to be easier without Anya, but my body is so spent that it almost feels more difficult on the way back up–the branches seem to weigh even more than Anya.

I barely make it to the top, and tempting as it is to catch my breath and rest, I hear the soldiers still progressing close behind, and know I have only precious minutes left.

I reach into my satchel for the small knife I found in Tomas’s room. It will serve as a good weapon at close range, but for now I use it to begin carving sharp points at the ends of the branches.

I cut and hack into the wood, forming rough points. I get them as sharp as I can, but the wood is thick and the knife is small. I hope that the thick density of the wood, and the advantage I gain from the high ground, will be enough for the javelins to cut through the soldiers.

The footsteps are nearly at the bottom of the ridge now, and I can hear the soldiers’ voices.

“The alien is on the high ground,” a man’s voice whispers. “Two heat signatures. The Tsarina is still with him and sedated. Kill the alien, but take the Tsarina alive!”

I sigh in relief. They won’t kill Anya, but if they take her alive, a fate worse than death could await her.

I need to kill every last one of them to protect her.

I grab a javelin and listen for their approach.

“His armor is like a full arsenal!” a soldier hisses. “We need to completely overwhelm him! If you get a good shot, don’t just take it, take ten!”

“Roger,” another says.

Fuck. If only my suit were active, I could take them all out with ease. I remember how I bragged to Anya that I didn’t need the suit, but I can hear no less than twenty soldiers, fully armed.

I have...eight sharp sticks, a small knife, and my ability to shift into bear form. This gives them a slight advantage, depending on their weaponry.

I wait for them to begin climbing the ridge, but I hear them stop short of the ridge line.

I hear small squads of three or four men each fan out to the left and right. Shit. They are flanking me. They are going around the ridge, and they’ll come around from level ground. I need to kill the ones below me before the others can get around the other side, or they’ll completely encircle me.

I look down at Anya to steel my resolve. She’s blissfully asleep and unaware, and if I do my job, she’ll awake none the wiser. But if I fail, she’ll wake up to the man who killed her father–alone and unprotected. I can’t allow that to happen.

I grab the javelin in my hand and pop out from behind the tree.

I hear shocked cries and spot movement out of the far corner of my eye. It’s the squads moving to flank me–they have run out of cover as they walk along the ridge.

I throw the javelin using my full strength. It cuts and swooshes through the air.

Without waiting to see if it will hit–I know it will hit–I dive back behind the tree. Before I’m even behind cover, I hear a roar of gunfire, and suddenly tree bark flies out from both sides. They are unloading their arsenal into the tree.

I hear a grunt, and the smell of blood hits my nose. My javelin hit, but now I’m completely pinned down by gunfire.

“Why the fuck is he throwing twigs at us?” a soldier shouts.

“Twigs? That thing rammed through Chavez’s throat!”

“But it’s no fucking power armor!”

I hear rustling at the ridgeline on either side of me. The flanking teams may have decided to cut me off aggressively, figuring I’m totally pinned down without my biosuit.

I grab a javelin, one in each hand, and crawl on my belly away from the tree and away from Anya. If I want to protect her, I need to draw the fire away from her. If I’m pinned behind that tree, she’s as good as captured.

When the tree is a few dozen meters behind me, I risk standing up to a low crouch and move parallel to the ridgeline.

I hear shouts from below–they know I’m moving.

But before they can pinpoint me, I dive to my belly again and crawl across the foliage like a snake hunting its prey. I smell two men just below me.

As I near the ridgeline, I pop out and throw the javelin straight down at one of the soldiers. It hits him in the forehead, splitting into his skull and killing him instantly.

I throw the second javelin, and then dive away from the ridgeline, still low on my belly.

Gunfire erupts, but I’m clear of their line of fire.

And then I hear metal friction–the sound of pins being pulled.

Grenades.

They couldn’t throw them when I was next to Anya, but now that I’m clear of her, it’s free license to blow me away.

I hear a grenade land just behind me, and I shift to bear form and run.

It explodes behind me, and I feel the heat of the shockwave on the back of my fur. Some broken branches and mulch hit me, but I clear the true force of the blast.

I shift back to Marauder form and run back toward Anya. I need to make sure no one climbs the ridge and grabs her, and I need to get more javelins. Five left, and at least 17 soldiers still standing.

Shit.

I crawl back to the tree, and I feel sick to my stomach realizing that Anya’s presence is shielding me from being pummeled by more grenades and explosives, but I’ll use every edge I can to protect her.

As I grab hold of a javelin, I see someone popping up above the ridge.

He fires, and a bullet tears into me. I throw the javelin on pure instinct and see him fall back.

I hear more soldiers climbing, but I see the soldier’s gun laying on the edge of the ridge. I have to risk going for it.

I drop into a low crawl, and the leaves scrape against my gushing bullet wound. As I crawl, I hear a familiar whirring, and three flyers float up above the ridgeline. Darts hit me from all sides, and I start to feel light-headed.

I take the knife and slash into my own shoulder, forcing adrenaline and pain to shock me back to full consciousness.

It works, but I feel unconsciousness threatening to bring me down. I crawl for the gun, and just before I reach it, a soldier pops above the ridge and hoists himself over right in front of me

I try to get up and drive the knife into him, but before I can slash him, an arrow appears in his chest. He grabs hold of it, gurgles blood from his mouth, and falls backward down the ridge.

From down the ridge and all sides surrounding the soldiers, I hear...it sounds almost like a Marauder battle cry, but yet it’s different.

“Yayayayayayaya!” The voices shriek in unison, and suddenly arrows, spears, and hatchets are flying out from the trees, sinking into soldier after soldier. The soldiers turn away from me and blindly open fire into the trees.

The battle cry stops, and the soldiers begin reloading.

More arrows burst from the forest, and more soldiers fall.

I take the opportunity to grab a javelin, but when I cock my arm to throw it, I get so dizzy that I drop it and collapse to the ground. The javelin falls into the foliage beside me, and my vision begins to fade. The last thing I see before passing out is Anya breathing softly beside me, and I pray to the pure Seraphic Form that we will awake together–or at the least that she will awake –even if it means I have to die for it to happen.

11 Anya

“How do you know this is the Tsarevna?” a man’s voice whispers above me.

“I’m good with faces,” a woman says. “I recognize her from a photograph.”

“When did you see the photo?”

“A few years ago.”

The man huffs.

I open my eyes, and I see the man and woman are both pale white, blonde, and naked as the day they were born.

I’m lying flat on my back, and I’m in some kind of hut made from leaves. I look down to avoid embarrassment, but realize I too am totally naked.

“Ah,” the woman says. “She’s awake!”

“My dress,” I say, feeling my face burning. I try to cover my breasts with my hands and cross my legs, but the man doesn’t seem to be looking at me...at least not like that.

“I told you we should have covered her,” he says. “Look at her blushing! If she really is the Tsarevna, you can’t expect her to walk around naked like we do.”

“Aegus,” I say. “Where’s Aegus?”

“Oh,” the woman says. “The purple fellow with the big teal dick?”

I blush even more at that, but give a slight nod.

“He’s fine,” the man says. “A tough Viyebnutsa. He took on over twenty Imperial bastards with some sharp sticks and a butter knife. He could easily have run away to save himself...but he held his ground against impossible odds to protect you.”

I bite my lip, and remember the drone flying up next to me. It must have darted me, and Aegus watched over me the whole time.

“He killed a full squad of Imperial soldiers?” I ask. “Without any weapons?”

“No,” the woman says. “He killed a handful of them, but he was pumped full of darts. He was ready to die protecting you...but we protected him.”

“Thank you,” I say.

My mouth is still dry, my voice hoarse.

“Could I get some water?”

They hand me a wooden gourd filled with water. The man squats down next to me, and then helps me lift my head to drink.

I drink a few small sips of water, and then lay back down.

“Is Aegus awake?” I ask.

“No,” they say in unison.

The woman smiles. “I’ve never seen someone sleep like that. It’s like he’s hibernating.”

They give me some type of tropical fruit to eat, and I soon have the strength to sit up. I realize I am exhausted, but as the tranquilizer wears off, I realize I’m not injured at all, just drugged and tired. Aegus really did protect me.

“Can I see him?” I ask.

I’m still starkly aware of just how naked I am, but neither look at me as if I were, and since they are naked as well, it doesn’t feel as weird as it otherwise would.

“Oh,” I say. “I’m Anya.”

I reach out my hand.

They look at each other, and the woman gives a smug grin.

“Yes,” I say. “The Tsarina.”

“You mean...your father is dead?” the man asks.

I nod.

“I am Peter,” the man says.

“And I am Nastya,” the woman says.

They both look to be about forty years old, though both are lean and muscled.

Nastya’s hair is dreadlocked and pulled back into a bun, while Peter’s is medium-length, but covered in some kind of plant resin.

I run a hand through my own long hair, and realize that it’s matted and filthy. My hand can barely move a few centimeters through it before hitting an oily snag.

“If you’ll be staying with us,” Nastya says, “you’ll probably want to do something about that.”

“You guys really don’t wear clothes?” I ask.

“It’s too damn hot,” Nastya says. “We have photos of our great grandparents wearing leaves and stuff, but you figure you can see everything anyway–leaf or no leaf–and I guess we just stopped caring about that somewhere along the line.”

I nod. They are both so white, like relics of pre-Imperial Russia. It’s an odd contrast to the ancient photos of dark-skinned tribespeople in the old rainforests of Earth.

“I understand,” I say.

They give each other approving looks, but I sense some nervousness or apprehension beneath the surface.

‘What is it?” I ask.

“Not everyone thinks you should stay here,” Peter says.

“I understand,” I say. “You’ve already had to fight Imperial soldiers because of us, and they won’t give up.”

“Oh, uh…,” Nastya says. “We should tell her!”

Peter nods and beckons to me while pulling up the tent flap.

I follow him and Nastya outside.

As soon as I step outside, I see more naked people than I’ve ever seen before. And they are all ghostly white, as the UV rays can’t get through Venus’s thick atmosphere. They are all busy: a small team is carving a long tree trunk, a mixed group of men and women is sorting through a large pile of berries and twigs, and one man is red rather than white.

He’s covered in blood, though he’s smiling and laughing, so it must not be his blood.

Everyone looks at me as I exit the tent, but they quickly lose interest and go back to what they were doing.

“Did he fight against the soldiers?” I ask.

“No,” Peter says. “That’s boar’s blood. And look at this!”

He reaches into a woven basket and pulls out what looks like a big purple fruit covered in more blood. Painted on the fruit is a face that’s full of suffering, and there are triangular ears tacked onto the top with wooden skewers.

“Is...that supposed to be Aegus?”

“Yep!” Peter says. “We let a few of them live, and our drama guys painted this up in a hurry. We made a big show of throwing him down behind a tree and swinging a hatchet, then we held this thing up and warned them to never come back.”

“They’ll come back for me, though,” I say.

Peter reaches into the basket and holds up another bloody fruit, but this one looks vaguely like me.

“Oh,” I say. “I see.”

“They will believe you are both dead,” Nastya says. “But we must hold a vote to see if you can stay here among us.”

I nod, but say nothing. I don’t want to speak for Aegus until he’s awake. I don’t want to stay here, I want to get back to Sankt Petersburg and kill General Bahamut...but I realize also just how unrealistic that is given the circumstances.

Aegus spoke of his original plan: to recruit the tribes and get them to fight. Maybe that is what we will have to do.

“What do you call yourselves?” I ask.

“We told you our names,” Peter says. “Are you feeling dizzy, Anya? Any bruises or tender spots on your head, or–”

“No,” I say. “Sorry, I mean...your tribe. What is it called?”

“Oh,” Peter says. “Each jungle has its own tribe...they aren’t big enough to hold multiple tribes, and we make sure to stay harmonious. Trade, war, or conflict between jungles almost never happens. If we ever do need to communicate between tribes, we just call ourselves Vosyem.

“Eight?” I ask.

As the Tsar’s daughter, I was expected to learn Russian–to an extent–but that tradition had been more and more diluted over the generations, to the point where I can barely remember how to count. English had become the Lingua Franca of the solar system centuries ago, and almost all the old languages are totally dead...except in isolated pockets such as these floating jungles.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “I think this was the eighth floating forest they made, so all the tribes just have a number.”

The eighth one. This must be one of the very oldest floating jungles, which is why all of the tribespeople look so much like a time capsule of the first Venusian colonists from old Russia.

“You want to see Aegus?” Nastya asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Please.”

We are in a large clearing. When I look up, I see we are below the highest part of the dome, so we are in the dead-center of the jungle.

The empty center of the clearing is where most of the bustle and activity is happening. There are more tribespeople than I can count, and even deep in the forest and high in the treetops I can see what look like the tribespeople’s huts and dwellings.

Nastya leads me through the clearing and among a maze of huts and naked people. Finally we stop at one of the huts. Outside are two lithe women with spears and scowls. They are not standing rigid like Imperial guards, but even their lounged posture reminds me more of a panther ready to strike than someone taking a break.

Nastya nods to the women, and they step away from the entranceway.

“We have to guard him,” Nastya says. “As I said...not everyone wants you here. We have done our best to stay isolated from the civil war, so many think that harboring an alien warrior could bring us into an even bigger war.”

“And what do you think?” I ask.

Nastya huffs. “All I know is that this one can fight. I don’t want to send away good fighters.”

Aegus is lying flat on his back, as naked as ever.

Nastya grins. “They are calling him Yelda...as a term of respect.”

“Yelda?” I say. “I’m sorry...but Russian is all but dead in the cities.”

“It means huge penis,” Nastya says. She points down to Aegus’s big teal dick. “Yelda!”

I focus on my breathing to avoid blushing. “I thought you didn’t...focus on that.”

“When something is that big,” Nasty says, “you don’t need to focus on it. It’s just there! Have you ridden it?”

Now I do blush, my face burning so hot I feel forced to look away from her, as if my skin will melt off.

“Hmmm,” Nastya says. “It seems you have not. A shame.”

“No,” I say. “I was forced together with him. This stupid Yelda ruined everything for me, and my life has been a total mess since he stepped into it.”

Nastya nods, and gives me a knowing look. “Tell yourself what you must, Tsarina, but if you do want to ride this one, you will need to stake a claim on him soon. If he’s allowed to stay, all of our strongest warriors will want to take Yelda into their tents.”

Stake a claim? Seriously?

“Nastya,” I say. “Aegus says that half of the Marauder fleet wants to eradicate humanity. Just because you’re on a jungle floating on Venus doesn’t mean you’ll be safe. I’ve only been Tsarina for a matter of days, and I’ve been on the run the entire time...but as Tsarina I respect the tribes’ isolation and autonomy.”

“Yes,” Nastya says, “But…”

“But,” I say. “Would you fight to preserve that? Even if the Marauders don’t kill you, do you really expect someone like General Bahamut to leave you be? Think of what happened to the rain forests on old Earth...what’s to stop that from happening here?”

“I never said I am not willing to fight,” Nastya says. “Only that many here want no part in these external squabbles. There are those of us who would argue that stripping the jungles for short-term gain would stop the terraforming of the planet and leave the surface of Venus forever out of reach. They would argue that the Empire would not risk this.”

“It didn’t stop them on Earth,” I say.

“I only am trying to tell you what you are up against,” Nastya says. “Perhaps I would fight, given the right circumstances.”

I look down at Aegus, and I can’t even tell if he’s breathing. I put a hand on his neck to feel for a pulse, and only after waiting many moments do I feel a faint sign of life.

“Is this why you say he’s hibernating?” I ask.

“Partly,” Nastya says. “But also because we saw him turn into a giant purple bear.”

Maybe he really is hibernating.

I see that his legs and shoulders are wrapped in some type of leaves.

“Was he hurt?”

“Shot many times,” Nastya says. “But he is healing at a tremendous rate. More evidence of some kind of hibernation process.”

“Do you mind if I stay here with him?” I ask. “If he wakes up and sees a familiar face, he’s less likely to do something insanely stupid.”

Nastya nods and smirks at me. She looks down at my breasts and says, “I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you when he wakes.”

She starts to leave the hut, but just before she throws the hide-skinned flap down, she says, “Don’t forget to stake your claim!”

The floor of the hut is simply the same packed dirt found in the clearing, but it’s comfortable enough to sit on.

I have no idea how long it will take for Aegus to wake up, but I’m worried that if he does wake up and is surrounded by strange people, he might attack them on instinct.

He also nearly died protecting me, and I at least owe it to him to be there and thank him when he wakes.

I intend to stay awake and wait for him, but my eyelids get heavy. I lay my head down on the ground convincing myself that I will take a short rest.

* * *

I wake up with my arms wrapped around Aegus. I realize I must have just done it while asleep, so it’s not like I chose to do it.

And we’re both naked, so it almost looks like...like I staked my claim.

But damn, his body feels so good against me. My breasts are pressing into his strong arms, and I can feel his chiseled abs beneath my palms.

And yet it’s totally wrong, and I need to pull away. I will, too, after a few more seconds…

Suddenly Aegus’s eyes pop open, and those jade green eyes peer into mine.

His ears prick straight up, and a devilish grin covers his entire face.

I let go of him and jump to my feet.

“Shit!” I shout. “Shit, shit, shit! Aegus...I’m sorry, I–”

“You can’t claim you were cold,” he says. “We’re both sweating in this sweltering heat.”

“I fell asleep,” I stammer. “I...I...I just woke up like that, God–”

“Your body knows what it wants better than your mind,” he says, sitting up. “I am fully rested, but I have ravenous hunger.”

“I’ll go see if I can get you some fruit,” I say. “They had boar’s meat cooking, too, let me–”

He grabs me by the forearm before I can leave, and I force myself to look away.

“I’m not hungry for food,” he says. “Well, that’s not quite true. I’m always hungry for food. But right now, I’m most hungry for you.”

His other hand cups my chin, and slowly he pulls my head so my gaze has to connect with his.

We lock eyes with each other, but I’m paralyzed by fear...and excitement, and the butterflies fluttering around in my stomach.

“Women do not stake claims,” he says. “This is a male’s job.”

His ears twitch, and he narrows his eyes at me.

I stammer again, at a loss for words. I can’t get a single cohesive thought to settle in my head–forget about actually speaking.

“And even if I believed in their ways,” he says, “I’d never let another woman claim me. I want what I want. You.”

His eyes fall down, probing my body. Though his grip is on my wrist, I can nearly feel him touching me as his eyes rove up and down my body, fueled by lust and desire.

“One thing I agree with these tribes about,” he says, “is the lack of clothing. Finally I see you, Anya.”

I still can’t get any words out of my mouth. I feel that if I could, I’d tell him to stop, that this is too much. But that’s not what my body feels, and my body must be stopping me from saying something so stupid. From throwing this moment away.

And my body is burning for him. Burning hot and wet. I feel myself leaning into him, remembering our first kiss, and wanting to feel that–and more–more than anything.

I lean further in, and just as I decide I will go for it–seize what I want and stake my claim–he pulls me into him with frightening speed.

Suddenly our naked bodies are pressed against each other, and his huge arms wrap around me. Our lips are warm and wet as they press together, and the blissful wetness of his tongue fills my mouth, roaming and dancing. I surrender fully to him, and my hands grip his muscled back. I slide my palms down across his sweaty and glistening skin.

I can no longer resist him, and I reach down and grab his big cock, his Yelda, in my hand. It’s so thick that I can’t even close my hand all the way around it, and it’s impossibly warm. I can feel it throbbing in my palm, and it grows harder as I squeeze. The thick veins press against me, and as I begin to stroke up and down his incredible length, I feel the friction reduce, and my hand becomes wet.

I run my thumb up along his head, but I don’t feel the thick pre-come I expect.

“How is it so wet--?”

“Marauder dicks are self-lubricating,” he says. “Don’t stop.”

Self-lubricating? Holy shit. Considering how big his cock is, it better be self-lubricating. Even then, I wonder how it can possibly fit inside me.

I stroke him up and down, and his hard, calloused hands run up and down my body.

“Are you sure you’re recovered?” I ask.

“Fully,” he says.

He squeezes my ass cheeks, and I bury my face into his wide chest, moaning.

I stroke his dick harder as his hands run up my sides and finally find my breasts. He cups them gently at first, but his fingers are impatient, and they soon take hold my nipples.

When he squeezes my nipples, the electric shock running through me, it’s all I can do but squeeze his cock and continue moaning into his chest. His dick vibrates as I squeeze it. I can’t even imagine how it might feel inside me.

But his dick is slick with lube, and my hard grip just causes my hand to slide along his shaft, and each time I try to regain my grip, it slides again.

He groans in pleasure as I stroke him, and when he dives down and attacks my breasts with his mouth and tongue, I buck my hips wildly.

He takes my whole nipple into his mouth. He squeezes my breasts as he sucks and tongues my embarrassingly erect nipple.

“God,” I say. “It feels so good…”

I don’t know if I’m talking about his rock-hard dick or the feeling of his tongue flicking and licking against my nipple–maybe I mean both, or maybe I mean everything about this moment.

I dig my nails into his back as I continue stroking him with one hand. I look down at his big teal cock and suddenly want to taste it.

I fall to my knees, and with the same hunger and intensity that he devoted to my nipples, I wrap my lips around the thick, wide girth of the head of his cock.

I barely can get the head into my mouth, but I push on, sucking hard as I go.

I hear a loud slurping pop and I clear the ridges of his head, and suddenly the thick veins of his shaft are pressed against my tongue. The lube on his cock tastes like the essence of masculinity–I can imagine Marauder dick lube would be highly sought after as cologne for human men...if they could get past wearing an alien’s dick juices on their skin.

I suck with hunger, savoring the taste of him, and each time he grunts and moans, I feel a rush of pleasure spiking down my spine to my center.

I start to bob my head back and forth, taking as much of him as I can into my mouth with each stroke, and I gently cup his balls as I work him further into a frenzy.

As much as I want to fuck him, I have a sudden urge to see him come. To feel his seed spilling hot and sticky all over me. There will be plenty of time to feel him inside me, but I suddenly want nothing more than to feel a thick and warm Marauder load as it dumps all over me.

So I suck and tongue him with fury, until suddenly the head of his cock swells impossibly large, and his body tightens and tenses.

I suck faster and harder–a few more strokes–and then I pull my mouth away.

The lube and spit forms a gleaming line between my lip and his cock, and then it breaks as I squeeze him with my hand and stroke for all I’m worth.

I stand up to get the most power I can, and I feel a huge thrill seeing this seven-foot-tall alien who can kill dozens of fully armed Imperial soldiers with no real weapons melting like butter in my hands. He could kill any man with ease, but when I hold his dick in my hand, he’s mine.

I stroke hard as his balls tighten, and suddenly the biggest load of come I’ve ever seen explodes all over my chest. He blasts thick rivulets onto me, until my tits are soaked in Marauder seed, dripping down and off my nipples, seeping between my breasts. Warm blast after warm blast pounds onto me, and I can’t help but laugh and moan as he empties everything onto me.

When he finally stops coming, I let go off his cock and laugh.

“Yelda…” I say.

He twitches his ears and cocks his head at me.

I wipe some of his warm seed onto my finger and lick it clean.

“You taste so good,” I say.

“Bend over,” he says.

“What–”

“On your knees, Tsarina!” he orders, roughly grabbing hold of my waist.

He pushes me back onto my knees, and I hold my upper body up with my hands.

He slaps his hard and come-covered cock onto my ass cheeks.

“How are you already hard after coming like that?” I ask, already panting.

“You haven’t come,” he says.

“Yeah...but you sure did, take a break and–”

“Marauders do not lose their erection until the female has come,” he says.

Holy shit. I do need to stake my claim. Or let him stake me. Hard and deep.

“So make me come, Yelda,” I say.

“I do not know what this word means,” Aegus says. “But you will pay for insulting me.”

I assume he’s teasing me, but his voice is deadpan, and he leaves me just enough in the dark that I feel a little bit of fear. Which makes me wet and ready for–

There’s an intense pressure, and my lips are pressed apart by the soaking wet and warm battering ram that is Aegus’s big cock.

It slides into me, stretching me impossibly wide, and though there’s a sharp pain, it melts into blissful ecstasy as my juices soak around his huge dick.

“That’s just the beginning,” he says.

“Uh-huh,” I say, moaning and groaning more than speaking.

He fondles my breasts while waiting like that, partially inside me. I feel my inner walls adapting to his incredible girth, and soon I’m ready to take several more inches of him inside me.

I buck my hips slightly, asking for it, and Aegus obliges.

He presses deeper into me, and it’s so tight that I can feel the bulging veins on his shaft as they slide against my wet insides.

“God! Aegus!” I scream, breathless.

He feels so fucking massive inside me, and the way he grips my waist with those solid hands makes me feel more secure and protected than I’ve ever felt–and I grew up with my father’s royal guards surrounding us.

This one man–this one alien–could keep me safer than any army, and he’s already proven he’ll never let anything happen to me.

He slides further in, and my eyes roll back into my head from the sheer force of the feeling.

“Anya…” he says, in a reverent tone. He lets out a low growl. “Anya…”

And then he slaps my ass so hard it burns, and I feel myself gushing in response. Before I can even scream, he begins thrusting in and out of me so hard and fast that my elbows slip out from under me, and I fall chest-first to the ground.

“Good,” Aegus says. “Get that beautiful ass up in the air for me, just like that.”

He squeezes my hips, pressing his thumbs into my soft ass cheeks, and thrusts even harder and deeper. His hips slap against my ass, and my ass and thighs shake each time he pounds into me with a wet slap. My pussy seeps come all over him, and he slides in and out of me so impossibly deep.

But I want more, and I rock my hips against him, hoping to get those few fractions of an inch deeper inside me. His balls are hitting against me with each thrust, and I’m drooling and moaning all over the floor, as if nearly all of my consciousness has gone to my burning hot pussy and clit. I have no control over my body.

And then, as if reading my mind, his hand slides across my belly and reaches for my clit as he slams me with his Yelda.

His finger goes straight to my clit, and it’s so swollen and soaking wet that it’s not at all oversensitive when he touches it directly and rubs it while he fucks me.

It sends a new shock wave through me. My adrenaline surges and my pussy clenches tight against him.

He slams in and out, speeding up with each thrust. He slaps me hard on my other cheek, and I writhe in pain and pleasure.

Through our moans, the thick, rhythmic and wet slapping of our bodies beats like a steady drum, and I fall inevitably closer and closer to explosive relief.

He shoves me flat onto the ground, but doesn’t slow down his thrusts. His hard body slides against my back, and I feel all the hard ridges of his muscles against me.

His elbows are digging into the dirt on both sides of me, and he kisses and licks my neck as he fucks me into oblivion.

I begin to twitch and writhe as the most glorious orgasm seizes control of my body. My pussy squeezes Aegus’s cock like a vice, and he grunts.

“Anya, ugh, it’s–ahhh! Fuck!”

I feel his cock swell inside me, and I scream all the air out of my lungs.

And Aegus blasts hot alien come into my pussy, in loads just as big and thick as before, but now each one is filling me up inside. I feel as if I will burst.

Warm electricity surges through me, and icy hot blasts of pleasure and shock rock me so hard I lose sense of time and place. I can feel nothing but this union between us, and I exist solely in that space where his warm loads flow deep into me and oozes out of me and down my thighs.

As I sink back to reality, to the dirt-packed floor of the leafy tent, now soaked in come, I feel his cock throbbing inside me.

But it’s no longer filling me up. All the come is dripping out of me like a stream, and a warm blanket of well-being washes across me.

“Now,” Aegus says. “Tell me what Yelda means.”

12 Aegus

When we finally clean ourselves up and walk out of the hut, I notice two strong women with spears just outside the doorway.

I narrow my eyes. I’d seen women on Mars fighting with guns or piloting fighter ships, and it was difficult to accept at first, but I eventually realized that weapons like guns and ships require no face-to-face violence. But spears? That’s another thing entirely.

I look at Anya to confirm the ridiculousness of a woman fighting with a spear, and her face is burning red.

Is she angry or embarrassed at the idea of women fighting in hand-to-hand combat? I can’t be sure.

“Seriously?” Anya says, getting right up into one of their faces. “You just stood there. The whole time?”

The woman slams the blunt end of her spear down into the dirt, so the point is going skyward.

“Of course,” she says. “We stand guard.”

“But...but…” Anya stammers.

Oh. I realize now Anya is worried that these woman heard the loud orgasm I gave her. She doesn’t care about the unsuitable nature of women fighting in close quarters.

The woman grabs Anya by the shoulder and smiles wide. “Congratulations! You have staked your claim...loudly! All the women have heard and know that it is you alone who rides Yelda.”

Now I get in the woman’s face. “Tell me! What is Yelda?”

“You,” she says, sticking a finger into my chest, “are Yelda.”

She pulls her finger back, then lowers it until it’s pointing right at my cock.

“Yelda,” she says. “Big cock.”

Anya charges into the woman, ripping the spear from the dirt.

The two women topple naked to the ground together, and my eyes widen in shock–but I can’t bring myself to stop this. It’s too funny. And I want to see Anya win.

I notice the other guard just standing with her arms crossed. She must have the same idea as me.

Anya grabs at the guard’s dreadlocks and tugs, and the guard digs her nails into Anya’s shoulder.

Anya pulls harder on the dreadlocks, swings the wooden shaft of the spear, and slams it against the back of the guard’s head. She grunts and rolls onto her back.

Anya springs on top of the guard and slaps her face. “Do not touch him!”

I pull Anya off before she decides to really hurt the guard.

The guard spits out some blood and starts laughing. “You could be a strong fighter! And no one can doubt you’ve staked your claim! I am Irena.”

She leaps to her feet without even using her hands, and snatches the spear from Anya’s grasp.

The other guard nods to us, “And I am Yulia. Come with us, it’s time to hear your story, Yelda.”

Yulia’s head is shaved completely bald, in contrast to Irena’s long dreadlocks.

They begin to lead us back toward the center of the dome.

I look down at Anya as we walk and I smile. She has bloody nail marks on her shoulder, and she’s gritting her teeth at the women in front of her.

“What?” she snaps at me.

“I didn’t think women should fight hand-to-hand,” I say. “But you’ve changed my mind.”

She scowls at me, but I grin wide and grab hold of her waist as we walk.

I begin to understand: a male’s greatest strength in battle is usually anger, while a female would always seem to fight with her full heart. Even when I fought to protect Anya, I was channeling everything to anger, but women have much greater depth and range of emotions than anger and pride.

They also have jealousy.

I catch myself laughing, but I quickly seal my lips and force a neutral expression.

Anya scowls up at me, and another laugh escapes from inside me.

“What?” she glowers, her eyes so narrow they are nearly closed.

“I see you are angry at me, but do not pull my hair,” I say, chuckling.

As we near the center of the dome and the tribe’s clearing, we see a big fire with hundreds gathered around it.

Closer still, we see five older men and women clustered off from the rest of the group.

“Those,” Anya says, tilting her head toward them, “are probably the tribe elders. The decision makers.”

I notice that three of them are women. If I had seen this shortly after arriving in the humans’ solar system, I’d have laughed it off as a joke, but I know well enough–after almost ten years here–not to say anything.

“Yelda, Tsarina,” the oldest looking woman says as we approach. “Welcome. We rarely have need to meet together like this and exercise our authority as elders...but here you two are.”

It could sound as if she were blaming us for being here, but there’s no real spite in her voice.

The old man behind her–on the other hand–his arms crossed and glaring at me, seems quite spiteful.

I expect there to be some type of ceremonial procedure before we get down to business, and the smell of boar meat roasting over the fire has my mouth watering. My stomach feels empty as the deep, empty space between galaxies. I pray to the Seraphic Form that the elders will offer us some–

“Let’s get right down to it. Cut through the crap,” Yuri says. “Tell us, why are you here, and why should we let you stay?”

I gaze longingly at the meat, dripping juices as the smoke rises up against it–and the golden glaze and black char forming on the skin–and force myself to focus on the task at hand.

“Elders,” I say. “First, the Tsarina and I apologize for barging into your territory and bringing Imperial soldiers with us.”

The man uncrosses his arms and says in a low voice, “Tsars and Tsarinas never apologize. You speak on behalf of her,” he points an accusing finger at Anya. “Yet she dares not speak?”

“No,” Anya says. “But I am a different kind of ruler, and I do apologize. I also thank you all for saving our lives and taking us in, even if you decide it will be just for a few days. Though I truly hope it will not come to that. Aegus–Yelda–wants nothing more than to end this war, and I truly think the tribes no longer have the luxury of sitting this out. You may be able to remain isolated for a few more years, but sooner or later, the war will come to you, and it will be too late to fight then.”

The elder crosses his arms again and grunts.

“What is your plan, Yelda?” the woman asks me.

I look at all the glassy eyes focused on me. Hundreds of them. These tribes started out as scientists, but I see no sign of any real technology anywhere in their settlement. I’m not sure how much I need to dumb down my explanation, but I suspect they will resent me if I assume they are ignorant.

“The Marauder fleet has split into two factions,” I say. “The ships are all nearly side-by-side, but they are delaying open conflict until they arrive in your solar system. One faction, my faction, wants to peacefully co-exist with humanity. The other wants to annihilate every last one of you. They will not care if you are living on an isolated jungle like this, they will destroy you if given the chance.”

“Your faction sounds weak,” the man snarls. “If they will lose anyway, we may as well enjoy the time we have left in peace.”

“My faction will win,” I say. “I’ve spent the last five years setting up antimatter scoops in orbit around Jupiter. The nano-factory on Titan has been building mines packed with antimatter. A few months ago we deployed a minefield toward the incoming fleet, and when detonated it can destroy every last ship.”

“You’d destroy your own race to protect us?” the woman asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I would,” I say. “But there’s another way, though it’s not without its sacrifices. Within my faction there’s been a lottery, and half of all Marauders loyal to me will die for the cause. They will eject themselves into interstellar space, along with all the life support machinery needed to keep them alive.”

The man laughs at me and shakes his head. “Why?”

“This will cut off enough mass from my faction’s ships that they will cut off their engines a week before the minefield hits. While the enemy faction’s ships continue braking, my ships will zoom past, and once they are out of the detonation range, we blow the minefield and annihilate the enemies.”

“What’s to stop the enemies from cutting their engines too?” he asks.

“Idiot!” the old woman says, shoving him. “If they stop braking without shedding the extra mass, they will fly right through our solar system, like a wild boar with a bee up its ass.”

I nod. It seems the tribes didn’t lose their understanding of science even after hundreds of years.

“So the wise, all-powerful Yelda,” the man says, scoffing, “has already taken care of everything. Why do you need our wooden spears and arrows when you have antimatter minefields?”

“Because,” I say, “when my faction arrives, their goal is peaceful co-existence. Think of what they will see when they get here. The habitats looking down on the surface dwellers, the Martians fighting against Earth, and Venus as a puppet planet ruled by a brutal dictator. It’s clear to me that the Empire is the problem. Do you trust General Bahamut to leave your jungles untouched?”

The elders stay stone-faced, but the crowds further away all start murmuring and whispering with each other.

“What exactly do you want us to do?” the old woman asks.

“I talk about these two Marauder factions as if they are clear-cut with no grey area, but surely there will be people still on the fence even among my faction. The worse the situation here is when they arrive, the greater chance they will splinter off and give up on humanity. They’ll follow my lead for a while, but if this civil war drags on, I can’t guarantee anything. My faction’s ships will arrive in just over six months, and they are going to attack Earth directly. Hard and fast.”

“And what about us here on Venus?” the man asks.

“Marauders can swarm Earth with drop pods. Millions of Marauder warriors can take out every last Imperial soldier while sparing the civilians. This won’t work on Venus. We can’t crush the Imperial elements here without destroying the cities. We need you.”

I point to the elders, and then out to all the surrounding tribespeople.

“I don’t trust him,” the old man says.

“I do,” the woman says. “Who else sides with Yuri?”

There’s a weak shout and sad showing of hands among the crowd.

Yuri stamps off and mutters, and the old woman smiles.

“So we will fight,” she says. “Not for you, but for Venus, and for our home. What else do you need?”

“Ships,” I say. “A lot of ships.”

“Luckily we have those,” she says, grinning. “Hidden well away.”

13 Fenrir

On Jupiter’s moon, Titan

I watch the screen. My fists are balled up tight, and I dig my nails into my palms. My chest is tight against my pounding heart. Phase two of Aegus’s plan is about to begin. The friendly ships are tens of millions of kilometers in front of the enemy’s ships.

Everything I see on the feed now happened a month ago, as the fleet was a light-month away when the minefield detonated. But this is the first time we’re seeing if Aegus’s plan worked.

“Relax, Brother Fenrir,” Dr. Wang says. “This all happened already a month ago, we’re only just now able to see the lightwaves! So whether you worry or not cannot change the outcome. Mr. Einstein not only found out about the limits of light-speed, but postulated also that time is simply a fourth spacial dimension...so either way you look at it, we cannot change the outcome!”

“That’s an obnoxiously logical way to look at it,” I say through gritted teeth.

I look around the room, and everyone seems just as nervous as me. Except for Dr. Wang.

“My wife is pregnant, Dr. Wang,” I say. “If this minefield doesn’t work, what future does my child have?”

Dr. Wang never answers questions that don’t suit him, and this is no exception.

The screen in front of us is a feed from our most powerful orbital telescope, and it shows around one hundred pinpricks of light. It looks like a field of stars laid out in a grid. Each little star is the antimatter engine of an enemy Marauder ship.

There’s a timer below–a countdown to the detonation. It reads two hours.

Suddenly, one of the engines cuts off.

“Shit!” I shout, my ears standing as rigid as they’ve ever been. “Wang, what the fuck?”

“Erm,” he says. “It’s possible they spotted the minefield.”

“It’s too late, right?” I ask.

Wang pulls out his tablet and starts hitting buttons. “Hmmm,” he says.

“Don’t ‘hmmm’ me! Tell me it’s too fucking late for them to dodge the field!”

Five more lights cut off. “Shit! Shit!” I shout.

Wang hunches over his tablet, and I shout loudly at all the scientists and physicists and other assholes to figure out what’s going on.

Over the next hour, twenty more ships cut their engines, leaving just over half still on course for the center of the explosion.

“Okay,” Wang says. “The first few ships that cut their engines. If, and this is a big ‘if,’ if they cut their engines, turn all the way back around, and restart their engines toward us...they might escape the blast.”

“The first few,” I say. “How many ships?”

“Six,” he says.

Six too many. Even one hostile ship like that–one antimatter torpedo launched into Mars–could destroy everything in the universe that I care about.

There’s nothing left for us to do but watch.

My adrenaline never stops pumping, and as the countdown approaches two minutes, I feel a thick rush of blood burning through my rock-hard, perked-up ears.

“Aegus,” I hiss. “You cocky fucking shit. If this doesn’t work…”

10, 9, 8, 7, 6…

The countdown hits zero, and nothing happens.

I inhale and hold my breath, and just before I let it all out in a roaring expletive of anger and despair, the entire screen flashes pure white.

“Boom!” Dr. Wang says, “See, Brother Fenrir, I told you–”’

“Shut up!” I shout. “When will we know for sure?”

The light begins to fade away, and when all the white is gone, there’s nothing left on the screen but black space and the regular constellations.

It’s what we were supposed to see, but how many of those six ships have survived?

“We’ll know within an hour, I’d wager,” Dr. Wang says. “Every extra moment they spend not braking will mean more mass they need to shed, more lives and life support ejected. They’ll need to get those engines back on ASAP.”

“Wang!” I shout. “What is your first name.”

“Arthur,” he says.

“Thanks, Wang,” I say.

“Why did you ask me that if you’re just going to call me Wang?”

“Because,” I say, “if Fiona wants to name our kid ‘Arthur,’ I’ll tell her no.”

A low chuckle reverberates through the room, but I was dead serious. That smug bastard scientist has been on my nerves ever since I landed on Titan, and it’s easier to take my anger out on him than it is to worry about what I might see on that godforsaken screen.

Suddenly, a new star appears, and moments later, a second.

“Shit!” I roar. “Two fucking ships.”

“So far,” Wang says.

I growl at him.

We wait for several hours, and decide that it really is only two ships.

“Two ships,” I say. “That’s four hundred thousand Marauders hell-bent on obliterating humanity. On killing my wife and child.”

“Hmmm,” Wang says.

I grind my teeth together. “What?”

“Their dodging the mines will mean they’ll have to sacrifice an incredible number of crew and life support systems if they want to brake in time. It will be much fewer than four hundred thousand.”

I sigh. “Get an encrypted message sent to Venus. Let him know.”

“Aegus may not even be alive,” Wang says. “The Imperials are claiming he was killed on Venus—“

“Fucking do it!” I shout.

14 Anya

Six Months Later

I pull back the bowstring. My arm is strong now, and I pull the bow back with ease. I still remember my first attempts, unable to even get the arrow knocked.

I steady my breathing and take aim at the boar.

Just before I release the string, the boar squeals and dashes to the side. I keep calm, and I lead the boar, moving the bow along with it as it runs.

The arrow flies, and I lead it just right. The arrow lodges into the boar’s neck, and it topples to the ground.

“Clean shot,” Aegus says, putting a hand on the small of my back. “No pain.”

He runs his hand up my body to my hair, which is now thick with dreadlocks.

“It will be different when I get my shot at Bahamut,” I say, lowering the bow.

I see a subtle twitch of the ears from Aegus. I’d not have noticed it months ago, but now I know it means he’s worried about something, but stubbornly will not say anything.

I sigh at him and walk toward the fallen boar.

I pull out my arrow and wipe it clean on the leaves of a nearby tree, while Aegus hoists the 100-kilogram boar onto his broad and chiseled back.

He’s recharged his biosuit to full capacity on boar’s meat, fruit, and bugs, but he’s not used it since. He’s saving it for the coming battle. Which means I’ve enjoyed his full nakedness for the past six months...and he’s enjoyed mine.

If he weren’t mad at me now, I’d consider taking him right now here on jungle floor, but he’s definitely mad at me. He avoids my gaze as he hauls the boar back toward the village.

After far too many silent steps, he says in a low whisper. “I can hear your every footstep.”

“I’m not trying to sneak up on you.”

“You never know when you’re being tracked, so always walk quietly.”

I stop walking, and he takes a few steps without me before stopping himself.

“I didn’t mean to stop walking entirely,” he says.

“Why don’t you just say what you mean then,” I snap back.

He turns to face me, the big bloodied boar still hoisted across his back, and he’s hunched down looking at me with his ears pulled back.

“Forget it,” he says. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“Aegus,” I say. “Put the fucking hog down and talk to me. Now.”

He huffs.

“Drop the pig, Yelda!”

He throws the boar down, and it jiggles as it hits the ground. His purple body is sweaty, and his muscles are bulging and glistening.

“How fast do you think you can fire that bow?” he says, pointing at me.

I look down at the bow, clutching three arrows in my right hand.

“I don’t know,” I say. “A few seconds?”

“Turn around,” he says, “and close your eyes.”

He still seems mad, and I know I’m not going to get a sexy surprise, so I start to feel a nervous tightness forming in my chest.

“Why?”

“I want to show you what is bothering me,” he says. “If I tell you, you’ll deny it.”

“Fine,” I shout, and I turn around and close my eyes.

“If your bow is drawn before I’m on top of you,” I hear his voice say. “You win.”

“Win what?” I ask.

“Stop talking,” he says, “and listen. Count to ten, and then turn back around and open your eyes.”

I’m starting to feel fucking furious at him for being a cryptic asshole, but I decide to play along with his little game, if only to prove him wrong.

I start counting back from ten, and I listen as closely as I can.

I hear the regular sounds of the jungle, which I barely even notice anymore. Birds chirping, crickets buzzing, leaves rustling– but I don’t hear Aegus moving. The arrogant bastard is trying to prove to me how quietly he can move. I do move quietly, but he has alien and bear super hearing...it’s not my fault he can hear so well.

I reach zero and spin around, opening my eyes.

I’m hoping to catch sight of purple skin, but I see nothing but green and brown. He could have cleared a lot of distance in ten seconds, and he could have gone in any direction.

He was standing about five meters in front of me when I first closed my eyes, and he could easily have gone another twenty meters in either direction.

I grip the bow and nock an arrow, dropping the other two to my feet.

The moment the arrows hit the ground, I see leaves rustling to my left. As long as he’s more than a few meters away, I’ll see his big purple ass coming in time to draw the bow, I don’t know what Aegus is trying to prove, but he’s going to fail. The only way he could sneak up on me would be…

I start to spin around, and I pull on the arrow and start to draw the bow even before I can look over my shoulder. When I’ve turned only about forty-five degrees, I feel the bow snatched out of my hands. I finally turn around only to see Aegus’s smug grin towering above me, my bow in his hand.

I’m left holding just the arrow.

“You see–” he starts to say.

I raise the arrow up like a weapon. “I could jab this into your stupid face!”

He snatches it out of my hand before I can even blink.

I grit my teeth at him. “You cheated,” I shriek. “You snuck up behind me, making out like you’d come from the front, as if it was all about whether I could draw the bow fast enough after seeing you.”

“No,” he says. “I did what anyone trying to kill you would do. I took advantage of the situation, and you failed to defend yourself.”

“So you’re mad at me,” I say, “because I’m not an elite fucking warrior after six months of training?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not mad. I’m worried. You talk about killing Bahamut as if you will lead the charge into the palace.”

I glare up at him. And I realize that I have imagined the attack this way, with me leading a charge of warriors into the palace. I don’t admit this to Aegus, of course.

“You can’t blame me for wanting to kill him,” I say.

“We have to kill him,” Aegus says. “For the greater good, not just for revenge–”

“Come on!” I shout. “You know that’s not why you’re mad. Don’t preach that shit to me.”

He narrows his eyes at me.

“This stupid test,” I say, snatching an arrow from the ground and poking it toward him. “You don’t care about why I want to fight, you just don’t want me to fight.”

“I want to have something to fight for,” Aegus says, leaning into me. “If I lost you…”

“The only way you’ll lose me,” I say, “is if you force me to stay safe while you and all the others fight my battle for me. How could I live with myself after that? Whatever you see in me, it would be gone if I let you, Yulia, Irena...even old ass Yuri, take back my own palace. What would I be then?”

“Beautiful,” Aegus says, gently gripping my chin. “Charming, radiant…” His other hand grabs my waist and pulls me tight against him. “And safe.”

I punch him hard in his ribs, but it just hurts my fist.

“Mark my words, Aegus,” I say. “I will take back my palace.”

He reaches down and squeezes my butt. “And I will take you...to bed!”

He flings me up and hoists me over his shoulder. I laugh and pound him with my fists, no longer angry, and he starts to carry me back toward the village like one of the wild boars. His prize.

“Aegus!”

“You can’t talk me out of this,” he says. “I will make you come so hard you’ll be too tired to fight–”

“Aegus, the boar!”

He stops and spins back around, making me dizzy as I hang over his shoulder.

“Ah,” he says.

He places me down gently. “I still mean what I said.”

“I know.”

He nods and heads back toward the fallen boar. He hoists it up onto his shoulder and grabs my hand with his other. We walk hand-in-hand back to the village together.

* * *

When we arrive back to the settlement, there’s a man in filthy clothes standing among the tribespeople.

As I get closer, I realize who it is.

“Donovan!” I shout, throwing my bow and arrows to the ground. I rush toward him in a full sprint. I slam into him, wrapping my arms tightly around him.

His body feels like a limp fish in my arms, and he begins trembling even as I squeeze him.

I let go of him and stare at him in worry. His face is pale white, and he’s looking down at the ground, not daring to face me.

“Donovan,” I say, “What’s wrong? Please–”

“Tsarina…” he says, still trembling.

“You can tell me, Donovan, you–”

“Tsarina...please. It’s not right…”

Oh. God. I’m naked. I’ve been naked for the last six months, and I haven’t even thought about it after the first week.

But I’m the Tsarina of Venus, and Donovan is...seeing me naked for the first time. Not only that, but I grabbed him and pressed myself up against him.

“Aegus,” I call. “Get me a rain blanket.”

Aegus slams the boar carcass onto the dirt, ducks away into a tent, and fetches a woven rain blanket.

He hands it to me, and I wrap it around my body.

“I’m sorry, Donovan,” I apologize.

He looks up at me, and his face has gone from ghostly white to deep red. “Please, Tsarina, let us never speak of this again.”

I resist laughing, and gave him a regal nod. “Can we get you something to eat or drink?”

“No,” he says. “Well, yes, later, but I need to deliver this. To Aegus.”

He reaches into his pocket and holds out a tablet. “I...didn’t know if you had a way to open a hard drive here, so I brought the tablet.”

“Is it a message?” Aegus asks. “From Fenrir?”

“It’s encrypted,” Donovan says. “But the signal came from Titan.”

“It’s Fenrir,” Aegus says. “Thank you, Donovan.”

He grabs the tablet and starts entering an impossibly long password string. Finally, the tablet shows Fenrir. He looks a lot like Aegus, but his eyebrows are...meaner looking, and his ears are pointier. His chin is pointier, too, but he’s definitely a good looking guy. Or good looking alien, I remind myself.

“Brother Aegus,” Fenrir says. “I don’t know if you received my first message…”

Donovan looks up at us and shakes his head.

“So I’ll repeat everything from the start…”

Hundreds of tribespeople begin to gather around, but the tablet is too small, so Yuri repeats everything loudly back for everyone to hear as Fenrir speaks.

“...so two hostile ships unaccounted for,” Fenrir says. “They cut their engines and went dark around the Oort cloud. We guess they are biding their time, and we’ll have to be on guard for decades against them. The good news...our reinforcements are here. A lot of people think you’re dead, but I don’t believe it. We’re going to hit Earth hard, with everything we’ve got. The Emperor’s reign is over…”

There’s some cheering from the tribespeople, but the question on everyone’s mind is what will happen to Venus.

“That leaves Venus,” Fenrir says. “We can’t really infiltrate those cities. The best plan we have so far is a blockade. Just starve out General Bahamut until he surrenders. If you’re still there and alive, and have a way to get a message to us...we need to know what you’ve got cooking so we can coordinate. We’ve got a stealth receiver floating in dead space between Earth and Venus. I’ll give you the coordinates for it, and you can send your message there. It shouldn’t be interceptable.”

The message ends, and everyone starts talking at once.

I go to hug Donovan again, but my blanket opens up and gives him another full view. He turns away as if I’m going to kill him, and I quickly pull the blanket closed. “Sorry,” I mutter.

“Aegus,” I say, squeezing his hand. “Your plan worked. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel already.”

He squeezes my hand back, but looks down at me with a worried expression. “It could have gone much worse than it did...but two hostile ships lurking outside the solar system is a big problem.”

“It’s not something we can deal with now,” I say.

“Yes…” he says. “We have enough to deal with on Venus alone.”

“If only there were a good way to send a message to that receiver.”

“We could use the science hut,” Irena says.

“The...science hut?” Aegus and I ask in unison.

“Yes,” she says. “The hut where we keep the scientific equipment and the tokamak reactor that powers it.”

15 Aegus

Massive relief and volcanic rage take hold of my body. They fight each other deep in my gut, and they cancel each other out in a stalemate. I no longer feel anything at all, and I can do nothing but look up at Irena in bewilderment.

“You have...a tokamak reactor and the means to send and receive signals across the solar system...here in the jungle? The jungle I have lived in for six months, and you never thought to tell me this?”

Irena throws her bundled dreadlocks over her shoulder, sticks her spear into the ground, and sneers. “You never told us you wanted to broadcast anything, Yelda.”

“What is Yelda?” I hear Donovan whispering to Anya behind me.

The anger starts to come back. “When I told you all of my plan, you should have realized how beneficial it would have been for me to be able to signal Fenrir on Titan.”

The tribespeople look around solemnly at one another. Some scrape their feet and look down at the ground.

I begin to realize they are not stupid; no one could be so stupid. But they must not have trusted me or Anya enough to tell us about the equipment, and now they feel shame debted to us.

“Forget it,” I say. “Perhaps it’s best we didn’t know. Even the most cautious attempt to broadcast could have endangered the tribe and the Tsarina. Our greatest advantage has been Bahamut thinking we are dead.”

Irena nods. “But now, Yelda, we are about to strike. Maybe it’s not worth the risk of alerting them...they can intercept this signal still, yes?”

“Yes…” I say, thinking. “Of the ships we’ve gathered, how many of them can reach escape velocity?”

“A handful,” Yuri says. “Why?”

“I’ll do it,” Donovan says, stepping forward and anticipating my thoughts. “I will pilot the ship to the receiver.”

Donovan is smarter than I thought. “You can fly it?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “My father was a pilot. He taught me. I’ll simply broadcast that they should meet me in person, and I will only communicate the plan to one of your most trusted men. This way there is no risk of interception.”

“Good,” I say. “You’ll need to leave now.”

There are a few ships docked on our docking bay, but the bulk of them– almost a thousand– are hooked up to the deep and hidden jungles. The tribespeople have lowered the oxygen content of certain jungles by tampering with the valves, and these jungles float much deeper in the atmosphere below the visibility of most scanners. It’s barely hospitable so deep down, so oxygen masks and pressure suits are required. Just before we attack, we’ll close the oxygen release valve again on the deep jungles, float them back up toward a more hospitable altitude, and load the ships with tribal warriors.

“Let’s start raising the shipyards,” I say. “And prepare to fight.”

* * *

Anya doesn’t come to our hut at night, so I go out looking for her.

The dome turns opaque at night to cut out the sunlight, as a day on Venus is over one hundred Earth days long. The trees need 24-hour day-night cycles, so the forest just stays on the dayside of Venus, while the dome cuts out the sunlight every twelve hours.

Anya must know she cannot hide from me even in darkness. I can track her scent.

Through the lingering scent of boar’s meat, leather, fruit pulp, smoldering ashes, thousands of tribespeople– I smell her.

I walk through winding paths toward her, and find her sitting among a small campfire with Irena and Yulia.

I hear her voice well before she can hear me.

“...so if you call someone a dick,” Anya says, “in the cities, it means they are...like...an asshole. You know?”

“How is a dick an asshole,” Irena says.

“Unless the dick is inside the asshole,” Yulia says, laughing.

“No. Like...stubborn....pigheaded...kozyal!” Anya says.

“Ohhhh,” the two warriors say, suddenly understanding.

“So you are not complaining about the size of his big teal cock,” Irena says.

I see her swig a drink from a gourd of palm wine.

“You will fight beside us,” Yulia says, standing up and chugging her wine. “It does not matter how large Yelda’s dick is, he cannot tell you what to do!”

I walk straight forward into the firelight, and they suddenly grab their spears as they spot me.

“Ah,” Yulia says, “Aegus…”

“You never call me Aegus, Yulia,” I say, grinning, “unless you’re worried I’m angry.”

Yulia grips her spear and narrows her eyes at me.

“You,” I say, pointing at Irena. “And you!” I point at Yulia. “Stand up!”

They both jump to their feet. They have no reason to obey my orders, but they owe me shame debt for talking about me behind my back.

I step right in front of them, and I snatch the spear from Yulia’s hands.

Anya is looking down at the ground, avoiding my gaze. She thinks she owes me shame debt, but she does not. It’s me who owes her.

“When we attack Sankt Petersburg,” I say, “would you trust Anya to fight alongside you?”

“Of course!” Yulia says, grabbing the spear back out of my hand. She slaps the wooden end against my ass. “She’s a fierce fighter, and I trust her with my life!”

“And you?” I point to Irena.

“Da,” she says. “It’s the same for me. I will fight by her side.”

“Good,” I say. “Then you will. Now get the fuck away from here so I can stake my claim.”

The two women grin, grab the skin of palm wine and their spears, and walk back toward their huts.

“So you’re really going to let me fight?” Anya asks.

“I thought about what you said,” I say. “It will show you are a strong ruler...your people will respect it.”

“So that’s the only reason?” she asks, finishing off her drink.

“No,” I say. “You want to do it, and I don’t control you.”

“Wow, Yelda, you’re becoming far too progressive for a Marauder–”

“No,” I say, grabbing her. “I still think with my cock.”

I pull her body into me, and my cock hardens against her stomach. It begins to vibrate as she reaches down and squeezes my ass.

I grunt and squeeze her back, and our lips lock together. We kiss deeply and without abandon, and the flames dance beside us, casting long shadows across the jungle.

I attack her suddenly and without warning, snatching her off her feet and pulling her down to the ground with me.

I roll onto my back, and I hold her naked body above me. She positions herself over my cock, but I tear her away, sliding her already wet pussy across my body until it’s just above my mouth.

She moans as my tongue licks up her juices and massages her clit. I reach up and cup her glorious breasts. I’ve seen her naked every day, all day, for six months now– but I never tire of seeing her body. I run my thumbs across her nipples, and my tongue slides up into her wet hole.

She gasps. We’ve been all over each other since we came to the jungle, but I’ve held one trick back from her– until now.

My tongue slides deep into her, as deep as a human man could go. I press my lips up against her and suck, and then I extend my tongue several inches deeper. Deeper than any man’s tongue can go.

“Jesus! Aegus!” she gasps. “What is that? What…what are you doing to me?”

I say nothing, as my tongue is embedded at least six inches deep inside her. I answer only by sliding it further and further into her, and when I’ve completely filled her up, I begin sliding it in and out.

“Oh my God!” she cries out, and I feel her inner walls tighten around my tongue. Suddenly I feel a surge of her wetness leak across me, and I taste her delicious come all over my tongue as I suck down her juices.

“Aegus!” she moans heavily, bucking her hips against me.

I reach up and press gently to her clit with one finger, and I move it in small circles as she drips come across it. She’s so wet that there’s almost no friction, and I feel the telltale signs– the tightening and convulsing and moaning– that she’s about to come. Much sooner than normal, too.

I slap my hands onto her ass cheeks and squeeze, and I slide my tongue in and out faster and faster as she begins to come hard all over me.

She screams and wails uncontrollably, and I drink deeper of her juices– deeper than I ever have before. I know that what I’ve just agreed to let her do could mean her death, and I’ll protect her at all costs, but I need to hold tight to her and feel and taste every part of her while we are together like this.

She trembles atop me, and as I lick up the last of her juices, she falls off of me in a limp heap beside me.

“I can’t believe you saved that trick for so long…” she says. “You hiding anything else?”

I raise my eyebrows at her and flick my ears. “Perhaps…”

Someone coughs from the forest. “Ah, Tsarina, Yelda…”

Seriously? Now?

“What?” I snap.

“Very good news...for both of you. Come!”

* * *

It’s my first look in the “Science Hut.” The tribespeople had been fairly tight-lipped about it ever since mentioning it, and I didn’t want to risk offending them by asking to see it. Now, though, Yuri hurries us along as we run through the trees in the early morning. The dome is slowly transitioning from opaque to transparent, and it feels as if the sun is rising, though there’s no actual sunrise to see–just a growing orange haze above the dome, like faint embers of a dying fire.

“Here,” Yuri says, bringing us to a huge tree.

“I don’t see anything…” Anya says.

Yuri sticks his fingers into a notch on the tree and pulls.

A panel opens up on the tree like a door, and he disappears down a staircase.

Anya looks back at me and shakes her head.

“I’d never have found it,” I say.

We step down the stairs, and lights begin turning on. I realize it’s the first time I’ve seen artificial light in six months, and being fully inside a building with electric lights rather than in a hut with a tarp door feels quite strange.

We reach the bottom of the stairs, and the space expands outward to form a room that looks to be about thirty meters by thirty meters. It’s packed with outdated equipment– even for humans– but it’s still hundreds of years more advanced than anything the tribes have above ground.

“Here,” Yuri says, turning on a monitor. “Watch. This is live news from Mars. They’re broadcasting pirate signals toward Venus so the civilians here can know what really happened.”

The sound comes on, and I see footage of a massive, purple Marauder ship floating above Venus. The camera pans back out, and forming a full sphere around the planet are dozens of other Marauder ships.

“Holy shit,” Anya says. “How big are those things?”

“They are larger than your tallest skyscrapers,” I say. “Each ship can hold two hundred thousand Marauders, propulsion systems, and all the life support and antimatter needed to power a voyage across the stars.”

“Everything you guys do is big,” Anya says, looking down at my dick. “You’d think the ships would be teal.”

Yuri clears his throat, loudly, and Anya stops flirting with me.

The narrator starts to speak. “After the Emperor’s suicide, when faced with the Marauder-Martian fleet, General Bahamut promptly declared himself Emperor, and moved the seat of power and capital of the Empire to Sankt Petersburg.”

The screen shows the great statue of Tsar Nikolai IV being torn down, and a time-lapse fades in, showing a statue of Bahamut rising up in its place.

“That bastard,” Anya shouts, balling up her fists.

“The Marauder fleet is surrounding Venus, but it’s not as Bahamut says,” the narrator continues. “The Marauders are closely allied with Mars, and they wish no harm to come to the citizens of Venus. They’ve already liberated Earth, and they have left Earth and Luna to re-establish a democratic system of government.”

“We’ve won…” Anya says.

“Almost,” I mutter, thinking of Bahamut playing emperor in Anya’s palace.

“Our human-Marauder coalition is hoping to force Bahamut into surrendering. He’s threatened to sink the cities into the crushing pressures of the lower atmosphere if he sees a single ship break into orbit from space, so we will make no attempt to attack. We have no interest in causing civilian deaths, but…”

“They must have received our message,” Aegus says.

Yuri rolls his eyes. “That’s a stretch, but whether or not they did, your plan seems like it will work...given these circumstances.”

That stubborn bastard, Yuri. He disagrees with me just for the sake of disagreeing, and even when he does agree with me, it never sounds like it.

“So if Donovan got our message out,” Anya says, “then they’ll know exactly what’s happening when we attack the cities...they probably have some way of backing us up already planned out.”

“And if they didn’t get our message,” I say, “our mission is the same. We need to secure control of the oxygen valves as our number one priority. Once we take these, they can’t carry out their threat of sinking the cities.”

Anya nods. “Except Sankt Petersburg. There we need to seize the palace. Bahamut won’t sink himself. Then we get a message up to orbit to let them know that the tribes are securing the cities and that Bahamut is dead.”

“Then your big dicked friends can take over the planet,” Yuri says, “having tricked us fools into what you’ve wanted all along.”

“Yuri,” I say. “Are you serious? Are you really so cynical and paranoid?”

He huffs. “Maybe I am.”

“I’ll find you the most stubborn Marauder woman, Yuri, and–”

“Let’s get out of here,” he says. “We have a lot to do.”

I snicker at him as he walks away, and Anya gives me a look.

“What?” I ask.

“That was mean.”

16 Anya

“The ships will be here soon!” Yuri barks. “Everyone get ready!”

Irena pulls the top off of a huge wooden barrel and dips her hands into it.

When she removes her hands, they are covered in purple, and she runs the purple pigment all along her body until she’s covered from head to toe.

“There’s a teal one down here,” she shouts. “For the men. A much smaller barrel.”

Everyone starts laughing.

“Why are they doing this?” Aegus whispers to me.

“To confuse them when we attack. It was my idea.”

“Oh,” Aegus says. “Why didn’t you run it by me?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” I say, dipping my hands into the bucket.

I cover myself in the pigment, and Aegus helps to get the hard to reach areas on my back and face.

“How do I look?” I ask.

“I prefer you as you are,” he says. “But you make a good Marauder.”

“Now we will look like you, Yelda!” one of the men shouts, raising his spear.

“Not quite,” Irena says. “He’s called Yelda for a reason.”

The woman all laugh, and the men glower.

“Actually,” Aegus says, “I’ll be fighting like this.”

Suddenly, the small little sphere on his shoulder melts and spreads across his body. It covers all but his head, and hardens into his teal bio armor.

“Shit,” I say. “I should have thought about that. I haven’t seen your stupid suit in so long.”

“Stupid?” Aegus asks, ears lowering down.

“I like looking at you naked,” I say, smiling.

He grins. “Soon enough, Tsarina.”

I realize we haven’t really talked– at all– about what might happen after this battle. We both feel at home in the jungles, but I don’t think I could stay here. My place is in the palace, and I hope that Aegus will feel his place is at my side. I’m almost afraid to ask, and there’s so many other things to be afraid of right now, so I push it out of my mind.

“Everyone drink some of this,” Yulia shouts, opening a big iron kettle.

The smell hits me and it stinks like raw sewage. I see Aegus’s nose crinkle up as well, and he takes a big step backward.

“It will protect you from the Imperials’ stun darts,” she says.

Dammit. I’ll have to drink it.

I wait in line, and when it’s finally my turn, I take a big gulp of it while holding my nose shut. Some of my friends laugh at me for doing this, but I’ll be the one laughing when they stick their open nostrils over the kettle and vomit involuntarily.

I swallow it, keeping my nose held closed. I count back from three, and finally let go of my nostrils.

“Not so bad–”

The foul taste rushes up from my stomach and floods my mouth and nose, and I start coughing and retching uncontrollably.

Irena takes a big chug of the medicine, swallows, and smiles at me. “You must be stronger than this, Tsarina.”

“I’ll be strong when it matters,” I say. “I probably just got a thicker chunk of the broth.”

“Yes,” Irena says. “That is a very good excuse.”

Aegus chugs down his dose, and he smiles.

“The smell is bad,” he says, “but the taste is delicious!”

“You have to be joking,” I grimace.

He scoops up another spoonful and sucks it through his lips.

“Ahh,” he says, ears twitching happily up and down.

I shake my head at him as I grab my spear and bow. I strap the bow across my purple-painted body, and then strap on the quiver of arrows.

We don’t usually use straps and quivers when hunting, but we’ve trained with them for the past month to prepare for the assault. Usually two or three arrows does the job while hunting, but in a battle, it’s best to have more.

We all begin to walk toward the docking platform; there are hundreds of us. I’ve never seen the whole tribe move together like this, and seeing it, I realize just how much power the tribes truly have. There are thousands of jungles like ours, and though not every jungle has agreed to join the fight, enough have that there will be tens of thousands of us.

And one Marauder with a fully charged biosuit.

When we reach the docking bay, it’s still covered in vines and grass the same as when we arrived, but our ship isn’t there anymore.

“Your ship was too small,” Yuri says, pointing at the much larger ships docked all along the bay. There looks to be at least twenty of them, and each can likely hold several dozen fighters. “We had to move it out of the way.”

“It wasn’t our ship anyway,” Aegus says.

I almost feel bad for Tomas. We did kind of steal his ship. When I take the palace back, I will try my best to find him and return the ship to him.

I get onto a ship with Aegus, Irena, and Yulia. Around fifty other tribespeople crowd onto the ship with us. It’s laid out like a shuttle, but some people have to sit on the floor, almost on top of each other.

“We eat less than the city people,” someone jokes. “The ship can carry us all!”

Each tribe has a few members who visit the deep jungles once a year to fly the ships for training. But I still feel nervous, as our pilot has only been down for one training run, and he’s looking down and squinting at the controls.

“Vlad!” I shout. “You sure you can fly this?”

“You think just because I am a man, that I can fly the ship?” he says, furrowing his brows at me.

“...What?”

“No, Tsarina, I cannot fly it! The levers and buttons are all different than I remember.”

I shove through everyone and look at the controls. “I can fly this.”

“Then go ahead,” he says, stomping away from the pilot’s seat and melting away into the crowd.

Aegus has followed me to the pilot’s seat, and he nods at me as I grasp the controls.

“You flew Tomas's ship,” he says. “And it was much older and more difficult to control than this one.”

I squint at all the buttons. Many of them aren’t even labeled. “I can fly it,” I say. “But I’m not sure I can get the docking wires to disconnect.”

“I can,” Irena says, tearing a hatchet out of someone’s hand.

She kicks the door open and jumps down onto the platform.

She swings the hatchet into the docking cables, and they start to sever. She swings again, and again, and again, and they finally tear away in a mess of frayed cables.

“Done,” she says, and jumps back into the ship.

She shuts the door behind her, as I test the throttle. The ship sways and jerks just a little, and I kill it.

I watch in front of me, as ship after ship awkwardly floats up and ineptly flies down the docking bay, into the outer airlock, and finally out into the sky.

Some of the ships even bump against the airlock walls as they exit.

I wait until the ship in front of me is clear, and I push the throttle for real. Some of the tribespeople fall over as I hit the gas, but I manage to maneuver the ship smoothly down the airlock and out into Venusian atmosphere without bumping into anything or killing any of my passengers. I count it as a success.

Unlike Tomas’s ship, these all have navigation systems, so I’m able to set Sankt Petersburg as our destination, then simply follow the map.

We’re travelling at near the maximum depth the ship can handle, and the atmosphere is so thick that I can’t see a thing through the window. The tradeoff is that Sankt Petersburg will have a hell of a time seeing us as we approach. As will all of the other cities we will attack.

All of the Imperial monitoring equipment is pointing up toward orbit, looking for a Marauder-Martian attack from the upper atmosphere. The last thing they will expect is a bunch of tribespeople, painted purple– and teal– popping up right below them.

After a few hours, the map tells me that I’m directly beneath Sankt Petersburg. All I need to do from here is go straight up. Because it’s the capital, we are sending ten full ships to Sankt Petersburg– roughly five hundred warriors.

The attacks on the other cities will have only about five ships each, and they will have to brute force their way onto each of those cities’ docking platforms.

I smile at Aegus as we wait for the order. We will be entering Sankt Petersburg another way.

We have to wait for hours, but none of our warriors show signs of weariness or impatience. They have all hunted their entire lives, and a few hours’ wait like this is nothing to them.

I, on the other hand, can’t help but feel horribly annoyed at the wait. I’ve waited over six months for this moment, and each extra second that I have to wait feels like an eternity.

I get a signal from the ships attacking Novo Siberia. “We’re here. Everyone ready?”

“That’s the last city,” Aegus says. “We’re ready.”

“Yes,” I say. I wait for hundreds of other ships at dozens of other cities to sound that they are ready. Once everyone is checked in, we sound the attack.

I hit the lever and begin to climb. The map shows that the other nine ships coming with us to Sankt Petersburg are less than one hundred meters away from us, but the atmosphere is still so thick that I can’t see them. When we’re about one kilometer below Sankt Petersburg, I finally see the other ships’ lights through the haze.

“Visibility is getting high,” Aegus says. “That means the Imperials can see us...if they’re looking.”

Three hundred meters. 200. 100.

Sankt Petersburg is directly overhead, and we soon hit even altitude with the bottom of the city. I keep climbing, up along the dome.

“Ready, Aegus?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll try to make this brief.”

He raises his teal-armored hand toward the windshield, and his hand and entire arm begins to glow purple.

“You’re sure the glass isn’t going to shatter all over us?” I ask.

“It will melt,” he says.

And then a thick beam of plasma blasts a hole through the windshield. It hits the dome, and about a half-second later, the dome melts apart. Aegus squints, and the beam grows thicker along the dome, and the hole widens until it’s twice as wide as our ships.

He cuts the beam off. “Go!”

The Venusian atmosphere is leaking into our ship, and it’s still cold this high up. I try not to breathe it in, and I hit the gas.

We fly through the hole in the dome, and I move aside and cut the throttle so that we are hovering just inside the dome.

The other nine ships begin to roar in behind us, but they don’t stop like we did. They fly across the skies of Sankt Petersburg, heading straight toward its heart: the palace.

When the last ship is through, I adjust our course until we are pointing back at the big hole in the dome.

A portion of Aegus’s suit melts off into a sphere, and he throws it at the broken edge of the dome. The material begins to melt around the edges, and slowly the hole starts repairing itself.

“It will seal,” he says. “Go!”

I turn the ship back toward the palace and fly.

17 Aegus

I feel my stomach churn as Anya races the ship down toward the palace.

A number of our ships are already lowering, making their final descent next to the palace under the shadow of the statue of Bahamut.

A few reach the ground, and I can make out faint purple dots pouring out of the ships the moment they make landfall.

But then I see a rocket launch up from the ground, and it slams into one of the ships before it can land.

There’s a huge explosion, and debris and flames rain down on the surface just outside the palace.

“Anya,” I shout. “Land! Now!”

“We’re still a few kilometers away–”

I shove her out of the seat and crank the lever down.

More rockets fly toward the hovering ships, and a number of them explode. I doubt anyone inside survived.

I see one ship dodge the rocket, and arrows fly down from the windows.

Anya is trying to shove me back out of the seat, but I hold her back with just one arm.

We’re about to slam into the surface, but I jerk the lever again at the last moment.

Everyone starts to fall over, but as I close the last few hundred meters to the ground, a rocket blasts from the palace, and it zooms straight toward us.

I throw out a sphere of super-hot biomatter through the hole in the windshield.

As the sphere rises, so does the rocket.

Our ship touches down, and the rocket explodes into the hot sphere, maybe fifty meters in front of us. I can feel the heat from the explosion on my face.

“Out!” I shout. “Now!”

Anya puts her hand on my shoulder, and I look up at her. “Sorry for shoving you, but–”

“No,” she says. “You were right. I wasn’t thinking. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Everyone rushes down the exit ramp with their weapons drawn.

We step out onto Nikolai Park. Anya told me that she played here as a little girl, though surrounded by guards and cut off from the regular people.

There are huge screens showing General Bahamut sitting on the throne, shouting loudly. His voice rumbles across the entire city. “These rebel forces, and anyone who aids them, will be killed without a trial. I still control this planet, for the Empire…”

Now the park is swarming with purple-painted tribal warriors, and the regular people who were relaxing in the park are now screaming in terror.

I run through the park, shoulder-to-shoulder with Anya. Irena is in front of us, Yulia behind us.

A man and a woman scream and drop their ice cream cones to the ground as we come into view.

Ice cream...so delicious...and such a waste of good food.

They fear us, but that will keep them away. Anya was wise to have all the humans paint themselves like this. If they weren’t so afraid, they would end up in the crossfire, and innocent lives would be lost.

The palace is in view as we exit the park. It’s only a few blocks away, but armored Imperial soldiers rush out from behind a barricade as we approach the gate to the palace. They are armed with assault rifles, and escorted by the spider-dog drones from the jungle.

I blast a burning-hot beam of plasma directly at the barricade. It melts into molten concrete, and I see dozens of soldiers screaming and falling over as it melts totally away– all over them.

A handful of soldiers cleared the barricade in time, and they open fire on us.

I stand in front of Anya, and a bullet hits my chest. My armor absorbs the impact, and I fire another– much smaller– blast directly at the shooter. It melts through his helmet, hair, and skull, liquefying his brain.

He collapses, and we take cover behind a line of parked cars.

More soldiers appear from behind the gates, but the warriors have already nocked their bows. Anya included.

They all let loose in unison, and a rain of arrows flies up into the sky.

The soldiers shoot each other confused looks, and they start to run as the arrows begin their downward arcs.

Arrows cut into dozens of them, and at least half of the squad falls down. Some are dead, but others are writhing and trying to pull out the arrows.

“Again!” Irena orders.

Another volley fires, but the soldiers have mostly taken cover between the pillars of the gate.

I charge up both hands, and I blast two pillars at once.

The Imperial soldiers have learned their lesson by now, and they scatter immediately, which brings them right into the path of the arrows. Almost all fall, and the few remaining turn their backs and run back into the palace.

“That was amazing!” Anya says. “I can’t believe we–”

“We haven’t won yet,” I say, killing her enthusiasm. “Never celebrate until you’ve won.”

She bites her lip and nods to me.

“Good call on the purple war paint,” I say. “They won’t know that I’m the only one here who can fire plasma. They must have no clue what’s going on.”

Anya grins, and I’m very tempted to kiss her right in the heat of battle, but I remember my own words about not celebrating until we’ve won.

Irena points, and we run past the line of cars and take cover behind some of the remaining pillars of the broken gate.

“On three,” Irena says. “We breach where Yelda toasted the pillar.”

She counts down, and on three we all run full speed past the gate and onto the main lawn of the palace.

The statue of Bahamut is towering above us, and we enter into its shadow.

There is burning wreckage of ships all along the palace lawn, and dozens of dead and charred bodies are strewn across it.

I remind myself to later say a prayer for our fallen comrades, but for now I focus fully on protecting Anya.

There is no further resistance on the lawn– the Imperials must have decided my plasma attacks are too powerful on open terrain– and they want to try to force me into close-quarter combat.

I grin. Wait until they see what my suit can do up close.

When we reach the palace walls, we find a gaping hole where the doors were. One of the massive wooden doors is lying flat on the ground,full of arrows.

I see several dead Imperial guards lying in the hallway. Yet I also see more fallen comrades. We don’t have enough intel to know how many soldiers Bahamut had in Sankt Petersburg. It’s quite possible the bulk of his forces are boarding ships waiting to intercept an attack from space, and they could come back at any time when they realize the attack came from below– from the jungles.

We need to hit hard, and fast. If we take Bahamut down and seize the capital before reinforcements can arrive, they likely will give up their attack and surrender.

We move slowly through the palace hallways. I stand in front, shielding the rest of our warriors– but Anya most of all– from any potential attacks. But from behind me, Anya shouts out where we should turn, as she knows the palace better than any of us could.

“Turn left up ahead,” she says.

I sniff, but the palace is too full of the smells of battle. I can’t tell if the hallway ahead is clear based on scent alone.

I stick my hand out around the corner, and gunfire erupts. I feel a bullet slam against my armored hand, and I bring it back in.

“Let us fight, Yelda!” Irena says.

“I can clear this hallway alone,” I say, stepping forward. “No need to risk yourselves. Just cover me.”

I step around the corner, and the soldiers all unload their guns into me, but just as fast as their bullets, my suit forms seven sharp tendrils– one for each shooter– and they lash out from my body. Each tendril impales one of the shooters through his heart, and when I pull the tendrils back, every single one collapses dead onto the ground.

I hear Anya and Irena shout behind me, and I hear the telltale thunk of bow strings being letting loose.

I turn around and see two shooters with arrows in their chests, and their guns drop to the ground.

Anya and Irena are holding their bows up, pointing toward the dying soldiers.

“Good shots,” I say.

Anya smiles.

18 Anya

“The throne room is on the top floor,” I shout. “They’ll have locked the elevators.”

“I can get the elevators working,” Aegus says.

“You’re sure?”

He nods.

“Okay,” I say. “Go down the hall and turn right.”

We move in hunting formation, with Aegus in front. The wild boars would sometime charge us from behind while we hunted, and Irena and I move backward with arrows knocked. We trust that Aegus, Yulia, and the others can cover any threats from the front.

When we reach the elevator doors, we form a semi-circle pointing outward from Aegus. I look back and see that the fingers of his suit are melting off into the elevator’s control panel like thick goop.

“Shit,” he says.

“What?”

“They cut the cord.”

“You said you were sure you could get the elevators working, Yelda!” Yulia growls.

“Hmmm,” Aegus says. “Actually, I can.”

He pries the doors open and beckons us in.

All six of us crowd into the elevator, and he lets go of the doors.

“You’ll have to trust me on this one,” Aegus says.

He points up toward the ceiling, and his suit blasts through the top. I see his eyes narrowed in concentration, and after several moments he nods. “Here we go!”

His feet melt and solidify onto the floor, and suddenly the elevator begins moving upward.

“You’re pulling it up with your hand?” I ask.

“Technically it’s my suit,” he says.

When we’re about halfway up, I hear loud gunfire from above, echoing out from what must be the top of the shaft.

Aegus forms a shield, and expands it outward over the entire roof.

“Several shooters,” he says. “As long as they don’t try to cut my–”

His eyes widen in fear.

“Shit!” he shouts.

The elevator stops moving, and he shoots his other hand through the roof.

We begin moving up again, but when we are a few stories from the top, he points toward the door.

“Pry it open, fast!”

Yulia and I jam our spears in and pry the doors open.

“Out, fast!” Aegus says.

“What about–”

“Out!”

We all run out, and the moment my foot is clear of the door, the elevator– and Aegus– plummets down.

I peak my head down the shaft, and I see him falling down at full speed. Then I hear gunfire.

Irena tugs me back into the hallway.

“Idiot!” she says. “You know there are soldiers up there!”

“Aegus!” I say. “We have to go back for him–”

“No,” Yulia and Irena say in unison.

“Anya,” Irena says. “You know Aegus can take care of himself. If we go back for him, we endanger the mission. We need to take out Bahamut before reinforcements arrive. Surprise was our biggest advantage, and each moment we wait, that advantage shrinks.”

I hear a giant explosion from up above– it sounds like it’s the top of the shaft.

“See,” Yulia says. “He’s doing fine. Now, we must go!”

A wide-open shot to take out Bahamut, and all I can think about is going back down for Aegus. I never thought I’d be in this situation: my friends having to convince me to take the revenge for which I’ve waited so long. It must mean that revenge is not as important to me as I thought, or more likely, that Aegus is much more important to me than I ever imagined.

We continue moving in formation. Irena, Yulia, two other male warriors, and me.

“The staircase is just over here,” I say, leading the way.

We breach into the staircase, and each sound we make echoes loudly. The staircase is never used, and it’s decorated as such: sparse concrete with almost nothing to dampen the sound.

All of the practice in the jungle paid off, and the five of us creep quietly up the staircase. We’ve strapped our bows to our backs and are holding our spears, ready to poke anything that comes around the next flight of stairs.

We reach the top after a few minutes, and I try the door.

It opens slightly, but hits something on the other side.

“There must be rubble on the other side,” I say. I ram it with my shoulder, and feel it open a few centimeters further.

“Move!” Irena says. “I am stronger at ramming things than you are.”

“I got it,” I say, ramming it again with my full strength.

The door moves open just enough that I fall through headfirst, but I get stuck halfway through.

“Idiot,” Irena says, kicking my feet. “Now I will have to ram the door with you stuck like this.”

“Behind us!” one of the men shouts.

I hear a loud and sudden hiss from behind, and it grows to a deafening buzz.

“Anya,” Irena shouts, and her body slams into me, covering me.

Something explodes behind us. I feel my ears nearly blow out from the shockwave, and there’s searing heat all over my body.

When the ringing in my ears dies down, I shove the door as hard as I can, and I hear the rubble on the other side scraping across the floor.

The door finally opens enough that I fall all the way through.

“Irena,” I say. “We’re through. Is everyone okay?”

I turn back and check on Irena, and I see that her back is badly burned, and her eyelids are barely open.

“Irena!” I shout. “Tell me you’re okay. Yulia? Can you hear me?”

I peek back into the hallway, but there’s no sign of anyone else. The ceiling has caved in, and there’s nothing but concrete boulders, metal girders, and chunks of drywall piled just behind us.

“Shit, Irena,” I say. “They must have been sealed off from us. We can go back around and–”

“I cannot go anywhere,” Irena says, pointing to her leg.

There’s a metal beam lodged into her upper thigh.

“I should have stayed in the jungle,” she says. “No sharp metal there.”

I look back into the hallway outside the staircase. I could reach the throne room in less than thirty seconds, but there’s no telling how many guards are there. I wonder if my best hope isn’t to just keep Irena safe while I wait for Aegus.

“I can watch over you,” I say. “The others from the tribe will find another way up here, or Aegus will get to us. Either way–”

“I will be fine here,” Irena says. “You can come back for me later...just don’t forget me here.”

I put my hand on her face. “I’ll never forget you, Irena. Idiot.”

“I told you I could ram the door better than you,” she says. “Now you have to scout the area, make sure Bahamut doesn’t get away.”

His voice is still audible all through the palace. He shouts propaganda while his soldiers fight and die.

“Do you really think he’s alone in there?” I ask.

“If he is,” Irena says. “You kill him. Avenge your father, and show Yelda that you are a strong warrior.”

I know Aegus wouldn’t approve, but this could be our only chance.

I squeeze Irena’s shoulder. “I’ll be back for you.”

I grab my spear and step into the hallway.

It looks like some kind of bomb went off here. There’s dead Imperial soldiers everywhere, but no signs of spears or arrows.

It looks almost as if...they were fighting each other. Could Bahamut’s grip on power really be so far gone?

I stalk quietly across the hallway. After trying so hard to move quietly on leaves and branches that crunch and crack, staying quiet on soft silk carpet is not even a challenge.

I hear Bahamut’s voice still booming over the intercoms as I approach the throne room. The double doors are wide open, but I hear him only over the speakers, and not in person.

“Martial law will restore order,” his voice says. “And anyone who aids the invaders in any way will be executed without trial…”

I wait with my back to the doorway, trying to figure out where he is in the throne room.

I still can’t hear him, so I risk a peek into the room. I see the long red carpet leading up to an empty throne. My father’s throne. My throne.

Could it be a pre-recorded message? Is Bahamut already dead? If he were alive, I’d expect more than dead bodies guarding him.

I grip my spear and step into the throne room.

It seems completely empty. There are large marble pillars spaced about two meters apart leading all the way up to the throne. The room is huge, but I see not a single dead soldier or drop of blood anywhere.

Nor do I hear Bahamut’s voice coming from the room. The images we saw earlier showed him speaking from the throne, but I’m still not totally convinced it wasn’t pre-recorded. Could he have fled? Where could he possibly even go now?

I step forward slowly, doing my best to make no sound. I grip the spear and prepare to strike. Halfway to the throne and still I don’t see him. If he’s here, he could be hiding behind a pillar.

I stop dead in my tracks and listen. A huge wave of deja vu washes over me, and I watch the pillars in front of me, wondering if I could hit him before he was on top of me.

Deja vu. No! He could be–

I spin around, and I see Bahamut charging me. His clothes are torn and shredded, and his body is covered in bloody gashes, but he’s clutching the Tsar’s ceremonial sword, and it’s covered in blood.

He’s too close for me to jam the spear into him, as he could cut my head clean off. I swing the spear up to block his sword, and the long shaft deflects his blow.

He grabs hold of the shaft and pulls, hard.

Bahamut is stronger than me, but I don’t dare let go of the spear. He pulls me in toward him, and the sword begins swinging back around for another slash.

I slam my heel into his balls as he pulls me into him, and he lets go of my spear as if it were a venomous snake.

He staggers three or four steps away from me, and he points the sword to me as he steps back, hunched over in pain from my kick.

“Tsarina,” he says. “I’d given up all hope.”

“You’ve lost,” I say. “It’s over.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d thought so, I truly had. I’d considered following in the Emperor’s footsteps and killing myself. Better than to–”

“If you surrender now,” I say, “I’ll give you a clean execution.”

He holds his sword up toward me, and as it trembles in his hand, blood drips off it.

“Execution? Don’t you want real revenge for your father?”

“I want this shit to be over,” I say, holding the spear out toward him. “Do you really want to take your chances against a spear? That sword isn’t even meant for real combat.”

I consider slowly backing away and drawing my bow, but I’d likely only have time for one shot. As it is, I outrange him with the spear, and he has no more hope of a sneak attack on me.

“Oh,” Bahamut says. “I’m going to use this.”

He reaches behind himself, and draws a gun. Before he can fire, I throw the spear.

19 Aegus

The elevator begins to plummet, and suddenly it feels as if I’m in zero-g again.

I shoot tendrils out through the floor, and I harden them to slow the descent. It takes longer than I’d like, and I’m down to the twentieth floor by the time I stop the fall. I still feel bullets hitting the shield above me, and it’s quickly draining my suit.

I pry open the elevator and see that I’m halfway between floors. I jump out onto the twenty-first floor, and only after my body is clear, I pull all of the biomatter back into the suit.

I don’t even know where the stairwell is, but I reason it’s close to the elevator. I pray to all that is holy that Anya will not try to come back for me. She needs to get to the throne room, and those soldiers at the top of the shaft are there.

Shit.

I dive back into the elevator as I charge up a blast of plasma.

I fire straight up through the hole in the ceiling, and moments later I hear the explosion from the top of the shaft.

That should make things easier for them.

I climb back out, and begin to feel hunger gnawing at me. I’ll need to use the suit less, saving it for life-and-death emergencies. Otherwise I’ll completely deplete it and be effectively unarmed.

Now...to find the stairwell.

I circle around the hallway, and see a window.

Fuck the stairwell.

I kick the window out, and climb out onto the windowsill.

Below me I see the smoldering remains of our crashed ships, but I see no movement, and out on the streets I hear no gunfire.

The only constant sound is Bahamut’s droning voice, speaking as if this small “rebellion” is nearly over.

It definitely seems like it’s over, just not in the way he’d hoped.

The palace is made of red bricks, and using my Marauder strength, I begin to scale the wall with just the grip of my toes and fingertips digging in between the bricks.

The climb saps more of my strength, but it’s safer than the stairwell. I have a bad feeling that I am the top target, and that they will unload everything they have if they spot me. Anya and the others are likely in the stairwell now, and I don’t want to draw danger to them.

I climb up and up, and after two or three minutes, I reach the last window. I don’t know which floor it leads onto, but I kick it open and jump inside.

As soon as I hit the ground, I hear the faintest patter of footsteps. Bare feet.

I sniff, and I smell Yulia, but not Irena...and not Anya.

“Anya!” I shout, surprise be damned.

“Yelda?” Yulia’s voice cries out, and then I see her turning the corner.

“Where is–” I start, but Yulia cuts me off.

“There was an explosion, but Irena protected her...we think.”

“Where?”

Yulia points up, and I use the last of my strength to blast a hole in the ceiling. Without waiting for anyone, I leap through the hole and climb up onto the next floor.

I sniff as soon as I reach the ground, and I smell Anya.

And I smell fear.

I shift to bear form for maximum speed, and I rush down toward the scent of Anya.

I spot a large opening from the corner of my vision, and I roar as I run into it.

It’s the throne room, and Anya is standing face-to-face with Bahamut.

And he’s drawing a gun.

I shoot a tendril out from my back, aimed at the gun.

Anya throws her spear, and just as my tendril worms into the barrel of the gun, I hear it go off.

The gun explodes in Bahamut’s hand, and he yelps, dropping it. The spear jams into his gut, but he ignores the pain and charges toward Anya with his sword.

I run faster.

Anya tries to back up and pull an arrow from her quiver, but Bahamut is on his last dying breath, and nothing but death will stop him.

And I am his death.

I roar and leap over Anya.

Bahamut doesn’t even look at me, he just wants to take Anya down with him, but I land on top of him, slamming him down to the ground.

He jams his sword into me, but I bite into his soft neck and tear it apart.

I taste his blood, but I bite in again and claw his arms.

I shred his flesh to ribbons, roaring with abandon.

“Aegus!” I hear Anya’s voice behind me, faintly. I’m too consumed by rage.

“Aegus! He’s dead! I’m fine! We need to get to Irena. She’s hurt!”

I fight my bear down, and I stop tearing at Bahamut’s corpse.

I shift back to Marauder form, and I’m so covered in blood that I must be more red than purple.

“You’re not hurt?” I say, looking down at her. There’s not a cut on her body. I sniff, and it confirms she’s unharmed.

I grab hold of her and squeeze her tightly in my arms. She hugs me back, and the spot on my side where Bahamut’s sword sunk into me burns with pain, but I ignore it. Anya’s safety feels better than any painkiller.

“Irena is really hurt, Aegus,” she says. “Go to the stairwell, I need to end this war.”

She sits down on the throne and presses a button.

“This is Tsarina Anya Ivanov! General Bahamut is dead, and the Empire with him…”

I run to the stairwell to look for Irena, but I can hear Anya’s voice echoing behind me as it rumbles through the speakers.

I find Irena, and I use the absolute last drops of my biomass to seal her wound– after painfully ripping it out of her leg.

“Sorry,” I say.

She smiles. “It’s okay...we won. Nothing can hurt me on the day we win a battle.”

Epilogue

Our wedding reception is the wildest party of Venus. Many of the elite of Sankt Petersburg are there, dressed to the nines in smart fabric and radiant dresses. And then there’s all our tribal friends, dressed in…nothing.

I told Aegus he could wear his biosuit as a compromise between naked and stuffy, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on wearing a full tux, which—I must admit—looks hot as shit on him.

“How does it feel to be Tsar?” Cygnus asks. He’s travelled all the way from Mars just for the wedding, as has Fenrir.

“I’m not really Tsar…” Aegus says.

I grab him by the arm and smile wide. “He is Tsar! Don’t listen to him.”

“So,” Fenrir says, narrowing his eyes. “Should I call you ‘Great Brother Aegus’ or ‘His Excellency?’ Which pompous title do you prefer.”

Aegus grits his teeth and says, “Anya is in charge here. She is Tsarina through birth…I’m just…the husband of the Tsarina. It’s not so difficult to understand.”

Fenrir sips his drink. “So…I guess it’s Great Brother Aegus then.”

“You guys know you can just call me Aegus. Stop being assholes.”

“I don’t know…even though you’re my brother, I feel like I need to give you some kind of title,” Cygnus says, holding his glass up and pointing behind us.

We turn around and see the giant statue. It’s just “The Marauder” statue, but I can’t help but feel it bears a striking resemblance to Aegus. Most of the people in Sankt Petersburg are even calling it “Aegus the Great.”

“Was that your idea, Anya?” Fenrir asks.

“No,” I say. “I wanted to commemorate the Marauders ending Imperial rule on Venus. It will be one of the most important days in human history.

“Yeah,” Cygnus says, “But was it your idea to make the Marauder look like Aegus?”

I beam a wide smile, look up at Cygnus, and give what I hope is an imperceptible nod.

“Let’s drink to His Excellency,” Cygnus says. “To The Great Brother of Mars, His Excellency the Tsar of Venus, and First Warrior of the Marauder Fleet!”

“I’m going to punch you,” Aegus says, smiling.

Fenrir hands me a drink, but I see Irena out of the corner of my eye, and she slaps the glass out of Fenrir’s hand. It shatters to the ground, and Irena glares up at Fenrir. And then Yulia is beside her, appearing as if out of nowhere.

“Tsarina,” Irena says, “You must not drink. Even if pigheaded Marauder man wants you to.”

“That’s what my wife calls me too,” Fenrir says, holding out a hand.

“The Tsarina is pregnant! She mustn’t drink!” Irena shouts.

And she shouts it way too loud, because everyone is suddenly turning toward me, big smiles plastered on their faces.

“Congratulations!” Donovan shouts.

Everyone starts nodding, mumbling congratulations, and clapping.

“The ultimate and final claim has been staked!” Yulia shouts above the murmur of the crowd. “Let no other woman ride Yelda, and let no other man take the Tsarina!”

The tribespeople hoot and cheer, and the clothed Venusian elite give each other confused looks in aghast silence.

I smile and thank Yulia, and finally everyone joins in the clapping.

“That was fucking awkward,” I mumble to Aegus.

And then Aura and Fiona are on top of me, copying Yulia’s trick of appearing out of nowhere. They are sisters, and Aura is Cygnus’s wife, while Fiona is Fenrir’s.

“You better watch out!” Aura says, pointing a finger at me. “Sara is a handful!”

I smile and nod. Everyone is warning me about how difficult kids can be, but Aura and Fiona are the only two women in the solar system who know what having Seraphim—human-Marauder chidren—is like.

“Sara is stronger than me already,” Aura says. “And she can be even more stubborn than her father.”

Cygnus scowls at her.

“But it’s worth it!” she says, “I love her more than anything…do you know if yours is a girl or a boy?”

I know, actually, as of two days ago, but I’ve been keeping it secret, to surprise Aegus.

“We don’t know!” Aegus says, “But I’ll be so happy either way! If it’s a girl, I think we will name her Olenna—“

“What if it’s a boy?” Fiona asks.

“Arthur,” Aegus says, stone-cold confidence covering his face.

Fenrir spits out his drink, and his eyes bulge. If I had a drink, I’d spit it out too.

“Arthur!” I shout. “We are not naming our son ‘Arthur,’ where the hell did you—“

Aegus bursts into laughter. “I was just messing with Fenrir, there’s this scientist back on Titan who he can’t stand. If it’s a boy, I was actually thinking ‘Ramses.’”

“Ramses,” I say, thinking it over. “I like that name.”

Preview of Marauder Ramses

25 years have passed since the events of “Marauder Aegus” and the arrival of the Marauder fleet…

1 Ramses

I slam the door with one hand, and grip my gun with the other. It’s my first day on Earth, and I’m already breaking the rules. I was supposed to meet up with the Chicago Police Department the moment my shuttle touched down, but I got a tip before I even broke orbit, and I don’t have time for bullshit bureaucracy

I slam the door again, harder this time, and I keep pounding.

“Fuck it,” I mutter. “Time to break some more rules.”

I kick the door, expecting it to break into pieces, but it just wobbles and bends. Dammit. There’s too many Seraphim and Marauders on Earth now, and no one feels safe living in a house where a Seraph like me can just break the door open like tissue paper.

“I can smell you inside!” I shout. “I’m a Seraph, not a cop!”

The guy inside is Seraphim as well. I hear a few footsteps from within, moving toward the door.

“Leave me alone then, man. You know what’s up!”

“I’m a peacekeeper!” I shout through the door. If he’d open the fucking door I wouldn’t have to shout.

“For real?” he says. “Prove it.”

“Then open the door and I’ll show you my badge.”

“No way!”

Alright. We’ll do this the hard way. Peacekeepers--in theory--are the only ones authorized to use Marauder weaponry, and humans haven’t quite figured out compact plasma pistols yet.

“Back away from the door,” I shout.

“What you doing, man?”

“I’m proving to you I’m a peacekeeper.”

I adjust the gun to fire a wide blast at low velocity, then pull the trigger.

The plasma shoots out, nearly coating the door. Within moments the door is melting, and the smell of burning wood makes me want to go for some smoked ribs, at least until the wood melts down into an acrid stink.

When the door is nothing but a smoking pile of chemicals, I leap over and into the asshole Seraph’s apartment. He’s staring wide-eyed at the smouldering remains of his door, and his pale pink ears are bending back and forth in anger.

“You burned my door down!” He shouts, “That’s not very peaceful!”

“What’s your name,” I ask, holstering my weapon.

“Kaleb,” he says.

“Where’s your roommate, Kaleb? I’m Ramses.”

I hold out my badge.

“I don’t know, man,” Kaleb says. “Sanga doesn’t tell me where he goes--”

I reach out a hand and shove Kaleb’s chest until his back slams into the wall. He grabs my forearm to try to break free, but I squeeze his wrist and bend his arm backward. He’s strong, but he doesn’t have the training I do.

“Ahhh,” He shouts, wincing. “Shit, man, let me go!”

I don’t let go. I grip him harder, and bend his arm way too far in the direction it’s not meant to go. “Talk and I let go.”

“They’ll kill me!” he hisses. “You won’t!”

I bend his arm further, just short of breaking it, but I don’t go further.

He screams out in pain, but just keeps muttering. “They’ll kill me! I can’t talk. I don’t wanna die, man!”

I finally let go of his arm, and he grabs hold of it and backs away from me as if I were a venomous snake.

“Who will kill you?” I ask.

“I’m not saying a word,” Kaleb says.

“I think it’s the Marauders from the Dark Star,” I say. “And I think they have Seraphim from Earth working for them.”

I shove him into the wall again, and I look deep into his pale green eyes. They widen in fear when I mention the Dark Star, and he looks down, avoiding my gaze.

“Mind if I take a look inside, Kaleb?” I ask. “I never saw you here. You were out getting drunk, so I had to burn your door down and search the place top to bottom.”

He nods at me, grabs his wallet, and rushes outside.

I ransack the place, tearing out every drawer, dresser, and cabinet. There’s nothing there. Based on Sanga’s room, he does nothing but eat jerky and smoke. The floor is covered in ashes and jerky wrappers, and--

I hear a faint footstep behind me, and suddenly the telltale sound of a human gun--oiled metal plates sliding against each other.

I jump and roll, and the moment I leave the floor, I hear the gunshot explode behind me.

I pull my own gun out as I roll, and I raise it toward the shooter and fire--not having the luxury of checking who it is before I kill him.

And then I see it’s Kaleb, with a hole clean through his stomach. The gun drops out of his hand, and his mouth hangs wide open.

His body collapses to the ground, and I search him. He’s got nothing on him but the gun, but I heard his keys jangling when he walked out.

I grab my phone and shout into it as I run. “Chicago PD, this is Ramses Ivanov! I made a...pitstop before reporting in. I’ve got a suspect dead and a potential terrorist attack unfolding. Requesting backup!”

I check the alley around the corner, and spot a dumpster. Before diving into the dumpster--a dirty lesson I learned a few years back--I check beneath and behind it, and I find Kaleb’s keys and phone. The phone is locked, but when I wave my badge over it, it opens right up.

I scroll to his message and see one from Sanga.

“Kill him, then meet us at the station.”

I shout into my own phone. “Train station! Terrorists at the train station!”

Shit. My shuttle landed at the train station, I was right there. I had to sneak around the main lobby to ditch the cop they sent me to meet. Elise something or other. It’s a good thing I lost her, or this attack would have happened while I was getting my ass kissed at their backwater police station.

2 Elise

My phone lights up, and it’s the chief, of course.

I pick up and hear him already shouting.

“Where the hell is our VIP? Don’t tell me you lost him! I know his shuttle landed over an hour ago!”

I grit my teeth and take a deep breath. I speak in a calm voice back into my phone. “Sir, he told me he would meet me just under the clock in the main lobby. I’m standing under the clock, and have been all this time. He’s ignored all my messages. He was ordered to report in with us, so he must have chosen to disobey--”

“Don’t blame it on him!” The chief shouts. “Now you’re going to get the Tsar of fucking Venus on our case. As if we don’t have enough on our plate--”

I mute the phone.

I take a sip of my coffee and continue waiting. If Ramses fucking Ivanov wants to dick us around, that’s his choice, but I will not be the one who takes the heat for his bullshit.

Just as I’m about to unmute my phone to see if the Chief is still there, it flashes red, and an emergency message starts to broadcast right into the implants in my ears, bypassing the phone entirely.

“Chicago PD, this is Ramses Ivanov! I made a...pitstop before reporting in. I’ve got a suspect dead and a potential terrorist attack unfolding. Requesting backup!”

A map of his location displays right onto my eyes--more implants--and I realize he’s less than ten blocks away.

I run with my coffee still in hand, shoving my way out of the train station. I try to throw the coffee into a trash bin as I run, but the lid pops off, and not-quite-burning-hot coffee spills all over my arm.

“Fucking Ivanov,” I grunt, running faster as I clear the bulk of the crowd.

I shove the doors open, turn left, and race down the street.

I’m in pretty good shape, and at this pace I can probably make it to Ivanov’s location in just under seven minutes.

The bastard not only disobeyed orders, but managed to kill someone in his very first hour on Earth. Peacekeeper my ass.

I’m halfway to his location when another emergency broadcast from him shouts right into my ears.

“Train station! Terrorists at the train station!”

I dig my heels into the sidewalk to stop myself.

“You have to be shitting me, I was just there!”

And now I’ll be there a few minutes before Ivanov. I’m sure a Seraph can run faster than me, but not that much faster.

Ivanov is breathing heavy as he describes the suspects, and I can tell by the map that he’s gaining on me. I might only get there a minute or so ahead of him.

“We’re looking for one or more Seraphim,” he says. “Prime suspect is named Sanga Horizont. He’s 6’8”, medium build for a Seraph, long hair…”

“I’m almost there, Ivanov,” I say, gasping for breath.

I can see the train station again as I turn the corner.

“You in uniform?” He asks me.

He’s no longer on the emergency channel, just directly speaking to me.

“Yes.”

“Stop running.” he says. “You’ll scare them.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, asshole.”

I do stop running though. He’s got a point. It’s normal for uniformed police to be around the train station.

“And stop those cars!” Ramses shouts. “Send backup, but don’t make it so obvious.”

I see all the backup on my map slow down and begin parking on the roadside.

I’ll definitely be the first to arrive now, but if this Sanga guy doesn’t know I’m onto him, he might not shoot me on sight.

I walk into the main lobby, but pretend to look down at my phone. I scan the room from the corner of my eyes, acting completely disinterested and unaware of any danger.

The first thing that catches my eye is the tallest man in the station. Not a Seraph, but a pure-blooded Marauder. He looks like he’s pushing 60 years old. His skin is deep purple rather than the pale pink of a Seraph, and everything about him screams danger.

“Got a suspicious Marauder--” I start to say, reaching for my gun.

Something grabs my arm as I go for the gun, and I hear Ramses Ivanov’s voice--in the flesh--right in my ear.

“Don’t mess with this one,” he says. “I’ve got this.”

I spin around, not sure if I’m going to gut punch him or kick him in the balls.

But then I see him. He’s almost as tall as a pure-blooded Marauder, and his face looks like a chiseled marble statue back from the Imperial days. His cheekbones are impossibly high, his strong jaw is both imposing and gorgeous, and his eyes are the vibrant teal of the northern lights in the dead of winter.

His eyes widen as he sees me, and I see his mouth open just wide enough to exThank pose his perfect white teeth. His ears twitch three times, and then stop.

“You’re...Elise?” He says.

I force myself to calm down, trying to will my heart to stop pounding so hard in my chest. He’s absolutely drop dead gorgeous, yes, but he’s a cocky asshole, and if I don’t keep my guard up, he might just get me killed.

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More From Aya Morningstar

He came to kill, but stayed to claim me.

When the captain throws me in the brig, it feels like things can’t get any worse. But they can. A deadly alien assassin slaughters everyone on our ship, but spares me.

If I want to survive, I’ll have to accept this brutal alien’s protection. He’s frustrating, insufferable, and never admits he’s wrong. And the worst part? He says he wants to kill all humans. But he protects me, fiercely and without question.

His body is a deadly weapon, and he’s vicious and unrelenting. So why has he spared me? And why does he keep looking at me with those jade green eyes and that smug grin?

Falling for this cocky alien killer may just be the one thing that saves me, but who can save me from him?

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About the Author

Aya Morningstar lives in Denver. She writes with a hot cup of Earl Grey and her loyal were corgi by her side. She writes both paranormal and sci-fi romance.

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- @ayamorningstar

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