Corsar Read online

  CORSAR

  SKY WARRIORS 2

  Becca Colton

  Copyright © April 2020 Becca Colton

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Of Sex and Starships

  Newsletter

  Also by Becca Colton

  Copyright Notice

  Chapter One

  Corsar walked along the command platform, his eyes roaming over the officers at their stations, although every man and woman assigned here knew their job and each one of them was committed to the safety of the floating city, Stratos, and Kriath itself. They didn’t need a babysitter. Corsar saw himself simply as an extra pair of eyes. Between the city and the visitors who came from other planets—sometimes lightyears away—to explore the jungles below, they had a lot to keep their eyes on.

  He glanced outside the open window along the far wall. It was going to be a beautiful day. A perfect day to steal away a few hours early and take a nice leisurely flight around his favorite meadow.

  “Sir,” a young man said, pointing excitedly at the digital display floating in front of him. “Some of the ruins of Avia are collapsing because of ground tremors in the area. A guided tour is headed there now.”

  “Relax,” Corsar said, patting the man on the shoulder. The worker had recently celebrated his final youngling molt. He was a man now, but this was his first job and he was easily excited over almost everything. “Ground tremors are a common occurrence. Simply have the guide reroute to the next location. They can visit the city of Avia on the way back.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said, quickly moving to contact the guide.

  Corsar sighed. Soon the ancient city of Avia would look like just a pile of random rocks. The ruins of the ancient generations—the generations before the people of Kriath were gifted with the power of flight—were losing the battle against time and nature.

  An alarm sounded at one of the orbital observation stations. “Sub-Commander,” a young woman said, adjusting controls to focus on one particular section of her screen, “a Struun ship, classification freighter, is approaching the asteroid belt.”

  Corsar walked closer to the station, staring intently at the screen. The slavers had their asses handed to them the last time they tried to abduct Kriathian women. They must have been desperate for credits if they were making another attempt, especially with the defensive asteroid belt in place now. He watched as the ship entered the asteroid belt. It took a few solid hits and he waited for it to alter course. Instead, to his surprise, the ship suddenly dove toward the planet, engines powering up to full power as flashes of light indicated explosions along the ship’s bridge.

  “Father Sky and Mother Moon,” Corsar swore. “Sound the alarm and raise the shields around the city to full power,” he snapped. “Contact all tour groups and order them to take cover.”

  Movement out of the corner of his eye made Corsar turn toward the window, muscles tensing as he readied for an attack. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that it was Andar, his best friend and commander of Stratos SkyGuard, flying in. Since he had come from above the command platform, Corsar knew his friend had been at the atrium, probably drinking a glass or two of nectar. It was his usual morning routine.

  “Report!” Andar snapped.

  Ah. Andar apparently hadn’t had a chance to finish his morning nectar. Corsar grimaced. He was always grouchy when that happened.

  “A slave ship just entered our atmosphere,” Corsar said. “It appears to be damaged and is expected to crash in our quadrant in less than five minutes.” He flashed a predatory grin at Andar. “The asteroid belt our scientists established around the planet appears to have done its job.” He wasn’t entirely certain about that though. The ship had taken a few solid hits but they didn’t seem to be enough to down the ship, especially with engines at full power. Best to leave that to himself though until more information was available. Andar didn’t like making plans based on guesswork.

  “Armor up and assemble a team,” Andar barked, heading for the balcony’s ledge. “Meet me at the atrium and we’ll fly out to the crash site and remind these little green bastards what we think about slavers. It’s obviously been too long since the last lesson.” He snapped his wings open and flew up toward his quarters.

  “Comm station, alert Delta Wing to assemble at the atrium,” Corsar ordered. He didn’t know what was going on with that ship, but he knew the elite SkyGuard team could handle it. He dove off the balcony and opened his wings, soaring down to his quarters. He didn’t even bother landing until he reached his door. The wide halls provided plenty of room for flight and the alarms ensured that everyone cleared the way.

  He entered his quarters and quickly pulled on his bronze armor, sliding his Razr blaster into the holster on his right hip while he slid the smooth wooden handle of his deactivated LazerMace into its holder on his left hip. Ready for battle, he snapped his wings open and soared up to the atrium to join his commander and the Skyguard.

  Chapter Two

  Chloe leaned back against the wall of her cell and sighed, looking around at the others. Her cell wasn’t technically just hers. She was sharing it with a few other girls from Earth and a few . . . “people” who would look right at home in the Star Wars Episode IV cantina scene.

  She thought she’d seen everything. She’d been all over the world as a war correspondent, reporting on and photographing the worst atrocities mankind could perform on itself. She thought she’d seen it all, had grown jaded by her experiences, the things she’d seen. Eventually it all blended together. If anyone had asked her, she couldn’t have even said for sure where she was when she was grabbed. It was just some desert in some country with some people fighting some other people. The danger of war had become boring. And then the little green men had shown up. At first she thought they were a hallucination brought on by too much heat and not enough water. She had even laughed when they pulled their obviously fake little laser pistols out and pointed them at her.

  She sighed and looked around the cage again, then beyond the bars to the window in the far wall. It revealed inky blackness and a field of stars. Definitely not fake. Not the little green men. Not the lasers that stunned her senseless. And not the spaceship she was currently on, taking her who knew where. Her one regret? Dropping her camera when the green guys stunned her. If she’d managed to hold on to that, the Pulitzer would have her name all over it when she got back to Earth. And she would get back. That was a certainty in her mind. That certainty had gotten her home from some of the worst hell holes on Earth, and it would get her home from this.

  A low growl from a couple of feet away made Chloe snort, a small smile on her face. Leah, another girl from Earth abducted a couple of days after Chloe, slowly stirred, opening her eyes and looking around. She groaned as she sat up, wincing as she stretched her back.

  “Sounds like someone is hungry,” Chloe said, “but cheer up. It’s a brand-new day and our morning ration of water should be showing up any minute now.”

  Leah rolled her eyes and Chloe couldn’t help but grin again. She wasn’t one for making friends quickly, but she had bonded with Leah in a short period of time. She thought maybe it had something to do with her and the brunette knowing how the world worked. Leah was a correctional officer, keeping an eye on the worst of the worst in the state prison
system. Her own personal war zone giving her an up-close look at society’s ugly underbelly.

  The other girls—Sofia, Reagan, and Paisley—well, Chloe didn’t know much about them. Sofia was a college professor, Paisley was a college student, and Chloe had no idea what Reagan did. The girl didn’t talk much. She knew even less about the otherworldly occupants of the cage. Two lizard-looking aliens looked mean as fuck but tended to keep to themselves, a girl that appeared to be made of purple jello, and a porcupine girl covered head to toe in sharp quills who was definitely as mean as she appeared. If it hadn’t been for jello girl stepping in to stop a fight with porcupine girl Chloe probably wouldn’t have had a chance to get to know Leah.

  As Leah climbed to her feet, Chloe glanced over toward the other girls from Earth. They were doing the daily poo of shame, as she had labeled it in her head. Bastard aliens couldn’t even give them a sheet or blanket to duck behind while pooping and peeing in a bucket. A fucking bucket. They were on an actual motherfucking spaceship that would probably be a wet dream for any Star Wars or Star Trek fan and their bathroom was a bucket. Fucking aliens. If that was meant to sap morale and make them feel hopeless it was doing a great job on the others, but Chloe had done her fair share of pooping in buckets and holes dug in the sand and her morale was doing just fine.

  “I’ll stand watch,” Leah said. “Get some sleep.”

  Chloe nodded, her eyes feeling like they were filled with sand. She was tired but she had been determined to stay awake while Leah slept. At some point the two of them had come to an unspoken arrangement where one of them would stay awake to keep an eye on the others. In an environment where almost anything could happen, it just seemed safer that way. She inhaled deeply and slowly exhaled, closing her eyes. Even before she found herself in war-torn countries on a regular basis she’d always been able to fall asleep practically on command. It was a talent that had served her well, and it didn’t fail her this time. The hard bars against her back, the murmuring of her fellow prisoners, it all faded away as she drifted off.

  The blissful peace of sleep didn’t last long. Chloe reached out blindly as the floor lurched beneath her. Her eyes snapped open as she thrust a hand out to keep from falling over on her face. She looked around, instantly alert, her eyes sweeping her surroundings. The first thing that caught her eye were the asteroids floating outside the window. Some looked to be close enough to reach out and touch, which explained why the ship was bouncing around.

  The second thing Chloe saw was more urgent. The creepy alien they had nicknamed lip-licker was standing right at the edge of the cage, his huge black eyes focused on Paisley. Leah had planted herself between the pervy alien and the young Earth girl, and it didn’t look like the alien liked that at all.

  Chloe rose to her feet, shaking her head, a small smile on her face. Leave it to Leah to go toe-to-toe with an armed alien to defend someone else. It was one of the things she liked about her new friend. Leah had a fire in her that refused to be quenched. The two of them could’ve been sisters with their shared determination and refusal to back down in the face of threats.

  The ship lurched again and the alien stumbled against the bars. Leah grabbed the gun from the alien’s belt and blasted it several times before the alien fell. Then she blasted the cage door, but the white light had no effect on it.

  “Does it have different settings,” Chloe asked. She smirked at Leah’s frustrated groan. Leah adjusted something on the laser and fired at the door again. This time the light from the laser was red and the lock was blasted into nothingness.

  The lizard girls hissed in triumph and even Ms. Porcupine smiled. Jello Girl waved an arm in the air victoriously.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Chloe said.

  Leah nodded and headed for the door, placing her hand on the panel next to it. Chloe swore softly when nothing happened. She’d seen the aliens place their palms on that panel at least a hundred times and the door opened every time, but Leah apparently didn’t have the magic touch.

  Porcupine Girl had a plan though, and Chloe blamed being tired and hungry for not thinking of it herself. The quill-covered woman grabbed the alien Leah had blasted and used his handprint to open the door. Then she buried several quills into the back of the alien’s head before dropping his lifeless body back to the ground. Porcupine Girl had been a pain in their asses but Chloe had to admit she was good to have around when trying to escape a bunch of alien scum-sucking slavers.

  The door slid open. An alien was there. Leah blasted it without any hesitation and the creature fell, its stomach now missing. She stepped through the door, followed by the porcupine girl, jello girl, and the two lizard people. None of them seemed interested in arming themselves so Chloe grabbed the pistol, adjusting the controls the same way she’d seen Leah do. Fuck the whole ‘set phasers on stun’ crap. She was all about making body parts disappear.

  The group slowly made their way down the corridor, occasionally stumbling from one wall to the other as if they were drunk as the ship continued getting hammered by the asteroids. Leah blasted a few more aliens ahead of the group, while Chloe vaporized various body parts of a few slavers that tried to sneak up on them from the rear. Sofia, Paisley, and Reagan armed themselves with pistols from the fallen aliens as they made their way further down the corridor.

  When they got close to a closed door at the end of the corridor, one of the lizard girls grabbed a dead alien to use its hand on the pad next to the door. The door slid open, revealing what Chloe guessed was the bridge. Aliens glanced back from their glowing screens and controls, apparently too stunned to react. Leah took advantage of those precious few seconds, opening fire as the others surged in behind her. The slavers eventually shook off their shock. They pulled their weapons and returned fire.

  It didn’t take long to realize why the non-Earth members of the escaping group had ignored the laser pistols. They didn’t need them.

  Porcupine Girl sent her lethal quills flying, her targets screaming in pain as they fell. The lizard girls used their sharp claws and teeth to splatter the bridge with the blood of their enemies, and the bridge was filled with the stomach-turning smell of burnt flesh as the jello girl enveloped one green alien after another, burning them alive within her purple form.

  Chloe aimed her pistol at one of the green aliens, then dropped her hand down to her side, the alien forgotten as she stared at the large screen at the front of the ship. She was vaguely aware of the porcupine girl slamming a couple of quills in the face of the alien that had probably been seconds away from making Chloe’s head disappear, but she couldn’t be bothered with that at the moment. She’d seen a lot, done a lot—jumped out of a perfectly good airplane during a nighttime raid in a foreign country, got thrown out of the back of a jeep when it hit a buried mine—but a strange planet growing bigger and bigger on the screen at an alarming rate of speed was enough to short-circuit her brain.

  Fuck me.

  Movement out of the corner of her eye finally pulled Chloe’s gaze from the terrifying sight. Leah had grabbed a chair in front of one of the many stations along the wall.

  That’s a good idea. The chairs are bolted down.

  But that obviously wasn’t enough to break through the paralysis that locked her into place.

  “Hang on, everybody,” Leah shouted. “We’re going down.”

  It was as if Leah’s words made it real, and Chloe was finally able to move. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, filled her lungs with fresh air, and grabbed another seat in front of another station.

  Chloe waited for the air to grow hotter, for the ship to cook them as it went up in flames. Spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere had to deal with the heat of reentry, had to deal with their ship growing red hot, but the slave ship apparently didn’t have that problem. It was still a prisoner of gravity though, and it plowed through an endless ocean of trees, twisting and spinning like a giant corkscrew from Hell.

  Dead green bod
ies flew through the air, slamming into the walls, floors, and ceiling as the ship spun. Light—first as narrow slits and then as larger swaths—appeared throughout the bridge as sections of the hull were torn into and pulled apart. And then the ship finally hit the ground.

  Chloe wrapped her arms even tighter around the pedestal of the chair, her teeth clicking together so hard she was afraid they might break. The high-pitched squealing sound of tearing metal echoed in her ears as the ship tore a gouge like a knife wound in the ground. The floor bucked violently, and the chair Chloe had been clinging to was suddenly no longer mounted to the floor. She still held onto it though as she slid across the bridge. She dug her heels in, trying to slow herself down, and then the ship’s forward motion finally stopped.

  Resting her head against the cool metal floor, Chloe sighed heavily. “Well fuck me sideways while running down the road. We’re alive.”

  Paisley and Leah chuckled as everyone slowly made it to their feet, and everyone turned as one to look at the dark corridor as scurrying noises and the chatter of the aliens grew louder.

  Without saying a word, Chloe and the others moved toward a large rip in the hull at the front of the bridge. They scrambled up onto control consoles and pulled themselves out of the ship, careful to avoid cutting themselves on the jagged edges of the torn metal.

  Chloe glanced down at the ground, which was several feet beneath them.

  “Well, shit,” Chloe breathed. “It just keeps getting better and better.” She pulled herself all the way out of the opening, swung her legs around, and then dropped down, bending at the knees as she landed on her feet. There were trees everywhere. It could be a great way to lose their pursuers. Or it could be a great way to end up as lunch for anything that might be living in that dense foliage.

  Leah landed near Chloe, falling to her knees. She moved to help her friend but Leah waved her off.