Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5) by Aya Morningstar Page B
Authors: Aya Morningstar
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tendrils bonding to the ground, and at this point, only the bottom-most portion is solidified, while the greater length is a mushy gel-like consistency.
All 24 tendrils are spread out along a 50-meter-wide circle, converging up into me.
I will the tendrils to harden more at the bottom, and they become straight and solid.
If I make them too solid too fast, they will simply shatter, and I’ll plummet to the ground. If I harden them too slowly, they will slow my fall to a degree, but I’ll still hit the ground at a fatal speed.
I have to do it just right. Like Goldilocks. There’s a lot of wiggle room on Mars, less on Earth, and almost none here.
I feel my descent slowing as the tendrils steel themselves. When I’m about 100 meters up, I ramp up the hardening action, and I feel my stomach churn as my descent rapidly declines. I can feel the pressure–if I had ramped it any harder the tendrils would have shattered apart, and I’d still fall too hard to survive. But I balanced on the knife’s edge, and I continue to ramp up the tensile strength until it feels as if I’m falling so slowly that I’m on Earth’s moon. And when I’m about ten meters from the ground, I’m barely descending.
The tendrils reach 100 percent hardness when I’m only two meters from the ground. I pull them all back in and fall to the ground in a low crouch position.
A score of tendrils slam into the ground beside me, and I look up to see Raius falling at their epicenter.
Less than five seconds later, Raius is slowly lowering down. He touches all the way down onto his feet, in a perfectly gentle landing. No two-meter drop like I had.
He narrows his eyes at me. “You didn’t stick your landing, little brother.”
I smile, but I’m mad at myself.
He can still control the suit better than me. He’s been using it for over a year, so it should come as no surprise, but I know–given time–I’d quickly surpass him. But I don’t have time. I need to surpass him now .
It’s clear now that Raius is reporting back to Adus about me. It’s the main reason he’s been assigned to train me. Adus is up on the High Command ship, and when my plan is set into action, he’ll be too far away to intervene. Raius, however, always seems to be right on my heels.
When it comes time to escape, Raius will be the one who tries to stop me. And I’ll have to kill him, using this damn suit.
The plan so far–assuming those miners can make a bomb–is to blow up a wagon deep in the refinery. I’ll order my inexperienced Seraphim army to rush in with guns blazing, hopefully creating more chaos. In the ideal scenario, Raius goes to the explosion as well, but I have a gut feeling that if anything blows up, he’ll come straight for me.
So the realistic plan is that I have to kill Raius first, and then I can hijack a shuttle. After that...it doesn’t get any easier, but at least I’ll have Kara off of Darkstar. Anything that goes wrong from there, at least she will be directly under my protection.
But I’m still a peacekeeper, and I need to figure out what Adus is planning. Saving Kara while failing my mission as a peacekeeper means that I’m bringing her back to an unsafe solar system.
I have a plan for getting this information, but I’ll have to face Adus again and risk raising his suspicions.
* * *
I ’m standing up straight with my hands behind my back while I watch the Seraphim punch and kick the shit out of each other.
“Losers all have to do 100 pull ups!” I shout.
One hundred pull ups normally isn’t too hard for a Seraph. But in Darkstar gravity, it’s brutal.
I’m training them to drop the human notion of a fair or honorable fight. Human males especially have this strange notion of not fighting to win. I saw this firsthand on Venus, in bars on Sankt Petersburg. A man would look the wrong way at another’s girlfriend, and they’d soon be up in each other’s faces.
Marauders would stare each other down as well, but the first
All 24 tendrils are spread out along a 50-meter-wide circle, converging up into me.
I will the tendrils to harden more at the bottom, and they become straight and solid.
If I make them too solid too fast, they will simply shatter, and I’ll plummet to the ground. If I harden them too slowly, they will slow my fall to a degree, but I’ll still hit the ground at a fatal speed.
I have to do it just right. Like Goldilocks. There’s a lot of wiggle room on Mars, less on Earth, and almost none here.
I feel my descent slowing as the tendrils steel themselves. When I’m about 100 meters up, I ramp up the hardening action, and I feel my stomach churn as my descent rapidly declines. I can feel the pressure–if I had ramped it any harder the tendrils would have shattered apart, and I’d still fall too hard to survive. But I balanced on the knife’s edge, and I continue to ramp up the tensile strength until it feels as if I’m falling so slowly that I’m on Earth’s moon. And when I’m about ten meters from the ground, I’m barely descending.
The tendrils reach 100 percent hardness when I’m only two meters from the ground. I pull them all back in and fall to the ground in a low crouch position.
A score of tendrils slam into the ground beside me, and I look up to see Raius falling at their epicenter.
Less than five seconds later, Raius is slowly lowering down. He touches all the way down onto his feet, in a perfectly gentle landing. No two-meter drop like I had.
He narrows his eyes at me. “You didn’t stick your landing, little brother.”
I smile, but I’m mad at myself.
He can still control the suit better than me. He’s been using it for over a year, so it should come as no surprise, but I know–given time–I’d quickly surpass him. But I don’t have time. I need to surpass him now .
It’s clear now that Raius is reporting back to Adus about me. It’s the main reason he’s been assigned to train me. Adus is up on the High Command ship, and when my plan is set into action, he’ll be too far away to intervene. Raius, however, always seems to be right on my heels.
When it comes time to escape, Raius will be the one who tries to stop me. And I’ll have to kill him, using this damn suit.
The plan so far–assuming those miners can make a bomb–is to blow up a wagon deep in the refinery. I’ll order my inexperienced Seraphim army to rush in with guns blazing, hopefully creating more chaos. In the ideal scenario, Raius goes to the explosion as well, but I have a gut feeling that if anything blows up, he’ll come straight for me.
So the realistic plan is that I have to kill Raius first, and then I can hijack a shuttle. After that...it doesn’t get any easier, but at least I’ll have Kara off of Darkstar. Anything that goes wrong from there, at least she will be directly under my protection.
But I’m still a peacekeeper, and I need to figure out what Adus is planning. Saving Kara while failing my mission as a peacekeeper means that I’m bringing her back to an unsafe solar system.
I have a plan for getting this information, but I’ll have to face Adus again and risk raising his suspicions.
* * *
I ’m standing up straight with my hands behind my back while I watch the Seraphim punch and kick the shit out of each other.
“Losers all have to do 100 pull ups!” I shout.
One hundred pull ups normally isn’t too hard for a Seraph. But in Darkstar gravity, it’s brutal.
I’m training them to drop the human notion of a fair or honorable fight. Human males especially have this strange notion of not fighting to win. I saw this firsthand on Venus, in bars on Sankt Petersburg. A man would look the wrong way at another’s girlfriend, and they’d soon be up in each other’s faces.
Marauders would stare each other down as well, but the first
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