Bride of Death

  Prepared to die for her people, she is ready for a fight, but what she gets is an imprisonment that evolves into something unexpected.

  Saloa is in charge of the last group of guards for her people. They were unable to join the exodus that took their people away from their home, but they are prepared to die for their home.

  General Hinlior was ready to fight an entire city but only sixteen armoured warriors were waiting for him. He disabled them and the medic’s scan showed the surprising discovery of a Life Bringer in the mix. One breedable female is found, and it is reason for excitement among their people.

  If only he had known that Saloa was a hand-to-hand combat specialist, he might just have thought twice before separating her from the other prisoners.

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  Bride of Death

  Copyright © 2013 Viola Grace

  ISBN: 978-1-77111-643-5

  Cover art by Martine Jardin

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

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  Bride of Death

  A Sci-Fi Fairy Tale

  By

  Viola Grace

  Saloa Winger snapped into her war suit. She looked at the rest of her crew and shuddered. They were down to sixteen sets of battle armour where two hundred units once stood.

  They were going to die.

  Death was coming from the sky, and she could see the shadows moving over the last bit of daylight streaming from the heavens. The ships were here.

  “Gentlemen, it has been an honour serving with you. We bought enough time for the others to escape, but now, we have to face our doom. Death is coming, let’s make him work for it!”

  A roar came from the few colony guards that were left.

  The first thud of the attack ships sent a low rumble of unease through the ranks, but they had to fight. There was nowhere to go.

  Two days earlier, the last generation ship left, full to capacity with the other one hundred and eighty-four armoured guards. Everyone left had remained voluntarily to give a position to a guard with family.

  Saloa had done what she could. She was a junior officer but the highest rank of those standing with her. They were going to defend a patch of empty dirt so that the Death Bringers would have blood on the ground and not seek out the fleeing colonists.

  She started a steady pace that would put her and the rest of the guard out in the open. Hopefully, they would take a few of the Death Bringers with them before they died, but with limited armament, it was not likely.

  Saloa couldn’t help but think back to the probe that landed six months earlier.

  They had gathered around as their techs prepared to crack the first contact with an alien probe landing next to their colony.

  It didn’t take much. One touch of a tech’s hand and the probe cracked open. The tech was scanned, and suddenly, a voice came through every com unit in the fifty-mile radius of the colony.

  “Intruders on Laksiira. You have ignored our attempts to communicate, so this is our final warning. In six months, the Death Bringers will arrive to cleanse the surface of our world. You were warned, and you have put down roots on our soil. That will not be tolerated. Leave or die.”

  A projection lit up, and a helmeted head was in the centre of a glow. “You bypassed our satellites, you ignored our ground beacons, and now, you will pay the price. Leave or die. You have six months, and then the Death Bringers come to cleanse the surface of our world.”

  The beacon had turned off, and then, it was time for the shocked population to get answers.

  The organizers were pinned, but they admitted that yes, they had been warned. Yes, there had been beacons, but the first landing party had been ordered to destroy them. No one knew where the species was that had planted them, so perhaps they would never come. It was a chance that they were willing to take.

  It was not a chance that the colonists would have chosen, and Saloa’s parents had been horrified. She had spent the last ten years of her life on that world, and to have it pulled out from under them was not something that they had planned for.

  Saloa marched forward, and when she reached the centre of the plain, she stopped. Death would have to come to her. She was done making it easy.

  The other fifteen guards lined up behind her and took up a battle stance.

  The battleship dropped on the far end of the flat plain, and a wave of armoured warriors marched toward them.

  * * * *

  General Hinlior stepped out with his troops, and he paused. There were just over a dozen warriors facing him.

  “Recon, do a life-sign check. Something isn’t right.”

  He was used to fighting a ferocious population. Sixteen warriors were not even worth the sweat.

  “General. The sixteen warriors before you is the complete complement of the colonists.”

  He raised his fist, and his warriors returned to the vessel without saying a word.

  “Send out an EMP. We don’t need to destroy this handful. They can be sent to the mines.”

  “Understood, General. EMP deployed.”

  The shielded ship sealed before it launched, but Hinlior felt the change in the environment the moment that the pulse struck.

  “Confirm clearance?”

  “They are down.”

  General Hinlior lifted his fist again and called forty of his men with a simple gesture. The ship opened, and they stomped out to retrieve the fallen bodies of the last trespassers on their world.

  * * * *

  Saloa hissed and tried to move against the metal holding her in place. She had been prepared to die tonight, but she had not been prepared to be pinned to the ground like a bug.

  The dark figures approached, and she glared up at the man standing over her via her face shield. Another figure ran some kind of scanner over the guard to her left before he turned to her. Whatever the machine told him got him excited.

  The man staring down at her jerked his head toward the man who was babbling, and whatever the man with the scanner said, it decided something. The first man hauled her up and flipped her over his shoulder. Her suit was dead, and she was running out of air.

  The man carrying her walked swiftly back the way he had come, and aside from the strange silver markings on his back and shoulders, she couldn’t see anything.

  Her vision faded to black as she gasped for air and consciousness fled.

  The whirring of saws and grinders brought her awake with a gasp. Her faceplate had been sliced open and that was where her oxygen was coming from.

  Four men were working on her armour and pulling it away from her limbs, one by one.

  “What are you doing?”

  Two of the men glanced at her but kept cutting. One spoke over his shoulder, and a man on the far side of the
room got up and walked out.

  Her left side was coming free quickly, and a moment later, her right arm and leg were exposed to the air.

  She was wearing a thin lining suit, but it was nearly transparent. When they cut loose her helmet and pulled it free, she craned her neck to glare at them. They ignored her and finished a cut on her torso that cracked the breastplate of her suit wide open. The waist and hips came away, and they pulled her free of the shattered pieces of her battle suit.

  Saloa sat up and looked around. None of her men were nearby. She was alone and wasn’t feeling too optimistic about her chances.

  She looked down at the floor, and it was about a foot further down than it should be. Either she was shrinking or this race was pretty tall.

  She was alone in the room, so she hopped to the ground and took a few steps toward the only door she could see. She had almost reached it when it slid open.

  A man in a black battle suit came in, and she backed up. The faceplate tilted toward her, and she stiffened her spine and straightened up with aggression. His suit had silver marks on it, and she was wondering if he was the same warrior that had hauled her in.

  He spoke, and it was with a careful pronunciation. “Your species has females in combat.”

  She blinked. “Of course. Doesn’t yours?”

  “No. You will be held as a prisoner of war.”

  “Where are my men?”

  “They are being held separately. Are you intimate with them?”

  She recoiled and would have slapped him if he weren’t armoured. “Of course not.”

  “Where are your people?”

  “They left. They were ordered to leave, and they left.”

  He leaned in until he was inches away from her nose. “They left you behind.”

  “There were children born, so the ships’ holds were full. We volunteered to stay behind.”

  He stood up. “I have your quarters ready. Come with me.”

  She blinked. “That is it? No torture?”

  “Why? It was the land we wanted. Over two hundred years ago, we bio-formed this world, and we had to wait for it to settle. Your kind settled on it before we were ready to move our own colony to the surface. We had to make sure you were gone.”

  He spoke as he walked through the halls, and she was the next thing to naked, but she followed him anyway.

  The deck plates were cool, but her bare feet had been over worse. He stood next to her in the lift, and it rose dramatically.

  The crewmembers that she saw looked at her for a moment before returning to their duties. Whatever the man next to her was, he was definitely in charge of his people.

  She had no weapons, she was barely clothed and she had no idea where she was. This was not the time to attack the black back of metal in front of her. She needed to find her men, and she needed to be alive to do it.

  He paused next to an archway, and the door slid open. He waved for her to enter. “I apologise. We are not kitted out properly for Life Bringers on this ship. This was the best we could do.”

  His words were still stilted, but she made out the phrasing clearly.

  “What is a Life Bringer?” She struggled with the concept. In Prothean society, there were no classes, only ranks in the guard. Everyone else was equal.

  He cocked his head. “You are. There is clothing for you and a place to bathe. Refresh yourself, and we will speak again.”

  He waited until she passed the threshold, and the door slid shut. Unable to stop herself, she pounded her fist on it, shocking herself when it opened and she tumbled into the hall.

  Her escort turned, and there was amusement in his tone. “You wanted something?”

  She scrambled to her feet and stumbled back into the room. “No. I tripped.”

  “Keep your temper and you will trip less, little warrior.”

  The door closed, and she turned to face what they considered to be substandard for a Life Bringer. Even her apartment carved into the stone caverns had not had this much space.

  Wide, arched ceilings swirled above her. A bathing pool set into the floor was full of steaming water and swirling with flower petals. Whatever a Life Bringer was, they lived very well.

  Saloa removed the suit she was wearing, and it sighed to the floor in a sad and tattered heap. Steps led into the pool, so she eased into the heat of the water, shivering as it relaxed muscles tensed by the frozen armour.

  She inhaled and ducked under the water, letting her hair swirl around her in a golden cloud. A few drops passed her lips, and she contemplated inhaling the liquid. Her family was gone, her people were seeking out another world to live on and she was alone.

  Being alone was not something she had planned for and the feeling of emptiness was swamping over her.

  A little more water entered and she stood up, coughing. The urge to live was far stronger than giving in to despair. Her future was murky, but it was still a future, and she was going to live in it until it ran dry.

  A short exploration ended with her sitting on a bench beneath the water, and as she sat, a shelf rose from the metal next to her. Soaps, oils, lotions and a few other concoctions were in a series of bottles and vials.

  She washed her hair, cleaned her nails and scrubbed her body. When she had gone over every inch twice, just to kill time, she rose to her feet and walked back up the steps. Another shelf rose, this one with lengths of white cloth that absorbed the water and draped around her. Clean and shivering, she explored the exterior of the room and found not only a wide bed hung with all sorts of gauzy lengths but a huge wardrobe. She had seen an image of an ancient decorating manual, and it had had something extravagantly similar in it.

  There were only two gowns in the wardrobe and no bodysuits. She slipped on one of the gowns and its matching shrug. It was pretty, pastel and looked nothing like anything she had ever worn in her life.

  Her hair hung down her back in a damp tangle, so she went in search of a brush and found a small lav with a lady-like preparation station. The women of this world must be the most useless creatures imaginable or at least so lovely that the men were willing to bend over and give them nothing to do.

  She had no idea. She wasn’t even sure what it was that had possession of her.

  She found a brush and went to work on her hair, cursing convention. She had wanted to shear her hair off when she entered the guard, but it was not allowed. Minimum hair lengths were dictated for men and women.

  Once her hair was dealt with, she continued exploring her cushioned cage. Her wrap slipped down her arms, but it was so light, she barely felt it. A pressure plate in the wall begged her to touch it, so she did.

  The wall of her room folded back with metallic thuds. A balcony extended outward, and she tasted the air of her home, marked by the tang of unfamiliar metals.

  Saloa stepped forward, her bare feet on the metal decking. She looked around at a field of ships, each shifting and unfolding itself into an interlocking city. Where the kilometres of empty plain had been was now a landing metropolis.

  She looked down and gasped. Two hundred feet up, she was standing on the side of the first landing ship. The wind tugged at her, and she slowly backed into the safety of the structure.

  The aliens were reclaiming their territory, and they were doing it swiftly.

  “The progress is stunning, is it not? By the time the Life Bringers arrive, there will be twelve cities just like this on the surface.”

  She turned and locked her jaw to hold in her gasp. His skin was a reddish bronze, the highlights on it a soft gold. His hair was dark crimson with black strands mixed in, and the sleek wave reached his waist. He was out of his armour, but the black shirt and the vest with the rank markings labeled him as the man who had hauled her into the ship. She had never seen anything like him.

  He stepped forward; his boots rang deliberately on the flooring of the chamber. “Welcome to the Herald of Death, Life Bringer.”

 
She backed away. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “Because, it is what you are to us, lady.”

  “I am no lady.”

  His lips twisted in a smile, and she caught sight of sharp feral teeth. “And yet, our scans indicate that you are a breedable female of suitable age. That makes you a Life Bringer to our people. There is no other place for you.”

  She swallowed. “Where are my men?”

  “They are being held below and will join the servants when they arrive with the population carriers.” He stepped forward again. “They were very concerned about you as well, though two of them are dead.”

  She bumped into the wall and stared up at him, wide-eyed. “You killed them?”

  “They killed themselves. It seems your little gathering was prepared to die. I wish I had known it. I would not have left you alone.” His gaze was intense. His eyes a rich brown that seemed to take her in and approve of what he saw.

  She blushed and looked away. “I have decided that any future is preferable to none.”

  Long fingers cupped her jaw and turned her face to look at him. “Hmm...hair like sunlight and eyes the colour of a starry sky. Your men must be blind or stupid.”

  Her blush took on a new intensity, and she licked her lips.

  His pupil’s dilated, and he leaned in to kiss her.

  Her reflexes took over, and he was flipped to his back in seconds, his arm twisted to the point of pain and his back arched.

  He stared at her in surprise. “Well done, little warrior. I will not touch you without your consent again.”

  “Take me to see my men.”

  He frowned. “The brig is no place for a Li—for a lady such as yourself.”

  “If my men are there, it is the perfect place for me.” She removed her bare foot from his chest and released his arm as she stepped back.

  He gained his feet easily. “I am General Hinlior, and I will be responsible for your safety until you can join the Life Bringers in one of the cities.”