Insurrection: A Space Opera Harem Adventure (The Lost Fleet Book 2), page 1
Insurrection
A Seraph Universe Novel
Published by Jade Fantasy
Copyright © 2022 Sarah Hawke
Cover Inks/Pencils by Alfredo Reyes III
Cover Colors by Liezl Buenaventura
Edited by Sean L.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
All rights reserved.
Dedication
I want to offer a special thanks to all my wonderful supporters on Patreon, especially my super patrons Alcofribas, Daniel, Lamar, Paul, and Sean. Without your support, none of this would be possible!
Alan
Joe Good
Aftermeluckycharms
Joe Johnson
Blaine
John
Bob
Justyn
Billy
Michael B.
Commissar
Michael M.
Cookieforfox
Onyx Bars
David B.
Rick
DDoubleU
Romeo
Dumblindeaf
Ryan
James
Tom W.
Jeremy
Wes
Jerry
Wittington
Joe
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The Tartarus Cluster
For a more detailed map beyond what I could include for Kindle, head over to the new and improved www.sarahhawke.com! You’ll find detailed histories of the major species as well as some awesome new concept art from the Seraph Universe!
Prologue
Nirivarr, the Borderlands
Seven Years Ago
The first bombs landed when we were still in the car. Ash was trying to fix her makeup in the mirror, and I was trying to figure out where the hell I’d put our tickets. Initially, I mistook the rumbling for distant thunder, mostly because we’d put so much effort into getting dressed up that it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a spiteful galaxy to ruin our carefully laid plans with rain. But this wasn’t another storm brought on by the wet season.
The colony was under attack.
A soundless shockwave smashed into the car, rattling it so hard I banged my head on the steering wheel. The soundwave was next, a deafening crash that sucked the air from my lungs and made my heart feel like it was about to explode.
Then the parking garage began to collapse on top of us. The ceiling above us splintered into a spiderweb of cracks before bursting open in a shower of rubble. Ash shrieked when the first chunk of ferrocrete crashed down on the hood of our car, and I instinctively dove on top of her as the second and third chunks landed on the roof, buckling the metal until it was nearly digging into my back. Clenching my teeth, I held her in a crushing grip beneath me, my heart pounding with terror, knowing full well that my strange powers wouldn’t do either of us any good if we got buried alive.
I didn’t move again until the world stopped shaking. I held my breath, waiting for another collapse, but the only thing I could hear were discordant alarms and muffled screams from somewhere beyond the rubble half-burying our car. It was only then, when the world stopped imploding around us, that my survival instincts took control of my body.
I kicked my right leg out behind me, smashing the warped driver’s-side door open with a single violent blow. Pulling Ash along with me, I began to slide my way out of the car. She was little more than sobbing jelly in my arms, but at least she was alive and unharmed.
And I was going to keep her that way. No matter what.
“It’s all right, baby,” I soothed. “Just hold on, okay?”
She clutched me even tighter as I pulled her free, the heat of her half-Kreen body warming me through my suit jacket. I knew we had to get out of here as fast as we could, but I had to wait several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness enveloping us. Nearly all of the halogen lights on the garage’s support columns had been knocked out, either because they had been smashed by falling rubble or deprived of power. The only sporadic illumination came from the flickering headlight beams of the handful of cars that were still running—or whose emergency blinkers had turned on when they had been half crushed in the collapse.
I gave Ash a reassuring squeeze as she continued trembling. Her bright eyes were shot wide with fear, and the beautiful face she’d tried so hard to make up for me was stained with tears. The green dress she’d borrowed for our special date was ruined by dirt and dust.
It had taken me two months—and no small amount of help from my dad—to save up enough credits for a dinner and a show at the Parthax multi-plex. If Ash hadn’t taken so long getting ready, we would have been up there in the restaurant instead of fashionably late down here in the parking garage when the bombs had started going off.
In other words, we probably would have been dead.
I grimaced, squinting to try and peer through the darkness and haze of dust to the other side of the parking garage. I didn’t see anyone else moving, and the muffled screams had all fallen ominously silent. There had only been a few other people down here when the explosions had started—most of the other guests were already enjoying their pre-show dinner rather than frantically trying to find a parking spot like we were—but there had been another couple chatting and giggling next to the yellow Vesira Firestar two cars down. Grimly, I wondered if they had found shelter somewhere or been crushed by the debris.
Either way, we couldn’t afford to stay put. The dust in the air had started making both of us cough, and the rest of the building could collapse on us at any time.
“We need to get outta here,” I said, prying one of Ash’s hands from my shoulders and giving it a squeeze. “Come on, I gotcha…”
I would have gladly carried her out of here if I’d needed to, but once my hand squeezed hers, I swore I could actually feel the wave of determination sweep through her. My dad always said that Nirivian girls were made of sterner stuff, and at least as far as Ash was concerned, he was right. She rose beside me, cautious but resolute. I kept my arm slung protectively over her as we began to move just in case this place started coming apart again…
Which it did, almost immediately. We barely made it ten steps before another tremor shook the building, either from a new bomb or perhaps the aftereffect of the old one, and I pulled Ash beneath me as another massive chunk of ferrocrete dropped on top of us. It should have pulverized me—the chunk was more than a meter long and probably weighed at least fifty kilos. But instead, it shattered over my back as if my spine were made of thorotine.
I still didn’t quite understand why. But somehow, as long as I concentrated, my body became virtually invulnerable. Knives, rocks, even guns—none of them could hurt me. It was like I could ignore pain and injury through sheer force of will. It was how I’d survived a shot to the stomach during a gang war last month…and how I was able to make love to a half-Kreen girl every night without burning up inside her.
My ears were still ringing when the debris stopped falling, and I waited several seconds before I risked a glance upward to make sure another chunk wasn’t on its way. But what little I could see of the ceiling seemed stable, at least for now, and the bigger concern were the clouds of noxious ash and dust that were going to make it impossible to breathe in a few more minutes. We had to get out of here now, or we never would.
After carefully helping Ash back to her feet, I tried to guide her along with me at a steady jog. But her fancy shoes—the ones she’d spent weeks scrimping and saving for—weren’t up to the task. She almost tripped when one of the high heels broke, and she kicked them off to go barefoot instead. But with shards of rock, glass, and metal scattered across the floor, I knew she’d just end up hurting herself. So instead, I hoisted her up into my arms and broke into a sprint.
Pushing myself as hard as I could, struggling to get air into my lungs without breaking into a hacking cough, I carried her toward the passenger lifts that led up to the main level and the theater beyond. They wouldn’t be able to move without power, but I wouldn’t have risked taking them regardless—if the ceiling on the lowest level had collapsed, it meant that the main level must have been almost completely obliterated. Going up the lifts would be a death sentence.
But there was an emergency stairwell adjacent to them, and I wasted no time in charging over to it. After kicking open the door, I rushed up both flights of stairs and then down the narrow auxiliary corridor, praying to the Seraph that the door to the parking lot outside wouldn’t be blocked off…
Shit.
The door may not have been blocked, but the lot on the other side was. Curtains of smoke and flame rose from the lines of vehicles parked outside, and the blaring sirens of a dozen anti-theft systems blended together in a cacophonous chorus that made my ears want to bleed. A bomb or a missile or something must have gone off right in the middle of the lot, vaporizing dozens of vehicles and damaging or destroying dozens more. The debris and overturned cars had practically turned the lot into a maze of
Still, at least the outdoor air was cooler and more breathable than anything in the garage, and I crouched low as I hauled Ash outside, hoping to keep us below the smoke long enough to give our lungs a chance to get some oxygen.
“What the hell is goin’ on, Kal?” Ash asked, finding her voice for the first time as I set her down and helped her crouch next to one of the only intact cars near the door.
“No idea,” I said, throwing a glance up and behind us. The Parthax had definitely been hit by something; the top floor was a roaring inferno. The pall of smoke was so thick I couldn’t see anything in the skies beyond, but I didn’t need to. Marauding slavers had always been a plague on Nirivarr, though they typically focused their attacks on the outlying settlements, not urban centers like the capital. They also usually tried to avoid blowing up the groups of people they wanted to turn into chattel. But perhaps they were just hoping that the shock would allow them to grab more people in the chaos.
“I can’t—” Ash broke into a hacking cough as she tried to cover her mouth. “I can’t breathe!”
“Just try and stay low,” I said, blinking as the smoke stung my eyes. I really hoped that there was some way to get around the wreckage and reach the gate, because there was no way we would be able to climb the ten-meter-high fence on the sides…
The unexpected roar of a ship passing overhead drowned out the wailing of the alarms and the crackle of the flames, and I huddled protectively over Ash in case the attackers were about to drop another bomb. But there were no more explosions, only the fierce glare of floodlights cutting through the darkness and smoke as the shuttle circled overhead.
I couldn’t get a good look at it from our position, but it didn’t resemble any of the other dropships or transports I’d seen on the news and local Holosphere vids. Slaver transports always looked like beat-up hunks of scrap that were one maintenance check away from falling out of the sky, but not these. These looked too new, too clean…
Too military.
The truth hit me even before I saw the large, muscular figures rappelling down from the open landing ramp of the hovering ship. Even if I hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of their shrouded silhouettes through the smoke, their guttural snarls and savage war cries were more than enough to confirm that my initial guess had, in fact, been right.
The Pact had come to Nirivarr.
“Krosians,” I said as much as myself as to Ash.
The screaming intensified as the sounds and flashes of pulsefire filled the streets before the Krosian soldiers even reached the ground, and the low, teeth-chattering vibrations of their stun grenades weren’t far behind. If the rumors about Pact tactics were true, their initial bombardment was as much about sowing fear as softening up the enemy.
Not that there was much to soften here. The colony’s defenses were pathetic, even here in the capital. No one trusted the militia to stand up to a real enemy; they couldn’t be bothered to raise arms against the local gangs half the time.
Ash’s hand gripped my wrist like an industrial clamp. The terror in her grimy, bloodless face and wide eyes spread right through me. We weren’t soldiers; we weren’t even militiamen. We were just two terrified kids who didn’t even belong here in the capital. It would have been so easy to huddle here and pray that the Krosians would take whatever they’d come here for and then leave us alone.
And for several panic-stricken minutes, that was exactly what we did. But when I heard the guttural sounds of an alien language followed by the shuffling of heavy boots, I knew that hiding was no longer an option. Krosians weren’t known for their keen minds or dazzling intellects, but Pact soldiers weren’t idiots. They were obviously here for something, perhaps even slaves of their own to work the pulothium mines on one of their border colonies—or just conscripts to feed into the meat grinder of their secret war in the demilitarized zone. And their scanners were surely sophisticated enough to discern which colonists were healthy and worth keeping.
As a nineteen-year-old human male in excellent physical condition, they could absolutely use me for either one. But as for Ash…
My jaw hardened as the sound of crunching footfalls drew closer. A single look down at her tear-stained face steeled my nerves. There was only one likely fate for a beautiful young woman caught in the Borderlands slave trade, and I would gladly spend the next century toiling in a dank, poisonous mine if that was what it took to spare her from it.
“Stay here,” I told her.
Her breath caught in her throat. “Kal, what’re you—?”
“Stay here,” I repeated. “No matter what.”
I didn’t wait for a reply, and I didn’t tell her goodbye. She only would have tried to stop me.
Rising to my feet, I dashed around the side of the car and straight out into the open. There was a Krosian soldier waiting for me less than a dozen meters away, his impressive bulk clad in a suit of dark gray battle armor. Despite the haze of smoke, I had no trouble seeing the dozens of bone trophies threaded into his baldric, the mono-molecular dagger wedged between them, or the neuroshock “pacification” power cell attached to his bulky rifle—a favorite of bounty hunters, slavers, and anyone else who wanted to take their prey alive.
I clenched my teeth and began to charge, but he saw me coming. His faintly glowing orange-red eyes widened as he snarled something indecipherable through the wall of fangs that filled his mouth, and he lifted his gun and unleashed a quick trio of blue-white energy bolts right into my chest.
Each hit was like the lash of a flaming whip, effortlessly searing through my flimsy blazer and burning the fabric from my flesh. The pain—dulled but still intense—nearly caused me to keel over, but rage and adrenaline kept me barreling forward. The Krosian couldn’t believe what he was seeing—the shots would have overloaded the nervous system of two-tonne krandark, dropping them to the ground in a twitching, spasming mass.
But not me.
Slamming into him at full tilt, hoping that my years of casual throw-boxing and half decade on the school’s wrestling team would pay off, I tried to tackle the soldier. But I was used to beating up on humans, not Krosians, and I was promptly reminded why the Pact had been breeding them as soldiers for the past few generations. He turned smoothly as I hit him, deflecting most of my momentum, and with a single muscular arm, he grabbed the remnants of my once fancy jacket, hoisted me into the air, and threw me into the wreckage of another car five meters away.
I smashed into the hood with all of the grace of a human boulder, an impact that should have shattered my elbow or least dislocated my shoulder. But despite the fresh shockwave of pain that rattled through my bones, nothing snapped or broke. I didn’t even get the wind knocked out of me.
If the Krosian was impressed, he didn’t show it. He shot me again, two more lashes from a flaming whip that somehow didn’t melt my skin. But I could feel my concentration waning, and I knew I couldn’t just lie on the hood and let him unload into me. So rather than try to rise, I rolled and fell off the back of the car, hoping the battered chassis would be strong enough to give me cover—and that my enemy wouldn’t switch off his pacification cell and blow the car to pieces with a regular shot instead.
Luck was with me. He shot the car a few more times, the stun blasts boiling off the bright red paint. But rather than switch firing modes, the Krosian did exactly what I hoped: he came closer.
He had every reason to be arrogant. I may have inexplicably withstood a few stun blasts, but he still faced an unarmed human with a fraction of his strength and none of his experience. Gritting my teeth again, wishing my damn heart would stop pounding, I listened to the crunch of his boots getting closer. If I could just time this right…
