“Not anymore.” The voice of my second-in-command, Captain Trist, rumbled through my head and he made no attempt to hide his disapproval.
Fuck. He was such a by-the-rules man that he had the entire regulations guide shoved up his ass.
“If I stayed on the command deck all the time, Trist, you’d be bored.”
“You take too many risks, Commander. Risks you should not be taking. You are responsible for nearly five thousand warriors, brides and their children.”
“Well, Captain, if I die today, they’ll be in good hands.”
Rav answered, “No. They’ll be begging General Zakar for mercy.”
“Noted. Returning to the ship now.” If I were to be killed, or worse, captured and contaminated by the Hive, my father, General Zakar, would most likely come out here and take command of the Battleship Zakar himself. I might be a bit adventurous, but my father was cruel and unforgiving. If he returned to active duty, the body count would double or triple, on both sides.
We worked hard to hold the Hive in place, to prevent their expansion into this sector of space. My father would try to defeat them, drive them back. The Hive response would be to send more soldiers, more scouts. Things would escalate quickly to what they’d once been. We’d managed to spread them out across multiple sectors of space, slowly weakening our enemy by denying them new bodies to assimilate while thinning their lines. My father’s aggression would undo years of careful Coalition strategy, years of planning and work.
My father was too arrogant and stubborn to listen to reason. Always had been.
I had two younger brothers, both still in combat training on the home planet of Prillon Prime. They were a decade younger than I, and nowhere near ready for battle. My death would force my father out of his role as advisor to the Prime, and back into active service here, on the front lines. The alternative, to retire the Zakar name, our battleship reassigned to another warrior clan, was unacceptable. My father would rather die than see his family dishonored. This battle group had been named Zakar for more than six hundred years.
Trist would hate having his command stripped away and the people on my ship would hate it because…hell, no one liked the general. It just proved I had to stay alive. I might not be warm and cuddly, but I did the fucking job.
As commander, I was not required to fly combat missions. But sitting in the commander’s chair, bellowing orders and watching other warriors die in my place was not my idea of honor. If I’d known how fucking hard it would be, I would have turned down command of the battle group. I was the youngest commander in a century, and many argued, the most reckless. The elder generals labeled me rogue. But they didn’t understand. I needed to fight. I needed the rush. Sometimes, I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to fight…or fuck, and since I had no mate, fighting satisfied the restless rage I carried. Even now, with the mission successful, I should have been appeased. Eased. I wasn’t. Far from it.
Perhaps a warm, willing female with soft skin and a wet pussy could tempt me to give up these battle runs.
The Hive scouting teams had been infiltrating our space for several weeks, sending three- and six-man teams in, sneaking past our defense perimeters to surround and attack transport relays and cargo vessels. In short, they were making me look bad on the home world.
Every damn night I got a comm from my father, after he read the day’s intelligence reports. He said he was tired of seeing my sector losing ground in this war. Fuck that.
If the uptight bastard commed me tonight, it better be to congratulate me on taking back this section of space.
My gaze shifted to the tracking monitor to my left as I turned my small fighter back toward the battleship, toward home. Yeah, the hulking metal spaceship was home. The small blasts on the screen and whooping battle cries in my ears assured me that the remaining Hive ships were being hunted down and destroyed.
I gave the command for the Seventh Battle Wing to return with me while the other two battle wings remained to track and eliminate the rest of our enemies. Taking prisoners was not an option. Once the Hive took a man’s life, we never got them back. Those who survived the Hive Integration Centers intact were lost forever, sent to The Colony to live out their final days as contaminated warriors, dead to the rest our people.
No. I preferred not to take prisoners. Death was a kindness I was more than willing to offer.
“Commander, look out!” The warning came just as the proximity alarms on my scout ship sounded. The blast of sound had barely registered when my ship was torn out from beneath me.
In a flash of bright light, the ship exploded. My body was jettisoned into the blackness of space, the flight suit I wore the only thing keeping me alive. The intensity of the explosion, the force of my ejection into deep space was worse than any whiplash, any wild ride I’d ever taken.
“Commander? Can you hear me?”
I was spinning, too fast to get my bearings, too fast to track the large, orange-and-red star that anchored this planetary system. I had no way to regain control, to stop. The pressure on my organs was painful, had me struggling to breathe, groaning as I fought to remain conscious.
“Get him out of there!”
“Another ship!”
I lost track of the number of voices as an explosion of light and heat rushed over me from my left side. Debris raced past, traveling faster than my eyes could track as the Hive ship exploded around me.
A sharp, stinging pain erupted in my thigh and I gritted my teeth as the hissing sound of my flight suit losing pressure, and precious air chilled my blood. The suit’s self-repairing system began working immediately to close the seal, to maintain life status. But I was afraid it wasn’t working fast enough.
Still spinning, I closed my eyes and tried to block out everything but the rapid-fire chatter going on in my helmet. Nausea hit me, bile rose into my throat.
“He’s hit, Captain. His suit is losing integrity.”
“How long?”