Page 96 of Bound to the Orc Guardian

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CHAPTER ONE

Cara

I FLINCHED AWAY from blinding light, my arm sluggish as I tried to shield my face with my hand. Why did it feel like my insides had been scooped out and replaced with cotton wool? Oh, yeah. Cryo.

If they were waking me up, we were there. Our new planet! A thread of excitement wove through the sluggishness of cryohangover.

I blinked repeatedly, trying to get my eyes to focus.

“What the hell!” My heart skipped. That wasn’t a medic! The thing looming in front of me had to be alien! Like alien-alien, not like on the really oldStar Trek’s where they just glued different things to the actors’ foreheads.

Leathery gray hide covered a hairless head with four solid-black eyes and a little blob of a nose. It opened a large mouth, and a sound like crashing rocks filled the air.

As soon as it fell quiet, I said, “Do you speak English?” I winced. It was such a stupid question, but what the hell else could I ask? Maybe they had some kind of universal translator.

Those eyes stared, unblinking. Then it moved backward, letting more of the room come into view. Instead of waking on a bed in the medbay ofARK 1, the spaceship I’d left Earth in, I stood upright in my cryopod. This also wasn’t one of the ship’s cavernous cargo holds filled with cryopods. Nope. We were in too small of a room, and instead of white plastic, the ceiling, walls, and floor were made out of unpainted metal.

The alien got even more alien as the rest of it came into view. It had shoulders and two arms that ended in three-fingered hands, but below that, it widened out into a shape like a mini-mountain. The base flared in all directions until it was three to four times as wide as me. It looked like a huge slug without the tail. It glided over the flat floor, but how? Were there a million little legs under there? Did it slide like a snail?

Another rumble of rock on rock from it jerked my gaze upward.

The light wasn’t actually that bright, now that my eyes had adjusted, but it still glinted off the silver barrel of a gun the alien gripped in its meaty fingers.

“Fuck!” My body instinctively tried to backpedal, but I only pushed myself deeper into the gel bed of the cryopod. I started babbling, using my perkiest voice, “Hi! I’m Cara Peterson. I’m from Earth. You’ve probably never heard of Earth. It used to be a really nice planet, but it’s kind of not anymore. That’s why I left.”Oh, god, you’ve lost it now, Cara!I’d been trained to make an armed opponent empathize with me as a person. Who knew if it worked on aliens?

The alien certainly ignored me. Its other hand reached out and engulfed my shoulder, yanking me forward and around.

Damn, damn, damn! I tried every move I knew, but I couldn’t break the grip on my shoulder. The thing was freaking strong.

I swiveled my head, trying to keep the gun in sight. The barrel swung up, then disappeared behind me. Panic made my heart race. “I’m a trained peacekeeper! I help people!”

There was an uncomfortable thunk at the base of my skull as a sharp pain pinched. Then the alien let me go.

I sagged in relief, my muscles so weird and wobbly from cryo that I fell forward, face planting into the gel bed of my cryopod.Yep! That’ll really convince them you’re someone to take seriously.A bark of hysterical laughter pushed through my throat.

The grinding rocks came again as a hand lifted me and turned me around. More and more noise poured over me, coming from the alien holding me and another one I couldn’t see.

The sound stopped, those four inky-black eyes boring into me.

“Sorry, dude.” I licked dry lips. “I don’t know what you want.”

None of this was how it was supposed to go! The experts on Earth had programmedARK 1to fly until it found a habitable planet. The ship would wake a select team of personnel. As a peacekeeper, I was one of them. Kind of a police officer, solider, and bodyguard all rolled into one, my first duty would be to protect the scientists sent down to evaluate the planet. The women were all brilliant, but common sense wasn’t their forte. Thank god, I had it in bucketfuls.

It had sounded exciting and grand and way better than a dismal corporate security job on a dying Earth. And the thing I’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone else was I’d also imagined it would be like my favorite sci-fi TV shows and movies, the classic ones I used to binge watch with Gramps.

You wanted there to be aliens, Cara! Here they are.

When my ship had left Earth in 2123, humans had still thought we were alone in the universe. I’d always hoped we weren’t.

I’d also hoped for something different than this. Maybe watching Captain Kirk horndog his way through new alien species had skewed my view of what “first contact” actually meant.

The alien spoke again, its large mouth opening enough to show it didn’t have a tongue. A second one glided into view. The two of them looked exactly alike. Were they twins or clones? Or were there differences I couldn’t see with human eyes? I shrugged. I had bigger things to worry about.

While they talked, I craned my head over my shoulder, searching for clues. Crates in various sizes and colors filled the rest of the room, but in the back stood two upright white rectangles—cryopods. Excitement skittered through me.Hell, yeah! I’m not alone! There are more women here.

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