Battle Won (Space Warrior Adventures #1) - Erin Raegan

Chapter One

Emerson

The screams were loud.

Like where’s a pickaxe when you need it—kind of loud. I’d be down for rupturing my own eardrums. I was that fed up with them.

Them being the other girls. Women trapped in a cage, herded around like animals.

We were crammed inside like a bunch of flopping sardines. No one giving two shits that we hadn’t showered in over two weeks, that our pits ranked something awful. That I was pretty sure the cute brunette slobbering all over her crybaby best friend beside me had peed on me. Yup, I felt the trickle. She avoided my eyes, trying to play innocent but when something that warm and potent invades your space, you pretty much start plotting the murders of those around you. She just earned herself a place at the top of my list.

And this far into the game, I was growing a mighty long list. The game being slavery of course—yeah, I know, slavery’s not a game Emerson! Have some compassion! Fuck that, I was in this as much as the snotty chicks around me and they had no damn respect for personal boundaries. If I could move my ass and take a piss away from them, they could damn well give me the same courtesy. But nope, getting up from her pity party and using the damn piss bucket was not on her agenda. She and her bestie had plopped right down at the back of our cozy little cage the day we were shoved in here and they hadn’t moved. Not once.

Me, I was up. Inspecting every damn inch of this place for any little crack in its armor the moment they shoved me inside. Unfortunately, though our captors looked about as dumb as a box of rocks, they could weld pretty damn spectacularly. Our cage was sturdy.

We were not getting out of here anytime soon. Not without the fugly guys with the jelly bellies and slobbery tusks dragging us out.

And I didn’t want them to drag me out of here. That meant they’d sold me. No thank you. Pass.

The last girl that’d been dragged free of our cage had found herself the not so lucky newest acquisition to an alien that could only be described as an overweight angry worm. I didn’t even think it had eyes, but the bubbly slobbering lips it curled at her sent shudders throughout her body. And all of us still caged inside.

If a girl were to get sold—and I say if because not freaking one of us was down for that fresh hell—but if it were to happen, I’d take a nice little harmless alien to bet on me. Like the funky looking bird guy that barely came up to my hip. He’d been eyeing a few of us for a few hours now. He seemed timid but interested. I’d take him. He seemed easy enough to overpower. I’d strangle him by his little nose feathers until he took me back home.

Unfortunately, most of the assholes buying us up were not cute little birds, they were massive and angry and all-around frightening. No thank you.

But I wasn’t getting a choice in the matter. None of us were.

We’d lost the right to choose. To lead our own lives the moment we chose to step on that alien ship a month ago. Arguably even before that.

See it all went something like this:

Nearly a year ago, our world had been invaded. Some people may have had an idea how all this was going to down—if it were to happen, spoiler alert: it did. Some of the nuts thought they’d be malevolent beings that came down to save us from ourselves and our self-destructive ways. They’d gently lead us into a better way of life. Eventually slapping us on the wrists and correcting our selfish greed. Before long, we’d be flitting around in spaceships of our own.

But that was only one idea. The other half of the nuts—in my opinion, the more realistic side—believed we needed to prepare for this eventual invasion. They would not be our new best friends. They would take from us everything and anything they could. Leaving only a shell of what they first encountered behind. These people were afraid of what may lay out in the outer reaches of space. What we now knew hid among the stars.

Those people were the smart people.

Smarter than even me—one of the regulars who never gave aliens and space that much thought apart from Hollywood’s interpretation. They tried to warn all