Allies (Warriors of Karal Book 5) by Harmony Raines Read Free Book Online Page A

using a knife, he cut what turned out to be a cheeselike substance, and placed that onto it too. He looked up at her and smiled, encouraging her to do the same.
    Tentatively she took a cookie, some fruit and cheese, then took a bite of it. It was like an explosion of flavours in her mouth. The fruit looked quite bland, but it was spicy with a sweetness that made her taste buds tingle.
    “I didn’t expect it to taste like that,” she said. But then she hadn’t expected it to taste like anything much. Most of the food on Earth was bland, or else tasted so artificial it was hard to trick yourself into thinking it was actually good for you. Her taste buds had been totally unprepared.
    “The fruit grows abundantly where I live. So I hope you like it, because it is a staple of our diet down there. I have a friend who comes this way once a week, and he always brings me enough to last me for a few days. It stops me getting homesick.”
    She smiled at him shyly. “I never expected a man like you to get homesick. I thought if you were a warrior, used to going into deep space, that your home would be wherever you were at the time.”
    “No, I love my house, it’s where I’ve lived all of my life. My father owned it before me, and his father before that. It’s how we live here on Karal: we follow our fathers in where we live and what we do, what we name our children.”
    “So your father was a warrior too, he went into deep space just like you do?” Petra asked, picking up another cookie.
    “Yes. He spent most of my childhood at home with me; there wasn’t so much of a need to search deep into space during that time. They had found the females they needed for their generation to breed with, they were still living in the breeding house, so there was a lot of work on Karal that needed doing. The only missions for the warriors were to monitor what went on in the universe, and to find any new resources we might need. New technology, minerals that we need to manufacture our cruisers and weapons.”
    “What kind of weapons do you have?” She had never seen anything on the cruiser. But she suspected, since they went into deep space, where they were bound to come across aliens who were not friendly, they must have come some kind of defence.
    “The weapons are kept sealed under the tower. We have a limited amount on board each cruiser. But it is very rare that we use them. If a situation arises where we are in danger, we often run. It is much better to return to Karal with information, than to die needlessly.”
    Petra considered what he said. They could almost be described as cowards, running instead of fighting. However, the more she thought about it, the more she understood that it was the most sensible idea. He was right: a dead warrior was a dead warrior, and of no use to his species.
    They finished eating, and she helped him tidy away the plates, wondering what they would do now. While they worked together, she took the time to study him, to try to work out what kind of man he was. As a warrior she had expected him to be hard, but he had a softness, a gentleness about him, that did not detract from his masculinity, but it also made her feel safer.
    She smiled. Safe was not something she would ever feel here. She had to stop thinking about him as if he was her friend, because in reality, the Karal held all the cards. They knew how to get rid of the human race; if they really wanted to, they could develop the tag in such a way that they killed off everybody except the females they needed to breed with.
    While she had come here thinking that with the President gone, there would be a deeper understanding and cooperation between human and Karalian, it now became apparent that humans had nothing left to bargain with.
    Yet still, when he turned to her and smiled, her stomach fluttered in anticipation. And she struggled to believe that a man such as this would ever go out of his way to destroy something. Especially something as