Desperate Times (Lost Planet Warriors Book 1) by K. McLaughlin Read Free Book Online Page A

jump," the crewman manning the station said.
    "Put the arrival site on screen," I said. "Now!"
    The human's image vanished before she could utter another word, replaced by a view of the stars. The incoming point was well behind us now. We'd moved deeper into the Terran system, chasing their ship as it fled toward their home world. Now I watched, my breath held, waiting and hoping to not see what I feared would be arriving.
    "What's going on?" Kim asked me quietly.
    The star field erupted in a nova of colors before I could reply. I knew that ship. Their shape and style was burned into my memory. The monstrous vessel exploded clear of the supercharged particles that heralded its arrival. It was twice the length of my own ship, heavily armed and shielded.
    I'd known there had to be a reason the Skree who'd boarded my ship had decided to come out of hiding when they did. My hope had been that the Terran coming aboard was the trigger for their attack. But they must have had some way of communicating with their mother ship from a distance. They'd known help was near and coming fast.
    "It's a Skree mothership," I said. Doom had found us, far sooner than I could have prepared for.

Chapter Eleven
Kim
    T he thing coming through the particle cloud was enormous. At first I thought I could register scale from the small cloud of fighters it launched. Then those little ships launched smaller ships, and I realized that I’d completely misread the size of the mothership. The six smaller ships it had launched weren’t fighters at all. They were each about the size of the Ariel. I swallowed hard. The bridge was silent.
    “Are those your spider-crab friends?” I asked.
    My speaking seemed to rouse the Cymtarrans. I wondered why the hell they were all so shaken up. I mean, yeah, it was a big ship. They had a big ship too. I’d seen these gold-plated guys fight. They were good at it. If there was a scuffle coming our way, and that seemed like a good bet, then I knew I was in good company.
    “They are called the Skree,” Bran said, his voice soft and full of emotion that I couldn’t quite read. Hatred and mourning and grief and despair all wrapped into that one word.
    “What’s the plan?” I asked. “You guys beat them the other day. How can we do it again?”
    Something I said shifted the mood in the room. Every Cymtarran present looked away from me. Even Bran couldn’t meet my eyes. Clearly the Skree were bad news, bad enough that even my Cymtarran friends were feeling overwhelmed by their sudden arrival.
    “The Skree - that’s who damaged your ship, isn’t it?” I asked.
    Bran nodded.
    “You were running from them?” I asked.
    “We hoped that we’d lost them, and would have time to repair before they found us again,” he said.
    “Well, you didn’t,” I snapped. “You brought them here. To my world.”
    Was I being too harsh? Maybe, but it was them who'd brought their troubles to our doorstep. I didn't think it was too much to ask that they get their act together and help clean the mess up. Bran's expression remained bleak, though. The other Cymtarrans were silent. Was that guilt, or anger? They seemed to be waiting to see how their commander responded.
    "Yes, we did. That was not our intent or our hope," Bran said. "If things were different... Perhaps we might have been able to beat back at least this attack, if our ship was whole. As it stands, we have little hope. But perhaps we can do enough damage before we are destroyed that they are persuaded to leave."
    Destroyed? "Is their ship that much stronger than yours?" I asked.
    "In our current state? Yes," Bran said. "This is a battle we cannot win."
    I chewed on that a little. There had to be some way to turn things around, to twist this battle into a victory. I wasn't into giving up. I looked around the room and saw utter despair etched in all of the faces around me. They'd been hurt, smashed, beaten badly. I'd seen wounds like that before in humans. It was the look of