"Attention, all personnel! We are under attack! The Nayanors are coming for us! I repeat, the Nayanors are coming!"

It was the dead of the night when the raid ships came.

That wasn't surprising in the least. In fact, it was so unsurprising that Ashley Donovan spent a good long while sitting at her guard post and looking at the ships growing larger on the screen facing her. With her heavy fur boots carelessly propped up on the pristine console table in front of her, the senior technician of the Arctic Research Station No. 26 felt a peculiar calm.

It didn't fit the dire situation in the slightest, judging by the harsh look of the young woman fidgeting in her seat next to her. Around them, the alarms they'd set off were blaring.

Ashley knew they wouldn't do them any damn good, but it was protocol. Up to that point in her life, following protocol had been pretty important.

"Ash?" asked Felicia, looking like a roly-poly doll. "We should do something! How can you just sit there and look on!?"

"What do you suggest we do?" Ashley asked calmly. "It's not like we can come up with a solution in the next five minutes that the entire Galactic Union hasn't been able to solve so far."

"At least we'd be doing something," Felicia shot back at her, frowning. "Instead of giving our best impression of sitting ducks."

Ashley nodded, her eyes fixed on the screens where the Nayanor ships were continuing their descent right toward their station. She could see her own reflection too – long chestnut brown hair tied up in a neat bun not to get in the way, clear bluish-gray eyes. She wore a white coat to shield her from the cold, hiding her curves and making her look like a marshmallow instead.

"Don't get me wrong," she told her bristling companion. "If you can suggest anything useful and proactive, I'm all ears. All I'm saying is that I don't see any reason in running around the station, screaming my head off."

She pointed to the screens showing the complex of the station. People everywhere were trying their best to take cover or hide or prepare to fight as befit their position and rank.

As well as their gender.

What was going on didn't qualify as an epitome of equality, but of course Nayanors tended to have that effect on people. They had a very black-and-white view of the world when it came to the planets they targeted. Females were treasure and males were obstacles in their way. The crew was acting accordingly to that.

"Where are they all running to is what I'm asking?" Ashley went on, ignoring how her pulse was speeding up as the sleek raiding ships kept getting clearer on the screens. "There is absolutely no reason why one section of the station should be safer than the other. Even we can't tell where the bastards are going to land and you know as well as I do it won't matter much.

"Say what you will about Nayanors – they are thorough."

Looking at Felicia, Ashley felt slightly bad about what she'd said. The blonde, blue-eyed beauty couldn't have been a bigger target for the raiders if she had a red mark painted on her back. One of those savages was going to turn out to be Felicia's fated mate, clubbing her over the head and dragging her to his cave, or at least that was the general concept.

Nayanors didn't actually live in caves and they were far more intelligent than Neanderthals. Which begged the question as to what had gone so terribly wrong in their society to make them think kidnapping women was okay? Even if the whole fated mates thing implied that the couples were going to end up together no matter what.

Personally I blame the parents. Or was it education? I can never remember. What happened to good old-fashioned dating anyway? I never signed up for the medieval times to make a comeback through intergalactic travel.

"Sorry, Felicia," she murmured. "I didn't mean that. It's not hopeless. It never is. We've had our briefings, we know Nayanors can be beaten if we're very lucky and very smart about it."

It was getting more difficult to look at the screens as well as keep up the semi-happy charade for Felicia's sake. She certainly didn't appreciate what Ashley was trying to do, but there was an ugly grain of truth to it all.

There was nowhere for them to hide, nowhere to run. If some genius in engineering didn't accidentally get hit by lightning and invent a teleportation device in the next few minutes, they were utterly trapped.

Taking their chances with the Arctic wilderness didn't even cross Ashley's mind. It wasn't the olden days of Terra, after all, where the worst concern would have been snow and polar bears. The Arctic of their time was a far more dangerous place. Bad enough to make the Nayanors seem like the better option.

It was a stretch, though. The warrior race wasn't known for gentleness or hospitality, or mercy for that matter. The tall, broad-shouldered and massively strong brutes with silver hair roamed the Galactic Union in search of females for their male-dominated home world no one had been able to locate. Their incredible power was unfairly coupled with smooth, bronze skin as tough as scales, making them very hard to kill or even wound.

Not just that – for all intents and purposes, the Nayanors were practically immortal. All warriors, and there were only warriors in their species, had a square, sapphire diadon – a mechanical device with a diamond-shaped glowing mineral in the center – planted in the middle of their chests. It kept them alive far past the point where they should have died, ticking like a second heart.

The Union's best guess was that it somehow prolonged their lives as well, making them devastating enemies.

There were tears beading in the corners of Felicia's eyes. Ashley took her feet off the console table and pulled her friend in for what she hoped was a comforting hug. Felicia began weeping, clinging to her like Ashley had any answers or anything at all to say to make their fate sound any less depressing.

"Being a sex slave isn't that bad, at least we’d get laid regularly", she tried in her head.

The quality of her humor really was going down the drain as fast as the Nayanor ships were approaching.

Ashley kept her mouth shut, patting Felicia on the back gently. As much as she knew she'd been right about no part of the station being safe, perhaps there was some comfort in running around. Feeling like you were doing something to save yourself had to be nearly as good as actually achieving that, right?

"Come," she told Felicia. "We're going to get ourselves some guns and build a barricade in front of this door. It will be a bottleneck for those silver-haired assholes. We can start picking them off and make a stand like you wanted to."

Felicia raised her blue eyes to Ashley, filled to the brink with desperate hope. She looked like a drowning little fool who had just glimpsed a rope on the surface without realizing it wasn't attached to anything.

"Will it help?" she asked. "Will it keep us safe until the army gets here?"

No. At best we might be able to take a few of them down before we're abducted like all the other unlucky women they've taken. In all the other stations and cities, on all the other worlds.

"We can try," Ashley said encouragingly, intent not to lie straight to Felicia's face. "Come now. Wipe your face, don't let them see you cry. I bet that's not a turn-off for a Nayanor, but if I was you, I wouldn't want them to see my fear."

"Aren't you afraid?" Felicia whispered. "I don't understand how you can be so cool and collected about all this. We will never see our homes again, Ash. We will be treated like pets. I... I almost think I'd rather die than live with them."

Ashley slapped her.

Not hard, just enough to get her attention and snap Felicia out of the self-deprecating misery that had suddenly taken a hold of her. It wasn't like her friend at all. They'd always had fun together, to the point where their commanding officer Captain Reed had to tell them to at least try and act professionally while on duty.

"Don't say that," Ashley said, emphasizing every word. "Make sure I never hear you say something that dumb again. Yes, this is bad. Yes, of course I'm afraid too. But no matter what, this is not the end. You know Nayanors don't hurt females. We are like precious stones to them, in every sense of the word. They hunt us down without mercy but once they have us, they'll keep us safer than we ever could be.

"We can use that. We can fight back, escape. The Galactic Union might stumble upon their ships or their elusive home world. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow is the day when they're brought to justice at last. We don't know that. All we can do is not give up.

"Are you with me, Felicia?"

Slowly but surely, her friend nodded, starting to look like herself again.

A terrible blast rocked the station and they could hear screams as the ceiling above them shook like it was going to break and bury them. Ashley knew the Nayanors wouldn't let it happen. They weren't that careless, not as long as there could still be women inside the building they were raiding.

"They're here," she said. "Let's hurry. If this should go badly, hope you don't get picked by one of their harbingers. Those bloodthirsty creatures. Look for kind eyes."

The smile on Felicia's lips told Ashley she was finally starting to appreciate her hopeless attempt to alleviate the mood.

They slipped out of the guard room as the station rocked again.

Kind eyes, Ashley thought as they hurried back after hastily arming themselves. Good joke. Gods willing, we'll be the fateds of someone who doesn't matter much.