Chapter One
The fact that I had eight hundred kills intrigued the Coletti. The chief interrogator was called Oydle. He had to be a hybrid or a ringer. I mean, c’mon, a fat Coletti? With that jelly belly, how did he fight? And what was up with his fancy red dress uniform? Did the Coletti consider interrogations a formal event? If so, the least they could do was put some sequins on my crappy orange jumpsuit and shackles.
Big surprise. The new Coletti garrison came complete with its own interrogation room. There were thingamajigs on the metal walls, which I assumed were cameras or monitors. The Coletti hoped to catch me using my powers. Which wasn’t going to happen, no matter how much I was provoked.
My fingers twitched. I needed some grooming scissors. Oydle’s bushy eyebrows looked like two woolly caterpillars had crawled up there and died. Tufts of hair stuck out in every direction, and don’t even get me started on his warty, bulbous nose. Yuck, yuck, and yuck. Then there was his hair. I shuddered. Oydle’s warrior braids reminded me of moldy dreadlocks. Yep. He could pass for an ugly troll out of one of those fantasy books Aunt Tess liked to read.
“Tell I what powers possess you.”
A hard-to-understand troll. I gave him the one-finger salute. “My name is Sarah Jones. I’m a Marine lieutenant. My serial number is 888549405.”
“Tell what possess.” His snarl revealed two broken, yellowed fangs.
My eyes crossed. His breath was a lethal weapon. “My name is Sarah Jones. I’m a Marine lieutenant. My serial number is 888549405.”
“How wham Tai-Kok?” Flies crawled across Oydle’s face. He brushed them away. Twenty more of the pests landed on him. He swiped at them, but the persistent buggers kept coming back.
“Here are I,” Aunt Tess announced in my head. “You owe me fifty bucks. I told ya I could infiltrate the Overlord’s base.”
“You did.”
Oydle asked again, “How wham Tai-Kok?”
Aunt Tess snickered. “I thought the Coletti spoke perfect English.”
“Usually. He’s not quite what he seems.”
“I agree. For shits and giggles, the Overlord and his minions are probably watching your interrogation on the warbird’s big screen and eatin’ their version of popcorn.”
“Without a doubt, and they have all sorts of scanners trained on us too.” I mouthed, fuck you at one of the surveillance cameras.
“Let’s see how our pretend Coletti deals with a fly infestation of biblical proportions.”
I grinned as Aunt Tess’s flies arrived by the hundreds, and they seemed to love Oydle’s scent. A lot.
“You tell—” Flies flew into Oydle’s mouth. He swallowed them and smacked his lips.
Oh, ick. “My name is Sarah Jones. I’m a Marine lieutenant. Yada. Yada. Yada.” I wondered how long it would take him to realize I was fly free.
“How wham!” He batted crazily at the flies. “Tell how wham.”
Boy, would I like to wham him up the side of the head, but I was handcuffed to the chair. I knew the prick’s goal was to push me into using my psychic powers. Fat chance. “My name is Sarah Jones. Oh hell, you should have the rest memorized by now.”
“Tell how kill.”
“You wanna know how to kill the flies? Well, first you need a fly swatter or some bug spray.”
“Kill Tai-Kok! Kill Tai-Kok!” Oydle’s level of frustration was growing.
I asked sweetly, “Aw. Do you need help killing the Tai-Kok too?”
“No. You how kill?”
“Me? With my laser cannons.”
Oydle shook his head. “Use more.”
“Sometimes a Sidewinder or R40 missile will do the job.”
Bzzzzzzzz. The hum of thousands of bees suddenly filled the room. My eyes widened at the size of the swarm coming out of the garrison’s conveniently open air vents. Aunt Tess had been a busy girl. “Any more surprises?”
“Honey, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Clusters of angry wasps flew into the room.
Aunt Tess was the best critter wrangler ever. Not one bee, fly, or wasp came anywhere near me.
“You blab now.” Oydle swatted wildly at the bees dive-bombing his head. Which only pissed them off. They started stinging him.
To my surprised disgust, the bee venom had little effect on him.
“Blab or take by force.”
There was no way in hell I was going to tell him what he wanted to know. Were my commanding officers traitors? Had they ratted me out? Maybe. For now, only my family knew I was very, very good at mind control and had awesome mental shields. The pilots in my squadron knew there wasn’t an aircraft I couldn’t fly or a lock I couldn’t open, but only a few knew about my psychic tracking talents.
Oydle grabbed my braid and yanked my head back. “Warned. Me take lie.”
“Say what?”
The creep tried to force his way into my mind.
I giggled at the intense tickling sensation. “Is this a new interrogation technique? Tickle torture?”
“No. You fear power mine.”
I laughed. Zarek, the mighty Overlord of the Coletti clans, might be able to breach my mental shields, but Oydle? No way in hell. “My name is Sarah Jones. I’m a Marine lieutenant. My serial number is 888549405.”
“Get ready. My strike force is in position,” Aunt Tess informed me.
“Semper Fi.” This was going to be fun.
A wasp landed on Oydle’s bulbous nose.
The idiot whacked at it and yelped when the wasp bit him.
Huh? Wasp toxin did affect him.
The insects attacked Oydle. His slapping and stomping reminded me of a Texas line dance. Smack. Clap. Stomp. Stomp. Clap. Smack. Clap. Stomp. Stomp. Clap.
Aunt Tess’s strike force consisted of a couple dozen tarantulas and scorpions. They surged up Oydle’s legs, and he totally lost it. He wasn’t a Coletti. Warlords never hollered like little girls. The wuss pulled his laser pistol and started blasting away at the insects.
I hopped my chair behind a desk complete with a futuristic holoscreen. I flinched as a beam struck the holoscreen. Bam! It exploded in a shower of sparks. I tipped the chair over and winced as I hit my head on the desk. Maybe it was time to start using my powers.
Nothing Oydle did got rid of the insects. The stun beams only pissed off the little varmints, turning them into a marauding horde straight out of a horror movie. They swarmed over Oydle, covering him from head to toe and biting the shit out of him.
A big, fat skunk scampered into the room. Aunt Tess was an evil, evil woman. The little stinker sprayed the crap out of Oydle. Pee-yooo!
“Time to get the hell out of Dodge,” Aunt Tess said.
“You betcha. The skunk spray is pretty awful.” I hit the shackles with a tentacle of power and presto. They released.
The interrogation room door slid open, and Aunt Tess motioned at me from the hallway. “Let’s go.”
Projectile vomit spewed from Oydle’s mouth.
I gagged. And I thought it smelled bad before. My Spidey sense abruptly flared to life. It felt like a prickly cactus had taken up residence in my mind, but my internal radar had never failed me. “Incoming hostiles, Aunt Tess.”
Ten seconds later, immense power rippled around me, and Voss, Zarek’s formidable battle commander, teleported into the room. His black battle suit emphasized every bulging muscle, and the expression on his face threatened my bladder control. He blocked me from leaving. “Going so soon?” His English was perfect.
The sneaky bastards had been watching. “Yeah.” I pointed at Oydle and the teeming horde of insects. “I’m getting away from that. You really need to hire a good pest control company to come in and exterminate.” I switched to mind talk. “Get out of here, Tess.”
“Too late. Damn. He’s built like the Rocky Mountains.”
I caught a fleeting glimpse of her backing away from an enormous Coletti warrior in the corridor.
Crap, she needed help. I feinted to the left, then bolted around Voss.
He grabbed my ponytail and hauled me back. “Do you really think you are strong enough to defeat Rho or me?”
My temper flared to life. “Never underestimate a Jones.” I whipped my head around and crunched down hard on Voss’s fingers.
“Do you have a death wish, female?” He pried my jaws open.
Like I could answer with a mouthful of Coletti? I hooked my right foot behind Voss’s heel in a fast sweep and knocked him off his feet.
The Battle Commander hit the puke-covered floor and vanished. Poof! Ten seconds later, Voss reappeared and pinned me against the wall. Teleporting should be illegal.
“Nice move, little female.”
I eyed the scorpion sitting on his shoulder and grinned. “Thank you.”
Voss turned his head and sighed. The scorpion raised its stinger. With a flick of his finger, the Battle Commander sent the insect flying across the room. It landed on Oydle’s warrior braids. The poor guy took one look at it and screeched bloody murder.
“Good shot.” I chortled.
A low growl rumbled in Voss’s chest.
“You kinda sound like a grizzly bear.” I cocked my head and examined his nice sharp fangs. “Kinda act like one too. Big, aggressive, and bad-tempered.”
“Do not provoke me again. You will not like the consequences.”
I put on my best terrified expression. “Oh my God! Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. Please. Please. Please don’t hurt me. Please. Please.”
Voss clamped a hand over my mouth. “Are you done?”
I nodded.
He removed his hand and stepped back. “Are all Jones females like you?”
“Pretty much. If you’re looking for docile broodmares, that ain’t us.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rho, the mountain, pounce on Aunt Tess. There was a brief tussle as Rho easily overpowered her. He carried her into the interrogation room.
“You okay Sarah?” Aunt Tess’s tone was a bit too syrupy.
“Yup. You?”
“Been better.” Aunt Tess drove the heel of her combat boot into Rho’s knee. “Put me down.”
“No.” Rho’s voice was a gravelly rumble.
When Aunt Tess got that peeved look on her face, bad things happened.
“They say the Coletti don’t have balls. Shall we find out?” Twisting in his grip, Aunt Tess kneed Rho in the groin.
Her blow didn’t seem to affect him a bit.
“Guess the rumors are true.”
“Your pitiful blows cannot damage me, female.” Rho’s face was crisscrossed with pale scars that added to his menacing air.
“That’s Lieutenant Colonel Jones to you, buster.” She pried at the muscular arm wrapped around her chest. “I don’t answer to female.”
“But you are a female,” Rho deadpanned.
Aunt Tess regarded him incredulously. “Seriously?”
A stun beam sizzled by the Battle Commander’s ear. He snapped, “Oydle!”
The wannabe Coletti warrior’s shrieks stopped abruptly, and he quit firing. His face and hands were covered with red welts. He panted like a woman in labor. With that belly, he could be pregnant. Maybe he was an alien hermaphrodite getting ready to hatch.
The skunk scampered out of the room. I heard several startled shouts in the corridor. Aw, the little guy was making new friends.
In a quiet, terrifying voice, the Battle Commander ordered, “Send the creatures away, Tess.”
“What makes you so sure I can control them?”
“The battle on Jabal. You used your talents, with the Overlord augmenting your powers, to compel the Afulas and Kotsors into attacking the rogue Colettis.”
I smothered a groan. She was so busted. The alien crocs and monster spiders had made short work of the bad guys. A sudden thought hit me. Oh my God. The Overlord had been in my head too. How much did he know?
“Let us go, and I’ll be happy to oblige,” Aunt Tess countered.
The Battle Commander smiled a scary-ass sociopath’s smile. “Send them away. Now.”
The flying bugs left the room. The scorpions and tarantulas quickly followed.
I scowled. “Wait a minute. This whole interrogation was a ruse. Why?”
“Quinn.” Aunt Tess gasped. “They want Quinn.”
Shit! My cousin Quinn was an extremely powerful psychic, and the bastards couldn’t afford to let him live. A cold fury flared inside me. No one messed with the Jones clan. I took control of Oydle’s mind and ordered, “Stun the Battle Commander and his goon.”
Oydle obediently shot the Battle Commander. A crackling red energy storm ricocheted around Voss’s battle suit before dissipating harmlessly.
Bummer. Other than a few random muscle twitches, Voss was unaffected by the stun beam.
Rho, a fast-draw expert, blasted Oydle. The warrior collapsed as violent muscle spasms shook his body.
Well, shit. I scooped up Oydle’s laser pistol. The next thing I knew, I was locked in a bone-crushing grip. Voss increased the pressure on my right hand until I dropped the pistol.
“I won’t let you kill Quinn.”
“We want Quinn and your male relatives alive and reasonably unharmed,” the Battle Commander murmured in my ear.
“I thought you boys were only interested in broodmares,” Tess retorted.
“Males can be converted as easily as females.”
Aunt Tess and I exchanged stunned glances. In unison, we asked, “Why convert the men?”
“The Jones family DNA is quite unique. Our scientists think combing our DNAs with the Jones clan’s will reverse the cellular damage done in the Great War and accelerate our birthrate,” Voss answered.
“Oh joy,” Aunt Tess remarked. “You convert our men, and they go out and hopefully sire female children?”
“We do what we must to survive.”
“So do we. The Jones family has never lost a battle.” I wiggled in Voss’s painful grip. Yeow! He was cutting off my circulation.
Voss grinned down at me. “We are aware of your family’s tactical skills. Once you are converted, you will make excellent Coletti warriors.”
“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
“Yeah, popping out little warlords has always been our dream,” Aunt Tess added.
Oydle puked again.
“Who is he? He’s not the least bit intimidating.” I grimaced. The smell was horrific.
“Our original interrogator was injured in a battle with Malik’s warriors. We simply projected Tihar’s image on Oydle’s body and transmitted the interrogation on every military vid feed to catch your missing family’s attention.”
All to bring my kinfolk running to my rescue. “Who the heck is Tihar and Malik?”
“Malik is an ally of the Tai-Kok, and Tihar is an Askole,” Voss answered.
Any friend of the Tai-Kok needed to be put down like a rabid dog, and I wasn’t sure what an Askole was. “It won’t work. My cousins are too smart to fall for your hoax.”
“Your cousins, including Quinn, have been captured.”
“What? I don’t believe you.”
The Battle Commander tapped a button on his communications bracelet and held it out for me to watch. The vid screen showed my bruised and bloody family. Caleb, Jake, and Ethan were in chains. Quinn was unconscious and being dragged off a shuttle by two Coletti warriors. “They will be put into stasis chambers until we arrive at Tanith.”
Relief trickled through me. The Coletti hunters had missed a few vital members of the Jones clan. My cousin Samantha was meeting with Hank Benson, the founder of Earth First, at the Old Tucson theme park. He wanted us to join his resistance movement to stop the Coletti takeover. That was a done deal as soon as we lost Voss and his goons.
My little sister Casey was still MIA after her Lockheed C130 transport went down in the South Pacific a week ago. Central Command refused to give us any updates on the search for survivors. I knew Casey was still alive, but my attempts to mentally link with her had failed. Was she injured or laying low?
That left my rather high-profile uncles. Uncle Saul was a friggin’ four-star general in charge of the western United States, and Uncle Derek was the police commander for the entire state of Arizona. Central Command hadn’t arrested them. Yet. “Are you planning on beating up my uncles and putting them in stasis too?”
“No. General Jones will remain on Earth for now. Derek Jones will accompany us to Tanith.”
“And when we reach Tanith?”
“You will be mated to a warlord.”
“Once I start my crazy-bitch routine, no sane warlord will want anything to do with me.”
Voss smirked. “Warlords like a challenge. If I wasn’t already tracking my true mate, I would claim you.”
The breath left my lungs in an involuntary gasp of surprise. He was joking? Right? The thought of “doing it” with the Battle Commander was appalling. His chosen had my condolences. “Wow. I don’t know what to say, except excuse me while I puke, and who wants a woman who smells like a skunk?”
“A little time in the decontamination chamber will take care of the problem.” There was a glint of humor in Voss’s eyes.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, he had everything covered. “A decontamination chamber, huh?”
Aunt Tess whispered in my mind. “It might work for us, but the skunk sprayed the entire building, and I ain’t tellin’ them how to get rid of the smell.”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Best news I’d had all day. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when the Battle Commander informed the Overlord that their spiffy new headquarters now reeked of skunk and was literally crawling with a variety of insects.
Voss’s communications bracelet beeped. He touched an icon. “My warriors have located your cousin Samantha in a place called Old Tucson.”
Up until now, Sam had evaded every attempt the military police had made to trap her. Me? I wasn’t so fortunate. They snagged me the minute I landed my fighter jet.
The big question was: how in the heck had the Coletti tracked her? I peered at Voss’s vid screen. Old Tucson was a replica of 1860’s Tucson complete with storefronts, saloon, bank, hotels, and a genuine adobe church. To the delight of the tourists, four gunslingers, the sheriff, and his two deputies were in a shouting match. “You will never find Sam in that mob of people.”
“Once we turn the skunk loose, there won’t be a crowd,” Voss answered.
My eyes widened in alarm. It could work. “But you need a skunk.”
“We have one.”
“I won’t help you capture Sam,” Aunt Tess said adamantly.
Voss’s dangerously predatory gaze focused on her. “Bring the skunk back, Tess.”
“No.”
“I can force your obedience.”
“Wait! That won’t be necessary. We both stink to high heaven, and you have puked smeared all over the back of your nifty battle suit, which adds to the aroma. So, we don’t need the skunk,” I said quickly.
Aunt Tess cried angrily, “You’re going to help these bastards?”
“To keep you from being hurt, you betcha.” I added on a private mental link, “Just not the way they think.”
“Be careful, honey.” Aunt Tess screwed her face into a hateful mask and spat, “You traitorous bitch, I hope you rot in hell.”
“Too late. Hell came to Earth five years ago,” I retorted.
Voss studied me for a moment, a hint of a smile on his mouth.
Crap. He wasn’t buying the act.
“Take Tess to the ship and put her in the decontamination chamber.”
“Yes, Commander.” Rho and Tess vanished.
The Battle Commander’s big hand suddenly wrapped around my throat. “You make any attempt to escape, and I will break both your legs.” He gave me a shake. “Understood?”
Holy freaking shit! He was dead serious. I nodded. “Running bad.”
“I have always wanted to visit a replica of the Old West,” the Battle Commander announced out of the blue.
My jaw dropped. He wanted to make like a tourist? “You rooting for the cowboys or the Apaches?”
“Apaches.” Voss clamped me to his chest, and an inky black void surrounded us.