Three weeks later, I was still convinced the Horde was planning something. The longer we went without hearing any news from The Darkness—the part of the galaxy the Horde had claimed—the more comfortable the upper brass got. And the more nervous I became.
The Khanavai had gotten more lax over the years as the Alveron Horde failed to attack year after year.
I did not believe that we were safe from the ravages of the Horde. And I definitely didn’t believe the space station where we filmed the yearly Bride Lottery and Games was safe.
So here I was on Station 21, pretending to search for a bride.
Only Vos Klavoii knew my real mission. He’d been clear. I had to make my bride-hunt convincing—anything else, and he would have to boot me from the show, possibly too soon to do any good if the Horde did attack.
I glanced around the tiny room I had been assigned as my groom’s quarters.
This was a young man’s game. I was at least a decade older than every other groom here.
I didn’t fit in.
Luckily, I didn’t have to. I simply had to continue participating until I was absolutely sure that the Horde didn’t have something up their alien equivalency of sleeves.
I had no interest in actually becoming a groom.
Besides, my research suggested that the Bride Lottery and Games had been a terrible miscalculation on the original Khanavai explorers’ part.
Not that they weren’t immensely popular now—they absolutely were. But when we, as a species, had first arrived on planet Earth, we had been watching various entertainment programs for years. Earthers had been so naïve that they had blasted their entertainment out into space to be picked up by anyone who happened by.
We had half expected, given the content of the entertainment, that humans would have blown themselves to bits already by the time we got there.
As it turned out, although Earthers really were easily as violent as their television shows had suggested, they weren’t quite so likely to wipe themselves out entirely.
No one knew that yet, though, when Prince Khan had arrived half an Earth century before. He and his team had saved Earth from the Alveron Horde attackers, then dropped in on the planet to introduce themselves and ask for payment for protection: genetically compatible female mates to replace the ones the Horde had genetically poisoned.
When Prince Khan’s research team put together the proposal for the Bride Lottery and Games, however, they made one tactical error. They thought human reality shows were, in fact, real.
The Khanavai assumed the entertainment they had intercepted and studied was somehow indicative of Earthers’ actual, true courting rituals.
As it turned out, Earther females did not usually participate in games to win their spouses.
Not even kissing games.
Not competitively, anyway.
Mostly.
No one on Prince Khan’s team had realized that salient fact soon enough, so as part of the treaty between Earth and Khanavai Prime, the Khanavai had set up a game show during which human brides competed for the honor to mate with a Khanavai warrior.
As it turned out, human women were not uniformly thrilled with the idea of catching their mates like fish, as one early contestant had succinctly put it.
I’d had to look up what fish were and all in all, I was rather glad we didn’t have them on Khanavai Prime. No matter how delicious human women seemed to think they were, they appeared to be slimy and scaly.
And unflatteringly floppy.
No. We were definitely not fish to be caught.
Now that the Bride Lottery was fully enmeshed in their culture, of course, many Earther females had begun to look forward to it. But that early reluctance explained the Lottery portion of the agreement. The Bride Alliance Treaty specified that human women could not be mated against their will, but they could be convinced.
Early on, it took sorting through a lot of women to find one who was both willing to leave her world and compatible with one of our warriors.
Now it was much easier—but the Bride Lottery lived on as tradition.
Anyway, I thought smugly as I stretched out on the single bed in my quarters, I wasn’t actually looking for a bride. I was looking for any way the Horde could break through our defenses.
Spying on my own people wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I knew it had to be done.
A ding from my com let me know that a message had arrived.
It wasn’t the information I was waiting for, though. I had been hoping for more details about the station’s weaknesses, as the general had promised.
Instead, I received a catalog of all the human women whose names had been drawn.
Oh, well, I thought. I might as well entertain myself while I wait for the real info I need.
Paging open the com file, I began flipping through the images of the various women.
Humans all looked the same. They were all some shade of beige or brown, and all so uniformly, terrifyingly tiny.
I had to wonder how our warriors kept from damaging their new spouses during the mating rituals.
The thought made my skin crawl.
No one that small should ever be taken as an ally.
And definitely not as a mate. I was about to close the file and go back to my brooding when something caught my eye.
Two human women—complete opposites, but equally beautiful. One with amazingly pale skin, so pale I could almost see the veins through it. And the other was equally as dark, her skin the shade of the black lava rocks of the Trashanta plains.
Then again, maybe this assignment wouldn’t be so bad, after all.
Chapter Three
Mia
“No. Really. I’m not supposed to be here.” My voice broke as I begged the Poltien who had greeted me to let me go back home. “You don’t understand.”
The Poltien’s hot-pink nose-braid shivered as its owner inhaled in an obvious attempt to remain calm.
“You are required to be here. You are certainly not the first bride who has begged to
