Tail & Temptation (Alien Beasts #1)

Terminal Velocities and Gallows Humor

The deafening wail of warning sirens ripped the last shred of silence from the cabin.

It wasn't just sound anymore—it was a physical force hammering against my eardrums, setting the hull of the stolen freighter vibrating.

Red strobe lights sliced through the acrid smoke billowing from the ventilation shafts in harsh, asynchronous beats.

The stench of burning ozone, molten copper, and scorched silicon settled heavy in my lungs.

I didn't cough. I didn't blink. My eyes stayed fixed on the holographic interface in front of me while my fingers flew across the tactile keys.

“We're dying! Fucking hell, we're about to burn to ash!”

My best friend's voice cracked. Jules was pinned in the copilot seat to my right, straps cutting deep into her shoulders, knuckles white where she gripped the armrests.

Even now, with the gravity compensators failing and the ship bucking wildly around its longitudinal axis, she kept up her absurd humor.

“Remember the part of the plan where you said, 'Get in, the ship's a goddamn ghost on radar'? Because this fireworks show out here feels pretty damn un-ghostly!”

“My calculations were flawless,” I forced out through clenched teeth.

I ground my jaw. Rerouted energy from life support to the forward deflector shields.

Another alarm blared. I ignored it and silenced the warning display with a hard slap on the console.

“The entry angle is perfect. The goddamn scanner dampening on this piece of junk has a latency error of zero point four seconds.

That's a hardware failure. Not faulty math.”

“Oh, thank God!” Jules shouted over the screech of tearing metal. “Then we can put on our tombstone: She burned alive, but her math was excellent!”

A massive jolt rocked the chassis. We hit the planet's exosphere.

The G-forces struck like an invisible sledgehammer, crushing the air from my lungs and pressing me deep into the bucket seat.

The armored glass of the front viewport shifted from deep black to a glaring, deadly orange.

Plasma ate into the outer hull. The temperature in the capsule spiked fifteen degrees in seconds.

Sweat broke out on my forehead, ran into my eyes, burned.

I blinked hard, forcing the moisture away.

My hands gripped the manual control sticks.

The hydraulics groaned under the pressure, fighting me.

I tensed my entire upper body to keep the ship's nose up.

If the angle dropped by even two degrees, we'd smash into the surface like a meteor instead of skipping across the atmosphere.

Then it happened.

A short circuit in the main distributor. The console lighting flickered and died for a fraction of a second. The control stick in my hand jerked hard to the left. The hull pitched into a fatal angle.

My right hand let go of the stick to activate the emergency thrust reversal on the touchpad. But my fingers stopped in midair.

They trembled.

It was only a millisecond. A tiny, barely perceptible tremor in my bones.

But it was enough. The cold spreading through my stomach despite the scorching heat in the cockpit was familiar.

Loss of control. The words tasted like ash.

The vibration in my hand wasn't the ship.

It was memory. The sterile room. The smell of disinfectant and fear.

The ice-cold metal cuffs that were supposed to click around my wrists on my twentieth birthday.

The auction. The moment when my life, my mind, and my body would be handed over to the highest bidder. An object. A slave.

Bile rose in my throat.

No.

I clenched my trembling hand into a fist. Nails dug deep into my flesh until the skin gave way and warm pain cut through the panic.

I slammed my fist flat on the manual control console and forced my fingers open through sheer will.

I entered the override codes with mechanical precision.

The cold inside me transformed into razor-sharp arrogance.

No one took control from me. Not a hostile fleet, not cheap alien tech, and certainly not my own goddamn trauma.

I was the one who dictated the rules. Always.

“Thrust reversal initialized,” I heard my own voice say, cold and emotionless, as if reading a weather report. “Jules. Head down. Brace for impact.”

“I hate yo—”

Her words drowned in the deafening noise. We broke through the cloud cover. The viewport was a web of cracks. The plasma fire died, revealing the ground.

It raced toward us at lethal speed.

An endless ocean of pitch-black jungle. Trees as massive as skyscrapers, their crowns jutting skyward like jagged spears.

Farther back, barely visible through the smoke of our own burning drive, the horizon glowed a sickly neon violet.

Sharp, archaic metal structures ate into the flanks of a massive mountain range. An industrial facility. A fortress.

We wouldn't reach the fortress. The angle was too steep.

“Hold on!” I roared, yanked both control sticks to my chest, and slammed the rudder hard right.

The ship crashed into the canopy.

The noise was indescribable—not a bang, but a long, agonizing tearing.

Branches thick as imperial freight tubes whipped against the hull.

Titanium steel shrieked as it ripped open.

Gravity lost all meaning. We flipped. The bow ate into wood, splintered it, ricocheted back.

Something heavy tore away from the port side. Half the ship was literally gutted.

Then the actual impact with the ground.

The kinetic force punched through the seat straight into my spine. My teeth slammed together so hard I tasted copper. The straps nearly tore through my collarbone. The world exploded in a flash of pain and blinding white light.

Then darkness. Silence.

Only the hiss of ruptured coolant lines and the crackle of fire.

I opened my eyes. A stabbing pain shot through my ribcage as I drew breath. Every rib felt bruised, maybe cracked. Blood dripped from a gash on my forehead onto the shattered display in front of me.

I was alive.

My mind snapped back into command, shoving the pain into a dark corner of my consciousness. Status report. No paralysis. Arms and legs moved when I told them to. The cabin lay in semi-darkness, lit only by small fires feeding on torn cable strands.

My gaze snapped to the right. “Jules?”

My voice was raw, shredded by smoke. The copilot seat was half-ripped from its moorings and hung crooked. Jules slumped limp in the harness, her head lolled forward.

I slammed the heel of my hand against the emergency release on my harness.

Nothing. The system was dead. Cursing, I grabbed the survival knife from my thigh holster.

Two hard, precise cuts severed the webbing.

I slid out of the seat and landed hard on the tilted cabin floor, ankle-deep in water from the destroyed cooling systems.

I crawled to her, pressed two fingers against her carotid.

A pulse. Fast, shallow, but strong.

“Wake up,” I commanded, slapping her hard across the cheek without hesitation. Not gently. No time for sentimentality. “Jules, eyes open. Now.”

She groaned, blinked sluggishly, and spat a stream of saliva and blood onto the floor. Her gaze focused on me. “If you slap me again,” she croaked, “I’ll break the fingers you flew this piece of shit ship with.”

“Good. You’re still functional.” I cut through her harness and hauled her roughly to her feet. “Grab your gear. We’ve got ten minutes max before the reactor goes critical and turns this whole sector into a smoking crater.”

I turned away, climbed over the wreckage of the console, and made my way to the splintered remains of the front viewport. The hull was torn open, cold damp jungle air rushing in. It reeked of rot, moss, and something chemical.

I kicked the remaining glass shards out of the frame with my boot and climbed outside.

The reality of this planet slammed into me.

We stood at the edge of a massive crater our crash had carved into the forest. Before us lay the pitch-black jungle.

You could almost taste the danger in it.

There were no normal animals here. I heard deep, guttural sounds that made the ground vibrate, and the crack of branches from creatures definitely not on my side of the food chain.

I turned my head west. Above the treetops, only a few kilometers away, artificial light sliced through the darkness.

The neon fortress. Even from this distance, it looked brutal and threatening.

Sharp steel and flickering violet lights built into the raw rock face.

A place that screamed of blood and hard industry.

I closed my eyes and let my brain run the calculations. The options. The probabilities. Survival.

I made my decision in under three seconds.

Jules hauled herself through the splintered frame.

Her boots slipped in the wet black mud before she came to a stop beside me.

She wiped blood and soot from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Her gaze followed mine—first to the massive, pitch-black tree trunks rising into the sky like the ribs of a dead giant, then to the violet neon glow of the fortress in the west.

A deep growl rolled through the undergrowth, close enough to make the fern leaves vibrate.

“Please tell me we’re heading for the glowing murder citadel,” Jules forced out.

She drew her light blaster from the shoulder holster and flicked off the safety.

The click sounded pathetically quiet against the rumble of the jungle.

“I really don’t want to end up as a snack for some alien crocodile. ”

I turned to face her. My face was an emotionless mask. “We’re splitting up.”

Jules froze. She lowered the weapon a few inches. Her jaw dropped, then closed again. “Are you serious? The ship’s burning, we’re stranded on a hostile planet, and you’re pulling the ‘Scooby-Doo let’s split up’ move?”