Our Uprising: Planet Athion: Darkest Skies, #3

By Marissa Farrar

Aliens have invaded the Earth…

One race only means to do us harm, while the other wants to help…

After avoiding a near abduction by the Trads, I've been ordered by the president of the United States to take my team of gorgeous men and go back to the Observatory where this all started.

Only this time, we're not alone.

Accompanying us are two aliens from the planet Athion. With their blue skin, amber eyes, and iridescent black hair, it's hard not to be fascinated. They've offered to help humanity against the Trads, but how will Aleandro, Mike, and Casey react to having them around?

When a crisis lands us in the middle of a city destroyed by the Trads, we'll all have to put our differences behind us if we're going to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warwick House Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393709909

Book preview

Back Cover Information

Aliens have invaded Earth...

One race only means to do us harm, while the other wants to help...

After avoiding a near abduction by the Trads, I’ve been ordered by the president of the United States to take my team of gorgeous men and go back to the Observatory where this all started.

Only this time, we’re not alone.

Accompanying us are two aliens from the planet Athion. With their blue skin, amber eyes, and iridescent black hair, it’s hard not to be fascinated. They’ve offered to help humanity against the Trads, but how will Aleandro, Mike, and Casey react to having them around?

When a crisis lands us in the middle of a city destroyed by the Trads, we’ll all have to put our differences behind us if we’re going to survive.

PLANET ATHION: A REVERSE HAREM SCI-FI ROMANCE

DARKEST SKIES: BOOK THREE

OUR UPRISING

Chapter One

I’d seen plenty of crazy things during my career as a planetary scientist, and during the invasion of the alien race we knew as the Trads, but the giant spaceship hovering above the White House was currently in the number one spot.

The SUV we were in was self-driving, but that didn’t prevent me from leaning forward to the man sitting as backup behind the wheel. Can’t you make this thing go any faster?

If the Athions had sent their special forces, known as the Custo, down to help us fight the Trads, I didn’t want to miss a single moment.

I’m not going to push it any faster, Ms. Harran, he replied. We don’t know for sure what kind of obstacles we might come up against. The last thing we need is a collision.

He was right. We’d already had to face a deliberate road block and a mob of angry people out in the city. Safety was paramount, despite my frustration.

As well as the guy behind the wheel, I also had a government agent, Calicun, in the car with me, together with the three men I worked with, but who had also become so much more to me than just colleagues.

We’re almost there, Mike said from beside me.

His blue eyes were alive with excitement, and I knew our head of communications was experiencing the same thrill as me at getting to come face to face with an alien species. Though we’d had communication with other races for a decade or so now, actually having them on our planet was very different to a satellite conversation where the race you were speaking to were on a whole other planet.

Aleandro, my big security guy, spoke from the seat behind. We need to be cautious, Camille. We don’t have any reason to believe the Athions would wish us any harm, but we still don’t know them.

I nodded. I’m aware of that, but if the president is allowing them this close to the White House, she must trust them, too.

I trusted President Dana Wesley’s opinion. Just like any president, she had people who spoke badly of her, but as far as I could tell, she’d never given us any reason not to follow her guidance.

There’s a lot we can learn from the Athions, Casey said, pushing his glasses up his nose. Their space travel is far more advanced than ours. They’re a relatively peaceful race, with one ruler, rather than being divided up into different countries, like we are. I think that’s helped unite them as a species.

I frowned, thinking back to what I knew of them. I heard they’re not all good. They’ve had trouble with slavery and fighting pits.

Casey nodded and pushed a hand through his blond hair. Of course. I’m not trying to say they’re some kind of perfect race—they’re as complicated and multi-faceted as any human, and there are bound to be bad Athions among the good, but compared with humanity, the level of fighting among themselves is far less than in the history of our planet.

Yet they’re a dying race, Mike pointed out.

Casey shrugged. Through no fault of their own. They lost their female population to a virus. It wasn’t anything they did to cause it.

Humanity didn’t need a virus to wipe us out. An invading alien race was what might end our species.

I still want to get to the White House, I insisted. What’s happening right now is a historic event. Don’t you want to be there to witness it?

I wasn’t naïve. The president would most likely be meeting with the Athions now, and it wasn’t necessarily a conversation we would be privy to. We’d been lucky we’d been as involved as we had, but there were plenty of things happening behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of.

In the grand scheme of things, I thought that we were probably aware of very little.

I clenched my fists, trying to batten down the nerves fluttering inside me. I was still shaken up from my experience with the Trad alien I knew as Dean Lambert—though I was fairly certain that wasn’t his real name. I glanced down at my balled fists. A shiny film coated my skin. I pulled a face and did my best to wipe it off on my pants.

Ugh. Alien jizz. Gross.

I thought back to what had been contained in the mucus that was dried on my skin. At least now there was little doubt that the Trads worked biologically differently to humans. They didn’t have sperm like a regular human male, but instead ejaculated what appeared to be golf-ball sized eggs. They might be able to mimic how we appeared, but could they control that aspect of themselves when it came to sex? I realized the Trads must have a way of mimicking human sperm, too, or all it would take was a simple hand job for a human woman to know that something was very wrong. Did the size of those eggs vary from Trad to Trad—were there even bigger ones? I couldn’t help but imagine how those things would feel inside, and I pressed my thighs together, both weirdly sickened and slightly turned on at the thought.

The scientists back at the facility had a lot of work to do. I hoped they’d be able to make use of the sample I’d obtained and learn more about the Trads and how they worked. I knew enough biology to understand that when humans procreated, it was the woman who had the egg, not the male, but this was an alien race, and there was no reason for them to work the same way we did. Perhaps that egg contained all the genetic material needed to produce a new Trad, and the woman was only used as the incubator.

I shuddered at the idea of eggs being laid inside women. Was that what my best friend, Tara, was going through right now?

Dean had deliberately taken off his mask for me and shown me what he really looked like, but I wasn’t sure why yet, and he’d also asked me to leave with him, and then accepted my answer when I’d told him no. The whole thing confused me. I didn’t expect to understand the mind-set of an alien species, but that didn’t stop me trying to work it out. Had the reason he’d not snatched me simply been because I hadn’t had sex with him? The Athions said the pregnancies were necessary for a human woman to survive on Tradrych, and it did something to our DNA to make us compatible with their atmosphere. But obviously there were ways he would have been able to make that happen to me, even if my consent wasn’t given. What the hell did they care about consent? It wasn’t as though the women consented to being implanted with alien eggs or being kidnapped to another planet either.

We’re here, folks, Agent Calicun said over his shoulder from where he sat in the passenger seat up front.

My nerves stepped up a notch.

The big electronic gates that led us the back way into the White House were manned by armed guards. Though they should have been paying attention to our approach, I didn’t miss how one of them stood with his neck craned, staring at the huge ship in the sky directly above. It was truly incredible and made our own spaceships appear like children’s toys.

If the Athions stood by their offer of allowing human women to seek refuge on their planet, would these be the kinds of ships we’d be traveling in? My pulse picked up again at the thought, and I wondered if there would be any possibility of being allowed to look around this ship. Probably not. It wasn’t as though they were here as tourists. This was a military ship, and the crew on board would be military as well. They wouldn’t appreciate some human woman poking around.

While the Athions didn’t fight among themselves as much, their propensity for space travel meant other alien races posed more of a threat than anything else. They’d need to be prepared, and, I realized, if they were offering to host human females, that would make them a target to the Trads as well. I guessed they were already well equipped for such an eventuality and didn’t see the Trads as a threat to them, or they would never have offered.

The guard managed to tear his gaze away from the ship long enough to check the ID of the agent and allow us through. The gates closed behind us, and I exhaled a sigh of relief. After the attack we’d faced on the streets, not to mention the knowledge that Dean and his friends were out here somewhere, I’d been tense the whole way back from the facility. I’d been preparing myself mentally for another attack, but thankfully none had come.

The doors of the vehicle opened, and we all climbed out. I craned my neck, studying the intricate designs on the underside of the huge ship. Now we didn’t have the roof of the SUV between us and the ship, I knew I should feel more exposed than ever, but somehow the spaceship hovering above made me feel safer, protected.

The Athions were here, and we were no longer fighting the Trads alone.

Chapter Two

We left the car and marched as a small pack across the grounds, toward the White House.

The president is going to need to be briefed about what went down at the facility, Agent Calicun called back over his shoulder as he strode on ahead.

My cheeks heated at the thought of describing the events at the facility to the president of the United States, but then I realized he wasn’t only talking about the changes we’d seen in Dean, but also the attack on the facility.

If the Trads are grouping to launch coordinated attacks, he continued, there’s a good possibility the White House will also be on their list.

Aleandro spoke from beside me. The White House must be secure, though.

Calicun nodded. "Yes, of course, but they might have