Excerpt: Falcon

(this is an unedited draft and may contain errors and material that won’t be in the final version)

When Falcon traveled across the expanse of the galaxy in hopes of finding his Sky Mate, he’d never imagined he would meet an irresistible Terran officer on his first night in Texas who would bring him to his proverbial bachelor’s knees.

He’d come to Earth for one purpose: to be paired. The most prized warcraft on Sky’s End, their eons-old Dragon-class ships, were too complicated for even experienced, fully bioengineered Solos like him to fly. Dragons needed two pilots, a bonded pair of soulmates, their minds linked, their emotions in synergy. But genetic drift had happened. Sky Mates had become rare at home. Without them, they’d have to ground the incredible Dragons and face the end of their unique and proud culture, and perhaps, eventually, extinction.

The threat had driven Sky’s End out of isolation to form a partnership with Earth. The venture, his commander Major “Hawk” Hakkim’s brainchild, had brought Falcon and the rest of the handpicked team of Solos to Webber Space Force Base in Texas, where, Goddess willing, they’d find their genetically compatible mates.

Falcon’s focus was on keeping his flying skills sharp at Galactic TopGun weapons school while awaiting news of his match, and that was all.

Then he saw Dee Wilson.

He and the rest of his team of Solos were in O’Malley’s. The welcome reception hosted by their TopGun training squadron, the Crazy Eights, was in full swing. But the moment he laid eyes on Dee standing a few tables away, his world narrowed to only her. The noise, his friends, and the crowd faded away.

She was a bright spark of happy energy and color, a spray of golden freckles across her nose. Her lips curved into a curlicue on each end as she talked. When she glanced up—glanced at him—he was finished. One look and he melted in her sheer, incandescent cuteness.

Who was she? Who was this magical sprite?

Mine. In the center of his soul, he knew it to be true.

Before he could snap out of his trance, before he could go to her and find out who she was, she’d turned her back to him and walked away.

Only to roar back into his life the next morning with all the blinding heat of an atmospheric reentry.

As his academic instructor.

He watched, stunned speechless, as she stepped to the center of the classroom. Shiny red hair twisted in a bun, blue eyes sparkling, her uniform immaculate, she’d planted her hands on her hips and announced in fluent but Terran-accented Queen’s Tongue, “Welcome. I’m Lieutenant Dee Wilson. Call sign: Rainbow. I’ll be your battle management and weapons systems integration instructor at Galactic TopGun School. Get ready to sip from the firehose. Information is going to come at you fast and at full force. It might feel impossible to absorb it all, but work hard and you might.” Her curlicue smile seemed to dare him to try.

Bah. The subject matter was easy. Having to sit within reach of Dee for hours and not be able to touch her was not. I surrender, Lieutenant Wilson. You win. Take me prisoner…of your love. He couldn’t be with her, and yet it was futile to resist her.

She had no problem resisting him, however. None at all. By the end of the second week of class, he was no closer to winning her over than he was that first night in O’Malley’s.

Did his looks put her off? Sky warriors could be unsettling to some with their genetically engineered silver hair, shimmering skin, and vivid lavender-brown eyes. But using his cybernetic augmented senses to gauge her scent, her skin temperature, her increase in respiration, the way her pupils dilated whenever their gazes locked, he had already determined that the attraction was mutual. Well, physically, anyway.

Was his attitude the problem? At Webber Space Force Base, she was surrounded by fighter-pilots. She must be used to their cockiness. Yet he did his best to dial down any trace of swagger. In class, he was unfailingly polite, respectful, helpful, humble. A model sky warrior. He sat in the front row so that he wouldn’t miss a detail of her instruction. His exam scores, his briefings, his flights were perfect. Not that it helped. She still paid him no mind.

As a powerful man’s son, he was used to being aggressively pursued by females, and he’d never minded sampling some of what was thrown at him. The women came at him with their usual wiles and ulterior motives, the scripted repartee. He’d smile, shrug, and go along for the ride. After a while, they all seemed the same. Interchangeable. Temporary diversions.

He was under intense pressure to return to his home planet with a Sky Mate. He owed it to his people to be matched, and to his father. Returning home with a mate would set him on the path to making things right.

He was irresistibly drawn to Dee all the same

Was this a matter of basic attraction? Maybe many people felt this way, and it was only Falcon’s first time experiencing it. Most of Sky’s End population lived as regular citizens, after all. They met, fell in love, mated, raised families, or not.

Sky warriors were held to different expectations. They were born and bred to be paired with Sky Mates. As a Solo sky warrior, Falcon was free to play the field, or to enter a relationship—with full knowledge that a confirmed match would take priority. Everyone back home who kept company with a Solo sky warrior accepted this.

Even so, nothing had ever lasted long enough for him to worry about it. Sometimes he worried if losing his Sky Mate at such a young age had left him permanently damaged somehow and unable to sustain a relationship. But it wasn’t that. It was far simpler. No one had ever interested him enough to invest his heart.

His interest in Dee gained strength by the day. Not because she kept rebuffing him, but in spite of it.

Rainbow girl, why not get to know me better?

Or does someone else already own your heart?

Allowing his heart and soul to get tangled up with a female who couldn’t be his mate—or, worse, didn’t want to be—was nothing more than self punishment. And yet, he refused to give up. Maybe she was shy and needed to warm up to him.

He quickly figured out a way to spend more time in her company: extra instruction. While he was certain she was skeptical about his need for extra help, knowing his perfect test scores, she always stayed after class to assist him and the other WUGs. Sometimes, he was lucky to have her all to himself.

During those moments, he craftily teased out as much information as he could about her. Unfortunately for him, as an intelligence officer she was highly skilled at sharing only “need to know” answers. Orphaned, she’d been raised by her grandparents in a region called Nebraska, and they were now deceased. She’d become their caregiver at an early age, and he sensed she’d been good at it. She was an only child like he was. Also like him, she wasn’t mated. He’d gained that valuable tidbit from Major “Karma” Goren, one of the instructor pilots. He was always willing to reveal vital personal details about his squadron mates once you loosened his tongue with a few alcoholic beverages.

Such were his thoughts that Friday morning as he sat crammed into his usual seat directly in front of the instructor podium, listening to Dee as she lectured. He shifted position in his tiny chair, his knees scraping against an equally awkward mission planning table that seemed to comfortably fit other aviators from around the galaxy but not sky warriors. Ah, but the scenery was delightful today.

Her back was to him, the swell of her bottom swaying as she filled one of the whiteboards with scrawled diagrams, mission notes, and briefing points. There were maps on all the walls, and a big, primitive projector in the front of the room. Well, not primitive in the Terrans’ view.

“Always consider possible counter measures to deny, defeat, degrade, or avoid the enemy.” Dee rose up on her toes, reaching overhead to draw a diagram. The hem of her uniform blouse, a style worn outside of her waistband, lifted, exposing a creamy sliver of skin. Faint golden freckles dusted her back. The discovery intrigued him. She must have them everywhere. He’d love to fact check that notion. It was his goal to eventually taste them all, every freckle, no matter how long it took—days, weeks, years even, all her graceful angles and curves his to explore at his leisure.

Heat pooled in his groin with the thought of her spread out beneath him in bed, her back arching, his name a sigh on her lips as he kissed all her most sensitive places.

He swallowed a groan, drawing his boots closer to the chair legs, and quickly called on his bio-engineering to help divert blood flow from his aching cock to body parts more appropriate for a classroom setting.

To his brain, for instance. He was in class, after all. And Dee did have many other attributes besides the body he’d longed to taste and touch. Like her sharp mind and a love of teaching, her happy, endearingly earnest personality, and that quiet little snort she made sometimes when she laughed too hard.

His mouth looped into a grin. Goddess, that soft snort. It was adorable. Then there was her scent. He could no more pretend it didn’t exist than he could stop his heart from beating. He didn’t drink alcohol, it was thought to interfere with a sky warrior’s neural implants, but he doubted its effects could have dizzied him more than the scent of Dee’s skin did. He let out a sigh.

“Lieutenant Faulke. In a wartime scenario how would authority be delegated down to the weapons system operator?”

He jerked his head up. Dee’s gaze was on him, her coppery brows raised. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but her expression broadcast that she thought she’d caught him daydreaming. He was sure it looked that way to an non-augmented human.

He could hear Ellfen’s muffled snicker from a few seats away, where she sat with the other Solos, Rowan, Rigel, and Narekk.

Falcon sat up straighter, moving aside his Terran issued tablet computer and folding his hands on the table. “Well, Lieutenant Wilson, it depends.”

“Standard weapons officer answer,” Dee muttered with an amused roll of her eyes. She paced in front of him, tapping a pointer against her open palm. “Why does it depend?”

“If they are exercising centralized control, then the sector operations center would determine a target and assign the appropriate weapons system at the group level.” He waved a hand in a circular motion. “And then on down to the individual squads. If it is decentralized control, as is normal in wartime, then the individual sector commanders would have the authority to engage to protect their respective area of coverage.”

“Nice work, Lieutenant,” she said and turned away, shutting off the projector. Her warm expression told him his response had pleased her. Victory! He’d finally won her notice.

His mind was the way to her heart.

***

As the students filed out of the classroom, Dee stacked the day’s teaching materials on one of the mission planning tables, organizing the charts and publications before storing them in the vault. A flight of jets roared over the base so loud it rattled her car keys sitting next to her purse.

It pulled her mind back to the orientation flight she’d scheduled for that afternoon, part of the flight school she’d signed up for at a civilian airstrip. She wasn’t a fighter-pilot like most of her friends at the TopGun weapons school, but she loved her job as an intelligence officer and instructor. Her goals for today were simple: just get in the air and not throw up, thus proving she was capable of learning to fly.

Then she could enter her DNA in the Sky Mates study.

Being a Sky Mate sounded like a dream. Deep down, she’d always known she was meant to be part of something larger, destined to find her other half and be a team. Matched, mated, and synced, she and her sky warrior would go off to live on an exotic, faraway world together.

Granted, it was a stretch for a nerdy data wonk like her. She’d spent her life in offices, in classrooms, behind computers. She could practically hear her late grandparents who had raised her waving her off the idea of interstellar exploits: “It can only come to no good, D’andra. Stay home. Be safe.”

Like Mom and Dad didn’t do.

Her parents were true adventurers. In the photos from their world travels, they looked as exhilarated about their surroundings as they must have been in love with each other. There were even some with Dee as an infant in their arms. She’d visited three continents before she was eighteen months old. Then one day they didn’t return. Adventure became a touchy subject after that.

But she dreamed of it anyway—and him: the love of her life, her partner in crime for all the adventures she wanted to experience. She knew he was out there, her other half, she could feel it, the empty spot inside her only he could fill. She’d dated now and again, had a few boyfriends along the way, but none reached the high bar she’d set. She’d even submitted an application to the Intergalactic Dating Agency last year, thinking a man from the stars would be The One, but a few stilted video dates had left her disappointed.

The alien men were no different from Earth men.

Then Sky’s End had reached out to Earth, needing mates. She desperately wanted to submit her profile. She kept filling out the forms only to cancel. To be with a sky warrior, one needed to learn to fly. To fly, one needed to not have a meltdown at the thought of getting behind the controls of a plane. Would today be the day she finally got off the ground?

Her nerves jangled, sweat prickling. She pressed her fist to her stomach. Breathe.

Except she was already breathing too fast, her heart racing. It felt as if she’d run sprints. She blamed Falcon.

It reminded her of what had happened to her closest girlfriend Captain Kelly “Crackers” Ritz soon after meeting her co-liaison Hawk in person for the first time. His handshake had been so sexy Kelly had felt it clear to her toes.

Falcon’s explanation of battlefield planning had just done the same to Dee.

Oh, yeah. Talk dirty to me, baby. Whisper your thoughts on decentralized versus centralized control in my ear.

No question, she taught difficult material. Falcon had caught on faster than any of the WUGs—Weapons Undergrads—she’d ever instructed. Not only because he was part cyborg. The other Solos on his team were fast learners too. But because he was brilliant.

Men with brains were a huge turn on. But a man smart enough to challenge her intellectually, who also possessed the skills and muscle mass to rescue her from a burning building? He was a gentle giant. Kind to her and others. He was pretty much the “whole package”. Her dream man.

And that’s where he would have to remain, in her dreams only. The reasons against a future together were stacked from here to the stratosphere.

How could she be Falcon’s Sky Mate when a fear of flying kept her grounded?

She threw a glance toward the open door. For a moment, she’d thought he might stay after class. He did frequently, asking questions she was certain he already knew the answers to, and sometimes questions about her. Placing his hands behind his back, his big frame somehow gentle, he’d tactfully pry, all while his hopeful smile melted her heart.

Yet behind his smile was a mystery she couldn’t unravel. His amiable outer shell hid something. A wound. PTSD? She knew the sky warriors had fought the Drakken in the war, and it had been brutal. She was driven by her need to heal him as much as she was attracted to him physically.

But Lieutenant Faulke wasn’t a puppy to take in and care for. He was a combat veteran, a hero. Hard shell, a soft center—like the best kind of candy.

She inhaled through her nose as she sorted the last of the paperwork. It didn’t seem possible, but she detected a trace of his scent lingering in the air. Since when had she become so olfactory-aware? Her sense of smell had improved dramatically recently, especially around Falcon. He was sexual aromatherapy. One whiff and she wanted to do a striptease and use her somewhat limited charms to lure him into bed.

Talk about the highway to the danger zone.

Yep, she’d better be careful, or her monster-size crush on Falcon would turn into something more when it couldn’t.

A fling wasn’t out of the question, but it was a risky venture. If she wasn’t careful she’d fall for him. If she couldn’t be a Sky Mate that wasn’t good. He’d be paired sooner or later, and it wouldn’t be with her since her DNA wasn’t in the pool. Nor should it be. What man born to fly would be happy with a woman whose feet were so firmly rooted to the ground?

***

Outside the classroom, Falcon turned to his Solos. He’d backtrack to see Dee.

He handed Narekk the keys to the van. “I’ll walk back.” Their quarters, the Webber Inn, were only a few blocks away.

“Angling for extra instruction again?” Ellfen asked with a knowing smirk. “You must need a lot of help.”

He grinned back. “My aim is to excel in Terran academics.”

She shook her head and beckoned to Narekk, Rowan, and Rigel. “Let’s leave Falcon to his…extra instruction.” The group moved on.

Just as Falcon turned toward the classroom door, the sound of voices speaking with an Imperial accent invaded. A group of Drakken WUGs spilled into the common area from one of the briefing rooms. They like many others from across the galaxy had come to Earth to attend the weapons school.

Freepin’ dirt-suckers, the lot of them. Falcon glared then caught himself. In his mind, he could see Hawk shaking his head: No.

He’d promised his leader he’d be nice to the Drakken. But when he saw Ensign Garokk in the group, he almost snarled. They’d nearly come to blows weeks ago in O’Malley’s. They’d been keeping to a wary truce ever since.

Sky’s End needed to stay in the Terran’s good graces. If Earth abandoned Project Sky Mates, it would be disastrous. Apocalyptic. It meant Falcon couldn’t let himself get dragged into confrontations with the ink heads and risk setting off a political incident. Even so, it irked him the way Garokk eyed Ellfen with sexual interest, his gaze sliding over her body.

Any male would notice her. Tall and strong, she stood out in the crowd. Her pale hair was gathered elegantly at the nape of her neck and wrapped with a thin braid. It flowed down the back of her flight suit, shining like an ice sculpture on New Year Feast Day.

Ellfen was one of the best pilots Falcon had ever flown with, but anyone who mistook her love of feminine touches as signaling weakness in combat or out of it lived to regret the decision.

Garokk probably thought he had a better chance than most with a female as beautiful and accomplished as Ellfen. He was a good-looking male, his posture arrogant. His black hair was cropped in Terran military fashion, not a Drakken style. An attempt to fit in?

Falcon’s scowl deepened. Try to disguise his hide all he wanted, Garokk couldn’t disguise what he was. His hard expression and cold dark eyes marked him as a Drakken of battlelord ancestry, the elite military caste of his fallen civilization. Garokk was too young to have been a battlelord himself and never would have been admitted to TopGun if he’d been one of those sadists, the warlord’s brutal henchmen. They had been tried for war crimes and executed by the Triad after the war—except for one, Aral Mawndarr, who had switched sides and helped the Coalition to victory.

Ellfen’s steps slowed. She returned Garokk’s hard stare, neither one backing down or showing any softness. Yet to Falcon, they seemed less like adversaries than they did, well, interested in each other.

What was this about? A Drakken and a sky warrior? Oil and water, the Terrans would say.

Or fire and fuel.

A battle-hardened sky warrior, a war orphan, Ellfen could well take care of herself, but Garokk had better not try anything if he cared about his well being. He stood the chance of incurring her wrath as well as Falcon’s.

Falcon waited until Ellfen and the other two Solos had safely exited the building and Garokk had gone off with his compatriots before he turned back toward the classroom door.

Then he heard it—a muffled chirping sound. “Cheep-cheep.”

Falcon froze. Who dared to taunt his kind? In public. In front of everyone. Who? Hatred welled up, searing hot and impossible to ignore. He scanned the faces, looking for the guilty parties.

The open area between the briefing rooms was crowded with WUGs and instructors, walking singly and in groups, everyone going about their business. Falcon was the only sky warrior left in the building. The insult would be aimed at him then.

If some dirt sucker wanted to get him riled up, they’d done a good job.

Birdies. That’s what the chirping meant. No sky warriors liked it, but for him it would forever be a reminder of the attack that had stolen so much from him—his mother and Jahlann.

The entire planet had mourned, and Falcon had sworn vengeance against those responsible. Seething, he’d punished the Drakken Empire for the remainder of the war, but it wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough.

And now, here on Earth, someone apparently wanted to keep the war going. Someone wanted to cause him pain. To force him to react, and risk Sky’s End’s critical mission.

Don’t give them what they want. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

Maybe he hadn’t even heard the whistling at all. A trick of his hearing.

Yes, that. He wanted to believe it. He wanted peace.

He turned back toward the classroom.

“Cheep, cheep.”

His eyes hazing over with wrath, he whirled around, his braids swinging. Then something hooked his sleeve and yanked him backward.

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