The Arrival: A Sci-Fi Alien Warrior Paranormal Romance Read Online Free Page A

an alarm and he'd see it. Over the years there'd been very few pings. So they weren't dead. Which meant they were out there somewhere in the vast recesses of space. Biding their time. Waiting.
    "Are you still looking at those screens, old man?"
    Sorrin sighed and rubbed his fingers over his head. Back when he'd been a warrior, a proud one, his dark hair had fallen into his eyes and just over his collar. Now it was buzzed short, just the softest bristly strands still on his head, and sometimes he still made the motions of raking his hands through his hair in frustration, only to find air.
    "I'm not old," he muttered, turning to see Caldir, a young man who lived in the building. Sorrin wasn't old, and he wasn't even that much older than Caldir, maybe five years at the most, but the boy seemed younger by virtue of his inexperience. Or maybe it was just Sorrin's experience that made him seem older. Either way, the relationship between the two of them was what Caldir had called 'fondly antagonistic' before, and Sorrin couldn't exactly argue. He didn't have a problem with the boy, but he was always underfoot, and managed to catch Sorrin in more moments of weakness than he would like. "What do you want?" he asked, hoping to speed this along.
    But Caldir had that look on his face. The one that was all mischief and said it was going to be a cold day in the fire pits before this was a short, easy to deal with conversation. Sorrin sighed.
    "Just on my way back from work," he said. "Saw you up here and thought I'd say hello."
    "And now you've said it," Sorrin said, going back to his work. He aimed a kick at the side of one of the machines and watched as the screen flickered and died. Void take it.
    "You can't just kick this old tech around," Caldir said, stepping closer from where he had been leaning against the door to the roof. Strictly speaking, they weren't supposed to be on the roof of the building, but people came up here all the time, and there had never been any consequences, and no one ever really held Sorrin to those sorts of rules anyway. One of the perks of being a washed up former hero, perhaps.
    "So I should get new tech and kick that?" he muttered, running his fingers across the touchpad in frustration.
    " No ," Caldir replied. "And anyway, there'd be no need to kick new tech. Look, let me have a peek, okay?"
    Sorrin looked at him mistrustfully for a moment before he sighed and bowed out of the way, leaving the space open for Caldir to move into.
    He was much shorter than Sorrin's seven feet of height, topping out at maybe five feet at the most. But Caldir was a Presha, and that was how they were built. Short, stocky, and slightly reptilian, they did most of the manual labor required to keep the Colonies working.
    Gollen Par had been the city at the center of it all, but it wasn't the only one. Jotul, Fairgran, Bil-Dor, and Luz were all cities in the Colonies, spread out across two planets and operating under their own government, the galactic Senate. Each of the Colonies had something going for it, something they brought to the table, as well as some reason they wanted to be separate from whatever planet the city had been a part of originally. Each city had a Senator in residence, and each Senator had a warrior band that was responsible for the protection of the people and the Senator of that colony.
    Where Sorrin had lived and served in Gollen Par, the shining jewel of the Colonies, his shame had driven him to the outer edges to Luz, the colony furthest from the center. He'd thought about leaving altogether, of course, going back to one of the planets that had rejected the Colonies idea and still operated as a single unit, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. It was said that once you moved out to the Colonies it was hard to reintegrate back into life elsewhere.
    And Sorrin was having a hard enough time just living these days. So he'd stayed.
    As Caldir worked whatever magic he had with machines, Sorrin leaned his arms