Angel 6.0: Concubine by Travis Luedke
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Series: Angel 6.0, #1
Source: Personal Library
My Rating: 4.5 of 5 Stars

My name is Angel, and I live on Nugene Station. My days are filled with doctor’s tests, but I spend my nights dancing in zero G, or in the arms of my secret lover, Carver Liddell.

Nugene is the sole outpost orbiting Jupiter where specially engineered human clones are bred for sale to The Gran, a fierce alien race of Cats. The treaty between humanity and the Cats guarantees a constant supply of worker drones.

I am not a worker drone. I am something else. I am the untapped potential of the human genome. I am the next step in human evolution.

The Cats finally noticed me, they know I am special. Now they want me. They want to breed me. Silly Cats, don’t they know clones are sterile?

Nugene is only the beginning of my story.

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Meet Angel 6.0
A clone.
An experiment.
The next step in science-aided human evolution.
… and the bitch who’s probably going to kill you.

I had known love, but it was taken away from me. Now I knew only misery and the blazing hatred of the creatures that had ruined my life.

Angel 6.0 has lived her entire life in an orbiting cloning facility – the pet project of the head scientist, Nugene. The facility creates human clones to sell to The Gran – a fearsome race of cat people who once waged war against the human race. The clone slaves are Earth’s ransom to keep The Gran from enslaving the entire population… But that’s not exactly common knowledge.

Nugene Station’s operations are a secret.
Angel 6.0 is the biggest secret within the station, and she’s just been spotted by The Gran.

Angel is an über-intelligent pseudo-human in a futuristic universe. A gorgeous woman who will snap your neck while you’re busy ogling her tits… Yeah, she’s the kind of badass female main character I can get behind!

Angel lived her life in relative peace at Nugene Station, but now The Gran want their prize. They’ll stop at nothing to hunt her down and capture her. The enormous cat-like aliens have superior strength and weaponry, but Angel has a few tricks up her slave as well.

The fight of her life ends in betrayal and her inability to escape the clutches of The Gran…

Meet Angel 6.0
A slave.
A concubine.
An animal to be bred.
The only female on a ship heading to the far reaches of the universe.
…and she’s every bit as deadly as the predators holding her.

I had no way to imagine what my life would be like without the Cats, or why I should go on living. I was an experiment, a subject, a biotech investment in human evolution. I was a thing to be studied.

The experiment was over

There’s no escaping The Gran now. Angel’s only hope is to gain the trust of the Gran’s Captain and plot her escape. Luckily for her, The Gran have no idea what she’s capable of…

Beaten, bloody, dirty, but still fighting.
I sense a wonderful adventure in the making!

Like any debut in a serial series, this book places a focus on introduction – Who/why/where – but there’s no shortage of carnage, action, and wickedly hot sex!

Guard your furry cat balls, people…
and meet Angel 6.0

Excerpt:

Dancing in zero G is like virgin sex – scary, exhilarating, nauseating, awkward, yet liberating. I only danced during lights-out when the white coats are sleeping. They don’t like to be reminded of how different I am, and I don’t want them reminded.

Ear buds turned all the way up, I moved with the flow of my music. Fast, I spun, twirled and leapt off the crossbeams. Slow, I glided into the gradual sensation of gravity at the outer edge of the station’s central hub. The edges of the two hundred meter hub cylinder had a mild one quarter G. Zero G is only at the exact center of the hub, absent the seventy kilometer-per-hour centripetal spin of the station. Only in the center am I truly free, nothing to hold me back.

D’Anton has tried to stop me from dancing several times in the last two years. He complains that people were not meant for zero G. But I’m not like other people. He says it affects his readings on my biorhythms and blood chemistry. I say that if I always dance at lights-out his test results would be the same every morning. Doctor D’Anton Pascal doesn’t like to lose arguments, although it’s been happening more frequently.

I had appealed to Carver, the Liaison to the Gran. Carver struts around like he owns the whole station. At first he agreed with D’Anton that “I shouldn’t be flying all up and down the hub like a maniac.” After I showed him what I’d learned to do with my tongue, he agreed I should have a little freedom to dance when I wanted.

After a year of dancing without incident, D’Anton stopped complaining.

My music hit a grungy bass and I dived through the centripetal gravity well and flipped between the girders and cross beams, faster, harder and faster still. The hollow plastisteel thrummed with my impacts as my hands and feet slapped in time like a drum. I launched off the last beam into dead-center zero G, and let my momentum carry me to the gravity well on the other side. The trick was compensating for the opposite direction spin. I’d been doing it so long it was second nature, but not at first. I never told anyone about the time I broke my arm on a crossbeam. Nothing major – I was back in form by the next evening at lights-out.

All my attention focused on my music, and the wondrous euphoria of flying free as a bird, I didn’t immediately notice my audience. It wasn’t until I smelled their musky animal scents that I saw them watching me from the catwalk below.

The Gran.

They weren’t due for three more days – must have arrived early. By the time I saw the three Cats led by Carver, they were already pointing at me, halfway across the catwalk, thudding along in their magboots. I floated through the air and touched down on the other side of the hub. I turned off my music to better hear them as the tallest Cat gestured to me a second time and yipped a question to Carver.

D’Anton would be furious they had seen me.

I dropped straight down the access hallway and let gravity take me into a full slide away from the hub. D’Anton and Carver had warned me repeatedly to stay out of sight when the Gran were on tour of the station. They said I was too different, that I’d attract unwanted attention. Though Carver pretended he was the man in charge of the station, he couldn’t hide his fear of the Gran from me. Everyone feared the Gran.

The path of my fall brought me to another access corridor and my maglatch caught the edge of the opening in the steel wall long enough to send me swinging hard into the narrow passage. I demagged and sailed through the side corridor like a bullet. Not much room to maneuver, but I’d done it a million times. I slid off the smooth wall, letting the friction slow me enough to land on my feet. On touchdown, I broke into a full run and dived left down another access point. This was my playground. The maintenance passageways intersected across every level of the station. I had memorized the tunnels and their varying directions of grav-spin since year one.

Finally I found them, coming off the catwalk into the hallway leading to the elevators. I settled in quietly and focused on slowing my heartrate and respiration to a quiet stillness. I needed to hear every detail. The vertical slats of the air vents let me see the Gran as they walked past.

The tall, slimmer Cat sounded agitated, growling and yelping loudly. “I will have to report this breach to my commanders! This is an outrage! We demand the highest quality and performance from our workers, in accordance with the treaty!”

I had learned to speak Gran in the three days that I borrowed Carver’s personal tab and memorized all his sociology files on The Gran Empire. He hardly noticed the tablet was missing before I put it back in his quarters.

A look of fear passed over Carver’s eyes and I heard his heart beat pounding hard and fast. “Not what you think. The subject is … expedient, not for sale.” Carver was only moderately fluent in the growl-click-snapping language of the Gran. I knew he meant to say the subject is an experiment.

When I’m in the room, D’Anton and the other white coats avoided distasteful words like ‘subject’ and ‘experiment.’ They tried not to make me uncomfortable about what I am. Carver Liddell, Liaison to the Gran Traders Guild, was less tactful. If he knew I was listening, if he knew I understood what he said, he might have spoken differently. Many people speak differently when they know I’m listening.

The tall warrior’s clawed hand settled on Carver’s shoulder and pulled their procession to a halt. Sharp teeth bared, he hissed down at Carver with disapproval. Over two meters tall, with carmel and black striped fur, fingers and toes tipped with nasty, sharp claws, the Gran gave the impression of slim, angular cats standing upright. Unlike the cheetahs and mountain lions I’d seen in holovid archives from Earthside, the Gran had an unmistakable intelligence in their eyes and an array of facial expressions. The Cat smiled at Carver. The Gran do not smile from pleasure – it’s a predatory show of teeth.

Carver’s heart rate jumped higher and I heard him swallow. The poor guy was sweating hard under the scrutiny of the Gran. One of the many complaints about these cat-like creatures was their tendency for domination stare-down contests. The Cat was doing it now to Carver. He stared intimidatingly, expecting submission. Carver should have nodded, in acceptance of dominance – but he was holding the Cat’s gaze like an outright challenge.

I could see Carver found it disconcerting, and it put a smile on my face. I doubted they would eat him for dinner. The Cat was simply pushing for control, or acknowledgement of status. Carver started stammering, and his Gran speech devolved into gibberish.

The Cat cut him off. “An experiment of this potential should be discussed openly. This stock is far more capable. I want her. I want to sample this stock.”

About the Author

Travis Luedke is a NY Times & USA Today bestselling author of urban fantasy, scifi, and paranormal romance, best known for his violently sexy NIGHTLIFE SERIES. Travis can be found catching a third degree sunburn in San Antonio, Texas, while plotting world domination through erotic paranormal badassary.

As the author of the Nightlife Series novels, Travis lives very vicariously through his writings. He invites you to enjoy his macabre flights of fancy, but be warned: The Nightlife Series is violent, sexy, and occasionally violently sexy.