The Gate Jumpers Saga: Science Fiction Romance Collection

by Elin Wyn

  “S-Saros?” Dojan coughed, his eyes shining a brilliant emerald green.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she wrinkled her nose. Dojan frowned, but she just shook her head and leaned in close, putting her lips next to his ear. “He’s right here. Know how I know?” she kissed his neck, and whispered, “Because we’re bonded.”

  It was like Stephine had flipped a switch. One moment they were standing in what little leg space the pod allowed, and then Dojan was on top of her, pushing her into one of the seats while he bit her lips and squeezed her breasts.

  “Dojan,” she whispered, grabbing at the back of his shirt to lift it up. “I-I need—”

  “Me too,” he growled, breaking the kiss to yank off his shirt and pull at hers. “Since that morning.”

  “Since that night,” she breathed, sitting up to thrust a hand into his pants while he moaned and dove at her neck.

  It didn’t take much effort to pop his pants open and free his dick, and she wrapped her fingers around it in a satisfying grip. Dojan urged her on, squeezing and kneading and kissing and sucking her breasts. She preened against him, moaning under the attention, and soon she was stroking his dick in an odd rhythm to his own movements.

  “Get in me,” she demanded in a whisper, biting his earlobe the second after she’d said it. Dojan shuddered and grabbed both of her pants in one hand, yanking them down to her knees before rubbing a hand at her entrance there. “Do-ojan,” she moaned, drawing out his name. “Don’t be a tease.”

  “Says the abstinent bond mate,” Dojan muttered.

  “I heard that,” she hissed, grabbing his hair.

  “Then prove me wrong,” he smiled. Oh god, how she’d missed that smile.

  He entered her with a long thrust, his hands on her hips as he helped her sit down over his lap. She was still in the chair, her back arched, as he spread his legs over the arm rests and brought her forward, plunging inside.

  “Oh god, verdomme Dojan,” Stephine bit into the back of her hand, swearing.

  “Can you feel it?” Dojan whispered into her face, his erratic puffs of breath against her face making her grin. “The bond?”

  “I felt it,” Stephine swallowed. “Earlier. To find you—” She gasped as Dojan gave her a particularly hard thrust.

  “Do you feel it now?” he asked again, grinning.

  Stephine wrapped her arms around him. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”

  They didn’t last long, either of them. Stephine came first, though only because Dojan didn’t want to cum alone.

  “Come on,” he growled, hitting her faster, harder.

  “I’m almost,” Stephine gasped. “Just a little…”

  She came with a shout, her thighs shaking as she threw her head back and gasped. Dojan couldn’t hold on for much longer, and he came with a smile as he dropped his head against Stephine’s neck.

  Panting hard, Stephine asked, “S-still. Think. T-the bond. Failed?” she asked in small, ragged breaths.

  Dojan glanced at her. “Think we can do that all the way to the lab?” he asked cheerfully.

  Stephine rolled her eyes with a grin. “For a day and a half? Definitely.”

  Dojan raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. “What about forever?”

  “Mhm,” she hummed, looking over his face. “I’d say it might be just enough time to do everything that I want to do with you.”

  “Same,” Dojan agreed, kissing her again as the jewel on his wrist twinkled in the light.

  Trapped with the Alien

  Sherre

  Sherre was ecstatic. Standing before her was not one, not two, but five aliens. And they weren’t limited to the tentacle creatures that she’d learned about in training either, or the squat feline race that’d been discovered earlier that year. No, these were a free-thinking, sentient species. And while her teammates had been a little hesitant – or just downright stiff, like Willovitch – to approach them, Sherre couldn’t help but walk right up to them, her hand held high in a wave with her smile stretched wide.

  They were amazing.

  They didn’t really look like aliens, though. Not even the commonplace, aggressive beings that her trainers had droned on and on about in the academy. Those were the ones who were known to engage in a fight at the drop of a hat and die by the hundreds. It was why Earth’s military had all the information that they did on them: anatomy, weapons, clothing, and whatever else could be recorded from a corpse.

  The aliens standing before her now, though – they were incredibly friendly. They returned her smile with a few of their own, mimicking her wave with flicks of their hands and bobs of their heads. Sherre grinned as she saw that it encouraged her own shipmates to move closer, and she had to stifle a laugh as Jeline, the pilot, blushed as a tall man with purple eyes shook her hand.

  According to Captain Taryn, the five humanoid aliens standing before them were all associated with something called the Eiztar alliance, a group of five allied planets from the same star system. Only one was really an Eiztar himself, and he was the tall man with golden eyes standing at the captain’s side. Not surprising, as he had been the one to rescue Captain Taryn after she’d crash landed the ship into the dangerous planet that they were currently shaking hands on: Peshdushdar, a wasteland overrun by Thagzars.

  The Thagzars were yet another alien race, but not by any means a good one, from the sound of it. They were a species that the captain had described as, “big, green ugly snake men,” an aggressive force that the Eiztar Alliance had formed to fight against in the first place.

  Sherre herself hadn’t seen any of them yet, aside from the burned mounds of corpses to her left. They were unrecognizable now, and though Sherre hadn’t witnessed their death, the captain had, and she’d made it pretty clear that the alien crew before them was responsible.

  Apparently, the only reason that the five aliens were even on the planet in the first place was to carry out a stealth mission and seek an antidote to the latest bioweapon that the Thagzars had cooked up to use against them.

  Or, so Sherre understood. She really wasn’t sure. Her captain had just said everything so fast. Still, she’d like to have seen a Thagzar’s body before the acid in its skin had melted its own hide. Though the aliens before her were all from different planets, they were very akin to humans, and it would’ve been fascinating to have seen a reptilian that could match them.

  As Sherre stood there among the aliens, playing a game with herself as she tried to notice all of the little differences between herself and the different aliens before her, she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Yes?” she asked, keeping her tone polite as she turned around. She knew that she needn’t have – her words had no meaning to the Eiztar, just as their odd series of grumbles made no rhyme or reason to her. Still, her tone was gentle, and the brunette who had touched her smiled in return. Holding up a hand, he motioned to his dark brown hair, pointing to the small series of intricate braids that were fastened around the back of his head.

  Sherre beamed, understanding his meaning immediately. She, too, had her hair up in braids, though hers were not nearly as detailed. They were just two large French braids, the only kind that she knew how to tie that could keep her hair pulled up tight through a full day of work. As the navigator of her crew, the last thing she needed was to be blinded by her own hair.

  She could tell that the man before her obviously had a different outlook on it, though. Whereas Sherre routinely put her hair up in braids to keep it neat and organized, the alien had a variety of odd objects woven into his dark strands. From her shorter stature she could just make out some colorful feathers and leaves, but she was dying to stand on her toes and card her hands through his hair to find the rest.

  Sherre blinked, and blushed at her own thoughts. Just because they were aliens did not mean that they weren’t people who valued the same sense of space that all of her crewmates had drummed into her head. Being from a large Earth city herself, Sherre was used to things being crowd
ed and crazy, not to mention just the littlest bit cramped. She’d grown up brushing elbows and tripping over other people’s feet for as long as she could remember, something that had unnerved her captain from day one.

  “You. Stay over here,” Captain Taryn had told her on her first day, literally taking her by the shoulders to purposefully move her away. “It’s called the three foot rule, and – just saying – I’ll probably end up accidentally punching you by reflex if you don’t follow it.”

  Willovitch had been the same, and the ever frequent, “Can I help you?” that she had sneered at Sherre had become so common over time that now they both considered it to be something of a greeting.

  Sherre jumped as something touched her hair, and she was thrown from her thoughts as the braided man lifted one of hers, weighing it in his hand as he stroked a thumb over the rubber band at the end. He muttered something, and Sherre shrugged to show that she didn’t understand. He just laughed, and she joined in like she agreed.

  “Here,” Captain Taryn said, suddenly appearing at Sherre’s elbow as she butted in between them, causing the alien to drop her braid. The captain didn’t notice, and she took one of Sherre’s hands to press a small silver earbud into her palm. Sherre recognized it immediately as a communications tab.

  Back when she’d first joined the academy, a trainer had gone over the complicated technology behind a comm, a device that acted as a real-time translator between different races and species. So long as the language a person was trying to understand had been programmed into the comm, it would rest over the ear and relate everything that was being said nearby into the user’s mother tongue for easy communication.

  As a young woman who had only ever learned one language, Sherre loved them.

  Slipping it over her ear, she thanked her captain and looked at the alien at her arm expectantly. The Eiztar with golden eyes had just passed a comm to him as well.

  “Can you understand me now?” the braided alien asked, and Sherre couldn’t help but marvel at how his harsh rumble easily transformed into a series of soft words.

  “Yes!” she laughed. “And you?”

  “Perfectly,” he agreed, nodding his head as he tapped his ear. “I am Zaddik Wangari, the pilot in this crew,” he grinned. “And may I ask for your name?”

  “Sherre Balinko,” she smiled. “I’m the navigator.”

  It was odd, to be talking so easily with an alien. Scout ships almost never met with extraterrestrials since their primary job was to observe and report, not engage.

  However, the weapons ships met an average of six aliens every mission, though their objectives were always a bit more aggressive than the scouts. Which was why it was so surreal to be in the presence of five different aliens all at once.

  “Your captain is very brave,” Zaddik commented, glancing at Taryn as she moved on to speak to Jeline.

  “As is yours,” Sherre agreed, looking at the Eiztar following her captain not a step behind. “Oh, and you,” she said quickly, remembering the Thagzar corpses again. It was clear that the Eiztar crew had been outnumbered. “Thank you, by the way. For saving us.”

  Zaddik blinked down at her, but grinned at her words. “You can never be brave without first being afraid,” he winked.

  “Well, yeah,” Sherre shrugged awkwardly, wondering if he was making fun of her. It happened often, both at the academy and on the ship, and not just because she was one of the youngest recruits. She was naïve, she knew. As a city girl who’d never left her earth compound before training, it was only to be expected, she supposed.

  “But you are very brave, too,” he nodded fiercely. “For agreeing to accompany our crew and help us save our people.”

  He was talking about the antidote, Sherre realized. The captain had explained that their own Earth ship had been destroyed by the Thagzars, and that the Eiztars were willing to give them a lift so long as they could drop off the venom that they’d procured and get their people started on a cure first.

  “Of course,” Sherre assured him. “We wouldn’t ask you to abandon your mission.”

  “It is not a mission,” Zaddik said suddenly, shaking his head. “Hasn’t been just a ‘mission’ for a long time.”

  “Oh, of course not,” Sherre said, tripping over herself to avoid any offense to Zaddik. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Do not worry,” he smiled, waving her off calmly. He could obviously sense her discomfort, and she was grateful for his empathy. “I only meant to say that this has become something much more personal.”

  Sherre opened her mouth to reply, but her captain’s sudden shouts gave her pause.

  “All right, now that you can all understand me!” Captain Taryn called. She was standing at the front of the group again, with the Eiztar still stuck to her side. “Pair up! If we want to avoid capture, we’re going to have to split into five groups of two. The Eiztar came here to steal a virus that’s been infecting their women, and—”

  “And it is up to us,” the Eiztar beside her cut her off, “To transport it so that a cure may be created from the strain. We all know the coordinates to the lab,” he said, and Zaddik nodded along with the rest of them. “It is where we must go.”

  Sherre stood there with her arms slack at her sides and both eyebrows raised. No one interrupted the captain; well, unless you were Lyra, but she was the ship’s medic and she’d proven that she would pull that card as many times as she needed to in order to be heard, especially against Captain Taryn. But for a man who had known the captain for a little more than a day? Sherre watched, waiting for the impending fight.

  Except, the captain didn’t do anything.

  Sure, she gave him a small glance, but then she just seemed to shrug to herself, turning as she moved on. “Ladies,” the captain continued, and Sherre forced herself not to dwell on what’d just happened so that she could pay attention. “We’ve got a planet in need, and an enemy that thinks we’re going to drive in a straight line.” She paused then, smiling down at them like it was funny. Sherre grinned along, knowing full well that the captain was referring to Jeline’s evasive steering. “Pair up, and I’ll see you at the finish line.”

  Sherre joined in with her crewmates as they shouted their agreement, and in her excitement she turned, quite literally, into Zaddik. She hit him square in the chest, nearly bouncing backwards from the impact, but he caught her arm as she started to lose her balance.

  “Sorry,” she beamed, hoping her smile would hide her blush.

  “No problem,” Zaddik shrugged. Steadying her with a hand, he asked, “Would you like to be my partner?”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. Usually, she was the last one picked to do anything. Well, unless Jeline was doing the picking. Unlike the other women, Jeline had welcomed her at the start of their tour, happy to introduce Sherre to the map routes and star systems that they had soon bonded over. “Uh,” Sherre said, straightening her sleeves. “You want me for the miss—uh, to go with you to the lab?”

  “Yes,” Zaddik nodded. “We have to pair up, don’t we?” he asked, looking back up at Captain Taryn, like he was worried that he’d misunderstood.

  “Definitely, yeah,” Sherre agreed hastily. “But, you want me to accompany you?”

  “Of course,” Zaddik said confidently, puffing out his chest as he waved a hand at her hair. “I’d be a fool to choose another when you wear your braids so proudly.”

  Sherre’s smile fell a little at his words. For a moment, she wondered if the comm had mistranslated, but they generally worked really well or not at all. “Sorry, my braids?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Zaddik nodded. “To wear them so large is a display of bravery. But, I don’t have to tell you that,” he winked.

  Sherre wanted to tell him that yes, actually, he really did. Was he trying to say that wearing a braid was a symbol of bravery? Or – worse yet – did you have to do something to be allowed to wear them on his planet?

  Before Sherre could ask, Captain Taryn started yelling aga
in.

  “Balinko,” she barked, marching up to her. The Eiztar with golden eyes was following swiftly behind, and he nodded to Zaddik.

  “The toxin,” he said, handing over a small glass vial. Zaddik accepted it cautiously, as if he thought that the poison was going to infect him through the container.

  “We’re the ones who are going to be transporting it?” Sherre asked with wide eyes, suddenly feeling very, very nervous.

  “Stop sweating, Balinko,” Captain Taryn rolled her eyes. “We’ve divvied up the poison so that we can all take a bit of it back to the lab. Ideally, every one of us will make it back, but if not, just one pod will be enough.”

  Pod ships were not Sherre’s favorite form of travel by any means, especially after being stuck in one for the past day and a half. It hadn’t been her choice, of course, but it had been her captain’s orders after they’d gone through a bad jump gate. As a scout ship, Sherre and her crewmates were used to jumping through gates, happily taking advantage of the fact that each new gate would ‘jump’ them ahead through space into a new solar system. Unfortunately, the last one they’d jumped through had landed them in the middle of a meteor storm.

  Captain Taryn had taken control, yelling at Sherre and everyone else to get to a pod and activate torpor sleep while she had stayed up to navigate the ship out of danger. That, or, Sherre suspected from how angry Medic Lyra had gotten, die trying.

  Torpor sleep, while amazing for keeping crewmembers safely locked down in a sort of fortified hibernation, left a person feeling like no time had passed between when they had gone under and when they had woken up. But even though Sherre hadn’t felt the hours drag on inside of her pod while Captain Taryn had crash-landed and met the Eiztar crew, just thinking about being inside of a pod ship again was giving her a nasty feeling.

  “Thank you for your trust, Captain Kanthi,” Zaddik said as he bowed slightly, slipping the vial into one of the many pockets on his thick belt.

  “And you for yours,” Kanthi returned the bow.