by Kayla Stonor
“I apologize.”
She squeezed, a painful massage, and he rocked on his toes. Fuuckk. Better be the woman scrambling his control and not the Domme. He didn’t know which would hurt more by the end of this encounter, his pride or his ballsack.
Command came back online. “Address her as Mistress.”
Somebody at UR Command was fucking with him… he wondered if this security flag was nothing more than a practical joke.
Either get me out of this, Command, or bug out my head and stop recording.
Aloud he gasped out, “Mistress.”
Her punishing grip relaxed, moved to the base of his shaft and then to the head. Her fingertip smoothed wet into the glans. Pre-cum. Embarrassment descended to mortification.
“Background verification re-confirmed.” Tierc caught the equivalent of a mental chuckle. “Command recommends stand down.”
Copy that!
Tierc backed out of Ahnna’s space. She released him before his cock stretched taut.
“You’ve changed your mind?” She sounded amused.
“Yeah, sorry. Nothing personal. You’re very attractive, but this isn’t what I imagined.”
Her shrug made him wince. The fee wasn’t refundable, so of course, Mistress Catherine didn’t care either way, but he’d be sporting a raging hard on for a while yet. Was her attitude part of the act, or was she truly that callous?
Damn, just get the hell out and hope to never face Ahnna Sokovik again.
He turned towards his clothing when his psycom activated. “Belay last order! Cloaked transport on roof. Repeat cloaked transport on roof! Take her down!”
Tierc spun, caught a flash of metal in the corner of his eye. His forearm took the sharp point of a stiletto before it slashed his cheek. Thrown off balance, she tumbled into a roll and back onto her feet. Fierce aggression blazed in her eyes.
A sinking sensation struck him low. He didn’t want to kill this woman. “Ahnna, it’s not too late for you. You still have options.”
“Ahnna? So you’re not here for Mistress Catherine.”
“Surrender now, Ahnna, don’t make me use force!”
She edged to the bed and Tierc moved to block her. His eyes alighted on the cuffs. Shit.
That split second of distraction nearly proved fatal. He dodged a flying kick, plucked Ahnna out of the air and threw her onto the bed, taken aback by her speed and ferocity.
Refocused, he jammed her legs apart, fought to grab her flailing arms. She kept moving—chopped at him with the sides of her hands, punched, fucking cracked her forehead against the bridge of his nose. Tierc cringed for her, the crack sickeningly loud.
“Stop! You’re only hurting yourself.”
The back of Ahnna’s head smacked the bed. She blinked, brow creased, and relaxed under his cock. His ramrod erection pressed between her warm leather-clad thighs, her musky arousal filling his nostrils. The tension in her body collapsed. “I…” Her eyes rolled to the side.
Thank God. Subdued by pheromones.
Tierc released her wrists and moved to get up when her hands shot out and grabbed his ass, forcing the head of his cock against her sex. She writhed beneath him, rocking her pelvic bone against him, her eyes still hopelessly unfocused. The zipper on her leather corset had opened and pebbled nipples peeked through. She moaned and lust surged through him, mixed with the adrenaline coursing through his body. He inhaled her delicious scent scrambling his pheromonal control.
Skal.
“Whatever you might think about the Qui, I’m not into taking advantage of semi-conscious women. Unfortunately.” Her nails dug into his bare ass, pressed harder, piercing the flesh. He batted her hands away and pushed away from the goddamn hellcat! “What the hell?”
Ahnna rolled over and curled into a ball, her eyes closed. She looked out of it, but Tierc kept a close eye on her anyway. Lesson learned. What was wrong with him? He’d lost his usual edge.
Central Command broke through. “Heads up, Marcel! We’re reading an energy signature at your location.”
Tierc frowned, glanced at Ahnna as the whole corner of the room from floor to ceiling dissolved into light. Tierc recoiled, warm air blasted his face, but he didn’t lose his fix on Sokovik. She’d launched up, miraculously recovered—nothing wrong with her—and equally transfixed by the weird phenomenon. For a moment they both stared. Tierc could see an abstract painting behind the shimmering light. The building’s structure was intact and he dismissed the idea of an explosion. Sokovik’s head turned, mouth open in disbelief, her eyes questioning, accusing, as if he was to blame, but then her expression hardened.
She dived for something under the bolster, pulled out a knife. How had he not detected that?
He reported in to Command as she shoved aside the pillow. Sokovik armed. Unidentified incoming through corridor wall. What is it?
“Gravitons are off the chart! Reads like a wormhole!”
Wormhole? What the fuck? But he had a more immediate threat to deal with.
Tierc grabbed at Ahnna’s hair as she swung for him, missed but deflected a vicious kick to his groin that promised castration by lethal heel blades. Her knife scratched his throat. He extended his claws and slashed at the knife, but caught her hand. Blood sprayed and Sokovik growled with full-throated aggression, and then they were scrapping, her arms and feet a blur as she entered his space. A bone-crunching uppercut smashed his chin.
Tierc staggered back, shook his head. Tracers crossed his vision and a roar filled his ears. He felt shaky, confused, blinked to clear his eyesight. To his left, the light had formed a circle, like a cross-section of a sphere, its center draining off to a distant point. He struggled to pay the phenomenon the attention a wormhole deserved, his responses sluggish, the floor unsteady beneath his feet. He could see the rug, but his body disagreed. He dropped to his knees. A blow to his temple snapped his head around. Blinding light burned his retinas, yellow spots in his blurring vision.
Drugged. Her sharp nails… or those vicious heels. Hellcat owned him from the start.
Command, I’m com… promised… some bio-weapon… request backup!
Knees thudded into his lower back. Tierc fought to move, but he’d lost control over his limbs that felt numb and heavy. She tugged his hair back, pulling his upper torso upright. She twisted leaden arms behind him. Cold metal encased his wrists, bit so deeply he nearly passed out.
“Backup en route,” Command reported. “Wormhole confirmed. City evacuation initia—”
What? Tierc’s dulling mind tried and failed to reactivate his psycom.
“Stay back!” Sokovik roared in his ear. She sounded panicked, yelled at the light extending towards them. “I’ll fucking slit his throat.” She held a knife to his jugular and the palm of her hand against his forehead, forcing the back of his head against his shoulder, exposing his throat to the sharp blade.
Her knife cut, a stinging scratch.
“What’s going on?” she yelled.
Tierc couldn’t explain that he’d no idea.
The light grew stronger, enveloped him, and then a powerful force sucked Tierc forward, pulled him inside out. Everything warped around him. His mind blanked.
* * *
Half dazed, unsure what had happened, Ahnna raised her head off Marcel’s broad shoulders. Her belly rested on his cuffed hands and the pressure added to the nausea washing through her. Hands grabbed her arms and hauled her off him. She couldn’t find her feet. Her knife slipped from her useless fingers, her body limp and washed out.
Someone dressed in all white plucked the blade from her reach. Bending over, Ahnna puked all over a white pristine floor. Her captors supported her, a female voice offering soothing words, and then guided her away.
Ahnna looked back at Marcel, still out for the count, the Q-Narc in full-effect, his hands cuffed behind him. The sight reassured, a bargaining chip for the nightmare ahead. Her life was over; HD-X operatives routinely shipped out to asteroid mine prisons, never to see ano
ther Earth sunrise.
Part of her felt relieved. She’d been prepared to fight for the cause, for humanity’s freedom, a chance to work in the upper ranks of HD-X. She’d been trained to kill. Now she wouldn’t have to. No way to salvage her mission, her position compromised by failure. HD-X would never trust her with another assignment. She had no reason to kill, except in self-defense. Self-defense she could live with.
A load lifted from her mind.
She drew a deep breath and straightened, taking her own weight, although the two men holding her didn’t let go—probably as well—she felt light-headed.
“What happened to your hand?” the same woman asked. “You understand Earth-Common Language, yes?”
Ahnna turned over her hand and frowned at three inch-long cuts decorating her palm. The wounds looked cauterized, but as she watched, they began to open and bleed. She recalled her fight with Marcel… him slashing out in defense against her knife. Pain whipped up her hand and she gasped, cupped her injured hand with the other.
She scanned the room, like a surgical holding cell. “Oh my god, what is this? Where am I?”
She recalled horror stories of UR interrogation techniques, rumors she’d dismissed as too unlikely, but then she’d not suspected the United Regions capable of portal transportation either. The light had taken her to these people, a sensation of being pulled apart. A chill swept through her and she fought to control her stomach.
“All in good time,” a male voice answered, a man with a pug-like nose and a smooth scalp. “Let’s make sure you’re okay first. You’ve gone a little grey. Can you confirm you’re from Earth?”
Ahnna nodded, dumbfounded by the question. She glanced at the woman and did a double take, noting her white uniform extended to white glossy skin, but her eyes were pink. Her arms and legs were unusually long, her nose flat. Not entirely human.
Was she Qui?
She tried her psycom. Xavier?
“That’s useful,” the man said. “Normally we fit a universal translator during transit, but we can arrange that later. This jump didn’t meet our usual exacting standards.”
“Jump?” Ahnna’s voice rasped, her throat dry and with a nasty taste of bile.
She turned her head, watched two men transfer Marcel facedown onto a gurney that hovered a couple inches off the ground. It rose into the air to waist height. This set up didn’t feel like United Regions. This couldn’t be a military operation.
Xavier. Come in, please. Something weird’s happened.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked. “You seem distracted. Do you understand us?”
“I want a lawyer.”
The bald-headed man laughed. “Lawyer? I’m afraid you have no rights here, miss. The man you arrived with—it appears you are not on good terms. I assume you restrained him. Do you have the means to remove his cuffs?”
Ahnna stared at him, shook her head, a mistake. The room spun around her. “No,” she confirmed. She’d die before cooperating with Qui lovers. They could saw his fucking hands off and she still wouldn’t remove those cuffs. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Crandal, and my job is to help you get home, but one thing at a time. First, let’s get you fixed up.”
* * *
“Get them off me,” Tierc screeched.
He couldn’t hear his voice, the pain arcing from his wrists to the rest of his body beyond anything he’d experienced—pure torture. Abandoning his shift, the agony receded and Tierc lunged to the edge of the gurney, his hands restrained behind his back by the cuffs shredding his nervous system. He vomited and white shod feet jumped out the way. He squinted at the blur of people surrounding him. Sensing a threat he kicked out, connected with someone and heard a muffled cry.
Instantly, heavyset guards descended upon him and mired in drug-hazed pain, Tierc couldn’t throw them off. They slapped restraints across him, wide straps that pinned his limbs and torso to the bed.
“We want to help you,” one groused, “but you need to calm down.”
Calm down? He needed to shift. Now! They’d pay attention once they witnessed his Qui. He focused his concentration to shift and once again, pain arced through his body, a terrible mind-destroying pain. He burned in the flames of a thousand suns. His shift collapsed before it had begun, and as before, the pain receded back to the throbbing, stabbing grip around his wrists.
Skal.
Shift suppression cuffs. He’d heard of the nasty device used by HD-X operatives, the punishing effect more intense than he could have imagined.
Someone grabbed his elbow and pressed him to the bed, speaking words he didn’t understand, her voice sharp, direct, female. He couldn’t see her face for the bright light shining down on him. An unrelated sting against the inner crook of his arm made him jerk away. He struggled against the multiple hands holding him in place, got nowhere, his body in shutdown. Gloved hands tilted his head away from a bright light and then fingers pressed against his ear. He heard a click, buzzing. His ear burned, nothing to mention, and he felt drowsier. They’d sedated him, another drug on top of whatever poison Sokovik had used on him.
“Get a titanium-grade bolt-cutter in here.” The authoritative voice belonged to the woman who had put something in his ear, except before she’d spoken a language he didn’t recognize. “We can at least separate the cuffs, make him more comfortable.”
His heavy eyelids closed. His thoughts drifted and the moments of chatter became less important. Pain drifted away and he sighed.
Black folded over him.
Chapter Two
A hnna opened and closed her hand, impressed she couldn’t feel a hint of the deep gouges in her palm. “Not even a mark,” she conceded.
Crandal smiled from across the table, a dismal attempt at connection that failed before it had begun. “I’d say something to the effect that our tech is impressive,” he said, “but your Earth’s medical technology is well advanced.”
There he went again with the Earth references, as if Earth were a foreign thing, or place.
When his pause solicited no response, Crandal continued unfazed. “Your self-replicating nanos are ingenious—miniature AI units—but our wound gel does the trick.”
Ahnna tried her psycom one more time, gazing around the white cubicle room to cover her distraction. Can anyone hear me? HD-X? Xavier? Nothing. She touched her ear and explored the universal translator inserted there, feeling out its shape. “You’re not UR, are you?”
“UR? Ah, you refer to the United Regions government of Earth.”
“So, the Qui’s awake.”
Crandal pursed his lip, studied her. “The man you restrained, Tierc Marcel, is awake, yes, and demanding to know where you are.”
Okay, assume this wasn’t Earth… that they had been portaled to another planet. Then she probably wasn’t in the Qui Empire either, or Marcel would know exactly where she was. She displayed her healed palm. “Why didn’t your matter transporter fix any damage in transit? Should have been a simple construction of the missing data.”
Crandal’s eye twitched. “Your world hasn’t discovered portal technology yet. You’re still reliant on spaceships to traverse a wormhole.”
“The Qui tell you my name, too?”
“Ahnna Sokovik, Human Defense-X.”
Crandal bounced between the two of them, using intelligence they gave him to draw out more information from the other. Time to be more guarded.
She nodded. “Okay. You want gratitude for my hand, I thank you, but I don’t know who you are or why you brought me here. Now you said ‘all in good time’.” She gestured to the empty room. “So, where the hell am I? Who are you? And why am I here?”
Crandal leaned back in his chair. “Fair enough, I’ll give you answers, but I warn you, the situation’s complicated.” He flicked his hand and a small lens placed mid-center of the table lit up. Crandal pointed to a glowing planet in the 3D interstellar holo visual filling the space between them. “You are in an Octiron holding facility
on Primaera, the capital planet of the Central Alliance Sector in the Paragon galaxy.”
Complicated? Ahnna shifted in her seat, massaged her temples, accumulated rage, frustration and repressed terror feeding a headache. “Paragon galaxy?”
“Although we use portal jumps to conduct transport in a matter of seconds, the wormhole connects two points across space-time—astronomical distances, and much quicker than interplanetary transport.” He laughed.
“Sounds like you’ve made this speech before.”
Surprise flashed in his rounded eyes.
“You’re telling me I’m in another galaxy, one that includes humans, which is strange given we haven’t traveled beyond the Milky Way. So who are you?” Ahnna pressed. “I don’t mean your name, I mean your purpose here.”
“Ah, but that question leads to why you are here. Octiron is a media corporation and entertainment is our business. Octiron employs me to prepare you for the greatest adventure of your life.”
Ahnna directed her nanos to calm her rising pulse. “Prepare me for what?”
“You, Ahnna Sokovik, are our newest contestant in our most exciting show.”
“What show?” she croaked out.
“The Great Space Race—and the most spectacular race in Paragon! Name’s a bit corny, I know, but it’s great branding!”
Sounded like a Saturday morning cartoon. A nasty feeling crept over her. “I’m not competing in any race.”
“Yes, you are. Normally I’d point out that if you refuse to participate, we won’t offer you a portal jump home, but in your case we actually can’t.”
Crandal looked so smug, foreboding chilled Ahnna’s spine.
“Why not?”
“Because our portal found you and Marcel by accident—a freak malfunction of search conditions we can’t replicate, but that’s good!” He puffed up with excitement. “Our viewers will sympathize with your plight and that always drives up ratings. I predict you will be our most popular contestant yet!”