by Viki Storm
“I feel something,” she says. “But…”
My comm-panel beeps, shrilly destroying the contented peace of our cold, rented room.
I cannot hide forever. I have to attend to my duties. I must face my superiors and answer for my cowardly actions.
As I reach for my comm and prepare the signal antenna, I feel a sinking in my stomach. And it’s not only because I know I’m going to have to account for my whereabouts and failure to appear back at Lekyo Prime.
It’s Suse. She still hasn’t felt it yet. I feel something, she just said, but…
And that’s all I needed to hear. Because she’s a human. And humans don’t bond with their mates the way Zalaryns do.
She will never feel the way that I do.
I pull on my breeches and activate my comm.
“Where in the deepest reaches of the Void are you?” Vano says. He’s not quite shouting, but it’s a close thing. “You were supposed to be here with the rebel’s daughter three neus ago. And my comm is displaying that your IP address is located on fucking Irrok? Please tell me that the girl led you to a silo of electromagnetic vaporizers and you were so excited you forgot to tell me? Did you forget that the Guuklar are coming to our planet?”
Now he is shouting. Suse can hear him, and every word out of his mouth causes the little trench between her eyebrows to deepen. She wants to help, but she can’t. She was brought up in the Three-Star Rebel group, and jackasses though they may be, she wasn’t taught to sit around on your ass while others fight on your behalf.
Too bad the only thing she can do on Lekyo Prime is risk getting captured. There’s no way I can be around her every second of the day during an invasion, and even if I could, the Guuklar are fierce and ruthless, and I might fail to keep her safe. I could never live with myself if I let the universe’s most precious gift—a true bonded mate—slip out of my arms and into the twisted talons of the Guuklar.
She doesn’t understand, doesn’t realize the crippling fear I have of losing her. She doesn’t understand because she’s a human, because she doesn’t feel the bond. Yet, I tell myself, she doesn’t feel it yet. I sure hope so. I can’t stand the idea that she will never feel about me the way I feel about her, all because of her inferior human biology.
“There are no weapons,” I tell Vano. “The girl doesn’t know anything about her father’s supposed rebellion.”
“Balls,” Vano curses. “Are you sure? Maybe she’s hiding something from you? Maybe she’s sworn an oath to her rebel brethren and doesn’t trust you enough to break it? Maybe you have the wrong girl? Anything?”
“No,” I say. I rankle at his suggestion that she does not trust me, that she’s hiding information from me. I would be able to sense if my bonded mate was lying to me. Wouldn’t I? Maybe the bond is incomplete or otherwise insufficient because of her human DNA.
Is it all Zalaryn-human bondings that are somehow lacking—or is it just me and Suse?
“Then what are you doing on Irrok?” Vano demands. “Your mission was to get the rebel’s daughter and find out what she knows about her father’s plans. If she doesn’t know anything, then get back here. We need all available warriors to help prepare for the invasion. A ship of Zalaryns arrived two days ago, but we need to train.”
“The rebel’s daughter,” I start to say, but I hesitate. I want to tell Vano that we’re bonded; maybe he’ll understand and excuse my cowardly behavior. But something stays my tongue. Maybe you’re not as bonded as you think you are, I think. Maybe she is hiding something from you and that’s preventing a full and complete bond from growing. Maybe you’re afraid of telling Vano because she’s going to escape from you the first chance she gets and you’ll have to admit that you were wrong, you’re not bonded, and you fled the invasion for nothing.
“What?” Vano says. “She was supposed to have information, but apparently her father was lying to us, manipulating us so we would rescue her. He was a proven traitor; we should have known. But that still doesn’t explain why you’re on Irrok.”
“I have the rebel’s daughter with me,” I say. “We came here to investigate some of my contacts. I spoke with Ghora. He says that the Rulmek are behind the Guuklar invasion. They still want Lekyo Prime as their new homeland—and they want vengeance. But they don’t have the numbers now, thanks to us. They purchased a fission beam for the Guuklar with instructions to neutralize the population.”
“So we’re not just facing a Guuklar horde, we’re facing a fission beam, too?”
“Looks like it,” I say.
“What are you hiding from me?” Vano asks. Even through these billions of kilometers, it’s like he can read my mind. “You could have sent Ghora a comm. You didn’t have to stay there for the last… how long have you been there? What is going on? Are you defecting?”
“No,” I say, then I sigh heavily. I have to come clean. I can’t keep this up. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” he shouts.
“The girl, the rebel’s daughter,” I say. “She is my bonded mate.”
There is a long pause before Vano says, “I see. And you cannot bring yourself to take her back to a war zone.”
“Yes,” I say. I feel a weight lifted off my shoulders.
“And you just thought to let the rest of us—and our mates—fight and die while you and your mate couple underneath the furs?”
“I am not proud of myself,” I admit. “But I couldn’t do it. How can you stand it, knowing Queen Bryn is in harm’s way? How can Bantokk stand it? Both females carrying offspring, no less. Isn’t it driving you mad?”
Vano lets out a long sigh. “We both tried to send the females away until the invasion was over. They refused.”
“I’ll bet they did,” I say.
“Bryn said that asking her to go off-planet is like asking her to give up her crown. Lia had a colorful variety of curses, most of which were nonsensical to my ear.”
“So I am more cowardly than the human females?” I say. I have never felt this low, this ashamed of myself.
“These females,” Vano says, “they’re strong because of their bond. They feel secure because they know they have a Zalaryn warrior to protect them. They don’t know the fear and uncertainty in our hearts because males don’t voice such things. Ironically, because we protect them so fiercely, they feel safe and like they don’t need protection. But they do. And so does your mate. It would serve no purpose for you to bring her here. Only give the Guuklar one more potential female captive. Go ahead,” Vano says. “Stay on Irrok. But your new mission is to program our defense system against the fission beam. You can do that remotely, can’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “Thank you.”
“If you need anything, send a comm to Bantokk.”
“Of course,” I say. “Thank you, again.”
“Don’t thank me. I can’t force you to come back here, so I might as well let you stay there and do something useful.”
“You’re wise,” I say.
“Stop kissing my ass,” he says and ends the comm. Before I can set my panel down, Suse is sitting up, the blankets pulled up around her chest, covering her breasts. Knowing that I could reach over and pull off the blanket and reveal her ripe, full breasts, take them into my hands and thumb her nipples until she’s wet and moaning again, is distracting me. I can’t think straight around her. I thought the feelings would subside after we exchanged genetic material, but I was wrong.
If anything, my desire has only gotten stronger, more difficult to ignore.
How the holy Void am I going to program the Lekyo Prime defense system with Suse lounging in bed an arm’s length away?
“He was right,” she says. “We should go back.”
“Not a chance,” I say. Now that I have Vano’s reluctant permission to stay on Irrok, there’s no way I’m going to let her change my mind.
“All my life I’ve felt so helpless against these fleshtrading races,” she says. “They took my mom, enslaved her, broke her until the
re was nothing left, so she killed herself. They took me. You saw how the Trogii use humans, like we’re not even alive, just parts of their factory machinery. I want to do something. I wish my dad did have some rebellion plotted. Then we could be doing something. I’ll go mad if I just sit here, knowing that on some planet, these bastards are just doing what they do, destruction and abduction.”
“There’s not much we can do,” I say. “My specialty is with the computer systems, and I can do that here.”
“But it feels wrong,” she says.
“Maybe it is,” I say. “But it’s also wrong to march to our deaths. It’s wrong of me to take you somewhere I can’t fully protect you.”
“Ugh,” she groans and then falls back on the mattress. Oh, this female, nude and smooth under the blankets, on her back, inviting me to cover her body with my own.
Maybe it’s impossible for a mated male to be an effective warrior. When you have something precious to lose, you can’t give it your all on the battlefield.
I take out my computer system from my traveling case and start to set it up. Might as well get started now.
I log in remotely to the Lekyo Prime defense system and take a look at what we’ve got there. Our defenses are relatively weak because Lekyo Prime is a small planet with very few natural resources. Its biggest asset is the breathable, relatively warm atmosphere; its elemental composition is varied enough to allow numerous lifeforms to be able to breathe. The gravity is favorable for lifeforms under two-hundred kilograms. But other than that? Its location is remote, not on any of the commonly traveled flight paths. The terrain is rocky, and only a few select crops grow there.
But the Rulmek want the planet, and they are a single-minded, greedy race.
Fending off the Rulmek and the Guuklar and a fission beam? I don’t know if we can do it.
Not without a miracle. Or a weapons silo.
I get to work, trying my best to ignore the urge to mate with my beautiful, fertile female in the bed.
Getting started is hard, but after a few minutes I’m absorbed in my work, going through lines of code and checking algorithms.
And then it hits me like a blastwave from a fully-charged anankah.
“Suse,” I say. I’m shouting but I don’t care.
This is big. This warrants shouting.
“What?” she says.
“Your locket,” I say. “Take out the photograph of your mother and give it to me.”
“What?” she asks.
“Now,” I say. “The photograph inside the locket. With the numbers written on the back.”
“What is it?” she says. I’m going to burst out of my skin, the anticipation is killing me. I think I’m right. But I need to be sure.
Her fingers fumble as she tries to slide out the photograph. She finally manages to get it out, and I snatch it from her hand, turning it over so I can read the numbers.
Sweet Void, mother of us all.
I’m right. I’m fucking right.
“What is it?” she says, the impatience straining her otherwise sweet voice.
“These numbers,” I say, my own voice trembling with the sheer awesomeness of the implications. “I know what they are.”
“Tell me!” she says. “What?”
“I didn’t realize because usually it’s in binary, or sometimes hexadecimal. Occasionally in octal, but never decimal. No one uses decimal. So the place value was off.”
“What the hell is octal?” she says. “What are you talking about?”
“The numbers,” I say. “They’re coordinates.”
I am so itching to fly Orlon’s ship. It’s top of the line, given to him by High King Xalax back when we were on the Zalaryn home planet. I haven’t flown a vessel since my abduction. Riding the jec’h was similar, was close to the freedom of open space, but it’s not quite the same.
“Can I pilot this voyage?” I ask as he finishes the protocols that will latch the doors and enable navigation.
“You want to fly?” he asks, and I can’t help but take offense at the incredulity in his voice. “Do you even know how?”
“My father was a pilot,” I say indignantly. “Of course I know how to fly.”
He seems to consider this for a moment but shakes his head. “You also said that he was a deluded fool who dropped you off on your own as soon as you were old enough to cook your own meals.”
“That is also true,” I concede, though it does pain me to hear my relationship with my father summed up so callously by an outside party. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I know how to fly. I can probably fly better than you.” I can’t help adding that last bit, even though it’s probably not true.
“You want to wager on that?” he asks.
“Well,” I backtrack, “a Zalaryn computer programmer still has probably logged more hours behind the helm than me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I do know how to fly.”
“This is like the damned jec’h,” he says. “I bet you get a nice jolly feeling from doing things that make me nervous.”
“I do,” I say, smiling. “But that’s just a little added bonus. You can’t tell me you don’t get a rush from pushing a machine past escape velocity, breaking past the atmosphere, watching the planet below you become a pinprick as the all-encompassing blackness swallows you whole.”
“Entering the Womb of the Void,” Orlon says. “Some of our pilots describe it like that. But I feel no such joy. To me, it’s like going back into the womb that birthed you. It’s unnatural. And you can only hope that you’ll be properly squeezed back out at the end of the voyage.”
“You’re very uptight for a Zalaryn warrior,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be fearless?”
“Only a fool is fearless,” he says. “Fear keeps you alive. Fear is a blessing, the core of all our instincts. Warriors just learn how and when to ignore it.”
“Then ignore it now,” I say. “And let me have the pilot’s chair.”
He considers this for a moment—too long a moment as far as I’m concerned. I am eager to get going, to see if there’s any truth to his theory that the numbers scrawled on the back of my mother’s photograph are coordinates.
We plugged them into a navigation simulator back in our rented room, and it told us that, if they are coordinates, they are of a location on Ureb-R’iora, a distant satellite of some planet called Neptune that I’ve never even heard of. It’s uninhabited, with temperatures at absolute zero and so far away from its sun that it’s bathed in perpetual blackness. And it’s far. Even with access to Corva coils or Xorbanium, traveling at top speed, it will take four days travel time. And I can’t imagine my father getting access to Corva or Xorbanium—they’re both expensive, and the blackmarket is remarkably scarce for both materials.
“You’re basically asking me to rent out my ship,” Orlon finally says. “My personal ship that was a gift from my High King. That’s not something I’ve ever done before. But I suppose it could be arranged… for a price.” That look has come over his face again, the look of a hungry wolf closing in on a wounded rabbit.
And even though I’m the rabbit, I feel a surge of excitement. The memory of the ‘exchange of genetic material,’ as he bizarrely refers to it, is still fresh in my mind, often interrupting my benign daytime thoughts with blazing-hot flashes of heat and desire.
“Everyone has their price,” I say. “What’s yours?”
“That sweet little mouth of yours,” he says. “Nothing would make you more beautiful than having my cock plunged inside your mouth.”
“My mouth?” I say. “You’re not going to demand my…” my virginity is what I mean to say, but I can’t say the words aloud. I’m prepared to let him. I’m still not sure about all this bonded mate stuff—but I know that there’s something about Orlon, something that is drawing me to him the way the thin wires of refined Corva will attract any stray bits of copper shavings.
He keeps talking about our fates being intertwined, about how Zalaryns mate for
life, and that’s what I’m unsure of. But I do know that there’s a pull between us that is undeniable, that I’ve never felt before.
I can’t think too far in the future—my childhood and captivity have both conditioned me to only focus on getting through one day at a time. But I do know that every day I spend with Orlon, it feels like we’ve always been together. There was an instant comfort—instant trust—the sort of casual familiarity that’s usually only experienced by long-time friends and family.
“Yes,” he says. “Your mouth. I am your bonded mate, and I already own your cunt. But your mouth? That will be a treat. So if you want to fly my ship, you’re going to have to strip nude, get on your knees and let me use your mouth for my pleasure.”
“And if I refuse?” I ask, knowing I’m not going to. The moment he spoke the words, I started pulsing between my legs so quickly and urgently that I knew I would do it.
“Then sit down in a passenger seat and latch your harness,” he says. “But you’re not going to refuse. Your pussy’s already wet. I’d bet my ship itself that if I reached my hand down your pants right now, it would be slick with your arousal fluids.”
He’s not wrong, so I say nothing.
He reclines in the pilot’s chair, spinning it away from the instrument panel. He loosens his belt and takes down his breeches, letting them sit around his ankles. I didn’t get a good look at his cock before, but now I can see it. It’s even bigger than I thought it was, thick and long, and I don’t even know how it will fit in my mouth.
But I want to try.
“Strip,” he commands. I am wearing a new close-fitting suit, tailored to my body and designed for the rigors of space travel. I pull the zipper down to my waist, and the sides of the bodice gape open, exposing the inner mounds of my breasts. I shrug my shoulders and pull my arms out of the sleeves.
I expect Orlon’s gaze to go to my breasts, but it does not. He holds eye contact with me, making me tremble with anticipation. This male wants to take my virginity, to claim me, to breed me.
The Rulmek Captain threatened to sell me to the Guuklar warlord, where I would be defiled, claimed and bred. The idea was so horrifying that I betrayed an entire planet—started a war—in order to save myself.