Alien Lord's Captive

by Mina Carter

  He grunted at whatever the symbols said on the arc above her and turned to Tarrick. The field above her snapped off and she sat up to watch. Tarrick was stripped to the waist and she spent a pleasurable moment checking out her alien’s ripped body. Where the hell had she gotten so lucky? Tarrick had the kind of build she’d only seen on holo-actors and porn-vid stars, and he was all hers to touch, and explore, and lick…

  Snapping herself back to reality, she noticed Laarn focused his study on Tarrick’s wrist. Black marks covered the skin, wrapping around his wrist a couple of times. They appeared odd, almost organic, as though vines were buried under the surface.

  “What’s that? Did you get a tattoo?” she asked, scooting to the edge of the bed. The designs hadn’t been there last night. She slept like the dead though, so perhaps he’d nipped out to get it done while she’d been asleep.

  Both men turned to her, identical frowns on their faces. Even if she hadn’t known they were related, that expression right there would have clued her in.

  “A tat-Oo?” Laarn asked, mangling the word. “What’s that?”

  Cat blinked as surprise rolled through her and thought back. She hadn’t seen ink on any of the Lathar.

  “Uhm, it’s a body modification common among humans. Ink driven under the top layer of skin with needles to create a pattern or design.” She leaned closer. The skin around the marks was red and raised, just like a new tattoo. “The skin heals to leave the design permanently in place.”

  “Needles? And humans do that voluntarily?” Tarrick wrinkled his nose in disgust. “How barbaric.”

  She chuckled. “Humans have some weird kinks. Tattoos are tame compared to some of the stuff out there.”

  Laarn studied her with an intent gaze, as though she’d just revealed something fascinating. Being the center of his attention was a little unsettling. Unlike Tarrick, no emotion softened his expression. It was like being studied under a microscope. “Do you have any?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. But many people on the base have them if you wanted to take a closer look. My friend Jess has a large design on her back.”

  “Jess?” The big healer tapped out an enquiry on the console at the other side of Tarrick’s bed.

  “Jessica Kallson. She’s a traffic control officer, like I am.” A growl rumbled in Tarrick’s throat. She sighed. “Okay, fine. Like I was.”

  “This her?” Laarn turned the screen to reveal an image of a young woman.

  Cat nodded. “Yes. That’s Jess. She was on the flight deck the same time as I was. I haven’t seen her since.”

  Guilt washed over her. She’d asked Tarrick to make sure her friend was okay, but hadn’t seen her since the attack a few days ago.

  “She’s in stateroom three. One of the quiet ones, doesn’t seem to be causing any trouble…” Laarn paused to read. “The preliminary medical scan came back okay. She’s in good health and sustained no injuries in the attack.”

  Although she knew from Tarrick that Jess was okay, hearing the healer confirm it made her sigh in relief.

  “I’ll bring her in though, do a full check?” Laarn glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow arched.

  “Thank you.” She smiled her thanks. He seemed to have accepted her relationship with his brother without a qualm, and the fact that the link was important enough for him to check on her friend made her feel all kinds of warm and fuzzy inside. “So… if you guys don’t have tattoos, what is that?”

  They exchanged looks, and once again, she got the feeling there was more going on than they were admitting. Worry hit her, making her stomach churn and she slid off the bed to stand next to Tarrick. He kept trying to sit up, but Laarn reached out and shoved him down, none too gently.

  After the third time, Tarrick blew out a breath. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? He rarely gets to shove me around anymore,” he commented to Cat.

  “Yeah, right. Just every time we spar. For a war commander, you’re like a lumbering Karatan.” Laarn snorted, his green eyes sparkling with humor. “What my baby brother isn’t telling you is that if I hadn’t taken my healer’s sash, I’d be the one running the ship, not him.”

  “Really? Is that how it works with you guys?” She smiled encouragingly, hoping they’d keep talking. Although they were over the first hurdle and the Lathar warriors were considering human women as more than mere possessions, the more she knew about their culture the better. No unpleasant surprises that way.

  This time Tarrick spoke, laying still as Laarn scanned his wrist. “It’s based on skill and ability. Laarn and I have been training since we could walk and because we’re Litaan as well as siblings—”

  “Litaan? That’s your word for twins?”

  He nodded. “Same height, same build, same abilities. It’s down to performance on the day. And it doesn’t mean Laarn would be running the ship. He decided to welch on facing me and wimped out to take his healer’s trials.”

  “Trials? What…like exams?”

  Laarn frowned, leaning forward to study the symbols on the holo-field as he answered. “Physical ones, yes.”

  “Ahh, yes. Our medical students have to do similar exams before they qualify. Simulations of operations and procedures, right?”

  Laarn’s hair danced on his leather-covered shoulders as he shook his head. His voice was flat and unemotional without the snarky tone she was used to hearing. “Not quite, no. All healers must experience every ailment and injury. The pain, the sensation, everything. Depending on how much they can handle…that will be the level of healer they become, then they’re trained to that level.”

  “What?” Her jaw dropped in surprise. “But…that’s…They do…They hurt you? So you can become a healer? Fuck no, that’s barbaric!”

  Tarrick chuckled and motioned at the bed around him. “The trials are simulated. Fool the brain the injuries are real.”

  “Oh, I see.” She went quiet, feeling a little foolish.

  Of course, they wouldn’t intentionally injure their own people just to see what kind of doctors they’d make. Then Laarn lifted his head and she caught a glimpse of his unguarded expression before the mask slid back into place, and her heart lurched. Pain lurked in the back of his eyes and she knew at that moment the suffering he’d gone through to become a healer was beyond most people’s understanding.

  “But Laarn made it through.” Tarrick’s voice rang with pride. “He’s not only a healer, but the highest qualified healer in the Empire. He should be Lord Healer and control the Healer’s Hall, but he opted to travel for a quadrasec instead. He’s an asshole.”

  “Better than being a dickhead warrior.”

  Cat sighed and shook her head as the brothers’ conversation devolved into insults and name-calling. Men, the same no matter what galaxy, obviously.

  “Okay, so these marks…” She drew their attention back to the matter at hand. “Just so you know, all base staff are routinely checked for STDs, so if he’s got something nasty, it didn’t come from me.” She shrugged when they both looked at her in surprise. “Just putting it out there.”

  “No. Not that.” Laarn frowned. “Your people get infections from sex? That’s…”

  “Barbaric?” she guessed. It seemed to be Laarn’s favorite word when it came to humans.

  “No. It’s a simple genetic fix though. So simple even a child could do it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Speaking as one of the ‘children’ present, we have a saying. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Our doctors don’t mess at the genetic level in case they make things worse.”

  “Huh. Interesting.” Finally, Laarn snapped off the holo-field over Tarrick and leaned against the empty bed behind him, folding his arms over his chest.

  His expression was neutral. That special blank expression doctors got when they were about to say something awful. Another similarity with humans. Ironic. Humanity had spent so long being scared of the possibility of little green men. Who would have guessed the aliens would be so similar on
so many levels?

  “I have good news and bad news.”

  Uh-oh, here it came. Mentally, she braced herself. At the same time, she employed logic. Surely with their massively more advanced technology, the Lathar could fix most things, right?

  “The good news is these are exactly what I thought.” He pointed to the marks wrapped around Tarrick’s wrist. “Somehow, unbelievably, humans are genetically compatible with the Lathar. Not only that, but I think they might be an offshoot. I’d need to run tests at the Healer’s Hall to be sure.”

  Her world lurched sideways and Cat gaped at the healer. “We’re Lathar? Not human?”

  His shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Honestly, I can’t tell at the moment, but it’s a good possibility. There are too many similarities to be naturally occurring. To be sure I need to run deep level genetic scans and check all the markers.”

  He flicked a glance down at her stomach. “A quicker way to tell would be if you’d already fallen pregnant, but I checked and you haven’t.”

  Huh. She hadn’t even considered a baby, not with what Tarrick told her about his species’ reproduction problems. “That could happen?”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  Shit.

  “And the bad news?”

  Laarn smiled. “They’re mating marks, so you’re stuck with my idiot brother. You’re…what do you humans call it? Married.”

  Tarrick hated waiting. For anything. He particularly hated waiting on the Emperor while stuck in a non-combat bot. Actually, he just hated the non-combat bots. A little under his natural height, with none of the on-board weaponry or improvements of his own custom-built combat machine, it was restrictive and cramped.

  Worse yet, he was surrounded by courtiers as they all waited for the Emperor to emerge from his bed-chamber. They reclined on low padded couches, talking in soft voices. Tarrick used the machine’s central eye to study them without them being aware, not that they’d bothered much with the bot anyway. He’d deliberately picked up a standard palace model rather than one which would show his family affiliation and rank, so their sycophantic tendencies hadn’t been triggered. If they knew who he was in the metal shell, they’d have been all over him like a bad rash. The sister-son of the Emperor, he was considered part of the Imperial family. One reason he preferred to be incognito here.

  Tarrick sighed, his bot body clicking as it inflated its mechanical chest in an approximation of the movement. Most wouldn’t have been able to trigger the machine to make the movement, but Tarrick was an extremely experienced pilot. His control of the neural connection needed to operate the avatars was an almost perfect mesh of the biological and technological.

  He’d even qualified on the bigger Drakeen bots. Heavily armed and armored, they could take on hordes of combat bots by themselves, but were hellishly difficult to pilot. There were only a handful of Drakeen-qualified pilots across the entire empire. He was one, as was the Emperor.

  The chatter in the room stopped when the big double doors to the Emperor’s bed-chamber opened. His Imperial Majesty Daaynal K’Saan strode into the room, resplendent in his warrior’s leathers complete with his imperial sash—a dark, regal purple—across his chest. He was a born emperor, rather than one who had gained his position through conquest, so his sash was single color and unadorned. Warrior’s braids peeked through the mass of black hair that cascaded over his shoulders.

  Tarrick straightened, catching the Emperor’s eye as he strode past courtiers scrambling to free themselves from the low couches. Daaynal stopped, looked Tarrick’s bot up and down, then snapped an order over his shoulder. “Leave us.”

  There was a mass exodus. Courtiers raced to be the first to do the Emperor’s bidding, resulting in a pile up by the door. The servos in the bot’s neck whirred as he watched the stampede. “I have no idea why you put up with them, your majesty.”

  The last courtier got his cloak stuck in the door trying to get through. Frantically trying to free the heavily tasseled and ornate garment, he glanced up, realized they were both watching him and squeaked. A yank and the sound of tearing fabric later, he disappeared through the door like a gethal down its burrow.

  Daaynal’s lips quirked. “Entertainment value?”

  He turned back to Tarrick and grabbed the bot by its metallic shoulders, looking at the avatar with fond affection, as though Tarrick were there in the flesh. “So, my sister-son, tell me how things have developed with your humans?”

  The words, and the warm tone of voice they were uttered in warmed Tarrick’s heart. Twins didn’t run in the K’Vass family. Rather, they ran in the imperial line. His mother, Miisan, had been Daaynal’s Litaan, his twin. Every time he looked at his uncle, he saw his mother’s eyes. That Daaynal insisted on preserving the special relationship that existed between a man and his nephew's past childhood was something neither Tarrick nor Laarn had expected.

  “Things go well, which is the reason I’m here to speak to you.” He turned as Daaynal looped a massive arm over ‘his’ shoulders and turned toward the large windows at the end of the chamber. “They are technologically inferior, but in attitude and ferocity, they easily match us.”

  “Really?” Daaynal’s eyebrow winged up as he leaned one massive shoulder against the window frame and gazed out on the gardens below. The Herris blossom, the symbol of the Imperial family, was in full bloom. The sight of them, his mother’s favorite flower, never failed to ease Tarrick’s heart. “The males are much smaller than us though, correct?”

  Tarrick didn’t bother to hide his smile. Daaynal couldn’t see it on the unemotional face of the bot, but he wouldn’t have hidden his amusement anyway.

  “They are, but I wasn’t talking about the males.”

  Confusion flittered over Daaynal’s face for a second before a sound by the door made them turn. An Oonat, graceful in her hooded robes, slipped from the Emperor’s bed-chamber. No prizes for guessing why. Daaynal needed an heir, even an oonat-born one.

  Latharian DNA was dominant, so no child born of such a union would be a half-breed. Such children were always male, completely Lathar. His cousin Fenriis, for example, was oonat-born, and he was more Lathar in his upbringing and mannerisms than either Tarrick or his brother.

  And no one was more eager for Daaynal to beget an heir than Tarrick. His brother wouldn’t be able to avoid the Lord Healer’s position for much longer, and his calling there surpassed even that of the imperial throne. Which meant Tarrick himself was next in line. That didn’t mean it would be all plain sailing though. Because his claim was through a maternal line, there were at least four other warriors with claims they’d fight to the death for. He’d avoid a power struggle for the throne. He was happy being a War Commander, with his lovely little Cat by his side. Although…she would make a beautiful empress.

  “Then who were you speaking about?”

  “The females. It seems humans don’t have the same issues we do with numbers. Their gender numbers are equal. So much so, the base we attacked had female military personnel.”

  Daaynal stilled, his focus solely on Tarrick. “They don’t protect their women? What kind of species are they? Like the Oonat?”

  Tarrick laughed. “Draanth, no. They mounted a robust defense to our attack on their base but eventually lost to superior technology. Not for want of trying though. We secured their base and separated the males from the females as usual. That’s when we ran into problems. These females are not civilians. They’re as highly trained in weapons and tactics as the men. We couldn’t get any information out of them on questioning, and they were offering passive resistance until the T’Laat arrived.”

  The Emperor’s expression tightened for a second before his face cleared. It didn’t last more than a blink of the eye, but Tarrick spotted the brief flare of dislike and anger. Daaynal didn’t like the T’Laat, everyone knew that, but as emperor, he couldn’t play favorites.

  “And then?” he asked.

  “The T’Laat made the mistake of kidnapping the wo
men.”

  “I’m assuming since you’re talking to me now and you’re only just mentioning it, that you have the situation sorted? How many women did you lose?” Daaynal grimaced and reached a hand up to run through his long hair. “Fuck, I didn’t want the T’Laat in that sector. Now they know there are women there. They’ll be impossible to get rid—”

  “None,” Tarrick interrupted, “We didn’t lose any women. They’d already figured out our ident tags were the key to accessing ship systems. They stole one from Varish, used it to open a weapons cache. By the time we boarded the ship with combat teams, they’d freed themselves, bottlenecked the T’Laat forces and were blowing the draanth out of them.”

  This time Daaynal’s eyes did widen in surprise. Then he laughed. “By the ancestors, they sound perfect. Almost as bad as we are.”

  “Yeah, that. You might want to take a look at this.” Using the same subspace link he used to control the bot, Tarrick quickly sent the images of his wrist and medical data Laarn supplied, showing them on the chest-mounted screen on the bot.

  “Fuck me…” If he’d ever wanted to see Daaynal surprised, he was seeing it now. The bigger man’s expression was one of utter shock. “If there is even the chance they are what Laarn thinks, I want to see. I want to meet some. Bring them here.”

  10

  "The Emperor wants to see us? Really?"

  Cat followed in Tarrick's wake like a little lost puppy following its master. The impression wasn't helped by the fact she had to trot to keep up. Every long stride of his needed at least two of hers, maybe even three. It was demeaning, but at the moment she didn't care. She was more interested in what he had to say than any blow to her pride.

  "He does. He was most interested when I told him about your species and in particular this." He twisted his wrist in a telling gesture. The marks were covered by the long sleeves of his jacket, and a wrist bracer for good measure.

  She appreciated the foresight. If every Latharian warrior realized that, unlike the oonat, humans could trigger their long-dormant mating marks, it would be open season. Competition for a human woman, any human woman, could cause chaos and dissent in the ranks, potentially shattering war clans.