Kader leveled a steady gaze on the doctor. “Whether you are stupid or not, I do not care. My duty is the protection of this ship. Anything that could compromise the safety of this ship is something I should be made aware of. That includes requesting information from our supposed allies. The next time you need information this ship does not contain, the request must go through me. Understood?”
“Yes, Captain. Forgiveness.”
Kader waved away the male’s insincere-sounding apology. “What else do you know about her? Is she a threat?”
“Hardly. Her claws are too thin and would break if she ever tried to use them on our scales. They are also very short. Her blunt teeth suggest she’s an herbivore or possibly an omnivore, although I don’t see how her species could be anything except a prey animal, suggesting they do not hunt.”
“And the ropes attached to her head? What purpose do they serve?”
Gyan shook his head. “They make no sense to us. They are not attached with an adhesive but growing from her head and are not in a strategic enough position to make a viable weapon.”
Nodding, Kader said, “Her opponent would use them to incapacitate her and strangle her with them. A punishment, maybe?”
“I could not say. Maybe a status symbol of some kind? They are quite long.” Gyan made notes on his tablet. “We hesitated to remove her clothing. Some of it appears bonded to her. With her soft skin, it makes sense her people would use thick cloth to protect themselves. The tightness of the weave and density of the fabric suggest a certain level of intelligence.” He shrugged. “Until she wakes, we won’t know how much.”
“Hm.” Kader continued his study of the female, not sure why she held his attention.
And then it hit him. She was cute. No other word fit. Small and soft and cute. His fingers flexed at his sides. He wanted to find out how soft. He’d always had a weakness for cute squishy things, and this alien appeared very squishy. Especially the protrusions on her chest.
He pointed at them. “What is the purpose of those?”
Quagid, Gyan’s assistant, said, “They are fat surrounding dormant mammary glands.”
A quelling look from Gyan made the other male take several steps back with his head bowed and a mumbled apology. Gyan said, “As Doctor Quagid has already said, they are mammary sacks. Her species must nurse their young, indicating an inability of their young to fend for themselves at birth.”
“A very weak species.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. A species with so few obvious defenses may well be dangerous in other ways.”
Kader narrowed his eyes. “Venom?”
“The scans showed none, although there were high concentrations of chemicals in her system that would be fatal to us. Ingested on purpose, it would seem.”
“Poison eaters,” he said with a touch of awe in his voice. “That is a formidable defense this soft one has.”
“Soft one?” Gyan regarded the female as if seeing her for the first time. As a doctor, he must have been studying the female as a thing and not seen in her what Kader did. Now he looked and then nodded. “An apt description, Captain. I didn’t take much notice at the time, but her skin is soft due to her lack of scales.”
The urge to feel for himself returned. Kader tamped it down. He was only there for a report and had already lingered far longer than he should. If Gyan had been any other scientist on any other project, such as the female lead scientist of the transport experiment, Kader would have cut the doctor’s words short with cool indifference and left as quickly as possible.
But this alien intrigued him, and not simply because of how she’d arrived on his ship. Carried by waves of energy that had nearly torn his ship apart and yet she’d shown absolutely no damage from her arrival. No burns. Not even scrapes on that soft-looking skin of hers. All the damage had been focused on the bridge and was quickly repaired. He had recalled the escape pods. Several hours later, life had returned to normal.
The only thing that had changed was his ship’s purpose. The female scientist and her experiment had moved to a ship more capable of handling the energy surges from the attempt to harness and utilize the energy of their planet’s star—now that there was documentation of how bad the surges could get—while Gyan and his team had moved on board to study the alien the experiment had retrieved.
“Are you ready to wake her?”
Gyan gave a quick nod. “Yes, Captain. That was why I requested your presence to approve the removal of the stasis field.”
“Approved.” Kader glanced at the five security guards near the back of the room. They were unnecessary while he was there, but protocol demanded they be present.
With a few strokes on his tablet, Gyan deactivated the stasis field that had held their alien guest in suspended animation until they could determine if she was a threat, directly or indirectly.
The moment the field dropped, the soft one let out a tortured moan and shifted on the bed, only to moan again. She breathed shallow as someone in pain would do. Was she in pain? Or was that how one of her species breathed normally?
Gyan took out his exam rod and approached the bed, but Kader blocked his path with his arm out, noticing the soft one’s sudden stillness, as though preparing for something.
An attack?
A single look silenced whatever Gyan planned to say next.
Behind them, security readied their weapons. Now they would see if this soft alien was as helpless as Gyan described her.
Semeera had had some massive hangovers before, but this one was the Godzilla versus King Kong battle royale for who gets to destroy the world of hangovers. It hurt to breathe. When had she ever gotten so drunk that it hurt to breathe the next day?
Never. And she hadn’t been drinking the night before. What had she been doing? It hurt to think. She would kill for a tall glass of rum to chase down the bottle of aspirin she needed to get rid of this headache.
Did she have aspirin?
For that matter, how had she gotten home?
The last thing she remembered was running from purple lightning and praying not to die. And she could have sworn she’d gotten hit. Maybe it had just grazed her. But that still didn’t explain how she’d gotten home. Or what that sound was—kind of mechanical with soft beeps.
Nothing in her motel room sounded like that. She didn’t want to open her eyes to see what it was, knowing the light would make her headache worse. But she got the strange feeling she wasn’t in her room. That meant she needed to find out who she was crashing with and whether they had aspirin and rum.
She cracked open her eyes and then yelped, slamming her eyes closed once more and smacking her hands over them.
Mistake!
Huge mistake!
Colossal mistake!
That little bit of light ricocheted through her head and burned everything in its path, ratcheting up her pain beyond levels she didn’t even know a human could experience without dying. Breathing through the pain didn’t help because breathing fucking hurt. Everything hurt. She wanted to writhe with the pain she was experiencing, but moving hurt. The sobs leaving her lips were involuntary as were the tears seeping past her hands. She wasn’t the suicidal type, but if it meant an end to this pain, she would gladly eat a bullet.
For a moment she thought someone had heard her plea when something cool and blunt pressed to her forehead. And then the pain lessened. Not by a lot. She wouldn’t call it tolerable, or even acceptable, but at least the desire to rip off her own head had subsided.
And then the blunt object returned and her pain dropped again. She semi-relaxed with a thankful sigh, ready to declare her undying love to whoever had given her relief. Lowering her hands and opening her eyes slowly, she prepared to endure the pain the light would bring just to relay her thanks for whatever the person had done.
She screamed instead and backed up so quickly she hadn’t realized she’d moved until the wall pressed against her back. A quick look around revealed she was on a bed in a corner. Trappe
d.
The cause of her fright was the giant cream-colored lizardman standing over her. She waited for her brain to make sense of what she was looking at or for someone to jump out and laugh at her reaction. Neither happened, and the lizardman inched closer to her while waving behind its back.
She chanced looking away from it to see there were others in the room. Her blurred vision didn’t impair her ability to discern there were more lizardmen—gray ones this time—and they were just as tall. She snapped her gaze back to the one closest to her.
He was talking. At least she thought he was talking. His tone was soothing but then he ruined it by reaching for her.
Semeera screamed again and scrambled for the foot of the bed, tumbling over the edge and then darting under it to stuff herself as far into the corner as she could. Knees hugged to her chest, she prayed for the second time in her adult life. Funny how stressful situations beyond comprehension made a person religious.
More talking. Different voices. One sounded upset, almost frantic, as he tugged at the bed, causing the bed to scrape on the floor but not move. The other voice sounded annoyed. The owner of the annoyed voice had a tone of authority that made the upset one go silent and release the bed.
Had they given up trying to get to her?
And then the bed moved, lifting up and exposing her hiding spot. Semeera curled into as small a ball as she could and hoped death would be quick.
She didn’t expect to hear softly crooned words in a language she didn’t understand. But she didn’t have to understand their meaning to recognize their intent, which didn’t seem to be aggressive.
Shaking from the adrenaline coursing through her system, she lifted her head slowly to look at the lizardman crouched a few feet from her. She yelped and buried her face against her knees. Her eyes hadn’t lied to her.
A lizardman. An alien, most likely.
Invading?
Had they abducted her? Were they the cause of the purple lightning? Was she about to be part of some weird experiment that involved vivisection and anal probes?
She mentally ran through the possibilities of all the painful ways she could die as she waited for the lizardman to grab her and strap her down to an exam table. Except…
Hadn’t she already been at their mercy before she woke up? They hadn’t strapped her down then. And whatever they’d pressed to her forehead had partially relieved her headache. Her head still hurt, but she could ignore that when faced with the reality of aliens.
She chanced lifting her head again.
The lizardman was still there, waiting patiently with one arm over his head. He held up the bed and didn’t appear to be straining under the weight. He crouched still as a statue, staring at her.
A slight movement behind him drew her attention. She squeaked when that something came toward her. At first she thought it was a giant snake. Then it got closer, and she realized it was a tail. Following that tail led back to the lizardman in front of her.
It was his tail, and he’d moved it close to her feet, flipping the very tip of it in a slow wagging motion. Again, not aggressive. If anything, he seemed to be enticing her the same way a person would wiggle a toy in front of a cat.
Fine, she would embrace the crazy, play along. Nothing would be resolved with her huddled in a corner.
She poked at the very tip of the tail and then pulled back quickly in case he got pissed. When he didn’t, she did it again. Still no anger. She petted his tail, smoothing the very tips of her fingers over the bumpy scales. She’d been right to call him a lizardman because that was what his skin resembled.
He spoke to her in a deep rumbling tone, bringing her attention to his face. Slowly he held out his hand, palm up.
Long claws tipped his fingers. They appeared sharp. And she already had proof of how strong he was. But instead of snatching at her, he was waiting for her to come to him. So she did. She slowly put her hand in his and tried not to flinch when his big hand closed around hers.
He gave her a soft tug, urging her toward him but not pulling.
She crawled toward him with her right hand in his. It should have been awkward, but his hand remained steady and level, providing her support, as she made her way forward. Once she cleared the bed, he lowered it to the floor and then released her to straighten to his full height.
His people were toe-walkers, with their heels in the air and their knees bent forward. But the few inches he would lose from putting his feet flat on the ground still made him a hell of a lot taller than her.
“Jesus.” She tilted her head back and back some more. Her nose was level with the bottom of his chest. A nervous laugh escaped past her lips. “Somebody ate all his veggies growing up.”
The lizardman actually smiled and patted her head.
Had he understood her?
When he spoke in his weird language, the obvious answer was no. She didn’t understand him and he didn’t understand her. Great. Stranded with aliens and not a Rosetta Stone in sight.
Before she could think of her next move, the lizardman put his hands on her waist and lifted her onto the bed. His hands were huge. She knew that already, but the fact hit home when he spanned her waist with his fingers. And while he had no way of knowing, his touch hurt. Not because he used too much force, but because the waistband of her jeans was digging painfully into her stomach. She shouldn’t have let the cost and possible strain on her meager finances stop her from getting a more comfortable pair.
She chuckled and shook her head. Her money issues were nonexistent now. Alien abduction had some perks after all.
The lizardman petted her head, and she resisted the urge to push his hand away. She hated when people touched her without asking. She wasn’t a damn dog. But having dreadlocks down to her ass seemed to be an open invitation for some people. Then again, she doubted her hairdo was the reason for the lizardman’s actions. It was probably the fact that she had hair at all.
He didn’t. His head was smooth and lizard-shaped. All those artists who had drawn anthropomorphized lizard people had pretty much gotten it right. Basically, a lizard’s head on a man’s body. A man with a very broad, muscled chest, slim waist, and powerful-looking thighs encased in what appeared to be a uniform.
Sharp teeth lined the sides of his mouth, but not the front. His green eyes faced front like a human’s and had slitted pupils. And he had a forked tongue. She found that out when he flicked it at her, making her wonder if his tongue worked like forked-tongue reptiles from Earth and he was smelling her. He had nasal openings on his long head, so maybe not.
The longer she looked at him, the less scary he was. Sure, he was way taller than her, but his overall appearance was no longer a surprise. And as weird as he appeared to her, she probably appeared just as weird to them.
The lizardman said something as he threaded his fingers through her locs. He studied them and then let them sift through his fingers only to pick them up and do it again. Hopefully his hands were clean. She’d just washed her hair the previous night—or rather, the night before she got abducted. Who knew how long she’d been out since then.
“I really wish you could understand me. Knowing stuff like where I am, who you are, and what you plan to do with me would be great right about now.” She gave the lizardman a rueful smile and asked, “Don’t suppose you wanna send me home?”
He continued rubbing her hair.
Great. Maybe to him, she was a dog. Pet to an alien lizardman. At least he was nice… for now.
Chapter 3
The alien’s pain was obvious to Kader and the only reason he allowed Gyan to approach her with his examination probe to administer medication. Kader had thought the soft one had suffered no ill effects from the transport because there were no outward signs. Clearly, he and the doctors had overlooked internal injuries that caused her to cry and sob. One dose of medication from the examination probe didn’t seem to do much, but the second caused the alien to relax with a thankful sigh.
At least th
eir medicine had an effect.
Kader readied himself for what would come next, preparing to snatch Gyan back if needed.
The alien opened her eyes and let loose an ear-splitting scream while backing herself up to the wall so quickly she startled Gyan into backing up while making the security guards advance with their weapons raised. Kader and Gyan both waved them away.
The alien was frightened. Her round eyes were wide, and her scent tinged with fear hung heavy in the room—a scent that resembled theirs, albeit a little saltier. No aggression, though. She wouldn’t fight.
Gyan must have come to that conclusion as well because he smiled softly and said, “It’s all right, little one. No one will hurt you.” He reached out to her.
Screaming again, the female bolted for the edge of the bed and landed with a heavy thump on the hard metal floor. If the landing pained her, Kader couldn’t tell, given how quickly she disappeared under the bed.
“Hurry. We must get to her before she hurts herself,” Gyan said, tugging at the bed and only budging it a little, causing the metal legs to scrape on the floor.
Kader gave the doctor a wry look. “Your behavior is unbecoming and unneeded, Doctor. I doubt she can harm herself under the bed.”
“You don’t know that, Captain.”
“I do know your feeble attempt to get to her will fail.” Kader gestured at the way Gyan still struggled. The male was weak. A defect of those in his profession.
Gyan beckoned to the security. “Come. If you all lift the bed, I can—”
Kader said, “Stand away. I will retrieve her.”
“You’ll frighten her more.”
Flicking out his tongue, Kader scented the female’s fear and couldn’t conceive of the scent getting much heavier, not without her heart failing. “She’ll be fine.”
“Captain, I must object to this interference—”
“Do you want her out or not?”
Alien Mate Experiment Page 3
