Without even thinking, he morphed into his big-cat form. As a humanoid, he stood 6’6” as a big-cat he was larger than a Siberian Tiger but sleek as a Jaguar with dark blue fur, the same color as his humanoid hair. He paced back and forth the living room of his home, growling and roaring his frustrations intermittently.
Carly was still a month and a half away from joining him on Glasica and becoming his mate in every sense of the word. Now, her transport starship was being raided by unknown marauders, and he could only guess what they might do to her.
Utter fury ripped through him fed by the adrenaline pumping through his veins. It took him a couple minutes and considerable effort to vent his rage and calm himself enough to rise up on his hind legs to revert to his humanoid form.
Still growling to himself, he snatched his com-tablet up from the floor. He’d dropped it when he shifted. The star jumper wasn’t due back for another day, but he needed it now!
Using his cybernetics, he activated the com and signaled his team on the Sentry Hawk star jumper. Momentarily, the face of Lieutenant Thodai Icorax popped onto the screen. “Yes, Captain?”
“The Star Traveler has been intercepted by marauders as I was talking to my mate, and we lost contact,” Joven said. “I need the jumper.”
“Yes, sir. Kelbor, take us back to base,” Thodai told the pilot. “On our way, sir, we should arrive in about three hours.”
“Thank you, I got the coordinates where they were intercepted. We should be able to track them from there.”
“We’re on our way, sir.”
“I’ll see you when you get here.”
Carly hesitated after she lost contact with Joven, unsure if she should stay where she was or make her way back to her quarters. If she left the observation bubble, the invaders could find her. Or she could stay put, and what?
The ship was disabled. Life support systems could be next. She decided to make a run for it. Scooping up her tablet, she left the lounge and ran for the lift to the main passenger floor. Soon as she emerged from the lift, she broke into a run down the corridor to her cabin.
Her tablet was beeping the entire way. She answered it from the privacy of her room. Carly gave the command word, and Joven’s hologram appeared again.
“Carly, sweetheart, I contacted my team, and they are returning to base. Alliance Law Enforcement has received your ship’s distress signal, but they won’t reach you before the marauders,” he said. “We have your current location, but that will change as soon as they take your ship under their control. Then they will cut your interstellar com off.”
“Are they going to take us off the ship?” she asked, uncertainly.
“I don’t think so… At least not until you get to someplace, they can profit from you and the others. Then they will take the ship,” Joven said with a scowl. “My team is a few hours out, but I will be coming for you as soon as they arrive, meomee. I won’t stop until I find you.”
Joven stayed with her through the com-tablet until they were cut off just as he expected they would be. Before that happened, a strange voice came over the ship’s com, and he could hear it too.
“This is Captain Crazell. I am now in charge. No one will be harmed as long as you follow my instructions. All passengers will come out of your cabins and stand in the corridor for inspection. Anyone who does not comply will be punished severely.”
As Carly listened, she realized that her language implant was fully functional because she understood every word without a translator.
Joven had been frank about her impending captivity. He knew of some marauders who would rape and torture their captives for amusement, but he didn’t speak of that to Carly. She was already frightened enough, perhaps because she was thinking of it.
More likely, they would be ransomed or taken to the slave auctions. It didn’t matter what they attempted, Joven would get her back, and Crazell would pay.
Half an hour later, Carly was standing in front of her cabin door in the corridor with all her neighboring passengers. Unlike the landing bay where they came in, the passenger hallways were carpeted and reminded her of a decent hotel.
Three big men came off the lift at her end. Carly noticed right away the tallest was a feline. She guessed he was just a few inches shy of seven feet, with long, pale blue hair and silver-blue cat’s eyes. He was dressed in black synthetic leather with a slender braid on each side of his head.
Carly trembled as the trio stopped in front of her and the apparent leader put a finger under her chin and pushed up, so she had to look at him. From the gleam in his eyes, he seemed pleased, but she was afraid to guess his intentions.
“A very beautiful sapien. All of these females will bring a good price,” he said. “It will be worth our trouble to take them to Se’Nar. What happens to them after that is not our concern.”
Chapter Seven
The big man looked her up and down and made a growling sound in his throat. “If only you were meomee, you are utterly delectable.”
“I am meomee, he is waiting for me. We all have mates expecting us. Why are you doing this?”
“Profit, little sapien female.” He grinned, revealing a set of four sharp canines in his mouth. “We have families counting on us to provide for them.”
“What about our families?”
“That’s not my concern.”
“It would be if someone were stealing them from you. What would you do, then?”
“We would hunt them down and kill them.”
“What do you think ours will do to you?”
The feline curled one hand around her throat and pressed her against her cabin door. “It’s been tried before, but here I am. You will be long gone before they ever get to me.”
“Don’t count on it,” Carly rasped, refusing to cower to this pirate. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Crazell, Captain Zaif Crazell.” He pressed a little harder against her throat, enough to make breathing difficult without cutting her air supply entirely.
She wanted to kick him and claw at his wrist. She had been afraid at first when the whole ship was shaking, but now she was angry. This despicable gangster was keeping her from her husband.
He was a bully, who took what he wanted from people who worked honestly for what they had. It was that mentality that brought the Drayids to Earth to kill millions of people.
Carly wanted to kick him and pound him for all she was worth, but she knew she had no chance against this handsome brute. Instead, she glared at him and rasped, “Take your hand off me!”
For just a second, he pressed a little harder, and his eyes narrowed. Carly wondered if he was deciding whether to kill her or not. His next words confirmed it, “I could kill you little female sapien, but you will bring too good a price alive.” Crazell pressed even harder and held her there, unable to breathe until fear overwhelmed her anger.
Carly’s eyes widened, and she gripped his wrist and tried to wrench his hand from her throat. Crazell grinned, his eyes sparkling with malicious humor. Then he released her. “Don’t test me, female, or next time I might just choke the life out of your pretty face. Return to your cabin.”
“Bastard!” she muttered in English as he strode away.
Carly went back into the cabin, berating herself for backtalking her captor. Her journey to Joven was long enough without damn pirates making it worse. Now she couldn’t even com-chat with him.
To make matters worse, Carly later learned very unpleasantly that Crazell found out who she would be mated to if she made it to Glasica. Joven had been his Captain during the Drayid war. Crazell blamed Joven for sending him ground side into an ambush. An explosion had left him in pieces, and the only way to save him was to turn him into a cyborg. The war was over by the time he was discharged from medical, and he lost track of his unit. Angry and bitter, Crazell joined a space pirate gang, and now he had his own ship.
Crazell decided to take his revenge on Joven by tormenting Carly. As a feline, the thought of touching h
er sexually was distasteful. But using a pain stick, he could make her scream in agony without causing her lasting damage. And he needed something to entertain himself on this miserable ship.
Carly always looked both ways down the corridor outside her cabin before she left for the dining room. The second day after her encounter with Crazell, he was on the other side of the door when she opened it. He grabbed her by the throat and pushed her inside, pressing her against her bathroom door. When he started pushing up her shirt, she fought him. Carly thought he was going to rape her until she felt something cold pressed to the skin just above the waist band of her slacks.
Burning throbbing pain shot through her body, pain so excruciating it took her breath away. Every breath after that was exhaled into a scream until Crazell drew back for a few seconds before he pressed it to her skin again. She screamed until she was hoarse, and to her horror, she wet herself. That only made him laugh as he released her and she slid to the floor to sit in her puddle of urine, sobbing.
It was a long time before she could get up and clean herself in the bathroom. A small cleaning droid dispatched the puddle on the floor while Carly showered and changed. She put her urine-soaked pants into the cleaning chamber. No longer hungry, she collapsed onto her bed and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Her body ached from the muscle spasms induced by the device the pirate used on her. But she woke up hungry. Carly trembled with fear as she opened the door to check the corridor. She almost sobbed in relief as she scurried down the hall and into the dining room. She grabbed several handfuls of protein bars and some bottled drinks. She wrapped them in a t-shirt and hurried back to her room.
She ate one and drank one of the drinks then curled up on her bed in a fetal position. She berated herself for calling Crazell’s attention to her. Suddenly, Carly was more frightened than she had ever been in her whole life. She wondered whether he was going to kill her and feared that he would.
Carly barely left her cabin for fear Crazell would find her and kill her on a whim. Was he trying to kill her? The pain was so excruciating, and she never knew when he would come for her. She slept fitfully, waking to any sound. Days passed, and Crazell had stayed away but this time Carly woke to see him in her cabin standing over her playing with the pain device.
“Oh, please don’t,” she murmured as tears filled her eyes.
But he did. It was never sexual. It was done to hurt her. She didn’t put it together until much later why. All she knew is that it went on for the rest of the trip to Se’Nar. Sometimes he did it for one long session and others he would start and stop in multiple short episodes of torture.
Carly took comfort in replaying the com sessions she had with Joven. As the days or rotations as they called them passed, she seemed to become less susceptible to the pain device. It still hurt terribly, but it seemed to diminish every time he used it on her. Every time she wished him dead. She would have killed him herself if she had a weapon.
Chapter Eight
Joven was not easily angered, and rarely allowed himself to express anger or frustration. He roared, long and loud and morphed into his big cat persona without conscious thought.
He now knew exactly who was stealing his meomee! The pirate had been eluding Alliance Law Enforcement for years. Yet, he hadn’t been on Joven’s radar since they served in the war together until he took Carly. Joven wasn’t just angry, he was enraged and outraged; he would kill Zaif Crazell, rip him open and tear out his guts while he screamed in agony, tear off his limbs and spill out his blood…
But he could do none of that because he was grounded on Glasica until his team returned to pick him up. The only thing he could do at the moment was run his trails until he could calm his raging emotions. He charged the entrance door of his home, and it opened automatically.
He bounded out into the night, running full tilt to the opening into the forest on his property. He loved to roam the woods. Cutting the trails through his forest was the first thing he did after he bought the property, it was a must have when he was looking for a place to settle. He needed the forest to satisfy his inner cat.
Running through the forest in his panther form, unfettered brought pleasure into his life. This night he needed it to soothe his anguish because that’s what it came down to. He was terrified of losing Carly before he could ever hold her in his arms. As a feline cyborg, meomee was his one chance at happiness, the chance to love and be loved, to make a family.
As a cyborg, suppressing emotions was second nature to him so he could focus entirely on his mission, killing the enemies of the Alliance. It was a cybernetic enhancement that Narovian feline cyborgs required to dampen their heightened humanoid emotions. Joven now controlled that dampener.
He’d turned it off the day he was notified of his match with Carly. He wanted to feel all the joy of finding his soulmate and falling in love with her, and he had felt it all. But now, now that her ship was captured by pirates, he was feeling all the fear of losing her. He teetered on the verge of panic. So, he ran through the forest in his big cat form; running, running, running as though he could outrun the emotions that threatened to overwhelm him.
Joven ran through the forest most of the hours it took for the Sentinel Hawk to return to Glasica.
He could reintegrate the dampener but chose not to. He embraced his fury, he would use it to hunt Crazell, and he had developed strong feelings for Carly and he did not want to lose those.
It would be difficult to open himself even to his soul mate if he restricted his emotional self that severely. He didn’t have a switch where he could turn it on and off.
Joven returned to his dwelling as Sentinel Hawk was coming in for a landing. He resumed his humanoid form and was waiting near the landing pad with his duffle as the ship descended vertically to the ground.
Kelbor didn’t even cut the engine. He just extended the ramp for Joven to board and lifted off before the ramp was fully closed. His handsome features gave no evidence of the emotional turmoil that caused him to run for hours before they arrived. But they could see he wasn’t the same as their last patrol together.
Now Joven was clearly distressed, but grimly holding it in. He nodded in greeting to his team and retreated to his quarters. He spent most of his time there connected to interstellar communications, focusing his attention to the Drayid channels known for humanoid trafficking. He heard his team talking about him, determined to do whatever it took to find Star Traveler and his meomee.
Kelbor, a fellow cyborg had served with Joven in the Drayid war. Joven had always planned to find a mate and make a family like humans who were not sired in Petri dishes and genetically altered. He’d waited years to find his soulmate. Now the cyborg was on the hunt, for the pirate who stole her.
Thodai and Drenag served with both Kelbor and Joven in Law Enforcement after the war. They too were cyborgs. They all knew how focused he became when they were on the hunt for slavers. No one would guess that he was the same person who played practical jokes on them, and told humorous war stories.
He was completely centered on purpose when they dropped out of warp in the Se’Nar system. It took them four and a half rotation sets, about a month, to track the two ships to their destination.
Joven joined them on the bridge as they moved into the orbit of the planet itself.
Carly had lived in fear since the day Crazell had choked her. He had come back to torment her at random intervals. She was an emotional wreck, praying Joven would catch up to them before the pirate did even worse to her. A guard was posted at the lift to prevent them from moving between the two passenger floors, but Crazell was the only one of the pirates that hurt her.
The pirate captain had mentioned Se’Nar, just as Joven thought. Carly didn’t’ know if he shared with the passengers or what would happen when they got there. She was too afraid to leave her cabin to even talk to the other passengers.
It didn’t matter, because Joven warned her that they would probably be sold into slavery. He wa
s on his way, but it had been over three weeks, by her concept of time. Carly just hoped Crazell thought her too valuable as merchandise to kill. Finally, sometime in the fourth week, something shifted that signaled they were dropping out of warp. By the end of the day, Crazell’s men rousted all the passengers out of their cabins and herded them into a cargo shuttle in the landing bay.
Wherever they were going, they were not allowed to take their belongings with them. From what Carly heard from the pirates, they were going down to a planet to be sold. She guessed it had to be Se’Nar as Joven speculated. She also hoped he would arrive before she was sold and taken off world.
When the shuttle landed, the passengers and crew from the Star Traveler were herded into two barracks, one for males and one for females. The shelter was very basic with rows of bunks stacked four high and two small bathrooms for over a hundred occupants. Four men were stationed inside with two at each entrance to ensure none of their merchandise wandered off.
If they didn’t move fast enough, walking from the shuttle port to the barracks, one of the pirates would shove them to make them move faster. One petite female fell onto the gravel and scraped her arms and knees. Carly stopped to help her up and was whacked across the buttocks by Crazell with a strap he carried.
Carly squealed, and he hit her again, but she managed to help the other woman to her feet before he could hit her a third time. By then, he had turned his attention to someone else.
Crazell may have been a feline humanoid, but he seemed to like hurting people, especially women. He was almost as handsome as Joven, but the man had no honor. His eyes held a hardness that spoke of his cruelty, which he directed mainly at women.
Carly wondered how he could be so different from Joven who have been bred and genetically engineered to kill the enemies of the Alliance. Perhaps, Crazell was born to a mother who didn’t want him, who had only made a business arrangement to have children with a feline who never found his soul mate. He could be taking out his resentment on all women.
Joven's Bride Page 4
