Hunters Mate

by Hunter's Mate (lit)

  “But how will I be able to monitor the process? That will never work--”

  “Human’s prefer privacy for copulation--most of the time. Victoria has requested we conduct our mating rites in a secluded place and one that is more comfortable than the cell.”

  Cherra grimaced. “I have half a dozen tests I plan to run during coitus. All that data will be lost during a private encounter.”

  Kash battled to keep his voice even. “What is more important, conception or a complete cataloging of the sexual act itself?”

  Cherra huffed and the instruments she’d been cleaning clattered in their metallic bins. “I don’t know why we’re suddenly allowing the hybrid to dictate these things. First she requests to be moved from the infirmary, then she demands to eat crew rations rather than the supplements I’ve painstakingly prepared for her with her specific physiology in mind. Now she wants privacy for mating. Weren’t you supposed to impress upon her the fact that she is, ultimately, a prisoner?”

  It was Kash’s turn to make a face. “The success of the breeding program relies on Victoria. In order to complete our objective, I would think making a few extra concessions for her comfort would be immaterial.”

  Cherra turned to face him. “Victoria? You’ve begun referring to her by her name. Despite your initial reluctance, it seems you are beginning to bond with her.”

  The curious glint in Cherra’s amber eyes made Kash uncomfortable. He’d noticed, too, that he no longer thought of Victoria as ‘the hybrid female’. He’d come to respect her and even enjoy her company, though he hesitated to call their interactions ‘bonding’. He swallowed his objections. “Obviously. Why else would I be preparing my quarters for the mating process?”

  “Good! Good. You’d better get started then.” Cherra turned back to her instruments. “I suppose I can take my readings shortly after coitus rather than during, though the conditions won’t be ideal. By my calculations, her fertility cycle is underway, so today would be perfect for conception. Go, do it now.”

  Kash could think of no comment other than to excuse himself from the infirmary. Being ordered to copulate would have seemed amusing under any other circumstances.

  Today was indeed a perfect day, but not for mating.

  * * * *

  Victoria lay on Kash’s narrow bed, trying to still her runaway thoughts. She’d been on the Katavarri for three days now, while her steak dinner sat defrosting on the kitchen counter at home. Had her parents tried to call again?

  If they hadn’t been able to contact her they would probably have called Chief Walters by now. She’d bet the police were crawling all over the farm. Her parents would be frantic. They were probably racing home from the other side of the planet right now, imagining every horrible scenario that could happen to a woman alone on a secluded farm.

  And here she was lying on the bed of a Sha-Shiri double agent, wondering, on top of everything else, just what was so wrong with her that he had ‘absolutely no intention’ of mating with her.

  It shouldn’t have bothered her. In fact, logically, she should have been relieved that Kash wasn’t planning on impregnating her for the cause of scientific research. Unfortunately, her fragile human ego couldn’t take any more rejection. She’d been prepared to fight him off, maybe even let him get to second base just so she could feel that velvety skin against her again. Whenever he touched her, her heart fluttered and her nerves jumped. She wanted to feel his tongue on her skin, his long fingers dancing over her body, delving into her core.

  But he didn’t want her, not even out of curiosity or in the name of peaceful human/Sha-Shiri relations.

  It irked her to no end and made her wish Mark Beck was in front of her just so she could tell him off again, and again, and again.

  When the door to Kash’s quarters opened, she jumped. Guilt at the naughty direction of her thoughts heated her cheeks. “There you are! I was worried. What took you so long?”

  Kash crossed the room and stood beside the bed. “I stopped in engineering. I had to wait until Ashan took his meal break.”

  “Is everything ready, then?”

  “Yes. Cherra believes we are engaged in intercourse. The captain is resting and Ashan is eating in the common room. I’ve prepared the sedation gas to be disbursed throughout the ship except for the storage capsule where you and I will be waiting.”

  Victoria rose and tried to ignore the tremor in her knees. Until this moment, she’d put all her faith into Kash’s expertise, but now doubt crept over her resolve. If this coup failed, if Kash was exposed as an Avan’tek spy, she’d end up as chattel--nothing more than the hybrid female breeder. Maybe Kash wasn’t interested in having sex with her, but some other Sha-Shiri male probably wouldn’t mind.

  “I’m a little nervous,” she confessed as he took her hand and led her from the room.

  “All will be well. Hurry. The gas canister is on a timed release. We have four minutes to reach the capsule.”

  They hurried through the corridors to the lower decks of the ship where the only sound was the hum of the massive engines that propelled the Katavarri toward the sun.

  The storage capsule was no bigger than a broom closet. In fact, it held what appeared to be cleaning supplies and smelled faintly antiseptic. Kash literally pushed Victoria inside and followed after her, pulling the air tight door shut behind them.

  Enveloped in darkness, her body pressed against his velvety chest, Victoria could do nothing but concentrate on her own breathing.

  This close to him, his masculine scent filling her lungs with each nervous, shallow inhalation, she felt both lightheaded and supremely protected.

  She caught her breath and a tingle of awareness skated along her taut nerve endings when one of his arms came around her waist.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered the words against his chest. Her fingers brushed the flat oval of his nipple and he tensed. Did she imagine his sharp intake of breath at the intimate contact?

  Beneath Victoria’s cheek, his voice rumbled like thunder. “I’m counting seconds. Soon the gas will fill the ship. After two minutes it will dissipate to a safe level and we will be able

  to--”

  “I meant, with your hand.” His fingers had slid down to the curve of her ass and the pressure on her flesh seemed a little firmer than absolutely necessary in the tight confines of the capsule.

  “I’m holding you.”

  “Why?” The question slipped out on a tremulous sigh.

  “There is no alternative in this small space.”

  He had her there. Of course in this intimate position, he had her, period. She longed to spread her legs to accommodate his hips between her thighs. The leather harness he wore was pressing into her belly through her thin sweat pants and beneath it, she was certain she felt the rigid outline of his cock against her leg. Or was it simply the hard shell he wore beneath his loin cloth that protected his vitals from a knee in the groin?

  “How much longer?” she asked as if she wanted their incarceration to end.

  “Another minute. Your skin is growing damp. Are you ill?”

  “I’m sweating. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a little warm in here.”

  “That’s an effect of our oxygen usage. You feel warmer because the carbon dioxide level in the capsule is rising with each breath we take.”

  “Oh, is that why?” Victoria shifted and Kash’s hand dropped a little lower. If she hadn’t been sweating a moment ago, she certainly was now. “For someone who isn’t turned on by humans, you don’t have a problem copping a feel, do you?”

  “Copping a feel?”

  Victoria wiggled in a vain attempt to dislodge Kash’s hand from her rear end. The movement only served to increase the friction of his hard abdominal muscles against hers. She considered reaching back and plucking his long fingers from her rump, but in all honesty, she didn’t want to do that.

  She looked up into complete blackness, but she imagined his beautiful feline features and won
dered if, like a human male, his innocence was all an act.

  “Time is up. It should be safe for us to exit now.”

  “Should be?”

  Now his hand did drop and devoid of his touch, she felt bereft. He opened the door of the capsule and they stumbled into the dimly lit corridor beyond.

  She watched him sniff the air and rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think if you could still smell it, we’d be asleep by now?”

  He merely blinked at her. Men. Didn’t matter what planet they came from, they were all from Mars.

  “I will retrieve Ashan and the captain. You will secure Cherra-Sha. Put her in the holding cell in the infirmary and be sure to lock the force shield. Do you remember the code?”

  “I remember the symbols you showed me.”

  “Good. Hurry. They will remain sedated for little more than an hour.”

  Victoria nodded and pivoted in the direction they’d come from. Hopefully the Sha-Shiri healer wasn’t as heavy as she looked. It wouldn’t be easy dragging her body into the holding cell.

  * * * *

  Kash watched Victoria until she rounded the bend in the corridor then took off in the opposite direction, pausing momentarily to adjust the codpiece beneath his loincloth.

  Despite his personal stance on breeding with humans, having her rub her smooth, supple body against him in the warm, close confines of the storage capsule had aroused him. His sex organ had grown full and pulsed intermittently with the need for sexual release. Obviously he’d reacted to her female scent, which was surprisingly similar to that of a full-blooded Sha-Shiri.

  He’d detected the subtle aroma of estrus in her musk which signaled fertility and naturally caused an answering chemical response for which he could not be held responsible. He could not fight instinct, of course. Therefore, he reasoned, his arousal was perfectly natural. Resisting the instinct to mate would not be easy, but he was a civilized being after all.

  He forced himself to think of other things, such as the myriad tasks he’d have to perform once the crew had been safely incarcerated in the holding cell.

  That calmed his ardor considerably, but despite his best efforts, images of Victoria plagued him. Would she respond as a Sha-Shiri female would to sexual stimulation? Would she purr for him and anchor herself to his body with her blunt human claws while he slid his sex organ deep inside her slick channel?

  Would she orgasm the way a Sha-Shiri female did, with howls and cries of ecstasy and inner tremors that would squeeze streams of his hot seed deep into her womb?

  Kash halted his trek to the bridge and took a moment to berate himself for such aberrant thoughts. He was not here to impregnate the hybrid female. He had to remind himself that his people were dedicated to exactly the opposite--preserving her integrity and saving her from the Val’teks’ damnable breeding program. How could he entertain such savage thoughts?

  Shame replaced his arousal, unpleasant but effective at calming his desire. With his mission foremost now in his mind, he entered the bridge.

  There he found Sirris slumped in his command chair. Rather than moving to lift the sleeping captain and carry him to the infirmary, Kash froze. Every nerve in his body went taut and every hair on his body stood on end.

  Something was wrong. In the forward view screen Earth’s sun loomed large and nearly blinding even with the Katavarri’s thickest shields in place.

  By now, the ship should have been almost at the perigee of its partial orbit, picking up speed to slingshot around the star and into deep space toward the Sha-Shiri homeworld, but the navigation controls were all dark. As were the captain’s eyes.

  Sirris was not asleep and the Katavarri was not on course.

  Chapter Six

  Victoria wrapped both arms around her middle and hugged herself, partly for comfort and partly to stop her own shivering. She didn’t know much about Sha-Shiri physiology, but she knew dead when she saw it.

  A wave of despair washed over her at the thought of telling Kash that somehow the sedative gas he’d released had killed Cherra-Sha instead of merely putting her to sleep.

  How would Kash react? Surely he’d be shocked and devastated. Victoria believed wholeheartedly that he had no intention of permanently hurting the Val’tek members of the Katavarri’s crew. Was she wrong to give him the benefit of the doubt?

  When he arrived in the infirmary with Sirris’s limp body in his arms, she tensed and curled a little deeper into herself. She took a deep breath, still unsure of how to break the news to him.

  “The captain is dead,” he said before she could make her lips form words. Sirris lay on the next medical cot, his head lolled to one side, his once brilliant blue eyes now a dull silvery gray, just like Cherra’s amber ones had become.

  Victoria huffed out a startled breath. “Uh...”

  “I know. Cherra is dead, as well.”

  “What...could have happened? Was it an overdose, or an allergic reaction to the sedative gas?”

  Kash turned his golden eyes on her, his features set like stone. “It was murder.”

  * * * *

  Kash held himself stiff and aloof, resisting the urge to move to Victoria’s side and comfort her. She looked lost. Her round eyes were wide and her face was paler than usual. He pretended not to notice that she shrank from him as he moved around the medical cot on which he’d placed Sirris’s corpse.

  “I did not kill them.”

  “I didn’t think ... I mean--”

  “You are naturally afraid that I’m capable of this kind of retaliation.”

  She shook her head. “No! I’m not, I just ... who?”

  “Ashan. Listen to this.” Kash crossed the room and activated the external communication channel which had picked up and recorded Ashan-Kona’s last transmission.

  In Sha-Shiri, the Katavarri’s engineer said, “I have completed my mission. The Val’tek traitors are dead, along with the hybrid abomination. I have set the Katavarri on a collision course with the system’s star and I await rendezvous beyond the orbit of the fourth planet. Hail Sha’tek!”

  “He says he has--”

  “I know exactly what he said. I understand Sha-Shiri.”

  Kash stared at Victoria and in spite of his anger at Ashan, his esteem for the human female rose even higher. To have learned her father’s language marked her as extremely intelligent. To have kept the knowledge secret this long marked her as clever and insightful. It also meant he wouldn’t have to struggle with the difficult human words anymore.

  “Looks like you weren’t the only spy on board,” she said.

  “Apparently.”

  Victoria sighed and released the tight grip she’d held around her midsection. Her hands shook and she clamped them around the rails of the nearest medical cot to still them. “In a sad way, the joke’s on him. We’re still alive, so his mission failed.”

  “Well--”

  She stiffened and Kash smelled her fear. “Well what?”

  “He hasn’t succeeded yet, nor has he failed. He has taken the Katavarri’s life pod. He’s also disabled and damaged the navigation controls--I assume as a failsafe in case any of us did manage to survive the poison gas he’d placed in the atmosphere ventilator. Released at the same time as the sedative gas I planted, it probably killed Sirris and Cherra before the sedative even had a chance to take effect. He then set a course directly into the chromosphere of the sun.”

  Victoria nodded as if the news were no more surprising than a weather report. Her eyes seemed to lose focus. “You can fix that, can’t you?”

  “I’m no engineer. I can attempt to stall the engines, but I don’t believe I can restore navigation control. That would leave us in a slowly decaying orbit. I believe that might buy us enough time to repair the long range communications, but it would take weeks for a distress signal to reach Sha-Shiri. By then, if the Sha’tek didn’t intercept the message first and come back to finish us off, we’d be long dead.”

  Victoria straightened her spine and her che
st expanded with a deep, shuddering breath. Kash feared for a moment she might be preparing for an emotional outburst, but when she spoke, her voice was flat and even. “How ‘long dead’ exactly? What happens when we hit the chromosphere?”

  “I calculate we have two days before the shields fail and the heat within the ship becomes unbearable. The hull will remain intact for a while longer, but there is always the danger of a thermal column or solar flare engulfing the ship. The engines would explode, which would be the swiftest and most desirable end. I’d much rather perish in an instant than be baked into dust over the course of several days.”

  “Thanks for that visual. You’re basically saying we’re either going to boil like a can of pork and beans dropped in a campfire, or we’re going to go off like a roman candle on the Fourth of July?”

  Kash shrugged. “If by that you mean we will either die from the intense heat or from a sudden, violent explosion, then yes, those are our options at the moment.”

  “You call those ‘options?’” She stepped towards him now, hands on her hips, her green eyes blazing. Her sudden defiance intrigued Kash. Anger would carry her much father than fear, but would either emotion be productive in the end?

  “I believe there is one more choice,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “I could vent the atmosphere into space and end our suffering at a time of our own choosing.”

  “Great. That’s a great option. Why wait?” She whirled away from him and strolled out of the infirmary muttering to herself.

  Kash hesitated only a moment before taking off after her. He followed her down the corridor and through the common room, across the bridge and into the access hallway that led to the emergency airlock. He’d only shown her the route briefly and it impressed him that she remembered.

  “What are you doing? Victoria, if you open the airlock, we will both be dragged out into space.”

  She hurled an untranslatable phrase at him over her shoulder before ripping open the protective cover on the airlock control pad. Kash reached out to stop her, then realized she had no way of knowing the control codes. She could press buttons at random all day and never activate the lock. He stood back, arms crossed over his chest, and watched her.