Graham looked at Mary’s steady expression then slowly turned his head towards Peyton, who was shaking his head and saying, “Maybe in Connecticut they don’t. In Texas, though—”
Mary quickly threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, here we go! Another ‘tough in Texas’ speech! Well, let’s make it clear now, Buster. You’ll never be touching me or our children that way!”
Peyton’s face twisted up to begin to argue, but before he could get a word out, the room was filled with mocking laughter, including from Graham himself, who thought Mary’s resolute expression—and hands-on-the-hips posture was just darling, as was her crazy notions.
Peyton’s face turned bright red. “Just because most of America has forgotten about the proper way for a husband to handle his wife, doesn’t mean I have, Missy! The only reason you’ve never gotten a good hidin’ is because you’ve never given me a reason. Keep up your naggin’, though, and see where you end up!”
Mary sputtered angrily, looking too taken aback by Peyton’s threat to fully contrive words.
“I LOVE humans. I want one!” Thorton finally blurted, looking merrily entertained by the tense energy surging between the couple. “She is SO cute.”
“Learn when to shut up, Thorton,” Mary demanded, turning her head to glare daggers at him.
“What I really hope to see is when she gets to Swaraan and is absolutely shocked by how much goes on there. Hell, the Admiral took a belt to me until I was eighteen!” he continued. Then, thoughtfully, he added, “Which is odd, really—because I don’t think he punished Graham since he was thirteen… And he wasn’t my father….”
“It’s because you never did learn when to shut up,” replied Graham with a laugh. It was true—when he had grown up with Thorton, Graham’s father, the High Admiral, had taken him under-wing as his own, especially because Thorton’s own father was dead, and his mother was small and feeble, even before the plague when she finally passed on.
Graham finally looked over at Mary, who was so upset that she was practically shaking. “You do need to get over it. That’s the way things are: children and naughty wives get punished.”
“Naughty wives?” she replied venomously. “What the Swarii need is to wake up to modern times! Put away all the misogyny,” she decided sternly. “Start acting like an intellectual species!”
“Well, if our culture upsets the little human girl, let’s change!” said Fie, who was normally quite quiet, from across the room where he was at the navigating controls. “Let’s just throw about a hundred years and the heritage of several species of our ancestors out the window—better to do that than to offend your delicacies.”
Graham put up a hand as if to calm Fie, who still looked quite insulted and defensive. “Have patience with her, Fie,” he instructed. “She doesn’t know better.”
“No. I do know better,” assured Mary stubbornly, stomping out of the room. “Troglodytes.”
As she stormed into the hall, all the men looked towards Peyton, who shrugged. “Nope. I don’t know what that meant, either.”
* * *
Even before any of the humans were called in for a medical examination by Fie, the girls were already in a nasty mood. Ellie woke up with the taste of soap still in her mouth and a sore rear end, and, as she was trying to avoid her punisher, had found Mary immediately when she braved leaving the bedroom. She quickly discovered that Mary was all in a huff.
Still, Mary was in the mood to sympathize with Ellie about her chastisement. “It’s not right! None of it!” Mary assured her with fervor. “I want to go back to Earth.”
“Supposedly it’s about a two month trip that way,” Ellie mumbled, pointing towards the back of the ship. “I already asked. And trust me, you have no idea how much I wish we could be home, too. Since I got abducted, it’s been one long train of aliens sticking their fingers up my tush and then abusing it. Now, I have some sort of strange addiction to an alien’s peeper—there’s nothing I can do to get away. Once I think I’m done with this stupid ‘sickness’ of theirs, it comes back! And then I’m at Graham’s feet again!”
“I was about to say—you look pretty feverish,” Mary acknowledged, with a sad smile. “So, I guess you believe all that union stuff now?”
“Believe it? Ha! I live it.” Ellie shook her head. “Maybe I’m not all human.”
“Hell, I could have told you that!” Mary replied immediately, grinning.
Ellie didn’t look amused by the joke. “Seriously—you really have no idea the weird stuff that has been going on in my brain. I really think I’m other. Why else would I be like this? And the thing is: I’m not even very well equipped for sex. I can barely walk afterwards—I swear last time I pulled my groin,” she complained. “His peepers is, like… BIG.”
Mary made a face of disgust. “Really, I don’t need that much detail.”
Ellie chuckled. “Ah. I get it. So, I get the gory ass-sex details back at the palace, but now that I have a story to share, nobody wants to hear it?”
Mary nodded. “Yep. That’s pretty much right.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, her face still looking angry as she went back to the original topic. “You know, I graduated the first in my class at Harvard. First in my class! I was gonna be something. Someone. I worked my ass off to get my MD! And then, poof! I get abducted and before you can say, ‘Tim Gunn’, I’m a seamstress slave trying to avoid eye contact from my alien masters, being sold, then bought, then bought and sold…”
“Hey, at least you got into OUR palace in the end. Peyton fell head-first when he first looked at you. Know what he did the first time WE met? Strapped me! Hard. And I hadn’t even been spanked before in my life! It was a FINE how-do-you-do, let me tell ya!” Ellie grumped.
Mary looked up at the ceiling, shaking her head. “That man can be a real ogre. And this living on Swaraan isn’t going to help him one bit. It’s already making him more macho then ever!”
“And just when I thought Peyton couldn’t get any more macho...”
“You and I know two different Peytons. I know the sweet, kind, careful, thoughtful-leader Peyton, and you know the brotherly-fatherly, protective, self-righteous, easily-frustrated Peyton,” she noted. “Although, now that the commander’s in the picture, and he doesn’t have you or the other girls anymore to vent to, I’m beginning to see more and more of the Peyton YOU know.”
“Ha!” Ellie gloated in response. “Well, hopefully the sex is good, that’s all I can say.”
Mary’s face blushed. “It’s very good, actually… It was everything I ever hoped it could be.”
“Good, because the brute is all yours.” Ellie’s eyes suddenly squinted into slits. “I still have to get even with him, though, for turning me in. The prick. The traitor!”
“I can’t believe you keep letting them manhandle you—men. I would never let Peyton put a hand on me.”
Ellie sized Mary up—Mary was about four inches taller than her, maybe a tad bit more muscular, about nine years older… But Ellie still raised a doubting eyebrow. “LET doesn’t have a damned thing to do with it, honey. I’m somehow married to a seven-foot Swarii, and YOU’RE married to a six-and-a-half-foot BEAST. You’ll not let him spank you as much as I don’t let them spank me.”
“It just wouldn’t happen,” assured Mary stubbornly, closing her eyes.
“Uh-huh,” Ellie said, slinking away, feeling a little slighted. Was she weak? Is that why she’d been spanked? Or did Mary absolutely have no idea what she was talking about?
During and after the conversation, all Ellie was thinking about was her last spanking; reliving it. She had asked for it, she knew that—it was that submissive new part of her that did it. Did the same part keep her from fighting?
She looked over in Mary’s direction, jealous. She began to think that maybe she had a way to keep spankings from happening; that Mary was right. She’d stick to her guns.
And then she spent the rest of the afternoon getting manhandled by Fie, who—standing eve
n a foot taller than Graham put Andre the Giant to shame—manipulated her fighting movements like she was an angry kitten. He made short work out of his unfortunate task to get x-rays and take blood samples from her, Peyton and Mary.
She left with a glance towards Mary as if to say, “I’d like to see YOU try.”
Mary merely smirked at her and shook her head as if Ellie was just being silly.
Chapter Seven
The next afternoon, Graham was running diagnostics on the engine when he found Fie, who was usually a quiet, calm fellow, running in his direction, shouting with excitement.
Graham prepared himself for bad news, as he always did when someone was running in his direction. “What’s wrong?”
“I finally got your wife’s blood work tested… twice.” He looked a little unsure about himself, then shrugged. “Alright, I tested it three times.” He passed an electronic clipboard toward Graham, who looked more than slightly concerned as he leafed through it.
Graham looked down at the summary. His look of concern morphed into one of confusion. “That can’t be accurate.”
“That was my first and second thought about it,” Fie replied. “She has no robocuffin in her blood. None whatsoever! Now, humans naturally don’t have it; it’s not grown in any food items on earth, and so humans don’t crave it naturally. BUT Ellie is only one-eighth Swarii; ONLY one-eighth, and her genetic makeup still recognizes robocuffin as an essential amino acid. But since it hasn’t had access to it, the part-humans in her family naturally tried to substitute something similar, with only a fraction of robocuffin’s properties, just to stay alive.
“In short, I don’t think she’s functioning anywhere near the level she’s capable of. Her brain patterns should work more like ours, and her lifespan should be equivalent—her systems just need robocuffin to do what they’re designed to do.
“And that’s not all—humans are one of the most contagion-reluctant species I’ve ever come across. You should SEE all the antibodies. In the short amount of time that the race has existed, they have seen probably three times more diseases than we have with all of the races the Swarii are made of, put together. If THEY had been hit with the Frians’ plague fifteen years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even noticed. They already had all the antibodies necessary to resist the virus, for example. All of them.”
“So…” Graham looked through chart after chart, test after test. “That’s why we were able to have the union. She IS a desirable genetic match.”
“Personally, I think a Human-Swarii breeding program would be better suited than when the Libii and the Swaraan melded together. There, both sides had to make sacrifices—the Swaraan got weaker and the Libii got stupider when they both became the Swarii. BUT this would be a straight-up win-win with very few concessions. Especially for male Swarii.”
“If the humans weren’t so naturally stubborn, you mean.” Graham smirked as he passed back the report. “They’re not particularly open-minded, are they?”
Fie shrugged. “Well, genetically speaking it’s a good match. Worth presenting to the federation, at least. If we could start by making an alliance with the humans, they might come around to the idea naturally…”
“Possibly,” Graham granted. “I can pull some strings, get you an audience with some people, if you’d like. I’ll be attaching your findings in our mission report. But personally, I’ve been feeling concerned about more intimate matters. For example, things like how often we are able to have intercourse without hurting her, how hard I’m allowed to discipline her, things of that nature… Also, basic care.”
Fie nodded, realizing that he was eventually going to have to test such things anyway. “I could tell you a thing or two about basic care,” he claimed. “Humans have complex diets, for example, but Ellie even more so, since she has to merge both of our diets together—get all the necessary vitamins. I suggest giving her an injection of robocuffin every month; try to get her up to the right levels. And I suggest for her nine hours of sleep a night, and one or two hours every afternoon…”
“Dear lord, man! She’s not a cat!” Graham laughed.
“Actually, it’s more on par with a small child. Humans sleep for muscle regeneration, general rest, psychological reasons—reasons more on par with a developing Swarii than an adult, for certain. Every human’s different when it comes to this—Mary and Peyton don’t need as much sleep, as shows from their tests, which were even different than the human data we have on file. That’s just Ellie. Humans are… different. More unique. It’s pretty interesting.
“As for discipline—obviously, she’s female and small. You can’t use all the strength in your arm, of course, but she’s not any more fragile than a Swarii child of her size. You can get a message through, fine enough—it’s not as if she heals slowly. Discipline her as much as is necessary.
“If you’d like me to run some other tests, I can check her anal and vaginal durability and elasticity… She just won’t like it,” Fie offered, grinning a bit at even imagining the scandalous look in Ellie’s face that would appear if told to spend the afternoon getting an enema preceded by being vaginally and anally plugged.
Graham snorted, obviously imagining the same look. “No, I could assure she won’t. I don’t want to put her through that right now, anyway. She had her first disciplinary session with me just yesterday, and she’s still a bit sore about it. Get the injection of robocuffin ready, however.”
“Yes, Sir,” Fie said, bowing his head, watching how the commander walked away toward the engine room with far more spring in his step.
* * *
“No! Noo!” Ellie pulled against Graham enough that he was literally pulling her arm across the floor. “I said no! I gave him blood, isn’t that enough?”
Graham stopped moving and Ellie was suddenly on the floor. “Do I literally have to drag you all the way there?”
“I’m not getting any of your alien tonic injected into my veins,” she insisted with a pout. “I’m fine without it. What the hell is robocuffin anyway? It sounds like what happens when somebody pisses the Terminator off.”
“I’m beginning to think that I didn’t spank you enough yesterday,” he noted, looking down at her with his hands on his hips. “I was too soft.”
“Didn’t seem soft to me,” she replied, but she refrained from moving. “Besides, you can’t solve EVERYTHING with violence, Graham. Didn’t you have a Lamb Chops equivalent to teach you that when you were young?”
“No.”
“I have rights, you know,” she informed.
This was beginning to get embarrassing. He’d seen four-year-olds get dragged to get shots in a more dignified manner. It was safe to say she didn’t trust aliens, but she had to realize by now that she wasn’t completely human herself, so not letting him make any calls in regards to her health were beginning to become offensive.
Graham sighed and picked her up and instead of pulling her this time, he carried her under his arm. She was tiny enough that her toes barely skirted the ground as she flailed. “And do you want me to execute MY rights?” he replied angrily.
“Help! I’m being subjected to dictatorship! My rights are being infringed!” she yelled into Peyton and Mary’s room as they passed by. Peyton was hanging upside down in the doorway by his knees doing curl-ups.
Ellie heard Peyton chuckle and say something to Mary, but needless to say, he didn’t seem to care about the fact that she was being forced into doing something against her will. Of course he didn’t, she fumed. The traitor!
The medical bay was a horrible place, in Ellie’s opinion. It was sterile, white, blaring, and had sharp things everywhere. When Graham put Ellie down on the ground, he flung her easily forward until she ran head-on into Fie’s stomach.
“A little nervous, Kitten?” Fie chuckled in his soothing baritone voice and his normal fatherly tone. “Don’t be. You’ll be just fine.”
Ellie had obviously decided that she was not going to be subdued by Fie’s n
atural, radiating calm. She tried to make it quickly towards the door, hoping to make it past Graham somehow.
It didn’t work. Fie picked up her struggling body and placed her down over his knee. “I thought you were giving me a shot!” she screeched, not liking the position she was in one bit.
“I am,” he assured, flipping up the hem of her shirt and then gripping the edge of her pants.
She flung her hands both back to keep the pants up. “No! You are not giving me a shot in my ass! Stop it! Put me down!” She held onto the hem of her pants until her knuckles turned white.
“Ellie, behave.” The sternness in Graham’s voice was more demanding than any amount of glaring. “You’re embarrassing me.”
Still, she continued to fight. “I don’t care! I don’t want anything poking me!”
“Did she give you this much trouble yesterday?” Graham worried, watching her struggle with a certain amount of interest.
“Yep,” Fie replied. “Only it wasn’t as easy as this will be.” With one firm tug, her pants and panties were suddenly around her knees, despite her grip. A tearing noise could be heard through the air.
She gasped; her mind rattled with what to complain about now. There was too much. Her face was turning a bright crimson color as she imagined how ridiculous she probably looked over Fie’s lap, scissoring her legs around. Her arms barely even hung down towards the floor in this position. Fie was large even for a Swarii; towered a whole foot over all the others. She felt like a baby when she even stood next to him, let alone was forced to be subdued in this position. “You broke my pants!” she finally accused shrilly.
Fie pinned her hands at the small of her back with one hand; it was so easy for him that it nearly offended her.
“Fie! I thought we were friends!” she continued, then all of the sudden, her body went frigid as she felt a sharp poke on her left bottom cheek. A burn seeped slowly through her flank—it was painful and reminded her of the way her dentist used to shoot Novocain into her gum as if he was trying to torture her on purpose.
Never Submit! The Swarii Brides, Book One Page 11
