Mastered by Her Mates (Interstellar Bride Book 0) (4 page)

“Get him out of there!”

“Another ship!”

I lost track of the number of voices as an explosion of light and heat rushed over me from my left side. Debris raced past, traveling faster than my eyes could track as the Hive ship exploded around me.

A sharp, stinging pain erupted in my thigh and I gritted my teeth as the hissing sound of my flight suit losing pressure, and precious air chilled my blood. The suit’s self-repairing system began working immediately to close the seal, to maintain life status. But I was afraid it wasn’t working fast enough.

Still spinning, I closed my eyes and tried to block out everything but the rapid-fire chatter going on in my helmet. Nausea hit me, bile rose into my throat.

“He’s hit, Captain. His suit is losing integrity.”

“How long?”

“Less than a minute.”

“Transport, can you get a lock?” Trisk asked.

“No, Sir. The explosion damaged his transport beacon.”

“Who’s close? Captain Wyle, what’s your status?”

“Six new Hive fighters detected, heading straight for him.”

“Cut them off.” That was Trist.

“On it,” Captain Wyle said.

“No.” I groaned as Wyle then ordered the Fourth Battle Wing on a suicide run with the approaching Hive fighters.

“Damn it! Get him the fuck out of there. Now!” Trist’s bellow made my head ache.

The warning alarms of my body sensors were beeping, as if I didn’t fucking know my blood pressure was dangerously high and my heart rate was too fucking fast.

“Let me take a medical cruiser.” That was Rav.

“No time. Wyle, get a traction beam on him.”

“His suit might disintegrate under the stress.” Rav again.

“It’s that or let the Hive have him,” Trist argued.

I decided to chime in on that one. “Fuck that,” I hissed. “Wyle, do it.” I’d rather explode into a million tiny pieces than end up part of the Hive’s cyborg collective.

“Yes, Sir.”

The energy of Captain Wyle’s traction beam hit me like a brick wall, the force slamming my forehead into my helmet. Hard.

Stars danced before my eyes and I couldn’t stop the scream of agony as it felt like my entire left leg was being ripped off at the knee. Explosions sounded all around, I used counting them as a means to hold on to consciousness.

When I reached five, everything went black.

* * *

Doctor Conrav Zakar, Battleship Zakar, Medical Station

“Is he dead?” The new medical officer’s voice trembled and I didn’t have time to ask his name. Nor did I care.

“Shut the fuck up and help me get him out of his flight suit.” The standard Coalition flight suit was made of nearly indestructible black armor, generated by our ship’s spontaneous matter generators, or MGs, as we called them. I used a laser scalpel to cut away one sleeve before the young officer’s next suggestion slammed me back to reality.

“Why don’t we put him on the MG pad and ask the ship to get rid of it?”

Genius.
Didn’t mean I had to like the little shit. “Let’s move him.”

I grabbed my cousin and best friend beneath the shoulders and lifted with all my Prillon warrior’s strength. I could have carried him myself, but my assistant stepped forward and lifted Grigg under his knees.

He wasn’t dying now. He’d done his fucking job out there in battle and it was my turn to do mine. It wasn’t the time to realize if he hadn’t left his command post, I’d be celebrating with the others instead of bringing him back from the fucking brink. Stupid, hardheaded fucker.

We moved him as carefully as we could to pitch-black pad where the faint green grid-lines of the MG’s scanning sensors quickly went to work examining Grigg’s armor, so we could remove it in stages. The outer layer of Grigg’s armor had so many micro-cuts it looked fuzzy, instead of smooth and hard. Blood dripped from his left boot to hit the floor with a spattering sound that made me grind my teeth. His helmet had been warped to the point that I could not release the locks and remove it. The helmet’s visor was shattered, a thousand tiny cracks obscuring my view of Grigg’s face.

If the bio monitors hadn’t insisted he was still alive in there, his heart still beating, I would never have believed anyone inside this destroyed armor had survived.

I placed my hand on the activation panel and ordered the ship to remove Grigg’s armor. Impatient, I didn’t look away as the faint green light glowed around his body.

When the light faded at last, leaving Grigg naked and bleeding on the pad and my heart stuttered.

“Fuck, Grigg. You’re a mess.” Grigg was covered in blood, his normally dark, golden skin a strange smear of orange and red almost everywhere. His left leg was cut through to the bone halfway between his knee and thigh, blood rushing to the floor with each beat of his heart.

Dropping to my knees I placed a bleed blocker over the wound. It wouldn’t heal him, but it would stop him from bleeding out while I carried his stubborn ass to the ReGen pod.

“I need more help over here!” I shouted. Aids and other techs came running.

“Help me. Careful of his leg.” I lifted him, once more under the shoulders, trying to keep his head from flopping like a loose doll’s. Other hands joined mine and he was quickly lifted from the table.

“ReGen pod?”

“Yes. Immediately.”

We moved as a unit, shuffling quickly to the large, full-body submersion unit used for the most critical wounds.

“Shouldn’t we sedate him first?”

“Shut up or get out,” I growled.

“Yes, Sir.”

The door to the medical station slid open and Captain Trist strode into the room, took one look at Grigg and came to a dead stop. “Is he dead?”

“No. But he will be if we don’t get him into ReGen.”

Trist stepped forward between two techs and helped lift Grigg under his hips. If Grigg had been an average Prillon warrior, we wouldn’t have needed five of us to move him, but he was a fucking seven-foot giant. Grigg, like all members of the warrior class on Prillon Prime, was a big motherfucker at close to three hundred pounds of hard, lean muscle. Built for war, the Prillon race was bigger and stronger than almost any other race in the Coalition. And the Zakar family? Well, Grigg and I belonged to one of the oldest warrior clans on the planet. He was genetically predisposed to be one big motherfucker.

I exhaled in relief as we lowered the commander’s body into the bright blue light of the Regen Pod. The clear cover slid over Grigg’s bruised and battered body automatically, the sensors beginning to work immediately. We stood back and inspected the raw burns and lacerations on his face that were clearly visible.

“He’s lucky he didn’t lost his right eye.” The medical officer who’d assisted me moved by rote over the control panel, adjusting the settings to ensure Grigg would heal at the maximum speed his body would allow.

“He’s lucky he’s not dead.” Trist slammed a blood-covered palm down on top of the clear casing.

He turned to me and I shook my head. “Don’t look at me.”

“You’re his second. Family. Can’t you fucking control him? He can’t keep doing this.” Trist’s rage colored his pale yellow skin a dark gold. “He’s the commander of this battle group, not infantry or a fighter pilot. We can’t afford to lose him.”

“He inspires the men.” The medical officer on the other side of the ReGen pod spoke reverently, awe in his tone. “They talk about him in the cafeteria. Hell, everywhere. They talk about him everywhere.”

“Do you need to be here?” Trist asked.

The medical officer looked at the monitoring panel. “The commander is healing properly. All protocols for his regeneration have been set.”

“Do you need to be here?” Trist repeated.

“Technically, no.” The young recruit looked shocked, his fear of Trist causing his skin to pale to a sickly gray nearly the same color as his uniform. With good reason. The captain was nearly as big as Grigg and twice as mean.

“Leave us.”

In seconds, I was alone with the captain, who slumped into a seat on the edge of the room. “How do we stop him? It’s like he’s insane. Hell, it’s like he’s turned into a raging beast, like a fucking Atlan berserker.”

Now that the danger was past, rage mixed with relief as I took a seat next to Trist where we both could keep an eye on the commander’s unconscious body. Blood coated our hands, our uniforms.

“We can’t stop him.” Staring down at my bloody palms, I wanted to strangle Grigg. I loved him like a brother, but he’d allowed his father’s rage to push him too far. He took too many risks. He was playing a very dangerous game and he was losing. He was alive, so it wasn’t a complete failure, but next time? And the next? Eventually the odds would catch up to him. Next time he really might die.

I’d had enough. Trist’d had enough.

I’d given it a lot of thought, and just one solution presented itself, I just hadn’t mentioned it before. There were no secrets between Grigg and me, but this one, I’d kept. Considered it. Ruled it out in the past. But now, now that he was in a ReGen pod healing a fucking severed femoral artery, broken femur, severe concussion and who knew what the fuck else, it was time.

“We’ll never convince him to stop, but his mate might.”

Trist straightened his legs out in front of him. “He doesn’t have a mate.”

Slowly, I turned to face him. “Then we need to get him one.”

Trist glanced my way. “How do we do that?”

I stood then, pacing. “Right now, you are in command.”

Order of succession was taught on the first day of fighting school. This was not something I had to explain to Trist. “And?”

“He’s a commander in the Coalition Fleet. He’s eligible to request a matched mate through the Interstellar Bride Program. Order me to process him for a matched mate. Order me to put him through the matching protocol.”

Trist’s eyes widened at the very idea. He didn’t live life on a hair trigger like Grigg did. He thought things through, clearly and methodically.

“And when he wakes?”

I grinned. I’d thought this through clearly and methodically, too.

“The processing is subconscious. It’ll be like a dream. He won’t remember a thing until it’s too late. He won’t know what we’ve done until his mate arrives, in the flesh.”

Trist smiled. Holy fuck, the man smiled. I’d never seen him do that before, thought his face was broken or permanently fixed in a benign gaze.

“And then he’ll be too busy fucking her to care—or get into any more fucking trouble.” Trist stared at me for a count of five before he burst out laughing.

I was too shocked by the sound to process his words.

“Do it, Doctor. Get him a mate. That’s an order.”

Chapter Three

Commander Grigg – Private Quarters, Battleship Zakar

For the tenth night in a row, I stared at the ceiling above my bed, restless. Waiting. For
her
.

Who she was, I could not say. A goddess, perhaps? A figment of my imagination? An image conjured by my brush with death?

All I knew was my cock was hard as a rock and the softness of her skin, the tight, wet heat of her pussy chased me into my dreams until I woke moaning and sweating, forced to take my own hand to my hard shaft to ease the discomfort. It didn’t take much, one stroke, maybe two, and I came like a rutting youth.

This
her
was haunting me.

Even now, during the fourth rotation, the least active rotation on the ship’s schedule, when most of my people slept, I could not rest. I had not been able to rest since I woke up in that ReGen pod to Rav’s frown and Captain Trist’s scowl. They hadn’t said a word about my recent scrape with death. They hadn’t needed to. My father had ranted for two hours, until his face was bright orange with rage and I’d worried my ears would begin bleeding. Again.

“Oh, fuck off. All of you.” I spoke to no one, my spacious quarters and huge bed big, though large enough to hold three or four bodies, only held me. Not that I couldn’t find a woman to warm my bed if I wished. I didn’t. At least, I never worried about it overmuch, until now.

When I’d been younger, on leave, I’d had more than enough female companionship to satisfy me. As I’d aged and advanced in rank, the women expected more. It wasn’t enough for them to fuck a strong, young warrior. Now they looked at me with calculation in their eyes. Now, I was a Commander and I had
value
. They didn’t want to fuck
me
, Grigg. They wanted to be
mated
to a Prillon Commander. They wanted status, rank, wealth
and
power.

But fucking and mating were completely different. Fucking was an impersonal few hours of pleasure. Mating was…everything.

My fist gripped my hard length, pulsing and ready for release. Using my thumb, I rubbed along the ridge with each pass. I knew how to get off and it was quick. My body tensed, my breath seized as a murky vision of
her
filled my head and my seed spurted hotly into my hand.

With my balls emptied, for now—I sighed, tossed off the covers and walked naked to the adjoining bathing room. Shit, I was hard again. Maybe there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t about to go tell Rav that my cock kept getting hard at the thought of a beautiful woman. I sighed, gripped my cock again. Yeah, he’d fucking believe that. Worse, he might and then he’d laugh his fucking head off.

A hot shower might ease me to sleep, but first, I had to ease the ache that was growing in my balls once again.

Moments later, I closed my eyes and let the hot glide of water pour over my body. I washed quickly, enjoying the luxury and quiet. We did not require water for bathing, but kept the ancient practice for one simple reason…pleasure.

My hard cock wept, a drop of pre-cum gathered on the tip. Fuck, maybe the ReGen pod had fixed me too well, given me some kind of super-cock, for I’d never been this quick to recover. Wrapping my hand around the thick head, I turned to face the water and leaned back against the shower tube as the heat surrounded me, and I tried to
remember
.

The dream. Her wet pussy. Her full, round breasts. The strange color of her skin, her strange and exotic dark eyes and black hair. She was not a golden Prillon female, but an alien woman. Strange. Beautiful. I’d held her legs open and spread her pussy lips open wide with my rigid—