Chapter 1 #2
“Looks like she was dehydrated, had lost weight, and her nervous system was firing too fast—all pretty common aftereffects of being submerged in alien goo. Her heart and lungs were okay.”
“Keep going.” He lovingly fingered his weapon and imagined not wasting a shot on Palk but using the weight to slowly and painfully smash Palk’s skull to a pulp. He wished he’d choked him to death in that hospital bed.
“Her ovaries . . .” Kai paused. “Significant decrease in stored eggs. One ovary completely cleaned out.”
He let that settle over him and realized his hands were shaking. “She asked me to find out if that had happened. And I didn’t fucking get around to it. I fucking let her down.”
“You didn’t know it was going to be important, Rehz. It was only when Aled told me about the male-female thing the Ungrich were interested in that it made any sense.”
He didn’t bother to answer. He knew he was at fault. He was fucking cursed . . .
“I’m accessing Aled’s files now. There’s not so much here, just a note about his genetic differences.” Kai shut down the files and erased the link. “What do you want to do now?”
“Find a way into Ungrich space.”
“What about Palk?”
Rehz picked up his weapon. “We’ll talk to him again when we get back.”
Aled tried again. “Why am I here?” The tentacles wrapped around his torso tightened like a hrel snake, and he fought back the urge to struggle. “Why? What do you want from me that I didn’t give you freely last time?”
“Female.”
Aled tried to gather his scattered thoughts. “I’m not female.”
“Human.”
“I have human DNA.” He tried to swallow and gagged on the thick column stuffed down his throat. “What do you fucking want?”
This time there was no answer, and he slipped back into the void, felt the coils of the two connected Ungrich support his weight, then knew no more.
“Why isn’t Palk stopping us?” Kai asked.
“I have no idea. Maybe I killed him.” Rehz shrugged. “I damn well hope I did. All I know is that we are getting close to getting through, and that’s all I care about.”
They had moved on from the main training facility to the inner area where the second stage of development took place. It was close to the only known entrance into Ungrich space below the planet surface.
Kai sighed. “Your single-mindedness is admirable.”
“Whatever Palk wants will have to wait. If we get back here alive, we’ll find out, won’t we?” Rehz surveyed the armory. “Is there anything here that can hurt the Ungrich ?”
“Plenty, but nothing they won’t detect as soon as we enter their space.”
He considered that. “What about a bluff?”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.” He started looking through the archive material on the screen. “I’ll get back to you.”
“I’ll check out the Ungrich portal. We’ve both had access to the security code sequences to open the portal. Let’s hope they still work.”
“You can do it manually, right?”
“Yeah, if we have to. They designed it that way in case the power ever failed, but it’ll take a while.”
“Human.” Aled was gently shaken awake by his hosts. “Come.”
He didn’t waste his breath arguing, and was soon drawn deeper into the goo, past many other Ungrich , and finally into an area bathed in bright light.
“Don’t fight.”
He was suddenly catapulted forward through a thick membrane, leaving only one tentacle wrapped around his neck like an umbilical cord. The thick soup dissipated, and for a few seconds he forgot how to breathe air and floundered on the spongy floor like a grounded fish.
Curled up beside him was another person. He crawled over to her and touched her face.
“Anna Lee?”
She opened her blue eyes, and he flinched at the combination of terror and anger within them. “Aled. What happened?”
“I don’t know. One minute I was having my final medical, the next Palk turned up and everything went black.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No! Gods, no!”
“Then why the fuck am I here?”
He stared at her helplessly and reached for her fisted hand. “I don’t know, but I reckon we’re about to find out.”
“Mate .” The Ungrich controlling him thrust the thought into his mind like a spike through the tentacle embedded in his brain. “Human male and female.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” he thought back.
“Mate.”
He cried out as pain stabbed through his entire body, and the single tentacle wrapped around his throat multiplied into a hundred narrow cords that swarmed over his torso, wrapping tightly around his cock and penetrating his ass.
His cock kicked against the confines of the tentacle, reacting as he’d been trained to any stimulus.
He wanted to rip the Ungrich away from him, but he knew it was pointless.
“Mate.”
“Anna. Can you hear them?”
“Yes.”
He groaned as he was forced to his knees. “I’m sorry. I—”
She caught hold of his shoulders, her gaze now defiant. “It’s okay. We have to survive this. We have to stay alive.” She opened her legs and he surged forward, buried his cock deep inside her, and started to thrust.
Anna opened her eyes to find Aled still slumped over her, his hips now still, his breathing uneven.
Her hand rested on the back of his neck, just below his now-soaked auburn hair.
Gods, she hurt everywhere. She didn’t dare wake him up, because he’d have to start fucking her again and she didn’t think she could stand another round.
She wanted to cry, but suspected she had no moisture left for tears.
The Ungrich environment badly dehydrated her.
And she wouldn’t cry. She’d been here before and survived. She could do it again. Oh gods, but she wanted Rehz so badly . . .
The Ungrich she identified as the dominant member of an integrated pair who were currently inside her spoke in her head. “Where is the offspring?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Offspring. You mated.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Explain.”
“Mating doesn’t always achieve conception.”
“Where is the fetus?”
She sighed. “It’s complicated.”
Pain lanced through her skull.
“Explain.”
Grimly, she attempted to marshal her thoughts—difficult when her head was crowded with fucking aliens and speaking out loud didn’t seem to register with them.
“In order to create a fetus, the male sperm has to fertilize the female egg. The egg has to be in the right place to meet the sperm and start to divide and attach itself to the interior of the uterus. Eggs are only available to fertilize for around five days every month. The baby takes nine Earth months to reach maturity before it can be born.”
Blessed silence followed her explanation and she fell into a doze, only to be awakened by Aled rearing up over her again.
“Mate.”
Aled held himself still over Anna, his muscles straining as he fought the command. “No. She needs to rest.”
“Give her your seed.”
The implacable voice of the Ungrich set his teeth on edge. “I don’t have any left. We both need to recuperate.”
“Offspring.”
He groaned as the thin net of tentacles covering his body began to pulse with energy, inflicting numerous small shocks to his entire nervous system. His teeth chattered as he fought to stay still over Anna, who was watching him intently.
“I can’t . . .”
The tentacles hardened, trapping him inside them like prey caught in a net, and moved his body despite him.
His arms bent at the elbows and he was shoved forward, his cock disappearing inside Anna.
He wanted to shut it all out, but he refused to close his eyes, needing to see Anna, to make sure she was all right.
“I told them we can’t produce a baby in one day,” she whispered as his hips rocked back and forth, plunging his cock in and out of her. “Tell them the same thing. You have to think it. They don’t do speaking.”
He gathered his thoughts and concentrated. “We can’t produce offspring in one day. Conception is not guaranteed. Do you understand?”
There was no reply from his hosts, and anyway he was too busy trying not to scream as his cock tried to come and had nothing left to give.
Silence fell in his head, but the pulsating chamber around them filled with his desperate moans.
He let his eyes close, and only Anna’s soothing hands on his shoulders maintained their emotional connection.
He had no idea how long they were left in the darkness until lights flashed on and something inserted itself through the membrane into their space.
He instinctively tried to put Anna Lee behind him as the tangled mass of reddish tentacles settled in front of them.
Two probes whipped out, capturing them each around the throat.
“Tell me about the process of procreation.”
He repeated his story, and Anna joined in with the pertinent information about female cycles and the likelihood of conception.
“You need more eggs.”
Anna shook her head. “We can only release one or two unfertilized eggs every cycle. You took my eggs, didn’t you? Why haven’t you replicated a human in your lab?”
“Unsuccessful.”
Aled put his arm around her. “We cannot be expected to endure this every day. It is pointless. If a female isn’t ovulating, all the seed in the world won’t make a baby.”
Anna nudged him hard and he shut up, letting her continue. “And you haven’t taken into consideration that humanoids procreate more successfully with their other halves—just like you.”
“We do not require a ‘mate’ to procreate. It is a primitive function.”
“But you are two entities that work together, yes?”
“Other.” The two distinct Ungrich voices spoke as one.
“Aled and I are not Other. We cannot share our thoughts, and we can’t survive for very long without our other halves. We will die. We belong with Rehz Akran and Kai Mexr. They are our Others.”
“We know of these males.”
“If they were here, the chances of Aled and I successfully mating and producing offspring would be far higher.”
Aled let out his breath as the Ungrich released the mind lock and disappeared back through the thick membrane protecting their air.
“Do you think it will work?”
Anna curled up against his side. “I don’t know. Rehz will be coming for me anyway. I just hope that if they believe us, he might be allowed to get through alive.”
Kai turned to see Rehz coming up behind him. He positioned himself by the controls to the door of the vault.
“I’ve rigged it up to let us in and then automatically close, but not lock.” He frowned down at the control panel. “Well. I think that’s what I’ve done. According to the schematics, there is a manual override on the inside of the door as well, so we can technically get out either way.”
“Good.”
“I’ve also sent a secure message to the head of the military and the president about what has happened.
I don’t know if the whole government is in league with Palk, but if they aren’t, they might come looking for us.
It certainly can’t hurt.” He looked up to see Rehz stripping off his weapons. “What happened to your arm?”
“I did a little doctoring on myself.” Rehz inspected the line of black stitches where the blood was still oozing out. “Let’s just call it our insurance policy.”
“You’re attempting to conceal a weapon?”
Rehz’s grin was lethal. “It’s not really a weapon. It’s something I got out of the military archives. It’s old tech and might not be spotted.” He continued to take off his clothes. “Come on, we need to do this. We’re already hours behind them, and Ungrich time moves differently.”
Kai stripped off, shivering in the cold confines of the rock cavern. He tapped in the prepared codes and walked slowly up to the portal, which was beginning to open. “I don’t fucking want to go back in there.”
“Then don’t. I’ll get Anna. You can stay here and let us out.”
He raised an eyebrow at his friend. “And leave Aled?”
“You really like that male, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do. Why do you think I’m standing here?”
Rehz slapped him hard on the back. “Then let’s do this thing.”
The portal opened to reveal the metal floor of the entrance chamber. The only difference he could see since he’d last been in there was that the walls of the room weren’t glistening pink.
“They aren’t here.”
Rehz paused to fiddle with something on the inner side of the door and then came to stand with him in the middle of the platform. “Don’t worry. Shut the door and they will come.”
He watched as the door swung slowly closed, and braced himself for impact.