Ferun's Mate: Alien Breeding Romance (Celoch Breeders Book 1) Read online

  Ferun’s Mate

  Celoch Breeders #1

  J. S. Betourne

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Author’s Note

  1

  “I can’t believe I’m sitting in this room,” said the a’Jebek. He rocked back and forth in his seat, unaware of how pathetic he looked. “Forty-thousand residents of the city and they chose me.”

  Ferun spared a glance in his direction.

  The a’Jebek went on, “When I entered, I didn’t believe they would choose me. I can’t wait to meet her. I think. I don’t know. I may be sick.”

  Ferun couldn’t resist.

  “No one chose you,” he said. “Chance selected you, not merit. And you need not be nervous. The female is likely to reject you and choose a more suitable candidate to provide her with offspring.”

  It was absurd, the idea of anyone choosing an a’Jebek worker for this. They were seldom trusted to mind the fisheries. It defied reason that one would be entrusted with the care of a female—their most precious resource.

  While the male beside him slumped down in his seat, Ferun sat with his back straight, feeling somewhat satisfied. Someone in the back of the room murmured empty words of reassurance while another failed to stifle a laugh.

  The room was divided down the middle, five males that had been selected via a drawing and five that had been chosen. Ferun was among the exemplars, chosen for outstanding performance within his field. Even among them, he was exceptional, enough that he might have even been chosen if the females had been doled out in accordance with yasn. Ferun was one of only a dozen first yasn on Jedth and was arguably more important than at least half of the others. There was also the fact that Ferun was partly responsible for the females being there.

  Jedth was their newest colony and over twenty light years from the core system where their council resided. When the colony vessel containing a hundred humans had been procured, it had been up to the local council to decide whether to keep them on the colony or send them along to the core. By rights, they should have gone to where the high council could oversee their distribution. Several hardliners had argued as much, but it had ultimately been Ferun’s swing vote that had kept them on the fledgling colony.

  He’d also had a hand in deciding how they’d be distributed, though he wasn’t truly satisfied with the end solution. He would have preferred ninety percent of the females go to exemplars, rather than half. It felt like such a waste of exceptional genetics.

  The air grew thick with anticipation as the door slid open. An engineer appeared, his eyes fixed on the tablet in his hand. When he glanced up, Ferun saw that it was Serus, an a’Sejan engineer. In Ferun’s experience, those from the Sejan line were either arrogant, insufferable, or both. Serus had a touch of both traits, but like most social engineers, he was mostly good-natured.

  His eyes fell on Ferun.

  “Esn-Ferun.”

  He addressed Ferun with a respectful tilt of his head. It was another reason that Ferun was inclined to like him. Most engineers, even those of the lower callings, considered themselves to be above soldiers. They weren’t, of course, but they also weren’t obligated to show proper respect to soldiers as a worker might.

  Ferun stood and followed him out of the room. His body felt unusually rigid and his pulse hitched.

  To his surprise, there was no female waiting in the hall. He turned to Serus, his lips pressed thin.

  “She’s still in the holding room,” Serus said. He’d read Ferun’s expression easily, as social engineers were apt to do. “We’re going to retrieve her now. The walk will give us time to review procedure.”

  To ashes with procedure, Ferun thought. He’d spent the past year of his life learning procedure for how to have and maintain a female. All that was left was to acquire her.

  “Tell me about her,” Ferun said, already walking swiftly in the direction of the human biome.

  Serus, with his long a’Sejan legs, kept pace easily. Artfully, he managed to both address Ferun’s question and proceed with his own agenda of protocol review.

  “She was pulled from stasis with no adverse effects. She’s fully inoculated and has received therapy to correct human cellular degradation. She’s passed her mental checks, but they aren’t a science yet. We still have a lot to learn about the human mind, so if you perceive any abnormalities you must contact us at once and we’ll perform an intake to monitor her. Remember that she’s capable of self-harm.”

  Ferun thought that if they could correct human aging, they should also be able to correct the human predisposition toward self-harm. He was no engineer, but it seemed to him to be a horrendous flaw in the human design. They would not only harm themselves but even go as far as to take their own lives. It concerned him to think that his offspring might inherit such an aberration, but it couldn’t be helped. The potential benefits far outweighed the risk.

  “I want to know about her,” Ferun said. “It’s been two months since she was pulled from stasis and I’ve been told nothing.”

  “That’s because we finalized the selection this morning,” Serus said, his calm demeanor countering Ferun’s impatience. “We didn’t know which of them would be yours until a few hours ago. I know it’s frustrating, but our priority was to prepare them for our society and for Jedth. Only once we were confident that they were ready could we consider pairing them with a partner.”

  “And the pairing, you’re certain we’ll be compatible?”

  Serus rolled his shoulders. “It’s the first wave. The price you pay for being at the front of the line is a level of uncertainty.” With a faint smile, he added, “We’re fairly confident they’ll be good matches, at least from a genetic standpoint. We can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy one another.”

  Ferun could only nod. In all the time he’d been preparing for his female, he had given very little thought to whether or not he would like her. That had felt irrelevant, and even now as the moment approached, it seemed like such a small thing. Her purpose was to give him offspring, not to be his friend. Yes, she would have to live with him, but he had plenty of cause to be outside of his residence. If he so desired, he could return home only when she was ready to breed.

  He doubted she would be that objectionable. He’d only seen a handful of the females but all of them had been utterly captivating. With each encounter, he’d felt something akin to a tight fist wrapping around his gut. Weeks later, his mind would still conjure images of them. It wasn’t uncommon for him to wake in a cold sweat, his hands grasping in vain for one of those soft, small bodies.

  It didn’t matter if he liked his female. She would be his. They would share a bed and share their bodies. Ferun would count himself fortunate. Not for being chosen. That was a given. But he was fortunate that they’d ever found the humans to begin with. After thousands of years of believing themselves to be alone, they had stumbled across another celoid species right when it was on the brink of extinction.

  His mind came back to the present where Serus was running through a tedious list of regulations. Regulations Ferun himself had signed off on.

  “And under no circumstances are you to attempt to forcibly engage in reproduction with your female. Doing so will result in immediate termination from the program and a conduct review.

  “Should your female reject your attempts to reproduce for a period exceeding twenty days, you can contact us and we’ll mediate the situation. If a satisfying resolution can’t be reached, every effort will be made to pair you with another female.
”

  While Ferun had approved the rules, he couldn’t claim to understand all of them. They were written almost entirely by Vesak and, Ferun suspected, Hope. Vesak’s human was not on the council, but the presence of the first human was felt in every matter that pertained to her people.

  So many of the rules she’d laid out perplexed him. It didn’t make sense to him that he shouldn’t coerce his female into mating. Was that not how an animal demonstrated his power and capability? When sparring, if he forced one of his people into submission they respected his power and skill. Why would this be any different?

  The only conclusion he could draw was that it had to do with the size differences between their races. Humans were remarkably similar to the Celoch, but they were small in stature.

  In particular, the females were weak and frail. They had no taut muscles to protect their chest cavity, only pliant ribcages that rested behind soft breasts adapted to produce and store milk. Their abdomens were similarly soft, meant to expand to hold a child, rather than defend against blows. Their skin tore easily and their bones broke under marginal pressure.

  During training, they’d been given silica models of females, their purpose to demonstrate the fragility of the human body. Few of them had taken the lesson seriously, Ferun included. He’d assumed the instructor had been exaggerating about how delicate the women were and had handled his model as he might have handled one of his own kind. He could still remember the sound its neck had made as it snapped beneath his fingers.

  Ferun had felt ill and so disturbed that he hadn’t felt indignant when the instructor decided to make an example of him. He’d proceeded to make Ferun break more bones, demonstrating how little pressure was required to do so.

  The ribs had been the worst. With some, there had been no definitive way to tell if they’d been damaged. They bent so easily and sometimes he’d feel the soft pop, but with others he hadn’t realized anything was broken until he was shown the body scan.

  For that reason, Ferun could understand why forcing themselves on the females was against protocol. The line between being assertive and being brutal was far too thin, far too easy to cross.

  Of course, he shouldn’t have to even contemplate such a thing. The females were there to breed with them. They knew what was expected of them and it was his understanding that they were eager to serve.

  Serus came to a stop in front of a door and Ferun realized that they’d already passed into the human biome. It surprised him that he hadn’t noticed the change in temperature. What passed as a normal human temperature made for near oppressive heat to a Celoch. Even being from Gealt, a largely tropical central planet, Ferun could only stand the human biome for a few minutes before he began to sweat.

  He was already beginning to perspire.

  Serus was no longer talking, but he was cycling through notes on his tablet, his gaze intent. Ferun looked between him and the door, his gut tightening. Part of it was anticipation, but there was something else. There was a light, lingering scent in the air that made him feel at once tense and restless.

  “Are we going in?” he asked.

  “In a moment,” Serus said without looking up. “You’re living off-base, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ve declined to have a carer in place to assist you?”

  Ferun’s hand began to curl and uncurl at his side. He felt his irritation rising again, as it did so often as of late.

  “I’ve studied human caring extensively. I’m fully prepared to provide for her needs.”

  Serus tilted his head up to meet Ferun’s gaze. “You do have your certification. Just remember that she needs to eat three times per day. Don’t let the home temperature go beyond or below the approved range. Don’t introduce any foreign plants into the home. She needs a minimum of three washings per weekly cycle. No loud noises or banned frequencies. Make sure your chemicals and weapons are in a locked storage area.”

  “It sounds as if I am accepting a child into my home,” Ferun remarked.

  Serus’s lips slanted. “With any luck, you may be within the year. Are you ready?”

  In spite of all his impatience, Ferun hesitated at the question. There was no way he would decline, but there was a reasonable part of him that questioned whether he was truly prepared for what was to come. It was one thing to know everything about human women, quite another to actually have one in his care.

  “I am as prepared as I will be,” Ferun said.

  Serus nodded his approval, and then waved his hand across the door’s sensor. The door slid open, revealing a sight that was somehow familiar and completely foreign.

  The room was not unlike the one he’d been waiting in earlier, with stone tables and chairs of woven wood. Only, the beings seated in them could not have filled a chair if they shared one.

  There were ten of them and no two looked alike. That was the strangest thing about humans. Each had different colored skin and hair. Their features were similar in scale, but not design. Some had thick eyebrows, others had ones that were laser-thin. One had wide, blue eyes and another had ovular eyes that tilted upwards. One had a twisting thicket of dark hair, while another had pale hair that spilled over her shoulders in waves.

  Ferun could have taken a Celoch from all ten genetic lines and found fewer differences between them than he could have between only two of these human women. But somehow, despite looking nothing alike, he found each of them to be captivating in their own way.

  Serus cleared his throat.

  “Zoe. You’re up.”

  2

  Serus’s voice echoed in the quiet room. All of the women were looking at him expectantly and Ferun couldn’t initially discern which Serus was addressing.

  His eyes fell on one female who was seated at a table with six others. Her straight brown hair and light skin reminded him of Hope, the hybrid matriarch and the first female Ferun had ever seen. Seeing this female, he realized that since that day, he’d always imagined his female as looking like Hope.

  But she was not the one that stood. From the back corner of the room, a woman rose from where she’d sat alone at a table. She had brown hair as well, but it was a darker shade, as was her skin. Her form was slight, too small for the jumpsuit she was wearing, and he could see no indication that she had breasts beneath it. Her head was…odd. It was somewhat round in shape and her cheeks were plump and prominent, much like her lips. Overall, it made for a strange-looking creature that Ferun wasn’t sure what to make of.

  With her head down, she approached them slowly. It gave Ferun a few seconds to look around the room and perform a quick comparison. Of the ten females, he didn’t think this one would be his first choice, or even his fifth. In fact, there was something about her, some combination of her physique and demeanor that made her the least appealing of them all.

  Yet as his gaze fell on her again, he recognized that it didn’t matter. Perhaps she was short and bony, and her hair was the color of tar. Perhaps her lips took up too much of her face and there was an odd black dot on the side of her jawline. She was not ideal, but she was his. What self-respecting Celoch could complain that his female was not to his liking? Having her would put him among the most privileged of his kind and he would not take that for granted.

  His spine straightened as she neared him. He could hardly wait to feel her skin and take in her unique scent.

  A chorus of whispers moved through the band of females. One of the dark-skinned ones met his gaze and then smiled. It was one of those human smiles he’d been warned about. The kind where they bared their teeth. He’d always assumed it would look threatening, but something about the way the female’s eyes crinkled offset any menace in the flash of teeth. Against all logic, it was endearing and Ferun found himself smiling back. Not with his own teeth, of course. He wouldn’t want to frighten her.

  At his smile, the women laughed and exchanged glances, their eyebrows going up and fresh whispers proliferating. He didn’t understand, but he fou
nd himself liking them even more. He wanted to step forward into the room and sit at the table, talk to them and see what other strange things they would do.

  Of course, that sort of thing wouldn’t be allowed, not even for him. And there was his own female to concern himself with. She had reached them now, though she’d yet to look up at him.

  “Later, Lucky,” called one of the females at the table, the one with the hair like gold. Her words caused a fresh batch of laughter to break out, though this time not all of the females joined in.

  Without looking back, his female lifted her hand and raised her middle finger at the group. It must have been some sort of human parting gesture he hadn’t learned. A second later, the door slid shut behind her.

  With the three of them alone in the hall, Ferun was eager to address his female. But she was still looking down at her feet and he didn’t understand why. Was it some sort of reverential gesture? Had they told her that he was of the first yasn?

  “I’ve been working with them all week,” Serus said, breaking the silence. “They’re fun. Especially Zoe.”

  It was the first time her name registered with Ferun, though he had little time to take it in. Serus gave her what Ferun assumed was a playful pat on the head. The a’Sejan’s hand looked so large compared to her head and she flinched away, scowling at him.

  She didn’t actually look angry, but Ferun was nonetheless agitated on her behalf. Wasn’t there a rule about touching someone else’s female? Hadn’t an a’Turin engineer touched Hope when she’d first arrived on Jedth? And hadn’t Vesak killed him without recourse?

  “You have a very warped notion of fun,” Zoe said.

  The sound of her voice made his breath catch. He didn’t think he’d ever grow accustomed to hearing a female speak his language.

  Aided by the small neural disk resting against her temple, she spoke their language with the fluency of any Celoch, though he’d learned in training that humans were liable to struggle with some aspects of the technology. Since Hope, they’d come a long way in configuring the language repositories for several of the dominant human languages. Still, there were many words and concepts that didn’t translate well. Idiomatic phrases posed the greatest challenges and there were still Earth languages that hadn’t been optimized.