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

  Zoe must have spoken one of the optimized languages because her words were smooth and clear. They rolled over him like warm water, heating him inside and out. The pitch was high, but not grating. It was closer to the voice of a child than an adult Celoch’s, but that seemed typical of women so far as he could tell.

  Serus said, “You’ll be glad to know that the fun is over, at least for now. This is your partner, Ferun.”

  Could Serus have given him a more miserable introduction?

  “I can be very fun,” Ferun grunted.

  Zoe made an odd noise under her breath and then, finally, she looked up at him. Her eyes were narrowed and she thrust her hand out in his direction.

  “I’m Zoe Lavoie. That’s la-ju-wah. Don’t call me Zo-ey Lah-vo-ey.”

  “That would not have occurred to me,” Ferun said.

  Although her posture and tone indicated a marginal amount of aggression, Ferun was undaunted. He liked watching the way her face moved when she spoke and she was close enough that he could smell her. There was nothing he could point to in her scent that was alluring, yet the full effect of it had his penis starting to swell, as if his body thought it would be appropriate to begin breeding with her in the hall.

  How odd.

  Taking her hand didn’t help matters. It amazed him that he even remembered how to perform a handshaking gesture as his skin came into contact with hers. It was even softer than he’d imagined it would be, and also somewhat damp. He wondered if the temperature in the biome was too high for her. Not only was she perspiring, but her face also appeared flushed.

  “Actually,” Serus said, “your name will now be Zoe Lavoie a’Ferun. That is, if you choose to accept Ferun as your partner.”

  Her hand slipped from his and then she was once again looking down at the floor. Her too-small shoulders lifted.

  “He’s fine, I guess.”

  Fine?

  Ferun was an admiral of the first yasn, the second-ranked officer on Jedth, and an exemplar of the a’Holst line. Fine was not a word that described him in any aspect.

  He could almost tell himself that it was a miscommunication, one of those things that didn’t translate properly. Perhaps her language wasn’t one of the optimized ones after all. Perhaps what she’d really meant to say was something far more respectful and flattering. Or perhaps this was some sort of cultural difference that he wasn’t aware of and there was something he was missing.

  Yet there was that note of aggression she’d shown him, coupled with her lack of interest in looking at him. And there was something about her tone that still felt off to him. All told, he didn’t like it.

  “What if I don’t accept her?” Ferun asked.

  That got her attention. Her head lifted, her eyes darting between Ferun and Serus.

  Of course, he wasn’t serious. Though, he’d be lying if his mind hadn’t flitted back to the dark-skinned female, the one who’d readily met his gaze and smiled at him. Still, if this Zoe was the most compatible female, then it behooved him to keep her. She would have to learn her place.

  Looking uncomfortable for the first time, Serus said, “If you’d rather have a different female, I can check with Kasur. We do have a protocol in place, though it’s likely you’ll be matched with a female in the next wave.”

  Which would mean two more agonizing months of waiting.

  “I was only curious.” Pointedly, he added, “She’ll suffice.”

  Zoe muttered something under her breath that Ferun didn’t catch.

  She was making fidgety movements now, reminding him of the a’Jebek in the waiting area. She seemed particularly intent on picking at her fingernails, which already looked rather blunt.

  Ferun looked to Serus, suddenly skeptical that this female had passed her health and mental checks. How was he supposed to alert them to strange behavior when she already seemed unfit to leave the care of her handlers?

  “We have a private room arranged for the two of you to talk and get to know one another better,” Serus said. “It’s right down the hall. Once you’re finished, we can finalize the discharge documents and you can leave the biome.”

  “Leave?” she asked. She seemed to have no trouble looking Serus in the eyes. “I thought I’d be keeping my room here.”

  “That would typically be the case, but Ferun lives off-base. You’ll have your own home.”

  “With him?”

  It annoyed him that she was talking as if he weren’t present. Why address these questions to Serus and not him?

  “That’s right,” Serus said. “But don’t worry. You’ll be able to make regular trips back to base to socialize with your peers.”

  “Hard pass,” she said flatly.

  Ferun had no idea what that meant, but Serus smiled as if she’d made a joke.

  “And do we have to sit in a room together, or can we just leave?” she asked. “I mean, we’ve already agreed to…whatever. Can we go now?”

  Ferun would have expressed the sentiment with more eloquence, but he was inclined to agree. He indicated this with a nod in Serus’s direction.

  Serus hesitated. “It’s not required that you spend time together, but it is encouraged. Once you leave base, you’re accepting full care of her. If you choose to forfeit care at that point, it’s unlikely you’ll be entrusted with an alternate female, even considering your rank, esn-Ferun.”

  Ferun looked at her once more, and to his surprise she was looking at him. Not in the measured, critical manner he might have expected. Her eyes were wide and there was a vulnerable quality to them. If a Celoch had looked at him in such a manner, Ferun would have felt nothing but cool disdain. But with her, he felt compelled to do whatever was necessary to make her stop looking like that.

  To Serus, he said, “Give me the documents. We’ll leave now.”

  3

  It took only a few moments for Ferun to register the necessary signatures on the tablet. When it was done, Ferun braced himself for another lecture on the proper care of humans, but Serus only wished them well and departed to collect the next Celoch.

  Alone with his female, Ferun was once again uncertain what he should with her. He was seldom at a loss for words and had thought it would be far easier to talk to a being from an alien species. Certainly, there were no shortage of topics they could discuss.

  “Are we just going to stand here?” Zoe asked.

  She was back to looking at the floor, still pink-faced and fidgeting. He hoped that this wasn’t typical behavior for her.

  “We’ll leave now for the shuttle bay,” Ferun said. “Is there anything more you need to bring?”

  He noted the pack on her back, which looked barely large enough to contain a change of clothes.

  “No.” She gave the pack a small shake. “That’s the sum total of my possessions, as regulated by the North American Space Force.”

  She put a flattened hand to her forehead and then let it drop, her lip curling. It was yet another gesture he didn’t recognize and Ferun was beginning to grow annoyed with his so-called trainers.

  They started walking and although she wasn’t speaking to him anymore, Ferun felt himself grow steadily happier. Once they exited the human biome, they began to pass other Celoch in the halls. Most were engineers, though there were a few soldiers and workers that greeted him with deference. All of them eyed Zoe with open interest and curiosity, and regarded Ferun with naked envy. They didn’t know that she was marginally less appealing than her peers or that she lacked the ability to remain still. All they saw was that Ferun possessed something immeasurably precious.

  Seeing their envy made him warm even further towards his female. He decided to try to nudge her into conversing with him.

  “Were you informed about me?” he asked. “My background, credentials, and qualifications?”

  “No,” was her clipped reply.

  Ferun pressed on. “It might please you to know that I am highly qualified to be your partner. I’m an admiral in the Halse Division and
the second ranked officer on Jedth, behind only Sadrit a’Sejan. I’ve been on partial duties for the past two years while I’ve undergone training in human anthropology and gender relations. I was not chosen at random, but rather I am an exemplar of the a’Holst line. You can be confident that I’ll provide our offspring with exceptional genes and the best possible upbringing.”

  She was quiet for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. When she finally said, “Sounds great,” Ferun felt utterly underwhelmed.

  Another moment passed, and then she sighed.

  “I’m from British Columbia, Canada,” she said with minimal inflection. “I’m a manager in the inventory division of Walmart, ranked second only to the store manager, Annie Lavoie, my mother.”

  “I didn’t realize you were a figure of authority,” he said.

  She looked at him, her eyes narrowed yet again. “Is that a joke?”

  Perplexed, he simply said, “No.”

  “Do you know what Walmart is?”

  Feeling a small degree of embarrassment, he said, “I’m not familiar with Earth institutions. Admittedly, I’m better versed in those of Mars. The content was quicker to take in.”

  To his relief, she smiled. Not a lot and not with teeth, but it was a smile nonetheless.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “In school we had four different classes of Earth-related history and only one of them had a module on Mars. I think it took us two weeks to cover the entire history. The colonies are barely two centuries old and their history is straightforward. Earth history, on the other hand, is messy and convoluted.”

  It was the most she’d spoken to him and Ferun didn’t care that he didn’t understand some of her terminology. He only wanted her to keep talking.

  “What sort of institution is Walmart?”

  The word felt odd on his tongue. Without the aid of a neural repository for human languages, he knew he was pronouncing it incorrectly.

  “It’s one of the largest institutions on Earth. There’s one in almost every city. It’s where people go to buy all of the things they need. Food, clothes, everything, really.”

  “And you manage this?”

  Her tongue darted across her lips. It was a quick gesture but it put heat in his groin.

  “Just the one in my city, but yeah. I’m kind of a big deal.”

  “It must have been a difficult decision for you, to leave behind such an integral position to come to Jedth.”

  Ferun wasn’t sure he would have done the same, if presented with the opportunity to live on Earth. Certainly, he would have wanted to, but his role on Jedth was too vital.

  “Well, I’m all about the mission,” she said. “Ready to give my body to a higher purpose.”

  Her tone sounded off to him again, but he dismissed it. Who was he to judge the tone of a human?

  “As am I. I consider producing offspring to be one of the greatest contributions I could make to society.” After a pause, he added, “I’ve met one of the hybrid children. She was fascinating.”

  All of the muscles in her face appeared to lift in unison. “Like, in a good way? Was she normal?”

  He couldn’t help but smile. “There is nothing normal about females, at least not to us. But there was nothing wrong with her to my eyes. By all accounts, she is a healthy and exceptional individual.”

  “Is she tall? Like you all are?”

  “She was still quite young when I met her, but the female hybrids are taller than their mother, or so I’ve heard.”

  Even with his position, he’d had limited access to any of the females or hybrids in the decades since Hope had arrived with her first two children. Esn-Vesak had been exceedingly protective of his offspring and rightly so. For most, they’d been a spectacle, but there were also plenty of engineers that had been eager to seize one of the aliens for their own purposes. Integrating females into their society had been dangerous.

  It still was.

  “Their mother is Hope, right?” she asked. “We met her a couple of times during training. She seemed nice, for a Martian.”

  The last part sounded like a slight, which Ferun found amusing. It hadn’t occurred to him that humans would dislike humans from other planets, as the Celoch did with their own kind. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought them to be above such petty grievances, though perhaps it was because their colonies were so young, barely centuries old. It didn’t seem long enough to develop an aversion to outsiders. Ferun had been on Jedth for forty standard years and he still felt only a perfunctory attachment to the fledgling colony.

  “Yes. Hope and her children are precious to us,” Ferun said, moving a bit closer to his female as they passed a leering engineer. “As you and your crew now are.”

  He’d hoped she would accept his words as a compliment, but her face scrunched in a manner that suggested she’d bitten something distasteful.

  “They’re not my crew. The Martians are the crew. And the other Earth girls, they’re just people whose rich parents got them out before the world turned to shit. More than it already has, that is.”

  The color in her face deepened. “I don’t mean to sound so anti-Earth. It’s my home. It always will be. But it’s a mess.”

  “I understand,” Ferun said, though he wasn’t entirely sure he did.

  “Is there any news about Earth and Mars?” she asked.

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  Her eyes widened. “Tell me what?”

  “Nothing particular. I’m only asking if they’ve updated you on the state of your planets. I understand you spent several years in stasis.”

  “Oh.” Her shoulders sagged with apparent relief. “They said that our star system was under Celoch protection and mentioned something about one of Jupiter’s moons, I think. They couldn’t tell us anything specific, like about our countries.”

  “Jupiter is one of the gas giants in your star system, yes?” At her nod, he went on, “We’re working to build a defense base there.”

  “But everyone is safe? For now?”

  “Yes. At last contact there did seem to be some issue with getting Earth to discard their vulnerable technologies. The core problem is gaining a consensus among the nations. We’ve sent an ambassador to work on unifying the nations of Earth. Thus far, diplomacy has been…difficult.”

  Ferun had never been much interested in politics, but human politics were particularly confounding. Even among their so-called nations they could seldom agree on anything.

  She snorted. “We still have countries in civil wars over land the size of your base. Unifying all of the nations of Earth is a fantasy.”

  “Our ambassadors can be very persuasive,” he said.

  Ferun stopped short of saying more. He didn’t want her to see his kind as a threat, but he knew that the Celoch would go to great lengths to protect the humans from themselves. They were going to need one another in years to come.

  A sense of the surreal fell over him as he coded into the shuttle bay. It was something he’d done so many times before, only this time he was leaving with her. In all his centuries of service to his people, he’d never questioned the value of his efforts. He still didn’t, yet at the same time he now had the sense that all of his sacrifice had been worth it. He had dedicated himself to being the best and she was his reward.

  Once inside the transition chamber, Ferun’s mind snapped back to protocol mode. He went to the case near the door and collected one of the small silica masks. When he turned back to Zoe, he found her staring with her mouth hanging open, not at him, but at the room beyond her.

  The protective walls of the transition chamber were transparent, allowing for a clear view of the shuttle bay. There were a handful of workers and aeronautic engineers milling about, but mostly the view was of the shuttles coming and going through the expansive half-moon opening. Through that, the tops of the nearby mountain range were visible in the morning light.

  She flinched back at his first attempt to put the mask on her.
Perhaps he should have given her a warning first.

  “Why do I have to wear that?” she asked.

  Had they not taken her outside yet?

  “The air pressure is very low at this altitude,” he said. “Your body isn’t adapted for processing oxygen under these conditions.”

  Without the mask, she’d be unconscious within minutes.

  She took the mask from him and attempted to put it on herself. After watching her struggle for a moment, he reached out and helped her fit it into place. His fingers brushed against her cheeks as he worked. They were even softer than her hands.

  When it was done, he indulged in staring at her for a few more seconds. Like most of the humans, her eyes were a muted shade. They lacked the nuance and brilliance of the Celoch eyes, but had a depth that he found intriguing. Hers were a rich brown color, like arable soil. Her wide, round pupils seemed to swallow up most of the color, making them look like a void he could fall into.

  “All set?” she asked after a long moment.

  She’d been staring at him as well, analyzing him as he analyzed her. He wondered what she perceived with her foreign eyes.

  “Yes.”

  As he opened the door that led into the shuttle bay, Zoe slipped her arm around his, her hand settling just below his elbow. A sudden spike of arousal made his mouth go dry and his spine straighten. As they stepped out into the shuttle bay he felt as if he were walking on air.

  When he heard Zoe suck in a breath, he assumed it was a reaction to touching him with such familiarity. It wasn’t until he looked down as saw her teeth chattering that he realized she was cold.

  Alarm gripped him. He moved his arm to encircle her and picked up his pace, urging her along with him. With his other hand he pulled his sentry pad from his pocket and checked the local air temperature.