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

  It was twenty-one marks, one mark above the temperature the human body could withstand before it could no longer efficiently transport warm blood to its extremities. Prolonged exposure to such a temperature could lead to cellular death.

  Why hadn’t they given her warmer clothing to wear?

  And why hadn’t he considered the temperature before bringing her out into the bay?

  He was inwardly fuming by the time he ushered Zoe onto the shuttle. She staggered over to the seat in the corner, her arms wrapped around herself and her body shaking.

  As soon as the door closed, Ferun integrated his sentry pad with the shuttle and raised the temperature by ten marks, two marks above the standard temperature of the human biome. The air began to warm rapidly and he quickly dialed it back by two marks, realizing that concern was causing him to overcorrect.

  He took the seat beside her and was startled when she promptly climbed into his lap and pressed her body against his. He knew she was only trying to warm herself but he had no control over his hardening phallus.

  He put his arms around her and rubbed her skin, trying and mostly failing not to think sexual thoughts. She had been warm in the transition chamber and it unnerved him that her skin had grown so cold so quickly. He had known humans were delicate creatures, but experiencing it firsthand was jarring.

  “Are you all right?” he asked after a few moments.

  She was no longer shaking. Her head rested against his chest and her eyes had fluttered shut. He could feel each rise and fall of her chest, her breaths coming a bit more frequently than his own.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Do you want it warmer?”

  “It’s fine.”

  She still hadn’t pulled away from him or even opened her eyes and Ferun didn’t want her to. He wanted her to stay just as was for the entire trip, safe and warm in his arms.

  “Are you going to pilot this thing?” she asked.

  “It’s automated.”

  Her eyes cracked open. “I thought Celoch didn’t do automation.”

  “We’ve perfected automation,” he corrected as he keyed their destination coordinates into his sentry. “It’s artificial intelligence that we avoid, for obvious reasons.”

  Seconds later the shuttle began to rise. It hovered in the bay for a moment, waiting for approval from the control desk. Then it pulled forward and out into the open.

  He felt a pang of disappointment as Zoe lifted her head to look out the window. She remained in his lap, which was a welcome consolation.

  Ferun watched her take in the sprawling mountain ranges that flanked the valley. In millennia past, the plates beneath the land had been in constant conflict. Eventually, the planet had settled into a supercontinent that was mostly stable, leaving behind some of the largest mountains they’d encountered on a habitable planet.

  The range they’d be living on was one of the smaller ones. The larger ones had so little air pressure that even the Celoch needed to attune their regulators to breathe properly.

  “The base is constructed from the first colony ships,” he said, sensing her curiosity. “One of the ships contained Hope and the first of the hybrid children. Since then, much of what we’ve built on Jedth has been designed to better accommodate the needs of the humans and their offspring.”

  “Is that practical? Designing your planet around, what, a handful of aliens?”

  “Protecting females and their offspring is our greatest priority.”

  Her lips quirked oddly. “I keep hearing things to that effect, but I don’t really understand it. You all seemed to be doing pretty fine on your own. Way better than us, anyway. Why would you want to mix our species together?”

  Engineers would have finer answers for her, answers that explained the benefits of genetic diversity and the potential for beneficial mutations. They’d explained them to Ferun and he’d understood them to an extent, but mostly his mind had been fixed on the possibility of intercourse.

  Like all Celoch, his flow of hormones was controlled by a component of his regulator, dubbed the inhibitor. It let pass just enough of the male sex hormones to keep his body functional in his role, but not enough that he’d be plagued by the ravaging hormones of unspent lust.

  As a soldier, his hormone levels had always been higher than that of the engineers and considerably above those of the workers, who were effectively castrated. This afforded him the level of aggression and the predatory instincts he needed on the battlefield, but often led to feelings of listlessness when he wasn’t engaged in combat. For as long as he’d been alive, Ferun had always felt the sense of lack shared by many of his class.

  With Zoe now in his arms, he wondered how the first of his kind had ever survived the loss of their females. Ferun had been raised never knowing the feel of a woman’s skin or the smell of her hair, but they had been acutely aware of what they’d lost.

  Ferun must have taken too long to answer, because Zoe asked, “Are those moons?”

  She pointed toward two pale spheres in the sky.

  “They are. There are four in total. You’ll be able to see all of them tonight.”

  “How long until nighttime?”

  He glanced down at his sentry. “Nightfall will be in approximately three hours and will last for twenty-five hours.”

  She made a whistling noise. “Guess it’s not too different from Canada. Is it always so cold outside?”

  “The cold season has barely begun, but there is a warm period where some of the ice melts,” he said. “Our home is climate controlled, so you won’t have to worry about it.”

  She nibbled on her bottom lip, a gesture that seized Ferun’s attention. When he’d first seen her, he’d thought her lips looked too large, but now that he wasn’t comparing her to the other females he found their plumpness to be strangely appealing.

  “Will our kids be able to breathe outside?” she asked.

  It was a simple question, but it made Ferun’s brain stall. He hadn’t been overly concerned that she would reject his attempts to reproduce with her, but it must have been in the back of his mind. At her casual mention of their offspring he felt a sense of relief and anticipation. Would she want to begin breeding tonight?

  “Most hybrids are adapted to the air pressure. Only a—”

  “What was that?” she asked, shooting up as a large creature flew past the shuttle.

  “It’s a kyr,” he said. “They’re avian creatures imported from Hofskr. They aren’t dangerous, if you aren’t a fish.”

  “It looks like a dragon,” she said with wide eyes. “They must eat a lot of fish.”

  Ferun made a mental note to find out what a dragon was and to learn more about kyr.

  “Does zoology interest you?” he asked.

  She suddenly appeared uncomfortable, though he couldn’t say why.

  “I guess. Yeah, a little, maybe.”

  He had no idea what to make of such an array of responses.

  She said, “When I was a kid, I wanted to work in a zoo. That’s where basically all of our animals live now. I like animals. A lot.”

  “Then why did you choose to go into inventory distribution?” he asked. “Did you feel you could better contribute to your society in that manner?”

  She made an odd face and he thought he’d said something to upset her. But then she laughed and he saw a flash of her teeth before her lips closed over them. He noted that her cuspids were rather blunt, not unlike an herbivore’s.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I’m nothing if not dedicated to society.”

  It must have been a very difficult decision for her to come to Jedth, so far from her home planet and removed from her position. She was a generous person, he decided. And beautiful. He could see that now. Maybe it was just because she was his, but he could scarcely remember the faces of the other females now. All that mattered was the one that was in his lap.

  “My home is down there,” he said, pointing out the mountain crevice that they wer
e headed toward.

  “We’ll live in there?”

  “The mountains shield the area from the wind,” he explained. “The temperatures are fairer and there is less radiation.”

  “Less radiation? Is it going to be safe?”

  “Don’t worry.” His hold on her instinctively tightened. “We don’t believe the standard levels are dangerous for humans, but there haven’t been longitudinal studies so we’re erring on the side of caution.”

  He was repeating the exact words one of the engineers had said when Ferun had asked a similar question in training.

  “So our home will be in there? With all the other women?”

  “The first humans and hybrids live there, as will a handful of your…those that arrived with you. Most of them will remain in base with their partners. Only those of a certain rank can live apart from the base.”

  “I’m surprised you even gave women to people without some sort of rank. I’d think you’d want to keep them all to yourselves.”

  Ferun inclined his head. “It is a necessary indulgence of the lower classes. If we don’t give them the opportunity to have at least a few of the females, they could rebel. It is also an opportunity to see how their offspring will differ from ours.”

  “How intriguing,” she said in an odd tone. “I, too, am simply fascinated to see how the plebian offspring will compare to ours.”

  Before he could piece together what was off about her tone, she said, “Hey, there’s another thing no one’s given me a good answer about. How do you even have lower classes? I mean, you’re all basically—no offense—the same.”

  He arched his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean you’re all clones of like ten different dudes.”

  “You mean our forebears?”

  She snapped her fingers. “Yeah, that’s the word. So, you’re clones of those ten original dudes. How is it that there’s you, an obviously important military guy, and then I had two guards that looked almost identical to you, and there was a guy in the kitchen serving food that looked like you. Same with the engineers. Ninety percent of them looked exactly the same, and they’re like totally oblivious to the fact that there’s a dude that looks exactly like them that’s cleaning the floors of their lab.”

  Ferun made another mental note to look up the definitions of guy and dude.

  “I think I understand what you’re asking,” he said slowly. “With the variations in your kind, our similarities must be striking to you. Don’t you have a phenomenon known as monozygotic twins?”

  He’d learned about it in his course on female anatomy and physiology. It still amazed him that women could bear more than one child at a time. He’d seen depictions of how much their body changed while carrying just a single child, two was nearly unfathomable to him. He tried to imagine Zoe’s small body accommodating a child, but couldn’t.

  “Do you mean identical twins?”

  It seemed like a reasonable colloquialism, so he nodded. “And these identical twins, although they share the same innate capabilities, do they always share the same life path?”

  She lifted her shoulders. “No, I guess not. But you’d think that with only ten people in your gene pool, you would have perfected how to raise them so that they turn out, well, perfect.”

  “If everyone were capable enough to be an admiral, there’d be no one to command.”

  It was strange, explaining something that to him was so fundamental. He considered going further and explaining to her how the possession of genes did not equate to the expression of genes. While he had the same fundamental coding as an a’Holst that cleaned floors, the genes they expressed were vastly different. But she seemed somewhat satisfied by his answer, so he left it as it was, not caring to tread into subjects better answered by engineers.

  “You must be really talented,” she said. “To become such an important person in a society life this.”

  Ferun had felt plenty of pride in his life, but nothing quite compared to the simple compliment given to him by a female. He wanted to begin listing off his many accomplishments, but he’d learned that it was best to be humble with females.

  “I am a fourth generation, so I’ve had more time than most to accrue my rank and status.”

  “Wow. You must be old. Like, over a hundred, huh?”

  “A hundred?”

  “Years. Like a century? Serus told us that he was seventh generation and he’s almost seventy but he looks like he’s in his thirties. It’s wild.”

  Another thing Ferun had learned in training was that human females were somewhat averse to learning their ages. Human males stopped being desirable breeding partners long before they reached their first century and this skewed their perception of age. Ferun looked no different than he had when he was a century old, but if she thought seventy was old then his age might be difficult for her to come to terms with.

  “How old are you?” he asked, even though he shouldn’t.

  Just as their ages were unsettling to humans, the human lack of longevity was equally difficult for Celoch to come to terms with. Humans matured, bred, and entered old age by the time a Celoch was finishing intermediate profession training. Serus was something of a prodigy, gaining such a high engineering position at only seventy. Most would not reach such heights until their second centuries.

  “Twenty-four. Or, at least I was. That’s not including stasis years.”

  Ferun knew he shouldn’t have asked. It was hard to reconcile her age with her apparent sexual maturity and the fact that his body was still stiff and eager to breed with her.

  “My mom must be in her fifties now.” She went on, thoughtfully. “If she’s even still alive. She smoked a lot.”

  He wasn’t sure what that meant and didn’t ask. Her eyes had fluttered shut and she’d drawn even closer to him, her head pressed to his chest as if she were listening to his heartbeat.

  No more words were exchanged between them as they descended into the enclave. Ferun followed her gaze out the window, trying to see the familiar setting with new eyes.

  The enclave consisted of a jagged split in the mountain. New homes had been carved into the sides of the sheer walls, connected by a series of enclosed tunnels. Strong winds blew through the enclave, though they were tame compared to the winds that routinely battered the mountainside. The passage of the wind created a low sound that Ferun had once found eerie, but now it reminded him of home.

  His home was near the outer left lip of the enclave, which provided the natural light that many of the other homes lacked. No one had mandated an interior shuttle bay, which irritated him as they began their descent onto the landing pad. Once again, Zoe would be exposed to the elements. Only for the few seconds it took to reach his door, but there was no shuttle bay to buffer her from the harsh winds.

  As the shuttle landed and recalibrated its compression, Ferun looked around for anything he could use as a blanket. There was nothing. He couldn’t even take off his own clothing to put around her. At the base he’d been forced to wash and change into a standard-issue jumpsuit to avoid contaminating the human biome.

  “It’s going to be very cold outside,” he warned her. “I’ll carry you home as quickly as I can.”

  Her arms moved up to loop around his neck. He liked how quickly she responded to him. Ferun pulled her closer, as close as he could have her while being confident that he wasn’t at risk of crushing her. Her body was so pliant.

  He checked his sentry. It was seventeen marks outside. He considered calling for someone to come and bring her suitable coverings to shield her from the wind and the cold. But there was his door, only a short distance away. He could have her in his home within seconds.

  Some strange form of arrogance had him going against his better judgment and opening the hatch. He knew that a few seconds of exposure to the low temperature wouldn’t be enough to harm her, but he also disdained the idea of involving another Celoch in her care.

  Another male.

&nbs
p; He’d never classified his own kind as such. For something to be male, there must also be something to contrast it. Concepts such as male and female, mother and father, son and daughter, they were all things he’d associated either with animals or distant predecessors.

  When the door to the vestibule slid shut behind them, Ferun exhaled with relief. He finally allowed himself to look down at Zoe. She was trembling, but looked otherwise fine.

  “You’ll have warmer clothes next time we go out,” he said in hopes of reassuring her.

  “Good to know,” she said through chattering teeth.

  Ferun continued to hold her while the room acclimatized. If he were on his own, he’d have no cause to linger in the vestibule. Humans, however, did not adjust easily to rapid changes in temperature. He’d already gone against protocol when he’d raised the internal temperature of the shuttle as quickly as he had. An engineer wouldn’t have made such an impulsive error. He wondered if the females wouldn’t all be better off with engineers, as had first been suggested to the council.

  Not that he would give his up, now, or ever.

  “You smell nice,” she said.

  Was she sniffing his chest?

  Ferun swallowed. “As do you.”

  She looked up at him, giving him a toothy smile.

  No, it was not threatening at all.

  He rather liked it.

  “Can you smell me from all the way up there?”

  “I haven’t stopped smelling you since we met.”

  She laughed, as if he’d made a joke. Shaking her head, she used her arms for leverage to pull herself up so that their faces were nearly level. Then, she turned her head to the side, exposing the smooth column of her neck.

  It was so narrow and fragile. Ferun could see her veins beneath the skin, so alarmingly exposed and vulnerable. He lowered his head and inhaled. His insides clenched with desire as pheromones flooded his system.

  “Good?” she asked.

  The word didn’t sound right or sufficient to describe her scent, but he nodded.