Alien Overnight (9 page)

“Very well, then. Your father was a Garathani scout,” he said baldly. “He—”

Monica felt her jaw come unhinged as her brain temporarily froze with shock.

“—was part of a reconnaissance team dispatched to Earth more than thirty—”

“I knew it!” she shouted. “Goddamn it, I
knew
this wasn’t the first time you people had been here! Everybody was acting like that landing was some great historic first,”

she snorted, “when you’d already been here for
decades
. Were you trolling for playmates even then? Oh my God, you were the ones abducting humans and conducting

experiments on them, then sending them back to Earth to look like nutcases, weren’t you? Do you have any idea how many lives you ruined—”

“On television, they slap people in the face to bring them out of hysterics,” he remarked in a casual but curious tone.

“Do it and you die, asshole,” she shot back. “Now let me out of this bed.”

“Monica, you will be very sick if you attempt to—”

“Let me up!” she screamed, struggling with the light blanket that covered her.

Kellen sighed and stood up, moving back out of her way as she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and lurched upright.

At once, a watery stream of vomit spewed from her mouth and landed with dull splash on the floor. The humiliation that seized her then would have just about finished her, if the weakness hadn’t gotten to her first. She listed hard to the right as dizziness struck, darkening her vision for a mind-bending instant. Fortunately, Kellen managed to grab her before she fell into the cesspool she’d created.

45

Robin L. Rotham

“You know better than to rise so abruptly after an extended illness, Dr. Teague.”

After easing her back onto the cushy mattress, he disappeared into an adjoining room.

Moments later, he was pressing a cool, damp cloth to the back of her neck and wiping her cheeks and chin with another.

“Your boots,” she murmured. He was standing right where she’d hurled.

“Are fine. The interior of this vessel is lined with a biologic pad that feeds on discarded organic material,” he explained. “It consumes everything from the skin cells we shed to the waste we excrete to the microbes that would harm us, and in return produces many of the gases and nutrients we need to survive.”

Monica roused herself enough to peer down at the floor, and sure enough, all evidence of her disgrace had disappeared. Thank God. But did that mean everyone just whizzed against the nearest wall? Surely not. They had to have designated facilities for that.

Didn’t they?

Kellen sat down beside her again and her heart thumped hard against her

breastbone. God, he was big. How could she have forgotten how big he was?

“It’s not all bad news, you know.”

“Do tell.”

“The Tooth Fairy left you seven more dollars and you now have twenty new molars.”

She sucked in a breath. “Oh, no way! That was you?”

“Guilty, I’m afraid.”

“Wait—twenty new molars? How the hell many teeth do I have?”

“Forty-four, the full Garathani complement. And your vision is now quite a bit better than the average Terran’s. You can see at twenty feet what most of them can see at eight.”

She thought for a minute. “So that line you fed me about halethoid mutations was total crap?”

“No, it wasn’t. The halethoid mutations cropping up on your planet are a natural part of humanity’s evolution. You carry nearly all of them because of your Garathani genes; thousands of years from now, all Terrans will likely be what the Garathani are now. The only reason their evolution has lagged behind ours is the inordinately high levels of bondridon emanating from Sol.”

She arched a brow. “Are you telling me we’re all Garathanis on the inside?”

“No, I’m telling you there’s a reason why Terrans and Garathani are compatible for mating. We’re descended from the same race of beings. In your biological terms, we are a slightly different species of the same genus.”

“Uh-huh.”

46

Alien Overnight

“I know this is a lot of information to digest all at once,” he said with a sigh, “but please, just let me finish my explanation of how you came to be.”

“Can I stop you?” she asked sourly.

“No, but I can stop you,” he threatened without heat. “It’s not uncommon for Garathani females who can’t hold their tongues to be gagged by their mates.”

“Oh, that’s really nice. Do you tie them up, too?”

“Only to fuck them,” he drawled.

Monica stiffened, her breath congealing in her lungs as her ears buzzed from the intense bass vibration of his reply. Issuing from his mouth, the f-word was a spider that skittered down her spine. She’d never heard Kellen or any of the other Garathani use foul language and this wasn’t exactly the time she would have chosen for him to start.

“That’s better. As I was saying before, your father was part of a reconnaissance group that spent two years on Earth gathering information about the various cultures.

I’ll leave it to him to share the details, but obviously he had intercourse with your mother, which resulted in conception.”

“Leave it to…” Monica’s eyes bulged. “You mean he’s still alive?”

“Yes, he is. I believe your name is a bastardized version of his.”

Her smart mouth automatically kicked out, “Bastardized—how appropriate,” while her brain shrieked,
Oh my God
,
your mother did the nasty with an alien
! For some reason it hadn’t occurred to her that her conception might be the result of intercourse. Instead, her imagination had fallen victim to its years of sci-fi conditioning and conjured visions of impregnation through some anonymous, technologically superior means of embryo delivery with a name like the Pregomatic-9000. Or, at other end of the spectrum, an ugly, torturous needle in the navel.

Obviously her own mother been served from behind by one of these massive soldiers. Oh jeez, she’d had his spur up her—

“You have no cause to disrespect yourself or your parents in such a manner.”

Kellen frowned. “Your father is one of the greatest warriors of our time, and to have been sired by him is an incredible honor. It’s my understanding that he was intimate with your mother only once, the night before he was to be recalled, and he had no idea that a child had resulted from the union. Not until…”

A sardonic smile dimpled his cheek. “It pains me to seemingly confirm your basest suspicions, but yes, we did collect a number of human subjects beginning nearly ten years ago, after the bio-war attack, and yes, we did conduct experiments with them.”

When she opened her mouth to lambaste him, he clamped his hand over it.

“However,” he said loudly, “they were not tortured or mistreated in any way, nor were they returned to Earth to face the ridicule of others. They were all women who had no immediate family and many of them have since become highly valued members of our society. It was through those experiments that we learned that interspecies breeding was possible.”

47

Robin L. Rotham

She swatted his hand away in annoyance but kept her lips pressed into a mutinous line, allowing him to continue.

“Our scientists were astounded to find that a chemical in Garathani semen triggered immediate ovulation in Terran females, resulting in conception in nearly every encounter. So far, nearly six hundred and fifty hybrids have been conceived by the females we appropriated from your planet, three hundred and twelve of whom still live.”

“Three hundred and twelve?” Monica gasped. “That’s a mortality rate of over fifty percent!”

“Experiments are not without their risks, Doctor. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the females we took were too small to mate with our males. Still more were unable to carry the fetuses to term, and of those who were able to carry successfully, many were unable to deliver vaginally because of the size of their fetuses.

Most of the fetal deaths resulted from babies too large in wombs too small, and sadly, a number of the females expired from the same cause and its complications.” He leaned closer, his gaze pinning hers. “Why do you suppose we’re so particular about the physical requirements for the recruits? The last thing we want is for the females who would serve us to suffer unduly or perish for our cause.”

Monica was dazed and not a little horrified by the tale he’d just told her. Women, many women, and their babies, too, had already sacrificed their lives in the race to save the Garathani people, and this information was not being provided to the reproductive candidates. They could very well be signing up for…

God in heaven, her own mother had died within days of giving birth to her!

“This situation is unacceptable, Commander,” she said unsteadily.

“I refuse to debate the morality of our actions, Monica. We are making every effort to ensure that the females selected are able to bear the children we plant in their wombs and that’s all I have to say about it.”

“Well, good, because I have plenty to say about it!”

“After I’m finished, you can flay the skin from my bones with your razor-sharp tongue all you’d like, but please contain yourself until then.”

“Fuck you, Commander,” Monica snarled, turning to face the wall again. Her wits scattered to the four winds when Kellen curled his long fingers under her chin and forced her to look at him.

“Believe me, you will,” he said arrogantly, fire blazing in his eyes. “Just as soon as you’re declared fit.”

*

Perhaps that hadn’t been the best way to inform her of her new lot in life, Kellen thought ruefully, scrubbing the nutty-smelling cleanser through his hair as the shower pounded his body.

48

Alien Overnight

After her eyeballs had threatened to pop from their sockets, they’d rolled back in her head and she’d fainted dead away. Ketrok hadn’t been pleased to find his patient unconscious again and had ordered him out of the infirmary.

Kellen ducked his head under the spray and tried to let the steaming water rinse away some of his tension along with the suds. Peserin, but the brat could be aggravating! He’d invented the bit about Garathani females being bound and gagged in an attempt to silence her, but even as the words fell from his lips, he’d known their fiction would become reality as soon as he pried her away from Ketrok. If her impassioned protection of the recruits was any indication, she would present quite an erotic challenge in the mating bed, and his cock was near bursting at the prospect.

The past two weeks had been the worst kind of torture ever devised, holding her as she lay helpless, caressing her body and soothing her with his warmth and his scent, all the while going stark raving bananas from the backed-up blood strangling his gonads.

Stark raving bananas
. He grinned. He could see the phallic fruit in his mind’s eye, peeled from its skin and ranting madly at not being fed into the orifice it was meant for.

No doubt Monica would bite off his banana, should he try to feed it to her.

The thought was enough to make him wince, but the imagery was so tantalizing, he cupped himself and groaned with a comic blend of trepidation and lustful curiosity.

What would it be like to push the bulk of his throbbing flesh into her mouth and feel that velvet heat laving him, knowing that she could emasculate him at any moment with a single snap of her jaw? How tempted would she be to try it, knowing that he could snap her neck with a single flick of his wrist?

Squirting a puddle of scrub into one palm, Kellen began lathering his groin with rough sensuality. He’d rarely considered questions like these, or their inherent roots in control and trust, outside the dark realm of his fantasies. The feminine fists that had ruled Garathan prior to the attack would have slammed down hard, and with resounding finality, on any male who expressed interest in, much less insisted on, receiving oral sex.
It serves no useful purpose
was the rationale for their females’ rejection of the activity, and that was true enough, given that males couldn’t orgasm from fellatio the way females could from cunnilingus. But it was just as true that their females were quietly disgusted by the idea of performing such a service, and in those days, females didn’t do anything they didn’t care to.

Kellen had roared with laughter the first time he saw “Girls rule, boys drool!”

emblazoned on young girl’s t-shirt. Only Terrans could have boiled Garathan’s pre-attack culture down to a flippant merchandising catchphrase. The concept had appealed to him on so many levels, he’d gone straight to his computer and ordered the shirt to keep as a visual reminder of the life he’d once known. The phrase would have been more poignant embroidered on that era’s decommissioned planetary banner, but unfortunately, some things couldn’t be had, even on eBay.

Tapping off the water, Kellen toweled his streaming hair absently. He was fairly certain Monica knew nothing of Garathan’s matriarchal history. That information had been deliberately withheld from the Terrans, and was, in fact, classified, though Kellen 49

Robin L. Rotham

couldn’t imagine any male on this ship would be anxious to relive his days as a second-class citizen through the telling of such tales. Because Terrans already had mixed ideas about gender dominance, the Council had deemed it prudent to limit the education of the recruits to Garathan’s current social order. Technically, the new democracy afforded females equal rights, but it was still in its infancy and, for the moment, run exclusively by males, and the sooner the recruits adjusted to their minority status, the better off they’d be.

Monica, however, was an entirely different kettle of fish. As a Garathani female, and the minister’s daughter at that, she would have every right, and indeed be expected to eventually learn the bigger picture of Garathan’s history. No doubt she would assign unjustly vengeful motives to his treatment of her, making the mastery of her even more difficult. And she didn’t even know about Shauss yet.

He winced again. Once she was awake and had time to think about what he’d said, she would probably arrive at the rest of it on her own and hit the proverbial ceiling. She was perfectly versed in current Garathani mating rituals, after all—she just hadn’t expected to participate.