Prime Obsession (9 page)

“How?”

“Between the Antarean attacks over the centuries and the loss of almost sixty percent of our fertile females after a mass evacuation during the last major Antarean attack of the planet, we have a less than zero population growth.”

“So, how does joining the Alliance solve that problem?” she asked, her forehead creased in concentration. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she reasoned through the possibilities. All the while she petted his neck as if she comforted him.

A smile crossed her face as she lifted her head and looked him in the eyes. “You want to bring in new humanoid blood.”

“Exactly.” Maren confirmed.

Wulf could say nothing. He didn’t want her to stop smiling at him. It took all his control not to seize her lush pink lips and kiss the sense right out of her.

“So, Ullyn is part of a neo-conservative, keep-our-blood-pure group?” She lay her head back down before he had the chance to do it himself.

“Yes,” Wulf said, struggling to stay on topic when all he wanted to do was carry her off into a dark corner and love her until she screamed with pleasure. “We knew there was opposition, but didn’t realize to what lengths they’d go to stop us.”

“But the pirates?” Melina lifted her head again, this time to look around Wulf at the closely guarded traitors. “Are they stupid? Pirates are the murderous dregs of the universe. They have no honor. The rebels would be killed once the pirates got paid.

They’d sell their own mothers to make a buck.”

“They are fanatics,
lubha
, who can understand what goes on in their minds?” Wulf walked over to the gurney and placed her on it. “Let’s see what you tore open while fighting. Then we can finish up the plans to retake my ship. I want you on a regen bed as soon as possible.”

Melina nodded her agreement and tapped her ear-com and got a verbal response, finally. “Nowicki, where are you?”

Wulf heard Melina’s second-in-command reply over his ear-com unit. “We’ve retaken all levels of the ship except for the area right outside the engine room. The pirates are dug in pretty tightly and I don’t want to risk high casualties on our end. Most of them are Erians. Any help from your end would be appreciated.”

“What are our casualties?” Melina asked as she winced at Wulf’s probing fingers.

“What’s wrong, Mel? Are you hurt?” Melina’s second-in-command was awfully sensitive to the tones in her voice. Just how close was this man to his mate?

“Ow, Wulf. Can you be a tad bit more gentle? I’m not a tough-skinned Prime, ya know?”

Wulf gave a short abrupt nod and swabbed more lightly at the knife wound that had reopened in her side. He was so jealous of whatever relationship Melina had with her second-in-command that he didn’t trust himself to speak without the anger coming through his voice.

Melina smiled and “mouthed thank you” at Wulf, then said, “I’m fine, Nowicki.

Now report, mister.”

This Nowicki could not keep his emotions for Melina out of even a cut-and-dried battle report. The thrice-damned Terran loved her. The only thing that kept Wulf from picking Melina up and hiding her away from the Alliance troops was the fact that he could see and sense with all their
gemate
-connectedness that Melina did not return the Commander’s feelings. Her voice and demeanor told Wulf she respected her second. This observation reaffirmed what his brothers had reported—she treated Commander Nowicki like a brother.

Even knowing and observing all that, Wulf was still jealous, envying the man all the years Wulf had lost with his
gemate.

“We have no major injuries,” Nowicki reported. “Just a few cuts and some laser burns. The pirates have lost about twenty men, most on the Command Deck. We have twenty other pirates in custody and on their way to join the others we’d already captured.”

“Good. We’ve contained two traitors inside the engine room.”

“Three traitors, Melina,” Wulf corrected. “We killed one before you came in through the tunnels.”

“Captain, who is that?”

Nowicki’s voice was harsh with a strong emotion. Ah, the man was also jealous.

“I’m Kenric Wulf Caradoc, Captain of the
Galanti.
Thank you for all your efforts in regaining control of my ship. I do believe we can help from this end.”

“How?” Melina asked, shoving Wulf’s hand away from her hip where he stroked the
gemate
marking.

He laid two fingers across her lips and shook his head, asking for her silence—and trust.

She blinked at him furiously, but nodded.

“Commander Nowicki, go to the fourth level, weaponry and weapons control. You’ll find stun grenades. I believe that there are enough to disable the pirates that are left.”

“That should work. We throw the stun grenades. You’ll open your doors and take out the ones trying to escape your way and we can get the ones coming ours,” Nowicki concluded.

“Exactly. We couldn’t do it before, because they had a highly strategic position and outnumbered us.”

“What about the maintenance tunnels?” Nowicki asked. “Can the pirates use them to escape?”

“No, the traps are deadly and still active,” Melina said, taking back control of the conversation.

Wulf grinned. His
lubha
did not like being out of the loop at all.

“Okay, we’ll signal right before we throw the grenades,” Nowicki said.

“See you soon, Nowicki.”

* * * *

Mel sat on the gurney in the makeshift medical unit and let the Prime crew assist her soldiers in regaining control of the final pirate-occupied area of the ship. She easily monitored all the activity over her ear-com and the visual monitor Iolyn had set up for her. Ostensibly, she was coordinating the action. Mostly she was staying put so Wulf’s carotid artery would not explode from his neck. He hadn’t wanted her to jeopardize her little
bhau
, ass, one more time on his or his ship’s behalf.

Truth be told, she wanted to sleep on a nice regen bed for about twenty-four standard hours. She was tired and even she realized she’d used the last of her reserves in the fight with Ullyn. She wasn’t even sure where she’d obtained the reserves she’d used to fight him.

Plus, she didn’t want to endanger any of her men—or Wulf’s.

The two traitors sat, manacled at the arms, wrists, legs and ankles, then to each other and to a support beam. They weren’t going anywhere.

She, apparently, guarded them. Ha!

“You don’t know what you are, do you, bitch?” spat Ullyn.

“Ullyn. I am getting a bit tired of you calling me a bitch.” She glared at him, then turned away to study the action on the screen. “I’m an Alliance Battle Squadron Captain.

You may call me Captain Dmitros.”

She hoped her feigned disinterest would open him up. She
wanted
him to tell her what was going on. He’d tell her more if he thought she didn’t care.

What was odd, and getting more spooky as the hours went by, was that she could read the Prime crews’ emotions—well, that is, if they did not guard them. Only Wulf, Huw, Iolyn and Maren seemed to know to control their feelings around her, but the rest of the men were like a frigging emotional download into her brain. What even surprised her more was that she was able to single them out and read individual feelings.

Her senses, always highly attuned, had become more so since she had met Wulf.

Why was a question she hoped these two would answer.

Wulf and Maren were withholding information from her—and it had to do with the names Wulf called her.
Gemate. Gemate lubha.
And the terms that Maren mentioned, battle symbiosis and battle-mate. She particularly didn’t like the sound of that last word.

There was that increasing sense of belonging she’d felt since she met Wulf. A belonging to him—and to the Prime as a whole. If she hadn’t known her parents were Greeks born on planet Earth, she would think she was Prime.

“You’re Wulf’s
gemate
.”

Well, that was blunt. But she had sort of figured that was what Wulf thought. He’d called her that enough.

She shrugged her attention on the final legs of the battle outside of the engine room doors. From the corner of her eye, she watched Ullyn. He waited for a reaction. She wouldn’t give him one.

“You, stupid bitch.” Ullyn glared at her. “You’re his mate. His woman. His wife, if you want to think of it in Terran terms.”

“Now, how could I be his mate? I only just met him a few hours ago.”

“You’re one of the Lost Ones. You have to be. You have his
gemate
imprint on your hip. The whole crew saw it,” said the traitor she’d wounded, a man named Prolow.

Everyone had seen her naked torso? She’d thought only Ullyn had. Hadn’t Wulf’s big-ass body blocked most of the view? She frowned, then recalled Wulf growling and ordering the crew back to work. Damn, she’d kick his butt for exposing her like that.

“I think you’re making all this up.”

She turned her attention back to the monitor, continuing to pretend she didn’t care.

Underneath she seethed. Something was going on and she was the only party who didn’t know the score.

The more information she could pry out of these two, the better she could deal with whatever lay ahead. Somehow, even without new information, she’d sensed that Wulf would not let her leave this ship—at least not without him by her side. Plus, he’d already stated he wanted her in a regen bed in
his
medical unit.

“Listen, you stupid cow. You are Prime. Your
gemate
mark glowed when Wulf touched it. That only happens in imprinted pairs,” explained Ullyn. “All the female evacuees before the last Antarean battle for Cejuru Prime were imprinted with their genetically optimal mates’ pheromones before they left. Most of the females never returned, depriving a whole generation of Prime males the chance at breeding more females for the next.”

Her mind reeled with the possibility that her whole life had been one big lie. How could that be?

She turned and gave them her full attention.

“Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m a Prime and one of the so-called Lost Ones,” she said. “Then what you tried to do here doesn’t make sense. By joining the Alliance, Wulf found me. Mightn’t this open up your planet to receive Alliance aid in finding other survivors? This would further your cause for genetic purity.” Prolow shook his head. His lips twisted into a sneer. “You don’t understand. Our birth rate is so low that even if we found all the lost females alive we could not raise the birthrate for several generations. The Prime leaders would still permit interbreeding with other humanoids. We can’t allow that to happen. Prime blood must remain pure.”

“But that means your race as a whole will die out. Correct me if I’m wrong, but inbreeding would reinforce genetic defects and hasten the end of your race. Don’t you see that?”

Prolow’s jaw grew hard. “You do not understand, woman. We must remain pure. If
Diew
chooses our race to die out, then it must die with pure blood intact.” Mel shook her head. Fanatics. The Prime leaders were right: New blood would strengthen and allow for more selective mutations. This had been proven within the Alliance as more races joined and commingled. The Prime would have a chance of survival with potentially even a stronger set of bloodlines. All humanoids fought to survive; it was the natural order of things.

While Prolow and Ullyn surely believed the line of propaganda they fed her, it still rang false. Allowing a whole species to die out was just plain stupid. The rebel leaders might have another agenda—one not told to the rank and file minions such as Prolow and Ullyn. She wondered what it was.

Well, whatever it was would be the Galactic Alliance and the Prime Council’s problem. Not hers. She was just a soldier.

“What’s battle symbiosis?” she asked. She might as well pump these two stooges for all they were worth. She didn’t want to place her faith in Wulf’s continued promise of explaining all
later
. She didn’t plan on being here later.

“You believe you are a Prime and Wulf’s mate?” Prolow asked.

“No, I’m humoring you.” She noted that the battle outside the engine room was nearly over. She wanted all her answers before she left the
Galanti
. She wanted to know what questions to ask her parents, the people who raised her for as long as she could remember.

“Battle symbiosis has not been seen since several centuries ago, before the Berean Wars.” Ullyn paused, his brow creased in concentration. “The stories say some mated Prime fought alongside one another and worked as one unit.”

“Battle-mates?” she whispered.

“Yes. In a perfect
gemat-gemate
match, the mated couple’s hearts beat at the same rhythm. What one sensed so did the other. One’s adrenaline aided the other’s. Legends even say they could communicate with their mind during times of strong emotions—

during battle and making love.” Prolow leered at her.

Ullyn added, “The mind-connection allows them to anticipate each other’s moves so as to become the perfect fighting machine.”

“So, Prime females used to be warriors?”

“Yes. Some,” Prolow qualified, “not all mated pairs had this battle symbiosis, you understand. But those that did were the leaders of their time.” Mel turned toward them. “I’m not sure about anything you’ve told me, but let me clue you in about partnering with pirates. You should be happy we caught you, stopped you, because the pirates would’ve turned on you, killed you and then where would your cause be?”

“You know nothing, bitch.” Ullyn glared at her in defiance.

“I may know nothing.” Shakily, she rose and turned the monitor off. “But your mercenary allies just got their asses handed to them.”