2
THULIAK
Iwaited in the airlock, and I laughed when Airlock engaged the magnets to seal me alone inside.
She’d be back. I didn’t doubt it for a moment.
I closed my eyes, because I could still smell her. It was the scent of flowers I’d never smelled. Her scent was painful and enticing, it made me weak, because I knew I’d give anything to have her.
It wouldn’t be simple, or as the Lexicon told me, a “cake walk” to wrangle together enough packships to protect Eden, but I would do it for Airlock.
It was normal to form a Breeding Swarm. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of packships would orbit a planet, until every last willing woman had been bred. The first scion to take a woman from the planet was first, and his pack had first courtship and breeding rights.
It was all routine, but nothing about the virgin planet would be routine. Scions who normally would never dare to cross me may be willing to declare war over a planet full of virgins. I had rights of first breeding, but among the Khetar, all rights of other Khetar could be taken by force.
So I needed to defend Eden, but I needed to do so in suchwould be to defend it in such a way that I didn’t paint a target onto the planet. If the other scions noticed the Grasp Drive signatures of dozens of packships all coming straight for Eden, they’d wonder what was there. Sooner or later, someone would come poking in to see what all the commotion was, and they’d find a planet full of virgin women.
If I didn’t get enough ships here fast enough though, I risked that someone else would show up in more numbers thanWrathhad, and I’d fail in my promise to Airlock to keep her world safe.
I needed to strike a good middle ground. I needed my two closest allies to come, probably Rhulgar and Eriok, offering them Weapons and Emissary for their trouble. Those two were already known to work with me, and no one other scion would find it too suspicious
Three packships would be enough defense, for now, and I could figure out a way to draw more ships in without attracting too much attention. With five or six packships all together, we could channel a bubble net around the whole system, which would stop an armada of any size from getting the jump on us. In a worst-case scenario, we’d have to retreat, but we’d at least be able to bring all the women who were actively breeding with us.
But what was I going to do? My first instinct had been to form a triumvirate as soon as possible to secure my legacy. Even after the kiss, that had been my plan. Now though? Now that I’d seen how wet I could make her, and how sweetly she screamed when I touched her? I wanted to breed her hard solo. I wanted to pump her full of my seed every night, filling her full. I wanted to make her cum so hard that she begged me to stop even as her body kept moving and asking me for more.
As much as I wanted her to give me a baby, I wasn’t ready to share her. Not yet. Whoever formed our triumvirate would not get to know her as a virgin the way I did. I’d give her over to him once she was more experienced—and maybe more able to satisfy a man—but only I, Thuliak, would ever know her as a virgin of the Virgin Planet.
I needed someone strong though. Someone who was worthy of breeding with us. Our first child would be the scion of his own packship one day, the alpha of this new pack we would soon form from my pack and the first “tainted” women of Eden.
I laughed, certain that Airlock couldn’t hear me through the sealed door. Already we were broadcasting to Eden. High Command was doing what it could to censor us, but their only effective countermeasure was physically isolating women from technology. They’d began resorting to this, as well as setting off EMP bombs in major population centers, but the damage would be done no matter what they tried to stop it. Any woman with an inkling of curiosity would see our physical form and anatomy, and maybe it wouldn’t have quite the same effect it had on these three in the flesh, but I was certain that hundreds of thousands of virgin women were about to come crashing on our packship door, begging us to breed them.
Maybe Airlock would be angry with me for tainting most of her planet, but it’s not like she didn’t make the same decision upon laying eyes on me. She had to realize by now just how repressed she had been, and how her planet’s leaders were doing that to her.
I was freeing the planet Eden from the shackles of virginity and celibacy. They’d thank me later.
Likely they wouldn’t thank me right now though, and I needed all three of them to agree to come with me. I reached out and felt the implants in Emissary's head, and I blocked them from receiving any signals from Eden or from the rest of the crew. I’d wait until they were safely aboard my packship before unblocking the women’s comms with Eden.
Thenmycomms started going off in my head. Loudly and urgently. The Khetar were far more advanced than humanity. In our most ancient history we developed machinery and technology similar to what humans had now, but over thousands of generations and eons of advancement, we fused with our technology. We existed as beings with no physical bodies for billions of years—or so the legends go—until just a few hundreds of millions of years ago the machine intelligence which we became created these bodies for us. The bodies were perfectly crafted to be irresistible to any females in the galaxy, but our bodies were still just small parts of us. Our true minds still existed in the machine intelligence, which was a type of hive mind that could fragment itself into smaller aspects. Our physical existence had come to be just one fragment of a greater whole, but that greater whole still was a part of me, which is why I could manipulate the humans’ primitive technology at will.
And now I received a message through the Hivemind. I didn’t get the message as words or even thoughts slowly broadcasting, but rather as a complete chunk of information that just appeared in my head fully formed. One moment I didn’t know anything was wrong, and the next I was fully aware of the situation.
A Grasp Drive had just spooled up a few hundred light-years away, and it was starting to pull on the space just outside Eden’s orbit. The drive signature was from the packshipHarbinger, which was scioned by Tschenkar. I wasn’t friends with him, and I probably couldn’t even call him an acquaintance. The only positive thing I could say is that we’d never actively tried to kill each other, though he had bombed my ship once, and I’d once tried to strand him between stars, which would indirectly have killed him.
My pack was waiting for me to come back—to see the race of women they’d get to breed in the flesh—but now they needed me back to prepare for a possible battle.
I willed the airlock magnets open, and I shoved the door open.
I saw all three women gathered in a circle, whispering to each other. Airlock had put on the top of her vacuum suit, covering her bare breasts. I grinned at her.
“What is it?” She snapped. “We’re not done yet, Thuliak.”
“You will come with me,” I said. “Now. Another packship will soon enter Eden’s orbit. If you’d like me to uphold my end of the bargain and defend your virgin world, then I’ll need to be in my ship. If you’re coming with me, now is the time.”
Airlock took a step toward me. I’d never really doubted she’d come with me, but I still felt a huge relief when she came up by my side and faced her human crewmates while standing next to me. I had her, and even if I couldn’t get the others to come, as long as I had Airlock I would be okay.
Though I did still want the others bad enough to fight for them if it came to that.
“Will you come with me?” I asked, “If not, I’d launch your popsicle ships away as soon as possible.Harbingershouldn’t be able to catch you…if you leave right now.”