Mated to the Beast(12)

Fuck. My cock was hard as a rock and not at all comfortable stuffed inside my armor.

I closed one cuff around my left wrist, then the right, the seal on them secure. The match had been made, my mate identified. There was no going back. I would fight until I couldn’t fight any longer, then take my mate home. I would grow old and fat on Atlan with a beautiful and well-fucked woman at my side. I felt the snugness of the bands, felt the weight and finality of my decision and let it settle around my shoulders like a cloak. I took a deep breath, then another, and grunted once the cuffs were secure.

The doctor held out a matching set of smaller cuffs meant for my bride and I clipped them onto the belt at my waist. She’d don them and be free from the military immediately. To her commander, it was a blatant sign of her mated status, a symbol that she belonged to me. While simply taking her wouldn’t form a permanent bond—only fucking while the beast within was unleashed, with both sets of cuffs on our wrists would do that—the knowledge that she waited for me, that she needed me, that she could be under fire this very moment, made me impatient to claim her.

“Send me now, before I tear this ship apart.”

My mate was in constant danger as a fighter. I stalked over to the transport pad located in the far corner of the medical station and cracked my neck side to side as I waited for one of the transport officers to communicate coordinates with the main system transporters. Normally, nothing but biological mass was allowed through the transport system, but when transporting onto the front lines, everything went for safety purposes. Armor and weapons included. I patted the ion pistol at my side and checked the knife on the other. All good.

“Good luck, Dax.”

“I’ll be back.” I met Commander Deek’s surprised look then tilted my head in the doctor’s direction. “I see no reason to go home. Once my mate is secure and the fever is gone, I will settle onboard the Battleship Brekk with her and continue fighting, as the Prillon warriors do.”

An Atlan female would never consent to that life, a life surrounded by war, but I was not ready to stop fighting the Hive, and my mate wouldn’t be given the choice. She would be reassigned to caring for the children, or some other safe duty with the other women in the battle group. And me? I would fuck her every night and kill Hive every day. It would be perfect, as soon as I found her and fucked her into submission, fucked away the mating fever that boiled through my blood.



* * *



Sarah Mills, Sector 437, Recon Unit 7—Recovery of Freighter 927-4 from Hive scout teams



I stared down the scope of my ion rifle and watched as nine Hive scouts moved around the supply room with robotic precision. The Hive had invaded and taken over the coalition freighter two hours earlier, the crew’s distress call still played in my mind like a broken record. The small ship’s pilot had died screaming as I listened in the debriefing room. The eight coalition soldiers assigned to this small freighter were all either dead or transported to an integration station on a Hive outpost. We couldn’t save them, but we could keep the Hive from acquiring the weapon stockpiles and raw materials in this hold.

Lifting my eye from my ion pistol’s scope focused on the upper deck of the supply room, I motioned with two fingers for my team of twelve to split in three and move silently around the perimeter so we could surround them from above and pick them off like flies. We’d done this a dozen times in the last month and my unit moved like ghosts along the upper rigging in the room, their blasters at the ready.

It took a month of induction training to be ready to fight the Hive. All coalition recruits Earth sent to the battle battalions were required to have previous military experience—Earth military. It didn’t matter which country a person fought for, only that they had extensive training in tactical, physical, and other skills they would need to fight the Hive. There were no homemakers or car wash attendees in the coalition fleet. That reassured me, for I’d been in the Army for eight years. I didn’t need to be shot in the ass by a green recruit. Nor did I need to get killed because some inexperienced kid panicked at the sight of the silver cyborg soldiers.

The Hive made the old Terminator movies seem like bad 1950s sci-fi movies. Those cyborgs were slow to respond and more machine than human.

The Hive were much worse; streamlined and fast, they didn’t wear clunky metal chunks and stomp around in moon boots made of iron. No, they were quick, highly intelligent, and, if they had civilian clothes on, could pass for biological if one didn’t notice the silvery hue to their skin and eyes.

Hive cyborgs created from captured Prillon warriors were the worst I’d seen; big, mean and nearly impossible to kill without taking multiple shots.