Dominating Dekalia Read online

  Well, it worked both ways, didn’t it?

  Dropping heavily into the copilot seat, Dekalia went to work on the complex system of cross-straps, an archaic system of protection quite redundant given the ship’s anti-grav and laser safety-beam system, but the primales were all about overkill.

  And this was a primale ship, a primale mission.

  “Thirteen one eleven, vector two,” he recited the landing coordinates.

  She read the numbers back, another of his precious primale procedures.

  “I don’t see why you need me to check you,” she said. “You have photographic recall and a computing drive for a brain.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw his jaw tense ever so slightly.

  Interesting. Was she getting to him?

  “No one is beyond error,” he said.

  She feigned shock. “Say it isn’t so.”

  “You will restrict all nonessential conversation until landing,” he told her now.

  Or else what? she thought, but decided to hold her tongue, restricting herself to an audible snort.

  “Approach factor minus eleven.”

  “Minus eleven,” she parroted for sake of the ship’s navigation system, which was itself a veritable smorgasbord of redundancies.

  The view out the cockpit window was changing. Where a moment ago had been only stars, now there were heavy clouds and flashes of lightning. They were in atmospheric approach. Yastin Minor One was said to have some of the most beautiful and colorful storms in the universe. Depending on their length of stay they might see more of them than any human before them.

  Again, under different circumstances… She might almost enjoy it, but she could not afford joy. She had work to do.

  Dekalia hadn’t only been crying and dreaming of sex. For days she had been thinking about escape, once they landed. Or at least of getting a message to her people. It would not be easy. Her observations revealed the primale slept a total of fifteen standard minutes out of every twenty-four hours. A bloody machine is what he was.

  She had tried not to think of him being up all the time when she slept. Foolishly she had attempted to stay awake when they first left.

  He had found her passed out in the corridor outside the galley thirty-six standard hours into the trip.

  She had received a lecture and a thoroughly maddening trip to her quarters cradled in his arms. In that half-dreamy state she had whispered a thing or two, she only hoped it was in keeping with her proper relationship as sworn enemy. It was one of the few times she had ever envied an obedient, being born and genetically engineered to love surrender, to crave it, to find sole purpose in letting a man care for you…forever.

  There were fems who fantasized, a few who tried to pass themselves off, but a primale knew the difference and it was a good thing they did. Another thing about primales was their habit of marking territory.

  One orgasm with a potential mate was often all it took and he would never want another woman, never even be able to seek one unless the first specifically and rather elaborately rejected him. Otherwise she was his for life. He’d find her, one end of the universe to the other, if separated and he’d die by her side, fighting or dying to defend her life.

  Those primales in the Guardian Corps were not allowed mates for this reason. They were bound to the species as a whole, to die and kill for its well-being, the whole time under orders of their superiors.

  This was Marax’s deal, his nature, his total reason for existence.

  As for Dekalia she was a contingency, a time-specific commitment.

  His order now was to defend her, she presumed to the death, but he might as easily be ordered to drop her at the nearest Earth settlement station.

  Or sacrifice her…

  The thought chilled her to the core. Surely he would never be asked to do this by General Tragaxar. Not even the most deviant primale was capable of murder. And if they’d wished her dead, why send her this far away?

  Dekalia managed a laugh at the irony of the whole situation. In some crazy way she still trusted them, the men designed to protect people like her. It was a faith that made her as much a part of the problem as the solution.

  “Are you fit to maintain your post?” Marax asked, taking note of her sudden apparent giddiness.

  She nodded. “Never been fitter.”

  Marax shook his head.

  His displeasure might have induced another round of laughter on her part but she really was anxious to keep on course. The sooner they got on the ground the sooner she would figure a way out of this mess—and away from him.

  Marax worked his hands over the instrument panel, his fingers assuming the motions for a landing he could have done in REM function. Meanwhile he thought of her. The fem obviously had no clue why she was really here. He didn’t trust her.

  She feigned weaknesses of all sorts, cried in her cabin when she thought he couldn’t hear. She pretended not to care but she did and he did not miss the way she studied his every motion. The way her eyes lit up and her breath quickened. It was sexual, but mixed with anger and she had made it clear she would as soon push him out a porthole into deep space as make sex with him.

  To all intents and purposes she was enemy and his prisoner and must be regarded as such. It would be a mistake to underestimate her.

  The time he had found her in the hallway, collapsed to point of exhaustion and beyond from a lack of sleep that would have killed most humans was when he realized what he was dealing with.

  The will of a primale essentially contained in a fem body and tainted with every fem emotion. A worthy foe indeed.

  He could handle a male enemy. This Dekalia was beyond anything he’d dealt with. She would certainly eliminate him to achieve her aims, but did she know with any certainty how to achieve her ends, in other words, was she a greater danger to herself?

  All of which was to say he could not leave her alone but since she hadn’t actually rebelled as of yet there was no cause for the sort of restraint she had alluded to moments earlier.

  Which was another confusing thing. The angrier she got the more she seemed fixated on his power and strength.

  There were fems, primale groupies, who sought out certain experiences of domination. Was she among them?

  Such women were fools because they had no idea what a primale was all about. Fems had their mems for sex toys and they needed to let it go at that.

  The bottom line was Dekalia drove him wild. With her long, silky hair and the soft smell of her skin, those kissable lips, the way she pursed them, halfway between a pout and blind anger. More than that, it was the pain behind her eyes and the hope, something irrepressible.

  He could barely stop thinking of her.

  Of being with her.

  Marax had in fact come very close to masturbating.

  He had known Dekalia was there that day, watching him exercise. It wasn’t difficult, with his augmented hearing, to detect her breathing and the pounding of her heart.

  Marax had been on the multipeze machine working out some of the frustration of this absurd mission, reliving for the umpteenth time his meeting with General Tragaxar. Marax had been told he would not be returning with his unit to the front, that he was needed for a vital mission of State, outside the normal scope of but not beyond the essential function of the Guardians.

  The machine had nearly heaved and cracked under the strain of his muscles as he had worked out yet again that memory when he had first detected her.

  In the hallway. By accident at first, but she’d stayed for the duration.

  He could sense her increased pulse. She had been aroused. She had wanted to come in after him.

  Dekalia had wanted to touch him and to be touched. She had wanted more too. She had wanted to be taken.

  And he had wanted her.

  Combat decompression, the eggheads from psy-specs would call it, the sudden overwhelming need for physical contact to confirm life over death.

  Marax needed no fancy names or theories to kn
ow that he had wanted the fem to walk into that room.

  He would have taken her in his arms. Kissed her hard. Then his instincts would have kicked in. The natural dominance of the primale.

  He would have ordered her to take her clothes off so he could see her once and for all. No more would she have been able to tease him with that body, that surreal beauty and the color of her hair, which she kept changing to his annoyance and distraction, a shade of blue here, waves of pink there.

  Fems had a million names for all these color gradations and they were known to make the most elaborate art forms of hairstyles and dresses. Every one of them a designer with the capability to perfectly manipulate any fabric, artificial or natural, using their style machines.

  The fantasy had continued with Dekalia naked. Even now the images pounded in his brain.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  She stood before him, perfectly still under his gaze. He watched her cheeks flush red as he commanded her to put her hands at her sides, denying her a chance to cover her sex or her breasts.

  “Please don’t,” she whispered but it only made him laugh.

  “Don’t what?” he teased as he told her to turn around.

  She drew a short stab of breath and rotated, giving him a full view of her perfectly formed body.

  “What were you doing spying on me?” he asked calmly.

  “I wasn’t.” The words stumbled from her mouth.

  “There is a penalty for lying,” he cautioned.

  Her mouth opened in a mixture of dread and desire. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Spank you? In a heartbeat.”

  She shivered visibly.

  “Come to me,” he said.

  He did not have to repeat the command. Shy but not unwilling, she erased the distance between them.

  He took her chin in his fingers, drinking in her beauty. Her eyes were moist.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  And then he kissed her, drawing away her breath. His hands moved to her sides to steady her. His lips moved to her throat and to her earlobes as he whispered to her the things he intended to do.

  And the things she would do for him.

  “You will be my obedient,” he told her. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Dekalia. “I do.”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Of course that was the fantasy Dekalia and not the real one. Fems were excellent lovers but only obedients knew how to fully satisfy a man’s pleasure.

  So this wasn’t about sex-making, about the two of them, but it was about obedience. She would have to do as told during their time together on the planet’s surface. Especially should an emergency arise.

  Dekalia would do or else she would be spanked.

  Correction, he thought wistfully. He would spank her anyway because he liked the feel and coloring of a hot ass as he took a female from behind, listening to her moan and whimper her surrender, begging to be fucked and conquered, to be lifted to mind-numbing orgasm on his terms at his exact command, the timing sequenced to his own relief—before, during or after.

  Marax’s own preference was to make a woman wait, let her take his cum inside her first, hot and copious as a primale’s emission inevitably was. He would feel her shudder in weakness, straining to obey, knowing she likely wouldn’t be able to, coming instead herself, a relentless earthquake, a chasm opened underneath him.

  And he would whisper in her ear the price, the punishment, and she would continue to come, knowing what was next, what he would do to her, anything he liked, for as long as he liked and he might leave her tied afterward, perfectly safe of course, but properly contained, so he could prepare himself…to do it all over again.

  This was primale sex.

  Only an obedient could know it. For only they were mature enough to understand that with their pleasure, far in excess of any fem’s, there came responsibilities.

  Treyela had been prepared to give everything. But he had chosen another more jealous mistress. The Guardian Corps.

  How ironic that its call could involve a sacrifice he’d never imagined, not his life, but his dignity, not the pain of war, but the pain of being left behind.

  The men would never laugh at him for this assignment, primales were not that way, nor would they pity him. They would feel nothing, say nothing, but they would go on, forgetting him as indeed he would need to do in their stead.

  This was the most painful cut of all. To be dead without really being so. To want a woman one could never really have. To undergo a mission to a ghost world, setting down to rest, a shadow ship among shadows or a world utterly without life.

  And she had had the nerve to laugh?

  Where were the words and where was the justice for that? But perhaps he was being too harsh. Marax tried to remember her pain, too, unfortunately at the moment he had another concern.

  They were losing power. The ship’s engines shutting down. Leaving them no option but to crash. On a world full of rock-hard ice.

  Chapter Three

  “Prepare for new coordinates.”

  Marax’s announcement was at first irritating to Dekalia, and then concerning, and then alarming, in that order.

  The full gamut of emotions took only a second or so to run. Something was wrong. She could feel it.

  “What’s wrong with the old coordinates?” she wanted to know.

  This time there was no mistaking the frown. Even a primale couldn’t hide whatever was happening for much longer. “What’s wrong is I have overridden them.”

  “Yes, but why?” It was at this point Dekalia felt the bottom drop out from underneath them.

  “Never mind,” she blurted. “I think that answers my question.”

  Marax ignored her. He was working his hands furiously over the panel, continuously moving his eyes and body, all while managing not to look the least bit panicked.

  “Are we crashing?!”

  “Not if I have anything to do with it. Do you see the button to your right, the green one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Push it.”

  She did so and immediately her half of the panel lit up, too.

  Controls Activated.

  He had to be kidding. Surely he didn’t expect her to copilot this thing for real?

  “We are going to have to go to backup systems, Dekalia. You’ll need to listen to me perfectly and do as I say.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then we will not live to fight another battle, neither one of us.”

  “When you put it that way…”

  “Two floating nodes will appear above your screen, wipe your hands over them. That will charge the backup.”

  The nodes were golden, like tiny holo images. They were innocent looking enough and almost beautiful but when she got her hand too close she felt a huge shock up her left arm and down her spine.

  Marax offered no sympathy. “Do that again and you will be dead long before we crash.”

  Bastard.

  “It’s not like I did it deliberately.”

  “Talking is wasting time,” he reminded.

  She spread her fingers, trying to level her badly shaking hands. There were noises from outside the ship now, scraping and crackling noises that did not sound at all right.

  “We are entering the heavy atmosphere,” he said. “One false move and—”

  “Don’t tell me, one false move and we will be crushed like grapes right?” Her hands were correctly in place now and she could feel a steady zapping, like an old-style telegraph from her nerve endings to the navigation system’s sophisticated controls.

  “Now I need you to relax.”

  Relax, with the energy of an interstellar navigation beam passing through her cerebellum—yeah, right.

  “Sure thing,” she shouted. “Want me to whip up a soufflé for good measure too?”

  “I’ve no idea what that is, but I am sure it is of no use to us right now. Take a deep breath and place the tips of your index fingers on the purple dots, just bel
ow the large, red pulsing light.”

  Child’s play, she thought, not realizing what the connection would entail.

  Connection.

  Of course. How dumb could she be? They were going to land the ship together. The power of two minds…linked as one.

  It generally lasted only a second but it was very real. Often there were aftereffects. Luckily such measures were only needed in emergencies when the regular computer systems were malfunctioning.

  “Relax,” he growled. “I need access.” Marax had ceased to move now. He was leaning back in his seat, eyes closed.

  I could kiss him right now, Dekalia thought. And he would never know. Wow, talk about all-time stupid ideas.

  “Tell me there’s another way, Marax.”

  “No. I need to get in there and work the guide lasers through you while I handle the old-fashioned throttles. I don’t have enough hands of my own.”

  Marax appeared to be done asking.

  Dekalia felt her will being pushed backward. Not brute force exactly, but overwhelming none the less.

  Oh, stars.

  A primale intelligence was pressing against hers, his will pushing at her boundaries, wanting her to yield.

  She tried not to make it sexual, the implications of having him push to be inside her, his hard aura, as seductive as it was overwhelming. He only wanted the motor system but how much else would he sense.

  Don’t fight, she heard him whisper from within.

  It was like an itch, this needing to yield, and only he could scratch it, with his indomitable control.

  I won’t hurt you, she heard him say now. Trust me.

  And she did.

  And just like that he was taking the helm.

  Her fingers began to move at super-speed. She looked down at her own hands as if they were someone else’s. Her breasts swelled and ached to have his or her hands on them.

  By the stars, what a terrible time to want to make sex with Marax.

  Not that there was ever a good time.

  “Audio nine, frequency two,” he announced now and she heard herself reply, something about reactor coil check alpha bravo.

  Was it her voice?

  Apparently.

  “Good,” he affirmed. “Steady now.”