Mastered by Her Mates (Interstellar Bride Book 0) (17 page)

“Yes, Sir. Lady Zakar, it’s an honor.”

“Thank you.”

The giant warrior bowed to me as we walked past. Grigg led me out into the hallway, my hand safely in his warm touch. He made me feel safer just by the contact. I had to hope that he felt at least soothed by mine. “Where are we going?”

“To medical.”

* * *

Conrav, Medical Station One

I shuddered as the two contaminated warriors that had survived their time on the Hive base arrived on field cots, rushed here from the shuttle.

We would try to save them. We
always
tried.

“Doctor Rhome?”

“I’m here.” The cool-headed doctor had transferred here after his only son perished in battle in Sector 453. He was twenty years my senior, and he’d seen more Hive Integrations than I cared to think about. It was my goal, Grigg’s goal, never to compare.

The two bodies twitched and fought the restraints that held them strapped to the exam tables. Two days ago, they’d been young Prillon warriors in their prime, lost on a scouting patrol. Now?

The were still warriors, but with no memory of their pasts, their identities wiped away by what had been described to me as a constant buzzing inside their minds. Like all warriors, they were large, and with their new Hive implants they would be stronger than any but our Atlan warriors in berserker mode, the microscopic bio-implants integrated into their muscular and nervous systems making them stronger, faster, and harder to kill than us inferior biologicals.

Fucking Hive.

“Which one do you want?”

Doctor Rhone shrugged. “I’ll take the right.”

I nodded and he stepped forward instructing the crew to wheel his patient toward the surgical station. I’d go left with my own crew and the warrior who still bore the dark orange collar of a Myntar mate around his neck.

Fuck. I knew him.

The door to the medical station slid open and I sensed who would be on the other side even before Grigg and Amanda stepped into the room. I motioned my surgical team to go ahead and prep the warrior at the station and glared at Grigg. “She has no business here. Are you fucking out of your mind?”

She wasn’t a warrior, wasn’t a doctor. She shouldn’t see this pain, this disturbing reality of war.

Grigg’s stare was cold, hard and completely unrelenting. “She needs to see what happens to us, what will happen to Earth.”

“No.” I turned to our mate, to the soft brown eyes, so innocent, so fucking stubborn. “No, Amanda. I won’t allow it. You should not see this. I am speaking as your second, my only wish to protect you, to shield you from it all.”

The contaminated warrior to my right bellowed and raged as the surgical team struggled to sedate him for extraction of the core processor the Hive had implanted. Amanda jumped at the sound and I shook my head at her. If the warrior survived, he’d be sent to the Colony to live out the rest of his life in peace.

Most did not survive.

I couldn’t let her see this dark misery, didn’t want her tainted by Hive filth. “No, Amanda.”

“Please, Rav?” Her eyes were fervent. Eager, not to see the harshness of what the Hive did to us, but eager for the truth. “I need to see for myself.”

“No,” I repeated. My first instinct was to protect my mate, and there was no fucking way she was watching one of these motherfuckers die on the table.

Grigg growled and I knew I was going to hate the next words out of his mouth. I wasn’t wrong. “Show her, Rav. That’s an order.”

“Fuck.” I shook my head. “I fucking hate you right now.”

“I know.”

I couldn’t look at him as I turned to my team. I ignored Amanda as well, she and Grigg following me like shadows.

The warrior had been strapped to the surgical table with special bonds we’d created just for this purpose. The Hive implants made them so fucking strong we’d had to develop special alloys to contain them.

The warrior Doctor Rhome had taken settled and I knew that his fate would be decided in the next few minutes. I dismissed him from my mind. He was in Doctor Rhome’s hands now. I had my own patient to worry about.

The warrior on the table before me was covered with silver skin starting at his neck, up his face to his temples, but for some odd reason the Hive had left his forehead and hair alone. His left arm had been completely mechanized, the robotic compartments opening and closing as small gadgets and weapons searched for a target. His legs appeared to be normal, but there was no way to be sure until we’d stripped him naked and done a full inspection.

We wouldn’t bother unless he survived the next five minutes.

“Sedate him, now.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Amanda hovered near his feet and I couldn’t look at her as my patient strained and cried out, the words an unintelligible jumble of sounds. The noise faded and the bio-monitors on the wall indicated his mind had settled into unconsciousness.

“Turn him.” Four medical staff hurried to do as I bid, all of them faces I knew and trusted, faces who’d gone through this hell with me before. Again and again.

Looking over my shoulder, I signaled an unoccupied member of my staff to join us. The young woman, newly mated and still innocent of the horrors of this war, hurried to stand before me. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Please notify Captain Myntar, in person, that his second was recovered from the Hive Integration Unit and is being processed in med one.” Captain Myntar would understand what wasn’t said, and, if he was smart, would keep his mate, Mara, far, far from here for a while.

“He’s on the command deck,” Grigg added. “Damn it.”

She hurried to do as I bid, to deliver the news to our third in command as Amanda raised her hand to cover her mouth. “Myntar?”

“Yes.”

Amanda gasped and I turned to her.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, it’s just—Mara. I know her. She’s the one… He’s Mara’s mate?”

I lifted my gaze to Grigg’s and he nodded. The time for secrets or half-truths was over. I softened my tone when I answered her. “Yes, mate. This is Mara’s second.”

“Oh, God.”

Grigg led her to the edge of the small surgical area, his arm supporting her waist as I returned my full attention to the warrior whose life hung in the balance. Now lying on his side, my team had cut away the armor covering his spine. The new scar was easily visible, the mark nearly five inches long running the left edge of his spine, not far from his heart.

“Bio-integrity field?” I asked as I took my place at his back.

“Activated and fully operational, Doctor.”

The energy field surrounding his body would prevent infection or cross contamination when we opened him up. I rolled my shoulders slightly, trying to ease the tension pinching me like microscopic vices. Some days I fucking hated my job. This wasn’t being a doctor, healing the sick, this was being a butcher, and oftentimes, a killer.

I didn’t shoot Hive scouts of the air or tear them apart with my bare hands on the battlefield, but I caused the death of more than my share, right here in a room designed to heal. And the real mind-fuck was every single one of them would probably thank me if they could.

Someone handed me a pair of surgical gloves and I slipped my hands into them as another placed the ion-blade on a waist-high tray to my left. Cutting was barbaric, beyond cruel, and the only way to remove the foreign objects the Hive implanted in our warriors, our women, our fucking children.

“All right, let’s get the damn thing out of him.”

“He’s stable.”

I nodded and reached for the ion-blade. Lifting the device to Myntar’s back, I cut him open slowly, layer by layer until the bones that lined his spinal column came into view. But I knew that wouldn’t be enough. I kept cutting away the bone until I saw what I hunted, the silver orb attached to his spinal cord, countless microscopic tendrils working their way through his nerves, working their way up and down his spinal cord, weaving themselves into his system. Taking him over.

We called the strange device their core processor, for any Hive, from the lowest scout to their fiercest soldier classes, ceased to function without it. Once removed, the minds of the individuals became their own, the constant buzzing chatter they suffered as part of the collective, silenced.

There was no easy way to remove it. Over the centuries we’d tried everything. Cutting. Tearing, Ripping it free. Melting the metal. It didn’t matter how gentle or unforgiving our method, the result was the same.

The man either lived or he died in a matter of minutes, a self-destruct sequence activated by the remaining implants that had been spread throughout the rest of the victim’s body. It wasn’t pretty, nor free of pain for the victim.

“I see it, Doctor.”

“Yes.” I set the blade down and dug my fingers deep into the warrior’s exposed flesh, wrapped my fingers around the metal orb that was a quarter the size of my fist. “Everyone ready?”

A chorus of yeses sounded around me as I gritted my teeth and pulled. Hard.

Chapter Thirteen

Amanda

Grigg’s arm was the only thing keeping me on my feet. Mara’s
mate.
Little Lan’s second father. Her family was about to shatter right before my eyes and I couldn’t help but imagine the wrenching pain of losing one of my mates, of seeing Grigg or Rav so helpless and broken on that table.

I didn’t know exactly what they were doing to the Prillon warrior, but by the tension in the air and grim faces around the room, I knew it wasn’t anything good. I ignored the sounds of the second medical team working across the room on another warrior who probably had a family. Loved ones. I didn’t want to know. I had all I could deal with right here.

That the man was a Prillon warrior was obvious by his golden hair, sharp features and dark gold forehead. But below that his skin had been altered to a strange, shimmering silver. Before they’d knocked him out his entire left arm had looked like something out of a robot horror movie, strange little devices emerging from his flesh to click, or grasp, or buzz into empty space like a lost fly repeatedly bashing its body against a clear window trying to get back outdoors.

The whole thing was so strange and sad. “What did they do to him?” I whispered my question to Grigg as Rav was completely focused on his patient and I did not want to distract him.

“They consume other races, implant us with technology that regulates our bodies. The core processor Rav is removing from his back integrates with the spinal cord. It’s a biosynthetic that continues to grow and expand with time until it infiltrates the brain. After that, there’s no hope at all.”

“I don’t understand.” I refused to look away as Rav cut open the warrior’s back. I even leaned closer as the light silver shimmer of a foreign object became visible where it had somehow attached itself to the man’s spine.
The core processor
. It looked wholly alien, so much more sinister than anything I’d ever seen.

Grigg’s hand came to rest on the back of my neck and I crossed my arms over my chest, bracing for the revulsion I knew was coming.

“Rav is going to remove it. Once he does that, we’ll know in the next few minutes.”

“Know what?”

“He’ll either wake up from his stupor and remember who he is, in which case he’ll be rushed to a ReGen pod to repair the damage to his spine.”

“Or?” I nudged Grigg with my shoulder, even as I leaned into the strong fingers massaging the base of my neck.

“Or he’ll self-destruct.”

I gasped. “What?”

What the hell did that mean? I opened my mouth to ask another question but all thought fled as I watched Rav’s muscles bulge and flex as he braced himself against the edge of the table and yanked the silver orb from the warrior’s back with one violent twist of his forearm.

“Containment!” Rav barked the order and one of his helpers in gray rushed forward with a small black box. Rav dropped the silver orb inside, the hairlike tendrils waving in the air as if searching for another host, another body to invade.

That thing was creepier than the worst of the monster-sized cockroaches I’d found under the sink of my crap apartment in college.

The officer closed the lid and rushed to an S-Gen station in the center of the medical station. He hurriedly placed his hand on the scanner and I sighed with relief when the bright green light flared and the box, and the creepy silver orb, disappeared, I had to hope, forever.

I turned back to find Rav finishing up, running a small ReGen wand over the cut he’d made in the warrior’s back. “Time?”

“Two minutes.”

Rav looked so sad, so resigned, and I knew from the anger and helplessness I felt flowing through my collar that Rav didn’t think the warrior was going to survive. “Roll him onto his back. Let’s see if he wakes up.”

They scrambled to do as Rav bid and I bit my lip, waiting to see what would happen next. The gadgets on the warrior’s arm remained dormant and I wondered what would happen to them if he survived.

Rav looked at me then, his gaze, unlike Grigg’s, hid nothing from me. He let me see everything, the pain, the helpless rage, the regret that he couldn’t do more. I could
feel
it.

“If he survives, I’ll remove as much as I can. But most of the damage is microscopic, biological implants too small to track or remove will have been embedded in his muscles, his bones, his eyes and skin, all designed to make him stronger, faster, his sight keener, his flesh resistant to extremes of temperature.”

“Is he—may I—” Hell, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to say, but I wanted to get a closer look.

Grigg deferred to Rav, who nodded. He sighed, probably realizing he could no longer protect me from the worst. “Go ahead, Amanda. Get a good look at what the Hive can do.”

I stepped forward, my legs stiff and unsteady at first, but I waved away Grigg’s offer to assist. I wanted to see this for myself. I needed to see this.

Four steps, five, and I was beside the hulking mass of the unconscious warrior. He looked almost peaceful, his strange silver face in repose. I wandered the edges of the exam table, taking it all in, the strange metallic pieces attached to his arm, the silver hue of his skin, the complete lack of recognition or control he’d possessed before they’d put him under. He’d been insane, incoherent. Unrecognizable as—as what? I’d been thinking as a human being, but he wasn’t human, was he?