Abducted by the Star Prince (Lords of Astria) (2 page)

“Father, enough! I’ll ready the ship and leave this night if it means no more nagging from you.” The images snapped back to blankness, and Kester’s body settled. He stood again. He knew that there would be no fated mate on Terra for him, but he would bed a Terran woman and impregnate her if he must. He couldn’t promise much on the marriage front, but he could perhaps get past that part of the deal and continue traveling from world to world and sampling each one of their women. If the Terran woman could give him an heir, he could return her home and have nothing more to do with her weak, medieval race. Kester turned and stormed from the great hall, turning towards the dock where his father stored the old hyperdrive ships. He would go alone and return soon. After all, he had to get back to his damned life.
 

Nadia

“Ready the airlock. Something’s wrong with the damn thing.” Nadia raked her fingers through her wavy blond hair and pulled it back into a ponytail. She hadn’t tended to her usual beauty routine on the space station because... well it was the space station. Her skin had been sallow since she arrived at the ISS, and her hair lacked the luster that it had back on Earth. It was worth it for the view though. She floated over to the window, looking out over the broad horizon. It was easy to feel small when you were far enough to see four continents, and the atmosphere casually swirling away, unaware of the humans below. As long as Commander Nadia Rainer had been on the ISS -- going on two months now -- her breath hitched in her throat each time she looked out of the window and saw Earth. It was something like the feeling she got when she looked out at the sea as a child, but on a far greater scale. Vast, expansive, utterly sublime. And sometimes lonely too. Dmitri was the person she’d worked with most since she’d arrived, but he was sullen and preferred not to speak English when he didn’t have to.
 

“Spacewalk, Commander?” he asked. There was something in his tone to suggest that he thought she might be going on a casual jaunt. Nadia’s heart beat fast at the idea. Spacewalking wasn’t usually on her to-do list for the day. She was more about monitoring the crew, keeping track of vital signs, studying the effects of zero gravity on the body. She managed a Twitter feed that was relatively popular, but she didn’t seem to have the renegade personality of Chris Hadfield, the space celebrity. She was all about the science. And it seemed people didn’t take kindly to girl nerds who monitored the health of the crew members -- and even more boring, the health of the space station itself. She sighed. Each time she returned to Earth, she missed the freedom of space. And each time she returned to the ISS or went on another mission, she missed the land beneath her feet. Sometimes, she didn’t think there was anywhere she belonged. Not really.
 

“No, Dmitri. You know I don’t like to go out that much, not here.”
 

“I don’t know, Commander.” Like always, Dmitri looked a little bit bored. He was right. He didn’t know. He didn’t particularly care what she was up to. It seemed he was just there to do a job. Nothing like the camaraderie she’d heard of when Hadfield was here. And hell, she’d never even met a
bored
astronaut before. That was just her damn luck to be paired with the least interesting Russian in space. Dmitri fiddled with the controls, and Nadia stepped aside to suit up, pulling the familiar astronaut’s gear over her petite body. Even for an astronaut, she was tiny, and she’d had to have a suit specially made for her five-foot frame. All of the folks at the Academy -- the men especially -- had thought she’d never pass her physical requirements. But she fooled them all.
 

“Well, I need to check that it’s working correctly. Parsons had issues with it closing correctly yesterday, and we can’t have that. I’ll go check it and see what I need. You’ll be here if I need you?” Dmitri nodded and started working the controls that led out to the lock. Nadia pulled on her helmet, shutting herself off from the world around her. Even though she hadn’t fallen in love with spacewalks at the ISS, she did love gently floating around her temporary home, learning its ins and outs... all at a safe distance from the ship. She nodded to Dmitri, and he opened the airlock. It closed behind her with a reassuring thunk. That beautiful sound that told her she’d be okay, that things were working properly. She checked her suit again, giving the signal for the lock to open to the outside. The shadow of Dmitri moved behind her, and the lock opened to space, sucking her out gently into that blank, dark beyond. She gulped and held on to the ladder-like handles that adorned the ISS, moving her way to the outside surely and deftly.
 

“Keep the lock open for right now, Dmitri,” she said into her microphone, the voice sounding muffled and strange in the tiny, manufactured atmosphere of her helmet. She climbed around the airlock, wondering why it had stuck for Parsons the day before. Could it have been some sort of electromagnetic interference? A solar flare? No, that couldn’t quite be it. She felt around the opening, closing her eyes and envisioning the sensitive ball bearings and mechanical structures. Everything needed to be in perfect working order at all times. On Earth, you could fudge a repair job on a car or a microwave and expect everything to be okay for a little while at least. In space, every change... every repair was essential to the safety of the crew. And to the safety of all of those who would come here after her time had finished. Every moment mattered. Every thing she touched
mattered
. She kept her eyes closed and pushed around the opening of the lock, feeling for any imperfections. It was strange through the thick material of her gloved hands, but she’d gotten used to it over time.
 

Suddenly, there was a great shaking, a rumbling the likes of which she’d never felt before. She gripped one of the rungs, opening her eyes and looking over her shoulder. A shadow seemed to pass, but it wasn’t one of the shadows she was used to seeing in the strange blankness of space. Normally, her eyes were turned toward Earth, examining the snowy white clouds and bright city lights. Those things were comforting to see -- evidence of humanity, evidence of home. This was something entirely different. It was a shape that wasn’t entirely a shape, something that her eyes couldn’t quite place. Something her brain couldn’t quite comprehend.
 

The space station shook again, rocking Nadia’s body and thrusting it against the clean white wall of the airlock. Her body smashed against her arm, and she heard a sickening crack, reverberating in the cave of her spacesuit. Nadia’s fingers let go of the rung that held her to life, to the comfort of the station that she’d called home for the past eight weeks. The place she was supposed to be for a year. The oxygen hose that was her tether to the ship grew taut and snapped. It all happened at lightning speed -- the snapping, the ripping away -- but Nadia saw it all in slow motion. The job she had loved, she’d planned for, she’d studied and trained for, the pinnacle of her career... she gripped haplessly, her hand opening and closing against the smooth surface of the space station. She passed it by, shot back by velocity, her remaining seconds of oxygen depleting. She closed her eyes and screamed, her body smashing against one of the solar arrays before the oxygen left her suit and the chilling darkness began to take her over.
 

I hope to God I didn’t damage that fucking solar array.
 

Her last breath escaped her lips, fogging the visor of her mask. As the oxygen left her body, turning her blood toxic, a white light appeared before her, guiding her forward. Strong arms took her, holding her. She wondered if this was what heaven was like. Gripped in powerful, healing arms... the arms that would carry her to the afterlife.
 

Everyone probably sees something different
, she thought.
I’m only feeling this because I haven’t been touched by a man in over a year
. She chuckled.

It was her last coherent thought before everything went dark, and she was gone.

Kester

The woman was wearing some kind of suit. Well, at least he thought it was a woman. She wore her hair back in a strange style, presenting her features in all of their odd planes and angles. He ripped the mask away, revealing her face. It was soft, like many of the females of Astria. But her skin was as pale as the surface of Gemna’s moons, her lips as red as the surface of the Lanids. And her hair -- it was long. He reached out and touched it. Soft as clouds.
 

Gently, Kester laid the woman down on the hard bed of his ship. Her body was light, so much lighter than those of the Astrian women he had brought back to his ship. He could hold her still and perform the healing, but the sensation of having her in his arms was disconcerting. He laid her down gently, pulling away the unnecessarily bulky suit and revealing her workman’s clothes below. He stepped back in shock. The woman was
tiny
. He didn’t know much about Terran women -- was this even a Terran woman at all? -- but he thought she might even be small for a female of the blue planet swirling below them. He brought his fingers to the woman’s neck, checking her pulse. A weak pulse but still there. He grabbed a mask from the shelf, gently putting it over her nose and mouth and infusing her with the oxygen she so desperately needed.
 

Silly Terrans and their clunky oxygen chambers
. The tiny mask clicked open and cloaked her face, pulling oxygen from the surrounding air in the ship and feeding it into the woman’s system. Kester found himself watching with more attention than necessary, observing her lips turn a brighter, almost bloody red. That moon-pale skin regained its pink color around the cheeks. Her tiny body flushed beautifully red. Perhaps there was something to this idea... at least for other males of the Astrian Federation. He pressed his fingers to her neck again, feeling her pulse become stronger under his touch.
 

“Good, good, little woman. We’ll get you back to that ridiculous sky home shortly.” Kester would find some excuse not to take a Terran woman back to Delma. He looked down at the weak woman’s body and picked up her arm, which was swollen and bruised. He closed his eyes, focusing on the source of the swelling and the imperfections in her human structure. A vision came to him -- a hairline fracture in the ulna, a solid break of the radius, ripped tendons along her wrist, and massive bleeding inside, pooling beneath the skin. He removed a medical pen from the wall, rubbing it lightly over her skin. It wasn’t as advanced as some of the medicines available in the empire -- even on Delma -- but it would have to do for now. The pen could stop the bleeding and begin the repair of the tendons and bones. It would take days to return to Astria, but there she would be healed in a matter of minutes. He held her arm again, envisioning the healing taking place inside of her. It was a brief solution, but she would be better off to return to his home galaxy and retrieve proper treatment in a healing chamber. With the medicine pen, he made one last swipe, immobilizing the break for now.
 

The tiny female will recover
. He breathed a sigh of relief.

The physiology of these humanoid creatures was very similar to that of the humanoid inhabitants of Astria, but they were so much more delicate. There had been interbreeding and abductions through the ages, though Kester had never imagined himself as the type of man who would take a wretched, backwater Terran woman away from her home. He sighed. In fact, he knew he
couldn’t
take an unwilling woman. He could have any female in Astria. Why take a Terran mate? They weren’t even able to travel between star systems. It would be like bedding a farm peasant of two thousand years ago.
 

He held her arm in his hands, rubbing his fingertips over it and marveling at the smoothness of her skin. He wondered absently what that skin would feel like against his lips, what that tiny body of hers would feel like wrapped around him He wondered if her channel was tighter than the larger women of his home planet, if it would feel as hot around his cock. He groaned slightly and bent to kiss her, resting his lips lightly against her neck, testing his tongue against the smooth, elegant line of her collarbone. The taste of her... the smell of her... it was something entirely different than any female he’d touched before.
 

He closed his eyes, taking in her clean, bright scent. The vision flickered in his mind’s eye... the tiny human who lived in space taking his shaft in that tiny, tight mouth, serving him with her hot, tight pussy. Well, the feeling of it didn’t seem too bad in his thoughts. Maybe if he could impregnate a Terran woman, that would be good enough for his father. It would establish the Gemnian presence on Terra, and he could leave the weakling woman to care for her child, returning her to her home planet while Kester was free to roam the Astrian colonies. He darted his tongue out to taste her skin again. The petite woman shifted beneath him, arching her back instinctively. He pulled outback to watch her body. That arched back... a perfect curve. The skin beneath the mask pink and bursting with health.