The
Earth/Kalquor War seems far away to Sister Katherine and the nuns of the
convent on Europa. That changes in an
instant when an enemy spyship arrives and invades the tiny moon colony.
Katherine’s
world is torn apart when she learns she is to become the mate to a clan of
three fierce Kalquorian men. How can she
save herself or the convent’s children from their conquerors when her body,
heart, and soul cries out for the blasphemous touch of her captors? How can it be that her peoples’ sworn enemy
is her only chance for true salvation?
Sister Katherine is the companion story to the bestselling Alien Conquest, Clans of Kalquor Book 3.
Mild BDSM, including captive sex/forced
seduction, anal play/intercourse, bondage, Dom/sub play, and multiple sexual partners
(m/f/m/m).
Chapter 1
Screams, coming from far away. Many high-pitched voices, screaming in
terror. Katherine’s eyes flew open to
only see more darkness, the same as the blackness of sleep that had been
interrupted. The horrified sounds
continued too. She knew almost
immediately she wasn’t dreaming. And on
the heels of that—
The
children.
She sat up in the hard, cold bed with a
gasp. The wounds on her back pulled
harshly. She didn’t notice the pain in
the onrush of fear, nor the coppery scent of the blood she’d shed in the
otherwise stale-smelling room. Ignoring
all those senses, Katherine held her breath and listened hard. It was difficult to hear past the quick
thudding of her heart.
Shouting. It sounded like Mother Superior’s voice. Then more screams flitted through Katherine’s
closed sleeping cell door. Thudding feet
ran back and forth outside her tiny room.
What in the world could be going on here on the remote convent colony of
Europa?
Katherine stood and rushed to the door
without commanding the lights to come on.
She knew the layout of her sleeping cell perfectly well without the
grainy, gray illumination. There was
little to see in the room: a hook upon
which her underdress, habit, and head scarf hung. A chair in the corner before which clunky
black shoes waited. A shelf where her
bible and lash sat side by side. Her bed
was only two steps away from the door in her tiny, cramped cell. She had so few possessions that there was no
fear of bumping into anything except the walls.
Katherine heard more screaming, the
clarion calls of definite panic out there.
Maybe the dorms were on fire. She
caught her breath in stark terror at the thought.
The
children.
She didn’t waste another second. She ordered the door, “Open.”
It did so obediently, and Katherine
stuck her head out for a look down the corridor before venturing from her room.
She felt as if she’d shoved her face
into a wall of strident sound. The
cacophony of screams rebounding throughout the nun’s wing of the dormitory
threatened to burst Katherine’s eardrums.
She winced against the bright corridor lighting and forced herself to
focus on the moving shapes before her.
White gowned nuns ran past. They stampeded towards the end of the hall
where the infirmary and linking hallway to the aspirants’ wing lay. Their faces stretched in expressions of
horrified terror. Katherine detected no
scent of smoke though. Her heart
drumming wildly and brain swirling with confusion, Katherine turned to look the
other direction. She stared at the end
of the hall, where the doors opened to the outside of the dorm.
She stopped breathing at the sight of
huge, dark figures flooding into the corridor from the wing’s gaping
entrance. Great giant men with brown
skin and long blue-black hair spilled into the building. They wore black bodysuits, the armored
padding of which did nothing to hide the muscled physiques the skin-tight
uniforms contained. These were not men
from Earth. They were aliens. Worse still, they were the enemy.
Kalquorians.
Katherine’s mind tried to accept what
her eyes told her. Even with those
massive bodies striding down the halls, sending nuns dashing in wide-eyed fear,
she couldn’t quite recognize the convent had been invaded. It made no sense Kalquorians would attack a
religious colony of barely 200 women.
Yet the men could be of no other species. No other race looked that much like Earthers.
Katherine’s heart pounded to see the
enemy in the flesh for the first time.
They were so big, so monumental.
She wasn’t the only one overwhelmed by the sight of the behemoths storming
down the corridor. The grim and foreboding
Sister Bernadette was only a few feet from the oncoming aliens, holding her
ground and waving her crucifix at them as if to ward them off. When they kept coming until they reached her,
the nun collapsed to her knees in terror.
Two Kalquorians immediately stooped next to her. One had a medical injector and he pressed it
to her neck as she screamed. Her cry cut
off sharply, and she started to crumple.
One of the aliens deftly caught her and laid her gently to one side.
The Kalquorians kept coming, the first
of them only half a dozen doors away from where Katherine stood. She had to run. She had to get to the other wing of the
dorm. That was where the youngest women
and girls of the order, the aspiring nuns, slept.
Katherine turned away from the oncoming
Kalquorians, taking her first step towards the connecting hall that would take
her past the infirmary and into the aspirants’ wing. She froze instantly.
A couple of the older aspirants, Brenda
and Ashley, were rounding the corner at a flat out run, screaming as they
came. More of the colossus Kalquorians
stalked into the corridor behind them.
The aliens were already in the
aspirants’ wing. They had the little
ones.
Katherine’s breath caught in her
chest. She hardly noticed as one of the
aliens held the feebly struggling Mother Superior while a companion pressed an
injector to her neck. It was on the very
edge of Katherine’s consciousness that the head of the convent drooped in the
muscled arms of a Kalquorian, who laid her carefully down onto the floor.
What mattered more than anything was the
little ones were under attack. Locked
cells wouldn’t be doing them any good either.
The aliens were pointing what had to be frequency disruptors at the
doors and opening them to the screams of those trapped inside.
More and more of the aliens spilled into
the corridor from the aspirants’ wing.
Katherine knew there was no hope as she watched them come. She couldn’t stop the Kalquorians, couldn’t
rush past them without them catching and sedating her. Worst of all, she couldn’t get to the
children.
Tears were already spilling down her
cheeks as she backed into her cell.
“Door, close and lock.”
The door obediently slid shut. Its beep told her it was now locked, but she
knew it was only a matter of minutes, perhaps seconds, before the Kalquorians
forced their way in and captured her too.
And then ... she knew the stories of what Kalquorians did with Earther
women, stories she’d not quite believed as true. And yet, faced with her own imminent capture,
Katherine entertained the worst case scenario with mind-crumbling terror.
She staggered to her bedside and sank to
her knees on the hard floor. Tears
coursed down her cheeks as she clasped her hands together, leaning her elbows
on the slightly softer surface of her narrow iron-frame bed. She listened to the continuing cries outside
her room, the pleading voices growing fewer by the second.
Katherine thought of the girls, all her
little ones. She especially thought of
the youngest of the aspirants, the ones who had not even entered their teens
yet. Darci and Marci Soames, sisters
sent to the convent by a devout grandmother no longer physically capable of
caring for them, were only twelve and nine years old. They must have been frightened to see the Kalquorians
coming at them and absolutely terrorized as the aliens sedated them.
Had Katherine actually wanted to meet
these creatures, these gargantuan Kalquorians who made helpless women and girls
scream? Were these the men she’d gotten
herself in so much trouble for, the reason she’d been exiled to Europa?
You
wanted to meet with them. Talk to
them. Reason with them. Remember the adage ‘be careful what you wish
for’? Well, your wish has come
true. You will now come face to face
with the Kalquorians.
Sobs shook Katherine’s slender frame as
she began to pray. “Heavenly Father, I
am so very sorry for whatever I may have done to offend you, especially if this
punishment was brought on by me. Please
let them take me, if that is your will.
Give me to these Kalquorians, but let the children stay safe. Keep these young girls and women safe, give
them strength, let them take me instead God, please.”
In her terror for her children,
Katherine forgot that God would never punish anyone with such horrors. That was imperfect man’s purview, not the
Almighty’s. Her horror had eclipsed her
beliefs as she imagined tiny Marci cowering in the shadow of giant aliens
towering over her, menacing her in ways too awful to comprehend.
Katherine knew she jabbered in her
rising panic. Hearing the sound of
barking-like voice outside her door only fed the terror. They’d come in any moment and take her like
the others...
The girls. What would they do to her girls?
“Please, God, please, don’t let the
innocent be harmed, I beg of you.”
Katherine’s tears poured as she pleaded
with all her might, thinking only of the young girls in her care that she could
not save from whatever was happening to them.
* * * *
Imdiko Vadef followed his Nobek down the
corridor of the building they had invaded, along with dozens of other
Kalquorians. Miv, his clanmate of three
years, waded confidently through the few panicked women left in the long
stretch of hallway. These women were
caught between his team and the other group moving towards them at the end of
the hall. Most of the Earther females
had fled into small rooms on either side.
Vadef accompanied Miv into several of those rooms to catch and sedate
the screaming females.
Rooms.
How could anyone call such tiny, cramped spaces rooms? Vadef was undersized for a Kalquorian, not
even an inch over six feet. Even so, he
almost had to duck to get through the narrow doorways. He’d thought his clan’s shared quarters in
the spyship had been cramped, but this made their home feel positively spacious. Vadef had had closets bigger than these
sleeping spaces of the Earther women. If
he had to stay for more than a minute in such a space, he’d be screaming to be
let out. He could only imagine how
claustrophobic Miv found the rooms, having a good seven inches of height and
much more bulk than Vadef.
The Imdiko clutched his sedative
injector in a sweating grip. He was no
medic, but he’d received emergency trauma training. It wasn’t the usual protocol on a spyship for
all personnel to have such instruction, but the head doctor Imdiko Degorsk
insisted on it for theirs. The knowledge
qualified Vadef to sedate the little female Earthers Miv caught.
One of the tiny sleeping room doors on
Vadef’s left opened. A woman, obviously
panicked into attempting flight, darted out right in front of Miv. The Nobek grabbed her and tucked her
struggling figure to his body, back to front.
His arms encircled her, pinning her arms to her sides. The hold both incapacitated her and kept her
from inadvertently hurting herself.
Vadef had a moment to compare the
differences between Earther female and his Kalquorian clanmate. The woman’s skin was pale to the point of
milkiness. Its flush of pink was all
that kept her skin from matching the billowing gown she wore. The arms of Miv were a rich, deep brown in
contrast, making the woman seem to glow against them.
The female’s long hair was wild and
uncombed. The invasion had occurred at
what was apparently the colony’s sleeping time.
Her tangled tresses were nearly as brown as Miv’s skin, except with
reddish glints. Earther hair fascinated
Vadef. Most Kalquorians had black hair,
such a deep ebony that the highlights were blue. Age or mutation could make that hair silvery
or white, but that was all. Yet Earthers
had various ranges of browns, reds, and yellows, with no two people possessing
the exact same coloration.
The alien species’ eyes were intriguing
too. Their pupils were round and
surrounded by irises of color as distinct as the Earthers’ hair. The browns seemed to predominate, such as
this one with her light, tan-colored eyes.
Vadef had seen blue eyes as well, and even two pairs of green and one of
gray. Kalquorians slit-pupil eyes were a
uniform blue-purple. Only shape and size
differentiated his from Miv’s.
Earthers were usually not as muscular as
Kalquorians either. Even the few
surviving females of Vadef’s race were powerfully built. Vadef himself had nowhere near the brawn of the
average Kalquorian; certainly he possessed none of the robust fighter’s heft
that Miv had. Yet he was still a
powerhouse compared to the female struggling in his clanmate’s arms. Her frame was spare with the hewn look of one
who had worked hard in her life. She was
too spare really, almost approaching scrawniness.
With her wide, staring eyes and tiny
face twisted in a rictus of panic, this poor creature looked very much like
prey caught in the clutches of a predator.
To liken Miv to a hunting animal was neither inaccurate nor insult.
Miv was of Kalquor’s Nobek breed, the warrior-protectors
of the Empire. That he belonged to the
most ferocious category of Vadef’s people was obvious in the wary and almost
feral expression he usually wore. Miv’s
demeanor was the first thing one noticed about him. You had to get past that evaluating hunter’s
stare to see the large eyes, the broad, crooked nose that had been broken too
many times to count, and a voluptuous surprise of a mouth.
Vadef doubted the Earther was getting
past his clanmate’s brutish aura at the moment, not when Miv was holding her
helpless and waiting.
The poor female unleashed one final
scream as Vadef painlessly injected the sedative into her neck. She lost consciousness an instant later, and
Miv handed her off to him. The Imdiko
looked at the now insensible face, which looked far more lovely without terror
overcoming it.
He grimaced. Vadef was not a Nobek. He’d never frightened anyone in his life, and
he didn’t like that he scared these poor women.
Miv’s hand squeezed his shoulder. His voice had a delightful gravel quality,
one that Vadef felt scratched an itch deep in his ear. “It’s all right, my Imdiko. We’re not hurting them.”
“I wish we could make them understand
that.” Vadef thought he might hear the
screams for the rest of his life.
“They wouldn’t listen. They are poisoned against us. Not to mention terrified at this moment.”
Vadef nodded. Even the most benign invasion would be far
from pleasant for those it was happening to.
With a sigh he carried the woman to the wall of the corridor and laid
her on the floor. Her white gown, while
voluminous, still seemed inadequate protection for such a small creature. It wasn’t cold in the corridor, but Vadef
still had the urge to cover her in a blanket or slip a pillow under her head
... something that demonstrated
care. However, he needed to keep up with
Miv, to finish this unpalatable work.
The sooner this invasion of the tiny Earther colony was over, the sooner
Vadef could sit in front of a computer where he belonged.
Reluctantly leaving the woman in the growing
line of sedated females, he followed Miv to a closed door. Either someone was inside or it hadn’t been
checked yet. The tiny sleeping rooms
that were confirmed empty had the doors locked in the open setting. Miv pointed his frequency disruptor at the
locking mechanism of the one in question.
It beeped and slid open, and Miv put out a hand to warn Vadef back.
The Imdiko obeyed and stepped aside,
though he really couldn’t imagine one of the miniscule Earthers being able to
harm him. Vadef didn’t get to feel big
often. Being near the small women gave
him a sense of how his powerhouse of a clanmate must feel.
He was content to let his Nobek be a
Nobek – protective, in other words. Miv
stepped into the tiny rectangle of darkness beyond the door to restrain whoever
might be inside. Vadef thought the room
must be empty since no screams issued from it.
Miv paused just inside and turned back
to Vadef with a confused look on his face.
Curious, Vadef stepped close to peer in past his clanmate’s large body.
One of the women was in the room after
all, kneeling next to the small excuse of a bed. Vadef could make out little about her; all he
could see was a large cascading mass of blond ringlets atop a hill of white
fabric. Her head bowed over her fisted
hands, and there was a breath of sound coming from her.
Vadef approached quietly, moving so that
he could see the peach-pale face between the curtains of hair. Miv stayed at his side, ready to snatch him
from any danger that might suddenly appear.
They both crouched low to look at the woman . Her delicate features, almost too fine to be
solid, gave Vadef the feeling of having become a giant brute. He’d never seen any living sentient that
looked so fragile.
Her heart-shaped face was streaked with
tears despite how tightly she squeezed her eyes shut. Plump petals of lips moved, creating a bare
whisper of sound.
Even with a crease between her tightly
drawn brows and the look of terrified misery on her face, she didn’t look quite
real to Vadef. She was too lovely, too
ethereal to be anything but a dream.
Miv whispered close to Vadef’s ear,
though the Nobek seemed incapable of taking his eyes off the female as
well. “Meditation? In the middle of an invasion?”
Vadef shook his head. His voice was equally low, though he doubted
the woman could speak Kalquorian. His
caution, and most likely Miv’s, came from not wanting to frighten her any more
than she already had been. “I think she
must be praying. She’s probably
appealing to her god to save her from us.”
Research and information were Vadef’s
specialties. On board a spyship that
delved deep into Earther territory, he’d devoted himself to the alien enemy’s
culture these last few years.
“It smells like blood in here. I wonder if someone harmed her at some point.” Miv’s lips drew into a tight line. “And now we’re frightening her. Who knows what she expects to happen at our
hands?”
Vadef knew his clanmate disliked making
these women fearful as much as he did.
As brutal as the Nobek was to enemies and his opponents in the fighting
circle, he was conscientious to females.
No one harmed women when Miv was around.
He couldn’t stand it.
The big man gave his clanmate a weary
look. “Come on, my Imdiko. Let’s get this over with.”
Vadef edged closer to the woman’s
side. Unlike his silent Nobek, Vadef’s
boots made soft clicking sounds on the hard floor when he moved. As if in response to his footsteps, the
woman’s voice, pitched high in terror, rose loud enough to be heard for an
instant.
“...the innocents, please dear Lord,
keep them...”
Her voice lowered again, but her lips
continued to move. She did not flinch as
they closed on her, crouching on either side.
Vadef put his lips close to her ear to murmur in her language.
“Matara?
It is all right. We are not going
to hurt you.”
She didn’t respond other than to have
more tears creep out from beneath her tightly shut eyes. To Vadef she looked like a rendering of one
of her religion’s angelic beings. She
was entirely too lovely to be mortal.
The Imdiko felt worse about making this one cry than any of the others.
He tried to comfort her again. “Matara, I swear you won’t be harmed. I am going to sedate you. That is all I am going to do, so please do
not be afraid.”
Miv said, “Go ahead, my Imdiko. The sooner you tranquilize her, the sooner
she won’t suffer any more fear.”
Vadef sighed heavily. Seeing this one weep made his chest
hurt. He definitely wanted to be in
front of his computer back on the spyship.
He was too damned softhearted to be on the front lines of this invasion
shit.
He stood and squeezed her thin shoulder,
still trying to offer some reassurance to the woman despite knowing he really
couldn’t. Miv swept her long curls
aside, baring the side of her neck.
Vadef pressed the cylinder of the sedating instrument against the
slender column.
Her voice rose again with fear. “...and give me strength, O Lord, as you gave
Moses as he wandered the desert...”
Unable to listen to that desperate tone
any longer Vadef depressed the plunger, sending the tranquilizer into the
female’s body. She lost consciousness in
the middle of a word, crumpling where she knelt.
Miv moved quickly to catch her before
she could slide to the floor. In one
smooth motion, he lifted her. She draped
across his arms like a broken doll. For
a moment he and Vadef didn’t move. They
simply stood there and looked at her pretty face framed by that froth of
glorious golden hair.
Vadef wondered if he’d ever seen anyone
so lovely. He was quite sure he
hadn’t. When Miv came out of his
momentary daze and moved to take her out into the hall, Vadef kept close. He couldn’t bear to lose sight of those
ephemeral features. He watched her face
almost breathlessly as they emerged from her dark sleeping room, to see if she
was just as beautiful in the full light.
She was not. She was even more stunning under the brighter
corridor lights, stealing his breath away for an instant. The only unflattering characteristic that he
could assign to her was how painfully thin she seemed, though some of that
could perhaps be attributed to the billowing swath of a gown she wore. Her face was too gaunt however, making her
appear underfed.
Miv laid her on the floor alongside the
wall like the rest of the sedated Earthers.
He straightened next to Vadef and they stared down at her.
The Nobek’s voice was surprisingly soft
with wonder. “Did you know they were
this lovely, my Imdiko?”
“I’ve seen vids, mostly of our empress,
but – no. Seeing them up close is
something much different.”
Miv was taking a long time to move
on. He was usually gung-ho to carry out
orders. Being a convict under a sentence
of military service left the Nobek feeling he had more to prove than most,
making him one of the most loyal members of the spyship’s complement of
security. Yet he seemed as loathe to
leave this wisp of female beauty behind as Vadef.
Miv said, “I find most of them
exquisite. This is the prettiest of them
all, I think.” He drew a deep breath and
shook himself. “We’d better get
going. It seems like most have been
caught, but we need to finish the sweep.”
Vadef nodded, but he was again looking
at how helpless and frail the tiny Matara looked. Damn it, he didn’t just want to walk off and
leave her lying on the floor like this.
He said, “Just one moment, my Nobek?”
Before Miv could answer, Vadef went back
into the little sleeping room they’d found her in. He grabbed the thin, rumpled blanket on her
bed and pulled it off. Under Miv’s questioning
gaze, Vadef went back out into the corridor and covered the golden-haired
female from her chin to her toes, carefully tucking it all around her
motionless body.
As he rose, he saw that others had taken
note of what he’d done. Imdikos, mostly
medics, hurried in and out of the other sleeping rooms, finding more blankets
and covering the unconscious women. Even
some of the Nobeks got into the act, and Vadef had to suppress a smile. No doubt the protective warriors saw this as
an opportunity to redeem their acts of taking such helpless creatures
prisoners. It made Vadef feel a little
better about carrying out his own duty.
Miv nodded his approval, even letting a
smile drift over his usually savage countenance. Vadef noted all the screams had stopped,
replaced by quiet mutterings from the Kalquorian crew. Perhaps they were done with the
unpleasantness.
He smiled back at his clanmate. “All right, Miv. Let’s see what’s next.”
Miv started to turn to lead the way, but
then he looked at something over Vadef’s shoulder and he froze. His spine stiffened. “Weapons Commander Lidon and Captain Tranis
are here.”
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