Page 5 of Alien Protector's Mate

If anything, the marks scared them.

So he hid his as much as he could and was soft and gentle. Then he took all his aggression out in the training hall.

His gaze fixed on the blank console, and he grunted as he sat up from his comfortable sprawl in the chair. The console activated when he waved his hand in front of it. His fingers danced across the holographic interface, inputting his credentials to access the mate program database.

The blue glow of the screen cast shadows across his angular features, and a muscle in the corner of his jaw pulsed as he opened his own matching file and prepared himself for disappointment. Again.

No matches found.

The words scrolled across the screen, burning themselves into his brain. Disappointment rolled through him, leaving abitter taste in his mouth, and he closed his eyes to allow himself a moment of weakness.

“One day,” he murmured softly to himself. “One day that screen will say there’s a match.”

Taking a deep breath, he pushed his disappointment down and pulled up the next file on his list. The emperor’s file. It took the system a moment to load it, and S’aad’s breath caught as hope blossomed in the center of his chest.

No matches found.

“Draanth,” he muttered as he leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair as he contemplated the implications. Him not having a match was one thing, the emperor, though… that was totally different. The emperor needed an heir. His sister’s son, Lord Tarrick, might be the next in line, but without a direct descendant to secure Daaynal’s lineage, there would be power struggles if the worst happened.

A soft chime from the computer pulled him from his thoughts. An alert flashed on the screen, and his expression cleared. Nothing important, just a routine maintenance check scheduled for the system. With a sigh, he initiated the process. It was necessary but boring as draanth as he waited for it to run through the routine.

A dull blade was useless in battle, he reminded himself, the saying drilled into him since childhood. And if the matching system was dull, they risked failing to find matches for the females in the program.

So he slumped back in his chair, an inelegant sprawl as he leaned his head back against the headrest. Idly, he watched the scrolling data. He couldn’t do anything until the process was complete, and it wouldn’t take long enough that he could head out for a second training session. At first, everything seemed normal, the familiar patterns of genetic markers and personalitycompatibility scores flowing across the screen. Then he frowned as something caught his eye.

Twisting in his chair, he reached out to pause the data and scrolled it back. Sure enough, he saw a discrepancy—a genetic marker that had been matched with a personality profile that didn’t fit.

“No… that can’t be right,” he muttered, sitting up to take a closer look. His fingers flew over the input interface as he dug into the data. He must be misreading the code; he’d been working hard over the last week or so, and the late nights and early mornings were taking their toll. The tiredness must be clouding his judgment… He adjusted the holographic interface, a frown creasing his brow as he checked through the data again. But the mismatches were still there—not one but three. They were only tiny, just a few points out each side, but still. That kind of error shouldn’t be possible.

So how had they happened? Was there a glitch in the matching program code?

His heart rate kicked up a beat as he dug deeper. If this was a glitch, they could have a huge problem. Females could have been matched to warriors who weren’t suitable. But then he found more and more. He sat back, staring at the screen. This was too consistent. Almost as if it was deliberate…

He rubbed at his face with both hands, looking past his fingers at the screen. This shouldn’t be happening. The recent updates to the matching algorithm were designed to prevent just these kinds of mismatches—meant precisely to ensure that every match was as accurate and reliable as possible.

Thishadto be someone tampering.

A growl in the back of his throat, he tried to track down the source of the mismatches, chasing leads in the code that only ended up slipping from his grasp like smoke. Each time he thought he had it, the trail vanished into thin air, as ifdeliberately erased. His lip curled back in a snarl. Who had the knowledge and access necessary to alter the system and then erase all evidence of their presence?

They’d been hacked. And he didn’t know how or by who.

He reached out, his fingers hovering over the communication panel. He should alert his superiors, but something held him back—a nagging doubt at the back of his mind, an instinct he’d learned to trust in over a century of service. What if the hack was someone on the station? Someone higher up?

No, he needed more evidence.

Decision made, he pulled back from the comm system. He would dig deeper and gather more evidence before bringing this to light. But… he stared at the screen again, he couldn’t do it alone. He needed someone with a different perspective, someone who could see patterns he might miss and who’d had nothing to do with the development of the system.

Someone outside the loop.

With a few quick commands, S’aad opened a secure channel and waited until a warrior appeared on the screen.

“S’aad,” Maax, the station’s assistant chief engineer, looked surprised as he pushed his long, dark hair behind his ears. He was obviously mid-shift, a streak of grease decorating one side of his jaw. “What can I do for you?”

S’aad leaned in, keeping his voice low. “I have a small issue, and I need your expertise.”

“Go on,” Maax said, focusing on him with interest in his eyes. “I assume this has something to do with the security level on the comm?”

S’aad nodded. “I was running a routine maintenance check on our systems and found some… irregularities. I’ve looked into them, and I can’t work them out. I don’t want to bother anyone higher up until I know it’s not just a line of code somewhere misfiring.” He paused for a second and then shrugged. Nothingventured, nothing gained. “Given that your grandmother was B’Kaar, I thought you might see something I’m missing.”

---