Page 17 of Her Alien Guardian

“I beg you to punish me for my lewd misbehavior before you take me, my lord,” Sala continued, her voice trembling slightly. “I know I’ve displeased you by touching another without your permission.”

Alpha’s expression was unreadable as he gazed down at his kneeling wife. The silence on the bridge was deafening, every eye fixed on the scene unfolding before them. I felt my heart racing, torn between guilt for my role in Sala’s transgression and a shameful excitement at what might come next.

“Very well,” Alpha said at last, his deep voice resonating through the room. “You know the consequences of disobeying me, Sala.” He turned to his first officer, a tall, lean man standing nearby. “Mero, bring me the naval cat.”

As Mero hurried to comply, Alpha’s gaze found mine. “Tessara,” he said gently, “come here.”

On shaky legs, I approached, acutely aware of my nakedness and the eyes of the entire bridge crew upon me. Alpha’s massive blue hand came to rest on my shoulder, his touch surprisingly gentle.

“The naval cat,” he explained, his silver-violet eyes holding mine, “is the traditional disciplinary implement of the Magisterian starfleet. Its design was taken from the navies of old Earth, refined over centuries to serve its purpose effectively.”

Mero returned, reverently presenting a sleek, formidable-looking whip to his captain. My eyes widened in terror as I took in its appearance. The handle was wrapped in supple leather, polished to a soft sheen. From it extended multiple slender tails, each knotted at intervals along its length. It looked nothing like the brutal implements I’d known aboard theConqueror ofBresla, yet it radiated an aura of authority and controlled power that made me tremble.

“Oh, no,” I whispered, my voice barely audible. “Please, don’t hurt her. It was my fault too. I should be punished instead!”

Alpha’s expression softened, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Your concern for Sala is admirable, Tessara,” he said. “But this punishment is not about pain or cruelty. It’s about reinforcing the bonds between us, about Sala’s willing submission to my authority. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, my lovely wife is playing a game with us, for she knows that the true, most ancient tradition is that the commanding officer’s wife be whipped before her husband takes her with his hardness.”

I blinked in confusion, but the captain only smiled in response, and turned back to Sala, who remained kneeling, her head bowed.

“Prepare yourself, my love,” Alpha commanded softly. “Mero, please bind this offender to the block.”

I frowned, looking around the bridge. I saw nothing like a whipping block, nor did anyone seem to be bringing one.

Sala rose gracefully, her black hair shining in the light of the bridge. With fluid movements that spoke of practiced ease, she bent over the command chair. I gasped as I noticed for the first time that the chair was not merely a seat of authority, but an implement of discipline as well.

Gleaming metal rings were strategically placed along its arms and base, their purpose now horrifyingly clear. The seat itself was wider than I’d initially perceived, with a slight curve that would perfectly accommodate a bent form. The backrest waslower than standard, allowing easy access to the occupant’s—in this case, the punished one’s—exposed bottom.

Mero moved with swift efficiency, producing padded leather cuffs from a hidden compartment in the chair’s base. He secured Sala’s wrists first, binding them to the arms of the chair. The striking contrast of her pale skin with the dark synth-leather brought a furrow to my brow.

The first officer knelt to fasten cuffs around Sala’s knees, spreading them slightly and anchoring them to the chair’s legs. Finally, a wider strap was placed around Sala’s narrow waist, holding her firmly in place. The entire process took mere moments, yet each click of a buckle or clink of a chain seemed to echo through the hushed bridge.

Alpha’s deep voice broke the silence. “Tessara,” he said, his tone gentle but commanding, “come stand beside me as I discipline my wife.”

CHAPTER 10

Gamma

It took me about an hour to get from Europa to Prosperia. As an individuated gathering of the Collective, going from the galactic rim to its core shouldn’t have seemed anything remarkable: the Collective traveled from galaxy to galaxyeffortlessly, after all, and in what for a human represented less than the blink of an eye.

Something hard-wired into the human anatomy in which I existed, however, produced in me a sense of wonder every time I jumped with my ship’s gravitium drive. Perhaps the evolution of the species, the ever-weaving dance of DNA’s marvelous double helix, had simply encoded a sense of old Earth’s night sky at the greatest depths of the human genome. I shared that genome despite having had it tweaked for such things as blue skin and great size in every aspect of my body.

When the stars changed, I felt it, deliciously, in the pit of my stomach: a sensation I ranked second only to fucking a beautiful woman whom I had just disciplined for something or other,making her sob with pleasure after the agony of her punishment before I came myself, feeling that my massive hardness had gone as deep into her eager body as her genetic coding lay.

So the mere change, otherwise imperceptible to a human body that lacked the Collective’s innate relationship to spacetime, from the stars of Europa to those of Prosperia, put a grin on my face. I wore that expression all the way down the space elevator that took me from the orbital station where I had docked to the main hub of Prosperia City.

Nor did my smile fade as I walked the short distance to the Magisterian Embassy where I presented my credentials as an ambassador of the Collective. Prosperia’s culture, that aesthetically pleasing adaptation of Magisteria’s naked—often literally—dominance to a Victorian nostalgia for one of the most elegant eras of old Earth, never failed to move me.

Women in long dresses, accompanying nattily dressed men, sauntered the streets of the embassy district with its upscale shops, peering into the windows to admire the latest fashions. The sight of a well-ordered urban existence pleased me on its own, to be sure—but, even better, I also knew that beneath those lovely gowns the wives of Prosperia wore precisely the undergarments specified by their husbands, and that inside that surely lacy lingerie each of them had her governor to keep her sexual arousal just as her lord and master chose.

I tried to keep my mind off my uncharacteristic impatience for Alpha and Sala’s arrival with thoughts of my first (and, until today, last) visit to this remarkable world, two years before. I remembered how, fascinated by the local culture, I had wasted no time in experiencing it for myself. Once a servant had shown me to my suite I had summoned one of the embassy’s Prosperianconcubines, a lovely redhead who had introduced herself, shyly, as Mary.

“Do you have a governor, Mary?” I had asked as she smiled tentatively up at me.

“Of course, sir,” she had answered, her eyes going wide at the thought of any Prosperian woman who had come of age lacking the ingenious device. “You may access it on your handheld, I believe.”

Once I had had her servant’s dress and her pantalettes off, I had turned the arousal in her sweet, bare cunt down to five to keep her off the boil as I tasted her, still fully clothed myself. I had made her hold her knees back to her little breasts and watch as my tongue explored the secrets of her body until she sobbed with frustration.

“Stay like that,” I had told her sternly, when I had lifted my head and risen to my feet. I had fetched the handheld and raised the level of her governor one notch, and then I had begun to undress.

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