Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

but left her navel bared. She had tight fighting pants of some odd material and a utility belt around her waist filled with various gadgets. Her face looked fairly human except that her nose was a bit flat, and her furry ears popped up from the top of her hair out of the mop of dirty blond hair she had.

      From what he could see her torso had no more hair than an Earth woman would have. In contrast her arms and legs had what appeared to be a soft fur on them. He felt the strange desire to stroke her fur. Behind her she had a long sinuous tail that also had the same fur with leopard-like markings.

      She walked up and bowed before her father and knelt in their odd manner with one knee on the ground and her hands against the ground. He supposed that for people with claws the custom of presenting their hands with the palms up to show that claws were retracted had symbolic meaning.

For his own part he wondered if he was going to regret having a wife with actual claws. Then again, he remembered the many times that Jessie had raked his back with her manifested claws and realized this wouldn’t be so odd. Besides what guy had ever watched anime and not thought about what a cat girl might be like.

      She repeated the bow to the rest of the council, then Namur-san said, “Eesa, my daughter, I give you to this man, Jay, the ruler of the humans and our new allies. You will be his wife. You are no longer of my house but are now of his. You shall seek what benefits him and perform all the duties of a wife as he desires. You shall seek to bear him cubs and your talents shall be his to direct. May he prove worthy of you, my daughter.”

      Eesa then turned and bowed to Jay. This time though she held the bow longer and it started to feel awkward. Jay realized that he must need to do something, but of course he had no idea what the right words were to say.

      So, as he had been for the past year, he just decided to wing it. “Rise and be accepted into my house, wife. I shall shelter you, provide for you, and protect you for so long as you are faithful to me.”

      She stood and leaned in to sniff him. Whatever she smelled must not have been too bad because she licked his face. Jay knew in an instant that he was in over his head. He said to her, “Take your place with my other wives. We will be going back to our ship. Listen to Amelia,” who he pointed out as he spoke. “She is my first wife and manages my home.”

      Eesa growled under her breath and said, “For now.” But she went to stand between Amelia and Trina.

       A brief discussion followed in which Jay learned that Eesa only got to keep the things that she was wearing when she left her father’s house and joined his. He was expected to provide everything else for her. That wouldn’t be a problem, but it was just another example of how harsh these people were. Definitely a patriarchal society but he decided since he was sleeping with more than one hundred women that he was no one to judge.

“And when can my scientists access the computer logs?” Jay asked.

 Jad-bal-ja smiled, “Tomorrow. Tonight, you will have your hands full. You have a new wife to tame and an alliance to consummate.”

  Apparently, they took this very seriously. He retrieved the PSI crystal from the mystic. It wasn’t that he would have been opposed to them having it, but he didn’t want to devalue them any further. She was clearly reluctant to release her grasp on it, but when her husband growled, she pulled her claws back and handed it over to Jay.

  Then he decided that he had been polite enough to his new allies. It was time to show his power. He telepathically instructed all of his fuses present to be sure that they were all touching one another and asked Amelia to make sure she had a hold of Eesa. Then he reached out and touched his first wife. With a surge of PSI, he teleported all of them back inside the ship. He smiled as he imagined the shock that must have caused.

 

Interlude 4- Final Reckoning

      The very stars around the A’snkarnt home world were trembling. For more than three light years in all directions the crafty A’snkarnt had seeded space with traps. They were not warriors though and there was only a limited number of ways that they utilized their traps.

      The sheer power of missiles that destroyed planets, bombs that created miniature blackholes, and even automated gun satellites capable of firing pulse cannons with absolute precision were terrifying. Most any enemy other than the Forlorn would be daunted by such defenses. They might even decide that taking one little planet with the infertile remnants of a dying race only numbered in the hundreds, wasn’t worth it.

      The Forlorn however did not think like other beings. It would be easier to talk an incoming wave to go back out to sea than to change the oncoming armadas. The Forlorn sensed an end to all resistance in the universe. They certainly had not covered every galaxy, but they were in dozens. The universe might be infinite but that would only allow them more room to expand.

      Now every last Forlorn vessel was here. They had stripped their worlds of every sentient being. All their resources were pooled up into seven different armadas each capable of obliterating any other enemy.

      It was a testament to the A’snkarnt