Read Online Adin's Adventure: How to Ruin a Rescue by Andromeda Bliss - Free Book Online

Adin’s Adventure :
    How to Ruin a Rescue
    _______________________
     
    Adin woke with his usual suddenness, keeping his eyes closed for a moment. Please let it have been a nightmare. But when he lifted his lids the little white cage was the same. Pale, featureless walls gleamed strangely in the soft glow from the ceiling, no exits or entries, no way to escape.
    He was still a prisoner.
    With a sibilant sigh, he sat up on the flat bed, wishing fleetingly for his sleeping tank on his home world as he scratched at his dry scales. Cocking his head toward the wall to his left, he quested outward with his mind, reaching for the next cell’s occupants. Yes, they were present and fornicating yet again. Tireless, those three. Or rather two…he sensed three minds but the images he received from them showed one of the beings with a second cranium.
    He’d never met such a species, hadn’t dreamed that such variety could exist. He’d never felt the need to travel away from their small world and explore. The adventurous one in their clutch had always been his older brother Ocen.
    Ocen , the brave and confident one, the starship pilot who had left their home to explore the galaxy. Ocen, who’d disappeared.
    Their mother’s tortured features and di m, suffering eyes had driven Adin into the stars to look for his brother. Adin was full-grown, nearing the mating burn. He was old enough and maybe brave enough to rescue his wayward brother from whatever fate had befallen him. He’d been so proud of the way he’d tracked Ocen, following posted schedules, docking entries, purchases, until he’d found the last entry, the last purchase at a strange drink vendor filled with the most exotic sentient species he’d ever seen.
    H is brother’s trail stopped there. Adin remembered asking the staff about him, remembered the drink tender giving him a peculiar smile and handing him a glass.
    Then he ’d awakened here, in this small white square with no memory of how he’d gotten from the vendor to this prison. He was also naked. So much for rescuing his brother. Now he was the one who needed rescue, trapped in a cage without even knowing who had taken him and why.
    What they wanted from him was clear enough—in the three wake cycles since his abduction, several females had entered his small cage and attempted to mate with hi m. In their minds he saw images of what they expected, what they wanted. But he had not yet reached full mating burn, though he’d tingled on the edge of it when one aggressive female had stroked his two largest phalluses with hands and mouth.
    Adin had sent each female away with mild regret that he could not please them and irritated curiosity about his abductors. If this was some sort of illicit breeding program, wouldn’t artificial means be easier? What he saw in the females’ minds, when they weren’t focused on mounting his cocks, suggested a behavior study. For what purpose? And surely they could get volunteers without needing to kidnap beings?
    Was this what had happened to his brother? Was Ocen trapped in a white cell somewhere also?
    With another sigh, Adin stretched and rose from the bed, paying no attention when it folded into the wall and completed the room’s unbroken, featureless whiteness. He wandered to the forward wall where his visitors had appeared as if sucked in and out of the wall material itself. He waited for a moment, expecting food and drink to materialize on a shelf like it had the previous cycles, but nothing happened.
    With a twitch, he turned away, irritated with himself for acting like a tame lab animal waiting placidly for its scheduled meal. Stepping over to the wall that divided his cell from the busy fornicators, he leaned a shoulder on the surface and closed his eyes, touching his mind to theirs. He suspected the abductors knew about his species’ telepathy and expected him to use it in just this way, but he had little else to occupy his time.
    Besides, he was curious. About them