Heart of the Agraak

by S. J. Sanders

  She shook her head helplessly.

  “I don’t know. It feels good, but I need more. I feel so empty.”

  Frankie felt him shift and lean forward, his nose bumping along her mons as he sniffed her, his breath hot on her most intimate place. The first sweep of his tongue made her cry out as pleasure shot through her. He drew that raspy tongue in firm swipes across her labia and clit, stopping to play with the swollen nub of flesh once he discovered that it brought her the greatest pleasure.

  Then he changed up his game. His tongue stabbed deep, tunneling into her, and he sucked her essence with every move. Her body quivered, her muscles tensing as he increased his pace, retreating to lave her feminine flesh with the flat of his tongue before plunging within again. Excruciating, it wound her tighter and tighter, keeping her at the edge of her pleasure until the flared tip of his tongue flicked at the soft, spongy cluster of nerves within her.

  Her vision went white and she arched as her body pulsated and swept through the most powerful orgasm she’d ever experienced. Her body dropped weakly back onto the floor and she panted as she struggled to regain her breath. She looked down at Kaede’s pinched face hovering just above her crotch and gasped.

  He looked up at her and gave her a pained smile.

  “I am in control.”

  She looked down at his tented dupar and winced in sympathy. That had to hurt.

  “You don’t need to suffer. I can help you too.”

  He blinked at her in surprise and drew away.

  “There is no obligation for you to do so. It is not necessary.”

  Irritation promptly replaced any lingering arousal.

  “I’m not offering out of obligation.”

  His gaze narrowed on her and his spines puffed around him, making him seem even larger.

  “Very well.”

  He swept back the edge of his dupar with one hand, shifting the fabric up and bunching it higher around his hip rather than removing it. An onyx-colored cock bobbed at her, the length so stiff that it moved with his breath. From either side she watched as a pair of long, dark tentacles slid off his shaft, flexed, and then wound back around it like twisted vines. It was like nothing she’d ever seen.

  Scooting forward on her heels, she took his phallus in her hand and peered at it, uncertain of how exactly she would proceed. To Kaede’s credit, he did not get impatient or make any demands. He stood there waiting for her to work her way around it. This was certainly not something the anatomy disclosure had covered. Then again, she supposed that soldiers didn’t necessarily need to know what it would be like to fuck an Agraak.

  Leaning forward, she licked the narrow, pointed tip of its head. Kaede barked out a rough sound and pushed his hips forward instinctively. With a smile, Frankie drew that tip of flesh into her mouth, sucking on it and playing with it. Eventually, she became aware of the phallic tentacles brushing against her cheeks.

  Moving her hands onto the tentacles, she gave them an experimental stroke as she sucked his cock in deep. To her delight, Kaede growled with pleasure.

  This was going to be fun.

  Working his cock with her mouth, she slid her tongue against it as she bobbed off it, swiping around and over the head again, and took it deep on the next pass. Her hands continued to stroke along his tentacles. She noticed his thighs quivering and his breath dragging out of him in frenzied gulps of air. A low shriek of air filled the room, starting out slow and progressively getting louder.

  Frankie nearly stopped until she realized what it was. It was a sound of primal pleasure dragging out of him. She smiled around his member and picked up her pace, eager to bring him to his own completion.

  His hips jerked against her strokes, his head thrown back, his dark braids running like banners down his back. The shrieking became louder and more aggressive as his claws scored into the metal on either side of where he knelt. Her eyes widened but she attacked him with renewed vigor until she felt a ridge swell over her tongue as his cock erupted into her throat.

  Her body convulsed with another orgasm as his semen hit her throat, and the ormar that had been roaring quietly through her system finally rested, feeling sated.

  Releasing his cock with a loud pop of her lips, she lapped up the few lingering drops, enjoying the exotic, spicy taste of him. He watched her silently, drops of his cum pooling around them where it had escaped from her mouth during his climax.

  Neither spoke for a while. Finally, Kaede got to his feet and adjusted his dupar before extending one hand out to her. She stared at it in mild shock. Except when she explicitly needed help, he’d never casually offered contact. She glanced and saw a wry smile on his face.

  “The ormar has been satisfied. What is done, is done. We will figure it out, but there is no reason for distance any longer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frankie whispered. “I cornered you into this. I didn’t mean...”

  Kaede held up a hand and shook his head.

  “There is nothing to apologize for, Frahnkee. I have no regrets. In truth, I have known more pleasure in your company in the short time we’ve been together than I recall knowing in many revolutions. And the pleasure you gave to me now is beyond words. Thank you.”

  A flush stole over her as she grinned up at him.

  “It was pretty amazing, wasn’t it?”

  “Very,” he agreed with a soft laugh. “Now, come. Let us investigate what remains of the sordid place and put it behind us.”

  Allowing Kaede to pull her to her feet, she followed him further into the depths of the facility.

  Chapter 14

  The dark halls looked gloomy in the light of the glow wand that Kaede pulled out of his pack. She’d pulled on her boots and strapped on her plasma pistol and her favorite daggers. They were as low-tech as it came but they were a gift from her brother, and she trusted them not to malfunction in tight quarters. The rest of her armor had been put into storage mode, which reduced it to a condensed hard cube, and put into Kaede’s pack.

  She ran her thumb over the hilt of one of her daggers as she stepped around an overturned table. With all the disarray, she half-expected some zombie to come shambling around a corner. It was like a scene straight out of a horror movie. Now she was beginning to regret her obsession with zombie stories in her youth; it was supplying all kinds of horrific scenarios to her overactive imagination.

  Their steps were muffled, adding to the oppressive silent atmosphere, broken up only by sounds of things that they kicked over or stepped on in their progress deeper into the facility. Every lab they passed looked diabolical to her. Kaede whispered what each room was utilized for as they passed. A medical exam room, a hatchery. All of them dark.

  The hatchery alone gave her chills. Equipment had been toppled over in the haste of evacuation. There were scanners and devices to weigh and measure, along with discarded warmers and blankets. But all the empty nests where once small babies would have been curled up were abandoned and felt especially haunting.

  How many offspring were bred and passed through here without the warmth of their mother’s touch? Each one in its cold, clinical bed until they were picked up. How many were euthanized when the lab shut down if their sires couldn’t pick them up? Did she even want to know?

  Frankie could almost swear she could hear crying. Crying women and babies bred in this horrible laboratory. Had her sister passed day after day here, breeding young for those who paid for the service? A large cold crate stood at the back of the room, its green light casting an eerie glow around them.

  A light touch on her shoulder had her glancing up and meeting Kaede’s sympathetic gaze. He looked over at the hatchery, his expression somewhat sad.

  “Was it this terrible before?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if weighing what he wanted to tell her.

  “Worse,” he admitted. One hand pointed to the nests. “They all looked pristine; hatchlings lined up like a display at a market. Each one alone, except the nest with the
twins who curled around each other for comfort. The attendants walked by them with scanners without ever touching them.” He shook his head in disgust. “And this is what we’ve come to. Hatchlings born into a cold world where they are commodities to be sold.”

  He gently took her arm and steered her away.

  “In our traditions, when an egg arrives, it is a time of great celebration. One delicate egg that has been prayed for. We don’t get the multiple eggs like our distant Edoka cousins. Just one. It is favored and adored from the moment it arrives into the world. Both mother and father tend to the egg, keeping the nest warm, crooning to the young developing within. Then, when it hatches, it is a time of great celebration among all the family of the house.”

  “That sounds beautiful,” she whispered.

  He slanted her a small smile.

  “It is. For generations upon generations that is how it was. No one knows why fewer females were born, and increasingly more of them sterile. Males are being born sterile as well. It has gotten to the point that upon sexual maturity every Agraak is tested to see if he or she is fertile. Family is everything to Agraak society, and now it is all relegated to laboratories and obsession with pure bloodlines that may have the best chance of bringing forth young.”

  She set a comforting hand against his wrist.

  “I’m sorry. That’s so incredibly sad. I can see why your people would think do anything to return something they lost... but this... this isn’t right.”

  “It is not,” he agreed. “This is an affront to who we are as a species. Something the upper raniks have forgotten in their zeal.” He glanced to the side. “Come. The sector we are looking for is this way.”

  The door that greeted them at the end of the hall looked dark and formidable. Without even a window, it was a stark barrier. Frankie swallowed, uncertain now if she wanted to see what was in there.

  Kaede handed her the glow rod and with a loud grunt slowly inched the door open. Beads of sweat rolled down his arms and back from the strain before he finally pulled it just far enough that they might squeeze through.

  He gave her a wan look over his shoulder.

  “It is a good thing that the power is out. This door would have been impenetrable if the seal had been activated.”

  “Looks like it without the seal,” she observed as she lifted the glow rod toward the entrance. The door itself was thicker than her wrist. She gagged as a horrible stench wafted out of the room. Kaede pulled her back.

  “I will go first. Stay here until I say otherwise.”

  She set her hand on her pistol and nodded.

  “I have your back.”

  He looked confused for a moment, but then a light of understanding entered his eyes and he smiled.

  “I shall trust you with it then.”

  Without another word, he slipped into the dark. The minutes seemed to pass slowly but at last his voice came up.

  “It is safe, but I don’t know if you want to come back here, Frahnkee. It is not pleasant.”

  “Nothing in life and war is,” she called back as she stepped into the room, holding the light high in front of her.

  Nothing prepared her for the sight that greeted her.

  It was like a prison or an asylum of old. Padded cells stretched down the length of both sides of the hallway. Bots used for cleaning sat in one upper corner of the cellblock, discarded when the place was evacuated. As she passed cell after cell, she saw too many with smears of blood on the white padded walls that no one had tried to clean.

  In several cells, it was like a madness had set in. Words written with blood that had run together so that she couldn’t make out any words save a few, but those she could decipher left no doubt in her mind just what the captive women thought of the males who continuously abused them. Frankie swallowed back her bile as she saw other rooms where bloody fingers painted lurid scenes of males with distended phalluses and punishing claws.

  Kaede was a shadow in the light glowing from the other end of the room. He’d pulled out another glow wand at some point and was staring down into a cell, his body stiff with tension. The smell of piss and shit increased as she approached him. Then she saw it.

  Three cells in front of him had the withered remains of dead women, their bodies emaciated, and the smell of waste and decomposition came strong. Frankie covered her mouth and nose, gagging as she resisted the urge to throw up. She scanned each of their faces, looking for any sign of her sister, but their frames and hair color were all wrong from what she could see. She pulled her eyes away from their bloated corpses and looked up at Kaede.

  His face was lined with grief as he stared down at them. He glanced up at her as if aware of the weight of her gaze.

  “This is my fault. These females were starving themselves to escape their suffering and I wasn’t able to get them the help they needed. If I had been able to do something more...” his voice dropped off and he closed his eyes wearily.

  Frankie stepped closer to him, setting a hand on his thick bicep, and turned her gaze away to give him some time to process his grief. The light of the glow wand reflected off something at the far end of the room. Leaving Kaede’s side, she crept closer to the source and was surprised to see an abandoned datapad sitting on a table at what appeared to be a guard’s station.

  “Kaede, over here!” she called out as she picked it up.

  “What did you find?” Kaede asked quietly as he came up behind her.

  Turning she showed him the datapad. Placing a finger along the insignia at the corner, the screen flickered and came on. A secure screen popped up and she frowned at it.

  “Damn. Password protected,” she muttered.

  “Here, allow me,” Kaede said as he plucked it from her fingers. “There are a few common passwords. We can just hope that the guard here wasn’t terribly inventive—ah, here we go,” he let out a triumphant rustle of his spines. “Just as I suspected. I have access.” His clawed finger scrolled through the menu. “My people are going to find this very interesting. It may do much to help our cause yet.”

  Peering over his arm, Frankie looked down at the screen.

  “Is the database searchable?”

  “One moment. Let me see if I can get into the subject study logs. Yes, I have access. What would you like me to search for?”

  She bit her lip hesitantly.

  “Do you think it used their legal names?”

  “Probably,” Kaede said. “Although they kept references of them by numerical assignation, it is quite likely that at the beginning when they thought they were participating in a study that they provided names. The scientists would have kept meticulous notes on everything, even if they didn’t use that information.”

  “Okay. Do a search for Alisha Martins.”

  He nodded and punched in the name as she spelled it for him. Frankie didn’t have much hope that it would work but then the screen lit up with her sister’s profile picture with a designation number Specimen Breeder H2-9. She snatched the screen out of his hands.

  “This is her!” she said, relief in her voice that she found some sign of her sister.

  “Are you certain?”

  There was an odd note to Kaede’s voice that had her looking up. His face seemed unusually gray as he looked at her. A haunted look in his eye.

  “Without a doubt.” She held the screen up so he could see the identical features she and her twin possessed. He swallowed visibly and a miserable groan shuddered out of him. Frankie frowned at him.

  “Kaede, are you all right?”

  He swiped a hand over his face and leaned against the wall beside him.

  “Frahnkee, remember when I told you that there was a female who aided me in acquiring information I needed for this facility?”

  “Yes, but what does that have to do... Oh, it’s her,” she whispered, everything suddenly locking into place. He had admired her twin sister. Did that mean...?

  “Did you...?”

  “No,” he denied vehemently, a
nd it eased the distress building within her. “We gave a performance that fooled them. There was nothing between us but a desire to shut this place down. But there is something you should know...”

  She nodded and held up a hand, requesting silence, as she scrolled down her sister’s profile. She was horrified as she took note of the list of dates during which they’d bred her. They barely allowed her any time to recover. Sometimes she delivered a single hatchling; sometimes her eggs brought forth twins.

  Each one was marked out and comments by the doctors regarding how well her offspring thrived. There was also a file notation that she was a popular breeder, requested often. The list of males who had contracted her service was horrifyingly long. Kaede’s name was there, second from last on the list.

  Her brow dropped as she continued to read. Although her translator allowed her to read Agraak, there were several shorthand phrases and symbols that she didn’t understand. She scrolled back up to the symbol beneath her sister’s designation. She lifted the screen and tapped at it.

  “What does this mean?”

  Kaede leaned in to read. His eyes went wide for a second and then he closed them, turning his face to one side. Frankie shook her head in denial. No, that response couldn’t mean what she thought it meant. His thick, warm arms came around her and he drew her close to him.

  “Frahnkee, I tried to tell you. The facility commed me when she never became gravid with my egg. They also informed me that she died in her last breeding session and that I would have to select another at a ‘discount’ rate.” He sneered the last in offense. “That symbol there means she was marked as deceased and set out of the lab for natural decomposition. It means ‘return to the womb.’”

  Denial and anger surged through her as she struggled against his embrace. It did her little good. He locked his arms down more firmly around her as she fought against the truth. He absorbed every strike without complaint until she leaned against him, tears flowing freely.

  She hadn’t allowed herself to cry since her sister had disappeared. Not until now.