She closed her eyes and waited for Graymard’s countdown to begin.
His soft voice filtered into her consciousness. “Sim to begin in three…two…one…”
Mentally she opened her eyes and found herself standing on the bridge of the Tamora Bight. In the command chair, she saw herself sitting there, reading with her legs drawn up under her. Emi felt her own heart jump and begin to race as her sim-self sat up at the sound of an alert beep. With shaking fingers, her sim-self reached over and touched the screen, where a message box popped up.
Emi took a deep breath and softly spoke. “Full immersion mode.”
Graymard immediately replied, although her sim-self didn’t react. “Full immersion mode, commencing…now.”
Emi experienced a brief moment of disorientation as she found herself now seated in the command chair and reading the alert message. Her heart raced as adrenaline flowed through her body.
She relived the events as they had originally happened to her in the first sim, struggling to remember that it was just a sim, even as the very first one had been.
Still, the emotions, the fear felt real.
The terror.
The grief, thinking she was going to lose Aaron to an alien. That he voluntarily went to his death to save their lives.
As the four of them stood in the Grantz executive vessel and received the ultimatum that one of them would stay or all of them would die, Emi didn’t care that it was a sim of a sim.
She had started to plead with Aaron to reconsider his decision when everything went black. She felt a rush of air against her face and heard the outraged voice of a man screaming.
“…you goddamned motherfucker! We told you we didn’t want her going through this part alone!” Ford.
She opened her eyes to see Ford leaning in over her, his face filled with worry as he started removing the sensor leads from her forehead. “Babe, are you okay?”
She burst into tears as he gathered her into his arms and helped her sit up. He cradled her against his chest, his anger at Graymard white-hot and volatile.
“She’s an adult, Ford. She asked for this.”
“We fucking told you! You promised!”
“Please don’t be mad at him,” she whispered. She felt Ford’s anger begin to settle, to shift from supernova to violet, then orange, eventually settling into the hot grey of embers, stable but able to be stoked at a second’s notice. “I asked him to do this. I needed to.”
A little more of his anger dissipated as confusion crept in. “Why, babe? We told you how rough it was. Why would you want to go through this alone when we could help you? Especially since technically it didn’t happen.”
“I needed to.” She sat back and wiped at her eyes as she met his blue gaze. Some of her recalled past still felt hazy, as if she’d watched it in a sim.
“But why?”
For the very reason she’d suspected, and the painful sim experience had confirmed. “I had to feel it,” she whispered. “I had to feel the pain.” It wasn’t the only pain that now flooded her soul. “I needed to feel it. I needed it to break through the final barriers.”
Graymard still stood by the console. He nodded to her. She knew he understood.
She returned her focus to Ford. “I needed to feel what grief did to me, deep inside me.”
Ford slowly shook his head, confusion now further dampening his fading anger. “Again, why?”
She took a deep, hitching breath. “Because it was the only way I could make the neural connections and remember what happened and how it felt when I lost my parents.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
—Orson Welles
Recovering the remainder of her memories was an agonizingly emotional process, but one Emi refused to shy away from. With the combination of the sim sessions, guided meditation tricks, and a lot of crying on the shoulders of Donna and her men, Emi quickly struggled her way through it to the amazement of Graymard and his staff.
And since having met other F’ahrkays without feeling the same darkness she had before, she realized more than ever how spot-on her empathic senses had been about Kayehalau and his intentions.
Her men swore to never challenge her again on that point.
They wouldn’t dare. Not after what happened.
The ISNC and DSMC also instituted new regulations that trained empaths could overrule the assignment of a crew member to a ship of less than ten permanent crew members without other cause. More than ten members, the captain and medical officer, if the med officer wasn’t the empath, also had to sign off on the refusal.
Five months after returning to New Phoenix and three months following the night of Emi’s breakthrough in the sim, what few holes remained in her memories amounted to little more than the smallest of moth-made wounds in the largest of tapestries.
In other words, she could live with it.
With her skills completely intact, and her knowledge of the Bight’s systems as strong as ever, Graymard cleared her to resume her duties. She asked for, and was granted, an extra week to take care of a few Earth-based errands.
Emi and her men, along with Donna and her men, and Yanna and Pabo, had a quiet celebratory dinner at the same expensive hillside resort with the great view that Emi and her men had stayed at before leaving on their first mission.
Before they started eating, Aaron held his champagne glass up in a toast. Emi looked into his sweet, brown eyes and enjoyed the flow of love from him as well as Caph and Ford.
The happiness that they were once again a whole family.
“Life is short,” he said, his voice choking up a little. “Too damn short. So to family. And to friends who are every bit as good as family,” he said with a nod toward the K-2 crew. “And to never, ever giving up hope. Crew first.”
They all repeated it. “Crew first.”
He leaned in and kissed her after they drank to the toast. Nuzzling his forehead against hers, she felt more than just love flowing from him at that moment.
He was as horny as she was. For that matter, so were Caph and Ford.
They made it through dinner without ripping their clothes off in front of Donna and her men. But from emotions Emi felt from that foursome, they wouldn’t be dawdling long at the dinner table either.
When Emi and her men returned to the room, she started ripping her clothes off as soon as she stepped through the door. She enjoyed the identical looks of pleased shock her men wore as she bounced, naked, onto the center of the bed.
“Come and get me.”
They swarmed her, eager tongues and fingers and the feeling of their passion filling her senses like a drug. One thing she would always be thankful for, she realized that either her empath senses were now far stronger than they ever had been before, or she’d become more skilled at using them. But it was hotter than hell feeling how badly her men wanted her.
Caph somehow managed to shuck his pants and underwear first, even though he still wore his shirt. His cock easily slid home into her well-lubricated pussy as Aaron and Ford still struggled to get naked.
“Hey,” Aaron playfully complained. “That’s no fair. He’s still got his shirt on.”
She held on for the wild ride as Caph slammed his cock into her, each thrust driving her up the bed until he finally came.
She clung to him, breathless and even more horny than before.
“You all right, babe?”
She loved that he’d finally put aside his timidity regarding her. He knew she wasn’t going to break. “No. I didn’t come.”
“Aww. Sorry. Here, let me make it better.”
She let out a squeal of laughter as he threw her legs over his shoulder and went to town. Her squeals soon turned to moans of pleasure as Aaron and Ford each latched onto a nipple and began sucking.
And when she came, she thought the top of her head would come off.
Caph sat up, a pleased look on his face. Then
Aaron shoved him over, making him fall onto his side. “Move it. Horny captain coming through.”
“And coming,” Emi joked.
By the time they finished fucking each other exhausted an hour later, Emi was ready to fall asleep. Sated, happy, and even better, tendrils of her husbands’ love for her still flowing through her, she drifted off into a happy, dreamless sleep.
* * * *
Two days later, Emi and her men took an air transport to Montana, where they rented a car and drove. The quiet hillside overlooked the valley where the city of Bozeman lay below. Emi didn’t need to stop at the office to know where to go. Her feet knew the way.
From memory.
The men hovered behind her in silence, following her through the rows of grave markers until she stopped in the shade of a silver maple tree. A small, engraved granite marker with two notations side by side, with different birthdates…
And the same date of death.
Dr. Jasper Hypatia, and Dr. Melinda Ellingham Hypatia — Beloved parents.
Emi dropped to her knees in front of the markers and set the small vase of daisies and marigolds in a notch on the bottom of the marker. She kissed her fingers and first touched her mother’s name, then her father’s.
The men stood alert, but respecting her need to do this despite them wanting to hover and comfort her.
“It was raining the day of the funeral,” she softly said after several minutes of nothing but the sounds of birds and the wind to break the quiet. “The headmistress of the school brought me. She was really nice. Mrs. Attwater.” Emi ran her hands up and down her arms against the crisp chill in the air. “She let me stay as long as I wanted. She didn’t try to rush me to leave when it finished. A lot of people showed up. They were well known in their field.”
She sniffled, the memories flowing faster, harder, the dam completely gone. “I sat here in a rain poncho while Mrs. A stood under the tree with an umbrella. I didn’t want to use the umbrella she brought for me. Several of their colleagues offered to let me come stay with them, but I told them no thanks.
“When it was late and I was ready to go, Mrs. Attwater drove me down into Bozeman so I could see the house one more time.” She laughed. “I remember when we first moved there when I was little, I wanted to paint it pink. Mom and Dad told me we couldn’t do that, but they let me paint my bedroom pink.”
She closed her eyes and tipped her head back so the breeze could dry the tears on her cheeks. “I loved it here when I was a kid. It was a great place to grow up.” She let out a sad sigh. “You know, I really miss my garden.”
Aaron stepped forward and gently rested a hand on her shoulder. “We can move here, if you want, babe. Get a house and a garden. Whatever you want.”
She smiled without opening her eyes and patted his hand. “I meant the hydro lab. I want to go back to the Bight now and get on with our lives.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Okay.”
“Go ahead to the car. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She waited until she sensed rather than heard the men walk away. Then she removed a small bronze vial from her coat pocket. Choking back tears, she used her fingers to pull back a small section of sod at the base of the marker, until she reached bare dirt. There, she dug a small indentation in the dirt.
Carefully, she twisted the top off the vial and gently tapped the ashes into the small depression she’d made. Then she covered it, put the sod back in place, and pressed her fingers over it. “Take good care of Grandma and Grandpa,” she whispered. “Tell them I love them.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
With excitement and trepidation, Emi sat at her console on the bridge and watched as the hover lifts slowly moved the Tamora Bight from the hangar to the launchpad. There was something comfortingly familiar about the feelings washing over her from her men. Their pleasure and excitement over returning to space, combined with their contentment that their family was not only complete again, but expanded with the presence of Yanna and Pabo on board.
“It is a very slow process,” Yanna noted as he looked out into the distance where the heavy tugs awaited them on the launchpad were visible through heat shimmers rising off the pavement. “It did not take this long to lift from Mars.”
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “Gravity, atmosphere, and population densities.”
Next to them, another set of hover lifts were being set up to begin the process to move the Kendall Kant.
I wonder if Donna feels like this before a lift.
“I can’t wait to get the hell off this rock,” Emi said. It wasn’t until she realized Aaron, Caph, and Ford were looking at her with smiles that she said, “What?”
Caph leaned over from his station at the console and kissed her. “I never thought I’d ever hear you say that again. Damn, is that good.”
* * * *
After two days at the orbiting hub, they headed out for Mars for resupply before their next assignment. Their first evening away from the hub, Emi sought out Ford on the bridge, where he had night watch. Without a word, he held his arms open to her and helped her snuggle into the command chair with him. She laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes as she felt him wrap his arms securely around her.
Safe.
The safest place in the world. Not that Aaron and Caph didn’t make her feel safe, because they did. But she’d never admit a tiny little part of her held an even more special bond with Ford for what they went through on the B’autachia. The first few snippets of memories she recalled were with him, in his arms.
It didn’t make her love Aaron and Caph any less, but it made her appreciate even more how fragile life could be.
And the other shared grief they had in common would always bind them more tightly together.
He kissed the top of her head. “You all right?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” she mumbled against his shirt. She belatedly realized they were both speaking Beyant.
Something else they would always have in common.
He gently stroked her back and remained silent.
After a few minutes her stress melted from her. “I don’t know what to do.”
“About what, babe?”
She kept her eyes shut as she aimlessly plucked at the front of his shirt.
He let out a sad sigh as he rubbed his chin across the top of her head. “We’re all still young. We have plenty of time to try again later.”
“They won’t force us out if we do. I looked it up in the regs. We have seniority and we’re not in battle.”
“No, but do you really think this is the right environment to have a baby? We’re not supposed to be in dangerous situations, but look what we’ve been through so far.”
“I know.”
His melancholy always tinged his blue aura with a green somewhere between melon and fern, different than the green of Caph’s content state. She felt it now. Not quite sadness, but not completely happy either. The little girl who never had a chance, even with their advanced technology.
His baby.
Their baby.
As she sat there in his arms, she felt the range of emotions flow through him as his thoughts bounced from one thing to another. The melancholy, the sadness. The grief that flowed into anger over what Kayehalau had done not just to her, but to all of them. Of the time he stole from them, her memories.
Their baby.
Eventually his feelings settled into a royal blue, his normal relaxed state, a mix of love, his mind partially on his duties, and tinged with a little lust over the way her bottom rubbed against his cock through his trousers.
“We’ll try again one day,” he softly said, still speaking Beyant.
“I know.”
“And it’s not the DSMC we have to worry about when we do.”
Confused, she opened her eyes and tipped her head back so she could look into his eyes.
He smiled down at her. “Rah’tien. Duh. Do you honestly think he’d let his little girl stay in space if she was ex
pecting?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Yanna would rat us out to him faster than we could blink.” He settled his hand flat over her tummy as he let his forehead touch hers. “I doubt he’d force us back to Beyantaeux, but he’d ground our asses on Earth or Mars or somewhere. And wherever that new somewhere was, he’d immediately get busy building an embassy station there to keep an eye on you.”
“He reminds me of my dad,” she whispered. She knew she hadn’t talked about her family much with her men before everything that happened. The trip to Bozeman had been her first time visiting their graves in several years. Going through the sim while retracing and regaining her memories had also unearthed a fresh harvest of grief and loss to work through.
Or, maybe she never had completely worked through it before.
“Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She laid her hand over his and laced her fingers through his. “I’d like to go visit Beyantaeux sometime.”
“So would I. The pictures and videos are gorgeous.”
They sat in comfortable silence for a while, her ear pressed against his chest and his pulse thrumming through her. “Can we go to Kels’ grave when we stop at Mars?”
He kissed the top of her head again. “Of course we can.”
She lay there a little longer. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Of course.”
She switched back to English standard. “What the hell is an M-squared, and why does the thought if it absolutely turn my stomach?” It was a small thing that had been bugging her, a question she’d never remembered to ask before, but knew it was one of those tiny missing pieces in her mind.
He laughed and kissed her again. “Oh, babe. I get to teach you the right way to drink this time.”
THE END
WWW.TYMBERDALTON.COM
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tymber Dalton lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Not only is she active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC winner is also the bestselling author of over thirty-five books such as The Reluctant Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, and many more.
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