by Astrid Amara
Mack let out his breath slowly, like he’d been holding it in suspense. He gently pulled my pants down my legs. He worked one of my boots off, then pulled the trousers off that leg completely so he had unimpeded access to my crotch.
I was surprised that his gentle ministrations had coaxed an erection out of me. It had been so long since I’d had one. It hurt, it was so powerful. Mack scooted closer to it, on his knees, and used his hands to softly spread my thighs apart.
He’d been staring at my cock, but now his eyes flickered to my mechanical right leg. His eyes widened. “What happened?”
I stared at where the cybernetic knee joint met the flesh of my upper thigh. “I don’t remember.” I frowned. Why the hell couldn't I remember an injury that severe?
“Hey.” Mack tapped my other knee. “Doesn’t matter. Watch me.”
I did. He smiled, his skin flushed, eyes a little dilated. Then he licked his lips, opened his mouth, and pulled my dick into his mouth.
I groaned, slumping back against the counter. Jesus, that felt good. Mack did something with his mouth—a curling rhythm with his tongue, swiping over the head of my cock and dipping into the slit before licking down and back up the shaft. His hands kept me spread for him, and he dipped his head up and down, taking me entirely inside his hot mouth. I could feel the back of his throat, wet tightness, and his muscles working as he tried to swallow some of his saliva.
Headache? Totally gone.
I wanted to grip his hair so badly, but I kept both shaking hands clenched to the plastic bench in case I scared him off. I couldn’t remember ever getting a blowjob this good. It was suction and heat and speed and pressure and softness, the slick movements of tongue and lips, the endless depth of his throat. I watched his lips spread wide around the base of my shaft, his eyes closed. One of his hands released my thigh and reached into his own trousers, where a pronounced bulge could be made out against the tight fabric. He pulled his own dick out of his trousers and started rubbing himself off as he sucked me, and that turned me on nearly as much as what he was doing with his tongue.
“This feels…familiar,” I whispered.
Mack didn’t respond verbally, but a smile lit his eyes as he stared at me.
The sight of my thick cock pushing through those wet lips, over and over, had me coming within minutes. Even as I pumped cum into his mouth, he didn’t change his rhythm, sucking me down and rubbing himself off frantically.
I dropped to my knees and gripped his cock. We both pumped it, my hand wrapped around his. He leaned forward and kissed me, and his mouth tasted of my cum.
I didn’t like kissing. Did I?
But I liked this. I liked the feel of his tongue thrusting inside my mouth, claiming me, sucking me closer. It was sloppy, messy, and vibrations of pleasurable aftershocks shot up my spine from my groin. He came, and hot ejaculate spurted into my waiting palm. It seemed to milk out of him forever. He never stopped kissing me.
And even when it was all over, he was still there, licking at my lips, slowing the pace but not the intensity, his stubble rubbing my chin and lips raw.
Finally I sat back, the friction too much, the need to breathe too strong. I stared at him, and he looked back at me, eyes glassed over, tears in the corners of his eyes.
“Ivo…” he choked. He pulled me into a hug. I tensed, my whole body going rigid with the need to explode free. But he didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t care. He gripped me to him so tightly I thought he would break one of my bones. He rested his chin on my shoulder and sobbed, great heaving gasps coming out of him as he shook in my arms.
I didn’t know what to do. I should have mentioned to him I didn’t feel anything for him. All I had was a vague sense of recognition and an attraction. There was nothing more. Inside, I was cold, an empty shell who wanted nothing but Peak and to up my kill stats.
But here was this big man, crying on my shoulder, holding me like I were the most precious thing in the whole universe, so I couldn’t pull away. I needed him.
To find the repository. That’s what I needed him for.
If fucking him and pretending to be his long-lost lover made it easier to get him to take me to my destination, then so be it. I could use this trust, I realized. I could let him think I remembered all he claimed we’d shared, and once I had my hands on the repository, I could turn him in.
With that thought, I let him cling to me. I wiped my sticky palms on the back of his shirt. He didn’t care. He nuzzled my neck and said that name, over and over.
“Ivo… Ivo… Ivo…”
I wished it sounded familiar. But he could have said my name was Todd and it would sound just as alien.
Chapter Six
The Modified Version
When I next woke, Mack stood over me, gently touching my shoulder. “Get up, cowboy,” he said, “the storm’s passed. Time to go.”
I moved my body carefully. I was weak, but much improved from the day before. My headache was distant, merely a nagging sensation.
More noticeable were all the other sensations I felt, sitting up. My hands still shook. I itched all over and needed a shower. The light was bright. My hunger was palpable, and I realized I had the fading remnants of a boner in my pants.
I scrubbed my hand over my face, and even that seemed strange. The stubble on my cheeks rubbed against my skin in a way that felt bright and sharp. It was like all these sensory pieces were dulled before and now felt vivid, unavoidable.
But I didn’t have time to think on these overwhelming sensations. I needed to get the repository, get to base, turn this guy in. I needed to get back to the familiar.
“I packed everything up,” Mack told me. He motioned to my bedding. “Grab that, and we can pull the cord.”
I nodded, gathering up my blankets. I yanked the cord and winced as the pain shocked through my thumb. Mack handed me a mask, and I followed him out into the dreary landscape of Calypso.
Mack was uncharacteristically silent as we sat in the shelter of the buggy, waiting for the tempcamp to deflate. He kept glancing at me, I could tell, but didn’t say anything. His jaw worked feverishly, though.
Gonna break your teeth if you keep clenching them like that.
I started at the memory of those words. Had I said them? Or had I only heard them?
Once the camp deflated completely, we both lifted it into the buggy, then I went to sit in the passenger seat.
We headed east. Sol 10 rose overhead, and the atmosphere took on a pale blue hue. It might have been beautiful if it weren’t so barren.
Mack started talking again, first asking questions that I felt uncompelled to answer. So he began talking about himself. About his squad, a group of men and women like himself who completed tasks beyond the typical responsibilities of the ragtag revolutionary army. He specialized in disabling security systems and hacking into secure servers. There were six in his team, he told me, and he’d been working with them for close to five years.
“It was hard at first,” he told me, expertly navigating around a large crater in the sand. “Finding a place to fit in? After all, I only knew you and Calypso Recon. After my tour completed, I didn’t have any idea what I would do or where I would go.” He cleared his throat. “You and I always talked about leaving Calypso, so I did that. I spent a good year working odd jobs on various satellites, even made it back to Earth for one programming gig. But nothing felt right. Nothing felt like home. That’s when I knew I had to come back and finish the fight my parents had started.”
I said nothing. Home was a mental state, anyway. For me, home was Peak. But I couldn’t explain that to someone who hadn’t been under its thrall.
“This is so fascinating.”
My sarcasm didn’t faze him at all. “You’d like Rosslyn, my teammate,” Mack continued. “She reminds me of you, a mix of feisty and lazy. You’d like Kun too. He’s a riot. Assuming he survived the train assault, that is.” He nodded. “Up ahead. See the glint of metal?”
&nb
sp; “The repository?” I asked.
Mack nodded. He let go of the steering console long enough to rub his hands together dramatically. “Yes! This is exciting.”
I rolled my eyes, but honestly, I felt excited as well. Maybe not excited as much as relieved. The last few days had been hell. I would return to base a hero.
Mack whistled as we approached the box. I thought of the dozens of ways I could overpower him, kill him, take the box and the buggy and return to headquarters.
But as I thought them over, I looked at my shaking hands. I wasn’t going to successfully navigate back to any biodome on my own.
Still, I narrowed my eyes at him. “Just because I’m unarmed doesn’t mean I can’t kill you.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I’m saying, don’t fuck with me.”
“I thought we had a truce,” Mack said, sounding a little disappointed.
“You said until we found the repository,” I reminded him.
Mack sighed, ran a hand over his face. “Really? Even after I sucked your dick?”
I snorted at that.
He shook his head. “Ivo. I could have left you.”
“I know,” I admitted.
“I could have killed you. I didn’t. You know why?”
“Because you remember me from the past.”
His eyes brightened. “Yes. And I’m not going to hurt you, if I can help it. But I need to be able to trust you.”
I thought back on my decision the night before. I was weak and shaky. At this point, he had all the cards. So if I pretended to go along with him, I could bide my time until I reached a way to contact HQ.
“Fine.” I offered up my uninjured hand. “Truce.”
He didn’t shake it. He took it in his hand, gingerly, and lifted it to his face. He kissed the palm of my glove. I registered it as a tickling sensation on my synthetic hand.
“Truce,” he agreed. He smiled widely, then got out of the buggy. He grabbed the repository, half-buried in the sand. It seemed light as air in his hands. Once he got back inside the shelter of the buggy, he handed it to me.
It was light and seemed to contain mostly air. “What’s in it?”
“Let’s take a look,” Mack replied. He grabbed the box back and examined the electric lock. “Hm. Hold on.” He reached back behind the seats and rummaged in the supplies. I watched his ass as he turned in the seat. It was tight and large and flexed right in front of me as he shuffled through boxes.
I want that, I thought. Then I shook my head. Fulfilling sexual appetites hardly seemed the most pressing matter at hand, and yet I now found myself entirely distracted.
When Mack sat back down, holding an electrical device and a screwdriver, he stared at me, seeming to read my mind. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Yeah?” I hoped I wasn’t flushed. “What’s that?”
He smiled. “You’re thinking about my ass.”
“Not my fault—you just shoved it in my face.”
His eyebrow quirked up. “Hold this.” He shoved the device in my hands instead.
It was a small, hand-held programmer, but I’d never learned anything about systems programming, so I couldn’t use it myself. Instead I watched as Mack unscrewed the backing of the security device on the repository.
“You can unscrew the lock?” I scoffed.
“It sends out an tampering emergency signal, but out here it’s not going to alert anyone, too far from a source.” He popped off the back and exposed a simple microchip. He held out his hand, and I passed over the programmer.
As Mack fiddled with wires and punched in codes, he talked about some of his wilder electronic exploits. I didn’t really listen, because I was more focused on the expert manner in which he casually dismantled one of Trust Insurance’s most secured electronic locks.
Granted, the repository had also been locked to the train, which had been guarded by agents, traveling in secret, but still. Those steps were useless when the revs wanted it so badly.
By the time Mack got the lock open, I was tapping my fingers on my legs like he did, desperate to see inside. When he opened the lid and revealed a small microchip, needless to say I felt heartily disappointed.
“Fuck. Really?” I blew out air. “At least it could have been something interesting.”
Mack grimaced as he pulled out the chip. “Jesus. There’s…brain on this.”
I stared at it. A goopy organic material did seem to be crusted around the device. My stomach lurched unpleasantly. “How can you tell its brain? Maybe it’s shit.”
Mack smirked. “You shit gray matter? Actually, scratch that. I know you do.”
“Fuck you. What does it do?”
“That’s the question. But whatever it is, it’s critical for shutting down Trust.” He glanced at me sharply, then shoved the chip quickly into one of the pockets of his vest. “I’ll be keeping this for now.”
“Still don’t trust me?” I asked.
Mack gave me a look that I immediately translated as of course not. Instead he said, “I’m going to see if there are enough pieces in the back to cobble some sort of reader on it. I might be able to decipher what it does before we rendezvous with the clients.”
“Clients?”
“We’re working with an off-world team, a doctor and some of his staff who have been trying to expose Trust for years now. They’re the ones who alerted us to this thing and asked us to fetch it for them.”
I nodded, storing all this information to report later. “Let’s go.” I smiled, but Mack didn’t smile back.
“Ivo.”
“Yeah?”
“Are we on the same side?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But I know I don’t want you harmed.”
His smile lit his face. “That’ll have to do for now.”
“I suppose if you suck me off again, I could be more persuaded,” I chided.
“Deal!” He patted my knee, and I flinched. His expression immediately softened. “Sorry.”
I felt nauseated. “No I…I’m just not used to it.”
“Used to what?”
“Touching,” I replied.
Mack looked sad but nodded. He started the buggy and headed north. He didn’t say anything for a while, which was a shock in itself. As we mounted another high point in the endless terrain, I spotted the outline of another rev outpost, and pointed to it. “Let’s see if they have tech,” I asked.
Mack nodded and drove closer.
Unlike the previous outpost, this one was clearly inhabited from time to time. Indents in the sand showed where buggies had been parked during recent sandstorms, and it had a fully functional airlock. Under a steel awning by the side wall’s incinerator vent sat heaps of supplies or garbage, covered by tied-down brown plastic tarps.
We parked close by, but not so close as to be ambushed. Mack narrowed his eyes. “It looks occupied.”
“I want to check it out,” I said.
Mack sighed but nodded. He reached back with his long arms and pulled the energy pistol from under the stack of his blankets.
“I thought you said you tossed that,” I told him, but I smiled.
He smiled back at me. “Yeah, right.”
We put on masks and stepped outside, moving slowly and quietly. No one approached from the outpost.
We flanked the door, Mack moving in rhythm with me as if by instinct. I noticed he followed my lead effortlessly, like we were a team.
I tried the airlock door, but it was secured. I peered in the window. It appeared to have all the signs of habitation, but no one present. I nodded to the lock.
“Can you open that?”
Mack nodded.
“Okay. You open the door, I’ll check the perimeter.”
I circled the building and confirmed there were no other entries, and the only supplies outside were secured under the tarps. I looked under the first one and saw empty crates. The second had a sin
gle sealed box of supplies, which I yanked out and opened to reveal cooking ingredients. Mack would be pleased. I checked the rest of the piles, but other than some dirty rags and a few broken mechanics, the crates were empty.
“The door’s biometrics operated,” Mack said. “So I’d have to break it.”
I moved to him, dropping the food crate. “Break it.”
“This is someone’s home. Why are we breaking in?”
“Because I need a comm device.”
“Why? So you can get more Peak? It’s all gone, remember?”
The words hurt, but he was right, unfortunately. “I need to get in touch with HQ.”
“No.” Mack stared at me. “Sorry, cowboy. I’m not breaking into this house so you can betray me.”
“Truce, remember?”
He smirked. “Yeah. And it’ll last until we get to Alspree. Come on.”
I gritted my teeth. I wanted in. I wanted to find a comm and alert security. Even if I didn’t have the Peak on me, and even if I wasn’t physically craving it anymore, I wanted it. I yearned for its hazy embrace. No questions, no worries. I tired of hurting and wondering.
But Mack was right. I could wait another day until we reached Alspree.
He did find the crate with the mechanics interesting, however, and hummed to himself as he shuffled through the odds and ends, pulling out random pieces of equipment with a look of boyish enthusiasm.
I didn’t realize I was smiling at his expression until he smiled back at me.
As he replaced the flap of the tarp back over the supplies, something shifted on the other side. He froze.
I instantly tensed. Mack backed up, aiming the gun at the spot of movement.
I held out my hand to tell him to wait and inched closer to the shuddering tarp. Something small was there, or else it was a person hunched low. I took a deep breath, then yanked back the other end of the plastic.
A small creature skittered out, squirming on its belly at my feet, looking terrified. It was a dog, I realized. Its tail beat frantically in submission as it crawled on the sand.
