by Amber Stuart
“Which way?” I ask climbing out of the manhole.
Vin pulls himself out and slides the cover back in place then stands up and looks around before pointing to the south. I grab his hand and pull him along. He laughs and I look over my shoulder.
“What?” I ask.
“You haven’t changed,” he says still laughing.
“Oh?” I ask confused.
“You loved going into space then too,” he says.
“Well…” I trail off unsure what to say to that. Is it a bad thing? Oh who cares, I get to go into space! “All right then, let’s do this.”
He chuckles and I run, forcing him to lengthen his stride to keep up. We’re not far from the edge of town but I can’t keep this pace up. I slow down to catch my breath. I’m holding onto his arm as we stroll and I realize, right then, how natural and comfortable this feels.
“Vintares?” I ask.
“Yes my love?”
“How did we meet? What happened? I mean, none of that is what’s in the history books, there’s no aliens, there’s no high tech, no Invaders…”
“No there is not,” he says.
“Did I… did I die for nothing?”
“No my love. Your sacrifice saved the world.”
“It did?”
An odd feeling fills me and I feel like I’m expanding. A bubbly sensation is the best I can think of it and it puts a spring in my step making me feel light as air. I’ve never felt anything quite like it before so it takes me more than a moment to recognize that it’s pride.
“Yes my love.”
“You’re serious?” I stop walking and pull on his arm turning him to look at me.
He gazes into my eyes and I almost lose my train of thought as I struggle to not fall into the deep pools of his amazingly blue eyes. The strong lines of his jaw come down to his perfect chin with those lips that I know are so incredibly talented and taste so amazing. He is the most amazingly sexy man I’ve ever seen. Only the allure of the stars keeps me from throwing away all else and taking him back to my place for a fresh round of love-making.
“But the world is…” I turn in a circle motioning around us with my arm. “Is this. No Lantarians, no nanites, no space ships. It’s… ugh.”
“Yes,” he smiles. “It is this. The fact that it is is a testament. If the Invaders had succeeded, this planet, this galaxy would not exist. It would be a lifeless sector of the universe. All power, all energy drained and incapable of sustaining life of any kind.”
“That doesn’t explain what happened!”
“No, it doesn’t, let’s move, I’ll talk as we go.”
“Okay, but I’m holding you to it. I want to understand,” I say, taking his arm again and resuming walking.
“You saw the bombings,” he says. “Did you see their planet killer ship?”
“Yes but I didn’t understand it. I thought, well what you showed me, their world ship was the real threat. What’s with the planet killer? Why do they do that if they can just come in and drain the sun?”
“Draining a sun powers their planet ship but it doesn’t feed their population,” he says and a cold chill runs down my spine.
“They can’t just grow food like normal people?” I ask.
“What do you know of ‘normal’ people,” he asks laughing. “Has so much of your former life has returned to you?”
“No, well, no,” I say my cheeks burning. “It’s just, I mean seriously okay. I don’t know, how do they feed their people?”
“You felt it already when the Infiltrator attacked. It’s as I told you before, they feed off of others’ life force,” he says.
“The weakness?”
“Yes. That was him draining the life force out of you,” he says. “Their race, their culture, all of it is of a parasitic nature. They drain life from other beings, they drain energy from other suns, they survive by stealing what others have.”
“Oh my god they’re alien vampires!” I exclaim. “Like, for real.”
“Yes, that is a good analogy,” he says.
“So you’re telling me that vampires are real.”
“Well, not in as such, but every myth has some seed of truth hidden inside of it.”
“Wow, okay. Uhm, yeah,” I say trying to think this through.
I find it almost more incredible than him being an alien which is probably silly but I mean alien vampires? Come on right?
“As for the rest,” he says. “Let’s get off the ground first.”
He stops walking and I look around not seeing a ship or anything actually. We’re standing in an empty parking lot of a grocery store. He looks around carefully then raises his arm and punches buttons on his suit. There’s a loud hissing sound and something shimmers. An opening appears as a set of stairs lowers to the ground. Vin walks up them without hesitation. I follow and my heart beats a hundred miles an hour. It’s beating so hard that my ears fill with the rushing sound of my own blood being pushed like the waves of the ocean. Tingles run up and down my arms and my hands are trembling as I take my first step onto his ship.
I walk up the stairs wide-eyed and expectant. Stepping into the ship itself I’m surprised by how ordinary it seems. While I’ve never been on a private jet I’ve seen plenty of movies and pictures and this is very similar. There are high backed chairs at tables and small windows. A plush beige carpet covers the floor while the walls are covered with a darker, more tan colored carpeting material. Vin walks through without a glance because to him it’s ordinary. I pause and take it all in, looking at every detail, wanting to memorize every aspect of my first time on a space ship.
I expected it to be more austere or utilitarian. Instead it seems almost luxurious. Towards the back there’s a dark paneled wall with a door in the middle. Temptation to explore pulls at me when Vin calls, interrupting my musing.
“Abby, come up front please. You’ll want to see the view.”
I rush my way to the front and through the door he went through a few moments before. Entering the cockpit area does a lot more to meet my expectations. Stepping through the door, the carpet is gone from the floor and walls. I’m standing on bare, polished metal. There are three seats, two towards the front and one to my right. The seats are high backed like those in the previous area but they appear to be much more utility oriented. There are panels with flashing lights, buttons, and screens that are displaying lots of different things. Vin has already seated himself in one of the front seats.
“Sit,” he says, motioning to what I assume must be the co-pilot chair.
Adrenaline is pumping through me in such quantities I’m just giddy with excitement. My hands shake, my palms sweat, and my head feels like it might explode. I take one step, then another, a mantra repeats in my head.
I’m on a spaceship. To the stars! To the stars! To the stars!
I take the seat next to him and my hands start fastening the multi-point harness like they know what to do. Maybe they do. I don’t remember it consciously but it seems likely I’ve done this before. As the harness clicks into place I take a deep, soothing breathe and try to calm my heartbeat. As the engines rumble to life and start to whine my attempts to calm myself fail. I’m so excited I want to jump out of the seat and bounce up and down screaming. I close my eyes and count to ten but before I make it to five I feel the ship around me shift and my eyes fly open in time to see the ground dropping away below us. We’re flying and I’m going!
To the stars!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Vin controls the ship with a yoke type steering wheel just like any other plane on earth. It’s so mundane as to be unrealistic. Maybe I’ve just watched too many sci-fi television shows but I certainly didn’t expect it to be so normal. Warp drives, probability drive, faster than light travel, it should be flashy right? At the very least it shouldn’t look just like any other plane on the planet. Okay so I admit it’s a little bit disappointing. The cockpit is bigger and th
e instruments have weird readouts but its not like I would know what the stuff on a regular plane was telling me anyway so it lacks the luster I’d dreamed of all my life.
I look out the window and that puts all my doubts and concerns aside. The ship is rising straight off the ground then Vin pulls back on the steering yoke and it angles up. The whine of the engine grows louder. It looks like for the longest time that we’re just hanging in the sky. No motion forward or backwards then there’s the slightest of rumbles through the metal flooring and I’m thrown back into my seat.
The pressure of the ship’s momentum, g-force as it’s known thanks to my love of reading science fiction, only lasts for a moment. It feels like for that few seconds I’m being crushed and run through a press then it’s gone. It’s not only gone but the sky outside is different. The stars are brighter and I can’t see the earth below from the angle we’re flying. The smile on my face goes from ear to ear. The stars are mine.
As the g-force lessens I expect it to go down to a zero-g effect but no such luck. There’s an instant when I rise up against the restraints but it’s barely a passing moment then everything feels like normal. No weightlessness, no extra force, I can’t even feel the ship is moving and with nothing outside the windows to reference I’m not sure if we are or not. Vin unhooks his harness then stretches to one side and presses some buttons on the wall. He then leans forward and flicks some switches and a hologram head appears just over the control panel in front of us.
“Commander,” the head says.
It’s a female and she’s gorgeous. The hologram doesn’t do her justice, I’m sure, but she has amazingly wide-set eyes, delicate cheekbones, and a perfect round face. Her hair is pulled back tight against her head but this does nothing to reduce her beauty, if anything it enhances the perfection of her face. Full lips, small nose, delicate chin. Jealousy fills me just looking at her. I can also see by her shoulders that she’s thin. More reason to hate her.
“Benji, you’re back on the ship? Report,” Vin orders.
The jealousy flares even higher. This is Benji. I knew it, I knew it and I hate her. Why, I have no idea. Which is ridiculous. Yes she’s obviously beautiful. Yes she’s spent all this time with Vin that I haven’t but I’m not a shallow person. I’m not going to hate someone just because she’s prettier than I am. That’s just not me, so what is it about hearing her voice that sets my nerves on edge? The hologram glances over at me. Her eyes widen and her mouth tightens before she returns her gaze to Vin schooling her face to show no more emotion.
“I was able to activate the control panel. There was an Infiltrator. I dispatched it.”
“Good, I activated this one as well. Are the platforms on-line?”
“No sir, something is blocking the signal.”
“Have you found it?”
She frowns and shakes her head.
“No sir,” she answers.
“Damn it, we have to get those platforms on-line.”
“Yes sir, I’m well aware of that.”
“I’m heading to the ship. By the time I arrive we need to know what is blocking the signal, Vintares out,” he says and throws a switch killing the hologram.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“Get to the ship and hope they have found what’s jamming the platforms by the time we arrive.”
“If they haven’t?”
“That’s not an option,” he says grimly.
“Right,” I answer, thinking about the consequences of failure. He’s right, we can’t fail. “How long do we have until we reach the ship?”
“Couple of hours,” he says.
“So… you promised me the rest of the story?”
Vin smiles and leans back in the chair, letting out a long sigh then he rotates the chair so we’re facing each other.
“I did. It’s not that long of a tale though.”
“I need to hear it, I need to understand,” I say. “Then after… maybe there’s a bedroom?”
I look towards the back suggestively and Vin smiles.
“Ah, a bribe, I see,” he laughs and I love the sound of it. Rich, full, filled with life and a joy that’s infectious.
“Well, it’d be at great personal sacrifice but for the cause you know?”
“The control panel was damaged. We were not aware of the Invaders having developed the Infiltrators you see. The creature sabotaged the machinery. Twisting it using their dark ways so that it drained life. The obvious sabotage was a lie. We believe now the thing had hopes of killing me. As the commander of the planetary defense, it could have thrown us into disarray. Bought them enough time to penetrate past the planetary defense platforms. The war would have been over.”
“Oh,” I say. “That would have been awful.”
“Yes but you stopped that. Your sacrifice saved the world. Quite literally. Did you…” he trails off staring into my eyes.
“Know I would come back?” I fill in for him.
“Yes, did you?”
“No. Well I don’t think so.”
“You said you’d be back,” he says.
“Yeah, I’m not sure but in all honesty I think I was just trying to make you feel better. Or myself. I remember how scared I was but the danger, the enormity of it all, outweighed my personal fear. I just did what I had to do.”
He nods biting his inner lip. Watching him I remember lying in bed with him so many times talking and he would do the same. Anytime he has something on his mind he chews on that inner lip. The memory brings a smile.
“You are so giving,” he says, placing his hand on my thigh.
Instantly my body reacts to his touch. An ache forms in my core. Desire flares so hard and so fast I’m almost overwhelmed to the point I have to stop myself jumping out of the chair and into his lap. My mouth is dry forcing me to swallow hard.
“Thank you,” I say, resisting my need for him for the moment.
“The planetary defenses activated but the planet killer ship was still there,” he continues.
“Why do they have those?”
“They eliminate any threat to the world ship with them and capture food,” he says.
“Ah,” I say.
“The defense platforms were holding the planetary ship at bay but the planet killer still had to be dealt with. The Lantarian Armada is strong but the main force had moved out in preparation to attempt to destroy the world ship.”
“Attempt?” I ask.
“Yes, it would have been a suicide mission. They turned around to come back to the planet and aid with the fight against the planet killer but it was going to take time, too much time. So we mounted the best defense we could. The Invaders began bombing. The bombs they dropped before I lost you were not the planet breakers. Those would be coming shortly. The ones they dropped before were only intended to soften our defenses.”
“How did you fight it?” I’m breathless in my seat.
He smirks and gives me a tight smile.
“I turned their tactics on them,” he says. “One of my strike teams was able to bring down one of their fighter ships. Using that they made their way inside the planet killer and detonated what you would consider to be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb a hundred thousand times bigger than anything that has been done on this planet since.”
“That’s what happened,” it comes out in a breath.
The entire planet, radiated, bombed back to the stone age. Vin nods slowly.
“The nanites combined with our suits allowed many of us to survive but you have to understand, we were only integrated around a handful of major population centers. Our mission was to assist you humans to integrate and join the galactic empire. Even the planetary defense platforms were just a precaution. This solar system is at the edge of the Empire so the installation was just an early warning defense. No one thought the Invaders would actually attack here. We were not prepared.”
“All those lives, that civilization,” I
shake my head tears swelling in my eyes. “Gone.”
“Yes, gone. In a flash, on my command,” he says and the sadness in his voice is heavy.
“But if you hadn’t made that decision, what then? At best we’d have all been food for the Invaders! You made the hard choice, you did what had to be done.”
“Yes,” he sighs leaning back. “So I’ve told myself every waking cycle since.”
“You blame yourself,” I say.
“Of course? It was my call,” a half smile forms on his face. “I did save the world. In my dreams, during the long sleeps. I saved it over and over. A thousand times I made a different decision, we were a little faster, I was quicker. I saved you. I saved you so many times.”
I don’t hold back any longer. I leap into his strong, muscular arms and land in his lap. Our lips come together with bruising force as I wrap my arms around his neck.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He sweeps me off my feet, literally. Vin grabs me in his arms and then in a blur of kissing and motion we’re moving. Dimly I’m aware of moving through the ship towards the back but our mouths barely part for air. He turns sideways carrying me through the door then strides across the room. His hand wraps in my hair, pulling my head back and a rumbling growl escapes his lips as he bites lightly along my neck down to my shoulder. Thrills run along my skin as lightning races towards my core.
Wetness leaks from me as I’m lifted higher and then he tosses me lightly down onto a waiting bed. His smoldering eyes devour me. I whimper, unable to contain the passion and desire flooding me. Vin unzips his suit exposing the hard planes of the sculpted muscles of his chest. I don’t know if time slows or he does but slowly, inch by inch, his washboard abs reveal themselves and I feel like I’m about to fall off a cliff.
As the suit slides down his muscles flex in the most enticing way as he reveals his hairless chest that is so incredibly sexy I could drink him in through my eyes. He crawls up on the bed with me. I roll from one side to another as he puts his knees down then he drops his head to my stomach. He grips my shirt in his teeth pulling it up. I arch my back to allow him easier work and he pulls it up to my breasts.
