That sent warmth through her heart and she smiled like an idiot. They entered the crew quarters.
“Over there, Kellac.” Gema waved her hand toward the pantry area. “There’s wine.” He held her while she rummage for a cylinder of sweet fruit wine and then carried her to the showers and put her down, slowly, so her breasts rubbed his chest.
With a grin she placed the wine on a shelf and with her back at him, whipped off her shirt. Her long hair flowed down her back and she glanced back at him over her shoulder. She wanted to laugh, to celebrate. To tease him. She took a swig of the sweet wine and held the container for him, but then poured drops of wine down her neck.
It seemed her plan worked. He yanked her close and began licking the top of her breasts where the wine spread. Soon all their clothes were on the floor. Kellac grabbed the wine and pulled her to the shower room. “Have a drink baby,” he said and she gulped from the cylinder, feeling light hearted and joyful.
Kellac turned on all the water in the entire room, not just one wall unit, so they were soon in a hot mist. He grabbed her around the waist, pulling her tight to him. Gema laughed and poured wine on his chest enjoying the shiver that ran through his whole body as she licked the red trail down his chest.
“You make me crazy, Gema.”
“You do that to me, too.”
He held her tight with one arm and placed the cylinder on a shelf then pulled her under the rushing hot water. His mouth found hers as the hot steamy water pulsed down on them. He lifted his head and looked down into her eyes, his own expression serious. “Don’t know what it is about you, Gema. Can’t seem to get enough.”
She felt the same way about him. “When we’re not together I think ahead to when we will be, and what we’ll do, how we’ll touch.”
“Put your arms around my neck, sweets.” She did and he pulled her back up, cupping her buttocks in his large strong hands. He pressed her against the warm tile wall behind the water. She wrapped her legs around him and with a little adjustment he was right where she wanted him, hard and deep. “You’re strong,” she said into his ear.
“But I can’t reach your clit. You’ll have to do it for me. Just slide your fingers right down there and rub, help me out Gema,” he said. He was breathless.
She giggled but it came out breathy. “I’d be helping you out, would I?”
“Oh, yes. Because I want to feel you come.”
Gema did what he said and her hand was trapped between them, providing slick friction. Through half closed eyes she watched his face as they pounded to ecstasy. She loved him, a lifetime type of love. If they couldn’t be together there would be no one else for her. He was the one.
Chapter Eleven
Lorl had food and was settled for the night. Dooley left her and hopped on the little float. He wanted to give Kellac and Gema some alone time, he could read the signals, so he drove around for some time. The empty corridors were boring but he had some nervous energy to burn off. It was crazy, he knew it. But he intended 2ln to be on the transport when they left.
Earlier in the day as he had inspected the weapons the cyborgs showed him, he saw 2ln enter a door down the hall from the armory. Dooley walked in and heard water running, faintly. He moved silently. Was there someone here? He came to a row of cots, each holding a cyborg he recognized. They were asleep and hooked via tubes to a machine. Maintenance, some type of nutrition, maybe. He knew nothing about cyborgs except they had their real brains fried so they could be ever obedient.
He followed the sound of water and walked into a shower.
2ln was bent over scrubbing her feet. She was nude except for cyborg appliances, computerized metallic plates. There was one on the side of her abdomen. There was another plate on her upper thigh, and her arm com was embedded. She’d removed her head piece, showing her bare skull, with small metallic touch points embedded to connect her head gear. Everything else was bare.
Slim, with high pink tipped breasts. Sculpted, every delicate muscle defined. Long legs and high arched feet. Calloused, rough toes. A dancer’s body.
Dooley knew dancers. His family made their livelihood with a traveling entertainment show. They traveled from planet to planet putting on musicals. He’d seen dancer’s bodies all his life. 2ln stood straight, water pouring onto her back. She looked at him and he could swear she looked… vulnerable. But how could she, she was a metal head?
“May I be of service?”
Star gods, she could. Those metal plates didn’t bother him at all—
He cleared his throat. He was not raping some poor brain dead girl, no matter how gorgeous her body was.
“No, 2ln. Continue with your shower. I was just inspecting the floor.”
He had never considered about what the cyborg bodies were like under those heavy suits. They seemed sexless. Now he realized the thick shiny material flattened out and disguised any shape underneath. They had to have gender, and some were female.
He sure hadn’t expected a body like that under the cyborg uniform.
“Are there specs on cyborgs on the com?”
“Yes sir. I can send you the link.”
“Very good. Carry on.” He needed to get out of there before he did something disgusting. What a body, so fine. Those big pink nipples, resting high, just right for his mouth…
On impulse Dooley gave a command. “Pistolet! Chase’!”
2LN froze. Her eyes blinked twice, and then her lithe body, no longer disguised under the thick armor, moved gracefully into the dance moves. She landed lightly on her feet and stood unmoving, awaiting orders.
Dooley walked toward her. “You remember. You were a dancer, once.” They’re not supposed to remember anything of their former life. Essentially brain dead. Yet she moved with the practiced ease of years of formal dance training.
She blinked again. “How may I assist you, sir?”
“Where did you learn to dance?”
Silence. Then, “I do not have the information in my database.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Enhanced Forces Quarters.”
An idea came to him. “2ln, do you have a personal id chip? An identifier of some type?”
“Yes, sir. Should I beam it to you?”
“Yes.” She didn’t question why he asked for it. He wasn’t sure why he asked for it. But there it was on his arm com. He’d look at the cyborg data before he slept. Maybe her id would tell him things specific to 2ln.
How bad off was he, trying to find out if he could put the moves on a cyborg?
Who knew a cyborg could be so sexy?
Dooley, Gema and Kellac dragged bedding onto the carpet of the com bridge and the three of them slept there, waiting for the alarm that would tell them the message had arrived. Dooley and Kellac had looked over the weapons and they were now armed.
“You think we can take a cyborg with us?” Dooley asked.
“What for?”Kellac asked.
Dooley shrugged on his bedroll. “Oh, just thought we might want to have another weapon handler on board.”
Kellac was silent for a moment. “But don’t cyborgs require maintenance equipment? We wouldn’t have room. And maybe not the right power supply for their equipment.”
“Yeah, I guess you are right. We don’t have time to patch some kind of electrical connection.”
The three of them had bedded down on the floor to sleep until the alarm sounded. Gema curled in front of Kellac, enjoying his heat and strength spooning her. Inside she felt wired up, but she knew it was because of all the changes happening and her unknown future, the one without him. She shifted around and he pulled her close, sliding an arm under her head. She pressed her lips against his forearm and blinked tears from her eyes. Everything changes…
The transmission came in a few hours later. The alarm woke Gema out of a deep sleep. She sat up but flopped back down and closed her eyes at the lights Dooley brightened. Kellac leaped up and studied the communication for a while. “Gema, Dooley get on
the com for Dusault 9 information. I beamed a lot more data files over, found them here on the system. We need to find a location, somewhere we can hide the transport, then send the coordinates so they can find us.”
“We can’t go back to our camp?” Gema asked. She was looking forward to being back at the camp.
“No, they advise us to find a place a long way away, with cover for the transport. They may have the camp location recorded, because the transport was near there.”
“I could burrow it into a hillside.” Dooley said. “Thought about that a lot after the Strafe, and found information on it. Glad I saved all the data I could find on the Strafe on my personal files and downloaded them to the transport. Sandstone would be the best.”
Gema keyed a query into her com with Dooley watching over her shoulder. They searched for some time.
“This is all new information on Dusault 9. Detailed topography. I’ll beam it to you so we can have it on the transport.” Kellac began the transfer while Dooley and Gema watched.
“Here is a location with what we need. Heavily forested. There’s a lake, and foothills of a mountain range. It’s the same latitude, almost, but on a different continent.” Dooley pointed out the area and they zoomed to look at it. A lake in the foothills of a mountain range, heavily forested with dark needle trees.
“Beam me the coordinates and save them. We’ll want to land as close to them as possible.” Kellac keyed the new information and sent it.
“How long until a ship comes for us?” Gema asked.
Kellac scowled just a little. “Not sure. They think there is probably a jumpstream the Toph didn’t publicly map. They are going to do some searches. If they find one, it could be fast, within a month or so. If not we might be wintering here.”
“I remember.” They’d talked about this before but she hoped he would have a more definite timeframe now.
Kellac grinned. “That was my brother Karvyr and my mother. My brother Kaistril, who we all thought was dead, is home alive and well!”
“Oh, good news.” Gema was thrilled for him. She knew he’d mourned his brother who he thought had been killed by the Strafe. She hugged him and he turned it into quick kiss.
“What’s that?” Dooley asked. “The third file. Farradae.” He leaned toward his screen, frowning, and keyed something.
A city came into view. Not a large, modern city, but a small village along a beach. Dooley typed some more. “Those lying Toph sacks of shit.”
Dooley’s face was flushed and his eyes glittered with anger.
“What?” Gema asked. “Is that a city?”
Kellac rushed to look at Dooley’s computer and soon they were all looking at the new information.
“Farradae!” Dooley barked out. “This is what happened to the Farradae!”
“Farradae sounds a little familiar.” Gema couldn’t place it though.
“What’s the Farradae?” Kellac asked
“A couple centuries ago colonists from Derry and Armagh took off on a sleeper ship, for what is now La Prele. It got lost somewhere in space. Except they ended up here. And survived. This file is even named Farradae.”
“Here’s a current picture.” Kellac pulled up a picture.
The city was made of white wood or stone, built on a hillside. A pretty place, with cobblestone streets and planters full of oddly luminous neon flowers on the rails of deep porches facing the sea. Many of the buildings were rounded. Dooley, on his computer, pulled up more data from his file. “Pictures of the inhabitants. Some Terran, some look wholly Zh Cle’, complete with wings and stingers.”
While Gema and Dooley looked at that, Kellac pulled up other data. “They really lied about Dusault 9. It isn’t a Seeder world. Not wholly. The northern continent where we camped is mostly Seeder flora and fauna. But the southern continents are native. Either the Ancients didn’t seed this whole planet, or something happened in antiquity to stop the Seeders from forming the southern continents.”
“They talk about theses wilderness planets as though they are similar to Terra,” Gema said. But the more she looked at the city, the more it became obvious it wasn’t Terran fauna. The flowers were oddly bright, and tall white fluffy plants grew along roadways.
“The Farradae have been there almost two centuries,” Dooley said. “This planet was explored by Toph almost a century ago. They met the colonists and even had teams studying their way of life and getting information on the flora and fauna.”
“I don’t understand. I thought a planet couldn’t claim a new planet that all ready has inhabitants.” Gema said. Then her heart jumped. “They didn’t kill them, did they?”
“No, they are still there. But no, Toph can’t claim this planet. Not by Terran Alliance Law.”
Kellac whirled around back to the bridge array and began another message. “I think my family will be interested in this knowledge. The Farradae. They’d be Terran Alliance, right?”
“They are Terran Territory within the Alliance,” Dooley said. “Definitely not Confederation due to Zh Cle’ ancestry. The Zh cle’ worlds don’t have full status. Not even now, and certainly not back when the Farradae traveled.”
“Require laws concerning Terran territory rights on colonizing a planet as first inhabitants,” Kellac spoke as he keyed. “I’m letting them know we have colony here with Farradae survivors. They look fairly prosperous.”
“Should we go there? Stay near them?” Gema asked.
Kellac looked away from his screen. “I don’t know if we should stay near them. But perhaps we should warn them of potential trouble.”
“Lorl and I upgraded the hardware and software on the transport’s com. If they have radio we can communicate with them,” Dooley said. Soon afterward he found the radio information recorded by the Toph Immigration Team. They decided to contact the Farradae survivors as the transport carried them to their new camp in the forest and let them know there would be some activity in the area.
Kellac didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary on the station, so they gathered the remaining supplies they wanted and then entered the transport for the journey back to the planet. The transport com was now set up to receive a message from New Prague, so they would know soon know how long the rescue ship would take. Gema rested in a recliner next to Kellac. She wouldn’t see the camp again, or the sandy river bank where she and Kellac had played and later made love. The dugout, with the beds made of meadow grass… That part of her life with Kellac was over.
Dooley took over the controls and they relaxed as they left the relay station. It would be several hours until they landed. They were all tired since the communication from New Prague had come in the middle of their rest cycle.
“It was nice of you, Kellac,” Gema said. “To find out information for the Farradae survivors so their planet won’t be overtaken by Toph.”
Kellac shrugged. “It will be hard for the Farradae to hold this planet without legal recognition and a space based military. But maybe something can be done to help. I’m no Toph fan. No offense, Lorl.”
“None taken,” Lorl sat in the back with her small boy sleeping in the recliner next to her. “I thought these planets were uninhabited, also.”
Gema sighed, softly. They were going to be stuck in this transport with Dooley, Lorl and her son. While she cared for all of them— and Lorl’s son Ulric couldn’t be cuter—she and Kellac had no privacy. Would they make love ever again? Kellac had taken her so passionately in the shower, he wanted her and wouldn’t give up their affair easily. But soon they would have no choice. Maybe they could build a little hut in the woods.
“It could be a couple months before a ship arrives. I think we should study up on shelters made of wood. We have a laser that can cut down trees.” Kellac said, softly so only she would hear.
He must be thinking about our lack of privacy, too.
“That’s a great idea,” she breathed near his ear, snuggling up against him. The heaviness on her heart lifted. We are still
together. At least for now.
Kellac wrapped an arm around her and they went back to sleep.
Chapter Twelve
The new location for the transport was on a thickly wooded hillside near a lake. Dooley carved a hold for the transport into a hillside, using the ship’s engines and landing gear to blast out a cave.
They all hated the new location. The lake was shadowed by a cliff and tall, dark green conifers. Most of the beach area was swampy land and marshy reeds with an odd decayed aroma. And the insects were unrelenting. Lorl was afraid to take Ulric out of the transport unless the fire was smoking and keeping the insects away.
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