The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  He stiffened at her touch, spine going rigid, shoulders squaring.

  “The experiment has too many variables to ever be the same,” she told him. “You and I have never met before, have we?”

  “No.”

  “There, you see. The experiment is already different.” She smiled. And then, because he was so beautiful, so sad, so alone, and because she knew that once he left, this chance would never come again, Eve did what she’d been wanting to do since she’d watched him tuck Misha into bed.

  She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

  His mouth was silky soft and warm, his eyes wide open and locked intently with hers. She brushed her lips against his, nibbling a little, touching her tongue to his lower lip. Tendrils of heat curled in her belly. Tingling sensations gathered in her breasts and groin. She drew back, smiling at the way his lips followed her, and knelt over his lap, straddling him so that they were face to face, chest to chest. Comfortable, feeling bolder, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her body tight to his.

  “Beautiful, beautiful man.” She smiled into his eyes and stroked the golden hair back off his forehead. “You’ve been alone so very long.” She cupped his face in her hands, loving the silky smoothness of his skin, the contrast of her darker flesh against his lighter, more golden tones. Bending closer, she feathered kisses across his face. “Don’t you think it’s time to come out of the cold?” She breathed the last into his ear, and followed it with an impulsive flick of her tongue.

  He shuddered. His arms came up, locking her in a tight embrace. His head tilted to one side, mouth slanting across hers with sudden fervor. His hands found her hips and pressed her down against his lap, against the rock-hard bulge beneath the clothes she’d given him.

  Eve gasped as dizzying sensations swept through her in rippling waves. The edge of his teeth scraped down her exposed neck. The moist heat of his breath warmed her skin. Lips and tongue tracked burning trails down her chest. His hand caught in her dense curls, and he pulled her head back, baring her chest, her breasts to his mouth and teeth and lips and tongue.

  “Dear God!” Just that fast, she was on fire. Breath heaved from her lungs. His teeth closed around one nipple through the thin cloth of her tunic. She sobbed and ripped at the fabric, wanting those teeth, those lips, on her naked skin. Cool air kissed her breast, turning dark brown nipples into hard, pebbled points as she flung the tunic away. And then his mouth followed the caress of the breeze, suckling with strong, hard pulls. The feeling ignited a taut, fiery cord that reached from each nipple straight down to her core. She moaned and thrust herself against him, pressing her breast into his mouth, clutching his hair in tight fists and pulling him tight against her.

  Then they were ripping at the rest of their clothes. Who tore what from whom, she would not remember, nor did she care. All she cared about – all she wanted – was the pure, sensual fire of his naked flesh pressed against hers, rubbing against her, driving her wild.

  “I’ve never—” She gasped. “Never – ah!” His fingers had found a spot between her legs, and sensation exploded across every nerve ending. Hot creamy moisture drenched her, making her body slick and steamy.

  “Nor I, Eve. You are so beautiful. I never . . . knew . . .” He guided the thick, hard length of his erection to her. The wide, silky-soft head pushed against her, into her, pressure building, stretching . . . The tendons in his neck stood out. His muscles flexed and trembled.

  She panted, rocking against him, biting her lip to stop from sobbing. “Don’t stop . . . don’t . . .” Her eyes squeezed shut. Something gave way. She registered a sharp pain, but then he was full inside her, hot and throbbing and filling an emptiness she’d never known existed. He moved his hips, and gripped hers to raise her up, then brought her sharply back down upon him.

  “Oh, my God . . .” Stars exploded across her vision. There was a word for this moment: ecstasy. But she’d never understood the magnitude of what that word meant until now. It swept her up in a firestorm, flung conscious thought to the winds. She wasn’t Eve Cartwright, scientist. She wasn’t Eve Cartwright, sister. Not even Eve Cartwright, mother.

  She was just Eve.

  Woman.

  Born for this moment, for this man.

  He moved inside her, above her, through her, body and soul. He moved, and her world moved with him, following his lead every shuddering, breathtaking, mind-shattering step of the way. Her nails scraped across the broad, strong blades of his shoulders as her feminine core clenched tight around him, suckling him with strong, rippling quakes. He flung her onto her back and crouched over her, hips pistoning, driving his body deep inside her in swift, hard, rhythmic thrusts until she screamed and exploded yet again, and then his body went rigid, as hard and unyielding as steel. He shuddered against her, and thrust into her one, two, three final times before collapsing to one side, his chest heaving like bellows.

  “Dear God.” Eve gasped and flung an arm across her face. She struggled to catch her breath. “You may not think much of the human race, but you can’t honestly tell me that isn’t worth saving.”

  One eyelid cracked open. One stunning blue eye peered at her. He laughed. And the rich, deep sound of it nearly made her climax all over again.

  Overwhelmed with emotion, humor fading, Eve brushed her fingertips against his jaw. She couldn’t believe this was real – couldn’t believe he was real. “You said you came here to die. But would you consider something else instead? Like staying here to live? With me?”

  He propped himself up on one elbow, his expression turning serious. With his free hand, he brushed the sweaty curls away from her temple. His gaze swept slowly over her face, as if drinking in the memory of her at this moment. For one, heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to say goodbye, but then the corner of his mouth tilted up in a wondering smile, as if he had just discovered an unexpected treasure.

  “Yes,” he murmured. He bent down to kiss her, lips brushing against hers with exquisite tenderness. “Yes, Eve, I think I would like that. I think I would like that very much.”

  The rover flew over the dunes of the wastes. Eve gripped the steering wheel firmly between her gloved hands to keep from constantly touching the man sitting beside her. In the back seat of the rover, Shar and Misha clung to the roll bar and laughed with a joyous abandon Eve had only ever seen on holovids of long-dead families from before the End.

  The noah had decided to stay. He would take Beri’s place in Homebase and add his collected samples of their world to their own. Together, they would bring life back to their planet. They were going now to fetch his ship. He had assured Eve that the outer hull of the ship had absorbed the bulk of the energy from the crash, and he was certain he could pilot it back to Homebase, where they could work on a way to transfer his biological storage units into their warehouses.

  Like the children, Eve was bubbling over with happiness. She’d lived her whole life with just her sisters around her, but now that the noah had come, she couldn’t imagine a life without him.

  Nonna, who wasn’t big on change – especially change involving the presence of a man in their midst – hadn’t been as enthusiastic as her younger sisters, but she had come around after the noah offered her full access to his ship’s computers and his vast organic library of plants and animal life long since extinct on their world. Science was her weakness, and it didn’t take the noah long to ferret out how best to win her over. Mind-reading definitely had its benefits.

  “You know, you still haven’t told me your name.” Eve maneuvered the rover around a rocky outcropping. The green lights on her in-helmet display showed the map she was following to the coordinates of the noah’s ship. “I can’t go on calling you ‘the noah’ forever.”

  “I have no name. I and my brothers are just the noahs. There has never been need for more.”

  “Well, there’s need now. We could call you Noah, if you like.”

  He considered it briefly, then shook his head. “No.
A noah is what I was, and what I am no longer. Now, I am just a man.”

  “Then we’ll come up with a name for you. We’ll have to give it some thought. Names are important things. You wouldn’t want to be called something horrible like Englebart or Euphaestus.” When he didn’t answer, she darted a worried look his way. He had lifted the polarized visor on his biosuit helmet, and through the glass faceplate, she saw him mouthing the names and frowning in consideration. Oh Lord, what had she done? He was seriously going to pick one of those. “No. We are not calling your Englebart – and not Euphaestus either. That was a joke.”

  “But I think Eve and Englebart has a nice sound to it,” he protested.

  “No, it doesn’t. Believe me. It absolutely doesn’t.”

  White teeth flashed in a mischievous grin and she realized she’d been had. Then he laughed, low and deep, and the sound rippled through her body, bringing back visceral memories of last night and all the hours of shattering pleasure.

  “Oh, God.” Eve gripped the steering wheel harder. “Stop that. Don’t laugh like that. You know what it does to me.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I do.” He sounded smug, but in an utterly adorable and sexy way.

  “What does he do to you, Eve?” Misha piped up.

  It was a good thing Eve’s biosuit covered her completely, because she did a full body blush. “Er . . . nothing, Mimisha. The noah is just being silly.” To the culprit in question, she muttered, “Down, Euphie. Behave. The kids are in the car.” Then, louder, in tones of exaggerated brightness, she exclaimed, “Oh, look! We’re here.” The rover rounded the corner of the last dune, and approached the crash site.

  As they drew near, Eve’s good humor evaporated. The ship was still there, where she’d left it, but the area around the ship was strewn with wreckage and riddled with large, charred craters. Several bodies lay sprawled in the sand.

  “Ghosts.” Eve maneuvered the rover closer, her gaze sweeping the area for any hint of movement. “Girls, stay in the rover.” Though she spoke in a low whisper, her tone left no room for debate. “Shar, charge your disruptor and keep it handy.”

  “Roger.” Shar moved closer to Misha. “Get down, Mimisha. There’s a good girl.”

  Eve climbed out of the rover, disruptor in hand, and crept toward the ship. “I don’t understand. Ghosts don’t have advanced technology, but these craters look like laser fire.”

  “They are.” The noah crouched down beside one of the Ghost bodies and turned it over. The lumpy, misshapen face with its lipless mouth and bared, sharpened teeth snarled up at them. There was a charred hole in its chest. “My weapon – the one I had when you found me – did you take it with you?”

  Eve thought back. Much had happened in such a short time. “No, I didn’t. You think Ghosts did this?”

  “The Ghosts may be more beast than man, but their ancestors were human. If they found my weapon, it wouldn’t take much for them to figure out how to fire it.” He headed for the open door in the side of his ship.

  “What are you doing?” Eve chased after him. “Wait! They could still be in there.”

  “No, the ship is empty.” He disappeared into the ship.

  Swearing, Eve followed. And what she found inside made her heart sink. “Oh, noah, I’m sorry.” The interior of his ship had literally been torn apart by scavenging Ghosts.

  The noah ignored the mess and headed to a console near the pilot’s seat at the front of the craft. Lights were still flickering. The ship still had power. He punched a button, and a flat panel display emerged from a console. Lights flashed in patterns Eve did not understand.

  The noah’s finger moved swiftly, typing and tapping at the display, bringing up several screens filled with more flashing lights.

  Suddenly, he swore and took off at a fast stride to the back of his ship, stopping beside what looked like a flat, crystal panel shimmering with more lights. Using his fingertips, he dragged four of the lights around in an intricate pattern, then slapped his palm flat. The wall opened, revealing a rack of metal objects.

  “What’s wrong?” Eve asked.

  “The weapon that made those craters out there had several other settings. The Ghosts have it and they’ve managed to put it on the highest setting.” He pulled several flat, egg-shaped devices from one of the shelves and stuffed them in the thigh pocket of his biosuit. With his other hand, he reached for a much larger, silver cylinder set with a blue-white crystal at one end. He clipped a strap to the cylinder and slung it over one shoulder.

  “So?”

  “So, I checked the locator on the weapon. The Ghosts are headed for Homebase, Eve.”

  Fear shot through her, and for one long minute all she could do was stand there, paralyzed. She’d seen her sister, Beri, slaughtered by the Ghosts. The image haunted her to this day.

  “The Ghosts have followed us back to Homebase before,” she said. Somehow, she managed to keep her voice steady. Breathe, Eve. Just breathe. Hysteria helps no one. “The walls are steel-reinforced concrete, twenty feet thick, and the outer airlock doors are solid titanium. They can’t get in.”

  He gave her a grim look. “If they fire the weapon on its current setting, I’m afraid they can.”

  Eve’s calm evaporated. She bolted for the door. “Shar, get on the comms! Call Homebase! Hurry!”

  She raced across the debris-strewn sands and leapt into the rover’s driver’s seat. She slammed the gears into reverse and slapped a foot on the accelerator. Sand spat out from beneath the tires. The noah leapt into the passenger seat as she was pulling away.

  “What is it?” Shar cried. “What’s wrong? Nonna and Dre aren’t answering. Why aren’t they answering?”

  Huddled on the floor of the back seat, a frightened Misha began to cry.

  “Keep trying, Shar.” Dread filled Eve’s veins with icewater.

  “I’m sorry, Eve,” the noah said. “I should have returned to my ship as soon as I regained consciousness to ensure it was locked down. This is my fault.”

  Fear for her sisters made her lash out. “Why do you even have weapons aboard your ship if your mission is all about preserving life? Or was that a lie?”

  “I have never lied to you. I never will. I am a noah, and my mission is to preserve life. But not all lifeforms in the universe are peaceful. Sometimes, even a noah must fight to protect the worlds he watches.”

  Behind them, Shar continued to call out on the wide-area comms, “Rover to Homebase, come in. Rover to Homebase, come in. Nonna! Dre! Answer me!” Her voice cracked.

  They’d reached the edge of the wastes, and the ride got bumpier as the rover sped over rocky mountain terrain. Eve kept up a desperately whispered mantra as she drove. “Please, God, please God, please, let them be safe. Please, let them be safe.” But when they reached the base of Mount Nuru and saw the smoke hovering in the air above the entrance to Homebase, Eve knew her prayers had gone unanswered.

  A pack of Ghosts were huddled in the middle of the road near the blackened hole that had been Homebase’s solid titanium airlock door. Their hands and faces were smeared with blood, and they were fighting like feral dogs over something that Eve feared to look at too closely.

  The noah stood up in his seat, slinging the metal cylinder atop his right shoulder. The crystal at the front of the cylinder began to glow a vivid blue. Then there was a blinding flash, and the pack of Ghosts disapppeared in an explosion of blue-white light.

  Turning, the noah fired another blast toward the side of the mountain, taking out another seven Ghosts hiding among the rocks. “Eve, you and the girls take cover by that rock over there. I will go look for Nonna and Dre.”

  She shook her head. “No. We’re coming with you. We’re safer if we all stick together.”

  For a moment, she thought he might argue, but then he said “Fine!” and reached into the pocket of his biosuit. “Here, take these.” He held out two of the flattened-egg-shaped metal objects to Eve and Shar. “To fire, put your thumb in the depression h
ere and your fingers in the depression here on the underside, then just point and squeeze.” He demonstrated with the third device, and made them do the same to show they understood. “Good. And be careful. The beam will vaporize whatever it touches. Misha, you stay between the three of us at all times. If you see a Ghost, let us know right away. Understand? Then let’s go.”

  Together, the four of them walked through the charred airlock into Homebase.

  What met them inside was total destruction. The airlocks had been vaporized, the rooms and equipment torn apart. The Ghosts hadn’t destroyed the power station yet, because the lights were still on, but sparks sputtered from torn wiring and smashed electronics. No room had been left untouched. Even the plants in the conservatories had been ripped up by their roots.

  There were splashes of blood on the walls and over a dozen Ghost bodies littering the floors of several rooms. Nonna and Dre had clearly put up a fight, but of the two eldest Eves, there was no sign.

  Then they entered the room that housed the Mind of Eve. The computers were shredded and sparking like mad, their torn surfaces splattered with red.

  “Misha, Shar, get behind me,” Eve whispered. She raised her weapons – disruptor in one hand, the egg-shaped device in the other.

  Growls and snarls and wet, smacking noises were coming from behind one of the destroyed computer banks. Eve and the noah had started to creep around the corner when Shar brushed against the edge of one of the computers and dislodged a torn faceplate. It fell to the floor with a loud clatter.

  Shrieks erupted. Half a dozen Ghosts leapt up and over the computer bank, claws extended, bloodied maws filled with sharpened fangs. Misha screamed. Eve, Shar and the noah fired. A blinding light flashed and the wall beside Eve simply disappeared. Eve turned to see an enormous Ghost holding the missing weapon from the noah’s ship in one massive, blood-soaked paw. The Ghost pinned its savage gaze on her and pointed the weapon again.