by A. C. Ellas
“Do it, then. They fall for it and don’t chase us, or they sail off into the Oort Cloud after us; in either case, we win.”
Cai fired his thrusters, deftly turning himself once more, but he didn’t kill the thrust from the ion engines, so as he turned, he started to curve relative to his original course. Once he was aimed at the gas giant, he fed more hydrogen to the ion engines, pushing them a little. Outside the heliopause, he was technically in interstellar space, and there was no atmosphere out here. Because of that, although he’d turned his body and although he was applying thrust in a new direction, he was still drifting out-system on his original course line.
This was the part of space flight that the holos still got wrong. Spaceships weren’t airplanes and didn’t behave like winged craft in an atmosphere. Cai continued turning his nose until he appeared to be aiming past the gas giant, as if he wanted to hit some target within the inner system. It was the only way to cancel his outward vector; the angled thrust would eventually bring him right in line with an approach to the gas giant. Laughing Owl had a variety of thrusters to position the ship in space. They weren’t very strong; they didn’t need to be. The three massive ion engines drove the ship, but that thrust could only be applied in one direction—aft.
Cai triple checked his calculations. He would continue to thrust for another twenty minutes then shut the ion engines down. At that point, he would be locked on a collision course with the gas giant. He would reach the giant in three hours. He didn’t have to be in Chamber to shut the engines down, that was something he could just program into his course and leave for the AI to handle. He locked his course and relaxed his mind, falling back into his physical self with the usual sense of letdown. Being the ship was so transcendental, being human was so... dull.
He managed to get himself out of his chair unassisted. He hadn’t been in the Chamber all that long, but he wanted to be rested for the encounter with the gas giant. “Lunch and a nap,” he announced to his adjuncts—pointlessly, since they already knew what he wanted. Sometimes, he just liked the sound of voices. Nick was waiting outside the Chamber door with a glass of iced tea and a smug expression.
Three hours passed quickly when Nick was involved, but Cai made it back into the Chamber on time and feeling refreshed. The gas giant loomed before him. All his dampeners were working, and by killing the ion thrust before he even got close to the planet, he’d hopefully thrown any Rels hunting his back trail off track. He’d give them something else to think about now. He rolled his belly to the planet, angled his shields and opened his ramscoops. He’d siphon some extra hydrogen off the planet while he used it to change his course. It would leave an obvious trail, but so would his planetary transit, so he might as well be hung for the whole sheep instead of just the fleece.
Fire curled off the edges of his shields as Laughing Owl dipped into the outer atmosphere. The gases scraping along his belly tickled, the winds shuddered his hull, and the planet’s gravity snatched at him and missed. He screamed across the day-night terminator and then shot away from the planet, having successfully used it to perform a two hundred eighty-degree turn. He left behind a bleeding gash of roiling, glowing gas that almost circumnavigated the globe of the gas giant. The Rels would have to be totally blind to miss seeing it.
However, he had performed the maneuver with all his dampeners running. He was now outgassing a select set of molecules and water along a particular line, as if the planet had made a grab at a comet, missed and now the comet was excited enough to outgas some content. If the Rels looked at him with sensors, they’d see a comet. If they looked at him with whatever they had that passed for eyeballs, he had enough ice and glowing gas around him that they’d still see a comet. He calculated how long an actual comet would outgas for after an encounter like that and set a program to taper off the outgassing along the optimal curve for a comet with half his actual mass. To the Rels, he would grow dimmer and dimmer and then vanish.
Once he was hidden again, he would adjust his course to reach the hardpoint. He had carefully chosen his cometary course to not pass over the hardpoint, thinking that would be too obvious. So he’d have to perform some minor, stealthy adjustments. Another thing he’d made certain of was that if he were actually a comet, calculations would show him shooting out-system with enough momentum to leave the system permanently. This did happen fairly frequently from an astronomical standpoint, in every star system that had planets, which was most of them, so should be considered unremarkable by the Rels.
The Rels bought it. Cai felt the sweep of sensors several times, but none of the spherical ships changed orbit to intercept. Comets were balls of rock and dirty ice and not worth capturing, unlike nickel-iron asteroids. The Rels let the comet escape, and once Cai had stopped outgassing, the Rels stopped scanning. Cai tapped all his starboard thrusters, gently pushing Laughing Owl, and he ran them for ten long minutes. Usually, thruster times were measured in seconds, but he had plenty of hydrogen now, and the thrusters didn’t ionize it, so it was invisible to any sort of scan.
He was relying on his new hull, the eye-twisting black that seemed somehow darker than mere black. Dark Star would have the same hull coating. He could hardly wait. He loved Laughing Owl, of course, but the lure of the heavy cruiser was tantalizing. In due course, he reached the hardpoint and jumped, smoothly and easily, back into the Rel home system. He was careful to emerge in the Kuiper Belt, not wanting to push his luck at the hardpoint. He sailed in-system, planning distant orbital slingshots around two gas giants that would maintain his stealth and aim him at a good exit point while allowing enough time for a full system scan.
The damage they’d done was staggering. No ships patrolled the heliopause. The radio chatter was continuous; Cai recorded it all in the hope that it would help the linguists crack the language. He took close-up images of blackened, ruined domes, of the ecological collapse of two of the inner, rocky planets. It was sobering, enough so that Cai felt pity for the Rels despite their aggression. Had the civilian populations deserved to die because of the actions of their military? Cai didn’t have any answers. The Owl Initiative had worked—too well. Only time would tell if it would prove to be a move of strategic genius or if it had created an implacable foe that would hate humanity for all time.
* * * *
Nick held Cai close as he thrust deeply into the tall, slender man. He held tightly, his arms wrapped around Cai’s chest, his feet wrapped around Cai’s ankles. If he didn’t, if he loosened his grip, Newton’s third law would rip the two of them apart. Once more, they were playing in Laughing Owl’s null-G spot. Cai found it relaxing, and the screens displaying the breadth and scope of the Milky Way only added to the serenity and the illusion of floating out in the void of interstellar space.
Cai’s moans of enjoyment as Nick took him were sounds that Nick treasured; it meant he was doing the job properly. Cai’s pleasure was more important to Nick than his own. He wanted Cai to enjoy him, in every sense of the word. It was a gift he could give to the Gator, like a consolation for being trapped in a physical body and not permanently locked into existence as a star ship.
Nick slid a hand down Cai’s body, loving the feel of Cai’s soft skin beneath his hand, until he reached his goal. He caressed Cai’s balls before wrapping a hand around the erect shaft. He pumped Cai’s cock in time to his action in Cai’s ass, aiming to bring them both off at the same time.
As he worked them, Nick kissed Cai’s shoulders, nibbled the strong column of his neck, anything he could do to add that extra bit of sensation, and it was paying off, for Cai’s moans were deeper, more heartfelt, more frequent. He was even murmuring encouragement now. Nick kept the pressure up, until Cai was just about singing his enjoyment and Nick was so tense and ready to blow he couldn’t contain himself any longer.
Nick cried out at the sheer intensity of his orgasm, made so much more powerful by his having staved it off for so long. With the telepathic bond wide open between them, Nick a
ctually felt his orgasm two ways—he felt the sensations of his cock shooting off in Cai’s ass as plainly as if it was his own ass that had just been filled with cum. He felt the hand on his cock as he climaxed and knew he was feeling what Cai felt and understanding that Cai felt the same things he felt. The paired orgasms rocked them both, waves of ecstasy crashed through them, rebounded from man to man, doubling and redoubling. Nick had withdrawn from Cai, they’d turned in place so they were face to face, their lips locked, and the kiss kept the passion alive for an amazing amount of time.
Cai broke the kiss off, looked Nick in the eyes, smiled gently and said, “Turn around.”
A shiver of delight coursed through Nick from head to toe as he complied, turning in Cai’s arms until his husband was on his back. He spread his legs and waited, holding still as Cai positioned himself. He felt the head of Cai’s cock pressing into him and tried to relax. Now, it was his turn to moan as Cai entered him and rearranged his insides. “God, that feels so good,” he whispered.
“I’m glad you like it, but I’m not a god,” Cai teased and continued his relentless impalement of Nick’s ass.
“You’re a god if I say you are,” Nick retorted, rocking his hips back into Cai’s thrusts.
“I’d rather be your husband than a god,” Cai said after a very enjoyable delay. “Gods are cold, distant beings if they exist at all. And I doubt they exist.”
“My husband, my friend, my soul-mate, my master,” Nick decided. “And... oohhh...” He forgot what he was going to say as Cai turned on the power, thrusting into him hard and fast. Nick sang for Cai, a song of grunts and moans, loving the sensation of Cai powering into him, riding him so masterfully.
Cai’s hands slid over skin, but it was the Gator’s teek that squeezed his balls and stimulated his erection with crackles of pure psionic power. Nick tried to contain his climax, but he was unable to hold himself back under Cai’s powerful stimulation. He sang out the pleasure of his orgasm in a long, drawn out “oh,” that had Cai pistoning into him even harder, faster, until Nick was shuddering in reaction, the stimulation bringing him hard again, hard and tight and then Cai was coming and Nick lost it completely.
The two men drifted through the illusion of the Milky Way, together in every way that counted, relaxing in the aftermath of a stressful mission and some glorious sex. Mind to mind, heart to heart, body to body, they were in perfect harmony with each other, and that was as things should be.
Epilogue
Gilly answered the incoming call with as much calmness as she could muster. It was the Psionics Guild calling her, which meant nothing really. There were any number of cases they could be contacting her about, but she still hadn’t heard back from them on the issue of Jason Hunter.
The Guildmember who appeared on her screen was not Yriad, her usual Guild contact, but an older man.
“I am Ortat,” he said immediately. “I have reviewed the information you sent to us. The issue will be dealt with by the Guild. Please stay out of it. If you reach out to contact the Hunters on your own, you risk jeopardizing the safety of one of our most powerful Astrogators, one who is slated for the second Star Wolf-class heavy cruiser. That, in turn, would have a direct impact on the ability of the Space Corps to protect us from our enemies. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I understand,” Gilly replied, fighting past a mouth gone desert dry to force the words out. Yes, she understood. If she told the Hunters where to find Jason, the Guild would come after her with everything they had. With both Nick and Evie out-system, by the time they learned of her fate, it would be years too late to change anything. There was a reason nobody in their right mind crossed the Guild. “I will drop the case entirely.”
“Thank you,” Ortat said, inclining his head.
The screen went blank, and Gilly sat back, closed her eyes and tried not to shake.
To be continued...
About the Author
I’ve long since embraced my inner nerd. I revel in my Greekness and in my Geekness. I have two lives—the mundane reality of life here on Earth and the far more interesting life in my head. I love ancient history, ancient forms of combat, target archery, sabre fencing, anything to do with horses, organic food and sustainable farming. Most especially do I love science fiction and fantasy of all varieties, especially conventions, which are the only gatherings on Earth where I can find many people just as strange as I am.
You can contact me at [email protected] or through my website www.ac-ellas.com
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