“The problem is that I’m fighting a lot of obstacles,” she said, turning the conversation back to business. “Physiologically, the Nancharm aren’t that easy to figure out—”
No argument from me. I had yet to tell the difference between the Nancharm men and women.
“—and their erogenous zones are elusive as butterflies in a tornado. It took me a while to find out what excited the women, and they were willing. The men?” Carmen shook her head. “Even as they face annihilation, they have a tough time accepting advice from an extraterrestrial. Culturally, the Nancharm remain convinced they are superior. Plus, in spite of the certain danger of self-extinction, the Nancharm fear that if they divert too many resources to this process, the other planets may seize upon that distraction and attack.”
“How likely is that?”
“I don’t know, but you can imagine they have plenty of enemies waiting to settle scores.”
“And you’ve had no success hooking up with the Nancharm?”
“I never said that. Like I said, the Nancharm women are willing.”
“And…?” I drew out the question. “Have you had sex with Moots?” I couldn’t help chuckling.
“Not with her. She’s very professional in that regard. Feels that her participation in the studies might taint her judgment.”
“How was it?”
“Sex with a Nancharm?” Carmen chuffed softly. “The experiment was very clinical. Most of the time, the women need a lot to prime the pump. Conversation, touching, foreplay.”
“Most of the time?” I asked.
“Once in a while, the subject demands a quickie. When things get going, they really dig the Kama Sutra, modified of course. Their favorite is position 42. Goat Climbs Tree.”
I pictured a goat bleating high in a tree and couldn’t see the analogy.
“The Nancharm women are surprisingly flexible and it’s easier than you think to get under their carapace.” Carmen tipped her head and raised one hand like she was holding up a car hood to inspect the engine.
“What did you do?”
“I used a tool.” She rocked her hand. “A heated vibrator-thingy. The Nancharm women are into sex toys. That’s what kept them smiling while they waited for their men to come around.”
We turned the corner and approached a spiral staircase.
“What about companionship?” I said. “There’s more to a relationship than sex.”
“Did you just say that?” Carmen exploded with laughter. “They made do. Apparently, Nancharm men are a real pain in the ass to live with. Not having sex with them didn’t become an issue until the population problem.”
I still couldn’t see their men completely dismissing sex. I’m a vampire and though making babies was out of my equation, giving up sex would be like giving up drinking. Thankfully, we are sterile and procreate by fanging and turning victims.
“And you’ve had no success with the men?”
“None.”
I supposed I needed an explanation of Nancharm physiology, although I didn’t really care. However, some Nancharm boners might buy us time, time enough for me to steal a flying saucer.
Carmen climbed on the first step of the staircase and made room for me. When I stood beside her, the stairs automatically ascended like a corkscrewing escalator. But the process didn’t seem mechanical like the turning of rigid components but more like the metal changed shape to lift us.
“Are the chalices practicing safe sex?” I asked. “A successful experiment would mean that Cassie and Juanita get pregnant.”
“When conception happens, the Nancharm use sonic waves to coax the fertilized egg through the uterus in a way so it won’t implant. Definitely not pro-life.”
We arrived on a mezzanine overlooking the gigantic main room, where Jolie and I had landed earlier in the day.
Carmen proceeded toward a narrow slit in the wall. It widened to let us pass and we emerged onto an outdoor balcony to face a twilight landscape. The air smelled fragrant. The green rolling hills faded to gray. Lights twinkled in the distance. A band of greenish yellow rimmed the horizon. The planet’s ring shined bright as gold wire against the jewel-like stars and an iridescent nebula of shimmering purples and blues.
“Hate to admit this, but D-Galtha can be quite beautiful,” I said. “This planet could be a great tourist destination.”
Together we stood against the balcony wall.
She wrapped her arm in mine. “Tell me about your plan.”
“If you could call it that. At this stage, it’s more like wishful thinking.” I glanced around us. “Aren’t you afraid of the Nancharm listening in?”
“The only thing they care about is sex. Besides, what chance do they think we have of pulling off an escape?”
An alarm rang. Carmen let go my arm, and I looked about in unease.
A spectral shape floated in the air and Juanita’s face materialized before us. “Carmen,” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with distress, “come to the kitchen.”
“What’s happened?”
“Toby tried to kill himself.”
***
Chapter Twenty-four
The walls blinked in cadence with the alarm. Carmen and I rushed back to the stairway and bounded down the steps to the ground floor.
Juanita waited for us at the door to the kitchen. My mind pinged at the smell of fresh human blood, and my fangs instinctively snapped into place.
Toby lay on the floor, his head resting in Jolie’s lap. His wrists were wrapped in blood-soaked towels. Two streaks of blood trailed from the dining room to his body.
Cassie and Irsan stood beside him, both holding clean towels. I suppressed my thirst for blood and withdrew my fangs.
Carmen ordered, “Alarm off.”
The walls quit pulsing, and the alarm fell mercifully silent.
Jolie said, “I heard Toby fall in the next room, and when he didn’t answer, I checked on him and found this.” She opened her free hand showed us a bloodied paring knife.
Toby’s eyes seemed to spin in their moist, red-rimmed sockets. Sweat on his face mingled with tears cascading down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated between sobs.
Carmen knelt beside him and cupped the back of his head. He grasped her wrist, pulled himself from Jolie and pressed his head against Carmen’s thigh. She ran her fingers through his moist hair.
“I didn’t want to do it,” he wept. “I knew if I offed myself then Irsan would be the next one to be cut open.” Toby’s crazy eyes swept the kitchen and locked on Irsan. “But I can’t stand this misery anymore. Take me home. Take me home, please.” His gaze broke from Irsan and speared me. “You, tough guy, find a way. Save us from this hell.” He raked the air with his bloody crooked fingers. “Take us home!”
His despair pressed against me, and I had to take a step back. My responsibilities weighed heavily on my shoulders, but I felt dumb as a trapped beast.
Carmen and Jolie replaced the towels on Toby’s wrists with makeshift bandages, then helped him to his feet. His knees buckled, but they held him steady. Irsan and Cassie began wiping the blood-spattered counter.
The kitchen door stretched open. Moots and another Nancharm, this one shorter and stockier, rode side-by-side on one hover scooter. Moots and her partner slid off the scooter and floated to the floor.
The tendrils on the shorter Nancharm flailed about, and a baritone voice boomed from the translator/cap, “You assured me this was not going to happen again.”
Again. I remembered that Carmen mentioned that human captives had a limited shelf life—they tended to kill themselves.
Moots’ face was a hard, featureless mask, and her eyes opaque as alabaster stones. Yet I sensed her distress. She pointed at the other Nancharm. “This is Doctor Fastid … my boss.”
I assumed from his deeper voice that he was male. The last time I had seen two of the Nancharm together, one was tall and lean like Moots. The other was shorter and stout like this guy so I supposed this
size difference was the easiest way to distinguish between their men and women. His face was more square then hers, and his eyes almond-shaped. His mouth was wider. His speaking tendrils were thicker, which may have accounted for his deeper voice … or not.
Though he was shorter than Moots, Fastid was still close to ten feet tall. He slid across the floor and stared at Toby. “You have no idea what this does to our budget.”
Toby dipped his head in shame.
Carmen motioned toward his injured wrists. “He’s going to need medical attention.”
“The iatric team is on the way,” Moots said.
Fastid turned to Moots. “Explain to me how this happened? We …” he stabbed a finger in her direction. “You are supposed to be in complete control of this research. Self-destruction by a specimen is completely outside the test protocols.” Toby’s spilled blood seeped across the floor toward the doctor and he retreated out of the way.
Moots kept quiet. She leaned ever so slightly from side to side and drummed her fingers against the side of her carapace.
“Maybe, we should confine them in pens,” Fastid said. “Take away a few of their amenities so they can focus on the task at hand.”
“That won’t work, and you know it,” Moots replied defiantly. “Humans are complex.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Fastid waved his hands. “The humans are complex. The Dacheen are complex. The Ekwistas are complex. Every species we’re studying on D-Galtha is complex.”
“And so are we,” Moots noted. “The men especially.”
Fastid’s tendrils puffed but nothing came out of his translator/cap.
Fastid glided back to the hover scooter. “I want a report on how and why this happened.”
“I can tell you why,” she replied. “He’s unhappy.”
Fastid’s tendrils shook, and his translator/cap bellowed, “He’s unhappy? We’re all unhappy! Tell me who isn’t unhappy on this miserable rock? Planet Pleasure my ass.”
Fastid levitated and slid onto the hover scooter. His head swiveled to pan the kitchen, and I caught his disgust with us. The scooter rotated and disappeared out the doorway. The doorframe shrank back to normal size, and the door slammed shut.
“Asshole,” Moots muttered. She approached Toby, Carmen, and Jolie. “How close are you to expiring?” she asked of Toby.
He raised his bandaged wrists. “Not close, not anymore.”
“Fastid and the Erection Analysis Committee were hoping for plenty of sex, but I’m going to tell them you’ll need time to let this trauma pass.”
“How much time?” Carmen asked.
“How much time do you need?”
Carmen looked past Moots and at me. Her eyes asked A week? A month? A year?
I had no clue. It all depended on getting my hands on a flying saucer. I shrugged.
Carmen wrinkled her nose in displeasure and answered Moots, “I don’t know.”
“Figures,” Moots replied. “Our motto should be, ‘We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.’” She paused as if distracted, then thumped the center of her chest. Her tendrils wiggled and odd, squeaking sounds came out of her cap. She kept quiet for a short moment, replied in more squeaking sounds, and tapped her chest. “That was the iatric team. They can’t make it here, which means I have to transport Toby to the infirmary.”
“How?” Jolie asked.
“In one of our shuttles.”
“The flying saucers?” I asked.
“Flying saucers?” Moots chuckled, sounding surprised. “I guess if that’s what you want to call them, sure. We’ll be going in a”—she made air quotes—“flying saucer.”
“Then let me help you with Toby,” I replied.
***
Chapter Twenty-five
Carmen narrowed her eyes. I could sense her mind echo with the question: Why?
As in why did I want to accompany Toby to the infirmary?
Jolie added to the pressure by giving me the fish eye.
I nudged her out of the way and took my place at Toby’s side. “Moral support.”
Carmen’s lips curved into a wry grin. “Then I’m also going.” She tipped her head at Jolie. “I’m leaving you in charge. We should be back soon.”
Jolie saluted. “Roger, dodger.”
A soft ticking sound from the dining room drew my gaze. A dinner plate-sized device—imagine a Roomba with spindly legs—crawled over the threshold like a spider. It advanced head down to vacuum Toby’s spilled blood.
Moots glided toward the door to the main room. It swung open and stretched to let her pass. Toby sagged against me. His already wan face faded to a grayish pallor, and his eyes became hooded. Carmen and I half carried, half dragged him behind Moots.
Cassie and Irsan continued wiping up Toby’s blood from the counter but their attention was on us. Jolie gave an anxious wave goodbye.
We caught up with Moots in the main room. Tall as she was, Moots looked tiny against the scale of the spacious interior. The big door scrolled open and revealed the star-filled night.
A glint in the sky snagged our attention. The glint turned into a crescent outlining the edge of an approaching disk. The hemi-spherical bottom of the flying saucer materialized beneath the disk. The saucer slowed and descended, accompanied by a hum that steadily increased in volume.
An hour ago, my dilemma was how to get close to, and hopefully inside, a flying saucer. Then Toby tried to commit suicide, and tragic as that was, his misfortune had created this opportunity.
The saucer halted and hovered maybe twenty feet above the edge of the paved apron surrounding the building. Three landing struts unfolded from its lower hemisphere. The saucer sank to the ground, and the struts flexed to absorb its weight. The humming noise softened to a murmur. Up close, the saucer rim was about a hundred feet across with the spherical body maybe fifty feet in diameter.
A rectangular door levered downward to become a ramp. Moots proceeded forward. Toby winced and gulped hard. I paused to let Moots put distance between us, then asked in a low voice, “Why is he afraid of the flying saucer?”
“It’s not the flying saucer, per se,” Carmen replied. “It’s that bad things happen to those who leave the facility.”
“But you’ve left. To visit the control room.”
“I’m not worried,” she explained. “I am a vampire.”
“How does that protect you? Do the Nancharm even care about vampires?”
“I doubt it matters to them, but they do consider me higher on the food chain. And you and Jolie, too. But what gives me confidence is that if they fuck with me, I’ll take a whole bunch of them out before I’m incinerated.” Carmen extended her free arm and talons telescoped from her fingertips. She smiled, revealing her fangs, and then retracted the talons and teeth.
Moots glided up the ramp. Carmen and I nursed Toby along. A bright, hazy light spilled through the door, making it difficult to see the interior details. The surface of the ramp was smooth but as we put our weight on it, I felt it grip the bottom of my shoes.
The top of the ramp was level with a round floor the bluish-gray color of steel. The white walls curved outward to the circular ceiling. The space was illuminated with a glow that seemed to come from everywhere.
A round hatch opened above Moots. The spot on the floor where she stood rose to piston her through the open hatch. The piston withdrew and the hatch snicked closed.
The boarding ramp retracted with a hiss. The edges of the door melted with the surrounding wall and the doorframe became invisible. A long segment of the ceiling lowered and unfolded into a mechanical arm with hooped jaws. The arm swung toward Toby, the jaws spread and caught him by his waist. The arm tugged gently. Carmen let go and I followed her lead.
A tube wide as a bowling ball emerged from the floor and swallowed one of Toby’s hands past the wrist. He moaned in discomfort. I moved to help him but Carmen held me back.
Toby’s arm slipped from the tube. The bloody bandage was gone, and a gauzy c
ocoon covered his lower forearm, wrist, and hand. The mechanism repeated the procedure with his other arm so that both of Toby’s hands and wrists were gloved to resemble the heads of Q-Tips. His eyes dilated into a hollow stare, and his mouth broke into a rictus of goofy pleasure. Whatever alien drug he was given spun his mind in supersonic circles.
A panel on the wall slid open and revealed a green mattress like a folded Murphy bed. The mechanical arm pressed Toby against the mattress, which molded around him, leaving his face and the front of his body exposed. The arm released him and snatched me by the waist. I resented its grip and grabbed the jaws to break them apart.
“No,” Carmen cautioned. “We’ll be okay.”
I relaxed and let the arm position me against another mattress that appeared beside Toby. The mattress flowed around me like warm dough and solidified. The arm retracted and left me frozen in place.
The arm collected Carmen and stuck her into a mattress on the other side of Toby. The arm folded upward and its contours blended with the ceiling. The light dimmed. My insides shifted as if we were in a moving elevator. The saucer swayed but without a viewing port, I had no idea where we were headed or at what speed.
“Carmen, you do this often?” I asked.
“Usually I fly topside.”
“That was my plan,” I replied. “Instead we’re in the trunk.”
“Maybe on the way back you’ll see what you need.” After a moment of silence, she added, “I appreciate that you and Jolie came for me. Regardless of the outcome.”
“I’m trying to undo a lot of guilt for what I let happen to you.”
“Felix,” she snapped, “get over yourself already. You’re not everyone’s goddamn hero. Being here is my fault. I let that bastard Clayborn and his human goons get the drop on me.”
The saucer swung ever so slightly, making minor adjustments in flight. After thirty minutes, maybe an hour and a half—I couldn’t tell—the saucer shifted abruptly, its movements smoothed, and we stopped.
The lights brightened and the circular hatch opened above. The floor pistoned upward and lowered Moots. She slid to the opposite side of the compartment and faced us. I expected the mechanical arm to extend from the ceiling and extract us from the mattresses. Instead, my mattress squeezed like pursed lips, spit me loose, and I tumbled to the floor. Carmen was also spit loose and landed beside me. Then Toby.
Rescue From Planet Pleasure Page 16
