by T. J. Land
“Bitchin’,” he said to himself.
“Don’t curse in front of the baby vegetables,” said Thomas, slinking up behind him and draping his lanky arms over Rick’s shoulders. “You don’t want ’em growing up as warped and perverted as you, do you?”
“Fuck off, Meléndez,” Rick drawled, tilting his head up to accept a kiss.
“How come our first crops are fucking greens? I haven’t had a donut in close on five years. Why can’t you plant some…bread seeds?”
“Wheat, you ignorant loser. We don’t have any grain.”
When they’d first set out from Earth, they’d been equipped with everything they needed for the duration of the one-and-a-half-year journey to Pluto, including a cargo hold full of supplies for the dwarf planet’s fledgling colony. They’d had nutrient shakes, chewable protein bars, enough canned food to feed one hundred people for four years, the reliable bounty of Rick’s vegetable garden, and flour. When they were set adrift by the enemy, they’d comforted themselves with the knowledge that they’d die of boredom and cabin fever long before they starved. Even so, Rick recalled vividly the bleak looks on everyone’s faces three years ago when Echo had informed them that the last of the flour was finished.
“Besides, donuts? That shit’s bad for you. Echo’s fruity desserts aren’t doing it for you anymore?”
Thomas made his meh face. “He’s been using that weird melon-shaped thing we found a lot lately. I can’t get used to the aftertaste. It always feels like someone coated the back of my tongue in cement.”
“Don’t let Echo hear you say that. He’ll be whatever his equivalent of upset is. And he might poison your dinner.”
Their new vegetable garden had been planted in the lee of the rocky hill next to which The Prayer currently squatted, her landing gear obscured by the long grass. Being situated in the planet’s temperate zone, they wouldn’t have to worry about the periodic decades-long draughts that assailed the southern regions. Because Antoine’s current fascination was the local marine life, they were within walking distance of the beach. There was another ancient abandoned town a few miles east, though Rick wasn’t all that eager to go exploring again just yet. Not after what had almost happened to Zachery and the captain.
Khurshed, Rick reminded himself. That’s what he asked you to call him.
Thomas was resting his chin on Rick’s head, a habit he’d picked up since Rick had started shaving his scalp. The explosion that had taken his eye had also burned off a good chunk of his hair, and Zachery had said it was as good a time as any to try a new haircut. Rick had agreed. Then, stupidly, he’d given Zachery free reign to experiment on him. The result was so arrestingly hideous that he’d had no choice but to go bald. Thankfully, it turned out that all three of his boyfriends thought his new look was sexy as hell. Rick wasn’t so sure, but he couldn’t deny that having his bare scalp stroked and fondled made it feel as though someone had pumped kerosene into his dick.
“Comfortable up there, asshole?” he inquired of Thomas.
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “It’s the price you pay for being my shortest boyfriend.”
“Okay, I’m gonna bite your nipples off for that,” said Rick, peeling off his gloves and turning around so he could get at them.
When Rick had first met Thomas, he hadn’t thought much of him. He’d come off as a bland everyday nice guy, maybe a bit of a worrywart, with unassuming good looks. Nothing special. As they’d gotten to know one another better over the course of the four years they’d been lost in space, they’d become amicable acquaintances, though not quite friends. Rick had liked him while never being one hundred percent comfortable in his presence, his feelings towards the ship’s security officer muddled by what he now recognized as a huge, unacknowledged crush. Then the captain had come along and dragged them all into bed with him, and after that, everything had worked out.
Rick wasn’t the type to rate his boyfriends; he felt as drunkenly, giddily in love with the captain and Zachery as he was with Thomas. That said, they were all vastly different people, and they each had their own place in Rick’s life. Thomas was the one Rick went to when all he wanted was someone to make him smile. When he’d emerged from the medical pod, Thomas had been the first to be allowed to see his empty eye socket, and in the weeks that followed, Rick had turned to him whenever he started thinking dark thoughts. No matter what else was going on, Thomas always made him feel good.
“Oh yeah,” Thomas said, his breath hitching as Rick settled a hand over his dick.
Rick smirked. One of the reasons Thomas always made him feel good was that making Thomas feel good was so, so damn easy.
“You’re such a whore,” he told him, rubbing the spot behind his left ear like he was a cat. As Thomas sagged against him, mumbling incoherently, Rick kissed him hard, grinding their dicks together while he moved his hand from Thomas’s ear to massage the back of his neck. As soon as Rick had learned where Thomas’s soft spots were, he’d realized that he could do pretty much anything with him.
“You like that?” he asked. Not because he had any doubt that Thomas did. It was just nice to see Thomas try and fail to make his tongue work, because sweet gentleman Thomas never ignored a question.
“Y-yeah,” he husked. “’S nice.”
Rick smirked. I have so got your number, pretty boy.
“How about we go inside?” Rick said. “Wouldn’t want to traumatize the baby beans, would we?”
They didn’t make it to the bedroom. They barely made it into the ship. The oxygen garden was closer than Rick’s bedroom, and as its manager, Rick knew for certain it would be empty. He ended up dragging Thomas into the small side room where he kept his gardening tools, a pillow, a spare blanket, and lube because this wasn’t the first time he’d brought one of his boyfriends back here. Wasn’t even the third.
Despite how well he knew his way around by now, he stubbed his toe on the doorframe as they went in. He was doing that a lot lately; since losing his eye, the left side of his body kept knocking into shit. He’d picked up three new bruises in the last day alone.
“You okay?” Thomas asked.
“It’s nothing,” he said, limping in and rolling out the blanket. “Down you go.”
In ten seconds, Thomas had shed his clothing and slid gracefully onto his stomach.
“Comfortable up there, shrimp?” he said as Rick manhandled him up onto all fours. That was something else being with Thomas gave him: the chance to play the big man, the guy in charge. Even though he was short as hell and naturally slender, he was more muscular than Thomas, who’d lost a lot of weight during their four years adrift—and he hadn’t exactly been bulky when Rick had first met him. Rick spent enough time in the ship’s gym to make himself look positively ripped by contrast, even though he no longer had aspirations of building himself up into a brick shithouse like Zachery.
“You got any lube stashed away here?” Thomas asked. Of course he’d worked out what Rick was hoping for. Rick didn’t even have to ask if he was up for it. Thomas was always up for it.
Such an awesome boyfriend, thought Rick. But he was playing the big man, so he said, “You think you deserve lube? Lube’s for people who’re nice to me, Meléndez.”
“Oh, is that so?”
While Rick was tugging his own shirt off, Thomas reached back with his beautiful pianist fingers and gave Rick’s cock a few delicate caresses, followed by a good, workmanlike squeeze.
“Is that nice enough for you?” he asked, smirking.
Rick was sorely tempted to beg him to keep going; Thomas gave the best hand jobs in the universe. But Rick’s mother had always told him the people who never amounted to anything in life were the people who couldn’t focus on a goal. To be an achiever, you had to keep your eyes on the prize, she’d said. And, as evidenced by the sexy man currently jerking him off, Rick was an achiever.
“Quit it,” he growled, forcing Thomas back into position and draping himself over his
back so he could bite his earlobe. “Or I’ll oil you up with that bottle of pesticide over there.”
Anal, he thought as he stretched Thomas open, is definitely my favourite kind of sex.
Weird, that. For most of his life, anal had been one of those things he just didn’t get, like basketball and marmite. When he saw it in porn it didn’t do anything for him—sometimes it even grossed him out. He hadn’t ever felt the urge to try it himself, and the only girlfriend he’d ever had hadn’t been down for anything more than a blowjob before marriage. Then the captain had given him his first taste of what it was like to screw a guy and ruined him for anything else. Looking back on his performance, in hindsight, Rick was amazed that Khurshed had let him do it. He was also embarrassed as hell by how bad he’d been about preparation. When Rick had let another guy fuck him for the first time, it had been Zachery, and they hadn’t used any lube other than spit; while he’d loved every minute of it, the soreness afterwards had taught him a lasting lesson.
In Rick’s opinion, the best thing about anal was…well, obviously the best thing was the noise Thomas made when Rick thrust into his cute, pale ass, bringing their bodies as close together as Rick had ever been with another living thing. The other best thing was the view it gave him of Thomas’s shoulder blades growing slick with sweat, and of every muscle in Thomas’s back tensing up and relaxing again and again. And the third best thing was how tight it felt. And how hot. And how…
Okay, there were a lot of things Rick liked best about anal. The one and only thing he didn’t like about it was that the most effective way to do it—and yes, Rick was confident that he knew which way was most effective, he’d been doing this for months now so he was practically an expert—was from a position that prevented him from seeing his boyfriend’s handsome mug. That was kind of a pain.
“Hey, are you crying?” Rick asked, seeing Thomas’s shoulders tremble.
“No,” Thomas gasped and then giggled. “No, God, no, I…”
He gulped as Rick thrust forward again, keeping their momentum going, and continued, “I thought of this…this stupid sex pun.”
“Let me guess; it was about the seeds. And ploughing. Right?”
“Y-yeah. Sorry, man.”
“Next time Khurshed lets us at his toy box, I’m going to put the cock ring on you and leave it there for a whole day.”
It worked like a charm. Even though Thomas wasn’t all that into pain, he got off on thinking about it, imagining what it would be like. Threatening to use the ring did more for him than using the ring ever would have. He took one more thrust and then came, moaning and shaking. Rick didn’t take much longer.
One other thing Rick had learned about his preferences in the last few months was that he really liked the way men smelled after sex. He wondered if it was something the other three ever noticed; they’d all been doing this much longer than he had. Maybe they were used to it by now.
“Quit sniffing me, you freak,” grumbled Thomas. “Feels like you’re about to bite a chunk out of my side.”
Rick smiled against his skin. That was the third time he’d heard that exact complaint from Thomas in the last week.
The four of them—Rick, Thomas, Zachery, and Khurshed—had been sleeping together more and more often recently. Not just fucking, actually sleeping together. And not just sleeping together after fucking either. A few weeks ago, after a day spent helping Antoine collect samples on the beach, Rick had staggered back to his room exhausted and crawled into bed fully dressed, without turning the lights on. When the door had opened about an hour later, and he heard Khurshed’s throaty chuckle, he’d blearily opened his eyes and noticed for the first time that he was, in fact, in Khurshed’s room, lying in Khurshed’s bed. As he’d slurred his apologies, Khurshed had undressed him and crawled in alongside him, the bristles on his chin tickling Rick’s scalp. When Rick had woken up the next morning, he’d found the captain sitting up in bed reading one of his poetry books, and he’d thought: Yes. This, I like. Then he’d looked to his left and seen Zachery and Thomas, both asleep and drooling on one another.
It hadn’t been long after that that they’d all decided Khurshed’s bed needed to be bigger. To do that, they needed to expand his room. After arguing the matter back and forth for a few days, they’d agreed that the most practical approach would be to take down the wall dividing Khurshed’s quarters from the empty neighbouring room. Its function, when Khurshed had first bought the ship, had been as a space for the captain to eat meals away from the rest of the crew. As the captain never used it, taking all his meals either in the mess hall with them or in his office, it was now where Antoine stored his growing collection of specimens. Persuading him to start moving them into the cargo hold had been the biggest challenge so far.
Removing the wall had finally put an end to any pretensions towards secrecy regarding the captain’s relationship with them. Khali had been making cracks about “the honeymoon suite” for days, while privately she’d patted Rick’s back and congratulated him as though he’d achieved some important adult milestone.
“So, how long until your baby veggies are big enough to eat?” Thomas asked as they basked in the afterglow.
Before Rick could answer, the captain’s voice rumbled from the nearest com.
“Everyone to the bridge, now.”
Chapter Two
The first thing Thomas noticed upon walking onto the bridge was that Antoine and Khurshed were arguing. No surprises there. What did surprise him was what they were arguing about. Having known them both for years, he’d come to recognize a certain pattern. Whenever a polarizing issue arose, the captain would be the one advocating caution, restraint, and safety, while Antoine would come down on the side of action, exploration, and investigation. The arguments they put forward wouldn’t always reflect their true feelings towards the matter; Khurshed wasn’t a fretful mother hen and Antoine wasn’t a reckless hothead. In trying to win the debate, they pushed one another to extremes that they wouldn’t have contemplated otherwise.
Today, the pattern had been disrupted.
“It’s too dangerous,” Antoine said, his arms folded. “I can’t believe you’re even considering it, Captain.”
“How can you be content to sit there and do nothing?” Khurshed demanded. “We have a responsibility. To ignore it would be indefensible.”
“What flavour of crap’s on the menu today?” Thomas whispered to Zachery, who was watching the two of them with obvious amusement.
The engineer pointed to the nearest console. “We’ve got mail.”
“We’ve what?”
“Is everyone here?” called Khurshed, breaking off his argument with his first officer.
“Where’s Rux?”
“Echo’s got him,” said Irene. Looking Echo’s way, Thomas saw a big green bird of prey perched on his shoulder.
“Good. I have an announcement to make. As you are all aware, for the last four years we have been trying to make contact with any human ships that may also have been teleported into this galaxy by the enemy. We have been unsuccessful. An hour ago, however, we received a message—not from another ship, but from Yusra’s neighbouring planet.”
“Yusra” was the name they’d given their new home. Khurshed and Antoine had bickered about that too, the former insisting that it was presumptuous of them to assign a new name to a planet that had been formerly inhabited. Eventually, he’d accepted Antoine’s argument that the planet’s original name, given to them by Rux, was impossible for human vocal cords to pronounce. The crew had been invited to propose alternatives, and eventually they’d agreed upon the name of the captain’s younger sister.
“Someone’s talking to us?” Thomas said, his eyes wide. “Who is it?”
“We don’t know. The message is short and fragmented. However, Rux says he recognizes the language as belonging to the species that created him—this planet’s original inhabitants.”
“Wait, I thought they were all extinct.”
> “You will recall Rux mentioning that a handful tried to escape the plague by departing for another planet. He believes this message has been sent by those survivors.”
“What do they want?” asked Zachery.
“Our help. The message is a distress call. Whoever is currently on that planet is in trouble.”
“Or is pretending to be,” Antoine chimed in. “Perhaps to lure us there so they can steal our ship. Captain, Rux told us that the ship his people took was experimental—‘cobbled together’, he said. They may well have crash landed on the nearest planet and have been living there all this time with no way of getting off it. Who’s to say they won’t try to steal The Prayer if we get too close?”
While the argument booted up again, Rick turned to Thomas, beaming. “We’re not alone. There’s other people out there.”
Thomas knew how he felt. The one disappointment Yusra had given them—and really, they had no right to complain because so far she’d been fucking great in all other respects—was that she only had one sentient inhabitant. From the moment they’d learned that the planet had the ability to sustain life, they’d all secretly hoped that they might find something that resembled civilization, even though they’d known how unlikely it was. It was pretty bleak to believe that they, the twelve men and women who crewed The Prayer, were the only community they were ever going to engage with again.
“We’ve just got here!” Antoine was saying. “We’ve just found a safe harbour. Now you want us to endanger our hard-won safety by launching ourselves into the abyss once more and flying into what may well be a trap? Captain, you’re being unreasonable.”
Rick held up a hand. “Wait, wait. Ant, back when you were researching this system, didn’t you say that planet was an ice ball? How could anyone live there?”
