by Sarah Hawke
“That’s a lie—you definitely know how to handle a stick.”
She snorted and gripped the controls. “It better not make a mess when I wiggle it around.”
I smiled and eased her all the way back against me. “Just close your eyes and relax. You should feel the Valkyrie calling out to you.”
“If I throw up because of this, I’m holding you—” Her body abruptly stiffened, and the lights in the cockpit flicked on. The familiar thrum of energy coursed through the fighter’s systems as we awakened the sleeping beast. “Holy shit…”
“Let it wash over you,” I whispered into her ear. “I know it’s overwhelming, but try and keep a part of your mind grounded.”
I gently squeezed her stomach while the Valkyrie tried to drag her mind beneath the waves. I had hoped that my touch would act as a life raft, but it didn’t seem to be helping. Her pulse quickened, her body began to twitch—
And then my own breath caught in my throat when she suddenly and unexpectedly linked her nervous system with mine. Her fear crashed over me, and for an instant I panicked…but as our breaths and heartbeats synchronized, we both gradually calmed down.
“Sorry,” Shandris breathed. “I was…well, you said I should ground myself.”
“It’s all right,” I rasped. The sensation of having every autonomic function in your body linked to another person was…bracing, to say the least. She normally used the technique to “absorb” people’s wounds into her body, but in this case she just seemed to be absorbing my knowledge and poise to calm herself down. It was an innovative technique…and it seemed to be working.
“This is…I don’t even have words,” she said. “I can feel like I can touch the mind of every person on the base.”
“The Valkyrie’s sensors are an extension of your consciousness,” I told her. “They basically turn everyone into a telepath.”
I didn’t know if Shandris could even hear me. I could feel her mind reflexively experimenting with the new sensations. She reached out as far as she could then retracted again, and each time the tiny hairs on her arms prickled like she had touched an electric current.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this was so amazing?” she breathed.
I grinned. “I knew you’d be a natural. But, uh…you could let me go anytime.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Over the next few seconds she slowly desynched our bodies, and I remembered how nice it was to control my own breathing. Her powers were incredibly useful, but they were incredibly disturbing, too. Just because she couldn’t read minds or see the future or throw people across the room didn’t mean she was any less deadly than the rest of us. She could probably stop my heart with a simple touch if she wanted to…
“I think I can handle this,” Shandris said, both of her hands clutching the flight stick. “It’s getting a little easier every minute.”
“Take your time,” I soothed. “There’s no rush.”
She snickered and wiggled her ass over my crotch. “You should know by now that I’m not a ‘slow and easy’ kind of girl.”
Grinning, I kissed the back of her neck again. I was starting to sweat in earnest now, but I didn’t care. I still had a lot left to show her.
“Hard and fast it is, then,” I said. “You can start by powering up the maneuvering jets. All you need to do is—”
The Valkyrie shuddered as the engines abruptly kicked on, and a second later the canopy closed and locked into place. I peered over her shoulder to the console and blinked in shock when I saw the readouts.
“Like that?” she asked.
“Uh…yeah,” I mumbled. “I thought you said you didn’t know what any of these controls did.”
“I didn’t, but you did. And now I do, too.”
I frowned. “But how…”
“I wasn’t expecting it either,” Shandris admitted. The Valkyrie rumbled as the maneuvering jets fired and began slowly lifting us straight up off the ground. “Normally when I connect with someone I just feel their body talking to me. But this time…I don’t know, I think the Valkyrie let me peek into your mind. You said the sensors basically turn everyone into a telepath, right?”
I nodded slowly. I had assumed from the beginning that she would pick this up faster than the others—despite her “nightclub girl” persona she was one of the smartest people on this base—but never in my wildest dreams had I imagined she would be effortlessly lifting this thing off the ground a minute after sitting down in the cockpit.
“Even telepathy normally takes time,” I whispered. “Hell, even a cybernetic database implant can’t upload its information into the brain all at once.”
“I know, it’s kind of terrifying,” Shandris admitted. “But like I said…I’m not a slow and easy kind of girl.”
The Valkyrie abruptly shot forward, and I had a mental flashback to when Kaveri and I had blasted out of the hangar on Varsus. The difference was that I hadn’t known what the hell I was doing at the time, but Shandris apparently did.
“Woo!” she shouted as we cracked the sound barrier and blasted towards the nearby mountain range. I clutched onto her even more tightly, my head spinning as the inertial dampeners struggled to compensate for the shifting gravitational forces. Having flown my whole life, I liked to think my stomach could handle anything…but evidently that was only true when I was in direct control.
“Barys ka taala,” Shandris breathed when she finally steadied our ascent. “This feels amazing.”
“The first time should be pretty disorienting,” I said.
“Well, it’s not. I haven’t felt this energized in days.”
I grinned and squeezed her against me. Maybe the reason I’d been so intent on trying this was that my clairvoyant abilities had known this would happen…or maybe it was all dumb luck. Either way, the Valkyrie’s amazing psionic technology had impressed me yet again. The idea that this type of device had been normal back in mother’s time…well, it made my life out here on the Rim seem even more rustic than it had before.
You could always go back. You could always do what Selorah envisioned and try to rebuild the Seraphim.
I grimaced at the thought. I had more than enough to worry about right now without slipping into delusions of royal grandeur.
“We can head back if you want,” I said, clearing my throat. “We have our answer about your abilities. I can talk to Blackstar about setting up a real training scenario or two.”
“I don’t want to train with Blackstar,” Shandris said. “I want you to show me what else this thing can do.”
I grinned. I really did love her adventurous spirit. If I had met her a few years ago, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trouble we would have gotten into…or the fun we would have had.
“You can link with me again if you need to,” I told her. “You might as well download everything you can from my brain while you’re in there.”
“That thought should probably terrify me more than it does,” Shandris said. “But I think you’re right. Here goes nothing…”
Her psycho-metabolic bond was slightly less disturbing when I was ready for it. I squeezed her stomach and closed my eyes as our heartbeats synched again, and this time I swore I could actually feel her rummaging around my thoughts. I wondered distantly if I could somehow access the Valkyrie’s sensors and make the connection mutual, but as far as I knew the fighter could only handle one pilot at a time…
“I think I understand,” Shandris whispered, tugging back on the flight stick and climbing towards space. “This is crazy…I shouldn’t know how to do any of this.”
“Let’s hope you retain some of it after you disconnect later.”
“If it’s anything like the medical database, I’ll fail the exam two hours later. Then again, maybe that’s for the best.”
I felt a sudden shiver ripple through her mind, and for a moment her skin cooled to an almost-human temperature. I couldn’t read her thoughts, but I didn’t have to. Now that the initial burs
t of adrenaline had faded, she belatedly remembered the coming battle—and the losses we were inevitably going to take.
“Just try and focus on the fighter,” I soothed. “Take us to the third moon…I’d love to show you the rings.”
“Right,” she said, swallowing and nodding. “Here goes nothing…”
The thrusters fired again, and we quickly burned through Maz Sepa’s thin exosphere and into normal space. Just like before, Shandris got the handle of things almost immediately. For a woman who insisted she wasn’t a warrior, she certainly had the instinctual poise of one. None of the other whelps—even the ones with combat experience—could have pulled themselves back together so quickly.
“Managing the flow of energy is the key,” I told her. “It’s easy to fixate on one thing or another, but it can take a while to figure out how to fly and keep the shields up at the same time.”
I felt her grimace even though I couldn’t see her face. “I think I understand,” she murmured. “Or maybe it’s just the Valkyrie that understands…I can’t tell where I begin and it ends.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty how much it works,” I said. “Why don’t we try to—?”
I slammed back into my seat when she punched the throttle again, and I watched in an odd mix of fascination and horror as she accelerated towards our target moon. I tried to keep coaching her, but it wasn’t really necessary—she had already picked up the basics. At this point all she seemed to need was more hands-on experience…
“Seraph’s mercy, it’s gorgeous,” she breathed as we surged closer and closer to the icy expanse encircling the moon. “I don’t care how many holos you watch—there’s nothing like seeing the real thing.”
“It gets better,” I told her, smiling. “Take us in.”
I probably should have been a lot more cautious under the circumstances, but I ordered myself to relax and enjoy the ride. We shared a triumphant cry when she dipped into the rings and starting whipping past the ice chunks. In one ear, I swore I could hear Raxyl pleading for caution; in the other, I could hear Kaveri egging us on. It wasn’t a fair competition.
“Punch it,” I said.
The engines roared with newfound vigor, and we blasted through the rings at genuinely idiotic speed. Every few seconds I checked the shield power levels just to make certain we weren’t about to get perforated, but Shandris seemed to have it all under control. I regretted not bringing along a recorder buoy; this footage would have easily gotten us onto the professional racing circuit.
We kept pace for two whole planetary rotations before she finally throttled back and lifted us out of the ice. She couldn’t stop grinning, even when she killed the engines and clapped her hands together.
“I can’t believe I almost said no to this,” Shandris said.
I snickered. “From now on you’ll just have to learn to trust me.”
“This is crazy,” she said breathlessly. “I can’t even…stars, this is making me so fucking hot!”
I grinned and kissed her neck again. “If you take us back, we can head to my cabin on the Gazack and—”
“I can’t wait that long,” she said, grabbing my hands and pulling them up to her breasts. “Get your cock out.”
I blinked. “Uh, what?”
“I said get your cock out! You don’t normally have a problem with it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Are you honestly going to sit there and tell me that looking at something this breathtaking doesn’t get you hard?”
“Well, no—”
“Good, because I can feel you poking into my back. Now get him out!”
Generally speaking, I had always preferred to abide by as few rules as possible—life on the Rim required a certain inherent flexibility. But I did have something of a personal code I tried to adhere to whenever possible, and one of the first tenants was to never argue with a woman who wanted your cock.
I nudged her off me just enough to fiddle with my belt, and she simultaneously pushed her leather pants off her slender hips. A few seconds later she was nude from the waist down, and she managed to spin around and straddle me with a fluid grace that rivaled Kaveri.
“I don’t think you understand how strange this is,” she breathed, slinging one hand behind my neck while the other snaked between us and found my cock.
“You mean trying to fuck inside a one-pilot starfighter?” I asked. “It’s almost starting to seen normal to me.”
“No, I mean the fact I’m interested in a man.” Her thumb and forefinger began massaging my swollen head, and the heat was already driving me crazy. “It’s just…it’s been a really long time since I genuinely craved cock like this.”
I shrugged. “Well, I am strangely charming.”
“More strange than charming,” she muttered, playfully licking the tip of my nose. “Honestly, it’s probably just the cultural taboo of sleeping with a human. Back home, this would be so scandalous I couldn’t show my face in public.”
I grunted and glanced out the canopy to the icefield again. “You do seem to get off on danger.”
“I get off on a lot of things,” she said, dragging her index finger up and down the length of my shaft again. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I actually like the idea of being in the Emperor’s harem...”
I smiled. “Really? And here I thought you’d find it demeaning.”
“I do, a little,” she said, nibbling at her lip. “I think that’s why I like it.”
My grin widened, and she leaned forward to kiss me again as her fingers steered my throbbing head to her sopping slit. The heat was already so intense I could barely stand it, but I knew she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I slipped inside her one centimeter at a time like a man foolishly lowering himself into a volcano. I knew it would hurt—I knew it would burn—but there was absolutely nothing in the galaxy like the carnal fire of a female Kreen…
“Son of a…fuck,” I gasped, clenching my teeth. The pleasure and pain swirled together until I wanted to scream and explode at the same time.
“I have a solution to this little problem,” Shandris said as she began slowly churning her hips against me. “I should have considered it a long time ago.”
“Wha...” I panted, my fingers digging into her back. “What is it?”
“Once I link our nervous systems, I could normalize our temperatures,” she said. “I’d cool down a bit and you’d heat up a bit. We’d basically meet in the middle.”
I swallowed and winced. It was taking all my self-control not to burn up…or explode inside her. “It’s just that easy?”
“I’m sure I could do it. The thing is, I know how much you like the heat. A girl’s gotta have an advantage or two up her sleeve when she’s facing competition like me.”
I grunted. “You don’t need to—”
“Shut up and let me finish,” Shandris said, smiling impishly as she began churning her hips even harder. “There’s another solution, one that lets you keep all the heat you want.”
I bit down on my lip. At this rate, I wasn’t going to last long enough for my cock to melt. “What…what’s that?”
She grinned and placed her hands on the side of my face. “All I have to do is absorb your pain.”
“Wait…what?”
“Don’t worry—I can regenerate any real damage before it’s a problem,” she said. “Little Cole won’t burn up.”
I blinked in genuine confusion. “But won’t that…won’t that hurt you instead?”
“That’s the idea. But don’t worry, I’m a tough girl. I can take it.” Shandris leaned forward until our foreheads were touching. “So give it to me.”
If I had actually taken a moment to reflect on what she was suggesting, I might have reconsidered. But my capacity for rational thought was inversely proportional to how deeply my cock was buried inside a beautiful woman, and so I instead I just clutched her waist, threw my head back, and pumped into her as roughly as I could.
“Oh�
��..ooooooh,” Shandris blubbered until her words became completely indecipherable. I could almost see her mind floating out of her body, but just before she left the material plan she tore open her jacket and thrust her red tits in my face. I eagerly stuffed them into my mouth, and every time my tongue lashed her nipple I swore she was going to throw out her back.
But soon thing I could focus on was the wet, scalding embrace of her cunt. I had always needed a gimmick to really fuck her before—a condom, an ice cube, a stream of cool water—but this time I didn’t have a filter. This time I got to feel her quim in all its molten glory…and it was magnificent.
“Shit,” I hissed. “I can’t…I can’t…”
“Hold on!” Shandris said. “I want to taste you...”
I have no idea how she managed it given the cramped quarters, but somehow her body slithered down mine until her lips encircled my cock. I burst the instant I grabbed the back of her head, pumping salvo after salvo deep into her waiting throat. She eagerly swallowed every drop, and she didn’t come up for air until well after I had already slumped listless in the seat.
“Hard and fast,” she cooed, flicking her tongue across her seed-stained lips. “It’s the only way to live.”
Interlude
Talasea
Dominion Staging Ground
1083.7
Yet another pile of plasma-scored detritus leisurely drifted into the starboard wing, and after it bounced off the kinetic shields it almost immediately clustered with the rest of the scrap looming in Talasea’s orbit. When Wynn Mosaad glared at the mangled heap, he couldn’t help but imagine all the frozen bodies drifting out here with the metal…nor could he block out the psychic echoes of their dying screams.
“I searched the rest of the compound, but there’s just too much rubble,” Natalya Vesh said from behind him. “I cleared out what I could, but…”
Mosaad swallowed the bitter lump in his throat. “You should have kept looking.”
She didn’t reply immediately, but he could still feel her eyes boring into him. “It has been almost three days. The odds that they’re still alive…I couldn’t sense any of them.”