“Our women—”
This time, his own people shouted Blowhard to silence.
The Envoy was nodding. “I understand your concerns. However, while we do look similar, our two species are not reproductively compatible.”
“So you say,” Blowhard huffed.
“As time will prove, Senator. May I continue?”
President Morgan frowned and offered a glower fierce enough to rival a sunspot for its intensity. “One more interruption, Senator, and I’ll have you escorted out.”
The Envoy continued, “These seedlings adjust chemical make-up in the water’s depths to force environmental changes. You are seeing the fruition of their work with recent arrivals to the upper waters of goblin sharks, long-thought extinct fish, and the beaching of differing species of cetaceans.”
A mutter cut through the hall.
“Like your amphibians on shore, your fish are your first warning sign when discussing water-based concerns,” said Robertson. “Your already documented dead zones and the recent aquatic behavior are huge indications of climate trauma.”
More muttering filled the hall. People exchanged glances.
Some looked guilty; some looked outraged. Mike speculated this topic had been an ongoing battle between Blowhard’s ilk and the more environmentally conscious.
“The key, however, is in your rain.” The pronouncement stilled the hall. “The toxic waste of the seedlings pollutes the water to create the dead zones. The chemical compound is pulled up into your skies via the rain. It is then deposited elsewhere, returns to the oceans, and the cycle repeats.
“The goal is what you see. The global warming and climate change. Unchecked, the waters will rise, and your world will become environmentally suited for only one species. Theirs.”
“Impossible!”
There was that word again.
“But no,” said Robertson. “Your island nations have already suffered oceanic trespass. I call to your minds Kiribati, the Maldives, Fiji, Palau, Micronesia, and Cape Verde.”
With that, silence fell. No one said anything for a long while.
Unhappy dignitaries shuffled through the documents inside the folders earlier set upon each chair’s seat. Mike could see the sorrowful realization sliding home into resistant minds. Expressive faces told an unhappy tale.
President Morgan was the first to break the silence. “You keep mentioning the seedlings or seeds. What are they? Have we come across them in some form?”
“Yes, you have.” The Envoy pushed buttons and shifted through the displays as he continued. “The seedlings are the first forms of your enemies. They are uniquely suited to change the environment for their larger species, the space-faring colonists.
The cycle of rain is the key, you see— But I’ve already said that.
Ah!”
The images came to a stop to display a tiny test tube held by what looked to be a human hand. The tube bridged the distance between thumb and first finger. Inside it was a miniature, translucent thing of evil.
Even knowing it was an image didn’t muffle the rage that swept though Mike’s heart. Just one glimpse, just one set of eyes, and that was all his people needed to storm forward, weapons blazing.
“Behold, ladies and gentlemen,” said the Envoy, “the face of your enemy. In Australia, it’s known as Irukandji.”
A brittle moment passed as everyone took in the image of the tiny creature. The Urilqii didn’t need to wait long for a response. A lone, timid voice spoke from the rear of the chamber.
“Uh, that’s a jellyfish.”
CHAPTER 2
Two years later…
The festivities were in full swing, but Liam Sinclair decided that he’d had enough. Well, for the moment, at least. It was the hottest days of summer, just a few days after the equinox, and the sun’s rays had blazed into the beautiful Gorge Amphitheater.
That was when he’d started dancing. Now it was full dark.
Lights played their neon messages across the sable sky. Stars flickered like distant fireflies. The sweaty mire of twenty thousand bodies grooving to the music had replaced the perfume of daylight wildflowers and river fecundity.
The event was happening inside “The Gorge at the George,” and the twenty-thousand-seat venue looked to be filled to capacity…okay, more than capacity if he counted the inevitable gate-jumpers who’d snuck in.
Everyone danced. It was awesome.
Considered one of the most scenic outdoor concert venues, probably helped along by the natural beauty of the Columbia Gorge at one border, the annual Paradiso Festival pulsed its annual event of electronic dance music into the air. More, it wasn’t expected to end for some time yet. Like, late tomorrow night.
Yeah, he was up to it. He just needed to catch his breath.
Actually, he could use a swim. In beer.
Liam headed over to the vending booths, where the smells of garlic and spice and whatever-else-was-on-the-grill wafted on the breeze, and purchased two bottles of water. The first he chugged immediately and tossed the empty container into a recycling bin.
The second bottle he drank from at a more moderate pace as he wandered back toward the stage-front crowd.
He checked his placement against lights and equipment, banners and talent, and concluded, yeah, he was in the right place.
He scanned the crowd to locate his friends. Just where he’d left them and happily banging to the beat.
He spotted something else, something unusual enough to warrant a second glance. A group of Urilqii.
Newcomers to this planet— jeez, how amazing is that? —the visitors were active in oceanic reclamation, temperature stability, and ozone layer reparation. They also, creepily enough, watched the skies for something they called the Targolt.
Endlessly, unrelentingly, obsessively they watched…except when they danced. The Urilqii, faultless pieces of eye candy the lot of them, loved to dance on their days off. Go figure.
They also loved tattoo shops, which was amusing because they each wore a piece of art on their right pectoral, applied before they’d made landfall on Earth. Humanity had learned the art identified the separate divisions of the battalion based on Earth.
There were six on this rock, and the ones in the Pacific Northwest area wore designs that looked like a bug. Camel spiders actually, except that the camel spiders walking their planet were the size of station wagons. Complete badasses, he speculated, which would explain the military icon.
Liam sipped his water and studied the Urilqii. They danced among the crowd like an island of bright colors highlighted by stage lights. They swayed to the electronic beats, draped in colorful and merry garments, looking like rare blooms amid a forest of Earth flowers, like orchids amid tracts of wildflowers.
Then there were the hairstyles. Tonight, for whatever reason, they wore mohawks. Each alien’s hair had been spiked into a palm frond crest along the middle of his skull. Blues, Reds, Greens, and colors he’d never seen before…they reminded him of pictures he’d seen of nebulae found in the dark reaches of space.
Except for the one guy who stood apart a small distance.
His military cut hadn’t been formed into a mohawk and, while he was dressed in merry, festive colors, it seemed to Liam that he’d cloaked himself in darkness. He was gorgeous, though, like the others of his kind. Dark-haired and light-skinned, a powerful build, and muscles both men and women would dream about.
During spacewalk or underwater, those colors blended into the darkness. Insta-camo. Like a great white shark or one of those peregrine falcons…or even the gray-and-white tomcat he’d had as a teen.
Like everyone else, Liam had been glued to the television and computer the first year of the alien arrival. He’d stuck to his couch while he watched the recorded ocean dives for data and spacewalks.
Any and all videos of the Urilqii had gone instantly viral.
YouTube had turned them into instant Internet superstars, whether they’d wanted to be or not.
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br /> The guy must have felt him watching because he turned his head, followed by the rest of that sculpted body, and faced him.
Their gazes met…and held.
The bottom of Liam’s stomach dropped away and he found himself restless. Not worried or afraid, no, just hot and antsy, like he stood too close to a stove. A charge filled the atmosphere, like the presence of an oncoming thunderstorm.
He glanced up. Not a cloud marred the starry sky. That fast, the sensation was gone. Its absence felt like a blast of artic air. He dropped his gaze and discovered the guy had turned away and was now gyrating to the music alongside other members of his unit.
Gorgeous moved like liquid metal, every placement of his arms or legs, every shimmy of his hips made with equal parts precision and grace. The comparison wasn’t a large stretch of the imagination. Along with their mercurial grace, the Urilqii were strong as hell.
Bullets ricocheted off their skin, knives broke instead of penetrated, and one of them could throw a bus three city blocks.
Yeah, they’d been put to the test. The Earth Pure movement hadn’t taken to their presence without a fuss. Liam didn’t fit into that culture, and he thanked God for it, since that tight ass, flexing thighs, the powerful plane of the back and muscular physique was way more interesting than hate speech.
Way more interesting. In fact, he was sweating. It wasn’t because of the temperature or humidity, no. The reason for his sweat was the sexy hitch of that guy’s hips. Beautiful.
Mesmerizing. Fucking intense, man. He stopped there because he didn’t have any more words for it.
Liam twisted off the bottle cap and gulped more water, but that didn’t abate the heat raging in his veins. The truth was it wasn’t water he wanted. The delicious hard body in motion called to him the way a siren’s voice had entranced the ancient mariners.
He considered, took a moment to evaluate the pros and cons, then came to the decision he’d known he’d make all along. The still half-full bottle bounced off the edges of a nearby bin before it settled inside. Sure, an avalanche of seven different types of shit was the probable outcome, but hell’s bells, how often did an opportunity like this come though a guy’s life anyway?
Liam waded into the cluster of Urilqii and came up beside Gorgeous. He tapped one wide shoulder. The dancing man turned to face the interruption. Liam held out a hand as an invitation to dance.
Time stopped, or so it seemed. His heart made two contractions inside his chest as their eyes again met and held. Something electric crackled in the air. Gorgeous offered a half-smile and caught Liam’s hand in his as he accepted the offer. The next thing Liam knew, he was dancing with a mouthwatering alien inside that splendid natural amphitheater.
Liam’s partner’s muscular body shifted in front of him with a smooth, sleek grace and in perfect time to beat of the music and he found himself getting hotter and hotter as they moved in simultaneous abandon. The blood throbbed through his veins, waves of pleasure that echoed the tempos of the neon light show around them.
The live musicians shifted and swayed as the beat played on, but Liam only had eyes for his partner, and his partner only had eyes for him. Those beautiful eyes called to mind the burning fires of a distant star. His warmed cheeks appeared to please the man, if he read the expression correctly.
Christ, I probably look fuck-flushed. His dance partner didn’t seem to mind, though. In fact, those amazing eyes darkened as the pupils dilated in the face of Liam’s flushed cheeks and panting breaths.
A blend of cinnamon and musk crept into the air around them to mask the omnipresent smell of sweat and clove cigarettes. He drew it deep into his lungs and shuddered from the pleasure. It seemed to fill his cells, if such was possible.
“God, you smell good,” Liam rasped.
His dance partner looked startled briefly, but then a smile broke across his clean-shaven face. “You like that, huh?”
The low-voiced question was somehow audible above the pounding music without a shout.
“Fuck, yeah,” Liam admitted. “I could drown in it.”
Those starfire eyes flickered with a blaze of heat, but he said nothing more.
I’m such a dickhead, Liam thought to himself. Dancing with the guy, turned on by his cologne, and he didn’t even know his name.
“What’s your name?” he asked, as coolly as he could, considering his exertion. “Mine’s Liam.”
“Mike.”
Liam edged closer, wondering about what he’d heard. “Mike?”
That didn’t sound alien.
“Your people have labeled me ‘Sergeant Mike.’”
The man said nothing more, but he didn’t need to. The sentence said everything. The guy he danced with was similar to humans, but not the same, and Liam didn’t give a shit about that fact. The name seemed familiar, though. Maybe he’d seen this guy in one of the YouTube videos?
He shrugged away the opaque memories since there were other things to think about. The music had changed to a low throb.
Couples everywhere were slow dancing to the beat. He wasn’t the shy type. Liam caught one of Mike’s hands and looped it over his shoulder. With a twist, he was back to front with the man.
The next few seconds would give the answer to his unspoken question.
Mike’s hand flexed against his upper chest, then slid down his torso and wrapped around his stomach. The other hand came to rest on his hip. With a tug, Liam was pulled even tighter against the powerful body. What felt like an impressive erection flared to life against his ass.
Oh hell, yeah… Whispered rumors were true. The Urilqii were not subject to Earth’s heteronormative binary paradigms. They didn’t view male-to-male contact to be repellant or frightening.
They accepted it without question, without shame.
The caress of that aroused body against his snatched all additional thought from Liam. Somehow he remembered how to move his legs to the music and how to move his hands to cup his partner’s.
Sensation stormed him: soft skin; powerful arms; an embrace that was like steel, but non-threatening. He reveled in the sensation, feeling crushed by the weight of energy that flared in the atmosphere. His awareness stirred in a way he’d never before experienced.
But there was no fear, just pleasure.
A low rumble sounded directly behind him. Liam stretched like a pleasured cat and ground his ass against his dance partner’s groin.
Around them, Urilqii closed in. Liam didn’t care. He dropped his hands and tangled his fingers into Mike’s belt loops. He tugged in a futile attempt to get them closer. Dressed and in public, however, they were as far as they could go. The Paradiso Festival was many things, but a bacchanalia it was not.
Sure, he hadn’t expected to go down this path so soon, if at all, but that body moved so beautifully against his he’d thought about intimate contact between them more than once or twice in the last sixty seconds…and repeatedly since he’d started this dance.
There was no way something that felt this good could be bad.
A hot mouth covered the sensitive spot below his ear, right where his jugular pulsed. Lightning sizzled through the pathways of his nerves and, in that moment, Liam’s reality changed.
* * *
Mike couldn’t stop himself. He sucked the erogenous point hard enough to leave a bruise. The accelerated beat of Liam’s pulse against his lips matched the wild tempo of his own heart.
He opened his mouth to take in a larger taste before he cupped Liam’s head and raked his blunt teeth down the arched sweep of skin and tendon. Hunger exploded into his soul. Intense and unexpected, he nevertheless dove through the gateway and into sensation like a famished man into food at a feast. In truth, that’s what he was.
It had been so long…too long…and to find that part of himself again with an alien astonished him. His body told him a truth his mind hadn’t considered. Their people were different, yes, but were the same in the heart, and that’s where it mattered.
&nbs
p; The music paused, but Mike only noticed it because Liam shifted in his grip to pull away from his mouth and turn face to face with him. They were close enough to breathe each other’s breath. They both stilled, balanced between one heartbeat and the next.
Liam took that step.
He fitted his mouth to Mike’s and ignited a firestorm. The kiss was hot, hungry and needful and moved across his mouth with pleading abandon. It was as though he, too, felt Mike’s long-restrained passion and wanted to have it all.
Mike was happy to give.
He slanted his mouth for a tighter fit and urged Liam’s lips open with a meaningful lick. Those lips parted without hesitation, and he plunged his tongue inside. The taste and feel spun his mind, especially when Liam began to suck. Each pull tugged and teased the pleasure conduits between his mouth and his balls. The sensation was fierce and devastating and breathtakingly intimate.
He reveled in it. If that was the way Liam sucked a tongue, Mike’s dick wouldn’t stand a chance. A mouth like that could coax a man to take risks.
Yeah, he was open to the idea. In fact, he wanted more of this and was willing to— A hard hit to his shoulder punched into his haze at the same time Steve’s voice sliced into his mind.
::Break free!::
He fought to think. ::What?::
::Surface.::
The warning in Steve’s tone finally broke through the slowness in his brain enough to catch Mike’s full attention. He forced himself to pull away from Liam’s amazing mouth and check their surroundings.
His men had circled him. They smiled and chatted, but Mike registered the pattern of back-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder positioning as a ring of defense. A glance past his people’s bodies explained why. A mass of festival-goers framed their position.
They pointed and whispered among themselves— that’s not good— and worse, some of them held those ubiquitous hand units up to their faces. The red winking eye indicated they were recording the action— a kiss?— and he knew he was about to show up on their global data feed again.
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