Arrival

by Michelle Robbins

  A couple of other soldiers were also in motion as they moved through the crowd toward the commander.

  “My rank is summoned,” said Steve. “It was nice chatting with you, Liam.” He headed away from the table.

  “Yeah. Me, too. Take care.” He was talking to the guy’s back.

  Steve stopped after taking a few steps. He paused as he tossed his trash and looked as though he was debating something. He came to a decision and reversed his path, wearing an expression so serious it raised the hairs on Liam’s arms and neck. Once again at arm’s length, Steve leaned forward and inclined his head toward Liam’s.

  “Don’t give up on him,” he said, low-voiced. “Mike needs you more than he will ever admit.”

  With that, Steve left him.

  Liam stood frozen, only barely aware of the fact he stood there, open-mouthed and gasping. He struggled to find his internal balance while the earthquake of Steve’s words shook his foundations.

  It seemed the Urilqii were damned good at rocking a man’s world.

  “Hey, Liam!”

  He turned to the shout and saw Goodard coming toward him through the crowd. Abandoning his leftovers, he moved to intersect his buddy, tossing his plate and warm Coke into a rubbish bin he passed on the way.

  “What’s up, Jace?” he asked when he got close enough he didn’t need to shout.

  Goodard slapped his shoulder, smiled, and gestured behind him with his thumb. “Over here, man.”

  “What?” Liam didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. A group of Urilqii stood beside a table, arms crossed and bearing disdainful expressions. “What’s up?”

  “A game of space pool.”

  Oh, a game of pool, was it? He was in, but to be fair he needed to warn the guy. “I can work a stick. Don’t bet against me.”

  Jace laughed, loud enough for Liam to question how many beers he’d had. But what the hell, Jace isn’t driving, he reminded himself. And he could use some jack-around money off the. He’d given a warning. It was up to Jace to pay attention to it.

  “You’ll suck…I don’t care how good you think you are.”

  Jace’s face was flushed with merriment or alcohol, or maybe both.

  “The game is four levels of play in teams of two. We’ve never seen anything like it. Those guys swear they’ll send us home to mommy.”

  “Whoa.” Levels of pool? Liam’s mind spun with the game possibilities and the challenge. “Hell, yeah,” he said. “Let’s go kick some intergalactic ass.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  * * *

  Mike didn’t know where he was, but he knew enough. He may not be familiar with the furnishings or the location, but he knew the most important thing. He knew the feel of a mouth around his cock. The face at his groin was both sex-flushed and familiar.

  He was lucid enough to realize the facts. Liam was dreaming a sexy dream of Mike and had reached for him with the untutored mind-link. Mike, asleep, was along for the ride.

  He didn’t mind.

  * * *

  Liam knelt between his legs and suckled his cock with long draws of liquid heat and suction that threatened to melt his brain.

  He cupped the back of Liam’s head to hold him still and grabbed the backrest of the…

  Liam knew the dilapidated, brownish log of painfully thin cushions “my sofa.” He knew the dream’s environment as “my apartment living room.” Neither of that concerned Mike in the least, since he could fuck anywhere. He’d even done it in the vacuum of space within the confines of a space suit. (His best effort to date; he wasn’t too shy to say it.)

  Fine, he could work in Liam’s living room. No worries.

  He gripped the sofa’s back, felt it give beneath the strength of his hand, and hitched his hips. His cock slid over Liam’s tongue and touched the top his throat. Liam gave a reflexive gag, his fingers tightening for a moment around Mike’s thighs.

  The grip eased in a moment as Liam adapted to the sensation.

  With a purr, Liam drew hard on Mike’s cock. He positioned Mike’s cock where he wanted it inside his mouth and took command of the sex-play.

  His tongue twisted along Mike’s shaft as he worked it in his mouth, sending swirls of delight along the pathway of the Urilqii’s nerves and directly into his brain. For a moment, he couldn’t see anything but the bright lights that streaked across his vision like comet tails.

  In fact, he forgot how to breathe.

  New as he may have been to deep-throat contact, Liam dove into the experience with undeniable exuberance. He played his mouth and lips along Mike’s shaft. He sucked, but also withdrew to play along the glans with lips and flicks of his tongue.

  Mike shuddered. He grabbed Liam’s head and urged it back down to the place that urged his balls to climb out their sac and nestle inside Liam’s mouth.

  Liam complied with the urging with a chuckle and returned to the task…only to shift away again after brief moments and a relaxing of Mike’s grip. Maddening.

  ::Suck me, damn it!::

  With a soft sound of amusement, Liam went back to the task.

  However, by the third—or fourth?—time he played his pull-away-to-tease game, Mike lost his patience. A harsh sound ripped from his throat, and he pulled himself free of Liam’s mouth and hands.

  Before Liam could do anything more than offer a low sound of protest, Mike had dropped to his knees, pushed Liam backward onto his elbows, and took his rampant cock into his own mouth.

  Liam gasped, whimpered, and bucked. “Ah, God, yes.”

  Mike drew his mouth along the shaft—short, fast forays across the glans and top section; languorous, long explorations along the prominent pathway of the veins to the base—until it was Liam grabbing for a grip in his short-cropped hair and begging for more…harder…yes…right there…right…there…

  ::Jesus, yes…so good. Ah, fuck!::

  He felt the lurch of Liam’s cock against his tongue and the hot flash that sizzled through his balls as he played them in his palm.

  Liam’s body stilled. A hard gasp tore from his chest the same moment ejaculate leapt from his dick. The salt-touched cream filled Mike’s mouth with each pulse.

  He swallowed it with a throaty sound. His dick knocked against his belly as lightning sizzled along the pathway between shaft and ball sac. He—

  * * *

  Mike jerked free of the dream and rolled off his bed. His dick was a lance of hot metal between his legs; his balls like hot coals.

  Climax threatened to blow his control between one heartbeat and the next.

  “Dammit, no.”

  He hadn’t spilled from a dream since his first foray into space and wasn’t about to do it now. Mike bit the inside of his cheek and lurched for the bathroom. There he stood under a waterfall of liquid ice…

  And burned.

  CHAPTER 6

  “What is the status of the volunteers?”

  “Mike has that report. Mike?”

  At the sound of his name, Mike jerked his mind back to the ready room. Everyone around the table stared in his direction, even the High Commander from the flagship now parked in the Cassini division between Saturn’s ring A and ring B. Like an E’ssennet lurking among the rocks, it waited for its prey. At the Targolt ship’s arrival to Earth, it would spring from its concealed position and strike.

  It dawned on Mike that he’d missed a question.

  “Sorry, sirs.” He thought of a reasonable explanation. “I was considering the status of our liquid teams. We do have that huge river nearby and…”

  High Commander’s eyebrows rose across his forehead.

  Busted! “Uh, what did you ask, sir?”

  Covert glances shifted back and forth across the table.

  Someone in the room coughed to cover a laugh. The image in the holograph wore an expression that could have been either humor or irritation. He wasn’t sure which. Irked might be a better description.

  “I need for to you stay focused,” sai
d his cabal’s commander from his position at the table, a chill to his tone. “No more daydreams.”

  ::No more steamy night dreams either.:: Amusement radiated through Steve’s mind-link.

  Damn it! Mike had been asleep when he’d joined Liam’s wet dream. Unlike him, however, Liam didn’t have the necessary control. And Mike, asleep, hadn’t shifted them into a lucid dreamscape to be controlled. As such, their sensual communication had, once again, been cabal-wide. What a piece of fuck-all stupidity that had been.

  ::Oh, bullshit. You liked it. We all did. It was tactile video porn.::

  ::Fuck off,:: he snapped.

  “I asked, Sergeant”—High Commander emphasized the word, even leaning on Steve’s presence as he did so to alert them both to his annoyance with the side discussion— “how goes the embedment project?”

  In the face of displeasure from the higher ranks, Steve realized Mike was in the hot seat and backed away from the conversation.

  In the face of his pod-kin’s departure, that craven fuck, Mike could do nothing but clear his throat and make his report.

  “Things progress well, sir,” he said. “We learned a lot about the individual volunteers at the orientation dinner, a very casual event. Medical and Intelligence worked the crowd, checking minds, emotions, and physical compatibility without inducing alarm. The sleeper spies and those uncomfortable with close contact with our people have been identified, as well as those who are physiologically incapable of the necessary psychosomatic adaptations.”

  “And?”

  “We thanked them, fed them, and sent them home.”

  “I meant, what were the results?”

  “Oh.” Mike suddenly felt an inch high. “One-third of the volunteers remain as viable possibilities. Of those, we expect more attrition as immersion progresses.” He shrugged. “It’s inevitable.”

  “Why ‘inevitable’?”

  Mike looked at the soldier on his left, one of the medical corps who’d shifted through minds at the meet-and-greet last night. “You got this?”

  “I’d better.”

  The doctor, called David on this planet, shifted forward a bit to indicate his insertion into the discussion. He raised the palm-sized data unit he held in his hand to his face as he did so. The doctor brushed his finger across the display a time or two, as if locating data, then raised his gaze.

  “The problem we face, sir,” he said, “is that this species doesn’t utilize mental contact between either individuals or groups. They, oddly enough, exist in a self-contained, individual bubble.”

  High Commander’s forehead furrowed above his eyes, now narrowed in confusion. “How is that possible? How do they manage social structures and collective betterment?”

  David shook his head and shrugged one shoulder. “We’re still examining the phenomena, sir. I’ll have better information after more research.”

  “Perhaps that is why domestic unrest is so prevalent on this planet,” the Envoy offered. “War is impossible when the words ‘how are you?’ need not be asked. We feel how our actions, words, emotions impact our others so, as a unit, we strive for domestic harmony.”

  Because it felt like fuck-all to hurt someone whose brain telegraphed the pain directly into yours, Mike knew. Their pain became your pain, which was something a thinking person worked hard to avoid.

  “Huh,” said High Commander. He spent a moment in thought before he nodded to the Doctor David. “Continue.”

  “Our first thought,” David resumed, “was how this issue would cause the project to fail. However, our concerns were negated with the arrival of the volunteers themselves. Even before we began the testing, a tiny number of volunteers demonstrated an awareness of the mind-link as it occurred among the cabal.”

  High Commander’s eyes widened with surprise. “This happened before any authorized immersion steps were conducted?”

  Mike felt the weight of a room full of amused glances gather atop his head. ::It was just a kiss, damn it!::

  David coughed into his fist. “That we’re aware of.”

  Meaning, there could have been other explorative intimacies between his people and Liam’s, other than his well-known one. No one had stepped up to admit it, though. If they’d acted on a feral impulse, they’d thus far managed to keep the memories locked away. He’d been the only dillrod to act out publicly, as well as get recorded doing it.

  David dropped his gaze to the palm unit and moved his index finger along the screen again. “Well…”

  Everyone waited, but the doctor appeared engrossed in his distraction.

  “Speak your mind, Doctor. I won’t be happy to reach for it from this distance.”

  David winced and nearly dropped his data unit onto the table.

  “Yes, sir. I merely paused as a thought caught me.”

  “And that thought was…”

  “There is a high level of adaptability as well as intuitiveness among these people. They call it ‘emotional awareness’ or ‘a gut feeling.’ It’s possible they haven’t yet turned on the gene, in a collective sense. It could be resting in the DNA, needing nothing but an evolutionary prompt.”

  High Commander stood and thought for a span of moments, then said, “Work on that. See about identifying and switching on that gene. Keep me posted.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Doctor David stepped back, his attention even now dropping to his data pad. Mike squirmed inside his skin as he pondered the idea that his sexual pheromones had somehow triggered a change in Liam.

  Just perfect, he groaned to himself.

  The plumy tones of the Envoy drifted into his mind. ::That means it was more than ‘just a kiss,’ wasn’t it?::

  In lieu of a reply, Mike bit the inside of his cheek. However, the Envoy never gave up without a fight when he had a point to make. He made sure it was heard.

  ::I’m confident it will be a beautiful blend.::

  ::Fucking hell…::

  The cabal’s commander switched his attention back to Mike.

  “Speaking of the liquid teams—”

  He reached and gave Steve a mental prod .::You’re up, bro.:: His pod-kin refocused on the conversation.

  “There’s a critical problem happening at the atolls of Kiribati,”

  High Commander continued. “The nation has been at a heavy risk since our landing, but things have taken a critical turn in the past…” He glanced to his left. “What are they called?”

  “Weeks, sir,” answered a disembodied voice.

  “Weeks, yes.” High Commander returned his attention to the inter-ship communication.

  “In their time of 2008, the residents concluded the ocean’s full incursion over their lands was inevitable. They anticipated total loss of their land territory by purchasing lands for the evacuation of their people from another island nation in their time 2012. But, as I said, things have changed and not for the better.”

  The intensity in the room amplified. The hair along Mike’s arms stirred. The enemy was coming. He could feel it.

  ::We’re ready to go beneath the waves,:: Steve vowed.

  Of course they were, Mike thought to himself. They were of his cabal. But he asked the question on everyone’s mind anyway. “The Targolt?”

  Everyone in the room was privy to High Commander’s ravenous hunger for Targolt blood. In fact, they shared it.

  “The bloom of an aggressive dead zone in that area leads us to conclude, yes, it is our enemy,” he said. “It has spread from New Zealand and reached to the Line Islands, all in a matter of weeks.

  Floods and high water threaten the communities. Already vulnerable, Kiribati faces immediate ruin.

  “Their cabal, called United Nations, has reached out to us. They note how a huge number of lives will be lost on those atolls, of all species, unless the Urilqii take action. We were asked to focus our efforts on the immediate crisis in that hemisphere.” High Commander stopped and swept a forceful gaze around the room.

  “Of course we will
take action,” he said, his tones a ringing call to arms. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

  The room rang with the E’ssennet battle cry.

  ::When do we deploy?:: If Steve had been in the room, he’d probably be bouncing in his boots. ::When do we deploy?::

  ::Shaddup and let me hear.::

  Steve went silent. Mike refocused on the conversation in time to catch the commander’s instructions.

  “…your pod-kin and have him evaluate his teams. We’ll lend half to the Unduk cabal and bring it hard to the Targolt. The rest, the best, keep here.”

  What?

  “Sir, you don’t want to deploy our best to assist with the reclamation of Kiribati?” That didn’t sound good.

  “Just so.” High Commander nodded from his ship. “Since your cabal is close to a dead zone, and since your liquid teams will be halved, I expect you will need the remaining water work done by teams that, effectively, can do double the work.”

  “Ah.”

  Command decisions that made a grunt’s work all the harder.

  Typical. His expression must have betrayed him because High Commander frowned.

  “I’m confident cabal E’ssennet has the skills and the soldiers ready to do the job on both sides of their Pacific, halved or not.”

  Like it or not, that was the game to be played. “The liquid teams are ready and able, sir.”

  High Commander gave a single nod. “Cabal E’ssennet honors its ancestors.”

  Mike couldn’t stop himself from puffing out his chest. Damned right E’ssennet honors its ancestors! All day; every day. His cabal would bring it to the Targolt hard and unrelenting. History would always remember cabal E’ssennet.

  Their cabal’s commander, speaking for the first time at the meeting, said, “You can count on us, sir.”

  The room again filled with the roar of the E’ssennet’s battle cry.

  High Commander nodded and reached over to touch an icon on his control panel. The communications from Saturn’s rings ended with a scattershot of pixilated data and a darkening screen.