Liam was startled to be addressed as “Mister” since he was nothing but a Private First Class, but he worked through it in mere seconds. It was correct, yes, but inappropriate in this context. A common Urilqii-style mistake.
“Um…” He should have felt embarrassed, but he didn’t.
Another need pressed upon him. “I need to use the bathroom.”
Hopefully before he puked on, pissed or shit himself.
Phil nodded. “It’s inevitable this topic comes up. Waste reclamation is a necessary element of the slip suit, since in the middle of a fire fight we can’t ask for a time out.”
Apparently oblivious to Liam’s condition, Sergeant Phil headed for him while still speaking.
“Take a look at the tubing at the right side of your leg holes. Make sure the equipment goes between your legs when you pull on the suit. Don’t push it aside. That’s the actual reclamation unit. I’ll demonstrate how you secure it onto your body with the help of Mr. Sinclair. Everyone? Watch.”
Phil stopped and reached for Liam’s crotch. Astonishment froze Liam in place. His eyes felt somewhat bugged out of his head. Good Christ! What if he pissed on the sergeant’s hand?
Worse! What if he puked on him?
A hair-lifting snarl cut into the moment, stopping Phil before he made contact with Liam’s body. Mike closed in on them both as another animal sound rumbled from his chest and throat.
Phil stepped away from him, or maybe he jumped backward. It was hard to tell since Mike’s body was suddenly between them.
“Ah, of course…” Phil spent a moment clearing his throat.
“Mr. Sinclair and First Sergeant Mike already know each other. It makes perfect sense that they conduct the demonstration.”
The guy looked like he was hiding a smile. Perfect. More strange, Liam’s oncoming emergency bathroom visit need vanished the moment Mike entered his personal bubble. What the hell was going on?
Mike pushed close. Very close.
“Step into the slip suit and pull it up,” he clipped.
Things weren’t logical anymore. He didn’t know what was happening or what he was supposed to do. So he just did what he was told. He bent over, grabbed the suit where it pooled around his boots, and tugged it with him as he straightened. It slid up his legs with a soft whisper of fabric.
“Now, turn around so everyone can see,” Mike ordered.
Liam did and found himself the subject of his fellow volunteers’ interest. He almost swallowed his tongue when Mike’s arms closed around him and his hands took hold of his US Army duty trousers at the belt buckle.
What the—
Mike worked the buckle and buttons. Liam flinched in surprise and came up against the solid wall of Mike’s chest. The contact and the subtle spice that wafted through his senses quieted any feeling of fear, shyness, or discomfort he might have experienced.
The gentle breeze tickled the hair on his upper thighs.
His olive drab underwear were (thank God!) clean. His momma had always said never to leave the house with dirty underwear and, by God’s grace, it seemed he hadn’t—
“Trust me,” Mike rasped near his ear.
Liam had time to swallow and nod, but without any real expectation of what was to happen next. Mike slipped his thumbs between his skin and the waistband of both pants and briefs and pushed.
Fabric went downward. His junk popped free.
The observers gave a simultaneous wince. Faces and gazes shifted away. A chorus of protests rose.
“Knock it off,” Phil grumbled. “It’s a dick. Everyone here’s got one.”
The sound cut through his horrified stupor. Galvanized, he grabbed for his pants, but Mike caught his hands with his. Their arm muscles strained in opposite directions.
Of course, Mike won.
“Hey! What the fuck?” Liam sputtered.
“Trust me, Liam,” Mike urged.
“Eyes front,” Phil snapped. “This equipment will keep you alive. You need to know how to put it on.”
Johnson hanging between his balls, his pants around his knees, and someone grabbing his hands like some shocked Sunday school teacher…Liam couldn’t envision a more humiliating situation.
“Now, pay attention. I’ll talk you through it, while Mike sets things up for Mr. Sinclair.”
Heads and eyes turned to face him. He was sure his junk shrank with every moment spent in the sun’s warm caress. Shame crawled through him.
“You’re doing fine,” Mike murmured, as if he somehow sensed Liam’s humiliation.
Liam shivered, grateful for the quiet comfort and yet still… still… Jesus Christ…
Phil was speaking, but all Liam could see was his shadow out of the corner of his left eye. It painted the barren ground like a tragic, lonely soul. He could understand.
“What we have is a critical tool for the reclamation of your body’s fluids,” Phil was saying, “which is sweated out during combat and, course, excreted other ways.” He waited for a wave of nervous titters to end. “The wearing of the equipment is painless. It moves with the body. Yet, proper setup is critical. Mike will demonstrate as I describe.”
Phil assumed a lecture tone.
“The inner gusset is drawn between the legs from ass to dick base…like so. Ensure it’s tight against the personal flesh to keep from any distracting twists or binding of fabric by making a firm tug or two to ensure a good bond…like so. Next is the collection tube, which looks, at this moment, like a plastic condom. A snap of the wrist pops it open…like that…and you tuck your dick into the tube. It tightens with a firm but painless seal…so!”
Liam fought to breathe. Mike’s hands were on his dick. They’d twitched his balls! A light brush of cinnamon and musk wafted across his senses. He knew the scent from his night at Paradiso.
It turned him on. Ah, Christ, he was hardening. The tube was starting to pinch. Mike’s voice broke the silence between them with a quiet groan.
“Think of something else, Liam.”
Like maybe baseball scores? Naw, soccer. That last World Cup had cost him a shitload of money. It still pissed him off when he thought about it. Those fucking Belgian players fucking stole the goddamn match!
The pinching sensation lessened.
“Good boy,” Mike murmured.
“Once that’s in place,” Phil droned on, “locate the side straps. They should be on each side of the slip suit. Pull them up and over the hips, then pull them tight…like that. At this point, a soldier’s slip suit is tight against his ass cheeks and his dick is snug in the tube. The only thing left is to ensure the slip suit across the crotch is sealed and secure.”
Mike ran his fingers up Liam’s body from crotch to belly button, causing the suit to close behind his pressing touch.
Lightning streaked through his balls. Omigod…so good…
“It’s as easy as that,” said Phil.
Mike moved his hands away from Liam’s crotch. In fact, he stepped backward. Liam swayed, but caught his balance. Fuck. He gets fondled by Gorgeous and doesn’t even get to blow his wad?
There’s some shit-tastic luck.
“Now get to work on the upper section of the slip suit,” Phil ordered. “Off with your shirts, both of them. The slip suit needs to be in contact with your skin at all times. The hood is pulled up to cover the scalp and neck so only the face is exposed. Your mask protects that area. Oh, and you can turn around Mr. Sinclair. Thank you for volunteering.”
Right. “Volunteering.” That bit of unfunny command humor seemed to span culture and species. Since making eye contact with the dudes who’d watched the first sergeant apply a space diaper was something he’d rather avoid, Liam happily turned his back on his audience.
Mike strode back to his original position, rubbing the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other as he did so. Scowling, he took a moment to point at Phil, while holding his fisted hand in front of his chest.
Hopefully that’s another thing that spans cultur
es, Liam thought. If he’d interpreted the gesture correctly, a promise of a knuckle sandwich had just moved between the two Urilqii.
Phil didn’t appear concerned, however. In fact, a fast grin flicked across his expression, which led Liam to hope he would be there to see delivery of that knuckle sandwich.
Dickhea— He cut off the thought. The last time he’d used that word had resulted in—
Did Mike just wink at him?
CHAPTER 8
All things considered, Liam thought, this flight thing wasn’t so bad. Sure, he’d nearly pissed himself the moment his boots lifted off the ground, but controlled by the training sled that hovered beside them, his squad left behind the comfort of Mother Earth and went airborne. Escalator slow, yeah, which was no doubt deliberate. He was glad as fuck that a cannonball launch into the sky wasn’t his introduction.
He could imagine how that would’ve played out. A gray, uniformed blob, his body curled in a fetal ball, headed across the sky to the accompaniment of his screams. Yeah, that would have been fun.
Not.
The slow passage upward had been okay. Well, as long as Liam didn’t look down. He’d made that mistake a couple of times early on, which had caused his stomach to freeze and flip behind his ribs, dark rings to encroach on his field of vision, and a yellow light to pulse slowly on the bottom left of his helmet display.
Urilqii hovered in the air around them. One in particular hovered nearby in a manner he felt was both watchful and protective. He thought he recognized the markings on the helmet from his first day on base.
Was that Mike?
How high were they? He looked down…and jerked his gaze back to the horizon with a taste of panic in his mouth. The light lit up on his screen again, blinking with the racing tempo of his pounding heart. The maybe-Mike-unit shifted angle and path to move closer.
Why?
Liam had other things to worry about. He gasped and gagged and finally his heart slowed its speeding beat. His nausea receded.
The blipping light went dark. The maybe-Mike eased away, leaving Liam and the rest of his team to the barked commands of their squad leader.
The slow rise stopped. The helmet display reported a height of two miles. ( Miles? Oh, translation protocols. Considerate. ) Below, cars looked like matchboxes, the Columbia River looked like a ribbon of blue, and the trees looked like clumps of green moss.
A bird flew past him, then reversed its trajectory to fly past him again. They exchanged glances as it did. The thing looked startled.
“Yeah, bird, it’s a weird moment for both of us,” he muttered.
It flipped upside down and dove toward the earth. Liam’s stomach roiled.
He jerked his gaze from the ground and studied the white mass on the horizon. Was that Mount Hood or Mount Ranier? Was he looking east or north? Where the hell was he, anyway? Motion on the edge of his vision resolved into the curious bird as it swung around and resumed its original path.
Damned bird made it look so friggin’ easy…
If man was supposed to fly, he’d have had wings at some point in time, right? But he was here and didn’t have much of a choice other than to tough his way through it.
Obedient to the commands that came though the helmet communication, he learned how to “float” in the air (the water beneath him was clear not missing), to experience and understand the world around him from this height (don’t look down, dammit!), and move about in the flight suit. Lights and information blipped and blazed on his mask information data screen. This equipment was easy, as Phil had promised. It was like wearing footy-pajamas on a cold, winter morning. It kept him warm and safe.
Awesome.
So what if he wasn’t laughing though gymnastic leaps and rolls like those jackasses on the other squad had been? Those daredevil fucktards weren’t laughing now, not since Sergeant Phil had busted their balls and forced them onto their backs to stare at the bottom of a training sled while they “thought about what it means to be part of a team.”
They’d been there for a while, long enough for Liam to forget about them, remember them, then forget about them again. But they must have come up with a good answer or something for the sarg because they’d just been released from their forced frozen state.
Grumbles, groans, and mutterings of “Thank Christ” filled the helmet communications as they floated from beneath the training sled and put their boots onto the invisible line in the sky. That “line” had been identified as their boundary and every action the sled controls had coaxed them to take had ensured they’d never gone below it.
He’d learned to be secure with that boundary beneath his feet…as long as he didn’t look down or remember that he was fucking miles high in the sky and kept alive by anti-gravity units sewn into his Buzz Lightyear PJs.
“Cut the chatter.” Phil’s voice cut into the link. “Listen up. We will release the suits from the training sleds in a few moments.”
He rose up from between Liam’s squad and squad Bravo, his legs crossed at the ankle and one hand on the side of his helmet, where it covered his ear. He looked so fucking relaxed, as if he hadn’t just lobbed a conversational bomb into the situation.
For fuck’s sake, they’d only been in the suits for—
“Remember,” Phil cut into his mental rant. “The suits will do what you want them to do. If you see yourself falling, it’s probably because that’s what you want to do. If you want to stay in the sky, then that’s the key. Want it and the suit will deliver.”
What the…
“It’s a machine,” said Phil, his voice filled with fortifying confidence. “It’s a tool. Use it. Don’t be used by it.”
Oh, God. Liam grabbed for the remaining threads of his courage.
So what if he sat on the same horizontal plane and didn’t move up or down? A man had the right to take some time to train. If those other guys wanted to play Top Gun, who was he to judge?
They’re crazy fuckers, anyway. I’m gonna take my time and—
The bottom fell out from beneath his feet. Suddenly, he was standing on nothing. He was gonna fall!
Ground… falling… and screaming… and falling… and screaming… and…
* * *
Mike gave Phil the nod, who in turn gave a nod to the teams on the training sleds.
The sleds released control of the suits.
The trainees’ suits took control. Micro-thin needles snapped from the housing and punched into human bodies for the first time.
Chemicals flooded the inner environment, saturating the new flyers’ bodies via breath and blood.
Terror slammed into Mike’s heart and went nova between one breath and the next.
Ground… falling… and screaming… and falling… and screaming… and…
Mike tore his mind away from the gripping horror. The monitor light inside his helmet blazed a violent red beside his personal ident-a-code. It was a color he’d never before delivered to Control because he’d never before suffered panic to that extent, not even during battle.
What the hell?
“We’ve got a tumbler!” Phil’s roar, both verbally and inside his head, pulled Mike’s concentration from his confusion. “It’s Sinclair. Catch him!”
Liam plummeted earthward, cartwheeling end over end like a spent rocket.
Mike reacted without thought. He tucked his hands close to his body and fell in pursuit, piercing the air like a bullet.
“I’m on it.”
Moments behind him, five fellow Urilqii flanked Mike as they dropped toward Liam. Back up. Unnecessary.
He was close enough now. Mike’s suit began a low hooting that signaled a proximity alert. Ignoring it, Mike reached and caught the leg of Liam’s external suit and yanked.
With only gravity’s resistance, Liam’s trajectory shifted at the pull. The two came together with a breath-stealing impact. Liam’s panic shifted into a scramble of arms and legs as he made a desperate, instinctive crawl across Mike in an attempt to stop
his fall.
Mike grabbed Liam in turn, making fists in the suit’s straps and equipment belts, and unconsciously dodged the knees and feet to his crotch. He linked their suits’ command lines and brought their downward plunge to a stop. With a tweak of intent, he turned them upright. The sun blazed across his left side.
“Good catch, Top,” said Phil. Approval filled his tone.
He was falling… and screaming… and falling… and screaming… and…
“Easy.” He reached for Liam’s mind with soothing waves.
“I’ve got you.”
He was falling… and screaming… and falling… and screaming… and…
“You’re fine. I’m right here. I got you. We’re not falling. Not anymore.”
Liam clung tightly, his arms wrapped around Mike’s shoulders.
He gibbered and shook. Mike gave a nod of dismissal to the nearby Urilqii, those team members who’d also challenged time and gravity in the race for Liam’s life.
Two shot upward and three resumed their downward path.
Mike quartered the area and caught sight of other clusters that indicated where volunteers had tumbled and been caught in mid-fall.
::Oh God, I’m gonna die!::
::I’ve got you.::
Liam’s panic had eased, but only a little bit. He continued to shake and cling, but thinking had arrived. In moments, Liam’s equilibrium would be stabilized enough to prove the statement true.
“How many?” Mike asked the question aloud.
Phil wasn’t confused by the vague question and delivered an immediate answer. ::Four, counting Sinclair.::
“How many hit the ground?”
Indignation flashed from Phil. ::None.::
“Omigod, I’m falling! Catch me!” Mike heard the words through his mind and his ears. Liam’s levels of panic were diminishing with acceptable speed.
“You’re not falling. Not anymore. I got you. We’re okay.”
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