Now, here she sat by the panoramic window of Tynan’s bed suite, alternately watching the stars as they appeared from here in the Catalan system where the planet Lacerta orbited, and looking back at the sleeping figure of the work of male perfection whose child she would bear. Sienna shifted her legs a bit and felt the stickiness between her thighs from his all-consuming sex, which made her skin flush and her nipples harden.
She smiled at him, ready for more and knowing exactly how to get it. The disease that had nearly claimed her life a short time ago had nearly taken every ounce of energy from her. Now, she was back to her old self, with all the energy she needed to use in the way she loved best.
She imagined Tynan at least half-erect, if not fully engorged, under that tangle of sheets, and she meant to tangle herself up in him for the rest of the night. Sierra stood up from the window ledge, slipped the robe from herself, and returned to bed, smiling at what she would do to bring him from his slumbering dreams back into their waking dream. Reaching for the sheets covering him, she smiled. Wake up, Tynan. We’re not finished yet…
CHAPTER TWO
Udarian mitochondrial disease was a nasty piece of work—every bit as nasty as every hostile alien and ferocious extraterrestrial beast that Sierra Smith had ever faced in her life as an interplanetary adventuress and treasure hunter. It had taken her down and laid her low with a cruel efficiency. By the time she made it to the hospital of the largest Earth settlement in Proxima Centauri and was placed in the hands of New Canada’s doctors, she was all but comatose and barely hanging on.
The illness attacked the mitochondria, the organelles in every cell that serve to provide energy output for the entire body. It interfered with their function, at first rendering the body listless and causing an inability to concentrate and focus. A highly enervated, stuporous condition quickly followed in which the body soon grew barely able to move.
The person so affected finally fell into complete torpor, unable to think, to concentrate, to stay awake. From there, it was a mean descent into a coma from which some never rose again. The physicians at New Canada gave her a fifty-fifty chance of surviving—but then, these physicians did not know Sierra Smith.
The old Earth term for Sierra would have been “adrenaline junkie.” She was a lover of excitement and risk and was well able to be as much a fighter as a lover—qualities that had served her well on the planet-hopping, adventure-seeking life on which she had embarked.
Unsatisfied with merely living on the interplanetary Commonwealth’s universal stipend for all citizens, Sierra had taken advantage of the freedom from the need for money to seek the freedom of the stars and all the experiences that they offered. In her quest for experience, she had become a hunter of the treasures and rarities of the galaxy, which had taken her to the most exotic—and sometimes the roughest, darkest, and most dangerous—places in space.
Her last adventure had been on the distant planet Naviri.
Sierra had taken on a new client who was wealthy enough to own moons but was rather passive-aggressive. He owned a fleet of unarmed interstellar cruise vessels and wanted his own fuel supply. Further, he wanted to procure it without the competition of the open space market or the criminal entanglements of the black market. So, he dispatched Sierra and a crew of prospectors and hired soldiers to Naviri to lay a claim for him.
Naviri, a planet in a neutral zone between sectors, some of them less than friendly to each other, happened to be very rich in all sorts of valuable minerals, including Odysseum, which was vital to space travel. The only reason that no other planet had tried to annex or colonize Naviri was that disputing claims between rivals might have broken out into costly and unpopular interstellar warfare. So much of what happened on Naviri was the activity of freebooters, prospectors, mercenaries, and pirates, all in sometimes deadly competition to claim some piece of land or the resources that it contained.
In other words, it was Sierra Smith’s kind of assignment.
One form of sentient life inhabited the planet. The Navirians were a form of telepathic plant life. They were mobile only when they were newly sprouted and otherwise stayed rooted to one spot for life, forming intelligent gardens, vineyards, and forests all over the temperate zones of Naviri. Their shared thoughts flowed through their vines, from one individual to the next, and radiated out from place to place in an invisible network of intelligence to which, on occasion, a visitor that the plant beings considered friendly was granted access.
Being able to communicate with the Navirians meant being able to find the choicest prospecting and mining areas, for the Navirians could sense everything living and non-living on their planet. It was to her credit and her advantage that the Navirians liked Sierra. They considered her a less than serene and placid personality but found her essentially harmless. And they helped her and her crew to find a place in a forested hillside of Naviri that held the fortune in Odysseum that Sierra’s client wanted.
Predictably, the claim did not go smoothly.
In spite of the best efforts of Sierra and her prospectors to avoid calling any attention to their presence and what they were doing, someone else discovered them. They were almost finished digging the mine and were almost ready to put out the claim marker that would make it off-limits to trespassers—one of the few interplanetary laws that pertained on this neutral planet—when they were set upon by a party of Galairites.
The Galairites were the descendants of space refugees. A species of avians whose wings had evolved into arms and digits, the original Galairites had ecologically ruined the planet of their birth and had to migrate to another. In the process, they had become an aggressive and rapacious breed, frequently in conflict with the other beings they met in space, always in competition for resources in some sector of space.
The impulse to seize whatever they could find on whatever planet whose orbit they crossed, had become a part of their way of life. The Galairite raiders moved in on Sierra’s claim and murdered two of her prospectors before she and her soldiers turned the tables on them and took them prisoner—this, with the telepathic help of the Navirians, who liked Sierra but had no love for the Galairites at all.
The Navirians read the minds of the Galairites and helped Sierra and her soldiers outwit them, until only the Galairite Clutch Captain, whose thoughts were so aggressively foul that the plant-beings could not bear to touch them, were left. This one, Sierra dispatched herself.
Sierra’s most prized possession was a Lacertan powerblade that had once been owned by an actual Knight of Lacerta, a gift given to her by a former treasure-hunting client. She took it with her on every mission of this nature and knew very well how to use it. The Clutch Captain gave Sierra a chase and a battle through the Navirian rain forest that Sierra would never forget.
The avian was himself armed with both a particle-beam rifle and a Chithisian energy whip, a long and stinging lash that could inflict pain both from its own tightly braided metallic length and from the pulses of energy that could be projected through it from the handle. It was a favorite weapon of another species of aliens that Sierra disliked even more than she did the Galairites. The Chithisians were sadistic flesh-peddlers who trafficked in slaves and subjects of bondage, especially females. Sierra had learned early on in her career to avoid them when she could and be on her guard and ready for battle when she could not.
The Galairian, thus armed and prepared to slaughter Sierra cruelly and painfully at the first opportunity, alternately chased her and was chased by her between trees, through underbrush and thicket, and across the mighty tree limbs that formed a network of living bridges between trees and across chasms and ravines. Their pursuit ended on a wide bridge of a tree limb stretching between two cliffs.
The two of them faced off, the Galairian aiming shots at Sierra’s feet, intent on making her lose her balance and go falling down the chasm to the rocks in the river at the bottom. Sierra responded by nimbly parrying his shots with the energy-blade end of her weapon. Something had
to give—and it did. When the avian changed his tactics and aimed for Sierra’s head, forcing her to duck, she crouched down and at the same time swiveled her weapon to its other end, firing off a shot that her foe evaded, at the cost of his own balance.
As he went sailing over the edge to the fate that he intended for Sierra, he fired off one more shot, making her lunge away and lose her footing as well. She plummeted to what would have been her doom if she hadn’t managed to grab onto an outcropping bough. She clung to it for dear life and watched her enemy drop down to a deadly splash and crash.
Sierra managed to pull herself up and out of her predicament and make her way back to her mining camp, where the rest of the Galairian crew were bound for transport to the nearest outpost of the Commonwealth authorities. She had made her claim and stood to reap a very healthy profit on it.
The harrowing and dangerous adventure had paid off and would become yet another exciting memory. She returned to one of her client’s cruise ships and a heroine’s welcome; not only did he pay her more than handsomely, he threw her a party where she met a beautiful, tall, blond cruiser helmsman named Dominik, who was hung like a laser cannon and gave her a night in bed that was another sweet reward for a job well done.
No sooner had Dominik given her a marathon sexing that she would not soon forget than Sierra found herself feeling what she thought was just common fatigue after the time she’d had on Naviri and the time she’d had with her delightfully horny helmsman. In a day’s time, she was in no condition for another marathon with Dominik, nor for the attentions of anyone else aboard except the ship’s physician.
The doctor rendered his diagnosis, and the owner of the vessel, grieved to see Sierra so ill after everything she had done for him, arranged for her to be transferred to a medical ship that would take her to Proxima Centauri. She was in and out of consciousness when she was thus moved from the luxury ship to the medical one, and by the time the craft reached its destination, Sierra was no longer conscious at all, with a better than even chance that she would never awake.
But Sierra Smith surprised them. When they read her personal history that accompanied her case file, they attributed what happened next to the same strength and fortitude that had gotten her through the danger she faced on Naviri and so many other perilous scrapes. She responded to treatment in less than a week and was able to sit up in bed less than a week later. In another day, she was a fully, though slowly, ambulatory patient of the Terrestrial Hospital of New Canada.
In her convalescent state, Sierra had time to think. The life to which she was accustomed was very fast. Whether for business or for pleasure, she was always going from one rush to the next: the next planet, the next place to explore, the next adventure or dangerous escapade—the next gorgeous man to give her what she wanted most from gorgeous men. Sierra was a bright, witty, shrewd, resourceful person, but she had not exactly lived a thinking person’s life. Now, recovering from an illness that had brought her to an utter standstill and might have permanently stilled another woman, there was little to do but think.
If she were honest, one of the things she thought about quite a bit was the attending physician assigned to her. Dr. Clark was the choicest of New Canadians: tall, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, athletically built, handsome enough to make a woman want to be sick just to be treated by him. He filled his tight, white physician’s uniform in a way that made it no secret what it was that filled it. Sierra promised herself that upon her full recovery, she would test whether his in-bed manner was as pleasing as at her bedside, and Dr. Clark seemed more than interested in giving her a full, in-depth examination of the most intimate kind. But otherwise, when not being looked at by her studly man of healing, Sierra now had an opportunity to examine herself as a person.
What struck Sierra the most in this, her convalescent state, was how awful, what a mean-spirited jest of the universe, it would have been for her to die of an alien disease after the way she had lived. How wrong would that have been for a woman like her, who had always flung herself at life, to lose her life to some pathogen that she picked up on who-knows-what planet? It would have been cruel, unjust, not the way she would want to go at all.
Sierra had always seen herself meeting with a different kind of death entirely: pursued by the Dark Rangers of Jakuta to the rim of one of the volcanoes of Narhadul or perhaps surrounded by screaming Yulan warriors in the desert of Makara. Perhaps she might even have fallen from one of the ice mountains into the frozen pits of Zeta Ceti IV. But to die in a hospital bed from some pernicious infection rather than in the throes of some action, standing tall with a weapon in hand, challenging whatever was having at her to do its worst? That was no way for Sierra Smith to leave this universe.
But that could have been the way she went. And knowing that, realizing how truly random the universe can be and that even the stoutest heart, the quickest mind, and the strongest limb were no match for the whims of the cosmos, Sierra pondered what she really wanted from her life. She’d always gotten everything—and everyone—she pursued. What would happen if just once she were to pursue something other than some treasure or secret of some distant planet? What more in the universe was there for her to want?
When she was strong enough, Sierra began to walk the corridors and grounds of the hospital without benefit of a Levi chair, recovering her strength. One such walk brought her to the maternity section for newborn humans.
It was the kind of place that had been a part of hospitals all the way back to Earth before the dawn of space travel: the outer viewing area, looking in through the transparent wall into an array of cribs where babies lay. Sierra had never frequented such places. This was as strange a place to her as any new and unknown planet. And yet, standing there on the visitors’ side of the glass, looking in at all those new arrivals to the universe and thinking of all the possibilities they represented and the dozens of different futures they promised, Sierra began to feel a stirring of something unlike anything she had ever previously felt.
It was as alien a thing as she had ever experienced—and as real. In the days that followed, she watched people come and go from the maternity section. She never bothered them, never intruded on them; she only watched them. She looked on as they held their babies and smiled and laughed and cooed at them. She watched the hospital staff feed them and teach their parents how to feed them. She saw the happy moments when some of them took their tiny, living gifts home. And that feeling persisted in Sierra. She found she could not shake it; the feeling was there.
And she did not know quite what to make of it or what to do with it.
But Sierra recovered fully, regaining her energy, coming back to who she had always been (except with that nagging feeling still buzzing around inside her) and checked herself out to the most luxurious room in a guest house of New Canada that her fee for the Naviri adventure would buy.
After one more night of rest, just to make absolutely sure she was back to one hundred percent, she made a holocall to Dr. Clark. The next night, he took her to dinner, and at the end of the evening, he was her guest in bed at the guest house. Naked atop her and thrusting skillfully inside her, Dr. Clark learned just how successful his treatment of his discharged patient really was. She responded most enthusiastically to a rigorous course of deep phallic therapy. Being in excellent health himself, he administered six doses of his warm and free-flowing seed to Sierra before they called it a night—or an early morning.
She had such a good time with Dr. Clark during her stay at New Canada that she continued going to bed with him for the rest of her time there. But one afternoon, while her bedmate was on call at the hospital and Sierra needed a distraction from thinking of the next time she would peel that tight white uniform off him and have him pinning her to the sheets, she happened to curl up on the bed where he’d be joining her and tuned in to the local media. And that was when the digital wall in her room brought her a story that caught her attention, speaking to that inexplicable voice that Sierra had brought h
ome from the hospital.
The man on the screen announced a new story. “The Medical Association of the planet Lacerta announced today that a new trial would soon begin for the breakthrough drug Proliferon, which could change the course of that planet’s history.”
Sierra decided not to scan the channels but let the wall stay tuned where it was. Something about this announcement intrigued her.
The man continued, “The previous round of testing for Proliferon met with disappointing results. The new fertility drug that was developed to curb Lacerta’s dependence on its Courting Lotteries produced no offspring that survived. The pregnancies were non-viable or ended in premature deliveries of infants that did not survive, or the infants were stillborn. Dr. Gwyneth Garver, the obstetrics and fertility specialist who developed the Proliferon formula with the backing of the Moran family of Nimbus City, Lacerta, explains.”
The picture on the wall shifted to a view of a curly-haired blonde Lacertan woman about a decade older than Sierra, dressed in physician’s whites. The caption gave her name, and Dr. Garver said, “The intent of the Proliferon project was to reduce our planet’s need for the Lotteries that genetically match Lacertans with humans for mating to replenish our population. It was meant to give Lacertans a higher birth rate with other Lacertans. Despite our best efforts, the formula has resulted only in a higher rate of pregnancies.
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