I had been eager to help the cause, to bring the timeflow back under control and to continue the objective of the first chrononauts: to stave off the degradation of the planet and create an Earthly utopia by altering the past. That original retro-jump had occurred in 2068, some twenty-five years ago as it is reckoned on Earth, when overpopulation and environmental deterioration were threatening humankind's future. The result of that initial mission, however, had been to almost immediately send time itself spinning into chaos. Now, only a few dozen sites on the planet had been kept preserved. Still, utopia remained the goal, and I was confident it could be achieved if just the right chain of historical events could be orchestrated. Humanity would be at peace and the Earth would prosper, for all time.
But those paradisiacal ideals weren't much on my mind as I stepped limply onto the streets of the Hub, beneath its "sky." I smelled greasy, frying food. The gritty asphalt crunched under my boot heels as I walked along through the garish glare of eateries, whorehouses and equipment depots. The Hub was stable as far as the timeflow was concerned, yes; but it was also a trashy way station, like a sleazy border town out of ancient literature. This wasn't Earth. This was, in a way, nowhere. But it a safe nowhere, a sanctuary that danced impossibly on the head of a temporal pin.
Time Zenith was supposed to be a place like this too, an island carved out of the untamed timeflow streaming all around the Hub. But Time Zenith was also rumored to be immaculate, lavish, the place where all the big decisions were made. It was there that the big heads oversaw the changes we agents made to the timeflow. They studied every tiny twitch and tic, factoring in every new variable, laboring to shape the past so that it would result in that ultimate paradise on Earth.
I still believed in that objective. But I was no raw recruit any longer. A certain cynicism had set in, or maybe it was just general fatigue. Whatever, I felt bleary and bleak as I made my way along the street, trying to sort out my immediate needs. I should get some food. I should have myself a shower and a good long sleep in a bed with reasonably clean sheets.
But those weren't my only needs. I was a young, healthy female. There were primal requirements that my body insisted be addressed. Or to be blunt: I needed to get laid.
Food, though, first. I knew a place that served Asian cuisine, and I was very much in the mood for some spicy noodles and crisp vegetables. I'd been eating heavy European food, with a decidedly Germanic flair, and wanted something light but filling.
The Hub was about the size of a small town on Earth, and its streets were laid out in a sensible grid pattern. Building materials had been brought here by the same temporal means used to transport us agents. Maybe the Hub had started out as a sparkling clean place, as tidy as Time Zenith was said to be. But during its history it had gotten rundown, until it looked like a bad neighborhood in an old decaying Earth city. Everything was crumbling. Every building and piece of equipment had been patched up in helter-skelter fashion. We were told that resources were limited, that the energy for the temporal technology had to be saved up to send the chrono-agents into the timeflow.
Right now I didn't care. I was glad to see the Hub. Glad to have escaped the ever-changing and dangerous past again. Glad to be among my own kind once more.
At the Asian eatery, I dug into my meal. The joint was small with water stains on the walls, but it still took me a whole bowl of won ton soup to notice the other diner. He was tucked into a corner, picking uncertainly at a plate of steamed greenery. I eyed him as I ate up my crackling noodles. He was ginger-haired, with pale freckled skin and soft, almost girlish eyes. He looked young. More than that, he had the innocent vibe of a new recruit.
With his slim frame and bony arms I might have figured him for one of the Hub's support staff. You needed some grit and muscle to go retro-jumping. But no, he had the insignia of a chrono-agent on his jacket.
When I was done eating, I wandered over to his table with a cup of tea in hand. "Hey, brother, mind if I join you?"
He blinked long-lashed eyes up at me for quite a while. Something was wrong with this guy, a deep instinct told me. In a dazed sort of voice, he said, "Sure...that'd be nice."
I sat, noticing he'd barely touched his food. "No appetite?"
He shrugged, but it was more like a spastic jerk of his narrow shoulders. "Thought I was. I should be..."
Suddenly I knew: he was just back from a mission. And what was more, I was willing to bet it was his very first one. I sipped my tea, noting what were now to me the obvious telltales--his unfocused gaze, the nervous twitches.
"It gets easier," I said.
"Huh?"
"Jumping. I remember my first one. They briefed me, of course. I knew exactly what to expect--the temporal transition, the disorientation. I studied the history of my target time." I muttered a little laugh. "And it was still a mind-blowing experience. It was like a hand reaching into me, wrenching out my soul, and flinging it into a hurricane. When I got where I was supposed to be, I huddled under a haystack and cried for about four hours."
He was looking at me across the table, really seeing me now. I liked his face. There was a sweetness there. His mouth tugged into the start of a smile.
"That's about how it was for me," he said.
"Want to tell me about it?" I set down my empty tea cup.
"Yes."
"Want to tell me over a drink? Unless you're actually going to eat that."
He smiled for real this time and pushed the plate away.
I said, "My name's Beth."
He mouthed my name silently, like he was committing it to memory. "Darcy," he said.
We left the restaurant together, and I was thinking how nice it would be if I didn't actually have to go visit one of the Hub's seedy brothels for some company.
* * * *
The alcohol stung, but it was already undoing some of the stresses I had accumulated during my last jump. It felt like I'd sleepwalked through my last mission, or else taken it on as a kind of waking nightmare. The historic locales had become too familiar with repetition--the 19th Century architecture, the quaint customs, even some of the people I'd encountered on previous jobs.
"Still," Darcy said, with a glass of whiskey in front of him, "Hitler. I mean, that's something, isn't it?" He didn't sound quite sure, which I put down to nervousness.
I shrugged and had another hefty swallow of my drink. "Yes. Of course. But. I've had the same mission over and over. It happens. Some agents do nothing but try to eliminate, say, Genghis Khan or Caligula or Dick Cheney or Ulrike Meinhof, any historical figure who caused widespread suffering and did nothing to advance the possibility of utopia."
"So," Darcy said, "Hitler just won't go away, then?"
"Some evil people don't eradicate easily, evidently. It's probably the same for saintly ones, but I wouldn't know. Mind you, I've prevented Hitler's life lots of times. He doesn't get born in those realities I create by retro-jumping into the timeflow. But the idea of him doesn't completely vanish. Somebody else comes along and does what he did--or near enough. Maybe the time was just ripe at that moment in history for a Hitler-type person to emerge. And sometimes I screw it up. He gets born to some other mother, or sired by another father. But it always turns out to be him."
He looked down at the scarred bartop as he listened. Now he lifted his head. "Why do you keep doing it?"
"Orders. What kind of question is that?" I said this a bit too sharply. He winced, and I felt bad. "Sorry. Guess I'm still winding down."
"It's okay."
I added, "As an agent, you get trained for something and get to know the particulars really well, and after that it's all you end up doing. Even if every time you finish the job, TZ wants you to do it again."
"Right. TZ." Again his tone was uncertain.
I shot him an amused frown. Such a newbie. "Time Zenith."
"Right."
I drank more of my drink and gazed at Darcy. My interest had grown. Maybe I was seeing myself as a fledgling chrono-agent in
him. Maybe he was just simmering my juices. But I liked how his red hair caught the murky light of the bar. I wanted to comb my fingers through it.
And with that thought, my hand rose without any explicit command. My fingertips traced lightly through the hair above his temple. My little finger grazed the top of his pale earlobe.
Darcy's eyes went wide, and he stiffened on his barstool. "What'd you do that for?" he asked.
I could have made excuses. I could have said I was strung out from my last mission, that the booze had impaired my judgment. But I thought, the hell with it, and gave him the truth: "I really want to fuck you."
The naive shock that came to his face just made him more desirable. Eventually, though, he smiled, and it was a lovely, salacious grin. I realized only then that he hadn't gotten to tell me anything about his mission; I'd dominated the conversation with my own prattles. I took his hand and drew him off the stool, determined to make it up to him.
* * * *
The booze had loosened me and the prospect of sex with an attractive male buoyed my spirits, but I still found myself glancing upward as we stepped outside, on our way to a room. There was nothing up there; but it was a kind of nothing that could shrivel your soul if you let it. The Hub had existed for nearly two and a half decades, and even in its dilapidated state it possessed a certain splendor. But I had always wished that somebody could somehow paint clouds or a field of stars above it.
Actually, just the fact that the Hub was here at all was amazing enough. It stood as solid proof of the effectiveness of the temporal technology, even if that same fantastical science had led violently to the hopeless jumbling of Earth's history, so that it would take a fucking miracle to sort things out again, even with TZ calculating every microscopic variable until they were blue in the--
"Beth, are you crying?"
I had stopped in the street, catching a breath that hitched in my chest. The tears had sprung suddenly to my eyes, but before I could feel a flush of embarrassment, Darcy took my shoulders and drew me into an embrace. It felt cozy and intimate, and surprised me in a good way. I pressed my face against his throat and inhaled his scent, a clean masculine smell.
"Sometimes the whole thing catches up to me," I murmured. "Usually at inappropriate moments. Sorry." I sniffled.
"It's okay."
I straightened up, wiping my eyes. "It's just part of being a chrono-agent," I said in my tough-girl voice, which didn't sound very convincing just now. "You'll find it out yourself."
"I suppose I will," he said with a wistful fatalism.
We headed for the room. It was on the second level of a tumbledown establishment, which was laid out like an old cheap motel on Earth. The Hub, of course, provided places for agents to rest, to stop and collect themselves between missions; but it wasn't anything like a home, lacking even the false permanence I'd felt in the girls' dormitory when I was a child.
Still, as I shut the door behind us, I wasn't concerned with the ambience. My flesh prickled with desire. I gazed hungrily at Darcy as he looked around the small, somewhat shabby room.
"You'll get used to the Hub," I said.
He turned. "You're a lovely woman, Beth."
Heat dotted my cheeks at that. I smiled.
"How old are you?" he asked.
On Earth, that was maybe something you didn't want to ask a woman. Here, it was just a ridiculous question. I shrugged. "I don't know."
"You don't?"
"I've lost track. Time passes here at the Hub, it passes when I'm out on a mission. But there's no calendar to check off the days in any orderly way. Things jumble. You forget. It's something that--"
"--that I'll find out for myself," he finished with a bleak little laugh.
I felt for him. He was new, and he was uneasy. Softly, I said, "We call it schizo time." He nodded, looking lost. I slipped off my jacket and tossed it onto the only chair. "I'm going to have a shower first." Again my breath caught briefly, but this time it was purely from desire. "You want to join me...?"
Getting the water going in the stall, I was very aware of him undressing in the other room. I had slipped off my clothes. The pipes complained, but steam started billowing, fogging the bathroom's mirror. I heard Darcy's bare feet on the tiles. I turned.
He was slim but not scrawny. His muscles were lean, but his body appeared nicely toned. No scars. I had a few. Shit happened on missions, stuff you'd never expect, and I, just like every other agent who survived, adapted. By now I could handle myself in just about any situation.
Darcy stood there with the shower's steam wisping about his trim, naked form. I was staring. He was doing the same. Already his cock was stirring amidst ginger-colored curls. My nipples had stiffened, and anticipation rippled through me.
"You really are lovely," he said, a bit hoarsely.
"So are you." I stepped into the stall and put out my hand. "Come on."
We kissed for the first time under the spray, faces wet, my dark hair dampening around my shoulders. His lips pressed me softly, and I felt the flicker of his long eyelashes against my face. When I opened my mouth, the warm water spilled over our meeting tongues. I felt his hardness against my leg.
I broke the kiss and reached for the soap. "I really do have to get clean," I said over the noise of the spray.
He grinned. He wasn't in any mad rush.
I lathered up my hands. The warmth of the water and the slipperiness of the soap felt good. Where I'd been, it had been cold. Darcy soaped up his hands as well, and laid them on my shoulders. I felt the strength in his fingers as he started to knead my flesh.
When I put my hands to him, I found how solidly built he was despite being so thin. His chest was almost flat, but the pectoral muscles were like metal plates. I flicked my thumbs across his nipples, liking the feel of the tiny hard buds. He returned the attention, sliding slick hands over my breasts, catching one nipple between two knuckles and squeezing just enough to draw a gasp from me.
He stood a few inches taller than I did, and his mouth fell onto mine again, grinding now, his tongue stabbing. I trailed my fingers down his narrow flanks, counting off each rib, until my hands rested on his hipbones. He continued to caress my tits, clutching, grasping, his strength rising.
I reached around and seized his ass with both hands. Soapy water spilled down our bodies. His hard cock had risen between us, the swollen crown rubbing across my navel. I gouged that sweet ass, digging in with my fingers, thrilled by the tautness of the flesh.
But I had to get a hold of that cock. A hot tingling raced all under my skin, setting me flowing. I was panting into Darcy's mouth, even as I thrust my tongue back against his. Letting go of his ass-cheeks, I slithered an eager hand between our slippery bodies.
His, though, was already there. His fingers were diving between my thighs, grazing my sensitive lips. A fingertip traced my furrow, and I jumped at the contact. He delved deeper, easily prying that finger into me, finding me damp within as well as without. My hips awoke, and I jammed myself anxiously onto that digit.
I put back my head, wet hair trailing halfway down my back, as Darcy swirled his finger inside me. Another joined it, then a third. I ground my pussy onto the whole bunch, loving the feel of the hard knuckles, the flexing joints. His thumb skimmed my clit and I cried out, the sound echoing off the tiles.
Through the drizzle from the showerhead, I blinked at him, delightfully dizzied by the orgasm. It had been so straightforward, so matter-of-fact. But there had been nothing unfeeling about it. This, then, wasn't just sex. Even if we never did anything like this again, I realized that I would remember this person for a long while to come.
Darcy drew his fingers from me, grinning again. As it had been in the bar when I'd run my fingers through his hair, I watched my hand float out again and this time take hold of his cock. I didn't know which of us shivered first at the contact, but my shoulders bunched tightly and a deep flutter went through my middle.
His cock was, of course, as hard as maho
gany, and of a very decent size. I felt the individual squiggles of the veins lining his shaft. With my thumb I explored the swollen cap, grazing across his piss-slit, then I traced my way down his cable-thick underside vein and cupped his balls. They stirred against my fingers.
With my other hand, I fumbled behind and found the valves. I shut off the water. "I think I'm clean enough," I said as the drain gurgled. Still with him delicately in hand, I stepped from the stall. My heart raced eagerly. It was all I could do to pause so that we could towel dry, before hurrying to the bed in the other room.
The bed frame creaked as I encouraged him to lie back. How delectable he looked, spread out before me. I climbed onto the foot of the bed, on my knees, shouldering apart his smooth thighs. Hunger burned in me, primal and powerful. I took hold of his cock again, squeezing the straining shaft, beholding it at eye level now. He was beautifully shaped, with a nice upward curve to him. His ginger curls were dark with damp. I inhaled his soapy scent.
Then I put my mouth to him.
His whole body jerked, jouncing the mattress beneath us. I sealed my lips around his thick knob and swirled my tongue over it. I tasted the oily drizzle of his precome, savoring its mildly salty sting. I closed my fingers around his testicles again, with my thumb and forefinger gripping him snugly around the base of his shaft.
I slid my mouth down his shank, feeling those squiggly veins now with my avid tongue. I felt too the pulse and heat of him, as I swallowed him inch by inch. Far-off somewhere, I heard him moan, a long drawn-out sound of pleasure. But I was occupied with the fantastic livingness of him that I held in my mouth. How vulnerable he was, I couldn't help thinking, even as I took him into my throat. Wet wiry pubes grazed my nose.
His legs closed around my shoulders as I lifted and dropped my mouth. Spit ran down his shaft. His hips were thrusting upward. Strands of my still-wet hair spilled over my eyes. I felt his balls roiling in my grasp. My own desire was rising, streaming through me.
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