Overload Flux

by Carol Van Natta

  “… I’ll have Ravan show you to your quarters,” Zheer was saying. It was suddenly the end of the meeting and everyone was standing up.

  Before she lost her courage, Mairwen spoke up.

  “What about the security detail for Foxe?”

  Zheer stopped mid-step, nonplussed. “I wasn’t aware he still needed protection. We’re in transit, with trusted employees and contractors... Oh, I see your point.” She gave Mairwen a considering look. “Your dedication is... unanticipated. I imagine it’s part of why you’re all still alive. Are you volunteering?”

  Mairwen felt Luka step up behind her, so close she could feel the heat of his body on hers. She just barely stopped herself from melting against him.

  She needn’t have bothered, because he put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her back to him possessively. Her heart skipped erratically.

  “No, she’s not,” Luka said firmly. “She needs rest as much as I do. All three of us will need protection until we can record our official statements. I’m sure you brought enough staff depth to cover it.” She felt his breath against her ear, and she had to slam down her senses to stop her body from responding.

  Mairwen mentally held her breath, waiting for Zheer’s reaction.

  Outside of a momentary eyebrow lift, Zheer’s only response was to say she’d take care of it, then to blandly lead them to a corridor and point. “Your names are on the doors. Breakfast will be at seven. We’ll talk tomorrow evening.”

  Their rooms were clustered together. Jerzi found his and said he’d see them all later, then sealed the door behind him.

  The singleton rooms assigned to her and to Luka weren’t much bigger than utility closets, but the pull-down beds were wider and better padded than those on the Khong Met Moi, and the control panels had individual lighting and temperature controls. Each room had bags of military-issue work clothes and toiletries. Luka took charge and brought her bags into his room and put them all on the chair.

  He sealed the door, then pulled her tightly into his arms and hard up against him. Any doubts she might have had about whether or not he wanted to stay with her faded away. She clung to him as if he was a life raft in a turbulent sea.

  He reached out one hand and fumbled for the control panel, turning up the heat and setting the lights at half-glow. He stroked her back and gently kissed her face around the wounded areas.

  “I’m never playing games of chance again. I used up all my luck when I met you.” His smile was teasing, but there was a tinge of desire to it.

  Happiness bubbled in her, and she laughed at his hyperbole. “Probability doesn’t accrue.”

  “I know, but I love the poetry of it.”

  He reverently took her face in his hands and kissed her expertly and thoroughly.

  “I love your laugh.” He kissed her again. “Ég elska þig. I love you.”

  “I love you,” she whispered, then kissed him with no expertise, but with everything she was feeling, everything she had to give him. The taste and the scent of him were drenching her senses.

  The aching that had plagued her chest and arms turned to liquid fire. She pulled out his shirttail so she could burrow her hands under and splay them on his warm skin and firm muscles. A moan vibrated through her and she couldn’t tell if it was his or hers.

  “You're not still in pain, are you?” he asked. The moan must have been hers, then.

  He started on the buttons of her shirt. She tried to help, but the tremors had already started, and she couldn’t hold her fingers steady.

  “Not much. You?” Her command of words was slipping fast.

  “No.” He kissed her neck behind her ear, making her gasp. “Right now, I wouldn't care if I was.”

  He undid the last button and pushed her shirt off her shoulders. She let it drop behind her on the floor. She released her wrist and ankle sheaths and put them on the shelf above the desk. He practically ripped his shirt off.

  His muscled chest and bare skin were entrancing, and she had to touch. She traced the remnants of the bruised discoloration on his right shoulder with delicate fingers. It troubled her that he'd been injured.

  He grabbed her fingers and brought them to his lips for a kiss.

  “Don't you dare apologize for me getting hurt.” He pulled her close and lowered his voice to a whisper in her ear that sent a tingling wave through her. “We'd be dead three times over if it wasn't for you. If anything, I owe you an apology. I should have… evaluated Haberville a lot sooner.”

  She appreciated that even when deeply distracted, he remembered that little pilots might still have big ears, and they each had secrets to keep.

  He traced the bottom edge of the narrow-strapped, tape-patched tank top she wore. “Have I told you how plasma hot you are in these?”

  His questing hand swirled under and up to the pebbled peak of her breast, and she arched into his caress. She tried to speak, but a tremor rippled through her like overload flux in a light drive. She gasped involuntarily and struggled to regain control of her sensory inputs and her body’s response.

  To her regret, he moved his hand away from her breast, but his other arm tightened around her and brought her flat against him. “We'll go as slow as you need, elskan,” he said.

  She wanted this so badly, but she was afraid she was too impaired. She wished she knew what to do, other than try not to have seizures.

  He slowly caressed her back under her tank. “I know it’s rude to ask, but have you had other lovers?”

  She remembered he’d said he’d had a few, and she was glad at least one of them had.

  “Not… lovers.”

  She didn’t want to distress him, but he deserved to know that she didn’t have the right kind of experience in what they were about to do. Or at least, in what she hoped they were about to do.

  “In the first few months of, uh, school, trainers used sex on all of us for… discipline. That stopped once we learned… skills.”

  “Defensive skills,” he said.

  She could hear the anger in his voice, and she wanted to soothe it away, but didn’t know how. She couldn’t change her past, only her future.

  “Some students found relief with each other, but I had no interest, even after I left. I thought I was permanently broken.” She nuzzled her face into his neck and inhaled his exotic scent, letting it curl up into her nose. “Until I met you.”

  “I’ll try to make it good for you, ástin mín. My love.” The rumble of his voice and the pressure of his breath against her ear made her tremble. She licked his neck with little touches of her tongue, savoring him, then kissed and licked along his collarbone. The taste of him was irrevocably associated in her memory with love and desire.

  She moved back from him long enough to pull her bedraggled tank off over her head and drop it on the floor. She pressed her chest to his, drawing little soft moans from them both.

  His breath was ragged. “Chaos, but I’ve wanted this. And for once, no one’s trying to kill us.”

  She smiled. “So far.”

  “Hush, woman, you’ll jinx us.” He kissed her as if to keep her from saying more, but the kiss grew more sensual when she took his hands and brought them back up to her breasts. This time, she managed to hold off the tremor until his mouth found their pebbled tips. The sensations shredded her control and drowned coherent thought.

  He kissed her mouth again, then pulled away. “I have too many clothes on, and so do you.”

  He pulled her to the bed and sat her on the edge, then kneeled before her and started undoing the fasteners on her boots. She awakened from the haze of desire enough to get the idea and did it for herself, while he removed his boots and everything else. He was gloriously, rampantly male. She wanted to taste every centimeter of him.

  She stood and fumbled at the hook for her pants. He sat on the bed in front of her and gently pushed her hands away. He undid her pants and helped her slide them and her underwear down so she could step out of them.

  �
�Falleg,” he breathed. “Beautiful.” He skimmed his hands up the sides of her hips, thumbs skimming over the matching scars, and onto her abdominal muscles. He stood and wrapped her in his arms, molding his body to hers.

  “We fit together perfectly.” He kissed her long and deep.

  She slid her hands down his back to skim and cup his beautifully muscled rear, pulling his pelvis into hers because it felt right.

  She felt a deep shiver flow through his core. Worry washed through her. He’d turned up the heat, so he shouldn’t be cold. Was his talent working?

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he whispered, “I just want you.” He tightened his hands on her hips and ground his hard arousal against her. “A lot.”

  She was thunderstruck. “Trembling is normal?”

  “It is when you desire...” he trailed off. He took a deep, uneven breath and looked at her with dawning revelation. “When we kissed in your apartment, you were afraid it was because you’re...”

  “…no longer human,” she whispered.

  He smiled at her with such loving compassion she thought she’d melt. He pressed butterfly kisses to her face. “It’s because you are human.”

  Her eyes were filling with tears again, and she added profound relief and hope to the list of things that made her cry. The list was getting disconcertingly long.

  He pulled her onto the platform bed, entangling his limbs with hers and kissing her wherever he could land his mouth. “Delectably… delightfully…”

  She found the most sensitive part of him with her greedy tongue, and he bucked.

  “I won’t last two minutes if you do that… human.”

  CHAPTER 28

  * Interstellar: “Padrashan Librero” * GDAT 3237.048 *

  She had no words to describe making love with Luka. Becoming lovers. Becoming one.

  Her body still simmered and her emotions still swamped her rational brain. Slow had turned into fast, and into slow again, and pleasurable release was only part of what they’d shared with each other.

  She lay at his side, half draped over him, their heart rates only quite recently slowing to something like normal. He was caressing her with smooth, lazy strokes. Every breath she took was laced with the perfect scent of him. She didn’t know how she could feel both energized and drained at the same time. The floor of the stateroom looked like an explosion of clothes.

  His wonderfully sculpted stomach growled, and it made her smile.

  “How long until breakfast, do you suppose?” His voice was deep and quiet as it rumbled in his chest and vibrated against her ear. “I need a flux resupply.”

  She calculated from when they’d stepped into the stateroom together. “Three hours, seventeen minutes, if they serve on schedule.”

  “You’re really accurate with time.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. Honesty made her add, “Except I lose track of it when I’m… engaged with you.”

  “Do you have a clock implant?” His voice was so quiet that only she could hear it. As was often the case, the direction of his thoughts was mysterious to her.

  “No, just training. Time slows when I’m in full... action. I need an anchor to the real world.”

  “Action, like what you did with Haberville, or the ramper in Etonver, or the mercs?” He smiled at her, his eyes sparkling with intuition. She delighted in his mercurial, brilliant mind.

  “Yes,” she said, responding to his smile with one of her own. She’d known he’d eventually figure out the right questions to ask. He was the one person in the universe she’d ever trust with the answers.

  He kissed her forehead. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, by the way. I noticed you didn’t kill those two mercs who jacked me in Etonver.”

  She guessed he was wondering why she’d let them live. She shrugged a shoulder and looked toward his face. “It would have been easier, but I thought you’d seen enough death already that week.”

  He laughed and kissed her lightly. She loved that he laughed so easily. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

  She slid her hand lazily down his chest. She couldn’t get enough of the feel of him. She lingered on two jagged scars between his ribs.

  “Why do you still have these?” She knew they were from a year ago, when he’d nearly been killed by the collector pedophile he’d cornered. Any half-decent body shop could easily erase them for a reasonable fee.

  “A memento, I guess. Some people have skin art; I have scars.”

  She’d found another, longer scar when memorizing every surface of him with her hands and mouth. She slid her hand to his hipbone and touched the much older, faded mark, but still pale against his exquisite light brown skin. “And this?”

  “The reason I went into forensic investigation.”

  “An old, bad memory?” She didn’t want to make him think of painful things. His extraordinary talent made him remember more than enough as it was. She started to slide her hand away, but he caught it and held it fast.

  “Bittersweet. I was thirteen, and a friend of mine was beaten and killed. I found his body and the crime scene. The man who did it was my friend’s uncle. He was a respected business owner and charity director, but he also liked anal intercourse with adolescent boys. My friend resisted, and the man panicked. My mother had died only a month before, and the detectives thought I was delusional when I said I could see some of the things that happened. But the forensic investigator not only listened to me, he believed me, and it led them to the uncle. He tried to kill me because he thought I had to be a witness.”

  She wove her fingers through his, then pressed a kiss to the back of his hand. It reminded her of the first time she’d touched him, barely knowing how to offer comfort. She would never willingly go back to being the person she was then.

  “Have I told you I love the sound of your voice?” She’d meant to tell him several times, but couldn’t remember if she’d actually said it. She wanted to be better about words with him.

  “I thought you loved my scent. And my taste.” He began to caress her with less-than-lazy strokes, and her arousal began to surge along with the pace of his heart.

  “I do,” she agreed, as she released his hand so she could rise and slide herself sensuously up and over him, to where their hips fitted together perfectly. “Let me show you what else.”

  CHAPTER 29

  * Interstellar: “Padrashan Librero” * GDAT 3237.049 *

  Luka finished his official report for La Plata and sent it to Zheer’s workspace in the shipcomp. He’d volunteered to compile it with input from Mairwen and Jerzi, rather than making them create separate reports. The Padrashan’s ship days were synced to Etonver time, but his body clock was still confused. The ship’s food was passable, but not as good as Jerzi’s, and it was about time for the evening meal, but his stomach thought it was mid-morning at best. They’d be arriving in Rekoria space in about thirty hours. He could have used something from the med kit to reset his sleep pattern, but since Mairwen couldn’t take it, he’d rather stay synced to hers.

  Jerzi was young and resilient, and his bullet wound was almost healed, but he’d grown increasingly quiet as they got closer to home. Now that Luka had filed the report, he sought Jerzi out and found him sitting in his room, feet up on the narrow desk. The brand-new, military-issue pants and pocket-covered tunic were a marked contrast to his battered gunnin boots.

  “Everything okay?” asked Luka.

  “Yeah, sort of. It’s just little things, now that I have time to think about them.” He waved, inviting Luka to sit.

  “Dom DeBayaud was a friend, and I’ll miss him. I feel like an idiot that Haberville manipulated me. I know the pharma companies involved in all this won’t get what’s coming to them because money can buy a lot of immunity.” He sighed. “I don’t know that I want to go back to being just another ex-gunnin on a security team, but I don’t know else I can do.”

  Luka knew the feeling, from when he’d left the mil
itary, before Leo had brought him into La Plata. “What do you want to do?”

  Jerzi shrugged. “Whatever I can so I can get my kid and her mother away from where they are. We needed her family to support them while I was still in the service, but that family is nasty crazy. Now it’s just a question of money. I miss them a lot. I’m going to use some of the extra downtime Zheer authorized to go see them.”

  “Before you do, talk to Beva Rienville when we get back to Etonver, and tell her I sent you. She’s heading up a new division for personal security. I can personally attest that you’re damned handy in a firefight.”

  Jerzi looked a little surprised. “Thanks. I will,” he said after a moment, then gave Luka a knowing look. “I’m a piker compared to Mairwen.”

  “Aren’t we all,” said Luka, with a small smile for the shared secret.

  After that, he went looking for Mairwen and found her in one corner of the large exercise room. He didn’t recognize the other man in the room using the free weights, but then again, he didn’t even know how many people were on the ship. He hadn’t spent much time outside of the room he shared with Mairwen.

  She was working gingerly on the force isolation machine to strengthen her lower left leg where the projectile had pierced it. The wound pack had done its job promoting rapid healing, but the bruising and scarring were still evident. All her injuries were getting better, but he knew she was still in moderate pain. He wished his minder talents included healing so he could help her.

  He watched her do five more repetitions, then turn the machine off. She grabbed her towel and crossed to where he was standing. She’d been working hard and sweating. The dark military-style sleeveless tank she wore was plastered to her chest, outlining her firm, high breasts with their delightfully sensitive tips. He drew a deeper breath, suddenly in need of more oxygen.

  “Want to read our report?” He tried to achieve a business-like tone.

  “I don’t know. Is it odd?” She gave him a small smile.

  He grinned at the unexpected teasing. “Yes, and boring, too. It’ll be ready after your shower.”