by Hana Starr
“No, I understand,” the assassin sighed. “Well, it does sound stupid but I also understand. That’s part of the reason I agreed to this. That area is near your planet. If we secure the border, it’s closure for you.”
Sorlo blinked at her. “And why do you care?”
“I shouldn’t,” she said, and left the table.
Chapter Seven
Several very long, and yet incredibly short, days passed as they waited for the g-ahead to begin their mission. The process was not at all simple, which was merely part of a system of checks and balances to make sure that each and every battleship departure was as well thought-out as it could be. Red Riser wasn’t exactly the center of the Federation –that was the home base back on Earth- but each and every decision had to be for the better. Warriors couldn’t simply go racing off willy-nilly into the far reaches of space without being debriefed and properly supplied, and extra-supplied for emergencies of any foreseeable nature.
For this particular mission out to the Bright District –as the galaxy where the Illurian planet was situated had come to be known, mostly out of simplicity. It was a three-sun solar system- that meant it had to be taken into account every single thing that Jade and Sorlo would need, as well as emergency supplies, and the maximum amount of supplies for the maximum amount of survivors, plus extra for them. It went on and on, from food to medical to clothing, to calculating energy and oxygen…
And there was no way that all that would fit on Jade’s Falcon, or on a regular Peace Bearer, so a rocket was commissioned from a shipping company at a substantial price. Then, it had to be made certain that both members of the crew could successfully pilot the rocket if either one went out of commission, or if the autopilot went down for some reason. Flying the rocket manually was no challenge at all for either one of them though, and Jade even commented on how much simpler it was. Quietly, Sorlo agreed. And so that part of preparations passed in only several hours, but that was just the first phase: the planning.
Second phase was approval. That wasn’t difficult, as everyone on the base agreed it was the best for everyone, but it was a long and grueling process as official councils needed to be gathered, documentation needed signing and certain witnesses…
It was all a gigantic pain in the ass.
Sorlo spent his time working out or in the knowledge center, studying up on the Bright District, as he had been steadfastly avoiding doing so his whole life. And still now, he refused to research anything about his own planet.
And what Jade might have been doing, he didn’t know. Probably sleeping. She was the main pilot on their soon-to-be voyage and was probably going to be a bit short of it at times, as they were expected to stick to the strict schedule currently being programmed into the rocket. She must have come out to eat and exercise and bathe, but he did not see her until at long last he was summoned out to the garage.
There was no other reason that he would be called out there but for this, so he took one last look around his room. Only then did he remember that all his personal belongings were aboard his ruined and drifting ship many trillions of miles away. And seeing as it was in a very unpopulated part of space that would probably not be colonized anytime at all, not even for a century, it was unlikely to be recovered. He had nothing to take with him but memories.
A little saddened, he headed out to the garage and was met by Jade, who spared him a short glimpse of a moody smile. They were debriefed with the same old speech they had heard many times by now and seen into the rocket by Byron himself.
Once inside, Sorlo looked at Jade and felt his heart flutter. “Should we get started then?” he breathed.
“What else are we going to do?” she retorted, and then began a thorough interior check of the rocket and its systems. Sorlo nodded to her smooth back and took up his half of the job. Within an hour it was done, and Jade took the helm.
Settling gratefully into his own cockpit chair, he watched the monitors and then glanced out the front screen to watch her power up the huge rocket and start it forward. “Don’t forget that this isn’t your nimble little Falcon,” he couldn’t help saying.
Jade growled slightly in his direction. “I’ve got it. I did even better at this test than you.”
“Does that mean you think I did okay anyway?” he teased lightly.
“I give credit where credit is due.” She huffed. “And besides, my Falcon better still be here when I come back. Earning honor isn’t going to do me shit if I have to try to be stealthy in one of those cumbersome Peace Bearers. They’re like sky elephants.”
The TranslateChip didn’t quite know how to translate the word but instead supplied him with an image of a mountainous grey animal with floppy ears and some strange sort of face-cock. Sorlo put his hand over his mouth to try and control his giggles, scared of distracted Jade as she guided the lumbering ship out of the airlock and onto the runway.
Then, suddenly, she jammed the power up nearly to maximum. The rocket leapt forward with surprising speed for something of its size, rocketing down the rapidly-shortening length.
“Hey!” Sorlo screamed, grabbing his chair. “Slow the fuck down, okay? You’ll crash us!”
But, a glance at the monitor at his lap proved him wrong as the rocket suddenly jumped up and began to gain elevation. Once they were suitably away from the base, Jade switched gears. All the times he had seen her pilot a craft, it was a dance of motion. Her whole body moved with it, like she was part of the ship.
After setting them on course, she said, “Coordinates read okay.”
“Coordinates okay,” Sorlo confirmed.
“Then, don’t tell me what to do!”
It wasn’t going to be the last time they clashed, just like it definitely wasn’t the first! He hadn’t said much when it had been her personal ship but this was partly his responsibility, too. He had every right to question her decisions, and he did.
The strange thing was that many times, he didn’t even really have a good reason to call her out on something. It was very much against his nature but it was like he found himself constantly waiting for her to make some slight move that he could jab at her with, solely for the purpose of seeing her riled up. He loved to see her angry.
Or do I love to see her be real? he thought, sitting in his cockpit and looking up into her furious dark eyes as she glared down at his lightness.
“For the last time!” she practically screamed. “Stop! Stealing! My lights! I need to be able to tell what’s really lit and what isn’t!”
This was it. This was some sort of breaking point. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but it was about to.
His voice was hoarse as he said, “Make me.”
And her mouth clamped down hard against his.
There was no passion in it, only the anger he lived to see in her now. Her soft lips were hard and furious against his, trying to claim his as he parted them; her tongue slid deep inside, fucking against his now without a rhythm. It was the roughest and most improper sort of kiss he had ever been exposed to in his entire life, and it was making him so incredibly hard. In only a matter of seconds, his member had swollen and was pressing painfully against his uniform as it tried to elongate to its full potential without any real success.
Reaching up, he grabbed at her shoulder. She shook him away angrily and then stumbled. Stretching out her arms to try and catch herself, her palm landed right in his lap. Her fingers splayed across his hard dick, accidentally snaring it beneath them.
Slowly, she looked down.
“Oh,” she said, and it was a contemplative little sound but when she repeated it, it came out a purr. “Ohhh…”
Watching her face, Sorlo was witness to the change that overcame her. It was almost magical in its intensity, watching that hard face of wretched emotion become something so smooth and lovely. It was almost worth crying over, honestly.
Reaching to her again, Jade accepted it this time. His hands wrapped around her face, hers folding over his as they d
id so, and he brought her mouth back down to his to kiss her as sweetly as he knew how. Their mouths moved together slower than before, so slow they seemed almost to be frozen in that single moment of time.
Her body began to slump, relaxing down upon his lap so that he could feel her round ass cheeks upon his dick. He moaned into her mouth, their breath mingling sweetly.
“I saw you,” he whispered.
Jade’s sexy-hazy eyes flickered to look into his.
“That night before we got to Red Riser,” he explained huskily. “I saw you fucking yourself. And I thought you looked lonely.”
Her throat moved as she swallowed hard. “Why didn’t you come out to join me, then?”
“I should have,” he admitted. “I wanted to. But you don’t really like me much and I’m aware of it.”
Gently, her arms rose to wrap around his neck and she kissed his lips again and again. He took a deep breath every time, trying to calm the burning heat that was trying to crawl up his shaft and make him explode so soon. He wanted this to last as long as it possibly could, and it was ever so frustrating that he couldn’t control that internal light the way he could all others.
Which gave him the idea. In the very back of his mind, he took from every single light in the cockpit so that their surroundings dimmed immensely. In fact, it was so dim that it was nearly impossible to tell that she was black or that he was white as volcanic ash.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, both of them beginning to undress each other while slowly sinking to the cockpit floor.
“Ambiance,” he murmured and bit her throat, making her scream, but the real reason was that he wanted to be one with her in every sense of the word.
As she fell back onto the floor, grabbing passionately for his hair to pull at his long locks, he grabbed her wide hips with his hands and held them hard to keep her in place while slowly guiding the full length of his throbbing cock into her swollen depths. The wet pulsation of her muscles on his most sensitive of places broke what last bit of control he had been hanging onto, and he started to thrust inside her just as hard as she had been kissing him earlier but with one difference: this was all passion.
And like most passions, it burned very quickly. There was no holding back or taking his time, and the screams and joyful throes of the woman beneath him gave him no reason to do so. Within a matter of minutes, he reached an earth-shattering orgasm. As hot bursts of cum spilled inside her pussy he lost control of the lights, and they flared on brightly just in time for him to watch her face as she orgasmed as well.
Spent and exhausted, they both lay there immobile on the floor for a time until finally one of them had to move. And, of course, it was Jade.
She sat up and hid her face slightly, obviously trying to pick up the pieces of her mask.
Sorlo watched softly, a little sad that she would still want to hide but thinking that perhaps things would be different from now on.
“It’s time for us to do our checks,” she said softly.
“Alright,” he agreed, and stood up so he could straighten his clothes.
Inwardly, he thought, you want things to go back to being the same but honestly, nothing will be after this.
Chapter Eight
After their moment of passion together, Jade couldn’t help but feel like things had changed. The days went on and their dynamic felt the same but it was also so different somehow in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Watching the Illurian go about his work, often neglecting some of hers for the specific purpose of just observing him, she could sense that he knew it, too. He might have even been working at bringing this about all along.
The thought of his smugness, thinking he could change her, made her want to smack that self-assured look right off his face. But then he glanced over at her and she saw the light in his eyes, a proper light for his kind instead of the darkness that had been living there, and the confidence returning to the way he held his jaw, and she knew she couldn’t do it. If he liked the changes in her, wherever it might be coming from, and she liked the brightness coming back to him, perhaps there wasn’t any harm in it.
And in any case, she really liked the sex. If there was one thing she definitely didn’t want to ruin, it was the sex.
They continued to challenge each other as they traded positions with driving the rocket, firing back insults like they were charge gun blasts, but there didn’t seem to be any disdain in it now. At least, Jade couldn’t find any in her own words. She was certainly angry whenever he poked at her skills, as she knew her hands on this ship were far more capable than his, and she retaliated in kind when it was his turn, but there was no hatred for him.
Why don’t I hate him? she wondered. It wasn’t just upon a single occasion, but any time where she was sitting while he was piloting them on their preplanned course. She sat there, sometimes with her legs spread so wide that her pussy lips were outlined against her uniform, and watched him at his work and wondered why she didn’t hate him. Why she didn’t feel a pulse of rage when he corrected their trajectory by a fraction of a degree, or why she didn’t despise the shape of his body, the way he took up space, the manner in which he spoke. It was all so baffling and her only refuge from him was sleep or work.
Yet, sleep was often spent with him at first, both of them pounding away at each other until they were replete. Then as he went away, she fell asleep with the feel of him against her intruding on the sanctuary of her thoughts.
And work? She could stare at her monitor as closely as she liked but she was an assassin and hyper aware of his presence no matter where he was or what else he was doing while she tried to distract herself. He was everywhere at all times, and there was no escape from her own confused feelings, especially because they had not as of yet made any headway on finding the lost ship. That wasn’t so frustrating, as they weren’t actually behind enemy lines, but this was the route the other ship should have taken to get there in the first place which meant she had been scanning the space around them as they went, expecting to pick up on signatures or debris. There was simply nothing, and Jade couldn’t stop herself from complaining about it long before they actually got where they were going.
“It’s been a while,” Sorlo said calmly, trying to soothe her irritation. That tone of voice irked her but she dealt with it anyway. “Anything that was here has probably drifted away ages ago.”
“I get that,” she replied. Impatience filled her voice. “But I wish we had more time to range around instead of heading straight there. If I could find a trail now then I might be able to actually track it all the way to wherever it currently is. But, that’s looking like an impossibility at the moment.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up on it when we get behind the lines,” he reassured her, and then patted her shoulder.
She went away from the gesture not irritated but just confused.
Within several more days after that incident however, they had crossed over the boundary and were in Bright District.
Sitting up eagerly in her chair, Jade said, “Here we are.”
“Here we are,” Sorlo repeated in a softer tone. He looked very solemn, almost stroking his screen as he touched it. “Want to do a scan to see if you can pick anything up?”
Don’t need to tell me twice, she thought, and entered in the commands for a scan. Her heart was pounding in her chest as the command was carried out, breathless for herself and her alien companion –but the results were blank.
“Damn,” she swore softly. Glancing over, she saw Sorlo’s expression fall. It hurt her to see. “Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll find something.”
But, they didn’t.
They set up a grid of the Bright District in the computer system, dividing it into portions the exact size of the area the rocket’s scan could reach. From there, they went about systematically scanning each and every marked area. It was a grueling process of careful positioning and waiting, an eye-straining thing of con
stant watching. And still there was nothing to show for it, even after days.
“I don’t understand,” Jade said, grumbling into her folded hands. “Communications were cut. These are enemy lines. Everything points to them having been attacked and shot down. And this was recent so we should still be seeing some sign but there’s nothing.”
“We haven’t done the whole area yet though,” Sorlo said. He sounded calm but he hadn’t truly been himself since they got here. She knew why and truly appreciated his efforts. “Just be patient. We might find something.”
“I doubt it,” she said, and brought up a diagram of the areas they had already searched through. “Look, here we are right now.” Searching, she brought up an older document and positioned them side-by-side for comparison. “And this is the point where communications went down. We have passed that point. We should have seen some sign of an altercation or even some sort of spread as debris drifted. And yet, there is nothing here.”