by Lexi Sinner
The bus rolled up with a heavy sigh of exertion and the doors slid open. It was only about half full, mostly with senior citizens, and they were all seated near the front. We filed all the way to the back and sat in a double seat side by side. As the long vehicle got moving Rose poked my belly.
“What’s that look for?” She asked.
“What look?”
“You’re staring at me like a lost puppy. What are you thinking about?”
“I’m just wondering…” I said shyly.
“Wondering what?”
“If we… will we…” she poked me again, but this time her hand stayed pressed against my stomach and slid down between my legs, pressing up my skirt. Her finger penetrated the folds of my wet pussy and I sighed and leaned my head on her shoulder.
“Does that answer your question?” She asked.
“Yesss,” I hissed in her ear.
“Good,” she said, “I know the guys will feel like they’re in control of you… but you’re my good girl. Don’t you ever forget it.”
“Your good girl. Only yours,” I whispered as I stole a glance toward the front of the bus. No one was watching us.
“That’s right,” she growled, biting my ear lightly. “We’re going to have so much fun, Nina.”
Story 20
Chapter One
She ran into the building as the security had their backs to them, her every step as silent as the night itself and as she got into the building Eliza Gray knew she was very close to escaping the dying Earth’s fate. Entire ships had been launched carrying thousands of people while the civilians of Earth evacuated, yet there were still lots of people unable to flee and Eliza was one of them. Eliza was so angry that she’d spent her life working as an engineer studying astrophysics but that anger was what lead her to breaking into the space ship facility. Her heart pounded as she ran into the launch bay and scanned the area, quickly scoping out the security making their rounds and routed a path mentally as she squatted down into a shadow to hide from an upcoming guard. He walked by and didn’t even notice her, not even when she started sneaking right behind him and crossed the walkway as she headed towards a single-person space ship, the Journeyer Lite edition, perfect for what Eliza had planned. Eliza opened the ship’s door only enough to slip into the space pod before she quietly closed the door.
“Alright, this is a different setup…” Eliza said as she looked around at the Journeyer’s controls but started spotting familiar buttons and realized the setup was actually an improvement, “Ohhh, sweet… Time to get off this rock.”
Eliza started the engines and caught the attentions of every guard in the launch bay but that just made her even more anxious to get off the ground, especially as they all started forming a firing line. Eliza’s eyes widened and she quickly cranked the engine but it was still warming up. She looked up to see one guard in particular standing up with his gun down.
“Ma’am, you have got to get out of that.” The guard said as Eliza glanced down at the controls and spotted the engines nearly warmed up, “I understand you’re panicked right now…”
“Bye!!” Eliza said as the engines turned green and, because she had already cranked the engines, the Journeyer soared straight upward, truly launching out of the bay and took off into space with a comfortable ride that Eliza wasn’t ready for; she started looking at the controls to see what kind of engine she was even using and her eyes widened, “I have a warp core?! I am sooutta here.”
As Eliza flew through space she soared passed the moon within minutes and, now knowing what kind of engine she was running, Eliza sat there fully understanding that her space craft was moving through space not by propelling itself through space but by pulling up on spacetime itself with antigravity just behind her ship. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was to have chosen a ship that had a warp core and started imagining all of the worlds she could go explore. While she flew she looked over at the pressure suit and grinned, liking the design of it before suddenly red emergency lights started flashing. Eliza’s stomach knotted up with the worst fear she had ever felt in her entire life, thinking she was going to just drift in space for the rest of existence as the mobility functions shut down. A monitor on the side popped up with an emergency trajectory and it made Eliza somewhat angry as she couldn’t even control the ship anymore to keep it on the arcing path.
“I’m… I’m dead…” Eliza said but as she flew she started noticing the ship icon on the emergency trajectory map actually following the path and breathed a massive sigh of relief; she looked at the readings popping up about the planet she would be landing on and couldn’t believe her luck as she started reading the reports out loud, “This ship is designed to find Earth-like planets in cases of emergency. Please sit back and relax… relax?! That’s kinda tough to do when my homeworld is dying and I’m on an uncontrollable trajectory to an alien world… Still, that’s a nice feature but what if there wasn’t an Earth-like planet for years? I still would have died out here.”
Only about an hour later Eliza started entering the Earth-like planet’s atmosphere and just could not believe how similar it looked. She watched out of the window as she soared through the sky, looking down at the vast oceans of what looked to be water and large spans of green covered land masses. As her space ship continued flying through the sky she saw something that amazed her, cities, yet as she got closer her amazement turned into horror and fear as she saw the cities were in ruins. Eliza looked ahead and saw that her space ship was headed directly for a ruined city and worried that she was going to have a crash landing. Eliza grabbed her pressure suit and started getting into it as fast as she could while her ship continued descending towards the ground yet slowed down as she got closer. The ship swerved to the side and avoided a building by itself before it slowed down even more and prepared to land.
“Ship landing. Please refuel the antimatter.” The ship’s female voiced AI said, startling Eliza as it spoke and nearly caused her to drop her helmet facemask first into the engine thruster control.
“Whew…” She sighed as she caught her helmet with the good grip on her gloves before she put her helmet on as the ship started lowering; Eliza sat back down in her command chair and started running an atmosphere scan and sighed as she read the atmosphere was basically exactly like Earth’s and sighed, “Better to be safe than sorry I guess.”
Eliza opened the hatch on the Journeyer and climbed out of the ship, looking around fairly horrified by the ghost city she’d landed in. She thought about how her ship was fueled by antimatter and had absolutely no idea how she would ever refuel it and realized it being low on fuel was why the guard had tried to stop her from taking off, not just to stop her from stealing the Journeyer. As she walked around she thought about how many other space ships were in the launch bay back on Earth and realized that they probably didn’t care about the single-person ship and were trying to stop her from launching herself into space. Eliza thought about how lucky she was to have had the emergency trajectory system as she looked into a destroyed building that she recognized as some sort of supermarket. As she looked away she spotted an animal and noticed it seemed rather healthy but it quickly turned and ran away. Eliza thought the thing had run from her but she heard the high pitched whine of some sort of electronic and turned around to find a person in a full-suit of military-like protective armor with a full helmet and mask aiming some sort of gun at her. Eliza’s hands raised up out of fear yet she felt anger at the same time and wanted to punch the person in their head but heard the sounds of footsteps and looked around as an entire group of people dressed in the same protective armor and electronic guns surrounded her.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” The man asked, startling Eliza again that she could understand him, “Answer me!”
“I crashed.” Eliza uttered, fearing the man would shoot her and didn’t expect her pressure suit to be able to sustain the attack, “My ship brought me here because it’s Earth-like.”
&
nbsp; “You’re from Earth?” The man asked, the tone of his voice quite questioning as he spoke.
“You know about Earth?” Eliza replied but the man made a motion with his hands and Eliza was suddenly seized and before she knew it she was being hauled towards a strange truck-looking vehicle but it didn’t have any wheels and was hovering, “What’s going on?”
“You’re the first person to come here since we colonized the planet. We lost contact with Earth years ago. We need to know how things are. We’re gonna protect you, give you a place to live that’s comfortable… not these… ruins.” The guy said as they all climbed into the back of the hover truck.
“Wait, hold on. First you said we colonized this planet? When? How long ago did this happen because the people of Earth are unaware.” Eliza said as the guy took his helmet off, revealing that he wasn’t the best nor worst looking guy but he seemed friendly yet the look on his face scrunched with anger.
“They abandoned us.” He said, his eyes distant as he spoke.
“To be fair, things on Earth aren’t goin’ great… The planet is… dying.” Eliza said to the guys sheer horror, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news… twice, but you were gonna ask me about Earth eventually, right?”
“Asher will wanna hear about this.” He said before he stood up and walked into the pilot bay, sliding the door closed as he walked in.
“So… Anybody wanna tell me when we colonized this place?” Eliza asked as she looked around at the rest of the people, each now without their masked helmets but none of them seemed to be paying attention, “Or ya know, what this place is even called?”
“Terra… We called it terra as a way to give an ode to Earth.” A woman spoke up, her tone somber as if she too was crushed by the news that Earth was dying and caught Eliza’s attention, “We were sent here to colonize the planet forty Earth years ago, but on this planet it’s been eighty years since we landed.”
“Why is time doubled here?” Eliza said, having never studied too hard into time because it confused her.
“Well, it’s a mix of time dilation and Terra’s orbital pattern around Sol 2, another thing we named as an ode to our home system. Terra is a bit bigger than Earth so it’s gravity is slightly more. This doesn’t feel like much but it does cause a drag on time. The other factor is that Terra simply doesn’t orbit Sol 2 as fast as Earth orbits the Sun.” The woman replied before the guy that initially found Eliza walked out from the pilot bay.
“We’ll be docking with the Magnus in ten minutes.” He said as he walked in and sat down before he looked over at Eliza, “My name is Sargent Evan James. I apologize for having not introduced myself earlier. We thought you could be hostile.”
“I was alone. If anything I could have been an explorer but…” Eliza started saying before she noticed a happier expression appear on Evan’s face.
“So the Norliks never made it to Earth? You would know what I’m talking about if they had. That’s good to know. Why is Earth dying then?” Evan asked while Eliza was still reeling from the revelation of an alien species they knew of called Norliks and couldn’t help but stare at Evan wide-eyed, “I take it no aliens have went to Earth? You seem pretty startled by that.”
“No aliens have been to Earth that the public is aware of, but we also didn’t know you even existed.” Eliza said as she looked over at Evan, “As far as the people on Earth know we’ve only made it to Mars and we’re just now starting to try to colonize that.”
“That means other settlements went better than we did, at least, so that’s good.” Evan said, trying to see the positive as the hover truck started docking inside of a massive ship hovering over a volcano, “Welcome to the Magnus.”
“A floating city?” Eliza asked wide-eyed as she looked down at the molten lava beneath them.
“We harness the thermal energy of the volcano to power the Magnus, but, if you’d follow me our leader Asher would very much like to talk with you.” Evan said as he walked over to the back of the hover truck and opened the door, revealing a nice garage within the Magnus; as Eliza stepped out she looked over at the strange light blue glowing wall where they’d hovered in at but put it off, already having too much information to take in, “So no Norlik ever made it to Earth? Not even one?”
“Not that we’re aware of. How would we know? You said I’d know what you were talking about if they had.” Eliza said as they walked into a hallway and into the lobby of the Magnus but just kept walking as Evan headed directly for Asher’s office.
“Norliks are quite predatory humanoid creatures and they’re also warmongers due that predatory nature of theirs. One landed here fifteen years ago and, well, you seen the devastation it caused just to kill it.” Evan said with a tone that warned Eliza of the seriousness of a Norlik, yet she still wanted to know more.
“That whole city was destroyed to get rid of one alien?” Eliza asked, her eyes quite wide as she thought about how dangerous they must be, “How did you destroy it?”
“One big ass bomb. The resulting explosion devastated that city and killed any person, plant or animal caught in it. Since then we’ve had to deal with the Mirrans, but don’t worry about them. We can protect you from those savages.” Evan said as they walked into Asher’s office; Eliza looked up to find quite the handsome man sitting behind a desk working on some paperwork for a moment before he looked up at her and she noticed his eyes widen ever so slightly, “Asher, sir, this is the woman who landed here.”
“I can tell by that retro pressure suit. Thank you Sargent James, you’re dismissed.” Asher said with an approving nod in Evan’s direction before Asher looked at Eliza while Evan headed out of the room; Eliza had watched Evan leave and when she turned back she caught Asher checking her out, “My name is General Asher Defray. I hear troubling things about the fate of Earth.”
“You’re not worried that the public doesn’t even know you exist?” Eliza asked, feeling sorry for the colony and fairly angry for them.
“No.” Asher replied, shocking Eliza, “I knew that this colonization effort was experimental and that if we were to fail it would make the public have a lack of faith in attempting colonization but it’s the only way for Humans to survive something like what’s happening on Earth now. Even if all of the people sadly perish on Earth then we still have people scattered out throughout what parts of space we could get to when we were first sent out.”
“How did we even get here?” Eliza asked, getting a stern look from Asher.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.” Asher replied, frustrating Eliza but she couldn’t help but admire his dedication and professionalism, “We’ve got a lot to discuss. You might wanna take a seat ‘cuz it’s gonna be a while.”
Chapter Two
“So the Earth’s toast and there’s nothin’ we can do to stop it.” Asher said with a sigh before he looked over at Eliza, “You wanna know how we got to Terra? We reverse engineered alien technology when we found a crashed ship on the moon. From that we managed to make space travel a much easier to accomplish thing as well as making the distance we could travel further than we ever thought possible.”
“Yeah, and faster. I made it here within an hour.” Eliza said with a chuckle, checking Asher out while he wasn’t looking and noticed how tone he was, yet, “So, that’s all for Earth and how you guys got to Terra but what about aliens. Besides the Norliks Evan asked if no aliens had made it to Earth, not just the Norlik, so how many kinds of aliens do you know about?”
“Five. Three are hostile and two are docile and even helped us develop the technology the Magnus is made of, along with our protective gear and weaponry. If it wasn’t for the Syromarpeople we would have been wiped out by a singleNorlik a long time ago. The Syromar people are two species of aliens who’d formed an alliance through peace that allowed for them to develop technology to protect, not harm, and we’re working to become a part of, but the damn Mirrans are making it difficult, the savages. Laros was not our fault… we had to do it or m
ore people would die. We’ve proved we could rebuild and when we did we made the Magnus with the help of the Syromar people.” Asher said but as he spoke Eliza couldn’t help but notice him checking her out every now and then and smiled, thinking he was quite the hunk as well as a good person deep down.
“Sargent Evan mentioned the Mirrans too. Who are they?” Eliza asked and happened to glance at the time, realizing it was getting to be what midnight there and it strangely felt like it was midnight to her too.
“They’re an off shoot of us. After we took down that Norlik they condemned us for our usage of technology, saying it wiped out everything and they wouldn’t listen when we told them we could rebuild the city. They live there now, down in Laros, that city you were picked up in. The thing is, recent reports suggest that the Mirran people are now using technology, in small portions, but still it’s a bit hypocritical and us with all our technology, we’re having a food shortage.” Asher said before he shook his head to the sides with frustration and as he did Eliza took her chance to check him out again, finding his body quite nice and as Asher looked back she looked away yet when she looked back he looked away, causing Eliza to chuckle a bit but she stifled it, “They’re probably doin’ much worse down there on the ground but due to our food shortage we couldn’t take them in even if they wanted, we just can’t. The food creating machines we developed still have some kinks but they do produce good food, yet not on the scale they were built for like we need them to be. We don’t fully understand the technology yet.”
“Well that doesn’t sound very good. Could you maybe contact your alien friends and have them come help?” Eliza asked, somewhat fearing meeting them but was also excited about it at the same time and looked out of the window at the dark, night sky, looking for any constellations she recognized while Asher checked out her ass but Eliza caught him as she looked over at him without turning her body, “Are we stealing glances at each other?”