Whynn was busy counting down to the moment they would pass into the wormhole. The ship began to shake as the outside gravitational forces took hold of them. Whynn had warned her that the event horizon would be very violent, but reassured her that the midsection of the wormhole should be fairly calm, like the eye of an Earth storm. The shaking became more savage. Tessa wanted to close her eyes to avoid the seemingly spinning room, but she needed to stay focused on the holographic data. The ship gave one more jolt as if to punctuate a sentence, then the motion stopped. Tessa took a breath to steady herself. She heard Whynn unclick his safety harness, so she did the same. He floated above the seat then toward the middle of the room.
“What’re you doing?”
“Come here,” he invited, smiling that slightly suggestive smile of his. She pushed off and glided next to him on the far side of the command center where he had stopped at a window. “Look.”
The view was breathtaking, surreal, overwhelming. Colors she did not know existed swirled and pulsed unpredictably. She ventured that the strange colors were a beautiful side-effect of light being stretched and warped as it tumbled through the wormhole. Though she had traveled through many, many wormholes, she’d never taken time to appreciate the strange effect it had on the light.
She shook herself from her reverie and slowly turned as if to drift back to the center of the room. Suddenly, Whynn reached out and took her hand, surprising her with the impulsive gesture. The minute their hands touched, their eyes met. She thought perhaps he just wanted her back beside him at the window, for companionship, but he brought her to his chest instead. She giggled nervously, awkwardly, as their bodies met. Then she looked back to the holo-console with concern.
“Don’t worry,” he said coolly. “We’ll be in transit for at least an hour.”
This time, she initiated the contact. A kiss. Throwing caution out the space window, she deftly wrapped her legs around his hips so she would not drift away as she started to pull down the zipper on his uniform.
The momentary thought that she was only doing this because there was a chance they were going to die before they got to the other side of z114 flitted threw her mind. It was gone as she saw what was offered by Whynn’s open shirt—she decided she’d be doing this regardless. She felt his body respond and stiffen under her hips. She urgently pulled the top half of his jumpsuit down so his arms were freed of the silky bonds.
Whynn, now half-naked, apparently wanted to catch up. His hands, which until now had been supporting her bottom as she clung to him, set to work undoing her shirt. In only a few seconds, she was released from it, her bare body glowing in the hypnotic lights beyond the window. She saw the reflection of her shirt floating away behind her. Returning to the task at hand, she ran her hands hungrily over his bare chest.
It was easy to forget that he was much older than she was. He was heavily muscled with smooth, flawless skin. The best money can buy, she thought wryly to herself. She could feel genuine animal strength in his body, though, not synthetic. As he gripped a bar on the wall with one hand and placed the other on the small of her back, he kissed her again. She felt his erection grow with nothing but the fabric between them.
Now that his arm was around her and he had secured himself against the glass wall, she was free to bring her legs down and remove her pants and panties. Now your turn, she eagerly thought. She was pleasantly surprised that Dextronin design was so intuitive—his pant legs each had a seam that came undone easily. She pulled his pants off and sent them drifting away behind her to mingle with her shirt. She reached up and placed her warm hands on his heavily muscled chest up to his neck.
The scientist in her couldn’t help wondering what genetic difference between Dextronin and Humans resulted in that physical difference. Soon, the thought was replaced by pure sensation as she ran her hands over his thick shoulders. She pulled herself to him and began kissing and nipping his neck. She heard his breath catch in his throat. I am doing something right, she smiled to herself.
Whynn let go of the support bar, unable to resist gripping her hips in both hands. Neither of them noticed or cared as they drifted, entwined, toward the center of the room. They caressed each other demandingly, hands and mouths exploring. And then all chance of logical thought was truly lost as Whynn thrust himself inside Tessa. She moaned and arched her back in response to his passion. He began to stroke in and out, keeping a strong grip on her hips so the force of his movements did not push her away. Her hands fumbled momentarily for something, anything to hold onto, but there was nothing. She gave up and returned her hands to him. In response to his urgency, she gripped a thick handful of his dark hair. If it hurt, he did not complain. Tessa pulled his head forward and kissed him hard.
Finally, Tessa’s back met with a solid surface. They had drifted across the room and landed on the far wall. She glanced around and realized they had also rotated so that their chairs now appeared to hang from the ceiling. She quickly looked back to Whynn to avoid becoming disoriented. He was a welcome focal point. He found another handle on this wall and his free hand located a vent that he could link his fingers into to steady himself.
Tessa was pinned between his glistening muscular body and the wall and she didn’t mind. Whynn wasted no time in taking advantage of the firm grip and renewed his thrusts with vigor. She gasped and grabbed onto his upper arms, her fingers sinking into his bulging biceps as he pulled himself forward. Nothing, not the chairs on the ceiling or the clothes dancing in the center of the room, could take their attention from each other. After what seemed the most delicious of eternities, they climaxed together, sated and spent.
Chapter 10
Tessa was safely strapped into her chair again as they made their approach. Just as Whynn had predicted, they were leaving the figurative eye-of-the-storm. The ride got bumpy again as he counted down their exit of the fixed end of z114. The turbulence abated once they were free of the wormhole’s gravitational forces thankfully. Whynn immediately sent a message to the nearby station. Obviously no one there was expecting someone to come flying out of the wormhole, but whoever received the message confirmed for him that only a few hours had passed while they had been in transit. That gave them a few hours before the DexTek ship would pass the station.
They docked and Whynn went to work rallying a security force to head off the ship. They prepped two large vessels that Whynn Tech had designed for possible future exploratory missions. These ships were equipped with laser cannons and projectile weaponry, just in case they explored somewhere that turned out to be hostile. The ships hadn’t been field tested yet, but Whynn managed to convince his team that it didn’t matter—this mission was of dire importance to the future of the company.
Once they were prepped, Tessa met Whynn at the dock
“What’re you doing here?” He sounded concerned.
“I’m going with you. I’m supposed to be with you when you retrieve the message, remember?”
“Actually, the old message just said you’d be with me at the message’s emergence point. That’s already happened. You were very helpful there, but now, I’m relying on my team to get the job done.”
“Erill Whynn,” she said indignantly, “I’ve come too far to sit on the sidelines now. I want to be with you when you get that piece of the future in your hands. I want to know if… well if….” She abandoned words and threw her arms around him locking him in a passionate kiss.
“Okay,” he said as he slowly separated himself from her embrace. “Climb aboard.”
Tessa was where she had committed to be, right by Whynn’s side, when his armed ships overtook the DexTek ship. They moved in front of it and started a slow breaking maneuver. The DexTek ship was forced to slow down as well to avoid a collision. They made an attempt to contact the ship, but no reply came. Then Whynn ordered a demonstration of their firepower. The crew wasted no time in flexing their guns, laser cannons blasting in an arc around the ship. They paused expectantly and sure enough a DexTek holo
-message arrived.
A man’s head appeared on the console. It appeared to be the same man as before back on the other ship, but this time he was facing them. The holo-image also showed expression and movement this time. Tessa realized it was a live feed when the man took a moment to survey each face in the room. His gaze settled on Whynn.
“Mr. Whynn,” the man boomed. “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person. I am Captain Bax. To what do we owe the welcome party?”
“Drop the act, Bax. I was aboard the ship you attacked on the far side of the belt. You have a piece of my property,” Erill stated boldly.
“I’m quite sure I don’t know what you mean. We’ve just returned from a routine mission surveying asteroids for potential mining opportunities.”
“I’ve seen survey ships and mining ships and your ship is neither,” Whynn scoffed.
At that, Bax dropped the act and spoke with the same conviction in his voice as Whynn had: “Mr. Whynn, this isn’t my first year as captain of a spacecraft. There’s no way that you could have been on the other side of that belt with us and somehow also have headed us off today. I confess, you have designed some powerful engines, but last I heard, they were still confined to sub-light speeds. Unless… there is some kind of… shortcut?” Bax was trying to get Whynn to admit that z114 was still open, but Whynn wasn’t going to fall into that trap.
“Well, I guess that just goes to show how much you know about our drives here at Whynn Technologies,” Whynn replied. He seemed to be reminding Bax that they were currently in Whynn territory.
“I’m sure the authorities would not be happy to hear that you fired a laser weapon at a corporate ship,” Bax ventured, but it didn’t shake Whynn.
“Not nearly as interested as they would be in your virtual attack on my ship and the termination of an artificial intelligence." That answered Tessa’s question about the unlawful deletion of an AI: It appeared to carry its own charge, less than murder, but still against the law and therefore punishable.
Captain Bax was silent for a moment. Of course, he’d intended for Whynn to be stranded and unable to prevent him from getting the message back to DexTek. He didn’t seem to have a plan for the predicament he was now in.
“Let’s contact the authorities right now,” Whynn suggested. “I am sure that the Interplanetary Guard would be glad to come right out to investigate what happened here. I can contact them if you like. I have it on good authority that their old DexTek 200 drives have been replaced with far superior engines, so they’d be here in no time at all.”
Chapter 11
Whynn asked Tessa to join him in the domed glass room atop Whynn Corp’s flagship building for the official opening of the year’s prophetic message. They enjoyed another sumptuous meal under the stars before the big moment.
As they settled back, sated by the delicacies they had just enjoyed, Whynn pulled out a small box. “This is the memory core containing the message. Once I put in my authorization code, the message will be displayed on the surface, but it’s designed to only be readable by one person at a time.” He tapped the box once. She didn’t see anything change, but clearly Whynn could now see the keypad on the black surface as he started tapping in his code.
He looked up. “Before I read the message, I wanted to ask you what you plan to do with yourself now. I mean, you’ve completed the one task I asked of you in order to secure your grant. What would you like to do with it?”
“Well, Mr. Whynn, spending some time in the Dextronin System has piqued my interest in you people. I mean really, scientifically, you should not exist. You are biologically identical to humans and yet have no fossil record to explain your presence.”
“Yes. I understand why we’d be quite an annoyance to a xeno-paleontologist such as yourself.” He grinned playfully.
“So, I think the only logical thing for a scientist such as myself to do is to stay in this system and figure you people out. I’m certain I can get Xeno-Bio to approve the project.”
“I’m sure you can. Especially once Whynn Technologies pledges to fund the endeavor. And who knows? I might need you to accompany me on another mysterious mission that has no relevance to your field of study.” They both lifted their glasses to that. Then he tapped the black box, revealing the message to himself. The sly grin he had been wearing expanded. “Looks like we have quite a year ahead of us.”
THE END
Equilibrium
Chapter 1
“Please, you have to let me go. Look, I don’t have any money right now, b-b-but I’ll get it soon!”
For all of Flint Moscow’s pleading, his captor was as immoveable as stone. He was a powerful looking man, at least six feet tall, with tanned skin burnished by the ravenous desert sun and wind. His most notable feature was the curious pair of black and red framed goggles covering his eyes. Anyone who’d ever encountered him knew he never took them off.
Flint’s only thoughts that day had been to have one last drink in his favorite bar right before taking his last coin and quitting this God-forsaken moon once and for all.
That thought was all but forgotten as his captor, a man known by the locals as “Eyeless Mort” (pronounced roughly as “Elyes”) smashed him in the head with a tankard of stale beer then thrust a stinking burlap sack over his head and dragged him from the bar. No one in The Pluto Inn would’ve dared intervene. Elyes was infamous for bring a ruthless thug-for-hire; he had been paid to do every kind of illegal job under the sun. This included breaking gamblers’ kneecaps on behalf of loan sharks, kidnapping and even murder if the price was right. As a rule, Elyes never went after females or children regardless of species. This did not make the males of Plutarch feel any safer.
Today, Elyes’ only concern was the deadbeat kicking and screaming as he tied him to the back seat of his hover-bike. The struggling of his victims didn’t bother him; he was impervious to human emotion, even though it did make up half his DNA. He was stone-cold because of the other half of him—the unflinching Stratan DNA. If there was anything to be said about that abhorrent alien race, they had the wisdom to never think too long or hard about their inherent lack of moral compass.
“Elyes, don’t hand me over to him, I’m begging you! He’ll kill me the second that you do!” Flint begged. “You know people who can smuggle me off of Plutarch—let’s cut a deal!” The screaming could be heard even over the growls of the hover-bike roaring to life. Elyes ignored them. He just hunched low, gripping the rusty handles tightly as he took off through the greyish sand covering the sparse landscape of Plutarch. This was the twelfth moon of Strata, a forgotten speck of rubble in the solar system; a place for riffraff and scumbags. Even though the year was 2053, Strata had not evolved too much more than being a bastardized replica of the American Wild West, circa 1800s Earth. On Plutarch, you counted yourself lucky if you could make a living off “legal” enterprises, let alone stay alive at all.
A black expansive form soon rose on the dusty horizon. White smoke billowed around Elyes as he brought his bike to a grinding halt. It was a ramshackle building shambled together from rotting wood and crumbling concrete, rising four-storeys high above the sand dunes dotting the melancholic landscape. Elyes thought it was a strange residence but this was his strangest client yet, and he shrugged it off. This was a job like any other; there was no need for further contemplation.
He hopped surprisingly gracefully off his bike and deftly untied the knots holding Flint captive to the metal bars. The prisoner renewed his desperate but useless pleas for mercy as Elyes gripped him by the back of his grubby shirt. He blocked Flint out as he absent-mindedly dragged him, bottom scraping a trail in the sand and gravel, up to the main entrance. He rapped five times on the large wooden door and was immediately admitted by a man wearing a brown patch over his right eye. Elyes noted tiny slivers of sunlight peeking out from slatted windows rising high in the walls of the foyer. He and his prisoner were gestured to go up a flight of rickety stairs that creaked and moaned with every step.
Though the building was dimly lit, Elyes stubbornly kept his goggles on. The rumors were true: he never took them off, save for when he washed or slept. What the rumor mill didn’t know, however, was they had been fitted with special lenses to help him see in the dark.
His hand still on Flint’s collar, Elyes drug him down the torch-lit stone hall, stopping to knock on a handsomely detailed door. The thought flitted through Elyes’ mind how curious it was to see this beauty within the crumbling fortress. It opened on a large, lavishly appointed room. The sultry tones of a traditional Stratan folk song played as several scantily clad, voluptuous women danced slowly and enticingly on the deep red carpet. He looks like an Earth sultan, Elyes thought to himself. The client was perched on several lush scatter pillows atop a carved wooden platform not unlike a theatrical stage in the center of the room. To further the exotic tableau, he was indulging himself from a luscious selection of delicacies arranged on a bronze platter.
Raising his eyes from the tasty offerings, the client beamed widely at Elyes and the prisoner, showcasing a mouth full of yellowing, uneven teeth. “Elyes Mort, we finally meet! My name is Yul Ulari, but you can call me ‘Yul’,” he laughed heartily.
This man’s name was whispered in the darkest corners of the moon with both envy and terror, but Elyes had never laid eyes on him before today. Despite his humanoid form, Elyes could immediately tell Yul was Stratan. His smile, though intended to charm, was etched with the sadistic pleasure most of his species wore as a badge of honor. It reminded Elyes of his own Stratan father, a cruel and cunning man. And it made him dislike the gangster all the more.
Romance: Alien Romance: Simply Aliens: A Ten Book Alien Romance Collection (Paranormal Scifi Interracial Romance) (Fantasy New Adult Alpha Short Stories) Page 32