by Lisa Lace
I shook my head. I had to even the odds. If I fired a missile at one ship, it would keep them busy for a moment while I focused on the other. Before I could finish the thought, the missile was out of the launch bay and chasing the enemy on the right. The fighter veered away, and I imagined I could see one of their pilots shooting at it.
I turned my attention to the second ship and fired until I broke through its shield. Then I aimed carefully and blew out its fuel cells. The ship immediately dropped back. Both damaged ships were almost off my screen. But the third starship had destroyed the missile and was on our tail again.
Narrowing my eyes, I let my mind float, allowing my reflexes to follow the erratic movements of the evasive ship. I managed to get a lock but lost it when Gwen steered violently to the right. I cursed, trying to get a lock again.
“A steady hand would be nice.” My eyes focused on the sole remaining fighter.
“Would you rather have us hit that asteroid?”
Asteroid? I had been so focused on my problems that I had lost track of the forward monitors. They were full of rocks flying toward us at high velocity. Most of them looked small and relatively harmless, but the one she dodged must have been big enough to do some real damage.
I groaned. “You took us into an asteroid belt?”
“Are all your gaming skills failing now that you’re out in the real world?”
“I’m going to have to hold my fire.” I tried talking through the problem. “I can’t get a lock if we’re moving around so much.”
“You’re going to be waiting a long time.” I turned my head to look at her. She was busy with her console, keeping her eyes on the screens without glancing in my direction.
“Why?” I frowned.
“We’re going through the asteroid belt, not around it.”
“Wait a second.” The fighter fired another shot at us. Our shields were so weak that our ship rocked to one side. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because no human pilot has ever flown through an asteroid belt without being turned into space junk.”
“As a matter of fact, you’re right. Most human pilots can’t fly through asteroid belts.” Gwen glanced at the pirates behind us. She looked like she was trying to remember something. “I heard a rumor about one special pilot who could beat the machines. I wonder where he is. We could sure use him right now.”
I stood up. “I’m good, but this is suicide. Do you really think I can do this?”
She looked deep into my eyes, standing up and coming over so we were nose-to-nose. “Actually, I do.”
She moved to the port console because she knew I preferred the starboard side. We both sat down.
Could I do this? Theoretically, yes. But was I willing to risk our lives on a possibility? I had made many mistakes in my life. If I screwed this up, we’d be dead. I looked over at the woman I loved. She believed in me.
Another shot rocked the ship, and a red light started flashing on one of the monitors. The shields were at five percent. They wouldn’t be able to protect us against another hit until they recharged.
“I’m on it.” Gwen jumped up and headed to the repair station.
If I didn’t succeed, they were going to kill us. I sat down at the console and put on my game face. I could do it. I was a master at piloting and even better than a computer. We weren’t going to die out there if I had anything to say about it.
GWEN
Anders steered us into the asteroid belt as I ran a maintenance diagnostic. The computer identified the problem, and I gave the system permission to make the necessary repairs. After a minute, the red light stopped blinking.
We were moving at maximum speed. Our ship was at the edge of the field. The asteroids were all either small, easy to avoid, or not a danger.
I checked the monitor. The fighter was still tailing us.
“Buckle up. I hope you have a strong stomach.”
“I’ve done a few simulations.” I held up three fingers. “In the centrifuge after breakfast, I walked away by myself. I never blacked out. I wasn’t even dizzy. ”
I smugly smiled until I realized Anders wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the monitors in front of him.
“I wasn’t kidding about strapping in. You have to be ready. This might be worse than the training simulators.” His face held no trace of a joke when he met my eyes for only a moment.
“You’re starting to scare me. Whose idea was this, anyway?”
“We’re going to do this, but there’s zero room for error.”
I nodded, determination coming over me. “I’m up for it.”
“That’s good. If we make even one mistake, we’re dead. We’re coming into the central part of the asteroid belt now. Reduce speed by fifty percent.”
A class four starship was a complicated piece of machinery. Two pilots split the responsibilities. One directed the ship, and the other was in charge of speed, repair, and defense.
Since Anders was steering, he was in command and could give me orders. But I had autonomy over my tasks. I didn’t need to ask or tell him what I was doing.
I started slowing down as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Our lives depended on how well we worked together. Anders maneuvered easily around the first few asteroids, not asking me to adjust our speed at all.
“They’re still gaining on us,” I reported after taking a quick look at the rear monitor.
Anders couldn’t answer me. He was already in a trance like state.
The asteroids started coming in earnest. We were able to dodge the majority, and suddenly we were in the thick of things. Asteroids were everywhere. Anders stopped trying to avoid any collisions except with the huge rocks that would smash our ship to bits.
“Cut velocity by half again.” I moved to comply as quickly as I could.
There were silent explosions every few seconds as smaller asteroids hit the hull and blew up. Our shields didn’t have enough strength to protect us from anything.
“Hold on.” Anders was shouting now, and it startled me. Suddenly we were sideways, and a massive asteroid blew past, narrowly missing us. We dropped straight down, avoiding the second asteroid in our flight path. With a quick turn, he steered us around and flipped us over a massive one, then he drifted to the right, avoiding a smaller rock. I marveled at his reflexes and unwavering concentration.
I couldn’t relax while Anders weaved an intricate path through the asteroid belt. My nerves were on edge, but unbelievably, we were getting through.
After we had been tumbling through the asteroids for five minutes, he spoke again. “That wasn’t too bad. We’re getting to the nasty part now.”
He was right about it being nothing like the gravity simulator, the bane of every starship pilot trainee’s existence. The simulator was a powerful centrifuge that reproduced the pressure of flying into a planet’s atmosphere and moving at extreme speeds through space. Most trainees hated it and got sick. I never had.
I wasn’t planning on throwing up this time either, but the movement was pretty intense. I tried to focus on whatever Anders was telling me to do. Otherwise, I might pay too much attention to the ship’s motion and lose control. I concentrated on staying calm and doing my job as the ship lurched from side to side, then accelerated straight up and looped around. The speed alone was dizzying. He hadn’t asked me to slow down at all. He was racing through the blanket of asteroids like it wasn’t even there.
It was incredible and a little bit of a turn-on. I pushed any thoughts of romance away. There would be enough time for that if we managed to survive. I held my tongue a thousand times, wanting to shout a warning, but I knew that speaking would break his concentration.
He veered to the right and moved the ship in a circle then banked steeply in the other direction, making a path around five giant asteroids. We were moving faster for some reason. Anders threaded in and out between the enormous boulders. Despite the inertial compensators, the force pushe
d me back in my seat.
Was he trying to get style points?
I noticed that we were matching the speed of one of the biggest asteroids I had seen so far. He flew beside it, then over it. I couldn’t believe what he was doing, but before I could blink, he had landed us on the huge rock.
“Deploy clamps and stabilizers.” After he gave the order, he sat back in his chair and let out an enormous sigh.
I scrambled to attach us to the ground. Once the ship was stable, I turned to face Anders. He was slumped back in his seat with his eyes closed and his hands over his face.
“Did you just land us on an asteroid going at nearly the speed of light?” I still couldn’t believe it. It was supposed to be impossible. There’s plenty of room for a ship to touch down, in theory. But the logistics of matching velocity and deceleration were thought to be too much for pilots, even with the help of a computer.
“I think we did.” He was breathing heavily as if he had just run a marathon.
“I guess the rumors about that pilot were true.”
Chapter Eight
ANDERS
I took my hands away from my face to look at Gwen. She leaned back in her chair, fingers interlaced over her flat stomach. Wonder filled her bright blue eyes. I couldn’t have done it without Gwen. No one else was good enough. We were quite a team.
I stared at her lovely face, framed by the flaming red hair that I loved, and wished we were a permanent pair. I wanted her to be my wife so we could do things like this together for the rest of our lives.
“That was unbelievable, Anders.”
I felt a half-smile pull my lips up on one side. “It was, wasn’t it?”
Adrenaline pumped through my body, and I was on a natural high as my bloodstream flooded with feel-good chemicals. A near-death experience is the extreme sports enthusiast’s drug of choice.
I grabbed Gwen with one arm and pulled her into me. She gasped as she felt my cock between us. I felt her nipples against my chest.
“There is nothing that makes me harder than doing the impossible,” I whispered into her ear. I kissed the spot where her neck meets her shoulder, and she swallowed audibly.
“There’s nothing that makes me wetter than watching you do the impossible.”
I closed my eyes, sending a grateful prayer into the heavens. I dragged Gwen back to the only horizontal surface on the ship — a couch in the changing area. I ripped back the curtain and pushed us inside, leaving it fluttering open.
I quickly removed her shirt and sports bra. She tore my shirt off me, pulling my lips to hers and kissing me deeply. I didn’t notice where our clothes landed. I was too lost in her presence to pay attention to anything else. Soon we were both naked, and I pushed her down onto the couch, covering her with my body.
My desire was at a fever pitch already. I felt hard as a rock. I wanted to bury myself in her and thrust until we both came apart...but I couldn’t do that. Even through the haze of lust, my training restrained me. I had an idea for what might be the next best thing, remembering how she had woken me that morning in the hotel and how good it had felt.
I kissed her until I thought I might explode. She was pushing her hips up toward mine, silently pleading. When I touched her clit, her hips bucked. It only took a few minutes before she was ready to go.
I pushed her legs apart, spreading her open. “Anders, what are you doing?” She looked at me through half-open eyes.
“I’m not going all the way inside.” I slid myself between her folds, being careful not to penetrate her.
She drew in a deep, shaky breath as I thrust between her legs, rubbing against her clit and her sex. She was slick, and it took all my restraint not to push inside of her. But this felt pretty good too.
She moaned as I rubbed along all her sensitive parts. “Oh, Anders.” I bent my neck down to one of her pink nipples, taking it between my teeth and scoring it before I sucked hard. “Fuck. I’m close.”
“Touch yourself.”
Her eyes got wide.
“Do it.”
She shut her eyes and slid her hand between us, rubbing her clit. I sped up, hoping she would come soon because I didn’t know how much longer I could hold back. Her moans started to get loud, and I thrust faster. My hot skin rubbed with the sweetest friction against her soft, wet flesh.
She arched her back up toward me, muscles spasming involuntarily in bliss. I went even faster until the heat, wetness, and her soft body convulsing against me pushed me over. I came, groaning. How could it feel so damn good?
I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like inside her. I would probably lose my mind.
A few minutes later, Gwen was playing with my hair. “Anders, I feel great. I need you to fuck me.” She sighed and laid her head on my arm. We were squeezed onto the couch, facing each other with our bodies arranged so we could fit together.
“Don’t talk like that.” I squeezed my eyes shut and felt myself getting hard again.
“But I do. I feel empty.”
I pressed my lips together, trying to control myself. “All I want to do right now is flip you on your back and fuck you until you can’t walk.”
She whimpered. “What’s stopping you?”
“I can’t. Do you know about Bond Rejection Syndrome?”
She shrugged, closing her eyes and laying her head back down again. “No, but it sounds stupid.”
“When an Auxem mates with a female, it creates a life bond, remember?”
She shivered when I used the word ‘mate’. I felt her nod against my skin.
“This is great if the two people are in love and married. It brings them together and makes it so they can’t lie to one another. The man will never mate with another woman.”
“It doesn’t sound stupid now.”
“The problems come when the couple is not in love and not married. It’s different when they only share an attraction.” My heart felt heavy at the thought. “If they fuck under those circumstances, the bond will be corrupted. Sometimes Bond Rejection Syndrome occurs, which can lead to madness or death for both people.”
“Okay, it’s stupid.”
“Sex without love is not advisable for someone from Auxem.”
“I guess I get it.” She sounded like she wanted to be okay with it, but wasn’t.
“I’m not sure that you do.” I lifted her chin and forced her to look at me. “I want to make love to you, Gwen, more than anything I have ever wanted. If it weren’t for Bond Rejection Syndrome, I would take you to bed and not let you out for a week.”
“Do you think you have that much stamina?”
“You have no idea, woman. I feel like I could go forever.”
“I wish I could be there to see it.”
I did too.
GWEN
I wondered how I had survived all the previous years of my life without Anders giving me an orgasm as I came again under his skillful hands. We had both been pretty worked up after all the stress and adrenaline that came from speeding through the asteroid field. Fooling around helped relieve the immediate tension, but I still felt tight. I craved the release I could only get by having Anders inside me.
But I would never get that because we weren’t in love. I had a vague understanding of Bond Rejection Syndrome. Mating was supposed to be dangerous to someone from Auxem if the two people didn’t love each other. It was a good thing I hadn’t had that problem with Jake.
The implication was that we weren’t in love. We weren’t, of course. At least, I wasn’t in love with him. But every time I climaxed from his expert touch, or when he kissed me tenderly and passionately, or when he looked at me intensely, I kind of thought that maybe we could be.
But that was silly. No matter how I felt about him, Anders didn’t care about me, no matter what his body did. He was in lust with me. When we were back on the ship, he would find someone else. I had seen the pattern repeated many times. It wouldn’t do to get my emotions entangled with this alien.
&n
bsp; All I could do was enjoy the mind-blowingly good sex for as long as it lasted. Hopefully, we could go back to being friends and coworkers. I wondered if things would be awkward when he showed up for Friday night beers with his latest fuck buddy or, even worse, his new wife. My stomach clenched at the thought.
I didn’t want any woman but me having Anders inside of her. I felt like clawing out the imaginary woman’s eyes for daring to look at him. He was mine.
I blinked, taken aback by the ferocity of my thoughts. Anders wasn’t mine at all. He wasn’t my lover to keep, only to enjoy for a while. He wasn’t my friend either. We had crossed that line long ago. He wasn’t my man because he didn’t love me.
He wasn’t my anything. I would have to remember that. At least his body was mine for as long as he allowed.
ANDERS
We walked into the palace on Marka wearing our pilot’s uniforms, hoping that we didn’t look too scruffy to see the queen. A quick glance at the other supplicants made me feel better about our clothing immediately. The peasants in line to speak with the Markana were destitute. Some of the women had dirty faces and missing teeth, and were clothed in little more than rags.
I wondered if they were former sex slaves who had been freed and tossed out into the street. Without any marketable skills or ways to get jobs, many resorted to prostitution or begging. The Markana tried to help everyone, but rebuilding a world wasn’t an easy task. Many fell through the cracks.
I tried not show any discomfort at the body odor of unwashed flesh.
Gwen clung to me as we walked down the hallway to the end of the line. The floor was an off-white color, made from polished stone that showed our reflection. The walls were pure white, with adornments here and there that gave splashes of color. Blue and white figurines. A painting of a sunset — red, orange, and yellow. A single purple flower floating in a glass bowl.
There were a lot of people in line. I guessed we would be waiting for a couple of hours. I knew Lyzette was thorough. She would never rush anyone, instead preferring to give everyone as much time as necessary.
When we reached the end of the line, we slid down the wall and sat beside each other on the floor. Gwen pulled her knees up and wrapped an arm around them. I knew she felt out of her element. She never let go of my hand.