* * * *
Their options were getting thinner and thinner. With Reyes and Shelly down, their manpower was basically cut in half. After a short debate, Johnson and Wilkes agreed to take the tractor and see what they could do about moving the main ship closer to what had become base camp to work on the necessary modifications, leaving Claudia to take care of their fallen crewmembers.
No one had mentioned it, but Houston’s calculations suggested the ice world was going to become less and less stable the nearer it got to the sun and they knew they’d landed on the ice sheet above this planet’s ocean. It wouldn’t have to completely melt to become a death threat for them. If it melted enough to weaken the ice they were at risk of losing the only possibility they had to get off the planet before it shot into deep space once more.
And that was the best case scenario.
If Jupiter’s gravitational pull altered the course even by a few degrees, they could fly right into the sun or into one of the inner planets circling the sun.
None of those would be good for the crew of the IP Expedition One.
But if the planet collided with Earth ….
Ninety five percent of the human race was still on Earth. Colonists had been heading for Mars for a full decade—since NASA had installed an artificial magnetosphere that had allowed the water and atmosphere to return to the planet. But they were still in the early days of colonizing the solar system—nothing more than a tiny sprinkling of colonies on various moons and planetoids and mostly they just had robotically controlled outposts that they’d hoped would one day be full-fledged colonies.
Anyway they cut it, they could be riding the rogue to their doom.
* * * *
As determined as Torin was not to acknowledge the truth, it was more than anxiety and frustration over his inability to act that was gnawing at him when Claudia shut him out again.
Bafflement was part of it.
None of the humans had the abilities of his people or any understanding of it as far as he could determine.
And yet, she could block him out—toss him out even when he’d managed to make a connection.
She shouldn’t have been able to.
There was no one even among his own kind that could do that.
Maybe it was his own reluctance, though?
Maybe it wasn’t her? Maybe there was just enough doubt lingering in his subconscious mind that he couldn’t completely overcome it?
He hadn’t thought that he was reluctant when he had sensed the presence of the humans and gone to investigate. He’d thought that he was willing, even eager, to do whatever it took to save them all.
He’d chosen her straight away—Claudia. He’d soothed his conscience with the reflection that his actions might well save both worlds—not just his own.
He would’ve been lying to say it didn’t bother him, at all, to use Claudia, but, when all was said and done, he was not going to actually harm her … in any way that she would not recover from. And he thought it was criminally reckless to refuse to use the only tool he had available to him when worlds were at stake—or could be—only because his method might cause her some emotional distress.
He dismissed his qualms after a little bit and began trying to gather the strength to try again. This time, he decided, he would ignore his reservations, moral or ethical considerations, and his distaste for the task.
Well, there was none and that was part of the moral quandary he found himself in.
In the days before the great disaster, he could have taken to mate any of the most beautiful women of his world, women of his class—his intellectual equal.
He’d found many that he did not mind bedding, but none that he was prepared to give himself completely to, to devote all that he was to and welcome as his mate.
He should not be drawn to this female at all, distracted by her in any way.
He knew there should be distaste.
She was human.
She wasn’t just far, far beneath him in class. She wasn’t even the same species and he should have found her repugnant, not attractive. He should have found joining with her on any level so distasteful as to make the joining nigh impossible, particularly on an ethereal level—soul to soul. A physical joining could not be as intimate.
But there was no point in lying to himself about it.
He didn’t find her repellent in any sense—the opposite in point of fact.
He was more drawn to her each time he went to her. He found her so distractingly appealing that he had been having trouble focusing on his true need—the needs of his people—which was to escape the trap nature had so callously thrown at them to threaten their very existence when they had believed they had prepared themselves for any eventuality.
If they could not escape, if he could not convince Claudia to help them escape, or trick her into helping, they were doomed. Their world was doomed and maybe hers, as well.
Chapter Seven
Claudia ‘woke’ to his kiss. She knew, instantly, that it was Torin, even though she also knew she wasn’t awake, that, instead, she was caught up in one of the strangely realistic dream sequences she’d experienced since they’d crashed on the rogue world.
The dreams that were becoming more complex and real each time she had a new one.
They were standing in a room unlike anything she recalled ever seeing—alien—but so far from what she thought of as ‘high tech’ that it confused her.
She had only the perception of brilliant colors, drapes and pillows, furnishings heavily embellished with intricate carvings and exotically shaped windows and doors, though—brief, intriguing—before she found herself trapped between hard wall and hard, manly body. Felt his heated desire, felt taut muscle and sinew as every plain and angle of his body imprinted itself upon hers.
Excitement not anxiety had already begun to thread her veins from his masterful domination before the first brush of his lips across hers. And then he pressed his lips more tightly against hers in demand and she parted her lips in invitation, welcoming the conquest of her senses in erotic delight.
The feel of his mouth on hers was completely unique and substantial enough to be real.
She absorbed his taste and scent as if she was starving, with unimaginable hunger, feeling giddy with delight because she knew they belonged only to him. It was like drinking some sort of exotic elixir, an intoxicating brew that went right to her head and scattered what remained of her wits.
And when, at last, he broke that breathtaking kiss, she found that she was naked and he was naked and the two of them were entwined upon a bed that seemed to go on forever. The brush of his hot skin against hers awakened her flesh to intense sensation, making her skin pebble all over, sending a shiver through her that was entirely anticipation.
He moved against her restlessly, pressing the turgid flesh of his desire almost painfully against her belly until she opened her legs and tried to capture the delicious sensation where her body craved it.
He pulled away, then, to align his body with hers, she knew, and she tilted her head and lifted her eyelids to take in the sight of their bodies merging.
The discovery that he had two penises was such a shock that it jolted her right out of her dream. She awoke with a sharp inhalation, hearing her heart thundering in her ears, so disoriented by the abrupt transition that it took her many moments to figure out where she was.
They’d managed to drag the supply hab close enough to connect it with the med hab and seal it and then had transformed an area of the supply hab into sleeping/living quarters.
Thankfully, that had allowed them to discard their suits while inside. Houston wasn’t listening to her heart galloping ninety miles an hour so she didn’t have anyone breathing down her neck and demanding to know why her stats had just gone haywire!
It was hard enough to deal with without that, without the need to make up a believable lie to cover it.
She lay back down and pulled the coverlet up before anyone notic
ed and questioned her, struggling to regulate her breathing.
Contrary to the ‘laws’ of dreams, though, the images didn’t begin to fade when she’d managed to calm herself. As before, she began to recall more details rather than less and to realize that there was something vaguely familiar about the room in her dream. It reminded her of … something she’d seen before, she was sure. It had been furnished in a way that was as exotic as her alien lover was, filled with flowing, deep blue draperies embellished with designs in gleaming, spun golden threads in every shade from palest yellow, near white, to a gleaming red gold tint.
The door and window, she recalled, had been arched—but it wasn’t a simple roman-like arch. It looked—almost oriental, she decided.
The bed seemed to consist only of a vast mattress and dozens of brightly colored pillows.
She couldn’t begin to imagine why she would’ve dreamed of a blue alien with two penises!
Maybe it was sort of a nightmare? Where seemingly ordinary events transformed and became a threat?
Except she hadn’t been afraid.
She couldn’t even say that she’d been repulsed.
The memory didn’t repulse her.
On the contrary, as soon as the shock wore off she began to feel a vast sense of disappointment.
She’d been aroused, she finally acknowledged, to a point nearing culmination and then she jolted out of her fantasy before she could feel complete.
Damn it!
Her first wet-dream—ever—and she’d screwed it up!
She discovered she couldn’t dismiss it as a wet-dream, though, or in fact any sort of dream. It went beyond the fact that everything that had happened, everything she’d felt, had seemed completely real.
She was certain, now, that Reyes had seen him, too.
So did that make him real?
Was it even possible for both of them to hallucinate the same image? Let alone likely?
But then again, even though she thought Reyes was referring to ‘him’ the alien, she didn’t know that he actually had had the same hallucination, she realized. He’d just said ‘him’ and seemed to be referring to her alien.
And if it was some sort of AI then they could see the same ‘hallucination’.
She just didn’t know how likely that was.
She thought it was just too farfetched to believe the inhabitants of the rogue world were still alive, even if they’d managed to build an underground city to support life for a while. And maybe the planet had also been too long wandering to support the possibility of AI. She couldn’t imagine anything built by man lasting that long let alone functioning after a thousand or more years.
Realizing after a while that she wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, she got up and went through the airlock and into the med lab to check on Reyes and Shelly.
* * * *
Encouraged by Houston to make haste, the crew headed to the supply hab and began gathering up what they thought they might need for the attempt to move the main ship to home base or at least move it beyond the threat of sinking to the bottom of Rogue’s sea if the ice began to melt.
“How is Adams doing?” Johnson asked as they worked, frowning. “I thought you said it was a mild concussion. Shouldn’t she be up and about by now? At least able to manage some of her duties?”
And Claudia had thought for a minute he was actually worried about Shelly! She should have known Johnson was focused on Johnson—his concern nothing more than a roundabout complaint that she wasn’t pulling her part of the load.
In all honesty, Claudia was torn between anxiety that something was wrong that they hadn’t discovered and the sneaking suspicion that Shelly was using her injury as an excuse to ‘hide’—either because she wanted to shirk her responsibilities or because she was still scared shitless and it gave her a chance to hide ‘safely’ in the med lab.
“I don’t. Honestly. It seems like she should be awake and getting around, but who knows how a person will heal? Or how fast? All I can say is that her vitals are telling me she’s not in danger.” She shrugged. “Maybe the meds are contributing to her sleeping so much?”
“What about Reyes? How’s he coming along?” Wilkes asked.
Claudia immediately felt a pang. “I don’t know. I can’t see any improvement.”
“At least he’s stable,” Johnson responded—very offhand and completely lacking in empathy.
Claudia had to choke back an angry retort. “I don’t think we can consider him stable,” she said after a moment. “A failure to prosper isn’t stable in my book.”
“If he isn’t deteriorating, that’s exactly what it is,” Johnson ground out in a tone that suggested he expected her to argue with him, as if he sensed Claudia’s opinion of him had sunk to a new low.
There was no point in arguing about the situation, though, Claudia realized. They’d done what they could for him. From here on out, he was on his own.
Torin had offered to help, of course, and she was oh so tempted to take him up on the offer now that she could see that nothing they’d been able to do seemed to be making him any better, but even saying they actually did exist, there was the question of their capabilities. The question regarding their motives. And finally, she had no idea where they were if they did exist or how to get there.
He’d suggested that they needed help. They needed her to release them
It occurred to her for the second time to wonder how and why they were imprisoned.
Had he told her the truth as far as that went? He’d suggested that something had happened that they hadn’t anticipated and they’d gotten trapped.
Or had they committed crimes against their people and been incarcerated?
She considered that, but she couldn’t believe a whole planet would’ve been dedicated to use as a prison. The Rogue would’ve formed in a solar system and then been expelled at some point—possibly by the arrival of another rogue or possibly at the time the planets were forming by a larger neighbor that had gotten out of its own orbital path and had thrown it out of the system.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t prisoners and even if they weren’t, had never committed any crimes at all against their own people. Beyond that, Earth people were aliens to them and they wouldn’t feel the same moral obligations to them even if they were good, law abiding citizens. They could very easily see them as enemies.
Torin didn’t seem to treat her as an enemy, but what did she really know about him?
And, even saying all that she had experienced was actual contact with a living, thinking being, and Torin was friendly, she couldn’t just assume the others wouldn’t perceive them as a threat and an enemy.
“Maybe,” Claudia responded finally, “but he isn’t doing better and that’s something to worry about.” She paused. “I’m worried about it, anyway.”
Wilkes cut in before Johnson could say more. “Give Houston a call and see if they can bring in someone for a medical consultation.”
Claudia nodded, relieved at the suggestion, and headed in to call Houston as soon as she’d finished helping the men load up for the trek to the main ship and seen them off. She watched them until the darkness swallowed them—which took considerably more distance than when they’d first arrived.
They couldn’t tell how fast the rogue world was moving, but it seemed clear that it was moving damned fast toward the inner solar system if she could tell a difference in the light reaching them in less than two weeks.
It made her fear that Houston’s calculations might be off.
But then, again, she didn’t have the trajectory herself so she had no idea of the relation between the rogue and other planets in the system.
She discovered when she contacted Houston that they were way ahead of her. They’d already brought in specialists to study the readings from the equipment hooked up to Reyes.
Both doctors looked grim when they outlined a suggested treatment and alternates in the doses and medicines being fed to Reyes throu
gh his IV.
He wasn’t going to make it.
They didn’t say that, but she saw it in their expressions and body language.
Worse, the crash had decimated a lot of the medical supplies. She managed to locate two of the drugs suggested, but they were far enough down the list of choices that she thought they were probably not going to be very effective.
A knot the size of her fist swelled in her throat when she went in to give Reyes the medicine.
He surprised her by opening his eyes and looking at her.
Which wasn’t a good thing considering she didn’t have time to compose herself.
“I don’t want to die here, kid.”
It took Claudia three tries to swallow past the knot in her throat. “Don’t talk like that! You won’t. You’re getting better.”
He studied her eyes. “He said they could help.”
Claudia’s gaze sharpened. “Who?”
His lips tightened. “The alien, Claudia.”
Claudia was both alarmed and relieved. “We don’t know that that was real.”
“You think you were hallucinating? And I had the same hallucination?”
“I ….” Claudia stopped, swallowing the denial. “Not that, but … if we’re dealing with alien beings we don’t really know what happened out there. We don’t know what their intentions toward us might be. And, even saying they’re completely benign, they don’t know what’s wrong with you and even if they did—they’re alien—not like us.”
He swallowed with an effort, his eyes drifting closed as the painkiller she’d given him began to kick in. “I’d at least like the chance to see my family again.”
Claudia left before she could start blubbering.
She began to lose her grip on her emotions almost the moment she left the med lab, though, and sought a quiet place to regain control.
The shower Johnson had rigged up had been her favorite place since it had gone online and she headed for it, stripping down and climbing in. The water from the pool was hot already. She didn’t have to wait for it to warm up.
She wept till she was exhausted and it took all she could do to drag herself out of the shower, dry off, and dress again.
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