by Calista Skye
The mere idea sends hard tingles to my pussy. Gods, that river of alien booze made me horny. Or rather, it removes the inhibitions that make me ignore the horniness.
I’ve been in mortal danger before on this planet. And when I get out of it and the fear subsides, it always makes me all kinds of excited. Before, I had no chance to do much about it except wait for night-time and maybe get some release by myself, making sure to be very discreet and quiet because I had girls sleeping one foot away from me on either side. Right now, there’s an actual guy right here. With some spectacular equipment, looks like. And we’re alone and he just saved me from those moth monsters.
“Did you hear the scream?”
Brax’tan studies the paintings. “The talass scream to warn each other. Still, I had to cut one of them into ribbons before they’d leave. They must have been very sure of victory.”
I scratch my head. “Was that a ‘yes’?”
He ignores my question and taps his lips with one finger. “It would take a long time to figure this out,” he agrees. “And yet, this part here appears to be important. Note how an oval has been drawn around it. In red and black. I see that nowhere else on this wall. Doesn’t this figure, here, look like a drop to you? A drop of water?”
“It does. Just like that one looks like a man, that one looks like a dactyl, that one looks like a sophiasaurus and that one looks like fire. Some of them look like something. Some don’t. Same as in our cave. But what do they mean? When taken together?”
He taps a sequence of figures on the wall. “There is some logic to this one.”
I stare at the figures. A drop and a man and an L-shaped figure and a cloud and a triangle pointing up. Probably the alien booze water is making me stupid, because I don’t see it. “Uh-huh.”
“The man is probably a man. Or a woman,” he adds thoughtfully, looking me up and down in a way that’s pretty pleasant and makes me shoot my hip out a little. “Let’s assume that the drop is water. Or something similar. These two lines connected in a straight angle… I don’t know. This one that looks like a puff of smoke—”
“Or a cloud,” I offer, wanting to help.
“Or a cloud,” he agrees. “Yes, a cloud, I think. Even better. It has to do with the sky. And this one here, these three lines—”
“Triangle,” I state in English. “Tri-ang-el. Three angles. One, two, three.”
“Ah. These three angles, which it seems to me could also be seen as three lines… could they not symbolize a mountain?”
I sigh. “So a man, a drop of water, an L, a cloud and a mountain. It’s random. And how do you know it’s supposed to be read from right to left? You guys don’t even have a written language. Read the other way, it’s a mountain, a cloud, an L, water and a dude.
“It’s just a guess that my way is right,” he says mildly. “Because I read it as a man who wants to get up and into the mountain has to seek out water.”
“Which is what you did a couple of hours ago? By throwing yourself into a river? Okay, I see the logic. But we already knew that.”
“I think the cloud means up. Towards the sky.”
Finally, some of my rational thoughts are breaking through the increasingly heavy and actually quite pleasant haze from the not-water. “Instructions for how to get from here and into Bune.”
“That would be my guess.”
“And the L? The two lines in a straight angle?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
I pull a hank of my now very frizzy hair behind one ear. “It’s weak.”
“Maybe. I imagine a man, not unlike myself, discovering how to get into Bune. And then wanting the secret to not be lost with him, he paints these instructions on the wall, then draws a red and a black outline to show its significance.”
It’s my turn to shrug. A caveman with no knowledge of a written language — how would he try to convey a message using symbols? It actually makes sense. “How would you follow these instructions?”
“Find water. Go up. Into the inside of Bune!” He smiles happily, but there’s a glint in his eye that shows me that he knows it’s not that simple.
I can’t hold back a little smile myself. “Well, you lead the way.”
“I think I know where there might be water.” He marches past me back where we came from, into the room with the waterfall.
I follow, keeping my eyes glued to his back and butt inside his clingy kilt. How would those buns of steel feel in my hands? While pulling him deeper in me?
“Water!” Brax’tan says triumphantly and points into the large pool where I was hiding from the giant moth beings.
“We’ve both been in there,” I point out, having to raise my voice a little because of the dull thunder-roar from the waterfall. “None of us seemed to go up, exactly.”
“That is true,” he agrees. “But did you look around for anything when you were in there?”
“Not really.”
“Nor did I. Perhaps it’s worth the effort.”
In the light from the torch, the surface of the water is black and threatening. Except it’s not really water, but some other fluid that makes Earth chicks horny and their minds hazy.
“Perhaps.” Then I suddenly realize why the pool seemed weird to me. “The water has to go somewhere. The cave is not filling up, even though a lot of water falls in here. There is no obvious way for it to drain. It has to be below the surface.”
“That was my worry. Hold this.” Brax’tan hands me his big torch, then calmly walks to the edge of the water and dives in, still wearing his sword and his pack. I suppose it doesn’t matter much — he’s been splashing around in that water not long ago.
He comes up once for air, then jackknives and dives into the murky depths of the not-water.
I stand on the edge of the pool and hold the torch out over the surface as far as I can. He needs light to see by down there.
Two minutes later he comes up again, just as I’m beginning to worry.
He wipes his hair out of his face. “I think I know what the two lines mean.”
“You do?”
He looks up at me. “Are you coming?”
“Is it a way into the spaceship?”
He thinks for a moment. “It’s a way into something.”
Shit. I really don’t want to go into the cold water again. And how will I bring my crossbow?
“I’ll hold your weapon,” Brax’tan says as if he knows what I’m thinking.
Fine. If this is a chance to find a new way into Bune, one that might be a little unexpected for whoever controls the spaceship, then that’s exactly what I’ve been hoping to find.
I take the bolt out of the crossbow and put it in my short quiver, then hand him the heavy weapon. “It can’t shoot right now.”
He holds it in one large hand like a pencil, then treads the steel bow and string onto his arm. “That may be for the best.”
I scratch my head. The haziness in my mind is getting worse. “Can you tell me what the L means?”
“I can. But it’s better if you see for yourself.”
I sit down on the ledge, put the burning torch on the ground and plunge my feet into the not-water. “Why do you want to go inside Bune, anyway?”
7
- Delyah -
The light in his eyes flickers for a moment. Then he grins, and his white fangs shine in the light from the torch. “I don’t know!”
“Okay.” I drop into the cold, alien fluid.
We both take a deep breath, and then Brax’tan takes my hand and we both dive into the cold depths.
I see it immediately. There’s a hole in the rock right under the ledge I came from, and I think I can see a tiny speck of white light further in.
Brax’tan drags me in there, and I swim as well as I can. I’m vaguely aware that if I hadn’t been not-drunk on not-water, I would have panicked hard right about now. I’m inside a rock tunnel filled with fluid, and I can’t get air until I get to the other side. If there
even is any air there. I should have asked Brax’tan first. This is probably the most reckless, dangerous thing I’ve done on Xren. And, I calmly reckon, very possibly the last.
Brax’tan pulls me upwards, my head breaks the surface, and I gratefully gulp air into my lungs while a strong arm holds me up.
“We should be quiet,” the caveman whispers into my ear. “This is as far as I went. I didn’t check if there was someone here.”
I try to gulp air a little more silently. There’s light in here, a soft, white sheen that reminds me so much of the insides of Bune I’ve seen before that we pretty much have to be inside the spaceship.
We’re in a tunnel of some kind, and the water drifts lazily along it, dragging us with it.
“The L was a way to tell you there was a tunnel under the ledge,” I conclude. “Going in perpendicular to the wall. Or something. That interpretation doesn’t exactly leap off the page. Or the wall.”
Brax’tan ignores my not-drunk mutterings and climbs out of the water, then drags me up like I weigh the same as a down pillow. I actually don’t mind being manhandled like this. It’s nice to feel his immense strength so close.
We’re standing on another ledge, but this isn’t rock. This is some alien material, soft to the touch. It has a slight glow to it.
The water is running silently down the tunnel past us, into a circular hole. The air is stale and smells of... nothing. After almost a year in a jungle that’s always reeking of everything organic I can imagine, the almost complete absence of any odors feels as creepy as the silence in here.
I draw closer to Brax’ton and his dry, manly scent. There’s something I think he should know. “You know, you have a really cute butt. Can I touch it?”
Only when he turns to give me that alien frown do I realize that I’ve said something weird again. That damn not-water is turning me into a harlot!
My cheeks go hot. I have to fill this silence. “What I mean by that is, we’re inside the spaceship. Inside Bune. It’s a huge machine for flying through space. Did I tell you that already?”
He’s still frowning. He’s not buying it. “That’s what you meant to say?”
“Um. Yes. I sometimes express myself like that. In seemingly strange ways.”
“Seemingly? Commenting on my rear?”
I wave one hand nonchalantly. “Oh, it’s an alien thing. I’ll explain it some time.”
He keeps walking. “You were saying about the machine to fly through space?”
“Yeah, so, we think there’s someone still in here, controlling it. Someone who’s not too nice.”
He hands back the crossbow. “Then you might need this.”
I tighten the string and make a bolt ready. But I don’t load it into the bow. I’m too not-drunk to be trusted with a loaded weapon. “I hope not.”
The tunnel ends in a wall from the same alien material as everything else. As we approach, the material shrinks silently away and reveals a corridor, clearly made for larger beings than humans or even cavemen. The ceiling has to be twenty feet above me.
“This is big,” I state unnecessarily.
Brax’tan looks around in wonder. “A large cave.”
“The guts of a spaceship,” I correct him. “This is not a mountain. A space-ship.” I punctuate each syllable with a jab into his shoulder with my index finger.
“It’s like you think that alien word has any meaning to me.”
“It’s an alien machine. I know you know that word.”
“I do. We have one or two machines at the village.”
“This is a different kind of machine. It’s a large ship… no, a house. No, a whole village. A large village house cave built from this stuff.” I tap the soft wall. “And it can fly in the air. In the sky. Very far and very fast. To other planets. In space.”
“I know all those words. But even I know that Bune has always been here. It has never flown.”
“It really has. Gosh, those are some thick arms you have.” It’s hard to concentrate on anything at all when this amazing guy is so close and I haven’t felt male touch in forever. The small sliver of my mind that’s still more or less coherent coolly notices that the not-drunkenness from the not-water is not affecting my motor skills, which is at least something. And it makes me wonder how much of that stuff will cause a fatal poisoning. Well, there are worse ways to go.
The large corridor continues for twenty yards, then abruptly ends in a wall that silently folds itself away when we approach. Beyond is darkness.
Brax’tan gently takes my arm and steps past me, so he’s between the darkness and me. He silently draws his sword.
I sigh. That would have been such a romantic gesture if we were a couple. The warrior protecting his dame. No, that’s not right. His damsel? I chuckle. Me, a damsel! It’s too funny.
I stay behind him and peer past his huge bulk. I see shapes and reflections and dim light. But not movement.
“Let’s just go?” I state and try to march past Brax’tan, but he easily keeps me behind him.
“Sometimes bad things hide in darkness,” he says, much more quietly than I did.
But at least we’re going up to the doorway, and the caveman looks inside while I prod his back with two fingers. His muscles are endlessly fascinating to me, as well as the pitch-black stripes that have a texture like suede. The hard contours of his muscles move under my fingertips, and his scarred skin is soft and warm to the touch.
I casually slide my hand down his side and push it a little forward.
Brax’tan firmly takes my hand and half-turns. “The water from Bune is not good to drink. It makes us dizzy and strange, and you’ve been drinking a lot of it, I think.”
I look up at him like an errant toddler. “So?”
“So this is an unknown place where there might be living someone unfriendly, as you said. We should concentrate.”
“I am concentrating,” I protest.
“Granted,” he sighs, “but not on the right thing.”
“I can’t help it if you’re the way you are with your abs and your stripes and your ass. You should concentrate on being less… big.” I try to give his bulge a playful pat, but he steps away and out of my reach.
Brax’tan changes his grip on my arm and slowly drags me into the dark room. As soon as we cross the threshold, the walls start glowing, and the room is bathed in white light coming from nowhere in particular.
I gasp. “This is… terrific!”
It’s a huge hall with the ceiling a hundred feet up. It’s vaguely oval in shape and stretches for about a half mile into the distance.
It’s filled with glass cylinders the size of old-fashioned phone booths, thousands and thousands of them in tight rows. They’re all empty, as far as I can see. About a third of them are broken.
Brax’tan is shocked to silence, but I’m not.
“This is exactly what I thought! This is where the cavemen came from. Do you recognize it?”
“I don’t think I’ve been here before.” He lets go of my arm.
I go over to the nearest cylinder and knock on it with a knuckle. The glass is thick, and the thing has all kinds of tubes and pipes coming up from the top and going far up into the ceiling. It reminds me of the bacta tank that Luke Skywalker is placed in to heal after his encounter with the yeti-thing in that second Star Wars movie. “Oh, I’m sure you haven’t. But one of your ancestors came out of one of these. Less than a hundred years ago.”
I try to imagine this room full of confused cavemen, coming out of alien cylinders, just woken up from a long sleep in some kind of cryogenic cylinder. And then they would have been herded out the door, into the water, before they emerged in the pool outside. Still confused, on an alien planet. Some with green stripes, some with blue, some with red. Some with black.
And of course, they would all have been naked. Thousands of huge, muscular, naked cavemen milling around...
The thought sends delicious little tingles down below, and I steal another
glance at Brax’tan’s very nice bulge. “Did you ever hear of something called ‘Worship’?”
He’s still gawping at the immensity of the room and its alien contents. “Of course.”
“Because I think maybe this discovery should be celebrated. And I know exactly how. By Worship. You Worshipping me,” I say for clarification. “Right away.”
The rational part of my mind is still losing ground to the not-drunk horniness, but I have enough presence to know that I’m being scandalously forward and slutty. I’m pretty much asking this guy, whom I’ve known for a few hours and abducted at arrowpoint, to eat me out.
But I really want it. And more.
“You’ve drunk more of the water from Bune than advisable,” he says and walks slowly down one row of glass cylinders. “I don’t think that’s a good time for Worship. And I don’t think you’re The Woman.”
I’m not deterred. “Fine. Fine. It’s cool. No Worship. How about you just take your skirt off and show me what you’re packing? It’s only fair. You saw my ass when you picked those thorns off me.”
He doesn’t even turn around. “You say my Ancestors come from here?”
“Uh-huh. They were taken here by aliens. For some reason. Probably stolen from their own planet and dumped on Xren. That’s why you’ve never Worshipped a woman. This is your chance.”
“The shaman said that our women were taken by the Plood.”
I slap my forehead. “Good grief. Your women were never here! The men were taken. From another planet. But there’s a woman right here right now. You can Worship her, too. Aren’t you curious about what that’s like?”
“The old shaman lied,” Brax’tan calmly ponders.
I’m frustrated by how he keeps avoiding the real issue here. “The shaman probably thinks it’s true that the women of Xren were taken. Did he show you how to Mate with a woman? Maybe you should check if he was wrong about that, too. He sounds like a shady character. Could be that everything he taught you was just bullshit. It’s fine, I’ll show you.”