Maybe he did.
He’d certainly pinpointed the new gateway they’d found without any appearance of actually searching for it.
And, maybe not, she thought later when they finally stopped near dusk to make camp.
Dylan and Tor deviated from the ‘norm’ even further by leaving the campsite and disappearing into the jungle. They returned about an hour later carrying a dead thing—further proof that this sure as hell wasn’t Earth if she’d needed it.
They’d already cleaned it. Skewering it on a spit, they set it over the campfire Aurek had built to cook it—no roaring fire to chase the shadows and the things lurking in them. Just a fire big enough to cook the whatever.
They tried cooking some of the fruit Dylan had gotten for them and Roslyn discovered the charring definitely toned down the sour. And it was actually pretty good with the meat.
“Kind of reminds me of Chinese food, you know? Sweet and sour?”
The guys just looked at her.
She felt her face redden as it hit her that they wouldn’t have experienced Chinese food.
They hadn’t actually experienced much of anything, she realized abruptly.
They looked like men—young but fully matured to manhood—but the project didn’t date back more than a couple of years.
She didn’t even want to know how the scientific team had managed that.
She couldn’t think of them that way.
She was still more inclined to think, maybe, they’d—the company—taken young men, maybe, off the battlefield somewhere and ‘re-built’ them.
And then wiped their brains and reprogrammed them.
It hadn’t escaped her that Dylan and Tor, as badly as they’d been hurt in the firefight that had proceeded their latest adventure, were hardly showing any signs at all that they’d been wounded badly enough they should’ve died. Would have if they’d been a hundred percent, natural born, humans.
But there’d been scientists working on nano technology a long time—not perfected as far as she knew—but human technology in the works that could have been perfected.
No, whatever Aurek had said, she just didn’t want to believe, couldn’t make herself believe, they were cyborgs—machines not men—with alien, non-human biology.
Who thought they could make her pregnant.
Even if they were bionically enhanced flesh and blood and capable of reproduction, alien DNA had been used to create them.
She was less inclined to dismiss that for the simple reason that Aurek kept producing information he shouldn’t have had.
Before they’d come through that second gateway to an entirely different planet, she’d suspected the company/government had done a lot more research via probes than they’d admitted to. It actually didn’t seem reasonable, now, to think that when they would’ve known there was really nothing worth stealing—no technology to make them richer or more powerful on the world stage. But she’d still thought it was a plausible explanation for the things Aurek just seemed to know when he shouldn’t have had that information.
But that didn’t hold water when he’d led them straight to another gateway and through it.
If either the company or the government had been aware of that, they would’ve arranged to explore everything.
Contrary to what she’d more than half hoped—dreaded—she didn’t get an orgy for desert.
Either the guys were too tired or they actually had forgotten.
Not likely, she knew, but she couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t taken her up on the suggestion.
Then again, if impregnating her was their objective—which was probably the craziest thing out of all the crazy things the project had produced—this wasn’t really the time or place. They were still concerned the other group might follow them.
They finally relaxed and slowed their pace, a little, after the second day of wading through jungle growth.
They found themselves on a rise—not much of a rise, but a slight vantage point to see a little further.
Roslyn didn’t see anything but a sea of jungle, but Aurek sent the drone up for a look.
And, as they watched the feed, Roslyn saw a ruin emerge. It was hard to say if it was part of a city or just a random, singular structure—maybe an ancient temple?
It seemed to be Aurek’s goal, though. He brought the drone back and packed it up. After scanning the forest around them, he struck off again and, roughly an hour later, found a trickle of water that hardly deserved the name brook. It looked like someone had left the water hose on.
It was fresh water, though, and they’d almost depleted their supply.
Roslyn tested some before she filled her own water bottle. The guys might be able to process alien microbes and spit them out, but she sure as hell didn’t want anything like that swimming around in her belly.
Dropping a purifying tablet in for good measure to kill any local ‘wildlife’, she dug out her trusty washcloth and soap, walked about a yard downstream of the spot where the guys were refilling all of the containers and stripped down to bathe off.
They watched her.
She did her best to pretend she hadn’t noticed.
She wasn’t trying to ‘lure’ them. She just needed to wash off.
The place was ungodly humid.
Hot, too.
It could have been an equatorial jungle on Earth even though it wasn’t.
When she’d finished bathing, she discovered Aurek and Dylan had vanished.
So much for thinking she’d gotten them all excited!
Tor looked happy to see her, though.
She had to ‘bring the curtain’ down by putting her shirt on to break the spell.
Blinking as if he’d just woken, he went back to whatever he’d been doing before he froze.
Roslyn tried not to laugh. When it slipped out anyway, he looked a question at her and smiled tentatively back at her. That only made her laugh more—which made him cock his head inquisitively.
Struggling to beat back the urge to laugh, she shook her head. “Just … nothing.”
Maybe it was hysteria, she wondered?
Or maybe it had struck her as funny that poor Tor was so ‘enthralled with her sexiness’ because she knew for a fact that she wasn’t all that.
On the other hand, there was absolutely no competition and it was a lot easier to be a beauty queen when you were the only queen in town, she thought wryly.
Settling with her notes when they had finished setting up camp, she pulled up the pictures she’d managed to get of the ‘Rosetta stone’ before she’d discovered there were aliens behind them and went back to carefully sketching in her book. She’d found that sketching seemed to help her grasp things better. She had to focus completely to get all of the tiny details correct and that made her analyze them better.
The one she’d been working on reminded her of something. It had teased her from the moment she’d seen it, but she still hadn’t been able to figure out why it seemed so familiar. Finally, she put her pencil down when the light began to wane, took her small tablet out and inserted the memory card that had her reference books on it.
She’d been scrolling through it for some time when a sound that shouldn’t have been there finally penetrated her absorption. She looked up then to discover Aurek and Dylan had not only returned, they and Tor, had surrounded her.
Facing out.
Where the things were slowly, warily creeping closer in a low crouch that made it clear they were prepared to spring forward at any moment.
The sound she’d heard was the cock of the gun—one of them. Dylan slowly cocked his own and then Tor and, each time, the creatures, which looked somewhat similar to dogs or maybe wolves, would flinch.
Abruptly, the one in the lead leapt.
Aurek killed him mid-leap and he hit the ground, but the entire pack had surged forward at the lead dog’s lunge and the three men let loose a deafening barrage of gunfire.
Roslyn couldn’t decide whether to pr
otect her ears from the damage that was likely to result from that many decibels of sound right on top of her or to cover her mouth to stifle her screams.
In the end, it was no contest. She covered her ears.
Finally, they killed enough to discourage the others and they broke and began to leap toward the darkness beyond the light of the fire.
Aurek pried her hands down.
“Are you injured?”
She tried to read his lips. There was a great buzzing in her ears that made it impossible to actually hear him. She shook her head.
Apparently unsatisfied, he checked her over, brushing at the blood spattering her here and there to make sure it wasn’t her blood.
He settled beside her then and pulled her onto his lap, curling his arms tightly around her.
She didn’t realize till he did that she was shaking all over.
She burrowed against him frantically when he offered the comfort, squeezing her eyes tightly to try to block out the carnage surrounding them.
That could’ve been them, she thought.
Could have been her if the guys hadn’t come back.
And she’d sat down blithely by the campfire and buried her nose in a book while the damn things had surrounded their camp and began to creep closer.
With infinite patience, he held her until the sickening quaking inside of her finally stopped and the tension began to slip from her.
She discovered she could hear a little better when she finally sat up, but there was still a dull ringing that reduced her hearing.
Apparently, Dylan and Tor had dragged the carcasses away while Aurek had held her. The air still reeked of the stench of blood and gunpowder and the ground was littered with shells and blood soaked forest debris.
The bullets had cleared the forest back about two yards further.
Dylan and Tor were on their knees collecting the shell casings.
She watched them a little blankly.
“Make more,” Tor said when he looked up and saw her watching.
She didn’t know how, but she sure was glad they seemed to. They had to have used up a good bit of the ammunition.
And they couldn’t know if the damned things would come back or not.
When Aurek decided she was ok, he got up and got out a munitions box and then setup a series of trip wires around the perimeter, attaching flash-bangs every couple of yards.
It was going to be a hell of a wakeup if any of them tripped those things!
Instead of cooking their kill Dylan and Aurek had hunted down, they took out the last of the MREs and ate them. Roslyn choked down what she could and gave Aurek the rest.
Apparently, they decided the perimeter Aurek had set up was sentinel enough. All three of them crawled into the tent with her when she left the campfire for her sleeping bag. Instead of merely tucking her against his length as he usually did, though, Aurek caught her face in one hand, studied her for a long moment and then lowered his head to match his lips to hers.
It was soothing, a connection that wasn’t demanding as the last had been, or filled with determination and desperation. But it aroused both in her very quickly.
She lifted her hands and dug her fingers into his shoulders and then began to search for the opening of his tunic. He brushed her fingers away and unfastened it, leaning away from her long enough to shrug out of it and then gathering her close again and kissing her deeply, with a hunger that heated her up to flashover.
For minutes, it was almost more of a wrestling match than coupling, with both of them trying to undress and explore one another at the same time. Finally, though, they rid themselves of enough clothing in the confined space to touch skin to skin. Roslyn undulated against him while he explored her skin with his lips, enjoying the feel of her skin rubbing against his.
He rolled her to her back, gnawing a trail down her throat to the turgid tip of one breast and catching it in his mouth. Roslyn’s back arched as he pulled on it with the hard suction of his mouth. She felt her womb contract in response and a gush of warmth along her passage.
It put her in mind of what she wanted there and she began a slightly frantic search for the hard, lump of flesh she needed to scratch her itch.
It eluded her as he traded one nipple for the other and then went back to the first.
She began pulling at his head to urge him to move faster, managing to free one leg and curling it around him so that she could hump her pelvic bone against his hip.
That, apparently, was all the talking/prompting he needed.
He shifted over her, brushing a hand along her thighs to part them for his hips and then surging upward to join with her. She lifted both legs when he made the connection, to open her body wider for him and communicate her sense of urgency by curling her legs around his hips and digging her heels into his ass. He lifted his upper body from her, bracing on his elbows and curling his hips to delve deeper, making short thrusts that gained a little more ground each time until he had plumbed her depths. The rhythm he set then lifted her higher and higher with each lunge and retreat, building the tension inside of her toward the explosion she reached for with more and more desperation.
It caught her unaware when it went off like a Fourth of July rocket, shooting straight up and then fragmenting into tiny, sparkling fires. She was halfway back to the ground when she felt Aurek achieve crisis, shaking with it, lifting goose-bumps all over her when he gasped out his heated breath against the side of her neck.
Chapter Eleven
Roslyn was already half asleep when Dylan reached for her. She was tempted to just play dead, but he deserved better than that. When he dragged her over on top of himself, she curled her arms around his neck and kissed him with all the passion she could muster considering she’d just completely expended herself.
No one was more amazed than she was when it instantly aroused her again.
The effect on Dylan was even more profound.
He was gratifyingly desperate, shaking with need, clumsy with it.
But he’d already stripped in anticipation.
It flickered through her mind that Tor was probably waiting in the wings, holding his cock at the ready.
One more mountain to climb!
She couldn’t run fast enough to catch up to poor Dylan. He struggled to retain control at the last minute while she climbed toward the summit and then lost it.
Fortunately, she was close enough, and thrilled enough when he came to find her own quaking release.
When he rolled off, Tor was ready and waiting—as she’d suspected. He made no attempt to explore and relish as he had the first time. He was too anxious to slow down.
Or maybe afraid she’d brush him off and go to sleep?
Remembering she’d teased him with her bath earlier, and then laughed because he’d been so aroused he’d lost connection with the world, she lavished as much affection as passion on him and was almost sorry that he responded so readily that it was over before she could come.
Not that she needed another climax when she was almost comatose from the first two!
But it seemed he’d noticed and it bothered him.
When he pulled away, she followed him, demanding a last kiss that seemed to soothe him.
She would’ve curled up right then and there and passed out, but Aurek wasn’t having it. He sat up, reached across Dylan and dragged her over him—waking him up and rousing Rosyln enough that it took her a bit to drift away again.
It took them another two and a half days to reach the structure they’d seen in the distance. Rosyln didn’t think it would’ve taken half that time if they hadn’t had to fight their way through the thick jungle, but there were no trails to follow to ease their passage.
The area around the structure was somewhat clearer, but Roslyn realized fairly quickly that that was because it was covered in stones, that it had, apparently, once been a paved thoroughfare for whoever had built it. They saw a number of ruins of smaller structures near it and fading out into t
he jungle that suggested it had been a population center of some kind for a fairly large population.
The structure they’d spotted from a distance looked similar to pyramids found on Earth—probably closest to the south American pyramids.
She wondered if they were also similar in age in relation to the planet.
There was no way to tell, but she discovered pictographs. She made rubbings of them with the paper she’d brought since they were so badly degraded from weathering that she doubted photos would pick out the details she would need to figure them out.
She thought it must be similar to the sort of ‘recordings’ that had been found on Earth. Like cave drawings, they weren’t just for ornamentation. They were there to record events that had been important to the people who’d carved them.
Aurek made a circuit of the temple while she played with her paper and Tor and Dylan carefully stacked their remaining supplies in a tight pile and then settled beside them with their guns on their laps.
She glanced at them appreciatively.
She should have known, she thought wryly, that they couldn’t possibly be ‘real’—not naturally occurring. They were too perfect.
It still seemed to her that a terrible thing had been done to them if they were, in truth, even partly human.
Why was it that wealthy people seemed to lose empathy with ‘lesser mortals’ and begin to think of themselves as gods? How was it that they could justify the things they did in pursuit of wealth and power?
The guys had been created and grown in a lab? No childhood? No nurturing? And it didn’t seem to her that they’d been taught a damned thing beyond how to kill quickly and efficiently, how to be great soldiers.
One thing she really didn’t understand was that they’d seemed to immediately home in on her. She could’ve understood it if she’d been the only female, or the most beautiful, or the most fertile—if there’d been anything to really set her apart as being special. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of a damned thing that made her above ordinary, or typical.
Well, the brains. She had a pretty high IQ and the degrees to prove it, but that only put her a bit higher than average in that one respect and it wasn’t anything visible—nothing that could have drawn them to her.
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