by A. C. Ellas
Cai snuggled against him with a palpable air of contentment, rested his head on Nick’s firm left pectoral muscle and fell asleep the moment he got comfortable.
To distract himself, Nick reached an arm for the side table, snagged the connecting cable he was looking for on the first attempt and pulled the loose end to himself. He plugged the cable into his dataport and felt the immediate split as his consciousness entered the shipnet, leaving his body behind.
He checked the status reports—all sections were reporting in the green. No crises were in progress and everything was running so smoothly it was suspicious. Cortez pinged him, Nick accepted.
“Capt’n, we’re in full stealth and monitoring all traffic. No sign of detection, not even from our piggyback pal, which is halfway across the system from us now. We’re recording his course, of course. How’s Cai?”
“He’s sleeping. He was exhausted—he stretched his subjective time to the max, I think. Continue monitoring the system’s traffic. Cai wants to know which hardpoint they use.”
“Will do, Capt’n. Get some rest.”
Nick dropped the connection, but he didn’t take the XO’s advice. He wasn’t tired. Instead, he turned his attention the massive amount of paperwork generated by the routine operations of a spaceship. Why do we still call it paperwork when it’s not on paper? He steadily worked on reducing the backlog of reports, requisitions, requests and other random forms while Cai continued to sleep in his arms.
It was a full six hours before Cai stirred. Nick signed off on the last of the pending reports just as he felt his husband’s growing interest pressing against his thigh. Cai was often amorous when he first woke up. Nick disconnected the cable from his dataport and set it aside before he ran his hands down Cai’s body, enjoying the feel of the soft, warm skin.
Cai’s hands echoed his, stroking Nick’s sides. “Roll over,” Cai murmured as he lifted his weight off of Nick.
With a shiver of anticipation, Nick rolled onto his stomach. Cai’s hands found, stroked and then kneaded Nick’s firm butt cheeks. Nick turned his head enough to see Cai taking position atop him, but that was all he had time for before Cai’s hard cock pressed against him. Cool liquid abruptly pushed itself up inside him and invisible fingers stretched him open. He was quite used to Cai’s telekinetic ability being used on him, he’d even come to enjoy many of the things Cai could do to him with it.
“Are you ready?” Cai’s voice, husky with desire, vibrated his ear.
“Oh, God, yes. Please, master, fuck me.” Nick had given himself as a love slave to Cai as his wedding present, and their passion for the game had yet to diminish. Nick found much to enjoy in submitting to Cai, and Cai always seemed pleased by his enjoyment.
“Good slave.” There was laughter as well as love in Cai’s voice, but Nick wasn’t given time to think about it. Cai entered him with a strong initial thrust; Nick pushed back into it, trying to keep himself relaxed down there. The pressure let off, replaced with the sensation of fullness, of having something large and hard insistently rearranging his gut.
“Oh, yeah. Just like that...” Nick’s own erection was pressed into the mattress, but the tension in his nuts was incredible, mostly due to the locked leather cuff that encircled the base of his scrotum. The mark of Cai’s ownership of him, he wore that cuff at all times. It held his balls away from his body in a snug grip that was enjoyable when he wasn’t aroused and intensely pleasurable when he was.
Electric shocks cracked over Nick’s nuts and along his pinned shaft, causing him to moan and squirm. Cai bottomed out in him; Nick could feel the other man’s pubic hair scraping against the tender flesh of his anal ring. Cai paused and adjusted his position then pulled Nick up into a kneeling position without letting Nick slide free of him.
The crystal embedded in Cai’s right palm was always warm, but it was hard and had an oily texture to it that differentiated it from skin. It slid up Nick’s cock from root to tip with exasperating slowness, every millimeter serving to ratchet the tension higher, deepening the intensity of the sensation, adding to the growing tsunami of Nick’s impending climax.
Atop this, Cai finally started to pump his hips, thrusting himself deeply and urgently into Nick. The head of his long, delectable cock rubbed against Nick’s prostate in both directions by design—Cai knew exactly the depth of stroke he needed to cause the maximum stimulation of Nick’s body.
The hovering tsunami first crested then crashed down on Nick without mercy. Pleasure flared from his core outward, causing his back to arch, his toes to curl, his heart to pound and his voice to cry out. Cai made a sound of enjoyment, but he didn’t stop, he didn’t even slow. His relentless action in Nick’s ass, synchronized with the steady stroking of Nick’s cock, ignored Nick’s orgasm as irrelevant, and soon enough, the stimulation had Nick hard once more.
Nick panted and moaned as Cai continued his taking of Nick’s body. The aftermath of his climax had filled him with lassitude, and he wanted to lie down and relax, but he couldn’t, not with Cai still in him, fucking him and stroking him. His resurgent erection twitched under Cai’s hand, and he found himself working his body to accentuate Cai’s efforts. He stroked Cai’s hand, his leg, everything of Cai that he could reach. He wished he could express his submission to Cai more fully, more than the collar around his neck and the cuff around his balls meant.
Cai’s right hand started another devastating journey up Nick’s cock, and this time, Nick could feel Cai’s growing tension and need for release along with his own. Electric sparks wrapped about Nick’s member, traced his tautly held orbs, sank into his flesh like little needles, sharply painful, but somehow, that pain made the pleasure so much more intense. Cai’s hand reached Nick’s head, and finally, Cai cried out as he pumped his wad deeply into Nick. The pleasure slammed into them both, and they held on to one another until it finally released its grip on them.
* * * *
It was morning by the time Cai returned to duty. He was not only well rested and sexually sated, he’d managed to eat, too. Nick takes such good care of me. At this point, Cai couldn’t imagine what life would be like without his partner, nor did he wish to. Cai downed the bowl of raw Synde; he didn’t linger over it even though he enjoyed the flavor, which, to him, was of oranges and honey. Once the drug was consumed, Cai entered the Chamber, the heart of the Laughing Owl and the place where most of his work was done.
He approached his couch eagerly, already looking forward to linking his consciousness to the navnet, to becoming his ship-self and leaving his body behind. Cai eased into position, felt the connections being made, observed the ceiling open as the crystal array, a dense node of neurologic circuitry, descended into position, and then, in a rush of expanding consciousness, he was Laughing Owl.
He ran through his routine system checks and found that nothing was amiss. He checked his orbital position—Laughing Owl was in a stable elliptical orbit that was far enough from the binary stars of this system that a full circuit would take hundreds of Earth years. There were no signs of traffic within a hundred thousand miles of his current position. He turned his attention further outward. It was time to discover which hardpoint the Rel fleet was jumping from.
He knew the taste of the trail left by each of the Rel ships he’d tracked across the previous system. He passively scanned for any sign of them. Passive in this case meant that he let the data come to him, as opposed to actively scanning where he would expend energy to get a result. Passive was better, both for being untraceable and because it didn’t change or effect that which was being studied. Cai had started the passive scan when he jumped into this system, now he had hours’ worth of data built up, and he laid it all out in a simulated map of the system.
There was a lot of traffic in this system, enough to possibly obscure the traces Cai sought, but fortunately, the Rel ship they’d tailgated was still in system, approaching the sixth planet. Cai studied the faint ion trails of the previous ships. If
the current ship followed through the course of the rest, it would slingshot around the gas giant and head back toward the heliopause. That would bring the Rel to a specific hardpoint. Cai focused his telescopes and his attention on the hardpoint and found the unique jump signatures of many, many Rel ships.
“Captain, the Rel target is Aldebaran, ninety-five percent probability.”
“Understand target is Aldebaran system. Can we get there first? How much of a lead do the Rels have on us?”
Cai mentally winced. He hadn’t thought of that. The Rels could be two or more systems closer to Aldebaran by now and how could he get there before them and still remain undetectable? He was faster only if he gave his position away by lighting off his ion drive. He quickly checked his database, searching for alternate routings to Aldebaran. He found what he was looking for much sooner than he’d expected. “Captain, I have a course that will get us there well before the Rels.”
“How? Show me.”
Cai did so. “We jump from here to Tarasch, then to Epsilon Tauri then to Aldebaran. The Rels are adding three systems to their transit to bypass Tarasch.”
“Didn’t we encounter a Rel in the Tarasch system?”
“Yes, but I suspect it was trapped there. The Rels generally take great pains to avoid that system, as our own fleet once did.”
“Even if there are Rels there, it’s our best shot,” Nick decided. “We have to warn the colonial governor there and alert the fleet, and we can’t do that while skulking about making like a space rock.”
“I’ve already started the jump calculations.” It would be difficult to jump from where they were but not impossible. What worried Cai the most was his relatively slow velocity—less than point two c. He couldn’t accelerate without alerting the Rels; he couldn’t even change course without potentially alerting the Rels. I need an invisible, or at least an undetectable, drive.
Nick acknowledged the situation and issued orders for the ship to prepare for jump. Cai turned his full attention to his calculations, losing himself in the number storm. His perception of time slowed to a crawl as the number of required calculations per second rapidly increased. He drew on the raw computational power of his adjuncts as well as the ship’s computers in order to solve the difficult equations in such a way as to make the jump possible.
Close to arriving at his solutions, Cai surfaced long enough to announce the imminent jump ship-wide then dove back in. On schedule, he reached into the heart of his ship, to the imprisoned singularity held fast in the fields produced by his fusion engines, and twisted something untwistable. Laughing Owl speared through the fabric of space-time to emerge in a place of physics gone awry—subspace. Cai’s entry was so slow that the path he traveled was nearly flat. He piled on the power, forcing his mass to accelerate, the edge of the system looming ever closer, the chasm past that as wide as Cai had ever seen it.
All too soon, Cai was forced to leap the gap. He wasn’t truly ready, he didn’t have enough momentum, but he was out of time. He leaped, straining, pushing himself past his tolerances, and barely managed to catch the edge of Tarasch system. He hauled himself up the incline by sheer force of will and finally untwisted the untwistable. Laughing Owl emerged in normal space directly on top of the hardpoint. Cai set his course numbly, double checked it, punted it over to Nick so he could check it and ran a damage-control scan. He’d managed to stay within Laughing Owl’s tolerances—all the damage was to himself, to his aching head and strained psionic sense.
Chapter Three
Before knowing Cai, Nick would never have considered a headache to be a serious, debilitating injury, but in this case, the headache was a symptom of the real problem. The jump used psi, and Cai had given himself the psychic equivalent of a serious muscle strain in order to jump them from the Rel system to Tarasch. It hadn’t been so much where they’d jumped from as it had been how slowly they’d jumped. Velocity was more critical to the jump than Nick had realized. He knew that the faster their speed, the easier the jump would be but hadn’t ever considered the corollary that a slow jump would be more difficult.
Nick wanted to pamper Cai by putting him on bedrest and waiting on him hand and foot, but there wasn’t any time to spare. So he made sure Cai had plenty of water, aspirin and a good cuddle, but as soon as feasible, Cai was back in the Chamber, maneuvering the Laughing Owl toward their target hardpoint. Just in case, Nick and the crew kept a wary eye out for any sign of Rels. They found nothing. Only humans are crazy enough to use this system as a transfer point.
They sent a high-priority message drone through the hardpoint linked to Sol system. Nick and Cai worked on the report together. It was as detailed and forthright as they could make it; hopefully, Admiralty would respond in a timely fashion. They reached the hardpoint they needed without incident, and Cai jumped them with precision and ease.
Epsilon Tauri was a colorful system full of high-grade ore in its multiple asteroid belts. Cai sent them through it at the maximum permissible speed and well above the plane of the ecliptic to avoid commercial traffic. Twelve hours after entering Epsilon Tauri, they jumped again, this time to Aldebaran. Cai set his course for the colony world—an earthlike planet orbiting perfectly in the middle of the orange giant’s goldilocks zone. Years on Tascheter were twice as long as on Earth, but the gravity was within point two and the atmosphere was so close a match it was uncanny.
Nick sent his carefully worded message to all of the system’s outer installations as well as to the colonial government of the planet itself. He hoped for a response by the time Laughing Owl reached orbit around Tascheter. He also kept the crew busy, first by taking a survey of all available ships in the system then by working on potential evacuation plans. It wasn’t possible to evacuate the planet, but it should be possible to evacuate the mining stations and lunar colonies, all of which were far more vulnerable to space-based attack than the planet. Unless, of course, the Rels do unto us what we did first to them.
He grimly ran that scenario through the tactical computer. How many impacts before the planet is rendered uninhabitable? The answer depended on where the iron rods hit. If the Rels used rods similar in mass to the ones used by the fleet, as few as a half dozen impacts would be enough to destroy the planet’s ecosystem and send it hurtling into a long nuclear winter. He added these calculations to the strategic map he was building in the virtual space of the shipnet.
Cai had also been adding data to his map—marking the position of every installation and every ship down to the smallest of mining tubs. All ships were tagged with contact code and current course as extrapolated by the AI. There was a good chance that they’d have to commandeer those ships to use as lifeboats. Nick wasn’t sure if the civilians would be that much safer on ships than they’d be on the various stations and bases, but mobile targets were theoretically harder to hit than stationary ones.
The indicator light linked to Cai’s Chamber flashed from green to red—a reassuringly steady red, only meaning that the Astrogator was no longer physically linked to the ship. Nick stood and told Cortez, “You have the conn.”
“I have the conn, yes, sir,” Cortez replied.
They exchanged salutes, and then, Nick was on his way back to Cai’s chambers. The lasagna was already made, the six needed only to serve it, but Cai usually waited for Nick to arrive before starting. Evie turned into the corridor and matched strides with him. “Cai invited me to join you for lunch, if that’s okay?”
He grinned at his sister. “Of course it’s okay.” Evie had joined his crew as their ecologist a year before. Once she’d gotten all her degrees, she’d grown bored with planetary life and Cai had been more than happy to pull strings to get her assigned to them. Cai invited her to eat lunch with them a couple times a week—and it was always Cai who did the inviting at Nick’s insistence.
Nick never forgot that not only was Cai a level five telepath, he was also the one who couldn’t just leave if he wanted to. Cai was tied to his sh
ip; the chambers Nick shared with him were psionically shielded so that the Astrogator wouldn’t have to work to shield his mind from the thoughts of everyone aboard. Contrary to popular belief, humans broadcast their thoughts, forcing telepaths to actively work to not hear them as opposed to having to work to read their minds. Because of this, Nick felt it best to have Cai do all the inviting, making it the Gator’s choice to have company or not.
Evie was on the select list of those whom Cai invited over. The XO and the chief engineer were the other two people on that list. Evie, for obvious reasons, was their most frequent guest. She had a double doctorate—planetary ecology and xenobiology—and friends all over the place at various digs and research institutes who keep her informed of all the discoveries. She made and shared discoveries, too, and published her papers on the ecology of every new planet or habitable moon they found.
They reached Cai’s chambers, and Nick touched the door plate. It opened immediately—Cai had keyed him into the door once they were married, joking that a spouse should always have access. Nick had remained in the captain’s quarters until the year before, when Admiral Nbuntu had selected them as his flagship for a mission. Nick had yielded his quarters to the Admiral, moved in with Cai and had never moved out—after all, they were married. Juan had proven able to keep the junior officers settled down even without Nick’s presence in officers’ row.
Cai was waiting for them in the dining room, and Nick gave him a close look, noting the telltale tremor of the Gator’s body, a side effect of the massive dose of raw Synde he’d consumed. The tremors would ease as the Gator’s body processed the Synde. Cai had never invited anyone over so soon after Chambering, with his nerves still rawly sensitive and his body still coping with the Synde, but Evie was family.
“Are you okay?” Evie had obviously noticed Cai’s condition.