Authors: Lisa Lace
No, I was pretty sure she was satisfied with her triple orgasm experience. I hoped I had been the first to give it to her.
"Dar?" she said in a sleepy voice, rubbing against me in a distracted fashion. "I had a dreamâ¦"
She opened her eyes, and her voice trailed off.
"Oh." I could see her taking in our clothes scattered over the floor and our bodies stuck together with sweat. She sat up and her breasts looked good enough to taste. "It wasn't a dream."
The communication device had stopped beeping. I sat up, my cock popping up to remind us it was still my mating cycle.
"Oh, no you don't you little devil," she said, shaking her finger at it. She jumped down and started putting on her clothes. "I need a shower. And so do you."
She turned to me.
"Okay," I conceded.
"Come back to our quarters and I want you to get cleaned up and eat before you go back to work." Her words were accompanied by a look that I already knew meant that she was serious.
"Sure," I said, kissing her cheek. But she pushed me away.
"Don't start that. You know where it will lead. Even an innocent kiss turns into a full on screw fest when you're on your mating cycle."
I hardened a little more at her words, but she was having none of it.
"Shower and a meal," she said, glaring a bit.
"And then⦠?"
Her face relented, and I saw that her nipples were hard under her shirt.
"Then we'll see," she said. "You were pretty persuasive last night."
She checked her hair and we walked out of sick bay trying to look innocent.
After I had taken her in the shower and we'd had another quickie on the counter in the kitchenette, I finally remembered to check my comm unit.
"Shit."
"What is it?" Kenna said, looking quite respectable, not at all like she had just had five orgasms in the past ten hours. Her cheeks were a nice rosy pink and she was glowing.
"I've been ignoring my comm unit."
"Uh, yeah. I noticed. You were paying attention to other things," she said, blushing a little. "So?"
"So, Jared's been trying to get hold of me," I said, pulling my comm unit onto my left forearm. "An alien vessel has appeared out of the wormhole. And it's like nothing we've ever seen in this galaxy."
I burst onto the bridge, pulling Kenna by the hand. Jared frowned.
"Nice of you to show up." His voice trailed off as he took in Kenna's glow, and my relaxed posture. The frown turned to a grin.
"I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner, Jared."
"No, no." He held up his hands. "Far be it from me to interrupt the happy couple."
Kenna turned red and I heard him mutter as he turned back to the viewscreen.
"Somebody ought to be getting some."
"What's going on?" I said, afraid that I had missed something important when I was out enjoying my female.
"Don't worry, Dar. You didn't miss anything. The ship appeared about an hour ago, maybe two â you can check the ship's log."
"And?" I said.
"And nothing. It's just sitting there. We've tried to scan it, but it has some technology that interferes with our scanning devices. The only thing we have learned is that there are no life forms aboard."
"No life forms?" Kenna repeated She was as stunned as I was.
Jared shook his head.
"None."
We all stared at the view screen in consternation. How could this be?
Mana walked on to the bridge then.
"So you heard, sir?" she said.
"Heard what?"
She pivoted on her heel to face the view screen, too.
"That we're fucked."
KENNA
Dar, Mana, Jared, and I sat in the cafeteria grabbing a quick lunch before heading back to the bridge. We had been on alert for twelve hours already waiting for the alien ship to attack â but nothing had happened.
The ship only sat there.
"We need to make a plan to find out what the ship is and what it's doing there. We should be on the offensive this time," Jared said.
"But we have no way of knowing that it's the same kind of ship that came through the wormhole as before, do we?" I said, taking a bite of my salad. It had Susohnnan vegetables that looked weird but tasted good. "What if we attack a vessel that means us no harm?"
"We are currently contacting all the planets that use the wormhole. We can reconstruct a schedule for who is expected to come through in the next week or so," Mana informed us.
"There are no records for us to be able to tell if it's the same kind of ship," Dar said, answering my first question. "Anything that would have been recorded is normally stored on the space station, but now it's gone."
"Wait," Mana said, putting down her spoon. "No."
Her eyes lit up.
"There is a feed that is relayed back to Susohn every twenty-four hours or so. It is stored on our servers as a backup. This way, in case of emergency, we have a record of what was happening on the ship. Legally we're required to keep it. I had totally forgotten about it."
"Like a black box on an airplane or space shuttle? It helps investigators figure out what happened in the case of a crash?" Jared said, getting excited.
"Something like that. It contains various forms of input â readouts from all the sensors on the ship, information on the physical status of the crew, data about the functioning of the computer systems and machinery, audio feeds from the public areas, as well as all the video feeds from the view screens and security cameras."
She smiled and thumped her fist on the table.
"Mana, you're brilliant," Jared said, standing up. "Let's get those records."
"No, you're not done," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and making him sit again. "I already ate my soup. You finish eating and I'll meet you all on the bridge in an hour. It will take that long to get an interplanetary transmission set up and have the information downloaded to our computers."
"I'm finished," Dar said, standing and picking up his plate and utensils. "I'll come with you. You'll need the highest level codes to get that information."
He bent and kissed me on the cheek.
"See you," he said.
"See you," I echoed, watching as they quickly left the cafeteria.
"So you're seriously dating the king of Susohn?" Jared said, a teasing smile on his face. He speared something that looked disgusting, but he seemed to be enjoying it.
I chuckled.
"I guess so. When you put it that way, it sounds ridiculous."
"No," he said. "I didn't mean it that way. I was only wondering..."
He paused to fork another one of the strange looking pieces of food, his eyes getting a far off look.
"What is it like to be with one of them? Is it different than being with a human?"
I took another bite of my salad and chewed it, considering exactly what he might be asking.
"What exactly do you mean when you say being with?"
"Are they different from humans? I don't want to offend one of them by asking, but I thought maybe I could ask you, Kenna," he said. "I'm just curious."
I thought he was more than just curious, but I let the comment go.
"You know they have two dicks, right?"
He burst out laughing.
"Okay, okay. They're not aliens, in the way that we think of them on Earth." I said, starting with the easy part of the question.
"They're not?" He didn't look sure. "I don't know much about the Susohnnan, other than humans generally don't like them because they have more than we do. As far as I can tell, we're basically jealous of them."
"Look, I'll explain it to you. Humans and Susohnnan are genetically identical."
"We're exactly the same?"
"Well, no. Not exactly. On a genetic level, we're like the same species or something. I don't exactly understand the biology."
"So..." he looked a little embarrassed. "They have the same equipment? Sexually speaking."
"Yeah, all that's the same, except for one thing." I stopped and knew I was blushing. "I don't know how it is with anyone else, but with Dar, he always ASKS if I am willing."
"Willing?"
"Yeah, like he makes sure I'm consenting to having sex with him."
"Every time?"
"Pretty much. And well, the sex is out of this world fantastic. But that could be just him. I don't know if all Susohnnan are like that. And they have this rule or something..." I was blushing again.
"What is it?"
"Well, the woman comes first, or no one comes."
"What?"
"It's the male's job to make sure the woman has an orgasm before he does. And if she doesn't then neither does he. The Susohnnan have much healthier sexual relationships than humans."
"I'll have to remember that," Jared muttered to himself. And I wondered who he was thinking about when he said that, but I kept my questions to myself.
"Oh, and he always kisses my scar. It's to show respect for the woman. He used to kiss my upper thigh even when there wasn't a scar there."
"The scar. Can I see it?"
I pulled the waistband of my pants down a little on the left side to show the bright red triangle. He inspected it.
"And you almost died to get that?"
I nodded.
"You must love him," he said a little wistfully. "Are you going to marry him? You made that deal with his mother, right?"
"I'm not marrying him because I was forced in order to get us out of the volcano. I'm marrying him because I love him, Jared. Although technically, he hasn't actually asked me, yet."
"He will," Jared said. "I see the way he looks at you. Couldn't you ask him? Women don't have to wait for the men to make the first move anymore."
I smiled.
"That's true. But I guess I'll wait. In Susohnnan culture, it's still traditional for the men to do the asking. He might be offended. But even when he does ask me, we wouldn't be getting married right away. The traditional time for a Susohnnan engagement is very, very long."
"How much time?" Jared was fascinated by our discussion.
"Years, usually."
"What if you want to get married sooner?"
"I don't know. You have to get a special dispensation from The Conveyor of The Three or something."
"The what?"
"As far as I can figure out, he's a high priest, like the pope."
Jared nodded.
"Aside from sexual issues, there are some other small differences, like an increase in their brain capacity from 10 percent to 12 - 15 percent. As you might have noticed, they're highly intelligent."
I laughed for a second. "I sound like an encyclopedia!"
"I noticed," he said, with a wry smile.
"Hey, you're not doing too bad. What kind of an education did you get on Earth?" I asked, hoping that he might tell me a bit more about himself. "You seem to follow a heck of a lot more of that technical stuff than I do."
"Yeah, I have a couple degrees. It's fairly standard in my family."
"A couple degrees? What kind?"
"I got my bachelor's with a double major in computer science and engineering. Then I started what I consider to be my professional student years. I went back and did another degree in biology. My mother wanted me to be well-rounded so when I went to study for my master's, I took environmental science."
"You have two bachelor's degrees and a master's?" I said, raising my eyebrows. I was more impressed than I had expected. This guy was smart and hard working to have finished that much schooling.
"I also have a Ph.D," he said apologetically, as if he wasn't at all proud of such an accomplishment. "I enjoyed environmental science so much, I decided to do a research project on the economic and political viability of harvesting and marketing non-timber forest products. You know, instead of cutting down all the trees."
"I know. I grew up next to a forest that was continually being threatened by deforestation. My Gran owned the land, though, and wouldn't even consider selling to the timber companies."
"It's hard to believe that people still think it's a good idea to cut down forests," Jared said, shaking his head.
"Yeah, crazy," I said, putting my last bite of salad into my mouth. I swallowed my mouthful and decided to change the subject a little bit. There was so much I wondered about Jared. "Are you close to your mother?"
He frowned.
"Not exactly. We used to be but the last time we saw each other, we argued." His eyes fell to his half-eaten plate of food, and he dropped his fork. "We didn't part on good terms."
"That's too bad. I don't have any family. My Gran raised me, but she died quite a few years ago."
"I'm sorry, Kenna," he said, his green eyes compassionate.
"It's okay. It was a long time ago. Maybe you could call your mom and talk to her. Holophones don't cost that much and you would feel like you're in the same room as her."
I knew that Dar paid him enough to be able to afford a holophone call. If Gran was still alive, I would certainly spend the extra money to feel like I was in the same room as her and be able to touch her.
"Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen," he said, looking angry and a little hurt.
"Why not?"
"Because she's kind of busy. She's always been about her career â even when I was a kid. She's never had time for me. I was raised by nannies and tutors and servants."
"Really?" I said, and it was my turn to feel compassion. Gran and I might not have had much, but she always had time for me.
"She's got more important things to do than talk to me, Kenna," he said, standing up and picking up some trays on the table.
"Oh, come on, Jared. She's your mother."
"She's the woman who gave birth to me," he said, a sad look on his face. "I'm not sure she was ever my mother."
He turned and walked to the dirty dish wall. When he pressed one of the trays against the wall, a slot opened up and took everything.
"See you on the bridge, Kenna," he said.
I took the things off of Dar's tray and put his plates under mine. Then I piled all the dishes on and went to put the double tray into the wall.
I had learned a few things about Jared, but I wondered if we would ever really know who he was. As I had that thought, my comm unit beeped.