Scouts (33 page)

I looked back at Robert, who still lay where he had dropped. He groaned, clutching his arm. Blood dripped from under his hand. One of the rounds fired from below had caught him high on his right arm.

Vack. Now it was up to me. I peeked over the edge again. I could hear the running footsteps of the man’s partner on the ramp below me. I didn’t have more than seconds until he caught up. Another burst of gunfire rattled the ramp and I ducked back behind the edge.

The man shooting at me was right out in the open. There was no cover for him. All I had to do was peek over the edge and shoot.

And become one of
them
.

Become one of the people who would kill to advance his own agenda, one of the people who considered his own life more important than anyone else’s. There wouldn’t be time to shoot to maim. I took a deep breath, trying to quell my fear, quiet my heart. I wanted as little crisis orgone as possible going into that weapon. I didn’t know how worked up I would have to be to put a hole in the side of the station, but I didn’t want to find out.

I rolled to the side, raising my weapon over my head to poke it over the edge of the ramp. I fired a burst to get him to flinch, then aimed and fired again. He went down.

I leapt to my feet, catching Robert’s elbow as I went. Had I killed my target? There would be time to worry about that later. For now, we needed to run. I fired a couple bursts down the ramp, just in case the second pursuer was close, and we took off.

Luckily, our destination was only seconds away. A door at the top of the ramp opened and we dived inside. It was an emergency airlock, a type I was familiar with. The heavy door closed and Robert slumped against the wall, grimacing with pain. The outer door had red lights around the edge, indicating that the exterior was a vacuum.

My rescuer’s face was pale and sweaty. There was an awful lot of blood.

I looked around the tiny chamber for some way to keep the door from opening again, but there was nothing.

“Great,” I said, “now we’re trapped.” I took the first aid kit out of its vacuum-proof container and applied an emergency bandage to Robert’s arm. It bonded instantly, and I could see the relief of the built-in anesthetics wash over his face.

He smiled and shook his head. “No. We’re almost free.”

He stumbled to the outer door, hit the button, and it slid open. A short plastic transfer tube led to the belly hatch of a Scout ship. We crawled through and closed the hatch behind us. A hand reached down to help Robert up the hatch to the main deck. Once he was up, I got to see who it was.

Grecca.

She practically yanked my arm out of its socket pulling me up the hatch for a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. “You made it!”

“We did, but Robert’s injured. We need to get him into the tank.”

“No,” said Robert, “not yet. I’m alive, I’m not going to black out. You two are going to have to power the ship while I keep us from getting recaptured. As soon as they figure out where we went, they’re going to launch the drones. We need the fastest orgasm you’ve ever had.”

“Can do, captain,” said Grecca.

“You going to make it to the bridge on your own?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine. Go get started.”

Robert made his way to the bridge, steadying himself with his good arm.

Grecca took my hand. “Come on. The quicker, the better.” She led me back to the chamber. “The rendezvous point is fairly close, so we don’t need a good orgasm. We just need a quick one.” She knelt in front of me, pulling my pants down as she went.

“Rendezvous? With who?”

“Shirley, Masters, and Valka.”

“Valka! You mean . . .”

“Yes, she’s being rescued right now. Or at least, that’s the plan. We won’t know until we get to the rendezvous point. Concentrate, Challers, we don’t have time for talk. Now lie down. We don’t want to be standing if Robert has to make evasive maneuvers.”

Valka. We were going to see Valka. My heart leapt, but at the same time, I knew how dangerous getting away would be. I lay down in the middle of the chamber.

Shirley’s voice crackled from the intercom. “I’m strapped in. Starting up, hold on tight.”

“Ah, here we go,” said Grecca, removing the crumpled pants from my ankles. She moved closer and gave my as-yet-unawakened cock a lick. “Bleah!” She made a foul face and spat. “You taste terrible!”

“The gel from the gentank,” I said and propped myself up on my elbows. “There wasn’t time to clean up.”

“Well, this isn’t going to work like this.” She got to her feet just as the ship lurched to one side, and she stumbled and flailed for balance.

I took her hand and pulled her back down to the floor. “There are other ways. Kneel down, we’ll do it like new recruits.”

I hadn’t had an orgasm for a long, long time, and while my body was freshly remade from the gentank, my mind was more than ready. We quickly stripped off the rest of our clothes and knelt facing each other.

“First one to come wins,” I said with a wink.

“No fair! Men always win those races.”

“Tough. Just try, it’ll help me.” I wrapped my hand around my cock and concentrated on her body, watching as she stroked her breasts and pussy. My body reacted, filling my hand with hardening flesh.

“That’s it,” she said, “do it for me. Do it for Valka.”

One hand drifted back and forth between her nipples, making them into tight little knots of pink flesh. The other drew two fingers between her pussy-lips, making small, liquid sounds as she stirred her juices.

The ship bucked again, nearly toppling us, and I tried not to imagine the threats that could be causing Robert to have to maneuver that way. I focused my thoughts, blending all the skills I had learned in Physicality to let my body take over.

Grecca stroked her slim, pale body and let her head sag backwards. I let my eyes drink in the sight of her, enjoying her erotic display. I didn’t know whether she was really trying to orgasm, or if it was all for my benefit, and I didn’t care. I just enjoyed it.

A momentary vibration sang through the ship. I passed it off as the first rumblings of orgasm manifesting in the orgone collectors of the ship and refocused my attention. My hand was slick with the first secretions mixed with the lingering gel from the gentank. With the growing tension in my body, it became impossible to keep my eyes open. All the anxieties of our escape, all the excitement and rage and pain and confusion mixed together right behind my navel and then shot down into my pelvis. I came with an intensity and desperation that I had never felt before, and as the drumming concussions of the ship’s drive hammered in my ears, Grecca threw herself on top of me.

“We did it, Challers! We did it!”

We did it! We had successfully escaped from the Scout headquarters.

I climbed onto the bench ringing the chamber, heedless of the mess of gel and semen on my body, and opened a terminal from a side panel. We hadn’t gone far—only a fraction of a parsec—but it was enough to put us out of danger for the time being. Not only that, according to the plotted course, we had gone straight to our rendezvous point in one jump.

I pressed the control for the bridge. “Robert? Looks like we made it.”

No reply.

“Robert?”

Grecca made a panicked cry and ran up the narrow passage to the bridge. I followed close behind. Robert lay unconscious in the pilot’s seat.

She made a quick check of his pulse and breathing. “We have to get him into the gentank.”

“You go get it open,” I said. “I’ll get him out of the seat.”

“Got it.” Grecca ran back into the passageway to open the floor plates that covered the small gentank built into the Scout ship, while I opened the controls and slowly dialed down the gravity. When Robert became light enough to lift, I slowly eased him out of the control couch and into my arms.

There were bruises on his head, fresh ones, and more on the rest of his body. Had he fallen on the way to the control couch? It didn’t matter; the gentank would make him right. I lowered him down into the gel and Grecca fixed the oxygen mask over his face before letting him fully submerge.

The little screen on the side of the tank read, “Diagnosing.”

I stared at it, feeling my own heartbeats counting out the seconds. After what felt like days, I asked, “That should flip over to ‘Treating’ very quickly, shouldn’t it?”

Grecca’s brow furrowed. “Yes, it should. It’s been like that too long.”

She touched the control next to it to get a more detailed readout. “Multiple subcutaneous and internal contusions, cause unknown. Heart, lung, and liver function seriously compromised. Brain damage extensive.”

I shook my head. “Brain damage. That’s not good. How did he get brain damage? He got shot in the arm.”

“I don’t know. This doesn’t make any sense.” She stood up and looked towards the bridge. “I’m going to check the ship’s logs, see if there’s anything in there to explain this.”

“Good idea. I need to clean up.”

After a quick shower, I made a visit to the pantry to get some protein bars and electrolyte drinks. There wasn’t much else there, but there was enough food to get us to wherever we were going.

Which would be where? I put the food on a tray and started back towards the bridge. The plan for “where to go from here” lay in the injured brain under the deck plates. The gentank wasn’t good at repairing brains; that was its only real weakness. Suddenly, our escape seemed a lot less secure than it had been.

I set the tray down next to Grecca’s control couch and sat in the copilot’s seat. “Find anything?”

“I was just pulling up the sensor records.”

A holographic display appeared between us. Dozens of contacts had shown up shortly after we took off from the side of the station.

“They look like fighters,” said Grecca.

“They’re fast.” The little blips swarmed after us, quickly overtaking the ship.

“Yeah. See that warp signature? It’s pulling a hell of a lot of orgone. Whoever’s piloting those things, they’re going to be one hurting . . . whoa!”

Ten of the drones suddenly disappeared from the screen. “What happened?”

Grecca shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s like a bunch of them self-destructed. There was a huge ripple in the space-time structure. Look.” Grecca added new data to the screen. Bright lines streaked out from the disappearing drones towards the ship. “See those green spikes? Those are focused warp energy. A weapon.”

“What would those things do to us, if they hit?”

“To the ship? Not much. It’s hardened against that kind of thing, or we’d never be able to make a jump.”

“But not us.”

“No. Any of that energy that got through the hull would scramble our insides.”

“Or Robert’s.”

Long seconds of silence stretched as we watched the pursuit. The ship dodged and weaved, evading the deadly lances of green that shot out from the diminishing swarm of pursuers.

Grecca waved her hand at the display. “I can’t believe all those people committed suicide to try to stop us. If there’s anything the Scouts can’t afford, it’s to throw away lives like that.”

“No, wait. Look.” I froze the display and zoomed in on one of the drones. “That thing’s tiny. No way to put a pilot, life support, and a warp drive in there. They’re not using grown people. They’re using Ovor eggs.”

She looked over at me, eyes wide with horror. “They can’t!”

“It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.” The hologram sprayed flickering red and green light across her face.

Grecca took data from the sensor record. fed it back into the computer, and put the math up on a secondary screen. “It’s impossible. Look, there isn’t enough basal orgone in something that small.”

“Then it’s not basal orgone.” I felt my stomach tighten and I nearly moaned out loud from the pain of it.

“What?”

“They’re not just using Ovor eggs to power those drones, Grecca. They’re torturing them. That’s stress orgone.”

Grecca gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “No one could be that evil. What could motivate someone to do that?”