Only Superhuman (28 page)

Rachel finally let her up for air. “I know, it’s a lot to take in. What’s it been, twenty-six years, and we’ve never even met until now?”

“Twenty-two,” she replied quietly.

“Oh, of course, it’s not like you were born the minute Richard left! Some geneticist, not remembering that!” Rachel chuckled. “Ohh, let me look at you! My God, I’ve seen pictures, but you are so
beautiful
! Ohh, honey, you couldn’t be more gorgeous if I’d designed you myself!”

Emry fidgeted. “I, uhh, take after my mother.”

“Oh, of course you do. Don’t get me wrong … there’s no beauty like natural beauty. The most we can do is help it express itself more fully.” She looked Emry over more critically. “Well, there’s some of your father in you. Aspects of the jawline, the forehead … the mesomorphic build, of course, God, you must be strong! And you have my coloring, I daresay. Well, what used to be my coloring.”

“And a couple other things,” Emry said, indicating her chest. “I always wondered where I got these babies from. Not that I’m complaining,” she finished with a smirk.

Rachel laughed. “Well, you’re very welcome! And you’ve got my hips, too … plus you’re so strong, it should make childbearing easier.” Emry stared. “Oh, when you’re ready, of course. I’m just so excited at the prospect of adding your genes back into the mix.”

“That remains to be seen,” Thorne said before Emry could figure out a response. “Before a partnership can commence, Emerald needs to be tested. I need a full physical and genetic workup to evaluate the results.”

“Oh. One of your little competitions, right.” She shook her head at Emry, mouthing,
Men
. Being pretty competitive herself, Emry just shrugged. “Well, don’t worry, dear—you’ll give him a run for his money, I can tell just by looking at you. After all, you’re a Shannon.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Rachel said. “Strip to your skivvies and get on the table. I’d love to spend all day catching up, honey, but I really am in the middle of something urgent right now, and you know how it is when your muse is all fired up and shouting in your ear. So I’d like to get this done quickly, if you don’t mind.”

Emry obligingly began to remove her boots, giving Thorne a small smile as she did so. But Rachel glared at him. “And are you just going to stand there?”

“I’ll assist in the exam,” he replied as though it were a given.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind, young man. My granddaughter is entitled to some privacy.”

“She clearly doesn’t mind,” he said, gesturing at Emry, who was now pulling her top open. “And I need to know the results in any case.”

“And you’ll get them. Later. But Emerald and I have girl stuff to discuss and I want her to feel completely at ease—and under no pressure to show off,” she added pointedly. “It’s the only way I’ll get reliable results, and you know it. So go on. Shoo!”

She physically hustled the much larger man to the doorway, and surprisingly, he went without resistance. But as he left, Emry heard him mutter, “The woman is a force of nature.” Emry was beginning to agree.

13

Bed of Thornes

“Oh, vack,” Emry gasped as the sheer rock face loomed before her. Bad enough that Thorne had made her race him halfway around Vanguard’s equatorial forest to get to this point, six kilometers at roughly half again the gravity she was used to. Bad enough he’d made her do it spinward, so that the faster she ran, the heavier she’d get. But mountain-climbing was not a skill she’d needed much in life.

Still, they’d trained her for it at the Corps, along with every other contingency they could think of.
Lucky I’m a recent graduate,
she thought as the climb grew increasingly steep. For once her spinward course was working in her favor; the ground’s rotational velocity decreased with its distance from the axis, so as she climbed, she felt a small decelerating vector pushing against her, angling her weight vector slightly so that the climb effectively became a bit less steep. The faster she ran uphill, the less uphill it seemed to get.

But before long she was climbing a sheer vertical slope, unable to move fast enough to gain any significant benefit. The gravity was a bit more reasonable at this height, but not enough to make a difference. She’d stopped trying to keep track of Thorne, instead staying focused on the bumps and crevices before her, her world reduced to a few square meters of simulated stone.
Do real mountains on Earth get this steep?
she wondered. She’d seen such cliffs in movies, but had trouble believing the images were real.

Her arms were burning by the time she drew near the small plateau at the top of the cliff. As she reached the rim, cursing Eliot Thorne under her breath, she saw the man himself looming above her, blocking her. “Oh, come on!” she cried.

“This is your challenge, Emerald. Deal with it.”

“You won’t … let me fall.”

“Probably not. But I won’t let you past either.”

“Didn’t … you think you could take me in a fair fight?”

“We live in a universe where entropy has an inbuilt advantage. Fairness is a fiction. We prove ourselves by our ability to surmount unfair odds.”

You really do talk too much.
She’d braced her knees higher while he spoke, and now lunged up and forward to grab at his leg, hoping to yank him off balance. But he simply reached down and dragged her up by the collar. A moment later he was cradling her like a child as she struggled in vain … and then she realized he was dangling her over the edge.
Okay, pushing away is
not
the way to go here.
Especially since a falling body would curve antispinward,
away
from the cliff face.

So she opted for the Bugs maneuver. Abruptly, she grabbed Thorne’s head in her hands and kissed him on the nose. She’d wanted to go for the lips, but this more absurd approach proved more disarming. The nonplussed Thorne loosened his grip enough for her to clamber over his shoulders, jumping down behind him and running for the top. She heard him chuckle before his footfalls came after her.

The last part of the climb wasn’t as rough as the cliff face, but the air was colder and thinner up here, the ground covered in snow and ice. The Vanguardian metabolism demanded a lot of oxygen. Emry hoped that being only half-Vanguardian, and half Thorne’s mass, would give her an edge.

Unfortunately, his longer reach and stride proved more telling. Soon his hand grabbed her ankle from below and yanked her back half a meter with her face in the snow. She kicked down at his face and forced him to let go. She could hear his breath rasping as she clambered away.
At least I winded him. But now there’s wet snow in my cleavage. Great.

Now the peak was only a few dozen meters away. But Thorne overtook her again, tackling her against the sixty-degree slope and dragging her back by her waistband. She elbowed him in the head, which dazed him a bit, so she hit and kicked some more to try to knock him back downhill. But his inertia was twice hers, so she only ended up dislodging herself. He recovered enough to take advantage, stiff-arming her in the gut. She fell back a couple of meters, catching herself with one hand. Thorne clambered farther up while Emry recovered her grip. Growling, she pulled herself up after him and grabbed at his left ankle.

It was a mistake. Thorne kicked his leg out away from the rock face, jerking her out with it. She dangled for a moment, but promptly brought her knees up, pushed off, and somersaulted backward using Thorne’s ankle as a pivot, intending to kick him in the face. He dodged at the last instant, clinging to the slope by his right hand and foot only. She let go and let her momentum flip her upright again, reaching for a new handhold above Thorne. But his left arm caught her in the midriff, knocking the wind from her. One swipe of his arm and she was falling through the air, then tumbling back down to the plateau.

Gasping for breath, Emry looked up to see Thorne climbing swiftly, surely. In moments, he straddled the summit, his hands on his hips, king of the mountain. Emry slumped where she sat and just tried to catch her breath.

“Well?” Thorne called down. “Are you just going to lie there?”

“What do you want?” she shouted back. “I lost!”

“That’s no excuse to give up!”

She stared at him for a long moment.

Then she pulled herself to her feet and began climbing once more. Her throat burned from the cold air, its moisture choking her.

When she finally reached the apex, Thorne took her hand and pulled her up alongside him. He smiled, then turned her face outward to gaze upon Vanguard stretched out below them. “There. You see? You may have lost, but you still earned the reward.”

“Pretty view,” she gasped. “So what? I got a higher view … from the spaceport. It’s a hollow sphere, dummy!”

He glared at her, but simply said, “Perhaps to one who lived on Earth for a time, it seems a greater reward.”

“Yeah, well … after all that … I’m entitled to a bigger reward than this.”

“Then let me give you one.”

He lifted her off the ground once again … and this time his lips devoured hers, and his arms engulfed her body. It stunned her even more than being knocked halfway down a mountain … but she was feeling no pain this time. It was exactly the reward she would’ve claimed herself if he hadn’t made the first move. Her arms folded around him, her mouth opening readily to him.

Thorne carried her down to a relatively flat depression on the other side of the peak and sat on a protruding boulder, lowering her onto his lap. She didn’t even remember releasing her zipseal lock, but somehow she found herself naked, the heat of Thorne’s bare flesh throwing the icy chill of the wind into sharp relief. Before long, they were tumbling in the snow, a welcome relief for her overheated body—though she spent most of the time on top of him, of course, since his mass would crush her otherwise.

They kept at it for as long as they could stand the cold, and then Thorne called in an aircar to take them back to his chambers. Once there, after sharing a warming drink, he stripped her once more, massaged her aches away, and took her again.

In all her life, Emry had never been so completely overwhelmed by a lover. True, she’d only taken partners strong enough to hold their own against her, but even so, she’d rarely been outmatched in strength. And Thorne took full advantage of his strength, dominating her completely.

Not that he wasn’t considerate or attentive. On the contrary, he was extraordinarily responsive to her desires, her likes and dislikes. He probed out her most sensitive areas with expert precision and did incredible things to them. He gave her everything she could ask for and more, usually before she could ask.

Yet he remained very much in control. Emry was too completely carried away to assert much of anything herself. But just this once, she decided, she was fine with that. If Eliot wanted to make a regular thing out of this—and she profoundly hoped he did—it would have to proceed on a more egalitarian footing. But for now, it was certainly a hell of a ride.

And she had to admit … right now, with the weight of worlds on her shoulders, it was strangely refreshing to surrender all her responsibility and power and will for one night … and just let herself be taken care of.

*   *   *

It wasn’t until the next morning that Emry gave a thought to her growing relationship with Psyche. She felt somewhat guilty about that when she confessed it to Psyche, but the lissome Vanguardian absolved her readily. “Think nothing of it. What matters is that you let yourself be happy. The last thing I’d want is for you to treat my father as a one-night stand and avoid exploring where this relationship could lead. I’ll happily step aside, as long as we stay friends.”

“I’m not even sure it is a relationship,” Emry said. “It was just lots and lots of really exhausting sex.”

Psyche just looked at her. “You know I can read you better than that. You trusted him. Relaxed your guard like you never have with any other man. If our time together has helped prepare you for taking that kind of step, then I’m happy for you, and for my father.”

Emry was grateful for her understanding—and oddly unsurprised. Maybe she’d just known that what she and Psyche shared had been more a friendship with benefits than a romance. Maybe that was why she hadn’t felt bad about sleeping with Thorne. Not that she wouldn’t have slept with him anyway, admittedly.

And Psyche, gregarious as she was, had no trouble finding other companionship. That night, at a party she threw to celebrate Emry’s joining of the “team,” Psyche showed up flanked by two burly male escorts, whom Emry recognized as the two men she herself had picked out for their impromptu orgy the month before. And Psyche didn’t exactly discourage attention from the other men at the party. Unlike at the conference, she didn’t need to win these people’s trust and respect, so she was bold and frankly seductive. She owned the attention of everyone here, and she openly reveled in it.

If anything, she took it a little too far. Emry saw a twinge of jealousy in her bigger escort’s eyes, and it seemed that Psyche was deliberately provoking it through her brazen behavior with other men. Emry tried to divert the big guy with her own flirtations, reminding him of the wild times they’d shared that first night, though her futile struggle to remember his name hampered her efforts. And he only seemed to have eyes for Psyche. If anything, it seemed that the men were all giving Emry a wide berth, unwilling to take chances now that she was with their alpha male. But in the big guy’s case, it seemed to be more about the daughter than the father. Eventually, when Psyche spent an inordinately long time in a hot, intimate dance with another brawny Vanguardian, the big guy lost his temper and tried to cut in by force. Before long, it was a free-for-all. Emry was amused at first, but soon realized the two men were not holding back. If this kept up, someone could end up seriously injured, or worse. But Psyche was watching the fight raptly, giggling. “You think this is funny?” Emry cried. “You encouraged them, didn’t you?”

“Can I help it if they both fell in love with me?”