Specimen (10 page)

“I brought a change of clothes in this morning.”

“You’re learning.”

I lift her easily by the waist, reach around with one hand and rip her skirt and panties from her body.  I turn to press her back against the tiles along the shower wall.  I push open the lab coat and press my lips to her neck.

“Tell me you want it.”  I urge her with my words as I press my cock between her legs.  “Say you want my cock.”

“Sten!”  Riley giggles, and I pause to look into her eyes.

“Tell me.”

“I’m not saying that!”

“It’s true though, isn’t it?  I bet you saw me lying unconscious, and all you could think about was getting on top of me and riding it out.”

I tickle her side again, and she laughs as she tries to push my hand away.

“Don’t do that!  I’ll drop you on your ass.”  I hoist her a little higher against the wall.

“Don’t you dare!”

“You’re going to have to tell me that you were checking out my dick, then.”

“I did
not
ogle your unconscious body!”  She can’t get the sentence out without laughing again.

“Liar.”  I take my cock in my hand and rub it over her, pressing the head up against her clit. “Admit it.”

“You did look pretty good,” she says along with another string of laughter.  She grins as she runs her hand over the side of my face.

“You’re so beautiful,” I tell her.  “I’m glad you picked me.”

“I knew you were the one I wanted as soon as I saw you,” she says quietly.  “It wasn’t about your looks.  I knew you were the right one for what I wanted to do.”

“Ride my cock?”  I grin, and she rolls her eyes.

“I’m not dignifying that with an answer!”

“I guess I’ll just have to remind you what it’s like.”

Without another word, I lift her into the perfect angle against the wall and position the head of my cock between her legs.  I slam into her, pull back, and slam forward again.  I place one palm against the tiles and angle the rest of my body to hold her against the wall and just pound into her.  Riley holds on tightly to my shoulders and gasps every time I enter her.

I press my forehead to her shoulder, and she wraps her arms around my head.  I feel her tense all around me, gasping for breath as I impale her against the wall.  I press my body firmly against hers, burying myself deep and staying there.  I grind against her in slow, precise circles until her pitch rises and she cries out.

“Sten!  Oh, shit!  Sten!”

In my head, I whisper
Galen
and wonder if I’ll ever hear that sound from her lips.

I come as she shudders around me.  I press my lips to her collarbone and kiss her skin gently before slowly lowering her to the floor.  She keeps a firm grip on my biceps as she leans against me.

“Wow,” she says.  “That was…intense.”

“You bring that out in me.  Sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

“Sometimes?”

I shrug and grin at her.  She’s a little shaky on her feet, so I help her over to the rolling chair and sit her down.  She leans back and takes a long breath before smiling back at me.

“I’ve got to finish going over the data,” she says, “but all I want to do now is take a nap.”

“I just want to lay you down on that bed and start over again.”

“Maybe I do need to adjust your meds.”  She laughs.

I can only shrug again.  Meds or not, I don’t think I will ever get enough of her.

I’m in the field at the farm, turning soil with the trowel and trying to will water into existence.  My stomach has been in a tight ball for days.  I won’t have enough to keep anyone happy.  What are they going to do if I can’t deliver?  Will they take the land away?  Will they split us up?  Take my sister away from me?

The rumbling sound of trucks doesn’t concern me at first.  Trucks come down our rural road all the time, carrying goods from the storage barns to the city.  They’re so loud today, though, I head around the barn to see what’s going on.

I turn the corner and see the machines—huge metal monsters filled with soldiers.

I wake in a cold sweat.

Thankfully, I’m not alone.  Riley is curled on her side, next to me in the small bed.  She’d worked late to get all the data from our most recent training mission into the computer, and I’d practically begged her to just spend the night with me.  With her here, the dream, along with the fear that came with it, fades quickly.

I press my chest to Riley’s back and slide my arm carefully under her neck.  With the other arm around her stomach, I pull her closer to me.  I’m hard as a rock.  It’s hard to resist the urge to rub my erection against her ass, but I manage.  At least for a little while.

As she begins to stir from sleep, I kiss her neck and shoulder.  She hums softly and presses back against me.  I slide my hand over her stomach, down to her thigh, and then back up to cup her breast.  Her hum turns into a moan, and she turns her head to give me better access to her neck.

Moving my hand lower, I slip it between her legs and hold her thigh up enough to gain access.  I enter her slowly from behind, easing my way forward until I’m encompassed by her.  I pause and press my lips to her shoulder, holding her close to me.  Riley sighs and turns her head to meet my lips.

I move slowly, listening to the changes in her breathing and basking in her scent.  It’s different in the morning, stronger and slightly muskier.  I can smell myself on her, too.

Riley raises her leg a little more and shoves her backside against me, driving me deeper.  I pick up the pace as I feel her come with a small, high-pitched gasp.  I quickly follow, grunting my pleasure against her throat.

I wrap myself around her tightly, holding her to my chest as our breathing returns to normal.

“That was quite a good morning,” Riley mumbles with a sigh.  “For a minute, I thought I was having a dream.”

“Best kind of dream,” I respond.  Images from my own dream try to invade my head, but I push them away.  I just want to focus on the here and now, primarily, Riley’s warm skin up against my own.

“It was very nice.”

“Just nice?”

She snickers and rolls over to snuggle against me.

“We could just stay like this all day.”  I know my suggestion is pointless, but I say it anyway.

“I do have work I need to get done.”

I sigh and relax my grip.  Riley crawls off the bed and gathers her clothes from the floor while I get myself over to the shower.  By the time I’m dressed, she’s already pounding away on the computer.

“The techs are performing some maintenance on the virtual systems,” Riley says.  “I need to run home and check on a few things, and then I have a meeting later.  Do you want to hang out in the lounge while I’m gone?”

“Sure.”

Now that we have met, Isaac, Pike, and I are able to meet with each other in a lounge near the virtual training centers.  It’s a good place to talk about the missions we’ve done and compare tactics.  Most of the time, we all agree on what approach to take, but on the few occasions where we disagree, I find their reasoning interesting.

Riley escorts me to the lounge, where Isaac is already sitting at a table, leafing through a manual of some sort.  It’s a pointless activity—he could just have the information loaded into his implants, but he says he likes the tactile sensation of the paper.

I drop my ass into the chair beside him, and he pushes the manual away.

“Boring day,” he says.  “No training.”

“Me either.  The virtual systems are offline.”

“I heard.  I was going to go to the gym, but Shweta said she had a meeting to go to.”

“Riley, too.”  I reach over and flip the manual so I can see the cover.  It has the Mills Conglomerate logo printed on the top corner, and the title is
Healthy Today, Brighter Tomorrow
.  I thumb through a few pages.  All the articles are about the benefits of synthetic food sources.

I’ve found Isaac to be a very relaxed guy most of the time.  He’s thoughtful and soft-spoken but an animal when threatened.  When he talks about Dr. Rahul, he gets a glazed look in his eyes.  He says he’s in love with her.

I can’t define how I feel about Riley.  Love is too simple a word.

Though I have spent approximately the same amount of time with both Isaac and Pike, I identify more with Isaac.  Pike smells too much like Dr. McCall, and I don’t trust her.  She has it in for Riley, and despite the adjustments Riley made to keep me from going after Dr. McCall when she says something derogatory about Riley, I still struggle against the desire.

I flip another page of the manual, and there’s a photograph of someone planting seedlings in rough soil.  The man in the picture is older and red-faced with sweat on his brow.  Many of the seedlings are already turning brown.

They won’t survive.

I blink, the image reminding me of the dream I’d had last night.  A vision of my hands pushing tiny seeds into little paper pots fills my head.

“Do you ever dream?” I ask Isaac.

“I guess,” he says with a shrug.  “Sometimes I’ll dream about one of the training missions from the virtual center.  Usually it’s because I thought of a better way to accomplish the objectives—like my head wants to try it out again.”

It isn’t the kind of dream I want to hear about, but I can only nod.  Though I have similar thoughts in my head, I don’t recall actually dreaming about missions.  All my dreams are on a much more personal level.

But I can’t tell him that.

The doors open, and Pike strides in.

“I hear they’re getting ready to send us out on a real mission,” Pike says as he takes a seat across from me.

“Oh yeah?  Who said that?”  Isaac leans back in his chair, making the two front legs rise up in the air.

“Who else do I ever talk to?” Pike says with a laugh.  “Helen slipped me the info while I was slipping her the dick.”

Isaac chuckles, but I just roll my eyes.  I know the others are just as sexually conditioned as I am, but the very idea of having my dick anywhere near Dr. McCall leaves me feeling a little queasy.  How can they talk about missions while they’re fucking?

“Did you get any actual information?” I ask.

“Something about a defector,” Pike says as he shrugs his shoulders.  “I was a little preoccupied and didn’t ask for a lot of detail.”

“Perks of the job!” Isaac says.  He reaches over and punches me in the shoulder.  “With all the extra drugs you have in your system, you have to be all over Dr. Grace all the time.”

I can’t help the grin that spreads over my face.  There is no denying it.  Since the first time she let me fuck her, I’d been inside her as often as possible.  I try to wait until she isn’t busy, but sometimes I have to resort to distraction techniques.  I’d come up behind her when she’d be working on the computer, slip my arms around her, and kiss her relentlessly until she’d let me fuck her on the desk.

Pike laughs loudly when I don’t offer a verbal response.  I’m not comfortable talking about my sexual relationship with my doctor, so I try to steer the conversation in a different direction.

“I’ve got information on several defectors,” I say.  “When Riley uploaded historical data into my head, there was a bunch of stuff on technical people who went rogue last year.”

Isaac and Pike both pause for a moment, retrieving the information for themselves.

“She didn’t give me a name,” Pike says.  “I don’t know which one it might be.  Have you done any virtual training on recovering people?”

“No,” Isaac and I say in unison.

“Huh.”  Pike frowns.  “I’ve done two of those.”

“I thought most of our training was on the same timeline,” Isaac says.  “Are there any other anomalies?”

We discuss the types of virtual missions we’ve done, but the schedule is identical with this one exception.

“Weird.”

“Maybe you have another one going on today,” Isaac says as he nods toward the entrance to the lounge.  Dr. McCall is heading in our direction, but she doesn’t acknowledge me as she retrieves Pike.  He leaves with a quick “See ya later” in a tone too low for his doctor to hear, but she gives him a stern look anyway.

“Three likely candidates,” Isaac says.

“Candidates?”

“Defectors.”  He leans forward again, and the legs of his chair bang against the floor.  “Spencer Cannon from the medical division.  He fought against Project Mindstorm from the beginning.  Annabel Jarvis, also from medical is a likely candidate.”

“She made claims against synthetic food production.”  I tilt my head as I access the information.  “I understand Cannon—he knows a lot about the drug treatments for Project Mindstorm.  Why Jarvis?”

“She’s Graham Mills’ goddaughter, for one.  Having someone close to him run to the other side is embarrassing, if nothing else.  There’s some report indicating she may have had some information about the assassination of Robert Grace.”

“Riley’s father?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t have any intel on that.”

“Maybe an oversight?”  Isaac shrugs before he goes on.  “Errol Spat from the tech division is the last one.  He developed our implants.”

I nod as I retrieve the information.

“Any of those could be the target,” I say.  “There are countless others as well.”

“Those are the most likely,” Isaac says, and I agree with his assertion.

“I guess we’ll find out eventually.”

We hang out in the lounge all day.  When we run out of topics to discuss, I begin to get restless.  Riley has been gone a long time, and I wonder what is keeping her occupied.  She’s left me to attend meetings before, but they usually only last an hour or two.  She’s been gone for six hours and seventeen minutes now.

“Long meeting, I guess,” Isaac says as if he’s reading my mind.

I can’t hear the thoughts of my comrades, but I can definitely sense their presence and mood.  The closer they are physically, the stronger the sensation.  When we’re linked for a training exercise, the feeling is emphasized.

“I wonder if they’re talking about the mission Pike mentioned.  Wouldn’t Dr. McCall be in the same meeting?  I wonder why she didn’t leave Pike here.”

“There’s no telling,” Isaac says.  “It’s not like we’re given a lot of extraneous information.”

“Need to know basis,” I mumble, and he smirks.

Riley appears at the door, and I immediately stand to greet her.  She’s visibly troubled by something, but when I ask what it is, she just runs her hand up the inside of my arm and tells me everything is all right.

Dr. Rahul comes into the room as well.  Her expression is more passive than Riley’s, but she doesn’t smile or greet me like she normally does.  She quickly collects Isaac as Riley leads me back to the lab.

“What’s going on?” I ask when the door closes behind me.

“No one is listening to me.” Riley slams her tablet down on the desk.  “In other words, status quo.”

She starts to pace back and forth, running her hand over her careful bun, causing some of the strands to get loose.  She grits her teeth and shakes her head slowly.

“Idiots,” she grumbles.

“What happened?” I ask again.

“They’ve decided you’re all ready for an actual mission,” she says.  “I keep telling them we need more trial runs first, but they’re insisting the timing is right.  It’s all so fucking political!”

I flinch.  I’ve never heard Riley so upset, and I can’t recall her cursing at all unless she was on the verge of orgasm.  I’m concerned for her mood but also turned on.

“What’s the mission?” I ask, wondering if Pike had been correct.

“Intelligence wants you to go out and retrieve a defector.”

“Who?”

“Errol Spat.”

“The tech who designed our implants.”

“Yes, that’s him.  There has been some information regarding his whereabouts, and more importantly, where he will be in the near future.”

“Where will he be?”

“There’s a main road that parallels the Grey River, right by the border between Mills-controlled Yorkstown and Carson-controlled Haprin.  Can you access it?”

“Yes.”  I see it all clearly in my head.

“There is rarely any travel on that road due to the proximity of the border.  Do you see our border wall there?”

“Yes, it’s just on the edge of the river.”

“That’s it.  The road connects Carson City with Haprin.  We believe there will be a convoy carrying grain to Haprin and that Errol Spat will be transported from Carson City to Haprin and then further into Carson territory to Martinsberg.  Carson Alliance has recently built a new tech facility there.”