Annabeth Leong
“I don’t know what Earth was thinking,” Captain Mechelle Wharton complained. Every few seconds, there was a slapping sound as she caught herself against one of the cramped engine room’s walls and pushed off toward the other. It was a zero-gravity, extreme-power-conservation version of pacing, and it was on my last nerve.
The noise made it impossible to forget her presence. Besides that, every time she flew past me, air currents eddied around her and carried the scent of her body. I’d just spent six months hurtling through the vacuum in uncomfortably high gravity due to acceleration, totally alone, fed through an IV, drugged to within an inch of my life. The psych training courses I’d taken to prepare for the experience had mentioned extreme sexual arousal as a potential effect of coming out safely on the other side—something about the survival instinct asserting itself combined with an urge for connection after the extended isolation combined with an adrenalized response to intense situations—but they’d recommended spending time alone while acclimating. They hadn’t said anything about what to do if an attractive woman decided to watch your every move.
From my current position, entangled with the guts of her ship’s engine, I couldn’t see her face. I knew she could see my hands, though, so I continued to pretend I was actually trying to fix the problem that prevented her and her crew from returning to Earth with a cargo hold full of neurotoxin-producing alien bacteria.
I was so tangled up thinking about her that I could hardly focus on either of my missions—not the faux-repair mission she knew about, and certainly not the military mission she didn’t. I couldn’t deal with her speculation on top of that. Giving her my best noncommittal grunt, I tried to come up with more ways to look busy fiddling with the engine in hopes that she would eventually leave me alone.
She, however, apparently enjoyed thinking out loud. “Once you get the drive going again, I’ll have to divert power away from life support to get a strong enough push from the thrusters to put us back on course. That won’t damage our oxygen production permanently, but you know how math works in space. One more person breathing air adds just enough strain to the system that we’ll come up two days short on our oxygen supply. Even if we utilize every auxiliary oxygen tank on the ship, we can’t make it two days. Don’t they have engineers? I can’t understand why they didn’t do a better job planning how to get you back as well.”
The real answer was that Earth expected Captain Mechelle Wharton to be a little less mathematically minded. A little less observant, generally. I was supposed to have been able to show up, say I had the necessary supplies to fix the ship, present appropriate security clearance, and then, with no further questions asked, rewire the engine to blow us all to kingdom come, myself included. The powers that be didn’t expect her to fixate on the resource management required to get me back to Earth safely, probably because they’d never bothered to consider that question themselves. This had been a suicide mission from the outset as far as they were concerned.
I grunted again and unscrewed several attachments, knowing I was just going to reattach them a few minutes from now.
“I’ve had my crew running the numbers nonstop, Stefany,” Captain Wharton said. “I’m angry about this oversight, but I want you to know I’m committed to making this work.”
“Thank you,” I said, blinking rapidly to hold back an unexpected flood of emotion. PsychPrep was beginning to seem like a total failure. I’d been screened with a battery of tests that measured my loyalty, discretion, strength of character, ability to endure isolation and resolve to place the needs of the many above the needs of the few. I’d had no reservations about taking on a suicide mission, and my commanders hadn’t had any about giving me one. I’d been through death-acceptance classes, and I’d even put on a funeral party before embarking.
All that, and somehow the concern and strength in Captain Wharton’s voice made me want to weep. The alluring scent of her made me want to make love to her. The combination of the two made me want to live.
I remembered the cold, hard knot I’d been able to feel in my chest as I’d set out on this mission, but I could no longer summon the same icy purpose. Captain Wharton’s restless movements and constant questioning had irritated me from our first moment together, but they’d also unraveled me. I reached for the comforting efficiency of my former self. I could at least approximate it, even if I could no longer embody it.
“Don’t strain your crew on my account, though, Captain. You won’t have to worry about me breathing your air. I’ll step out of the airlock, won’t feel a thing.” I thought I might be able to shock her into leaving me be. Then I could alter the engine and none of us would have need of oxygen anymore.
I’d be giving up my life to keep those neurotoxin-producing bacteria out of the hands of the terrorist groups who’d vowed to capture Captain Wharton’s ship. Captain Wharton and the crew would make the same sacrifice unwittingly, but they’d known there was risk when they’d signed on to their mission. PsychPrep had taught me to think of myself in the context of that risk, a physical manifestation of the abstract forces of chance and chaos. I wasn’t a person assassinating the crew of a research ship and destroying their notes and specimens. I was the wing of the butterfly flapping, the resulting storm an inevitable and impersonal effect.
The noises she’d been making stopped. For a moment, I thought she’d left and I could get on with my task and end all this. Then I took another breath and had to bite back the moan summoned by her smell, closer now.
It wasn’t any sort of perfume—no civet or flowers or spices here. Her ship was a utilitarian, scientific mission with no room for such luxuries. Captain Mechelle Wharton smelled of sweat and pheromones, the funk of her sex unavoidably compelling in the cramped space.
She reached into the engine and touched my hand. “Come out of there for a minute, will you?”
The sensation of her skin against mine destroyed me. Before placing me in the slingshot—the ultra-rapid transport device that had sent me into space with nothing more than the barest essentials for immediate survival—the technicians had wrapped me tightly in a reinforced suit. The body needs to be held, they had told me, and perhaps the pressure of the suit against my limbs had kept me that much more sane, hugging me as I hurtled through the anesthesia and the blackness.
But it had been cold where her skin was hot. The suit had been inorganic, but she was life itself.
I had trembled for an hour after her crew had cracked open the bullet that contained me. I had performed the exercises I’d been taught, cautiously reawakening my joints and muscles, rubbing circulation back into my tingling toes. Even my own touch had confused me—like velvet, but also like knives.
Her touch, so casual and so profound, made me want to scream in agony as it overwhelmed my confused and disused nerves. I wanted to grab her fingers and never let go.
I pulled my hand away, my skin still stinging from the heat of her. “Give me a second. I don’t want to lose any of my tools in here.” I banged a few things against each other to stall, even as I discovered there was no way to prepare myself for facing her. Finally, I had no choice but to hope that PsychPrep would somehow kick in and do its job after all—at least enough to prevent me from compromising the mission.
I took a deep breath and crawled out of the engine. My cunt radiated a sharp, aroused smell of its own. My breathing was rapid and my face flushed, and I cringed at the thought of how I must look.
The captain frowned. “Are you all right, Stefany? I’ve read about how hard it is on the body to travel the way you did. I know this is an emergency repair, but we can spare a few hours if you need to rest.” She offered a weak smile. “The ironic thing is that we could float here indefinitely and survive—we’re stable with a surplus of oxygen now. We only have life-support problems if we try to go home.”
The real irony was that I was her biggest life-support problem, and yet she persisted in treating me so decently. I wasn’t used to feeling guilty about following orders.
I shook my head, but the gesture only made me dizzy. The sharp transition from heavy acceleration gravity to zero gravity disoriented me—I didn’t have to pretend about that. I made a gesture as if to fling hair away from my eyes, then remembered I’d burned that away with laser treatments before embarking.
I knew I ought to say something that would get her to leave me alone. Dragging this out was only making me unstable and confused. The captain was still talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I couldn’t take my eyes off her skin, which positively glowed with life and health. It seemed as if it would cure my every ill, not just the loneliness induced by my punishing voyage. I imagined myself with infrared vision, able to see the warmth of her overlaid on that smooth dark skin.
Perhaps it was the extreme sexual arousal talking, but I believed I would have wanted her under any circumstances. She was the hard and gorgeous type, her femininity emphasized by the way it slipped through her businesslike, muscular demeanor. On Earth, she had probably been made up of straight lines, sharp angles, smooth planes, firm, lean muscles and straight-cut athletic attire. Floating in the vacuum had softened her, though. With no gravity to hold her down, there was a buoyancy to her cheeks, a relaxation to muscles that were used to being driven hard.
“Maybe I should have the doctor take another look at you,” she was saying.
I shook my head quickly. “No. I’m really fine. It’s just disorienting, as you said.”
“Then rest before you work on that thing. I understand locking yourself in your bunk might not seem appealing after what you’ve been through. If you want company, I’d be happy to provide it. We can hang out in my quarters, nothing complicated. I can play you outdated pop music and serve you military rations.”
I rubbed my temples hard. Her quarters would carry the scent of her body even more than the engine room did now. I would see her cherished objects, get more of a sense of her as a person. I would not be able to prevent myself from looking at her bed, from attempting to gauge whether she ever shared it with anyone, from doing my best to wind up in it with her.
I had to say no. PsychPrep had gone over how to handle temptations and desires that undermined the stability and purpose required for the mission. I’d learned about the indecision that sets in as a result of delay.
I met the captain’s eyes. They were warm and brown and reminded me of the rich soil of a garden I’d once tried to cultivate. She summoned the image of earth—literal, earthworm-and-nutrient-rich earth, conjured here where outside the walls of the ship were swirls of nothingness. Saying no to her seemed equivalent to saying no to home, to safety, to humanity. I gave her a brief nod. “I’d like that.”
•
I suppressed my urge to take her in my arms the moment we entered her quarters, and so the captain truly did play me outdated pop music and serve me military rations. She asked questions about sports teams I didn’t follow, but when I shrugged helplessly, she only smiled. She asked me to call her Mechelle.
“How many times have you been to space?” she asked. “Have you traveled by slingshot before?”
I couldn’t give many details or I’d have made it clear that I wasn’t a simple repair technician. I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “Mostly near-Earth stuff, never by slingshot. This is very different.”
“I can’t imagine the slingshot. It’s hard enough when the trip is gradual. I feel like another person out here, as if I drifted away from the person I was on Earth until I became someone else. As I get closer to my supposed home, I guess I’m hoping the person I used to be will somehow grow back. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“What’s different about you?”
“Out here, I care more. You know, you grow up hearing things about the sanctity of human life, of life in general, but people don’t really act as if they believe those things. In deep space, those aren’t academic concerns. I’m safeguarding the lives of my crew. I’m bearing the awesome burden of transporting alien life forms. All that responsibility feels sacred now, but I would never have used that word on Earth.”
My heart stopped in my chest. She couldn’t know what I’d been sent to do, but here she was talking to me about the sanctity of life. And she was right that my memories of Earth seemed to belong to someone else. Back on Earth, political concerns about terrorist groups had seemed to matter. I had understood why one team had been sent to cleanse the neurotoxin-producing bacteria from the planet where Wharton’s crew had discovered it, and why I’d been sent to eradicate Wharton, her crew, their cargo and their data. Out here, those calculations were different, less meaningful than the intense drive to preserve life in contradiction to the emptiness around us.
I could not afford to get caught up in her sphere of influence. “You make your new perspective sound pretty good,” I said. “Why would you want to go back to the way things used to be?”
“I couldn’t bear being like this on Earth. I’d sob every time I watched the news, break down trying to walk past homeless people on the street. I can handle the responsibility I’ve got now. I can live up to it. Maybe life can only be sacred when there isn’t much of it around—when there’s more, we have to become a little less human. On Earth, I’d struggle to be fully human, fully compassionate, fully aware. It’s so painful.”
She made me want to fall to my knees. What I felt for her now wasn’t merely the desire for physical contact or connection. I wanted to become like her, to find a way to open my soul as she had. Spiced with the lust I’d been feeling, it made for a heady mix—something like the beginning of love. “I want to kiss you,” I said. I hoped she knew I’d been listening to her. The words were my most honest response to what she’d been saying.
She laughed, and at first I thought that meant rejection. Then she reached for my hand. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since the moment we cracked open that bullet ship of yours. I know they sent you for the ship, not for me, but there’s something about you that—”
I didn’t want to know what she saw in me. I couldn’t have borne the knowledge that it was false. I silenced her with the kiss we’d been discussing.
Six months of isolation, unfathomable distances, dark purposes—all of it faded beside the revelation of Mechelle’s lips. They were dry and a little chapped from the artificial atmosphere, but they were also warm, firm and soft. Her upper lip formed a bow shape, and I was exquisitely aware of the two curves of it and the point in the center where they came together.
We pressed our mouths together chastely at first, our lips pillowing each other and sticking together slightly. My breathing seemed far too loud in my ears, but could not drown the soft sounds of us coming together, parting and coming together again.
My throat caught on wild confessions I wished to make. I did the only thing I could to hold them back—I opened my mouth to kiss her more passionately. When she met me with equal ardor, I sobbed into her. She transformed my desperation into cries of ecstasy.
Together we came unmoored from everything I had previously known. Our tangled bodies floated aimlessly through the center of her quarters, propelled in one direction or another when we accidentally nudged her furniture as we kissed.
My stomach flipped and I lost my sense of direction entirely. It would have been a terrible sensation except for Mechelle’s arms and body against mine, holding me, showing me how to exist as a center of life amid emptiness. I needed her not only for pleasure but also for purpose. I wanted to be closer to her, to hold and be held ever more tightly.
We released our clothes to float as they would. I orbited her as a moon to a majestic planet, always facing her, drinking in the world of sights her body had to offer, bathing her in reflected light.
Her touch was divine fire. It amazed me that her fingers left behind no traces on my skin, for I felt the force of a brand from even her lightest strokes.
Where on Earth I might have reached first for her breast or sought her cunt impatiently, sex also seemed different so very many miles from everything most of humanity has ever known. I found myself barely concerned with erogenous zones or getting off. What I wanted now were pulse points. I pressed my lips to every spot I could find where I felt her heart beating—just above her ankles, the inside of each wrist, the sides of her neck, her chest just above her left breast and, finally, her inner thigh, so close to her pussy that her fur brushed my cheek.
What I needed was her heat, her breath, her salt, her wet. Between her legs, her blood moved beneath my lips, her cunt radiated scent and her pubic hair left traces of moisture on my skin. I turned to kiss her clit—a holy kiss, an act of reverence. My eyes had fallen closed. By kissing Mechelle’s sex, I was also kissing humanity itself, the root of life, the primal drives we never quite understand.
Then she gave a delighted laugh. “It’s been literally years since I felt a woman there,” she said. I smiled against her pussy and turned my kiss into a teasing lick. She rewarded me with a throaty gasp, and the galaxies outside receded from my consciousness. I was making love not to humanity or to all women but to her, to Mechelle Wharton, and that mattered as much as the universality of the experience did.
In the nonexistent gravity of the ship, I found it just as easy to push her away as to pull her close. I pulled my hands from her hips because I wanted to put my fingers inside her, but at the next flick of my tongue she began to drift away from me. Mechelle wriggled, catching the back of my neck with the crook of her knee. I wrapped my left arm around her thigh to hold us together, then sucked gently at her labia as I slipped my first finger into her clenching wetness.
She moaned, then moved in a way that sent us into a slow, head-over-heels tumble. “I want you, too.”
I’d always preferred to focus. I’d never liked the rush and pressure of two lovers trying to pleasure each other at the same time. “We’ve got hours,” I wanted to say. “We’ve got all of whatever counts as night out here.”
Before I could tear myself away from her long enough to speak, she climbed down my body. The change of position forced me to release her thigh, to allow her sex to rotate around my finger, to shift so I could find her again with my tongue.
She parted my labia gently, as if she knew how sensitive I already was. Nevertheless, I convulsed at the intimate touch. I wailed helplessly, going boneless in her grasp, unable to continue tasting her while her fingers entered me. I was dizzy, on the verge of spasm, my orgasm an alien force that threatened to take me over.
Then the scent of her cunt became an anchor point, a way to hold onto my sanity, and I buried my face between her legs. This was no competition. I made no attempt to lick her to orgasm before she induced that condition in me. Instead, I ate her because otherwise I could not have endured her thrusting fingers, her searching tongue. I drank her juices as if they were strength itself.
There was nothing hurried about the way we touched each other. We fell together at the speed of deep space, infinitely fast and infinitely slow at the same time. My head spun. Everything besides her body faded away. I cared nothing for gravity or time or either of my missions. I possessed no goals—not even the urge for pleasure.
I would have breathed her scent forever, or probed her body for as long as she allowed. I kept my legs spread for her, the idea of hiding any part of me unthinkable in the midst of the heat of our intimacy.
Mechelle’s thumb sank into my cunt, and her wet first finger slid back to my asshole. I sighed into her pussy. My sensitive ring of muscle fluttered under her touch. Relaxing there had never been easy for me, but she licked me patiently until an orgasm began to flower. It grew from the base of my stomach, out toward her face. My cunt clenched around her thumb, then went soft and pliant. Her first finger slipped into my ass.
I shivered as I took her in, the nature of my orgasm changing under her manipulation. My pleasure sharpened and lengthened as she pressed gently in and out of my ass. She held the very essence of me between her thumb and first finger. Having opened to her there, I knew I would eventually open to her in every possible way.
I could imagine myself spreading my legs for her fist. I could imagine myself whispering every dark truth of my mission into the shell of her ear.
My cry was born of surrender and defeat, but it rang with ecstatic force. When her voice echoed mine, I heard no gloating victory—only desperate pleasure.
•
“Do the bacteria worry you? That neurotoxin they produce—I heard it’s supposed to be deadly eventually and very painful for a long time first.”
Mechelle and I held each other in the center of her quarters, pressed against each other like twins in a womb. The possibility of further lovemaking still hung in the air, so neither of us had bothered to reach for our clothes. We had stopped to rest, though, and I at least was aware of unspoken things that could no longer remain so.
“We’ve got a good containment protocol,” she said. “Yes, they produce a chemical that’s harmful to us, but they’re also the first alien life form identified by the human race. They’re scientifically important. There are so many questions we want to answer with them. We’ve started by trying to determine what they share in common with Earth-based life forms—we’ve been calling them bacteria, but there’s a way that even that word presumes kinship with the life we already know. We eventually want to do the equivalent of sequencing their genome, once we’ve determined that the procedures we typically use will produce scientifically valid results for them. All that is worth some careful handling.”
“Do you get news out here? Have you heard about the terrorist group that promised to seize your ship and take the bacteria?”
Mechelle laughed, shaking her head. “Oh, there are some things about Earth that I haven’t missed.”
I set my jaw. “Let me tell you a few more things like that.”
I told her everything. To her credit, she never once pulled away from me or showed any sign of disgust. She was like the Madonna, receiving my kiss, my prayers and my confession without judgment.
When I had finished, she brushed her fingers over my scalp where my hair would have been. “What are you going to do now?”
I tilted my head back to look at her. She had asked in the tone of an honest question, as if she had no particular stake in what I decided. “What do you want me to do?”
Mechelle sighed. “Something that doesn’t force me to make a hard choice.” There was an edge of steel to that. I knew that for all her compassion, Captain Wharton possessed a mathematical mind, and she was no pushover. If I threatened her crew—or the precious bacteria—she would do what had to be done, even if it caused her pain.
For me, however, the choice didn’t seem hard anymore. Those qualities I’d been tested for—loyalty, strength of character, ability to endure isolation and all the rest—weren’t gone, they’d just shifted to serve a different purpose than the one Earth had assigned to me.
“I can destroy the bullet I came in and my comms. I can make a convincing-looking explosion. If you shift our coordinates even a little and don’t let them know you did, they’d never find us.” Poetry never came easily to me. Those practical concerns were my best attempt, my words of love.
She smiled. I knew she’d understood what I’d left unsaid. I closed my eyes and rested my head against her chest. It was hard to believe we’d just committed to living out our lives in the midst of the vacuum—my heart felt so full, and the light behind my eyes seemed so bright.
•