Atana faces down Menavi on the bustling, crowded main dock.
Massive chunks of grav tubes fill the area, obscuring the atmosphere veil just like when I first arrived. She pulls a hovering science cart down the dock toward us.
Atana stands behind me and crosses his blades in front, caging me in a deadly hug. “I can’t believe you came all the way out here. Are arena science officers so bored, you’ve got to make your own fun? We don’t have any embryos. Your control over Lia is done. Get back on your ship before someone misunderstands the situation and accidentally carves you in half.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re the only one who misunderstands the situation.”
“Oh, I’m not the only one.”
Indeed, the other engineers are hanging out comfortingly close and suspiciously well-armed. They’re behind, all around, and overhead, blocking all exits.
I’ve never felt so loved.
“Look, I did you the favor of coming to you, but I had a reason I requested you to come to me.” Menavi speaks to me directly, ignoring Atana. “Few science officers share my level of precision when it comes to excising the protective bag of the embryo. In an Arrisan, the material will just dissolve, and ‘who cares about lessers, anyway’?” She makes the air quotes, then snorts at her own joke. “If even the tiniest bit has broken off during implantation or removal, it can lodge in that blood brain barrier. Only our arena scientists are skilled and experienced enough to remove it. But, as it turns out, I like to travel, so here we are.”
Atana doesn’t move. “So you don’t have a research obsession with Lia?”
“Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t, but her problem is unchanged. I’m here as a favor to Allie, and because she says I’m at fault for this whole episode, and you not telling her that you were actually being visited by a whole other warship, all because I scared you.” She sets up her cart. “May I?”
I look up at Atana.
He measures her, unsmiling. “If you hurt her, if you so much as pluck a hair on her arm, you will never leave this place alive. Every single engineer in this bay will single-mindedly take you apart, and if you manage to get away, we will hunt you, and someday we will catch you, and we will kill you and make it look like an accident. So you think about that.” He releases me.
She rubs her lips together, thoughtful, then shrugs and taps her cart. “Okay, I’m sure that’s usually a meaningful and effective threat.”
I sit in her makeshift body scanner, and she removes my skinsuit. Yes, I’m nude in the middle of an engineering bay, and it’s a bit breezy, but nobody says a word.
Atana lurks.
Nobody cares about nudity, and his red spiral mark is a deterrent, because even Menavi averts her eyes. She runs the scan over every part of my body. It hesitates in a few places, but she eventually hmms. “Science officer on the NightStinger, huh? Very precise…very precise… I’ll have to look him up.”
She tapes a magnet-machine to my elbow to draw the microscopic particles into one place, then shakes a can of numbing spray and drenches my arm. I lose feeling down to my fingertips. She makes a tiny incision in my elbow, then shows me the fragments. “And now your neck soreness should subside.”
I rub my occasionally stiff neck.
She neatens the scars from the laser wounds on my elbow, then turns her attention to my belly scar.
“What is your research obsession?” I ask politely as she seals the skin, melting away the lines.
“You.” She tilts my arm, rechecking her work with her reflective surgical glasses. “Lusteal in humans. It’s so fascinating. But equally intriguing is this.” She taps my red tattoo, swirling like a thorny oroboros that spells, in the ancient Arrisan script, nine and six. “After generations of absence, now we see it. How does it affect our current generation? How does it affect future generations? I’ve got to study it.”
“By trapping and dissecting us…?”
She blows out air in a laugh. “When so many humans ask this, it really makes me wonder about the state of science outside the arena. We have so many eager volunteers, I can’t imagine having to trap anyone.”
“You don’t think like Orunfax.”
“Oh, he and I go way back. I’m rather excited to get my hands on his brain matter. It’s unfortunate it’s in the form of a paste.”
“Can you regrow him from his DNA?”
“Sure, I could regrow anyone from anything, but it wouldn’t be him, would it?” She smooths away the fanning microscopic lines one by one. “His traits are not unique. Obsessive pursuit of a goal? Sacrificing anyone and anything to accomplish it? These traits are concentrated in the very blades he so hated. Replicating his unique brain structure and neural connections to recreate his memories is impossible, and how much of his early success was a coincidence? A thousand Orunfaxes will be born in the empire this shift, and not one of them will rise to plot the destruction of the empire. There.” She caps her healing ointment. “All done.”
I swing my skinsuit around my shoulders. “So his vision is over.”
“His is, but we’re always attempting to transcend our limits. Genetics is the closest we can get to spirituality. Are we only chemicals? Why, then, do the genetic strands sometimes handshake one way and other times the opposite? And why does an alien species that is completely incompatible with us trigger our long-dormant mating bond? I think it proves, honestly, that we are more than our biologies. A meeting of minds is possible no matter how physically different we are. But that’s my own personal theory. My own data obsession.”
She packs her cart, stands, and taps the lid. “No matter how much we learn, still there are things we cannot know. And that makes my work unique and exciting.”
Menavi wheels her cart back to her ship and is gone.
After she leaves, we settle fully into the orbital mover routine.
The vice-captain recovers with an impressive new scar on his forehead. He nervously awaits Allie’s receipt and confirmation of Orunfax’s remains, because then she’ll turn her attention to his bomb.
“If you get demoted, you can always come to engineering,” Sewar tells him with a shoulder pat. “Of course, you can’t touch a single wire until you learn how to do a proper gauge selection.”
“I read that I was supposed to use that wire in your Shop textbook.”
“No! Were you reading the plan upside down?” He guffaws. The vice-captain turns red and looks down. But I think he’s happy.
Sewar offers Atana a gruff apology. “When I was loading the Humana ship, I discovered that the old man signed out a bunch of reinforcing plate. That’s when I started to think maybe he had taken measures and built up the bomb region. The guys said you were being such a screwhead that instead of mentioning it, I helped out Wakiza. So punish me if you want, but don’t be a screwhead again.”
Atana laughs and eats a puff-nute—from a new, untainted barrel, since the old one had to get sent to Allie. “So it’s your fault I lied. I screwed over an ex-high commander over nothing.”
“You were the one who sold it,” Sewar assures him. “Right, Gulak?”
“Yes. You talk quickly about horrible violence. You’re very believable.”
“Aw, I can’t take all the credit.” Atana taps his temple, his fractured eyes spreading a little wider than usual. “It’s the voice in my head. It keeps talking to me in the silence. That’s why I used to hum. If I let it run the show, it messes up my whole life.”
The puff-nutes crackle and pop in the drum.
“And then I met Lia, and she makes it all quiet.” Atana puts his arms around me and rests his chin on my shoulder. “Don’t you? That’s right.”
The engineers avoid eye contact.
Sewar clears his throat. “Uh, well, anyway, congratulations, Lia. From housing diplomats to feeding armies to being Atana’s Amante, that’s quite some trajectory…” He frowns and mutters as he turns away to go do a task. “…I think…”
The others wander off, suddenly having to be busy. They pack up the puff-nutes. The vice-captain hurries away, crunching his share of the snack, to his rest shift.
Atana waits until they’re basically all gone, then he leers at me. “So now that we’re alone, have you got time for me?”
“Can I talk to you?”
“Yeah.” He follows me across engineering and into the office, waves at Tekko monitoring the viewscreen while he sketches violent booby traps, and continues into my room. “Can you do it while you’re naked?”
Tekko at the viewscreen turns and looks at us.
I close the door. “Sit.”
Atana sits on the big ledge beside the bath and leans forward, resting his forearms on his thighs.
I slide off my skinsuit, and the fabric pools at my ankles. “Do you still hear the voice talking to you?”
“When you’re not around, sometimes.”
“What does it tell you?”
“To check whether you’re upset, if anything bad happened to you, how I should react.” He curves an arm around my waist and runs his big hand up my bare thigh. “Like if that science officer comes back and steals you, how I’d rip her ship apart with my bare hands and take you back. That kind of thing.”
That’s sweeter than I was afraid of. “The bridge crew has asked if I’ll start planning the next Humana visit. The Humana Commission wants to set up workshops for students within the year. And Allie’s sending out an architect to plan living spaces for potential allies such as the Eruvisans. She wants me to oversee that project.”
He turns me away and curves his hand over my bottom, squeezes the cheeks, then turns me back and examines my healed elbow. “You want to do it?”
“The vice-captain insists that everyone go through me and only approach you with a final plan.”
“That’s not what I asked.” He traces a finger over the ghostly scar across my belly. Menavi worked on it, but it was fixed so haphazardly that it’s still visible. “You wanna do it?”
“Yes. I think I do. But there’s a problem.”
He stands, zips off his skinsuit, and rubs his hard cock against my thigh. “Oh, yeah?”
“The officers seem to be under some impression that I used to manage the Humana Commission.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. And one engineer yesterday asked how I fed a battalion on dirt and leaves. I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Atana grinds against me. “Weird.”
“You didn’t say anything about my past?”
“The truth is, Lia, I’m not that interested in your past.” He pulls my backside against him and nibbles on my earlobe with his teeth while his voice rumbles against my back. “I’m mostly interested in your immediate future.”
My breath hitches. “My immediate future?”
“The next ten or fifteen clicks.”
His warm exhale across my sensitive skin begins the shivers, as does his little tug as he releases my lobe and drops his lips to the hollow behind my ear and suctions it. “You gonna come for me? Gonna grab my jack and beg for it, ride me so hard, you cry?”
He continues down my neck, licking and sucking like he’s going to eat me up, making me hot and liquid and ready for him all while he talks about how much I want him. “Your body is so thirsty for my liquid. You crave my jack slamming into you, shooting you into the stars. You can’t live without me for another instant.”
He reaches around and cups my breast, squeezes the flesh, pinches the tightening tip. Pleasure streaks to my throbbing pussy.
I turn in his arms and curl my hands around his neck, then place soft kisses around his mouth and nuzzle his nose. “Yes.”
He squeezes me hard against him, then softens, nuzzling me gently for a tender kiss. He’s weak to kindness. When I gaze into his eyes or study his mouth before I kiss him, when I honor and treasure his mind and his body, he seems to feel our union and forgets to talk though it.
I like the talking, though. It’s another way I know he’s here with me, fully present, no barriers between us.
He sets my butt on the ledge, hooks my knees around his waist, and glides his cock deep into my center, touching off little sparkles. He vocalizes with a shudder. “Aw, yeah. This is the center of the universe, Lia. Right here. Me being enveloped and embraced by you.”
Every coupling is different.
But every coupling, he’s present for me.
Sometimes he’s exhausted and all he has energy for is a quick blitz of mind-melting sex before he hops up again to solve the next emergency. Sometimes I wake up and he’s crawled in next to me, just studying me, and he pulls me on top of him and takes a cleg to explore my body before lighting me on fire. And sometimes he sees me from across the bay, and a switch flips. He pushes me into a dark corner and makes me show him the ancient tattoo design on my shoulder, then rummages for my suit and we have hard, fast, aggressive sex that truly and deeply makes me feel wanted. No matter what changes, his desire for me won’t. He will never again say he doesn’t care about me. He’ll never send me away. And, as for my body, he will never get enough.
“Lia, you’re gripping me so tight,” he moans in my ear as his cock delivers starburst after starburst in my center. “I wanted to take it slow, but you’re too hot for me. I’m going to…ugh…going…nnn…you are so unfathomably hot.”
And then he pounds into me.
The waves of pleasure lift me higher, make me arch my back beneath his, make me scream. He grips my hips and knees up next to me. Always trying something. A new angle, a trick. Even at the point of losing control, he’s playful. I’m his favorite toy, and I am infinitely stimulating. He’s addicted to all of me. My body and my mind and my soul.
He unleashes his release with a low groan. So vocal, always. And his heat coats me in liquid sugar, bubbling and boiling over, shimmering with wellness, and drying clear, so we can see exactly who we are.
This time, after we calm down and decouple, he crawls up next to me on the bench, turns me away from him, and settles me into his arms. Just a quick snuggle, because it’s still in the middle of the shift. His people are probably already looking for him, waiting impatiently for Captain Atana to reemerge, biding their time. But inside our room, we’re together in the quiet.
He hums lightly and nibbles on my shoulder. His cock pulses against my thigh.
Even though I was so recently satisfied, the answering awareness pulses in me. I guess this meeting will be more than once. It’s a feast, a banquet after so much bodily starvation. Every shift with him, he offers me the cake of kings.
But his energy makes me wonder. Men who are this tireless are often young. He’s a captain, which isn’t a position for young men, but he was appointed there suddenly by Allie, who couldn’t care less about propriety. “Atana, how old are you?”
“How old am I?” He teases a lock of my hair across my shoulders tracing over the swirling script. Even though my design looks a lot like Allie’s, they are all unique, and apparently, the differences are obvious to every Arrisan. “In kortans or clegs or instants?”
“Standard years is fine.”
“That’s no fun. You have to guess it.” He nuzzles my neck, then traces the thorny swirls with his tongue. “I was ten standard years when I saw my first blades.”
I shiver. “How long ago was that?”
“It’s a logic puzzle, see? I was eleven standard years when I entered the blades and sixteen when I left them.” He tells me a few more ages, but they’re all unmoored from any dates or ways to figure it out. But with his free hand creeping down to cup my throbbing pussy, I’m not the most focused anymore anyway. He pushes my knee up and fills me with his cock, his girth stretching me from this angle and giving me that triple pleasure from three simultaneous places and pulling my clit. He leans over me as I moan, biting my jaw, my lip, still murmuring his words even though I can’t even decipher them. Until his last.
He pauses, tilts my chin, his fractured irises holding mine. “It was ten years ago that I decided that there was nothing good about us and I had to end the Arrisan race. And it was one kortan ago that I met you and changed my mind.”
My breath hitches.
I reach around, this terrible awkward angle, and cup the back of his head. “I love you too.”
His smile breaks. He shudders, moans, and shudders again. And without changing anything, he releases his heat into me, sending me straight over the edge into liquid-sugar heaven.
In the old stories, the gods did not eat irony, but something my brother called liquid ambrosia. It’s honey-sweetened water, but so rich, only the gods can consume it.
The engineers say I’m Atana’s Amante. And I used to think that was a little silly. But maybe it’s true. Because every shift, Atana feeds me this fine meal. It satisfies me completely. So maybe all the fables are real. I’m living in heavens that the ancient storytellers couldn’t have imagined. I’m creating a new future for my race. For my greatest grandchildren.
And to do it, I’ve become a mythological creature.
I’ve become one of the gods.