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3
SOJOURNER
“Itold you to back away!” Emissary shouted, “Goddess! Did you see him?”
I barely heard her, but I looked up at her. My brain was slow. I was still staring at the naked alien. I was staring at his perfect form, which had filled in the missing half of the universe for me. Shame forced me to speak. Even in front of two women who had been tainted just like I had, I still felt like I had to defend myself. I felt like I needed to justify my stupidity and ignorance.
I nodded slowly to Emissary Eve. “I thought…I thought you were under duress, Emissary Eve. I thought I read a hidden code in your emergency message.”
“So I get three?” the Khetar’s voice boomed.
I hadn’t even stopped to think about his voice or to speculate how it might have sounded. Even his voice was different. It was deeper and more solid than any woman’s voice. I felt like I was hearing it from deeper down inside myself than when I heard any woman’s voice. Even though he was taunting me, I wanted to hear him speak more. I wanted his big voice booming deep inside me.
Airlock looked up at the Khetar. Her composure cracked. “What?”
Somehow I could tell the alien was just saying he got all three of us as a cruel taunt. He was taunting Emissary and me, because it was crystal clear that he had eyes only for Airlock and not for either of us. Airlock couldn’t see that as clearly as we could though, and he was taunting her by making her doubt just how solely dedicated he was to that impossibly lucky woman.
“I didn’t think it would be so easy,” the Khetar said. “Normally we’d have to offer goods, technology, and protection in exchange for breeding rights.”
I was still on my knees. So was Emissary. We both were still crying, but I was just leaking some salty water rather than bawling my eyes out now. I’d always been a very realistic woman, which was part of what made me so good as a weapons specialist. I’d been tainted. There was no going back. I wasn’t going to go into exile, and I wasn’t going to kill myself, though I’d briefly considered both as abstract possibilities to hide my shame.
I looked at the alien’s dingdong. I imagined the pure ecstasy I’d feel with one of those things inside of my kitten. Just looking at the glow on Airlock’s face, IknewI’d feel it. The Khetar ship was big. There were lots more Khetar where this one came from, and I wanted one.
Airlock was still arguing with her alien man, but he stopped her, and he spoke while occasionally making eye contact with Emissary and me, so that we knew he was speaking to us as well. Each time his eyes met mine, my insides melted to mush. “You said yourself,” his deep voice boomed, “that your options are to come with me, or to freeze yourselves for centuries and offer yourselves to the mercy of another human world, one on which ‘no man can satisfy you,’ is how your leader said it.” He grinned wide at Emissary. “What choice do you have? The ‘cold, lonely existence,’ or a warm existence with me?”
Yes. He was on the same page I was. He was a realist too. Maybe most of the Khetar were? Hell, maybe I’d fit in better with them than I did on Eden? The Khetar man was right. There was no choice here. I wanted to go with him. Thank Goddess he at least sounded willing to take me.
“It’s called spite,” Airlock said, “Thuliak.” Thuliak. That was his name then? “Humans are very good at it. We would deny you what you want simply to deny it to you. Don’t think you have us wrapped around your fingers.”
“Wrap me around hiscock,” Emissary whispered, drool dripping down the corner of his mouth.
Cock?From where her eyes were stuck, I knew what the word must mean, but it sounded even more vulgar thandick.
I raised an eyebrow at Emissary. It was all well and good for Airlock to talk about spite, but she’d already bagged her alien man. I wasn’t going to risk losing out on getting a Khetar dingdong just to spite someone who I didn’t even know. It also occurred to me that as soon as I had a Khetar man looking at me the way Thuliak looked at Airlock Eve, it would be trivially easy to get him to teach me how their weapons worked. I may have been tainted, but I doubted High Command would refuse a gift from me that would give our women a huge edge against the pirates.
Emissary started sobbing again. I’d never seen a woman from High Command look so hopelessly broken and defeated. Why was she so upset? Had she not seen the silver lining in all of this yet? Or did she know something that only High Command knew? Something that would make me sob like that if I knew it too.
“I don’t think she’s our leader anymore,” Airlock said, frowning at the sobbing Emissary Eve. I met Thuliak’s eyes, and I managed to hold those teal gems for almost a whole heartbeat. “What exactly do you want to do with us?”
“Nothing that you won’t enjoy, little human,” the alien’s voice rumbled, and then he turned his attention away from Emissary and me, focusing fully on Airlock Eve. He raised his hand to her face. He was huge in every way—not just his dingdong—his hands were much larger than Airlock’s face, and his fingers were thick. He put two of them right over her lips, and muscular veins bulged out of his teal forearm as he pressed against Airlock’s lips. The woman—of whom I was now feeling an intense, gut-wrenching, seething jealousy toward—parted her lips and trembled, and Thuliak’s fingers slid past her lips and into her mouth. As if she’d done this—or something else like it—before, Airlock closed her eyes and started to suck. The first wet popping sound brought Emissary out of her sobbing spell. She looked up at the alien man and his human woman, and her face turned deep red. She looked at me with glassy eyes, then looked down at the ground in what must have been a horrible mix of shame and embarrassment.
I still felt shame too, but I was trying to move past that. I wasn’t going to get untainted, so I needed to look forward, not backward. Shame was looking backward. Jealousy, at least, was looking forward, at Thuliak sucking on Airlock’s little fingers.
As Airlock sucked and moaned, the Khetar’s teal dingdong began to twitch. Thick veins seemed to grow longer, and the tip of the dingdong seemed to grow larger still. I put a hand on Emissary’s wrist, forcing her to look up. She needed to look forward too, and this growing teal dingdong was—as far as I was concerned—our only future. Well, notthisdingdong, but other Khetar dingdongs.
We watched together in astonishment as it not only got larger, but began to move. It rose up, growing larger than I ever thought possible. Soon it slapped up against the Khetar’s chiseled abdominal muscles. It twitched, though it looked stiff as a rod now. I don’t know how I could tell it was hard and stiff—because it was still skin—but just from the way it stood perfectly tall and erect, it looked hard. Goddess, how I wished I could touch—
I’d raised my visor, but now I took off my helmet. I leaned in closer to Emissary. “Are you okay?” I whispered.
“No,” she whispered back. “I’m tainted beyond redemption.”
“So am I, but we’re not going on some exile skiff, are we?”
“The Khetar seems to value us,” she said.
“They want us,” I said, realizing that Chef had been right all along. “We should just let them—”
Emissary grabbed my arm. She still had tears all over her face, but she looked strong again. Finally. “Listen, Weapons. It shames me to admit, but I want what Airlock has. Still, we shouldn’t just show our hand.”
