Chapter 5
Ember sauntered down the ramp after Baz, hips on casual mode, trying not to skip or look excited. This was Omm, and to her it was a Holy Grail like the one from Old-Earth, the end of her private rainbow. A bloody rainbow, perhaps. One of her suspicions was that the cybermonks had been involved in the death of her home planet.
Over the years she’d encountered hints as to their involvement in conspiracies. She’d found their metal thumbprint embedded in the middle of data streams from various crises, wars, a few genocides even.
She twisted her mouth and caught the edge of her lip in teeth, sucked.
This place was gorgeous. A bouquet for strangers to admire. Sky so blue it hurt your eyes with streaks of pink.
And her... The misfit.
What person didn’t know where they’d come from?
“You’re stopping here?” Hoss asked, pausing beside her where ramp met flowers.
“Just...looking.”
Ahead, Baz kept going a few steps then also stopped. Legs spread and arms on hips, he was perfectly silhouetted by the slanted sunlight of dusk.
“Poser,” she murmured before ignoring him. Hoss stayed, her portable giant heater. The light breeze cooled her, and she almost sneaked closer to him.
Resisting closeness when she had a dirty memory of sliding down Hoss’s cock. So hard. Fuck, it had been hard.
Her thin and sexy tights weren’t the best insulation for keeping out the cold, even if she’d spent some time sewing the crotch back together with the thread the ship’s engineer had given her. When she moved, she could feel the thick synthetic thread pressing on her. He probably used it to stitch the ship together when bits fell off. The Floating Leaf was ancient.
Omm was less a mystery to her than her birthplace, and all she’d done was fly across it.
They’d cruised over dense, green forests, where the trees seemed to rise far higher than those on most planets. The trees reached a few klicks into the sky...unless mountains slumbered beneath their foliage?
The gravity wasn’t low enough to support such immense heights, she calculated on seeing them. A fudgy, smooshy sort of calculation that’d been.
The Leaf had zoomed on, leaving her breathless and mystified.
“Leaf. What a great ship name for this place.”
Hoss grunted agreement, companionable if quiet. He’d always been her least-chatty escort guard.
Very little of Omm appeared to be populated. Even here, beside this low-tech spaceport, the nearest town was small, judging from the stretch of the sun shadows as they came in to land.
This was late afternoon, on a planet with a day-night cycle that took thirty hours, and somewhere to the magnetic north of the equator.
Sort of.
Without true data, she was floundering.
Wrick was her first remembered planet.
She’d been left on Wrick when two years old, from her best guess – her carer dead soon after from something never explained to her. She’d survived because that woman had made arrangements before her death for Ember to be brought up and educated.
Set adrift and orphaned by galactic wars. But which war? There’d been so many. She didn’t know her home, her full name, or which war had killed her parents. Pitiful.
The cybermonks would divulge their secrets. She was an expert data extractor with her own secrets, with her well-honed skills, and last and not least, her little dragon, Ig.
Ember clenched her fist. Yes.
Though dragon was wishful thinking. Dragons were an Old-Earth myth. Ig was weird but an unknown species, uncatalogued, his kind likely extinguished by the same war that’d killed her planet.
They were both orphans.
“Let’s start walking.” Baz pointed at the distant low buildings. “I can see a car coming, but it’ll be slow.”
“Slow? Why?”
Hoss shrugged, Baz just walked away, clearly expecting them to follow.
Stay and sulk at his lack of reply or follow and pretend it was her idea?
She followed.
This spaceport was near featureless – a large, kilometers-wide field of low yellow flowers swaying in a light breeze. The Leaf’s engines had scorched beneath her and made a shadow of crisped flowers.
Her forehead almost cramped, this so baffled her. “Hey! Where does anyone refuel? Restock with provisions, repair?”
The ramp had dug into moist earth. The dirt here was...she walked backward for a second, checking her tracks...brown. Good to know. Blue was never a good color for dirt.
The grass and flowers were springy under her boots. Her long boots might seem impractical but they were light and she could run in them. She went to one knee to pluck a flower, felt the wisp of cold as Ig flew by and was gone. He’d come back later, was probably going to explore.
Baz tossed words over his shoulder. “We can refuel here. The cybermonks like to make it look natural. Everything is underground.” He halted and looked back. “I don’t know why they want to see you, but as I said, you can go once they have.”
Her turn not to reply. She raised a nonchalant brow.
He raised one also then stomped off.
Did he really believe that?
Whatever their reasons, they wouldn’t be trivial. Every plan the cybermonks made was supposedly “worked into the fabric of the Universe.”
“Why is he such a grump?”
Hoss shrugged, rolling those immense shoulders, and she imagined biting them, sighed. “He hates CESS and you are one of them. Don’t waste time thinking about him.”
Something about the tone Hoss had used made her wonder if he was trying to make Baz look bad in her eyes. Not difficult to do though.
“You’re employed by CESS too.”
“Yes, but I’m male. Female and CESS confuses him.”
“So...” She twirled the flower stem. “Why is that a problem?”
“He’s a man. He likes sexy girls. Like, hate. See?”
“Oh.” The heat of a blush came fast and unexpectedly. Being called sexy was always unexpected. She loved the idea of being wanted, hated being told it. What a contradiction. Being a sex object was not her thing. Ever.
The flower in her finger and thumb was open but no bigger than her thumbnail.
The curve of a petal held mathematical secrets...the perfection of pi.
Within the petals were rows of silver scales that glinted in the pinkish sunlight.
“It’s said the cybermonks have a glorious city modelled on nature, with turrets and towers, and walls with writing that predicts your future.”
“Sounds like graffiti.” Hoss dumped words as heavily as he did his feet.
Rising, Ember shielded her eyes to look up at him. Unlike Baz the half-orc returned the scrutiny.
“Are you well, Ember?”
Her insides still felt wrong. Automatic intubation was normal. Baz doing it...that made it dirty. Once they’d popped from hyperspace, in the days approaching Omm, the fourth planet in this system, she’d tried to get over the feeling. Hadn’t quite succeeded.
“I’m okay. No Miss Ember anymore?”
Hoss had the biggest, shiniest, brown eyes, as if they were the eyes from a big stuffed toy. Of course, she still hadn’t recovered from her first orc sex. Physically, sure. Mentally? No. Confusion reigned supreme today. Rebuffed by Baz, strangely attracted to Hoss.
“No. I know you now. Too well.”
Nervous, she wet her lips, wondering what to say. Wrong-footed by an orc...half-orc. The pretty curve of the red horns on his head, his bigness, the mane he let spill down his back, all those said hey now, you fucked a huge, non-human monster.
“You’re my guard, that’s all.”
He was in rut still. It wasn’t fair to keep the orc thinking she was interested in him, not as a person. She had hormones. He had hormones. Just because she had a monster cock fetish and she’d told him... Done him.
He’d said know. Yeah, awkward.
They needed to talk.
“You know what I mean, little female.”
What. The. Fuck. She blinked. “Hoss...I am not your...”
“Hmmm?”
“We need to keep this professional from now on.”
“Mmmm.” The comment was a rumble.
What did mmm mean except that it gave her an odd quiver deep in her stomach?
They needed to talk, real soon. She needed to figure out how to answer replies that made her uncomfortable, especially when they made her knees jellify.
Mmmm wasn’t even a word.
She tried to scowl rudely, but was pretty sure it came out looking like bewilderment.
Keep it professional? She could already see the reason for termination: Fucked a half-orc. Does not comply with company moral standards.
“Here’s our ride!” Baz shouted. “Get on board.”
A truck-like thing that appeared to be made from antique and rusted metal was chugging toward them. No smoke, no exhaust, so it was running on something clean but noisy.
She flicked down her CESS data spectacles and ran her techy gaze over the car chassis. People thought these only helped with programming, but she could analyze most machinery to its constituent parts in seconds. Electronic leads and points, processors, all these and more lit up in bright greens and pinks. A turbine engine? Old but efficient. So the noise was fake?
Why would the cybermonks fake that?