Raven sobbed, covering her eyes behind one hand, hating herself and the pleasure that still glowed out from her womb. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t stand to see his mocking smile.
He leaned into her, only a little shy of breath, and slowly let her slide down his body to her own feet. He stepped back, combing once at the lock of her limp, purple hair, and then he reached down and tugged hard at her pubic down. “I hate the feel of this,” he said. “Take it off.”
Raven blinked wetly around the shower stall. “There’s no razor,” she said. “If we go to a store tomorrow, I can buy one.”
“Soon enough, I suppose.” He scratched lightly at the half-beard lining his jaw and then suddenly grinned and put his hand hard between her thighs.
She uttered a shrill, mewling sound and pressed herself flat against the tiles, trying to clench away from him.
“Now where…?” he breathed, pushing up, parting her. Even his finger was thick and long; her body gripped it greedily even as her guts churned. “Ah, gods! Feel that!” he grunted. He pumped his hand, and Raven broke into tears. “Move,” Kane said. “You know you want to.”
“I don’t want to!” Raven wailed.
Kane grabbed her hip with his free hand and pumped her towards his thrusting finger. Her nerves, already heightened, flared out in ugly orgasm. Kane paused again, his lips parting as he stared at her belly with that incredulous grin on his face. “I’ve never felt anything like that,” he remarked, and pulled his hand free of her at last.
“You bastard!” she sobbed, stupidly but beyond caring. In that moment, still with hellish pleasure tingling through her, she wanted to be dead.
He laughed at her. “Wash up,” he said cheerfully. He picked up the bundle of her shed clothing and his pants and tossed them in the tub with her. “Do what you can with these and hang them up to dry. And don’t take too long. If I have to come in here after you—” He stroked his open hand once across her pussy. “—I might get distracted.”
She covered herself as soon as he moved his hand away, shivering, and he left, still laughing. Raven found the spongy sliver of soap in the bottom of the tub and rubbed it over herself, her tears coming even harder. There wasn’t enough left for her to get clean. There wasn’t enough soap in the world for that.
*
Tagen burnt the bodies.
It took most of the night, too much time to spend in idleness, but Tagen sat watch over the burning regardless. He did not know the funerary customs of humans, but this much he could do for them. Despite the urgency of his mission, there was a guilt in him that needed to be assuaged, and he hoped that honoring the dead in this way would bring him that little peace.
He watched the bones blacken and shrink, and in his mind’s eye he heard the deafening crack of their weapons. Pellet projectiles. Crude, but quite effective in their own way. Had Tagen not been armed himself or had he been a little slower to return fire, he had no doubt he would be dead at this moment. It was a truth he did not ignore, and for that, he felt perhaps less responsibility for their deaths than he otherwise might have. But the ease with which he had extinguished their lives seemed more significant to him. He could have used his neural stunner. He had killed them instead.
His thoughts returned to the sight of the smaller human buckling and falling. It had not even tried to fire its weapon after it had seen its companion die. Its face had been stricken, disbelieving. The more Tagen thought on that, the more it bothered him. He wondered if the smallness of the human had been an indicator of age rather than mere size. He began to think perhaps he had killed a father and his son.
How often had Kolya taken him, as a child, into the wild places of Jota to hone his tracking skills? Living rough beneath the open skies, learning to forage and hunt, training his body to act beyond the effects of discomfort or want…and at times, sitting at a fire beside his father, sharing the bond of family. They were the only times Tagen could remember feeling happy as a child, that his presence in Kolya Pahnee’s home was more than a continuation of name and legacy, and that he were truly wanted.
What had he done?
Tagen closed his eyes and let his thoughts still. The image that came to him in the darkness of his quiet mind was that of all the debris and devises that orbited Earth. He could no longer believe them merely the leavings of Jotan smugglers and slavers. The humans had put it all there themselves.
The humans had been to space.
Five hundred years ago, they had been primitives on the verge of chaotic collapse. Now they were poised to leave their world, perhaps even to encounter another. They had made two thousand years of progress in an impossibly brief blink of time.
As disturbing as he found this, Tagen recognized that it could prove useful to him. The humans might have a means of detecting or tracking incoming traffic. Their on-world security forces may even have ways of monitoring their civilization for non-human infiltration. Gods willing, they may even have E’Var in custody already. And when Tagen relieved them of the criminal, perhaps they’d give him a clean-burning, inexpensive propulsion fuel for trans-orbital transport vessels.
Tagen rubbed his eyes and then leaned into his hands and watched the bodies burn.
The reality of his job meant that he could never count on outside help from any source, and moreover, logic dictated that if the humans truly had a coordinated anti-invasion force, Uraktus E’Var and others like him could never have made their fortunes.
Tagen was adrift and it was a singularly ugly sensation. This was not the world he’d been led to expect, but neither was it the sort of world he had come from. The humans were not small, scattered populations of hut-builders. Neither did they have oceanic colonies or out-world reach stations. He could not afford to keep going blindly and he could hardly continue to rely on the information he’d studied on the way to Earth. What else had changed since the Far-Reachers had made their studies? Were the pellet projectile weapons the extent of the human’s war-craft? What were their on-world defenses? They had been to space before, but could they follow Tagen’s craft when he left? Would they find the Gate? Gods, would they come through it?!
He had no way of answering any of these questions.
Tagen opened his eyes and stirred up the coals so that he could see the contents of his pack. There, at the very bottom, forgotten until now, he found the dermisprayer. A mild sedative, the scientist had said. To make them compliant.
Against every part of his training, Tagen began to consider the merits of overt contact. This could not continue. E’Var may or may not be on Earth, but the odds of stumbling across him as Tagen wandered in the woods were slim. Instead, he had encountered three humans, all of them armed, and had killed them all. The weather showed no sign of changing and he had only so many suppressants left. He needed some way of covering greater distance, he needed access to the humans’ media devices, and he needed reliable supplies of food and water.
In short, he needed to find a human. He needed to talk to it, to win its trust somehow, and use it to help him find E’Var.
The bodies were now nearly consumed. Tagen broke the bones apart and began to smother the coals with dirt.
He had a reasonable understanding of N’Glish, and he’d listened to the language program all the way to Earth. He thought he’d, well, if not mastered it, at least become competent, but most of what he’d heard so far had been utterly incomprehensible. Perhaps if Tagen could subdue a human, he would have more time to listen and decipher the words. Even if he gained nothing else, gaining the ability to communicate made the attempt worthwhile.