Alien Touch Page 15

  He did not get far, unfortunately, before he got stuck and he could not seem to get it unstuck.

  Sighing, he considered the situation, but the stinky little hut was the only thing that he had spotted that he thought might work for them.

  Focusing, he managed to teleport himself and the wheeled hut to a cleared ribbon that seemed to be made for such things. He discovered it was far easier to operate it then, leaving him with nothing to do but find his way back to his clan and retrieve them.

  Contrary to what he had expected, Amber was not thrilled with the hut on wheels that he had provided, but then she did not get the chance to assess it right away. She was still asleep when he returned and barely stirred when Luki, who’d been curled around her to keep her warm, lifted her and carried her inside.

  He managed to get the thing on wheels deeper into the woods, near a stream, before it became so hopelessly stuck that one of the wheels fell off.

  But he decided that it was a good location to wait.

  Wedged between two trees, dirty and faded to a pale tan with flecks of green, the hut on wheels blended in very well with the surroundings. And it was far enough, he thought, from the owners that they weren’t likely to find it soon enough to present a problem.

  Their flanx would come soon—or at least one of the clans.

  * * * *

  Amber was cold. She was so physically and emotionally exhausted, though, that she couldn’t find the will even to try to get more comfortable.

  But she didn’t resist when it was offered.

  And she didn’t object that it wasn’t Alaric. Although she thought she would have liked that best, she had developed a fondness for all three.

  It went beyond mere fondness, though, she realized when Luki had pulled her snuggly against his body and curled around her like a blanket to chase away the morning chill. There was pleasure in his arms that exceeded the physical comfort he gave her just by moving close enough to share his warmth.

  She’d come to trust him, to rely upon him for all things necessary to life, for the things that gave comfort and the things that gave joy.

  And she realized she wanted more than the warmth and comfort he’d offered by cuddling her in his strength and body heat.

  She needed his touch.

  She needed to feel him inside of her, as a part of her.

  She wasn’t certain of why she did, but she was certain that she couldn’t rest until she had convinced him to fill her senses with his essence and chase away the awful sadness that had descended upon her.

  It was wonderfully easy to convince him.

  She who had so little experience in seduction could think of no words she wanted to voice that might have a chance of producing magic. Nor could she bring herself to be too forward and brazen in her touch, but she plastered herself tightly against him and wiggled against him until she brought his dragon to life.

  And then nature took over.

  He pulled away just enough to meet her gaze, his own tumultuous and questioning, and when he saw the invitation there he seized upon it with gratifying hunger, covering her mouth in a kiss that made quick thaw set in to even her most remote, chilled places. The fire that had begun to smolder low in her belly the moment he settled beside her roared to life, quickly became a conflagration that spread through her veins in molten want.

  The flimsy green jumpsuit they’d given her at the prison to replace her spacesuit after they’d stripped and searched her was like so much tissue in his hands, vanishing like the mist that had rolled over them just before dawn.

  She found herself naked beneath him, her senses divided by the contrasts of the heat of his body and the chill of the ground, the hard smoothness of his form and the prickly forest litter of grass and leaves.

  But his kisses and his touch dragged so much pleasure from her that everything else faded from her mind within moments.

  Except her awareness of Serge.

  He watched.

  She could feel his hungry gaze, could feel him in her mind, and it made her desire flare higher.

  And then Alaric was there, as well, a part of Luki, touching her as he touched her and Serge—in her mind, stoking her desire to new heights.

  As desperation overtook want, she began to pull at Luki, demanding he/they end her distress and Serge joined them on the ground, sandwiching her between his body and Luki’s.

  Luki/they responded with gratifying swiftness, pushing her thighs apart and settling the head of his eager cock against the mouth of her sex, pressing into her until her flesh yielded to his. He released a choked grunt as her body sheathed his, fisting tightly around his engorged flesh, and drove one from her as the weeping walls of her sex eased his passage and he claimed her entire channel on his third thrust, penetrating so deeply she felt him as a part of herself.

  She felt all of them—their touch, their desire.

  She clutched Luki tightly on that thought, absorbing it, feeling that assuage the need she couldn’t name even as he drove her toward culmination with the friction of his thrusts.

  She came, Earth shatteringly.

  It was everything she remembered … and more.

  Her body shook with the eruption of hard tremors of ecstasy and, when those echoes began to die, a deeper, more satisfying warmth filled her.

  A sense of belonging—of love, of being cherished and valued.

  For the first time she realized what the guys had meant when they’d told her they wanted her for their mate.

  They needed her as no one ever had.

  She gave them a home, a future.

  And they gave her something she’d never had in her memory.

  Someone she truly, deeply mattered to.

  Her grandmother had meant everything to her, but she’d only loved Amber because she’d lost her own daughter. She didn’t blame her grandmother for something she couldn’t help—people loved who they loved. It wasn’t something they could control, but it had always hurt deeply to know she was just her grandmother’s consolation for the loss of the daughter she loved.

  And maybe she was her guys’ consolation, too, but they didn’t make her feel that way. They made her feel as wonderfully special to them as they were to her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The ship the Safat clan arrived in was as bad, or worse, than the ship the Phoenix clan had had, but Amber was as glad to see it as if it was her old home.

  She was pretty convinced that the ‘rolling hut’ that Alaric had ‘borrowed’ was almost more miserable than sleeping on the dirt would have been, but she did her best to pretend she was thrilled that he’d managed to acquire something to house them until pickup.

  And she was ready for that—more than ready.

  There was no joy in being on Earth during her early childhood.

  Aside from the fact that she found it vastly unnerving given the theories of matter—the same matter—occupying the same space, her childhood had been pretty damned miserable and not a time or place she wanted to relive.

  She hadn’t been able to resist sneaking close enough for a few peeks, but it gave her far more pain than joy.

  It wasn’t home.

  It was Earth, but not the one that she knew and missed.

  Even if she could have set aside her personal prejudices—just left the area and pretended she wasn’t back in a time when her most painful memories lived—there was the fact that it was not the best of times for women’s rights in general and was years before real space flight and explorations began.

  She might or might not live to see the day if she stayed, but she’d be too damned old to take part in it.

  It did occur to her that the guys had picked her up in ‘her’ time and should be able to find their way back to it, but somehow just coming back was enough to bring to light all of the dark little things she’d hidden from herself.

  She wasn’t happy.

  She didn’t think she’d ever in her life—s
ince her mother’s death—been happy, until she’d gotten the chance to explore the universe with the Furians.

  Beyond that, they made her happy.

  It was weird, she knew, to feel such a strong sense of belonging to aliens when she’d never even felt anything close to any of the humans in her life, but there was no getting around the fact that she did.

  As soon as they’d been picked up, Alaric assured her that they would acquire another ship and they would take her to the Earth in the time she belonged.

  She assured him and Luki and Serge that it didn’t matter. She was glad she had the option of visiting, but she didn’t need to live there. She just needed to live wherever they would be happy to live.

  She’d be completely satisfied drifting around space.

  As happy as that made the guys, they were very stern in pointing out that they had a family to think of and the young needed a home that was a world—hers or perhaps the one they’d claimed as home base. But their young needed to learn the ways of the Furian warrior before they went off to find battles to fight.

  Put that way, Amber was happy to accept the home base as their permanent or semi-permanent residence—sight unseen—because she didn’t really care where she lived.

  She wasn’t convinced, at that point, that she actually was pregnant, but she wasn’t really surprised when she finally realized she definitely was.

  And she was happy about it even though she found it more than a little unnerving.

  They made her happy—gave her the entire universe. She wanted to make them happy.

  * * * *

  “We’ve got it, Sir,” Airman Neesom announced as soon as he entered the director’s office.

  “It was the Starlight?”

  “Yes Sir!”

  The director stared at the young man with a mixture of bafflement and anger, wondering why the bastard was so fucking cheerful about the discovery.

  He shook his head, as if by doing so he could shake some of his dark thoughts. “How big is the debris field?” he asked, struggling with a knot of sickness in his throat.

  The young man gaped at him. “There’s no debris field, Sir.”

  It was the director’s turn to gape. “No debris field?” he echoed. “But you’re sure it was the Starlight capsule?”

  The airman looked more excited, if possible. “I’ll be better if you just come take a look for yourself.”

  Thoroughly bemused, the director merely stared for a moment more and then pushed past the airman and strode toward the exit at a brisk walk just shy of a run.

  The airman had to run to keep up, but he managed to reach the exit just a few steps behind.

  There was a bundle on the back of the semi-trailer outside that was easily recognizable by the shape and size.

  “Get it in the hanger!” the director bellowed in a voice that cracked.

  The soldiers who’d been propped against the truck or squatted beside it immediately leapt to their feet and scrambled to comply.

  Some twenty minutes later, Director Bill Williams found himself gaping at the capsule they’d been sure was lost forever.

  It was dirty, but completely intact as far as he could see.

  “It was buried,” Airman Neesom volunteered.

  Williams whipped such a quick glance toward the speaker that his neck cracked. “Buried?” he echoed.

  “Yes, Sir. We located it by the beacon, but we had to bring an excavator in to get it out. That’s what took so long for the recovery. The beacon took us right to it, but there was nothing to be seen but a field. It’s the weirdest damn thing!”

  Williams shook him off. “Thank you, Airman. You and your crew have done a fine job. You can go now.”

  Airman Neesom contained his disappointment with an effort. When he and the other soldiers had disappeared, the team Williams had assembled swarmed over the capsule and began collecting samples for testing.

  The man first inside came back out in seconds, white faced.

  Ohmygod! Williams thought. She’s till in there. “Is it …?”

  Apparently it didn’t even occur to the man that the director was asking about their missing astronaut. “It’s … full of … uh … stuff.”

  “Debris?” Williams asked quickly.

  The man shook his head. “No. Stuff.”

  Williams pushed past him and went to look for himself. Unfortunately, he was really no wiser once he had. ‘Stuff’ pretty much described it. Because there wasn’t another description that fit.

  Nobody said it, but from the moment the scientists began to very carefully unload the capsule they knew the objects inside were alien in origin.

  Luckily, they were already dressed in their clean suits.

  As an added precaution, the director had sent the team members chosen to go inside back to put on heavier protective gear and an isolation tent was set up.

  He paced, peering through the opaque ‘windows’ at the objects inside, trying to figure out what they were and how they might have gotten inside the capsule.

  For that matter, how had the capsule gotten buried?

  Gotten to Earth in less time than the trip had every taken?

  And what had become of Major Trujillo?

  As it happened, she left them the answers rather than a deep, unsolvable mystery.

  Well—the believers. Some weren’t convinced, naturally enough, even after they’d watched the video and listened.

  * * * *

  “The capsule should not be found by anyone other than NASA since we set the locator beacon to activate precisely at midnight on January 9th, 2023—the day I, Major Amber Trujillo, disappeared.

  “However, in the event that it is discovered by anyone other than representatives of NASA, please be certain to pass this information and the artifacts contained within the capsule to them as it is of utmost importance to the future of the people of Earth.

  “I had completed the first part of my mission which was to deliver supplies and workers to the moon base to complete construction and was on the return trip to Earth when the capsule was hijacked by aliens who called themselves the Basinini.

  “These have frequently visited Earth and taken Earth people as captives in order to experiment on them for reproduction purposes many times over the decades—searching for females that can be genetically altered to be compatible to their species because of a war they started themselves with the Furians of Ator, formerly, known as the beastmen of Ator by their enemies.

  “There people who rescued me, and who are responsible for the gifts left within the capsule for the people of Earth—call themselves Furians of Ator. They prided themselves on their skills as warriors--their cunning, their speed and strength. To the civilized galaxy, they were known as the beastmen of Ator. Partly the title arose from their barbaric custom of raiding their peace loving neighbors for anything that struck their fancy. Mostly, however, they were known as beastmen because they seemed able to control some of the most nightmarish beasts created by nature with ease.

  “To the Furians, counting coup had ceased to be a matter of warring against enemies of the people many generations past. It had evolved into more of a game to perfect the skill and cunning of young warriors coming of age. Their objective wasn’t to destroy. It was to get in, take what held value to them, and leave before anyone even knew they’d been for a visit.

  “Most of the people of the galaxy thought it was a small price to pay for protection by a people who not only excelled at war, but thoroughly enjoyed it and were always among the first to line up to fight in the event that anyone else overstepped the bounds of civilized behavior.

  “The Basinini, new to the galaxy, didn’t see it that way. They were possessive, aggressive, and extremely territorial and when the young men of Ator counted coup upon them, the Basinini retaliated with malice and extreme prejudice, destroying the Furian Empire.

  “In doing so, they aroused the fighting blood of those Furians
who’d survived—and discovered why the Furians of Ator were known as Beastmen.

  “By tradition, they are clans of three—by birth. They’re always born by threes (the males) to three different fathers. These clans of three are called triads. A flanx is the larger family unit—three generations of men and women of connected clans. The tribe is their extended social group.

  “They wear their clan totems. This is a tattoo that represents their patron beast—which they can summon at will. It’s the strongest of their inner beasts. They have others but none are as strong as the clan totem.

  “It’s the tradition among their people that the young men go out to prove themselves in a raid to count coup on ‘enemies’. To count coup is to use their skills, strength, and cunning to take things of great value and rarity and bring them back to the flanx to increase their wealth which in turn increases the wealth of the tribe. This hasn’t evolved much over the centuries because their unique gifts have made it possible for them to travel from world to world without the technology other species must develop to achieve such a thing. They mastered this because a beast invaded their world that had the ability of time-jump. When they defeated the beast, they captured its spirit within themselves and can use it to time-jump merely by summoning it.

  “I understand that many of you will not believe at all and those who do will still be skeptical, but this is the history of the people who have taken me in as one of their own and I thought their story was important to pass along.

  “Beyond that—this is the story of ‘we are not alone’. There are others, many others, and it has been my very great privilege to represent the Humans of Earth in the adventures I’ve enjoyed entirely because I was chosen as the mate of the Phoenix Clan of the Beastmen of Ator.

  “The relics were collected by them and left by them for the people of Earth—my family—as bride gifts. Be careful. Most of these wondrous gifts are dangerous, but they will take mankind further, faster, than ever before.

  I wish you all safe journeys!

  “My best to all,

  Major Amber Trujuillo”

  There was dead silence when the video went dark. The people who’d been privileged to watch were too stunned for a very long time to say anything at all.