Tales of the Golden Planet

Scrumbles

By Shadar

August, 2005

Rev 11

I grabbed the back of Karn’s pack as we struggled to push through the milling crowd, trying to reach our privileged seats along the sidelines right above the Red Devils bench. Fans were singing and cheering all around us, many of them dressed in bits and pieces of the team’s colors, their faces painted bright colors. Incense sticks burned along the fringes of the runways, and the sulfuric scent of bursting fireworks filled the air. The sweetness of pheromones drifting on the air made me feel warm and cozy.

The crowd moved as one, bodies jammed in to fill every square centimeter of the causeways at the back of the stadium, children painted in shades of red and orange riding on their parent’s shoulders while eating cotton candy. Actors dressed in bits and pieces of team uniforms hung from the overhead beams, swinging back and forth, playing a make-believe game of Scrumbles in the air. Mimes stood in the middle of the causeways like islands in the stream, the press of humanity parting to flow around them. Music was blaring from dozens of speakers.

I felt as if I’d fallen into center ring of the circus of the insane. An insanity that came over otherwise respectable Velorian citizens whenever the playoffs began.

I was damn lucky to be here.

Karn’s father was a big shot in one of the telecom companies, and he’d picked up a couple of the highly sought playoff tickets to entertain a client. Fortunately for us, his business deal had folded up before the first game started, and his father flew off to try to fix it, leaving Karn with the coveted tickets. He’d invited me to join him. Our seats were in the VIP section, and only a few meters from the Red Devil bench.

We stomped our feet and screamed like the other Scrumbles fanatics, anxiously waiting for the match to begin. Down on the field, the players were forming up. Half of them were female as per the rules, yet the male players seemed to evaporate, leaving me staring at the strong backs and long legs of the Red Devils women. With their blonde hair hanging below the bottoms of their abbreviated tops, and their throngs revealing the most gorgeous backsides in the universe, connected as they were to the longest and shapeliest legs in all of creation, the Red Devil women lived up to every dream I’d ever had about Velorian women.

My heart was racing as I leaned forward in my seat, concentrating my gaze on the Red Devils’ captain. She was standing with her back to me, holding the game ball under her arm as she talked with the officials. She was not only the tallest member of the team, but strangely, she looked vaguely familiar. She shifted slightly the side, tilting her hips, those marvelous glutes flexing in concert with her diamond-shaped calves, and that sense of strange familiarity hit me like a punch. I’d stared at that cute ass and those gorgeous legs for too damn many hours… my Lord… she was…she was my math teacher!

I gulped and tried to duck lower in my seat, but it was no use. Ms. Quiv’an seemed to sense my eyes on her, and turned around, searching the stands. Her gaze passed over me, and then jerked back, her hawk-like eyes staring straight into mine. I felt like a deer frozen in headlights, unable to move.

She said something to the official next to her, and started walking straight toward me, finally pausing just in front of my seat with the ball still under her arm.

“So, Ben Shaffer, is this how you plan to prepare for my mid-term?”

I gulped for air, my eyes opening so wide they hurt. Conflicting emotions raced around my head like dogs and cats, tearing at each other, leaving me both thrilled and intimidated and mostly wickedly turned on as she towered over me like some kind of Valkyrie goddess. She looked so mind-bendingly gorgeous and athletic, especially in that abbreviated top and a red thong. Her tummy was flat as a board, her breasts large, widely spaced and riding high on a hard plate of Velorian muscle, her pert nipples trying to escape her very brief halter-top. Her shoulders were broader than her hips, and her slender arms were very long, the tendons of her hands and wrists telegraphing her extreme strength. She was graceful, beautiful and spectacularly athletic, all at the same time. A super woman.

Unfortunately, none of that had anything to do with her question. The cold, hard fact was that I was failing calculus.

I’d been a decent math student back in Pennsylvania, so failing calculus had been the least of my worries when I arrived on Velor. After all, the golden planet had a reputation for sending out blonde warriors who could kick ass while simultaneously posing for the cover of Vogue. It made no sense that the Galens had also imbued them with a special aptitude for advanced mathematics.

I soon learned it wasn’t capriciousness on the part of the Galen, but simple purpose. Velorians couldn’t carry computing devices with them when wormhole diving, and they had to solve advanced celestial mechanics problems in their heads to navigate safely. One calculation error, and you ran smack into a black hole and died, or you skipped out of the wormhole and wound up God knows where. Or when.

My immediate problem was less dramatic, but still threatening. If I didn’t pass tomorrow’s mid-term, I had the horror of Mandatory Tutoring to look forward to. I might even have to give up my spring vacation, specifically, climbing and backpacking in the endless expanse of the Valkin Mountains. The Valkins looked like the Himalayas of Earth, but on steroids, and I was totally psyched up about climbing all 78,000 vertical feet of them.

I swallowed hard, screwing up my courage to stare back at the person who held my fate in her hands: “I’m… I’m already ready, Ms. Quiv’an. Honest. Been working my tail off all week.”

Her eyes narrowed briefly, and then she shrugged. “Well, it’s your funeral if you’re wrong, Shaffer. You fail tomorrow and I’ll drop kick you all the way to Tutoring.” With that threat hanging in the air, she spun around with a ballerina’s grace and ran back to rejoin her classmates. Her long, powerful strides made her look as if she was flying.

Karn leaned closer to whisper urgently in my ear. “Skietra! What the hell did you do to piss her off?”

I shrugged. “Guess she takes it personal if someone fails her class.”

“Then don’t. She’s leading the league in scores, you know. If the Devils win tonight, she’s going to be a planet-wide celebrity. Up for the Pros even.”

“Yeah… and since when do high school math teachers play pro ball?”

Karn smiled as he punched me in the arm. “Welcome to ever-fucking Velor. Everybody has two careers here. At least. How else do you keep from getting bored over the next three centuries?”

My heart continued to race as I fidgeted in my seat. I’d had a thing for Ms. Quiv’an since the moment I’d stepped into her classroom. Tripped actually. I took one gawking look at her, and my feet tangled up in the heavy gravity and I went down, spilling my books and the contents of my lunch bag across the front of her classroom. Given that Vels rarely eat and have unnaturally good poise and balance, my demonstration of physical ineptness instantly confirmed everyone’s worst expectations of a Terran exchange student.

Ms. Quiv’an was the only one gracious enough to help me gather my things up and make me feel at home in her class. She was a surprisingly good math teacher, so it was completely my fault that I was failing. My excuse, one that I’d never tell anyone else, was that I was always dreaming some very x-rated dreams about her as she wrote on the board, her tight backside wiggling so sexily beneath a Velorian-short skirt as she worked her way across the front of the room. My notes were woefully incomplete, but my dreams about Ms. Quiv’an were in fabulous shades of Technicolor.

Naturally, I’d asked around about her. She was married to an older college professor and had a young daughter. That sounded bad, until I found someone who said she was also into ex’tosy with her group of athletes. Ex’tosy was the very appropriate name for the kind of ‘just for fun’ sex that Velorians seem to love so much. It technically meant ‘sex outside of a committed relationship’.

As opposed to dating and chatting each other up like Terrans do, Velorians seemed to progress from being strangers to lovers with the ease of slipping on a well-worn pair of gloves. Compatible couples ignited the glow of erotic love with effortless grace. They experienced that wondrous glow of falling in love over and over again, just like that breathless first love of adolescence, the feeling ever fresh.

It wasn’t one-night stands and casual sex like outsiders assumed, but real love affairs. Yet somehow, these ex’tosy affairs never diminished their devotion to their true love, call lumor. Jealousy was rare, occurring only when a man or woman got their ex’tosy and lumor confused. Like on Earth, divorces did occur, but they rarely had anything to do with sexual infidelity.

I soon discovered how this was possible. It was the pheromones. They allowed a person to feel the wild rush of head-over-heels love, yet the affect was clearly chemical and transitory, just like the puppy love of adolescents back on Earth.

Unfortunately, I didn’t give off pheromones, nor was I very sensitive to them. Which meant I was as out-of-place as a blind man in an art gallery.

I knew I shouldn’t be complaining. My enhancement by Xara on that Scalantran trading ship had been a dream come true. She’d been even more exotically sexy than I’d imagined in my dreams, her body so perfect it defied reason. Even more, she’d been sexually aggressive the whole way, seducing me at the oddest moments of the day. Whether we were in our room or socializing with the Scalantrans, she would smile and snuggle closer to me, her long, silky hair cascading over me to form a golden tent, her soft kisses finding my lips, her body yearning for mine.

The first time we made love in public was at the Captain’s table. The lighting was dim during an after-dinner dance performance on stage, and she was inspired enough to float out of her chair and straddle me right there at the table, her blonde hair picking up what light there was. Before I knew what was happening, I was inside her and she was rocking back and forth, having a wonderful time. I stared around the table at the eyes that were staring back at me, shocked and embarrassed, horrified if the truth be told, but the Scalantrans only smiled at me and turned back to enjoy the other performance.

As a race, Scalantrans were into group sex, mate-groups and all, but not at the dinner table. At least, not normally. After Xara got enthusiastic a few times, they started to react to her her pheromones, and suddenly we weren’t the only ones doing the dirty. I guess they learned to recognize the scent of human love. Trust me, that Scalantran starship was the randiest place I’ve ever been. I guess it gets boring spending all those months and years in space.

Thanks to Xara’s mutagenic enhancement, I got stronger and more energetic every time we made love. Although unfortunately, not bigger. I tried my new strength out on her as we wrestled in bed, only to discover that her slender beauty was the perfect disguise. She could have twisted the mythical Supergirl into knots. Yet she hardly needed strength to overcome me. All she had to do was open those long legs of hers and my body switched into sexual overdrive in two seconds flat. I became the embodiment of every X-rated fantasy I’d ever had.

Unfortunately, the gold field of Velor and the heavy gravity ripped 90% of my new strength and prowess away when we arrived in orbit and I shuttled down to the surface. Still, having twice the relative strength of a bodybuilder in his prime, coupled with a gymnast’s flexibility, was nothing to sneeze at.

So as I said, I shouldn’t really complain. Unfortunately, my classmates, P-classes all, were hardly appreciative, and far from charitable in sharing their charms. At best I was ignored at school, and at worst, ridiculed. Teenage Velorian girls proved to be just as cruel toward funny-looking weaklings and social outcasts as cute girls were on Earth.

Still, there were distractions that made it all worthwhile. Like this Scrumbles game.

The bone-crushing impact of the scrimmage lines slamming into each other was terrifying, as were the deafening screams of victory and defeat as the athletes surged up and down the field, often as not passing one of their fellow players down the field as he or she tucked the ball in, trying to protect it. Players some times pin-wheeled out of control up into the overhead lights to set off a shower of sparks. Other times they tumbled completely out of the stadium, but mostly they crashed into the stands, splattering the spectators with mud and sweat, their skin coated with that exotic pheromone of honey and wildflower that Vels give off when they’re aroused. Or feeling violently aggressive. Appropriately for a race of warriors, those two emotional states were often indistinguishable.

By the time half-time came, the player’s uniforms were shredded, with the player’s essential modesty preserved only by mud and grass stains. Karn’s girlfriend came looking for him, a vision in blonde wearing a tiny skirt and a torn Red Devil jersey that hung off one-shoulder, and she gave me a big smile and wink as she tossed a blanket over herself and Karn. That lucky bastard was getting laid during the half-time show!

I was disappointed by the blanket, but Vels have a little more class than most people grant them. Instead, I stared at my feet as his girlfriend leaned against me as they went at it, decent enough to share at least some of their pleasures. That was cool of her, but she didn’t exactly invite me to join them.

Instead, I leaned the other way and tried to distract myself by wondering how I’d describe Scrumbles to the kids back home. I decided I’d have my Terran readers imagine players with a dozen times the strength of an NFL player, along with the quickness and agility of a floor gymnast. Then make the players completely invulnerable to injury. Then expand the playing field by three times and remove any rules designed to protect the players. Throw in some WWF style wrestling moves, along with kickboxing and a few unique martial arts moves. Finally, make half the players female, looking like beach volleyball players, and then tear most of their uniforms off.

I smiled at that last thought. Nobody would believe that.

Nor would they believe that these beauty queens played the most savagely violent athletic contest in the universe. Only the Supremis could combine sex and savagery in the same game, and the clouds of irresistible pheromones they emitted made the event as exotically arousing to the spectators as it was for the players.

Witness Karn and his girlfriend.

She finally tossed the blanket off to emerge looking like the cat that’d eaten the canary, licking her lips, her hair messed, her eyes bright. She smoothed her skirt back down and squeezed in between us, resting her hand on my leg, tracing her fingers along the inside of my thigh to send a riot of tingles through my body.

I was still debating whether she was toying with me or inviting me, when the second half kicked off. We all jumped up and screamed as the Red Devils lined up again, and that potentially sexy moment passed.

The second half was even more intense than the first, what with the ball carriers routinely being tossed from one end of the field to the other, their legs whirling like crazy when they hit the ground, only to be brutally tackled and ground into the turf. Several of the spectators joined the game after players were tossed high into the stands, but they didn’t last long when facing semi-pros. Still, they went home with mud-stains and wild stories to share with their buddies.

Amazingly, the underdog Red Devils won!

When it was all over, there was but one casualty: me. I’d screamed myself hoarse.

More importantly, Ms. Quiv’an had been declared MVP. She’d even smiled at me as she was carried off the field by her teammates, wearing only head-to-toe mud and grass stains.

Unfortunately, for all that excitement, the next day at school was an unmitigated disaster. Her calculus midterm was a killer, and I was doomed before I got past the first page. I hadn’t expected the exam was going to have as many differential equation problems on it as it did. DiffyQ was my worst area.

Instead of trying to solve most of them, I found myself staring at Ms. Quiv’an as she sat in front of the room, wondering how she could look so flawlessly beautiful after last night’s mayhem. Every strand of golden hair was back in place, and her eyes were bright and clear. Her skin was unmarked and glowing. She truly looked like a goddess.

And she was.

Unfortunately, she was the goddess of calculus, and I was a poor worshipper at her shrine.

I’d barely attempted half the problems when she finally called time. Rising, I walked past her desk and tried to slip my paper unobtrusively into the pile, but she picked it out and scanned it, shaking her blonde head. “If you’d used those hours last night to practice a few more problems, you might have passed, Ben.”

“The… the game was awesome, Ms. Quiv’an,” I blurted out. “Actually, you were awesome. A real goddess.”

I winced as I listened to myself. I sounded like an idiot.

She just shrugged, taking it in stride. “My daughter might debate the title, she’d probably choose witch, but we all need more than one skill in this life, Ben. My second one seems to be Scrumbles. But since this is math class…” Her voice trailed off as she pulled a dreaded Mandatory Tutoring form from her drawer. “Be in the tutoring office after school starting today and everyday going forward until you catch up. We’ve got some serious work to do.”

I blinked, barely comprehending her words. We’ve got some serious work to do? Was she going to tutor me… personally? I suddenly wasn’t sure what to think. Spending time alone with Ms. Quiv’an was a dream come true. But spending a couple of hours a day studying differential equations was going to be pure hell. Still, I prayed I’d understood her correctly, and that she wasn’t going to drop me into the clutches of Mrs. Winkler, the dreaded remedial math tutor.

Seemingly a lifetime later, as the other students tossed their school bags over their shoulders and sprinted for those soaring runways that arched over the city, I walked into the Admin wing of the school. I stared longingly out the windows as the last of my classmates accelerated up the ramps at speeds that would have shocked an Olympic sprinter back on Earth. Loping along at sixty kilometers per hour was the norm here, sometimes holding that speed for hours. Anti-grav flitters were only used to go between cities or to carry large loads.

I sighed resignedly, and pulled my gaze back inside, very aware of the dull gray walls that now surrounded me. The Admin block was a place of detention. A place of isolation. A place of death. I walked as slowly as I could toward the Math Department office, but couldn’t put it off forever.

My hand felt as if it was made of lead as I knocked on the door. I heard Ms. Quiv’an’s sexy voice telling me to come in, and my heavy heart lifted a bit.

An hour later, I was immersed in solving a particularly tough problem. Ms. Quiv’an had decided to personally tutor me, and surprisingly, she hadn’t turn out to be the math Nazi that I’d expected. She patiently showed me how to strategize solutions, although I was still having trouble factoring the equations down to a form that could be solved. Algebra hadn’t been my best subject back on Earth.

She decided to go back a step, and dug out a remedial algebra program, rescheduling the next dozen tutoring sessions to focus on basic skills.

Those sessions were grueling. Day after day came and went, weekends too, as I spent two hours in her office, and then two more hours doing homework. Most of the time, Ms. Quiv’an was off practicing with her Scrumbles team.

After a dozen sessions, she gave me an algebra test. I barely passed, despite the focused work.

“Your problem isn’t talent, Ben,” she finally declared after watching me fidget in my chair. “It’s focus and motivation. You seem terribly distracted, even here in my office.”

I slumped further in the chair, staring glumly at my test paper. I didn’t want to talk about motivation. Or distractions. After all, Ms. Quiv’an was the greatest distraction in my whole life.

“But I’ve read that Terrans are good a modifying their behavior to reach a difficult goal, if they really believe in it. In fact, you’re better at that than we Velorians.”

I shrugged. “Maybe an achievable goal. My brain cells just don’t work as fast as yours.”

“I don’t think it’s your head that’s a problem, Ben. Not your big one anyway.”

I looked up at her, jaw dropping.

“I know what’s distracting you, Ben. Girls. Especially the way your classmates ostracize you because you’re Terran.”

“I’m more than…” I started to proudly say, but she waved her hand to stop me.

“We both know you’d be a most impressive man in the eyes of your fellow Terrans. But not in this school, and not on a planet whose people are the purest expression of superhuman beings in the universe.”

“That’s why I came…”

“As you know,” she continued, seemingly having rehearsed her little speech, “the endless pursuit of genetic purity is built into our genes, along with a rejection of damaged or inferior genetics. It’s a leftover from the Galen’s attempt to make us their procreators. It’s also not something I’m proud of.”

“Then why don’t you just get over it?”

Her smile faded. “If it was that easy, we would. Like this.” She snapped her fingers. “Unfortunately, the Galen embedded an unconscious fear into our people. A fear of intimacy with those of lesser genetics.”

“You mean, like a phobia?” I asked disgustedly. “Like I might feel toward handling spiders or worms?”

“No, no, not like worms, Ben. As a group, we are very fond of Terrans. After all, we are you with a few tweaks. It’s only the concept of intimacy that creates… problems.”

“Only intimacy…?” I nearly shouted. “Only the most important aspect of Velorian society!”

“We don’t see ourselves that way, Ben. Personally, I greatly enjoy your unique perspective on all things Velorian. It’s refreshingly honest.”

“I didn’t come here for refreshing honesty,” I muttered glumly.

She smiled. “But considering our problem as a phobia… hmmm, that’s probably closer than I’d like to admit. We sense each other’s pheromones, and can judge sexual compatibility that way. P-class depend the most heavily on scent to drive attraction, but most of the rest of us depend on it to a significant degree. The whole idea is to find lovers who have the greatest degree of genetic overlap.”

“I’m not trying to become a god-damned father, for Christ’s sake,” I growled. “I just want to get laid.”

Ms. Quiv’an’s smile grew broader. “Well, your scent isn’t pushing the right buttons for that, I’m afraid. Velorian women rarely engage in charitable sexual gratification.”

“Charitable…?” I started to sputter.

“We’re raised from the earliest age to believe in sexual equality.”

I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. “Which means, if you can’t scratch my itch, then I won’t scratch yours!”

“That’s a negative way to look at it, Ben.”

“Then give me another way.”

Ms. Quiv’an said nothing.

I was on a roll now. “You’ve got your fucking Maternity engine for making babies… I thought the sexual act was just for fun! Who gives a damn about ‘genetic overlap’?”

“True as far as that goes, Ben, but that brings us to the second issue. The Galen made sure that sex was uniquely pleasurable for Supremis females, but they did it by rewiring our nervous system. They gave us a Ctei.”

“And reduced the role of the clitoris.” I slumped even lower in my chair. “I know all this. I’ve read the god-damned books.”

“Then you didn’t pay attention,” she said defensively. “It’s still more sensitive than any human woman’s. Like… way more sensitive.”

“But you’re all addicted to Cteis anyway,” I said despondently.

“Not all. But your classmates, yes. They are all P-class, and they know their role in the universe. They are also well aware that there are forms of sexual contest; call it combat if you will, that involves Cteis, which makes them naturally competitive when it comes to sex. It’s built into their genes to constantly explore the limits of their powers.”

“And I didn’t make the cut to be on that team.”

She smiled sympathetically. “That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”

I sighed. “Well, at least it explains why most girls look at me like I’m a slime mold when I ask them out, yet they’re friendly enough at other times.”

“It’s not a conscious thing, Ben, so don’t blame them. It takes a great deal of maturity to look past the physical, to overcome chemistry. Fortunately, Protectors are conditioned during their later training to look at sexual relations more broadly, which eliminates the phobia. Many of them learn to find great pleasure in the arms of ordinary humans.”

“So here I am, a guy only a Protector could possibly find interesting, and I’m on the one planet that Protectors rarely return to. The place where they are all training to leave forever.”

“Yeah… pretty ironic, huh? Reminds me of the stories about genies and the dangers of asking for wishes to be granted.”

Despite my growing funk, I couldn’t help but smile. “A simple act of twisted fate. That’s me.”

“Speaking of twisted. You still have to master DiffyQ.”

“Damn. And I thought I was talking my way out of it.”

“Tell you what,” she said, stretching languidly in her chair, her tiny skirt riding up high enough to make my heart race, “I’ll make you a deal. You figure out how to pass my class, and I’ll fix your other problem.”

My jaw nearly hit the table. “You’re shitting me!”

“Ace the final and you’ll find out.”

When I returned to my room that night, I worked on my math homework for five hours, ignoring the holo and its exotic video games. Ms. Quiv’an’s sexy promise made all the difference, and my days were soon filled with a blur of math class and math tutoring and math homework. Only when I finally collapsed exhausted in my bed each night did my dreams wander back to Ms. Quiv’an and her promise of exotic pleasures.

By the end of another three weeks of work, I saw a glimmer of hope. My usual intimidation when faced with a difficult problem had given way to grim determination to solve it.

And I did.

Even more excitingly, the Red Devils won the championship and Ms. Quiv’an’s picture was on the front of every sporting broadcast on the planet. An instant celebrity, she went on a promotional tour with the team, traveling to all the major cities.

“You’re making great progress,” she confirmed when she returned to school. “The final is in two days… so why don’t you relax for a bit.”

I beamed at her. The goddess whose picture beamed down from posters all across town thought I was ready! For the final. For her?

My ego puffed up like an inflating balloon. All I had to do was ace the damn test and my sexual deprivation would end!

She looked at me strangely for a moment, sensing my excitement, and seemingly flipped a mental coin. It landed heads up. “How about joining me for dinner, Ben. I’ve got a demonstration game tonight and I have to eat some real food before I play. Trace nutrients and all.” She winked at me. “And, of course, we’ve got your other problem to start working on now.”

My heart was racing so wildly it almost fluttered as I fumbled around trying to gather my books up. “Ah, sure. Absolutely. Where to my lady?” I grimaced as I heard my own words. My lady? She was twice my age. Maybe more.

“My mother’s place. She owns a salara parlor over in Soho.”

Salara was a local dish that was the closest thing to the pizza I’d known back home, and Soho was a bohemian neighborhood full of funky restaurants and clubs.

I dumped my books into that ubiquitous backpack that all Velorians carry and followed Ms. Quiv’an out of the building to join the Soho runway. I managed to keep up with her for a few kilometers, mostly from the inspiration of staring at her legs.

She finally took pity on me and slowed down. Still, I was gasping for air by the time we exited the runway and came to a stop in front of a small art deco-style restaurant.

I collapsed heavily into a chair, panting like a steam engine. Other than her windblown hair and a slight sheen to her skin, Ms. Quiv’an looked as cool as she had sitting back at her desk. She sat down beside me and ordered a couple of sparkling waters, hooking her bare leg casually over the arm of the chair. “So, we have to get you some ex’tosy, huh.”

I nodded as my breathing slowed. “But all the girls think I’m slime mold.”

“Everyone has their own kind of beauty.”

I snorted. “Easy for a Velorian goddess to say.”

She smiled her silent thanks to my compliment. “Seriously. You’re really interesting to talk to, Ben, and your stories about Earth are so different than we see on the Holo here.”

“Not that anyone cares. Most of the girls in school just want to talk about themselves, or the planets they’re going to save when they’re Protectors. Not some dusty old planet that they’re not even allowed to visit.”

Ms. Quiv’an shrugged. “P-class are all Prima Donnas. But don’t worry… most of them will grow out of it.”

“All I see now is self-centeredness. Everything has to revolve around them or it’s boring.”

Ms. Quiv’an took a drink of the sparkling water as it arrived. “As a society, we tolerate that of the P-class. After all, we do ask a huge sacrifice of each and every one.”

“I guess,” I said with a shrug. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the table, but they kept wandering down to stare at Ms. Quiv’an’s bare legs. Her long legs had opened slightly as she relaxed, giving me a straight shot between her perfect thighs. She saw me looking, but didn’t seem to mind.

“You could fill in some blanks about Earth’s popular culture,” she continued. “I just need to get you connected to the right people.”

I struggled to pull my eyes from her legs. “Well, yeah, I’ve already been working with Professor Mark’um. He heads up the Earth History department at UV.”

She nodded approvingly, pausing to twirl some strands of golden hair around her fingers, taking another sip of her drink as she peered curiously through the glass at me. “But to the subject at hand… we both know that’s not what you came to Velor for.”

I shrugged. “Kind of stupid, wasn’t it, Ms. Quiv’an?”

“My name is Mary.” She set her glass down. “And don’t be so shy about looking at me.”

Startled, I realized she knew exactly where I’d been staring; I blinked and looked up to meet her gaze. “Mary? That’s… that’s a Terran name.”

“My parents studied Terran customs. They even went there once on a science mission.”

“How come you never told me this before?”

“I wanted to figure you out on my own. Especially since there is talk of sending you to a lower tier school next term.”

It had been suggested before that I’d be more comfortable in a school that catered to B-class. The Tier One school I was attending now was focused on preparing P1’s for their Rites, and no B-class attended. Ninety plus percent were P1’s, the remaining handful P2 and P3’s. But I’d asked to attend just such a school as soon as I found out they existed, and Xara had pulled some strings to get me enrolled as an exchange student.

“I heard you turned down earlier suggestions to attend the second-tier schools, Ben.”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s tough here, but this is where I want to be. Among Velor’s best.”

“Even if it makes you lonely?”

“That damn sure wasn’t part of my plan.”

Mary nodded. “How anyone can live a few days without ex’tosy, I can’t imagine. Let alone weeks and months.”

My heart leaped again as I stared at her wide-eyed. I’d already learned that Velorian conversations, even teacher to student, sometimes traveled down some pretty sexual paths. “So, you… you have it… every day?” I asked daringly.

“Not today,” she answered with a sexy laugh. “My husband is out of town and my teammates are all busy.” She winked at me. “But the day isn’t over.”

My heart nearly leaped from my chest, and my arousal was suddenly so complete that I felt as if I was floating on air.

Mary smiled brighter at my reaction and opened her legs even wider, a beam of late afternoon sunlight revealing that, like most Vels, she wasn’t wearing panties. “You’re definitely a man, Ben, and I did agree to solve your problem if you mastered my class. You’ve held up your end of the deal well enough. Now its my turn.”

Was this discussion really going where I was dreaming it was? A recurring fantasy crossed my mind – one of Ms. Quiv’an and I exploring a new kind of student/teacher relationship.

She smiled and reached out to rest her hand on my knee, closing her own. “I’ve been thinking… I think I know just the girl for you to meet.”

My hopes peaked, still circling around the summit of my desire for as long as it took for her last words to penetrate my dense brain. “Wha… someone…? Else? But not…?”

She smiled tolerantly. “I’m your math teacher, Ben. We do have a few rules here.”

Shit! SHIT! I cursed silently.

Her smile faded. “I’m sorry if that’s where you thought we were going. But I was really thinking of finding a girl your age – someone who’s also been ostracized because of her race. Someone who is also challenged by lack of pheromones.”

I felt like throwing up as that familiar sense of depression fell over me like a wet blanket. “How is that possible… you Vels are all the same?”

“The girl I’d like you to meet is a Tanzrobian.”

I jerked my head back up. “A Tanz-what?”

“It isn’t widely publicized, but we have a contingent of Aggressors on Atlantea. Some Tanzrobians are part of that organization.”

I’d heard of the Aggressors. They lived on a Daxxanian moon that had been terra-formed. It was a military complex.

“The Aggressors are involved in some heavy-duty training of new Protectors,” she explained. “I work with them during school vacations, wearing my hair dyed black as I pretend to be an enemy Prime. I’m involved in full contact battles… the whole bit.”

“Ah, then that means…” I started to ask, only to have my imagination race on, envisioning a fully empowered Ms. Quiv’an battling it out with some teenage Protector candidates.

“I’ve been ‘killed’ a dozen times by Protectors in training, Ben,” she continued, sensing my racing thoughts. “But I’ve got a few victories too. Damn proud of those. Those P-class are impossibly strong after Aphro’dite gets done with them.”

“Cool. You’re a Scrumbles player and an Aggressor. Not to mention a hard-ass math teacher.” I shrugged, trying to act cool, even as my thoughts grew more confused. “I bet your husband loves that. But what’s that got to do with my problem?”

“One word: Ples’tathy.”

I gawked at her. Xara had described a few of the Protector tactics her mom had taught her, and that included Ples’tathy. I briefly imagined Ms. Quiv’an trapping some Arion dude in an endless orgasmic rut until she’d drained his energy into her body, her sexual energy rising to feed her endless desires as she fucked him to death.

I gritted my teeth and clamped off that x-rated thought, and felt myself blush wildly as she looked into my eyes. Blushing is something Velorians find very cute as they lack the ability.

“Most of the Aggressors are part-timers like me,” Mary continued, her smile a bit impish now. “But sometimes we get lucky and come across someone like Kath’a who is willing to work with us full time.”

“Kath’a? That’s a strange name. And what’s a Tanzrobian, anyway?”

“A race of humans who come from a planet seeded by abductees from the eastern African continent of Earth. They’d already been futzed by the Galen, presumably an early attempt to create a Supremis-like race, and a few of their families approached Primal levels when the Empire conquered them. The Arions started a campaign, more than ten generations ago now, to enhance them into their ultimate warriors… part of a grand experiment that was kept secret from their own people. They made great initial strides as they forced enhancement after enhancement upon them. A large number of Tanzrobians died from enhancement fever, but those few who survived eventually possessed genetics that were 90% correlated with the Primes. The only difference was in their appearance.”

“Shit! You want to introduce me to a Prime?” I knew all too well that a Prime would have twenty times my strength. She’d suck what little orgone I had out of my body and crush me like an eggshell.

“Yeah, I do. A very lonely one. She also needs to learn to control her Ples’tathy, and I figure that two lost souls might find solving that problem something you could share.”

“And she’s a Terran enhancee like me? I thought there was an upper limit to our power. A limit that’s still well below a B-class?”

“Generations of Arion selective breeding say otherwise. It appears the Arions were desperate for agents they could implant on seeded worlds who wouldn’t be suspected as being Supremis. So they were working on preparing Africans, Asians, Indians… possibly others too.”

“Jeez. So much for the Supremis’ universal blue eyes.”

“Actually, that was the rub. They almost always got blue eyes when they mixed in Supremis genes. Blue is dominant for us, not recessive like you humans.”

“And they deployed these Tanzrobians to human worlds?”

“Yeah… a fair number of them were dropped on seeded worlds, some even back on Earth. But by then the Tanzrobians were starting to figure out what was going on. They finally saw those Arion bastards for what they are. Racists. Slave Masters.”

“Good for them.”

“No, not good. They rebelled, and ,ost of their planet was destroyed by the Arions. But given their empowerment, many Tanzrobians escaped and now operate outside Arion control.”

“Lucky for us.”

“I agree, but the Arions were just as happy to see them go as we were to get them. They didn’t like the idea of Terran expatriates becoming nearly as strong as their best warriors, so they were more than happy to abandon the Tanzrobian project to work on the Tset’lar program instead.”

I shuddered as a sliver of fear lanced through my body. Everyone on Velor knew the Tsets were a twisted race of warriors who’d been created exclusively to prey on Velorians.

“You may have read the story about that Tset who colored her hair and infiltrated the government buildings on Velor ten years ago. She killed several high-ranking officials before she was discovered, and in the ensuing fight, she seriously injured a handful of Protectors before they overwhelmed her. And that was down here in the gold field.”

“I heard about her,” I nodded. “Alexa something.”

“Right. Rumor has it she survived the disintegration chamber she’d been sentenced to die in and escaped.”

I shuddered again as Mary paused to smile confidently at me. “But you don’t need to worry. There’s no known connection between Tsets and Tanzrobians. Or any love lost, for that matter. Especially after the Arions used the first generation of Tsets to hunt down and kill rogue Tanzrobians.”

“And now you’re trying to fix me up with one?”

“Like you, they are Terrans first, Ben, not Supremis. So they lack many of the Galen’s control mechanisms, including our racial purity paranoia and our need for pheromones to release our ultimate sexual desires.”

I stared at her, wondering what her ultimate desires were like.

“They aren’t as strong as us either,” Mary added as if by afterthought.

“What about gold?”

“It hardly affects them, which is why we’re pretty sure Geheimite genes are involved.”

“Ouch. That would make them wickedly dangerous on Velor.”

“Fortunately, they are sensitive to a variety of pathogens that exist down here, so they aren’t as much of a risk as you might think at first.”

“More Galen foresight?”

Mary shook her head. “Just dumb luck, or so our scientists think. But that said, Tanzrobian history is murky. What we do know is that the first Tanzrobians we encountered were extremely capable warriors. Kath’a’s mother, in fact, is almost as strong as me, although she has to carry more muscle than I do to achieve that. She’s agreed to help us train Viragos now.”

“So she works for us? For real?”

Mary nodded. “Along with Kath’a, who was born on Atlantea after her mother’s empowered conception. She won’t tell me who the father was.”

“Empowered conception,” I breathed, trying to rein in my racing thoughts. The eroticism of Velorian sex outside a gold field was nearly indescribable, as was the invulnerable nature of a woman’s ova. It took a real superman to achieve conception. That and a lot of heat.

“Rumor has it the father was a Geheimite. That would be my guess too, based on Kath’a’s appearance. Other than her dark skin and a few facial features, she looks more like us than she does her mother.”

“And she’s my age? Seventeen?”

“Interestingly, you share the same birthday. After adjustment for time warps and different calendar systems, it appears you were born during the same minute, but on opposite sides of the universe. What are the odds of that? Or of you meeting?”

“Lots of people have the same birthday.”

Mary shrugged. “Not to the minute, they don’t. And you guys are the only Ubers in the Velorian system who were enhanced from human stock. At least since the Galen created our race.”

“It’s all engineering no matter who does it,” I said with a wave of my hand.

“Ha. Don’t tell that to one of hose Christla cultists. They’re screaming about the immorality of genetic manipulation, claiming that ‘divine evolution’ is far different than mere engineering. Or enhancement.”

“That’s gotta be the most hypocritical thing a Velorian could claim,” I chuckled. “Those cultists keep trying to re-write our history. Turn science into mythology. Or maybe it’s the other way around?”

“Good thing nobody listens to them.”

Neither of us had anything more to add on that subject. Velorian cults or religion, other than the widespread worship of Skietra, wasn’t something I was comfortable talking about. And Christlas were a sore point with most Velorians; they’d originated way out on one of the surrogate worlds, but some travelers had made a small but growing group of converts here. It was bad enough that they believed in some unknowable and unseen God, but they saw the universe as an expression of His divine purpose, not the Galen’s. Like I said, a real sore point for most Vels.

Mary finally continued the conversation. “What I do know is that Kath’a can’t come down to Velor due to the bugs. So she’s stuck up there on that lonely moon. At least until her mother releases her to go elsewhere.”

“So how am I supposed to meet her then? I’m governed by the same rules as you guys – no leaving the planetary gold field unless you’re granted a special visa. Violators are jailed for a very long time. Or worse.”

“Simple. You’re the best reporter on the Selt’wan school newspaper, and our school is very well regarded. We graduate more Protector candidates each year than any other school.”

“They’re going to grant a funny-looking student reporter from a high school access to a top secret installation?” I asked in disbelief.

“If you think that, then you don’t have a clue about the reputation of our school,” Mary said, the pride clear in her voice. “In the eyes of the Hall of Protectors, the Council… hell, anyone involved with Protectors, we’re the standard to which they try to hold all other schools.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never suspected that.

“I can sign you up to write a story about the girls who have graduated from our school and gone on to be Protectors,” Mary said with a smile. “You can write about how they train with the Aggressors on Atlantea. I’m sure your editor would make it page one.”

“You can arrange that?” I asked doubtfully. I still saw her as just a math teacher.

She shrugged. “After winning the championship, plus my time on Atlanta, I know some people who can pull strings.”

When I got home that night, my adoptive-sister, Mari’anne, was standing outside my bedroom, dripping wet from her evening exercises, her thin, white blouse unbuttoned and clinging to her wet skin, the tails barely covering her enough to be decent. She was busting her ass to get ready for her final meeting with the selection committee for the Institute of Scribes. Only six months to go until her sixteenth birthday. Like most P2’s, she looked a few years more mature than she was.

Like all Primas, she was stunningly cute. Something I tried not think about.

“So, you ever going to take me up on my offer, bro? Six months from now and I’ll be gone. Might be your last chance soon.”

“Damn you,” I swore under my breath as a wave of dizziness passed over me, my pants tightening as I was instantly hard as steel. Not from her pheromones, but from my own misguided imagination. She was my sister, damn it!

She looked down at me, then back into my eyes and smiled in a very un-sisterly way.

That pissed me off even worse. She was flooding the hallway with pheromones. Deliberately. And while we both knew that I was more or less immune to them, she knew that I’d inhaled enough of hers for them to make me dizzy.

“Well, Ben? We’ve got an hour to kill before our sitdown.”

My parents always had a sitdown while I ate dinner. A family meeting. A gathering. A time to talk about our day.

I turned my back to Mari’anne without saying a word, and opened my bedroom door to slide inside, quickly closing it behind me to lean against the inside of the door, breathing hard. I was so turned on that I couldn’t see straight. More than anything in the world, I wanted to follow Mari’anne into her room and let the last five months of frustration go. For despite her tender age, she was hardly a blushing virgin. Primas left that silliness behind them by the time they were fourteen.

I knew full well that she was just trying to help in a unique Velorian way, but damn it, I was Terran raised. I wasn’t going to start banging my sister upstairs while my mom made dinner downstairs.

Instead, I took the easy way out. I lay on the bed and took care of myself. I felt guilty enough doing that, but my head was going to blow off if I didn’t. Unfortunately, I felt even guiltier knowing that Mari’anne was probably lying on her bed on the other side of the wall thinking about me. I imagined her looking through the wall, watching me, doing herself at the same time – and that’s all it took to finish me.

By the time I could breathe again, I realized I was going to have to wash the damn ceiling again.

Damn you, Mari’anne.

The next two weeks passed slowly, but Ms. Mary Quiv’an was as good as her word. I received a Holo message to be a Pad 17, Space Port Delta at 0600 hours on the 21^st. I debated telling my adoptive mom where I was going, but I figured I’d be back before they got worried. My mom had a real phobia about going off planet, there were dangerous Arions out there she would say, and I knew she’d refuse to let me go. And as my legal guardian, she could have jinxed the deal.

Instead, I rose before dawn and ran across the city and then ten kliks out into the prairie to the Port. Before I knew it, I was getting hooked up to the tranks in the cabin of an Atlantean shuttle while staring at three impossibly cute Protector candidates. They were happily chatting about their first full-contact training regimen, and wondering what it would feel like to escape the gold influence of Velor.

I was about to describe what I knew about being empowered, after all, I’d spent the last week of my trip here outside a gold field after being enhanced, but unfortunately, when I opened my mouth to speak, the sweet-smelling gas arrived to wipe out my chance to impress the girls.

When I woke up, I was lying alone in a room full of empty cots. I stared up at the ceiling to see a large mural depicting the eagle’s wing emblem of Atlantea. Damn it! The girls must have recovered quicker than me. Aphro’dite’s magic did strange things to Protectors.

Rising groggily to sit on the side of my cot, I tried to stand, only to feel very light on my feet. I tiptoed toward the huge picture windows that made up the far wall of the recovery room. I felt so wickedly strong that it was like walking in a miniscule gravity field. Yet Atlantea’s gravity was about the same as Earth’s.

An incredible surge of well-being filled me with the energy of an eight year old combined with the continuous aura of delightful teenage arousal. For the first time since I’d been with Xara on that Scalantran ship, I felt hopeful about my prospects for finding a girlfriend. I was empowered now, and the girls here were Protectors in training. Girls who were undergoing conditioning to eliminate their xenophobia.

I half ran, half floated up some further steps to stand in the middle of a huge bay window to look out at Atlantea’s vast Sea of Chimera. Azure blue water, white sand and palm trees.

Atlantea had two artificial suns, really just very large orbiting fusion generators running in Mode Zero, which cast a whitish light that was strong enough to counteract the red glow of Velor’s sun to turn the water blue. A century ago, Atlantea has been a frozen world, with half of its twenty-day orbit around Daxxan leaving it in icy darkness. Now the two artificial suns gave it periods of sunlight, as well as an Earth-like visible spectrum, along with a surface temperature ranging from 10C to 30C.

The terraforming was all part of creating the illusion of an Earth-like world, the kind the seeders and surrogates had deposited most humans on. The kind most Protectors were assigned to.

What it didn’t have was gold.

The achingly familiar scenery before me combined with my surging energy to fill me with a rare pang of homesickness. While I’d hated every moment of my former life on Earth, better or worse, Earth was still home. A home I could never go back to.

“Are you Ben Shaffer?” a deep voice spoke from behind me.

I spun around to see a man in a black military uniform standing in the middle of the room. His eyes were a startling shade of azure blue and his complexion had the distinctive golden hue of a Velorian – except that his hair was jet black.

An Arion?

I involuntary stepped backward, especially after I saw the skull and crossbones rune on his uniform. “So… so what’s it to you?” I managed to choke out.

“I’ve been instructed to escort you back to the Aggressor squadron compound,” the soldier said crisply.

I forced myself to relax slightly as I remembered Mary’s comments about Velorians imitating Arion appearances and behavior. “So you’re one of them? An Aggressor?”

“Sergeant Ale’can Yanstran. But you can call me Alex. We all take Arion names while in the Aggressors.” The soldier grabbed my bag, the same one that had felt so heavy down on Velor, and tossed it lightly over his shoulder as he led the way.

“So, Alex,” I asked as I followed, “how many Aggressors are there here?”

“Four-hundred and three as of 1700 hours yesterday,” the soldier replied, his words military crisp and precise. “Maximum contingent is four-twenty.”

“That’s more than I expected. I read that only a hundred and twenty Protector candidates are stationed here at any one time.”

“Affirmative. Each class is about thirty, and we’ve got Phase 1 thru 4 classes up here at any one time. They come back to train four times, each time for three months before finally graduating.”

“Four against one, huh. Lopsided odds.”

“Affirmative. Arion tactics have changed, even during infiltration missions, and a Protector is unlikely to be engaged by a single Prime these days.”

“So… you’re a P-class?” I guessed. The man was as tall and athletic as a Messenger.

The man shook his head. “The majority of us are Matras, along with as many P3’s as we can recruit. P2’s all train as Messengers.”

“They send Messengers up here too?”

“They undergo a single training session. Self defense only.”

I nodded. Only on Velor were the women trained as warriors, the men as communicators and companions.

“And a few Ubers,” the sergeant added, almost as a postscript.

“Ubers?” Mary had used that term, but I wasn’t sure what it meant.

“Our name for foreign born but empowered. Currently, our Uber contingent consists of six Primes, three Tanzrobians and two Geheimites. They’re part of the permanent contingent.”

I gawked at him. “You have a Geheimite here?”

“Affirmative. The ProCans need a diversity of training, mostly from those less powerful than them, but working against them in teams. But they must also learn to fight someone more powerful.”

“ProCans?”

“Protector Candidates. They don’t have any skills in empowered fighting when they first come here. We fix that. Nobody gets out of Training Command until they pass four rounds of live-fire training.”

I was still thinking of the Geheimite. Geheimites had started off as Velorians, but had since interbred with the Galen, resulting in a more powerful race of the Supremis. Like many Velorians, I wasn’t exactly sure where the boundary between superhuman and goddess lay, but I knew that wherever that boundary was, the Geheimites straddled it. Which was impressive to a guy like me who spent his time trying to sort out the lesser boundary between human and superhuman.

The sergeant led the way past a line of waiting cargo flitters, and then wrapped his arm around my waist as he leaped off the ground, carrying me upward in a silent whoosh. I gasped as I was suddenly flying so fast that the wind tore at my clothing, my shirt lashing wildly against my skin.

I looked around in wonder, marveling that the sky was full of people flying to and fro, dressed in everything from formal wear to one teenage girl who seemingly wore nothing but waist-length blonde hair. Ordinary people on their way to and from work and school and out on errands, but flying instead of running, as was their birthright. I was suddenly even more jealous than usual of the Velorian-born and their volatai.

The sergeant landed in front of a glass skyscraper a few minutes later. The windows were so darkly tinted they looked black, and the structure itself looked as if it was made of CNT, an exotic material comprised solely of carbon nanotubes. CNT was much lighter and more rigid than Vendorian steel, not to mention easier to make. It lacked only the heat resistance and malleability of that alien wonder metal.

The same skull and crossbones symbol that the sergeant wore on his lapels was etched deeply into a twenty-meter tall edifice that greeted me on the ground floor. Looking up, I guessed the building was a hundred stories tall.

I was glad to be walking on my own again and not being pressed against some soldier’s body. The sensation of his muscles flexing so sensuously to control his flight had reminded me of flying with Xara. That had awoken a misplaced surge of arousal before I clamped it off. Velorian males were just as seductive as their women, and equally likely to be bisexual.

In fact, the only people who’d come on to me since my arrived on Velor had been a couple of male classmates. My horrified refusal to join them in ex’tosy had further emphasized my strangeness. Homophobia wasn’t in vogue on Velor, but it sure as hell was in my head.

I walked a few steps behind the sergeant as he led the way through the elaborately decorated entrance of the Aggressor building and into a yawning interior space. A central tube twenty-meters wide extended from ground floor to the roof, with circular walkways ringing each of the floors. The building was so tall that the central tube tapered nearly to a vanishing point. Disturbingly, I noted that none of the narrow walkways had railings.

There were dozens of graphics painted on the black onyx walls of the lobby, many of them depicting battle scenes, each one labeled with what looked like a squadron number. One in particular caught my eye. It was a disturbing view through the strong legs of what I assumed was a female Aggressor, her fists clenched. She was standing over a blonde girl wearing only the tatters of a red and blue uniform. Clearly a Protector, the girl was lying beaten and unconscious on the ground.

“Ah… the much feared Punishers,” my guide commented as he saw where I was staring. “The 409^th. Their commander is Arion born and he recruits as many other Arions and Tanzrobians as he can for his squadron.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“They are. The 409^th has the worst safety record on Atlantea. But they’ve also trained more Viragos than any other unit. If a candidate can survive them, they can handle anything that’s out there.”

“Except maybe a Tset,” I added, remembering that I was supposed to be a journalist. “And what safety issues are you talking about?”

The sergeant looked around before stepping closer and lowering his voice. “Off the record?”

I nodded, truly interested now.

“The 409^th has lost a dozen candidates during training in the last two years. Some of their own people too. Command has shut them down three times, but after protests from the Hall of Protectors, they’ve always lifted the suspension. Command doesn’t like it, but the powers that be back in the Hall have started channeling everyone with Virago potential to the 409^th.”

I started to make some notes on my wrist PersComp. “What kind of accidents?”

“I thought this was off the record?”

“Just keeping my notes in order. I won’t quote you.”

“Well, I’ve only heard about two of them. The first involved this really cocky ProCan who kept harassing this Arion guy. They went at it a dozen times in training, and it was getting rougher and nastier each time. As the story goes, she publicly challenged him to a fight that no red-blooded Arion could refuse, and they met out behind a bluff on Range 3. Fought all night as I heard it, the last half of it Ples’tathy style. In the morning, the Arion was drained dead.”

“Shit. What happened to her?”

“Nothing. Other than to make her a Virago. That was why there was such a stink back at Command. Breach of discipline, and all that. She should have been bounced out of the program.”

I made some notes. “And the other incident?”

“Similar, except the guy was one of our resident Geheimites. Another bitchy, over-confident ProCan was pushing him, trying to force a fight. Told everybody she could take a pansy, pacifist Geheimite. Same kind of out-of-control meeting took place, except that this girl met her match. That part-Galen bastard fucked her to death.”

“And he got promoted too, right?”

“Hardly. A half dozen ProCans from that girl’s unit went after him. He didn’t look so good for a while.”

“So how’s that a problem with the 409^th?”

“Stuff like that doesn’t happen in the other units.”

I finished my notes and then walked over to study the other graphics. Most of them depicted candidates and Aggressors smiling for pictures, arms clasped like they were good friends, but a few others showed images of lightning or eagles with talons extended and other symbols of aggressive power. Clearly, different squadrons had different ideas of what training meant. And since each ProCan had to undergo four sessions of here, they apparently gained a variety of experience.

Including, of course, the most questionable training – the use of Ples’tathy as a weapon. That controversy had recently made it into the Holos down on Velor. Apparently some of the P1 parents thought a weaponized version of Ples’tathy was the wrong thing to be teaching their daughters, especially when they were barely in their mid-teens. Despite the unusually permissive nature of Velorian sexuality, teaching their daughters to use sex as a lethal weapon was outside most parent’s comfort zone.

Pulling my attention back to the central corridor, I saw people flying up and down it, many of them raven-haired – which reassured me that they weren’t really Arions. The flyers landed lightly on one walkway or another to disappear into the rooms that ringed it.

High overhead, I was drawn to a vision in gold, her blonde hair floating around her head like a sunlit cloud as she descended. I paused to gawk as a stunningly mature Protector landed lightly beside me, her tiny skirt rising above her hips to reveal a tiny blue thong and the longest legs I’d ever seen. She was dressed in an archaic red, white and blue uniform complete with a flowing cape and ‘S’ rune between her breasts, her midriff bared to reveal her phenomenal fitness.

Far from being a candidate, she was an experienced Protector, a veteran who’d come back to share her field experience. She saw me staring at her and paused to face me, hands on her hips in a classic Protector’s pose, an expectant look on her face. When I didn’t say anything further to indicate I recognized her, she shrugged and turned to walk coolly out the front door.

I stared transfixed at the way her calves rippled as she walked, her tight derriere and hips tilting so gently, her posture so perfect; her movements as weightless as an air dancer. She looked like a goddess, even when standing in a crowd of other Velorians. It was easy to imagine that she’d fought and defeated the Arions on several worlds, placing her invulnerable body between her Protectorate and the violence of the Empire. How many Arions had she’d defeated?

I cursed myself for being tongue-tied. She’d given me a split second opportunity, and I’d wasted it gawking at her. Despite their pledge to serve and protect humans, Protectors obviously didn’t suffer fools.

The sergeant moved closer to whisper. “Her name is Kaari, and she’s more than a hundred and fifty years old. Been assigned to six worlds. The last one was shot out from under her by a contingent of Destroyers. She killed two of them.”

“Killed Destroyers? There’s only one way to…” My voice trailed off as I remembered what I’d read. Destroyers were made of 300 pounds of steel muscle and sinew, far stronger than a Protector and truly indestructible. You could nuke them, you could knock them into orbit, and they’d just keep coming. Very few Protectors could take down a Destroyer on her own. The only conceivable way was to overload the bastard with pheromones and seduce him into a mindless, pheromone-induced rut and let him take her until she drained him dry of everything, including his orgone. Given that Destroyers were to porn stars what King Kong was to gorillas, few Protectors, could survive some bastard pouring all that power into sexual violence.

Hell, few cities could survive it!

The fact that Kaari had taken down two of those monsters made her one hell of a woman.

I stared at her back, exhaling slowly as she floated away. Alex’s gaze following mine, both of us staring reverently. “A goddess,” he breathed.

I was suddenly glad I hadn’t tried to chat her up. What could I say to impress a lady who ate Destroyers for lunch?

I blinked the vision of her perfection away, and tried to focus back on the story. “Ah… so you have a number of graduates here, Alex?”

“A small contingent,” he nodded slowly, still staring out the door. “Like Kaari, they come and go between assignments, mostly to advise the staff and hold some inspirational meetings with the ProCans.”

I remembered how boring Career Day had been back in my high school on Earth. I’d give anything to attend the equivalent here.

“Times wasting, and I need to get you up to your hostel level,” Alex finally said after Kaari disappeared.

Before I could say anything, he reached out and grabbed the back of my jacket and lifted me back into the air. My ardor was suddenly replaced by terror, my mouth going dry as we spiraled around, barely missing several hurtling bodies that were descending at terminal velocity. The lobby fell away rapidly, leaving me gasping from my cursed fear of heights by the time my feet arrived on the walkway that ringed the thirtieth floor. I collapsed to my knees after making the mistake of glancing back down, my stomach filling with butterflies as my legs turned to rubber.

Walkway was far too grand a word to describe what was really little more than a ledge. Two people could barely pass abreast.

I literally crawled forward on my hands and knees until I could hug the inner wall of the balcony, even while repeating over and over to myself that I could survive any fall. I was invulnerable up here.

Assuming I didn’t die from terror during the fall.

Still, my Earth-born instincts were screaming, sending a disabling mixture of cold fear and surging adrenaline through my nerves, paralyzing my flight or fight reflex into quivering legs. I’d always suffered from an extreme form of acrophobia back on Earth, and it had followed me here.

It was all I could do to edge my way along the inner wall, flattening my body against the black carbon nanotube, groping the edges with stiff fingers until I found the crack of a doorway. I pulled myself through the opening so quickly that I stumbled and fell to my knees just inside the door.

Looking up, I was startled to see that I was in a very large hotel lobby. A garden with fountains was to my left, a piano lounge was to the right with the registration desk forty meters straight ahead. The lounge wasn’t on one level, but instead there were tables floating in mid-air, arranged in a 3D grid that rose three stories above me. Two dazzlingly blonde ProCans were floating in mid-air, their long, bare legs crossed lotus-style as they sipped on Cappuccinos while chatting happily.

I quickly got back to my feet to maintain some level of dignity, and walked across the lobby on my damnable rubbery legs, passing the bubbling water fountains and the vast arrays of brightly colored flowers. A rustic-looking woodlands trail wandered through the garden, seemingly bringing a bit of the outside in.

What was really weird though was to walk directly beneath the floating angels. I glanced up at the ProCans as they hovered fifteen feet over my head, and struggled to pull my eyes from that glimpse of Velorian heaven. Micro-skirts, flying women and the Velorian disdain of undergarments were an Earth-boy’s dream. Fortunately, they were too busy talking to notice me staring up at them.

I eventually navigated my way to the smiling clerk behind the registration desk. She was very slender and only slightly taller than me, and wore a navy blue uniform with silver buttons down the front. The uniform fit her body like a second skin.

“I’d like to check in.”

“Your name?”

“Shaffer. Ben Shaffer.”

I looked around the lobby again as she typed on her computer, only to see a female janitor mopping her way down the hallway and into the lobby. She looked like a supermodel dressed in dungarees, her blonde hair hanging straight to her waist. Smiling, I realized that both she and the clerk, despite their ordinary jobs, were cute enough to have graced the cover of Cosmo magazine back on Earth. And both of them were strong enough up here to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Yet instead of such dramatics, these two beauties were wielding a mop and a pen. Such was the nature of Velorian society. A thousand times fitter, ten times cuter and twice as smart, I reminded myself for the millionth time, hoping at the same time that my sense of wonder about Velorians would never fade. If I could just find a girl who didn’t think I was first cousin to a slime mold, I’d truly be in heaven.

Alex interrupted my musing by following me across the lobby to drop my bag off. He shoved out his hand to say goodbye, his grip as firm as steel. “You’ll be contacted when we’re ready for you.”

Then, without further explanation, he turned and floated across the lobby and out the door to dive over the edge of the balcony into empty space. My stomach fluttered again, forcing me to grip the registration desk with white fingers.

The clerk looked up at me curiously, her right eyebrow lifting. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, eyes closed.

“Your passport, please.”

I opened my eyes and dug my document bag out, deciding as I handed my passpord to her that she was the spitting image of the actress Jolene Blalock back home, except for having blonder hair. Unfortunately, her expression held all the warmth of the Vulcan that Blalock had played on Enterprise. I found myself unconsciously glancing at her ears.

“Skietra!” she suddenly exclaimed as she read my passport. “You’re a Terran? From Earth?” Her eyes were huge as she looked back at me. “How is that possible? It says here that you came up from Velor.”

“I’m the only Terran living on Velor,” I replied proudly. When she looked at me suspiciously, I added: “I’ve been enhanced.”

Her eyes sparkled a brighter shade of blue as they flicked up and down my body. I moved closer to the desk to maintain some modesty, very aware that she could easily see through my clothing. Beneath those clothes my skin was severely freckled and I had small muscles, most of them hidden under a thin layer of fat. That combination, along with my unruly yellow hair and milky green eyes, hadn’t been considered attractive even back on Earth. Here I was truly an ugliness freak.

To her credit, her professional smile didn’t fade, but when she handed me my key, she flinched when her fingers touched mine, jerking them back like someone who’d just touched a snake. I sighed as I bent down and swung my bag over my back to head for my room.

Nothing different up here.

I wandered through the confusing, unmarked inner corridors of the hotel, deciding that the rest of the guests probably just looked through the walls to find their room. Privacy wasn’t valued very highly in Velorian society.

I finally located room 97 at the end of a quiet side hallway. I unlocked the door, only to discover that the room was little more than a tiny cube with a low bed. To the hotel’s credit, holographic art decorated the walls, floor and ceiling.

Amused by the later, I sat down and played with the controls, discovering that I could recreate the visuals and acoustics of anything from standing in the silence of an expansive desert to the noisy dance floor of a rock club. Smiling, I realized that this tiny room was much like the holodeck in a Star Trek movie. The perfect hotel room for an old video-gamer like me. I flipped through the holo guide and was thrilled to find a highly sought-after series of Explorer programs, including one that was intriguingly labeled: Wormhole Dive.

I decided to save that one for later, and sat down on the edge of the bed, only to feel the hard mattress give very slightly beneath me. I peeled back one side of the down-like comforter to find a transparent bag of extremely viscous gel. The mattress was in turn anchored to carbon nanotube girders as big as my calf. Punching the gel as hard as I could, I saw only a very small ripple spreading outward, and that was immediately damped as the thick gel gave just enough to leave the imprint of my knuckles.

This was clearly a bed designed to soak up massive force without sloshing or collapsing. A faint shimmer of excitement raced through me as I was reminded how enthusiastic Velorian sex could be outside a gold field. Xara had disrupted the Nav system on that Scalantran ship several times during our lovemaking, forcing a course correction.

Which made me wonder why they hadn’t put this hostel on the ground floor.

Peering closer at the bed foundation, I saw huge shock mounts under the girders. They were even more impressive than the girders. A magnitude twelve earthquake could originate in this room without affecting adjacent rooms. In fact, the entire building structure was part of an elaborate shock absorption system!

I couldn’t help but imagine two empowered lovers intertwined on this bed, Velorian muscles thrusting desperately, the man’s flying power driving him downward to take his beautiful lover with all his superhuman strength and size, penetrating deeply into a luscious blonde temptress who was screaming for more…

I clenched my fists and choked that wickedly sexual thought off. I couldn’t fly, and for all of Xara’s enhancement and her willingness to teach me how to make empowered love, I wasn’t a superman in the eyes of these people. Not in that way.

Still, the image of such empowered loving thrilled me. And disturbingly, I found myself envying the size and power of that Velorian man of steel, imagining his porn-star-like erection and the way a Velorian girl would welcome his powerful thrusts; his deep penetration. My hands started to shake and I got hard just thinking about what I’d do if I were built like that.

The first time I’d seen a Velorian with an erection, I thought he looked deformed. He was that big. Smiling, I couldn’t help but think that the Galen gods gave out strange gifts. Advanced mathematical skills to the women, a supersized Johnson to the men.

Clenching my fists, I cursed and forced myself to stop thinking of that. I’m not gay, goddamn it!

Just envious as hell, that small voice in my head reminded me.

I leaped back to my feet to pace around the rest of the tiny room. I ended up in the bathroom, finding that the walls, ceiling and floor were made of mirrors. My imagination started to careen out of control again as I pictured a Velorian man with a naked blonde ProCan in here. He was soaping her body up as she floated in thin air, her body rising and falling weightlessly on that porn-grade erection as she screamed in delight, both of them watching their reflections from all angles, steaming water spraying from all sides.

I closed my eyes and held myself this time, nearly overcome with desire. “No, god-damn-it,” I groaned out loud. I was up here to get laid, not to whack off as I usually did. I had to save my strength. Save everything.

I began my old counting exercise, and when I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I was thinking straight enough to walk again. Barely.

Needing a further distraction, I continued my inspection of the room. The shower was impressive, both from having a half dozen jets that converged from three directions, but for a control dial that started at 70C and went to 100C and finally to LS. As in, Live Steam. I wondered how normal Terran visitors dealt with that, given that Enlightenment starships often docked here. Their crews were composed of Ordinaries. I wondered if they had rooms for Ordinaries? If they did, I was glad they hadn’t given me one.

Back in the main room, I found the minibar stocked with various kinds of sparkling waters. Nothing alcoholic of course. Drugs didn’t work on Velorians unless they were in a gold field or wearing the same, and this wasn’t a place for testing one’s weakness. Rather the opposite.

No food either, although there was the expected contraption attached to the wall that had some thick power cables running into it. It had a couple of fierce-looking clamps at chest height that were spaced ten inches apart. I winced at the thought of attaching those clamps to my smaller nipples, but knew I’d have to soon enough. Male or female, the recharging technique was the same, only the orgone carrying capacity varied, with Protectors standing at the head of the power list and we males at the tail end.

Fortunately, given my lesser physique, I’d been able to metabolize the orgone I needed from food alone down on Velor, but that wasn’t going to work up here unless I was comatose.

Reminding myself that I was supposed to be a journalist, I unpacked my bag and changed into a fresh shirt and grabbed my PersComp, My grumbling stomach reminded me that it had been a long time since breakfast. Unlike a Vel, I had to eat at least twice a day. Besides, I hoped a restaurant would be a good place to meet people and get some local perspective on Atlantea.

I glanced through the literature in the room, but there were no references to any restaurants, not even room service. I called the front desk and inquired, and after some understandable confusion, the clerk told me there was a café on this level that served Terran food. I swear from her attitude that I was asking where the closest tobacco shop was – something to feed my nasty habit.

Returning to the lobby, I found that another ProCan had joined the first two. I indulged myself by studying the floating lovelies for a few minutes before deciding, based on their wide-eyed naivety, that they were barely sixteen -- only months beyond their Rites. Undoubtedly their first trip up here. Jailbait, at least back on Earth, but wisely, Velor had no such laws.

I took a deep breath to calm myself as I daringly walked under them and then out the front door and onto the narrow, circular walkway. The dizzying drop before me turned my legs to rubber again, barely leaving me with the strength to slide alone the inner wall of the walkway. I finally found the café, and gratefully stepped inside and slumped into a chair, trying to act natural as I struggled to slow my heart rate. The menu on the table contained pictures of what looked vaguely like Asian food. I sighed and put it back down. What I really wanted was a burger.

There was one other patron sitting in a far corner of the café, a swarthy-looking gentleman who appeared to be as Terran as I was. Intrigued, I walked over and introduced myself, only to discover that he was a ship’s captain from an Enlightenment world. A Frail. I caught myself thinking that word, and cursed. Ordinary or Frail, they were both words that diminished a man.

The Captain, his name turned out to be Tanebaum, seemed very surprised and pleased to find another Terran here. He was from Galatica and was dropping off a load of clothing and picking up medical supplies. I’d never heard of Galatica, and the Captain knew little of Earth, so we wound up trading tales about our home worlds as we ate.

The food wasn’t very good. I ordered a green curry that arrived looking watery and over-spiced, but the company more than made up for it.

An hour passed quickly before the Captain excused himself, saying his launch window was coming up fast.

Alone again, I paid my bill and walked out to start edging my way around the walkway again. I felt a bit less dizzy this time – probably the full stomach. Still, I decided I needed to get my feet down on terra firma and take a real walk.

Once safely back in the hotel lobby, I asked the clerk for directions to the nearest stairwell, only to be rewarded with a shake of blonde hair. Same answer when I asked about elevators. The clerk saw my puzzled look, and took pity on me, offering me a ride down to the ground floor. She walked from behind the desk to take my hand; she didn’t shirk this time, and tugged me across the lobby. Once on the ledge, she wrapped her arm tightly around my waist and promptly dove off the edge of the balcony into thin air.

My heart was in my throat as I clung to her in terror as she descended at nearly free-fall speed, slowing only seconds before our feet hit the ground floor. Without saying a word, she leaped back into the air, flashing back up to the 30^th floor in the blink of an eye.

I took some deep breaths to slow my racing heart as I tried to get my legs to work. Wandering slowly across the lower lobby. I’d almost made it to the front door when it opened to emit a stream of young women. The ProCans danced through the doorway in groups of two or three to flow around me, all of them dressed in the most exotic nightclub attire imaginable. Alien and sexy and nearly nonexistent attire to be exact. They were chatting excitedly about their day’s training.

I found myself drooling at an unusually well-endowed girl of eighteen wearing a diamond-studded top that proudly bared her left breast. She was way over-charged and showing off. Probably a Phase 4, I decided, most likely training for a high-endurance fight the next day.

The ProCans chatted and giggled like teenage girls did everywhere until a chime sounded, and then they rose as one to soar straight upward. I guiltily enjoyed the view from below as they flew so gracefully, my enhanced eyes narrowing in to keep them in focus until they landed way up on the top floor walkway and disappeared.

By the time I looked back down, the lobby was empty again. Sighing, I realized that one thing hadn’t changed up here – the girls were still so self-absorbed that I was invisible.

I made a fist and pounded the black onyx of the nearest wall. Damn it, I wasn’t going to give up so easily this time. All I had to do was to get up there to wherever they’d gone. I mean, it’s not like I was going to have any competition. I hadn’t seen any guys.

I was puzzling how to do that when three off-duty soldiers walked in. I quickly introduced myself and asked where the girls had gone. The soldiers filled me in on Skietra Dome, a nightclub on the 99^th floor. They claimed it was THE place to pick up ProCans.

My heart leaped at that prospect. Clearly, even among these sexually privileged Velorian men, scoring a Protector, even a trainee, was a big deal. And maybe, just maybe, these girls had completed the Terran Familiarization portion of their education and would be interested in checking out the real thing. For training purposes only, of course.

The soldier smiled understandingly at the enthusiastic look in my eyes and offered to give me a lift. He and his buddies rose like bullets, leaving my stomach down on the ground floor. By the time we arrived at the top floor, my lungs gulping for air, the ProCans were already air dancing beneath a huge, transparent dome.

I forgot my discomfort, and just stared. The dome was huge; rising five stories above the rooftop, and the music was a type of airy, progressive jazz that lent itself to graceful air dancing. The first group of dancers, more than a dozen girls in all, formed a complex and ever-varying sequence of shapes as they whirled around the top of the dome, arms and legs intertwined as they performed like circus acrobats. It was beautiful and sexy, especially the way their filmy clothing floated around them, their hair shimmering like a cloud of spun gold. I thought of Cirque de Sol, but with Velorian peformers.

The men who continued arriving, mostly soldiers, rose into the air to join them now, including the soldier I’d hitched a ride with. The music immediately took on a stronger beat, and lasers began to flash so blindingly that it was hard to see what was going on. I squinted my eyes as a military-grade laser began targeting the dancers as they cavorted high overhead, the dazzling flashes nearly blinding me as the beams found bare skin, each strike sending burned clothing exploding in all directions. The air overhead soon looked like Cirque de Sol combined with a nightclub dance contest accompanied by Fourth of July fireworks.

The beat of the music grew even heavier and faster now, with partners exchanging rapidly as the ProCans moved from one man to the next, dancing only long enough to discover whether they were compatible enough in their graceful movements to move onto air sex. If not, they moved on to the next man.

The soldier I’d come in with paused just over my head with one of the ProCans in his arms, and they kissed passionately in the flashing darkness. I tried not to stare at the way they started to enthusiastically make love only a few feet over my head, but I wasn’t successful. The girl was so damned gorgeous and young, and the soldier was everything I wished I could be. I forced my gaze down to the table, only to have the scent of their loving wrap around me like a pink cloud, sucking me up into the action like a summer thunderstorm. I started to rise from my seat, drawn like a moth to a flame, only to have the couple float higher and out of reach.

My bubble of growing passion burst like a rotten egg again, sending me lurching toward the closest wall, leaving the lovers to their sexy cries of passion, reminding me that I barely responded to pheromones. A quirk in my enhancement.

I looked around, finding that everyone in the room was getting laid except me. Hell, even the bartender was air dancing with one of the older girls now, leaving his bar untended. The lights dimmed further, leaving only the flashes of the laser to light the room.

I suddenly felt even more alienated than ever. The price of admission to this erotic dance was a volatai. No fly, no dance. Angry and disappointed and frustrated, I decided I wasn’t going to just sit here all night and watch. I had more pride than that.

I rose and ran stiffly toward the door, ducking under a pair of dancers who were going crazy near the door, bouncing off the walls and floor and they lost themselves in a passionate dance that was part intercourse, the man taking his lovely partner from the rear as they cavorted. I waited for them to bounce the other way, and then dove forward through the empty space, emerging breathless to almost fall over the edge of the walkway.

I teetered there on the edge of the abyss for long seconds, waving my arms to try to get my balance, the yawning drop reducing my legs to rubber again. I finally staggered backward and sat down hard, the surge of terrifying acrophobia effectively washing away the raging pheromones in my blood and deflating my arousal completely.

Gripping the corner of the doorway, my heart nearly exploded from my chest as I looked around desperately for a way to get down.

Nothing.

I looked back through the door at the glowing fireflies that were floating in the dome overhead, and saw that couple still making it just inside the doorway. I decided they were likely to be dancing until dawn. Velorian sex was measured more in hours as opposed to minutes like human sex.

I debated just sleeping here on the balcony; loud music and all, only to see the same janitor I’d seen in the lobby step out another door. She was hauling some trash bags behind her. I called out to get her attention, asking if she could carry me down with her trash and drop me back off on my level.

Traveling with the trash… that’s about right, I nearly said out loud.

The janitor smiled and wrapped her arm around my waist to lift me into the air, and then began to float downward as gently as a feather, finally touching down on the hostel floor. Encouraged by the warmth of her slender body against mine, my spirits rose just enough for me to hold her hand for a long moment after we landed, asking her when she got off and whether she wanted to have a drink with me.

She smiled politely as she saw the desperation in my eyes, but still slipped her hand away, explaining that she had to clean up the Scrumbles stadium next door. She headed back toward the edge of the walkway with her bags in tow, pausing long enough to look back at me, a sad look in her eyes. “Oh, hell, come on. You’ll love watching the game as I work. They’re always playing over there.”

Discouraged and intrigued at the same time, I let her carry me down to the ground floor, and then tagged along, carrying half her trash bags as a measure of good faith. I’d heard some wild stories about the way Scrumbles was played outside a gold field. If I wasn’t going to get laid, I might as well enjoy what I could of Atlantea.

I was barely through the door of the stadium when I saw a huge metal ball fly through the air. I quickly raced the rest of the way up the stairs to the field just in time to see a slender blonde leap from the ground to catch the huge ball, only to be tackled in mid-air by a man and woman with raven black hair. The ball crashed down hard enough to shake the stadium floor. A dozen players swarmed around the ball, half of them shirtless, the other half dressed in a variety of torn outfits, the two groups pushing the ball this way and that like a rugby scrum.

One of the blonde-haired men suddenly flew vertically upward from the pile with the ball in hand, and made it ten meters down the field before he was tackled violently by a raven-haired woman wearing a lace dress and high-heels of all things. She finished her tackle by wrapping her legs around the man and squeezing the air from him, then pummeling him so hard with her fists that the shockwaves from her blows nearly knocked me off my feet. She finished her attack with a fantastic upper cut that caught the man under his chin and sent him flying the length of the three hundred meter long field.

A whistle blew to stop play and the woman who’d punched the ball carrier lowered the ball to the floor, then leaned her back against it to stare up at me, her bright eyes narrowing. The official held up a card, obviously assessing a penalty.

I stared back at the tall woman, deciding that she had to be at least six feet tall. Then down at the ball. It was obviously made of solid trans-steel, a dense iron alloy that must have weighed ten tons. It had deep handholds torn into it, presumably by the player’s hands.

“So, you wanna join?” the woman shouted up at me. “We’re a player short now.”

I swallowed hard as I watched the man she’d punched limp off the field, painfully twisting his neck from side to side. I turned back to face the woman.

“Me?” I asked in a small voice.

“I don’t see anyone else in front of me, asshole.”

One of the other dark-haired women laughed. She was shorter but just as fit looking. “He’s that Frail clone-boy. Enhanced. Read about him on net. You can squash him like a bug, Mystal.”

“Then why don’t you just fuck him to death and put him out of his misery, Ala,” the one named Mystal chortled.

I backed up, suddenly terrified as I remembered what Mary had said about some deserters from Aria being here. Were these really Arions, or where they Velorians pretending to be Arions? I looked at the clothing and bag piled along the far bench, and saw a couple of shirts were emblazoned with “409^th”.

That’s when I remembered the sergeant’s stories about the that unit. The way they used deserters. Real Arions. And about the fatalities. A few training deaths to prevent a thousand more. Typical Velorian logic, I realized.

“Join or die,” the woman named Mystal said. “Your choice.”

Her friend punctuated her threat by walking up the steps to stand behind me, resting one strong hand on my shoulder. I was very aware that she’d walked, not flown.

Is this how I’m going to get laid, I wondered? By an Arion who will make such violent love that she’ll leave me depleted of orgone… cold and dry and almost lifeless?

Excited and terrified at the same time, I remembered the way Scrumbles teams unwound after a match: a pairing between opposing team members, with the after-game athletics continuing down some very erotic paths. I just had to survive the game and I’d finally get laid!

I heard myself say, “I’m in,” before I know I’d said it.

“Good choice,” Mystal said. “And by the way, you’re mine. After the game. If you survive, that is.”

“You won’t make out of here on your feet,” the woman behind me whispered in my ear. She punched me hard in the back, sending me tumbling head over heels to land in the middle of the field.

“Shirt off, Frail. You’re playing skins.”

Moments later, I was linking arms in a huddle with five other players, three of them women. The woman next to me was a blonde Matra, wearing nothing but a bikini bottom. A fabulously endowed ProCan huddled to my left. I tried not to stare at their marvelous tits.

“What’s your name?” the first blonde asked. She looked old enough to be a centurion, which meant she looked like a very fit thirty-year-old back on Earth.

“Ben.”

“Okay, Ben, I’m Lala. Since the shirts are obviously going to focus on you, newby and all, we’re going to give you the ball just long enough to get them all converging on you. Then Aaila, you do an overhead swoop and take it away and go for the goal. Bala and Jard, you’re blocking on the goal sweep. On four.”

The huddle broke, and I suddenly found myself setting up opposite the Arion woman.

“You’re dead, Frail,” she growled menacingly at me.

“Only if you can hit me.”

I tensed my muscles, preparing to leap to the side on the four count, hoping to get around her. I had no idea what I’d do when they tossed me the ball. Ten tons of steel would flatten me, even up here.

The count hit four and I lunged to the side, but Mystal was quicker. Her steel-hard shoulder slammed into me like I’d just been hit by the Titanic. I went tumbling end over end to land face down. Scrambling back to my feet, I saw Lala wind up to one-hand the massive ball my way. It flew ten meters into the air and forty more downfield as I raced to get under it.

I could feel the shirts converging on me from all directions as the huge shadow from the descending ball blocked out the lights, and then it slammed me to the field to bury my face in hard turf. I struggled to rise, impressed that I could even move with that much weight on my back, and was almost on my feet when I was simultaneously hit from three sides. My eyes filled with sparks and I went down hard, the sparks quickly extinguished by a waterfall of darkness.

Part Two

The next morning arrived as it always did – with my awakening alone in my bed to the sound of an alarm chime. I winced as I tried to get out of bed, gasping as my bruised ribs protested with knife-like stabs of pain. Confused, I searched my memories, but couldn’t remember anything after that hit on the field. Somebody must have carried me back to my room.

That’s when I saw the red envelope on the table. I picked it up and opened it. The writing was classic Velorian:

We won! Come play again. Lala.

Great. I’d somehow helped win the game for the ultra-competitive Velorians. Which meant I should have been a star in the post game celebration. Which was the only reason I’d been stupid enough to put myself in harm’s way in the first place.

Instead, I’d been unconscious.

I flopped back on the bed. Obviously, my luck with the ladies wasn’t going to change, not even up here.

The nag alarm chimed again, and I gritted my teeth against the pain to rise to my feet, limping over to the minibar to choke down one of the flavored drinks. That’s when I saw the Message light flashing over the desk. I switched it on and was greeted by a hologram of a mechanical personage.

“Major Nicole Spec’tral invites you to view the day’s training exercise on Firing Range 5 at 0930. Take a cargo flitter from the reception desk.”

Hot damn, at least one thing was going according to plan! Mary had proven to be as good as her word in getting me an invite to the training area. The Tanzrobian girl was supposedly out there every day challenging the Protector candidates.

I called the desk and inquired about breakfast. The clerk directed me to a coffee shop with the dubious name of the American Café. I couldn’t help but wonder what Velorians knew about my fellow citizens living half way across the galaxy. Especially given that they rarely ate. On the other hand, they did drink more coffee than even the good folks in Seattle. Strong and bitter espresso was the preferred brew.

I dressed and left my room to find the café, only to be astounded when I walked through the door to hear Credence Clearwater Revival’s Effigy playing on an authentic-looking Seventies-era jukebox. I loved that old twentieth-century song, but it was the last thing I’d expected here. Even stranger, a glass with little American flags sat below an old picture of John F. Kennedy.

The waitress, her hair a startling whitish-gray, was standing behind the counter looking bored as she chewed on a straw. I took a seat and stared at her amazingly pale hair as it stuck out of her head like straw, leaving large blue eyes looking out from behind. My first thought was that she looked like a Japanese Anime character, yet her outfit was clearly Velorian. Her checkered blouse was tied off under her large yet perky breasts, leaving an expanse of fantastically toned bare midriff. Tiny denim shorts rode low on her hips, and her legs were slender and tan.

She shifted to her other foot and leaned on the counter as she turned to face me, those smooth legs revealing a tight expanse of muscular curves. No doubt about it… she was Velorian and she was empowered.

“What can I get ya?”

My first reaction was that the waitress wasn’t really attractive, not with that hair color, only to catch myself in that ridiculous thought. Damn I was jaded… the waitress would have been considered insanely cute anywhere back on Earth, and she would have driven the Japanese completely wild given those large eyes and that pixie-like look. And that was before anyone suspected that she had more or less the strength of the mythical Supergirl.

“A triple cap and a scone, if you’ve got one.”

She continued to stare at me as she chewed on her straw. “Hey, I know you. You’re that Terran guy.” Her voice was low and melodious and definitely not pixie-like. “Ben somebody. Right?”

“Shaffer. And how’d you...?”

“The Holos last night. You were a big hit.”

“Me? On the Holos?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

“You’re a real Earthling, not just a colonist.”

“Yeah… but I hadn’t expected such a warm welcome.” I glanced at the American flags.

She turned to look at the flags, and then back at me, shrugging. “The owner is a Homeworlder. He’s got all kinds of collectables from Earth.”

I knew the type. Velorians who were infatuated with stories of the wild and primeval Earth. Some Supremis struggled with feelings of inferiority, being artificial beings and all. I’d never understood that. There was nothing attractive about being ordinary.

The pixie leaned over the counter, displaying her marvelous breasts. “So, the scuttlebutt around here is that you came up here to write a story for your school paper.” She paused to wink at me. “But the reporter on the Holo said that’s just a cover. That you’re really just looking for love.”

“Jesus,” I gasped as I stared down at those perfect globs, then back up into her mostly hidden face. “So everybody here knows?”

“Probably. Your story was on the WA segment, and it’s our most popular show.”

“WA?”

“Weird and Amazing. Gets kind of boring here after a while.”

“And you’re obviously easily amused,” I said despondently.

“Fortunately we have our Scrumbles. They started the sports news with a recap of you playing with those AA’s. You really got flattened.”

“Huh?”

“AA’s. As in, Arion Aggressors. The real thing. Course, we mostly got ALA’s up here.”

I guessed at the second one. “Arions Look-Alikes. Right?”

She nodded.

“Yeah, well, joining that game was the dumbest thing I’ve done in a while.”

“Figured. You wouldn’t have liked the spin CNV put on it in the following WA segment. A poor ETB boy desperately looking for a little ex’tosy. So desperate he’d even play hard-core Scrumbles with AA’s.”

“Shit…” I felt myself blushing as she mentioned my search for ex’tosy. This was even worse than the hazing I’d endured down on Velor.

“But hell, Ben, I understand. Working this counter is about as good as it’s likely to get for me, so I know the feeling of being on the bottom end of the food chain.”

I gawked at her in disbelief. “You’re a Velorian and you’re living outside a gold field and cute as hell and you tell me you understand my problem? Nobody born Velorian has my problem.”

She laughed. “Tell that to my tri-centurion boss who’s the only guy who’s been trying to get into my shorts for months. Most people look at this weird hair and my short height and just laugh. There’s plenty of ProCans to go around up here if a guy wants some action.”

“I never saw that shade of hair down on Velor, that much I’ll admit.”

She brushed her fingers through her hair, tugging on the ends. “It’s a byproduct from tweaking this damn rock into a livable place. The terra-formers released a virus that wiped out most of the local bacteria, but it has a subtle effect on anyone who was born up here.”

“Well, I think it’s damn attractive, especially in this endless sea of blonde.”

She smiled. “Tell that to those folks down on the golden planet. They consider we Atlanteans to be a notch below B-class’s. Moon trash. Especially given that we all come out so skinny. Can’t build much muscle when you’re empowered from birth.”

I stared at her, not sure if she was joking or serious. Her powers were a gift from the gods. And despite her claim, she wasn’t as skinny as those supermodels back on Earth. She had several times the bust line to start with.

“I will tell you something though, Ben Shaffer. You figure out how to get me off this rock, and I don’t mean back to Goldy, and I’m your girl. Anytime, anyplace, anyway you want me.”

I just stared at her, my eyes narrowing. Instead of being excited by her offer, I was disgusted. “So, you come with a price tag, huh?”

“I’ve read those Earth books that my boss has. They say that sex on Earth is all about pro quo or whatever you call it. Some men even paid money for it.” She sounded intrigued by the last, which pissed me off even more.

“Some, yeah,” I mumbled. “But certainly not me.” I glared up at her. “And I thought Velorians were all about giving and sharing freely?”

“Giving and getting, you mean, as in Cteis. The racial affliction of all Vels. Still, my boss would probably love watching you getting it on with me.” She leaned even closer, her sweet breath teasing my lips. “I mean, he’s always wondered how Terrans do it… you know, without having much, ah, fortitude.”

A flash of anger filled me as her teasing words sunk in, bringing on another attack of my usual insecurity. When mixed with anger, that sinking feeling always caused me to lash out. At anyone, anything. “So, you’re just another stuck-up Velorian bitch, aren’t you? Like all those P-class in my school.”

Her eyes crinkled as she suddenly laughed. “Stuck-up bitch? You got to be shitting me.”

“That’s what I fucking see.”

“Geez… you even talk like those people in the Earth movies.”

“Ha, ha,” I said glumly. I was getting damn tired of snotty attitudes.

She floated up to sit on the counter next to me, resting one bare leg provocatively on the top. I tried not to stare, but was reminded for the millionth time that Vels had the best legs in the universe, no matter what their genetic class.

“So, that makes me a bitch, huh? Just because I suspect you can’t ring my bells and I don’t want to waste both our time trying?”

“So it’s Cteis or nothing, huh?” I sneered as I spun around on my stool. “Well, I’ve been turned down by the best. P-class. You’re no big deal.”

“Ooh… Earth boy bites back. Maybe your tongue can do what your manhood can’t.” She winked seductively. “I hear you Frails are good at cit’aris.”

I clenched my fists angrily as I turned back to glare at her, barely able to keep from staring at her legs. She tossed her head to the side to clear the hair from her eyes, those luminous orbs twinkling in amusement. Instead of seeing the challenge in her eyes, I just saw another snotty girl making fun of me. Even worse, her reference to cit’aris made me cringe.

I’d made a study of the biology of Velorian sex after arriving on the golden planet, and had found it was far different than I’d expected. For one, the unrestrained power of the female Velorian orgasm was based on the stimulation of Skietra’s Girdle, with the clitoris playing only a minor role. The so-called Girdle was a ring of incredibly dense nerve endings just inside what was popularly called the ‘inny’, a muscular inner vagina that has no parallel in human physiology. More properly called the Ctei, it was just beyond a ring of muscles that were the strongest in a woman’s body.

The Galen intent was simple enough to grasp, to risk a pun. The muscular ring of Ctei muscle would contract around the shaft of the penis just below the head, trapping a Galen in the inner pocket with such force that the matter/anti-matter explosion of Galen anti-matter semen finding Velorian hormones could be contained. The heat of a tiny sun would be ignited, generating pressures that could scarcely be imagined let alone measured. The heat and pressure would destroy most of the normally invulnerable sperm of the Galen, along with the weakest ova of a Procreator. It was a ‘trial by fire’ that ensured only the most robust sperm and ova could undergo conception.

That heat, a small portion of which was also present in the annihilation of anti-spinning Supremis male/female hormones after ejaculation, also explained the extremely low fertility rate of the Galen.

In contrast, Cit’aris was the Velorian name for a solely clitoral orgasm, and it was a skill that lesbian women shared. It was very pleasant to be sure, vastly greater than any human’s pleasure could ever be, but it wasn’t nearly as intense as Cteis. In fact, accusing a man of practicing cit’aris was a supreme insult on Velor, implying he was incapable of anything more dramatic.

That last thought sent my anger rising higher. “Well, I’m not going to fucking sit here and be insulted by the likes of you,” I rose to glare at her.

Her teasing look evaporated. “But hey, I always was a sucker for a hard-luck story. And I have a girlfriend, so I really like cit’aris. It’s so mellow.”

I gritted my teeth. Just my luck that the only woman who was willing to give me a second look was a lesbian. More angry words tumbled from my mouth before I could stop then. “I’m not your god-damned charity case, and I can do without a mercy fuck from some lesbian waitress in this bottom-feeder espresso dive.”

I spun around on my heel and headed for the exit.

The waitress floated upward to land in front of the door, blocking my way. “Hey, don’t go away mad. My name’s Ivy. And I’m really Bi, and we could…”

I was so pissed off by that time that I gave her the finger and lowered my head to bulldoze my way past her. She yielded just enough to let me through, and I stalked off around the perimeter walkway, too distracted to even be aware of the drop this time.

I was still cursing and mumbling out loud as I stalked around the woodland trail in the hotel garden a few times, cooling off. When I finally returned to my room, a glance at the clock said I was running late. Very late.

I dashed in and out of the shower, trying to brush my hair as I hopped around, trying to get dressed. I finally gave up on even trying to bring a sense of order to my hair. Vels used their heat vision and all those mirrors to dry off in seconds, so the hostel saw no need to provide microdryers.

I was still barefoot when I grabbed my gear and slammed the door closed behind me. I sprinted for the lobby, desperately begging the desk clerk for another lift down to the Transit area on the 25^th floor. The woman on duty looked old enough to be my grandmother.

She obliged, embracing me with more enthusiasm than the younger clerk, revealing that she still had the supple muscularity that was a trademark of all Vels. Take away the lines on her face, which looked sixtyish, and her body would still match up to half the fitness models on Earth.

“I need a flitter to go to Firing Range 5,” I told the concierge as soon as I touched down in Transit.

“Yes, sir.” He said as he punched some keys on his PersComp.

I didn’t make a pass at the desk clerk this time. My fantasies don’t extend to grandmothers, even if I did sneak a look at her legs as she floated back up the central corridor like a matronly fairy. They were surprisingly cute.

I dismissed a few unworthy thoughts as I focused instead on the day in front of me. That’s when I made the mistake of glancing up at the hostel floor above me. The waitress was waving to me from the coffee shop. A flash of my earlier anger returned.

A lesbian of all things, offering me mercy sex. This had to be a new low. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer that Kath’a would live up to Mary’s advertising. I imagined she would look like a bit like Halle Berry.

A soft trilling brought me back to the reality, and I opened my eyes to see a robotic cargo flitter nudging up against the side of the balcony. I strode confidently to the edge this time, carefully focusing my eyes only on the flitter and not the yawning chasm below it. Disconcertingly, the flitter didn’t have any seats, let alone seat belts, so I stepped on board and wrapped my arms around one of the cargo stanchions. The flitter backed away from the balcony and then rose straight up, accelerating.

The walls of the central shaft rushed by faster and faster as I clung desperately to the cargo stanchion, my stomach following me about twenty stories below. I looked up to see the ceiling growing huge as the flitter continued to accelerate toward it, and was about to throw myself on the red ABORT button in front of me when a circular hatchway in the ceiling snapped open and closed like an old-fashioned camera shutter to spit the flitter out into the bright sunshine.

My eyes were like saucers as I daringly looked back down at the black spire, seeing it shrinking below me. The steel cargo tie-down started to crush in my white-knuckled grip, the fresh wind blasting across my face. I saw dozens of smaller towers spreading out from the black tower like spokes in a wheel.

Soon, those buildings were left behind as we flew over the huge firing ranges that radiated out in broad spokes to the horizon. I remembered reading that each range was ten miles wide at the far end and forty miles long, and each one had a tall observation tower set in the center. I saw hundreds of machines that looked like LandWarriors passing beneath us, along with an equal number of concrete and steel buildings, many of them badly damaged or destroyed, with others in the midst of being rebuilt. Some of them looked curiously melted.

I was pondering that when a brilliant flash of light behind me turned the landscape stark white for a brief second. Spinning around, I saw a small mushroom cloud rising in the distance. I swallowed hard, understanding the melted look now. Live fire on a Velorian moon meant using working nukes. Mary had hinted at this before falling silent, telling me that a lot of what happened on Atlantea was classified.

Fortunately, I knew the term ‘nuke’ had been carried forward from a cruder type of weapon. These modern so-called ‘nukes’ didn’t use fission/fusion explosives with their radioactive fallout. Instead, these were antimatter weapons. A tiny pellet of opposite-spin matter was wrapped in Zar’lenz, an extremely stable form of matter whose electron spin was so close to neutral that it didn’t react with matter or anti-matter. A sphere of explosive surrounded the Zar’lenz so it could be shattered on command, exposing the anti-matter to a positive universe.

The Arions used these things like hand grenades, often detonating dozens of them during an infantry attack to take out armor, bunkers or concentrations of troops. Most of them were rated at one kiloton, which meant they created a blast equal to a thousand tons of plastic explosive, along with star-like heat inside a hundred-meter diameter fireball.

Some movement drew my attention to the left, and I looked up to see two ProCans flashing across the morning sky, moving at very high Mach. My enhanced eyes were good enough to see that they were holding hands. I snapped my eyes further to the right to see a sixty-meter long mockup of an Arion shuttle flying level in the opposite direction, moving well over the Mach itself.

Mary had said these mockups were made of solid steel so they could survive a number of training sessions, and could easily be recast when they didn’t. They weighed hundreds of tons and were powered by members of the Aggressor squadron who were encased inside tunnels that had been drilled into the steel. It was a very low-cost but effective technology… no moving parts, no expensive technology.

The shuttle, actually the soldiers inside, tried to turn fast enough to avoid the two attackers, but the two ProCans deftly adjusted course to impact the shuttle in a flash of kinetic energy. I blinked as the mock shuttle tore apart to send molten metal spraying in all directions. Their connected bodies and outstretched arms had just cut through sixty-meters of cold steel!

By the time the spots in my eyes cleared, I saw the trainees somersaulting down to catch the two halves before they hit anything. The girls were still several hundred meters off the ground when the Aggressors who’d been inside the shuttles engaged them with their heat vision, turning the ProCan’s skin cherry-red. Some other Aggressors on the ground added fierce Klav’en fire to the cause, catching one of the ProCans in a crossbeam. Her body disappeared in a shower of sparks.

A second fight was on now, pitting the ProCans, who apparently had orders to safely guide the wreckage to the ground in order to protect the surviving ‘occupants’, against a larger group of Aggressors.

The girl who’d been bracketed by the Klav’ens reappeared a few moments later, her body so hot that her skin had that dangerous metallic sheen to it. Her partner tackled her and dumped her into a lake, which promptly erupted into a steam volcano.

Fascinated by the battle scene, and impressed by the degree of teamwork I saw, I barely noticed it when my flitter bumped gently to a stop against one of the tall observation towers.

“Welcome to OBS 5, Mr. Shaffer.”

I turned to see a man wearing an ensign’s uniform standing beside the flitter. I peeled my fingers from my death grip on the cargo tie downs and crept toward the edge of the cargo bay, only to be half blinded when an even closer nuke blast washed all the color from the sky. I scrambled blindly forward, but was lifted off my feet when the searing hot shockwave arrived to slam the flitter into the side of the tower. I lost my balance and fell over the side, desperately grabbing for purchase on the curving outer hull of the platform.

My nails scrabbled uselessly against the polished steel! Behind me, the flitter spun around to race back toward the safety of the complex.

I was saved from falling at the last possible moment when the ensign levitated downward to grab my belt and hoisted me inelegantly up to deposit me on the flat top of platform. I didn’t slow my desperate scramble on hands and knees until I grabbed onto the safety of an antenna array a few meters in from the edge of the platform. It was all I could do to rise shakily to my feet, my heart palpitating with fear.

“Is… is this how it always is?” I gasped.

“You mean, the quiet before the storm?” the ensign grinned as he bobbed around in mid-air, oblivious to the shaking platform.

“It gets worse?” I hadn’t planned to be in the middle of a battle zone, and the last thing I needed was to further feed my damned acrophobia.

“You bet. This is just the warm-up round.” The ensign grinned happily as he floated down to lead the way up the curve of the tower toward a smaller spindle set in the middle of the platform.

I started to follow, only to pause in front of a huge groove that had been torn three meters deep into what appeared to be solid steel. I just stood there and gawked at it… if this whole platform was solid steel as it looked here, then it had to weigh tens of millions of tons.

“Damn. You guys definitely build things to last!”

“The asteroid belt is rich in iron,” the ensign shrugged, “so it was cheap to bring it down. Besides, steel is easy to reshape and fix, at least outside a gold field.”

“Fix?”

“Nukes are our biggest problem. One blast melted the spindle of a tower in half a couple of years ago.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“But this particular groove was made by a ProCan who hit the tower at Mach 6. She knocked all of us off the platform, and her carelessness nearly got her tossed out of the program. Seems she was buzzing the tower to give us a shockwave lashing when a nuke blast threw her off course.”

I shuddered as I tried to imagine that scene, and hung onto my handhold all that much tighter. Everyone else could buzz around the tower like gnats if it started to shake like that, but I’d get tossed off.

“So, I understand you’re the first Earth-born Terran to visit one of our firing ranges,” the ensign probed.

“I’m not exactly a Terran any…”

“I’m sorry,” he quickly interrupted. “ETB.”

“Huh?”

“Enhanced Terran Born. You know how the military is with acronyms and abbreviations.”

“Naturally,” I said slowly. Were there enough people like me to justify our own acronym? Maybe the Tanzrobians were considered ETB’s.

“Besides, no Frail could survive down in the gravity well of Goldy, let alone have the courage to brave the dangers of our firing ranges. So of course you have to be an ETB.”

“Goldy? I heard that term this morning…” Then it came to me. “Oh, you mean Velor.”

“Sorry again. I’ve been up here way too…” The ensign’s words were ripped from his mouth as a deafening crack of sonic booms lashed the tower.

I barely caught a glimpse of four young ProCans disappearing into the distance at high Mach.

“Okay!” the ensign shouted. “Looks like the fast movers are on the range now. Class 9635 arrived a few days ago for Phase 4. It’s their last round of training. They’ll be graduating in a couple of months, and today they face the 409th. Let’s go watch the fun.”

He wrapped his arm around my waist to float upward and deposit me on top of a small transparent glass-like tower that rose another thirty meters above the platform. A group of technicians were arrayed around the precarious perch, operating advanced imaging equipment.

“They record everything for the debrief sessions,” the ensign explained. “The morning session on the range is followed by debriefing and critiquing for the rest of the day.”

I stood as close to the edge as he dared, hanging onto one of the camera mounts, the butterflies insisting on swirling inside my stomach. The transparent tower was even scarier than being carried aloft, mostly because I didn’t trust it.

It was all I could do to force myself to look down at a small group of buildings a quarter mile away, and zoomed in with my enhanced eyes to see a desperate battle being fought. An extremely muscular black-skinned woman was fighting three ProCans.

This is the Tanzrobian? My jaw dropped as I observed her height and muscularity. Easily two meters tall, she was built on a heroic scale, her physique positioned somewhere between a bodybuilder and Conan the Barbarian. No wonder she’s lonely, I thought. With those legs, she’d probably break a Messenger in half! The most critical part of him, anyway.

My disappointment grew as the Tanzrobian Amazon pounded the ProCans with punches so powerful that the teenagers flew around like rag dolls. She grabbed one of the girls and slammed her so hard into one of the Landwarrior mockups that thirty tons of machine bounced completely off the ground. Despite the distance and the height of the tower, I could actually feel the impacts through the soles of my feet, and could see the shock waves spread outward across the ground as the Tanzrobian hammered the hapless girl chest-deep into the solid steel, the young warrior’s legs wiggling helplessly.

Her teammates tackled the Tanzrobian together, and the fight dissolved into a wrestling match, clouds of blonde and raven hair intermingling in a contest of raw strength. The two on one battle was going the Tanzrobian’s way until the first ProCan extracted herself from the Landwarrior mockup to return and deliver a blow to the Tanzrobian’s back as her friends held her – a blow so powerful that the shockwave flattened the wooden building behind them and sent a circle of dust exploding outward to obscure the battlefield.

When I could see them again, the Tanzrobian was standing against a weathered door of the collapsed building and the ProCans were picking themselves up fifty meters away.

One of the ProCans cut loose with a Klav’en. The powerful laser-conducted particle beam, a fifth-generation energy weapon, was nominally capable of cutting through the meter-thick titanium-ceramic hulls of warships, or melting five meters of ferroconcrete in a flash.

It splashed against the Tanzrobian’s muscular midriff to elicit a sharp cry of pain from her as it threatened to eat its way through her tough hide. She stopped her attack and went totally defensive, diving to the side, leaving the beam to flash through the now emptied space to vaporize a huge groove in the concrete bunker behind her. The beam continued on to melt the front half of a Landwarrior mockup into slag.

The other two ProCans lashed out with their heat vision, triangulating the more powerful woman. The Tanzrobian collapsed in a puddle of molten sand, overwhelmed by the heat.

“They’re killing her!” I gasped in horror.

“They certainly could...” the ensign started to say, only to have the Klav’en beam and heat vision vanish. The Tanzrobian’s black skin glowed with the dangerous sheen of molten metal. “Tanzrobians aren’t usually as tough as Protectors, but the Major is a rare exception.”

“Damn, you guys play rough up here!”

“The Arions don’t give or take any quarter,” the ensign shrugged. “So we can’t either. We take ‘em right to the edge.”

I gawked as the three battered but victorious ProCans linked arm and arm to march toward the observation tower, their uniforms in tatters, cheerfully singing some kind of exuberant song that I couldn’t quite make out.

The Tanzrobian lay glowing white-hot on the ground as a small robotic ship floated over her and doused her body with what looked like liquid helium. She disappeared in a cloud of vapor, only to appear moments later, staggering around on rubber legs. She paused to exhale a cloud of glowing plasma, and the robot doused her again. She looked steadier on her feet when she emerged from the vapor the second time, and proved it by taking a few running steps before leaping into the air.

I gawked wide-eyed as her powerful leap launched her forty stories upward -- moving straight toward me. I cowered backward as she thumped down on the far side of the small platform, the still lethal glow from her skin threatening to ignite my clothing. Wisps of smoke rose around me, yet the Amazon merely seemed amused as she grinned at me.

“So you’re the ETB guy,” she said in English, her accent less guttural than a Velorian’s. “Welcome to our little bit of hell. I’m Major Nicole Spec’tral.”

I swallowed hard as I patted out the flames that had erupted across the front of my shirt. “You… you guys didn’t pull many punches up here, do you?”

She shook her head and held out a glowing hand. “The Arions won’t, so we can’t.”

My sleeve burst into flames as I gripped the strongest and most sinewy female hand I’d ever held. One of the soldiers took pity on me and sprayed me down with some CO². Their uniforms were obviously made of something more resistant to heat than the ordinary clothing I wore.

“Jesus! You ever lose anyone?” I already knew the answer about the 409^th, but I wanted to hear it from her.

“Unfortunately, yes. Mostly Aggressors like me. Occasionally a trainee. Those skinny blondes don’t look very tough, but they’re real hard hitters.”

“Except you took them on three to one.”

“And I got my ass kicked.”

“You were holding your own until they fired that Klav’en. I thought Vels fought with biological assets only?”

The Major shook her head. “We train them to be adaptive. Once they realized the futility of engaging me hand-to-hand, they reacted correctly by going to weapons. Weapons are obviously far more dangerous for their Protectorate, so it’s discouraged, but it’s also necessary at times.” She clenched her fist and made a muscle that was as large as a softball. “Especially since I’ve got more muscle than any two of them combined.”

“Interesting…” I breathed in awe as he stared at her freakily large and vascular arm. Was Kath’a this woman’s daughter?

“It’s what this place is all about these days,” the Major added with a note of finality. “Finding a way to win, no matter what the odds.”

I could only nod as the Tanzrobian walked over to discuss something with the other officers. I’d never seen anyone, male or female, who carried that much muscle.

She finished her discussion and then turned back my way. “So, my friend Mary said you want to meet my daughter.”

I blinked as I nodded, praying her daughter wasn’t as gargantuan as she was. I thought of the She-Hulk.

“Might be good for her. We both know that the blondies are pretty exclusive when it comes to sharing their affections, now don’t we? Sometimes I think they’re even more racist than the Arions.”

“And you aren’t? I mean, the Arions considered you one of their own.”

“With this black skin?” she laughed. “No way. The Arions hate us for what we’ve become. Not that it started with them. You white-skinned Terrans always had your own issues with Africans. Even the Vels think we’re some kind of throwback to a violent past. A bunch of aborigines who used to run around in the jungle or whatever.”

“We all used to run around in that same jungle,” I said diplomatically.

“Agreed. This is one area where you Terrans have made larger strides than the Velorians. Their focus on genetic enhancement and purity has made it harder for them to value differences.”

“That’s a very chartable definition of latent racism.”

The Major shrugged but didn’t reply.

“But since you work for them, they must trust you.”

“To a point, yes, they do,” she growled. “They know I have no love for the Empire, and since the Vels are the only ones who can keep the Empire from absorbing all Terran worlds, the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ thing works for both of us.”

I stared at her, convinced there was more to it.

“Besides, the Vels want to encourage human self-determination, not destroy it. Kath’a keeps reminding me how important that is.”

I nodded, only to realize I was staring down at the Major’s sex, part of my brain noting that it looked surprisingly human. Inward folded labial lips and a trace of pubic hair. It looked deceptively delicate compared to the rest of her.

She saw where my eyes were focused, and was sensitive enough to realize the limits of my Terran upbringing. She turned to modestly pull a white gown out of a compartment and pulled it on.

“My daughter is about to start her exercise,” the Major pointed toward the east. “Look toward that lake over there.”

I pulled my eyes from the Major’s amazing body to squint toward a group of low buildings next to a large lake about six kilometers away. I zoomed in to see a handful of simulated armored vehicles parked along the shoreline. More significantly, I saw a younger and far slimmer version of the Major flying along the shoreline, finally touching down at the edge of the water. She was wearing a flowing, silver gown that rippled and changed color as she flew, her hair a highlighted shade of brown, not black. The wind caught the top of her gown to reveal cleavage that was far more dramatic than belonged on a young woman her age.

“Tanzrobians can fly?” I gasped.

“A few of us inherited enough Geheimite genes to grow a volatai,” the Major said proudly.

I found myself enthralled as Kath’a engaged a solitary ProCan, blasting the blonde with strangely colored heat vision, more gold than reddish. The beams knocked the ProCan out of the air to flop helplessly to the ground.

“What the…”

“We Tanzrobians were the first step on the path toward the Tset’lar,” the Major continued, her descriptions and tone of voice sounding clinical. “Our heat vision is x-ray augmented. It doesn’t kill like a Tset’s, but it can penetrate a Vel’s skin to put their volatai into spasm for a few moments.”

Kath’a took good of advantage of that moment by delivering a series of punches that propelled the hapless ProCan through both walls of what appeared to be a concrete pillbox. The small building collapsed on top of her.

It exploded like a bomb a half second later as the ProCan launched herself through the ceiling and re-engaged, her levitation restored.

“The girl she’s engaged is only in Phase 2,” the Major said softly as she returned to my side, “so Kath’a should be able to take her.”

The young Protector-to-be lived up to her legacy by deftly dodging Kath’a’s fists and then tackling the Tanzrobian, hoping to restrain her with raw strength before she could hurt anyone else, something I knew every Protector learned to do to keep her Protectorate safe.

The two young women rolled back and forth on the ground, each trying to get an advantage over the other until a second ProCan showed up. She grabbed Kath’a from the back, wrapping her arms around her neck to bend her head far backward, her legs tightening python-like around Kath’a’s waist.

That’s when Kath’a’s body suddenly flashed white-hot, and a shock wave radiated so powerfully from her skin that it sent the ProCans flying. The light grew brighter and brighter until a blinding fireball surrounded the Tanzrobian.

I blinked the tears from my eyes as I staggered and fell to my knees, finding my supposedly invulnerable eyes were nearly blinded by what had obviously been a nuke that had gone off in the middle of that wrestling match.

“Don’t worry,” the Major said calmly. “It’s only a training device. 0.1KT. The dangerous ones are 1KT and up.”

“But… but it was still a nuke?” I gasped, astounded. 0.1KT was equal to a hundred tons of plastic explosive, and that was enough to flatten a large-sized town.

The ProCans re-engaged, but Kath’a was holding her own now, her star-bright body supremely empowered. Amazingly, while the concrete buildings fifty meters away were smoking, a LandWarrior a hundred meters away was barely glowing. The close-in shock wave from her skin had dislodged her attackers, and her body heat had melted a circle of fused sand around the spot where she was standing, but the detonation had otherwise caused little damage. I didn’t know how that was possible.

“We like to call them MADs these days,” the Major continued, “although the Arions still call them nukes. A 0.1KT MAD will put most of the girls out of it for a minute if they’re inside the fireball, but they live. Teaches them a lesson in pain if nothing else.”

“Except that particular fireball was… was inside her,” I gasped, finally realizing why there wasn’t more blast damage. “Inside your daughter!”

Major Nicole Spec’tral shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “You weren’t supposed to see that, Ben Shaffer. Your eyes are better than I’d expected.”

“I don’t understand. How could you…”

“It’s a new tactic were working on. The smallest MADs are only four centimeters in diameter. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain further how a female could conceal and then use them to her advantage.”

I just stared, mouth open, as Kath’a fought like a banshee, that burst of internal heat visibly transforming itself into enough orgone for her to hold her own against the two novice ProCans for several minutes. But eventually, raw strength ruled the day, and two to one were impossible odds. The ProCans, who’d clearly faced this kind of tactic before, wrapped their bodies back around the Tanzrobian to steal much of her heat and energy, shifting the battle into an aggressive variant of Ples’tathy, using their pheromones to augment the inescapable arousal that came from that nuclear blast.

Kath’a was soon writhing out of control as the ProCans displayed some very intimate combat skills.

I didn’t even try to talk now, as a single thought echoed around my brain: How was I going to impress a young woman who’d just done THAT to get off?

“I don’t know what Mary was thinking when she sent you up here to meet Kath’a,” the Major continued, clearly sharing the same thought, “but as you can see now, Mary may have… misjudged the situation.” She turned to look sympathetically at me. “She met Kath’a before she’d fully come into her own.”

I felt both humiliated and embarrassed as I got back to my feet, yet struggled to show neither of those emotions. Instead, I focused on my cover mission, which was now obviously my real mission now. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, major. I simply came up here to document the kind of training the graduates of my high school go through up here. I’m getting lots of good material.”

The looked at me for a long moment, and then nodded. “Okay. Except that some of this is classified.”

“I assume the trainees don’t always win?” I offered after a long moment, not knowing what else to say except to focus on the story.

“Generally, they don’t,” the Major nodded. “A warrior learns more from defeat than from victory. But Kath’a made the mistake of using that MAD too quickly today. She’s learning too.”

The rest of the day proved to be as amazing as the beginning, but that delicate spark I’d been carrying in my heart had gone out again. I was once again overwhelmed by my own inadequacy. So much so that I decided I didn’t want to meet Kath’a after the day’s training was completed.

I focused instead on plugging along with my journalist’s job, taking notes on everything I saw, and then submitting them to the censor to determine what I could use to write my article. I got back about half of what I’d submitted. Enough for a story… barely.

The cargo flitter returned just before dark to fly me back to my hostel, but made the mistake of dropping me off on the ground floor instead of the lobby level. I tried to argue with the robotic driver, and refused to step out of the flitter, but the automaton just stared at me with red eyes glowing, seemingly content to sit there forever.

Swearing, I finally gave up my battle between man and machine and stepped out, looking for a way up to the 30th level. There was no one around. I waited for a bit, and then started to seriously debate climbing from balcony to balcony to reach my room. Given the last two days events, my acrophobia was starting to settle down a bit.

Walking out into the central tube to look upward at the dizzyingly height, I decided it hadn’t subsided that much. Besides, climbing would be even more publicly undignified than grabbing a ride.

Except that I might not have a choice. The trainees who’d been partying here last night were still at their debriefings, along with the rest of the local population, including the hotel staff. I was reminded that there was only one reason for anyone being on this moon, and that reason had nothing to do with me.

I screwed up my courage and started climbing, swinging from level to level Spiderman-like, finding it was actually very easy given my fantastic strength. I still hoped no one saw me. And I didn’t look down.

Once I was safely back on the hostel level, I glanced over at the café and saw that Ivy was busy with a dozen customers, most of whom appeared to be Terrans judging from their coloration and physical condition. I’d heard someone mention that an Enlightenment ship was docking today.

I debated joining them, but my first encounter with Ivy was still echoing in my head. In thinking back, I realized that I’d been an idiot. She hadn’t been deliberately belittling me. That’s when my familiar funk started to gnaw at me again. I wasn’t Terran anymore. And I wasn’t Velorian. I wasn’t anything. Only an idiot.

Frustrated and a bit more depressed than usual by that last thought, I decided to salvage what I could of the trip by working on my story. I was going to write my best story ever, and I knew the aspiring Protectors back home would find it fascinating. Maybe they’d want to talk about it.

The room was cold and empty when I returned, but I managed to work for a while before the walls started closing in. I flopped on the gel-bed and punched up that Explorer-series Holo show. The ceiling, walls and floor immediately disappeared to create the realistic impression that I was floating in space. Softly ethereal music seemed to come out of nowhere as I raced toward a circular hole in the star field, a swirl of glowing gasses spiraling into it. I recognized the black hole that powered a wormhole.

A parallel stream of bright lights began to race by me on all sides, Tachyon beacons I realized. Looking down those rows of lights, my target was revealed – a pure white spot in space that was just inside the event horizon of the black hole. I was moving very fast, probably more than a third the speed of light, although the simulation was clearly running in time-lapse mode. The bright spot raced toward me as the music grew louder, finally exploding into a thundering roar as I raced through the white hole.

Searing heat tore at me, and searing light threatened to blind me, the bed shaking violently as it tried to pitch me off. I hung on as the sensation of heat and brilliant light grew unbearable, frightening even, and then I was suddenly through, ejected into the absolute zero blackness on the far side, possibly hundreds or even thousands of light years from where I’d entered.

The simulation slowed down, the music faded and then evaporated as the holographic projectors turned off, allowing the dull, gray walls of the room to surround me again. My heart was pounding, even though I knew what I’d just experienced was nothing compared to a real hole dive. The gravity waves in a hole were measured in thousands of G’s, and the heat in millions of degrees. For the first time, I began to understand the arrogance and bravado of a P-class. They were preparing to endure those forces without the protection of a ship.

The casualty rate, the number of times someone went into a wormhole and didn’t come out, was one in a thousand. That compared very poorly to Terran airline travel, where the odds of disaster were one in two hundred million. A nearly five order of magnitude difference in safety.

My heart was still racing, so I thumbed around on the control to find something less intense, and stumbled onto an archived newscast that showed a team of Scrumbles players posing. Supposedly the Scrumbles champions of graduating class MOD173. They wore their hair identically; platinum, straight and long, as well as wearing the same tiny blue team bikini. Their nearly identical look reminded me of the rumor the ship’s captain had told me. He’d heard that Protectors were really all clones of a Geheimite woman. It certainly wasn’t true, but if you came across Protectors individually, as was the case on Enlightenment worlds, it would be easy to assume they came from the same mold.

All of which made me feel more out of place than ever. I thought of Ivy and her café, and quickly clicked off the Holo. I grabbed my PersComp and notes and headed for the coffee shop to work, just like I had to Starbucks back on Earth. Warmth, good coffee, people coming and going… they would all create at least the illusion of human companionship.

I owed her an apology in any case.

Unfortunately, as far as companionship went, the café was empty this time of day. The locals were still at work and the ship’s crew had obviously been on a tight schedule.

Ivy was washing some cups when I came it. She turned around and actually smiled as she recognized me. “So, how goes the world of journalism?” she asked cheerfully, wiping her hands off. “Seen enough over-thyroided jocks bashing each other’s heads for one day?”

I slumped in a chair, amused despite myself that her view of the day’s events was that close to mine, which reinforced my conciliatory mood. “I thought you’d be pissed after the way I huffed out of here this morning. And how’d you know I was writing a story?”

“I did my research on you, Earth boy. And as far as this morning goes, I think we got off on the wrong foot.” She held out her hand. “Let’s try again. I’m Ivy Lightfoot.”

“Lightfoot? That’s an American Indian name.”

“My parents were Homeworlders like my boss. Big enough into the movement that they even changed their family name. My dad came up here to live.”

“Why Atlantea of all places?”

“He wanted to meet some real Terrans, ship’s crew, to learn what you guys are really like. Not just videos and edited histories and folktales.”

“So now who’s writing a story?” I couldn’t help but grin.

Ivy hiked herself up on the counter again; her lovely legs glowing so tan and fit in front of me. “Both of us, I guess. But I definitely wasn’t prepared to meet an ETB this morning.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Sorry? You got to be kidding. I get to talk to the crewmen who come in here from every Enlightenment ship, but my father has always been telling me that ETB’s are the missing link between what we Vels were in the very beginning, and what we are now. Hell, you were even born on Earth. Earth!” She was fairly bubbling now. “My dad is going to bounce off the ceiling when I tell him about you.”

“And your boss?”

She placed a finger over her lips. “Not a word about that bastard. He only went along with the deal about my working here to get in my shorts.” She paused to look directly into my eyes, and then giggled, her blue orbs sparkling so brightly. “And he’s such an old fart that he can hardly get it up.”

My heart leaped. No Velorian girl had ever looked at me that way. Or talked that way about a Velorian man. Against all hope, I was encouraged. I’d flamed out a hundred times with a hundred girls… what was a hundred and one.

“So, do you ever close this joint or what, Ivy?”

She looked at me for a long moment, and then silently floated up from the counter and over my head to land by the front door. She tugged on the drapes to close them, and then stabbed the button to illuminate the Come Again sign. When she spun back around on her toes, she was smiling. “My boss is off visiting the Captain of that Enlightenment ship, so what the hell. He’ll never know.”

Part Three

My mouth was dry but my feet were floating on air as I followed Ivy out the back door of the café and into a circular service corridor that ran behind the shops. The corridor tapered off to a doorway that opened directly into the central corridor. I gritted my teeth and followed Ivy to the edge, and then made the mistake of looking down. The central tube tapered down to spotlight the ground floor lobby so far below. It was like looking the wrong way through a telescope. The horrifying view froze me in the doorway, my fingers holding onto the metal handle with a death grip. The next step was thirty stories down.

Ivy bobbed around lightly in mid-air, a warm smile on her lips. “Acrophobia. That’s what it’s called. What you’ve got?”

I nodded, as my mouth grew drier yet.

“Yeah. I read all about it after I watched the way you were tiptoeing around the balcony this morning.” She shrugged. “Don’t sweat it… I won’t drop you.” She floated back to hook her arm around my waist, hugging me tightly to her warm body. Still, she had to pry my grip from the doorframe before carrying me outward.

I gripped her arms with all my strength as Ivy floated weightlessly downward, descending as gently as a feather. Unfortunately, people kept swishing by us, many of them hurtling downward at terminal velocity or beyond, each one taking part of my stomach with them.

I closed my eyes and lied. “I’m… I’m okay, Ivy.”

“Cool…” she said as she began to fall faster.

I clung desperately to her bare skin as the air began to howl past my ears, my clothing flapping wilding as we reached escape velocity. I thought my heart was going to burst when she suddenly slowed, and touched down on tiptoes, the landing as soft as a kiss.

“Told you I’m a good flier. Now come on.” She sprinted off toward a doorway on the far side of the lobby.

I put my rubbery legs into gear and ran after her, stumbling along until I saw her slip through an inconspicuous entranceway. I followed her, only to emerge on the entrance ramp of a narrow runway that was jammed between the skyscrapers. Amazed by the buildings rising around me, the Aggressor’s building by far the largest, I saw layer after layer of flying people passing overhead.

Ivy grabbed my hand and started to run like the wind, her long, blonde hair streaming out behind her. I appreciated her kindness… we were the only people with their feet on the ground.

I figured we’d run a dozen kilometers when Ivy suddenly turned to dive through another small, unmarked doorway to enter a building. I followed her, and had barely stepped inside when she wrapped her arm around me and soared upward like a bullet. Before I had time to freak out, she deposited me on a small ledge on the twelfth floor. I hung on to a metal column as she placed her palm against the ID reader on the door.

Satisfied with her ID, the door unlocked and opened inward. I was so relieved to follow her through it and get off another railing less balcony that it took me a moment to realize I was standing inside a nicely decorated apartment.

“I gotta change,” Ivy said as she headed toward the bedroom. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I looked around, only to be drawn toward a wall covered in pictures. I recognized Velor, Daxxan, Atlantea. There were a half dozen other planets and moons that I didn’t recognize. The only thing they had in common was that all the pictures had been taken directly over gigantic storms swirling in the atmosphere below.

Ivy reappeared moments later, dressed in a blue micro-skirt and simple burnt-orange halter that left her arms, shoulders and midriff bare. Her legs were stunningly cute. I watched her in awe as she tied her white hair in a crude ponytail, and then lifted off on her toes to float over to land next to me.

“These are really good, Ivy. You like storms? ”

“Yeah. I’ve always been interested in extreme weather. These are the biggest storms from the last twenty years in our system, as well as Galatica, Ceres and a few places I better not talk about.”

I knew that Galatica and Ceres were Enlightenment worlds a hundred light years away.

“I’ve never seen storms this big.”

She walked over to a picture that was clearly Velor. “The Skantea cyclone of 03. Winds over five hundred KPH for two full days!”

“I remember. We sent food and stuff that we’d collected at our school.” I studied the picture closer, squinting my eyes, only to realize with a shock that I could see all the way down through the eye of the cyclone to make out buildings on the ground. People even.

“Skantea had the best defined eye of any cyclone in recorded history,” Ivy explained. “I stared down through it like a looking glass for hours.”

“You were actually there?”

Ivy picked up the large camera on the coffee table and waved it at me. “Military issue. I found a guy willing to trade.”

“But I thought you couldn’t leave Atlantea.”

“Not supposed to, that’s for sure, but there are enough ProCans coming and going, many without formal flight plans, that nobody pays much attention to an unidentified blip.”

“But if you get caught… I mean, that’s really bad news.”

“Capital crime down on Velor. I know. Guess I just like living on the edge.”

“All a Protector would have to do is…”

“We mostly have ProCans around here.”

“Wrong. I saw the real McCoy just today.”

“Odd…” Ivy mused for a moment before brightening up. “But nobody has ever chased me, and I’ve orbited both planets and all the moons lots of times. Even went to those other places.”

“You dove through a wormhole?” I was blown away. She was only a B-class.

“I studied the math in school… and yeah, it wasn’t fun, trust me on this. My skin was red and sore for a week afterward.”

“But other than the hole itself, it must be so cool. Floating in space, traveling from planet to planet to moon, free as a bird.”

“Birds don’t do well in vacuum.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. And I’m glad you feel that way, Ben my friend. ‘Cause that’s what we’re gonna do tonight.”

“Space walking?” I gasped.

“Sure. You ever been naked in space, Ben?”

I shook my head. “I’ve been living on Velor since I was enhanced, so of course not.”

“Well, it’s a little known fact that it has this really cool effect on our bodies. Makes everything get tingly.” Her eyes suddenly sparkled. “Or big, as the case may be.”

“What do you mean…?”

“I mean, its how you can become all the man you can be.”

I looked puzzled for a moment, and then remembered something I’d read back on Earth. Of how men with impotency issues used to use vacuum pumps to get it up before they invented drugs to fix that problem. “You’re shitting me?”

“Works on us femmes too. A little swelling in just the right spot makes it all that much more fun.”

“And this is how your boss and you…?”

“We aren’t talking about him,” Ivy interrupted sharply. “Besides, he’d never risk his business by breaking the law. He just wants to keep his head down, retire and go down to Velor and live on a beach until he dies. Booorrriiing.”

She punched the button on the wall for Comm, set it to audio only, and said: “Call to Bently.”

A woman’s voice answered after a few beeps, and Ivy picked up the handset to talk quietly for a while. At one point, she seemed to be having a problem convincing her correspondent of something, but she was smiling again when she set the handset down. “I hope you don’t mind if my friend joins us.”

I felt the floor lurch beneath me. Not again… “Your friend?” I asked lamely.

“As in my girlfriend. You okay with a threesome?”

My mouth fell open, only to have a lesser thought cross my mind. I wasn’t so sure about finding room between two lesbians. “I was kind of hoping to… you know, be with you.”

She winked at me. “Trust me, Ben, you’re going to get seriously laid tonight. By two superfemmes, not just one. So stop with all the worrying.”

“Okay,” I smiled, my imagination taking off again. Like any man born on Earth, I’d had my share of fantasies about what two girls on one guy could mean. Some convoluted but very sexy positions came to mind, Ivy’s long legs wrapped around me as I took turns fucking them. “I mean, long as I’m not the odd man out.”

“Odd man? Ha,” Ivy said as she floated across the room to land beside me, gently running her fingers through my hair as she leaned closer. Her breath was sweet with honey and wildflower as she kissed me the first time. Her tongue met mine, jousting awkwardly for a moment before I started kissing her back, hungrily, deeply.

Her eyes were alive with sparkling blue light when I came up for air. “Not bad,” she murmured, clearly impressed. “Somebody taught you how to kiss. But we’re going to teach you things about cit’aris that no man has ever dreamed of.”

“I can’t believe that Velorian men don’t… won’t…”

Ivy laughed. “All those idiots know is how to wave that oversized Johnson of theirs around. Boring.”

I’d never heard a Vel talk like this!

“Instead, we’re going to make you multilingual.” She giggled as she saw my eyes open wider. “To speak in tongues.”

I kissed her again, loving the softness of her full lips and her sweet, flowery scent. I remembered that taste from my time with Xara, and knew it was the natural perfume of a Velorian femme.

She giggled and gently turned her head as I got really into it. I kissed my way across her cheek instead, and then down to her sensitive neck, making her giggle.

“Hey, hey, not so fast, sailor,” she laughed, floating away from me. “Wait until Bently is here and I can properly introduce you guys. Don’t want to make her jealous.” She followed that with a wink. “Besides, we gotta save our energy for hard vacuum.”

I gently cradle her face in my hands, my thumbs tracing the sensitive outline of her ears, making her smile even cuter. “You are so, so beautiful, Ivy.”

She accepted my heartfelt comment by melting softly in my arms, resting her head on my shoulder. I couldn’t help but kiss her again, tenderly at first, gently, then suddenly hard, my tongue probing, demanding, a wild surge of passion sending a firework of tingling arousal through my body.

Far from pulling away this time, Ivy jumped up to wrap her legs around my waist, her arms around my neck, and kissed me back. We were soon too lost in our awakening kisses and the pounding of blood in our veins to hear the door open and close. It wasn’t until I blinked my eyes open to see locks of Velorian golden hair mingling with Ivy’s white that I realized we were no longer alone.

Ivy slowly rotated in my arms to embrace a younger woman, golden hair mingling with white as she kissed her friend as passionately as she had me. I instinctively went with the flow, and shaped my body to Ivy’s back, pressing my surging hardness tightly against the delightful fold of her ass, a surge of heat filling me as I watched the two of them kissing so intimately.

I’d never seen anything half as wickedly sexy as watching these two beautiful girls kissing that passionately.

The new girl, Bently of course, slowly guided Ivy back around to face me while unbuttoning her top, freeing Ivy’s breasts for me, then circling those perfect globes with her delicate touch, teasing her nipples.

Ivy passed on the favor by grabbing the top of my shirt and then tearing it downward.

“Oh my, you’re so hairy,” Ivy giggled as she playfully traced her hardening nipples through the coarse hair on my chest. Bently ducked down for a brief moment, returning with Ivy’s tiny skirt in her hand. Seconds later, she grabbed the waistband of my pants and tore them off as if they were but tissue paper, freeing my surging erection to press tightly against Ivy’s stomach.

Before I could absorb the wonder of finally getting laid, Ivy floated up and guided herself to me, wiggling herself, using me to open her. She was so wet, so ready. Bently wrapped her warm body around my back, her breasts pressing so softly, and lifted my feet from the floor, pressing her pelvis into my ass to drive my steel deeply into the exquisite softness of Ivy’s sex.

I lost it right there, and began to thrust myself forward as Ivy wrapped her legs around both of us and took all of me, lifting us toward the ceiling. We were suddenly making love on nothing at all!

I threw myself into that loving, anchored by Bently’s pelvis grinding against my ass as I grabbed Ivy’s hips to begin taking her as hard as I could. Her eyes rolled back in her head with pleasure as she flopped backward to hang suspended only on my steel. I reached further up to cup her breasts, using them to pull her back upright as I pushed and pulled her body up and down my shaft, those incredible waves of Velorian muscle inside her drawing me ever deeper.

Ivy began crying out in that rising song of passion that all Vels lose themselves in, only to have Bently begin kissing my ear at that moment, biting hard on my earlobe just as Ivy froze and screamed as she went crazy on me. The rush of her orgasm and the pleasure/pain of Bently’s teeth drew mine, and I exploded with a fury like none I’d felt before, my mindless rut pouring into the frantic reflex to gain every more penetration. Bently pushed me forward until I slammed Ivy’s back against the steel wall, anchoring my ass with her pelvis, giving me the power to thrust against Ivy with every ounce of my being.

I must have passed out. All I know is that my vision filled with every color of rainbow, and then a million tingles of warmth raced up and down my body. I was astounded that my release had been so intense that I’d literally passed out for a moment. Bently was standing barefoot on the rug in front of me, one brilliant blue eye focused my way, her other eye hidden behind slightly curly golden blonde locks, looking curiously at me. She was still wearing her blue sundress.

I smiled as I noted that her complexion was lightly tanned with a scattering of freckles. Flaws by Velorian standards, but they made her look cute. Undoubtedly a B-class, she was taller than either of us, closer to the 5’10” average of a Velorian femme. And based on the golden tint of her hair, she’d clearly been born down on Goldy, not up here like Ivy.

Ivy’s voice broke the golden spell behind me. “So, you think we should do the introductions? Bently, this is Ben. Ben, this is the woman I love more than life itself.”

I held out my hand, not sure if shaking hands was even appropriate given what we’d just been through, but Bently slipped past me to rest her arms on my shoulders and lean down lightly kiss me. Not as deep a kiss as Ivy’s, or as inviting, but still warm with promise.

“Hello, Ben,” she said softly as she traced her soft kisses across my cheek. She gave my earlobe another quick nip and then floated gently backward to slip her arm around Ivy’s waist. “Ivy said you’re Terran, but you make love like a freakin’ Messenger.”

I blushed red from her outrageous compliment, and that in turn brought my superhuman arousal back to a full boil. Hard as steel again, the length of me spanning the gap to the two women, I realized that Ivy hadn’t said anything to Bently about my being enhanced, letting her discover it to her surprise.

“A little more dynamite in the bag than you expected, huh?” I said, wincing as I realized how lame that sounded.

“But how is that poss…?” Bently started to ask. “I mean, I didn’t think that was…”

“He was friendly with a Protector once upon a time,” Ivy interrupted. “A natural-born Protector who was part Geheimite, even a bit Galen if the rumors are true.”

“That’s even more impossible,” Bently gasped as he stepped forward to rest her hands on my shoulders. She began to gently trace her hands down my body, testing me. My abs tensed unconsciously as her hands explored them, and I gasped in pleasure as her fingers circled my manhood, coaxing it to full hardness again. She squeezed me hard enough to almost hurt, but apparently found me adequate, as her lips brushed across my ear again as she breathed, “Oh, that is so nice!”

I felt as if my head was going to blow off this time. Not only from her hand, the embrace of a super girl, or from her kisses, but her wild compliment. Nice! I’d never been called that before.

Ivy winked at me. “Seems as if you’ve been hanging out with prima donnas since you arrived on Velor, Ben. Those bitches can make anyone feel inadequate.”

“Cteists, huh?” Bently frowned. “Thank Skietra we found him.”

I looked at Bently, then at Ivy, clearly confused now.

Ivy laughed at the look in my eyes. “I didn’t know how to tell you before, Ben, so I let Bently.”

“Tell me what?” I was having trouble breathing now as Bently relaxed her grip enough to stroke her hands gently over me, varying the grip of her fingers rhythmically, kneading my steel, her touch driving me mad.

“Well, it’s like this, Ben,” Ivy explained. “Not all Velorians are into Cteis. All the P-class maybe, but not we simpler girls. Some of us find it… painful.”

“What… what are you saying?” I asked in wonder, eyes wide.

“Simple. You’re a god-send to us, Ben Shaffer.”

“I don’t under…”

“Put it this way… you’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd, Ben.”

I was still confused, but I understood enough of what she was saying for my emotions to soar like a rocket.

Bently added rocket fuel to that fire by crossing her arms and pulling down the straps of her tiny dress. The filmy fabric fluttered to the floor to free the large breasts of a Velorian-born, those perfectly round mounds riding high on her strong chest.

A surge of lightning-bright arousal filled every corner of my body as Ivy circled behind me this time to mold her body intimately to mine, the softness of her smaller breasts flattening against my back, her firm nipples pressing urgently just below my shoulder blades. Clearly it was her turn to be the backstop.

Bently just smiled as she floated weightlessly from the floor, opening her long legs to wrap them around both of us, her small hand slipping down to guide me to her, lifting me off the floor by my handle. She brushed my very erect head sensitively across her labia, wetting me, and then parted herself bit by bit with me, her eyelids fluttering in pleasure as he slipped me an inch inside her. She sighed luxuriously, and ever so slowly took me to her inner warmth, her body so willing and so ready.

Ivy joined in by pressing her pubic bone against my butt, thrusting herself upward as I suddenly found myself helpless in the girls’ grasp again. Part of my brain realized that Ivy was using me to please her lover, resting her cheek on my shoulder to bury me beneath her pale hair as Bently leaned over my shoulder to kiss her long-time lover.

I didn’t care as Bently began tensing her inner muscles in that rippling, erotic wave that was so Velorian, the softness of her vagina growing tighter every moment as the two femmes began to rise into the air. I reached back and grabbed Ivy’s hips to gain enough leverage to begin thrusting on my own, and Bently giggled in added pleasure.

Seconds later, we were rising through a skylight in the ceiling to emerge into the darkness of the Atlantean night. I was very aware of slowly fucking Bently, on my own and as Ivy’s toy, the wild inner heat of her body joined by cold wind that whipped her soft hair around me as we accelerated. The slipstream turned sharp with hard shockwaves as we slipped through the Mach, sending a deafening sonic boom radiating outward.

I tried to protect my eyes from the shockwaves by burying my face beneath Bently’s long hair, even as I continued to pour all my strength into my loving. Ivy slipped into perfect tune with her lover, her hips pressing me upward in perfect timing to Bently’s cries of pleasure.

We were still in the atmosphere when Bently began to shake and quiver. What had started as gentle undulations of vaginal muscle now turning hard and demanding, drawing me inward with frantic force. Ivy bent her legs and jammed her feet against Bently’s hips to use her extreme flexibility to both push and pull on my body, overcoming the spasming force of Bently’s onrushing orgasm to keep us going strong.

Bently suddenly stiffened and screamed so loud my hearing turned to white noise, her soft cries unheard in the thin air she lost it completely, her body drawing me deeper in the frantic desire for penetration. She wrapped her legs around me and rode me like a banshee, her hair flying everywhere in the supersonic slipstream, every muscle in my body thrusting when she yielded, then yielding when she thrust, Ivy behind me, the three of us lost in the primitive rut.

Bently clawed and bit at me like a wildcat, her inner strength shocking me, gripping my erection so powerfully it hurt. The pain/pleasure was so intense in fact that I lost it and started to come harder than I’d even experienced with Ivy, the wild orgasm which had been building like a thunderstorm inside my groin suddenly radiating through my body to find its outlet deeply inside Bently’s warmth, our two passions melting into a single, shared orgasm of earthshaking pleasure.

Like a force twelve earthquake, it didn’t fade, but instead continued to rise, shaking us even harder, racing around and around our bodies, feeding our lust further every moment, every muscle in our bodies flexing, thrusting as hard as we could as we dove into the maelstrom of unending desire called Ples’tathy.

I never saw the stars slow their flicker and become steady, the purple sky fading to black around us. My blood was pounding so hard in my veins, my heart tripping at machine gun speed such that I never noticed when all other sound vanished around us. I felt only Bently frantically kisses, her tongue filling my mouth as my manhood filled her sex. I felt so big, so vital and so empowered as we tumbled through space, the world around us fading into a blur of stars, sunlight, sunrises and sunsets as we orbited the tiny moon, sky and moon and our wondrous loving fading into a single kaleidoscope of pleasure.

Part Four

I awoke once again without knowing how I’d gotten here, this time finding I was in a completely unfamiliar room. The walls were a pale shade of pink, and the furniture was overstuffed and tan-colored. My head was spinning gently and my lips were chapped, my entire body aching. Still, I could only smile as I found that most of the ache was coming from my groin -- the result of a kind of overexertion I’d never known before.

I tried to raise my head, only to find that it felt incredibly heavy. I struggled to roll onto my side, and smiled as I saw Bently sitting at the other end of the long couch, wearing a white nurses uniform. Ivy was floating cross-legged in mid-air behind her, wearing only her tiny blue skirt.

“What… where…?” I croaked.

“Orgone depletion. My apartment,” Bently answered in as few words as possible. Her voice was as soft and melodious as a singer’s.

“I don’t remember…all fuzzy… what happened up there?”

Bently smiled. “We proved to be a bit more compatible than I’d thought, Ben, and that triggered an attack of Ples’tathy.”

“I caused you to fall into the fever?” I’d read so much about Ples’tathy, but had never seen anyone in the throes of it. “That’s a good thing… right?”

Bently shrugged one slender shoulder. “Normally, yes. But we didn’t realize that your metabolism still requires some oxygen to function. At least we didn’t before your heart stopped.” She turned and smiled at Ivy. “Fortunately, my girl here still had her head about her.”

“Good for her…” I muttered, not sure what this was all about. A stopped heart was obviously a big deal, even for an ETB.

“Not a difficult discovery at first,” Bently shrugged. “Zero blood pressure makes it kind of hard to keep it hard.”

I flopped back on my back. “I flamed out during sex?”

Ivy giggled. “That’s one way to put it. Although Bently was so far gone I’m not sure she knew what galaxy you’d put her in at that point.”

That didn’t sound so bad.

“The problem was that you quit absorbing orgone,” Ivy continued. “I brought you guys down into the atmosphere, but it didn’t help.”

I ran my hand across his chest. “My heart really stopped?”

Bently nodded. “By the time I came out of it, you looked terrible. Definitely code blue… flat lined. Had to call in my boss.”

“How could… who’s he?”

“I’m a nurse at the local hospital. The doc said it was the worst case of orgone depletion he’d ever seen. It took him a bit to figure out the oxygen starvation. He doesn’t normally treat Terrans.”

“So he fixed me.” I was so weak I could barely lift my arm. “Kind of.”

“He solved your oxygen deficit and got your heart started, but we have a new problem. You aren’t absorbing orgone.”

“Need to hook me up, huh?” I wasn’t looking forward to that.

“And risk stopping your heart again? No way.”

“So how?” I felt myself weakening just from trying to talk. It was getting hard to even breath. I was burning through what few ergs of orgone I had left.

“We slept with you between us last night. Even made love a bunch of times, hoping our radiated sexual aura would give you some help, but it didn’t help much.”

I cursed silently. I’d slept through all that?

“The only way we can imagine helping now is to use an Arion technique. You ever heard of Recharging?”

I nodded. “Read about it. It’s sexy and exploitive at the same time. Violent sometimes.”

“Well, we need to try that. Assuming you can get it up just a little.”

“Interesting… technique…” I tried to smile. “Only a Velorian nurse would suggest…”

Bently laughed while floating backward to hover in mid-air, her legs crossed. “Unfortunately, we both got busted for extra planetary flight and we’re due at Guardian headquarters in a few minutes.”

I tried to lift my head again, really worried now. “Is that bad?”

“Not good. But the authorities are pretty tolerant up here. Guess we’ll be paying them off for a long time.”

I’d heard hints about corruption on Atlantea. Maybe that was a good thing this time. “So how do we… I mean, how serious is my condition?”

“My boss said there was no hope,” Bently said flatly. “But then Ivy told me something about this girl you came up here to meet.”

I remembered Kath’a. “Big mistake. She turned out to be a nuclear-powered ubergoddess. Not exactly my type.”

“You don’t have a type, Ben Shaffer,” a different voice joined in. It was lower but still intensely feminine. “And at the moment, only a goddess can save you.”

I turned my head painfully toward the source of the voice, and saw a tall chocolate-skinned woman standing across the room, her eyes overly large and blue. She was dressed in a purple one-piece outfit that was cutout in a dozen places to reveal her abs, her back and hips. Her magnificent breasts were threatening to escape the confines of her top.

Kath’a!

“Besides,” she added, “Mary would never forgive me if I let these local girls kill you off.”

I turned the other way to see Bently’s eyes narrow, the effort of moving my head making the room spin dizzily.

Kath’a followed my gaze to Bently. “Hell, you girls should know that ET’s need at least some oxygen to maintain our hybrid metabolism. Some more, some less.”

“ET’s?” I smiled as I watched the lights on the ceiling swap places with each other. An old Spielberg movie suddenly came to mind.

“A title we both share, Ben Shaffer. Although we differ in a few ways.”

I stared at her wondrous cleavage and nodded.

“Not that, silly. What I meant is that we share a few limitations and advantages. You were almost done in by this lunie and her friend. We ET’s have to stick together.”

“Hey, so we screwed up,” Ivy said defensively. “It isn’t like anyone has published anything about you ET’s. It’s all top secret shit.”

Kath’a’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Or maybe it’s just too shameful for you pure-borns to accept. You can’t admit that the Arion scientists accomplished at lot of what Skietra did for you blondies.”

Ivy shut up, but Bently jumped in. “Some of what she did,” she glared back at Kath’a. “Meet me outside the atmosphere, girl, and I’ll show you what a pure born can do.”

“So you don’t need oxygen,” Kath’a shrugged. “That can be handy, I admit. But gold also turns you into fucking mice.”

Despite her beauty and startling presence, I was reminded that Kath’a possessed a portion of the genetic technology that later ended up in their Tset’lars. Including their immunity to gold. And I still couldn’t get the image out of my head of how she’d used that nuke to defeat her opponents.

“Ladies, ladies,” I jumped in, straining to metabolize the last bit of the orgone in my body. “You really don’t have to fight over me.”

Part of me was thrilled by Bently’s ethereal blonde beauty on my right, and with Ivy’s exoticness on the other side, not to mention Kath’a’s rich coloration and dangerously compelling eyes in front of me. Despite my weakness, I was filled with a strange kind of confidence.

All three women glared down at me. “Over you?” they said at the same time, their voices equally incredulous.

I swallowed hard. So maybe my confidence was really overconfidence. But I knew I’d made an impression last night.

Kath’a stepped closer, motioning Ivy and Bently closer. “This is going to be tricky, but I think he’s tough enough to handle it. There’s a defect in the genetics of everyone with Supremis genetics, and it’s far worse for ET’s, where we can’t metabolize orgone if our energy drops below a certain level.”

Bently nodded. “Tell us something we don’t know. A doctor friend who was here said that’s what happened, but also that there isn’t a way to restart the metabolism in Ben’s case without killing him. It takes the equivalent of a lightning strike, and he says his heart can’t handle it.”

I looked up, eyes wide. I didn’t like the sound of that!

Normally, that’s true. But we Tanzrobians know a few things about resuscitation, given that we’re closer to Ben than you guys in this way.”

Bently smiled smugly.

Kath’a ignored her. “But I’ll need your help. It generally takes three femmes to revive someone.”

“Whatever you need,” Ivy shrugged.

“We’re going to do an orgone burst. A way of infusing his body with the equivalent of a lightning strike, but with orgone not electricity. That won’t affect his heart.”

“Okay,” Bently said warily. “How do we do that?”

“Simple in principle,” Kath’a said, her lips tilting with a hint of a smile. “And maybe easier for you guys than me.” She paused for a moment to let that thought sink in, then continued. “Our orgone metabolism is maximized during orgasm. All we have to do is to synchronize that.”

“You’re shitting me!” Ivy exclaimed.

“And one of us has to be in the Arion recharge position.” She looked down at me and smiled. “Guess Mary’s going to get her wish, seeing as that last job goes to me. I’m still carrying a lot of energy from my fight yesterday.”

“The nuke?” I asked weakly.

She nodded.

“What nuke?” Bently asked.

“Top secret,” I winked at her.

“You two need to get things to a boil, holding yourself close to the edge, your bodies wrapped around Ben as best you can. You have to transfer enough ergs to warm him up, and I mean in all ways. I’ll do the rest.”

Bently looked a bit shocked, but Ivy giggled as she looked down on me. “You came up here for a little ex’tosy, Ben. Seems like you’re getting a bit more than you bargained for.”

My eyes fluttered from energy depletion, but I still managed a tiny smile, and said weakly, “Now would be a good time. Before I pass out and miss it again.”

She turned and expertly undid Bently’s uniform, then stripped her own clothes off. Kath’a hooked her arms under me and carried me to the bed, and Ivy and Bently snuggled up on both sides of me, their bodies so smooth, so glowingly warm. They wrapped their arms and legs around me and rested their heads on my chest to begin kissing.

I looked up as Kath’a stood beside the bed, crossing her arms to pull her top down, revealing her absolutely gorgeous breasts. Large and firm and perfectly round, they rode high on her chest, yet without the overly large nipples of a Supremis. She looked like a Terran, only a lot better.

Ivy and Bently began rocking themselves gently, one reaching under me, the other over to lend the eroticism of their fingers to each other’s passion, hands buzzing like a vibrator. They were obviously very expert at pleasing each other.

They were breathing hard, biting their lips to try to control the wild pleasures threatening to burst inside them, their breasts warming to send a wonderous glow shining deep inside my body. I felt myself warming and quickening at the same time, especially after Kath’a’s hand slipped between my legs and began to gently caress my balls, then my growing erection. Whatever energy I was drawing from the girls, it was all flowing down there now.

Kath’a leaned down and took me with her lips, drawing me in, her tongue vibrating softly, teeth scraping gently but intoxicatingly along my length, her head bobbing gently as she made me so hard, her soft lips soothingly tracing behind the gentle touch of her teeth. I felt myself rushing forward, and reached down to grab her head, encouraging her to go just that tiny bit faster that I needed, but she suddenly rose upward instead, licking her lips. She spread her legs and straddled me as best she could with Ivy and Bently there, and I gasped in wonder as she lowered herself over me, so warm, so tight, so wet. I felt as if I was entering heaven itself.

“You might be a bit more of a man after this,” she gasped as her nipples grew so hard, her body soaring with the same arousal I felt. “My DNA isn’t very stable.”

I had no idea what that meant, all I knew was that Kath’a was making love to me, and Ivy and Bently were making love to each other, and that my entire body seemed to project forward in a burst of energy that was aimed directly at Katha’s core. She rocked herself faster and faster, biting her lip to hold herself back as I felt the rush of her orgasm coming over her.

“Oh, God, fuck me… NOW!” she cried out, and threw herself over the three of us. A blinding flash of blue lightning exploded all around me as I lost all control, a brilliant light exploding inside me as I came, washing away every sound, sight and sensation.

Conclusion

The first rays of the early morning sun of Velor found their way through the window, illuminating the room with a ruddy glow. I blinked and awoke, my head full of cobwebs. I stared for a long moment into the bright sunrise, not realizing what I was seeing at first. The cursing as I realized I did.

The color was reddish/orange. Which meant I was back on Velor.

Damn it!

I sighed and sank deeper into my bed, lost in the wild flurry of confused images and memories of Ivy, Bently and Kath’a swirling around in my head like a fading dream, making it impossible for me to figure out where reality and dreams interfaced. Katha’s face floated angelically before me as well. I could still feel myself inside her.

Deeply disappointed that that sensation was just a memory, I rose from the bed, sensing that my normal energy levels had returned, albeit dampened by the gold well. That was good and bad. Interestingly, the heaviness of my body proved that my memories of Atlantea weren’t just a dream – my muscles had clearly been well down the path of adapting to living super.

Walking out onto my balcony as I stretched, I inhaled the mouth-watering aromas of home rising from the kitchen below. Bacon, coffee and eggs. Waffles too. My adopted mother, Alur’a, had always cooked an Earth-like breakfast for me, finding it a joy to cook for someone who relished food and didn’t just eat enough to get their trace nutrients. She was training herself to become a chef in one of the rare gourmet restaurants on Velor, and I was her principle guide and critic.

I saw movement in the shadow of the adjacent balcony, and turned to see my adoptive sister, Mari’anne, walk outside to begin her morning stretching exercises. She was only fifteen, but she was a P2, and she was already taller and far stronger than me. With her mature figure, she could have passed for eighteen back on Earth.

She turned to look at me with incredibly bright eyes, her skin and hair glowing orange from the sunrise, and crossed her arms to pull her sleep top off, revealing the pert breasts of a girl becoming a woman.

Instead of complimenting her on her improving figure as a Velorian brother might have done, I turned away and blushed slightly. This was just another one of her endless teases to get me to think and act more like a Velorian and less like a Terran.

She smiled coolly at my averted gaze as she started her stretching. “You’re thinking like a Terran this morning, Ben.”

Mari’anne was an expert on that subject, for she planned to become a Scribe. She was studying everything there was on Terrans, and had been picking my brain since I arrived. She couldn’t wait to leave Velor and live in the far reaches of the universe. She wanted to live on a seeded world that was struggling to remain free of the Empire.

She and Alur’a were struggling over that, with Alur’a believing that the Council was throwing young women’s lives away for no reason. Like any mother, she loved her daughter too much to want her to leave.

“Where’d you go anyway, Ben?” Mari’anne asked while bending herself double, pressing her chin against her knees to restore her modesty. “Mom was really worried when you didn’t come home the last few nights.”

I shrugged as I turned back her way, but said nothing.

“I told her you probably found a girlfriend. Finally.”

I couldn’t suppress a smile as Mari’anne stood back upright, putting her hands on her hips as she began to stretch from side to side. My smug expression told her more than I wanted it to.

“Okay! About time, bro,” she laughed with a maturity that belied her years. “Mom didn’t believe me. She still worries about Arion infiltrators and Skietra knows what.

The daughter of a friend of Alur’a’s had been killed in that Tset’lar attack years ago, and Alur’a had never fully recovered from the shock. If she knew I’d been knocked out by a couple of Arions, she’d freak.

“But next time, tell her before you go. Okay?”

Next time? I wondered as I looked upward, wishing I could see the sliver of moon that was Atlantea. Had my life really changed again? Or were these last days destined to become but a fading memory?

I wouldn’t allow that to happen, for even now, the memory of Ivy and Bently’s enthusiasm awakened my passion. Whatever Kath’a had done out of compassion to save me, it didn’t seem to have worn off. I felt more vital than ever before.

I turned my head to see Mari’anne staring down at my profile in the shadows, her eyes sparkling as she looked impressed for the first time. “Wow! Is that how a guy gets after he finally starts getting some? Bigger… like all the time?”

Cursing, I quickly covered myself and turned my back to her again, her comments sending another surge of heat racing through me. It was bad enough that she kept extending that open invitation to me, but even worse with me standing out here with my flagpole extended. “You don’t have any shame do you?”

She just laughed. When it came to sex, we both knew that concept didn’t exist on Velor.

I struggled to remember exactly what Kath’a had done to me, but after that first wondrous rush of pleasure, I drew a complete blank. She’d said something about unstable DNA. I decided I would ask Mary about it later, but my guess was that a bit of her DNA had crossed over along with all the energy she’d poured into me.

After that, I figure she put me in the shuttle where I was further tranked along with everyone else. Mary must have met the shuttle on Velor and brought me home without anyone knowing. After all, as part of her practicing to be a Scribe, Mari’anne made sure she knew everything that happened in our house, so she must have been sound asleep.

Mari’anne paused in the midst of a long stretch to smile, and I heard her sniff. Then again. The morning breeze was blowing a hint of my arousal her way. She licked her lips, and one eyebrow lifted as she dissected the scents.

“No just a girl, but several. Two… no three. Damn! And you never took me up on my offer.”

“I told you I don’t know how many times, Mari’anne. I don’t swing that way.”

“You and your silly Terran hang-ups. But the hell with that, you’ve got to tell me all about it, Ben. Was it a foursome?”

“Not a word. Not on your life.”

She pouted as she continued her stretching. “That’s not fair, Ben. Everyone talks about their ex’tosy.”

“Just chalk it up to more of my Terran weirdness,” I said, surprised to find that I really didn’t care any more. I was Terran, I always would be, and there was no reason for me to go through life regretting something I couldn’t change.

Instead, I let my thoughts drift further away, slipping warmly into the future. I was home again, but now I had some real friends. People who liked me for what I was instead of despising me for what I wasn’t. They weren’t on Velor, but I had known from the start that my fate would not be to live on this golden planet forever.

“I’m going to take that transfer, Mari,” I said after a few minutes. “To that school outside the city.”

“About time. Hanging out with those P1’s isn’t good for anyone’s ego.” Being a P2, she’d run into her own brand of Protector versus Scribe prejudice. She might be #2 from the top of the totem pole with me at the bottom, but nobody likes to be looked down upon.

My thoughts reached comfortingly out toward the more distant future. Perhaps… just perhaps… Mary would find a way for me to join one of the government agencies that helped ordinary Velorians live off the planet. Maybe I could learn to be the bridge that connected Terran and Velorian cultures on worlds were both of them lived. Maybe Mari’anne and I might wind up on the same world someday.

And maybe, if I were really lucky, I would see Kath’a, Ivy and Bently again. They wanted to leave Atlantea. I wanted to leave Velor.

There was a whole universe out there.

Waiting for us.

The End