I didn’t divide it into 2 sections like I did the other parts, since nobody appreciated the extra efforts I took to shorten it anyway. The people who like my stories don’t care how long they are, as they simply download them and read them at their own leisure. In fact, the webmaster of this site once e-mailed me and told me that I was free to write stories of ANY file size (I could put the entire book into ONE file if I wanted). So stop your wimpy whining about the length, and just enjoy it! (Jeez!)
The Adventures of Béla, the Vampire Girl
Book 4: Time Walker
Part 4
Chapter 1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lisa stretched her wings, gliding now that she’d gained some altitude. Her arms, wings, rather, were burning from the hard usage she forced on them to gain this much height. She was breathing heavily from her exertion and not paying attention to where she was or who might be watching. She sailed over a gorge, enjoying a free updraft for a moment, then banked and began her watch, looking out over the ranges and the forest, checking for anyone who might be out there.
The little flitter flashed by less than twenty meters over her head, descending down toward a small mountain lake. Lisa tumbled head over heels as the sudden turbulence flipped her over, tearing the thinly stretched flesh along her rib cage.
Stretching her wings as wide as she could, Lisa tried to regain control of her spin, but her wings kept folding back because of her increasing spiral descent and her muscles simply weren’t strong enough to hold her wings steady.
‘Mac’s right!’ she realized, angrily giving up and folding her wings back into arms. ‘I’m soft and out of shape!’
Lisa knew she was lazy, preferring to teleport and levitate rather than do anything physical, like actually fly using her wings. To keep her body trim, she would simply flame and rematerialize. Poof! No excess fat! Simple… but she couldn’t make her body stronger by doing that. She could only make it leaner. She looked good, but didn’t have any stamina. At times like this, she needed stamina.
She plummeted downward for another minute, mentally searching for the craft that had almost struck her. She found it, and watched as it erratically descended toward a mountain lake. It was a tiny two-seat sport flitter built to get around in large cities, never intended to travel any distance. And this one was hauling a glide trailer! It was seriously under-powered for what it was being used for. Lisa located the empty seat beside the pilot and teleported.
Rematerializing next to the overwrought pilot, she turned to him, grinning, and said, “Hi! Overfly any giant condors lately?” The man jumped, jerking back on the controls and putting his craft into a steep climb.
“You should probably roll out before you stall or something,” Lisa added, sounding bored. “You could crash, you know.”
“What the fuck!” the man exclaimed. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
‘Christ! She naked!’
Then he was too busy trying to steer as his craft as began to sway wildly with the weight of the attached trailer. The flitter lurched to the left, suddenly, and the engine went very quiet.
“Shit!” the pilot cried, finally straightening out. “We’re not gonna make it. We’re too heavy! Comin’ down too fast!”
Lisa watched the wild images he was broadcasting in his fear and frustration. To save himself, he could detach the trailer hitch and let the trailer glide down until it crashed into the side of the mountain. He was completely unwilling to do that, even to save himself. His pregnant wife and her twin sister were in there.
Lisa held onto her seat as the flitter again lurched one way, then the other as the unstable trailer reacted to a sudden updraft. She peered around to the left so she could see the pilot’s panel. The powerless craft started to tilt down as the trailer ascended, raising the rear of the flitter, and she lost her balance, fell across the seat and squashed her bare tits into his lap.
“Open the aft-burners!” she cried, trying to push herself back up.
“There’s nothing to burn!” Roland cried back. “I’ve got just enough to soft-land!”
They were plummeting down more rapidly now, the increasing speed and the internal giros keeping the craft more or less level.
Lisa straightened up and looked at the panel. The airspeed indicator read 335 kph. The direction was forty degrees down. The craft was starting to tilt the other way and the engines were delivering absolutely no power for guidance. Any landing they made wasn’t going to be soft.
“This thing’ll never soft-land!” she exclaimed. “You’re dropping too fast!”
Stretching out past the pilot’s shoulder, Lisa flipped the after-burner switch. The remaining fuel was sucked into the twin ramjets and vaporized, giving them a three second burst of power, just enough to stabilize them and level out. Then it was quiet and they were beginning to drop again.
“You Asshole!” the pilot screamed. “You just used up all the fuel! We’re gonna crash!”
Lisa wasn’t paying attention. She was concentrating on the ignition chamber inside the ramjet. Then the ramjet burst into life as Lisa created a tiny ball of fire inside the ignition chamber from the nuclear energy stored in her mind.
They were both pushed against the backs of their seats as the engine suddenly fired with more power that it ever had originally. Now there was enough power in the engine to control both the craft and the trailer. The pilot pulled up, dropping off most of the downward and forward speed. He didn’t understand it, but he knew that somehow, this naked, dark-haired girl sitting next to him was doing something to make the engines work with no fuel. He dared to turn and stare at her for an instant. Her eyes were squeezed shut in concentration.
‘Hurry!’ he heard her cry out in his mind. ‘Something wrong! It’s getting too hot!’
He glanced at the engine temperature readout. It was three thousand degrees and climbing. Stutter jets weren’t meant to run at that temperature. The entire craft could catch fire. He suddenly realized that the power he was feeling in the engines was constant. That was why the jet was getting so hot. There was no airflow between the bursts of fuel to cool it down. There was just a steady flow of exploded fuel. The aft-burner could actually melt under these conditions.
They were almost down, now. The airspeed indicator was reading 75 kph and dropping. He adjusted the controls to a twenty-degree descent and aimed at the shoreline a few hundred meters ahead. The surface of the lake was coming up really fast!
“Brace for impact!” he yelled into the intercom.
The little craft hit the water belly first and bounced. Pulling as hard as he could, the pilot strove to keep the nose up. They bounced again. The power was gone out of the engines now that Lisa’s concentration was broken. On the third bounce, they were going too slow and the nose dove in beneath the water and struck the sandy bottom. Lisa watched the trailer glide by overhead as it broke free from its hitch and narrowly missed the rear of the flitter. It was gliding into the trees.
“No!” the pilot cried in anguish, watching it float by, almost in slow motion. “God! Please! No!”
Lisa teleported into the trailer. Two females were being bounced around violently as there were no seats in the glide trailer. They were desperately trying to bury themselves in a pile of clothing for protection against the coming impact.
Lisa teleported outside levitating above the gliding trailer and created a fiery force field in front of it and let the trailer fly into it, forming an energy field around the skin of the trailer. The trailer continued on into the tree line, the force field coating its surface slicing through every obstacle that threatened to damage the craft. It dropped into a clearing two hundred meters further in and came to rest against the cliff face of the mountain.
Grinning with self-satisfaction, Lisa teleported back to where the pilot was. The other craft had pivoted around on its nose and beached on the shoreline, miraculously still upright.
The pilot stared at the sheared off trees the trailer had vanished into. His grief flooded the little craft.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Lisa said softly, “You’re safe now.”
“No,” he replied, his voice barely audible. “You don’t understand. They were in the trailer. Over there. It hit the trees and… and it…”
He dropped his head down against the stick, overwhelmed with his loss.
Lisa sighed and looked at him. “Everybody’s okay! They didn’t crash. The trailer landed in a clearing on the other side of the trees.”
“What?” the man said, disbelieving, but needing to hear that his little family was all right. “Clearing?”
“Yep!” Lisa brightly agreed. “A clearing. Over there.”
She pointed toward the swath of sliced trees.
The pilot looked up at her. She was kneeling in the copilot’s seat with her head bent against the overhead air shield. He suddenly reached up and grabbed the girl’s right tit, squeezing hard.
“Ow!” Lisa yelped. “Hey, asshole!” She slapped his hand away, then gently held her breast up with her hand. “That hurt, you shit!”
“You’re real!” the pilot murmured, leaving his hand hanging in the air where Lisa had slapped it.
She suddenly realized he was in a state of shock. He still thought the trailer was lost and everyone else was dead.
She reached down and stroked the side of his head to comfort him. The man took her gesture as an invitation to wrap his arms around her naked waist and hug her tightly, digging his unshaven chin into her soft belly.
Lisa sighed as her body responded to his gouging whiskers and all the excitement of the last few minutes and moaned her pleasure to him. He began kissing and licking her stomach and hips, mumbling to himself.
“Oh, God! You’re okay! I was so scared… so scared, baby,” he kept saying, over and over.
He reached her bare cunt and stopped. ‘There’s no hair down there!’
Lisa heard his shocked thought resonate through her. The man looked up at her with his mouth open, more than a little confused.
“Right idea, wrong girl,” Lisa grinned down at him. “But you can continue if you want. It felt really good – what you were doing…”
The man stared up at her, still in shock, not understanding what had happened.
Lisa gave his head a gentle nudge toward her crotch, wanting him to continue what he’d started.
“Don’t stop now,” she complained. “You owe me for saving those two blondes in the trailer!”
“My wife!” he exclaimed, suddenly jumping up. “I’ve got to find her!”
He shoved Lisa back and crawled over her legs to the door.
“Hey!” Lisa yelped as his knee dug into the inside of one thigh and an elbow poked into a tit. “That’s all right. Just crawl right over me!”
The door opened and the pilot nearly fell out.
“Roland, why is there a naked girl in there with you?” someone asked irately from behind Lisa.
Lisa moaned and tried to straighten up.
“I’m Lisa,” she said, looking over her shoulder to the blonde standing outside the door. “This bumble-fuck here knocked me out of the air back there and I hitched a ride down.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Roland, the pilot, asked, now that he realized that they were all alive after all.
“I’m Lisa,” Lisa repeated candidly. “Maybe you remember seeing me – big condor – flying? You nearly tore my wings off!”
Roland wasn’t speaking. He was just staring. At her. Specifically, at her breasts. The blond woman swatted him behind his head. It seemed to help his mind begin processing data again.
“Where’s your flying gear?” he asked, stunned. “How did you get in here, anyway?”
Lisa shrugged. Maybe she would show him her flying ‘gear’ later, but she really didn’t know what to say to his questions. She’d simply acted on impulse, teleporting into the little flitter to complain about his driving.
“And how did you get the engines running again?” he asked, as another question occurred to him. “And how did the trailer land like that?”
“My turn,” Lisa said, started to get annoyed. “Why are you flying over restricted air space? This land is private property under the protection of Tomlin Security. I work for them, so it’s me where I belong and you trespassing!”
She smiled at him, watching his mind process her words. Now he was interested in something besides her tits.
“I’m not trespass…” he began, then changed his mind. “Look, we’re just trying to get out of Denver and find a place to hide. I remembered this lake where my family used to come when I was a kid. It was part of a National Forest back then. I didn’t know it was private property now.”
“What’s so private about this wilderness?” the girl asked, interrupting. “Is there some kind of secret base in the mountains somewhere?”
Lisa laughed. Solar City wasn’t exactly a secret base. It just wasn’t advertised. It would be impossible to hide a whole town, even an underground one. Simple logistics would get in the way. Food, fuel and other materials were constantly coming in. Raw ore was being constantly shipped out.
There were several major industries in the little town – Mining was the main industry as it paid for the construction of the new NorAmCo Airframes plant and the thousands of electronic parts that go into building a spaceship.
Camden Research and Development, the corporation which had purchased NASA, had just completed a working model of a magnetic drive thruster similar to the planet-sized magnetic drives situated, one at each pole, in New Eden. Béla’s Praetor, along with additional schooling in electromagnetic engineering, provided the new engineering concepts for the design and development of the new ship.
“Solar City is no secret,” Lisa replied. “But it is underground. Those shiny-looking panels on the mountaintops are our power source. It’s important to maintain some increased level of security, these days. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yeah, well,” the girl said sarcastically. “But you? Guarding those solar panels? You’re just a naked girl out here in the woods. What can you do?”
“I fuck the trespassers and convince them to go away,” Lisa replied jokingly, ignoring the girl’s sarcasm.
The girl was just scared, she realized, and was acting defensive to cover it up.
“Male or female, I’m not fussy,” she concluded, only half-jesting. That blonde was really pretty.
Lisa pushed her way out of the little flitter and dropped to the ground, took a deep breath and stretched her arms over her head, displaying her entire, beautifully naked, slender form.
The mountain air smelled fresh and alive. The quiet breeze whispering through the trees and the sounds of the birds belied the stress and danger that they all had just endured.
“You guys got any plans?” Lisa asked the girl, looking in her mind to see what was going on in there.
The girl was one half of a set of twins – sisters. Her name was Ember. Her sister’s name was Amber and was the one married to Roland. Amber was also pregnant, which was why she’d invited Ember to move in with her and Roland in Denver. Roland’s ability to impregnate Amber was what made him so attractive to the twins. Fertile, healthy men were getting hard to find, and the twins agreed long before they found this one that they would share whoever they found with the other.
“No, no plans,” Ember replied, uncertain of how much she should say to this naked young girl intruding into their lives.
They had no idea how trustworthy she was, or if she was at all. But Ember was also confused. She seemed to be able to see right into the mind of the naked girl she’d caught her sister’s husband with. She realized that Roland, for once, was completely innocent and that this strange girl had tried to seduce him. Ember could understand why Roland was reluctant to leave the flitter. This girl was the most alluring female she’d ever met.
Lisa smiled at the blonde, reading her thoughts. She realized that her mental shields were down and Ember was latently Empathic, like most twins. Suddenly the blond girl kissed her.
“I get the idea that you saved us,” Ember said, suddenly embarrassed and releasing her from the kiss. “What can we do to repay you?”
Lisa was really feeling frustrated, now. She’d been kissed and hugged by two very attractive people, now. She was game for lots more.
“Well,” Lisa replied, trying to behave rationally with her body starting to go hormonally postal. “We could finish that kiss…”
She looked at the blonde hopefully. She could feel Roland standing to one side, watching intently. He was secretly hoping something exciting would happen between the two. Ember was, after all, a pretty wild child.
Then he radiated his pleasure, strong enough for Lisa to feel. Ember was moving toward her, her lips pursed for another kiss.
“I’ll get a blanket!” he said, trying not to sound too excited.
Ember was easily turned off by his vulgar desires and would often spite him by refusing to continue with whatever he so badly wanted her to do.
Lisa happily puckered up to receive her kiss, putting her hands on the blonde’s hips as she did so and pulling her closer. She left her mind open so that they could both share their emotions and sensations.
“Wow!” Ember murmured after a moment. “I never had it feel like that with someone else!”
She moved her hands up and began massaging Lisa’s bare breasts, curious about how the feedback would feel in her own mind. She chuckled low in her throat as she felt Lisa’s body respond.
“This is like touching Amber,” Ember said, smiling at her. “I can feel her, too. But I’ve never been able to feel anyone else. Are you a twin?”
“Hum?” Lisa asked, realizing she would have to recover from her emotional saturation at least enough to vocalize some kind of response.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I mean, no. I’m just…” She thought for a moment. “I’m just special that way…”
She went back to kissing the sexy blonde. Roland wanted to join and put his arms around both of them.
“Go find your wife,” Ember said, almost sneering at him.
Then she saw in Lisa’s mind that Lisa didn’t mind him being there and changed her mind. She kissed her sister’s husband and then pushed him down on the blanket. Both girls dropped down beside him, one on each side as Lisa caught on to the sexual torture Ember had planned for him.
Ember and Lisa, both on their knees, now, formed a luscious structure of female flesh over Roland and continued their interrupted kissing. Lisa began unbuttoning Ember’s front, having to slap Roland’s hands away a couple of times when he tried to help.
After a moment, Ember’s breasts were free and the girls pressed closer to each other, each rubbing their nipples against the other’s. They both giggled into each other’s mouths as Roland stared at the incredible scene above him. They could actually hear him salivate.
Then Ember’s hands were traveling lower, caressing Lisa’s sides and hips. Lisa scooted forward, offering her pelvis to the luscious blonde and moaned as a hand disappeared between her legs. In return for the pleasure she was receiving, Lisa began caressing the blonde’s magnificent breasts, still in ‘feedback’ mode so that each could feel the other’s sensations.
Ember jumped, mildly surprised, when Roland decided to get in on the action and pushed his hand up between her legs. Lisa was so amused by Ember’s annoyed reaction to Roland’s invasive hand that Ember decided to let him stay there with his hand playing between her legs.
‘He’s such a crummy lover!’ Ember complained mentally. ‘He doesn’t even know where my clit is! The one man in the last two years that’s still fertile, and he can’t fuck worth a fuck!’
‘So, show him!’ Lisa thought back at her, marvelously amused. ‘He’s a man. He can be trained. Just show him your bodacious ta-ta’s and he’ll do anything you say.’
Image of her life-mate, Macario, making love to her, touching her in exactly all the right places.
‘Holy shit!’ Ember thought back, stunned. ‘I came just from watching him fuck you! I’ve got to fuck him! Can I? Please? I’ll let you fuck Roland…’
“Ow!” Ember yelped, as Roland managed to miss her vaginal opening as he gouged his finger in and out of her. “Can’t you get…”
Then she remembered. ‘Training – He’s a man. He can be trained.’
Lisa sat back and watched, laughing to herself as Ember spread her legs, showing Roland, probably for the first time ever, what she liked and what she didn’t like. Ember was sounding a little sarcastic, but, Lisa realized, if the lesson took and he improved, she’d be more willing to explain next time.
Now Ember was practically purring as Roland slipped his fingers back and forth, massaging her pussy lips instead of gouging his fingers into her.
“A little higher,” she crooned. “Oh, yes! That’s nice! That’s my little love knob – my clit. It just loves to be touched.”
She was quivering, her stomach muscles contracting beautifully as she responded to Roland’s previously despised touch. She suddenly remembered Lisa and went back to kissing and fondling her new friend.
A moment later, Roland had both his hands on both their pussies and the girls were writhing above him, locked into their passionate kiss and moaning loudly. Their sexual sensations raged back and forth between them, reflected from one to the other and back again. Even Roland was receiving some of the feedback and was completely absorbed by the incredible sexuality of what was happening.
The girls came simultaneously, crying their orgasms out to each other and embracing tightly. They both collapsed down on top of Roland, who immediately began kissing Ember, embracing her tightly. Lisa, collapsing the other way, found herself staring at Roland’s pants. They were stretched to the limit, trying to hold his cock as it pointed straight up, tenting his trousers.
Lisa giggled, then began running her nails up and down the length of the penis hidden and yet so visible beneath the coarse fabric. She heard Roland moan with pleasure and was surprised to notice that Ember now included Roland in her mind, still linked with Lisa’s. The three of them were now experiencing each other’s sensations.
Between the two girls, they managed to relieve Roland of his pants. Ember’s hot little pussy claimed his dick first, sinking down onto it with almost no preamble at all.
Lisa sat back and watched, noticing that Ember was trying to work things out in her mind as she humped up and down – her feelings of jealously toward her sister for being the one married to Roland, her feelings of inadequacy because her sister was the one that was pregnant. She desperately hoped that Roland would make her pregnant today.
There was one thing that made Ember feel better, though. Now that she could see Roland’s mind, she realized that he loved her as much as he loved his wife – her sister. She didn’t need to feel jealous about that any more.
As her legs started to burn with all the humping, Ember lay down on top of Roland, swiveling her hips around more that she was bouncing on him now. She realized that this was even nicer – her clit was rubbing against his hairy pelvis down there. In another moment, she was coming – her first orgasm ever with Roland. Before this, she could only orgasm with her sister and had been jealous of the fact that her sister didn’t have the same problem.
As Roland felt her twitch, he realized that she was actually coming. He began thrusting upward, trying to get deeper into her pussy, trying to make her come harder. Then he was coming, pumping his seed into her. They clung desperately to each other, grinding their pelvises against each other almost painfully, hoping that maybe now Ember was pregnant, too.
Lisa sat back, overwhelmed by the desires the two of them were sharing with her. She had no idea that the need to be impregnated could be so… erotic. It almost made her want to go fly with Macario. Her body tensed and trembled as she orgasmed at the thought of Macario’s seed taking root inside her, sharing her sensations with the pair fornicating madly right in front of her.
The two lovers, Roland and Ember, collapsed, their energies depleted completely by their newfound ardor for each other.
“Why’d you leave Denver?” Lisa asked, after a few moments. “Are things getting bad there, too?”
“Well, living in Denver’s been pretty bad for a while, now,” Ember replied. “But lately, entire city blocks have come under gang attack. People were being burned to death in their own homes. We had to leave.”
Lisa could see in her mind that Ember was worried about her folks. They had to leave them behind, there not being enough room in the tiny flitter that was already seriously overloaded with the glide trailer. Lisa’s additional weight when she’d teleported aboard was all it took to make the craft too unstable to fly.
“Where are your folks?” Lisa asked, unable to get a good image in the girl’s increasingly upset mind.
Ember was starting to feel guilty about enjoying the afternoon’s romp while her parents might be in the process of getting murdered.
“I don’t know,” Ember replied. “They were… they were going to try leaving overland – by car, I mean.”
“What do you do for a living?” Lisa wanted to know, changing the subject to get Ember to relax a little.
“Well, I… Amber and me – we’re dancers,” Ember said, glad to talk about something else.
Lisa caught images of the type of dancing they did and grinned at her.
“My mom owned a strip joint, once,” Lisa volunteered, letting Ember know that she wasn’t judging her from some snobbishly superior point of view. “What’s Roland do?”
“Roland?” Ember thought for a moment.
Neither sister really knew him that well, although they’d been together for almost a year now. They were simply doing their personal best to keep the human race going.
“Well,” Ember finally decided. “He’s kind of a ‘fix-it’ guy. He repairs stuff. He got that old wreck of a flyer going so we could get out of there before everything blew up.”
She was referring to what had happened in Arlington and Washington, D.C. a few weeks earlier. Mass riots, burning, looting and shooting ran rampant in the nation’s old capital, coming to an end suddenly when someone detonated a nuclear device, wiping out most of the remaining population in both cities.
“Hey, Sis!” someone yelled tiredly from not too far off. “Y’all have fun without the old draggin’ queen tagging along?”
It was the other sister – the pregnant one – waddling across the clearing toward them.
“Hey,” Ember called out. “We got company.”
She indicated the dark-haired naked girl standing next to her.
“Yeah!” I noticed,” Amber called back. “I could feel you guys’ little orgy all the way back in the trailer.”
She looked at Lisa and nodded. It suddenly occurred to Lisa that she might have been snooping while everyone else was having orgasms.
“Get anything from Mom and Dad?” Amber asked. “You think they made it out?”
Ember just shook her head, feeling more miserable by the minute.
“What about your mom and dad?” Lisa asked. “What do they do?”
“Mom and Dad,” Ember replied. “Well, they’re retired. Dad was an engineer at Northrop, but they’re out of business, now. God, I hope they’re all right. I hope they got out. Have you heard anything about…”
She stopped, realizing a naked girl in the Colorado wilderness probably wouldn’t be up to date on current events.
Lisa shook her head. “No. I haven’t heard anything.”
She noticed that there was enough of a psychic connection between the two twins and their parents that she could follow it to Denver. She lay back on the edge of the blanket and closed her eyes so she could concentrate better.
‘Think about your folks,’ she thought into both the twins’ minds. ‘Where might they be? Don’t imagine – just look…’
Lisa could see the girls’ parents now, and so could the twins. They were stranded in ground traffic jamming what had once been a lovely, winding eight-lane highway leading out of the city. Now, the freeway was jammed with vehicles, some of which were burning. Nothing was moving except people. They were running around in every direction – reminding Lisa of an anthill.
‘How did you do that?’ Ember wanted to know.
Amber was, surprisingly quiet. She seemed unsurprised at Lisa’s capabilities, confirming Lisa’s suspicion that Amber had snooped in her mind while she and the rest of her little family happily fucked each others brains out.
‘My God! They’re in trouble!’ Ember cried out in both the other girls’ minds.
There were half a dozen hoodlums smashing car windows, assaulting and terrifying people.
‘Want to see what else I can do?’ Lisa asked them both.
Ember was already astounded at her new experience. Amber waited patiently for Lisa to show them. Lisa frowned and torched each hoodlum as she determined which of them were actually terrorizing the Normals on that distant, jammed up highway. It happened so quickly that none of them even screamed. They just flashed into powder.
Both twins watched as their mother, no longer threatened, climbed cautiously out of the car, then rushed to where her husband had been dragged and beaten. Lisa smiled at the convenience of not having to teleport the entire vehicle and pulled them both into the teleportation zone once they were together.
They were both screaming in terror as she pushed them out into the clearing next to Roland’s crashed flitter.
“Okay,” she said, grinning to both the astounded twins. “Your folks are safe. I’ll be going now.”
Forming her wings, she leaped up, beating the air furiously, and flew off over their heads. As she left, she shielded her mind so they were no longer capable of sharing her special abilities. As soon as she was certain she was no longer being observed, either physically or mentally, she teleported back to Solar City.
“Hi,” Macario said cheerfully as Lisa appeared in her living room. “S’up?”
“There’s squatters at Chalk Lake,” Lisa replied, dropping down on the couch. “Denver’s burning, and thousands of refugees are gonna be crawling all over the hills by tomorrow.”
“Not everybody will come here, will they?” Mac asked, concerned. “We can’t feed much more than the population we have – especially if the trucks stop running.”
He knew there was enough canned goods to last the entire community several years if it became necessary to isolate them from the rest of the world. It was his job, after all, to maintain and increase their inventory of perishable goods. And he was good at his job.
“Well, we knew it would come to this,” Lisa said, sounding helpless and upset. “I suppose we should call a board meeting. It’s crisis time.”
Chapter 2 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The board meeting was essentially the same as one of the Tabor clan’s family forums. The same people were there, only more of them, now that Solar City was fully operational. It lasted almost an hour; plans made several years ago now being put into effect.
Assignments were given to the Femme Fatales and Tomlin Security, which had relocated to Solar City several years ago with the collapse of the Supreme Board of Directors.
The main entrance into the underground community was Tabatha’s new home for the duration. With her ‘timeslip’ shield capabilities, she was the strongest defense for the city’s most vulnerable entry point. Every vehicle entering the city would have to be inspected from now on. Refugees would only be allowed if they had something to contribute – preferably skills, now that the city’s primary source of wealth, raw ore, was becoming redundantly valueless as there was less and less civilization capable of processing it into something useful.
Tanya was ‘backup’, now that Tabatha had a point position at the entrance into the mountain. Béla and Lisa, both capable of independent flight, were assigned reconnaissance. It was their job to keep the solar panels and everything outside their mountain stronghold secure.
The security guards provided by Tomlin were more of a military unit, now, and were stationed around the perimeter of the newly constructed launch platform for the space capsules still being tested on the ground. The platform was a two-mile long railed ramp running up the backside of the mountain the city was located beneath. It was completely camouflaged, undetectable by spy-satellites and hard to recognize for what it was even standing next to it on the ground.
Surprisingly few people came into the mountains from Denver. The city didn’t blow up and most people decided it was easier to live together in squalor than to make their way somewhere else. The news from everywhere was bad, so it didn’t seem to make sense to pick up and leave just to discover how much worse off you could become.
The first space capsule was launched two months later. After that, construction of new capsules was proceeding at the rate of one every six months. Once in space, the capsules were attached to each other, creating a space station that would eventually become the ship that would take them all to a better place.
Over the next ten years, a magnetic drive was perfected that would power the orbiting space station-slash-spaceship. During that same period, a ‘transport’ device was developed using alien technology; actually hooking the Praetor up to two ‘cyclotrons’, one on the orbiting station and one in Solar City.
No technology on Earth could compare to a Praetor’s microminiaturized ‘living’ brain to enable personnel to move instantaneously back and forth from the space station to the town. This was the same technology that had been used on the great ship for emergency transporting of personnel. Now, the space capsules only handled items that were too large for the transporter.
By now, there were probably less than a billion people left on earth. The remnants of the coastal cities were flooding as the polar ice caps melted. There were three major areas of civilization still extant, of which Montreal in Canada was the hub on the North American continent. The rest was a wilderness of ruined cities and towns where roving bands of marauders raided and stole what they needed to survive from each other.
The largest of these bands, calling itself the Confederacy, was beginning to establish order in what had been the southern states. It was, from information gleaned from refugees, a harsh, militant group determined to insure the survival of mankind even if they had to kill every last dissident alive. Volunteering in their ever-growing army was a sure way of ensuring that you would be fed and your family would be taken care of. Despite its harsh, militaristic rule, it was very popular, offering itself as the only viable salvation for mankind.
Surprisingly, most of the army was put to use farming and constructing underground shelters. There was no fuel for machinery, so everything was done manually, including plowing and cultivating crops. With the amount of organized manpower involved, it became relatively successful in a dying world.
Unfortunately, there was nothing that Solar City could offer the Confederacy or the Montreal district in exchange for food or produce. There wasn’t enough room on the ship being constructed in orbit to hold more than the population inside their mountain stronghold and with all the abandoned machinery covering the planet, raw, unprocessed ore had no real value.
“IT’S EMPTY!” Jackie yelled, as loud as she could.
“Empty-empty-mpty-pty-ty-y” echoed through the round, twenty-meter-wide cylinders making up this section of the space station. Part of Jackie’s self-created job, along with Béla’s Praetor, was to design the insides of this giant donut of a ship into a habitable cocoon for a townful of people.
Right in the center, attached to the space station with high-grade steel conduits and causeways, was where the Magnetic Drive would go. In the center of the ship, it would magnetically affect all parts of the ship equally, causing less stress on the ship’s structure during maneuvering. The living quarters would be in the two center sections, with eight sections surrounding them to provide protection from radiation.
Unlike the ‘old ones’ great ship, this small tubular station had no artificial gravity plating. The elements needed for gravity plating didn’t exist in this solar system except for whatever might be left in the wreckage of the great ship, wherever it might be drifting, now.
If someone wanted to make gravity plating, they would have to catch a quasar, where most of the anti-gravity, anti-matter elements resided in this universe. The more practical method was simply to duplicate quasar conditions in a laboratory and recreate those elements, which was what the old race had done. But that was far beyond the capabilities of mankind, even with the Praetor’s knowledge of how it could be done. There was simply too large a gap in technological capabilities between the two civilizations.
Incoming traffic, the Praetor announced in the minds of everyone aboard the space station.
Several people suddenly appeared on the transport platform, along with pallets of building material and some machinery. Jackie was surprised to see Béla among the people climbing down from the platform.
‘Okay,’ Béla thought at the Praetor, loud enough for Jackie to hear, as well. ‘I’ve even done it now, and I still don’t understand it! How did I get here?’
Béla honestly tried, but she was unable to fathom how the Praetor transported solid objects from one point in the physical universe to another. She remembered the first time she ever saw a Praetor transport something. It was such an alien concept that she believed that the person transported had been horribly vaporized at her request.
‘The circuitry is called a ‘Focal Press’,’ the Praetor replied, sounding somewhat superior. ‘The theory behind it is that matter is simply energy suspended in space and shaped by tremendous forces acting against it, causing the energy particles to bond with other similar particles gravitationally and electro-magnetically.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Béla thought back at it, perplexed. ‘What kind of force can turn energy into matter? And why does it ‘bond’?’
‘The amount of force required is more that can be applied with the physical universe in its present state. However, the theory enabled the construction of the Focal Press, and the device works.’
‘But,’ Béla wanted to know, ‘how does it work?’
‘The Focal Press takes the outermost particles of the object to be transported and collapses them down into a single central point. The rest of the particles follow suite. It is not entirely understood why this occurs, but it has something to do with how particles bond to each other. This ‘single point’ is then transmitted to a distant cyclotron, which fires it against a barrier at the speed of light. The single point containing all the particles of the object passes through the barrier and reconstitutes back into a solid object.’
‘But, why?’ Béla asked. This device was simply beyond her understanding of the physical universe. It simply violated too many natural laws. ‘If I were to take, for example, a pallet of bricks and transport them somewhere, what happens to the mass and weight of all those bricks?’
‘To begin with,’ the Praetor stated, and it was definitely being haughty with her, now, ‘a brick doesn’t have enough internal structure to maintain its integrity during transport. It will revert into its original material. Highly refined metals and living tissues are the most resilient materials to transport, maintaining almost one hundred percent integrity.’
‘You mean stuff gets lost during transport?’ Béla asked, incredulous. ‘Somebody could lose a kidney or something?’
‘You may lose a few atoms of material,’ the Praetor replied. ‘It is of no consequence. Your question was regarding mass. Do you still require an answer?’
‘Yes, please,’ very contrite.
‘Mass has nothing to do with the object being transported,’ the Praetor replied. ‘The compressed particle being transmitted doesn’t weigh anything. You can transmit an elephant as easily as you can transmit a feather.’
‘But,’ Béla always got confused on this point, ‘where does the mass go?’
‘Unknown,’ the Praetor admitted, finally. ‘It has been hypothesized that mass is an illusion of sensory perception. An alternate theory is that ‘mass’ occurred sometime after the creation of the universe, stabilizing the universe forever into its current ‘mass = energy’ status.’
‘What about E=MC squared?’ Béla asked. ‘Some Earther figured that out a couple hundred years ago. Is it right or wrong? Are you talking about the same thing?’
‘Yes, and no,’ the Praetor replied. ‘The ‘squared’ is not a necessary part of the formula. It works, regardless.’
‘Okay, then, where does the mass go?’ Béla asked, certain of her facts, now.
‘There is no mass in a single point,’ the Praetor insisted. ‘All single points weigh the same – nothing.’
Once again, Béla felt defeated. The way she understood how a Focal Press worked was that it simply didn’t follow the natural laws of the universe. It operated outside the physical universe.
‘Very good, child,’ the Praetor responded. ‘That is correct.’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Béla thought, disgusted with the whole subject.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” Jackie asked, walking up to Béla.
“It’s frustrating!” Béla replied. “I don’t understand it!”
“Well,” Jacked laughed, “You haven’t managed to teach me how to teleport, either. But I would like to make a comparison to, maybe, demonstrate a hypothesis regarding your question about mass.”
“Okay,” Béla replied, closing her eyes in expectation of a mental image.
“Ahem,” Jackie cleared her throat, attracting Béla’s attention again. “I was just going to mention my views on the subject.”
“Oh,” Béla murmured, a little embarrassed.
“Perhaps your trouble with understanding the concepts behind the ‘Focal Press’ and my inability to learn how to teleport have a common area of, um… understanding? Misunderstanding? Whichever…
“Anyway,” Jackie continued, “I can easily see how the Focal Press works, and you can easily see how to teleport. Both techniques accomplish the same function – instantaneous movement of an object from one location to another.
“When you teleport,” she continued, “you basically ignore the physical universe laws regarding time and distance, although those factors determine how much mass is lost during teleportation. Now, when the Focal Press transmits a person or a thing, physical universe laws regarding ‘mass’ are ignored, and distance is basically determined by the wattage of the transmitted signal, which is, as far as anyone can tell, unaffected by the mass of the object or person being transmitted.”
Béla stood there getting glassy-eyed as she tried to hold her weary gaze on Jackie’s forehead where her brows furrowed together – a valiant but doomed attempt to grasp the strange concepts swimming around in her mind.
“Yeah…” Béla replied, doing her very best to pay attention through the weariness surrounding her.
“What I’m getting at,” Jackie was saying, “is that both methods ignore different physical laws of nature. But that doesn’t mean that they both don’t work…”
“Stop!” Béla cried weakly. “I can’t listen to this! You’re crushing my brain with all these empty words…”
Realizing she was probably insulting Jackie terribly, Béla turned away, nearly losing her balance in her anxious attempt to escape. Reaching into the teleportation zone, she mentally pulled herself in and shoved herself out onto her bed in Solar City. The omnipresent teleportation zone was something she understood and was comfortable with. It existed everywhere and nowhere at the same time – a contradiction, perhaps. But at least she knew how it worked.
Jackie sighed, truly frustrated, then turned and went back to work.
“Heads up!” Jake called out, throwing a biscuit across the bed to his lifemate.
It disappeared in mid-air.
“Delicious,” Béla said, dully. “Another?”
“Wow! Hard day, huh?” Jake ventured.
He handed her the next biscuit. She physically ate that one, a bite at a time. After a moment, she burped out the air from the first biscuit.
“Jackie’s designing a whole spaceship,” Béla complained. “What if she’s wrong and something happens. There are so many limitations to your technology. Everything has to be put together by hand. My father’s ships weren’t built that way. They had machines that could build whatever you could think of.”
Jake laughed. “I’ve seen your images of the inside of Deimos. It didn’t look very creative to me.”
“Deimos was made by hand,” Béla declared. “The machines don’t exist here. They probably don’t exist anywhere, now. And hundreds of lives were lost trying to build that sanctuary for my father’s people.”
She was referring, of course, to the failed Phobos project, the first sanctuary. Shortly after the Phobos shell had been completed and ice glaciers were melted inside it to provide an atmosphere, the artificial moon was struck by an asteroid, collapsing half of its exterior shell and venting its internal atmosphere into space. Several hundred of the old race died that day, their bodies never recovered from the depths of space.
The second sanctuary, Deimos, was constructed after that. It was much larger and, like Phobos, was purposely designed to look like an asteroid, just in case the Arcadians ever came looking for them. The first two hollow moon projects were good practice for the construction of New Eden, which was actually constructed by the great ship, using energy particle emitters and tractor beams. Each piece had to be connected manually, but the ship did all the heavy work, including moving ice glaciers into the hollow moon to provide an atmosphere.
Béla grunted her pleasure as Jake began massaging her shoulders and neck. He always seemed to know what she needed.
“Everything will be fine,” Jake assured her as he worked his fingers into her shoulders. “The Praetor knows what it’s doing and it knows the limitations of what we can do. Everything that can be done, will be done. You know that.”
He kissed the nape of her neck, sending chills down her spine. She grinned, gritting her teeth as she shivered.
“You feel up to checking out the changes Lisa and I made to the maze?” he asked brightly.
The maze was his son’s idea – a training module to keep Tomlin Security’s Femme Fatales in tip-top condition. It had very lethal traps in it that were supposed to be detected and avoided. To date, every girl triggered every trap in the maze every time they entered. From a training point of view, it was a complete failure. As a carnival ride for an immortal, sex-crazed female, it was great fun!
Jake Hedron abandoned the ‘maze’ after several years of forcing himself to watch recordings of the girls – his own wife, especially – getting mutilated and repeatedly murdered by the insidious and often lethal devices placed within its confines. Now, the girls themselves, along with Frank Tabor and Jake Pestova, came up with ideas for upgrading it, often surprising each other with some new, insidious torture.
“I could use some diversion,” Béla smiled up at him. “Anyone else in there?”
“Tanya was helping Lisa make some final adjustments,” Jake informed her. Béla raised her eyebrows.
‘Tanya and Lisa together? I hope I don’t get decapitated…’ Jake heard his wife think.
‘No, not decapitated,’ Jake thought back at her, then verbally, “They were playing with an old wire trap that Frank bought for her years ago. They even trapped me in it.”
“Really!” Béla exclaimed.
She knew Jake wasn’t ever remotely interested in being on the receiving end of any kind of torture. Receiving sensation seemed to be more of a ‘female’ issue. Men preferred to dish it out, instead, and watch the fun rather than take it in the gut or wherever the limited male imagination could deliver it.
“Yeah!” Jake replied, sounding really disgusted. “That barbed wire gouged the hell out of me!”
Béla was immediately much more cheerful. “Did it leave scars? Can I see?”
She hopped up and pulled at Jake’s shirt. She got it up around his chest, excitedly checking out his torso. There wasn’t even a scratch on him.
“Phooey!” Béla grumbled, and flopped back down.
Jake stared at her, his mouth wide open. “What the hell was that?” he yelled, still staring at her. “You act like you wanted to see me all ripped to hell and back! Are you nuts?”
Now it was Béla’s turn to stare. She kept quiet, having absolutely no idea what to say. She’d acted purely on impulse, expecting him to response favorably, like he always did when they played games together. She finally shut her mouth and looked away.
“I guess,” she admitted.
The thought of running her hands over his bleeding chest while she was madly riding his hard cock really turned her on. She dared to project that image to Jake. Stunned, Jake sat down, almost missing his chair.
He looked at her for a moment. Béla’s mind was open to him, letting him see her thoughts as easily as she could see his. In all the time they’d known each other, neither of them had ever thought of reversing their roles like that. Jake could see that she was entranced by the idea, now that it occurred to her. Béla knew he would do anything to please her, but she also knew that he wouldn’t enjoy this.
“Alright,” he said, finally.
He got up and left. A moment later, he returned from the kitchen with a steak knife. He handed it to her and lifted up his shirt, again.
“How do you want to do this?” Jake asked, staring at her and waiting.
Béla stood in front of him, knife in hand, totally uncertain of her next move. After a moment, she raised the knife up and laid the blade against his left pectoral. She stared at the shape edge of the blade, mesmerized as she touched it to his flesh. She hesitated, unable to continue.
“I… I can’t…” she murmured finally, backing away and shaking her head. “I can’t do that to you. I can’t deliberately hurt you.”
Raising her head, she nervously met his gaze. He seemed relieved, but there was something upsetting him, deeper inside.
“I do it to you all the time,” he told her. “Sometimes even in my sleep I dream about carving on your sweet flesh.”
Béla grinned at him. “I dream about you doing that to me, too.” she laughed nervously. “But, I’ve never wanted to do that to you. I’ve never wanted to hurt you.”
Jake laughed right in her face. “You beat the crap out of me every chance you get! What do you mean…”
“Only when I’m mad,” Béla interrupted, raising her voice, “and only when you need to be taught a lesson!”
She moved toward him threateningly with the knife. Jake was bright enough to flinch back. Instantly, Béla stopped and glared down at the little knife in her hand. Then, snarling at it, she threw it down on the couch.
Jake sighed, “This isn’t going to work.” He put his hands on Béla’s shoulders and pulled her to him. “Use your teeth.”
“What?” Béla asked, half-laughing and backing away to look at him.
“I realize that, for you, a knife is too… impersonal,” Jake reasoned. “Your teeth and nails are your weapons of choice. The knife and gun are mine. Go with what you’re familiar with.”
“I…” Béla began, then stopped.
She blinked and looked up at him again.
“When we’re making love,” Jake said, still trying to get through her odd hesitancy about hurting him, “you often bite me. You always apologize for doing it, but I know you love biting me. So bite me now.”
He pulled her toward him again.
“No! I mustn’t!” Béla cried out, shaking free of his gentle grasp. “I can’t!”
There were tears in her eyes, now. And… Fear?
“What are you afraid of?” Jake asked. “You won’t kill me. You have my permission. I love you!”
Béla allowed him to pull her up against his bare chest. She buried her head in his chest and arms and started to cry.
“Please,” she pleaded, sobbing quietly. “Don’t make it okay for me to do that to you. It mustn’t ever be okay!” She looked up at him through her tear-streaked eyes. “I’ll kill you…”
“No you won’t,” Jake replied, laughing nervously at her fears. “You love me too much.
“At least, I hope you do,” he added, trying to joke her out of her strange mood.
He hugged her tightly, suddenly remembering that there was a lot about Béla that he didn’t know – thousands of years of things happening to her and of things she herself had done, both good and bad, that he was completely ignorant of. This was obviously one of those ‘unknown’ things he was running into, now.
Backing her slowly toward the couch, he sat down, pulling her with him so she was sitting halfway on his lap. He continued hugging her and kissing her soft, silky black hair. After a moment, Béla sniffed, trying to dry her nose and eyes. He handed her a cloth off the end of the couch. She blew her nose on it and handed it back, both of them giggling as he delicately took it from her with two fingers barely pinching the edge of the soiled cloth and tossed it aside.
Béla was soft and warm, a little sticky from crying, and very vulnerable. Jake’s cock was raging, as it always did in the presence of a helpless female. He continued kissing her and massaging her shoulders and back with his hands, helping her to relax and forget about whatever silly thing had happened in her distant past.
After a few more minutes, he lay her back on the couch, her legs and hips still in his lap, and unbuttoned her blouse. Then he pulled her up, his arms wrapped around her back, and began kissing and sucking on her nipples. Béla let her head fall back, gently moaning her pleasure to him. Holding her up with his left arm, he moved his right hand down, only to find her pants didn’t have any fasteners. They simply slid on and off.
Béla raised her head, noticing his problem regarding her limited accessibility. She grinned at him and her pants simply vanished, falling on the floor next to the couch. Jake chuckled at her simple maneuver and began massaging her hip and left leg, laying her back down on the couch. Then he slid out from underneath her hips and knelt down on the floor, massaging both her thighs with his hands.
Béla parted her legs as she gazed down the length of her body into his eyes. Jake began kissing and nipping her warm, soft, inner thighs, traveling slowly up toward that magical center between them. Béla sighed as his face brushed gently against her vulva, and then grabbed a handful of his hair while trying not to buck too hard against him as he licked along her entire length, from her butt to her clitoris.
“Oh, God!” she sighed. “Do that again!”
She could feel his hot breath as he laughed to himself. He enjoyed making her feel the sensations she was broadcasting. Moving back down, he repeated his long, slow tongue torture, traveling from her ass back up to her clit, again. This time, he bit her clitoris gently, letting her know he’d arrived at her special place.
Béla was broadcasting her need for more sensation constantly, now. Jake added his fingers to his slow, sweet torture of her, first simply rubbing her anus gently with a finger, moving to her pussy, then back again. Back and forth. He stopped for a moment when Béla bucked against him, moaning in her frustration.
When she was still, again, Jake continued his slow torture. He moved his index finger into her anus ever so slowly and very gently, using his thumb and middle finger, began to stroke the cleavage where her legs ended. Béla trembled, forcing her body to stay still, needing him to violently tear into her, but loving his tender torture of her, loving the sweet way he made her wait. She knew that when she finally came, it would be worth the waiting and the torture.
Finally, he had his index finger buried in her ass and was pushing into her soaking wet pussy with his thumb. He continued simply holding her clit in his gentle teeth, occasionally flicking it with his tongue. His hot breath exhaling against her sensitive flesh was followed by the cool air rushing back into his mouth as he breathed, hot and cool, hot and cool, against her clitoris gently trapped in his teeth.
Béla grabbed at the edges of the soft, uncaring couch, needing to grasp something with her hands to help stabilize her cascading sensations. If she touched any part of her body, she knew she would explode in orgasm, destroying the sensations she was riding on now. She cried out, rolling her head from side to side, forcing the rest of her energized body to remain steady, holding it still, forcing it to not react to the orgasmic sensations that threatened to overwhelm her.
Then Jake, his thumb and index finger buried in her pussy and ass, bent his thumb backward and raked his thumbnail gently against the soft, sensitive tissue inside the front of her vagina. That was all it took. Béla began exploding in orgasm, bucking her hips wildly against his face and crying out her pleasure, her entire body convulsing as she came.
Pulling his finger and thumb out, Jake used both hands to hold onto her thrashing hips and sucked her clitoris further into his mouth. He chewed on her soft girl-flesh and rapidly flicked his tongue against her clit, keeping her coming for almost a minute. Béla cried out and thrashed her body around on the couch, Jake’s face and mouth tightly riding her pelvis.
Finally, Béla weakly pushed her hand against his head, trying to get him to release her poor, tired clit from his torturous lips. He grinned and let go, rubbing his moistened face against her inner thighs as he withdrew. Béla lay exhausted on the couch, her stomach and breasts heaving up and down with each exhausted breath.
Jake sat back and watched her for a moment as she lay there, recovering from her orgasms. She was so incredibly beautiful lying there with her legs spread like that, with her moist pussy glistening in the lamplight and her tight flesh stretched between her jutting hips. She radiated sexual satiation and contentment. Everything was right as Jake gazed at her, loving her.
He realized that, as satisfied as she was right now, she was lying on the couch by herself. She was alone – just her and her sensations. Jake thought that perhaps he was beginning to understand why she needed him so badly. She was alone on the couch but she knew he was there, sitting there and watching over her. It made the difference, to her, between being alone and being lonely.
Impulsively, he reached up and put an arm around her stomach, hugging her and resting his head against her side, listening to her breathe. He could hear her heart pounding from the workout he’d given her. As he listened, it slowed down until it was beating normally. Her breathing was normal now, too. She moved her arm and tousled his hair with her hand.
“You haven’t come yet,” she murmured, smiling into the room, her eyes still closed.
“That was for you,” he replied.
His cock was hard, but he wasn’t feeling horny. The conflicting conditions confused him a little, but loving an exotic immortal was bound to have strange side effects; at least that was his reasoning. He just wanted to hold this beautiful, wild creature for as long as he could – which, he realized, wasn’t going to be much longer. She was already getting restless in his grasp.
After another moment, he felt her stomach muscles tighten and she grunted, trying to sit up. Pushing herself up along the back of the couch, she looked down at him.
“I should do something for you,” she said softly, responding to his earlier reply.