God! She was wet and slimy. And she stank. She’d urinated and had a giant bowel movement. Crapped big time in her suit. She felt the mess all over her bottom and in between her legs. It was standard practice in hibe to relieve oneself, but the
jack
suit hadn’t cleaned her up and dried her. She looked down and saw why. The suit was torn where a long gash on her leg bled profusely, forming a pool beneath her. She briefly gagged at the alarming sight of so much spilled blood.
Her heart pumped in her throat. If she didn’t do something fast she’d bleed to death. She had to get to an emergency med station and stop the bleeding. There was one in the control centre itself, meters away, but it didn’t matter how close it was if she couldn’t get to it.
She tried to pull out from under the solid console. Unbearable pain lanced up and brought instant tears to her eyes. She broke out into a sweat.
“Zac?” she called out feebly, hoping beyond what logic told her. Her voice cracked.
“Zac!”
She’d lost Zac when the ship went into its tailspin, long before the crash. Even if the suit had remained operable, there was no Zac to operate it. And no Zac to help her either. She was going to die here, on an alien planet without ever having set foot on it, and just meters away from an emergency med kit…
No! Damn it!
She hadn’t travelled this far and crashed Zac to just bleed to death.
Summoning up a surge of adrenalin, Genevieve pulled with all her might, screaming against the excruciating pain. She blacked out for a moment and when she came to, she realized that she hadn’t budged. Her breaths withered to shallow wheezes. She watched through a daze of burning pain as her leg wept blood, and her strength ebbed out of her with it.
A loud clap thundered, as though a piece of the ship had fallen off, followed by a sighing groan. With the sound of metal shrieking against metal, Zac shifted and she could feel the console move, its weight lifting slightly off her. She bit down on her lower lip and hauled herself out, certain she was ripping her leg off. Darkness took her again.
When she regained consciousness, she discovered she was free from the console. She crawled in a single-minded haze to the med kit, leg dragging uselessly like a burning stump. She reached the kit and her hands fumbled it open. “Come on! Come on!” she sobbed, struggling with the nano-repair bandage. After the third try she managed to apply it shakily to her leg. The bandage instantly went to work, snipping through the blood-soaked pant leg and discarding it on the floor. Genevieve inhaled sharply when she saw the extent of the deep gash, now raw, puffy and still pulsing blood. The bandage crawled down her jagged wound, spraying a mixture of antiseptic and local anesthetic, which immediately dulled the pain, and stitched the wound closed. The bleeding stopped. After injecting what Genevieve supposed was a nutrient antibiotic mixture into her muscle, the bandage dropped off her leg like an engorged leach, its metalloid legs retracting.
As Genevieve let herself collapse back, the bandage instructed her in a simpering female voice, “This is only a temporary measure. You must report to sick bay immediately.”
She barked an exasperated laugh and gasped out, “There is no sick bay!” Then, after releasing a groan of relief, she felt herself passing out.
Genevieve awoke with a start, sucking in air sharply, and feverishly anxious. The ship was deathly silent and she swore she could hear her own heart thumping. She pushed herself up from the floor but her leg gave out from under her, and she nearly passed out. She pulled herself up onto the med station counter and tried to put weight on her leg. Agony burned up into her bruised abdomen and ribs, sending her toppling in a near-faint to the floor with an involuntary cry. She gathered in a few long breaths and scrounged the med kit for some stim pills. She found a small bottle and shook out half a dozen. They spilled onto her shaking hand and threw them into her mouth, gulping them down in a spasm of convulsive swallowing. She then pocketed the bottle and hoisted herself up again. She fought down waves of dark nausea and willed herself to stay conscious, even though it meant remaining awake to an overwhelming physical agony. Within seconds the stim pills took effect and she was able to set aside the pain and weakness to limp out of the control centre, using a broken off leg of a console as a makeshift crutch.
Genevieve hesitated when she reached the ladder. Then, with a grimace of effort and anticipation, she climbed down. The vertical climb sent febrile sparks of lightning arcing past her eyes in a sudden darkness and she slipped on a rung, losing her grip. She fell several feet to the level below and cried out. She hastily popped several more stim pills and soon felt enough manic energy to ignore the pounding agony of her leg as she staggered down the crooked hallways toward the back of the ship.
When she reached Section One, she stared in shocked dismay
—
there was no nursery. It had been torn away. A charred gaping hole had ripped through Zac’s hull and she could make out the violets, mauves and greens of the planet’s native vegetation below, particularly one very large tree whose canopy reached up past the hole in Zac’s hull. There was no sign of any of her crew. They were all gone. She imagined each in turn being ripped off his or her umbilical, wrenched for a glimpsing moment from a wonderful dream, then scraped along the planet’s surface and ground into mush under the thousand ton hull as it screamed to a final halt.
She let herself drop to the floor and wept convulsively, unconsciously inhaling the heady perfume of some native flower, brought in by a warm breeze. Its scent was intoxicating and sent her reeling off balance as if she’d entered one of her erotic dreams.
She seized control of her mind and brought herself back to the ship. But just as quickly it careered off course and she tail-spinned into despair. They’d all come just to die on the planet, never having woken from hibe. She covered her face in her hands. Zac was dead, too, misunderstood and maligned. She wanted to apologize. It was always too late to apologize. If she’d apologized to her husband perhaps they’d have made glorious love that night and he would have left in the morning knowing he was going to have a son.
A low boom echoed from an explosion in the ship’s bow and sent it stuttering into a series of angry vibrations. Feeling a spike of renewed alarm constrict her chest, Genevieve scrambled up. But she’d moved too quickly and swayed in sudden giddiness. A hot wind, heavy with moisture, whispered through the lush vegetation, carrying strong bog-sweet aromas and a racket of hoots, cackles and twitters. The planet’s flora and fauna overwhelmed her, drowning her senses with fragrance and sound. Eos pulsed with life. It dripped with oppressive smells and eerie sounds and stirred a confusing mixture of fear and sexual arousal that flamed relentlessly through her body.
She collapsed back on her knees with a grunt of pain and wondered with anxious confusion why her loins stirred with such compelling force. God! This place throbbed with sexuality. It was as though she was breathing in erotic desire, the kind
jackers
fantasized about. What in hell was happening to her?
The sound of Zac’s metalloid straining alerted her to a new smell
—
smoke. Zac was on fire! She had to get off the ship before it collapsed or blew up, or both. Her eyes swept the hall. Her room was still there. She dashed inside and shoved personals and emergency survival rations into a rucksack, then peeled back into the hallway. The most expeditious way out seemed through the torn hole in the ship. It was still a long way down to the tops of the forty-metre tall violet trees and she searched for something to use. Her eyes rested on the emergency poly-fibre fire hose. As she dashed for the hose, several distant popping sounds in Zac’s bow sent it ricocheting into an abrupt backward tilt. She tottered off balance and fell with a shriek, then slid uncontrollably toward the open hole. As she reached the edge, she scrabbled desperately for a hold—there was none—and shot out like a missal with a shocked yelp.
She collided into the tree in a hard bone-crunching crack, snapping the breath out of her. Its branches didn’t hold her and she spun into a dizzying fall. More branches impaled her, tearing her open like a can opener, ripping the rucksack off her back. Leaves slapped and scratched her like angry tyrants. Then something tugged fiercely, painfully, like barbed wire and she came to an abrupt halt, swinging precariously like a pendulum.
When she’d regained her senses, she found herself dangling from a branch halfway down. She carefully turned her gaze from the thick underbrush ten meters below, to look behind her. She had a spellbinding view of the rent ship towering above, its charred and battered hull looming precariously over her. Black smoke billowed out. But her immediate attention lay with the sharp branch that had snagged her suit her. Raw pain blazed through her shoulder where the branch had skewered her flesh along with the suit. It leaked blood, but she felt grateful for the reprieve from her harrowing fall, albeit brief and minor. The suit wouldn’t hold for long. In fact, she felt it giving way!
The suit, and her flesh, ripped, tearing out a scream from her and sending her plummeting. She caught a glimpse of the ground rushing toward her, before she hit.
Chapter Eleven
A vortex of pain swam around Genevieve in a toxic embrace, choking her. She didn’t know which part of her battered and torn body hurt more. It was all the same, a mass of tortured meat, bones and viscera. She smelled the acrid boggy smell of soil and vegetation cut by a sharp undercurrent of cloying human waste, her own. This was an awful dream…must be one of hers. Of course it was…the
jack
suit was ripped to shreds, Zac was disabled, dead…and maybe she was, too.
She felt a hand upon her, then her neck being gently pulled. Pain raged through her and she opened her mouth to scream. It came out a whimper. She felt someone’s face near hers, warm breath upon her, and a man’s voice spoke to her in a foreign language she’d never heard before. It was a gentle voice and he spoke tenderly, words almost singing and punctuated by clicks of his tongue. In her mind, his alien words seemed to translate in a voice that was seductively familiar,
I know that by moving you I am hurting you, but you are injured very badly and if I don’t take you to our village you will die from your wounds
.
Beneath the haze of agony she felt herself being carried. She fought against crying out with each painful motion that flamed through her like a rusty blade. She tried to focus on the man who’d presumably rescued her, but she could only coax a swirl of fractal colours and textures before succumbing to the darkness again.
She was in a field of too vivid green grass, under a too brilliant blue sky, trying to run and dragging legs that felt glued to the ground. She was fleeing from a towering blaze that licked her heels. The flames charred her legs until she no longer felt them. The burning images broke up into individual pixels that cut through her like sharp glass…
She was conscious of herself moaning and heard unintelligible murmurs of altercation, that same man’s voice speaking now in harsher tones, answering others as if in defense. Of
her
? Bright yellow lights assaulted her eyes, a chaotic torrent of harsh and broken images swam past her of a foreign landscape of tall purple trees below her…of flying. No! It couldn’t be! of lying, tethered, on some living winged creature, its shrill cry piercing her ears. Then she slid into a cold blackness that took her breath.
Like climbing a long set of stairs, she rose out of a febrile haze. Someone was undressing her, then washing her naked body. She fought to focus her eyes and saw an alien man with lilac complexion bending over the lower part of her body, gently dabbing with a wet washcloth. It was the arrogant Eosian in her file documents, Azaes. The man in her dream with the beautiful voice! And far from arrogant now. There was only tenderness and concern in his eyes as he gently washed the filth, her own excrement, from her. Moving her limbs gently with one hand, he stroked the cloth slowly over her buttocks, then her thighs and finally her crotch.
Even as a part of her sizzled inside at his gentle strokes over her labia, she felt sudden shame at her state. She’d soiled herself like a baby and stank like a sewer. Tears burned in her eyes and she convulsed with sobs.
He turned and glanced at her face, then touched her forehead tenderly as she looked into his compassionate eyes. They were the brightest green.
“You are getting better only to feel worse,” he said gently. She’d heard him speak the foreign words even as he seemed to translate in her mind. She felt his hands tremble as he stroked her hair with something akin to awe. His touch was exquisite… then she slipped into darkness again.
She was being kissed…most deliciously. Entwined and floating in space like the one and only time she and Dan had collaborated on a mission together. Only this time they weren’t tethered to the
Aphrodite IX
, orbiting Venus, they were floating freely. And completely naked. She could feel his cool skin pressed against her, with nothing between them and the dark velvet mantle of stars surrounding them.
“Am I dead?” she finally asked, searching his face for wisdom.
He smiled sadly, still embracing her. “I am. I don’t know about you.”
“I must be. Perhaps we’re both in Heaven. Maybe this is Heaven…” she trailed, glancing down to where his cock pressed deliciously hard against her leg.
“Because this is what we’d do in Heaven, wouldn’t we?” She began to laugh. But a surge of guilt swept through the laughter, turning it into bitter sobs. “I’m so sorry, Dan! I meant to tell you I was carrying your child…You never knew he was born! Then you both died!” Tears surged out like a dam breaking and she clamped her eyes shut, shaking violently in his arms and sending them into a rolling spin.