Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
M ax returned to the barge as the second morning bell sounded for the larger boats to leave their berths, complete the turnaround, and ride the current up the northeast leg of the canal to Port Paducah. The smaller crafts departed earlier to avoid the wake of the larger boats.
Unlike his predecessors who wore a jacket and hat on duty, Max wore a fitted navy tee and dark green pants. The colors, as well as his size, set him apart as the commander but also gave him the freedom to leap into action when needed.
When Max stepped aboard, his men lined up to salute him, their faces betraying no hint to onlookers that Quiggs was hidden in his cabin, and anyone who interrupted without just cause before the commander’s three claiming days were completed would be flogged. He saluted his First Captain, who’d assumed command while he was hospitalized. From their communications Max knew the outbank was quiet.
Max cast a glance at Beau watching him from the archer’s tower. Childishly, he held up a carton of arousing treats from the Canal Street Bakery. An unhappy whine drifted down .
Max found Quiggs sitting with his bare feet on the table and a commander’s logbook propped on his stomach. He’d unlocked the legs of the chair from their grooves on the floor in order to sit tilted back and had dozed off reading, arms loose at his sides.
Max missed the small belly and braid, but Quiggs’s essence attracted him. He’d fucked muscular soldiers, skilled fems, and eager cadets in the academy, yet his sensors always picked up the inner battle between their deference to his rank and their disgust of his odd cock. Max never lowered his guard with other men. With Quiggs, layers of distrust peeled away. The needy sounds his concubine made when Max stroked him were sincere. When Quiggs’s big green eyes lidded with heat or widened with fascination, Max’s sensors shot bolts of heat straight to his cock.
The doctor had warned him against vigorous sex before Quiggs was fully healed and no penetration until his seed ran clear. During their therapy showers, Quiggs appeared ready, while Max experienced only pleasant zings of warmth.
“Good morning, my concubine. Hungry?” Max dropped the carton on the table. Quiggs started, his arms flailing for balance. Max straightened the chair before it fell.
Quiggs sniffed and tore open the carton. “Honey custards!” He cracked the brown glaze, and his face lit up as he licked a spoonful.
Max’s cock stirred. His breath hitched. His attention focused on the zinging. Come on… come on… Then the swelling. Getting there. Then the throbbing ache at full mast. Don’t think. Use it or lose it.
Max growled, “I want you naked. On the bed. Now!”
Max pulled off his boots and wrestled off his uniform before he remembered the restraint on vigorous fucking. He turned to Quiggs to apologize, expecting to find him huddled over his custard, afraid Max would hurt him. A puddle of clothes lay on the vacated chair. Quiggs was already naked in bed, slicking his trembling thighs with oil.
“Dr. Knowles said no penetration or sucking until our seed runs clear,” Quiggs said. “I think we should start with thigh fucking. What’s your preference? Me on top facing you, riding reverse, or lying on my side? The taint is a very erogenous zone for me. Any which way you’re long enough to rub your cock right under my ass and in between my thighs.”
Scared baby cadet, my ass. “You’ve given this some thought.”
“Or you can lie down, and I’ll sit alongside and rub you. Maybe put one finger in your ass for extra—no? Stefan said to ask anyway.”
At the mention of a curious finger near his crack, Max’s sensory hairs stopped zinging and fired warning shots. His instinct screamed to ravish, discipline, win, but he wrestled for control. No vigorous sex. No penetration. He concentrated on images of Quiggs’s painful recovery. The breathing tube… the cock cage… the peeling skin… the seizures.
Max sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, ashamed. “You’re too frail for sex. I should take the edge off alone.”
Quiggs’s bark of laughter triggered a coughing fit. When he caught his breath, Quiggs knelt behind him and squeezed his shoulders. “Pfft. I jerked off twice before you arrived.”
“Twice? You couldn’t wait an hour for me to come aboard?” Max clapped a hand over Quiggs’s mouth when he started to explain. “Save your voice. Allow me to answer. Because you are twenty, right?”
Quiggs nodded, then licked Max’s palm. The wet tongue reminded Max how wonderful his concubine’s mouth felt surrounding his cock their claiming night.
His voice deepened. “You were curious how your cum looked.”
Lick. Lick.
“And the dick wants what it wants whenever, wherever.”
Lick-lick-lick-lick.
“Was twice enough to clear your semen for oral?”
Quiggs dragged Max’s hand away by the wrist. “A trace of yellow speckles remains, but the stench is gone.”
“Stench? ”
“Nasty stuff. Had to open the port holes before I suffocated myself.”
Max laughed until his sides ached. He fell on the bed, hugging Quiggs to his chest. He couldn’t remember hugging anyone here in his bed. Gripping, grinding, clasping, yes. Affectionate hugging demeaned a man unless it was with a spouse or concubine. He stroked Quiggs’s bristly head.
Quiggs squirmed from his embrace and straddled Max’s waist. “You always touched me in the shower. I want to touch your body.”
Max folded his hands behind his head and flexed his muscles. “Help yourself.”
Quiggs rubbed his hands together, getting them warm, then worked them down Max’s jawline to his shoulders. He tickled his pits, commenting on the sparse tufts and the musky scent. He smoothed his hands down to Max’s chest, tracing each defined pec. “Holy, shit,” he breathed. “Like slabs of warm stone. Hardly any give.” His fingers lazily circled flat brown nipples. “Bosoms scare me. Witters told me to spend time playing with Rosamunde’s bosoms before sucking them. I dreaded it.”
The blunt comment amused Max.
Quiggs stroked a path back up to Max’s ears. “Your tawny hairs cling to my fingers when I touch them. Like they’re tactile.” He rolled one between his thumb and forefinger. “Feels like a nubby strand of fur.”
Max groaned. The nubs were receptors, and Quiggs’s touch ignited them, sending flashes of heat down Max’s spine. With other men, the hairs disliked the feelings detected. With Quiggs, the hairs behaved like wanton bosoms, demanding attention.
Quiggs leaned down, utterly preoccupied with the discovery. With a slight turn of his face, Max could press a kiss on the corner of Quiggs’s mouth. “I know what you’re thinking. Kiss me and I’ll pull a hair!” Quiggs tugged on one, then immediately squealed, jerking his hand back. “The little bastard shocked me!” He fanned his hand, scowling at Max .
“Don’t blame me. The hairs respond before the sensory input reaches my conscious mind, so I can’t control their triggers. That shock was minor, a warning of the damage it could deliver from a real threat.”
“I thought you were making excuses.” Quiggs stared at the reddened mark left on his skin. “Are there hairy surprises below the waist?”
“None.” Max had sparse body hair.
“Good.” He applied oil to Max’s cock. “Oh… you’re rising. Damn, I forget how huge you are and how your ring pales and pulses when I rub it like—”
“Enough!” Max cut off Quiggs’s exposition before it turned into a fog. He positioned his cock between Quiggs’s slicked thighs, using one hand to hold himself in place while the other clenched a rounded buttock. “Too rough?” Max gasped.
“Heh. Shut up and finger fuck me. I need the extra.”
Max slid in an oiled finger to the knuckle. His concubine squirmed on top, biting his lip as if rethinking his words. Max rubbed the third nut, and a howl erupted. He stuffed a towel in Quiggs’s mouth before he damaged his healing throat.
Quiggs’s eyes rolled back, and his channel squeezed. His cock spurted over his fist, his body flushed from ears to chest at the intensity of his third orgasm. No faking this time. Max followed, bucking and splashing his concubine’s ass and thighs with weeks of cum. He rolled them to their sides to cuddle, but it was short-lived when Max caught a whiff of the repulsive speckled seed he’d spent.
Quiggs spat out the towel and mopped the cum. “Vile, isn’t it? Open the port holes.” He inspected his hand. “Good. Mine’s clean.” He yawned and promptly dozed off.
Max opened both port holes, then lifted the lid off the tub Cutty had filled for them and lowered his sleepy concubine into the steamy water. Quiggs squirmed until the heat rendered him boneless, with his arms dangling over the sides and his head resting on a towel .
Quiggs sighed. “I’ve decided I love sex a thousand times better than honey custards.”
“You’re inexperienced. You’d love it with a toothless eel skinner.”
“I love sex with you .” Quiggs closed his eyes as Max added a handful of perfumed bath salts.
Max knelt by the tub, soaping lazy circles around each pink nipple with his hands. He liked flat hairless chests with pebbly pink nipples. And cute melon heads. And thick, long lashes. And lush, pouting, sweet, rosy lips owing him twelve seconds…
As if sensing an oncoming kiss, Quiggs slid lower until the water level covered his mouth. The water bubbled from his burst of laughter at Max’s frustrated growl.
Max would collect his twelve seconds another time. He lifted Quiggs out to stand on a small rug and toweled him dry. “Showers with your braid must have been an ordeal. But it’s over now.”
“Until my hair grows out.” Quiggs spoke without anger, just a quiet statement of the obstacle in their future.
Max cursed himself for dousing their afterglow.
“There’s only one solution,” Quiggs tucked the towel around his waist and padded to the table to finish his honey custard.
“I can’t submit,” Max snapped. “You felt a mild shock. Imagine a fully charged one.”
“I’m not asking you to submit. After my service ends, when the braid becomes a nuisance, I’ll visit a pleasure house. The act will be verified and the issue settled without injuring your pride.”
Max listened to Quiggs’s blithe solution. Share Quiggs with another man? Before Max exploded, a hard knock on the door interrupted.
“Commander?” It was Beau at the door, his voice agitated.
Max wondered how much of their sex play Beau had overheard. “What is it, Private?”
“I smell blood in the air. Human blood. Ahead at Milepost Sixteen.”
A sputternut orchard owned by Rosamunde grew on the outbank near Milepost Sixteen, four miles from Port Paducah. His naked body exuding the power and authority of his rank better than any ridiculous formal jacket and sash, Max strode to the whistle panel. He whistled the code for the pilot to tie off at the next milepost with cables thrown around the posts on each bank to hold the barge in place. Next, he whistled for his sergeants to have the first wave of defense at attention, ready to storm the outbank with him.
He dressed for battle, selecting a pair of gleaming axes for his shoulder harness and sliding into a pair of thin flexible boots that would allow his double-jointed feet to race through the vines. Quiggs had never remarked on his abnormal feet, never investigating much lower than his thighs.
“Max, is it a raid?” Quiggs pulled on his Bucket Patrol tee and tucked it into his pants.
As he fastened a studded leather collar around his neck to prevent teeth ripping out his throat, Max spoke quickly. “Likely a raid. I won’t rule out it being a distraction to scatter my men and leave you vulnerable. Don’t worry. A killer and his accomplices can’t board with the ramp pulled back from the bank and with the barge in the middle of the canal. Pulling alongside in a boat won’t work because archers in the towers will spot them. Stay locked inside the cabin where you’re safe.”
This was the first time the thought of dying in battle grieved Max for what he would leave behind. He struggled to find the words to say goodbye.
Quiggs’s over-bright green eyes implored Max to return safely.
“Fuck it.” Max seized Quiggs and pecked him quickly on his surprised mouth. He leaped back before Quiggs gagged. “Gotcha, my baby cadet.”
Quiggs rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.
Max grinned. “I’ll be back to collect the rest of my seconds.”
“Ten.”
“Eleven and a half.”
“Twelve if you come back. Be careful, Max. ”
“I’m taking Beau to track the scent. Lock the door behind me.”
Max, Beau, and sixty soldiers reached the orchard before the blood on the ground had dried. The raid was swift, brutal, cunning, and of a magnitude Max had never encountered. Neither had his uncle or centuries of previous commanders.
He knelt and examined the bloodied metal objects scattered on the ground, then looked up to find broken branches among the trees. Fucking hell, advanced ferals. Under the cover of fog with heavy metal objects as weapons, these ferals had climbed the trees before dawn, patiently waited for the unsuspecting men to pass beneath the branches, and hurled to crush skulls.
For each of her orchards, Rosamunde hired two middle-aged herders and eight experienced older guards. The large number discouraged a typical raid. A feral scout might slip through and snatch a goat or two, but she would warn her band against a full-blown raid.
The archers in the watchtower on the inner bank told Max the men had rafted across the canal for their scheduled rotation less than an hour ago. The ferals struck, took the goats, and killed the men. It was over before the archers fired a third flight of arrows. Until Max explained, they were unaware the attack came from the trees.
The raiding party had planned this attack with the help of earlier scouts and climbed the trees with weapons while the mists hid them. And where the fuck had they found pristine colonial metal for weapons?
By sheer luck, Max’s barge was nearby for him to reach the orchard and follow the trail of slashed, trampled vines left behind before the vines repaired themselves. He and Beau ran abreast, leading the chase. Where the trail disappeared in places, Beau and Max picked it up, following the blood scent of a female struck by an arrow .
Like Max, Beau wore a protective collar and carried an ax and a spear. The other soldiers wore field goggles, collars, and abdominal plates. The added gear gave a soldier a chance to deliver a killing strike while the feral wasted slashes instinctively aimed at his protected throat, eyes, gut. Max and Beau declined wearing plates and goggles because the items hampered their sensory input.
Chasing after the raiding party, Max picked up a different scent. Hideously oily, musty, intense. Females entering a mating heat had participated in this raid. High-pitched cries echoed in the distance—from sentries guiding their sisters through the vines to rejoin the rest of the band. Humans couldn’t detect them, but Max and Beau could. They glanced at each other, concerned at the size of the raiding party.
As they closed the gap behind the ferals, Beau appeared confused. His tongue darted out tasting the air, and he shook his head, his pace slowing. “The scent ahead is thinning. It should not be thinning. My hairs tingle. Something is wrong, my commander. I think the females are splitting up into smaller groups.”
Max trusted Beau’s instincts. He raised a hand, halting the line of soldiers running behind them. In the stillness, the tawny hairs around his ears tingled at the whisper of vines disturbed by bodies coming toward his men from either side. Max shouted to form a defensive circle. They closed ranks as the ferals sprung from the vines.
Max speared one and was desperately fending off two more when the ferals abandoned the attack and raced ahead to join the others. Their speed and strength shocked Max. These females outmatched his soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.
Six soldiers died instantly, their necks snapped. Eleven men were critically wounded from limbs ripped off or clawed to the bone and bleeding out. If Beau hadn’t noticed the change in the air, Max would have lost everyone. He had worried he was tracking twenty at the most. Now he realized the number was twice the size, with more waiting at their breeding den. He barked orders to bandage the injured and retreat to the canal .
Max found Beau squatting by a female he’d speared through the heart. Traumatized by his first kill, Beau rocked, his pupils blown. Blood had been sprayed across his face and chest. Max rested a hand on his shoulder. “You saved the lives of many good men, Beau.”
“I killed family,” Beau whispered. He wrapped his arms over his head, a yowl escaping when Max peppered him with questions.
The females he and Beau killed had a broader forehead and longer jaw than a typical feral. They were taller, muscular, well-fed. Beau’s female was old, her long gray hair matted with filth. Her skin was a leathery yellow with purple markings on her arms as if she boasted her kills as Max did. A necklace of teeth from animals he didn’t recognize dangled between sagging breasts that had suckled offspring. A triangular scrap of leather covered her genitals.
Since when did ferals exhibit modesty?
Where had these creatures come from? Little was known beyond a mile of the canal. The band could have broken from a cluster a thousand miles away.
Beau said he had killed family . Were his memories surfacing? Until he calmed, Max couldn’t get answers. He gently ordered Beau to return to the barge where he could guard Quiggs, reminding him that the killer could use the upheaval in canal traffic to slip aboard.
Beau stopped whimpering. Immediately, he jumped to his feet and sprinted alone to the canal to guard his good friend Quiggs.
When Max returned to the orchard, his couriers greeted him with the news of a second raid at Milepost Eighteen. A few goats were taken. Six young men were missing, and the older men were dead. If the ferals had taken young men instead of available goats, they were creating a breeding den. Possibly they had found a multi-chambered cave to accommodate several bands.
The raids would escalate when the young arrived.
What could be done to stop them? The Triangle relied on its thousands of goats to graze the 60 miles of outbank. A small sector of vines crossing the canal would wipe out crops within a year. If several sectors crossed over, the vines would smother the land within two months.
Max could ban the herds from grazing. The storage bins held enough grain to feed them a week. But goats depended upon fresh vines, or their body mass declined. Meanwhile, the ferals would scout the canal and add eels and fins to their diet. If the herders grazed their starving goats, the ferals would hunt until none remained.
Hand-to-hand combat with these ferals was ineffective. They’d rip a spear from a soldier’s grip before he knew he was under attack, then rip off the arm. Max would lose men faster than goats.
What Max needed was something to scare the shit out of this new species—like the explosive trap Quiggs had mentioned. Quiggs had a week to build one and to dig answers about family from Beau.