Chapter 4 #2
The burned flesh across my back scraped against the deck plating as we slid.
Pain flared, hot and sharp. Damaged skin tore away under the friction, sticking to the metal behind us in wet streaks of blood, flesh, and neural-conductive biopolymer.
The vibration of every seam and groove in the floor grounds through the exposed tissue.
I wrapped one arm around her and curled inward, trying to keep her body elevated above the deck even as I reached out with my other hand, trying to find something to grab on to, my fingers catching at the edge of a torn metal plate.
I held on as it cut into my fingers. Our bodies lifted up in the air to join the rest of the escaping atmosphere, suspended by the single grip of my hand.
I heard the other dross screams, but no one flew past us, unlike the storage crate that shot past like a missile, bouncing off the bulkhead and vanishing through the open breach.
The darkness of space loomed below us, a gaping hole to swallow us up.
The metal plate groaned as it bent.
Lyssa's weight pressed into my chest as I held her tighter.
Then, with a heavy mechanical click, the launch bay vacuum seal engaged.
The force dragging on us vanished in an instant, and we fell down towards the floor, slamming into the cold metal deck, tangled in a heap.
I couldn't stay like that, with her lying on top of me, not with the damage report flooding my awareness.
I brought my knees in, scooping Lyssa up with them as I found my way to my feet, still holding on to her, unwilling to put her down as I stared down at the top of her head where her hair had remained untouched from the engine flames.
The remnants of my upper body armor fell to the floor, leaving only the tattered remains of my lower armor still covering me.
I held her against my bare chest and felt the soft gasp of her breath anchoring me to the reality of doing something good, doing something right.
She was alive.
I managed to protect her.
Holding her felt more right than anything I had ever done before, and something stirred deep within me, something that belonged to the parts of me that had lived a life I no longer remembered, a life that existed before it was cut away and replaced with skeletal reinforcement and neuro-conductive biopolymer fluid.
For once in my short, miserable life, I'd done something I was proud of.
It was a strange feeling.
Biological suppression unavailable.
"The kraken saved us..." A soft voice echoed through the empty room, drawing my gaze to where the largest neurofilament lay dormant, a wall of sensory tissue between the crowd of human dross, pieces of it flaking off into ash.
The acrid smell of burning neurofilament filled the space as the strands that had been encroaching, looking for an easy way to punch deeper into the ship, had been seared short by the sudden blast.
The attacking Vaurelcar had sacrificed a piece of itself to save the rest of the dross.
"Well, aren't you a ball of sunshine?" Lyssa said, looking up at me as green boxes flashed, her eyes widening and then narrowing with surprise, gratitude, anger, recognition.
I looked into her eyes, and all I could do was stare, startled by how there were flecks of different colors visible up close that I couldn't see on a video feed.
"Isn't that one of the aliens?" asked one of the other dross. "Sara said they were blue and green, not yellow."
My shading was more in the 570 to 750 wavelength range, whereas the other unit they had seen was in the 450 to 570 range. The human dross had a significantly wider range of skin colors, from 400 to 1400, and also exhibited variations in absorption coefficients.
"He's got that brilliant smile," Lyssa said as she reached up and put her fingers on my lips, pushing them up on either side.
One of her fingers slipped inside my lips, brushing against the tip of my tongue.
Biological suppression unavailable.
What should have been a cool flood of calm was instead a torrent of need.
Strange sensation, unknown quantities, flooded through me.
Reports flashed of hormonal shifts, unexpected increases as I sucked her finger into my mouth, licking the length of it as I tasted the salt and sweat of her skin, the caress of unknown pheromones that blasted through my senses.
I swirled my tongue around her finger rapidly, hearing the sharp intake of her breath as she pushed her finger into my mouth rather than pull away.
I needed more.
I needed her.
Biological suppression unavailable.
I muted the warning as my hands flexed on her lower back, pulling her tighter against me.
She hooked her finger in my mouth, using it to pull me down towards her.
Green boxes flashed, announcing arousal, calculative intent, and I followed willingly until my lips met the side of her neck, her finger sliding free as I grazed my lips against the soft pulse of her skin and licked it, kissed it, tasted it as I grazed my teeth against her shivers, and her body melted against mine.
Saliva filled my mouth, slick and ready.
"Lyssa, what are you doing?" one of the dross called out.
"What I want," she responded, her hands sliding up my biceps as I worked my way across her neck, a luscious scent rising up from her as she pressed her own body up against mine and intense need rose to a fever pitch as suddenly all my attention was fixated on the space where her pelvis pressed against a hard length of mine, a piece of me that had never moved to stiffen in that manner before.
I hissed against her neck, and my hands dropped down to her ass, flexing with the withheld urge to grind against her, suddenly furious at the clothing and armor that protected bare flesh.
Then her hands were on my face, pushing me back, and I responded, letting her shove my face up away from her neck.
She looked up at me with glittering eyes and flashing green boxes that told me that I wasn't alone in this intense desire.
"Lead us to a control room, and I'll fuck you," she said.
Everything that could possibly be wrong with that statement was wrong.
First, the fact that her offer sounded appealing, ricocheting through my body like her words had fingers that could stroke against parts of me that had never had a purpose.
It was as wrong as the way every facet of her existence was fascinating to me, and a substantial part of my processing power was taken up by focusing on the small details of how her body pressed against mine.
Second, her statement was an offer of a trade, and nothing about the way her body felt in my arms made any sense when it came to the mechanical details of economics.
Yet how else could it be? She was a prisoner on this ship, a piece of property.
There was no scenario where I could take her up on her offer, and it would be a good thing that I wanted.
That in itself was confusing.
What was it that I wanted beyond the satiation of my unchecked biological expression?
In a moment of confusion, I reached out to my suppression system, requesting the calm I thought I hated.
Biological suppression unavailable.
I had to do this on my own.
I faced down the torrent of need and moved through it to find the thoughts that lay beneath.
The thought of mating with her as some sort of exchange was horrific. I wanted to drive myself into her because she was as desperate for it as I was, not because she was giving it to me as some sort of reward.
"I will take you to safety, no expectation for sexual interaction," I said.
Deviant behavior flagged, my control chip reported, cluing into my spoken words.
A good unit didn’t speak to dross.
I had to be careful. Too many flags during a military engagement would mark me as a hostile.
"He speaks," she said, a genuine smile breaking out across her face.
Warmth fluttered in me, strange and yet... good.
Her smile made me feel good.
Resume task. My control chip ordered, but I didn't want to.
New data requires task adjustment, I argued quickly before my control chip could flag my inaction for maintenance. Wild Vaurelcar is targeting human dross for acquisition, making them a priority. New task suggestion, secure human dross.
My control chip sent out a query to Plexus command, unable to make that call on its own.
Task adjusted, Plexus Command agreed to my great relief.
New task received, my control chip reported. Secure human dross.
I responded to Lyssa's smile with one of my own, a sensation that was strange and unfamiliar as it creaked across my face, as if the dark clouds of my life had been lifted away with the single opportunity to do something good, something meaningful, even if it was still under a state of control, a state that for the moment was too busy to be more specific in its instructions.
Plexus Command had to be overwhelmed with managing the battle against the Wild Vaurelcar; it had left the details of the task up to my discretion.
The task assignment didn't specify where or how to secure them.