Blades of Arris: Sithe

2. Sithe

Two

Sithe

I slide into nearspace like a held breath.

All comms are quiet. Battle armor sealed. Power to a whisper.

The Eruvisan pirates huddle over their kill: an outdated vassal-planet cruiser belonging to one of the many lesser races my warriors have conquered. Escape pods scatter like broken shards, and the slim pirate vessel, a modified missile carrier not capable of lengthy space travel, has attached to the cruiser like a parasite to a helpless bird, breaking the wings as it drains the fluttering vitality.

They have finally made a mistake.

I position my ship over their parasitic vessel, matching velocities, and c***k my hatch.

Vacuum meets vacuum. Silent.

Descending to their ship like a shadow, I stretch my arms. Long, black blades emerge from the interior of my wrists. I pass over their vessel.

Comms first.

My left blade slices through the receiver relay.

I hook my fingertip beneath the bolt and thump my right blade against the metal hull. Its subtle reverberation paints a picture on my hood, showing what’s inside.

Two males hunch over comms and rub their erect s****l organs. They are so distracted, they do not notice my pulse.

The Eruvisans are never distracted. That is how they’ve escaped me so many times.

I walk forward using the tips of my blades to hook into the metal and pulse a second time. Still hunched. Oh, they’ve noticed the downed communications. One presses the comm button furiously. The other looks up at me—although I am invisible to him through the metal hull—with a frown.

Kill.

My boots magnetize to adhere to the metal with a soft clink which I hear inside my suit via suit-augmented bone conduction. I draw back my left blade and plunge it through three layers of alloy. The curving blade heats as it shears electrons from atoms. I skewer both men through their armored chests; their death shudders reverberate in my blade-bones.

I lift my hand. The blade retracts. Atmosphere puffs into the vacuum and then stops.

One of their bodies has probably plugged the hole.

Silence no longer matters, but the circumstances of their distraction tingle my nerves with a vague foreboding. I pulse my way across the pirate ship, taking more care than usual. But nothing seems amiss.

Why did they not notice my arrival?

Eventually, I slice the hinge cables to breach their airlock, flood and pressurize the small chamber, and then stride into the atmosphere-filled pirate ship.

A dank film molds the surfaces. Bad moisture cleaners. They could not have operated this vessel much longer.

Their stolen cargo is stacked beside the grimy force chute.

I wave my palm over the origin mark. Symbols glow, reacting to my suit, and identify it as Arris cargo lusteal. Aphrodisiac powder. The sweet metal needed to bring on mating l**t in Arrisan males and females is all that stands between our race and annihilation.

Anger flashes in my chest. After all the unimportant metal they’ve stole from us, this goes too far.

And yet, they successfully escaped to another system. I barely followed.

Why didn’t they get away with it?

Why were they trapped here, on a lesser cruise ship, after evading a blade fleet?

The lessers on this cruiser could never have overpowered the Eruvisans.

So, how?

Their hull-cracker tube is still attached. I drop into the chute.

Their parasite ship gravity loses me, but momentum carries me until the cruiser picks me up. I land scale-light on the floor. Heat-proof, radiation-absorbing, sound-dampening, light-bending armor conceals my movements so that only the briefest stir of air marks my passage through the cruiser.

But something is odd. Unusual sensations like soft fingers slide up my back, somehow beneath my skin-fitted armor.

Something is different here.

The atmosphere is breathable, so I open the suit.

Strange scents assault my nostrils. The Eruvisan stench chokes me with body malfeasance and waste-cycling problems consistent with their ship. Beneath that, the scent of the cruiser—no, of the lessers who once inhabited this cruiser—causes an odd tautness in my abdomen.

One escape pod door hangs open.

The scent intensifies.

I follow it to the bridge and stop. An incomprehensible sight greets me.

The Eruvisans are not dead as I expected. They are very much alive, and yet they have all ignored the most basic safety protocols. This mistake will end them.

They surround a small, multi-limbed creature lying on the floor making the strangest squeaking noises. One male thrusts his pelvis to its pelvis. Not it, her. Her pelvis. This seems to be a group mating ceremony, but the Eruvisans are not noted for mating outside their race, much less in the middle of a heist, so this whole scenario is senseless.

Strange.

My implant projects ship status and species information in the same impersonal way it attempts to translate the guttural grunts and cries.

“Oh, yes! Yes! More!” Male grunting noise. “Almost there!”

This vessel originates from our colony Humana, and this unfamiliar female is one of the humans. She seems to have five limbs, four of which grapple the cold-blooded Eruvisan, and two sets of ears. The extra nonfunctional limb and one of the sets of ears belong to another species of animal on the Humana home planet, wherever that is. Galacticus? Somewhere outside the eighty-nine asteroids? It is so difficult to keep our conquered worlds straight.

She encourages the Eruvisans to mate with her, and they have clearly been in space too long—or perhaps they have gotten addled by their poor environment—and so they oblige.

I have a duty to announce my intentions. I deglass my suit to become visible and drop my hood. “Eruvisans.”

My words disappear into the noise of their wrestling. The thrusting male slows and stands, his leathery green s*x organ erect and dripping.

I clear my throat and try again. “Eruvi—”

“Oh, please, no. Just a little more,” the female begs. “I was so close. I almost remembered. I almost…please.”

Her words are strangely effective. My midsection tingles.

Another Eruvisan unfastens his trousers and kneels between the female’s legs.

Honorable or not, I will not wait. My blades emerge from the bones of my wrists.

The Eruvisan nearest me catches the shimmer out of the corner of his slitted eye. He turns slowly and then hisses. “Blade!”

They all freeze.

Finally.

I give the proper warning. “You have stolen from noble Arris. All who wish to face judgment in the pits of Ranna, remain still. All who wish an immediate death, move.”

The silence stretches.

Will this truly be the day I take prisoners back to Ranna? I flex my wrists, extending the blades in promise.

Everyone moves at once.

I don my hood, not bothering with stealth, and unleash my blades. Scything the room, I paint the bridge in blood. The work of death is effortless and it is my greatest skill. I kill so that the empire of Arris lives.

When it is done and the last disease-ridden thief drops, I cross the spongy blood-soaked floor and pull in my blades to touch the console. This is Arrisan technology. I would understand it even if my implant didn’t automatically translate the colonial scribble into honorable text. Opening a comm channel to our military, I transmit my coordinates to the nearest fleet ship, a new dreadnought christened Spiderwasp.

Now, to wait.

I rest in the captain’s seat. It is covered in strange pink fabric, taut at the top and loosely wavy beneath. The implant whispers that the lesser humans call this design “frills.”

I lean back in the seat and close my eyes. It has been a very long time since I have rested.

A wobbly voice reaches my ears. “Can I move?”

The lesser is the only one who remained still and thus she is the only one who remains alive. I do not care. She is a problem for someone else now. “Yes.”

She rises. A mess of flesh, torn fabric too delicate to withstand wear, and dripping with bodily fluids.

And yet something about her disturbs me.

I ignore it. The Spiderwasp can possibly reply in 27-695, 27-694, 27-693…

“You’re a blade?” She steps over a severed torso and wobbles when her bare foot lands on a hand. “You took over Humana in like a day.” Then she stops as though she’s just noticed. “They’re all dead.”

I do not answer because it is obviously true.

“But I never got my clarity.” She turns to me with new intention in her eyes. Her back flexes, sinuous, and her movements become slinky. She grabs the long, bedraggled appendage and curls it around her wrist in a way that she seems to think is enticing. She lowers her chin and looks up through her lashes. “You’re a man.”

“I cannot help you.”

“Oh, sure you can.” She slinks toward me and leans forward to emphasize the valley between her breasts and curves of her shoulder, her waist, and the roundness of her a*s. When that elicits no response, she releases the tail and wraps her fingers around my forearm on the armrest. “Please?”

It is a unique experience to be approached by a lesser who has no fear. Rarely do I allow anyone to touch.

But her dream is a delusion. l**t only hardens my jack in the mating arena sparked by heated females who have ingested lusteal, the aphrodisiac powder.

I have entered the arena and mated five females. Each time, I held absolutely still as the female climbed my nude body and impaled herself on my erection, then took her pleasure until she demanded my seed. The arena is stressful, mating is uncomfortable, but being selected five times is a rare honor. I always perform.

So this female lesser looks at me with clouded eyes and runs her tongue across her orange-smeared, bloodied lips. “I’ll make it worth your time.”

Explanations take too long and anyway are beneath me. I hook my index finger in one of the sealing seams and c***k the skinsuit to display my flaccid jack.

She looks down, and her lips curve. Her eyes form happy crescents. She lifts my jack as though it is a precious gift. Then drops her mouth on me. Wet heat caresses my male member. Her head bobs up and down.

Strange heat pulls into my loins.

My blades pierce the skin at my wrists. This lesser is doing something to me. And that should be impossible. “What are you doing?”

She lifts her head and beams. “Getting you ready.”

Ready?

She leans back and tucks her bedraggled hair behind her true ears. Splaying her knees settles her weight. She dips her head to create more stimulation.

I grasp her hair to stop her.

My jack has firmed and is partially erect.

Strength leaches from my fingers. How…?

She pulls free from my lax fingers. Her mouth closes over me another time, and her tongue caresses my heating length. Her breath tickles my crotch, clever fingers encircle my shaft, and her other hand cups my sac. Little moans send shocks in the backs of my heels and twitch my tendons. I curl my fingers over the armrests.

How is she doing this? What is she doing? How am I reacting?

Shock and disbelief prevent me from protesting. I expect this moment to end. And also, I do not want it to. Hot blood-rush thuds in my ears like the first time I ejected my blades and entered a ring for combat.

She releases my jack from her mouth and stands, one hand between her legs stroking her feminine crevice, her gaze lit on my jack in anticipation. Using a confidence I can’t understand, she pulls my waist forward and rests her scuffed, stained knees on either side, straddling my legs. Her weight barely burdens my thighs.

Tilting her head, she teases the collar where the skinsuit meets my hood. “Don’t say much, do you?”

There is nothing to say.

The unnatural female licks her sticky fingers, smiles knowingly as my jack jerks in response, and positions the throbbing, hard tip of my long shaft against her bare, wet crevice. She sinks onto me, nesting our pubic bones—hers dusted with rich brown curls, mine dark as silent sky—with a satisfied moan. Her innards clasp me in a humbling embrace as though I am enveloped by the warm ocean of my youth, and then she begins to move, drawing away and surging close. Thought, memory, sensation is sucked away, leaving me floating on the crest of a deep oceanic peace.

“Oh yeah, that’s good.” She rolls her hips to take me to the hilt, thrusts and writhes, and elicits more electric shocks in my body. Her rhythm drives me deeper into the comforts of the chair, and I stiffen my abdomen to control her wildness.

Controlling her is an illusion.

Her body bounces against this new resistance, sucking and popping, slamming me with half thoughts and rolling me over with a chaos of sensations. Her thighs, small and yet powerful, clench my waist. Her a*s, round and juicy, slaps my lap. Her breasts rise and fall with the artificial gravity.

Her fingers creep across and squeeze her own breasts, then one hand entangles in her hair, stroking her extra set of ears. “This…yes…you…Blade…mmm.” Her body suddenly convulses. She collapses against my chest, a satisfied groan wrenched from her throat. We both breathe heavy, hot gusts of air, and I have never felt more like a male.

My muscles ping. Unfinished impulses meeting caution. Is it over?

“Oh yes. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to feel that.” She pats my pectoral, takes a deep breath, and rights herself with new energy. “I’ve got to do that again.”

No. This strange addictive sensation is not over.

She undulates her hips across my abs, driving my jack in deep and long, and then thrusts, hard, fast, and undeniable. All the muscles of her body tense, including the tiniest in her face, and she gasps in release. Then she clenches my shoulders, locking her forehead to mine, and impales herself over and over onto my jack with enough force to loosen the floor weld of the chair. She is an animal. In that moment, so too am I.

Her eyes, foggy and feral, fix on me. “Do you feel it?”

The question unlocks something deep inside. My balls draw up and tighten. Eye to eye with the creature who should be a lesser, who should be as unimportant to me as the cushion, who should be unable to incite my l**t, my body snaps. Hot seed shoots from my jack and buries deep in her hot, wet center. A second shot, a third spatters her insides.

Her body crests against mine, and she shatters. Gasping, crying, shaking, she arches hard enough to roll off backward.

I catch her around the waist, locking her in place, jack to socket, until the last shot of seed spurts into her shuddering body. She hangs motionless off my lap. I ease her off and settle her at my feet.

Gone is the confident female who commanded me to sate her l**t.

One hand slowly brushes the disarrayed locks from her face. The eyes that only moments ago were fogged now sharpen with clarity. Her arms tremble.

She takes several deep breaths.

Gags.

Then cinches an arm across her chest, hugging her biceps, hunching in on herself. Wide, frightened eyes scan the blood-spattered, weapon-burned bridge. She looks away.

My blood diffuses into my body and empties my engorged jack. I return it to the safety of the skinsuit. The suit seals up, evacuating the foreign molecules, so I am returned to a normal state.

But I will never be in a normal state again.

A ping on the center screen informs me the Spiderwasp has sent a response. It takes some time to connect with this lesser technology.

“What…?” she asks quiet, confused, and also awed. “What did you do to me?”

I have no answer, because my question is a mirror.

What has she done to me?