Martian Summer

Lieutenant Adkins lay on his side on the bunk, idly looking out the porthole and resting his aching muscles. The Martian landscape stretched away on all sides, a cold barren desert of red sand, red rocks, red mountain, red sky. The sheets of his bunk were still damp with the sweat and residue of Lieutenant Brandon. Or maybe Sergeant Minnelli before her. Or perhaps Ensign Geneva before her. In the past several days in his little bunk, their sweat and residue had mingled and mixed like the red rocks and sand and sky outside the porthole.

Out there, the small setting sun gleamed briefly on the round silver dome over the dig site in the distance, a glittery speck on the horizon, where so many of the crew members had broken down and cried at what they'd found. Three of them -- including the last two males besides Adkins himself -- had lurched out into the wispy Martian air and yanked open their pressure suits and died squirming and gasping in the red dust rather than live with this new, piercing knowledge.

Adkins, never an especially religious man, hadn't cried, had assumed he would survive the knowledge, and he was right.

Surviving the pleasure was another question.

He lay back and closed his eyes and let his naked muscles go limp. He'd quit bothering with clothes several days earlier, the process of dressing and undressing having become just one more exertion. During one recent bout, he'd actually become so exhausted that his legs had given out and his weight had settled entirely onto Helmsman Decker, who wasn't a big woman and might gotten hurt had he not managed to push himself off with his arms.

He'd told Captain Janeway, after that episode, that he'd need to sleep, preferably for a few days.

"Request denied," she'd answered, through the intercom on the wall next to his bed. "I'm sorry, Bill, but this particular order is the most important one I've ever given. I wish I could distribute the work more evenly, but as you know, I can't. The best I can do is to tell you that all your crewmates are fully committed to the mission. In fact, I'll be joining the rotation myself soon . . . "

* * *

He'd just tipped toward the edge of sleep when he heard the gentle rap on his door and the rustle of another body in the room. He opened his eyes. Commander McNamara, right on schedule.

He smiled wanly at her, not bothering to conceal his exhaustion. She'd been a year ahead of him at the academy, where they'd briefly dated without consummation (ironic now, in hindsight) before settling into a casual but sturdy friendship that had endured the years of their winding, occasionally intersecting careers. Her current status over him on the ship -- second in command -- hadn't diminished it.

She smiled sympathetically. "How are you, Bill?" she asked.

"Exhausted," he said, with a small laugh. "More exhausted than I was during basic training. Maybe they ought to add this to the regimen."

They both laughed. Then they both smiled, she with sympathy, he with exhaustion.

"I'm sorry, Bill. I have my orders," she said, unzipping her jumpsuit. "And so do you."

* * *

Lieutenant Adkins opened his eyes to find Captain Janeway sitting on the edge of his bunk, looking down at him, a small, calm smile on her lips. Outside the porthole, the sun had almost completely set behind the jagged red horizon, cloaking the Martian landscape in sharp-edged clusters of darkness.

He was looking at the landscape and letting his mind climb out of sleep when he realized that his half-hard cock was in the gentle but firm grip of his captain.

"Sorry to wake you, lieutenant," she said, and she sounded as if she meant it. "I know you've been through a lot lately. I was actually hoping to do this while you slept."

After a moment's tense consideration, she added: "I was . . . um . . . I was just getting ready to use my mouth. If you think that would work."

He blinked, and breathed deep and shook off the sleep as best he could, and took in her face. She was significantly older than he, though not so old as to have a biological excuse to sit out the order she had given the rest of the crew. It occurred to him, for the first time, that she wasn't an unattractive woman: tall, curvy, with silky dark hair that she kept in a tight bun on duty but which now cascaded down over her shoulders. Her breasts, somewhat heavy, low but not too low, announced themselves through her jumpsuit. She noticed the direction of his eyes, and she turned her body toward him to accommodate a better view.

A moment later, making a decision, she stood and stripped off the jumpsuit in one efficient motion, and then was standing naked before him. Her breasts, free now, were fuller than her uniforms had hinted; her nipples were prominent and red. Her hips, too, were rounder and fuller than he'd guessed. He was gratified to see a lush dark triangle between her legs, a generational difference, he supposed, from the younger members of the crew. (He'd been so put off by the bare skin between Ensign Wexler's legs that he'd had to avoid looking in order to finish with her.)

* * *

"Does this help?" Captain Janeway asked him, placing her hands on her hips and turning her naked body slightly to one side, then the other.

She looked at the hardening shape pushing through his bedsheet and saw her answer. She peeled back the sheet and gently straddled him in the small bunk, taking his cock in her hand and guiding him into her.

As the pleasure started to build, Lieutenant Adkins' gaze drifted back out the porthole and over the jagged landscape of Mars, now almost entirely cloaked in darkness. God had died out there amid those red rocks -- had died as surely as he himself would die, should he attempt to step unprotected into the thin icy atmosphere outside his porthole. So it was possible to die of knowledge.

Was it possible to die of pleasure? he wondered, as his captain pressed her lips to his ear and whispered an unyielding military order cloaked in a soft womanly rasp: "Relax, Lieutenant. Relax . . . "

(END)