Arcturus Syndrome Ch. 07

"Well?" Ruth asked.

She had her hand on her hip, a shadowy figure in the darkness, and yet... such a hip! Such a shape!

"I admit, that was a lot rougher than I expected, and I was hoping to make better time. I'm tired. But... I do have a plan. Now, while it's dark, we can keep to the roads and just hide if anyone comes by. However, Ruth, I have been thinking."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"Originally I was just thinking about walking through the night, but I have been thinking about some ways to boost our chances, and make things a little easier."

"Like?"

"It would involve crime."

"Like?"

"There are some farms out this way. I plan to steal a car. If you want to go your own way from here, this might be the right point to split up. I don't want to get you in any more trouble than you are already in."

"You're going to leave me out here? In the woods? On a farm? Come on, let's steal a car."

"You know, this probably ends with us in jail."

"Or dead."

"I just want it to be on my own terms."

"I just don't want to have to face my husband."

"You do have a husband?"

"Yeah, he thinks I'm in Chicago, for a conference."

"I see."

>>> Philipsburg, Pod A, 22:00

Katherine knocked on his door.

Thorvald opened the door, cautiously.

"Imani came up with a funny idea," Katherine said.

"Funny?"

"Can I come in?"

"Yeah, ok."

He opened the door.

Katherine slipped in and shut it behind her.

"Imani thinks we are wired up for a very specific reason."

"Science."

"What did they tell us, in no uncertain terms, not to do."

"Have sex. It will kill us."

"But they know that it doesn't, always. And they have been pumping us full of this nasty drink, which is definitely not just to make sure we aren't drinking bad water. There's something in this drink."

"Okayyy..."

"So, what if they want us to do it?"

Thorvald snorted. "Don't you think they would just have said something? Or at least not bothered with the 'don't do it' talk?"

"Imani thought that maybe Dr. McKinnon was a little too insistent. Like, she was covering herself for legal purposes."

"So you're saying, it won't kill us."

Katherine shrugged. "It won't kill me. I'm immune. It won't kill Imani, she's immune. You're the unknown quantity. What did you say earlier? Might as well enjoy it?"

"For science."

"Science. But... there's one more thing. We did a little, uh, shopping."

Katherine stood, went to the door and rapped on it three times.

Imani opened the door.

She was wearing a silver fishnet body suit with only the sensors on underneath.

"I'm so happy that was three knocks and not one," Imani said. "Will you show him your choice?"

Katherine shrugged out of her sweats. She wore a black thong, and a black-lace bra.

Thorvald sat, eyes wide.

"Close your mouth, Thor, you don't want to look like Joey."

"I..."

Katherine watched the immediate effect they were having on Thorvald's physiology. It was very gratifying. The temperature seemed to rise quickly throughout the room.

Thorvald regained his powers of speech. "I need to tell you, I've never..."

"Shhhh," Imani put a finger to her lips. She crawled onto tiny bed and slid in behind Thorvald, pulling him back against her, giving him a little shoulder rub. "Just relax, honey."

Katherine felt that surge within her that she was getting so familiar with.

"Thor, before this morning, I had never either. Let's learn together."

The space was barely big enough for the three of them to be in here, and there was no way they would all fit on the bed. But if they left the pod, the sensors wouldn't be able to send their data.

Katherine stepped in front of Thorvald. She leaned in, pressing his face to her breasts, holding him close, feeling the head of him. Imani looked up at her, eyes glittering.

"You're salty," he said, tasting the skin of her breasts.

"Mmmm."

Imani lifted his shirt, pulling it over his head. She bit his shoulder. "You're salty too. It's delicious."

Katherine knelt, having to angle her calves in order to fit in the narrow space between wall and bed. She brought her lips to Thorvald's chest, kissing over the slabs of his pectoral muscles, teasing around his nipples, tasting. She caressed his sides, and her hands discovered Imani's bountiful curves flattened to his back. She caressed that beautiful side-boob shape as well.

Thorvald moaned. "Heaven before death. Worth it."

Katherine kissed down his torso, savoring every ridge and muscle of him. She hooked her fingers over the waist of his pants and gave a suggestive tug. She unsnapped, unzipped, and pulled. Imani encouraged him, lifting him a little.

Katherine pulled the pants and underwear off in one smooth stroke. Thorvald's cock bounced free, thick and already hard.

Imani's hands caressed down his chest and belly. She wrapped her fingers around him and held him firmly.

"Magnifique!"

Katherine bent to kiss him there, which Imani encouraged.

He had a deeply masculine scent. Katherine didn't have any experience with such things, but somehow she knew. She knew the scent of his desire, his arousal. She felt her own readiness, the slippery wetness soaking the thin strip of fabric.

She tasted the texture, flavor, shape of him. His erection curved a little, like a banana with a knob at one end. That knob had a slightly fleshy texture, a little bit rough, like the surface of a tongue. Her tongue met that texture and she swirled around him.

Thorvald let out a long, powerful groan.

Amy in the next bedroom burst into more sobbing; they could hear her throughout the pod.

"That girl," Imani said. "If we could fit any more people in here, I'd get her in here and stuff that crying mouth of hers full of this beautiful cock. That would fix her."

"It's mine," Katherine said.

"Tut tut, don't be greedy. It's the healing power of pleasure," Imani said.

"Is that part of your yoga training?"

"Oh you wouldn't believe."

Imani continued to gently, slowly stroke Thor's cock while Katherine swirled her tongue around it.

"It really is a beautiful thing though," Katherine said, coming up for air. "They talk about blow jobs like it's a dirty thing, but this is just so... delicious."

"Riiight???" Imani purred it, kissing and licking at Thorvald, who was helpless between them, moaning and gasping.

"But are they all this big? Can a woman really swallow that all the way in?"

"Girl did you grow up under a rock? You never watched porn?"

"I just didn't believe it was real. And now that I feel this, I'm not sure how it's possible!"

"Well, don't rush yourself. I think he's enjoying it just the way you're doing it, aren't you Thor?"

"Gnnnngck."

"That's Thor for 'Yes Ma'am.'" Imani translated.

Katherine continued to delight in the sensations of Thor's cock. The way it twitched and throbbed in her mouth She felt him wanting to thrust, and she rode those small motions of his hips, keeping him right where she wanted him. A couple of times she took him to the back of her throat, but it just seemed impossibly huge, her body resisted.

Imani caressed her, combing through her hair with her fingers, gently pressing her down on Thor, trailing her long nails over Katherine's shoulders, drawing out an intense shiver.

"Uh, uh, uh," he said, trying to get their attention.

"He says he's enjoying this too much and might cum if you continue."

Katherine took her mouth off him, and watched with fascination as he pulsed, stretching for her. A bead of clear fluid amassed at the tip. She looked up. Thor's head was leaning back against Imani, even as she looked over his shoulder. Her dark eyes were filled with desire, too.

"I want him to cum," Katherine said wonderingly. "I want to taste it. I want to drink it."

Imani nodded, smiling. "Good girl!"

"But, they say it's gross."

"Taste that, tell me what you think."

Katherine darted her tongue out, licked up the drop and let it sit on her tongue, breathing across it, feeling it with all her senses.

"It's amazing!" she said after a moment. "It's like flowers."

"It's a lot like flowers. Doing the same job, at the end of the day. The actual cum is thicker, heavier, and not quite as floral. More powerful. But I think you're like me. It's only sad, prudish women who have bought into the myth that it's nasty. They've probably never had an orgasm, either. But you're not prudish, are you."

"No. Never was, I just didn't have... opportunity, I guess."

Katherine felt Thor's cock straining and throbbing in her hand.

"He's young, and will bounce back in a few seconds, so I think you should give yourself, and him, that pleasure. Plus, we'll find out if the science works. Get us some of those drinks queued up."

Imani continued to slowly caress and stroke Thor while Katherine mixed three big cups of the military-grade energy drink. Thor grabbed one, and drink it down in one go. "Another," he begged, and Kathering made two more. There was just enough shelf space for her line of prepared drinks.

"Ok, Thor, are you ready to see if this works?"

He didn't even speak. He nodded.

Katherine unsnapped her bra, and knelt again, pressing him between her breasts.

"I can feel him pulsing against my heart," she said, wonderingly.

"Ok, you might be a little in love, but don't worry," Imani said. "That's beautiful too."

She continued: "Give the lad what he needs. If this experiment is not a disaster, we have all night to test out the different variables."

Katherine wrapped her hands around the shaft of his cock, feeling the velvety skin, the pulsing veins, the intense hardness of it, the powerful heat of it. She felt her own desire intensifying, the need to feel that sensation inside her.

But she took the big, broad head of him in over her lips and began kissing, sucking, swirling, bobbing her head.

The sounds Thor made drove her wild. He was growling like an animal.

And Imani: she was moaning with her own desire, her fingers wrapped into Katherine's hair, pulling her down on Thor with more urgency.

Katherine found that now the thick head pressing into the back of her mouth was exciting, and she loved to feel some of his length extended along her tongue. She wanted to reach for more, to get her lips farther down. She imagined pressing her lips to the very base, but still she couldn't do it.

Thor, however, was not complaining. He was grunting, gasping, moving his hips.

His thighs were tense, rock-hard under her arms.

His belly was hard as well, each muscle standing out.

"Oh, oh, oh," he uttered, lifting his hips, every muscle tightening further.

"Gaaawwwd..."

Katherine felt it, a dramatic thickening through his cock, contractions pressing that hardness into her mouth.

She felt the cum flowing, jetting through his shaft.

It erupted into her mouth, a flood. Saltty. Very, very salty. Delicious.

She felt herself quiver, the excitement of this intense experience coursing through her. And another power, as well, a tingling across her skin. The thirst on her lips, the intense spike of pain, like a headache in the back of her head, but beautiful too, a detonation of pleasure. Was this another kind of orgasm?

And then, Thor spasmed again, shooting more cum into her mouth, overflowing. She tried to swallow, but then her real orgasm hit. She felt the flood of light through her body. Golden heat, radiance, and extraordinary power. She almost couldn't see. She felt her whole body filling with Thor's climax, every cell lighting up.

Someone was making an unearthly howling sound.

She felt it in her body, in her throat. That was her.

And then Imani slapped her, hard.

"Drink! Drink! Get Thor drinking."

Thorvald was lolling half senseless in Imani's arms, his body twitching.

Katherine grabbed one of the drinks, and put it in Thorvald's hands, lifting it to his lips.

"Drink!" she yelled at him. Imani smacked him now too.

Thorvald finally gulped it down.

Katherine took one for herself, and found that the flood of it's coolness into her body was somehow intensely perfect.

When she set it down, she found that Thor was compulsively licking her skin.

"It's definitely the salt," Imani said. "Look." Her own perspiration had hardened in a few places to a diamond-dust of crystalline patterns.

"And here," she pointed to Thorvalds face: a few crystals had formed around his forehead.

She pulled him back against her, and licked at them.

"Salty. But strange, not like sweat. Not like table salt."

Katherine sampled it. It was very strong, and it had a strange bitterness. But it wasn't unpleasant, and it only made her feel even stronger.

"Thor!" Katherine said. "Lick here." She lifted the heaviness of her breasts so that he could like the especially salty sweat that had accumulated beneath them.

He did, and a few minutes later he leaned back. "This is the most intense day of my life, and... I'm not dead. In fact, I feel better than I have ever felt in my life."

>>> State College, PA, 23:20

McKinnon terminated the last ConCall of the day. She was getting really tired of these people.

Or maybe she was just tired. She wasn't quite ready to start dropping meth just yet, so maybe she would let herself take a nap.

Which was when Salvator burst into her office. Dr. Absalom Salvator, Nobel Prize winner, and generally annoying person.

He slammed a petri dish down on her desk.

She looked at it. It was empty.

She looked at him.

He shook it, and she heard something rattle.

"What am I looking at."

"I have no idea," he said. "But it is not from Earth."

She bent closer to the glass container. There was a bead in it, a small grey pebble about a millimeter across, or a little larger.

She looked up at him again. His expression was not triumph, it was awe.

"Tell me more."

"This," he said, "is a molecule. This is thousands of times bigger than any protein on earth, and the complexity of it is going to take us years to understand. This was in the sample we pulled from Dr. Fitzpatrick. It was lodged in or adjacent to the amygdala. Our scans of Dr. Young are not conclusive, we didn't get an MRI of that region, but the sonogram does show something in a similar spot."

"A single molecule? What would it do?"

"This is unlike any molecule anyone has ever seen, and we will be working on understanding its role in the Arcturus Syndrome with all due urgency. But based on our earliest findings, it might be more appropriate to think of it as a machine. An incredibly sophisticated and complex machine. We can't call it life from another world, not yet, but we are definitely participating in some kind of first contact event."