ΔV Pt. 12

Cinder's back arched. Her cunt tightened. And she screamed her pleasure out as her fingers gripped onto Lata's blond hair. Tight enough to almost tear. And she felt no pain -- at first. Then, as the white cleared from her eyes and she sprawled back onto the ground, she felt her muscles whimper and mewl, but in sharp, clear lines. Like knives, scraping against her spine. She hissed her pain through her teeth as her fingers went slack and Lata drew back, licking her chops slowly.

"Do all t'row taste like that?" Lata slid two fingers along her chin. Scooping up juices that glowed, faintly, with mana. Her tongue darted out and, with an almost excessive relish, she licked her fingers completely clean. The whole operation could have been dainty and elegant and controlled. But Lata licked herself clean like an animal and refused to break eye contact with Cinder the whole time.

Look at how delicious you are, my little t'row, those blue eyes said, in purring tones that Cinder would never have expected to hear fromCaptain Markova. But it seemed humans, once they took their uniforms off, and dropped the Captains and the Luydmiilas and Markovas and allowed you to hear their shortest, most personal names, their Latas...

Well.

It seemed that they could become something, someone, entirely new.

Cinder nearly came again, just from the sight of it.

"Well?" Lata crooned.

"Yes..." Cinder mumbled, turning her head. She wanted to bury her face into a pillow, but just the act of turning her head set off tiny twinges through her body. She squirmed and shivered and then gasped aloud as Lata lifted her leg. Cinder lifted her own head up, craning and peering down her nose at the other woman. Lata had slipped off her leggings and her panties and was settling down against Cinder. For a moment, Cinder was baffled. Then she felt the soaked heat of Lata's cunt, pressed to hers.

"W-What are...oh..." Cinder whispered. "Ohhh." Her croon was warm and eager and she started to rock her own hips back, despite her aches and her pains. Pleasure washed through her -- less fierce and intense than the licking and nuzzling and fingering. But there was something warmer about it. She could feel her lover's sex. Her lover's pleasure. And that pushed her over an edge again. It was less of an explosion than the last time, but it was still enough to make her mewl and moan. Her eyes closed and she trembled as she leaned in, her body molding to Lata's.

The two sprawled together. Lata panted softly, her eyes half closed. "Mmm..." She caressed Cinder's hair and Cinder closed her eyes, letting her tiredness carry her away into a deep, dark, dreamless sleep. When she woke the next morning, she was holding onto nothing and her body had stopped aching quite so much. She managed to roll herself onto her belly and then slide to her hands and knees. She stretched, like a cat, her back popping loudly as she groaned. "So..." She mumbled to herself, drawing down to her knees and sitting back onto her ankles. She looked at herself in the mirror of the bathroom. "You're an official t'row now..." She smirked, ever so slightly.

When she emerged from the bathroom, it was to find Kaleb standing and stretching while Lata...

Markova.

She couldn't see the wry Lata in the woman sitting at the table. While she had left off the official parts of her uniform, she still had that shield around her. That feeling of being a stern woman at her job. She was Markova again and Cinder wasn't sure what they were -- or if they had been anything more than a fling. She gulped. "So..." She said. "Kaleb. You're welcome." She sounded snarky. She didn't want to -- but Kaleb grinned at her.

"You're welcome," he said. "We're alive, I'm young again." He shrugged. "All in all, things are looking up."

Markova slapped the magazine of her pistol back in and checked the chamber. She pursed her lips. "Can you get the disguise done, Cinder?"

Cinder nodded.

"Good," Markova said. "We're going to find anyone who is fighting back...and we'll see what they can do with a wizard of their very own." Her lips pursed. "I think we'll be able to cause some damage, eh?"

Kaleb nodded.

And so, a trio of humans left the cottage.

The owners never returned. In the chaos of the days to come, the cottage was left to be slowly reclaimed, piece by piece, by a long battered, long repaired ecology. In remarkably short time, vines and leaves and grass and moss had worked the cottage down to a leaning ruin. But sheltered in the tiled bathroom, the small makeshift bed where Cinder saw past Captain Markova's shields, if only for a brief, sweaty moment...lasted.

For longer than some things at least.

***

The Enterprise and the Russian fleets did not break orbit all at the same time. The dance of orbital dynamics required them to burn in sequence, each one striking at the moment of apoapsis, the moment when their slightly elliptical orbits were furthest from Arcadia. At that moment, water was boiled in the nuclear rockets and jetted out of the thrust nozzles of the starships, sending them whipping away from Arcadia and towards the Janus Portal. Aboard each ship, they were loaded down with a new kind of consumable.

Wizards.

Each Arcadian state and principality and city that had helped to battle the Dark Lord centuries before had found the finest of their spellcasters, and sent them up alongside extra supplies. Normally, starships used dried rations that could be hydrated into something approximating an edible state. Stored like this, they took up less space, less mass. But the old calculations, the rocket equation that had dominated human engineering for centuries, had been tossed out on its ear with the advent of men and women who could create reaction mass from nothing.

However, not every ship had it as easy as the Enterprise.

Two thirds of the Russian fleet -- the laser frigates Ladnyy and Admiral Grigorovich, the drone carrier Svatoy Nikolay Chudotvorets, the railgun corvette Sarov and Gorky -- were all hydrogen burners. Hydrogen was less massive than water, providing a lower thrust, but since it was less massive, more could be stored, giving them a greater measurement of ΔV over time. This had led to some hasty jerry rigging and the solution had been somewhat sloppy. The SNC, like her departed sister ship, carried sixty drones, each one loaded with a rapid fire conventional cannon. Cheaper than a railgun, faster rate of fire, and slower muzzle velocity, with significantly less strain placed upon the projectiles. This allowed said projectiles, safely protected from the chemical propellant by sabots, to be more complex than the Teflon coated tungsten slugs used by most railguns. The end result was the Russian drone fleet fired semi-guided explosive projectiles, designed to explode and 'shotgun' at enemy ships at relatively close range.

This meant that the drones were designed to go slower, to allow their slower firing guns more time to fire. Russian thinking was that it didn't really matter if this gave enemy point defense lasers more time to burn the drones out of the sky. The drones were going to be shot off into space once they had emptied their tanks anyway. Losing a few to lasfire was acceptable, if it gave the survivors more time to pelt the enemy with explosives.

But the end result of this tactical doctrine decision was that each drone had a rather large chunk that could be easily removed -- the ammo bins and the conventional weapon, as well as the gimbals. What was left was a relatively efficient thruster, tanks of liquid mercury, and an empty space on the strut-work. Working with duct tape, screw drivers, and the brainpower of every engineer in the fleet, the Russians knocked together several gas carrying drones, allowing their largest remaining ship, the SNC, to serve as a fuel production station while in transit.

Wizards made water on the SNC, the SNC's nuclear reactor powered the electrolysis, and the water was turned into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen became a serious problem after a few hours of operation, but by then, the Russians had jerry rigged a set of vents to blow the oxygen out of the SNC's rear nozzles without causing too much damage. The end result was that the Russians were able to burn towards the Janus portal. Not as efficiently as the Enterprise which was able to just use the water as is. But they managed it, drones bringing each ship in their fleet the magically summoned, technologically filtered hydrogen.

The end result of this inefficiency was that the Enterprise emerged first, a week after setting out from Arcadia. They emerged with good timing, considering the slow, celestial dance of the solar system. Jupiter and Saturn were relatively close to one another, as opposed to being on the far sides of the solar system from one another. The Enterprise had shot through the portal at an obscene velocity -- one so high that the crew had actually stopped actively celebrating it in the mess hall, the number having grown beyond their own ability to be quite comfortable.

Deceleration was a long, slow process -- spanning several more days as the Enterprise began the glacial turn through space that would bring her back around to begin falling towards Jupiter. They had been going too fast to use Saturn's gravity to slingshot -- but that kind of maneuver, so important when ΔV was a budget and not an infinite, renewable resource that could be drawn from seemingly nothing, was essentially meaningless in this new age of spaceflight.

When the Enterprise -- and two days later, the Russian fleet -- arrived at Ganymede, they arrived at a colony that had been completely turned over. What had once been the remassing and rearming station of the entire United States outward fleet, as well as home to nearly ten thousand colonists who were beginning to work on future plans to settle the entire Jovian system was now the refugee home of the only parts of the human race not currently under the boot-heel of the Dark Lord.

In total, there were five fleets in orbit: The Americans, the Indians, the Russians, the Chinese and the smaller powers. The final fleet was a nearly even split between the European Union (who had always been more focused on terrestrial issues and concerns during the 2^nd Space Race), the Brazilian star navy and the private fleets. During the bloody nightmare of the 21^st century, most space based companies had floundered as their labor base and capital had evaporated under the wave of climate refugees and economic collapse. By the 60s, only a few had survived. One, owned by an eccentric family of former emerald mine operators, had tried to bring the thriving private military contractor market into space.

They had failed utterly at making it profitable, but Space Fist did have two gunships which were now in a polar orbit around Ganymede. As the Enterprise finished their deceleration, the gunships were being repainted in USAF colors. Lucas watched the crews working as he sat in Helen's cabin, listening to her reading of ship names with a slow, growing note of awe in her voice. "This is the second biggest fleet humanity's ever put together," she said, tossing her tablet down and starting to pace around. Ganymede turned in the spin-corrected viewscreen that served as the cabin's window. The pock marked moon, streaked with its distinctive lines of white, had a thin spread of glowing dots on the surface -- the colonies that had been constructed down there.

The moon's value was more than just its position in the Jovian system. It was large enough to have a magnetosphere, and it had a liquid ocean beneath its crust. Perfect for colonization. At least. It had been.

Now, after looking at Arcadia, it just looked barren and worthless.

"How many ships is it?" Marcus asked, though he could have figured it out from his own memory. He had been tracking them all long enough back in his old day job. He thought of Teller and wondered if he was still trying to pick up chicks while the moon was under occupation.

"About sixty two," Helen said. "Mostly laser frigates, with a few railships and a handful of drone carriers." She shook her head slightly. "They were all out in the belt when shit dropped." She chewed her lower lip. "And we're facing nearly a hundred and twenty in orbit."

"And those are ghost ships," Lucas said, his voice grim.

Helen sighed.

A sudden knocking at the door jerked both of them out of their funk. Helen walked over -- opened the door -- and yelped. "What the flying fuck are you doing here?" She asked, her eyes wide as saucers as she looked at Fireheart. Seeing the elf here, in the doorway, should not have shocked Lucas at this point. Not after weeks of watching mages at work. Not after weeks of being taught magic by those mages. But it still somehow felt bizarre to him.

"I never got off the ship, Lord Winsom," Fireheart said. Her voice didn't hold the normal line of tension it had when the three of them had been back on Arcadia. In fact, Fireheart was looking downright nervous. Helen's brow furrowed and she shot a glance at Lucas, who wished he could do more than give her a very tiny thumbs up. He had her back. For what little good it would do.

"Well, what do you want, then?" Helen asked, frowning. Fireheart clenched her jaw tightly -- then let out a sigh. Her fingers brushed her bright orange hair back behind her pointed ear and she leaned against the door.

"I want..." She paused. "I need to ask you for permission. As Lord Winsom, you are my liege, and any decisions I make must be cleared by you. And...I have waited until now, until we had come to a world that was not Arcadia, to ask -- to be far from the strictures of the court. To-"

"You do know we left Arcadia's universe half a week ago, right?" Helen asked, her brow furrowing.

Fireheart's jaw tightened again. She looked aside. "I wanted to be certain. The Faelands are strict in the rules of the Telling, and to do this near their censure, it would invite...discourse." She shook her head. "Listen. The last time that the elves faced the Dark Lord, it created new Tellings for the first time since the Dawn Age. It made new stories. It altered the old -- it was no longer possible to tell stories of objects and beings that were eradicated. The tales of the t'row had to be completely altered with the destruction of the underground. It..." She sighed. "I...I wished to come, and so did every mage here, because this will create even more new stories. I wish to lay claim to these. I wish...to be First."

She lifted her chin, glaring at Helen, her eyes flaring with a defiant light.

"Okay, sure," Helen said.

Fireheart looked as if someone had just cut every wire that was keeping her standing upright. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. "...okay sure?" She repeated back, slowly. Then she flung up her hands, slamming them into the cramped roof of the ship. "Okay sure!? That's your response?"

Helen shrugged. "Should it be-"

"Okay sure?" Fireheart grabbed her. Lucas sprang to his feet, but he saw that Fireheart wasn't trying to kill Helen. She was just shaking her. "You killed Lord Winsom and claimed his seat -- and knew not what it was worth. Now, you hand me the right of a millenium, the chance to be the star of a new Telling, to be First, to choose my own name and claim my own place in our people's history...and the only fucking thing you can think to fucking say, you stupid bitch, is okay sure!?" She was so close to Helen that their noses were almost mashed together. Helen, her eyes wide, lifted her hands up. The two remained nearly entwined, panting softly.

"Are...we gonna kiss or something?" Helen asked.

"Arrgh!" Fireheart shoved her back, then stepped away. "I...fucking humans!" She turned and stomped off. The sound of her anger faded down the corridor -- and a confused yelp from Dr. Goldberg announced that Fireheart had pushed her out of the way. Once the sounds had faded to nothingness, Helen turned back to Lucas.

"Elves, man. You'd think an alien species that looks like us would be easier to fucking get," she said, shaking her head.

Lucas, trying to not smile and failing, said: "It's not complicated, you know?"

"Ehh," Helen shrugged.

***

"Wheeeeeeeee!"

Qasim watched as Hua flew through the air, tumbling nose over tail, his wings fluttering. Beside him, Huxian adjusted her silken dress, glaring at the fabric, which sought to perpetually curl up and away from her body in the incredibly light touch of Ganymede's gravity. Every few seconds, the air currents that the cycling system ran through the colony would snatch onto the fabric of her outfit and try to flash the whole world her milky thighs.

"Do you want new clothing?" Qasim asked.

"Wheeeeeeeee!" Hua shot by overhead again.

Huxian shook her head. "Why is it that this place feels so much lighter than the Enterprise? I thought you said that gravity was from mass. A moon is more massive than a ship." She sniffed, her silvery ears pinning back against her head. Beside her, Ning was stretching her arms over her head. She looked like she was happier than she had been in weeks -- dressed in a PLAA jumpsuit that fit her like a glove. She shot Qasim a little smile, but Qasim himself felt a growing sense of uncertainty. The four of them stood in the antechamber of what had once been a Chinese colony -- but the Americans had very quickly changed that.

Once the bullet holes had been patched and the blood cleaned off the walls, the Americans had nixed the Neo-Maoist art on the wall and replaced it with an American flag, some painted landscapes, and lots of natural colors. Lots of blue, as well. The seal of the People's Republic had been replaced by a massive seal of the United States -- complete with their Latin motto, which sprawled underneath his feet as he waited, still dressed in the Oni clothing he had been given.

Since, as it was, his current legal status was entirely up in the air. Captain DuPont had given him asylum, and Huxian had been more than ready to lay out her own legal documentation, showing that the Glorious Prince of Heaven was a member of the Dragon Empire and, thus, a foreign citizen. None of that quite managed to erase the worry in the back of Qasim's mind about some political officers rounding him up and taking him away. And, as if his worries had summoned them, the doors leading deeper into the colony opened and out came the brass. There was Captain DuPont, standing to the left of the American admiral -- who looked nearly as Chinese as he did. The Chinese admiral was a stern looking woman who was nearly a head shorter than the rest of the party, and the Russian admiral was a dour faced, square jawed fellow with hair that had gone nearly white.

The American admiral stepped up and held out his hand to Qasim. "Prince Qasim," he said, with the strange accentless affect of the translation spell. "I'm Admiral C-" He stopped short, looking up as Hua slowly rotated by overhead. "Jesus Christ!" He exclaimed, jerking backwards. The Chinese admiral -- racking his memory placed her as Admiral Wei Xu -- managed to keep her expression still, while the Russian admiral scowled.

"We all saw the video files," he said, his voice dripping with condescension.

The American nodded. "Right..." He schooled his features. "Admiral Cho," he said, holding his hand out once more. Qasim took his hand and shook it. "This is Admiral Xu and Admiral Zakaroff. We've been monitoring the situation on Earth..." He paused. "On Stark and absorbing the briefings you have sent us." As he spoke, Qasim tried to get a read on Xu, but Xu did not give him more than she gave to anyone else. Her face was as unreadable as...well, as his. Hua landed, slowly, on Qasim's shoulder.