Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 02

Chapter 2 - Ezra crash-lands on Samothea

The power on Ezra's spaceship failed immediately it emerged from its final hyperspace jump. The lights, engines, navigation system and central computer were all down. Ezra was in a dark dead ship travelling in who knew what direction at who knew what speed with no means to arrest his motion.

Suppressing his urge to panic, Ezra punched every button on the piloting console, seeking to regain control, begging the emergency power to come on. At last! The computer display flickered, some buttons lit up and Ezra's ears and eyes were suddenly assaulted by wailing alarms and flashing lights.

After he had cancelled the alarms, Ezra found his hyperspace engines would not come back on, whatever he did.

"It's no real problem for the moment," he encouraged himself, pressing buttons and waiting for the response, "just so long as I'm not headed toward anything solid;" but the navigation system gave no reading.

Ezra had already wasted many minutes with the engines; he could not waste time with navi-comms. Cursing his ship and himself, Ezra decided to navigate the old-fashioned way, by looking at the stars.

He slid down the ladder into the forward observation bay, a perspex bubble with an optical telescope. It turned out he didn't need the telescope. When he turned around at the bottom of the ladder, his entire visual field was filled by a blue, white and green planet, Samothea for sure.

"Fuck!" Ezra exclaimed and rushed back to the piloting consol.

"Fuck!" he repeated. Now he knew where he was - in a crippled ship, heading at high speed to a hard and messy impact on a planet only a few hundred miles away.

If his engines would not work, and he could not power up the rocket thrusters, then Ezra knew he was dead.

"Work, damn you! Work!" he repeated like a mantra, punching the control buttons, hoping to awaken some driving power. It was no good. The rocket thrusters were dormant. Ezra tried again. Still nothing. The third, fourth and fifth attempts were also fruitless. Again and again Ezra adjusted dials, pulled levers and thumped switches until, at last! he felt a kick as the starboard rocket lit and began slowly to spin the ship around. Five seconds later the port rocket also ignited. Not powerful enough to escape the gravitational pull of Samothea, Ezra could use the manoeuvring rockets to slow his descent and possibly come to a safe landing.

After three good burns on the rockets, Ezra had slowed considerably and, from the smoothness of his trajectory, judged he was still above Samothea's atmosphere. He made another long burn and rested the rocket motors again for a few seconds. Now the buffeting began. He had breached the atmosphere and was slowing down even more but the ship was harder to control. A half-minute burn and the ship was hurtling through clouds, maybe five miles from impact. Ezra prayed the clouds would not descend all the way to the surface and, to back up his prayers, risked a longer burn on the rockets.

The clouds dispersed to reveal a blue-green ocean with a coastline about ten miles to the East. He was descending under control with half burn on the rockets, hoping they would last long enough for him to touchdown on land rather than crash into the sea.

With about two miles to fall and six miles to the shore, Ezra steered his craft steeply in, slowing under power as much as he could. It seemed to be working. She was gliding gently. In another minute, he was at two thousand feet and a mile from the shore. A good final spurt on the rockets and it looked like she would make a gentle touchdown, right on the beach.

Ezra slapped the piloting console a last time and shouted in relief.

"You beauty, I knew you wouldn't let me down!"

It was the wrong thing to say, of course. A second later the over-heated starboard motor coughed and gave up, the ship turned on one side and fell spinning out of the sky. It hit the sea hard, throwing Ezra sideways against the rear of the bridge, where his head hit a spar. He passed out.

The ship floated for ten minutes before it began to sink. Water was pouring into the bridge. It woke Ezra, who felt excruciating pain in his left arm when he tried to push himself up. There was blood on his shirt and he felt light-headed; but he knew that, if he wanted to live, he must get out of the flooding ship. Drowsy and weak, nursing his arm, Ezra sloshed his way to the airlock and grabbed at the escape lever. The mechanism worked and the hatch opened, letting in more water and pushing Ezra out with a bubble of air.

He swam one-handed toward the beach, which was only a hundred yards away but took a lifetime and all his energy to reach. Forcing himself to go on, he felt relief when his feet touched the sandy sea-bottom, after which he half-swam and half-scrambled onto the shore, where he fainted again from exhaustion, pain and blood loss.

Some hours later, while Ezra was lying on his side in the surf, he was woken by hands gently lifting him, pulling him up the beach. He screamed in pain as someone pulled his left arm. The pairs of hands shifted to his shoulders. A minute later, he was lying on his back, the low morning sun on his face, his rescuers kneeling beside him.

They were two girls: a skinny wraith, who looked to Ezra about ten years old, and a more substantial girl who on Earth would have been about thirteen. The wraith offered Ezra a bladder of water, which he gratefully accepted but he found he could not drink it lying flat. The older girl knelt behind him and helped him sit up. Ezra greedily drained the bladder. The bigger girl pushed her backpack behind Ezra and gently helped him lie down again. He tried to say 'Thank you' but fainted again.

Next time he awoke, the skinny girl had been talking to him.

"Uh, sorry. I didn't catch that," he said.

"I said, my name is Tamar, Madam. What's yours?"

"Um, Ezra, Ezra Goldrick."

Ezra was feeling stronger, though he ached all over. His left arm hurt like hell and the bright sun was in his eyes, but he was alive.

"Thank you both for rescuing me. Am I on Samothea?

"You are, Ezra. How did you get here? Why were you in the sea?"

"I crash-landed here last night or this morning. My ship is on the sea-floor somewhere over there," Ezra said, indicating the sea with his good arm.

Tamar stared out to sea but the older girl grunted at her. She turned back to Ezra.

"What kind of ship?"

"A space-ship."

"Oh!" Tamar said, addressing the older girl, "You were right."

"What is your friend's name?" Ezra asked.

Tamar started to speak but the other girl shushed her.

"It's OK," Tamar assured her. "I wasn't going to say." To Ezra she said:

"My friend doesn't use her name. I talk for her."

In fact, Ezra had only heard the older girl grunt or hiss, never speak words. If this was strange, Ezra was too tired to wonder at it.

He took a good look at his rescuers. Tamar, the skinny wraith, wore a cotton slip under a woollen cloak, tied around her waist with a coil of rope. The other girl was dressed in raggedy trousers, shirt and jacket, a mixture of cloth, leather and clearly ancient synthetics. Both girls had leather sandals, tied by straps to their ankles and calves. The older girl had a large and fierce-looking hunting knife in a holster strapped to her thigh. They both had substantial backpacks.

Tamar was amazingly pretty to Ezra: coltish, with long straight blond hair and large brown eyes. The other girl was taller and more athletic, with curly black hair and captivating light green eyes. She was tanned where Tamar was fair.

"What's wrong with your arm, Madam?" Tamar asked.

"I think it's broken. Anyway, it hurts like blazes every time I try to move it."

"What's a 'blazes'?"

"I mean it hurts a lot."

"Oh! Can you walk? We need to leave this place. This is Mariner territory but they can't keep the Herders away and if the Herders catch us, then we will all hurt like blazes."

"I can walk, but I'm very tired. Will we go far?"

Tamar and her friend consulted in whispers and grunts.

"We're taking you to the forest. It's on our way and the Woodlanders there probably won't kill you. It is quite far, Madam."

"Well, I'm in your hands," Ezra said, stoically. He struggled to get up and did so only with the help of the girls. "Meanwhile, Tamar, can I ask you a question?"

She nodded.

"Why do you call me 'Madam'?"

Tamar was puzzled. "What else should I call you?"

However, her friend made a snorting kind of laugh and pointed to Ezra's groin. Tamar said, "I don't know what you mean," but her friend laughed again and mimicked an action. Before he could prevent the girl, Tamar had pulled Ezra's trousers down and seen at first hand that he was a man.

Embarrassed, Ezra endured a painful moment pulling his trousers back up one-handed but neither girl was the least ashamed.

"What are you doing?" he exclaimed. "Haven't you ever seen a man before?"

"No," Tamar answered with simple honesty. She stared earnestly at him, delighted to learn something new. "I read about men in a book once but I've never seen one before. Where are you from?"

"Earth," Ezra answered automatically while he tried to digest what Tamar had said. What did she mean that she had never seen a man before?

"What about you," Ezra asked the bigger girl, "Have you never seen a man before, either?"

She shook her head.

"Please explain?" Ezra asked. "Are there no men at all on Samothea?"

"None that we know of," Tamar assured him. Her friend nodded in agreement but then grunted to Tamar, who understood her with seemingly psychic power.

"We must go, Ezra Goldrick. We'll answer your questions and you can answer ours when we stop for a rest but we must leave now."

Propped up at first by the older girl, whose strength he was learning to admire, Ezra managed to walk at a reasonable pace up the beach and onto the patchy grass that gradually gave way to a well-watered prairie. The grass stretched an unguessable distance ahead of them to a band of grey-green forest framed above by white-capped peaks of a distant mountain-range. Behind them was the shimmering blue-green sea. A heat-haze blurred the view left and right, suggesting the prairie stretched out forever.

Many wayward streams ran gently to the beach dividing the grassland into irregular strips of lush meadow and muddy puddle. Tracks worn by cattle and horses showed where the feared Herders came and went. Both girls kept a look-out as they walked. Once they stopped and crouched down near some fresh dung but soon the older girl gave the 'all-clear' and they were on the move again.

Ezra had little strength for talking. He resolved to keep his head down and plod on until he could do no more.

After a few hours walking, they stopped by a small clear stream, where the girls filled their water bladders and Ezra knelt down to submerge his over-heated head in the cool sweet water. It was a delightful relief but he needed the bigger girl to help him up again.

They rested there for ten-minutes. The girls sat cross-legged on the ground, while Ezra was propped up against a clump of pampas grass. The older girl pulled a long strip of dried meat from a leather pouch in her sack, cut it into pieces with expert swipes of her hunting knife, and passed the pieces around. Seeing the girls had such measly rations, Ezra tried to refuse the food but they insisted he eat and, because he was painfully hungry, Ezra gratefully accepted. The meat was strongly flavoured, salty and hard to chew but seemed nourishing. Soon Ezra felt he had enough strength to ask some of the questions that burned in him.

"Tamar, how come all the people here are women?" he said.

"We're all clones," she answered. "Every so often, someone goes to the Cloner City and comes back with a daughter. She always has a daughter. At least, that's what everyone says. I've never seen the Cloner City. I will someday, after I've visited the mountains."

"Clones! Of course!"

Ezra knew the terraforming engineers built laboratories to clone animals for release into the wild. After whatever catastrophe had interrupted communications between Samothea and the rest of the galaxy, maybe something caused the engineers to start cloning themselves.

"Why are you going to the mountains?"

"To see the Miners," Tamar answered. "I was a Miner but the Herders snatched me, then, er ... my friend rescued me and now we're going to the mountains to find my family."

At this, the older girl shushed Tamar, but she replied, "It can't hurt. She - I mean he - is an Earther. He won't tell the Herders. Anyway, they'll probably kill him first."

The bigger girl snorted as she had done before at Tamar's naivety, which the younger girl ignored this time.

The sun was now high in the sky and Ezra was feeling it strongly. He was exhausted but he wanted to get to the forest for the shade.

"Will we make it to the forest today?" The band of trees seemed just as far away now as it had hours ago when they were at the beach.

"No, we will have to settle down before the night-rain comes. We'll probably reach the forest tomorrow."

"Rain?" asked Ezra. It seemed unlikely. They appeared to be in the tropical zone of Samothea and Ezra could see no clouds. In fact, the only clouds Ezra had seen all day were over the sea. "Rain would be very welcome," he said.

"You won't like night-rain, Ezra," Tamar said with youthful sagacity.

Betting to himself she was wrong, Ezra kept silent and they set out again.

Three hours later they stopped again, this time on the forest side of a grassy hillock. Although it was still daylight, Ezra saw the girls were settling down here for the night. They undid their backpacks and spread out two leather sheets, pinning them together through eye-holes with pegs pushed into the earth and the upper sheet formed into a roof with bamboo sticks. Meanwhile, Ezra had a look back at where they had come and the most noticeable thing was that the sea was invisible, entirely obscured by a dense grey cloud.

"I may lose my bet," he wisely admitted.

Having gone a distance away to relieve himself and then wash in the nearby stream, Ezra felt a lot better, despite his fatigue. It was suddenly dusk, as happens in the tropics on Earth.

When Ezra returned to their makeshift camp, Tamar held a flap of the tent open for him and he crawled wormlike inside. She followed and climbed unceremoniously over Ezra to lay against him on his good right side. The older girl pulled the flap closed as she came in and did the same, to lie beside Tamar. Because of his height, Ezra's feet were perforce outside one end of the tent. He didn't mind. It was warm inside the tent and Ezra was one who did not like heat.

He decided it was time to ask some more questions.

"Tamar, how old are you?"

"Fourteen, Ezra."

"And your friend?"

"She's seventeen."

This was amazing. Ezra saw from their clothes that life was hard on Samothea and now he guessed that under-nourishment (combined perhaps with side-effects from cloning) had slowed their development.

"So why can't your friend speak?"

"Of course she can speak!" Tamar said defensively, "she just doesn't like to."

"And you can't tell me her name?"

"She has a precious name. She doesn't want to waste it."

"Well," Ezra asked addressing himself to the older girl, "would you mind if I made up a name for you? I can't constantly be calling you 'Tamar's friend' or 'the other girl'."

There was an indecipherable grunt in response, which Ezra decided to interpret as "Let me hear your suggestion."

"I propose to call you 'Wildchild'. I think it's fitting. What do you say?"

Tamar was delighted with the name, which even seemed to please Wildchild herself. At any rate, her grunt in reply did not signify disapproval.

Tamar snuggled up close to Ezra and rested her head on his chest, while Wildchild snuggled up to Tamar. It seemed the girls planned to sleep now and save their questions for later. Ezra also tried to sleep. Considering he was so tired, it should have been easy, but he was also getting rather warm due to two hot bodies so close. He pushed his head out of the end of the tent, seeking cooler air now it was night-time. Wildchild noticed and grunted at him to pull his head back in.

"You'll thank her later," Tamar assured him before snuggling back down on his chest, her arm over his shoulder.

Willing to be guided by such expert survivors, Ezra quietly obeyed. In fact, he had noticed the air was cooler and that a strong wind was pushing on the side of the tent. It seemed to be coming from the sea.

Then the rain began. The tent sagged and the temperature fell noticeably. Ezra put his hand against the tent roof and was surprised at how cold it was.

The girls snuggled even closer as the icy rain battered the leather sheet over their heads and dribbled down the tent flap onto Ezra's shoes. He could feel the cold on his feet. Ezra manoeuvred his good arm to hold the girls protectively to him. Although his mind was still buzzing with unasked questions - such as 'Who were the Herders, Miners, Mariners, Woodlanders and Cloners?' - exhaustion was even stronger than curiosity. Despite a background of drumming hail, Ezra slept.

***********

At the same time that an exhausted Ezra shared a tent on Samothea with his two young rescuers, his sister, Danielle, was lying on her back in her flat in Cambridge, her back arched, her legs spread, moaning sweetly as her new boyfriend, Roger, sucked at a milky-white breast while his long elegant fingers worked magic on her pussy. The creamy dampness on his hand and the drips between her thighs and down her buttocks onto the bed were eloquent testimony to his patience and her multiple peaks of pleasure. Now she gripped his shoulders as another orgasm struck her and he knew it was time for his own satisfaction.

Danielle sighed as Roger removed his fingers from her pussy and gave a last circling lick to an erect pink nipple before lying full length on her and giving her a kiss while she held him tight with arms and legs, loving the warmth of his body. Her heightened pleasure slowly ebbed away, leaving a warm glow of fulfilment.

Reinvigorated, Danielle guided Roger onto his back and, with a smile on her face, crawled backward down his long thin body to find his cock standing hard upright. Danielle took his cock in her mouth and basted it with her tongue. It was Roger's turn now to lie back and sigh.

She swirled her tongue around the tip of his cock and then licked down one side of the pole and up the other. Encouraged by Roger's heavy breathing, she repeated the sequence, alternating with very lightly rubbing his shaft with her hand. When she had Roger squirming nicely, she swallowed as much of his cock as she could into her mouth, sucking gently.

Danielle's licking and sucking were so teasingly slow and gentle, it drove Roger crazy. He put his hands in her hair and massaged her head as she continued her silky soft blow-job until he could stand it no more.

"Oh God! Danielle, you're wonderful! I, ... I need to finish soon."

Danielle had other plans so she disengaged with a last lick up the side of his cock and a small kiss on the tip, turned around and squatted over him, slowly enveloping his cock in her pussy. Roger had the lovely sight of Danielle's perfect bottom and thin waist. She began to ride him, leaning forward to increase the tension on his cock. She had never done this with him before. He loved it. Slowly and tantalizingly, she brought them both to a satisfying climax.

Afterward, as they lay together side-by-side, Roger said:

"So, apart from amazing sex, why did you invite me over tonight?"

"To open a letter from my brother. Sorry, I got distracted. You don't mind?"

"I don't mind you getting distracted at all if its anything like the last hour but what about Ezra's letter is so special?"