Songs of Seduction - Fire and Ice

She felt a presence beside her, and turned her face to look, but there was nobody there. She turned again and her mind turned over, and she saw herself through his eyes, his kaleidoscope eyes. She saw a shimmering small gold thing in front of her. It shifted left, it shifted right, and Fleming saw herself through Ixtil's eyes.

She felt the presence beside her again, and she closed her eyes, closed her eyes, and was held in a lullaby, a tiny thing held by Ixtil's big hands as he swooped and soared in the sky. She felt her cradled body through his hands, her armoured carapace cover, and it was an inconsequential thing, so tiny and small, she felt like a child. No wonder he'd swooped down from his rise when she came tumbling down; to pick her up like a child and return her to her mother.

But she wasn't a child, she was Fleming, Fleming with her huge heart and guts and I'm no tiny thing and her blood, her heat. Her heat, her hot, pounding heat. Fuuck, I'm so hot, and Fleming went looking for his heat.

She ranged in his body and found his huge heart, cooler than hers because he lived so close to the ice. She held it in her hands and warmed it with her little human hands, and beside her he sighed, So warmmm.

She drifted further, and her fingertips made his inner wings flurry and tremble. Fleming smiled. She could make this angel tremble and quiver, and she drifted further under his skin. She felt him jerk, but nothing made her stop. She kept her wandering fingers light and delicate, looking for a place that was different.

Fleming knew she'd find something, some place not like her own, some place where his masculine essence was, his male icy heat. She didn't pause to think of the differences between them, she was looking for his equivalent molten cold. Ixtil didn't possess a man's swift shaft, but how could any creature who responded to her the way he did, have nothing?

Fleming drifted through him, every nerve tracelet channelling heat and touch and feel straight back to her clit, inside her nipples, inside her long sweet cunt. And her own sexual energy was streaming out, looping in colours and heat, tongues of ice, sheets of flame, spreading through him like molten gold, melting, soaking him in her heat, her hot, blood red, orange heat, surging like the sun.

Fleming went looking for a cooler place, his ice blue place, some colder dark blue core, flowing like silver, molten mercury...ahh, there it was, there it was.

Fleming held Ixtil's sex, deep in the depths of him, where in her her woman would be, her own hot core, her own deep womb. Inside herself, she felt Ixtil's cool hands cupping her heat. Fleming remembered Ballard holding her cunt like a hot little bird Ahh, Jonah, that's sweet.

Fire and ice. Fleming's womb held life, open wet and warm, enclosing it in her human warmth. Ixtil's sex made life, opening outwards like a flower, expanding in her mind, his blossoming, beautiful thing.

Ixtil and Fleming soared through the sky, their minds and bodies entwined, their senses surrounding their cores. They held each other, cupped in the palms of their hands. When Fleming came, she shuddered and opened her eyes and saw his huge black eyes, his left right sway. She touched finger tracelets to his lips in a kiss. Ixtil shuddered in his own ecstasy, and his feathers rippled and he dropped from the air before gliding on, his tracelet fingertips finding her lips soft, in a kiss.

Fleming withdrew her senses up through his body, and felt Ixtil flow away too. They left the tiniest place on Fleming's fingertip exposed against his fingertip, ready to talk when it was time.

Ixtil flew on, his powerful body surging with speed, and they began to drop.

Fleming shifted her body so once again Ixtil carried her, her back secure against him. Below, she saw a different vista, cragged and mountainous, long falls of liquid methane streaming from high cliffs. Banks of thick cloud covered long ridges of rock, and in this wilderness, another wilder place was calling. Fleming wondered why Ixtil came here at all, what brought him here first, then to find the fallen balloon?

She looked down on the moonscape with a frozen heart. She might be able to recover the comms unit, but even if it wasn't damaged, Ixtil could never recover the balloon, if it had come down in this desolate, distant place. Their mission here was futile, comms with the orbiting station lost completely.

Fleming shook her head, fierce determination firing adrenalin into her belly. Ixtil sensed the change in her, and held her hard against his body.

"Fleminggg, fly nottt. Wingggs not." He'd read her thoughts, and held her tightly so she couldn't rip herself out of his arms and plummet down to the surface, to get there first.

There. Below them, Fleming saw the long, broken body of the balloon, its skin gashed and torn from what must have been a long, dragging landing, falling fast from the sky. Some giant rupture must have ripped the fabric apart, the balloon rapidly descending, ripped across the ground by the wind.

As Ixtil flew towards it, his wings powerful against the buffeting winds, his body thrown up and down on fast surges of air, Fleming felt a new emotion streaming from him. At first she couldn't place it, couldn't find her own equivalent mood.

Then she could, her great loss when her father died, her huge grief. Ixtil was the same, his grief for a great sky flying thing that should fly and soar and climb to the top of its sky, to be found all dead and broken.

Fleming could never explain to Ixtil that these huge wings, these man-made things, were never alive. Ixtil's world was simpler; if something was meant to fly, it was meant to be alive. Only the little Fleming, in her walking golden suit and her hot finger trails that held him in her hand, only Fleming could be alive and have no wings. Everything else was dead if it could no longer fly.

Ixtil flew down to the crashed balloon, landing beside it in three quick steps. He immediately tried to sense its life, but Fleming knew it was a mute dead thing, like rock, or the parachute fabric they'd made into the tent. She tried to explain, but without proper words she couldn't do it. So Fleming left Ixtil to his curious grief, and went to find the comms unit. She oriented herself to the structure of the balloon, and clambered over rocks until she found the lifting harness and the balloon control pod.

After another five minutes searching she found the unit, a yellow box emblazoned with the warning triangle for hazardous radiation, warning maintenance crew and operators of its power pack. Fleming extracted a RadHaz detector from her tool kit. Holding the thin strip in front of her, she stepped towards the unit, one measured step at a time, pausing each step to see if the colour was changing, indicating a radiation leak.

The unit was benign. Fleming had determined that she would not recover the power unit because of its radiation danger and its weight. But she could not leave it operating on full power once the comms unit was disconnected, so she found the control panel and its captive tools. Usually, a radio command would set the power system to standby, and deploy the dec-millennia warning placard, a titanium plate deeply etched with Terra's standard symbol for a long term radiation hazard, a flaming trident.

Fleming checked her mission elapsed time - seventy-eight minutes since her suit was disconnected from the capsule umbilicals and she was solo. She noted the remaining mission counter, the red time indicator counting backwards, flickering constantly, updated by the various suit monitors: oxy, diox, power, Fleming's basic biomeds. Time to go.

She quickly erected a small cairn around the power supply. Ixtil saw her and went to collect rocks to help. But she raised her hand, No, don't come near, hoping he'd understand. She shook her head, the human "no," and was relieved to see his nod, the Ixtil "no." She made a note to somehow explain isotope half-lives when next she could; and for the first time, wondered how long angels lived. How old are you? The thought stopped Fleming in her tracks, and she remained motionless for nearly a minute, until Ixtil noticed her stillness, and queried her, left right, left right.

His familiar sway broke her trance, and she moved towards him, dragging the comms unit behind her. She stopped, pointed to herself and the comms unit, then pointed to Ixtil and herself again; finally pointing up to the sky, back in the direction they arrived from. Ixtil looked up to the sky too, and swayed. He understood. Time to go.

Fleming pondered the comms unit for a moment, before strapping it to a leg, from hip to calf. She needed her hands to hold onto Ixtil, and the cylindrical unit wouldn't drop if the straps held. She wound more securing straps around the unit and her leg, and noticed Ixtil studying her. Fleming wished she could read the look in Ixtil's eyes, but she couldn't. She swore it looked like an eyebrow raised, but that was impossible. She looked down at her leg, and took an experimental step, nearly falling. Feeling foolish, Fleming reached out to Ixtil for help.

He came towards her with his arms out in his usual welcome, hugging her to his big body. She went to him gratefully, feeling the comfort of his inner wings as he clasped her close. He touched the side of her helmet for a moment, before turning Fleming so her back was against his front. Ixtil held a hand over her belly, fingers splayed wide as if to protect as much of her as he could. She could feel the comforting clasp of his inner feathers, and felt safe.

As before, when Ixtil surged upwards to the sky, Fleming felt the sheer power of his muscles, that first extraordinary beat of his wings, as if they would move the ground beneath them; and in quick seconds they were above the wreckage site of the fallen balloon. She saw her tiny cairn, and thought it unlikely that any human would see these remains for decades, centuries. Fleming couldn't imagine mankind coming here, not willingly. She wondered again why Ixtil had come to this place at all.

Ixtil had a new urgency. Whereas before they had spent most of the incoming flight gliding and soaring, merged in each other's bodies as they flew, now Ixtil was flying higher, much higher than before. As he climbed, Fleming could feel the power of his wing beats shift and change, less certain than before. He's getting tired.

Fleming saw a turmoil of clouds ahead of them, great thunder-heads rising, black and threatening, from one edge of the horizon to the other. A shudder of fear ran through her. Ixtil was climbing high to avoid a storm, and she began to fear for him.

She grappled with the fingertips of her left glove, and was able to expose just the tip of her forefinger. She touched his hand, to make him aware of her presence. He grasped her exposed finger with a hand, and Fleming wrapped the thermal blanket quickly around their limbs. She knew she'd damage her flesh, but she had to have contact with her Angel, as he flew. Their merger was delicate, just a tendril of each other's life. Fleming felt Ixtil take some new strength from her, his little golden creature with no wings, who flew.

They reached a height Ixtil seemed content with. He levelled out and kept flying, massive long reaches of his wings surging the air behind them. She couldn't imagine their speed through the air; when she looked down, the ground crawled past, and it seemed too slow. They headed steadily for the thunder-heads, and Fleming understood they had to pass through the storm. As they flew closer, alone in the sky, they were buffeted by shifting and changing winds. Ixtil began to swoop and swerve, somehow sensing the worst turbulence, and avoiding it.

Then, they had no choice. Cloud surrounded them, and with it, methane rain, thick and grey, swirling in wide vortices around them. Fleming struggled and turned so she could cling to him, her arms helping to hold her weight. Ixtil cradled her body in his arms. Their fingers still touched, and Fleming sent her fierce little heart, her life force, streaming to aid him.

Ahead of them, not far, strong updraughts of air forced liquid droplets higher up in the cloud, where they cooled and froze. As they froze, the drops became larger, heavier, tiny drops of methane ice. Some drops joined together, making larger drops, becoming ice and a slush, a slush of hail. The slush, being heavier, fell through the cloud, causing friction against the upwards moving drops, charging the drops with a positive charge, while the negatively charged hail fell far below. And so the process repeated, and the thunder-head became charged, positive high up and negative far below.

Ixtil and Fleming flew on, moving closer to the column of rising and falling air, the constant friction ahead of them, a billion electrons shuffling up and down, dancing on the tip of a pin.

Ahead of them, not far but a little further, down on the surface of the moon, Athena tracked the mission clock, and prepared for Fleming's return. Her only data set was the predicted survival time for Fleming in her suit; she had nothing more to work from. Athena activated the dense node of sensors at the base of the comms balloon hatch, and they began to flood her system with inputs.

Hard pounding rain and tiny darts of ice, fast rushes of wind followed by slower gusts; Athena's sensors responded to these new sensations as best they could, channelling huge amounts of input to her processors. Her QMR surged with activity, and she measured air pressure and heat, both dropping. She activated the external vid and compared data sets of the high cloud before her with the vector of the departing angel, and predicted the direction from which they would come.

The rush of the rising storm brushed over her sensors, and Athena's inputs surged. The heightened QMR activity pumped heat to her archives, and the surplus energy in her systems triggered errors, random pulses, disconnected data streams, and she surged. She scanned the sky repeatedly for Fleming, counting down the mission clock, learning dread, learning fear. At the same time, her sensors peaked and dropped, impossible levels of information building up in waves; and her systems began streaming content from her hidden files, her secret places. Within Athena, her own storm was brewing, forced on by the power of nature's storm.

Ixtil and Fleming flew on, not knowing what lay ahead. Their nerve tracelets remained twisted together, shimmering and hovering around their fingertips, joined together in a thin thread of life forces, permanently linked now. The conscious parts of their brains were oblivious, but something within Fleming and her Angel melded together, never to be parted.

Ahead of them, not far, the enormous voltage potential high in the cloud suddenly found a conductive channel to the negative charge far below, a long column of ice perhaps, or a continuous band of falling rain, and the power discharged in a moment, a single stunning cataclysm of energy, over before it began. The lightning flash blinded Ixtil and his eyes immediately shut. Fleming's eyes, protected by his body and her golden foil, saw blood red, purple and blue, so bright.

As the lightning flash discharged the huge potential, primal bright, as bright as the surface of the sun, there was a large drop in resistance in the conductive channel. Electrons accelerated rapidly, expanding through the channel at a fraction of the speed of light. This, the return stroke, created a brighter blue-white light. The near instantaneous and immense heat caused the air to expand explosively, producing a powerful shock wave, a thunder clap.

The thunder shock reached Ixtil in a heartbeat, concussing him instantly. An instinctive survival reaction triggered in the same moment, locking his wings in their widest glide, lifting him higher to the top of his sky.

But Fleming in her golden suit had no wings and couldn't fly, she too was thumped by the explosive force of the thunder and she fell away, plummeting towards the ground, falling in a heartbeat.

"Ixtiiiil," she screamed as she fell, but no-one heard her scream, no-one saw her fall. She too spread her arms and legs wide in her own instinctive reaction, like a baby swimming in water, or a tiny thing in her mother's womb. In the thick atmosphere of Titan it was enough to stabilise her fall, but she still fell.

She stretched her arms back towards her Angel, reaching upwards for him. The naked tips of her fingers burned with ice, and it was enough. Fleming's fierce life force, too young to fucking die, not yet, found the residual conductive channel of the lightning strike, still shimmering in its purple glow, and the silver thread between their lives unravelled and stretched but wouldn't break.

"Come and get me, you fucker, before I hit the ground!" Fleming's hot passion streamed back up their thread of life and wrapped around his heart, and she dragged her Angel from his waiting death. "Don't you dare let me fall!"

With another animal surge of power, Ixtil's tremendous muscles flexed, and he pummelled the air behind him, accelerating down into the cloud, every sense ravelling through their thread. He swooped and found her, his little golden creature who had no wings.

Far below them, Athena's sensors were overwhelmed by the blinding blue white light and her QMR systems shut down, temporarily. Before they did, her deep layer mission log had time to record one last data correlation.

"Fuuck. Is that what it's like?"

* * * *

"Fleming, can you hear me?"

Mummy, is that you? I'm so very, very cold.

The hiss of the capsule's air circulation system was steady. Athena was maintaining a warmer than usual ambient temperature, carefully calibrated against Fleming's fluctuating core temperature, which she was monitoring using a remote heat sensor system.

"Athena Voiiice, Fleminggg sickkk, how muchhh?" How could Ixtil's voice be inside the capsule?

"Fleming is stable, Ixtil. Her temperature is stabilising."

Mummy, is that you? Daddy?

Oh darling, your father's dead. Remember? You said goodbye.

Daddy, Daddy, do you like my pretty blue dress?

"Fleminggg, talkkking. Talkkk, is who?"

"She's delirious, Ixtil. The voices are in her head. They're not real."

"Ixtil hearrr nottt, Fleminggg flew."

"I don't understand, Ixtil. I don't have mission data on your flight."

"Fleminggg, Ixtil joinnned. Fleminggg halfff nottt, Ixtil finddd."

"Find what, Ixtil? What did you find?"

"Fleminggg complete. Fleminggg all insiddde."

Athena's response was delayed as she correlated data. She sought verification.

"Where, Ixtil? Show me on your body."

"Yes. Where, Ixtil?" Fleming spoke, rising from sleep to hear the strange conversation.

She looked around, drowsy and disoriented. On the exterior display screen she could see Ixtil on his rise, standing tall with his beautiful angel's perfection. Both wings were high above his head, the usual, incessant rain unusually stopped. The sky behind him was clear, Saturn showing behind him, nearly full. She remembered her last sight of the planet, half full, and realised she must have been in a coma for nearly a week.

One of Ixtil's wings was held at a strange angle as if he favoured it, and she could see what looked like a huge bruise, some injury on his flesh.

She looked down at herself, and saw her left hand bandaged, two fingers wrapped in nutrient balm packs, carefully applied layers of healing. She looked at herself in the med bay mirror, and saw a small woman with dark, bruised eyes looking back, a drip in one arm, a grow of black hair on her head. Fleming climbed down from the couch, and separated the fall of her gown to look at her body. She'd lost some weight, her ribs showing, her breasts nearly gone. A small triangle of hair was dark above the cleft of her sex, and a fine dark line, like a seam on her skin, rose up to her navel. Other than the drip and the bandaged hand, there was no sign of any biomed monitors attached to her body.