Worlds Apart Pt. 02

"When was the last time we went a whole day without doing this?" she sighed, her long lashes fluttering as she lowered herself down onto his shaft. "I get this...empty ache if I abstain for too long, like I need to be filled. God, that sounds bad when I say it like that," she chuckled.

"You have your opinion, and I have mine," Jamie replied.

She took him all the way to the hilt, letting more of her weight rest on him, pressing him into the nest of blankets. He bared his teeth as she wriggled, shaking her hips like she was settling into a comfy seat, the motion stirring him around inside her. Despite her size, she was almost unbearably tight, her pelvic floor muscles no less honed by the cruel environment of her homeworld than the rest of her body. He could feel her every twitch, waves of muscle rolling up and down his shaft like the teasing stroking of a fist, cushioned by the slippery flesh of her tunnel. She was fever hot, making him feel like he was melting into her, the boundaries between their bodies blurring as the shared sensations rocked them.

They remained that way for a moment, just enjoying the feeling of being joined. Jamie reached down to run his hands up her thighs, pressing his fingers into the layer of pillowy fat that made them so soft, firm muscle rising up to greet him as he probed. Her skin was as smooth as glass above the knee, coated in sandy fur below it, her complexion the color of caramel.

Liz leaned against the cabin wall above his head, casting him into shadow, her breasts wobbling beneath her shirt as she began to move. She slowly rocked her hips back and forth, keeping him deep inside her, the lazy motion sending bursts of tingling pleasure shooting up his spine. His alien lover wet her lips with her prehensile tongue, closing her eyes as though lost in a trance, her breathing growing heavier.

Jamie lifted her shirt, admiring the way that her toned core flexed, glancing up at her shadowy underboob as she towered over him. He rested the other hand on the wide flare of her hip, pulling himself into her, matching her steady pace.

"I wish we could turn off the AG field, just in this room," she sighed. "I want to know what sex in zero-G feels like."

"I could lift you up," he chuckled, imagining propping the five-hundred-pound alien up against the wall like she weighed a tenth of that.

"We could be floating around like we're underwater," she continued, her tone low and husky. "Like a pair of trapeze artists flying through the air, clinging to each other. It's romantic..."

Liz began to move faster, making a teasing infinity loop with her hips, the damp silk of her insides gripping him like a latex glove. She had all the core control of a dancer or a gymnast, chiseled muscle shifting beneath her dusky skin, her loins tightening around his pulsing shaft each time her movements drove it into her cushiony walls.

She slid a hand up to her chest, raising her shirt, letting one of her heavy breasts fall free. It bounced against her torso, the supple flesh wobbling enticingly, spilling over her hand like a ball of melting wax as she began to knead it. She trapped the erect nipple between the fleshy pads on her finger and thumb, giving it a gentle pinch that sent a shiver coursing down her spine. Jamie felt her tunnel clench around him, stroking him with a sharp contraction that made him gasp.

He quickly replaced her hand with his own, Liz bringing her chest down towards him so that he could more easily reach her, the quivering globe of fat spilling through his fingers as he struggled to grasp it. He supported it from below, her breast practically draping itself over his hand as he brought her nipple to his lips, trapping it between them. Liz's massive frame shuddered as he began to draw on it, teasing her with quick flicks of his tongue, gently pinching it between his teeth as she pushed out her chest in encouragement.

The punishing pace of her rutting grew faster, Liz lifting herself from his lap before letting her weight carry her back down. The clap of her butt slapping against his thighs filled the cabin, and Jamie found himself hoping that the walls were indeed as well-insulated as she had told him. She was coming down hard enough to bruise, but she was very familiar with his limits, knowing exactly how much he could take thanks to their months of cohabitation.

"Tell me when you're close," she purred, the impact of her thrusting making every soft part of her body quiver like a mound of jello being tapped with a spoon. "I want to savor it..."

Her depths wrung him with sordid intent as she danced atop him, every subtle shift of her hips, every clench of the velvet muscles in her reaches translating into him. Jamie found himself mesmerized by her sinuous, flowing movements, the way that her abs rippled beneath her flat tummy in waves. Like a gyroscope, her torso could remain in place, seeming to hang there in the air as her hips twisted and shimmied.

When they were younger, it was Jamie who had been obsessed with sports. He had been the one to spend thousands of hours running track, jogging around that oval circuit until his every muscle burned. No matter how hard he had tried, he had never managed to convince Liz to leverage her natural strength for competitive means. She had always been far more invested in her studies. Yet her people were built for an environment that would cripple the average human, one where the harsh pull of gravity mandated that every body reach its physical peak if it was even to move around. Even after months in low-G had made Liz a little softer than when she had first returned to Earth, she still retained a figure that would have made a Greek goddess envious.

Her ruthless pace became too much for him, Liz reaching down to enclose his hands in hers, pinning them to the sheets as she felt him throb inside her. A drunken smile spread across her face as he bucked up into her, her breasts and thighs quivering with the impact, his beaming partner letting her weight push him into her most intimate reaches. She cooed contentedly as the first rope of his seed painted her clenching walls, the wringing of her velvet insides easing more of it out of him, milking him as he writhed in the nest of bedding beneath her. Her eyes glazed over as she felt his warm emission flood her, her lips parting in a silent cry, her own steady thrusting halting abruptly.

Her satin muscles clenched around his pulsing shaft, caressing it in wracking waves, milking another thick spurt of ejaculate from him. She shivered as she joined him in his climax, her thighs tensing around him, as though the trembling Borealan was afraid that he would pull out of her. Through the blinding pleasure of his orgasm, he watched her sculpted body writhe and twist atop him, her toned muscles tensing beneath her sun-kissed skin. She had worked up just enough of a sweat to catch the harsh, halogen lights of the cabin, her sudor making her shine beautifully.

"Fuck," she moaned, loosing a drawn-out sigh. Her tensing muscles slowly relaxed, her taut body seeming to deflate like a punctured balloon as her ecstasy gave way to the warmth of her afterglow. "It's so hot...I can feel everything..."

She let slip an adorable whimper as he flexed inside her one final time, her spasming passage swallowing up the last of his emission. Her muscles twitched around his aching cock, stroking him as though trying to ease him deeper.

"I needed that," Jamie sighed, flopping back down into their nest.

"Let's stay like this for a minute," she pleaded, releasing him from her furry grasp. She reached up to knead one of her breasts with one hand, planting the other on his belly, easing out one last shuddering aftershock with a quick shake of her hips. Neither one of them dared to move much. They were too sensitive now, euphoria making them giddy.

"I swear I can feel them moving around inside me," she giggled, reaching down to rub her flat stomach. "Maybe it's just my imagination..."

"You're way more into this than you ever let on," Jamie mused, Liz biting her lip as she gave him a hasty nod in reply.

"Now that we've talked about it -- now that we're actually doing it," she added with a nervous giggle, "it all feels so much more real. I know, I know," she continued with a dismissive wave of her hand. "I shouldn't get my hopes up until we know for sure what to expect, but I get so...fuzzy thinking about it. I feel like my brain has been replaced with cotton balls, like I've suddenly contracted some kind of fever."

Jamie reached out to place a hand on her stomach, feeling her abs tense beneath his palm, his alien lover eyeing him expectantly.

"What are you thinking?" she whispered.

"I'm imagining what you're going to look like with a baby bump," he replied, her cheeks warming.

"Abs or a baby? Jamie's toughest decision yet," she joked.

After another couple of minutes, she finally elected to separate, the pair wincing in tandem as their still tender loins parted. She rose off him, Jamie watching as his glistening length slid out of her inch by inch, her pink flesh clinging to him like a second skin. He had been plugging a sordid blend of their fluids inside her, a thick, pearly glob of it sliding down her inner thigh. She collapsed into the nest beside him, wasting no time hooking him in her arm and dragging him into a bear hug.

"So," she purred, pushing her face into his hair as she nuzzled. "Think four months of being cooped up in this cabin together with nothing productive to do is going to be as bad as you thought?"

"I think I'll survive."

***

Life on the Magellan was rather uneventful. Most of the crew had duties to attend to that limited the time available for socializing. They worked primarily in the lab and the computer room, analyzing samples and trawling through petabytes of data from their prior missions. The long journey through the gulf of empty space gave them ample opportunities to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb.

Liz and Jamie spent most of their time in the rec room and the kitchen when they weren't holed up in their cabin. The rec room had a large projector on one wall that made a decent home cinema, which let them catch up on a backlog of shows and movies that they hadn't found the time to watch back on Earth. The most socializing happened at lunch and dinner, which had become something of an event thanks to Liz's skills in the kitchen. She had far more free time than most of the crew, which was an opportunity to prepare lavish meals, quickly earning her a lot of goodwill. The ship now had a full-time cook, and with Jamie acting as her assistant, Liz was able to lay out some impressive feasts with the limited ingredients available to her.

After the first week, they were on friendly terms with most of the crew. A few of them even took to joining the couple for movie nights when they had time off, sometimes resulting in half a dozen crew attending viewings. Jamie had been starting to miss his game nights with his coworkers back home, but he quickly discovered that both Bradley and Higgins were avid card players, and it wasn't long before they were playing together regularly.

It took almost a month for the superlight drive to recharge enough to make a second jump. According to Higgins, who Jamie had quizzed extensively on the subject during their poker games, the limiting factor was mostly the number and output of the generators aboard. The majority of the floor space in the engine room was taken up by four massive nuclear fission reactors, extending up through all three decks. Not only did they provide power to the ship and its ravenous superlight drive, but they could superheat the water that was used to cool them, splitting the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in a process referred to as thermochemical cracking. The result was a kind of enclosed ecosystem that turned wastewater into oxygen for life support and hydrogen fuel for the conventional engines. The Magellan could make jumps of up to fifteen light-years at a time, which meant that for a distance of sixty light-years, four jumps would be necessary in total.

He had once asked Higgins to explain how a superlight drive worked, but even the chief engineer couldn't give him a straight answer. It wasn't a mechanical matter, but rather one of theoretical physics that only a handful of top mathematicians could even grasp. All he could say with any certainty was that the device expended an obscene amount of energy to shunt the vessel into an alternate reality where it was no longer constrained by the light-speed limit.

Jamie had been dreading the second jump. As he followed the Captain to the bridge, he felt like he was walking into the operating room of a hospital, ready for some ghastly surgery. Liz seemed to sense his apprehension, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder as they neared the door.

Once inside, they strapped into their seats again, Jamie pulling his harness taut as he peered out at the blackness beyond the viewport. It was one thing to be in the Earth's orbit. There was still a planet in view, oceans and continents, solid ground. Out here, in the void between stars, there was absolutely nothing. They were surrounded by twinkling points of cold light, so far from Earth that even the constellations had shifted, unrecognizable now. That is, if he had ever cared to learn them in the first place...

He placed his bit in his mouth, adjusting it with his tongue as he listened to Cassidy announce the impending jump, his heartbeat quickening. He kept telling himself that he had survived the first jump, and he would survive the second, but the waiting was excruciating.

"Hey," Liz said, leaning over to whisper to him as the timer ticked down. "At least nobody can call you muddy anymore, right?"

The hairs on his arms stood on end, like an electric current was passing through him, then he blacked out.

***

Liz set down a large platter of bacon-wrapped sausages on the galley table, Jamie following after her with a sizable serving of fried eggs and mushrooms. It was morning, or at least what passed for morning when there was no day or night, and a few of the crew had turned up for breakfast. Liz was more than happy to cook for them. It had become her favorite part of the day, save for that which she spent with Jamie in their secluded cabin. It was almost like she had adopted the crew as her litter, and she was practicing for motherhood. Then again, Borealans were great lovers of food, and she would have been tasked with keeping her pack happy and fed during her time living on the homeworld. Either way, the crew appreciated it.

Today, both Captain Cassidy and Jessie the biochemist were in attendance, leaning over to fork sausages onto their plates as Liz watched with a satisfied smile. Jamie joined them, the conversation soon turning to Jarilo.

"What do we know about the planet?" Liz asked, digging into her breakfast.

"It's been colonized for a little while now," Jessie explained. "Surface gravity is point-nine-eight Gs, the atmosphere has a slightly higher oxygen content than Earth, it has a very active magnetosphere that shields it from solar radiation. It's what we call a garden world, a planet with an environment that's ideal for life. It has a little more landmass than Earth, something like sixty percent ocean coverage if memory serves. Practically every continent has been colonized by a species of giant tree that resemble the Sequoias of the Pacific Northwest. There's a lot of life there, too," she added as she gestured with her fork. "The native animals seem to be something analogous to Earth's early therapsids, with both reptilian and mammalian traits."

"I bet Liz already knows what those are," Jamie interjected, the Borealan giving him a grin.

"Mammal-like reptiles," she explained. "They're sometimes referred to as stem-mammals, as they're some of that group's earliest known ancestors. They lived before the dinosaurs." She turned her attention back to Jessie, her green eyes alight with curiosity. "That's fascinating, though. I wonder if we can see some of them when we go down there?"

"It must be strange, knowing Earth's fossil record far better than your own," Jessie added. "I know that Borealis' fossil record is spotty, at best."

"I like to think of it as an opportunity," Liz replied. "The history of life on Earth is well-understood, people have been documenting it for hundreds of years. I doubt there's much left to discover. But on Borealis...everything is untouched. Imagine the fossil beds that have yet to be unearthed, all of the discoveries, a whole planet's worth of evolutionary surprises."
"I always forget that you grew up on Earth," Jessie chuckled. "You treat our natural history like it's your own."

"It was a little weird sometimes," Liz admitted, prodding at a fried egg as she reminisced. "I remember learning about evolution for the first time, how everyone in my class was descended from an ape-like ancestor that lived in Ethiopia some four million years ago...except me."

"I can't imagine being the only human in a school full of Borealans," Jessie mused.

"I was kind of a black sheep growing up," Liz continued. "But the more I learned about myself -- the more comfortable I became with my Borealan identity -- the more confident I felt. I went from being fascinated by my alien roots, to rejecting them, to accepting them as an intrinsic part of me."

"You're certainly far more mellow than how Borealans are usually portrayed," Jessie chuckled. "I'll admit to being a little wary of you when you first came aboard, but I'm happy to report that you've made me feel rather foolish for thinking that way."

"What do you know about the Bugs on the surface?" Jamie asked. "Should we be worried at all?"

"We have UAS researchers on the ground," Cassidy replied. "Unfortunately, the Magellan has been surveying in deep space for months, so we don't have their reports on file. We know that there's a human colony and a Bug hive sharing real estate down there and that there's a UNN fleet in orbit that doesn't let anyone come or go without prior permission. Whether that fleet is there to protect the Bugs from reprisals, or to keep a gun barrel pointed at their collective heads, nobody besides the Admirals can say."

"There are colonists living there, though," Liz added. "And presumably nobody is forcing them to be there against their will. Some kind of balance must have been struck if they're able to coexist with the hive."

"I'm not sure how much experience you two have with the Bugs," Cassidy continued, her tone becoming somewhat more serious. "I've been captaining research vessels for a long time. Even civilian ships aren't safe from Bug attacks. When you jump into an uncharted system, there's always that thought in the back of your mind, that maybe this is the time you kick the hornet's nest. Their hive fleets jump all over the Galaxy, they can end up anywhere, there's no border separating the dangerous parts of space from the safe ones. Bugs usually kill whatever they find," she added, spearing a sausage for effect. "Other species, competing hives, doesn't matter. If there are people living on a planet they have their eyes on, they won't hesitate to kill every last one of them."

Jamie exchanged a worried glance with Liz. None of this was news to him, but it was the first time he had ever spoken to someone who had first-hand experience. Humanity had been at war with the alien species for decades, and there was no end in sight. They were not an organized force, and nobody knew where they originated from, so putting an end to their incursions was currently unfeasible.

"They're about as different from us as it's possible to get," she continued. "They're arthropods, something akin to insects or crustaceans. Empathy, compassion, morality, these are all alien concepts to them. They don't even speak, they communicate entirely through pheromones."