CollisionWithParadise (22 page)

As he moaned with pleasure, Genevieve guided his hands to her buttocks. He acquiesced eagerly and caressed her butt cheeks. She took his face in her hands and directed his mouth to her right nipple. It was obvious that he’d never touched a woman before. But somehow, he knew what to do and sucked the nipple with his lips, rolling it gently with his tongue. It ached with tender longing.

She pulled him gently to the ground and reclined alongside him. As he stared wide-eyed at her, she fondled one of his balls in her hand, rolling its soft folds of skin. He seized in a gasp. Based on what he’d said earlier and judging from his reaction, she guessed that he’d never been touched by a woman before. At least not
this
way.

Not quite knowing what to do, his hand drifted to her thigh and she nudged it down between her legs. He seized in another breath, cupping his hand over her hot mound, and she snapped her head back in sudden ecstasy.

Thinking of Azaes, she wrapped her fingers around the young man’s long penis and felt incredible excitement stir inside her as it responded by swelling hard in her hand. She vigorously jerked it and felt a pulsing wetness between her legs.

Diaprepes broke out into a sweat. Overcome with passion, his breaths escalating with excitement, Diaprepes had long since forgotten to do anything with his hand. That was all right, she thought, letting the throbbing ache in her gut bleed away. This was his moment, not hers. Within seconds, he moaned out his ejaculation. It squirted over her leg in several long spurts as he gasped out his breaths.

Not certain she’d done him a favour, Genevieve gently kissed the young man on the forehead and rose to her feet, looking for a rag to wipe off his come.

Lying on the ground, spent and smiling dreamily, Diaprepes looked up at her. “You are truly a goddess,” he sighed, eyes sparkling with misplaced reverence. “My queen!”

She half-smiled and glanced, self-conscious, at the scree that had not moved during the lovemaking. “And now for your promise, Diaprepes,” she urged.

Chapter Eighteen

Genevieve felt the warm breeze lift her hair and sighed with genuine contentment as she sat astride the scree, enjoying the magnificent view of the jungle below. She’d left several hours ago, after Diaprepes had gathered up some supplies for her in a backpack and given her a pair of sandals to wear, then taught her a crash course in scree-flying. It was pretty simple, she’d decided, mainly because the large bird was highly intelligent and could read her very well.

The
vishna
was definitely the dominant emergent tree, creating islands of purple over the main canopy of mostly greens, strewn with orange, crimson and yellow.

Thoughts still on the remarkable
vishna
forest below her, Genevieve puzzled over a new conundrum posed by Azaes’s startling revelation that he’d entered her dreams. How was it that he could permit her to experience the
vishna
joining so well if he hadn’t experienced it himself?

The topography dipped low into a large ravine, and at its center, she saw a large meandering river, swollen with brown water, snaking its way through the dense jungle. As they left the river canyon she spotted something glinting below in the jungle. She made out something copper-gold gleaming in the sunlight of a clearing covered in a carpet of choking vines. Some old wreck, perhaps an abandoned shelter, she thought. She would have liked to investigate it further but felt time pressing and decided against setting down.

As the scree flew on, Genevieve fell into a reverie of imagining the impossible odds of leaving Eos. First, there were the Eosian guardians, the Epoptes, or whatever the Eosians had interpreted as god sentinels of their planet: some phenomenon that kept destroying incoming Earth ships. Whatever they were, they’d let her in. Would they let her leave? Then there was the ship itself. As a result of their crash-landing, Zac had an enormous tear in his backside, the size of a land vehicle. Without his nano-system to help, there was no way she could repair such a large hole. When last she’d seen it, just before she’d taken her momentous tumble into the Eos jungle, Genevieve had witnessed a fire and an explosion inside Zac. It was quite conceivable that there was precious little left of Zac. So, why was she even bothering? She just had to, she told herself. She’d run out of options with the Eosians.

After another hour or so, she finally caught sight of Zac. Her spirits soared and she felt a glow of relief rush through her. Zac was still intact! Maybe the
Chimera
was, too.

Genevieve guided the scree into a wide circle around Zac to assess the ship from above. He looked pretty good―no, wait! Her heart plummeted. While Zac’s bow was buried under a thick canopy of trees, preventing her from making an assessment from above, a huge black cindered hole tarnishing Zac’s mid-section hull toward the control center gaped some twenty meters in diameter. Near the hyper-drive coils and matrix converter, she guessed
—
where the explosion she’d heard had most likely occurred. So much for using Zac to get home. Even if she coaxed the impellers to work, she wouldn’t get home for forty years. And, besides, there wasn’t enough on board to sustain her in that long a voyage. But there was always the
Chimera
, she thought hopefully.

“Okay, my friend,” she patted the scree gently. “Let’s go have a closer look.” No sense in delaying the inevitable.

The scree set her down gently on the wet ground on the stern-side of the ship, not too far from where she’d fallen. Genevieve slid off its back, landing with a splat on a bed of soaked moss and forbs, and hiked the backpack with a few supplies and food over her shoulders. After some hesitation, she signaled for the scree to return to the Eosian village. Diaprepes had explained to her that screes were highly intelligent creatures and they were caring and responsible animals. She saw evidence of that in its obviously nervous reluctance to leave her here. It took some coaxing and in the end she had to be rather gruff with it. Finally the magnificent animal, resigned to her wishes, took flight in a giant flurry of flapping wings. Genevieve watched her vehicle back to civilization fly away and felt a strange swirling tension in her belly. “I know what I’m doing,” she mumbled to herself, as she watched the scree circle one last time, ready to swoop down at her signal.

Then it was gone with an echoing screech, and the sounds and smells of the throbbing jungle pervaded her senses. Sharp cackles, squawks and oscillating buzzes filled the thick air with a cacophony of foreign sound. Suddenly she felt vulnerable and alone. This jungle was different from the enticing forest near Azaes’s place into which she’d strayed earlier. This was a genuine wilderness, she concluded with awe. Large, amoral and unforgiving. The kind she’d only read about on Earth.

The jungle air pulsed thick with moisture and seemed to drip with intoxicating aromas. Genevieve took in a deep breath, inhaling the strong perfume of the
vishna
forest and inadvertently awakened violent sensations. She almost gagged as her senses drowned in fragrance. It overpowered her and made her giddy with inexplicable sexual yearning. Her body flamed with the aching memory of the
vishna
experience as she involuntarily inhaled the erotic air with deep halting breaths. Despite what her logical mind was trying to tell her, despite what Diaprepes had warned her, she gulped it in like a drug addict.

Head throbbing with the rhythmic hissing of insects, she felt suddenly faint and fell dizzily to her knees. She must have blacked out momentarily because she found herself scrambling on all fours…then lying face down on the wet multi-textured carpet of moss and forbs, breathing in the sharp smell of fertile soil. She spread her hands out over the soaked vegetation and realized in a haze of delirium that the
vishna
forest was seducing her in tones of texture, smell and sound. She felt it stirring inside her, embracing her in tangles of moist green, leaves rustling through her to the seductive whisper of the breeze.

She could feel the individual blades and leaves deliciously probing her flesh, absorbing her into the jungle’s fractal network. God! It was like
jacking
again. And for an instant all she wanted was to surrender. Give herself completely to it. Lose herself in the deepness of it and spiral into an endless vortex of sexual ecstasy.

No!
She shook off the sexual trance with difficulty.
Focus!
she commanded herself.
God damn it!
She refused to succumb to the
vishna
’s insidious lure.
Exercise some restraint, girl!
She had an important message to bring back home and that tree wasn’t going to stop her.

Face and body dripping from the saturated ground, Genevieve sat up shakily to survey her surroundings in a blurry haze of garish light and forced her mind to concentrate on her task. When her eyes were finally able to focus she noted that, while the damage to the forest had been painfully obvious from above, it was less obvious from here, at ground level, where the young shrubs, forbs and vines had already covered the toppled
vishnas
and scraped landscape in a rich mantle of dripping green.

Her gaze rested on the topped
vishna
that had saved her life, according to Diaprepes. Fighting down renewed giddy longing, Genevieve craned to follow the line of the
vishna’s
magnificent smooth trunk to the top of Zac’s dull grey metalloid hull. The last time she’d seen him, Zac was spewing out charcoal smoke. She wondered if Zac was totally gutted inside from the fire. Only one way to find out, she thought, rising to her feet. She decided against entering through the aft tear in the hull by climbing the vishna for obvious reasons. She decided instead to enter through the
Chimera’s
emergency chute on the starboard side.

From this angle, Genevieve could see some of the damage Zac had taken to his aft hull from the crash. Much of the hull was streaked with stains from the fire and the outer metalloid was rough and scabrous where it had bubbled from the melting heat. It didn’t look good. Not good at all. She fully expected the bow, which had likely received the brunt of the impact, to be in even worse shape. It was looking less and less likely that she would be able to use Zac to carry out her plan of getting home. Tendrils of despair coiled around her thorax like a slowly closing vice, squeezing out a small gasp from her throat. She walked around the ship to do a complete outside appraisal. There was still the
Chimera
.

As she made it to the starboard fore side of the ship, Genevieve sucked in her breath. The exit portal for the
Chimera
gaped open. She scrambled closer and to her amazement and horror, saw that the
Chimera
was not in its berth. It was gone!

She let out a gasp of utter despair and closed her eyes. The
Chimera
must have jettisoned while they were still in space. No, she’d registered it in its berth as she brought Zac down. Genevieve opened her eyes and stared at the gaping portal. It must have opened on impact, flinging the
Chimera
out and crushing it between the planet’s ripped surface and Zac’s thousand ton hull. She scanned around for evidence of
Chimera
’s scraps but couldn’t recognize any. What did it matter? Unless she could repair Zac, she was stuck here, in the middle of an insidious jungle that threatened to drive her mad. And she was no expert in stream jump engineering, hyper-drive technology or matrix converters. Terrific, she thought, casting a gloomy look around her at the thick jungle. She was trapped and on a collision course with insanity.

“Well, you’re not going to claim me that easily,” she grumbled and slipped off her sandals for more sure footing to climb the steep ramp of the
Chimera’s
portal. The berth was more level, and from there she was able to make her way down the mid-corridor to the starboard side quite easily. The metalloid hall gleamed like a sterile tomb in the spare light and felt cool on her feet as she made her way stealthily toward the bow of the quiet ship.

Purple Eosian sunlight filtered in ahead, no doubt the breach she’d seen from the air of the matrix converter room, which ran the hyper-drive plasma coils. She reached the large hole and, feeling like a tourist gaping at road kill, picked her way slowly along the scabrous and torn floor of the corridor. What remained of the main hyper-drive engineering room was charred and unidentifiable. As she’d suspected, it looked beyond fixing. With a heavy sigh, Genevieve continued forward to the control centre, fighting off despair.

When she reached a sub-ancillary control panel, Genevieve played with the controls out of whimsy. The lights spattered on, much to her delirious gratitude. Zac wasn’t totally dead, she concluded as hope bubbled up inside her. “Way to go, Zac!” she whispered to herself. “Stay with me…”

Excitement mounting, she charged to the fore section and sprinted up the ladder to the control room―and skidded to a halt. “Oh, God!” she breathed.

The room was charred from an explosion and she could see the purple and green canopy overhead. Light filtered in from a three metre-squared gaping hole. The control panel that had fallen on top of her had partially melted in a subsequent chemical fire. It was basically gutted. There was nothing left.