Marauder Ramses (8 page)

I reach up and squeeze her tits, which look incredible from this angle. They are like mountain peaks bursting out above me, though they are soft as snow.

Her big ass presses against my cock, and she raises herself up above it. She slides her wet pussy back and forth across the head of my dick, and finally she starts to lower herself down onto me. She gasps when my head pushes her lips open and penetrates her, and I feel a tremble go up my entire body. My eyes roll back in my head, and my ears twitch. Her pussy is so fucking tight against my cock. I start to vibrate wildly inside her, though only the tip of my cock is inside her.

She lowers herself further down, and her tightness slides across the bulging veins of my dick, and she lets out a high-pitched whine.

I slap her ass hard, and look up at her with pure lust. “I want to feel all of you,” I say to her.

She nods, bites her lip, and presses down further. Each centimeter feels twice as good, and I can see her white pussy juice dripping down my veiny shaft. We’re both soaking wet, and the vibration of my cock inside her feels incredible.

“Ramses, God,” she says.

I pull her down as impatience overtakes me, until she’s pressing down against my balls.

“Ride me,” I order her.

She adjusts herself atop me, leaning further forward. As she moves forward and her hips rotate, I feel the incredible warmth and tightness slide wet around my shaft, and then she presses her heels onto the ground and starts to rise.

As her hips rise, I see my teal cock soaked in her juices. She pulls me almost all the way out, but then bounces back down onto me. Her ass slaps hard against me, and I feel my cock deep inside her once again. She starts to jostle up and down furiously, and my eyes wander up to her big tits slapping up and down against her body as she rides the hell out of me.

I slap her ass to urge her on, and I start to thrust against her even while lying flat on the ground. Her nipples are pointing out like missiles as her tits bob up and down, and I reach up and squeeze them, though nothing can stop them from bouncing furiously while she rides me.

The fire dances in rhythm with her fucking, and I see the shadow of our bodies cast on the wall. The silhouette of Elise riding me accentuates her feminine curves, and I grunt with incredible satisfaction as the warm tightness gives my cock everything it’s ever longed for.

Elise presses her palms into my chest, leans further forward, and rides me up and down from a new angle. We fuck like this this with increasing hunger and intensity, until finally I feel her inner walls pulsing against my cock.

I vibrate to full speed as Elise begins to come, and when her pussy squeezes me tighter than ever, my dick finally erupts.

The first blast of come is massive, and every pent-up feeling and tension I’ve felt since setting eyes on her releases into pure warmth as that load of thick come fills her.

She moans loud as I unload into her, again and again and again. Her pussy squeezes me back, milking me for everything I’m worth, and our loud moans and grunts fill the entire cave until we finally collapse on our sides, my dick still inside her.

We lay together for a time, and when I finally pull out, a warm buzz is filling my chest. It feels like peace and a sense of being at home – even though I’m further from home than I’ve ever been

We lose ourselves in each other’s eyes, until Elise buries her face into my chest. I wrap my arms around her, and hold her until she falls asleep.

I
wake
up still feeling warm. There’s a blanket wrapped around me, and sunlight is seeping in from the edges of the blanket. There’s still embers from a fire, but the flames are gone.

I smile thinking of last night, but then a horrible hunger overtakes me. I look up and see Ramses eating, and then the smell hits me. It’s not something I’d normally consider a good smell, but from my terrible hunger, I feel myself salivating at the scent.

“Can you lie to me,” I ask Ramses.

“What do you mean?” he says, holding a chunk of meat in his hand.

“I’m hungry,” I say. “But I don’t want to eat spider meat.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding. “I see. Well...you’re in luck then, because while you were sleeping last night I went out to pee...and I saw a chicken walking by.”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Yep,” he says. “It was a nice big chicken, and I just hit it with a rock, de-feathered it, and roasted it over the fire while you slept. Would you like some?”

I nod, and he hands me a piece of meat. I don’t look at it, just smell it, pretending it’s really chicken. I bite off a piece, ignore how much it doesn’t taste like chicken, and swallow.

“It’s pretty good,” I say.

“Way better than spider meat,” he says.

“You’re so bad at this,” I say, laughing. “But I have to admit it tastes...okay.”

I take another bite, and relish the thought of not feeling so hungry.

He hands the pot to me, and it’s full of water. “After I killed the chicken, I chipped out some ice from the sea and melted it so we’d have something to drink. I boiled it too...just in case.

I take a drink of the water, and smile. I never thought I’d feel so content from something as simple as a drink of water. But then I realize that a lot of that feeling of satisfaction is from what Ramses and I did last night. The orgasms were so good that I still feel a residual afterglow washing over me. With the fire dying down, the cold is seeping in, but between the blanket and the afterglow, I feel almost toasty.

Ramses and I eat together, and every time I look up at him I feel safe and protected. I forget that I might be infected with something, or that we might freeze or starve to death, or that Darkstar Marauders might come for us at any time.

“I think we can stay here and lay low until my cousin gets here,” Ramses says. “When we lost the ship, we lost our communications capability though.”

I was afraid to ask about that. “How can Sara find us then?”

“We have four days left. I’ll have to figure out something by then...some way to signal them.”

Every time Ramses has said he’d do something, he’s done it. I’m tired of worrying and doubting him. Now when he says he’ll find a way, I feel I can trust that he will.

Ramses’s clothes are hanging on a hook he’s nailed into the wall, and he starts to pull them off and put them on.

I frown at him, and he laughs.

“What?” he says. “You want me to keep walking around naked?”

“Well,” I say, “I was getting used to it...I have to say I’ll miss it.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “There’s nothing for us to do at night except each other.”

I laugh. “That’s an amazing line.”

He grins. “I was up all night thinking of great lines...that one is just a sample.”

He puts on his coat and hat, then steps outside.

I get dressed and follow him out. The sun is rising across the frozen sea, and it looks brilliant and beautiful as the light reflects and shimmers across the ice.

“What do you think happened to them?” I ask. “The people who lived here. Were they even human?”

“I think they were,” Ramses says. “Though I don’t know why. You humans used to call Venus Earth’s sister planet, before you knew what a hellishly hot place it was. It’s the same size as Earth, the same mass...looking at it through a telescope, early humans thought it might be a thriving place just like Earth. With technology we’ve managed to get cities and jungles floating in its upper atmosphere, but the pressure and heat on the surface is not survivable. And now...Atlantis. Another sister planet – or maybe a brother planet. It stayed habitable longer than Venus, but where Venus became too hot, Atlantis froze over.”

“How do you know it wasn’t always this cold?” I ask.

“Just another feeling,” he says. “From what my father said, it sounded like this planet used to be like Earth.”

In the sky, I see a bright light that looks almost like a star, though it’s too bright to see any other stars now. “Is that Venus?” I ask, pointing.

Ramses looks up and squints. Now I can see that the light is moving. It’s not a star.

“Shit,” Ramses says. “It’s Grius. Gather what we can carry...blankets, some food, nothing too heavy.”

The light has a tail as it breaks through the atmosphere, and soon it’s growing closer and closer. We gather as many supplies as we can, stuffing them into our bag, while the ship grows larger and larger above our heads.

And then it seems to explode, but it’s close enough now that I can see it consists of a handful of smaller pods – maybe five or six.

A few fly off toward where we originally landed, while others drift toward the other side.

“They’re cutting us off,” Ramses says. “They’re behind and in front of us, with mountains on the side.”

“What do we do?” I ask, lifting up my bag.

Ramses looks over to the ridge, and points to a shallower slope. “We need to try to find a way up into the mountains. This way they will have to follow us up, and we’ll have the high ground.”

I swallow nervously, but decide to put my faith in him. I can’t argue with the logic of his plan – not that it’s a good plan – but it’s the only one we have.

“Let’s go,” he says, taking my hand.

We walk toward the shallow slope on the ridge line, but as we begin to ascend, it suddenly doesn’t feel shallow at all. Ramses cuts a path through the snow, but with the heavy pack on his back and the slippery terrain, it’s incredibly hard to climb at all, let alone quickly.

“They seem to have a rough idea where we are,” Ramses says as we climb the slope. “But I don’t think they know for sure. A few pods landed around the area we did because they probably saw the hole in the ice left by our ship. It took us a few hours yesterday to reach the place where we camped, but they’ll be able to follow the path we left. I’d say we have around an hour and a half.”

“An hour and a half to do what?” I ask.

“It will be too easy for them to track us,” Ramses says. “But if we find a fortified position, we can overshoot it to leave false tracks, then double back and defend. Something like a flat platform above a raised mountain pass would be ideal. I expect they’ll have simple human guns, and if I can get the jump on them, I may be able to disarm one.”

“Good thing we saved the stun rod, huh?” I ask. “You can use the rock, and I’ll use the –”

“No,” Ramses says. “You’ll keep going while I defend. You know how to survive here now, and you’ll have the best chance of living through this if you go on without me.”

We reach the end of the incline, and we’re now atop the ridge. I can see the frozen sea from high up behind us, and ahead of us is an incline much more gradual than the slope we just climbed, but it ends in jagged and harsh, rocky mountains after a few kilometers of empty snow.

“Ramses,” I say. “Our best chance is to stand and fight together. You’re not going to get me to abandon you.”

“I promised I’d protect you –”

I put my gloved hand on his cheek and shake my head. “You
are
protecting me. Do you really think I can make it alone in the mountains? Especially if you don’t make it – and it sounds like you are planning on a suicide mission – how long until they track me down? If we both fight together, we may actually win. I
am
a cop, Ramses, even the murderous robot overlord saw that in me.”

Ramses sighs. “I’ll think about it, come on.”

We begin to climb across the barren snowy hill. The mountains seem so far in the distance, as if we will never reach them. After walking around twenty minutes, when I look back, I see just how far we travelled – and just how obvious a path we’ve left.

“The good thing,” Ramses says, “is that we will see them coming from up there.” He points to the mountains. “They can track us, but we’ll be able to watch them coming for us, and react accordingly. Being up in the mountains like that and looking down at someone on this big, wide-open space...there’s nowhere for them to hide – no way for them to get up undetected.

And then another light flares up in the sky, and it roars across our heads like a comet. I think it’s going to crash down directly on top of us – but instead it buzzes over our heads, leaving a thick smoke trail, and it slams down into the mountains.

“Shit,” Ramses says.

“So…,” I say, “there’s nowhere for us to hide, on this big, wide-open space.”

“We run,” Ramses shouts. He ducks his head down and plows through the snow like a bull. I try to keep up with him, but even though he has to cut a path through the snow, I still can barely keep up with him.

Even though I’d been exhausted and panting just from walking uphill so long, Ramses had seemed calm and collected, but after running for two or three minutes, he’s panting hard as he runs. The mountains seem close now, but the pod landed a while ago now, and assuming whoever was inside it survived and is armed, I don’t see how we’ll make it to a safe spot before –

There’s a flash of light from up ahead, and Ramses grunts.

Everything in front of me had been the brown of Ramses’s coat, and the white of the snow, but now there’s red.

His blood is staining the snow, dripping out of his shoulder, but he’s still running forward.

I stop dead, paralyzed by fear. My cop instincts are telling me to do
something,
but we’re in an impossible position. There are enemies on both sides of us, a sniper on the high ground, and we’re armed with rocks and a stun rod with an effective range of just over one meter.

There’s another flash from the mountains, and this time Ramses falls down. Now his leg is bleeding.

I cry out and start to run toward him, but his other leg explodes open, exposing the bone through his pants and skin.

“Ramses!” I scream, running toward him, sliding down onto my knees, and pulling the blankets out of the bag. If the sniper wants to kill me, he can kill me, but I will do what I can to stop the bleeding while I’m still alive.

T
he last shot
hits a nerve cluster in my leg. I know because the pain explodes out across my entire body, and because the leg goes dead. I try to push on, but the leg just falls limp beneath me, and I crash to the ground. I can smell my own blood thick in the air, and I can feel it dripping warm across my arm and legs.

Elise runs to me, and I try to tell her to run, but my voice just comes out as a low groan. She wraps something around my blown-out leg, and the cold starts to engulf me.

I don’t know how much time passes, but I drift in and out of sleep. Each time I wake up, I hope that Elise has come to her senses and abandoned me, but she’s always by my side each time I open my eyes.

And the last time I open my eyes, the sniper is standing above me.

He’s a Marauder, but it’s not Grius. It’s a Marauder that wasn’t on the file my father had me memorize...he’s too young. He must have been a baby when the fleet first departed my father’s birth system. He hibernated through the flight as a child? And he grew up on Darkstar….

“Ramses,” he says. “Elise.”

He slams the butt of the huge sniper rifle down into the bloody snow. Elise clings to my body and looks up at the Marauder towering above us.

“Who the fuck are you?” she snarls. “And what the fuck do you want with us?”

“I’m Kain,” he says. “I’m supposed to kill this one.”

He points down to me. His eyes are jade green, and against the snow they look as if they are almost glowing. His skin is a deep purple, and he’s wearing a long, white trench coat. His hood is covering his ears, but he has a strong jaw and calculating eyes.

“If you kill him,” Elise says, crying, “then kill me, too!”

The stun rod is poking out of my bag, but it’s about a half meter from my grasp, and I can’t feel either of my legs. I consider pointing to it, hoping Elise will use it, but I don’t want her to. If she goes for it, Kain might just kill her. It needs to be me.

“I’m not going to kill him,” Kain says. “Grius, my father, wants me to kill him to hurt Aegus. But I don’t believe that the sins of the father should be paid for by the son. I’ll take you and leave him here. If he’s as strong as he claims, he may just survive. It’s the best I can offer him.”

Kain holds out his hand toward Elise, “Come with me, please, and I promise you won’t be harmed.”

Kain steps between me and the stun rod. “I see you eyeing that thing, Ramses. I’ll let you keep it. You’ll need it to survive here.”

I snarl at him and dig my one good arm into the ground. I pull my entire body with just one arm, dragging myself across the bloodied snow toward the stun rod.

Kain kicks me with his booted foot, slamming me in the chest so hard that I flip over.

Damn it. I won’t be able to fight him. I won’t be able to stop him. I have to trust his word, that he won’t harm Elise. If she can survive until Sara gets here with reinforcements...she may just have a chance.

“You promise you won’t hurt her?” I ask, lying flat on my back, pain lancing across every nerve in my body.

“I promise,” Kain says. He seems like a total fucking bastard, but for some reason his word seems to carry weight.

“Elise,” I say, my voice a rattling rasp. “Go with him. Forget me. You know you can trust me….”

Grius and Kain don’t know that Sara is already on the way. I don’t want to tip them off to it either. I need Elise to understand, and –

She dives for the stun rod, rips it from the bag, and rolls away from Kain.

“No! Elise!” I try to yell out to her, but my voice is just a throaty whisper.

Kain grabs his rifle, and I muster every last ounce of strength I have to pull myself on one elbow closer toward him.

I hear the stun rod whirr as Elise hits the button, and she lunges toward Kain.

He’s holding the sniper rifle by the barrel, and he swings it like a bat toward Elise. The stock of the rifle slams the stun rod as she lunges, knocking it out of her hand. It flies several meters through the air and disappears into the snow.

Elise tries to run for it, but Kain flips the rifle around and points it at Elise’s back as she runs.

“Elise, no!”

I grab Kain’s ankle and start to pull, but he fires.

Instead of a bullet, a net blasts out of the barrel, and it wraps around Elise. Magnetic balls slam together in front of her, locking her in. She tumbles to the ground, her limbs tangled up in the net.

“I told you I wouldn’t harm her,” Kain says. “You probably will need to find a way to stay awake, Ramses, or you’ll never wake up again. Good luck.”

He hoists the big gun over his shoulder and walks toward Elise.

I hear her screaming my name as Kain hoists the net over his other shoulder, and he carries Elise away.

I drag myself by my elbow a few centimeters at a time toward the pack. One of my legs doesn’t seem to be bleeding so badly, but the other is gushing out, and I’ll die if I don’t stop it.

I keep an eye on Kain and Elise as they shrink on the horizon, but they’re leaving a clear trail for me to follow. I don’t know how I’ll follow with both legs blown out...but I
will
follow. Even if it kills me.

I dump the bag onto the ground, and I grab the matches and a sphere-shaped piece of spider innards.

I roll back onto my back and force myself to sit up. As soon as I sit up, I realize how much blood I’ve lost. I go completely lightheaded and nearly pass out straight away, but I bite down on my lip until it bleeds to keep unconsciousness at bay.

I try to tear the spider organ open with one hand, but my fingers are numb and weak. I raise it to my mouth and bite it open. The ichor starts to ooze out, and I hold the thing above my wound. The ichor drips all over my gaping wound, and I move the organ around above the wound until the whole thing is covered in the sticky ichor.

Then I drop the thing to the ground, push it about a half meter away, and light it on fire. I throw the blankets, twigs, and the bag itself into the flame, and it flares up. Heat starts to wash across me, but I’m not done yet. The worst is yet to come.

I take the still-lit match, which has burnt down nearly to my fingers now, and I drop it on the ichor-covered wound.

The ichor alights, and pain explodes across my leg. At least I can still feel it, but as it burns and cauterizes the wound, the pain completely overtakes everything, and the last thing I feel before passing out is the back of my skull slamming into the ground.