ΔV Pt. 03

"I need you inside me," she whispered.

"Hm," Qasim murmured, but Ning gave him no time to think or react. She grabbed onto his jumpsuit and started to tug. Her muscles bunched and the sound of tearing fabric filled the air – and she giggled. A shockingly girly sound for such a dangerous seeming woman. Qasim shook her head. "Wasteful."

"Oh shut up," she mumbled, leaning forward and kissing him. This time, when she spread and pressed her thighs to him, her hot, fuzzy sex rasped against his member. The feeling of her slick need awoke a fire in Qasim's belly. He gripped her, struggling to find purchase while also trying to brace to thrust. Ning provided some help by reaching up and grabbing onto the ceiling, her iron hard legs closing around his waist. The motion was practiced – making him wonder how many times she had flouted the regulations on sexual conduct...for about five seconds, the time it took before her undulations sank his cock deep inside of her.

She was...hot.

And slick.

And felt so...so very good.

Qasim closed his eyes and groaned low in his throat.

He began to thrust against her, using the wall as his brace, and she started to bounce back, her arms actually flexing to give extra motion to their meeting. His balls slapped against her round, perfect ass, and Ning moaned, her mouth opening, her eyes half closed. Remarkably, she was looking more and more beautiful every second. Qasim grunted softly, then growled. "Ning!" He leaned forward and kissed her again. His body trembled and he felt a rush of pleasure. Cum started to pump inside of her – and Ning threw her head back – groaning herself. She quaked and rocked and gasped softly.

The two spacers floated in a hazy constellation of their own sweat.

For the moment, the hunger abated. The thirst was banished.

The crash was an eternity away.

Ning whispered. "We're going to die, right?"

"Absolutely," Qasim whispered back.

Ning nodded.

Silence.

"Round two?" She murmured.

Qasim, for once in his life, felt content in his situation.

***

Ensign Helen Trevor, who had been responsible for dragging Lucas from the comfortable, peaceful quiet of his cabin in the habitation deck, lifted one of her drink bulbs. "Let's pour one down for the poor sorry sons of bitches on the...the..." She paused. "Ren...Re..." She bit her lip, slightly. "Renm..."

"People's Shield," Lucas said, his hands cupped in his hands. "That's the anglicized translation."

"Damn straight!" Helen said, snapping her finger and pointing at Lucas. Other officers in the Enterprise's rec room nodded, and several lifted their drinks as well. Helen breathed out. "I hope to god no one was in that reactor section."

Lucas slid his head forward.

He did not like spaceships. He had spent the past five months aboard a spaceship. This fact should have made the whole 'not liking spaceships' less of a factor. And for a little bit, it had – if only because talking with the scientific team on the Enterprise was discovering new and more interesting givens about the solar system they flew through every day. But then, four days ago, the PRCSS People's Shield had suffered a catastrophic failure. The engineering team on the Enterprise were still divided between an internal fault, sabotage, micrometeorite impact, or a 'black swan' - an event so far out of the understanding of the human race that it was utterly unpredictable.

One of the risks of entering an entirely new universe.

Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, the People's Shield was now tumbling in two halves. It was entirely possible survivors were on that ship...

And Lucas had killed them.

He had killed them.

Helen sat down across from him, her blue brows furrowing. She still looked like a living cartoon character – though she had complained that her dye pill was going to be wearing off in a few weeks and the ship didn't have any replacements – but that didn't make her look of concern any less serious. "You okay, Luke?"

Lucas sighed. Ever since he had arrived on the Enterprise, Helen had decided to make him her hobby. Whenever she wasn't on duty, she showed up to make sure that he was 'a-okay.' Since, after all, she had been given the order to make sure he had settled in when he had boarded in Earth orbit and had figured that counted even five months into the mission. He'd have felt flattered if female attention didn't trigger panicky reflexes he thought he should have divested himself of by the time he had graduated college.

"Fine," he said.

"You don't look fine," she said. "You freaking out cause of the Chinese ship blowing up? Listen, Chinese ships are flying coffins. Ever since we kicked their ass in the 50s with a computer virus, they design those things to basically run like 20^th century, Great War battleships. It's insane."

Lucas put his hands over his face. "It's not that," he said.

"What is it, dude?" Helen asked, sipping from her bulb.

"I...killed them," Lucas said, his hands sliding away from his face.

Helen blinked. Then she blinked again. Then she blinked a third time.

"...do...you have psychic powers?" she asked.

"No!" Lucas snapped. "I'm the logistics officer! I proposed this burn to Captain DuPont – if we weren't on this damn perpendicular orbit, we'd be able to mount a rescue operation." He groaned, then laid his head down on the table. Centrifugal gravity pressed his face against the metal and he wished that he could sink through the table and into the floor, then through the floor into space.

Helen's brow furrowed. "Walk me through this, doc..." She said, slowly.

"Okay," Lucas said. "Plane change maneuvers are expensive."

"I'm an Ensign, not a cadet, Luke."

Lucas pursed his lips. "Well, when the Sparrowhawk decided to share their water tanks with us, they gave us extra ΔV. Since we're on a scientific expedition to...to the other world," he said, waving his hand – not wanting to say what the scientific teams had been finding about third world of this solar system. "I suggested we do the plane change maneuvers now and approach the pole of our, uh, destination. We'll get a gravity capture and be in a polar orbit."

"Perfect for spying, nice," Helen said.

"But it also means that the People's Shield will be...is...completely out of our range to help!" he said. "And the Russians are burning so hard that they'll be tapped out of every propellant tank – and I think they tapped their drones for reaction mass just to get there ahead of us."

Helen pursed her lips. "That doesn't mean you killed them, Luke. The upper half of that ship was ripped to hell by an internal explosion. The lower half had a nuclear reactor and if I know that make of ship, it didn't have much more than secondary filters and maybe a head. Anyone there...they wouldn't have survived for rescue, even if we were on the plane of the elliptic."

"That's not helping," Lucas groaned. "Now I'm just picturing being stuck in a metal coffin, slowly dying of thirst."

Helen sighed, slowly, then reached out and gently patted the top of his head. "Wanna play some vid games?"

"I don't like vid games," Lucas mumbled.

"Wanna fuck?" Helen asked, casually.

Lucas jerked up so fast that his knee slammed into the table hard enough to nearly break. He clutched at his leg and wheezed, while Helen cackled, throwing her head back and laughing. "Fuu...ahhh!" Lucas closed his eyes. "W-What the hell, Trevor!?"

"See, I've distracted you successfully!" Helen said, clapping her hands. "Mission accomplished."

Lucas rubbed his knee, feeling the throbbing sensation fade by inches. His eyes closed and he breathed in slowly. Raggedly. "Helen," he said, his voice tight.

"Yeah?"

"If you want to actually distract me, you'd come with me to the science decks," he said, the pain and the anger he felt making him braver than he normally was. When he opened his eyes, Helen was beaming – not exactly the expression he had wanted to provoke. She sprang to her feet.

"I've got another hour of liberty," she said, cheerfully. "Lead the way."

The science deck had been bunged together over the past month – the scientists working around technicians and engineers from the USAF who were trying to expand what they had been given. In the end, the room was spacious and welcoming by the standards of a starship. Meaning it was easily the most cramped laboratory that Lucas had ever seen – far smaller and tighter than anything he'd seen in college. Cables snaked along the floors, connecting computer consoles to terminals, while the scientists that had been hastily bundled aboard before the Enterprise left orbit worked.

Two scientists, though, stuck out. Dr. Rachna and Dr. Mayur weren't distinct because of their skin colors, or even their accents – Dr. Mann, for instance, had a thicker accent than either of them. Rather, it was the green-gray of the Indian scientific branch's uniform...and the haunted look in Dr. Rachna's eyes. When she was working, she was merely determined and focused. But...sometimes, Lucas had seen her between shifts. In the rec room, or the mess hall, just...looking off into space, looking like she was barely there at all.

Dr. Rachna was currently looking at a set of spectrographic results. Lucas figured that would be dull enough to send Helen off to find a better way to blow her last hour of liberty. He stepped over. "Dr. Rachna-"

"Please," the Indian woman said, looking at him. "You can call me Vidya."

Something about her...

Lucas had just been thinking about how sad and distant she had looked earlier in the trip. But she was smiling now and her eyes sparkled with a kind of delight. Why, if Lucas didn't know better- he started as Helen grinned at Vidya. "Having fun with the givens, ma'am?" Her voice was very playful. Lucas tried to elbow his enforced friend as subtly as he could.

"Oh yes," Vidya said, pointing at the spread. "The atmosphere is Earth's mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon..." She smirked, slightly. "But there's no color line for the nanoparticulates that the climate stations put into the atmosphere. And no industrial pollutants." She tabbed a button and the spectrograph lines were overlaid by other, more familiar lines. They were often used in UNEC reports on the climate – which had been imprinted on an entire generation as vital, need to know news. Lucas still felt a tiny glow of pride seeing the bar that represented methane and CO2 shrinking, bit by bit, as the UNEC did its job.

Seeing the Earth's bars against this...other world...though?

It made his stomach knot.

"So, no humans, then?" Helen asked. "Or is it populated by the fucking Baku?"

"The...what?" Vidya asked.

"Don't ask," Lucas said, rubbing his palms against his face. Helen had chewed through several weeks of the voyage by spending her liberty watching every single spec-fic film that the Enterprise had on their memory banks. She had, of course, forced Lucas to watch every single one. Lucas was pretty sure that contravened some measure in the Geneva Convention.

"Oh, you're still studying the atmosphere?" Dr. Mann asked, bustling over. His turban seemed to shine under the light of the laboratory. "Do you have any new speculations, Dr. Rachna?"

"Yes, Dr. Mann," Vidya said, pointing at the lines. "There's more carbon in the atmosphere than there would be in a world without any sentient life. That could mean that the world has had a series of massive wildfires – possible, but unlikely considering the telescopic givens. I'd estimate that there are about a hundred million people using 21^st or 22^nd century technologies. Uh, a tenth of that if they're Westerners." She grinned, clearly planning for a joke.

Lucas gulped and did not laugh.

"What if they're low tech?" Helen asked, sounding fascinated.

"Then a lot more," Vidya said, nodding. "If this is all from campfires, then we could be looking at nearly six hundred million – the same as we had in our..." She tapped at the computer, looking at a profusion of spreadsheets. "Sixteenth century."

"Wow," Helen said. "Are you a airbreathy science type?"

"No, I'm a astrogeologist," Vidya said, dryly. "But I did a general planetology course before specializing."

"I find it hilarious that your career is literally space rock lady," Helen said, grinning. "Cause, I mean, most of space is empty. So, anyone got an actual picture of what the ground is like?"

Dr. Mann smiled, genially. "No. They're still too far."

Helen grinned. "What do we got?"

"There's no radar transmissions, no satellites, no launches, no-" Vidya ticked the things off on her fingers.

"So, definitely primitive," Helen said. "I'll need to read the regs. Are we allowed to even talk to them? I mean, I don't want to do a colonialism again." Vidya pursed her lips slightly at that.

Lucas put his hands over his face and wanted to melt. Helen elbowed him. When they started to head out – as Helen had to get back to duty, she then started to tell him about how cute Vidya was – and how she had totally been checking him out. And thus, the final week of flight passed, with the Enterprise smoothly burning to decelerate into a polar orbit, using the gravitation of the other world as a way to slow the last notch down. And here...

Here there was no way to ignore the uncomfortable realization.

A day after reaching orbit – with the Russians having been in an equatorial orbit for nearly a week by the time they arrived – the Enterprise had completely mapped the third world of the new solar system. From a distance, it had merely been a green and blue and white speck on a telescope – another singular blue dot, suspended in a sunbeam. Here...they could count the continents. They could trace the maps.

Lucas, being the logistics officer, was part of the meeting with the captain. DuPont, his hands clasped before him on the meeting table, looked down at the map that the science team and the computer had put together. "Well," he said. "I said it was this was a replica of our solar system in that meeting, but...damn." He shook his head.

There was North America. South America. Africa. Eurasia. Australia. The polar caps were significantly bigger and Greenland was appropriately icy. Some parts of the world were entirely different colors – healthier, greener colors. The Amazon rain forest was nearly twice the size it was on Earth, while the Sahara desert was a quarter of the size on Earth. DuPont ran his finger along the edge of the map, shifting the time scale, bringing night to some of the projection – and as he did so, the Earth failed to illuminate as it would in...the other...

"Are there cities?" DuPont asked, his voice ragged. Tight.

"Yes, sir," Dr. Goldberg said, her voice soft. "We've detected cities in California, China...er...uh, in the places that...correspond...to..." She trailed off, then shook her head. "Okay, I propose that from here on out, we use the names we're used to for clarity – we're all capable of remembering that this isn't the California we remember, right?"

"Right," Captain DuPont said. He looked at Lucas. "Can we get any closer up footage?"

"Uh, okay, we have a single STS shuttle," Lucas said. "It's fully stocked with propellant and reaction mass, but we have a problem: She's loaded with, uh, chemical propellant. Now, it is a space plane, which reduces the ΔV requirements, but not enough to make going too and from easily. But we shipped with a fuel synthesizer. If we set that up with the portable reactor, we can make a base and begin to ship water back to the ship – remassing will take, uh, maybe, a week? Two?" He gulped, slightly. "S-So, uh, we should put down on one of the classic launch sites, uh..." He looked down at his files. "California...if we want to be near local civilization, Florida, if we want to be in the boonies."

DuPont ducked his head forward. "We were sent here to make contact," he said, seriously. "And..." He sighed, slowly. "The Russians have already landed twice in Eurasia. If we sit back, we'll cede the whole world to them."

"Cold War 2.0, huh?" Dr. Goldberg muttered.

DuPont pursed his lips. "Dr. Goldberg," He said, his voice threatening.

"Sorry, sir," she said.

"Launch the shuttle," DuPont said, seriously. "Once its in atmosphere, it'll be able to do a flyover of California using its ramjet..." He nodded. "I want all of you in the science branch to keep an eye on this."

Lucas felt his tension bleed out of his body. He hadn't messed anything up during the briefing. Then as he sat down in the science lab, clustering around the main screen with the rest of the science team, his stomach immediately knotted again as he heard Helen's voice over the radio. "Ensign Trevor here, the drone is prepped, fueled and ready..."

The pilot, a steely sounding male voice, spoke up: "Ramjet engaged...okay...we're getting some chop."

Lucas spent the next hour worrying himself into a frenzy as he watched the camera mounted to the nose of the shuttle. They flew, for a time, over the sweep of the Arctic, then the Atlantic. Then-

"Ah, what's that? Angling the camera...zoom..." The pilot's voice filled his ears as the scientists started to mutter among one another. The camera wheeled and focused, panning down and showing a top-down view of what was unmistakably a sailing ship. It had the teardrop shape, the masts with the ferocious tangle of rigging. Shadowy shapes moved across it, the camera too distant to resolve clearly enough, but their movements were distinctly human. "Matching their course – they have to be heading for one of the coastal cities."

An hour later – an hour of boring waiting that Lucas turned into a gnawing terror – the shuttle crossed over the East coast. The pilot couldn't slow down – the ramjet required it to maintain maximum speed or else the process would falter and the shuttle would need to switch back to its chemical engines. But the camera swung to keep the city in sight for as long as they could, and several of the scientists, including Dr. Goldberg, bustled off to pore over the still images that they pulled from the video file.

To Lucas, it had looked like a dreadfully small excuse for a city – ringed by...a wall? He wasn't sure, the image was too distant.

The vast plains of the Midwest. Here, the entire science team watched in awe as the shuttle flew over what seemed like endless masses of brown shapes, flowing in herds that kicked up enough dust to blot out vast swathes of the countryside. Helen, her professionalism forgotten for the moment, whispered into her mic. "Goddamn."

Over the Rockies next – these were thickly dusted with snow – and then into the redwood forests beyond. And there, the shuttle spotted another sign of civilization, though one less palatable than a sailing ship. "Uh, Enterprise, I'm seeing what looks like a large cleared out area. Angling camera..."

The camera panned and showed a circle of forest, maybe...a hundred miles wide. It looked as if it had been swept clear by a buzz cutter and set on fire. Blackness spread around a central point – and the camera zoomed in, showing that the central point looked like a stone structure. It was too small to be a city, too large to be a house. But surrounding it were dozens of green pinpricks that Lucas swore were the size of campfires, and...enough humanoid figures, in a tight enough formation, that he nearly mistook them for the landscape.

Chatter came back and forth from the Enterprise – flowing in one of Lucas' ear and out the other. Then he heard the words: "Launching drone now."