Mother Lode

They were still side by side, hand in hand, larger than life. Their magnificent, graceful wings were partly open to show the gossamer film that connected the sweeping curves of the bones. A smile came to Erin's face, for they were wonderful. Her eyes stung with tears engendered by sheer beauty, but then her reason returned and she wiped away the telltale moisture while making a genuine effort to rekindle the hate she felt for the thing that held her prisoner in her own body. Ah, but it was difficult to hate, for the being's face glowed with her loveliness, and her stance was so proud, so proud. Erin jerked her eyes away. The strong field of power was fading. Her scalp tingled as her hair fell into place. She turned to Denton. «So now we know,» she said. He nodded, knowing that she was talking about the purpose of the Amplifier. On the opposite side of the orbital ring a moon-sized body swam in the darkness. «Poses some questions, doesn't it?» Denton asked. She nodded, glanced toward them. «I think we can go now.» She rose, picked up the Mop, who flung himself into position in the crook of her arm to have his chest rubbed. She nodded to them. They took no notice. Dent followed her out of the room. No overt permission had been given. They were above the ordinary little matter of day to day existence for the humans, but they had recognized the necessity for mere men to eat, rest, and perform bodily functions, all of which Dent and Erin did in the next hour. Erin had a shower and let the fragrant, dry wind evaporate the moisture from her skin. Dent was already in bed when she came out. His eyes were closed. She knew how he felt, for her limbs were leaden. They had not been overly generous in allowing sleep time. She eased into bed so as not to wake him. He sighed in his sleep, turned, put one arm around her. It was the first time since he had opened the door to the gym only to vaporize into a red mist that he had touched her. Reminded of what she had found with Dent, and then had lost, she wept quietly. She awoke with a sense of pleasure that became, as she swam up from deepest sleep, Dent's caress. She moaned in protest, but, after all, was she so tired? Her body said no as his lips found hers demandingly. She moaned again, but in a different tone. His hands were exploring her. «Ouch,» she said, wincing away from him. «You thought he was beautiful,» Dent said. «What?» The alien was the last thing she wanted to think about at that moment. Once before she had thought that she was in love—with Jack Burnish aboard Rimfire— but after that first night in Denton Gale's arm she had realized that she had never known the meaning of love until she was alone with Dent near the core of the galaxy. «His magnificent body,» Dent said. «You liked it.» «Hey, Dent—» «No need to be coy. Tell me what you would like for him to do to you.» «Get out of here,» she said, pushing on his shoulders. His hands became cruel clamps bearing down on her shoulders. «You're hurting me, Dent.» «Then do as I tell you.» «I don't understand,» she said, trying to push him away. «You wanted him.» «Dent?» She lifted her head, looked into his eyes, felt her blood surge in fear, for in Dent's face was the slackness that she had come to associate with control by one of them. She knew, then, that the alien was there, that he'd pushed Dent back into the prison recess somewhere, that Dent was helpless, perhaps looking on to see him with his hand touching Erin's soft breast. «Yes, I am Dent. But you wanted him. Tell me.» She started a prayer in her secret mind and felt a sheet of pain as he punished her. His hand twisted and she screamed in sudden agony. «Tell me,» he said. «Yes, it is true,» she whispered, for, although he had done no visible damage, the twist of his iron fingers had sent a lance of pain throughout her entire body. «I wanted him. I thought he was beautiful.» He became gentle, but when she fell silent he hurt her in a very intimate area, a hurt that caused her to shudder and jerk in anguish until he stopped long enough for her to continue. She struggled for words to speak of his beauty. She became incoherent, for he was using her and although it was Denton's familiar, beloved body, she knew revulsion, felt that ultimate insult that only a woman can know when she is taken against her will. She found that she could keep him from administering pain by saying, «Yes, yes, yes,» by moaning as if she were in ecstasy, by doing something she had never done before, pretending to enjoy being used. When she thought it was over, it had just begun. «He found that to be quite unsatisfactory,» he said. «We must try again.» And this time she felt him entering into her mind as well as her body, so that he saw her revulsion and punished her. He knew how to find the most sensitive spots on her body, and he used the strength of Denton Gale's hands and fingers, combined with shocking force, heat, and lances of pure pain that originated in his own mind. And that mind became open to her, for the pain he gave her stimulated him and urged him on to strenuous moves. It seemed to excite him to force her to look into his mind and be driven to the brink of insanity by the cesspool of cruelty she saw there, evil so bottomless, so infinite that she could absorb only a fraction of his affliction before loathing and terror caused her mind to go blank to all but the hurt he was giving her. Surely; she thought, I will die. But she did not. She lay on the bed beside the exhausted body of Denton with her limbs trembling, her breath coming in short, frantic gasps. She was afraid to move, afraid that he would return, or that movement would bring back the excruciating agony that he had inflicted. She closed her eyes and lay very, very still. «Erin?» She tensed, jerked away from Dent's hand. «Erin, it's me.» She opened her eyes. Dent was weeping. «Don't,» she said. «He made sure that I was aware.» «Damn him.» «Oh, God—» He clasped her to him and his strong, young body shuddered with his sobs. «Don't, Dent. Please don't.» «I couldn't do a thing. Nothing. I could only watch, and hear you begging him to—» «Do you still think they're beautiful?» It worked. His sobs halted. He sniffed. «The thing is, I don't know what to do.» «I don't either,» she said. «We can't fight them. They're too powerful.» «And they are weakened by having lost their own world.» «Did you understand that from him?» «Yes.» «And what they're doing is recreating their world?» «Yes.» «Will they do it in seven days?» she asked, then clutched at Denton's hand. «Believe me, I'm not trying to be sacrilegious, not now.» «I know. But this wasn't heaven that was destroyed, Erin.» «If it was, then the preachers have been telling us lies all of our lives,» she agreed, shuddering as she remembered the enjoyment that he got from her pain and from her screams for mercy. «If they're angels—» «No,» she said. «They're not. They may look like the angels that the craftsmen make on Delos, and like some of the illustrations from that old Bible, but there is nothing divine about them.» «Do you remember my telling you about my dream, where the world was about to be destroyed and the people were flying around trying to think of a way to escape the cataclysm?» «Yes. The people in your dream were like them?» «Yes and no. Alike in form, but not in malevolence.» He cradled her in his arms, kissed her cheek. «There was something I didn't tell you about that dream, because, quite frankly, it scared the hell out of me. It seemed so real. After I saw the people with wings flying around in panic and it was all over, I woke up and then I heard a voice say, 'Leave them to their rest and go from here.' « «Now you tell me,» she said. «I should have told you,» he said. «But would it have made any difference?» She snuggled close, fighting the revulsion she felt, for it was Dent's arms around her, not his. «No,» she said. «I had gold fever. I would have laughed at you.» They were both silent for a long time. «Dent?» «Ummm.» «You know that they'll never let us go.» «I've been trying not to think about that.» «They'll use us to make a body for another one of them. They killed Plough and his crew without the slightest hesitation. They need us, at the moment, to do the work aboard ship. When they don't need us anymore, they'll take the life out of us and toss it away just as they did with those on the Plough ship.» He squeezed her, kissed her. She did not answer his kiss, for her mind was elsewhere. «Now and then,» she said, «when she's concentrating on something else, she relaxes her control over me. If the time ever comes when I can take advantage of it, be ready.» He did not speak. He held her close, so close that it was difficult for her to breathe and she sensed that he was terribly afraid not of the danger of becoming nothing, but of losing her. She'd never known such sweetness. What she felt for Dent and what he felt for her in return was worth fighting for. «All right, you gormless mother,» she said to herself, directing all of her hate toward the alien female. «All right.» And even though her reason told her the situation was hopeless, that she and Dent were helpless in the power of the two winged things, she was, after all, human, a product of a race that could find hope while standing on the brink of the grave. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The stats from X&A Headquarters on Xanthos caught up with Rimfire as she was leaving Haven.. The inquiries were politely worded, or at least as courteously stated as could be expected when the admirals on Xanthos became aware that the prime exploratory ship on X&A service had been diverted from her priority mission of opening up a new section of the galaxy. Messages left Rimfire traveling on two paths, one back to Xanthos and one along the blink route given to Captain Julie Roberts by Erin Kenner's blinkstat, the one that had invoked the magic letters, F.R.A.N.K. The messages to Xanthos were answered. The stats sent toward the swarming splendor of the core worlds were not. Julie Roberts knew that she was risking a lot on her personal assessment of Erin Kenner. She wasn't exactly betting her command and her career that Erin would not have evoked the ultimate dread of space- going mankind, xenophobia, without good cause; but if it turned out that she had taken Rimfire on a spook chase her status as the fair-haired, A-number-one, up-and-coming, sure-admiral-to-be would be eroded, perhaps enough to allow a couple of her male competitors to jump over her on the promotion list. You were allowed a few goofs as a junior officer, but when you reached the rank of captain you were playing a sudden death game. One serious mistake and you found yourself benched, navigating a desk back on Xanthos. The series of coded stats to Xanthos did not fully explain Julie's reasons for Rimfire's diversion toward the Dead Worlds and the radiation storms of the core. While the big ship was charging her generator in the Dead Worlds sac, drawing power from the stars that looked down unfeelingly on those devastated planets that were still capable of giving even the bravest human