“Sang chi’ay,” he whispered, and pulled at her head, but not insistently.

She went willingly anyway, letting him pull her along his cock, angling up to open her throat for him. The washcloth on his belly pushed as her other hand gripped his base and squeezed. He thrust slowly, drawing himself almost completely out of her before pumping into her mouth again. His three fingers flexed and relaxed on her head, flexed and relaxed.

She ran the soap through her fingers and wrapped her hands around his shaft, twining and tickling as she coated him with slick foam. Then she began to milk, steady and gentle and strong, rapidly lashing at him with the tip of her tongue only and sometimes pausing either to suck once or to blow a stream of air or water at his glans.

“Up,” Kane said hoarsely. “Up now.” His claws clenched painfully in her hair, pulling her faster when she didn’t rise fast enough, and then he pushed her into the long wall and lifted her, pulling her legs around his hips.

She didn’t have time to brace herself, but it wasn’t as bad as she remembered. The soap helped. He stroked up inside her all the way, forceful but not brutal, urgent but still calm. She hung her weight on his shoulders and tried not to feel what he did to the rest of her. He took what he needed from her with constant, indifferent motions, his taut stomach slapping wetly at hers with every swift thrust. It’d probably be over soon. That was something at least.

Then he pulled her thighs up, tilting her hips, penetrating even deeper, and suddenly the swollen friction of him was in a whole new place, one that sparked violently in unwelcome response to his movements. It startled a gasp from her, an instinctive tightening of her arms, and God help her, he noticed. His laughter was deep and nearly soundless, a rumble that passed from his body to her bones, melting humiliation into every pore of her.

She twisted her face away, but couldn’t unfeel his touch and now he was slowing, stroking at her with exquisite deliberation. She felt herself whimper, and then heard herself beg. “Please…just…No, please, no…just finish, please, just—”

His hands rubbed slickly around to her ass, pulling her even tighter, positioning her for an even fuller fit. His cock scoured her, massing at her from her pussy clear to her throat, and her traitor body seized on him and flooded with heat. She began to fight futilely, trying to squirm up and off him, but of course, succeeded only in adding to his rhythm. “I don’t want to!” Raven cried, but she knew what was coming. “Oh God, no!”

“No?” Kane gasped. He sent a tight succession of short, sharp thrusts against her, each one yanking her a little closer to that hateful climax. “This doesn’t feel like no to me.” He started to say more, and then hissed in breath as she came and let it out in a strangled, “Chok, Raven! Ah, gods! Ah, chok-se en erashe!” His body locked up tight and he unleashed an awful, strained groan and bucked twice into her with bruising force, cumming in shudders.

Raven sobbed, covering her eyes behind one hand, hating herself and the pleasure that still glowed out from her womb. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t stand to see his mocking smile.

He leaned into her, only a little shy of breath, and slowly let her slide down his body to her own feet. He stepped back, combing once at the lock of her limp, purple hair, and then he reached down and tugged hard at her pubic down. “I hate the feel of this,” he said. “Take it off.”

Raven blinked wetly around the shower stall. “There’s no razor,” she said. “If we go to a store tomorrow, I can buy one.”

“Soon enough, I suppose.” He scratched lightly at the half-beard lining his jaw and then suddenly grinned and put his hand hard between her thighs.

She uttered a shrill, mewling sound and pressed herself flat against the tiles, trying to clench away from him.

“Now where…?” he breathed, pushing up, parting her. Even his finger was thick and long; her body gripped it greedily even as her guts churned. “Ah, gods! Feel that!” he grunted. He pumped his hand, and Raven broke into tears. “Move,” Kane said. “You know you want to.”

“I don’t want to!” Raven wailed.

Kane grabbed her hip with his free hand and pumped her towards his thrusting finger. Her nerves, already heightened, flared out in ugly orgasm. Kane paused again, his lips parting as he stared at her belly with that incredulous grin on his face. “I’ve never felt anything like that,” he remarked, and pulled his hand free of her at last.

“You bastard!” she sobbed, stupidly but beyond caring. In that moment, still with hellish pleasure tingling through her, she wanted to be dead.

He laughed at her. “Wash up,” he said cheerfully. He picked up the bundle of her shed clothing and his pants and tossed them in the tub with her. “Do what you can with these and hang them up to dry. And don’t take too long. If I have to come in here after you—” He stroked his open hand once across her pussy. “—I might get distracted.”

She covered herself as soon as he moved his hand away, shivering, and he left, still laughing. Raven found the spongy sliver of soap in the bottom of the tub and rubbed it over herself, her tears coming even harder. There wasn’t enough left for her to get clean. There wasn’t enough soap in the world for that.

*

Tagen burnt the bodies.

It took most of the night, too much time to spend in idleness, but Tagen sat watch over the burning regardless. He did not know the funerary customs of humans, but this much he could do for them. Despite the urgency of his mission, there was a guilt in him that needed to be assuaged, and he hoped that honoring the dead in this way would bring him that little peace.

He watched the bones blacken and shrink, and in his mind’s eye he heard the deafening crack of their weapons. Pellet projectiles. Crude, but quite effective in their own way. Had Tagen not been armed himself or had he been a little slower to return fire, he had no doubt he would be dead at this moment. It was a truth he did not ignore, and for that, he felt perhaps less responsibility for their deaths than he otherwise might have. But the ease with which he had extinguished their lives seemed more significant to him. He could have used his neural stunner. He had killed them instead.

His thoughts returned to the sight of the smaller human buckling and falling. It had not even tried to fire its weapon after it had seen its companion die. Its face had been stricken, disbelieving. The more Tagen thought on that, the more it bothered him. He wondered if the smallness of the human had been an indicator of age rather than mere size. He began to think perhaps he had killed a father and his son.

How often had Kolya taken him, as a child, into the wild places of Jota to hone his tracking skills? Living rough beneath the open skies, learning to forage and hunt, training his body to act beyond the effects of discomfort or want…and at times, sitting at a fire beside his father, sharing the bond of family. They were the only times Tagen could remember feeling happy as a child, that his presence in Kolya Pahnee’s home was more than a continuation of name and legacy, and that he were truly wanted.

What had he done?

Tagen closed his eyes and let his thoughts still. The image that came to him in the darkness of his quiet mind was that of all the debris and devises that orbited Earth. He could no longer believe them merely the leavings of Jotan smugglers and slavers. The humans had put it all there themselves.

The humans had been to space.

Five hundred years ago, they had been primitives on the verge of chaotic collapse. Now they were poised to leave their world, perhaps even to encounter another. They had made two thousand years of progress in an impossibly brief blink of time.