“We ought to be safe in here, at least,” Tyger said. He removed his shirt and jacket and tossed them onto the deck as the soldier ducked into the airlock and closed the door behind them. No sooner than she did this than her scent, now mixed in with and magnified by her sweat, became more pungent than before. Inside, Tyger wanted to cry.
My kingdom for a human sense of smell, he thought as the lights inside the cockpit switched on.
“It’s in excellent shape, considering it’s been over twenty years.” the soldier commented.
“The stasis field did its job.” Tyger said. He inhaled deeply after they descended the ladder that led into the empty cargo bay, mostly to clear his head, but partly to take in the scent of his father. They explored the area, which was lined with various boxes and containers, and, after a cursory glance, climbed back up and opened the hatch to the habitation section.
“You seem to like this fact,” the soldier cast a sideways glance his way. Tyger figured she’d noticed his constant sniffing. His expression broke into a grin that faded slightly to the sheepish side as he caught another hint of her scent.
“It smells like my dad,” he explained. “The only thing that smelled like him back home was his journal, and it was very faint. It’s everywhere here, and stronger than I’ve ever known it to be. God, I know this sounds creepy, but ... I wish I could just bag it and save it for later, y’know?”
“Indeed,” the soldier remarked with a strange expression.
“Well, don’t take this wrong; I don’t expect you to understand. You never had parents. While I never knew Cole –that was my dad’s name–, Mom taught me everything she knew about him, told me stories every day right up until I was old enough to leave home.”
“Is it comforting?” the soldier asked, appearing to take no offense. They passed through the narrow hatch that separated the cockpit from the rest of the ship. At the soldier’s insistence, Tyger had let her take point, as she was better armed and better equipped to deal with any unexpected nasties.
“The stories or the scent?” Tyger asked.
“Both, actually. But I’m more curious about the scent.”
“The stories, definitely,” Tyger said, “the scent, more than it should be.” He did not admit that his father was not the only pleasant scent that permeated the air at the moment, and both were a welcome change to the vile odor from the creatures. His pants still had splatters of ichor that offended his olfactory nerves in ways that he knew her nose could only faintly detect.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” the soldier said. “Parents or not, the Imperium will always be my family.”
“So do you have anyone like a mother figure, or is it all just downloaded?” Tyger guessed the answer but he thought that maybe there were veteran tanks that maybe offered life lessons to newborns.
The soldier sighed and paused before opening the hatch to the next cabin. Tyger paused as well, swallowing back the fear that he had, this time, offended her.
“Not like you have,” she said. “We’re given all we need to survive at the beginning. Some are lucky to live long enough that they may teach the young soldiers things that can’t be downloaded. Such is the purpose of our existence. Our candle may burn brightly but briefly, but in that time we serve our masters as best we can.”
When Tyger exhaled, she let out a small laugh.
“You thought you had offended me?”
“No!” Tyger protested. “Well, maybe a little.”
“For one who has shown such bravery as you, you have moments of inexplicable innocence,” the soldier remarked, extending her vajra and poking it into the next compartment. Carefully, Tyger moved in behind her, and flipped the toggle for the lights.
“Whoa,” he whispered.
The cabin reminded him of the luxury airship hotels that floated in the skies of Haven, though somewhat less classy and more homely. A blanket of Felyan make lay over the bed, rumpled from its last use. A stationary light and console, its display over two decades out of date sat on a small bedside table formed from an extension of the ship’s hull. A framed picture positioned on the table contained an image he was quite familiar with. It was a copy of the only picture of his father that his mother had owned: she and him, arms about each other’s hips, his father in full uniform, both of them standing on a balcony that overlooked the neon-flecked skyline of Xiao’s Tiāntáng City. He’d kept a copy of the photo in his own room on An’Re’Hara, and one in his luggage at all times.
As his mother had often commented, Tyger saw his father reflected in his own features, despite the dominant Felyan muzzle. And he still had two eyes. Across from the bed was a monitor and beneath it was a small compartment of drawers. Tyger opened one and found it full of Cole’s clothes. Practicing a considerable amount of self-restraint Tyger manged to prevent himself from diving into it and inhaling the phantom nostalgia of a man he never knew.
“Your father apparently spent quite a bit of time here,” the soldier said, opening an adjacent hatch that led to a small galley kitchen, and continued her way towards another cabin on the room’s opposite end. Tyger, shaken from his pleasant reverie, followed her in that direction, and discovered a surprisingly spacious bathroom, complete with a walk-in shower, sink, toilet, linen cabinet, and a laundry unit in an alcove beside the entrance hatch.
“Not surprising,” Tyger said, idly checking the controls on the laundry unit. Feeling satisfied that they still had power, he moved to the sink faucet, which he let run in order to cycle the water. “He didn’t really have a permanent home, aside from my mom’s suite on Xiao. Guys in his line of business travelled light and travelled often.”
“I’ve dealt with assassins,” the soldier replied. She gave a casual nod as she took stock of their surroundings. “They come and go in the places I’ve been stationed.”
Still conscious of the stench emanating from his clothes, Tyger entered the bathroom and made a beeline for the utility cupboard. A quick evaluation of the linen closet revealed a mostly full box of detergent, a pile of towels, and a bottle of body wash.
“Jackpot,” he said.
“What did you find?” The soldier came to his side and peered into the linen cabinet a look of wide eyed curiosity on her face.
“Just what I need right now,” Tyger said, and strode over to the shower. He pushed the translucent sliding door aside, and typed up the requirements for a hot shower into the control pad. The shower head came to life, raining its streams of water into the stall. Giving it time to reach the desired temperature Tyger returned to the entrance hatch and retrieved his soiled garments from off of the floor.
“I figured you would want to bathe,” the soldier said as he threw the clothes into the laundry unit. Tyger puffed out his cheeks with a long sigh, “My olfactories can pick up smells you could only imagine; I gotta get this crap off of me.”
“You know,” The soldier gave an ambiguous grin, “you may have made a serious tactical error allowing me to lock us inside.”
“Oh? Tyger went to check the temperature of the shower. Why’s that?”
“I could just take the ship from you.”
“You could try,” Tyger said, slipping out of his hefty sandals. “Good luck accessing the primary systems without the codes, though.”
“So confident.” The soldier gave a slight smirked and her eyebrow twitched. “I could beat them out of you,” She eyed the circumference of the room. “Although I can improvise some more, creative, forms of torture. Plus Techs aren’t the only ones capable of hacking a computer system, you know.”
Tyger prayed she was joking. “We might be in trouble anyway, to be honest. The astronav appears to be on the fritz. I’ll have to run a diagnostic.”
“And if it’s broken, what will you do?” The soldier asked.
“The comm is still working,” Tyger replied, removing his pants and not caring if she saw him naked. She’d already stripped him of his pants once already. Her scent carried on the humid air and again he felt the primal urges began to rise. With the shower door open, a generous amount of steam was now pouring into the bathroom. Trying to distract himself, Tyger continued.
“I came to the surface alone but the rest of my crew is elsewhere in the system. The comm system seems to be working fine so I’ll ping them and arrange for a pickup. We might even be able to solve the problem of those creatures from a safe distance.” Tyger shot the soldier a wink followed by a cheeky grin. “I get to take dad’s ship home; you get to leave this rock.”
His grin faded when he realised he’d been a little presumptuous. “Or your station, or wherever you want to go.” He said hastily.
“May I use the shower as well?” the soldier asked, as he was about to step inside.
Tyger paused and realised he’d been in such a hurry to get himself clean that he’d forgotten that the soldier had been out in that jungle among the filth and who knows what else for many weeks longer than him. “Did you want to go first?” He asked. Felyans weren’t usually as concerned about modesty as humans but, her constant eye on his body made him feel unusually awkward.
She smiled at him and reached for her zip. Her gaze fixed on him, holding him in a kind of seductive trance. “I’m sure the cubicle is big enough for both of us no?
It was at this point he had to remind himself that she wasn’t exactly mature sexually despite having been shown multiple techniques by the ‘Colonel’ she mentioned. In fact he was pretty sure she wasn’t even that old for a tank. Something nagged at the back of his mind. She hadn’t given him her actual name but he was pretty sure there was a clue in the designation she’d given him.
“AZ that’s your initials right? You’re pretty young aren’t you?”
The soldier paused and looked at him, her expression a mix of puzzlement and annoyance. “I am a thirteenth generation, batch twenty-six; what of it? I’m old enough for battle, I’m old enough for you.”
Feeling suitably admonished Tyger stepped into the shower and shut the door. His thoughts turned back to the soldier. Gray-white skin and monochromatic hair aside, she was human. And he was a hybrid. He was going to be attracted to her more than he would be attracted to other Felyans or even hybrids. And he was a sucker for a bouncy ass–
Stop it, stop it, stop it! he thought, pressing his head into a corner of the shower stall as the water ran hot rivulets over his body. Blindly, he reached for the shower controls and shut off all the hot water. The shock of the cold caused him to jerk upright, letting out a yelp.
His eyes opened wide as the door slid open and the soldier stepped in, her nude form becoming visible through the fading steam, he let out another, louder yelp.
“Is something wrong?” She asked with that standard robotic innocence, as if she’d just asked him to pass the salt at the dinner table. Cold water hit her body, she shivered and stepped back. “Ugh, Why is there only cold water now? Did you use it all running it hot for so long?”
Eyes irrevocably locked on every curve of her body, Tyger fumbled for the controls and he reactivated the hot water. It was just as well; the cold water wouldn’t be of any help now. “I’m ... sorry, he stammered, the comforting warmth of the water erasing the bite of the cold.
Though she had mentioned it, Tyger hadn’t expected her to actually enter the shower with him. Except for children and lifemates, even Felyan males and females would not normally bathe together, but of course, this kind of moral would be meaningless in the single-gendered society the soldier came from– damn, she was hot!
Her breasts were full and invitingly round, her muscles perfectly sculpting every inch of her skin, in spite of the numerous battle scars that mottled her ashen flesh. And Tyger found himself attempting –in vain– to shake the fleeting thoughts of what he wanted to do with that body from his head.
The soldier reached for the body wash. She sniffed at the bottle’s neon blue contents and grinned. She then approached Tyger, and let the cascade of water from the shower head fall upon her. And for the first time, he noticed a full, genuine smile spread across her face. “It’s been too long,” she said, pouring the body wash over her from head to toe, and rubbing it into her wet skin, paying special attention to her hair. “There aren’t any bodies of water nearby, and I was concerned about my open neural jack getting infected.” She parted her hair beside her temple, and, with her little finger scrubbed deep into what looked like an open, steel-rimmed hole in her head. She then allowed water to flow into it, and turned to the side to let it spill out onto the shower floor.
“Why did you leave it open?” Tyger asked, desperate for a benign subject that would distract him from the rapid fire slideshow of lurid thoughts that were spiraling through his head.
“I had an aerial in as standard when we were deployed,” she explained while giving the jack another good washing out. “It broke in one of the fights I had with the creatures, and I didn’t have any plugs.” She cast a sideways glance at Tyger. “Have you ever had static fill your mind, furry fighter? There is no pain quite like it.”
Tyger was acutely aware of the internal communications systems employed by tanks. His crewmates aboard the Shadow Star were, for the most part, cybernetically enhanced and all carried some form of internal comm unit. Sometimes he was thankful that he only needed a headset.
“You said the comm unit is functioning, correct?” The soldier asked.
“I think so,” Tyger replied, trying and failing to avoid eye contact. “I didn’t get enough time to test it fully, but I saw no errors on the main screen.”
Done with the second washing, the soldier paused and set her gaze upon him in a way that was almost heartbreaking. “You don’t actually like me, do you?” She pointedly asked.
“I don’t ... not like you,” Tyger said, reaching gingerly for the bottle after the soldier had finished. After she passed it to him, he watched as she went back to work on the lather she’d previously built across her skin. Despite the fragrance of the shower gel her now clean skin radiated a scent stronger than anything previously.
“You have a funny way of showing it,” the soldier replied with a tiny scowl. “You behave as if you find me unattractive. I’m used to it, you know. Not all of my sisters understand what it means to be awakened. Their reaction to my advances was quite forceful.” She ran her finger across a long scar just below the tattoo of the Imperial insignia on her right shoulder. “Yet I find your reactions more painful than even these wounds.”
Tyger glanced down to see that things had not changed from their prominence from his first view of the solider without clothes. Was she truly so dense, she didn’t understand a male’s most basic responses? How could she possibly think that he didn’t like her? But then again, she had likely been little more than a sex toy to her superiors. For all he knew, she could have thought that all men looked the way he did from the waist down, all the time. And damn, if her disappointment didn’t genuinely break him inside. Unbidden, Tyger’s sympathy flared his feelings anew, and into a fire that propelled him with a sensation like he had been drawn out of himself, watching his body move closer to the soldier’s. He experienced the scent Imperial soldiers on a near daily basis aboard the Shadow Star, but from her there was something new and different. It was hypnotic ... better than even riss.
He was aware on some level when he took her by the arm that she could probably break his like it was twig with the merest twitch, but he let the scent bring forth the assertiveness that he had pushed aside since the beginning of this adventure with her.
He felt a purr well up from his depths as he pulled her to him. The soldier made no move to rearrange any of his orifices; in fact, he felt her lean into him. Clearly, she wanted this as much as he did, shedding her strong persona and allowing herself to be vulnerable in his arms. Her skin was smooth and wet, and her scent made his eyes roll back.
“I was never going to reject you,” he said.
Screw his “pride.” He never had a chance. He felt her hand grab his crotch forcefully but not enough to cause pain.
“Talk is cheap, furry fighter,” the soldier’s voice held purr of its own as Tyger’s tail wrapped partly around her right calf. She craned her neck to one side while he nuzzled her. “Why did you act the way you did?”
“Have you ever heard of the term, ‘sexually intimidating?’ Tyger said, and licked at her neck and cheek. Though he preferred to kiss, this female was bringing out his Felyan nature much more quickly than anything else.
“No, I hav-” the soldier’s words caught in her throat as his left hand slid down her stomach.
“You’re an Imperial soldier,” Tyger wrapped his right arm around the soldier’s smooth, muscular waist, and brought his left hand back upwards, then gently to her graceful throat. “So deadly and yet you saved my life. And you’re so very beautiful.”
“Then why the wait?”
“You don’t understand. I’m half-Felyan.” Tyger whispered, and nipped softly at her earlobe, listening to her first pleasured vocalization. He moved his hips to the rhythm that the soldier had begun, knowing what she wanted –what they both wanted. And he would soon oblige.
“Never ... had one,” the soldier replied, swallowing against another yelp as Tyger took the lead and gently pressed her against the wall of the shower stall. She warbled a soft, seductive, and very feminine giggle as she swayed her hips with even more urgency against his waist.
“Your scent ... is irresistible.” Tyger bent forward and ran his tongue from the base of her spine, feeling the texture of the goosebumps that erupted on her body as he traveled to the nape of her neck. “We Felyans, even hybrids like me, like humans. I mean, we really like humans.”
“Not to eat, I hope?” the soldier whispered.
Tyger could not help but laugh as his soon-to-be mate pressed herself more securely against the shower wall, presenting herself to him. He pressed forward and cupped her breasts, a very loud, almost growling purr rumbling from him as she groaned with their joining. For Tyger, it was like scratching a formerly unreachable, particularly vexing itch. And he knew that every scratch hereafter would only yield greater satisfaction.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said.
