Tempted by Celestial Bodies

Resonant Drives

In the vast and lightless interstellar void, time ceased to hold real meaning for the traveler eons ago.

He does not fear death, because death cannot touch him. He does not fear age, because he is ageless. He does not fear pain, because he’s already survived the worst pain he can imagine.

But he survived. He’s still here. He has eternity to wait. And he fears eternity most of all.

He could wait forever, and what he waits for—craves— requires —might never come again.

He may never find her . Never feel her. Never free himself from this empty, echoing expanse, an endless shrine to everything he lost. He may never fully live again.

He’s alone in the dark, the way his kind was never meant to be alone. Without a pilot, without his mate, he’s lost and will stay lost.

In the deep void, he waits, still, silent, searching. He stretches his senses and his will across vast distances, to every far-off star within his reach, but finds only a hundred, a thousand, a million barren planets.

One in a million times, hope flares, quickly extinguished when he scans rock after rock seeded with simple life, single cells, nothing to sate him. Again and again, the life he finds strives only to fade away. The failures stay with him like they’re his own. Maybe they are. If only he hadn’t let her go, if she had stayed, they could have tended this little corner of the galaxy until it overflowed with life.

Then, against all odds, something changes. How did this small blue jewel bound to a yellow star escape his notice? How did he miss its flowering, closer than he’d ever guessed, almost in his own orbit?

No matter. Because he couldn’t have missed the call that draws him now.

Find me. Take me. Claim me. Fill me.

The tether snaps into place, a sudden, tangible gravity that shivers across his iridescent shell, exposed as always to the relentless, enveloping cold of the void. It cracks him open and unfolds him, lighting up long-dormant pathways in his neural net, echoing in abandoned corridors of the vessel which contains his multitudes.

She’s mortal. Unfamiliar. Human. And yet…

Come for me.

It’s her. He knows her. Needs her. Has to have her.

His by fate, by right, she’s the one he’s been waiting for. She’ll give him everything. Take him everywhere. And in return, she’ll have all the pleasure he can wring from her, forever.

He has his heading, and there’s no power in the universe that can stop him from claiming her.

His core ignites. He shudders. Rumbles. Roars.

I’m coming.

* * *

Kat Hayworth shouldn’t be awake at 2 a.m. But she can’t put her book down now. She’s just getting to the good part.

Her long workdays at the lab don’t leave much room for letting off steam. Not safely, at least. Experimental fusion drives aren’t quite rocket science, but they could be, someday. Kat wants to be around to see that day.

For now, she’s a first-year postdoc fellow in a large cohort, the lowest rung on a mercilessly competitive ladder. The real rocket scientists get paid for genius, not kindness. The other postdocs are no more than frenemies on a good day.

That’s where smutty literature comes in clutch. When the cruelly hot antihero corners the protagonist on the page, she can trust they’ll eventually have their happy ending, or at least a lot of lovingly described orgasms.

Her male colleagues might be able to find exoplanets or split the atom, but the mechanics of the clit still escape them. By contrast, the love interest in her latest book has aphrodisiac venom, a vibrating cock, an inhuman devotion to feminine pleasure, and is wildly, obsessively in love with his ordinary human mate.

And now he has her at his mercy, bound and begging for release.

Kat props her e-book reader against the pillow and lies back. She will have a crick in her neck tomorrow morning. Her free hand wanders down to tweak a nipple tenting the thin fabric of her t-shirt. Biting her lip, she turns the page and slips her fingers under the waistband of her panties. Scanning the page with frenzied eyes, mouth dry, she chases her own release.

Her fingers aren’t enough. She needs more. With a low moan of frustration, she throws back the covers, book forgotten as she yanks her favorite vibrator from the drawer and plugs it in. Finally, she falls back into the bed and switches the wand on at its highest setting.

God, she needs to come so bad. She’ll do anything. She imagines a shadowy form above her, pushing inside her with brutal force, calling her mine. Taking her, claiming her, filling her until her brain whites out and she falls apart around him.

Her back arches, poised at the edge of a sudden, shattering orgasm when all the lights go out and the vibrator stills in her hand.

“ Fuck! ” she screams, the waves of pleasure ebbing as fast as they rolled over her. “Not again. The wiring in this place, I swear to God…”

It’s not the first time she’s thrown a fuse. Once the entire apartment complex had gone dark and didn’t come back on for hours. One neighbor, wondering aloud who’d used enough joules to blow the fuse box, had mentioned they’d heard someone using a power tool, which was…not incorrect.

Flushed, panting, she lies in the dark, her heartbeat thumping in her ears, almost lightheaded. Even cut short, her toy packs a hell of a punch. She can still almost feel its hum in the air, in her body, shaking the windows?—

That’s not the vibrator at all. It comes from outside, a deep rumble that seems to reach all the way to the marrow of her bones.

She tries to roll over, sit up in bed, but her body won’t respond. She can’t even turn her head.

Harsh light flashes over her, bright enough to bring tears to her eyes. It paralyzes her. She can’t speak or scream.

The mind-numbing vibration draws closer, right outside her window now, shaking her apart, squeezing the breath from her lungs. It’s loud enough to wake the dead, let alone her nosy neighbors.

But no one comes to save her, and amid the overwhelming thrum of whatever is outside, she realizes: she’s not in bed anymore.

She’s floating on air, body rigid, drenched in light that pulls her inexorably— elsewhere.

Abruptly, the light fades away. In Kat’s last conscious moments, the darkness comes as a relief, until?—

Hello, sweetling.

Held helpless in the dark, she shudders. The voice caresses her, velvety and deep as night unending.

Now you belong to me.

* * *

Taking her is easy.

Her desire flares across the empty reaches, a beacon drawing him into her orbit. This small blue world and its riotous gravity of life isn’t all her, of course, but his mind balks at the concept.

He exists as a collective, a network of individual neural nodes and bodies with separate functions, but all his , all himself . He is the vessel floating in the void, and its protective shell, and all it contains within. Each experiences its life as linked inextricably with the whole, forming an integral part of a singular entity.

His scans tell him that she is one among billions, like and unlike her, each life autonomous, without the cohesion perfected by his kind. Not just millions of individuals but millions of species , an overwhelming variety, a wild proliferation of biomass. He can hardly picture such a wealth of difference.

It’s everything that he has waited and watched for, this world. But it requires a brand new frame of reference.

How lonely it must be, how strange, how small and separate she must feel, even among billions. That profound difference intoxicates him. It holds an irresistible, terrifying promise. In her truest essence, she’s unknowable, and at the same time, she must be unknowing too: incapable both of fully knowing him or being known by him.

An encounter with such a unique entity could create something entirely new, unpredictable, unstable, dangerous… and powerful.

Similar alchemy once created this world in its dizzying variety. It’s not entirely unfamiliar to him, and what he does know of it revives something new and old within him: a restless dissonance, a loss of wholeness.

He knew what that was like, once. So long ago, now, that he’s forgotten how it works—worked—must work again, if he’s to live as he once did. Worse, he’s forgotten why it didn’t work, in the end, why it left him echoing and hollow.

Did he try to forget, or did he lose that knowledge, one small part of everything that ending took from him?

The question grips him at his core. It spills from the empty places inside him as he drops into synchronous orbit with her position on the landmass. He aches with it, as if the line between him above and her below has pinned him at the balance point.

Already parts of him reach out to her, long arms unfolding from where he hangs suspended at her zenith. Now, hidden in her world’s shadow, he hesitates.

In that pause, the space of one of her short breaths, her pleasure hits its peak. Even at this distance, it electrifies him. A slender thread of exotic energy— her energy—sparks from the ground upwards, racing along his length toward his center.

With that brief pulse of her essence against his, he’s well and truly lost. All sense of caution, all sense of himself as himself, fails in an instant. Only for an instant—but it’s enough.

He won’t have another chance, not like this, locked onto her and shrouded on the dark side of her world, in a night that’s all too short. If he lets go, velocity will slingshot him out of orbit, faster than her gravity can hold him still.

It’s now or never. He reaches for her, curling fingers of force and shadow around her. She trembles, going rigid at his touch.

She fears him . The realization shakes him. Her terror flows out like a black wave. Her call fades into silence.

No. No, no, no. Panic flaring, he folds her closer, his body shielding her from gravity, acceleration, heat as he places her in emergency stasis. It’s too cold for her in his hold, even at his core.

Now that he has her, the singular hunger that drew him temporarily sated, he can spare attention for logistics, long-term plans. A thousand processes launch at once. His sensors back online and working overtime, he samples her home environment, running comparisons.

Even the atmosphere in his hold is wrong. She needs oxygen most, but tempered with nitrogen, argon, trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, helium, and methane, with enough water vapor to keep her body supple and skin hydrated, all at a very specific mercurial pressure.

Void take him for a fool, she’ll need so many things. Air, warmth, water, sustenance. Human biosignatures mark them as omnivores, but what this human prefers will be individual, unique, unknown. Her den yields few clues, but he gleans enough to make a start.

What brought her to the peak of ecstasy that called to him across the light-years? From her small surface den, he collects a handheld data pad and a stimulator tool of some sort, a starting point for study and iteration. But to master her species’ expectations for mating rituals, he must satisfy her in every way, not merely fulfill physical necessities.

He must delight her mind and tantalize her senses. He needs her to feel for him. His nanoprobes range more widely, gathering samples from local food sources, tapping into a million data streams to gather cultural context, physiological diagrams, electronic libraries, human attempts to parse the mystery of their own sexual diversity.

He keeps her in stasis while he prepares to host her. He must get this right. That brief burst of energy she gave him, all unknowing, told him everything he hoped and feared was true.

She’s perfect. She’s everything he craved in those long epochs of waiting, his end and his beginning.

His fate. His fuel. His freedom.

With the power she holds, she can save him…or destroy his last chance to fulfill his purpose. But no matter how his gambit ends, he knows one thing.

He’s not alone anymore. It’s more than he thought possible. And for a moment, with her wrapped safe and sound within his hold, it’s enough to drive him forward.