Quicksilver
by Chris Chris
*** 11 ***
I head back the way I came, back to “Remote Feeding”, and realize with a shock that I’ve got no idea how to get off the ship. My first expedition ended in such a haze that I can’t even remember how I got home. But it must have been the cube, and now, back in the feeding area I’ve got that sinking feeling. The other woman is gone now, all the stalls are empty. And in “my” stall, there is only a puddle of the golden liquid. The cube is gone.
I’m stuck here. The reality of it hardens my resolve. I need to find out who is responsible for this, free Janet, and find a way home. Gun in hand, I head to the main area of the ship.
The passage reaches a corridor that curves off to the left and right, with rooms lining the walls. It looks like a modern office building, or maybe hospital, since the surfaces are so smooth and white. I imagine the corridor curves around and meets up, making a large circle, so left seems as good as right.
I see only empty rooms on the outside wall, each with a large glass window facing the hall. The inside wall is windowless. It’s clear there are doors, but the only visible means to open them are plain panels set into the walls and these do nothing when hit, pressed, or anything else I’ve quietly tried. I creep a little further down the hall and begin to hear noises, coming from one of the rooms, and as I get closer I can make out a few different people, and no surprise, they’re having sex.
This is the room. I crawl past the door and peep through a corner of the big window. This room is twice as big as the others, and looks very lived in. There’s a normal looking desk, some normal looking bookshelves, some normal carpeting, and a normal bed with a very normal looking guy and three well above normal women having an orgy on it.
The forty year old guy and the Swedish Bikini Team, I think. He’s fucking one of them doggie style, standing with his bald spot to me and framed by two flawless legs spread obscenely wide in front of him. The woman’s blonde hair flows down her deeply arched back and sweeps the bed with the rhythm of his pumping.
The other two women are to the side, facing each other. Their nipples are chrome caps on inhumanly firm white globes, and the tips are a hairsbreadth apart, erect and straining to close the gap. They touch and are hidden as the kneeling women lean together for a long slow kiss, their hands gently roaming over each other. Their lips are too red and too shiny, touching only at the top and bottom and parted to let me see the caress of tongues.
“I can’t see.. unh.. you two. An .. unh.. Angelique, come over.. unh.. and let Dominique eat ..unh.. you out ..unh.. Monique, you work ..unh.. on her butt, ok?” His voice was as unappealing as the rest of him. Could that really be their names?
“Yes Doctor”, robotically, and they break their kiss to crawl across the bed. I guess it’s Angelique who presents her pussy to the woman on the bed, and Monique who moves out of sight behind her. They look exactly the same. The doctor has quit his pounding to admonish them while they get into position.
“Don’t look so disappointed, you bitches. You can play kiss ‘n cuddle for hours when I’m done with you, but now I want you to get those six inch tongues ramming hard, and let me hear everything you’re feeling, got it?”
“Yes Doctor”, in unison. Then it’s Angelique alone.
“Mmmm.. Dom’s licking up and down my pussy.. Monique’s pressing her tongue on my asshole, Doctor. It’s making it all wet and relax.. ooohh, Dom’s sucking on my clit, oh Doctor that feels so good”
“Allright.. unh.. cut the foreplay and ..unh.. fuck her hard, you two.. unh.. I’m gonna come soon.. unh”
“Ahhhh! Ohhhh! They’re so far up inside me, Doctor, sooo far! She’s moving it around in me in my cunt and oooh in my ass too Doctor they’re pushing back and forth now huhhh they pulled out nnnn and in they’re so big Doctor I’m so so full so full and —”
“Uunnh”. The doctor comes, tensing up and turning red, and quickly tells Angelique to shut up. “Ok, go on back to quarters. I need to do some work”. With a “Yes Doctor”, they untangle themselves and I realize they’re going to leave and discover me in the hall. I manage to reason that ‘back the way I came’ is safer than ‘deeper into the unknown camp of evil’ and take off down the corridor, my bare feet padding silently on the cool floor. When the room has curved out of sight, I stop and listen, trying to hear the sounds of the women over the pounding of blood in my ears.
I hear a whoosh which might be the door opening and wait, holding my breath tighter than my gun. After a minute, I creep back towards the room and peek in. The women are gone, the “Doctor” in boxers and a t-shirt, studying a terminal at his desk. His face is not unattractive, intense brown eyes well spaced above a roman nose and decent chin, but the glow of the screen gives him the opposite of a tan.
I shimmy under the window and continue exploring the hall, checking each window before I pass. All the other rooms are empty. At least, the ones with windows on the outside wall are empty, and the doors on the inside wall are all locked. I give up testing them after a while, which reminds me of a card trick where the mark gets to see red card, red card, red card, red card, and then to save time lets the rest go by unchecked, and all black. I give up testing anyway.
The corridor keeps a steady rightward curve and eventually brings me back where I’d started, both physically and metaphorically. I tick off my five fingers worth of problems: I’m stuck on this ship. I don’t know how to get off. The only possible way I can think of is to wait hours and hope the cube comes back. The cube will probably be covered in addictive orgasmic goop. I need to rescue Janet.
I’m out of fingers, but the gun in my other hand suggests a solution. If I’m getting Janet out of here and back to normal, I’m going to need some information and some help, even if I have to coerce it. I walk, more boldly now, back to the doctor’s room.
*** 12 ***
He’s still at his desk, intent on the screen. I tentatively touch the obvious panel by the door and the door zips open, almost dangerously fast. I’m nearly as startled as the man, who jerks up from his work, knocking his chair backwards with a bang.
“Who the hell are you? Why aren’t you wearing pants?”
By the time he’s finished blurting, I’ve crossed the room and have the gun nearly up his nose. “You—sit down—are going to tell me what in the name of God is going on here, then release my friend and get us all off this ship! If it is a ship.”
He sits down, his hands raised palms out in the universal gesture pleading for mercy. His surprise passing, he looks very calm.
“Yes. It’s a ship. We’re on the dark side of the moon, out of view of Earth. Look, I’ve been up here alone for years, I’ll be happy to talk to you.. can you take the gun out of my face?”
I back off a foot. “Alone? What about ‘Dominique’, ‘Monique’, and ‘Angelique’? And what kind of names are those?”
He gives me an ugly leer and chuckles. I like him even less.
“They have no more brains between them than a two year old. All they are capable of is following orders, so I treat them as slaves. Really, I’m the only person on the ship.”
“What about all the women in the Power area? And those black octopus things?”
“Listen”, he says, “maybe I should start at the beginning. Let me tell my story before you judge me, ok?”
I’d already judged him. But I’d still let him speak. I was here for information.
“This ship belongs to an alien race that call themselves the Dureel. Not the octopi you saw in the power area though, those were Coatl. The Dureel are inorganic creatures, a really amazing life form. I use the term ‘life’ because they are sentient, and they move, but otherwise they look like and are essentially made of liquid metal.”
“Well before the Earth supported life, the Dureel evolved together with the organic Coatl, the black octopus like things, as you put it. The Dureel require the Coatl for reproduction, and the Coatl, apparently, are nearly mindless and certainly helpless without the Dureel.”
“When reproducing, the Dureel create a new embryo somehow—again, I’m not sure—and then it’s life is jump-started by a monumental outpouring of energy from a Coatl host. It’s quite remarkable. Somehow, the Coatl are able to generate tremendous quantities of power though a kind of resonance in their nerve molecules—a resonance which must pick up energy from some external source, since the power generated is far more than the Coatl possesses. And it’s enough to breathe life into the new Dureel child.”
“As the Dureel evolved, they figured out how to harness the power generated by the Coatl for other purposes. It required them to develop a sort of organic metal that replaces the host’s nervous system and channels the energy. They built their civilization on it, eventually creating these self-contained ships. This ship is a science vessel, an explorer ship. We are currently nearly one hundred thousand light years from their home planet, and they travel at just under light speed! This ship has been on the road for a hundred thousand years!”
“Wow.” I am impressed.
“But some five thousand years ago the Coatl developed a disease, a disease which killed them so slowly it had spread to every last one before it was discovered. The Dureel’s efforts to cure the disease were fruitless. But they detected, emanating from Earth, a faint trace of the resonance their life requires, and gambling everything they set out for our planet. Nearly a million Dureel and over a hundred thousand Coatl inhabited this ship, and when they arrived here ten years ago they had died off until only three Coatl and a dozen Dureel were still alive. Amazingly, they had calculated that they would probably make it, but it would be that close.”
“Why only a dozen Dureel? Why not make more?”
“Ah, I see your point. But they needed the energy to power the ship, and they only spared enough to keep the race alive. So they made it to Earth, and discovered that humans did create the right kind of resonance. But only while having orgasm, and especially human females. But it required a tremendous re-engineering of the human nervous system to focus the power, and they needed help. So they contacted me.”
“I took the job because their technology will revolutionize medicine. And a clean, renewable power source like this could revolutionize the entire world. Yes, they want two million women, but—”
“Two million! You can’t be serious!”
“My dear, the earth has a population of five billion people. For the kind of rewards they are offering, a mere two million will hardly be missed! It’s a deal I had to make, and one that someone else would have agreed to if I hadn’t!”
“But you’ll be a mass murderer worse than Hitler! Than Pol Pot! My God, how can you live with yourself!”
He just glares at me. I realize I can deal with him later, and that right now I just need a few more answers. I calm myself down a bit.
“But why did they really need you?", I ask him, “If they’re so advanced and know so much, why take the risk?”
“Two main factors, really. First, they don’t completely grasp the intricacies of our culture and needed a liaison to set up and plan operations on earth. They probably could have just gone in blasting, but they have a queer value for life. They’re perfectly happy to sentence a sentient being to life as an orgasming power cell to drive their ship, of course. But like a cattleman, they don’t just indiscriminately waste their herd.”
“Still, I think the main reason they needed me was for the finer points of human neurology. They tried designing the necessary equipment without me, but, well, may I show you something?”
“What?”
“Come, it’s just across the hall. I really think you’d want to see it.” I agree, but he’s obviously plotting something. I keep thinking, two million women! He enters a quick command at his terminal to unlock the door, and we cross the hall carefully, his hands on his head. The opposite door is open, and I follow him inside.
There’s only one thing to see, a woman in a sealed clear tank. The tank is completely full of the gold honey-like goo, covering her body completely and filling her gaping mouth.
“This woman was their first attempt. They replaced nearly all of her nervous system with their controlling metal circuits, her sensory nerves, her brain, and most obviously her eyes.”
I looked. Her eyes were wide open, but inside there was only smooth chrome, reflecting my own shocked expression back at me through six inches of golden liquid. The rest of her skin had a metallic sheen which increased to pure mirror at her lips, hands, nipples, and vagina, the metal a testament to the network of alien nerves in her body.
“However, with her body so completely violated by inorganic material, the essentially organic nature of the orgasmic power source failed to work. In short, she comes but doesn’t channel the juice.”
We observe her in silence for a moment, a still living fossil encased in amber. I wonder if those eyes can see, if she has any awareness left of her situation. I hope not, but am almost immediately proved wrong.
I feel a tingling, like electricity in the air before a thunderstorm. The doctor nods to me, he feels it too. It begins to build, quickly, and before I can even worry I am jolted by an orgasm, from out of nowhere, an orgasm mixed with severe pain as all of my nerves scream hot, cold, and sharp at the same time. In my head I hear a woman’s voice, dripping with a mix of pain and pleasure that my own feelings only echo weakly. The voice says only “Help”, three times, each more pitiful than the last. Then, as suddenly as the experience began, it is over. The woman has not moved.
“You sick bastard!", I yell at him. “How can you let her live like this?”
“There is no ‘let’ about it—the Dureel keep her here, and keep her alive. I can’t turn her off.”
“You could break the tank! You could cut the feed tube! The only reason you keep her alive is because you probably come in here to get your fucking jollies off of her pain! Look—you creamed your jeans, you asshole!”
It was true, his boxers had a dark stain on the front. He probably didn’t know that I had come as well, involuntarily.
“I’m sick of this shit! Release Janet now and get me off this ship or I’ll blow your fucking brains out! Move! Now!”
“Ok. Um, who is Janet?”
He is so collected, even with a gun to his face. My knees are shaking, my hand white with it’s fierce grip on the barrel of the weapon. I force myself to cool down, keep the situation under control. If I kill him, I lose my only way off the ship.
“I want you to release one woman from your evil array of power cells, ok, and then get the two of us back to Earth, understand?”
“We’ll need to go to the power area to release her. Is that ok?", he asks coolly. I nod, and prod him towards the other section of ship, trying to put the anger out of my mind.
“You noticed the mental communication?” he asks rhetorically, continuing a serene discourse as we march. “The Dureel had no idea, they simply weren’t attuned. I managed to isolate the factors that caused it, and in a few subjects I was able to instill the ability. Another great boon for mankind that will come from this!”
I jam the gun in his back. “Shut the fuck up. Another word from you and I’ll blow your ass to hell!". We walk in silence.