Nepenthe Read online

  “Permit me?” he said, when she only stared at him.

  Yesmín nodded, and the front of her throat moved up and down.

  The heat of her still surrounded his sheath, and the Magistrand was reluctant to break the seal. He pulled his suckered arms from around her thighs but continued to use one of the limbs to hold a knee of hers up, nearly out of the water.

  “Bear with me.”

  He ducked his upper half sideways below the surface, under the lifted knee, his body reorienting at the pivot point where they joined until he surfaced close at her back. The woman’s legs tried to paddle, and her arms flailed to keep her upright, but he had her. They were still one.

  His human arms slid around her middle, and Dae Keth could now tuck his face alongside hers. “I am sorry,” he said, “for the fugue. It is difficult to control.”

  Yesmín shifted and rested her forearms atop his. “I panicked,” she said. “You … didn’t hurt me. I just … everything’s new.”

  Yes. Everything was new. There were far more Nepenthe males—raja— than there were human females capable of incubation. If their races made an agreement, each raja would request an opportunity to implant. There would be more than one round of hosting for each woman. His kind tended to seek pleasure and successful matings over pair bonds, but Dae Keth was no longer certain, with Yesmín in his arms, her thoughts washing around him, that he would remain composed while seeing her swollen with another’s egg mass.

  If you used your rank to your advantage, it would be a first.

  But who was he, to claim an entire female as his own? The Ptolarch?

  And did she want to be claimed?

  “This time,” he said, breaking from unhelpful worries, “shall we return to pleasure? I am learning what your body enjoys.”

  She made some breathy noise of amusement, “Well, when you put it like that …”

  Dae Keth smiled. “Come,” he said, “lean back. I will help us float.” And with that, he sank backward so his own torso could drift on the water’s surface and drew the woman along with him.

  Again, he had suckered arms lifting the backs of her thighs, letting them fall bent at the knee, above the water, wide so she was spread for the work of his sheath. Yesmín let her head loll back at this and swished a hand overhead to trace the side of his face with wet fingers.

  He made a conscious effort to retract his anchor, so he might realign and inject it where the tip of an arm had gone before. Her hips tried to point at the ceiling when he did, and she took in a gasp of air. The process with his true anchor was more fluid, and far slower than his arm had been earlier, when it had forced its way inside all at once. It took him long moments to fill the rear cavity, and he watched her nipples firm up to tiny, dark points again, as he did.

  His anchor swelled, just inside that ring of muscle it held open, and locked them together again. At the peak of expansion, his sheath took over and began to churn. To work up stimulus within his body to eject the next egg.

  “Mmm, Dae Keth.”

  An exotic luxury, to hear his name murmured in this context by an alien being. He would have more of it.

  They floated together, there in his waterberth, eyes on the ceiling, her back to his chest. A pair of his arms climbed the sides of her body and slipped low, between the human legs he held apart. Rows of his sucking mouths sought the fleshy areas that parted around his pulsing sheath. Sought and latched on, to pull at her skin in delicate ripples. He made sure at least two found that critical bead of flesh he’d discovered with his mouth, back there on the ledge.

  Yesmín made a sharp sound and clutched at his human arms. Her hips tilted. He made sure the suction continued.

  There was only so much momentum his sheath could generate on its own, but now he might work with his anchor. An arm was one thing, but the specialized member could perform in a tandem he could achieve in no other way.

  The second mating organ lodged in her body—swollen now so that he could feel his sheath rooting alongside, only thin internal tissues between—began to move. The bulbous shape inside, preventing its early removal, began to bob along its own length. As it built force, the motion jerked the woman’s twin entrances against the place where their bodies coupled.

  “Dae Keth! Wh—! Oh!”

  Water sloshed around them, now. He used free arms to keep her thighs wide, to circle her ribs and tread rows of suckers across her breasts, her nipples. His busy anchor pulled her onto his pulsing sheath, over and over with rough hitches of contracting muscle. When her noises escalated, so did his flights of fancy.

  “Perhaps I will ruin you for human men,” he said.

  Tiny mouths shifted and suckled between her legs, and the human squealed. Spurred to boldness, Dae Keth brought an arm tip to curl over her shoulder. To climb her neck and seek that gaping mouth.

  “Perhaps they cannot provide so much pleasure at once.”

  Whatever rabid reply the woman had for him, it fell apart around the flesh he stuffed between her lips. Her eyes rolled back, and she sucked with abandon, muffled cries enthusiastic as he practiced every last thing he’d learned all at once.

  And then the second egg dropped.

  It was out of him before he’d realized it was coming. His body bent around hers, tightening the seal, hunching him with the stimulus of ejection. Yesmín was long gone to her own delirium and twitched atop his human chest.

  The Magistrand could not stop.

  He hadn’t attempted a mating in cycles. He’d doubted his crew would even encounter this opportunity to save their race. But now that he was sheath-deep and anchor swollen, there was no higher thought. There were only her wild sounds, and how he could keep them coming.

  There was only to fill his host full of eggs.

  Yesmín wailed and thrashed.

  Dae Keth fucked her.

  There were times he slowed. He could taste the exhaustion on her skin, see in her thoughts the tenderness of her entrances from his continued exertion. He murmured to her alternating words of filth and soft encouragement.

  By the time he was sure he’d released every egg, her middle rose in a small, round hill above the water. They were both limp and barely clinging together, the tips of his arms he could see almost lavender where the blood had rushed away to his mating organs.

  She did little more than twitch when his anchor subsided and withdrew from her body. Her eyes were glassy and on the ceiling as he turned beneath her, his upper half leaving the water at her side. His human arms supported her floating form, and he used the last of his energy to guide her along the surface to the ledge, where he lifted her up and out.

  Yesmín lay on the floor, head rolling toward him. One of her hands drifted to where her skin was taut from what he’d put inside her.

  She is full of your eggs. You have a host, Dae Keth.

  “What do you wish, Yesmín?”

  The Ptolarch had agreed on protection for the humans, but in the moment, Dae Keth felt a greater debt.

  “Tired.” She blinked slow lids at him. “So tired.”

  He reached out and dragged several of her dangling plaits out of the water. “Do you wish to rest? Before you return and report to your people?”

  Yesmín closed her eyes. Her throat moved. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to make them wait longer.”

  “Then I will help you.”

  Dae Keth made his way out of the berth and onto the fixed floor. She accepted his aid to sit upright, to maneuver back into her garments.

  It was the kiss that caught him off guard.

  When they drifted apart from the warmth, she looked more ready to collapse into sleep than ever.

  “What are we going to do now?” she said.

  Dae Keth smiled.

  “Remake both our worlds.”

  Kiral didn’t know what was worse: trying to survive alone on an island or attempting to navigate the politics of this alien clusterfuck.

  He folded his arms over his chest and watched with
a raised brow as discussion rippled out among the motley band of survivors. He stood on the periphery of the group, as he did in any gathering, eyes and ears wide for opportunities.

  The woman Yesmín—somehow their collective spokesperson and negotiator, where nobody else had grown the spine—had returned after long hours with the Nepenthe second-in-command looking exhausted and conspicuously swollen. Just like the other one. Hypatia.

  He didn’t know Yesmín. She hadn’t been from his outpost. None of the people huddled here in this alien cargo hold had. Kiral was the only survivor which was, not to put too fine a point on it, probably just as well. His station mates and his last identity had almost met, before the rejection virus found them. It would not have been ideal.

  Nearly all the Nepenthe had left the hold to go about other tasks while both their races had awaited a verdict. But with Yesmín’s return, the ship’s numerous crew—who made Kiral imagine something mostly humanoid attempting to fight its way out of an octopus—began to trickle in from other parts of the craft, and to crowd in, lining the hold’s walls, again.

  They were the color of the deepest purple bruise, these beings, with traces of lavender where it appeared their skin might be thinner. Many of them morphed from shape to shape before the humans’ eyes, most in attempts to mimic the structures of the last surviving people from Earth.

  It wasn’t insult, nor was it aggression or any attempt at disguise. It felt, he wanted to say, like when visitors to an animal exhibit stood on the outside of an enclosure and made attempts to imitate the animal’s sounds. There was fascination there. A desire to discover whether their mimicry would be perceived as communication. It was fun for these beings. Ignorant, and possibly misguided, but fun.

  The women among the humans were the decision makers here. Yesmín had declared the implantation process safe, if lengthy and tiring, but there was no way it wouldn’t be foreign and bizarre. The hushed debate had boiled among the women for some time now, and they’d been questioning Yesmín like she was on trial. The vehemence was simmering, however, and Kiral could see more and more nods of consensus. Whatever fate they were choosing for humanity, they appeared to be coming to an agreement.

  Kiral had his preferences for the outcome. He did not want to go back to the surface.

  Yesmín got to her feet again, knees shaking as she rose from one of the makeshift seats the Nepenthe had provided. Other conversations in the room fell off to an expectant hush.

  “We will make this alliance, Ptolarch.”

  Kiral’s shoulders dropped in relief.

  “Our capable women will host your eggs,” she went on, her voice the slightest bit hoarse now, as it carried. “And in exchange, the Nepenthe will provide for us, and assist us in locating another suitable colony planet.”

  Murmurs rose up around the hold. Heads bent together to whisper, Nepenthe and human alike. It might be a naïve agreement, but it made better odds of survival than staying on that fucking planet.

  “Then we are pleased to make this agreement, Yesmín of the Humans.” This from the one the Nepenthe called ‘Ptolarch’, and Kiral smirked at the ‘title’ the alien had assigned to Yesmín.

  The one who had announced himself as Magistrand, who’d left with Yesmín and pumped her full of eggs, hovered between the two groups on indecisive tentacles—arms? Legs?—before moving to join the woman, where she stood at the head of her group. A wise move on the alien’s part, as summoning Yesmín to leave her people and stand at his side just now might have cast the decision in an ill light. Had her loyalties changed? Did this alien think he owned her now? The budding truce needed none of those doubts poking holes in it while it grew.

  And Kiral noted this Magistrand hovered at her shoulder in a way that smacked of both pride and protective urges. If the rest of the pairings could go as smoothly, the agreement with the Nepenthe might not be a disaster at all.

  But if they did not? What leverage did his people have? They’d be trapped in this ship until the aliens decided to land it. The women could threaten to destroy the eggs they carried, but that would only be a valid threat if the Nepenthe needed willing hosts. There were way more of the shapeshifting crew than there were humans. At least three to one, if not more. If they wanted cattle locked into a breeding harness, by what means would the bedraggled refugees prevent it?

  The Magistrand slid a humanoid arm around Yesmín’s waist, and she allowed it. Women among the group eyed the pair with blatant curiosity, and Kiral saw what he might classify as a few covetous looks among the Nepenthe.

  If they had wanted captive incubators, however, they wouldn’t have bothered with all this negotiation. The last of humanity was all on this ship, now, aside from the three who had chosen to leave. The Nepenthe could have had the lot of them imprisoned, restrained, subjugated in any way. They could have had all the remaining women fat with eggs, if that was their plan.

  And it did not appear to be. Kiral was an excellent liar. He knew when people were putting on a show.

  But these are not people.

  Not human people, anyway. And they could change their entire appearance as easily as he might change the part in his hair. What Kiral wouldn’t have given for that ability on any of several dozen occasions in his past.

  When some of the buzz of conversation died down, the Ptolarch spoke again.

  “If your able females will choose among us, as you did our Magistrand, Yesmín …” The alien made a sweeping gesture with a human-looking arm at the Nepenthe crew watching from the perimeter of the hold.

  Some of the women exchanged glances.

  “N-now?” One of them spoke up. “It’s too soon.”

  “Too soon,” came several overlapping, quieter echoes.

  Yesmín’s brow knotted, and Kiral did not envy her position of having to broker cooperation between the two groups. She said something low to the Magistrand, who shook his head.

  “You don’t have to go through the process right now, tonight,” said Yesmín to the crowd.

  “The cargo hold is not equipped to serve as a living quarters,” said the Magistrand. “As some of you will be hosting our eggs, one of us will be hosting each of you in our personal quarters aboard this vessel. The arrangements should be made before we depart.”

  More uncertain looks from the survivors—the men and older women in particular—as many had likely not given the matter thought, once they understood they weren’t personally going to be involved with the egg situation.

  “Come,” said the Ptolarch. “Meet us. Let us greet like friends; we are all the survivors of our races. Let us begin our journey together.”

  The women Yesmín had convinced continued to scan the gathered Nepenthe, many tight-lipped and with folded arms. Their leader closed her eyes and looked very tired. When she opened them again, Yesmín turned in to the group and motioned for the women to circle close. They did their best, for as many of them as there were.

  Yesmín spoke in quiet tones, and Kiral couldn’t make out words from where he stood, but he recognized a cadence both dogged and encouraging. There was a pause in her speech, then she said something else that had the familiar tune of both tension-relieving joke and sales pitch. Several of the women stirred the group with low crackles of laughter. A few sets of eyes left lifted from the huddle to watch the aliens again.

  Their leader straightened her spine and held out a hand to another woman in the group. The second woman—who wore what looked like a med tech uniform that might have been clean once—swallowed, took the hand, and let Yesmín lead her out of the safety of the circle.

  One of the Nepenthe stepped forward; the one who had been attempting to circulate water and food among them, who had used alien equipment to asses vital signs and health. This one remained formed in an imitation of human appearance and did so in a more convincing manner than most of the others. He had given his name as Ea Nir, but the only way Kiral could tell him apart from the humans at this point was his clothing.

  The Nepent
he—as the humans all had to get used to—wore no garments, and so while many of their attempts at mimicking body structures were successful, the simulation of additional layers, not part of that body, tended to be cruder. The shapes moved in ways that weren’t quite right, and it might have been uncanny enough on the eye for his people to prefer the aliens not bother, only the alternative was nude imitations of the human form, and that had proven to be beyond the current bizarreness limits of most.

  Ea Nir made some complicated gesture with a human-looking hand, which Kiral took as a greeting, and began to speak to what might be one of the last human med techs alive. The woman’s eyes were round, but she responded, and the Nepenthe healer gave her a perfect human smile in return. A conversation began, halting but sincere.

  So Yesmín was playing matchmaker.

  Something in this interaction punctured the bubble of inaction among the survivors. A few more of the women took steps away from the crowd, some going in pairs, a braver number alone, and Nepenthe, in all stages of shape between their natural form and pseudo-human, moved away from the walls to meet them.

  Kiral stood and watched it all.

  Our first contact with an alien race, and this is how it’s going to happen, is it?

  But it wasn’t only the women who would need to choose.

  And now that the agreement was struck, Kiral needed to worry again about his own problems. His eyes wandered among faces. Pairs and clusters of beings beginning the most unprecedented dialogues in the history of humanity.

  Some spoke in earnest, gesturing. Some were hesitant, hovering at the outskirts of other groups, listening but not joining yet. Some hung back entirely, still maintaining quiet discussion among their own kind.

  Kiral spoke to no one, and so it was his observing eye that landed on a single Nepenthe who did the same.

  The alien had not left his place against the outer wall of the hold. He’d not shifted form in any way and did not exchange any quiet commentary with others of his crew.

  There were no others. Any Nepenthe who’d stood at this one’s side had since emerged into the mingling of races to seek their chances of impressing one of the women who might be a host to their eggs. This one stood in the shadows below the catwalk that circled the high-ceilinged space, the occasional lateral blinks of those odd inner eyelids the only movements he made. As if he wished to remain unseen.