The First Nova I See Tonight by Jason Kilgore (best ereader for pdf and epub TXT) 📗

Terran from the mouth at the top of her head, the little tentacles there waving. "You haven't lived until you've let a Rigellian give you head."

Dirken stopped walking. He knew very well how it felt, and her invitation to experience it again was very tempting. He was flush with money, after all.

Then he remembered Yiorgos's warning not to go gambling and then "slipping away with some floozy." He'd already done the gambling part… sort of. But his will was good. He was still a bit spent from the flight with Eow, after all. With a shake of his head, he kept walking.

"Ohh!" the Rigellian moaned. "You know you want it! I see it in your eyes, sweetheart. Come back for the experience of your life."

Dirken moved on. The crowd thinned out, and soon Dirken found himself in a series of apartments carved into the dripping innards of the comet. There wasn't much to see, but as he turned to head back to the hangar, he passed one apartment with an open hatch. Peering inside, he saw through a transparent inner door to an atmosphere that swirled with visible waves of vibrantly colored gases. High heat emanated from the doorway along with a sulfur smell. This was an apartment for a Proximan, a species that liked hellish temperatures and high pressures and was known to vacation on Venus. He couldn't help but be nosy, and stood there for a moment peering through the haze inside. Two Proximans, stripped of their atmosphere suits, were rolling together on the floor. Oblivious to his presence, they rolled through the mist and came to rest against the transparent door. The purple male stuck out his long, dark blue tongue, wrapped it around the neck of the light blue female and squeezed. She moaned in ecstasy, her own long tongue whipping back and forth across his face. She raised her pelvis, exposing herself to his two, eel-like penises. Prehensile, they undulated and searched out her vaginas, entering as he thrust himself. She moaned and increased the frequency of her tongue whips. He shivered, then from wide pores over his hairless body a thick stream of clear slime came pouring out of him, dripping onto her and coating them both until they rolled back the other way, back into the haze, leaving a trail of goo in their wake.

Dirken exhaled. Now there's something I've never seen before! He'd never had a Proximan. He'd have to wear an atmospheric suit if he did. It's not out of the question, he thought.

Wiping the sweat from his brow, he meandered through back corridors, again checking to see if he was followed. The cold of the adjoining corridor was a welcome relief.

He dodged to the side as five Dracordans rolled past him. One popped out of his rolled-up form, a greenish ball about a third of a meter in diameter like a giant roly-poly. "Watch out, buddy!" the Dracordan yelled at him with a pouty red mouth, pointing at him with two of his six green arms, his words translated from his squeaky Dracordan language into a deep-throated Terran by a bracelet translator. "Didn't you hear? There's a fucking pirate headed here!" He narrowed his big, emerald eyes at Dirken, waving on long eye stalks, then curled up and rolled away after his companions.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HACKING THE NETWORK

Dirken hurried to the hangar. He was met with a cacophony of starship engines and alarms. Several ships were attempting to take off at the same time. Two of them, a sleek Terran yacht and a patchy Rigellian freighter that looked more warship than cargo hauler, collided and scraped against each other in their rush to leave, the metal screeching until a piece of shielding fell off the yacht and slammed to the deck, narrowly missing a cargo hauler with a fusion core.

"For fuck's sake!" he said aloud.

Off to his right was 'TakTrak's Jen'torian clipper, the Raptores, with its cyan frame festooned with added armament and the row of attached silver cargo cubes.

Dirken wound his way through the parked craft, pausing as another ship lifted off — a Cordrac caravel that looked like a mass of purple orbs glommed together. Heavily scored by laser blasts and bashed in on one side as if it had been rammed, the ship seemed to have some difficulty taking off, but the powerful engines on the back looked like they were scavenged from a corvette. He kept a healthy distance away as the ancient lifter pads on its underside shot lightning-like plasma emissions. Better adjust your capacitor arrays there, buddy, he thought, before you electrocute some hapless ground crew… unless your ground crew is made up of Argulans, he added to his thoughts, remembering the amphibious species that emits, and absorbs, high-voltage shocks.

Once the freighter was out of the way he was able to see the Bloodhawk's fightercraft at the other end. Yiorgos stood at the prow of it with two technicians working on the weapons array there. Another technician was up in the cockpit, likely adjusting the controls to allow Terran commands.

Yiorgos had the duffel bag with the Heart at his feet — in full view of everyone.

Dirken hurried over. "What do you think you're doing?" he muttered to Yiorgos, eyes glancing down at the duffel.

Yiorgos followed his gaze down to the Heart. "Well I'm not going to leave it in the ship with that engineer in there. I don't trust that guy."

"Well you can't have it out here. People will see!" Dirken glanced over to a group of a half dozen mafia guards at a nearby ship.

"Relax. It's completely covered in the bag." Yiorgos gave a quick command to the technicians to "be sure to add a better cooler to that laser," then hefted the duffel bag and looked back to Dirken. "Over here." He nodded his head toward the ramp as the two of them moved to it. "I don't trust those technicians, either. The Reptiloc has a shifty look."

"Don't