Aces IV
NC-17: Gay Sex(light bondage)
NC-17: Gay Sex(light bondage)
"Did you know they were monsters...evil gods?" Taylor asked quietly, the husky's face grim in the stark fluorescents of the surgical bay.
Cheryl looked at the linoleum, hugged herself. For the first time the vixen seemed vulnerable, more and less than the demigoddess that was the greatest ace ever. "There were rumors," she said softly. "Jackal Mask is a mass murderer, a tyrant. I didn't think anything out there could be worse."
"Welcome to reality," Walter purred, cleaning his claws on his hospital gown.
I looked over at the tiger and a piece of his puzzle fell into place. He was scared, and the more he tried to hide it the more he became the unapproachable aristocrat.
"Don't mean nothin'," Shard mumbled. "They gave us the mission. We finish it, we live forever. The empire goes on and we live like kings."
"You don't really believe that crap?" Taylor whispered. "We're bugs to them, toys...tools."
Cheryl stood, slim back straight, beautiful in bright white. She seemed naked without her brace of knives. "Shut the fuck up, all of you," she said calmly in a tone of hello, how are you today? "It's not our place to question our orders."
I was about to speak, shut my mouth when I saw her paw signal. The others saw it too.
The silence stretched on after that, until they came for us.
The room I was taken to was white, white like a true rainbow, white like the pristineness of fresh snow or the blinding brilliance of a pulsar. The cheetah who stepped through the plastic door wore white too, his eyes hidden by mirrored goggles.
He held a huge needle, long and wet.
"What are you going to do?" I asked, taking a shaky step back. There was a buzzing in my head, a billion bees packing a humongous hive bloated with honey sticky and viscous, trapping my thoughts in an amber slowness. This was all very surreal.
Had I been drugged already?
The glass of water, I realized.
"Well, first there's the nullifier," the stranger said. Nullifier...nullif...ier...ierrrr...rrrr
I closed my eyes against the crashing echoes. "What's that?"
"Interesting," the cheetah said, bemused. "They were right. You're a strong one."
"What. Is. It.?" I said again.
The feline's laugh was anything but friendly. "A small device, implanted in your skull. In the event of your capture it detonates. You've seen the Council. The enemy can never know. You understand?"
I understood the question was rhetorical. "What else?" I managed, forcing myself to look at him. The white place was unstable, something shivering and bent. My claws dug into my palms, the pain bringing me back just a little, just enough.
The cheetah cocked his head. His goggles were disturbing, gave him a bug-like appearance. "You have no idea fox," he said in a tone of hateful envy. "I'm just a tech. You...you're about to become a techno-god. I hope it hurts faggot."
"Wha-?"
He stepped forward with lithe grace and stabbed me in the neck with the syringe, his lip curling. "Your little secret is in the file. No one important cares, not really. A couple of them are like you actually," he paused, leaned close. His breath smelled like roast beef, grilled onions and pepsi. "Personally, if I were on the Council, I'd exterminate the lot of you sick fucks."
My knees got weak and I started to fall. The tech stepped back and let it happen, the tip of the needle he held red with my blood.
A monster mosquito, I thought, delirious as I blacked out.
_"I love you Lanter," my mother says as I watch the cherry blossom petals fall. I try to catch a few. The ruin of a place known only as Dominus Corinus, or D.C., is a dead god made of marble whose corpse is marred with black cracks and sinuous scars carved by acid rain, is a grave so vast it engulfs the sunset horizon.
I recall what my father said about this. "They gathered so much power that they became something else, left the physical behind. Left us behind. No one knows where they are now, but the shell is still there. Don't worry about it."
The shell was still there, yes it was. Like horseshoe crabs it was still there, after spins in countless millions, like fossils frozen in sepulchers of silent sediment whose layered faces played poker with eternity, hiding their cards in paws of stone and claws of clay.
I didn't worry about it. I wanted Star Fox 3000, wanted mom and dad back together, wanted to stay home from school tomorrow. I didn't really give a fuck about history.
I'm alone with one of the Nine and he has me chained to the ceiling. It's the fox of course, the one most like me. He's not dressed like a debutante anymore, not in drag, all he wears is a velvet loincloth and a coronet of diamonds more suited to a princess._
I'm naked and I whimper. I hang there, twisting as I try to force my wrists free, my feet a few inches from polished marble. The chains rattle.
"Isn't this what you wanted?" the Councilor asks, tongue lolling, eyes dark in torchlight. His vulpine face is heartbreakingly handsome, angular and sly. "You and I, we're just...misunderstood. Aren't we? They say such things, such terrible things. Yet we know, don't we?"
"Please," I whisper, feeling the start of an erection and hating myself for it. "Just let me go."
The Councilor smiles, moves to a large, golden bowl filled to the brim with oil. "Go where?" he asks as he reaches into the fluid depths. He pulls out a long, thick leather rod in the shape of a dick. It's slick and shiny. He holds it up to the flickering light, seems to admire it. "Don't you want this? I know you do."
"No, please," I beg as he advances.
"Yes, you do," he says, his fangs glinting in twisting fires, holding the colossal dildo before him like a talisman. He slides around behind me and I feel his excited breath on my neck, feel the wetness of the rod's tip on my ass as he lifts my brush. "Stop pretending. All your life you've hidden. Reality has a hard lesson for you, bitch."
I whimper as he forces it in, my swollen cock out of my sheath and my pulse roaring in my ears like a freight train.
His teeth find the curve between my throat and my jaw. His bite is warm and wet and his arm is around my chest, a vice that holds me still while he fucks me. The rod is liquid friction. He knows just how to use it, starts slow and long.
It goes on and on.
I rose up from a dark, bottomless pit, its warped walls riddled with screaming skulls and grasping paws, my wings the fetid breath of the black horror that's always falling.
In a gray place I stand before my fighter jet, the glittering titanium-aluminum angles a divide sharper than a razor between earth and heavens, the missiles darkly painted and the bores of the guns the size of planets. I know the war machine wants to speak, that it has something it wants to say, and though it has no voice somehow it tells me we're one thing, one being, and our purpose is death, our heartbeat destruction, our pulse the smoking craters and smashed dreams we leave behind.
I try to run, try to close my eyes, but then I'm inside the F-26 and we've launched, I've _launched, and at a thousand miles an hour I arm every weapon system and become a cloud king, a crazed king whose crown is the sky, a crying king as my finger finds the trigger and the civilian I used to be realizes what's going to happen when I pull it.
Reality quakes and-_
"Lanter!" Cheryl yelled, her paws on my shoulders. She shook me again. "Wake the fuck up!"
My eyes snapped open and met hers. They were bloodshot and she looked tired as hell. "You look awful," I whispered. My throat was dry, burned like a hot coal.
Relief flooded her face. "You were in the middle of a Grand Mal or something," she said softly. "As for my looks, ravens and crows smartass. Grab a mirror."
She and I, the rest of TA too, were all in the very white room. There were no mirrors, just clean colorless plains where our very shadows seemed alien.
I didn't need one anyway. I felt it, felt as if I had been torn apart and stitched back together by a battlefield surgeon who had proscribed himself a triple of Southern Comfort for the stress of that nightmare operation. "How long were we under?"
"I don't know."
Walter limped into view. The tiger didn't appear particularly noble now. I could see the whites of his eyes. "Welcome back. I'd like to thank you for that little show of yours. Watching your seizure did so much to soothe my fucking nerves."
I managed a small smile. "You're welcome," I said. I forced myself to sit up. That wasn't so bad. Trying to get up off the cot was a mistake though, and I paid for it in pain.
"You should wait," Taylor said belatedly, settling down beside me. "Whatever they did to us it was major."
"What did they do?" Shard asked. His hospital gown was three sizes too small and he was nervous, though none the worse for wear. I envied him. Of all of us he had handled whatever we had been through the best.
"We'll have answers soon enough," Cheryl said, leaning against the wall. She glanced up at the camera bolted to the ceiling. "Now that we're all conscious it shouldn't be long."
As it turned out the vixen was right, though I wound up wishing she hadn't been. Ignorance, they say, is bliss, and I could have used a few extra minutes of basking in the warm glow of that soothing star, or at least a wish as it fell.
The door slid soundlessly open and an overweight dingo in the uniform of an admiral walked through the threshold, his officer's cap jauntily askew, its piping and emblems sparkling. A dusky greatcoat was draped over his shoulders like a cape and every step he took was swagger.
His smile was jovial. He clapped his thick paws together. "Congratulations! You all made it through."
Cheryl stood at attention, that old spark of invincibility kindling. "Thank you sir," she said, swaying.
"No captain, thank you!" the dingo replied, winking. "The impossible has been done. The High Nine chose well."
I didn't like the sound of that but kept my silence.
"What did you do?" Shard asked in a whisper.
The admiral didn't seem to hear him. "There are some tests to run but I'm confident. The AI cores calculate a ninety-six percent chance of complete integration. It should only take an hour to complete them."
"What did you do to me?" Shard said, louder and with a trace of panic.
"Then what, Ralik?" Cheryl said, friendly but wary. "Brennan wouldn't say a word. What are we going into?"
The dingo laughed. "Nothing you won't be able to handle. F-26's are a thing of the past. We have something new for your team to fly. You wouldn't have been able to before, but now-"
"What the fuck did you do to me!?" Shard roared. Everyone in the room jumped and my headache, just starting to fade, came back with a vengeance.
Ralik turned. It was only then that I noticed that he had hidden one, meaty paw beneath the greatcoat. What did he have under there?
"That," the dingo said with deliberate slowness, as if speaking to an idiot, "will all become clear in the briefing you'll be attending shortly."
Cheryl stepped forward, put her head on the admiral's shoulder. She didn't see the look of hate that flashed over his face like a stroke of lightning. His mask had slipped, and what was beneath it was ugly.
"Just give us a heads up?" she asked plaintively.
I was impressed at how perfect the smile he gave her was. "It will have to wait I'm afraid." He jerked a thumb towards the camera above, shrugged helplessly. "Orders. If it were up to me I'd tell you everything."
I doubted that. The dingo seemed more and more familiar to me in fact. I was sure we had never met, but there was something about him...
Cheryl's ears flicked back. "Ralik...we served together. I saved your life more than once. Don't do this."
"My dear I cannot help you," he replied gently, touching her cheek. "Fear not."
As she hugged him his paw shifted and I saw what he was holding. It was a detonator.
Well first there's the Nullifier, faggot, the cheetah tech's voice said in my head, his mirrored goggles as impenetrable and soulless as spider eyes. It's buried in your head now, can kill you instantly, and guess who can push the button?
Goering. That was it. Ralik reminded me of the human commander of the Luftwaffe, the air force of the aggressors in Two.