Viridian Queen Read online

  L'Laya looked square at her. “Definitely time for that history lesson.” She chuckled, then took Sarah’s arm in her hand, leading her away from the center of Haven and towards the edge of the mesa. She walked with her. “My civilization was destroyed by the Claw over many centuries. I was the only one to escape – on a sublight transport ship containing the records of my entire species and a vast array of technological devices. I did everything I could to ensure that I would not be detected – including narrowing the thrust plume of my drive, so that one would need to be directly behind my ship to even notice. I cooled the temperature of the hull and placed myself in cryogenic suspension and allowed the intelligent machines of my ship to guide me. They took me to this world, far from the Claw, and there, I slept, kept in cryogenic storage as the machine intelligence watched the heavens and tracked the destruction of-”

  “Wait!” Sarah shook L'Laya. “You’re not the last Pro-Tas.”

  “Well-” L'Laya stopped dead, her arm half lifted, as if she had been about to gesture grandly. “What?”

  “I met another one!” Sarah said, hurriedly. “Uh, never got his name, but-”

  L'Laya grabbed onto her shoulders. “Where?!” Her eyes shone.

  “He was on the ship!” Sarah stammered. “That’s kinda why I want to find my friends, he’s on one of those escape-”

  L'Laya grabbed Sarah’s hand and sprinted away, so fast that she dragged Sarah along the ground for a good five seconds before Sarah got her feet under her. Haven flashed by and before Sarah had even blinked, they were standing before a large, rectangular building that bore all the hallmarks of being constructed by a nanolathe – the smooth sides, the perfect fitting, the lack of tiny irregularities that human hands would leave behind. The front doors were already opening and the roof was spreading and parting like the wings of some great insect, letting starlight glitter on a sleek, arrow shaped aircraft.

  “Is that your ship?” Sarah asked, blinking.

  L'Laya didn’t respond. Instead, she stepped into the warehouse as internal lights winked on, giving Sarah a better look at it. The fuselage was made of the same burnished gold metal that seemed to be the foundational alloy of all Pro-Tas technologies. There was a narrow, black cockpit on the front, which swung open as L'Laya leaped from the ground, arced into the air, and landed in the cockpit’s front seat with a soft grunt. She began to flip switches and press dials, causing the ship’s engines to whirr and groan to life. Turbines buzzed and glowing blue fields sprang to life underneath the swept back wings.

  “Hey, Double-L!” A man said, pausing in his walking to eye the two of them. “Going for a spin?”

  “Get in,” L'Laya said, her voice tight.

  “Really?” the man asked, grinning.

  “No, Kappel, now!” L'Laya pointed at Sarah, who blushed and hurried forward. She hopped up onto her tiptoes, reaching out and grabbing onto the lip of the cockpit, near the back, where a second seat was nestled. There she scrabbled for more of a purchase, her belly making an undignified squealing noise against the side of the vehicle. L'Laya growled under her breath, her mandibled mouth opening then snapping shut and, in her irritation, she reached out, grabbed onto Sarah’s arm and dragged her up and over the lip, causing Sarah to yelp every inch of the way. Sarah ended up with her head mashed against the floor of the cockpit, her feet waving wildly in the air, and then her dirt covered toes were scrabbling against the cockpit’s glass as it closed around her and L'Laya.

  Sarah managed to get herself upright by wriggling and squirming, only to then be knocked backwards into her seat as the aircraft shot out of the hanger and roared above the city of Haven. It swept out a single broad arc, then began to spiral into the air as Sarah felt golden straps closing around her body, tightening and cinching her into the chair.

  A cool, feminine Pro-Tas voice spoke from the consoles to her left and to her right: “ Claw taint detected.”

  The consoles unfolded and a pair of heavy duty, short barreled guns emerged from them and aiming right at her head. Sarah yelped and lifted her hands, ready to grab the guns and rip them right out of their fucking sockets.

  “ Disregard,” L'Laya said.

  The guns retracted. Very grudgingly. Sarah managed to not stick her tongue out at them. Then L'Laya snapped her fingers. “Where would the escape pods have landed?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Can your flying thingy detect other Pro-Tas technologies? He had those...you know, wrist mounted plasma sword things.”

  “He...” L'Laya whispered. Her hand went to her chest and she closed her eyes. “Another Pro-Tas. And a male.” She shook her head slightly. “I...right.” She started to tap a few buttons, and the computer made a soft whirr-whoop noise. She nodded again. “We’re detecting a signal.”

  “Gr-” Sarah started.

  Acceleration mashed her back into her seat as every single engine on the aircraft ripped to life at the same moment. A sonic boom rattled Haven – shattering a few of the weaker windows and waking up half the people trying to sleep. They emerged to find a slowly expanding pair of blue contrails, and a distant, brilliant star that shone above the north. That star faded, grudgingly, and then dipped over the horizon.

  ***

  Sarah had thought of Trappist-1a as being a planetary jungle but, really, she knew that had been inaccurate. While the majority of the supercontinent that had been Trappist-1a’s landmass had been covered in sweltering jungle, there were northern climbs that approximated savannahs from earth, and the far south had become scorching desert. But Trappist-1a had also been significantly smaller than Earth, with a metal rich crust and an incredibly dense core that had never been as warm or tidally stressed as Earth’s core. These two factors had kept their tectonic plates mostly quiescent, and had prevented the formation of mountain ridges or separate continents that provoked the emergence of more diverse biospheres.

  That was not the case on Haven.

  Looking out the window of the Pro-Tas scoutship, Sarah saw them leave the jungles, then reach a broad flat plains, then dart over a biome that seemed to be entirely dominated by thick, pulsating tentacles, then they were over desert again, then ocean. The ship continued to cut through the skies at its incredible speeds, while L'Laya kept adjusting the controls – little twitches and tiny fiddlings that never made the wings alter their shape or change their course. It was the aeronautic equivalent of fiddling with your handheld computer while waiting for a queue to cycle through.

  “So, uh...” Sarah gulped. “Did you know your race had invented faster than light travel? Near the end?”

  L'Laya looked over her shoulder. “Truly?”

  “Yeah. He said that he was from one of the last bases that fell before the Claw took out, um...” Sarah coughed. “Well, uh, he said that they had invented FTL and he’s been bopping around the galaxy ever since.”

  “The failed dream...” L'Laya shook her head slowly. Her large, nearly perfectly black eyes closed and she clasped her hand to her chest. “I fled my people while they were still consuming our homeworld. But the probabilistic modeling was clear: They were going to be unstoppable. There were just...so many of them and so few of us. But if we had...” She shook her head. “No. It’s not worth thinking of what might have been, what we could have had. We must instead look ahead.”

  Sarah nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.” She paused. “How long till we get there?”

  “At least an hour,” L'Laya said. “I would break the atmosphere and go suborbital, but this craft is purely designed for travel in such a medium.” She gestured to the window beyond. “So, we must stick with flight.”

  “Then you can tell me the rest about Haven!” Sarah said, nodding. “Like, what kind of script do you use?”

  L'Laya chuckled, softly. “I was woken by the first of the human explorers to land on the planet. They were aboard a ship, which they had named the End of History. It was apparently some arcane jest on their part, in reference to a school of thought they all found quite laug
hable. I did not understand it. They were excited to make contact with an alien race – it seemed that the Pro-Tas are not the first aliens that your people have met. But apparently, these corporations of yours are less than gentle when they meet less advanced aliens.”

  Sarah rubbed the back of her neck. “Y-You could say that, yeah.”

  “Well.” L'Laya sighed. “They wished to stay. While I was not originally from this world, I was here first . And so, I agreed to help them construct Haven. But by then, the factions aboard the End of History were fragmenting. It seemed that they were refugees from your home solar system, from a place called Chi-Town.”

  “Chi-Town...” Sarah chewed her lower lip, then closed her eyes. She tried to think of every city she knew.

  “Chicago, they said, was the older name?” L'Laya said. “Near a place called Lake Michigan.”

  “Lake...oh!” Sarah said. “Right, that was that old lake. It’s mostly infill now, but it’s right next to Big Shiny. That’s this huge crater, I think it was some kind...of...art project or...terraforming stunt or something. I dunno, I never did much research on it. It was a bit far away from where I lived, so...” She trailed off. “...wait...” Her eyes widened. Her mind wanted to rebel at the idea – Big Shiny was almost six hundred square kilometers wide. It was so big and so reflective that it altered weather patterns by reflecting sunlight into the air, punching a permanent hole through the cloud layer. She knew the average population density of a metroplex area.

  If Big Shiny had been a city ...

  “T-That’d have to be...almost...at least a hundred, maybe even five hundred million people!” Sarah said, leaning forward and grabbing onto the edge of the seat. “That’s not...”

  But her memory came to her. It didn’t want to have her disagree. She was forced to remember how Tex had talked about smashing up aliens with the full might of a commander’s battlesuit, before she had defeated him in battle. About the way that a corporation had been gleefully eager to saw off the arms and legs of an employee just to make them a better prop in their amusement park. About every single goddamn thing that had ever happened to her in her life. About what Hailee had told her, about how in a world with nanofabrication and automation, children like her had grown up malnourished in the prole sectors of overcrowded, overpopulated megacities.

  She drew her legs up onto the chair, hooking her heels on it. “W-What I don’t get is why?” she whispered. “Why would people do that?”

  “People who stand at the top,” L'Laya said. “Don’t like to step down.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “One of the Haveners told me that,” L'Laya said. “I assume it’s true of your people.”

  “Not all of us...” Sarah said, quietly. “S-So. The Haveners...did they tell you why they had to run away from Earth?”

  L'Laya nodded. “They were winning their little war. With nanofabrication at their side, fighting security guards and armies that were merely trying to cash a paycheck and get their insurance cards validated, the Chicagoan front was on the verge of taking hold of immense amounts of real estate. The last records they had were that they had managed to get four regiments of Disney infantry to switch sides, and they had just captured an FTL capable cruiser via the Chi-Town space elevator – the ship that would later become the End of History. And then...” She shook her head. “The United Nations dropped an antimatter bomb on Chicago and immolated them. The End of History escaped, heavily damaged, and came to Haven. And they have been here ever since.”

  Sarah chewed her lip. “Chapo and Fullerene said they were both second generation Haveners. So, that had to have been...”

  “A century before,” L'Laya said.

  “Which is when corporations started using Commanders,” Sarah said, a final piece clicking into place. “You can crush an uprising with an army of robots and one employee.” She shook her head. “Those bastards . Those fucking bastards . They made people to be a boot on our neck, then made us fans of the fucking boot! ” She punched the window, rage exploding through her. Her fist crunched through the glass and shot out into the freezing air that howled by outside. The two guns that had retracted back into the consoles popped out again and aimed right at her chest. “Sorry! Sorry!” She said, then jerked her wrist back – the glass shimmering as it repaired itself in a haze of golden light.

  “Don’t punch the window again,” L'Laya said, her voice flat.

  ***

  The aircraft swept down over the campsite and Sarah felt her stomach loosening in its knots. She counted, immediately, several figures around the crackling fire that had been set up in a gully of rock and snow. But then she had no time to do anything but wait for the flurries of snow kicked up by the thruster engines of the aircraft to die down. Once the cockpit whirred open, she stood and she saw that Aiden, Tasha, Tex, Sexy, Kellen, Synth, Steve and a large spherical orb that she was pretty sure was Hailee were all standing up and watching the airplane with a nervous energy. Then she waved at them and Aiden charged forward, storming through the snow.

  The rest of the group had thrown into a higher, more elliptic orbit than her more direct route. This had kept them suspended in the air and should have shotgunned them across the arctic continent that sat like a pregnant spider on the northern edge of the world. But how they had managed to all land in one area was entirely beside the point from Sarah’s POV, considering how she had slid down the side of the aircraft, hissing as her rump stung against the shockingly cold metal.

  “Aid-”

  And then Aiden was kissing her. Hard. His palm cupped her breast, finding one of her dark green nipples and began to tweak and tease it. Sarah felt her body responding with an instinctive upswelling of desire, the heat between her legs banishing the chill of the arctic north in a mere second. His other hand slid down to cradle her ass as his tongue thrust into her mouth. Synth, who had reached them second thanks to being a robot who didn’t need to worry about the chill of the snow, shook her head.

  “Biologicals,” she said, freighting her voice with disdain, despite the fact that she was a sex robot. “You’re embarrassing us in-front of the aliens .”

  That was when the Pro-Tas warrior, who had been walking forward with a clear expression of shock in his large, almond shaped eyes, was tackled by L'Laya. His face wrapping was torn aside by a single twitch of her hand, and her mouth opened into its three parts, allowing her three tongues to emerge, thrusting against the other Pro-Tas, whose mouth opened as well. Three tongues met, wound against one another, and the two leaned into one another as they kissed with a passion that felt all too human. The rest of the group gaped, even as Aiden drew his mouth away from Sarah’s lips, then started to kiss his way down her neck, angling his head so that he could keep nipping and nuzzling at Sarah’s skin while still keeping his eyes on the two aliens. The male had fallen back into the snow, his arms flailing as L'Laya locked her legs around his angular hips, her hands sliding along the golden cuirass he wore as his chest armor.

  Aiden’s mouth closed around Sarah’s achingly hard nipple and he sucked . “Aiden!” Sarah moaned. “We should...in...I...” She trailed off, blinking as L'Laya, her hands questing with desperate urgency, began to undo latches on the other Pro-Tas’ armor. Metal popped and hissed and the snow that was drifting down from the heavens seemed to slow, as if the global climate of Haven was willing to go along with this nonsense. The two aliens broke their kissing as L'Laya sat back on her haunches, holding the front half of the cuirass in her hands. Underneath, the muscular, gray skinned chest of the warrior heaved as he panted, blinking up at her.

  “ But I do not even know your name! ” he exclaimed.

  “ Our species is extinct and I have not been laid in centuries,” L'Laya responded. “... L'Laya.”

  “ Zeradar,” he said.

  “There,” Sarah whispered. “Now we know his name.”

  “You can understand what they’re saying?” Aiden asked, in the few seconds between sucking on one of her nipples and movi
ng over to tease the other. The warm ache of his mouth made the rest of the world dim around him, reducing the moment to the cool pressure of the aircraft behind her, the heat of his body, the smoldering fire between her legs. Sarah reached down to begin teasing with one of his hair spines.

  “Y-Yeah, uh...” She trailed off, then scoffed. “Fuck it. Eat me out already!”

  Aiden snorted. “As if I was going to survive almost dying to not eat you out.” He knelt down, his green knees crunching in the snow. Sarah closed her eyes and leaned back against the aircraft, using it to prop herself up as her thigh was lifted and her knee crooked onto Aiden’s palm. He cradled her as if she was the first meal he had had in days. His mouth pressed to the steaming slit that was her sex and his tongue darted out, lapping from the base of her sex to the very top. He moaned and Sarah had to bite her lip to not just scream in pleasure. Her body could withstand a vacuum with ease – it was adjusting to the cold weather, turning it from something to be concerned about to merely an extra, pleasant edge to sensation of Aiden devoting himself to utterly devouring her sex. His tongue slid into her and crooked up, grinding against her center of pleasure while his free hand cupped her and his middle finger plunged into her sex. His thumb crooked up, his hand contorting to do it, and his thumb found her clit and began to circle it, pleasuring her more and more and more.

  “Oh Aiden, oh Aiden, ohhh ...” Sarah moaned – but she was not the only one who was moaning.

  L'Laya had gotten her top off. Maybe the Pro-Tas came from a cold world. Maybe they had engineered their bodies to withstand wide extremes in temperatures. Maybe centuries of solitude and thinking they were utterly alone was enough to make them forget everything but one another. Whatever it was, L'Laya was grinding herself against the massive girth of Zeradar’s cock. A Pro-Tas cock was something to take a long, lingering look at – it had a thick ridge right around where a human vein would go, ribbed in a way that Sarah’s cunt ached to feel. The tip was triangular and, rather than having balls, the Pro-Tas member simply emerged from a concealing slit, their testes clearly concealed inside of their bodies. A Pro-Tas cunny, by comparison, was nearly human.