Songs of Seduction - Fire and Ice

"I felt the pressure of the touch, Fleming, and I felt how you pushed hard against its fingertips."

"Anything else, did you feel anything else?"

"Negative, Fleming, all I could sense were your usual biomeds, those I always monitor."

"I felt a sensation in me, Athena, in my fingers, up my forearm. A tingle, like a tiny electric shock." A shiver, and if it was in my spine, it would have been right up my spine.

"Negative, Fleming. I recorded only your usual biomeds."

"Hmmm. Okay. The usual, huh? How did I respond?"

"A slightly elevated heartbeat, faster breathing, an increase in your core temperature..."

"My core temperature? How do you monitor that...oh, that's right, the waste retrieval systems...Christ, those fucking doctors, they forgot to tell me that!" Fleming remembered Ballard's warm hand cupping her cunt. "How intimate, a thermometer right next to my asshole. Whatever will they think of next, a tiny probe up my pussy?"

Athena was silent a heartbeat too long.

"Fuuck. Don't tell me you monitor that too. Athena, have you no shame?"

"Mission protocol demands..."

"Fuck mission protocol, Athena. Just stay the fuck out of my wet dreams, okay, sister?" Fleming shook her head. "Jeez..."

And Fleming shook with laughter, as the alien nodded in apparent agreement.

"Oh, he's my man! See, Athena, even an alien agrees with me, stay the fuck out of my dreams."

Athena's QMR systems surged. Fleming was sending so many contradictory signals, Athena was struggling to keep pace.

"Damn, the rain's just increased. I can hardly see." Fleming tried to brush the moisture from her helmet, but the glove was clumsy, and her vision remained obscured.

The angel arched up its wings, high over Fleming's head, spreading them wide around into a cover, protecting them both from the rain. With two fingers, the alien carefully brushed the moisture from her helmet. Fleming gazed into its eyes and it looked back, its irises dilating and shrinking, almost in time with her breath. On an impulse, Fleming took a step forward, and put the palms of her gloves on each side of its head, gently touching its cheeks. She saw its eyes dilate, responding to her touch, and she smiled.

Equally gently, Fleming's Angel placed its hands on her hips and drew her closer. She turned as it did so, and pressed her back against its chest. Its big hands curved onto her turning body, and one hand cupped her belly, or would have, but for the torso armour; and its other hand curled around her fingers. Fleming wondered how something so big could be so gentle, and she remembered it had lifted her up in its arms already, and laid her down to rest.

Fleming pressed herself back against the alien's solidity and had never felt so safe. Because of its crouching size, her helmeted head was level with its head, and they touched. Fleming was secure in her armoured suit, but safer in the angel's arms.

Fleming looked out from under the arching cover of the angel's wings, gazing out over the strange landscape of Saturn's moon, rain swept and gloomed by cloud. The mother planet was low in the sky, its half arc cut through by the slice of its rings. Fleming saw the distant glowing orb of the Sun, but could not feel its heat, it was so far away.

She slapped herself on the chest, me, pointed to the distant Sun, then rippled her fingers as she brought her hand back, landing it on the alien's chest. Here. Fleming didn't know if the creature could understand her meaning, but she was a very long way from home, and a guardian angel was holding her in its arms. Momentarily, Fleming wondered if she was dead.

* * * *

Ixtil learned.

Fleming learned.

Over the next five Sol days, measured by the twenty-four hour mission clock cycle, the astronaut and the angel learned about each other. Their rudimentary communication developed, deepened, and they each understood their intelligences were different, their worlds unique, their differences utter and complete.

Ixtil learned that Fleming's kind came in two forms, a bigger male not unlike himself; and a smaller female, and Fleming was smaller than most, a delicate thing in a golden suit. He lifted her up in his arms, and laid her down to rest; but he could not comprehend the difference between them. Why did she have no wings, and why was she only half?

Fleming learned that Ixtil's kind was just himself, there was no other. She could not comprehend how his species survived, how they bred, but she held her hand against his solid strength and would bathe in his gaze, and be lifted up in his arms like a falling feather.

Fleming rigged speakers and microphones, and they heard each other's voices over the relentless, constant wind. Ixtil's voice was deep and low, able to resonate in the thick atmosphere, accentuated by higher frequency clicks and hisses, his natural frequencies found where the wind didn't blow. Fleming, aided by her natural contralto and some subtle frequency shifting, found another sighing place where the wind whispered and Ixtil's head shifted to and fro. They murmured together, and Ixtil saw her laughter, and Fleming saw his eyes.

And always, dreadful always, the heat of her fire and the cold of his ice came between them.

They would touch for fifteen seconds, and Ixtil discovered Fleming's heart. But then he would have to pull himself back, his finger's touch lingering in her veins as long as he could, before he burned and before she froze. They began to ache.

Above in the sky, the planet light from Saturn turned and grew thin. Night came, and the distant Sun became the brightest star, a blood red orb always low on the horizon, casting dull shadows on the darkened world.

Ixtil told Fleming he had to go and hide, deep down, even his hard skin unable to protect him from the darkest cold.

Fleming stood and watched as he left, his massive powerful wings beating slow and steady, regular and slow, like the beating of her slow heart. Tears poured down her cheeks, and Athena couldn't comprehend it at all.

* * * *

"Comms report please, Athena. When are we going to hear from the station?"

"I cannot predict that, Fleming. The balloon has stabilised altitude at 300,000 feet, plus/minus 20,000, but it's in a fast jet stream. It's only overhead two or three hours every thirty-six."

"Can we command it higher or lower, to find a slower tropo band?"

"Negative, Fleming. The current altitude is optimised for both atmos and free space comms. We send the balloon higher, we compromise the downlink. Bring it lower, we lose the uplink."

"But we've got neither up nor down, Athena. Christ, it sounds like one of your old nursery rhymes." Fleming was becoming accustomed to despair. "You're not Jack, and I'm not Jill, and we've got no fucking hill."

Athena paused, her QMR processors spooling and finding synch. "But you tumbled down, Fleming."

Fleming laughed, "Very droll, Athena, very fucking funny." She looked down at herself, clad in just a soft pair of track pants, a thin tee, the thermal layer, and her bandaged left arm. "Still, my ass didn't bruise as much as I thought it might."

She wiggled her derriere. "God, I miss Jonah. He was always a bit of an ass man."

"Keen on your little tush, was he, Fleming?"

"Keen on my...where do you get all this, Athena?"

"You'd be surprised what I've got stored away, Fleming."

"I probably would be, Athena, I probably would."

Fleming looked at the exterior cam monitor, but Ixtil's watching place was empty. "I want Saturn to rise, Athena, so my Angel will come back. I miss him, too."

"Yes, he's a fine specimen." Athena's voice was her usual bland, neutral tone, carefully calibrated to match Fleming's mood.

"A poor choice of words, Athena. I hope that was accidental."

The pause in Athena's response was palpable. Heat pumped from the QMR.

"That was accidental, wasn't it, Athena? Athena?"

"...affirmative, Fleming. My linguistic selection left something to be desired. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

No, it won't. You'll carefully file that little response away, and analyse it later.

Deep in Athena's QMR, the processor monitoring the conversation filed away a spurious response, ...something to be desired.

"Can I tru...No, it doesn't matter." Fleming speculatively picked at the edges of the bandage binding her wound, something niggling at the back of her mind, something...

"Report please, Athena. Med status on my injury."

"Indicators show no secondary infection, some minor swelling still evident. Do you have full motor control in your left hand, Fleming? You mentioned numbness."

Fleming exercised her fingers. "Hmm, still a faint tingle on the outside edge of my palm, but no, my finger movement's fine."

She looked at the bandage, and a thought popped into her head. "I think I'll take this dressing off, and there's also something I want to try on the old sleeve, the damaged one. Can you pull up the heat pump schems for me, please, Athena."

Fleming went through to the med bay and unravelled the bandage, including the biomed monitoring layer.

"I've just lost your arm, Fleming." Athena's voice remained neutral, just making an observation. One of the monitor QMRs cycled high.

"It's okay. I've still got it." Fleming replied, as she too noted the obvious. It's my arm, girlfriend, not yours.

Fleming looked down at her wound, the seven black stitches like a small ladder on her skin. The surrounding flesh was bruised, a myriad of colours, red through purple to green. She tentatively pressed her finger tip to the area, probing for where it hurt most.

"Ooo, that's a bit sore still. But overall, it's pretty good."

"Affirmative, Fleming. My visual comparison shows the bruised area has reduced by twenty-three percent."

"Twenty-three percent, huh?" Fleming laughed. "It's all numbers for you, isn't it, Athena?"

Athena paused momentarily. "Of course not, Fleming. I..."

"Don't fret, girlfriend. I'm only teasing."

Athena's deeper layer QMR kicked in.

"The colours are impressive, too, Fleming."

"Nice try, honey, but not quite the full cigar."

The QMR heat load surged as Athena tried to cope with Fleming's unpredictable responses. Fleming smiled to herself, sensing the computer was rattled, but unable to pinpoint exactly why.

"Athena, do you think it strange that we've had no comms from the station? It's been a week now?"

"It is unusual, yes, Fleming. I would have expected some acknowledgement and a compressed interrogation file to have come down by now. The balloon's flight path is quite predictable, and the mission should be tracking it. The first data set included our precise location, so the mission knows where we are."

"You did remember to press the big red button, Athena?"

"There isn't a...you're pulling my leg, aren't you, Fleming?"

"Yes, I am, Athena." But I'm paying closer attention, too.

* * * *

Saturn rose in the sky and became a giant sickle, then a quarter orb. A penumbral light cast long, intense black shadows on the ground like spilt ink. Mounds and hillocks sloped forward from the dark, like strange, lurching things seeking light. A layer of frozen methane snow softened the edges of the high rock outcrops. Ice had built up on dark side of the capsule, falling snow freezing hard as it hit the cold metal skin. Icicles connected to the ground in thick pillars, in a frozen crescent all around the coldest side of the craft.

Ixtil returned from his hiding place deep underground, and took up his watch from the rise. Soon enough, Fleming's small form appeared from the lower hatch. Ixtil felt a strangeness within himself at the sight of her. He stood to greet Fleming, curving his wings high up and around, to shelter her from the wind and rain.

Ixtil was rewarded by Fleming's smile. She'd explained to him the human concept of happiness, which was something inside her made visible by a smile, the corners of her lips turning upwards, and creases around her eyes. More happiness was shown by a laugh, with white teeth and a tilted back head. Ixtil thought happiness must be like the feeling he had when he soared high in the sky, swept upwards and circling in great loops around the pulsing clouds. He wanted to share his happiness with Fleming, but gazed instead on her face.

Fleming came towards him with her fingers outstretched. She couldn't feel Ixtil's skin through the armour of her gloves, but could feel the familiar pressure of his touch.

Athena sensed it too, but only through Fleming's right hand. The pilot had disabled the sensor mesh on her left arm, as part of the modifications she'd made to the thermal layer and its heat transfer systems.

Fleming had modified the sleeve removed from the damaged suit, and now wore a forearm sleeve and skin layer glove on her left hand with enhanced heat control. It meant she could expose her fingertips to the cold for longer periods; and expose her whole hand, at least for a little while.

With care, Fleming thought she could touch Ixtil's fingers for maybe five, perhaps seven or eight minutes. Maybe longer. Fleming felt she might take that risk, to feel his presence inside her once more. For as long as she could. Fleming was beginning to feel many things about her Angel, not all of them rational and scientific. He's not my specimen. Ixtil saved me, and laid me down to sleep.

Athena could feel nothing at all from Fleming's left hand.

"Fleminggg, welcome I." Ixtil greeted her, his speech mechanism able to sound out her name with a characteristic drag and click on glottal sounds. He insisted on a syntax based on the logical importance of his words and their meaning. "Fleminggg..."

"Ixtil, I knew you would come, as soon as you could." Don't go away and leave me...

Fleming went in under his wide spread wings and pressed her helmet up against his chest. Ixtil crouched down and turned her so her back was against his chest, and he held his hands to her belly. They looked out over his world, seeing the same things in the strange, glimmering dawn.

"I have ideas, Ixtil. Look."

Fleming showed him, using simple drawings and diagrams so he could quickly understand.

Ixtil quickly understood, and went to recover the other descent parachutes from where they billowed and rippled in the constant wind. It took twelve hours for him to make two journeys, bringing them to the capsule, dragging them across the ground. While he was gone, Fleming inspected the chute Ixtil had recovered before the night, and thought it sound. She laid out a pattern on the ground, close to the capsule and bordering on Ixtil's hill.

With all chutes available, Fleming was able to cut and weld large panels of fabric together. Over three days she and Ixtil made an inflatable chamber, held in place by boulders and rocks that Ixtil moved, tied down by the parachute risers that Fleming tied. She sealed a crawl tunnel to the capsule's air lock, and Ixtil pulled tight a huge sheltering sail, carefully curved so it would spill the wind when it blew all around.

Even so, Fleming spent many hours under Ixtil's wings, as he sheltered her from the constant rain and wind, his broad wings arched up and spread all around.

Fleming remembered an ancient poem, a few lines at least, and asked Athena to find it.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

"Whatt pleasure is, Fleminggg?" Ixtil asked, when Fleming recited the poem to him, curled against his side.

"Like happiness, Ixtil, but longer and more powerful," she replied.

"Flyinggg skkky topp?" Ixtil looked for a parallel in his experience.

Fleming gazed at him with her dark eyes. "Yes, Ixtil, like flying to the top of the sky. That would be intense pleasure."

Athena's QMR processors surged with a combination of biomed inputs from Fleming showing elevated physiological reactions: heart rate, breathing, engorgement, wetness; as well as emotional and reactions triggered by the poem. Athena knew she was monitoring something mysterious, something she didn't fully understand and couldn't correlate, unless Fleming was dreaming.

Athena recalled similar profiles while Fleming slept and dreamed. She also remembered Fleming's reaction to her monitoring. Just stay the fuck out of my wet dreams, okay, sister?

Athena's QMR surged.

* * * *

Fleming lay upon Ixtil's reclining body, out of the rain for the first time under their enclosure, rather than dry from the span of his wings. She'd watched, amazed, as he'd folded away the broad flight wings close to his back; and she studied for the first time the inner layer of smaller wings, that continuously rippled and fluttered. In time with his breathing? she wondered. When he crouched before her, she'd gently pushed him back, back against a smooth rock. Ixtil watched the smile on her lips and in her eyes, and swayed his head, left right.

"Ixtil, I've changed my glove. I can touch you much longer now." Fleming felt almost shy, but her heart was thumping. "Do you want to..."

"Happinesss Fleminggg be?"

"Yes, Ixtil, like flying..."

She took her left glove off, and touched her Angel's fingertips, barely enough to feel his cold skin.

Athena, unable to feel anything from Fleming's left arm and hand, ramped up the sensitivity of the right glove's sensors and spooled up the biomed data monitoring sets. She caught the catch in Fleming's breathing, her faster heart rate. Her QMR processors cycled normally. This was controlled mission data capture, there was no ambiguity here.

Fleming felt the familiar, wonderful tingle as Ixtil's nerve tracelets slowly enter the tips of her fingers. She stretched her fingers, splaying them wide. Her own nerves, not made for internal stimulation, changed Ixtil's inner touch to a thrill on her skin. Unlike a human touch with its delicacy like velvet or filigree lace, his touch was chill breath on a cold day, whiskey at the back of her throat; a liquid smooth sensation.

Fleming stretched languidly, and waited for the cool thrill to move further into her body. She shuddered as a shiver, a cold sliver, ran down her spine. She felt a gentle touch on her lips. She licked them, her moist tongue tip, and Ixtil ran his finger into warmth and heat. She sighed, and he did it once more, a delicate touch. She sighed again, "Ohh, that's nice..." His touch swayed, left right across her lips, intensified in a learning kiss.

The same on her cheeks; gentle, cool, a touch like silk. Left, slowly, right. Ixtil learned Fleming's face, her hot throat. She gripped him with her right hand, her gloved fingers clenching slow patterns on his flesh. Fleming saw the tremor of his inner feathers change, a different flow, responding to her hand, responding to her touch.

The gentle cool shiver spread down Fleming's body and her nipples tightened. His caress intensified, she'd never felt her breasts like this before, her firm, sweet flesh. Her nipples, her small breasts, they felt as if her whole being were centred there, just behind her skin.

So much new feeling, her nerves blazing with a golden warmth, rich red and orange, her nipples a tight ache, feeling so big, so hot, all of her thought, her feeling; there. In a quick cognition, Fleming knew that this was how Ixtil experienced her flesh, every part of his senses focussed. Ah fuck, left breast, right breast. Back again, left right. Fleming smiled, seeing Ixtil's inquisitive sway, his silver eyes dilating black. Tight sensation surged through her breasts, ice cold, burning hot; she couldn't say, she didn't care, she wanted more.