The War to End all Worlds Pt. 05

I bit my lower lip, then nodded. "O...Okay...but that doesn't actually answer-"

Your race uses our secrets without knowing the danger inherent within them, and seeks after greater ones. You, Gipp, must stop this. The man who seeks most greedily and has discovered the most of what we have buried brackets your path. And if you fail...

The last Sorn's face imploded. It was as if he had been shot – but rather than blood and viscera, his pale white skin simply folded on itself and then expanded outwards. His skull ripped open and dark red eyes glared from the infinite blackness that had been within his mind. It was something...that hungered. For me. And as the limbs started to emerge from the blackness and the shape within started to emerge, I began to scream and scream and-

###

I jerked awake, gasping heavily.

I was sitting on a small bedroll that was nestled up against a dead tree, its corpse completely wrapped by red vines. Red vines twined and twisted around one another, covering the earthly vegitation that had once called this place home. The air smelled acrid and vicious, and I could hear the faint sounds of conversation from nearby. Before I could look around more, Tjen's face swung into my view.

"You have been unconscious for three days, Gipp." She paused. "I cried a great deal during the first day, which is why my voice sounds scratchy. I am glad you are awake." She held my hands, squeezing.

I gaped at her. "I-It's okay...I...didn't notice..." I whispered. The fear that had jangled through me was receding slowly – but the memory of the dream stuck there. The Sorn, its terrible warning. But at the moment, all I could think of was the concern in Tjen's face, the way she was holding my hands. I could feel her hands shaking against mine.

"You're still pretty," I said, smiling at her.

Tjen's already red cheeks flushed darker and she smiles. "It pleases me greatly to hear you say such things. Continue to do so."

She leaned forward and kissed me and for just a few moments, I was able to lose myself in the warmth of her lips. Their softness. Her eyes closed and she leaned into the kiss deeper still. Her tongue explored my mouth as if we had never kissed before. I slowly laid back, dragging her atop me. I may have slept for three days, but I felt a kind of vitality filling me that almost shocked me. The need to feel Tjen around my cock was so astoundingly intense that it shocked me. My hands grabbed the thin band covering her breasts, yanking at it. The cloth tore and she pressed herself against me, slithering underneath the bedroll's sheets as if she was a snake. Our bodies pressed together, and her hands worked quickly, undoing buttons. I grabbed the bedroll, tugging it up and over our heads, forcing the two of us into darkness.

In that darkness, I saw with my eyes and my heart. I caressed her smooth skin, feeling her as she breathed in my musk. The smell of us washed away the alien stink of the red weed that had infested this part of the world. My hands cradled and cupped her breasts, squeezing them eagerly. They felt larger. And from the soft hiss that came from Tjen, more sensitive. Her voice crooned quietly.

"I am beginning to change due to my pregnancy. The egg inside of me has triggered hormones that has enlarged and sensitized my breasts..." she paused. "Earlier than humans do, I believe. To be, ah, quite...ah..." Her breath became softer, more desperately eager as she trembled. "Oh...oh yes..." She gasped, biting her lip.

My mouth had worked faster than my brain. I had found her nipples in the darkness of our shared bedroll, and her head rolled backwards, pressing against the fabric, allowing more light in. It stabbed my eyes, painfully bright. And so, I closed them and focused only on suckling her breast. Tjen's fingers worked through my hair, which had started to grow long and unruly. She trembled and crooned.

"Earlier than most...Red Martians. I do not know if..this I because...oh George..."

I didn't mind when she moaned my name like that. I did not mind at all.

Her breasts pressed to my face as she drew her knees up underneath her. She was bent almost in half, her cunt pressed to my belly, her thighs spread wide. But this freed up her hands so she could caress her own enlarged breasts and mash them against my face. I did my best to be neat about it. Oh, that was a whacking big lie. Five seconds into nuzzling her and I was being as sloppy as a pig. My tongue slathered her with spittle, kissing and sucking and nibble. I had gone insane and I felt my own chest tingle. My cock ground against the fabric of the bedroll, and I groaned with a frustrated eagerness. I bucked my hips and Tjen bucked her hips in time, writhing atop me.

Every time I moved, she moved.

And as her pussy dragged across the taut muscle of my belly, I felt a tingling heat rush along the base of my cock, like she was licking it.

I nibbled on her nipple and felt pleasure jolt through my own nipple. My eyes opened and I looked both at Tjen at myself. And...I was shocked to see how she saw me. I was just a bloke. But in her eyes, my own eyes turned into the deepest sea, my jaw became a strong, thrusting majesty of a chin. My hair wasn't just hair. It was something she could nuzzle and caress forever. The closeness of this moment felt too divine to sully with anything as crass as sexual penetration.

Or so whispered a tiny, tiny part of my mind. A sniveling little shit of a thought, born from being subsumed in a culture that saw sex as only a step or so above shitting on the toilet.

The rest of my soul took that thought and threw it down from top of Olympus Mons. I rolled in the bedroll, not caring that the blanket covering us was cast aside, that the nippy air of the outside world rushed in to join our bodies. I only cared that Tjen was underneath me and I was above her and she was above me and I was underneath her. My fingers and hers interlocked – and hers interlocked with mine – and squeezed as my cock and her cock slipped against her pussy and my pussy. Our eyes couldn't look away from one another.

She whispered. "Yesss-"

"...please..." I finished.

It was not so much a thrust as a meeting. Her hips were just as desperate to move up as mine were to slam down. Our balls slapped against our ass and the unity of mind and being was nearly perfect. I closed my eyes, unable to do anything but revel in the pleasure. It didn't just get shared. It was reflected, like heat in the bowels of a heat ray. It rebounded and grew stronger with every bounce. Her pleasure became mine, enhancing mine, and then bounced into her, becoming hers and being enhanced by a wailing wave of orgasmic bliss. My brain felt as if it was going to cook as the pleasure became almost unbearable. Our hands clenched and I got a single thrust off, my balls clenching and what felt like a torrential blast of cum filling our bodies. I could feel it, rushing into me, and suddenly, I could grasp why women enjoyed it so much.

We trembled and quivered and gasped.

And, with the gingerness of someone trying to free a cotton shirt from a thornbush, we started to untangle our brains and souls.

It took a few eternities – but to my shock, when I finally could see through my eyes, I saw that only a few moments had passed. The sun hadn't even moved in the heavens. However, standing before me, looking down with a wry smirk, was Darren Sharpe. She had a bandage wrapped around her forehead, and a piece of cloth jammed into her left nostril, to stop up a bloodied nose. She shook her head and snorted.

"Men!" she said. "One thrust and yer done. You didn't even get her off!"

"In...core...ect..." Tjen burbled, her voice coming out between body shuddering gasps. She started to mumble something in her native tongue as she relaxed into a puddle of amazingly well fucked Red Martian. I, myself, barely managed to keep myself upright by locking my arms and drawing deep on the deeply human, deeply male, urge to not look stupid in front of a girl.

Darren snorted, turned, and left, saying: "Come on once yer pants is on!"

###

The city of Ypres had once been a large, bustling European place. Peaceful and happy, surrounded by well tended green parklands and farms. That had been in a previous century, before the madness of modernity had crashed down in the form of Martian cylinders and stomping tripods. Now, almost twenty years later, the city itself was only a ruin and a memory. The people who had once lived here had fled. At least, I liked to think that they fled. But I knew that beneath the thick vines that sprawled across the buildings and wrapped around the trees and smothered the grass, there were hundreds of bones.

Millions of them.

Darren led the way, with her best friend Drusilla walking beside her. The two were quite friendly, often stopping to consult maps and talk to one another in whispers so close that they nearly seemed to kiss. Ollie trooped along with a grim expression on his face, a rifle salvaged from the Titanic over his shoulder. Yalen slashed at red vines that hung across our path with a cutting blade, clearing the route. Tjen walked with her head on my shoulder, her arm looped around my back.

It felt too somber a place to have conversations.

Once we were in the city proper, though, Darren spoke up.

"When my crew and I started flying," she said. "We knew that there were going to be times we needed to split. Free France has places that the rest of em can stay, assuming the Frogs don't have another revolution." She shook her head. "Revolution. They have em whenever they sneeze, and they never seem to stick."

"She's still bitter about Napoleon," Drusilla said, pulling a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and settling them on her small nose.

"Tha' bloody Corsican hijacked the first real socialist utopia and slew it dead, even before Marx put pen to paper!" Darren snapped. "Damn right I'm bitter about his stubby arse!"

Yalen frowned, using her impressive height to look down at Darren.

"Explain why we are here," she said, quietly.

Darren sighed. "So. When we were first raiding and redistributing the wealth," she said. "We knew we might get downed. The plan was, split, remeet when the heat died down. And so, we stashed goodies across Europe, in red zones like this. So..." She nodded to Drusilla, who stepped forward and took hold of vines. She dragged them backwards, revealing the ruin of what had once been a livery stable. The stalls had been knocked down and the hay had been carted off, the warm smell of horses long overridden by the acrid stench of the red weed.

But sitting there, brand new and shining, was a...a...

"Is that a Frisbie?" I whispered.

"That it is," Darren murmured. "A Russel Abner Firsbie Spiderrunner floatcar!" She gestured to the sleek, red painted vehicle as if she were a showgirl on Guess the Box. The floatcar wasn't actually a hovercraft, though I did notice that it had a greenish anti-gravity engine under the belly. Its primary method of transport were a set of eight legs. They looked only slightly dusty. Drusilla walked forward and started to check the vehicle over.

"Does anyone know how to drive one of those?" Ollie asked. "I've ridden horses, but I've never touched one of those."

"I fear that I am not proficient in the use of your variations on Tripod Builder vehicles," Tjen said.

Yalen just shrugged. Then each of them looked at me.

"Weren't you a longshoreman?" Tjen asked.

"I mean...yeah, I drove a handling machine!" I said, nodding. "But that had six legs, not eight. And it had gripper arms!"

"Technically," Drusilla said, standing from where she had been kneeling. She brushed her hands off one another, grinning as she looked at me. "This is designed for total traversal. See?" She pointed at where the feet rested on the ground. They had curved claw-tips, designed to bite and drag. "The anti-gravity engine reduces the weight of the vehicle, so it doesn't cause damage to anything but very fragile structures. Or glass."

I rubbed my hands along my face.

"With this sucker," Darren said. "We can clear the red zones and get to Austria like that." She snapped her finger.

"And what do we do when we get there?" I asked.

"Vienna is famous for their coffee houses," Drusilla said. "We can ask around."

"Do any of you know how to speak Austrian?" I asked, trying to get away from the fact that I would be driving this thing.

Drusilla nodded. "I do."

Tjen smiled. "May I touch your forehead?" she asked.

"I...what?" Drusilla blinked.

"I have noticed that ever since Gipp impregnated me with his child," Tjen said – causing Darren and Drusilla to start in surprise. "My connection to him has grown. I was once able to make a recent sorrow feel old for him, as well as alter the memories of a police officer who would have apprehended us. I believe that I could take the ability to speak Austrian from your mind and then place it into the minds of the rest of our compatriots."

Drusilla frowned. She looked at Darren.

Darren shrugged. "We've been buggering around with Soomie shite for years, it can't hurt."

I blinked. "Wait! That's right!" I said, flushing. With the sex and the walking and the mystical visions of alien civilizations and the shock of finding a blood speedster walker that was more built for the Grand Prix than for civilian life, I had completely forgotten about the fact that Darren and her crew could appear from place to place like magic. "How the bloody hell did you do that?"

Darren sighed.

She reached into her jacket pocket, then pulled out a small sphere of pale white light. It was as solid as a gemstone, but it shimmered and glowed like a lamp, lambent energy spilling from between Darren's fingertips. She smiled at me.

"This," she said. "Is how we done it."

"It's a mind stone," Tjen said, her voice reverential. "The device used by J''onn J'onzz in the olden times, to battle the Tripods when they first began to conquer Mars."

"Pfft," Darren said, shaking her head. "Nah, mate. This here's the last possession of an honest to god Confederate son of a bitch named John Carter. And when his nephew was traveling the transatlatic with it..." She grinned. "We nicked it."

"You nicked it!?" Tjen sounded shockingly offended. "And...the famous hero J'onn J'onzz was a human!? A human from the land of the American Confederacy!?"

Darren shrugged. "This is why you never meet your heroes, kids." She said this blithely, though I was fairly sure that she was younger than both I and Tjen. "They always end up being some kind of bastard."

###

I settled into the driving couch. My hands closed around the controls. Tjen sat next to me. Behind her, Yalen was being buckled in by a clucking Drusilla, while Ollie leaned back on the rearmost seat. Darren buckled herself in next to her best friend. Drusilla and her leaned against one another, clearly overcome by the long trip. I breathed in, then out.

"You can do this," Tjen murmured, squeezing my hand. "I have a strong belief that you will not crash us into a tree and lead to all of us dying horribly."

I chuckled. "Ah, thanks, Tjen."

I looked forward. The red weed had been cleared from the front of the livery stable. We had an idea of where Vienna might lay. Going full tilt, if nothing was in our way, this sucker could get there by tomorrow morning. I nodded slowly, then pushed forward on the controls. The Frisbie trundled forward, moving with shocking speed. I jerked and the legs clattered as we sprinted down the center street of the weed covered town. I grinned wickedly as I felt a kind of intoxicating rush fill me. We sprinted down the road, picking up more and more speed – then careened around a corner and shot out of the city, emerging from two buildings. A road that had been overgrown by the red weed remained mostly flat, and as we zoomed along it, I whooped.

"This is much scarier than flying!" Darren squealed.

Ahead of us, I could see that some movement had come from the forests of red weed. I started to slow-

And saw Torg's lumbering body emerging. He was still dressed in flying leathers and behind him, Mr. Sinclair was dragging what looked like the heat ray from their flying machine. The two men gaped at us. Ollie unslung his rifle and I hit on the accelerator as Sinclair started shouting: "Torg! Now! Now! Now!"

The burly idiot started to lift the heat ray-

Ollie's rifle cracked.

And then we were rocketing down the road again, shooting towards Vienna.

I soon fell into a kind of trance. The roads were nearly empty and the red weed had grown thick, but not tall. The Frisbie was able to easily clear any obstruction, and even the rivers we had to cross proved no real issue. I was able to add extra juice to the anti-gravity engines and just jump the vehicle across. On the first attempt, this produced screams of delight and shock. By the seventh, though, the others had simply started to snore through it. Everyone seemed to sag as we drove along – but I felt great. Refreshed and eager.

We drove on through the night. The distant light of the villages and cities that survived the march of the red weed showed where human habitations were. Occasionally, a flying machine would soar overhead. Once or twice, we saw a cylinder. But on the whole, of the hundreds of millions of people who had once dwelt in Europe, we only saw a few scant signs of hunters and gatherers. It was best to not think about it...and yet my mind kept drifting back.

This place had been the center of a golden age, or so the old folks said. Culture, education, peace, all of it had thrived here. But my father had looked on it with a jaundiced, glowering eye. He had talked about the exploitation of Africa and Asia and America. Of the brutality of Eastern Europe and Russia – despotic rulers who had stepped on the backs of oh so many people. The Poles had been forced to watch as their land was taken by German and Russian and Austrian soldiers. And there was a reason why Panslav hated the Austrian Empire even now.

Should I even have felt sad about the lands I trundled through?

Had Europe deserved the Martians?

These thoughts were given a stark answer when we stopped for a short rest. I may not have felt sleepy...but I did still need to pee. Ollie had stood guard as I stepped off the road. There, I found an overgrown carriage, red weed worked through the rusting spokes, the wooden frame of it falling to pieces. I had brushed some aside and saw a skeleton sprawled over the back, vines peeking through the eyesockets. It had been a very small skeleton.

I shuddered and drew backwards.

No.

No one deserved the Martians.

No one deserved this.

By noon the next day, we had clattered past a few villages that showed life, past fields that had been cleared of the red weed and were watched over by Austrian Tripods with heavy cannon and heatrays. As the sun still hung overhead, we came to Vienna itself. The capital of Austria had changed since the golden age of Europe. Half of the city had been left to the red weed, the buildings collapsed and ruined. A wall encircled the rest – not one to keep out humans, but one to keep out the weed itself. The gates were open and farmers were bringing in crops, while flying machines buzzed in and out of the central port. Men in exoskeletal armor patrolled along the walls, and Tripods stomped along the roads.

None stopped us as we came up to the gateway. The man who came up to us was a bored looking fellow, clean shaven, with russet brown hair and a dueling scar that marred the left side of his face.