“I… Thank you,” Demi smiled, despite the streaks of water that rolled down his cheeks. One from each eye made a total of seven tears since the silent shot that had changed him. Demi wiped his face dry before he could lose track. “Do you see, now? The time we shared on Saturn, after you and Lilia saved us from the Dragons… That was physical. What we have now… It’s too dangerous to let it develop further. I won’t put you in the danger of being loved by me.” Kalus tilted his head down toward Demi. He cocked him a daring eyebrow.
“Captain. In case you’ve forgotten this about me: I excel in dangerous situations,” Kalus smirked. He scooted close to Demi on the edge of the desk. He slid Demi’s hand into both of his own, on his lap.
“As if you would let me,” Demi smirked. He tightened his hands around Kalus’. “There’s no way to actually change your mind, is there?” Kalus applied the slightest pull, to probe for willingness. Demi rose with the tug. He stepped closer to Kalus. The sides of their legs brushed together. In a single movement, Demi and Kalus shared a wordless understanding.
“No, there is,” Kalus told him. “You already have.” He moved one of his hands from Demi’s to his waist. He pulled his Captain in between two open legs. Kalus closed the vice of his thighs surprisingly strong for so thin a man, locking Demi’s waist against his own. He had to stare up to find his Captain’s hazel eyes. Stare he did, right up until the second Kalus’ lips trapped Demi’s.
The entire ship seemed to shift around them with the tremors of passion, so suddenly released. The air heated by twenty degrees. The desk rocked back just slightly with the thrust of Demi’s hips. A hand slid down, over his pants, to the mass of his throbbing excitement. Kalus rounded the shaft to pull it up, against the inside of his own leg. Demi pressed forward hard, while tongues sparred between the walls of pressed lips. Kalus felt his partner’s pulses of pleasure as clear as his own when he squeezed Demi into himself with his legs. Demi leaned back to unbutton the top of Kalus’ shirt. He made it down three buttons before the crackle of the PA stopped them faster than an electric shock.
“Attention, all Dogs of War,” Sophia’s voice filled the room through speakers in the wall. “Please report to the deck to discuss our next destination…like we were supposed to ten minutes ago. Please.”
“Right… The meeting,” Kalus smirked when he peeled his lips back from Demi’s neck.
“This was…supposed to be a quick scolding, damn you,” Demi chuckled. He buttoned Kalus’ shirt back up, then retreated to straighten out his own uniform. Kalus ran his fingers backward through his hair to restyle it.
In moments, they were Captain and Arms Master again. Captain and Arms Master who stole one last kiss before they left the office.
Chapter Sixteen: Firestorm
The Dogs of War were no closer to a decision of what to do about t
he coordinates imprinted on Kalus’ arm hours after they’d started their belated meeting. After trying Marcus for the fifth time to no response, the decision rested with them. They were divided down the middle, with Kalus and Sophia on the side of charging the Dragon base as their mission dictated, and Demi and Lilia counseling caution. Troubling as the words of Donellanus had been, it wasn’t quite enough to convince them his invitation wasn’t the bait for an ambush. That left the ultimate power of decision in the hands of Howard, the tiebreaker. The rest of the Dogs awaited his answer in person for a full thirty minutes before finally disbanding with the agreement to regroup and hear what he eventually decided. He had two more days to consider the options and decide, before the Cerberus arrived at Jupiter. Either way Howard swung, they had another trade route to establish, from the SkyLine to the Gas Giant.
Everyone awaited his answer at the briefing before they launched the new SkyLine branch. Everyone was disappointed when he said he never agreed to answer before the trade route mission. They begrudgingly agreed to give the researcher until after the operation was complete to decide. He did, after all, have the most experience with Dragons, and so would break the tie with the most informed decision. So, in the meantime, Sophia launched her craft, lined up the Launcher and shot a new stream of nanomachines into the side of the SkyLine.
“Hey, Lil. What’s the Launch Station look like on Jupiter?” Kalus called to his sister through his earpiece from the deck. He leaned out over the rail of the Cerberus to scan the enormous yellow-orange planet with his binoculars. The floating city of Nimbus was fairly easy to spot, considering it was the only break in the solid, flat color of Jupiter’s dense clouds.
“It’ll probably be a little taller than most others. It’ll have a big black ring held up by two posts on the roof,” Lilia described.
Kalus scanned the city, a hundred steel towers not unlike the skyscrapers from the Earth city of Rome around the Coliseum. Each one was connected to the others around it by steel-framed footbridges of condensed particles from Jupiter’s whipping clouds. The bridges were built in segments, able to bend and twist with the slight bob of the floating buildings inside the WCC’s biggest terradome yet. Well, without solid ground to support the city, it was more like a terrasphere. The same eggshell-colored shield that kept Jupiter’s harsh winds and crushing gravity from getting in kept Nimbus functioning with comfortable, localized artificial gravity to replicate a city on the ground as best it could.
“Eyes on,” Kalus said when he spotted it. As Lilia had said, the Launch Station stretched well past the other buildings around it. His eyes climbed it to the receptor ring, waiting in tilt for the new SkyLine branch. It was there Kalus’ eyes jumped to next, the growing tube of darkness under Sophia’s control. She unrolled it from the existing SkyLine toward the Jupiter before his eyes, toward Nimbus. Kalus’ eyes flitted from the nanomachines to the receptor ring. “A little right, Soph,” Kalus told her. “And higher.”
“Higher?” Sophia echoed. She squinted through the interface projected over her craft’s viewing screen.
“You might not be able to see from there, but the buildings rise and fall, subtly. Trust…” Kalus trailed off when his eyes caught sight of something, just to the left of the Launch Station. A column of gray smoke billowed up from one of the lower buildings.
“Trust what? Get your head out of your ass, Kalus! Are we lined up?” Sophia called back to him. Kalus’ eyes shot over to the nanomachines, unfolding toward the receptor ring.
“You’re golden. But the city…” Kalus searched the surrounding buildings up and down. He caught sight of the source flame just before another blasted the glass from the windows of a nearby building.
“Kalus, are you seeing what I’m picking up?” Lilia gasped from the bridge.
“I see fire. What are you picking up?” Kalus asked.
“Dragons…and others, maybe Faders… They’re everywhere,” Lilia muttered. Her fingers trembled inches away from the endless life signature blips consuming her console. “SkyLine connected… Energy synchronizing. But I can’t connect to the engineers.”
“Then who’s running the program?” Sophia countered while she pulled her ship back close to the Cerberus.
“The engineers are just a safeguard. The SkyLine link-up is an automatic program… If there’s anyone in the Launch Station, they’re too busy to talk to us,” Lilia shuddered. Kalus clutched the rail of the ship with one hand, the other sweeping his binoculars across the city of Nimbus. Fire twisted across walkways and puffed up floating towers before his eyes. It was hard to distinguish the shadows inside them from so far away, as bodies, rubble or winged beasts.
“Dammit…Demi, can we reach Marcus?” Kalus growled.
“He’s still not responding,” Demi answered.
“I vote to find the Dragon base,” Howard’s voice broke the radio silence of hesitation.
“As soon as the people of Nimbus are safe,” Demi amended. His voice deepened and sharpened to a key embodying pure authority. “Sophia, get down there and burn some scale. Kalus and I will follow closely behind. Lilia. Take us in close.” Lilia grasped the navigation bars of the Cerberus even as terror gripped her lungs in two icy hands. She turned the nose of the ship for the floating city of Nimbus in the wake of Sophia’s zipping auxiliary ship. Kalus rushed inside. He passed Demi on the way to the cockpit of his own deployable Cerberus head.