Earth, 2050AD

Chapter Ten

By Shadar with edits by JH

Graphics: Shadar

Models: Kitja (Jessica Alba, Juliet Holleran), Sharon (Jessica Simpson), Lucia (Lucia Tovar), Tammi (Elle McPherson), Azriel (Jolene Blalock), Ara (Jennifer Garner),  Elle/Kitja (Erin Ellington)

(Revision: 1) 

Itu Aba in the Spratly Islands, South China Sea

Eric stood in front of the mirror, certain that he couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing. Shockingly, an Arion Prime was staring back at him. 

His recollection of what he had said to Andrea was impaired by all the booze he’d drunk that night.  He did remember venting his frustrations to her, the pain of being cuckolded by Zalen, the realization that he could never have children with his beloved Kara, and his conviction that if he had the right body she would never have cause to leave him for another man’s bed.

“If you have all these Galen powers,” he had said, “prove them  -- make me a superman too, a man above even Zalen.  Let me be on top.” 

Then, well then, he might have cried. Just a little. 

 Andrea was sympathetic, but perhaps just a little amused by that scene, he remembered in hindsight. 

“Be careful what you wish for,” she might have said, and then went on talking about what she could do to, or for, him.  She had said something about accessing her racial knowledge, establishing a connection to her mother and grandmother’s minds, and constructing a perfect map of a Supremis genome.  Once she did that, her body, without conscious thought, would form a retrovirus that would inject that exact structure into every cell it encountered. The DNA of a Supremis male. 

At least that's what he thought she had promised.

“Like Kara can, huh?” he had mumbled. 

“No,” she replied. She told him she could control the virus precisely;  Kara had no control, and as he should know himself, the Velorian retrovirus was weak and unpredictable.

“You’re gonna make me a superman, right?”  Eric had said in a slurred voice redolent with the Jim Beam.

“After I give you that kiss I was talking about, there won’t be a single Terran gene left in your body,” she had replied with pride.

“Good.  Just make sure, make sure, hell, make sure that that jerk Zalen’s scared of me.  And I want Kara’s hair to stand up on end when she sees my rod.”

Andrea had responded to that last boozy statement with a cold stare, he now recalled.  Swallowing one last shot of the bourbon, he had given himself up to Andrea’s enhancement.

Now it had all happened, just like she’d said. Shockingly, he looked thirty years younger, barely into his early thirties, an unexpected bit of craftsmanship on Andrea’s part.  He stared into eyes that were widely spaced and  larger than his had been, the whites like ivory, the pupils as clear as a child’s, the irises reflecting the room light like faceted blue diamonds. Their dark blue warmth was offset by the stark whites and the glistening black of his dilated pupils. They were not human eyes, but they were mesmerizing and beautiful beyond description.

Beautiful. He laughed at that thought. Nobody had ever called him that. But he was.

His jaw was square and strong, cheekbones high, his nose almost Roman. His teeth were dazzling white and perfectly straight. He ran his hand over his cheek, and found no stubble. He’d known that hair grew only on a Supremis’ scalp, but he hadn’t thought about losing his facial hair. But if not, it would not have been shavable.

He paused to stare at his hand. It was large, his fingers long and strong with sinewy tendons. It was the strongest hand he’d ever seen. A hand that he already knew could crush steel.

Lowering it, he looked at his shoulders and chest. They were broad and tightly defined with muscular curves even when he was relaxed, his upper body looking as if it had been chiseled from a single block of granite. His chest was massive, and his arms flexed powerfully with even the slightest movement, yet the edges of his fantastic muscles were smoothed ever so slightly. Like a stone sculpture that had been chiseled to razor sharp edges and then lightly sandblasted.

He clenched his fist and curled his arm, and his biceps grew so massive and defined that it looked as if it was split in half. Tendons like steel cables sprang to life to add new angles to his arms and wrists. Yet despite all that hard muscle, he didn’t see a hint of vascularity. Just smoothly sculpted muscle. That made no human sense given how lean he was. His vascular system was clearly different now, with most of it protected beneath hard muscle.

His waist and hips were very narrow, a subtle six-pack adding relief to his completely flat stomach. It made him look lithe as opposed to bulky. He liked that look. He’d never been impressed with the extreme look of a bodybuilder.

And below his waist was the legendary attribute of an Arion male. A manhood that had been created to be the obsession of goddesses. Even relaxed, it angled outward, and was as firm as a soft erection. He held himself and smiled briefly as he imagined Kara’s reaction. No longer would Zalen’s services be required.

A surging heat exploded inside him at the thought of finally pleasing his wife in all ways. Heat that turned into an irresistible tingling desire. Shockingly, his manhood doubled in width and length in seconds flat, rising like a sword into the air in front of him.

 He imagined loving Kara, and that made him harder yet. And shockingly large.

Turning, he walked awkwardly across the bedroom to try to pull on a pair of stretchy and strong shorts, but they merely clung to him, outlining his ardor but not diminishing or hiding it. He tried everything he could think of to get it to fade, including an ice cold shower, but to no effect. He’d heard Kara talk about ‘Arion fixation’, but he’d thought it was more a state of mind than a physiologic state.

Clearly, there was only one way to fix this. That presented a second challenge. He’d heard Kara say that a Prime’s ejaculation was lethal to ordinary women. He translated that into it being very messy if done indoors. He quickly walked out onto what should have been the deserted beach behind his house.

He’d barely taken two steps out his door when he found himself facing Kitja. She was kneeling in the sand near the water’s edge, dressed in enough gold to sink a battleship.

She tilted her head and looked up at his arousal, then further up at his face, a mischievous smile slowly tilting her lips. “Hello. And exactly who are you?”

Shocked to see her kneeling there, Eric's ardor impossibly increased further. Gasping, he turned his back to her, only to see his reflection in the glass door. The waistband of his shorts was far too low to contain him now, reaching as he did to his navel.

“Where is Eric Banks?” Kitja demanded, her fists clenched.

Eric’s thoughts raced as he tried to cover himself. He could just tell her the truth, but would Kitja believe him? Andrea’s gift was far greater than he’d imagined. She hadn’t just enhanced him, she’d turned him into a full-blooded Prime. There was only a hint of his old appearance left in his face. Even worse, Kitja’s mother was a Velorian, a P1. If she’d passed on her aggressive survival instincts, the girl would likely attack him. In her eyes, he was Arion. A Prime.

Primes were for killing.

He turned to look back over his shoulder, only to see her flying directly toward him. Reflexes as fast as thought sent him leaping to the side, but not before she got an arm around him to sweep him off his feet.

The impact of her flying tackle sent them both crashing through the glass wall, smashing furniture and inner walls to plow halfway through the house, ending up in the kitchen. Gas and water pipes broke and the refrigerator fell on them, spilling its contents. Kitja sent the heavy appliance flying with a sweep of her arm, and then grabbed Eric around the neck to slam him down on his back. He looked up at her with eyes wide as he suddenly remembered something Kara had told him about the Supremis. Where humans had been programmed with a fight or flight reflex when faced with lethal danger, Supremis women had a third option when the opponent was another Supremis. Draining off their orgone energy.

He pushed her off him, and was shocked when she went crashing through the wall, tumbling head or heels as she rose a hundred yards into the air. There she snapped to a stop as if she’d come to the end of a tether, and dove back toward him. Using his superhuman reflexes, he managed to roll to the side at the last moment, and she crashed through the floor and into the basement.

He turned and ran for the front door. Darting out of the kitchen and across the living room, he'd almost made it when Kitja erupted through the hardwood floor to tackle him. They crashed through one of the legs of the grand piano in the living room, and it fell on him, momentarily knocking the wind out of him. Kitja grabbed the Yamaha Grand and threw it through the east wall as if it was weightless. He looked up to see her eyes bright with the hunt, her feral grin making her look like a hungry cat.

He grabbed her wrists and pushed her back again, astounded to find he was far stronger than her. A dark fantasy crossed his mind, and he imagined pinning her down, then violently impaling her, crushing her body in his arms as he tore her apart from inside. That horrible image, one that he knew came with his Arion genetics, burned like a fire in his mind, sending a further wave of vitality and confidence through his body. She was Velorian. She was his for the killing.

Fortunately, his higher mental functions were as human as they’d ever been.  He got to his feet and ran away from her, knowing he couldn’t trust his own instincts any more than he could trust Kitja now. He could already taste the dark, musky pheromones he was radiating, even as he inhaled the sweetness of her honey and wildflower. Knowing he was only seconds away from the fatal conflagration of those scents, a point where only the most ancient impulses of the animalistic id took control, he ran straight toward the water’s edge. The water would wash away the chemical insanity of his body.

He never made it. Kitja swooped down to flatten him against the concrete of the back deck, the fingers of her hand wrapping around his manhood to hold him with incredible strength. He fought back by pure instinct, smashing his huge fist into her face, sending her body crashing back through the house, tearing through the electrical wiring to send sparks flying. The escaping gas from the broken pipe ignited the house like a bomb, and the walls bulged outward as if in slow motion. Chunks of concrete and shards of glass peppered his body like buckshot, but he felt no pain.

Shocked by the explosion, he could only of Kitja's safety now, and without thinking, he ran into the inferno to rescue her from the flames.

“Kitja,” he called out as he breathed the live flame. “I’m not what you think I am. I’m Eric. Andrea did this thing…”

His words were cut-off in mid-sentence when Kitja appeared before him like magic. Her hair was billowing around her head, her clothing fully engulfed in flames, her eyes more red than brown. She slammed her fists down on his shoulders to burry him waist deep in the hardwood floor, then swept her hand down her body, tearing her burning clothing away. He suddenly found himself staring at the perfection of a nineteen year old Supremis. A young woman as insanely aroused as he was.

An even hotter fire exploded inside his loins, and the resulting surge of hormones ripped the last of his human sensibilities away, releasing the Arion instincts which were now encoded in his genes. He reached out and grabbed her, slamming her down on the floor beside him as he tore himself free of the flooring. An explosion of insane desire burned his thoughts clear, leaving him with only the violent desire to take the Velorian in the most primal of ways.

Sharon saw the smoke billowing upward as she emerged from the corona of ionized air that surrounded her re-entry. The private island in the South China Sea she was heading toward was Kara’s private hideaway. She and Eric had built a half-dozen homes along the beach, and one of them was burning brightly. The Vietnamese domestic staff was trying futilely to put it out with fire hoses from the other buildings.

That was strange. Kitja should have been dealing with this situation.

Sharon landed next to the Chef as he dutifully manned one of the hoses. “Where’s Kitja? And Eric?” He turned to stare at her, and his eyes opened wide at her nudity, her skin glowing like she’d been the one in the fire.

“Down by beach," he said excitedly in his sing-song voice. "Saw bodies.”

Sharon flew so fast that she literally blinked out of view. She found Kitja a half mile away, her body intertwined with those of a Primal male. The sand was plowed up around them, and several palm trees had been cut in half.

“Oh, God, Kitja,” she cried as she saw her daughter. She hugged her to her chest, crying, “Oh, baby, are you O.K?”

No answer. Kitja was breathing slowly, her heart steady, but she was too deeply asleep to awaken. Sharon brushed the sand from her daughter’s skin, seeing her enlarged breasts, finding the moistness below, feeling the residual glow of her inner heat.

She knew what had happened to her daughter without asking. The Primal male lay near death, his orgone almost depleted, his skin pale. Kitja had depleted him, and in so doing, had overloaded her own system.

Sharon’s first thought was to simply finish the Arion bastard off. It would be easy to kill him now. She could use the old Velorian killing hold, driving her fist up under his diaphragm to crush his heart.

Filled with a mother’s anger toward a man who’d attacked her daughter, raping her the way Prime’s had raped her in the past, a cold certainty filled her arms and legs and with strength as she laid her daughter gently on the sand. Returning to the Prime, she straddled his waist, jamming her small fist up under his ribs. She began to push, his flesh yielding to her strength, stretching elastically as she buried her fist under his ribs.

Part of her mind screamed at her: no, she wasn’t a killer.

But her anger flared hot and violent inside her. This man, this hated Prime, had threatened her child. He’d tried to take Kitja's life, but had escaped with only her innocence. Still, that was enough to condemn him. Kitja had experienced sex for the first time during an act of violence, not of love. The Prime deserved to die for that reason alone.

She pushed harder, feeling his heart pounding against her fingertips. Looking up into his face, she was struck by a strange sense of familiarity. She knew this man.

But that was impossible. He was a Prime. An assassin, sent to kill her daughter.

Her thoughts raced, indecision replacing anger, a Scribe’s ability to separate herself from her actions injecting a faint sliver of objectivity into her thoughts. She’d always been a thinker, a writer. She’d always tried to see both sides of every situation, no matter how horrible. She'd never been a slave to her emotions.

Turning back see the healthy glow in Kitja’s cheeks, she realized that her daughter had acted with the instincts of a P1. There was a faint possibility that the Arion might not have been the one who attacked her. That aggressive response to a Prime's presence was wired into every P1, a response she’d fought to contain all her life. Could Kitja have been the one to act first?

No, impossible. She looked down at the Prime again, knowing that it would be child’s play now to grasp his heart and crush it. No, there was a mystery here, and she’d  never solve it if the Prime was dead. And there was the fact that he looked so familiar.

Pushing back her anger, calming her emotions the way she'd been trained so long ago on Daxxan, she relaxed her arm and withdrew her fist. Gathering up what gold coins she could find from Kitja outfit, now scattered across the beach, she cupped a dozen of them in her hands and turned her eye beams on them. They melted. Drawing a thin line in the sand with her toe, she poured the molten gold into her crude mold to cool. Minutes later, she held a bar of pure gold. Quenching it in the ocean, she returned to wrap golden bar around the Prime’s neck and fused it closed with another burst of her eye beams. He wasn’t going anywhere now. 

She then cradled Kitja in her arms and flew toward Kara and Eric’s house on the other side of the island.

“That was a pretty intense encounter yesterday, Eric.”

Eric massaged his sore diaphragm as he opened his eyes, finding he was lying on a day bed on the balcony of his cottage. His stomach ached as if he’d taken a bullet in his lower chest. “I don’t remember much of anything from yesterday.”

Kitja put her hand on her hip and tilted her head, giving him that insolent smile of hers. “I remember everything, Eric.”

Eric smiled nervously, even more worried now about what he couldn’t remember. All he recalled was this overwhelming desire to take her in the most Primal of ways. Then his world had turned white-hot with angry passion, and after that, nothing. “You took nearly all my orgone, or so your mom says. Not that I know a damn thing about orgone depletion or even how to get the stuff.”

“Yup, I’ve got it all now.” She took a deep breath to emphasize her significantly enhanced bust line.

“Yeah, well, you’re welcome to it. I must have been some kind of animal yesterday. Primal instincts obviously go deep. I’m just glad your mom didn’t finish me off. From what I gather, no less for the ache in my chest, she was on the verge.”

“It was her fascination with understanding everything that saved you. There was something about you, a mystery she had to solve, so she held back.”

“I thought that gold around my neck was going to drive me crazy when I woke up. I felt incredibly aroused, but nothing worked. Total frustration.”

Kitja laughed. “Well, it definitely worked yesterday.”

“And you’re not embarrassed by… us?”

“Shit happens. I was as weirded out by my reaction as you are. Remember, I’m the girl who’s so good at pretending to be Terrran. But something came over me, something I couldn't resist. Something I didn't want to resist."

"That's more detail than I...

"At least now I know what Supremis sex is all about,” she said dreamily. “It’s both better and worse than the Terran kind.”

Eric couldn’t help but laugh. As dangerous as yesterday had been, Kitja’s freshness and innocence was appealing. “So how did you come by this sudden wisdom, young lady?”

“My secret,” she winked at him. “Does Kara know about all this?”

He shook his head. “She’s tied up with the Tyrell board members until tomorrow night.”

“Then she doesn't know about our encounter either?”

“I don’t see that she needs to know, at least not right now. I’ll leave that for when we get back together and she’s kind of adjusted to the new me, that is, if I stay this way. Anyway, Kara’s always had the Supremis attitude toward hooking up.”

Kitja brushed some sand from her hands. “Yeah, like my Mom. I still don’t get it, although our sex was a dream.” She paused for a moment with a far-away look, and then continued. “Well, I gotta get back to school. I’ve got my own mess to clean up there. Good luck with your wife.”

He reached out to hold her arm gently. “One thing you have to know, Kitja. I may not remember very much about yesterday, but I know that I never intended to hurt you. It was just this… insanity that came over me.”

“Who said you hurt me?”

“I just remember… at first, how I… wanted to...”

Kitja smiled as she shook her head. “Forget about it, Eric. I’m obviously made out of tougher stuff than we thought. And I was the one who attacked you, remember?”

“That part is a blur. All I really remember was wanting to kill you… in that... way.” He remembered the frantic drive for penetration, his every instinct screaming out for him to kill her during the act. Impaled, crushed, torn about inside, he’d thrown every ounce of his far greater Primal strength into the effort.

Kitja giggled. “And here I thought that was the good part.”

Her smiled was contagious. “How very Velorian of you,” he laughed nervously.

“Don’t tell my mom that.”

“Right…” Eric said thoughtfully. There were aspects to Kitja’s relationship with her mom that he still didn’t grasp.

“Actually, you were the one in real danger, Eric,” she said, her face serious now. “If I’d known more about how Velorians defeat Arions, I probably would have killed you. And since my mom had a second change to do that, I think two of your nine lives are used up now.”

He sighed. “I worry that if I’d known what I was doing, I would have really hurt you. I’ve got several times your strength.”

“Which is kind of cool,” she winked. “I’ve always had a thing for those pro wrestlers on the holo-TV. Imagining they were as strong as they looked.”

Now he knew she was pulling his leg. “Well, I guess there is something to be said for both of us being untrained and more or less inept when it comes to finer points of Supremis combat. I hadn’t realized all the weirdness of being an Arion when I agreed to Andrea’s enhancement.”

“Welcome to the mutant freaks club, Eric. I’ve been trying to figure out this tangle of crazy genes that I’ve got for years. Maybe together we can make sense of what it means to be both Terran and Supremis.”

“Let’s keep in touch, Kitja,” Eric smiled as he opened his arms.

Kitja slipped into them to hug him tightly in return, holding none of her strength back. She felt a strange familiarity in his steel-hard body. There was something exotic and exciting about being around a man stronger than she was. “Nobody else is going to figure this out if we don’t.”

With that, she slipped away and rose into the air, heading east. Eric watched, his remarkable eyes zooming in to watch her flight. He smiled as he saw her clothing shredding as she accelerated through the sound barrier to begin her suborbital trajectory back to Los Angeles. Her body disappeared into the superheated corona of her passage just as the last of her clothing burned away.

As always, Kitja was a master of timing.