Chapter 2: The Taste of Curiosity
The air in Anubis’ quarters was always three degrees too warm, thick with the incense he burned to cover the sterile scent of the ship. It clung to the back of the throat, a sweet, fungal weight.
Néphéthys stood just inside the iris-door, her hands folded neatly in front of her pale grey robes. She watched him. He was sprawled like a deposed king across the vast bed, its black silk sheets shimmering under the holographic projection of a jackal-headed god that flickered on the ceiling. In his hand, a slim datapad cast a blue glow across the sharp angles of his face.
“You’re hovering, little sister. It’s undignified.” Anubis didn’t look up. His voice was a lazy drawl, a studied carelessness that never quite hid the calculating precision beneath.
“You missed the strategy sync,” she said. Her own voice was soft, but it carried in the bass-thrumming quiet.
“I was strategizing.” He finally glanced at her, a slow, wolfish smile spreading. He tapped the datapad. “More informative than Hélion’s casualty projections. Look.”
He tilted the screen. The grainy, jerky footage was from a maintenance drone’s perspective in Bay Seven. It showed the confrontation. The circle of guards. The two tall figures at the center. Wilhelm, a pillar of frozen outrage. The new one, Adler, a study in contained eruption. She saw the moment Wilhelm dismissed the guards. Saw the two of them alone in the vast space. The tension was palpable even through the poor resolution.
Then she saw the kiss.
It wasn’t a tender thing. It was a collision. A seizure of motion. She watched Wilhelm’s head wrench back, saw Adler’s fist tangled in that perfect blond hair. She couldn’t hear the sounds, but her mind supplied them: the gasp, the crunch of fabric, the wet, violent meeting of mouths.
Néphéthys felt a flush creep up her neck. Not embarrassment. A clinical, fascinated horror. “That’s a live security feed. Accessing it is a capital offense.”
“So is selling plasma rifles to the outer colonies, but here we are.” Anubis chuckled, tossing the pad onto the bed. It showed the frozen image, a tangled, intimate crime scene. “Our impeccable Commandant. Our ice prince. Look at him. He’s not pushing him away.”
She looked. He was right. Wilhelm’s body was arched back, but his own hands were fisted at his sides, not striking. It was the posture of a man being dismantled, not resisting.
“Why show me this?” she asked.
Anubis patted the silk beside him. “Come here.”
She obeyed, moving with the serene grace of her Caelis breeding, settling on the edge of the bed. The scent of him—myrrh, ozone, the underlying musk of sweat—was stronger here.
“He’s my best customer,” Anubis said quietly, all mockery gone for a heartbeat. “And, occasionally, my best distraction. A man that tight, that controlled… he’s a beautiful instrument to play. He needs the release. I provide a service.” His green eyes, sharp as broken glass, fixed on her. “This Adler? He’s not a release. He’s a detonation. That bond isn’t about harmony. It’s about possession. And Wilhelm is letting it happen.”
He leaned closer. “You’re the empath, Neph. The brilliant one. You’ve read the Dyade theory. But have you ever wondered what it feels like? Not the official, sanctioned connection. Not the pretty synergy. The real, filthy, neural feedback of two minds trying to fuck each other into submission through a psychic link?”
His words were crude, deliberate. They hung in the perfumed air. Néphéthys didn’t look away. “It would be overwhelming.”
“It would be everything,” he corrected, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Every secret urge. Every hidden shame. The taste of their spit in your mouth, the ache of their lust in your gut, the echo of their heartbeat in your skull. All at once. No filters.” His hand came up, not touching her, just tracing the line of her jaw in the air. “Wilhelm is about to have his mind forcibly married to a barbarian. He’s walking into that chamber hard-wired for a psychological rape. And part of him is hungry for it.”
He finally touched her, a single fingertip under her chin. “You’re curious. I see it. You study everything. But some things you can’t study from a distance.”
“What are you suggesting, Anubis?”
“A test run.” His smile returned, all charm and danger. “No bond. No politics. Just biology. Two people. The rawest translation of that… current… into physical terms. To understand what he’s walking into.” His thumb brushed her lower lip. “You trust me.”
It wasn’t a question. She did. He was a criminal, a provocateur, amoral and self-serving. But he had never lied to her. He had killed for her, once, when a client thought her knowledge was a commodity to be taken. His protection was absolute, and his price was her clear-eyed acknowledgment of what he was.
She thought of Hélion, her fiancé. Kind, predictable, safe Hélion, with his gentle hands and his discussions of terraforming yields. She thought of the child she wanted, the family she dreamed of in some quiet, post-war future. A future that felt like a thin, fading parchment.
She thought of the frozen image on the pad. The violent, desperate hunger.
“Yes,” she said, the word leaving her lips before her more rational mind could veto it.
His eyes gleamed. “Good girl.”
He moved then, not with the brutal aggression of the man in the video, but with a predatory certainty that was just as absolute. His mouth found hers, but it wasn’t a crushing invasion. It was a claiming. Slow, deep, wet. He tasted of bitter stim and sweet wine. His tongue explored her with a thorough, arrogant intimacy that made her whimper.
The kiss was a hypothesis, tested.
His hands went to the fastenings of her robes. They were complex, Caelis design. He solved them like a locksmith, each click and whisper of parting fabric loud in the room. He pushed the grey material from her shoulders, baring her pale skin to the warm, scented air. She wasn’t ashamed. Her body was a tool, like her mind. But it was trembling.
“See?” he murmured against her throat, his lips tracing her pulse. “Anticipation. The system flooding with signals. The mind trying to calculate the next move, the body just… wanting.”
He laid her back on the silk. It was cool against her bare skin. He stripped off his own tunic, revealing the hard, scarred map of his torso. He wasn’t sculpted like a Caelis; he was built from conflict and survival. He knelt over her, looking down.
“Tell me what you want the experiment to be, Doctor,” he teased, his voice rough.
“I want to understand the feedback,” she breathed, her scientific terminology a fragile shield. “The loss of boundary.”
“Then lose it.”
He kissed her again, harder, and his hand slid down her stomach. His fingers were calloused, ungentle. They parted her folds without ceremony. She was already wet, a hot, shocking rush of betrayal that made her gasp into his mouth. He grunted, a sound of approval.
“There’s the data stream,” he whispered, circling her clit with a blunt, knowing pressure. “No thought. Just wet, filthy need. This is what’s screaming in Wilhelm’s head right now. This, dialled to a thousand.”
He pushed a finger inside her, then another. He worked them in and out, his pace steady, relentless. The stretch was intense, almost too much. It wasn’t meant to solely please; it was meant to occupy, to claim space. Her hips lifted off the bed, seeking more, seeking a different angle. He denied her, controlling the rhythm.
“You feel that? The mind goes quiet. Just the pulse. The slick, hot slide. The animal that doesn’t give a fuck about Dyade protocols or genetic nobility.”
He removed his fingers, shiny with her. He unfastened his trousers, freeing his cock. It was thick, erect, the head flushed and leaking. He rubbed it against her soaked entrance, smearing her wetness over himself, letting her feel the blunt, heavy pressure.
“This is the translation,” he said, his breath hot on her face. “The crude, physical wiring. No psychic link. Just this. Me. Filling you up. Giving you what that pretty fiancé of yours is too polite to take.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He pushed inside.
The penetration was a deep, splitting fullness that stole her breath. It wasn’t painful, but it was overwhelming. He was bigger than Hélion, and he didn’t pause to let her adjust. He seated himself to the hilt in one slow, inexorable thrust, his groan vibrating through her body.
“Fuck,” he hissed. “There. That’s the connection.”
He began to move. His thrusts were long and deep, a piston driving into wet, willing heat. Each one jolted her up the bed. The sound was obscene—the slap of his skin against hers, the wet squelch of her cunt taking him. He fucked her with a focused intensity, his eyes watching her face, cataloging every twitch, every choked-off cry.
“This is what Adler wants to do to Wilhelm’ mind,” he growled, his pace quickening. “To own it. To fuck it this raw. To make the great Commandant come apart on his cock and beg for it.”
The vulgarity, the visceral truth of it, unmoored her. Her hands scrambled at his back, nails digging into the scar tissue. Her legs wrapped around his hips, pulling him deeper. The pleasure was a coil, tightening low in her belly, fed by the very wrongness of it. This was not her safe future. This was now. This was heat, and sweat, and the animal reality of a man using her body to prove a point.
She could see it. She could feel the analogy. The brutal merger. The loss of self. The terrifying, exhilarating surrender.
“Anubis—” she choked out.
“I know,” he grunted. His control was fraying. His thrusts became ragged, brutal, pounding into her. “Come on. Let go. Show me the data.”
The coil snapped. Her orgasm ripped through her without warning, a silent, convulsing wave that clenched around his driving cock. Her back arched, her mouth open in a soundless scream.
The feel of her tightening around him tipped him over the edge. With a raw, guttural shout, he slammed into her one last time, burying himself deep. She felt the hot, pulsing spill of his release inside her, a claiming more intimate than any bond. He shuddered through it, collapsing his weight onto her before rolling to the side, both of them slick and panting in the silence.
The holographic jackal flickered above them.
After a long moment, he spoke, his voice hoarse. “Report, Doctor Néphéthys. Conclusions?”
She stared at the ceiling, feeling his seed leak between her thighs. The theoretical was now a throbbing, physical reality inside her.
“It’s a takeover,” she whispered, the words clinical, her voice trembling. “Not a partnership. The stronger will subsumes the weaker. It’s terrifying. And… addictive.” She turned her head to look at him. “Wilhelm isn’t going to bond with Adler. He’s going to be consumed by him. And part of him is already gone.”
Anubis nodded, a shadow passing over his face. It wasn’t jealousy now. It was something colder. Calculation. “Then we have a problem. A consumed Commandant is useless to me. And a Dyade that volatile is a threat to everyone.” He sat up, running a hand through his dark hair. “Get dressed. We need to be ready.”
“For what?”
He looked at her, and for the first time, she saw no charm, no teasing. Only the ruthless smuggler beneath. “For when the detonation happens. And for picking up the pieces. Or profiting from the wreckage.”
Outside, deep in the ship’s core, the Resonance Chamber powered up, its hum a sub-audible thrum in the bones of the dreadnought.
The ship’s deep, activating hum seemed to vibrate up through the deck plating, into the bones of the bed, and directly into Néphéthys’ spine. It was a sound below hearing, a pressure change in the soul of the vessel. The Resonance Chamber was waking.
Anubis felt it too. His calculating expression hardened, eyes flicking toward the wall as if he could see through the obsidian to the core decks below. “They’re starting.”
Néphéthys said nothing. The clinical analysis was over. The data was collected: the ache between her legs, the cooling slickness on her inner thighs, the phantom fullness. Yet the experiment felt incomplete. The theory was proven, but the application—the raw, repeated application—remained. The sub-audible thrum from the ship’s core wasn’t just a sound; it felt like a counter-rhythm to her own quickening pulse, a call she couldn’t ignore.
She looked at Anubis, her calm, empathic mask utterly gone. In its place was a naked, hungry interest. The intellectual curiosity had been consumed by a simpler, more urgent drive.
Without a word, she opened her legs again on the rumpled silk, the movement deliberate and slow. The lust in her look was not an invitation, but a demand. She didn’t care about the Chamber, or Wilhelm, or the coming wreckage. Her body needed to feel him, the specific, brutal weight of him. She wanted his seed, not as a concept, but as a physical truth inside her, a bulwark against the psychic storm she knew was beginning elsewhere.
“Again,” she said, her voice husky. “Now.”
Anubis’s smirk was instant, but it lacked its usual veneer of amusement. This was a mirror of her own hunger, sharp and predatory. “The sample size needs to be larger for proper verification,” he murmured, his gaze locked on the wet, flushed evidence of their first test. He didn’t move to touch her. He made her wait, letting the ship’s hum and her own need amplify in the silence.
“Don’t talk,” she breathed, arching her back, presenting herself. “Just fuck me.”
That broke his poised observation. A low growl escaped his throat. He was on her in a fluid, violent motion, his hand sliding behind her knee to hike her leg high over his hip. He was still hard, his cock leaking against her thigh. There was no preamble, no slow entry. He positioned himself at her entrance, still swollen and used from before, and drove back into her with a single, deep, reclaiming thrust.
The cry she let out was pure sensation, ripped from her lungs. He was rougher now, more possessive. The detached scientist was gone, replaced by a man marking his territory against the invisible threat of the bond forming deep below them.
“This what you need?” he grunted, his thrusts a hard, punishing rhythm. Each one jolted her, the bedframe protesting. “This gonna scrub his perfect face out of your head?” He was talking about Wilhelm, about the footage, but he was also talking about Adler, about the violent connection threatening his own influence.
“Yes,” she hissed, her nails scraping down his back. “Harder. It’s not—enough.”
He understood. He shifted, pulling her hips up, angling himself so each stroke ground against the most sensitive part of her. The pleasure was a sharp, bright wire of electricity, singeing away thought. She could hear the wet slap of their union, could smell the mingled scents of sex and sweat and incense, a primal cocktail.
“You want it?” he snarled, his breath hot against her ear, his pace becoming erratic, brutal. “You want my come in this pretty, brilliant Caelis cunt? Gonna pump you so full you’ll feel it for days.”
His filthy words were the final key. They shattered the last of her detachment. Her second climax tore through her, a wave of convulsing heat that clenched violently around his driving length. The sensation tipped him over. With a choked-off roar, he buried himself to the root, his body rigid as he emptied into her in hot, pulsing jets.
He collapsed, his weight a solid, suffocating comfort. For long minutes, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and that damned, omnipresent hum from the ship’s belly.
He finally rolled off, lying beside her. She felt the slow, inevitable trickle of his release leaking from her. She made no move to stop it.
“Conclusions part two?” he asked, his voice ragged.
“It doesn’t help,” she said softly, staring at the flickering hologram of the god on the ceiling. “Knowing. It just makes the hunger sharper.”
A sharp chime from his discarded datapad cut the air. He lunged for it, the languor gone. The screen cast a sickly green light on his face as he decrypted the message. His expression stilled, then hardened into something deadly.
“It’s started,” he said. “The Chamber is active. Initial feedback loops are… catastrophic. They’ve already blown two neural dampeners.” He looked at her, his green eyes reflecting the data scroll. “He’s not being consumed, Neph. He’s fighting. And the fight is tearing the chamber apart.”
He stood, grabbing his clothes. “Get dressed. The detonation isn’t coming later.” He pulled his tunic on, the casual smuggler vanishing, replaced by the hardened operative. “It’s happening right now.”
Néphéthys moved, her body sore, her mind clearer than it had ever been. The theoretical was now a lived-in reality. And as she gathered her robes, she knew Anubis was wrong about picking up the pieces. Some structures, once shattered, could not be reassembled. They could only be replaced.
They could only be replaced. The thought was cold and clear in her mind as she watched Anubis dress, his movements sharp with a new urgency. The hum from the Resonance Chamber was a tangible vibration in her teeth now, a wrong frequency. It scratched at the edges of her perception, a screaming static beneath the ship’s normal operations.
He was buckling his belt when her voice stopped him, not soft, but stark in the perfumed quiet.
“Anubis.”
He turned, his expression already halfway to the door, to the crisis. “We don’t have time for more theory, little sister. That sound means the ice is cracking. Fast.”
She hadn’t moved to gather her robes. She lay where he had left her, naked on the black silk, the evidence of their coupling glistening on her inner thighs. Her posture was not an invitation. It was a statement. Her dark eyes held his, devoid of their usual calm empathy, replaced by a singular, biological focus.
“Forget about them for now.” The words were measured, each one weighted. “I want you to give me a souvenir before I marry Hélion. If you understand what I mean.”
Her gaze didn’t waver. She didn’t put her clothes back. She wanted a child from him, a living piece of this brutal, honest chaos to carry into her sanitized future. A souvenir to bring with her when the fight would be done. Her body was ready, her cervix waiting for his semen deposit, an anatomical truth she presented to him without poetry.
Anubis went very still. The crisis in the chamber, the datapad in his hand, it all receded. He looked at her—truly looked—seeing not the brilliant Caelis strategist, but the woman beneath, making a demand more profound than any contract. His smirk didn’t return. His face softened into something unguarded, almost startled.
“A souvenir,” he repeated, the word flat. He understood. He took a slow step back toward the bed, his eyes tracing the lines of her body. “You want to get pregnant. Now. With me.”
“Yes.”
“Because of what you felt?” He gestured vaguely between them. “The ‘feedback’?”
“No.” She shook her head, her hair fanning on the silk. “Because of what you are. He is kind. You are real. This war might take the kind. I want something real to survive it.”
He let out a long, slow breath, a sound of surrendering to a greater logic. The datapad chimed again, insistently. He glanced at it, then, with a decisive snap, shut it off and tossed it onto a far chair. The silence it left was filled by that terrible, growing hum.
“Okay,” he said, the word simple. He began to unfasten his belt again. “No more experiments. Just the transaction.”
But it wasn’t a transaction. The mood had shifted, distilled. When he joined her on the bed, he didn’t pounce. He moved over her with a deliberate gravity, cradling her face in one calloused hand. He kissed her, and this kiss was different—deep, searching, almost tender in its intensity. It was a signature.
“This might not take,” he murmured against her lips, a pragmatic ghost of a doubt.
“Then you’ll have to try again. Later.” Her hands came up to his shoulders, pulling him down. “But now, you need to finish deep. Don’t pull out. Don’t spare me. I want to feel it.”
A shudder went through him. “Fuck, Neph.”
He guided himself into her, and she was still swollen, sensitized, every nerve alive. The initial thrust was a slow, burning repopulation of a conquered space. She gasped, her heels digging into the small of his back, urging him deeper. He obeyed, sinking until their bodies were flush, no space between them.
He set a rhythm that was entirely different from before. It wasn’t about proof, or power, or chasing a mutual crash. It was methodical. Deep, rolling strokes designed for maximum penetration, each one a deliberate attempt to reach the fundus of her womb. The wet, slick sounds of their union were louder, obscenely purposeful.
“Right there,” she whispered, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. “Don’t stop.”
“I’m not gonna stop,” he grunted, his forehead against her temple. His pace was relentless, a machine designed for a single function. The pleasure built not in sharp peaks, but in a steady, rising tide of pressure and heat. She could feel the precise moment his control began to fracture, the rhythm faltering into something more primal.
His breath grew ragged, hitching in his chest. “You’re gonna feel it. I’m gonna pump my fucking seed so deep into you it’ll never wash out.”
His words were the trigger. Her climax rolled through her, a deep, internal convulsion that was less about sharp pleasure and more about a profound, muscular acceptance. Her walls clenched rhythmically around his shaft, milking him, pulling the release from him.
With a broken groan that was part triumph, part surrender, he drove home and held. His body locked, spine arched. She felt the hot, vital pulse of him deep inside, jet after jet, a flooding claim that seemed to go on forever. He collapsed onto her, his full weight pressing her into the mattress, as if by sheer mass he could force the deposit to take.
They lay there, entangled, for a long time. The hum from the chamber reached a fever pitch, then suddenly cut to an alarming silence. A new kind of tension replaced it—the vacuum left by a catastrophic event.
Anubis finally stirred, lifting his head. He looked down at her, his green eyes searching her face. He slipped from her body, and she felt the immediate, warm spill of his semen between her legs. She kept her thighs together, holding it in.
He touched her lower stomach, his palm broad and warm. “Souvenir deposited,” he said, his voice rough. The attempt at his old smirk failed, revealing only a raw, unfamiliar vulnerability.
The comms system across the room crackled to life, not with AION’s smooth tone, but with the panicked voice of a deck officer. “Security to Core Level Seven! Resonance Chamber integrity compromised! All medical staff to standby!”
The real world crashed back in. Anubis was on his feet in an instant, grabbing his tunic, his face hardening into the operative’s mask once more. But he paused, looking back at her. “Stay here. Lock the door. Whatever just happened down there… the pieces are already flying.”
Néphéthys nodded, finally pulling a sheet over herself, not to cover her modesty, but to cradle the warmth within her. The souvenir was taken. The replacement, perhaps, had already begun. And as Anubis vanished into the corridor, the ship screaming around him, she placed a hand on her abdomen and listened to the new, deeper silence.