Earth Shine

Part Three

by Shadar

June 2019

Chapter Eight

The Arion HQ along the rugged Washington coast.

(While Pete was struggling to fit into the Velorian camp, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Bull Satrop of Texas, a man who had turned his back on his country, his planet and even his species to support the Arions, was struggling inside the Arion Headquarters.)

Bull jogged after Scarlet, who was floating/walking further into the complex, moving slightly faster than he could walk. As always, she was playing her dominance game — forcing him out of his comfort zone as she highlighted his relative weakness. She liked to remind him why the Arions called his people Frails.

What he didn’t know was that she was hurrying to a meeting with the Governor-General, who was waiting for her now in the DISC command center.

A place Scarlet had always avoided.

In her eyes, the doxy-trained whores of DISC were mind-fucking an entire planet. They used the psychological tools of Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance to seduce powerful men to their cause, twisting them around their slender fingers, which often as not were wrapped around their dicks.

It was all in sharp contrast to Scarlet’s job as a Primal Warrior. Her role had always been both simple and high-integrity: protecting the Arion cause from Velorian interference by projecting raw, physical power whenever required. She’d listened to many stories of conquest during her training. Stories about Primes like herself conquering an entire planet of Terrans. She was convinced it could be done on Earth as well. She and a few of her sisters could easily destroy Earth’s entire military, and then destroy any civilian resistance that arose. No one on Earth had a weapon that could stop them.

But conquest by force wasn’t their mission here. Instead, the Emperor wanted to preserve Earth’s resources and population while bringing the planet into the Empire. Earth was a militaristic planet whose troops could be useful in dealing with rebellious Terran planets, and that would free the Arion military for more important missions.

To accomplish that, the Governor had given the Earth mission to an agency named DISC. As he saw it, Earth was full of arrogant and narcissistic men in leadership roles, and the more important they thought they were, the more they desired greater power. Power the Empire could grant, in any way a man desired it.

Very soon now, the leaders of the most powerful nations — all of them subverted to the Arion cause — would come together to reveal the nature of extraterrestrial involvement on Earth, ending forever the speculation about UFO’s. They would also ask for entry into the Arion Empire on behalf of the entire planet.

While patriots in each country would certainly rise up to oppose them, they would be quickly dealt with by the Terran leadership, with silent and hidden Arion help as needed. Bull had convinced the Governor-General that the vast majority of his people would be ecstatic over the offers of prosperity, technology, trade, the eradication of disease and greatly extended life-spans. The last, of course, depending on how useful one was to the Arion cause. Few people could turn down prosperity and health combined with a permanent membership at the Fountain of Youth.

While all of that made a certain kind of sense to Scarlet, it left her dreaming about facing a Terran rebellion large enough to warrant the unrestricted use of her powers. She also dreamed of the day when she’d be allowed to teach Bull Satrop that she wasn’t merely his glorified bodyguard and driver. There were exactly 206 bones in a Frail’s body, and she knew how to break every single one of them.

Scarlet’s meeting with the Governor-General was brief and very painful. Given that Bull was being groomed to be the first Governor of Earth, or “King” as he called it, the governor demanded that Scarlet assume Freya’s previous role as his handler. After all, she already had a relationship of sorts with him.

Scarlet protested angrily, claiming she detested the man. He was the worst kind of Frail in her opinion — weak, narcissistic and exploitive. Clever and manipulative and completely amoral, caring only for himself. If not for her explicit orders to protect him, she would have killed him many times over.

The Governor-General fired back that her mission to protect Bull had not changed. But he gave her one concession — she could manage the relationship any way she wished, just as long as she personally ensured that Bull Satrop would be prepared to sit on what he called the “Throne of Earth”. Bull’s ruthlessness and knowledge of the inner workings of the power structures of Earth would ensure that Earth’s billions of new subjects would be useful to the Empire.

The Governor finished by reminding Scarlet that there were vast profits to be made for their families back on Aria. The Arion system awarded economic credits to everyone involved in bringing new worlds into the Empire, and Earth was a prize above any other world.

Scarlet scoffed at the talk of profit. She cared nothing for money, which she considered obscene. She was a Dominionist who cared only that Arion power and prestige expanded throughout the galaxy. She wanted to ensure a Homo Supremis future.

The Governor laughed at her sophomoric foolishness, reminding her that despite all the patriotic speeches he’d heard (and given), all of them designed to seduce the gullible and the poor into dying for the Empire, it was really about profit for the ruling clans. He reminded her that she’d been born to Clan Aerie, the proudest and most powerful of all the warrior clans. She was here on Earth to make her family proud — and to further expand their wealth, along with the other ruling clans.

Scarlet glared at him with clenched fists, her body turning hard-cut with superhuman muscle, knowing she could easily kill such a lesser Arion. Struggling to control her anger, her eyes leaked enough power to blow his hair backward and make his clothing smoke. The Governor merely grinned at her, knowing she’d never cross the line to dishonor her family. He laughed at her silly display of anger, her eyes burning so brightly.

It was all Scarlet could do to turn away and run out the door before she lost control… and right into Bull, who was waiting outside.

He dove to the side as she glared at him with the fire of anger still bright in her eyes. Yet instead of burning him to ash as she SO greatly desired, she merely turned to stalk off.

Bull had to run again to catch up with her. “Hey, so what’s… Freya’s… status?” he shouted while gasping for air. “Is she… going to be… OK?”

Scarlet stopped so quickly that Bull ran into her, bouncing off her dense body to land painfully on his ass. “OK?,” she glared down at him. “She has third-degree burns over half her body. She suffered an Orgone containment failure. She’ll be in the healing tanks for weeks, maybe months, and likely will never be the same again. No, she’s definitely not OK.”

“Can I see her?”

“No. She’s in a medically-induced coma. Once she awakens from that, she’ll be sent directly home to complete her rehabilitation.”

“She WILL want to see me first.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Bull. You’re just an asset she’s been working. Don’t think for a moment that there was anything more between the two of you.”

Bull gritted his teeth, resisting the urge to tell Scarlet how he and Freya really felt about each other. But he knew that would only draw her derision. Instead, he slowly got back to his feet to say: “You don’t know everything about her work. Or about us.”

“And I’m truly glad I don’t. Unlike her, I wasn’t born to win wars with my pussy.”

Bull jerked his head up to stare at her in shock. “That’s what you think of Freya? Do you look down on everyone in DISC?”

“Does it matter? We all have different ways to serve the Empire. Doesn’t mean I respect them all.” Scarlet cringed as she heard her own words. Would she be able to respect herself after this new assignment was done? “We all do our best according to our orders,” she finished lamely.

Bull grabbed her arm and tried to turn her, but she was rigid as steel and immovable. And then it suddenly hit him: “Holy shit! You’ve been told to replace Freya, haven’t you?” He smiled, eyes dancing.

Scarlet’s eyes flared red again, her chest rising and falling as she gulped air, adrenaline sending a surge of Orgone into her veins. Her red hair rose weightlessly to twist like a flame over her head. She’d never wanted to burn anyone more than she did right now. Bull was laughing at her. A mere Frail, taunting her? How dare he?!

Clenching her fists powerfully enough to have crushed diamonds, she wished she could just punch him into pink mist! It would feel even better than it had the first time, down on the beach, years ago.

But she didn’t do any of those things. She was a Lieutenant in service to the Empire, and she followed her orders. The Governor had barely touched on her true obligations. She had her family honor to uphold. Her father was a famous General who had won mighty battles, and his Aerie warriors had killed many Velorian Protectors over his long career. Her mother had personally ravaged an entire planet that had turned its back on the Empire, killing thousands and utterly destroying their military and industrial capacity, all with her bare hands. Yet here Scarlet was, unbloodied by battle and now ordered to control and protect and promote this arrogant Frail to lead a conquered planet. Far worse, she had to understand every thought in his head, and there was only one way to do that.

This wasn’t warrior’s work!

“Go to your quarters and await me,” she growled angrily. She then spun on her toe as she gave up all pretense of walking to fly off into the inner reaches of the Complex.

Bull stood in the corridor for several long minutes after Scarlet disappeared into the distance, smiling even brighter as he imagined how this proud, young Prime felt about being ordered to play a game she so despised. This was perfect. There was no one with a worse temperament for the job than Scarlet, but also no one as driven to uphold her family’s lofty reputation for duty.

He danced a little jig as he laughed. Oh, yes, this was going to be very entertaining. On so MANY levels.

Chapter 9

Bull turned to head back toward the quarters he’d shared with Freya, only stop stop and turn back around. If he was going to survive, he had to maintain a certain level of control over Scarlet, and he couldn’t do that if he didn’t understand her completely. So instead of following her orders, he followed her deeper into the Complex, walking down dimly lit corridors for the better part of a mile before finding her in one of the huge exercise rooms. Like everything else, the room had been laser-cut from solid rock.

Arions need to constantly work on their flexibility and suppleness to avoid stiffening into immovable steel, a drawback of their extreme muscles and invulnerability. And given they were a warlike culture, personal combat was the preferred way of loosening up.

Bull paused at a thick, armored porthole that looked into the chamber, finding it was actually a massive hangar-like room large enough to park a dozen of Earth’s largest aircraft. Scarlet was sparring with a dozen men and women, tumbling her way through the room, sending the more ordinary Arions flying in all directions as she let loose her frustrations. Her opponents crashed into the walls hard enough to shatter rock, only to return to attack her as a group, each of them landing blows that would have dented military-grade armor. Scarlet shrugged them off as she took them all on at once.

Minutes later, she was the only one standing.

Bull knew she’d been born into the Aerie-clan, but he’d never see her unleash her power like this. The warriors she was sparring with each had dozens of times the strength and vitality of the strongest human who had ever lived, and enough personal toughness to turn a rifle bullet with their bare skin. But given they were from lesser clans, they lacked heat vision and had limited flight ability — just like the technicians that had carried him up from the beach.

The result was that Scarlet threw them around like they were paper puppets. Between slamming them into the ceiling with neck lifts, their skulls cracking the rock, to kicking them hard enough to send them flying the length of the massive chamber, to punches that would have stopped a main battle tank in its tracks. To their credit, the lesser warriors kept getting up and coming at her, often all at the same time. But even then, it was clearly not a fair fight.

Her opponents eventually gave up and remained on the floor. Scarlet stepped over them to walk from that chamber through a hundred meter long tunnel into the next one. The walls of this new chamber were partially melted from frequent blasts of heat vision and were deeply indented from massive impacts, with hundreds of huge divots where fists had missed a face and hit mere rock instead. This was a room that only a Prime could survive in. Three women who looked like ultra-fit supermodels began to circle Scarlet, along with a huge man who was as muscular as the comic-book Superman. Their fists were all clenched, eyes wary, feet floating above the floor. Dressed in tiny but artistic bits of colorful fabric, they each had an order of magnitude greater strength than the first group of warriors, not to mention sufficient invulnerability to deflect a sabot round from an Abrams tank. If Ursa, that mythical Kryptonian from Earth’s fiction, had truly existed, these men and women could have each held their own against her.

But Scarlet was something more. She was an Aerie-Prime with anger to burn.

At four against one, it looked bad for Scarlet at first, what with her getting knocked around by supersonic punches and blasts of heat vision and kicks that would have dented a battleship. Staring through the foot-thick armored glass, Bull’s eyes teared from the intensity of their heat vision as he saw all four of Scarlet’s opponents grab her at the same time. They were well-trained and skillful warriors in the extreme, superhumans all.

Scarlet went crazy in their grasp, spinning around like a pinwheel, her lethal eyes blazing as she punched and kicked so fast that she was little more than a blur. The air filled with a confetti of bright colors as her opponents clothing disappeared under the blows, her blasts of heat vision turning skin white-hot. Bull couldn’t move his eyes fast enough to follow Scarlet, but he saw the Primes she was fighting flying backward to crash into the walls so hard that they left deep impressions in the rock.

Yet still they managed to stay in the fight, delivering combined blows that staggered Scarlet. At one point, the huge man pounded her like a nail into the stone floor, burying her to her shoulders, only to have her explode from the floor, sending huge chunks of rock flying as she attacked them again.

As the superhuman battle continued, Bull was tantalized by the way the combatants grew more and more aroused. Such was the nature of Arion combat. Especially the man, whose “stature” would have intimidated a porn star. At one point Scarlet grabbed his erection to swing him around by it before launching him into the gaggle of women, bowling them all down. They leapt screaming back to their feet as they flew toward Scarlet, the huge man driving them forward with his hugely muscled arms, the entire group wrapping themselves around Scarlet in the most basic of Arion techniques — crushing their opponent with the strength of arms and legs.

They would have succeeded if Scarlet had merely been made of steel or titanium or even the hardest stone. But she was made from something far harder, and she proved that by slowly turning the tables. She started by gripping the man’s chest with her powerful legs, and then wrapped her arms around the chests of two other women to squeeze with all her strength. She bent their unbreakable ribs inward until the pressure on their hearts grew so extreme that they quit pumping blood.

Dropping the three unconscious warriors to the floor, knowing they’d recover soon enough, she turned to face the final woman, who was so beautiful that she made Bull’s heart ache. Her purple-black hair signaled that she was Spartus-clan, which meant she was in Scarlet’s league, strength-wise. The two of them traded equal punches and kicks at super-speed until their fight began to change its flavor, with wrestling moves replacing punching ones, their positions becoming more sexual than combative by the minute.

Bull had always heard that combat between closely-matched Arions was decided during sex, without regards to gender, but he’d never seen such a thing. He stared in utter fascination as Scarlet and the Primal women attacked each other with lethal passion, Scarlet’s red hair intermingling with purple-raven hair as it flew wildly, their scissoring bodies little more than a hyper-speed blur to Bull’s eyes. Clitoris dueled with clitoris as their lower bodies began to glow cherry-red from friction alone, their wild, screaming orgasms gradually becoming perfectly synchronized as Scarlet filled the air with her pheromones. While this was technically sex, there was no doubt that it was also combat, with each woman struggling to draw Orgone from the other during the loss of control of their orgasms, hoping to deplete their opponent and grow stronger themselves.

Bull had never imagined that Arion sex could be this violent or so arousing. He couldn’t help but imagine that he was that super man. Surely, with such endowment and muscular power, he’d have been able to tap deeply into Scarlet’s power.

Unfortunately, the super man he envied was still laying unconscious on the floor, struggling to breathe, his heart barely beating.

Bull was gasping for air himself as he stared at Scarlet, knowing he had to force himself away from the porthole. If Carmen saw him pleasuring himself while watching her, she’d likely forget her orders and kill him in some gruesome way.

Staggering back the way he’d come, hoping no one would notice his profound arousal, he walked as fast as he could given his condition. Losing control was a good way to get dead around here.

He was still red-faced when he staggered into his apartment, only to find that all of Freya’s things had been removed. Every trace of her, even the photographs of them together, it was all gone. Was this how the Arions handled failure? By making the injured vanish as if they’d never existed? Did they celebrate only the victors?

If so, this was even better than he’d hoped. For all their power and violence, despite their blatant racism and arrogance, he truly loved living among these superhumans. For he’d learned that while they could crush steel in their bare hands, they were no match for the cunning and focused intelligence of a man who’d fought his way to the top in the dog-eat-dog world of American politics. A man of Imperialist background who understood what it took to rule a human world.

Or an Empire.

Yet he was very aware that even the youngest of Arion children could easily kill him with their bare hands. Sometimes, in those moments when weakness and doubt filled him, he felt like a moth circling a bright and seductive flame. But those moments of doubt were rare. He knew what he had to offer the Empire, and so did the Governor-General.

Arion power turned him on in ways he would have trouble describing. He found it intensely arousing that even in her teens, Scarlet could stand at ground zero of a nuclear burst and not singe a single strand of her gorgeously red hair. She could work the hardest steel in her bare hands with no more difficulty than he could work soft clay. She could fly under her own power, beyond the edges of a solar system to dive through a blazing wormhole, shaped by the infinitely violent event-horizon of a black hole. She was a young woman of extraordinary beauty who looked confidently forward to a lifespan measured in centuries.

To say she was “out of his league” was a profound understatement.

Yet there was a chance, if he played it just right, that she might someday sit beside him as his young Queen, her blazing eyes vaporizing their enemies like dragon-fire. A woman with erotic powers and skills beyond anything a Terran woman could even imagine.

He stripped off his clothing as he fantasized about making love to Scarlet as they floated among the high, puffy clouds like gods. His fondness for air sex aroused him further as he walked toward the huge shower. Once inside, jets of hot water blasted at him from every direction — walls, floor and ceiling. He dialed the force and temperature down to a comfortable level as he sorely missed Freya’s soapy body in his arms — most of their sex had taken place in this shower.

Feeling small and helpless standing there alone, he sustained himself by imagining the power that would be his when he was finally King of Earth. A King with a beautiful Queen at his side. A Primal woman of Aria.

Once out of the shower, he forced his thoughts and emotions back under control. Pulling on a long robe, made as it was from the snow-white fur of an exotic animal from their home-world of Aria, he began digging around in the cabinets. He quickly found some of the excellent wine he’d brought on his last visit here. Wine which unfortunately would normally be completely wasted on Scarlet.

Like Freya had, she drank cocktails laced with alien drugs that created specific moods. Alcohol had no noticeable impact on her, not even after drinking quarts of it. In the end, their most potent intoxicant wasn’t a liquid of any kind, but rather a band of Velorian gold.

He considered it likely that Scarlet would arrive at his door wearing such a gold choker, given her new assignment. The peculiar nature of the radioactive inclusions in Velorian gold would suppress her thyroid gland. That would in turn reduce Orgone metabolism in her body to near zero, leaving her intoxicated and aroused and radiating pheromones from her hair. Most importantly, her strength would be greatly reduced, with her power of flight and heat vision vanishing, along with a portion of her invulnerability.

He was planning to use that gold-induced gap in her usual invulnerability to get her very drunk, and that would lead to some humorous moments. No woman was hornier or crazier than a gold-inhibited and drunken Arion. And given that Scarlet was obligated to replace Freya, that meant reading his mind to ensure his loyalty, which Arion women can only do in fragments, the window into his mind opening only briefly during orgasm. She would need a number of such moments to fully read him.

Sighing, he knew he could not allow that to happen. Instead he was going to teach Scarlet a lesson. He had to find a way to balance her power. She’d crossed the line earlier today when she blew him over the edge of the hangar doorway, and he was going to remind her that she alone was responsible to ensure that he someday sat on his throne. His thoughts soared again as he imagined that his future Queen might have red-hair and piercing blue eyes that could burn anyone who challenged his right to rule. A young and impetuous Queen who would wage war on his enemies with all the power of a mythical dragon.

That future was far more exciting than even the best sex of his life, which Scarlet could certainly deliver. Arriving wearing gold, radiating pheromones that would normally ensure a man’s total arousal, she would have the beauty to seduce anyone, along with enough residual strength to move beyond seduction if that’s what was required to read a man. What she didn’t know was that he had a genetic anomaly that reduced the effects of Supremis pheromones, a rarity that Freya had found professionally interesting.

It was his sole weapon against Scarlet. He might very well be the one man on Earth that she couldn’t seduce or control. Yet that was her mission.

He was smiling broadly at the irony of that when the door suddenly buzzed.

His thoughts instantly sharpened as his focus and confidence grew. He might have a ways to go before winning his throne, but before this day ended, perhaps he’d be a little closer to winning his Queen.

Walking to the door, he took a deep breath before opening it. He found Scarlet standing there as expected, wearing a fur robe like his own, a bright band of gold shimmering around her neck.

Her face was half covered with her red hair, her youthful face clearly telegraphing her unfamiliar intoxication, not to mention her arousal. Tilting her head, she looked at him with all the confidence of a young goddess.

She was so beautiful that he nearly forgot his long-laid plans.