Glitch (The Harem at the End of the Galaxy, #4) Read online

  Oh, they're highly evolved, all right. You have no idea.

  “Some problems aren't a problem.” Felicity smiled. “They're too easy to solve. The problem of making the device operational is one thing. I'm still not convinced it works. But, sure, we can rid you of your nuisance hard-on before we move on to the real test.”

  Thank you, pheromones of the future.

  I promise you, these three girls weren't the kind of females who normally put their hands on a male co-worker when they were on the clock. They'd definitely been influenced by something in the very air around us. It was a great moment, two hot brunettes and one equally hot blonde swarming me from all directions. Grabby hands, greedy mouths. I backed happily into Jaime, who was herself backed into the nearest wall, the better to wrap her supple arms around me to hold me tight. Bette and Felicity were tongue-fighting on their knees with my hard dick trapped between them.

  Nice. Very nice.

  Jaime's hips rotated at high speed. She was grinding her clitty nubbin into my muscular ass-cheeks. Felicity and Bette had already figured out how to finger-fuck each other while still slobbering together all up and down the length of my shaft. Shifting my weight, tilting my leading edge more directly for Felicity's mouth, I wasted no time in flooding her taste buds with a full load of my hot goo.

  Drunk on sensation, at first I thought I was imagining the flashing red lights.

  I wasn't imagining those ear-blasting sirens, though.

  “We are at Defcon One. This is not a drill. This is an actual emergency. Immediate action is mandatory. Move to maximum readiness for immediate nuclear war.”

  Chapter 3

  Well, that sure cooled our jets. Talk about a mood-killer. Felicity acknowledged the alarm by placing her entire palm in an electronic box. The room went dead silent, the flashing red lights stopped, and the overhead fluorescents dimmed. An energy-saving measure, in case nuclear war really did break out.

  “We're out of time. Ready or not, we've got to make this test.” Jaime looked grim and not just because she hadn't had her turn to suck my lollipop.

  “Could be a false alarm,” Bette said.

  Nobody answered that. It was always a false alarm. Until it wasn't.

  “NASA must have finally picked up on the alien craft entering our solar system,” I said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Felicity.

  “I'm telling you. I've been there in the future. I've seen shit.”

  “You haven't been anywhere. Not yet.”

  “Maybe one of us should go,” Jaime said. “I'm not sure he's competent to handle the situation.”

  Bette shook her blonde head. “We can't risk one of us being lost. We each have critical knowledge and experience.”

  “I can't understand why Dyers thought he'd make a good test subject,” Jaime said. “That wild imagination of his... It could be a real problem.”

  “He's young, he's healthy, and, hell, he's the test subject we have,” Felicity said. “I think we've got no other serious option. Bette's right, Jaime. We can't risk one of us. Our knowledge of this technology is literally beyond priceless.”

  I was expendable. No surprise there. More deep breaths. “I don't know what to say to reassure you, but I'm fine to take this trip, and the device is going to work. I know that, all right? You have to trust me on this.” I tried a technique I'd tried before with the general. Talk slowly and calmly, and maybe you'll settle everybody down. “No point in arguing about it. Zip me forward into the future, and I can gather information for you. Leave me here rotating on my thumbs, and I'm fucking useless.”

  “We need more than information,” Jaime said. “Bring back some future tech. Some evidence.”

  I couldn't do that. Nothing traveled through time except human bodies. But, again, no point in arguing. They'd find out when they found out.

  They guided me around another bank of steel equipment that hummed a low sinister hum, and then I was stepping through the final airlock - the one that admitted me to the interior of the device. The too-tight pod reminded me of the old Mercury space capsule from the National Air and Space Museum. I'd always told myself astronauts were smaller in those days, like jockeys, but I had no idea if that was really true. This device was deliberately designed to be a tight fit because it was intended to maximize contact with every square inch of the average man's body.

  I dressed quickly, only bothering because they insisted. Another thing they'd find out soon enough - the good old jeans and tee-shirt were getting left behind. If the people of the future had actually been prudes, we'd have a real problem with this method of travel.

  “What if the future Earth is a smoking nuclear wasteland?” I wasn't supposed to hear Bette whisper into Jaime's ear, but my senses were on high alert. Hell, I'd be having the same thought if I hadn't already been across the galaxy. “He could come back dead. Or contaminated with radiation sickness.”

  “I'll be fine,” I said. “I don't know how many times I have to say it, but I'll be fine.”

  “I have the Geiger counter operational,” said Jaime. “If he comes back dead or dangerously contaminated, we never open the pod, but we have to know. If World War III has already broken out, we have to figure out a way to travel through time and stop it before it ever happens. I don't intend to spend the rest of my life in this fucking bunker.”

  “Pretty short life,” Felicity said. “We've only got supplies for a month.”

  “We'll all be fine.” One thing I knew for sure - nuclear war wouldn't end the Earth. A sneaky virus was the problem.

  “You're so brave,” Jaime said.

  “I'm not, I'm just... I've seen it. There's no nuclear war in our future.”

  The thought worried me a little as I settled into my confined quarters. DOD was readying itself for an attack, but they would stand down when no visible attack came. I knew that because I knew the virus had succeeded in quietly making the planet uninhabitable for the human male. Somehow, the aliens from Andromeda had convinced the Earth's military that they weren't a threat. Not a single shot had been fired, not a single bomb had been rocketed into space.

  How had they done it? Had they posed as traders, friendly explorers, bored tourists? It might be perfectly logical for the world's governments to accept them as friendly if they posed as friendlies. After all, the universe was a big place. Why would anybody fight over one tiny planet on one obscure solar system in the outer arm of a perfectly average galaxy? There was room enough for everybody.

  All the aliens had to do was pose as friendly or at least neutral. Then the Earth was never attacking first. They'd be dreaming of all the possibilities a space-faring civilization could bring to our planet. A smart alien intelligence would play on those dreams. How easily it could happen. How quietly. A tiny pod, perhaps no bigger than a falling meteor, could be slipped into the earth's atmosphere, and the deadly deed would be done. After that, the virus would replicate itself.

  Fuckers needed to get blown out of the sky sometime around Neptune.

  But nobody was going to listen to me.

  I had to find the general. We were running out of time, and only she could convince the Joint Chiefs to issue the command. If she was stuck on the other side of the galaxy, to the other side of the galaxy I would go. The time-travel team thought they were sending me a few years into the future of my own planet. Well, they hadn't perfected their calibration. They had no idea how far I was going.

  Chapter 4

  It was the first time, maybe the only time, I'd ever departed from the Earth in the experimental device. Something about the process of being transported changed my genetic code, not just from that day going forward, but also for some time reaching earlier into my past. You couldn't understand if you insisted on believing time was a river that always flowed in one direction. Time, for me, wasn't a line and never had been. It was indeed a loop, and I could circle around and around again and never reach an end or a beginning of that loop.

  In t
hat sense, there was no first time. The device wasn't a time-travel machine in the sense of a train carrying me to different stations in spacetime along our galaxy. It wasn't a car driving me to a destination.

  It was a surgical tool that tweaked all the cells of my body down to an elemental level. It changed me. I was still human, but I was also something other than human.

  I was, myself, the time machine.

  Even though I couldn't control when I would travel or where I would go, I only needed to use the experimental pod once. After that, my body was forever changed. I could travel, if unpredictably, and others in physical contact with me could travel too. Like the ability to exude the pheromones of the future, the ability to travel through time was a contagious condition.

  Of course, some contagions spread more easily than others. The pheromones seemed to change a person almost from the first moment you breathed it in, while the ability to travel through time seemed a little more unpredictable.

  What percentage of the women I seeded would develop the ability to travel between the far end of the galaxy and my origin time? A few of them, some of them, all of them?

  Was there a critical amount of gush I needed to spray to give them the power to travel? Or was it all a matter of individual immunity? Would some women pick up the gift on the first try, while others remained resistant for years?

  There was so much I didn't know about my new superpower.

  If it even was a power. If it wasn't a nuisance.

  But I couldn't complain about how my life had changed since I began to travel. My only complaint was how short that life might be. We were running out of time to stop the alien attack, and I never seemed to make a lot of progress. It was always two steps forward and one step back.

  This time I landed outside a building I recognized as the hospital. Darlene and an L-clone were in the lead, the L-clone healthy and smiling. They were both wearing the stripper nurse uniforms they'd been wearing on that first trip.

  “It's him!” Lacey flung herself into my arms to hug me tight. “It's real, he isn't just a legend.”

  “Well, look at you,” Darlene said. “Clayton Parks.”

  It was our first meeting, the one I didn't remember because the first thing I remembered was waking up on the table inside. My brain must have still been getting adjusted to its new talent. In fact, even as I had the thought, I began to sway on my feet. My knees had gone to jelly, and my head felt light and full of air.

  “He's going to faint.”

  “Let's get him inside.”

  Other women in white crowded around to catch me. Where did they come from? I didn't even see. There was a glitch, in me or in time or both, and then I was on the table looking up.

  “Is it supposed to be that big?” somebody asked.

  “How the hell should I know how big it's supposed to be?” asked somebody else.

  “I think it can get even bigger.”

  Two hands from two different women clutched my stalk. Experienced hands, velvet skin with muscle underneath that knew how to grip. I struggled to focus. This was the dream again, the dream I'd had all my life.

  No. No dream.

  This was real. This was the first time, but also it wasn't the first time. If I tried, I could remember what I needed to do.

  “The general.” I struggled to sit up. “I have to talk to the general right now. It's urgent.”

  “He's trying to say something,” somebody said.

  “He's confused. It takes time to make the adjustment.”

  “Maybe it's important.”

  “Our mission is more important. We need to start collecting seed.”

  “I'm first. I won the lottery. We all agreed.”

  “Well, climb on, then. Everybody wants their turn.”

  Was this what happened before, or had time changed? I wasn't sure. A long leg lifted and curled itself around my thighs. A bandage mini-skirt rolled up a pair of lithe hips. My cock, always cooperative, thrust toward the sky to welcome the sweet pink lips spreading over its drooling crown.

  Lacey was still healthy. No one knew yet they'd been infiltrated by an alien posing as one of them. Nobody knew a virus attacking the L-clones was about to be released.

  I could save her life. I could save all of them.

  If only somebody believed me.

  “There's someone who doesn't belong, someone working to bring about the end of humanity,” I said.

  “He's still trying to talk.”

  “Mmmm. I can get talking anywhere. Right now, I need him for his seed. Who knew these things were so big?” My partner flexed the inner walls of her pussy around my shaft. Squeezing and milking. Damn. Where did she learn that technique in an all-female society?

  The smell of citrus-vanilla musk overwhelmed my senses. Women were pressed close around us, and I could never fail to be aware of the onlookers pushing and shoving for a better look at the action.

  Enjoy the performance, ladies. I know I am.

  Evidently, their pheromones were powerful enough to distract me from the impending end of the world.

  Chapter 5

  Without warning, I snapped into the sub-sub-sub basement, bouncing back a few minutes to the moment when Felicity had just pulled the cuffs out of her lab coat pocket.

  “I don't need the speech,” I said. “Matters of national security, above-top-secret, even the president doesn't have a clearance this high, super-duper can't talk to anybody without a need to know on pain of lifetime detention. Already heard it, don't need to hear it again.”

  But the speech unrolled anyway. “It would be life-altering if you were to expose national security secrets beyond these walls.” Jaime was already moving me into position. I twisted around, but Bette caught my other arm and, well, I'm not a guy who hits girls. So there I was, with my nose up against the wall. “If there is any chance of you spilling these secrets to the outside world, you are to be immediately transferred to a federal facility where you will be sequestered until such time as an act of Congress deems it safe to release public information about this project.”

  The cuffs went around my wrists, securing them quickly behind my back. Shit. I didn't get cuffed last time around.

  What changed?

  “Hey, you're not sending me to detention now, are you? Don't you need me to be the lab rat?”

  “We need your silence more.” Felicity sounded grim.

  “This project isn't scheduled to be declassified for one hundred years. I need to speak with General Dyers a little sooner than that. I can't be silent, not now.” Fuck me, why did I say that? In this timeline, I was finding a way to do everything wrong.

  “You signed an agreement. If you become a security risk, you're subject to indefinite detention.”

  “We're about to go to Defcon One at any minute, and we're not qualified to handle this alone.”

  “He's babbling about nuclear war again,” Bette said. “It would have been nice if they'd selected a test subject who didn't have quite as many mental health challenges.”

  Felicity: “It does make you wonder why the brass chose him.”

  Jaime: “He wants to see the general real bad.”

  Bette: “You think they're actually... doing the deed? Them? I always pegged her as a total lesbo.”

  Jaime: “I always thought it was suspicious she had such a squeaky-clean reputation. It's the quiet ones you have to watch.”

  “I'm standing right here.” I flexed my wrists within cold steel. “I can hear everything you're saying.”

  Felicity: “I think we should call security. Have him removed, have him replaced.”

  Jaime: “But if he's the general's friend...”

  Bette: “She can make trouble with the committee. She can get our funding shut down.”

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Put me in the fucking device. I can't talk to anybody in there. Run your fucking tests. Get it over with. But then we really do need to find the general. The Earth is under attack. Hell, the whole fucking galaxy'
s under attack.”

  “There's something about him, though.” Jaime snuffled, and I realized she was breathing in a little too hard.

  The magic of future pheromones to the rescue...

  “Janice, are you grabbing his dick?” Bette squealed. “Janice!”

  Evidently, Janice was Jaime's name. Good to know.

  “Like you're not curious yourself, Becky. Like you don't want to know what it's like to handle a general's boy toy.”

  Becky was Bette.

  “Fuck you, Janice. And, fuck you, Felicia. This isn't what the science is all about.”

  Huh. So Felicity was Felicia. Nah, I was never swallowing that. It was too neat, too close to the names I'd invented for them before. Janice, Becky, and Felicia weren't real either. They were code names, maybe. Or the timeline was experiencing another glitch.

  Jaime/Janice's hands squirmed all over my dick.

  Focus.

  “We don't have a lot of time,” I said. “Take off these fucking cuffs, so we can get this show on the road.” As pleasant as the impromptu handjob might be, I had zilch desire to spend eternity bouncing back and forth between this bunker under the Pentagon and a hospital at the end of the galaxy. I needed to figure out some way to make forward progress.

  The pheromones began to affect all of them more strongly. Janice/Jaime was walking her fingers between my nuts to press on my taint. What the fuck? It was an exterior prostate massage of some kind, and it felt electric. Becky/Bette, despite her earlier protests, leaned in to curl her fist around my shaft.

  Felicia/Felicity couldn't just stand and watch. Rocking back on her haunches, she openly fondled herself through her lab coat as she watched her two colleagues play with my cock, balls, and taint. “This is completely unprofessional behavior,” she said in a dry voice with absolutely no force behind it.