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  The colonists all report seeing the same thing—Santa Claus.

  With their maiden voyage behind them, the crew of the Laughing Owl is sent on a mission to ferry scientists to an odd planet where, according to reports, Santa Claus has been sighted, flying high in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Nobody’s sure what Santa’s up to—he hasn’t delivered a single present.

  Captain Nick Steele agrees with the scientists who propose that Santa is a mass hallucination and probably the result of some unknown compound in the water, air or food. But Astrogator Cai isn’t so sure, because if Santa is a hallucination, everyone on the planet is having the same hallucination, identical to the smallest detail.

  As Christmas approaches, will the crew of the Laughing Owl solve the mystery of the hallucinogenic Santa or will the man prove to be real by delivering presents in the dead of night?

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  A Laughing Owl

  Copyright © 2015 A.C. Ellas

  ISBN: 978-1-4874-0152-8

  Cover art by Carmen Waters

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books Inc or

  Devine Destinies, an imprint of eXtasy Books Inc

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  www.eXtasybooks.com or www.devinedestinies.com

  A Laughing Owl

  By

  A.C. Ellas

  Chapter One: Returning to Earth

  “Tell me how this isn’t a typical military operation,” muttered Captain Nick Steele as he read over the change in orders. Originally, after mapping Tarasch, they were supposed to report at Hevetich for deployment with the Fourth Fleet. Now, they were being ordered back to Earth and it was “further orders pending arrival El-Five Station,” he read aloud. “What exactly is that supposed to mean? And why El-Five? I thought we only used that station for in-system flights.”

  “It means,” drawled his XO, Juan Cortez, “that they either don’t know what they want or they don’t want to commit anything to permanent record. Given that admiralty’s full of blockheads and ass-kissers, either possibility is equally likely. Sending us to El-Five instead of Orbit Control is their idea of stealth; they think our presence won’t be noted if we’re docking at El-Five, and never mind all the civvies who’ll see us.”

  Nick glanced at the craggy profile of his second in command, noting the easy grin. Cortez had a wicked sense of humor, to the point where Nick had been tempted to list his primary language as sarcasm on his latest fitness report. He looked next to Cai, the ship’s Gator, who still had a glazed I’m not here mentally look on his face, which wasn’t surprising since Cai was uploading a lot of data to the shipnet without the benefit of a physical connection.

  Sometimes, Cai’s sheer psionic power made Nick nervous, but mostly, he just liked looking at his arctic fox of a lover. Cai was long and lean, and there was an air about him at the best of times that made one think he wasn’t entirely present in the real world. This ethereal air, combined with his pale skin, platinum white hair, slanted, elfin features and large blue eyes the precise hue of fine tanzanite always made Nick think of a fox.

  They were gathered in Nick’s office, a room just off the bridge dominated by a console nearly as capable as the one in Cai’s chambers. The bulkheads were painted a soothing honey tan, which matched the faux golden oak of the desk and bookcase. The chairs were standard ergonomic faux leather office chairs, but the rich brown of the fake leather complemented the rest of the furniture.

  Astrogator Cai set the half-sphere crystal down and stretched his back slowly. “It seems odd that admiralty would go to the trouble and expense of sending a messenger drone when they could have just alerted us at Hevetich.”

  “Perhaps,” said Nick. “But then, they have no way of knowing when we’d reach Hevetich. For all they know, we could still be in the middle of the mapping.”

  “And if they sent the change in orders directly to Hevetich, the fleet commanders there could and would question the orders that takes a ship of the line out of their fleet,” Cortez added. “We aren’t part of Fourth Fleet until we reach Hevetich and report in, you see.”

  “So the fleet commanders can’t complain about losing us because they don’t know they have us yet?” Cai cocked his head and Nick refrained from grinning like a fool at the adorable mannerism.

  “Pre-cise-ly,” Cortez drawled.

  Nick forced his mind back to business. “How long to reach the hardpoint for Sol system?”

  “Let me think,” requested Cai, and the glazed look in his eye that indicated he was accessing the shipnet returned.

  Nick had learned that Cai was never not linked to the ship’s networks—even when he slept, a corner of his mind maintained the connection to his ship, so it took Cai only a moment to manage full immersion in the shipnet, and all without needing the physical connection of a datajack like everyone else.

  “Quickest transit time, in-system through Tarasch, three days, eight hours. Transit along the outer system only, two weeks, one day, four hours. I’ve routed the orders to the appropriate stations and made the requisite hard copies.” Cai came out of the shipnet and looked at Nick.

  “I think the in-system transit is our best option,” Nick said. “I don’t fancy taking two weeks to skirt the system like we’re afraid of it, especially not now that we have it mapped.”

  “I concur,” agreed Cortez.

  “I’ll go plot the new course,” Cai said, standing. He gave them both a civil nod and strode out of Nick’s office.

  “I’ll go soothe the ruffled feathers.” Cortez stood as well. “You know how it is, any sort of change and people complain.”

  “Thank you, Juan,” said Nick, grinning back at the man in shared amusement at the vagaries of their crew. Cortez slipped out of the office, leaving Nick alone for the moment.

  Nick leaned back in his chair. He’d been captain of the Laughing Owl for less than a month, but he already had a crew he could depend on, officers he trusted and an Astrogator who was something more than a friend. Sometimes, he had the urge to pinch himself to see if he was dreaming. Could life get any better than this, he wondered and not for the first time.

  * * * *

  Jumping was one of the joys of Cai’s life, and emerging from the hyperawareness of the number storm and subsequent flight through the physics gone awry of subspace was a wrenching adjustment he didn’t much care for. He shook it off and checked to make certain he was in the right system. He relaxed marginally when the scans proved he was in Sol system and at the outer marker. Unfortunately, he was screaming inbound at point seven five c.

  He throttled back the engines and funneled the excess thrust forward to slow himself down. His body shuddered a little from the stresses of deceleration, a reaction he ignored since it didn’t hurt any more than shivering did. He was well within his structural safety margins. As he slowed, he
worked out his inbound course. When he reached point five c, he killed the thrust and idled the engines. He didn’t shut them down because they took a long time to warm up, and he preferred to have instant power should he require it.

  Laughing Owl was on a perfect inbound vector now, coming in above the plane of the ecliptic as requested of Space Corps ships. There was so much traffic in the home system that it was easier and safer for the Corps ships to avoid the trouble by flying above the disk of the system. It was also faster, because Cai didn’t have to worry about the orbital position of Sol’s planets or asteroids. Once past the Kuiper belt, the occasional inbound comet was the most he had to contend with.

  In fact, there was one now, and it was one his computer banks recognized. He pinged Nick via the shipnet, and once he had the captain’s attention sent the image of Halley’s Comet and said, Just passed an old friend.

  Not as pretty now as he will be in what, ten years?

  Eleven years, six months. And no, he doesn’t outgas this far from Sol.

  Nick chuckled. Nice jump, by the way, but the reentry was a little fast.

  Unavoidable, the gradient coming in from Tarasch is nearly vertical. Cai paused as he locked his deceleration program into the computer. Are you coming for dinner?

  Since no aliens have leapt out of hiding to attack us, yes. I’ll be there in a pico.

  Immensely cheered, Cai released the connection and began the procedures for exiting the Astrogation Chamber safely. He wasn’t sure why Nick had started cooking for him, but he appreciated the man’s thoughtfulness even more than he appreciated Nick’s skills in the kitchen. The man can really cook, he told himself with a fond smile. He’s almost as good in the kitchen as he is in bed.

  Cai opened his eyes and watched the huge crystal array retract into the ceiling. The array was built of neurologic circuits, amplifiers, transmitters and other various components that were instrumental in enabling the full immersion and physical feedback loops of the Astrogator to the ship. From a subjective point of view, when Cai linked to the ship, he became the ship, the steel and carbon composite of the hull became his skin, the engines his heart, the life support systems his lungs. Even when he wasn’t in the Chamber, he remained intimately linked to his other self, his ship-self.

  The ceiling panel closed silently once the array was fully retracted, and even though he was no longer in full immersion, Cai remained in his acceleration couch for a long moment. It was a major effort for him to move after any amount of time spent in the Chamber, but he knew that the only cure for his exhaustion was food and rest, in that order. Food because what he did burned a huge amount of energy. He wasn’t diabetic as the ancients knew it, but psi took energy, and energy in the body came from sugar in the form of adenosine tri-phosphate, the end product of the citric acid cycle of cellular metabolism.

  To replenish his energy, he had to eat. He knew from experience that if he tested his blood sugar levels right at this moment, before leaving the Chamber, he’d be close to or at a critically low level—fifty or sixty milligrams per deciliter. He stood slowly and stretched muscles gone stiff from laying motionless, idly wondering why the holoshows always portrayed Astrogators as fat when he couldn’t seem to put weight on even when he tried.

  He exited the Chamber, and tired though he was, he felt a smile stretching his lips and a stirring in his groin at the sight of Nick.

  His captain was as hot as they got with a body that wouldn’t shame a professional athlete, spacer-short black hair, a pleasingly square face with a well-shaped nose and an appealingly cleft chin. His light brown skin glowed with health and his hazel eyes sparkled. His eyes varied from blue to grey to green, depending on his mood and the lighting, though usually they mostly looked grey. Today, they were greenish, which was Cai’s favorite for all that he liked Nick’s eyes no matter what color they happened to be.

  Nick wrapped him in an embrace as soon as he was clear of the hatch, and Cai felt himself relaxing as he allowed his head to rest on Nick’s strong shoulder. The comfort was just what Cai needed just then. It was amazing how Nick seemed to know what he needed, often before he even realized he needed it. Nick held him for several minutes before he firmly supported and guided him to the dining room where their meal was being laid out by a couple of Cai’s adjuncts.

  He had six adjuncts in total, human-shaped organic computers tuned to his brain waves. They were more than AIs but had no truly independent sentience. The adjuncts were subsets of Cai’s own mind and programmed with functions to assist in Astrogation and additionally to take care of Cai outside the Chamber. The adjuncts had once been humans but condemned to death by the courts. Instead of killing them and wasting all that grey matter, the Guild claimed them.

  After a full telepathic scan to make absolutely certain the subject really was guilty of the crimes they’d been convicted for, they broke all synaptic connections between the neurons of the brain and re-synapsed them into the patterns that formed the Astrogator’s adjuncts. The person they had been was destroyed in the process, so the legal terms of the death sentence were met and the brain was repurposed to something far more useful to society.

  Cai sank into his seat and took a deep breath, enjoying the wonderful aromas of Nick’s cooking for about a nanosecond before he dug in like a starving man. Nick wasn’t a slow eater by any means, but he couldn’t hope to keep up with Cai’s pace. Cai also ate quite a bit more than Nick did and his captain saw to it that his plate was always refilled from the plentiful supply that’d been prepared. Nick always made enough that there would be leftovers that Cai could reheat for snacks.

  When Cai finally pushed back from the table, he was feeling much better. He cocked his head at Nick and raised an eyebrow. “Time for dessert?”

  “Absolutely.” Nick shot to his feet and reached for him.

  Cai allowed Nick to draw him up, but then, he took point, pulling Nick toward his bedroom. They hadn’t been lovers for all that long—not quite two weeks, though they had shared some very erotic dreams before Nick had overcome Cai’s reluctance for physical intimate contact. Cai had feared to burn out Nick’s mind due to his inability to hold telepathic shields while engaged in such erotic, emotional, intimate contact with another person. But Nick was tough, a natural impervious under normal circumstances, the most Cai could ever read from him, during sex, was surface thoughts and feelings. It made him an ideal partner.

  However, Cai was starting to miss the dreams. He’d enjoyed the freedom they allowed, freedom to play with things like bondage without fear of harming his partner. Nick’s sexual submissiveness still surprised him, almost as much as it gratified him, and though he frequently gave Nick turnabout, he knew he didn’t have to. Nick was always content to just be taken.

  When they reached the bedroom, Cai pushed Nick down onto the bed and straddled him, pinning his wrists to the bed. He leaned close to Nick’s ear and whispered, “I’m going to ride you hard.”

  Nick groaned something that sounded suspiciously like, “Take me, master,” but Cai was sure he’d imagined that last word. Cai stripped Nick without allowing the man to rise from the bed. And as he bared each limb, he secured it with some rope he’d rigged up the night before.

  He’d found the silken rope in a dusty box in an out of the way closet on C-deck. The room the closet was in was one of those odd spaces with no identifiable purpose. Cai had locked it with his personal code. He had plans for that room.

  Cai could sense both Nick’s trust and his excitement, which assured him that Nick didn’t mind being tied down. That, and the huge erection he sported, which waved in the air now that his pants were off, because Cai had tied him on his back. He pushed a pillow under Nick’s butt to raise it off the bed and give him a better angle for penetration then sat back and admired his work.

  Nick looked so hot like this that Cai had to restrain himself to keep from pouncing on the man and using him like a sex toy. Nick looked at him and pulled against the wrist re
straints. “C’mon, what are you waiting for? I’m tied down and at your mercy.”

  Cai stroked Nick’s jutting pole. “You like this?”

  “I do,” Nick told him, flexing his hips to rub himself against Cai’s hand. “I’d like it better if you were in me, though.”

  That was all Cai needed. He quickly undressed and climbed onto the bed between Nick’s widely spread legs. He stroked those legs, loving the heavy muscles that turned them into works of erotic, masculine art, working his way up to his goal. When he slid the first finger into Nick, the man arched his back and cried out, “Oh, yeah. Give me more of that.”

  Cai inserted a second finger then a third and pumped them in and out, purportedly to loosen Nick’s anal ring, but mostly because he enjoyed watching and feeling Nick’s reactions to being finger-fucked. Once he deemed Nick good and ready, panting with lust and pumping his cock in the air, Cai removed the fingers and pressed the pucker with his lubricated cock. He slid in easily at first then met resistance. He thrust powerfully, introducing his length into Nick millimeter by millimeter.

  The noises of enjoyment coming from Nick only encouraged Cai, who thrust harder to get those last millimeters in until he was fully sheathed in Nick’s ass. He set a hard, fast rhythm, looking Nick in the eye as he did so. Nick looked back with an outpouring of love that left Cai a little breathless.

  “I like it hard and fast,” Nick told him conversationally, as if he wasn’t being pummeled by Cai’s cock.

  “And I like giving it to you,” Cai managed to gasp back. He thrust harder and faster, and Nick’s ass worked itself on him like a true cockslut. Neither man could last long under such intensity, but Cai managed to pace himself so that he came at the same time as Nick did. In the aftermath, he used his weak telekinetic power to untie his partner, then the two of them cuddled until they’d recovered enough for Nick to the turn the tables.