Tap-Dancing the Minefields Read online

  Tank’s fingers were sliding in and out easily, and he couldn’t wait anymore. Tank ran his slicked hand over his own cock and then moved close enough to line up with Lev’s hole.

  “Hurry up. I’m dying here if you don’t get your dick in me.”

  Tank pressed in carefully. His cock fit, but Lev’s hole was almost painfully tight.

  “More. Fuck me. I’m not going to break, Clyde. Stop treating me like I’m going to break.”

  “What?” he asked, his mind struggling to make sense out of the words. “Tank. My name is Tank.” He grunted as he finally got all the way in. “Okay, this is good. This is very good. This might be over embarrassingly fast, it’s so good.” He rocked back and forth, and Lev moved with him, the two of them synchronizing their thrusts. Lev’s words finally failed him as he devolved into wordless groans. Tank speeded up, their bodies slapping together. As Tank’s orgasm approached, both of Lev’s hands were busy trying to keep Tank’s thrusts from slamming him into the wall. Damn. Lev had a cock. Tank normally didn’t forget that other people had bodies and needs and cocks, but his brain was not firing on all cylinders.

  Tank shivered hard and then reached around and grabbed Lev’s cock with his oil-slicked hand. Lev went wild. Bucking violently, he impaled himself on Tank’s cock and then threw himself forward. “Yes. Yes.” Tank held on while Lev took over the thrusting. Tank strained not to come before Lev. Finally Lev’s body spasmed, every muscle going tight before he came against the wall, and Tank drove in one more time and came himself.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my blissful God,” Lev mumbled. Tank leaned against Lev’s back and breathed in the warmth of his lover. Lover. That was unexpected. Now that the lust was sated, Tank’s big brain had come partially back online. Something was definitely off.

  Before Tank could say anything, the door to the closet came open and the biggest man he’d ever seen stood there pointing a weird-ass gun at him. Even stranger, the guy had patches of pale and midnight-black skin across his body. Panic drove Tank into action—he dropped into a crouch and struck out with his boot at the man’s knee. Unfortunately the man moved inhumanly fast, grabbing Tank’s foot and yanking him out of the closet, then dragging him down the hall.

  “John! Stop! He was… um, helping.” Lev ran after them, hopping as he tried to get his pants up.

  Tank was still flailing, his pants hanging open and one leg in the air because John had a seriously strong grip.

  “We… um… we need to get to engineering, or maybe medical,” Lev rushed to say. “We need to shut down ventilation.”

  “I have,” John said with a bit of a growl in his voice. Tank usually didn’t go for the he-man sort, but in his current state of sex-on-the-brain, the growl made Tank’s cock sit up and take notice. “This is a ship function. It comes from the walls.”

  “It?” Lev asked.

  “Mating hormones. Someone set off the mating functions.”

  “Oh, shit.” Lev turned white. “We have mating hormones on the ship?” Tank had expected someone to start talking about demons and spells, so “ships” and “functions” felt a little out of left field. Lev looked down at Tank. “Oh, John, this is Tank. Tank, John.”

  “Hey.” Tank waved from the floor, and John finally dropped his foot so that he could scramble up off the ground.

  “You do not belong here.” Suddenly Tank found himself staring down the end of that oddly shaped weapon again. He threw his hands up in the air.

  “Hey, I was just delivering food, so technically I should be in the commissary, but I couldn’t stop the elevator, and trust me, I tried. So no shooting the random private. I mean, I’ve been shot at, and I really don’t like it, so if we can avoid any pain or blood, that would be awesome.”

  Lev stepped to John’s side and put a hand on his freakishly oversized arm. “We need to get to the central environmental controls.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Tank looked from one of them to the other. This John guy pretty much set off all his demony warning bells, but “environmental controls” was sounding a little too scientific. “Maybe it’s the crazy-making lust talking, but are you guys suggesting….” Tank stopped and looked from one to the other.

  Lev blushed. “Let’s get to the central core area,” he said without answering.

  “Uh-huh,” Tank said. “That’s what I thought.”

  John shoved his gun in his holster. “Don’t act like you understand this, and if you step one foot out of line, I don’t have a problem killing you and leaving your blood to stain the floor.”

  Tank blinked.

  Lev shouted back at them from halfway down the hall. “John, not now. Do your intimidation thing later. There’s a very small window here before I lose myself to this need.”

  “Yeah, what he said.” Tank smiled. John caught Tank by the arm and essentially shoved him ahead. Right. Don’t leave the unknown at your back. Tank actually approved of that rule, so ignoring the cold terror in his guts, he ran after Lev while trying to get his spent cock tucked back into his uniform.

  The curving hall led to a series of stairs that were far too tall for Tank to use easily. He had to frog-hop his way down, which was even less graceful than his usual. However, Lev used a hand on the wall and his long legs to easily navigate the awkward space, which suggested he was used to giant-sized stairs. Tank didn’t dare turn to see how John was handling it, because carelessness led to falling down and breaking bones.

  Lev stopped at a huge door with a spiral pattern embossed on the leatherlike wall. He rested his forehead against the pattern and took a deep breath. “I will not lose control,” he whispered.

  “If you need to, fuck someone fast and get back on the job,” John said. He pushed Tank to the side, but Tank chose to not take offense, especially since John was huge.

  “How are you controlling it?” Lev asked John.

  “Didn’t,” John said. “Fucked someone. You want me to fuck you?”

  Lev jerked upright. “No, that’s okay. I’m okay. On the job. Do we know what system this uses?”

  John grunted. “They didn’t invite me to learn the systems.”

  “Right.” Lev pressed his fingers into a groove on the side of the door, and it swung open. “Definitely hormone related. Airborne. Ship-wide or isolated area?” He looked at John.

  “Ship-wide,” John said.

  “Okay. I can do this,” Lev muttered to himself before heading into the room.

  Before Tank could offer to get lost, John reached over, caught him by the arm, and said in a perfectly calm voice, “Stay close, and if you touch anything, I’ll cut off the offending fingers.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tank said. John didn’t strike him as the officer sort, but it never hurt to “sir” someone when trying to avoid hospitalization. He allowed John to herd him into a labyrinth of a room.

  Tank had seen lots of demon toys. Having two best friends who were half demon, and one who was trying to fight her way free of her evil father, led to a passing familiarity with a lot of demonic tinker toys. However, he had never seen anything this massive.

  “Grab the fluid-return conduit—the tube, the long green tube thing,” Lev said, his finger waggling in the general direction of one of the walls. John didn’t seem tempted to help. Tank had disassembled his share of these things back home in New York, although generally Marie’s father had little devices, not room-sized monstrosities. Still, there were certain rules. The harder you pulled, the more it resisted. If you squeezed and eased a part out, the pieces wouldn’t fight you. Tank wrapped his hands around the top end of the conduit.

  “Is this the end you want me to pull?” His lust made thinking difficult, but he concentrated on the pipe.

  “No, pull the other end.” From the strain in Lev’s voice, he felt the growing desire too, but he stayed on his knees, his arms deep into the guts of the machinery.

  Tank moved down to the other end, grabbed it where it disappeared into the wall, then squeezed and slowly pulled it
free. The pipe fought him, but he kept up a steady pressure until it came free and thick, viscous liquid spilled across the floor. Tank exploded up onto his feet before the crap could touch him. Then Lev was moving, his hands flying across a dozen controls, half of which were buried into the organic layers of the wall. The scent of perfume mixed with vomit filled the air. Demonic equipment never smelled good, but whatever fluid had just fallen out of the pipe exceeded Tank’s expectations on the gross front.

  Tank was considering throwing up when Lev suddenly shouted, “Got it!” The second the magic vanished, Tank could feel it. The heat—the fevered heat that made him forget about everything but his cock—eased up. It was still there, but it was like standing in the breeze of a fan instead of a hurricane. Lev turned around. “Where the hell is Campbell? Campbell!” he bellowed.

  John rested his hand on his weapon. “Probably out fucking someone. We’ve got another problem.” He looked straight at Tank.

  Tank knew that look. He’d been center stage for that expression more times than he wanted to remember. He held up both hands in surrender. “Oh, no. I am totally not problemish. I am antiproblem. I see nothing and know nothing, and I am very happy to take the last airplane out of here and bury all this under copious amounts of alcohol.”

  “Name,” John snapped.

  “Private George Tankersley,” Tank said without hesitation.

  Lev glanced over, and something must have made him decide to look for Campbell later. He hurried closer. “Tank is a soldier. You know how Clyde feels when you break soldiers.”

  John’s eyes narrowed. “He congratulates me for reminding them that they can never stop training or assume anything when it comes to this fight.”

  “Okay,” Lev said slowly. “I have to admit that’s a Clyde sort of thing to say, but he would not want you breaking random privates.”

  Tank opened his mouth to make a joke about the innuendo, but the look on John’s face stopped him. The bridge of his nose was black, along with the skin around his left eye, but the nose tip was white, along with the area around the right eye, with a huge black strip on his right cheek that spilled down onto his chin. Maybe it was the patchwork pattern that made him look homicidally angry, but self-preservation required Tank to shut the hell up.

  “He can wait in the brig.” John reached out and grabbed Tank’s arm in a painful grip, but that was fine. Tank had never in his life been so happy to have someone threaten him with the brig. At least he would survive a little incarceration. Tank looked around at the demonic walls and weird shit. Maybe.

  Chapter Two

  THE BRIG turned out to be in the human side of the base, so Tank had concrete and metal bars to deal with. Honestly, considering how things turned out when Tank was around demons, that was probably for the best. But as he lay on the bottom bunk staring at the underside of the top one, he had to wonder what the hell was going on. As much as he’d enjoyed the sex, he was pretty sure he’d just had unprotected, unwise sex, and he wasn’t sure his partner had really wanted it. Now that he had sobered up, Tank didn’t regret any of it, but that didn’t mean Lev didn’t have some girlfriend back home. He could be off having a panic attack right now. Sex drugs. And here Tank had assumed he’d seen everything.

  Marie’s father was a demon, and when he’d shown up right before Tank’s freshman year in high school, it had started a small war. Yep, war was a good word. Tank’s side consisted mostly of teenagers, Zhu’s human mother, one hippy teacher and his wife, and near the end, the Big Brother Tank’s mom had signed him up for. She’d thought it would keep him away from New York gangs. She’d also thought that the lack of a male role model had hurt his moral development. After seeing Marie’s father and even the slightly less sadistic demonic shithead Zhu called a sperm donor, Tank was all in favor of avoiding father figures. Surprisingly, it had turned out that Captain Hoffer was pretty damn handy in a firefight and surprisingly willing to keep their secret.

  But now that secret seemed less secretish. Before going to basic, Tank had vowed to never say anything to anyone about Marie and Zhu’s unfortunate demonic heritage, or even that demons were real and rode the subway. But the government seemed to be doing a little research on its own. Or actually a lot of research. This place was demon central, and clearly some of them knew how it worked.

  “Hey,” someone called softly.

  Tank sat up to find Lev standing outside the bars. “Hey back. So….” He had no idea if he was supposed to mention the exceptionally hot closet sex, or ask for a lawyer, or request to speak to a superior officer, or apologize. For all the stupid procedures drill sergeants had forced on him, no one had covered this set of circumstances, although the lecture about what happened when you got arrested on leave came close. The difference was that the officers had assumed any arrest would be related to general stupidity and alcohol.

  “Sorry about all this,” Lev said. That did suggest he wasn’t blaming Tank, at least.

  “Please tell me that ‘all this’ isn’t going to include getting dumped in some jail cell for the rest of my life, because honestly, I’m totally okay forgetting I ever saw John’s gun, which looked suspiciously like an alien prop from a really cheap movie of the week.”

  Lev grimaced.

  “Funny, Tankersley. What is it with you and comedians, Lev?” An older man stepped into the visiting area of the brig or stockade or whatever the hell the Army called it when they screwed you over. Tank really should have paid more attention to the getting-arrested-on-leave speech.

  Lev stepped to the side to let this new guy closer to the bars. “Clyde, this is Private George Tankersley, who came in with the delivery plane. Tank, this is Colonel Clyde Aldrich.”

  “Colonel.” Tank shot to his feet and saluted. Damn it. Officers should wear their rank insignia, not run around in civvies.

  “Private Tankersley. I hear you kept a cool head.”

  “Um. Maybe.” Tank had no idea how he was supposed to play this. “Wait. Clyde?” Tank looked over at Lev, remembering how he’d used that name during sex.

  “You have a problem with that, private?” Aldrich’s gaze sharpened.

  “No, sir.” Tank stiffened up and tried for a perfect posture. “I’m just adjusting to a lot of, you know… stuff… sir.” Tank really didn’t want to out Lev. In fact, he was scared to even look at Lev for fear of accidentally saying something even more stupid.

  “We have a little problem,” Lev said. Tank’s stomach dropped. “You see, the supply plane had to leave, but you aren’t cleared for the technology you saw, and Clyde didn’t exactly bust his ass to get you cleared faster.” Lev turned a baleful look in the colonel’s direction. Oh, shit. Had Tank fucked an officer? That was a level of bad that Tank was not prepared to even consider, but enlisted guys did not glare at officers like that. It was a rule.

  “Paperwork takes time,” the colonel said without a hint of apology in his tone. He stared at Tank.

  “Yes, sir,” Tank agreed, since he pretty much couldn’t figure out what else to say.

  “You picked a bad day to deliver MREs,” the colonel said mildly enough. He had a little bit of a hot-old-guy vibe going. Salt-and-pepper gray hair and wrinkles around his eyes showed his age, but he still had a fine body. Tank could see why Lev had a Clyde fantasy or two rattling around in his brain. He was a striking man, way too fit to be one of those colonels who sat behind desks, which was weird since this place was supposed to be a weather station. Despite that laid-back facade Aldrich had clearly developed, Tank worried. His life was in this guy’s hands.

  “That’s me. I showed up on the wrong day and missed my own graduation, but you know, I’m great with secrets. The things I know. I mean, if anyone knew that Marie had a cat phobia….” Tank whistled. His joke went over like a lead fart in church. Tank waited for someone to verbally rescue him, but Aldrich just stared and Lev was rocking back and forth with his hands in his pockets. That left Tank. “Okay, jokes aside, I really have no interest in telling a
nyone anything. I am going to forget all the weird stuff. I’m forgetting it already.”

  Aldrich leaned against the bars and studied Tank. “You’re still stuck here for four months. Winter storms are about to close our airstrip, and until it opens in spring, you’re ours.” Aldrich was definitely waiting to see how Tank would take the news.

  Honestly, Tank wanted to panic. Flailing was sort of his default setting, but he would set aside time to freak out later. “The Army has trained me to mop one hell of a floor, so I would happily mop your floors as long as I can get on that plane in four months.”

  “Clyde, you’re freaking him out.” Lev punched Aldrich in the arm, and the colonel gave him an incredulous look. “Besides,” Lev continued, “he has a natural talent with alien tech. It usually takes me weeks to get my engineers to stop yanking and pulling at connectors like they’re inanimate objects. Living technology. The ‘living’ part of that is rather important, but so many of my engineers are totally stuck in human habits.”

  “Underwood!” the colonel snapped.

  Lev rolled his eyes. “Face it. He saw alien technology at its animate worst. Hit the wrong combination of commands, and the organic-based tech will start pumping out exactly the wrong compounds. You should have seen what happened when Chavez found the coolant system.” Lev twisted his features into an exaggerated grimace.

  “Alien?” Tank could feel his throat close up around that word.

  Aldrich sighed before pulling a key out of his pocket and unlocking the cell door. “Welcome to the country’s deepest secret. Starting in the 1940s, the American government realized not only that we were being visited, but also that the aliens were manipulative assholes who were using our populations for testing.”

  “John?” Tank asked. If someone was going to be an alien, John was his best guess. Unfortunately he already had a few other guesses based on the fact these devices looked so damn familiar.

  “No. John Doe was an experiment. We recovered him when we chased a small group away,” Lev said. “We picked up some neat tech there too. That’s what we do here. This ship crashed sometime decades ago, and we’re going through her systems and trying to reverse engineer the pieces.”