B Cubed #3 Borg (12 page)

            Her
release triggered his own. He roared, threw his head back and emptied himself
deep inside her, hips still jerking as he came for the first time inside his
mate.

             His
strength gave out then and he collapsed on top of her in a boneless heap. She
was strong enough to move him off her if she wanted but she loved the feel of
him.

            Loved
him.

            She
smiled to herself as she ran her hands through his sweat dampened hair. He
grunted and pulled her tighter against him with a murmured “Mine.”

            She
drifted for a time and awoke to the sensation of him growing hard inside her
once more. He made love to her again, more slowly this time, though with the
same burning intensity.

            “What
changed?” He lay on his back now, with her nestled into him. One hand trailed
slowly up and down her spinal column.

            Sage
knew what he meant. “Nothing really. I spend the days listening to your mother
sing your praises, tell me how smart you were, how much you’d overcome. I’d lie
awake night after night and try to figure out what I wanted to do with my life,
but all I could think about was that you didn’t come to see me.”

            “I
never gave up on you. I wanted to give you the time and space you needed.”

            She
lifted her head and looked up at him. “You did. But then your aunt came by and
said something that really resonated with me. Something about an object at rest
stays at rest unless acted on by an outside force.”

            “Newton’s
first law,” he muttered.

            “Well,
I guess we were just a couple of objects at rest and she was the outside
force.”

            He
made a noise she took for agreement and then stiffened.

            “Dayen?
Is something wrong?”

            He
repeated the words, “An object at rest stays at rest…,” almost to himself. Then
a grin broke over his face. “Sage, you’re brilliant!”

            “I
am?”

            He
got up, helped her to her feet. “Come with me.” Not bothering to dress, he
strode down the hall.

            She
picked up her clothes, not wanting to stride around in the raw, even if he did.
Of course his ass was not something that should ever be covered.

            He
flashed her a wicked grin over his shoulder and she blushed when she recalled
that he could hear every lewd thought she entertained.

            He
entered a darkened room pied to the ceiling with books, papers, maps and other
odds and ends she didn’t have names for. “Angular momentum,” he said.

            “I
have no idea what that is.”

             He
picked up a globe. At least she knew what that was, her father had had one as
well. “This is the earth. Well, the earth that was before it quit spinning and
everything shifted. Aunt Cass asked me earlier why the Earth stopped spinning.”

            “No
one knows why.”

            “Right.
Not for certain. But we know it used to and the force that caused it to spin on
its access was called angular momentum. According to this,” he dug through a
heap of texts and then brandished one in triumph. “The Earth was formed out of
a nebula which collapsed and as that happened the globe started spinning.”

            “Why?”

            “In
a vacuum, it takes less force for objects to spin than for them not to spin. If
we can undo whatever caused the earth to stop spinning, angular momentum will
force the earth to start spinning again.”

            She
sat down on the floor, trying to absorb he words. He crouched before her
gloriously naked and grinning from ear to ear.

            “My
love, you’ve just saved our future.”

Epilogue

Cassandra’s Journal

Date: The future yet to
come

           
Love,
in fact, does not make the earth go round. But a couple in love who are
determined to ensure the survival of their species can make the earth go around
once more, with a little help from angular momentum.

            It
took Sage and Dayen and the rest of the survivors seventeen years to locate the
artificial gravity well that had stopped the rotation of the earth. Another six
months of study to the ancient device before they could safely shut it down.
But they were together for the dawning of the first day of the rest of their
lives. Together, they helped rebuild the food chain from Sage’s seeds, to the
insects all the way up to the rest of humanity. People jockeyed for power as
people always do, but the strongest were determined not just to survive, but to
thrive and to flourish.

            Just
like I knew they would.