by Laney Kaye
*
An hour later, slightly before sundown, which always came with terrifying swiftness in the desert, I’d set up my camp.
The pickup parked at a right-angle to the huge rock which towered like a land-locked dinosaur, I’d spread my pack close to the latent heat radiating from the monolith. While it was still hot now, night time temperatures dropped fast and low. My chair sat alongside the bed, my sketch pad and watercolor pencils balanced on a handy nearby rock.
I’d brought a couple of bundles of twigs with me from the station, as foliage was sparse out here. Now I lit them, creating a blaze directly in front of the camp setup, and another to my right. Along with the carefully angled pickup truck, they gave the impression of a fence or corral, giving me a feeling of security in the vast wilderness.
“Stop judging me, Gray,” I said as I hauled our food out of the icebox. He hadn’t moved from the shade of the rock, even though the sun no longer covered the sand. “I still don’t have any different grub for you, so there’s no point holding out hope.”
I lied; I fully intended to share the sausages I threaded onto metal skewers, though he wouldn’t be into the chunks of pineapple I placed on each end of the rod. I’d stuck a couple of sturdier branches upright in the loose sand either side of my cooking fire, and now I wedged the skewers into the V-shaped splits of the logs, suspending the sausages above the fire. The fat dripped from the meat, sputtering in the coals, the delicious aroma instantly rumbling my stomach. Even Ol’ Gray managed to look momentarily interested, shifting from his side to a slightly more alert position.
A dingo coughed in the distance, and Gray’s ears twitched in that direction, but he kept his gaze on the sausages in case they made a run for freedom.
The meat cooked quickly over the leaping flames. Or the outside casings charred, at any rate. I’d always had a cast-iron stomach, so I wasn’t too concerned about the food being undercooked. In any case, the sun had dipped below the rim of the earth now, painting the skyline in shades of pink and purple, and it was instantly too dark to see how raw the meat was. I’d brought a torch, but I knew from experience that using one in the desert was never a great idea. The tiny pinprick of light in the vastness made me far too aware of my insignificance. On these trips, I made a habit of eating early, then crawling into the imagined security of my swag, as though a bit of insect-netting was shark security grille. The early-morning was my special time, and being out here early enough to take in the pristine dawn was my inducement to rough-it overnight.
Ol’ Gray prowled over, trying to look disinterested as I used a stick to drag a foil-wrapped potato from the embers. Ever resourceful, I’d microwaved the spuds before leaving the station. The naked flames simply added the finishing touches, crisping up the potato skin and heating the fluffy white flesh through.
Splitting it open, I smothered the spud in butter and shredded cheese. I could never see any point in packing light when I had a pickup truck to do the carrying and two cool boxes to store everything I could need for a forty-eight-hour trip. Yeah, two. What can I say, I was a Girl Scout. I liked to be prepared. And I did not like to be hungry. Good food was a blessing, solace, company, and pretty much the only thing left in this world to get off on. Definitely the only thing ever going in my mouth.
I spread the sheet of tinfoil wider alongside my carefully balanced glass of cask wine on my rock tabletop and took the skewers from over the flames. Pulling the meat free, I blew on it before offering Gray a piece.
He took the morsel with a fair show of disdain, the tip of his tail twitching furiously. But he devoured it with far more relish than he displayed with his minced kangaroo.
“Like that one, do you?”
Gray flicked his ears at me but didn’t condescend to look in my direction. I was only his servant.
I popped a piece of sausage in my mouth, funneling my breath around it to cool it as I frowned at the cat. Although I ate with the family in the station house, the detached flat that was part of my employment package included a tiny kitchenette. Maybe I’d have to start cooking meat for Gray, to tempt his appetite.
For sure, it was the only way I’d be getting hot sausage.
Gray wolfed down more than his share of the meat and then jumped onto the arm of my battered camp chair to stick his nose in the buttery potato sitting on the makeshift foil plate balanced on my knee. I grumbled and elbowed him aside, but he glared at me, repositioned himself, and planted a paw fair square in the spud, challenging me with his mono-optic golden stare. I couldn’t really argue his claim: he’d not had any of the chocolate on the drive. Besides, if I argued with a cat in the middle of the desert, it would sound like I had a whole lot of crazy going on.
“All yours then, Gray.” I leaned forward and dropped the foil onto the hard, red crystals of sand. “I’ll stick to wine.”
Once I’d given him permission, the ass lost interest and prowled toward our swag, leaning against the mesh as he cleaned himself.
I muttered — still not as bad as arguing with a cat — and kicked sand over the potato, but then changed my mind; any food left out in the open would attract visitors of the most unwelcome varieties. Dingoes, ants, wild pigs, and I-didn’t-want-to-think-abut-what-else. Ignorance was most definitely bliss. I was pretty proud of the manner in which I’d managed to get down and dirty with the whole living in the outback ethos, despite being a city girl. I was even okay with most of the animals, despite Gray being the only pet I’d ever had. I’d ridden horses — okay, the aged pony the twins had learned to ride on when they were tots, but still — petted cows, and the uncountable station dogs were often around my feet. But that was about my limit when it came to non-human warm-blooded interactions.
I wriggled off my camp chair: over the half-dozen camping trips I’d made, my bottom had stretched the fabric and made a sizable indent on the seat. Really, canvas wasn’t what it used to be — and picked up the spud, hurling it into the distance. Well, toward the distance, anyway. I’d never make the grade as a physical education teacher.
“Right, Gray. Toilet time. I am not getting up in the middle of the night with you, so it’s now or never.” We both knew I was lying. Ol’ Gray had unlimited tenacity when it came to being deliberately awkward. He’d definitely win the Battle of the Bladders if he decided he wanted to go out, because he’d be happy to yowl at me all night and then sleep all day when I had to be awake.
As I hitched up my shorts after squatting alongside the rock a respectable but not too-scary-way-off-in-the-dark distance from the campfire, Ol’ Gray strolled over, wrinkled his nose, and then headed back to the mesh tent. Clearly, he had no intention of toileting until the aptly-named wee hours of the morning.
Grumbling again, because that was pretty much all the control I had of the situation, I crawled into the tent, holding the flap open until Ol’ Gray apparently decided a sufficient number of mosquitoes had entered the bug-proof enclosure to keep me awake all night, and consented to wander inside.
I zipped up the flap so fast I caught my loose hair in it. Also Gray’s fault. Still, much as I loved the serenity of the desert, I’d rather not be all alone out here. If the only male I was ever destined to have in my life had a propensity for licking his own nether regions and hacking up fur balls, I may as well make the best of it.
Lying on top of my sleeping bag, I shrugged my bra off from beneath my tee and shimmied into a daggy old pair of worn-through cotton sleep shorts. Then I lay flat on my back, staring out of the fine black mesh.
The oh-so-soft desert sand was instantly as hard as the eons-old rock just below the deceptive surface, and stray pebbles inched their way beneath my thin camping mat. But the stars; nothing could come close to the view of stars from the central Australian desert. Without a competing light source for hundreds of kilometers, they shone with crystal clarity, shattered diamonds sprinkled among coal. The Milky Way lit a great swathe across the sky, a highway I could imagine transporting hundreds of alien beings on their
daily business. Hundreds of male alien beings, that was. I mean, if I was going to fantasize, I may as well go all out. Out there, somewhere, there had to be entire races of hunky men. Although, according to books and movies, they were all going to look unpleasantly alienish. Not at all sure that would work for me — but there again, the pickings at the B&S Ball hadn’t been anything to write home about.
I gasped and startled upright, my elbows digging into the mattress as a comet or piece of space junk flamed diagonally across the Milky Way, a trail of tiny sparks effervescing in its wake like celestial glitter. “Gray, look!”
The cat grumbled as my movement tumbled him off the sleeping bag.
“Sorry, dude. But if you hadn’t invited all the bugs in, I wouldn’t need the bag anyway,” I said as I lay back down. It seemed a shame to close my eyes, to shut out the celestial display. But after almost five hours of driving in the sun, I was beat, my eyes scratched and burning from facing the harsh glare.
Besides, it was sure to be a broken sleep, with Ol’ Gray Donkey waking me to pee whenever he figured it would be least convenient.
Predictably, I woke to the cat’s yowls before dawn. The sun hadn’t crested the visible curvature of the Earth, but light was just blooming, a pink wash across the sand striping the horizon with promises of the heat to come.
But it wasn’t the ethereal beauty that caught my attention.
It was the three pairs of polished black boots neatly ranked just beyond the zippered flap of my little tent.
Chapter Two
Tennn
Austria didn’t look anything like my limited research had led me to expect. But then, my research had been, like I said, limited. Not only through lack of interest, though my fifth tour had left me a little jaded, but physical and mental exhaustion was taking a toll. Fifteen collections in one lunar cycle were enough to mess with any guy’s interest in geography and off-world climate statistics.
Xander didn’t even look up as I pressed a control and the heavy shields cranked a hand-span further open. As usual, my lieutenant’s nose was stuck in a reader, his leather-clad legs stretched in front of him to rest booted feet on the control panel. To my left, Yanno cleared his throat. “Tennn? Something looks off.”
“Yup.” My gaze swept the tract of barren land visible through the shield slit. “Certainly doesn’t look hospitable. Guess that’s why this one is eager to get off-world”
“No, not that.” Yanno tapped the control panel. “The external temp readings are way off the scale. It should be around minus forty degrees and eleven o’clock at night. But the readings suggest daybreak with a temperature already hitting triple that.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. It had been a long cycle and I was eager to get back, offload the cargo, and hopefully pick up a bonus I could pass on to my comrades. I didn’t have any control over their pay rates, no more than I’d had when we were in the Force together, but I knew the bulk of the xasa for the mission would go into the royal treasury. Which was pretty much like stuffing it into my own pockets. And, while that made me feel guilty as all hells, I couldn’t suppress a grimace at how slowly those coffers were filling despite the number of craft we had mirroring our mission. At this rate, I’d be too old to breed by the time the principality could afford the requisite fertile Crasasi female.
I stood, shoving Xander’s feet to the sirdar floor with a resounding clang.
He looked up in surprise, completely oblivious to the fact that we’d landed, never mind that we’d been talking. “Cap?”
“Last pick up for the tour,” I inclined my head toward the shutter. “Suit up. The temperature gauges are off, it’s freezing out there.”
The second the bridge door lowered, Yanno and Xander flanking me on either side, their stunners held at hip level, I realized that the meters hadn’t been wrong. It was hot. Damn hot. Made more stifling by our heavy leather coats and molded leggings. Well, crap. We could hardly duck back in and change like a bunch of space princesses on our way to a ball.
I sucked in an annoyed breath and strode down the gleaming ramp of our craft. As I leveled out at the base, the crust of earth gave way under my foot. I scowled at it. “Snow?” I hiked an eyebrow at Xander, though he couldn’t see it behind my vision shaders.
He shook his head, his scalp gleaming in the sunlight. “Soil.” He squatted and rubbed it between his gloved fingers. “In fact, sand. Just like home.”
“Hardly,” I snorted. Back home, it would be blue. Still, that didn’t make me feel a whole lot less stupid for thinking it was snow. Damn, I’d had a hankering to see that mythical white, powdery stuff. This was supposed to be the one pick up where I could have made good on that desire.
Still, there would no doubt be another trip. And another.
I scratched at my crotch. Not so much because I had an itch — the onboard sanitation unit made sure of that — but because any thought of our job irrevocably led me to the reason for our job.
Which led to my yakeet twitching.
Not a great look for the captain of one of Her Majesty’s Starfleet. In fact, mother would be singularly unimpressed. Fortunately, Yanno and Xander felt more allegiance to me than they did to mother. Drinking, whoring, and fighting alongside one another evidently created a stronger bond than royal decrees.
I jerked my chin at the device Yanno had strapped to his wrist. “Getting a reading?”
He shook his head slowly, swiveling from one side to the other, his wrist held horizontally across his waist, his attention focused on it. “Not a damn thing. Maybe those rocks are blocking her implant signal?” He jerked his head toward a granite monolith. It’d take us half a day to trek around the thing.
I glanced around, as though someone might have snuck up on us in this deserted wilderness. Even the air smelled hot, singeing my sinuses. “Send the ship above visibility level and deploy lifters.”
Neither of my men argued; none of us had any interest in hiking in this heat.
As the ship disappeared from view, although it would remain cloaked not far above us, our personal boosters stirred the sand-that-wasn’t-snow beneath our feet, ridiculous red clouds blowing over our boots, then smoothly lifted us up. Using our mind links to the blaster units to pilot, we each rose vertically, then moved toward the massive rock, skimming over it without breaking a sweat.
Well, almost. Dressed all in black, I was sweating like a pervert in a sleaze-easy as the sun hove over the horizon.
As the blasters silently lowered us to the ground on the far side of the rocky mountain, I scanned our perimeter, knowing my two lieutenants would be doing the same. At least, although our collection intel seemed a bit off, we’d found our pickup. The inhabitants of this country certainly lived basic, though; this candidate was clearly visible through a piece of stretched mesh that obviously constituted her home.
My shaders scrolled data across the screen and I grabbed for my stunner. “Second life form. Unidentified,” I barked. The threat’s vitals registered on my scanner, although the form was hidden behind the human shield.
“Come out of your dwelling, hands raised,” ordered Xander, his weapon trained on the shadowy mesh.
A form slowly complied with the lieutenant’s order, crawling from the house.
I spared a quick assessing glance. A woman. Our pick up, then. We only collected females, though I’d heard rumors of illegal slavers with a penchant for men. “Stand still,” I snarled as the second form continued to register in the dwelling. “You’re not alone?” All of the pickups were orchestrated as singles, and in secluded locations. This collection was turning into one cock-up on top of another.
“Yes I am.” The female’s hands dropped to her ample hips, her tone annoyed. “What the hell, guys—?”
“Hands up,” Yanno bellowed, making me flinch. “Get behind me Your Maj…Cap.”
Typical Yanno. Liked to make everything a drama.
“Oh my God, wait!” The female’s voice pitched high with excitement. Evident
ly, she’d just realized that we were, basically, her dream come true. Her hands were still on her hips, though, which irritated me. It was bad enough having a dozen females of different races drifting all over my ship; I liked them better if they at least followed basic orders.
I stepped forward, clearing my throat, ready to go through the ‘we-come-in-peace’ spiel. “We—”
“Holy crap, you guys are in the Gender-Less in Black remake? Right? I knew they were filming in Australia, but I didn’t realize it was here. Oh, no, have I set up camp on your set?”
Apparently, humans had little need to stop for breath. Perhaps they used a form of osmosis to take oxygen from the atmosphere. I tried again. “We come—”
“I really don’t get why they’re doing a remake, though.” The female’s head jerked from one side to the other, as though she expected to see more troops over our shoulders. “I mean, sure, the one with Chris Hemsworth is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, but really, you’ll never do better. No disrespect intended, but I mean, y’know, Chris Hemsworth.”
“Oh, for fracks' sake,” Yanno muttered. “Not that beetric dung again.”
I swallowed my desire to agree — along with some annoying little insect that looked much like a teetzer fly and crawled into my mouth just as I opened it to speak. GLiB was the Galaxial Friendship Forge’s promo tool, supposed to help the narrow-minded humans adjust to and accept the concept of alien life forms. Instead, they swooned over the human actors and totally disregarded the careful placement of dozens of alien forms, as though the aliens were computer graphics or models rather than card-carrying members of the Intergalactic Actors Guild. Despite repeated attempts at introducing the concept over the years, the GLiB franchise was never going down in the annals of success in the Guild’s Hall of Fame.
I spat to one side, although the fly-thing was well on its way down my gullet by now. In fact, I was pretty sure I could feel its spiky little legs getting leverage on the inside of my throat.
