by Jade, Elsa
Ridley rolled her eyes at him.
The alien continued. “Apologies for this pre-recorded message. The Intergalactic Dating Agency is so sorry to not be here to welcome you in person. Due to unforeseen circumstances, this outpost has been closed indefinitely. However, the staff of Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides would like to clarify that we were in no way responsible for the Black Hole Brides incident. We have at all times prided ourselves on matching willing Earther brides with eager alien mates. We do not at all condone the kidnapping of innocent Earthers to be summarily fed into a black hole in the hopes of resurrecting a dead true love.” The central suckers twisted into what appeared to be an ingratiating pucker. “While this outpost is no longer available to process your profile, we encourage you to reapply at the next closest Intergalactic Dating Agency. Our nearest franchise is the Big Sky Alien Mail Order Bride outpost number two—”
“If it’s still Big Sky,” Ridley murmured, “that shouldn’t be too far away.”
“—in what you know as the Whirlpool Galaxy, only thirty million light-years from here.”
She deflated. “Oh.”
“A hundred million light-years or right next door, doesn’t matter,” Maelstrom said tightly. “Not when we don’t have the funds remaining for a new profile. We have to find whoever cheated us and get our credits back.”
“It’s really messed up that someone stole from you,” she said. “But it’s got to be more than that. I mean, they didn’t try to steal anything from Marisol, and she’s rich. In fact, they were promising to help her. But somehow they’re connected to you too.” She scraped a hand over her bristling hair. “I suppose we’ll just have to wait until they come to the house. Marisol said they requested tissue samples and analysis.”
Frustration and impatience knotted through him until he felt as useless as the spawnling fighters who’d died on his watch. “We don’t have time to wait.” He flicked open his datpad and sent a query. “The messages my commander received originated from this outpost. So the thieves had to be here, or at least their signal came through here. With the resources from my ship, if they use this point as a relay again to communicate with either us or Marisol Wavercrest, maybe we can trace their message.” He clenched his jaw. “No sky is big enough to hide them from me.”
On the wall, the Ajellomene continued blithely, “We hope to see you soon at the Intergalactic Dating Agency.” It threw its tentacles wide, flinging bubbles off-screen. “Cosmic craving, astral adventure, and a love that’s out of this world!”
As the IDA recording froze on the passionate Ajellomene, Ridley muttered something derisive under her breath, but Mael was focused on his datpad as he pinged the Bathyal. With the shielding measures that should’ve been in place to disguise the outpost not operational, he managed to get a stronger signal to the ship.
Coriolis responded immediately. “What do you have?”
“Nothing,” Mael replied curtly, watching as Ridley resumed prowling the room. “This outpost has been abandoned, likely for some time. If the entity you are communicating with used this signal, it was routed through here but did not originate with the Intergalatic Dating Agency.”
Coriolis rumbled low under his breath, and if they’d been home, the furious sonic vibration would’ve turned the water around him to a veil of opaque bubbles. “Leave your datpad there on an open frequency. If they try to route through the outposts systems again, we’ll catch them. We’ll monitor from here and be ready to move.” His ability to take shrewd, decisive action without hesitation had made him the strongest commander in the fleet, and his warriors had willingly followed him anywhere.
Maelstrom’s gaze lingered on the Earther female who was standing in the middle of the empty room, her hands on her hips and her feet braced wide in a way that reminded him amusingly of the Ajellomene’s star-shaped stance. He should return to the ship and wait for the lying snot-eels who’d misled them.
Instead, he heard himself saying, “I’ll go back to the Wavercrest house since our last communication indicated that is where they’ll go next.” The silence through the datpad was long enough that Maelstrom wondered if he’d lost the signal—or his commander’s trust. “I know you made me captain only because there was no one else left,” he said. “But I swear to you—”
“Don’t swear,” Coriolis interrupted. “If I had any doubts, you wouldn’t be on this mission. But if you leave your datpad to catch these bride frauds, you’ll have no way to contact me. You’ll be on your own.”
Maelstrom let out a slow breath. No bubbles here in the dusty place. “I won’t fail you again,” he promised.
And he wouldn’t be on his own.
Chapter 9
Ridley kept her focus on the image of the alien jelly-starfish even though she was eavesdropping with every nerve in her ears. She was surprised she understood, but Maelstrom had mentioned a translator several times, so presumably the device on his wrist was being polite to the clueless Earthling.
Or Earther, as the jelly-star had called her. It seemed rude that some alien who didn’t even know her got to decide what she was called. Although, now that she thought about it, she wondered how many naïve planets called themselves Earth or Dirt or Rock, believing themselves to be the only self-aware Earth or Dirt or Rock in a vast, lonely universe.
Except they weren’t alone, were they?
Conscious of the seething silence behind her, she pivoted on her heel to face Maelstrom. Actually, not every planet would call itself Earth. Some worlds were only water.
Her pulse rushed savagely, and she swallowed hard. How could just the thought of so much water bring on her panicked vertigo? The churning anger that had powered her this far felt tenuous now. Less than sand through her fingers, less than water.
She looked up at him. “We can’t let them know we’re on to them.”
He grimaced. “Are we on to them?” He shook his head, his dark hair rippling. “No, I know what you mean. I agree. They’ve gotten the best of us, and their overconfidence is all we have to work with.”
“They got the upper hand at the moment,” she corrected. “Or tentacle or whatever. But they haven’t won, not yet.”
“I thought I was done with war,” he murmured. “How foolish of me.”
For a heartbeat, he was as still and flattened and distant as the jelly-star projected on the wall. Unthinking, she reached out to lay her hand on the tight flex of his arm above the tablet device. The muscle was clenched so hard he might as well have been named Rock himself. But his skin was warm and smooth under her fingertips. He was very much alive, and hurting.
Just like her. “I can’t know what it was like for you—I can’t even dunk my head in the shower anymore—but I’ve always known that you have to fight like hell sometimes even when there isn’t a war.”
In the low light of the abandoned outpost, his icy eyes were shadowed. The veil of the secondary lids across his eyes warned her that he was feeling vulnerable, and the slow release of his pent-up breath went on for so long that an Earther would’ve passed out.
At the end of that endless breath, he put his hand over hers. “The Tritonyri who was captain before me, whose place I took when he died, liked to say you can’t truly find the current until you’re in it.”
“That’s…very profound.”
“And sometimes too deep-damned late. The last time I saw him, the slow drift of his blood was marking the tide. The only reason I moved up in the fleet ranks…was because there was no one left above me.” He strummed his thumb restlessly over her knuckles, each little bump and dip reverberating in bigger, invisible tremors down her spine. “I should never…”
When he fell silent, Ridley gave his arm a squeeze. “No one should have to go to war. But sometimes, you have to defend what’s yours—and not just what’s yours, but what belongs to everyone. Like your oceans.”
“I sacrificed my Tritonyri brothers for that war, and they had no chance at another life.”
“Did yo
u have a choice?”
Again he didn’t answer for a long moment. “It was one of the last skirmishes, when we’d almost broken the Cretarni offensive. At great cost to our forces.” His mouth twisted. “We’d crushed their navy and driven their army far from our shores. The Tritonesse had bonded the many Trytonyri clans before the war, but the Cretarni still had factions amongst themselves, even when united against us. We discovered that one group had engineered a lethally toxic cyanobacteria that they planned to release into our waters. The death bloom would’ve choked out entire seas, killing everything, so we had to pursue them. It was my first time away from water for so long.”
He closed his eyes, as if even the protective nictitating membranes weren’t enough to block out the memories. “I was second to Coriolis. My Tritonyri followed me. We’d come so far… But we were out of soldiers, out of supplies. Our feet and our gills burned in the air, worse from the poisoned earth and smoke from their chemical factory, and we fell, one by one. Coriolis was always the strongest, in or out of water, so he made the last push to the gates. I couldn’t let him go alone.” In the empty IDA outpost, his words were a forlorn echo. “I told my Tritonyri to wait, and I went after my commander. But somehow the Cretarni knew we were coming. We fought hard, but the gates were locked tight. No way in. Except… The Tritonyri I’d left on the outskirts of the compound found a sewage vent. While Coriolis and I provided a useless commotion, my three fighters—hardly more than spawnlings still—swam up the vent. They destroyed the factory from within.”
His hard exhale was like a distant detonation in the silence. “Only one made it out. And he… melted in my arms. Anywhere I touched him…”
He stood frozen, but she flinched for him. “Oh, Mael.” Even her little closed world had outlawed chemical warfare because of its horrors.
“The vent had been clogged with all the septic taint of the Cretarni’s hate for Tritonans, and they’d been fatally exposed. They knew it, but they swam all the way to the core and sabotaged the storage tanks, killing most of the Cretarni workers in the toxic gas cloud. There was nothing I could do to save him, only swear on the First Waters that his death would give hope for new life in our deeps. And now… I feel that chance evaporating, less to hold onto than one Tritonyri’s mortal remains.”
Ridley swallowed hard, her throat clogging as if some ghost of those poisons remained. “You haven’t broken your promise. This isn’t over yet.”
“Yet.” He twitched his arm out of her grasp, loosening the device from his wrist in the same motion. “I need to find an unobtrusive place to leave this to pick up any signals.”
She tucked her hands in her jacket pockets to hide the awkwardness of her suddenly empty gesture. Why should she be disappointed at his rejection? He obviously didn’t want or need her reassurance. She was just a clueless Earther, after all.
They quartered the rest of the IDA compound, but the place was basically empty. Big, airy gathering spaces and small crew quarters, empty. Some sort of commissary and tighter service hallways, empty. The building held only the forlorn echoes of their footsteps, but somehow she could imagine the alien beings—the people—who had come through here seeking the connection they couldn’t find anywhere else in the universe.
What had the jelly-star said? Cosmic craving, astral adventure, celestial lust or whatever.
In the center of the massive building, Maelstrom pointed out what would’ve been the data core of the complex, containing the advanced technologies and artificial intelligence that were still so far away for her world. But everything had been stripped.
In the core, he pulled open a few of the hundreds of large drawer-like storage cubicles. “This is where they would’ve kept the data gels,” he told her. “It’s a neural network wired through a sort of superfluid string-net polymer, but it’s all been cleared out.” He swiped his finger through the bottom of one drawer. “Or dried out. They really didn’t want to leave anything here that could be definitively identified as not from Earth.”
She grunted. As if more than half of those words even made sense… “So I guess I’ll give them some credit for trying not to freak out my poor people. Not sure how much credit to give them, though, if they had to close down because their clients were getting kidnapped.”
He slid the wrist computer into one of the drawers after connecting a thin cable from the device to a plug in the drawer. “This will track any signals coming through the outpost,” he told her. “But I’m not hopeful.”
Yeah, she knew that feeling too well. “Whoever it was that took your profile, they lured you here to a place that allowed Earth women to be kidnapped, even if the IDA claims it wasn’t their fault. And whoever brought you here knew that Earth women wouldn’t be compatible with your needs.” She wrapped her arms around herself at the cold prickle over her skin. “Even if we weren’t suffering from the symptoms of Wavercrest Syndrome, no Earth woman could live underwater like you do, not forever.” She stared at him. “I know you say your planet is desperate, but would you have taken unwilling brides like someone else here obviously did?”
For a long moment, his jaw worked as if he were chewing over what to say.
She grimaced. “Time’s up. You basically just told on yourself.”
He scowled back at her. “We would not have kidnapped anyone,” he growled. “Not only would that be wrong and wicked, but it would certainly negate the council’s willingness to reconsider Tritona’s potential for survival if the only new immigrants we could bring in were stolen.”
She pursed her lips. “Oh. Sure. That’s a reason, I guess.”
“I also said it was wrong,” he reminded her. “But obviously whoever lured us here was willing to believe the worst of us and leave us open to censure by the transgalactic council.” He shut the cabinet drawer with a decisive bang. “If anyone tries to relay through the systems here, we’ll pick it up. Although I don’t like the idea of waiting around until they make the next move.”
“So what can we do to force them?” When he narrowed his eyes at her, she shrugged one shoulder. “You set this electronic tripwire. Now we just need them to stumble over it so you can get a lock on where they are.”
He nodded slowly. “Since they refused to respond to our earlier hails, we’ll have to give them a strong reason to reach out to us again. What can we say to disrupt their plan when they obviously think they have us where they want us?”
“Right where they want us.” She tilted her head, considering. “Yeah, for some reason, they want us here together. So… What if we pretend we’re not? Your commander tells them he’s changed his mind and is going back to Tritona, and Marisol contacts them and says she’s going to—I don’t know—go skiing in the Alps or whatever hot young single heiresses do. If they’re so intent that we be together, they aren’t going to let us wander off.”
Which… She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Joining the Navy aside, she’d never excelled in group situations. Surfing had been a lone pastime, and even when she’d enlisted, she’d immediately slotted herself for the kinds of advanced training where the outcome depended on her alone, no one else. Relying on others… That had never gone well for her.
Of course, relying on herself hadn’t proved infallible either.
“Why did the IDA rep focus on you?”
Unnerved that he was seemingly reading her mind, Ridley frowned at Maelstrom. “What? Nobody focused on me.”
“It said greetings, lonely lady of Earth. That certainly wasn’t aimed at me.”
She shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “Well, presumably anyone who comes here is a wannabe alien mail order bride, so of course it would default to assuming anyone walking through the door was a lonely lady of Earth.” She scowled. “Not that I’m lonely.”
He shook his head. “This outpost would’ve greeted visitors from all across the transgalactic community,” he argued. “If anything, now that it’s shuttered, the only beings here would be non-Earthers.”
“Then I don’t know,” she said irritably. “Does it matter?”
“The recording was set to acknowledge visitors,” he mused. “Somehow, it recognized you.” He peered at her. “Are you registered with the IDA?”
“Not with either version, not the Intergalactic Dating Agency and not the InterGenetic Data Agency. I responded to Marisol’s letter, but she didn’t know how many of us would be showing up, so it’s not like she could’ve passed that information, even accidentally, to either IDA.”
“She clearly gave her profile to the IDA, whichever one it was. That’s how this whole thing started.” He headed out of the core, leaving Ridley to tag behind.
“She did say that she tracked us all down through our common ancestry. Maybe whatever processing power is left in this place to run the recording isn’t enough to distinguish between Marisol and other relatives.” It had been weird enough to find out that she might have some sort of hereditary disease, but to discover that that meant she had family was somehow weirder yet. Funny how bad and good—not to mention good and bad —seemed braided together so often.
Wanting the world to make sense had probably always been a hopeless proposition, and now she knew there were more worlds than hers.
“Something very strange is going on here,” he murmured.
“Really? Ya think?”
“I don’t think we’re going back to the Wavercrest house after all.”
She bristled. “Why not? You think I can’t handle myself, whatever’s going on? I’m neck deep in it, you know, so there’s no keeping me out—”
Wheeling on his heel to face her, he put his big hand over her mouth, cutting off the complaints. “I think you’re in deeper than you know.”
The threat of being submerged sent a cold shiver down her spine. But the caress of his fingers on her lips… It set the ice on fire.
There was an answering glint in his blue-green eyes, although maybe that was just the promise of a coming battle. “We need to go back to my ship.”
