by Wen Spencer
Behind them Hoto was braying out a minotaur laugh.
Turk discovered he could blush as deep a red as Paige.
The minotaur had only one living area. It was dominated by one large sleeping platform with a great multitude of large pillows—which the minotaurs had expected Paige and Turk to share with them. Apparently it was a show of trust for Hoto to allow another "bull" to share his space. During the long trip to Mary's, without any barriers to hide behind, Turk had to adapt to the lack of privacy. He now knew more about minotaur sexual habits that he ever wanted to. Likewise, he'd learned to ignore the minotaur's presence while being intimate with Paige. They had been careful, though, to stay under sheets to maintain the fiction that Paige was the male.
"I'm staying on top." Turk growled pulling her close. "I'm not about to become docile now."
Turk had spent the entire trip dreading what came next. All they could do now was hide and wait. He wasn't sure why he dread it so much; it was like the sitting in the Red pit before a jump, waiting to be dropped into a combat zone. He supposed it as because dying was easy compared to losing everything that you had.
He shouldn't let Paige get involved. He shouldn't have let her get dragged into his life of killing and death. He should have kept her safe on that stupid ugly boat of hers. She shouldn't be here, where people would kill her or enslave her without qualm, and the only thing keeping her safe is the promise of aliens that they'd not betray them.
And he didn't want to take her off the relative safety of Hoto's ship. But she'd probably hit him if he'd told her to stay.
"Yes, I will," she whispered.
"Will what?"
"Hit you if you tell me stay here, silly man."
"You're scary when you do that."
"Yes, I know."
The plan was simple enough. He and Paige stay hidden until the minotaurs were inside the harbor. They needed to then ascertain if the Red Gold was in harbor and if Ethan Bailey was still at Mary's Landing. If Hardin had already gone, taking Ethan with him, they would simply leave with the minotaurs to be picked up by the Tigertail once they were out of Mary's Landing range of fire. They had contingency plans, but the first step was getting into the harbor.
Outside an engine drew close and shouting started. Even muffled by the deck overhead, Hoto's bellows were clear enough. A human voice answered back and Paige hissed a curse.
"What is it?"
"The mouth is a woman. It's not Ethan. We're going to have to go looking for him."
* * *
Paige tried not to be disappointed as the Mary's Landing female 'mouth' and her armed escort of four men came onboard. Since the engines were for Ethan's work, she'd hoped that he would be the one that accepted their delivery. His absence might mean that Hardin had recovered Ethan from the Mary's Landing people and already left. Mary's Landing, though, had a nearly unlimited supply of second generation Blues, most of who had some ability at translating. Some. Apparently not a lot.
They'd left a remote camera on deck. She, Turk and the minotaur children crowded around the monitor, watching in mystification. The poor woman seemed totally out of her element. She had the verbal language down pat. She was missing, however, all the body language. She didn't try to expand herself to match the minotaur's size. She didn't stomp, shout, or make large gestures. She didn't have anything to stand in for horns, nor had she tried to disguise the fact she had long hair.
"I think this is the first time she's tried this," Paige whispered. "She's doing horrible. She's too quiet, too small . . ."
"Too docile." Turk murmured.
She gasped. "Oh gods, you're right, she's being female!"
Didn't the woman know anything about minotaur culture? Visiting bulls would speak only to other bulls; anything else was disrespectful of the host bull. Rude bulls became dead bulls.
Paige suddenly realized that as a Blue, the woman knew only one way to relate to males. And Hoto was nine feet of obvious maleness. The Blue was flirting with Hoto but it was only confusing him. The bull wasn't grasping that this mouth was female.
"Oh, this is not going to go well," Paige whispered.
Paige gasped in horror as the Blue moved unnerving close to the bull, reached out, and deftly slide her hand into his sarong. Hoto went wide-eyed and still with surprise as the woman grasped his penis, pulled it out and attempted to pleasure him.
The calves gasped and made sound of disgust.
"What is that bull doing to Hoto?" Toeno asked.
"Um," Paige started make up an answer but nothing came to mind.
"Oh please tell me that she isn't going to . . .." Turk murmured.
The Blue was. She bent slightly, opening her mouth, and tried to use her tongue and lips on the bull.
Hoto yelped in surprise and dismay and smacked the Blue away. He hit her hard, catching her in the head with his blow. The woman went flying across the deck and hit the railing in a crumpled heap.
"Shit, shit, shit." Paige leap to her feet and pointed at Turk. "Stay!"
She stumbled up the stairs built for minotaurs to get to the deck, praying that Turk would obey her. She couldn't sit back and let the events unfold any farther. There was a chance that Hoto would kill the woman. If he did, God knows what the Mary's Landing people would do.
At least one of the armed guards tried something. Hoto was busily disarming a man, carefully, as the bull thought the man was a female mate of the "bull" he'd just knocked unconscious. The minotaur's sexist culture was working in the human's favor.
A second guard was lifting up his weapon.
"No! Don't shoot!" Paige shouted. Oh please, please, please let Turk have stayed below. She didn't need to add him into the mess.
The guard turned at her voice and took aim at her.
She held up her hands to show she wasn't armed. "What the hell are you trying to do? Start a war with the minotaurs?"
"Who the hell are you?"
"Paige . . .Jones." Bailey was a dangerous name to use. Georgetown was a dangerous landing to come from. "Me name is Paige Jones. I'm out of Fenrir's Rock." Fenrir people had a more a drawl than Georgies, she laid it on thick. "You be?"
"Barry Lewis. What the hell are you doing here?"
Good question. The only positive note was that Mary's mouth was in no shape to contradict anything Paige said.
"Me boat sank off Midway. I've been cooped up with them for a couple months. They all were giving me a ride back to human waters."
"You can talk to them?" Lewis asked.
"A smidge." She lied.
"Why weren't you up here earlier?" Lewis asked.
"I was asleep!" she cried.
"Little mouth," Hoto rumbled. "I don't know what is wrong with that other bull. It tried to bite me!"
Oh gods what did she tell him? She couldn't tell him that the mouth was female or it put her own sexually into question. "It's a calf," Paige finally said. Calves were considered even more harmless than females. "It's a very badly behaved calf. And very young. Too young to be talking to adults. I'm telling them how stupid they are."
She turned back to Lewis, stomped her foot and did a head toss of disgust. "Stupid! Don't you people know anything about minotaurs? The translator has to act like a male at all times! He thought she was a bull trying to bite his thing off!"
"He can't tell she's female?" One of the other guards cried. He was crouched beside the Blue, examining her carefully.
"With those little hooters? They think I'm a boy," Paige stuck out her chest. Her breasts were only slightly larger breast than the unconscious woman but compare to minotaur females, they were both tiny. "Now put down the guns and relax or I'll talk them into taking this cargo to Ya-ya."
* * *
Mikhail was glad that they'd equipped the Rosetta with tracking devices. It was amazing how difficult it was to find a small boat on the open ocean. Mikhail landed the Svoboda on a small nearby island and took his newly purchased launch out the Rosetta. The sea was rough, and the boats to
ssed on the waves like an amusement park ride.
"We're over the debris field." Orin cried in greeting as Mikhail jumped from the launch to the Rosetta. "It's right where you Ensign Moldavsky said it would be."
"Have you dealt with the locals?" Mikhail said. Paige had told him that they would need to negotiate with nearest bull. More of a formality, she had said, than anything else. Apparently, minotaurs didn't like war ships parked on their back door.
"Yes, we told them that you were coming. The bull is actually somehow allied with Hoto's group somehow, so everything is hunky-dory there."
Mikhail nodded, hoping that hunky-dory meant "good."
"It's a rich find. We're going to be out here for a while. But there's something odd about the debris field. Come here, look." Orin lead the way to the Rosetta's bridge. On one screen there was a scattering of dark smudges. "When ships hit the water, the debris doesn't really scatter randomly. There's a certain pattern to it. It should—it should . . ." Orin grappled for words. "It shouldn't look like this."
"I see." Mikhail was starting to understand Eraphie's 'Blues have something going on up here.' They made the same logic leaps that he did, only more so. Was it just the Blue crossed with Red, or was it because they were Volkov? If Orin said the debris field was off, then it was off.
Orin looked at him surprise. "Really?"
"It indicates that the manner that the nefrim ship crashed is different from how other ships you've salvaged crashed."
Orin considered him and then studied the screen. "It—It was in pieces before it hit the water. This isn't one debris field, but three. See."
Mikhail considered the various ship pieces. "It's surprising how little coral is on it."
"Nefrim ships never seem to have much on them. It's like the coral doesn't like nibbling on their wrecks."
"This is the bridge." Mikhail was pleased to see it seemed undamaged and perhaps even airtight. They may actually find the navigation system intact and operable. But what had Ethan planned to salvage? What did the seraphim want?
"In ghost stories, spirits are always clinging to things that no longer exist," Mikhail said.
"Ethan might be many things, but he's a good translator."
Mikhail stared off across the featureless water. The only thing in sight was one of the floating islands, so distant it was pebble-sized. A blot of black moving over the water.
It felt wrong to list in the water like this, ungrounded from everything. What was he doing? How did he know this was the right thing? His mission was to find the Fenrir, and he had. He'd told his crew that they were coming for the navigation device but deep inside of him, he knew he had come for what ever the seraphim wanted. Why should he be chasing after phantoms? Because of his fear of his own past? Because it was easier than facing his own weakness? What if he was betraying his species? What if this was some kind of weapon that could be used against humans?
He supposed that until they found it, there was nothing to go on but memories.
Clouds had piled out around a floating island and darkened into a storm.
"You said that we would have to watch for a floating island." Mikhail said. "What did you call them? Vimana?"
Orin turned and followed his gaze. "Not that one. It's too far down the axis." He turned into the wind and brought binoculars up to his eyes. After a moment, he grunted. "Yeah, you barely make Loki out. We have days until we have to worry. I can look up on the charts to see exactly how much time we have. We'll have to move out of its path."
"Can I?" Mikhail held his hand.
"Sure." Orin gave him the binoculars. "Straight into the spin. Use Fenrir's Rock as a landmark, it passes just down the axis by a mile."
Mikhail eyed the oncoming vimana. Orin called it down the axis from Fenrir's Rock, but it seemed as if would pass directly over the sunken spaceship. "If you have charts, then the orbits of these vimanas are stable?"
"At least for as long as we humans have been mapping them."
"Is it possible that the nefrim clipped Loki?"
"Like you did with Icarus?"
Mikhail nodded.
"The vimanas seem to float and not collide with each other because they seem to be made of some material that repels metal and possibly heavier material. The size of the vimana doesn't seem to effect how high it travels. Its as if there is some constant keeping it in place that has nothing to do with mass—because vimanas collect water and vegetation. Lower vimanas travel faster than higher vimanas."
"That would follow basic centrifugal force. The items closer to the center moves slowly while that at the rim moves quickly."
"Paige saw you clip Icarus. Because of your acceleration, you actually spun the vimana as you and it repelled each other. It dumped a shit-load of stuff off it."
"Anything that looked like Fenrir's Rock?"
Orin frowned and took back the binoculars and stared through them. He got the dreamy look that Paige would get time to time. "Yes," he finally said. "Fenrir's Rock was part of Loki."
The nefrim ship had hit Loki hard, dropping part of the vimana, and finally falling to the ocean floor. Not so unlike himself. Mikhail had left part of his bridge on Icarus. Had the nefrims left part of their ship on Loki?
"How do we get up there to see?" He asked Orin.
Orin laughed. "We don't. The only thing that can land on the vimanas are kites."
"Can you speak their language?"
Orin laughed again. "They supposedly speak Standard. Their language is one of money and thrills. They'll do it for the kick of it; but you have to pay them to."
* * *
It took every once of Turk's self-control to stay below deck as Paige bolted out to save the situation from spiraling out of control. Especially when Lewis turned and leveled a weapon at Paige. Turk trusted that Paige could talk her way out of trouble as long as she didn't have to explain too much. And she did, smoothly.
Things, however, continued in an alarming direction. True a pilot came onboard and helped to steer the large minotaur ship into the harbor, just like they did at Ya-ya. There was, however, a large number of armed troops at the dock that they guided the minotaurs to. Said troops showed signs of wanting to board the ship.
"Don't leave the ship," Turk whispered, pressing his fingers to the monitor, wanting to reach out and keep Paige from moving off the ship.
Paige stood on the gangplank and argued with both sides. She got Hoto to allow on the medical crew to care for the still unconscious Blue. Once the Blue was carried off, she and Hoto followed the humans down the gangplank.
"Oh, no, no, no." Turk could barely see her now. She was the shortest person on the dock.
The medic from the medical team turned back. Turk couldn't hear what he said to Paige but saw her stiffen and shake her head. The men standing on the dock, though, slowly gathered in around her.
Turk could barely breathe. Paige hunched down into herself, not liking what she heard, but apparently unable or unwilling to flee. She shook her head a couple more times, and then, reluctantly, held up her arm to the medic.
Oh god, they were going to take her DNA. They'll know she was a Blue. Once they realize it, they might try to seize her.
Can I just kill them all?
The Mary's Landing people weren't that heavily armed, didn't have serious armor, and weren't expecting an attack from him. He might be able to kill them all. If he did that many people, though, they would have a limited time window to get safely out of the harbor—with no guaranteed that the minotaurs would flee. Actually, minotaurs probably wouldn't flee until they got their pumps, important for their future survival. Killing them all wasn't an option.
Can I kill everyone in this town?
Doubtful.
The medic stepped forward, took Paige's arm and pressed a medical device to it.
Turk thought about simply going out and joining Paige on the dock. That way they'd be together and he could protect her, but the first thing the Mary's Landing people would probably do
was strip him of his weapons and armor. He would have to kill them all to keep the armor and he'd already decided that wasn't a good plan.
No, he would be more effective staying hidden and following. She wasn't in immediate danger; the Mary's Landing people considered her far too valuable to hurt. He had to keep track of her though. He had a tracer that he could use, but he needed to get it on her. How did he get it on her though? One of the calves could take it down. He could hide the tracer in something and have a calf take it to her. Turk hunted quickly around the room for something to put the tracer in.
The calves watched him.
He settled on a piece of soft-fleshed fruit. The small tracer could be pushed its side, totally hidden, Paige could tuck it into her pocket, and there would be no reason why the Mary's Landing people to take it from her.
"Toeno!" Turk called to the little bull who was the only calf that would talk directly to Paige. It got all of the calves attention. Turk showed them the tracer. Pushed it into the fruit. Held it out to the bull. "Paige." Turk tapped the monitor where she stood and then shook the fruit at Toeno. "Torno. Paige."
"Annnno . . ." The tallest of the females calves murmured. "Hano nana ra sa ne."
"Bowae!" Toeno cried.
Turk had no idea what they said. He wasn't even sure if they were asking questions or not. He couldn't tell if there was any understanding in their eyes. Were they looking at him in confusion or were they perfectly aware what he was asking only refusing because it broke one of their father's rules?
Turk caught Toeno's hand, pushed the fruit into the bull's hand, and then pointed at Paige on the monitor. He then tried to push the bull toward the door.
The females calves all reacted with outcries. Toeno dug in his heads. All of them started to talk at once, but Turk couldn't even tell if they were trying to address him. Were they angry? Dismayed? Confused? He couldn't read any of their emotion. In Ya-ya, he interacted with humans that didn't speak Standard. He'd been able to buy food and clothes at the small Ya-ya shops. He'd ask how something cost with a lift of his eyebrows, understood that the shopkeeper's upraised fingers indicated amount, negotiation the price with shake of the head, agree to cost with a nod of the head, and close the deal by holding out coins. It been almost effortless. Because they were both human.
