Tiny and Fierce

by Margo Bond Collins

  “You threatening us?” I took a step forward, and even though I should be pissed, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill run through me. Sexy. Stubborn. And apparently balls of brass.

  My kind of woman.

  “So what if I am?” Her bottom lip quivered ever so slightly as she spoke.

  I couldn’t help myself, I smiled.

  “You think this is funny?” She closed her eyes, sighing. “Blue, I know what I’m doing.”

  “Who the hell are you talking to?” I leaned back against the bar casually, even as a pang of jealousy shot through me. You know, since I had a right to be jealous over a woman I’d just met.

  She half-turned away from us, whispering to some unseen entity. Her side profile was… delicious.

  Evik clicked beside me and he placed a curved claw on my shoulder. Chilcheks don’t exactly read your mind, but they feel your emotions. And not all can do it, and some can barely do it, and then there’s the rarity that can really do it. I joke that Evik’s got nearly-impenetrable skin that serves one purpose—protecting his sensitive-as-hell emotions. He hates being teased. He’s the picture of a warrior for his species at almost four feet taller than me, though the big-ass horns shouldn’t count, in my opinion.

  And tough exoskeleton or not, I got under his skin real easy. Sometimes too easy, and it zapped the fun out of it—like a beryllium core mounted too close to a quantum intake.

  I focused for a second on Evik, long enough to ‘hear’ what he was saying.

  “Calm down, man. Keep it in your pants,” was the gist.

  I didn’t make a habit of getting overly close with anyone, though as far as friends went, these two dumbasses were as near to a meaningful relationship as I currently had. Being a prince on the run had its drawbacks. There was always the niggling worry that anyone who saw my face might also see one of the bounty notices. Even the most loyal friendship might be swayed by ten thousand digi-coins, courtesy of the Duprasi Queen herself. Hell…I’d been tempted a time or two to turn my own cursed self in.

  I didn’t make the marriage agreement to her second-born daughter. That was all my parents’ doing. They had a bounty out on me, too. Good old loving Mom and Dad. Yet here I was on the run, pulling scams to make my next meal.

  We were a proud planet colonized by the first early wave of human refugees. We’d cross-bred with the humanoid natives and built a civilization as advanced as any thriving thirty-first century Earth city. There was little advantage, in my mind, to joining with the Duprasi. Sure, a quicker route through the Öpik–Oort to certain trade posts might have its benefits, and we’d no longer have to fork over the insane toll the Bufo Alvarius Empress charged for passing through her galaxy, but...

  There was no way, not by the heat of a dozen suns, that I was going back to marry a woman who basically looked like a walking, talking magbrie. They were uglier than a damn Earth rat. I’d rather dive headfirst into a black hole and take my chances.

  The spitfire of a woman was still whispering, but then her hand dropped from her ear and she turned back towards us. She was grinning.

  “You’re wanted by the Duprasi for some reason.” She pointed at me. “You’re wanted by the Chilcheks.” She pointed at Evik. “And you,” she directed her finger at Morph. “Holy space crimes against the known universe, Batman.”

  Morpheus stood up, raising to his full height, his wings outspreading in a metallic rainbow.

  “Fine,” Morph said. And I’d never seen him look worried, but hell if this tiny ass woman hadn’t just said something to shake up the impenetrable, scarred, mysterious fucking Morpheus Madagar.

  “Fine what?” I looked over at him, confusion jumping around my brain like heating kernels refusing to burst.

  He looked at me, his large eyes narrowed. “We’ll be her crew.”

  3

  Evik of the Chilchek

  “Blue is this way.” The tiny human woman led us through the station toward her ship’s berth, jogging to stay in front of the three of us. I tried to read her emotions, get a sense of what she was feeling, but Morpheus’s fear-laced rage overwhelmed everything else. It roiled around him in bitter waves of orange and red, covering even the scent of Alder’s lust.

  The swirl of emotions was enough to make me pull my antennae close to my body to try to block out my partners’ responses to the woman.

  Sure, she’d essentially blackmailed us, but it wasn’t like we had anything else to do. Our own ship had been virtually destroyed by weapons-fire during our frantic escape from the last station we’d docked in. The authorities there caught onto our scams too quickly. Their docking clamps were disabled easily enough, though—for all that Morpheus and Alder might call my upper appendages my “horns,” my mandibles were perfect for snipping wires.

  They were pretty good at cutting through flesh, too. And if Morpheus didn’t rein in his emotions, I might take a chunk out of him.

  Alder dropped back beside me, speaking in that quiet hiss humans sometimes used to shield their voices from others’ hearing. “Sensing anything about our new boss?”

  I signaled no with my scent glands and mandibles, but unlike Morpheus, Alder had never learned to read those signs, so I clicked a negative for his vocal translator to give him.

  “Too bad. I’d like to know how much trouble we’re in.” With a sigh that my translator told me suggested annoyance, Alder quickened his pace to walk next to Morpheus.

  I shook off my own irritation, flicking one of my wing casings as if I could physically remove the emotion from my body. I didn’t expand my wings, though. For one thing, we were headed down the hallway leading to berth 351, and it wasn’t wide enough for my wingspan. More importantly, though, seeing my wings always put Morph in a foul mood. And the last thing any of us needed was more anger from him.

  Instead, I focused on the woman, examining her from all sides. Until I’d left Chilchek, I hadn’t really believed that other species’ eyes couldn’t take in multiple angles at once.

  Her skin, paler even than Alder’s, glowed from within. The heat radiating from her brushed against my maxillary palps, making me want to move them against her as if she were food, or maybe a mate.

  The thought made the tip of my flagellum stiffen.

  And to think I’d told Alder to keep it in his endosoma. Not that human males could tuck their reproductive organs away safely.

  Exposed genitals. So ridiculous.

  Mammals. They were soft in every way. No natural armor to cover their most vulnerable bits. Limited senses. No eye facets. And most of them couldn’t even hide their emotions. Even Morpheus, who was closer to Chilchek than the others, radiated his feelings.

  Back home, had I finished my training as a warrior, I would have been a Paladin in my colony by now, working with other warriors to protect the planet from invaders. Part of the hive mind, my emotion-reading skills providing a link that allowed us to live, work, and fight as one organism.

  Out here, though, I am alone.

  Well, almost alone. Alder and Morpheus might not be Chilchek, but they were my ‘brothers-in-arms’, as Alder had once said. He tried to explain that a “brother” was more than just a colony-mate. He saw us as if we three came from a single egg sac. And perhaps wore the same removable chitin. It didn’t make any sense, but I could sense the importance of the phrase to him, so I had programmed it into my translator. Egg sac and chitin sharing warriors as one.

  “Here we are.” The woman stopped at the hatch, keying in her code to cycle us into the ship. I didn’t recognize the metal it was made of, but the midnight-blue coating reminded me of my egg-parent’s chitin.

  Perhaps she, too, could become one of our egg sac and chitin sharing warriors as one. Despite being female.

  I would have to ask Alder if that was possible.

  The hatch was low, so I dropped down to walk horizontally as we entered the ship. It was the most natural form of movement for me, anyway.

  “Lights on, Blue,” the woman said. She’d g
iven us her name. However, although it started with a respectable click, the long, sibilant sounds following that were nothing I could reproduce. I would have to assign it a Chilchek character and program it into my translator, as I had for Alder and Morpheus. I wasn’t looking forward to the day Morpheus discovered the character I’d assigned him meant broken wings.

  Speaking of Morpheus, he’d had enough time to walk off some of his anger and was no longer clouding the room with the stench of his fear-rage. So I unfurled my antennae and focused them on the human woman again. Her scent also carried a touch of fear, woven in with the vibrations of excitement. Not fear of the men she’d brought aboard, at least. Still, something had the woman worried.

  “Blue, this is Morpheus, Alder, and Evik,” she said. “Guys, this is Bluebird, my ship’s AI.”

  “Hello, and welcome aboard.” The ship’s tones were lovely, as were so many of the liquid languages of non-Chilchek.

  Too bad they’re unreproducible heathen languages.

  I waved hello with my mandibles, released a greeting scent, and added a verbal click to enhance the salutation experience.

  Morpheus gave me a sidelong glance, but I ignored him. Even among heathens, it does not hurt to follow all the formalities.

  As the others greeted the ship, I quickly recorded its name and tagged it in my translator with a short series of Chilchek symbols. Flight of Atmospheric Color.

  I was still recording when the ship said, “Lise, there’s a squadron of station enforcers headed down the hallway.”

  A momentary scent of elation escaped me. I needed to learn to keep my own emotions under control. But I had caught her name without having to ask. Now to connect it to Chilchek. She was tiny and pale, as if fresh from the egg sac, but from Alder’s response, she was also a sexually mature female.

  I pushed aside the part of me that pointed out I, too, had an oddly sexual response to her.

  Adult female larva human.

  Close enough.

  “Time to get out of here,” Lise was saying. “Hope you guys didn’t leave behind anything important.”

  Morpheus tapped his hand against the bag holding our take from the con game we’d played, along with what we made selling our last ship for scrap metal as soon as we brought it limping into the station. “We have all we need right here.”

  “Good.” She sprinted down a corridor, speaking as she went. “Blue, lead them to their quarters. I’m spinning up to get us out of here.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Alder announced, following her.

  Morpheus and I glanced at each other. “Us, too,” he said.

  Lise didn’t bother to answer directly, simply shouting out as we hit the ship’s bridge, “Blue, have they locked us down yet?”

  “Not yet. I have access to the station mainframe. The orders have gone in, but I blocked them.”

  As her tiny hands flew across the control consoles, Lise nodded—a signal I had learned to interpret as an affirmative response. “Then get us out of here.”

  The high-pitched whine of the engines vibrated through my exoskeleton.

  “Buckle in,” Lise ordered, throwing herself into a seat far too small for me—or even Morpheus, though he could probably squeeze himself into it if necessary. Alder was able to fall into a similar seat. Luckily, the bridge had restraint straps built into the walls for additional crew members, and Morpheus and I rigged ourselves into them. Not a moment too soon, either, as the Bluebird shot out of its berth alongside the station, the docking clamps falling away with a thunk that reverberated throughout the bridge.

  The room echoed with a tense silence as we waited to see if any security ships followed us. As soon as we were far enough away to give us a head start on any pursuers, Lise blew out a breath. This one translated as a sigh of relief.

  If only it carried a scent, maybe I could translate it myself.

  Mammals. Utterly barbaric.

  “What the hell was that, Blue? Why is station security so interested in us?” Waves of anxiety floated off Lise.

  “They are not interested in us,” the AI answered. “They’re interested in one of your new crew members.”

  We egg sac and chitin sharing warriors as one glanced at each other, waiting to see which of us was in the most danger this time.

  The ship continued in her lilting voice.

  “Morpheus Madagar.”

  4

  Morpheus Madagar

  I tilted my head against the hard-composite surface of the inner ship walls and closed the inner and outer lids of my eyes. The thin membranes did not completely block out the blinking lights of the bridge console, but the dimness was enough for me to set afire the quiet buzzing at the back of my throat that helped me focus.

  Security at the station hadn’t been interested in the con activities with Evik and Alder. No, they’d specifically been interested in me, and me alone. After all this time, I thought my existence had melted into the fabric of space. I wasn’t important enough to keep chasing, despite my expansive list of criminal activity.

  But I’d been wrong.

  As the only successful hybrid that came out of that galaxy-forsaken place, of course I was still a prize to be caught.

  I’d been on the run… for long enough now that I could barely remember what it was like in the electrified cage.

  It had been long enough to walk a few feet back and forth. Tall enough to nearly stand upright. Not nearly wide enough to spread my wings. My real wings. Those opaque expanses of pearlescent skin stretched over hollow bone. Delicate, yet strong enough to lift a thousand-stone Odonata into the air.

  I’d been a healer in my other life, before the specimen ship had snatched me on a relief mission to the outer stretches of my planet, where those who did not embrace the industry of the larger cocoon cities made their homes. I remembered the great, metal beast, reaching its sun-hot pincers down between the hairless trees. I’d kept them from grabbing a child, one only days removed from birth. One whose wings had not yet unfurled.

  But they had taken me instead.

  Damaging my wings in the process. So severely that, though they healed and I could move them, I would never fly again. More than that, my wings were part of my… my speech. The way I communicated with the world around me.

  Broken. So very broken.

  It was only a few star cycles before they clipped my wings completely.

  And then came the needles, and the tests, and the vat of liquid that smelled and tasted like the valley of the dead back home.

  I learned my abductors’ language, as they pumped me full of noxious liquids that sent me into convulsions punctuated by hallucinations of my mate and the young ones who’d not hatched before my mission, the pale-yellow eggs so full of promise. They would be long birthed now, grown with mates and egglings of their own. I used to wonder if they had the pearl of my wings or the sky of their mother’s. My mate would have moved on, as was our custom when a partner dies.

  It had been so long since I flew over the forests and parishes of my planet. So long since I soared high above the tall city and dipped low to run my tri-jointed fingers through the cool blue waters of the great lakes.

  And I would never go back. Not on the off chance it would cause the scientists to also return. Plus… I didn’t belong anymore. Not with the way I looked, not with the way I was. Not with my mechanical wings.

  From what I knew, having hacked into a highly-classified database under the identity ‘Splice,’ my abductors—who, I determined, had been acting on the Bufo Alvarius Empress’s orders—had not stolen more of my kind. Not since the enactment of the Peace between Planets pact and the creation of the Universal Equality Federation. Experiments like the one that had stolen my life, my mind… and my wings, were now outlawed.

  Yet, I’d still not been safe.

  Retrieving an old splice, apparently, was still fair game.

  The ship rocked to the side and the human girl muttered something unintelligible as the ship’s AI, B
lue, instructed her to keep a steady hand on the controls. I backed off the mental buzzing and opened one set of lids. I could focus, easily, on more than one thing at a time. So half my concentration could watch the human girl while the other half kept thinking over once again being on someone’s active radar.

  “It’s not like I’m playing Asteroid here, Blue. Give a girl a break.”

  “And if I don’t stay on your case, Lise, we’ll end up a pile of space junk.”

  “Scaredy-cat.” The girl named Lise laughed out loud.

  “Human error.” The AI poked back, its voice pleasant and teasing.

  It was strange to hear such a relationship between a ship and its captain. Of course, I knew AI had personality functions, but I’d rather not have a piece of machinery talking back. To each their own.

  The other part of my mind was back in the cage, watching the scientists move about the room. We were on a ship, not the one that had taken me, but another, larger one. Sterile, too white, too bright. Too clean. I could not smell the soil in the air or the sun on my face. My wings had been placed against a large wall of light, held in place by giant pins. They took pictures of it that showed the skeletal structure beneath and the veins that were once active rivers of blood and fluids.

  A part of me, separated, placed on a wall like art.

  That’s what one of them had said—my wings were like art. They could sell them once they were done with them. They would make a great deal of money.

  I learned that money was no more than digital currency stored in giant computer banks. Things used to buy food and homes and luxuries.

  That was what my wings were to them.

  I began to change, feeling my body grow weak with the aches and pains of a second DNA changing the fabric of my identity. Later, I remembered only the screams.

  I thought they were another creature’s pained cries.

  Eventually, I realized that I was the one screaming.

  “Where the hell we headed, anyway?” Alder’s voice, calm and direct, broke the quiet that had descended on the bridge after Lise had navigated the field of space debris. I knew him well enough to catch the undercurrent of excitement. He was always up for an adventure, especially if that adventure included someone he found… sexually appealing.