years. I’d learned the hard way to listen to them. So I opted to play along, at least until help
turned up. “Look, the name’s neither here nor there. I still need to splint my foot.”
“Agreed.” The Lupan grunted and rose. “Then, if you will graciously stop thinking you can
kill me, I’ll see what I can do for your foot.”
“Why?” The question came out of its own accord.
“In case you’d forgotten, we Lupans are human, too. Though I confess the admission
embarrasses me.” He stepped back to perk an ear at Roy. “You…” made the word sound dirty.
“Roy,” our Sprite said. I couldn’t see him but I heard the hurt in his tone.
The Lupan ignored it. “Your uniform says you’re a medic. Is that true? Or is it as much a lie
as the rest of you?”
“It’s true.”
I craned my neck to see Roy nod despite the tears welling in his baby browns. The Lupan just
uhffed. “Good. Then go find a medi-kit. Our little fish has a broken foot.”
“It’s not my fault, you know.” Roy flipped the end of his rainbow scarf over his shoulder,
though he had sense enough to be sidling toward the doors as he did it. “I’m really a very
competent person.” The Lupan lifted a lip, baring one massive fang tip. Roy whirled and fled out
the bridge doors.
Once the door shut, the Lupan leaned back against the nav post, head down and breathing
hard. The Aryan part of me yearned for a knife. The rest of me wondered why in all the hells I
suddenly felt so… defeated. It felt like all the hope in my life had been sucked out and was
giving me the finger from across the street. I shook the feeling off by studying the Lupan.
He was about my age – thirty-two, maybe, thirty-five at the outside. Much as I hated to admit
it, he looked good enough to stir instincts in me I’d thought had died five years ago. He had to be
educated, too. It wasn’t unusual to find a Lupan who spoke Standard; lots of Dogs spoke the
Commonwealth language. It was the way he talked: warm and mellow and gentle and proper.
Like a real gentleman.
Yeah, well I’d learned back then what gentlemen were like, hadn’t I? I re-set my
commonsense and peered over at him. “You mind me asking you something?”
He lifted an ear in my direction.
“Why aren’t you dead?”
He looked up enough to give me a tight-lipped smile. “Titanium alloy.” He tapped a talon tip
against the blackened remains of his torque. “You should’ve aimed for my head.”
“Figured the shot would bounce. I’ll do better next time.” I shifted position and winced. “So
why didn’t you kill me? ”
“Already told you. I don’t kill women.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t kill Roy, either.”
“I mistook that one for a woman. And then… it was too late.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t kill him even after you figured out the mistake. Why?”
He ignored the question. Instead he walked over to turn the scowl down on the Samurai
woman’s corpse. “What a waste.”
“Why? ‘Cause she made you shoot her instead of…” I remembered his gun and shut it.
The Lupan caught my meaning anyway. “I am happy to see you know enough about
weaponry to realize my rifle would have made a somewhat larger hole in her head.” He knelt
beside the corpse. To my surprise, he closed her eyes with a gentle hand. “It would be good to
know who did kill her.”
I agreed, but I settled for a shrug. “Whoever it was is dead now anyway.” I was beginning to
form an idea of what must have happened on the bridge. He was right: Lupans had no part in it,
at least not a shooting one. Sasaki, though… I switched my gaze to the slashed remnants of the
captain’s body. Those gashes were too fine to be Lupan talon work. A slice’n dice job like that
was Samurai sword work. Samurai officers still carried swords as part of their uniforms. They
knew how to use them, too. Same as they were famously dead shots with the dainty, deadly
pistols called needlers. The kind of narrow bore gun it took to put that hole between the woman’s
eyes. Yeah, there’d been a fight on this bridge all right, but it wasn’t with Lupans. Odds were it’d
been Sasaki against all comers. The question was, whose side was Sasaki fighting for?
“I expected you would know.” The Lupan’s voice drew my attention back to him.
“Why so? Told you, I’m just a grunt.”
“Of course. As I am just a Dog.” He rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Now I need to remove
these bodies.” He gave me a grin of pure wickedness. “The smell of raw meat gives me an
appetite.”
I started to push myself out of the command chair. The wave of pain pushed me back down.
“Where do you think you’re going?” The Lupan perked both ears at me.
“You just said you want to remove these bodies, right?” I set my jaw. Damned if I was going
to let a Dog out-man me.
“Sit. You’d just be in the way.”
“I can hop!” But he was right. And truth be told it didn’t bother my conscience at all to settle
back into the chair. “Okay. Say, what’s your name?”
He bent to pick up the dead woman. “You should be able to figure it out, Vahrheitsyaeger.”
“Gods dammit! I told you I didn’t choose the name. So what’s the big secret with yours?”
“He hasn’t got a name.” Roy’s voice wafted in from the bridge doors on the scent of Jungle
Gardenia.
I twisted around to see the Sprite push in a medical cart. Sight of the tools on that cart made
my foot hurt worse. I forced myself to focus on the boy’s words. “What do you mean he hasn’t
got a name? Everybody’s got a name.”
“Not everybody. Didn’t they teach you anything in training?” Roy maneuvered the cart over
to my chair, then flashed the Lupan a simpering grin. “Lupan men don’t take names until they
marry. Their wives name them.”
The Lupan hefted the woman’s corpse. “My private life is not open to discussion.”
“Yeah, well, what do you want us to call you?” I asked. “Fido?”
“You can call it. Don’t expect me to answer.”
“Oh, I’ve got a name for you,” Roy cooed. “I shall call you Romeo.” He finished setting up
his medi-kit, glanced up at the Lupan through those long, dark lashes. “I shall go through life
calling, ‘Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou, Romeo’?”
“In which case I shall spend my life on the run.”
I yelped as Roy lifted my foot onto the cart. Seemed to me he was being rougher than was
necessary. It also seemed to me that as soon as he touched my foot, I felt a wash of bitter
jealousy. That was puzzling enough to bother me even through the pain. What made it terrifying
was that the jealousy was aimed at me.
The thought of having a love-sick Sprite using those bone-mending tools on me made my foot
hurt worse. The thought of having a jealous love-sick Sprite work on me made the pain seem
tolerable. “Hey,” I called to our new Romeo. “Maybe I better help you after all.”
Romeo settled the woman’s body onto one arm and started for the doors. “Stay put.” He
jerked his chin at the medi-kit table then flattened ears at Roy. “And you – do it right.”
Do what right? “Now, wait a minute-” I started to drag my foot off the examining table. I saw
a movement from the corner o
f my eye. Roy touched something cold to my neck. And the world
went black.
Chapter 2
Life came back in a whirl of male voices and chill air. Memories triggered: a cold metal floor,
and men’s voices laughing above my head... Memories I thought I’d washed out in blood. I came
fully awake in an adrenaline spurt.
Then I remembered the attack and the carnage on the bridge. I held my breath and did a
mental inventory: I was in the captain’s chair, my foot propped up on the examining table. The
foot didn’t hurt anymore; whatever else he was, Roy must really be a medic. He also wanted to
keep Romeo happy, since I was still alive and apparently fine. I felt lighter, too. A muscle flex
told me the reason: I was out of my armor, though still wearing the under-armor body suit. I
thought about sitting up, but my Aryan instincts nixed it. The suspicious side of me decided to
play dead while I ran back through what little intel I had.
Question was, what did I have? My battalion had been part of some secret squirrel action, that
was clear. It just wasn’t secret enough; somebody’d let the Lupans in on it. I wondered for a
moment if it’d been one of our own brass asses, trying to get a jump on the competition for
control of this sector once the war officially ended. Try as I could I couldn’t come up with any
other reason. The Commonwealth had lost the war and even the idiots in HQ knew it. We were
damn lucky the doves in the Lupan Parliament were still willing to talk peace instead of just
dictating terms. Army scuttlebutt said their military had argued for flat out annihilation.
So sending a Marine battalion out here to the DMZ made sense, kinda-sorta, as a brass ass turf
grab. Only some competing brass ass must’ve had his own operative on board. Somebody with
instructions to make sure us Marines never got to whatever turf was due to be grabbed. In that
case, only somebody on the freighter would have called that attack in. My guess was Sasaki. It
explained the fight on the bridge. It would also explain why he would call the Lupans in, and
why they’d take Sasaki with them. What it didn’t explain was why in all the hells they’d left
Romeo aboard. If they’d wanted to know where we were going, they could’ve just asked Sasaki.
Come to think of it, it didn’t explain why they’d left Roy aboard, either.
Maybe Roy…? It surprised me to realize just how much I wanted to believe that Roy had
betrayed us. It didn’t make sense, though. The boy couldn’t even sync in; how could he have
called in a Lupan attack? And yet here was something dark in that boy. Well, surprise again - the
boy was a slave. It’d be suspicious if he didn’t have an unhappy streak. Besides, who in hells
was I to talk about somebody else’s dark places?
Long story short, it looked like my best chance for survival was to surrender to the damn
Dogs. If any of the things the Sisters or Romeo said about Lupan attitudes toward women were
true, I’d be a hells of a lot safer as a POW than I would be in an Army interrogation cell. And
somehow, deep down inside, I felt they really were true. In which case I might as well admit
defeat and get it over with. I started to open my eyes to tell Romeo about my change in plans.
Then I remembered ShipMind. Gobbing hells! I’d told ShipMind to yell for help. But I’d been
thinking only of Commonwealth frequencies…
Keeping slitted eyes on the two men, I slipped my hand into the chair’s sync link. ShipMind
thrust those message packets at me again, but I shoved them aside. What I wanted was to make
out a new whisper in the feed.
Commonwealth Freighter XEA90876… come in XEA90876. The feed was too faint to make
out ID, but it was in Standard. Monkey’s luck: it was one of ours. No point trying to dodge it, not
now they’d got our signal. I gave myself a mental kick as I acknowledged the call.
Commonwealth Freighter XEA90876… This time the signal came in loud and clear. I made
sure our rescuers had our coordinates, got a thirty-minim ETA. That was a whole lot faster than
I’d expected. Our search and rescue ships must’ve been right in the neighborhood. Assuming
they were search and rescue…
The suspicions that had been forming about this mission went nova. It didn’t need math wonk
skills to figure out the odds against a Commonwealth rescue team being that close to us. It
wasn’t likely any merchanter ships would be this far out in the DMZ, either, peace talks or not.
No, most likely our rescuers were coming from wherever we were headed. A few years back I
would have convinced myself that it wasn’t any big deal. Hells, the war was over as soon as the
politicos signed the treaty at Bogue Dast. Now…this whole stinking attack told me otherwise.
Wherever we were headed, they were going to want to know why I was still alive. And keeping
company with a Lupan officer, no less. The short odds were that I’d be answering those
questions for some real Aryans – and my adopted Type deserved its ugly rep for their
interrogation methods.
What I needed was a cover story. Wouldn’t have to last long, just a couple of days til the
Bogue Dast talks finalized our surrender. I thought about claiming Romeo was just a passenger.
That was a no-go, not with him still in armor. Only other option, then, was to convince our
rescuers that Romeo was my prisoner. Dirty trick to play on him, but not nearly as dirty as what
any real Aryan would do to him. I remembered that sense of oneness, the warmth and safety in it.
Whatever that was, I still wanted it. So prisoner he was going to be.
I managed to not to laugh out loud at the thought. Capture Romeo. Sure, no problem at all. I
just had to walk up and punch him out. Hells, I couldn’t even think of anything that could knock
the man out: Lupan skulls were a helluva lot thicker than our human-only ones. As long as that
man could breathe, he could fight.
That was it! Even Romeo couldn’t fight in a vacuum. And breathing I could handle through
sync. I told ShipMind to seal the bridge doors and start siphoning air out into the corridor.
The ship’s AI might have been wiped chart-wise, but its mother hen instincts were alive and
well. The command got me a no-nonsense sanity check. And a demand that I put the living in a
life pod first.
Well, hells, the old tub’s mind was still working after all. Works for me, I told it. Where’s the
pod?
ShipMind flashed me an image. The pod’s hatch was built smooth to the deck between the
nav station and the bulb that housed ShipMind itself. Good. I promised ShipMind I’d get us all
into the pod before we died, then told it to start siphoning the air out of the bridge.
Still have messages pending, it reminded me.
Forget ‘em, I told it, then slipped my fingers out of the link. I’d seen the coding on those the
last time I sync’d in. Whosever they were, the coding wasn’t anything I recognized. They must
be Sasaki’s messages. And whatever game he’d been playing, I wanted it to end with him. Me, I
had more immediate worries. Like capturing one very large Lupan without his realizing it.
“Hi, guys.” I wiggled my toes and stretched. Damn, I must’ve been out for a good long while.
Now that I was paying attention a quick eyeball of the bridge showed that the bodies were gone.
So was the blood. Bridge certainly
smelled better. Matter of fact, the place smelled like coffee,
with an undertone of dirty socks. A nasty little voice at the edge of consciousness muttered the
sock smell was probably me.
“So our fish is awake.” Still fuzzy-eyed, I homed in on Romeo’s voice. I got him into focus in
time to see him push Roy out to arm’s length. Despite my smart intentions, I noted with
satisfaction the shudder that ran up Romeo’s arm when he touched the Sprite. I also noticed the
way light shimmered across the silvery tips of his mane, and the power in his body when he
moved. Roy saw me notice it all. The look that boy shot me was pure venom.
Too bad. Roy’s tastes in entertainment were his own problem. I ignored him and made a point
of sniffing in Romeo’s direction. “Say, you got any more of that coffee?”
“It’s cold, now,” Roy answered for him. “And we’re out of cream.” The Sprite added a purse-
lipped moue to his scowl.
“It doesn’t matter either way.” Romeo leaned past Roy to pour black coffee into a cup from a
matching pot. The sight of that cup and pot wiped all other thoughts out of my head for a minute.
They were made of porcelain, the kind painted with Home World roses. It sat on a fancy silver
tray, beside a matching coffee pot. I’d only seen stuff like that in history vids – things must’ve
cost a fortune. Wasn’t just my Aryan instincts that wondered how the captain of an old tub like
this had got his hands on that kind of credit. Fair bet this freighter’s captain hauled cargo that
never appeared on any official manifest. Like marines, for example.
Romeo handed the cup to Roy. The boy scowled, but rose smooth as flowing water. He
wafted over to me on a scent of warm vanilla, pretending to be wide-eyed and innocent.
“Thanks for fixing the toes,” I told him. “They feel fine.”
“I wish you wouldn’t sound so surprised,” he handed me the cup and swished back to drop
down beside Romeo once more. “I really am a certified medic, you know.”
“Not arguing – hey, cookies!” For a moment I forgot everything else in the sweet scent of the
sugar cookies he’d placed on the cup’s saucer. I stuffed one in my mouth, slurped bitter black
coffee over it.
“Enjoy it,” he said. “While you can.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked around melting cookie. Damn, ShipMind wasn’t wasting any
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