Hunters Mate

by Hunter's Mate (lit)

  “Come on, let’s go. Why wait to die? I want out of here right now. I don’t care if I have to float home. I’m not going to sit in this tin can and wait to be cooked to death.” She punched control buttons at random eliciting error codes from the panel and a series of discordant beeps.

  “You don’t strike me as the type to give up so easily.”

  “Give up? I’m not giving up. I’m doing something. I’m going to beat the system. We’re supposed to die thanks to Ashan. If he has his way, we snap, crackle, and pop. Let’s beat him at his own game and just not be here when the ship explodes.”

  “Victoria.”

  “Tell me the damn code, Kash. I’m walking out of this airlock. I know, I’ll freeze to death, right? It’s damn cold in space. That’s okay. Maybe a million years from now some space probe will find me and thaw me out and I really will get one over on Ashan.”

  “You’re being irrational.”

  She whirled on him and stuck a forefinger into the fur on his chest. “You haven’t begun to see irrational yet, bucko. Now give me the damn airlock code.”

  “You will not freeze to death.”

  “Sure I will--isn’t it something like a million degrees below zero out there?”

  “Your blood will boil first due to the lack of atmospheric pressure. Every capillary in your body will explode and what’s left of you will then freeze. Your body would fall into the sun in much less than a million years, but assuming some space traveler did find your remains, thawing you out would not restore you to life.”

  She stilled. “Thanks. Thanks for that science lesson, Mr. Wizard. That’s just what I needed to hear.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She growled, then rushed at him, fists balled. He caught her and held her and rather than attacking, she sank against him. “I want to go home, Kash. I just want to go home.”

  Uncertain of the proper response, Kash slid his hands down her back and locked them around her waist. He bent his head and laid his still swollen cheek against the soft, dark curls on her head. “So do I, Victoria. And maybe we can find a way. Come with me and we’ll figure out a plan to save ourselves. There must be something we can do.”

  For a moment the only sound Kash heard was the pounding of his own heart. How could he indulge in the fantasy that he could save them when Ashan had planned so well for them to die? How could he revel in the feel of her warm body in his arms when they had only hours to live?

  Chapter Seven

  “You still seem angry,” Kash said. He reached across Victoria’s lap and grabbed one of the tools he’d arranged on the floor beneath the navigation console on the bridge.

  Apparently Victoria had been handing him the tools with attitude so he’d taken to retrieving them himself, each time managing to brush his hand over her knee or thigh or against her arm. Each brief contact gave her a jolt of awareness that she tried to ignore.

  “Am I wrong to be a little ... annoyed about this whole thing? I didn’t ask to be half Sha-Shiri, you know, and for what it’s worth, I really only half-believed it up until now anyway. After all, my father always looked perfectly human to me. He shifted from Sha-Shiri form a long time before I was born. I look perfectly human and I feel perfectly human. As much as I always wanted to believe I was part alien, it still comes as a little bit of a shock, you know?”

  Kash only nodded. He was elbow deep in a tangle of wires and the muscles in his broad shoulders were bunched in visible knots of tension. Victoria forced herself to look away and continued her rant.

  “I was minding my own business, taking a walk in the woods in my very own back yard, mind you, and I get Shanghaied for the Sha’tek breeding program--”

  “The Val’tek breeding program.” Kash looked up from his work long enough to correct her.

  She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. As if that’s not bad enough, considering no one bothered to ask me if I felt like breeding, thanks to the political crap going on on your planet, now I’m being hurled into the sun at the speed of light.”

  “We are not traveling at the speed of light. If we were, we’d have been dead before we stepped out of the storage capsule.”

  “Whatever.” Victoria rose, dusted off her hands and began pacing the bridge. Each time she turned in Kash’s direction she had to shield her eyes from the increasingly brilliant light coming from the forward viewport. Beyond the nose of the ship, the sun boiled and churned like a ball of lava. The visibility shields made it possible to look at the star for short periods of time, but each time she did she imagined the temperature around her rising. Sweat beaded on her forehead and had begun to drip down between her breasts, yet Kash insisted the heat shielding was still working perfectly. What would happen when it began to fail?

  “I apologize for the actions of the Sha’tek and the Val’tek,” Kash said. “My mission is to preserve your life and I intend to do everything in my power to return you safely to earth.”

  Victoria swallowed her pique. She wanted to be mad at him. Since he was the only Sha-Shiri left on board, who else could she rant at about the continuing mess of her life?

  “I’m sorry to lay this on you. I really am. But I’ve had a rough couple of months and this just caps it all off perfectly. My parents are probably going insane worrying about me already, not to mention there’s a ten dollar Porterhouse steak rotting on my kitchen counter. On the off chance I do survive, I’m going to get reamed out for stinking up the house.”

  “Again, I apologize. Can you hand me the splicer, please?”

  Victoria complied, slapping the device into his outstretched palm.

  “I will do all I can to get you home, Victoria. I promise.”

  * * * *

  “I’ve done all I can with the navigation system.” Kash made his announcement with a heavy heart. Ashan-Kona had mangled the controls so badly that even an experienced engineer would have been unable to repair them with only the limited tools available. He’d begun the sequence necessary to stall the engines then realized that would also shut down life support immediately. They would gain nothing by delaying the ship’s descent into the sun.

  Victoria looked up at him from where she lay on his bed, arms outstretched, legs bent, her dark hair streaming around her in sumptuous waves. She looked nothing like a Sha-Shiri female, yet Kash’s blood warmed at the sight of her.

  “Is that your vague way of saying we’re doomed?”

  He moved to the edge of the bed and sat down, careful to maintain a few inches between his thigh and hers. “We could send a tight beam distress signal aimed at Earth’s Space Administration.”

  She laughed. “Yeah. Aside from throwing the whole world into a state of panic, what would that accomplish? At best it would take NASA a couple of days to get over the shock of finding out aliens exist ... well, assuming they don’t already know and are keeping it from the general public ... never mind, let’s not go there. Even if they launched a space shuttle, would it get here in under two days? It took four just to reach the moon--granted that was a long time ago, but still, it’s not like we’ve got warp drive or anything. And remember xenophobic? We’d be quarantined, studied, poked, prodded, and interrogated ….”

  “Which is better than dying.”

  “I’m not so sure. I’ve never had a DNA test, Kash, but what happens to my parents--my father--if the authorities find out I’m part Sha-Shiri?”

  “You told me your father is human now. Because of the shifter drug, his DNA is virtually human and so is yours. Cherra-Sha’s test showed only the most subtle differences, though she believed that mating with a full blooded Sha-Shiri would bring out recessive traits in your offspring and possibly create a natural shifter who would not need to rely on the drug to change form. Human medical tests probably would not be able to detect anything unusual about you.”

  “Maybe not, but what about you? They’d want to take you apart to see what makes you tick. Trust me, it’s no fun being someone else’s lab experiment.”

 
Kash bowed his head in shame at the actions of the Val’tek. Perhaps Victoria was right. He should have done something to stop the mission long before the Katavarri reached earth. “I’m not ready to give up, yet. Come with me to engineering. I’m going to keep working on the navigation system.”

  * * * *

  “Aside from being an Avan’tek counter agent and a designated breeder, what do you do? Back on Sha-Shiri, I mean.” Victoria’s anger at Kash and all things extraterrestrial had subsided after a few more hours of watching him work on the Katavarri’s engines.

  She’d begun to wish she knew something about space travel. It all seemed so easy on television. Why wasn’t there a helpful computer voice to tell them what to do, or a fleet of friendly space police just waiting to beam stranded travelers to safety? There always seemed to be a quick fix in the TV science fiction universe. Why did the wondrous reality of space travel have to suck so much?

  “I’m a researcher, much like your father was. I study the animals of other worlds and I specialize in nocturnal predators.”

  Victoria shifted her body and stretched out next to Kash on the floor so she could look up into the glowing mass of wires and circuit boards inside the control panel he’d dismantled. She had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t really doing much besides disconnecting and reconnecting the same set of wires over and over again, but for some reason it comforted her to know that he wasn’t going to give up yet.

  “My father always had a fascination for the big cats. Wonder why, ha! What earth animals have you studied?”

  “None so far. This was my first trip to earth. I suspended my studies on Sha-Shiri in order to become involved with the Avan’tek mission to save you. The Val’tek plan outraged many of my people and I was honored to be chosen to help.”

  Victoria stared at him. “You gave up your career to come all the way to earth to save me from the Val’tek breeder program without even knowing me?” Her heart fluttered. She’d yet to meet a human male who’d done anything half as honorable for her.

  “The idea of forced breeding is abhorrent to me. I would have done this for anyone on any planet who had been slated to be used for the Val’tek’s ridiculous scheme. No one should be forced to mate with an alien species against their will, even if the outcome might promote peaceful co-existence between races. Of course, considering human xenophobia, it stands to reason such a plan would only exacerbate human fears at this time.”

  Victoria sobered. She understood Kash’s words, but the reality of his beliefs still pinged against her sensitive ego. He still thought of her as an alien and though he couched his words in a denouncement of the Val’tek she couldn’t help but wonder if it were actually the thought of breeding with her that Kash found so abhorrent.

  “My parents made me promise never to tell anyone what I was. They said someday it might be possible, but they couldn’t predict when. For a while, I thought they were playing a game with me, inventing a story that would make me feel special so it wouldn’t hurt so much when other kids picked on me.”

  Kash looked up from his work. “Your playmates injured you?”

  “Picked on. It means teased, made fun of.”

  “Why would they do this?”

  Victoria gave a bitter laugh at the memory. She’d long ago outgrown the hurt but the lessons she’d learned had stuck with her, driven home this past spring by her experiences with Mark. “I was a shy kid, and it took me a long time to learn to talk. My mother always said it was because they were teaching me English and Sha-Shiri at the same time and bilingual children sometimes don’t verbalize right away. Some of the neighbor kids thought I was slow and they laughed at me a lot. I made up for it later, though. I always had good grades and sometimes that gets you teased also.”

  Kash nodded. “Sha-Shiri children will sometimes ‘pick on’ one another, though the practice is considered normal. It helps to prepare an individual for the rigors of adulthood.”

  “And what does a Sha-Shiri child do when his playmates pick on him?”

  “Usually he will stalk them and bite them.”

  Vitoria laughed. “What I wouldn’t have given to be able to bite a few people when I was growing up, but among humans biting is considered very rude.”

  Kash only raised one brow ridge and continued working. “Even without the benefit of biting your childhood tormentors, you seem to have grown into a functional adult.”

  Victoria covered her eyes and giggled. “Thanks. That’s so sweet of you to say.”

  Kash eyed her with what she’d come to recognize as his sarcastic look. “What do you do, Victoria? Aside from being a designated Val’tek breeder?”

  “Ha. Well...” Should she tell him the whole sordid story or sugar coat it to save herself the embarrassment? It would be hard enough to tell her parents. Maybe telling a stranger, or a near stranger would make the words come easier. “I’m unemployed right now. I quit my job as an advertising executive two months after being named Assistant Vice President at my company.”

  “Explain ‘advertising executive.’”

  “We ... create slogans and images and music designed to sell products, to make consumers aware of items and believe they want or need them. It’s actually a lot of fun ... a very creative process, but it’s a cutthroat industry. There’s a lot of competition and you have to fight to stay on top.”

  “And you cannot bite your competitors?”

  “No ... well. There’s some backbiting ... sure.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Yeah, me, too. Don’t worry about it.”

  Kash looked at her. “If you enjoyed this work, why did you ‘quit?’”

  “Ah. That’s ... it had nothing to do with the work. I mean, I guess I was a little burned out, but a week’s vacation probably would have cured that. I ... what really happened was, I thought I was in love.”

  Next to her, Kash stiffened a bit. He turned his attention back to the wires. “You left to pursue a mate?”

  “No. I left to get away from one. He ... I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me. We’d been working together for a few years and just hitting it off so well. He dropped hints about how much he admired me, how stable and smart and strong I was. I thought maybe he was the one.”

  “And he was not?”

  “Ha. He asked me out to dinner a couple of weeks ago, and believe me, I agonized over it. It’s not such a great idea to date your boss, but love is love. You have to follow your heart and I figured I could handle it. It seemed like a safe relationship. He was everything I thought I wanted, bright, successful, creative and he thought the same things of me.”

  “But you were incompatible?”

  “He didn’t want a girlfriend. He wanted a donor. I guess, it’s funny in a way, considering how valuable my DNA seems to be these days.”

  “Explain donor.”

  “An egg donor. His girlfriend--his real girlfriend--was some supermodel who wanted a baby but didn’t want to ruin her perfect figure. They were looking for an egg donor and a surrogate mother and Mark wanted to know if I’d be interested. He made it clear it had nothing to do with my work, and if I said no it would have no impact on my job, but he thought twenty thousand dollars for one of my eggs would be a nice way to say how much he valued me. I was ... hurt.” Okay crushed, she thought. Devastated. Demoralized.

  Kash had stopped working again and was looking at her. His golden eyes held sympathy and something more Victoria couldn’t identify. She couldn’t hold his gaze.

  “He begged me not to quit. I think he was afraid I might bring some sort of harassment charges against him. I know he wouldn’t hold my refusal against me, but I just couldn’t deal with the humiliation, thinking he wanted me and finding out I was just a commodity to him.”

  “You should have bitten him.”

  She laughed again and the weight that had settled over her heart all those weeks ago seemed to lift a little bit. “Yeah, thinking back, maybe I should have.”

  A spark eru
pted from the control panel and Kash rolled out of the way. Victoria jumped. “There! I think I’ve managed to--”

  Before he finished his sentence the Katavarri’s engines rumbled and the deck pitched beneath them. Together they tumbled across the floor of engineering and Kash landed squarely on top of Victoria.

  “What the hell was that?” Trapped beneath his muscular torso, she only managed to squeak the words out. When one of his thighs slid between hers, parting her legs just enough to allow his pelvis to settle against hers, she gasped.

  “That was the pitch stabilizer shutting down along with the main engine. Don’t worry, auxiliary pitch control will activate in a moment.” As if cued by his explanation, the deck bucked again.

  Kash’s body came down hard on Victoria’s, knocking the wind out of her before they rolled back toward the navigation console.

  This time she ended up straddling him with the bulge of his loincloth fitting snugly against her mound.

  “Are you injured?” he asked, raising his arms to steady her.

  She groaned. “Just a little.” She braced her hands against the velvety skin of his chest and pushed herself up. His hands slid down her arms and then he curled his long fingers around her hips.

  “Have you broken any bones?”

  She thought of the long, hard one that rested between her thighs. “Not yet, but I wouldn’t mind trying.” God, he was big--or was that merely part of his ‘alien sex slave’ uniform? She arched her back. “Ow! Oh, I think I’m going to need a chiropractor.”

  He wrapped his arms around her waist and righted her, then helped her to slide off his lap onto the floor. “I’m not familiar with that word.”

  “A chiropractor is a back doctor, someone who specializes in misalignment of the spine.” Victoria stretched and massaged the pressure points of her lower back. “Don’t worry. I’ll call one as soon as I get back to earth.”