by Amanda Milo
That is perhaps Brax’s mistake. Krortuvians are that stupid. Rotten thieves!
The Gryfala proves she has a healthy sense of self-preservation after all when she reverses her struggles with a yelp and lets go of her iron-clad grip on the doorframe in favor of crawling up my body. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is panicked and trying to escape instead of attempting to kill me and kick me out the door with the way she’s shouting what seems to be encouragements in my ears. Her manic struggling rips the shoulder seam of my suit and a few of my shirt’s buttons ping off in our struggle. Being undressed by a Gryfala in theory sounds so much more pleasant than our reality.
Trying to breathe past the pressure of her ulna bone now strangle-holding my windpipe as she half hangs off of my back, I slam the button that will draw the door closed. Slowly, slowly it lessens the gap. No wonder we’ve lost stock out of here sometimes. It shouldn’t crawl closed. I could have hopped in and out half of a dozen times by now! I reach up to pry off her arm, and grab a blessed lungful of oxygen before joining her in yelling at the door. “Come on, come on!”
They’re too far from us; they won’t make it, they won’t—
A pistol is aimed dead center on me; I watch for only the briefest click as the beam of light charges to life on my chest before I dive for the ground, taking the Gryfala with me and landing on her so much harder than I intend to.
The blast burns along my shoulder and sizzles a hole into the floor.
The bay door shuts with a hollow thud leaving all of them trapped outside.
We’re safe.
I pant in relief—and pain. I glance over at the smoking floor.
Maybe… maybe Brax won’t even notice.
I look around at the otherwise meticulously-maintained, pristine bay and swallow down a growl. Which makes my throat protest: she bruised my larynx with her assassin’s grip. Placing a hand over the lower ribs of my back that only just barely protected my now-angry spleen courtesy of her malicious foot, I glare at the female beneath me. “You are trouble,” I croak.
Even my tangle with Lem didn’t leave me this damaged. I side-eye her with a wary respect.
I rise up, struggling to lose what’s left of my shirt, so I can angle myself to get a look at my shoulder.
Deep, and searingly painful.
Also smoking.
Slowly, I turn to look back down at the Gryfala. She bites her lip and her shoulders come up somewhere near her ears. She opens her mouth and says something softly that sounds like “Eyym surrry,” and this time I’m unable to bite it back: I do growl.
She flinches, making me instantly regret my growl—but my mind is whirring, wondering just why I can’t understand her. If she’s had her translator removed; that’s one thing and it means she won’t be able to understand me. But what would cause me to fail to understand her? I’ve never had a chance to test it, but my translator should recognize Gryph. I ponder how I can get her to speak in front of Lem in order to see how his translator reacts. It could be mine is faulty and as I said, I’ve simply had no opportunity to find this out before now.
And completely unrelated and totally irrelevant—yet it’s a fact I can’t help but notice: she has a teveking beautiful voice.
When it’s not screaming in my ear, presumably ordering a door to close faster.
I hop to my feet and haul the Gryfala up.
Shoulder smarting, ribs aching, and throat sore, (oh! And an internal organ bruised and protesting!) I grit my teeth as I attempt to lift her. When she starts struggling and shoves at me, I don’t think: I smack my tail into her rump.
We’re both shocked.
“S-sorry,” I stammer quickly, and now I can’t back away fast enough. What in the hells did I just do? She’s a female. Did I really just—? Guilt and horror wash together in my stomach and I can’t even meet her eyes now. Did I really just strike a female? Truly?
I jolt when I feel her hand on my arm—the one attached to the shoulder that isn’t laser-tracked. She starts speaking, saying something like “Whas tryying to stohp you from herrting yoreself, yoo dhummhee!” I’m watching her mouth so I’m stunned when she sets it grimly, and sort of backs her body into my good arm. And stands there. “Sence yoo inseest on cahrryeng meee,” she says, voice not impressed—nor are the haughty little line of furs that quirks up on her forehead.
I’m fixated on it, staring at her stupidly until she huffs and brings her arms up, as if she’s holding a bundle in her arms—
“Oh!” I say, feeling like a complete dunce. I scoop her up, bearing her weight on my good arm, and with a nod at her chin—because I’m a coward and I can’t meet her eyes—I take us up to the main deck once more.
***
Never punish in anger.
I honestly hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t meant to punish her at all! I hate Krortuvians, that is for sure, but I didn’t hold it against her when she had only set off the chain of events in ignorance. I had been afraid about the danger she put herself in.
It wasn’t about the money.
Lem would say it was a little bit about the money. Seven solars’ wages…
My fear had been about what would have happened to her if she’d made it outside. If it wasn’t Krortuvians, it would be some other sort. Many beings would prey on a lone female…
Here, it isn’t anything like her planet. Females do not rule. Females have no power. Not like the power she has grown up with.
These beings here? Most of them would—
They’d have ripped her apart. After they hurt her badly.
I chatter my teeth at the image. Past the jut of my cheekbone, I can see out of my periphery that she tips her head, watching the underside of my jaw, the thin lines of furs above her eyes drawing close together.
I make an effort to stop chattering and concentrate on hopping.
But still—I’m not—I wasn’t angry at her.
Thing is; Gryfala are keenly intelligent. If she could have understood me, if I could have simply communicated the danger, she’d never have taken such a risk. Yet Gryfala also have a reputation for not only standing up to current authority, but overtaking and dominating it.
It’s their nature.
Once she gets her bearings, language troubles or no, she’ll try it here, I am sure of it. And Brax hates Gryfala. If she tries this with him… His kind aren’t supposed to be capable of harming her sort, but then again Rakhii don’t normally have reason to foster the venom-filled loathing that he has in his hearts for them. If this one small Gryfala displeases him he could take the rage he has for her entire kind out on her, and that slap I planted on her back there will seem like a wisp of nothing in comparison.
A wisp of nothing? My stomachs turn again; the sound of it still echoing in my ears.
Not more than a few solars older than I, Brax had donned the mantle of an elder sibling figure to me. And like an eldest sibling, he could be dictatorial and authoritarian at times, giving me swift kicks with his big feet and swift snaps with the broadside of his tail when I needed to pay attention. To one of her kind, this might not seem like it, but he’d shown me patience. That’s what my people do to young that need instruction. Technically, our kicks are more powerful than a Rakhii’s too. And at first, I’d been an angry, resentful child. I chafed at having been stolen and sold against my will. It didn’t matter how kind my new owner tried to be, I was a spiteful terror. Another captain would have shown me the airlock or traded me off at the next stop if they’d gotten too cross with me. Not Brax. It isn’t that Rakhii don’t give up easily: it’s that they never give up. One way or another, he was bound and determined I’d learn whatever he thought I should mind.
Even Lem had used his glove-clad hand to swat me. By comparison, what I did was only just a swat—but still. I am breaking into a cold sweat just thinking of it. I don’t know anyone who actually has their own female—and certainly don’t know of anyone who has a female, and hits her. Well, the Krortuvians probabl
y do but I wouldn’t put anything past them—and for Creator’s sake—really, what does it say if they are my compass standard for actions?
I give up on trying not to alarm the Gryfala and warble chastisement at myself all the way back to the main deck.
CHAPTER 8
TARA
The Mutant is making woeful noises. Unless I’m mistaken, he seems to be cussing himself out good.
I mean, I don’t know for sure. Because we can’t understand each other. At all.
But I think so.
With my body gently swaying into his with every metronomic leap he makes, I accept that I don’t know how to get home. I accept that in here, in this ship seems a lot safer than out of it. I accept that at this time, I don’t know how to tell him what I need. He doesn’t seem to be a mean alien, but I’m still without a way to explain that I need to get home.
I cover my mouth as I think of my coworker, who is raising her granddaughter because of a military deployment schedule change. The baby’s mother had to serve overseas and has been gone nearly a year. My coworker said her daughter has really struggled, but she… she said she’s had to deal.
I’m going to have to deal too. Losing my mind won’t help me get back to them: I need to set aside my panic—set my worries for them aside—until I can figure something out, some way to get back.
I know this. I still start to cry.
And this breaks Mutant and he really starts to make noises. He even stops jumping—my body jostling into his front with a little more force on his last two hops. When he’s managed a complete stop, he sets me down to examine me. I try to tell him I’m unhurt but he even wants to spin me around and I have a fair idea I know what he’s thinking he should check over. I try to gently knock his hands back but you’d think I went after him with a baseball bat with the way he retreats, ducking his head. When I unconsciously rub a hand over my butt, he hisses a distressed sounding noise and in a strangely punishing-looking move, he slaps his hand over his injured shoulder and squeezes down on it.
I yelp, “Don’t do that!”
It startles him enough to make him drop his hand, at least. But he's still making that noise.
“Quit that. I'm fine, okay?” I point to my butt then make a ‘forgetta bout it’ motion with my hands.
I can’t even guess. I can’t even guess what he thinks my gesture meant but it must be close to “You beat me so hard my ass is broken,” because he has a meltdown and, chirping in alarm now, he goes for his shoulder again.
“What are you, the alien version of a house elf?” I say and sharply tug at his elbow until he stops hurting himself. “Enough!”
When he still doesn’t make a move towards me to pick me back up, I—feeling more than a little incredulous—slowly step in his direction, and watch his eyes dart up to mine before they guiltily flash away again.
For some reason, this makes me lose almost all of my fear of him. Maybe it’s the super submissive behavior, or the fact that he seems to feel pretty bad for smacking me on the rear back there, but… he really doesn’t seem so bad.
And… I’m starting to rethink the Mutant label. He’s too… it doesn’t fit him.
I look him over critically, and when he catches me doing this, brightly colored spots blotch his cheekbones before disappearing just as quickly as they appeared.
He brings a hand up to his chest and scratches at the slight dip between some seriously chiseled pecs. When he drops his hand again, it draws my eye down to his lower half being so… different. It looks like he’s been spliced: man up top, kangaroo on the bottom. More like a Centaur Kangaroo. Compared to the other aliens? I shrug. At least this one’s cute.
“Centaur Kangaroo, Kangaroo Centaur. You’re a Kentaur—ha. I like that better,” I say out loud.
This guy makes chuckling, cackling, snickering sounds that remind me of a Kookaburra bird—he also croaks. This is the sound he makes now, a chirping-croak, continuing to look miserable because although I like his new nickname better, apparently he doesn’t like anything better at the moment.
I sigh in exasperation. “Stop wallowing! I told you: I’m not hurt.”
When I walk to his arm this time, he hesitates only a moment before he carefully—so, so carefully—picks me up like my butt was burned, not tapped. I hiccup a laugh at the image, but this only serves to panic him a little more.
“Sorry,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t stop looking worried.
Sheesh. Guess from here-on-out, I need to try to keep to an even keel. Because right now, I think I’m scaring this alien. Me. Scaring an alien.
Weird. So weird.
I need to get home so bad. This could still be a dream.
Please just be a weird dream.
I’m aware this is no dream. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to be rational. Rational has no place on a spaceship when my children are separated from me—
So much for controlling those messy emotions.
Because now I’m crying again, and my sobbing does nothing to ease his apparent feelings of alienshame and alienguilt. He starts a teeth-clacking noise.
It’s a distressed sound and it fits my mood so I don’t try to stop him this time.
And when we reach the floor where I originally made my escape from him? He stops dead, making me bang against his torso with his aborted hop-skid motion. He stops dead, because in front of us is a giant—and I mean giant of an alien, with a burnt-sunset color to his scales and bright warning slashes of white color cutting through all the rusty orange-brown.
This one has huge horns, and he’s bent over, the tip of one horn extending so far out that it traces along the floor as he moves, as he sniffs along… the wall. Smelling a wall?
See what happens when you live in space? Scary space suits and weird bird calls and wall smelling—I’m ready to go home! I don’t want to end up like this!
And I could be mistaken but… isn’t that basically the spot I’d been doing my Ace Ventura’s Mission Impossible impression when I hugged my back to it and tried to sneak away?
The alien in front of us inhales hard—then he rises up sharply, making those huge horns dent one side of this spaceship hallway we’re in.
His head is even more striking than his body: with sort of a darker masking on his face, broken by slashes of white patterning on either side of his nose.
It’s intense.
It looks scary.
He looks scary. A lot scary. He’s also basically the size of a small Humvee. (Not really. But kind of.)
And he’s looking right at me.
CHAPTER 9
TAC’MOT
I’ve never seen this look on Brax’s face before. He’s staring at the Gryfala in a sort of awed horror as he lowers his head, almost performing a slow sort of bob, before he breathes, “How the tevek did you get a princess?”
Did he just nod to her? ...Wait. Why didn’t I think to nod to her?
My parents would be ashamed of me right now.
I could tell them I hit her too. Marvelous!
But then he looks as if he could bite his own tongue in half. He drags his eyes away from her and his expression turns harder than lizanrium alloy.
Thus he’s essentially wearing his usual disagreeably ill-tempered look.
His gaze flicks down again before he demands, “What's wrong with her?”
I twist my good arm upward enough so that she’s at an angle where I can see her face. So that I can clearly see her blotchy complexion, and her eyelids that have turned a distressing shade of red.
My stomachs experience another acid-burning roll. I need to talk to Lem.
“I… I hit her,” I admit, unable to look at either of them.
No one says anything. When I chance a glance back at Brax, his usual gruffness is gone, again—twice in one day, it should be noted this is a record of galaxy shattering proportions—and he appears deeply, deeply disturbed. “You did WHAT?”
“She tried to leave the ship—I shouted for
her to stop, but she doesn’t understand me, and then the Krortuvians rushed the chute and—”
My new ulcer is roiling at the rising levels of alarm shooting across Brax’s face.
“Put her down.”
I swallow. “I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“I’ll take care of her later. It’s you that I’m going to hurt right now.”
Hm. Well. Somehow, I’m not feeling very reassured.
“Here, I’ll take her!” Lem is at my side, helpful as you please.
“Thanks,” I say wryly.
“Don’t mention it. Get him good, Brax.”
What is this? The Rotation of Punish Tac’Mot? Crite! I resolve to let him get a few decent hits in. It’s true I’ve got them coming—and he doesn’t even know the half of it yet.
Yes. Better let him get us cubed now.
To avoid kicking out at Brax in an instinctive drive to protect myself, I sink down, transferring most of my weight on my legs and my tail, and secure my balance by putting a hand to the floor. “Ready.”
Instead of hitting me though, Brax’s attention is diverted to the Gryfala who has started to struggle against Lem. The wound on her face unclots and blood rolls down her cheek. The acrid scent of panic floods the air as Lem captures both her arms to better keep her still.
Brax’s reaction is extraordinary. His spines begin to leak as if there is a grave threat present. It shouldn’t be surprising that seeing a Gryfala upset would cause him distress.
Yet it is.
Brax is so… Brax. Nothing fazes him. Everything irritates him—but nothing truly cracks the hard, indifferent exterior he studiously cultivates.
Fascinatingly, the sight of the Gryfala becoming stirred up causes him to deviate from—and even, seemingly—to forget the purpose of our predicament. The volume of Brax’s voice is too loud when he shouts in my direction—and for the recordlog: uncalled for. He doesn’t even know about the laser burn in his floor yet. “You have three clicks to tell me why a princess is unwillingly on this ship before I snap you in half. And just where are her guards?” To Lem, he growls, “Let. Her. Go.”
