Hard to Fight

by Viola Grace

  It had been months since she had the nightmare. Her heartbeat was slowing to normal and that music was audible again. Her shoulders relaxed, and she gave the evening air one deep breath before she finished her water and returned to bed. The song in her mind lulled her into a deep and restful sleep.

  Brenn laughed as Dret emerged from his tent. His dark hair was standing straight up and at odd angles. Even his wings looked crooked. Apparently, mornings were not his forte. It was either that or his bed was not comfortable.

  “Good morning, Dret.” She held out a cup of caf.

  He remained silent until he had downed half the cup. “Good morning, Brenn.”

  “I have Drai-friendly quarters if you wanted a bed that doesn’t leave you flat.”

  He looked at her hopefully. “Are you sure?”

  “I am sure. This shuttle is a flying apartment. There are two bedrooms and plenty of space.”

  “Thank the stars.” He flexed and twisted. “I haven’t slept in my bipedal body in quite some time. I forgot that the ground is hard when you don’t have thick skin.”

  She laughed and reached out to touch his shoulder. “Poor baby.”

  The moment she made contact, she jerked her hand back. Casual contact was not her forte, but her hand was tingling wildly.

  He glanced at her and smiled. “Thanks for the touch.”

  She blushed and looked down into her own caf mug.

  “So, Brenn. What is on the agenda today?”

  “Just more designs, and I will start on the weight load.”

  He grinned. “Excellent. I will begin to stack the stones. It will give me something useful to do.”

  She finished her caf and patted his knee. “Come inside and have some breakfast. You don’t want to do any heavy lifting on an empty stomach.”

  The second touch didn’t have the shock of the first, but she was still reeling under the unusual sensation as she dialled up a double helping of her rations for him.

  He sat at the slat-backed chair and smiled. “Wow. This looks delightful.”

  “The best of the imperial kitchens packed for space transport. I have enough here for three years. All the food of home.” She smiled. “Well, my home.”

  He dived in with a fork and was groaning happily as he stuffed his face.

  “Slow down, Dret. It isn’t going anywhere, and there is more where that came from.”

  He slowed measurably and savoured every bite.

  Brenn grinned and got her sketches out, scanning them into her data pad and arranging them into a three-dimensional configuration.

  When she had them arranged the way she wanted, she began to add mass, electrical wiring, plumbing, water and occupant weight. She had to account for everything in her designs, including furniture.

  Now that she knew that nanites would be building the city, she was going to build every detail she could into the structures. She was going to save as much work for fitting it out as she could. This wasn’t going to be the shell of the city; it was going to be move-in ready.

  Dret murmured something to her, and she waved him off. Half an hour later, she heard the thuds of the stones being dropped at the site.

  She left the shuttle and watched the huge beast dropping tons of rock into the approximate formation of the city as she had laid it out the day before. He was doing well. By the end of the week, the raw materials would be there and the nanites would have something to work with.

  She returned to her workstation and focused. Brenn pulled the schematics for interior wiring and began to work them into her plans.

  She lost herself in the details.

  Dret roused her for dinner and slid a tray of food in front of her. She pulled out the designs and gave him the weight load that he needed to acquire.

  He chuckled. “I am glad that we have a few days.”

  “So am I.” She pulled the designs to a crystal and wiped her drive.

  He blinked. “Why did you do that?”

  “My father has the data pad set to send him my daily activities when the pad has gone dormant for an hour. I let him have snippets, but I wipe the info when I can.”

  She ate her meal and drank a glass of water to wash it down.

  She noted that Dret was squeaky clean for a man who had been ripping a mountain range apart. “I didn’t hear you shower.”

  “I bathed in a lake in the hills. It is beautiful, deep blue and it feels bottomless when you are in it.”

  “I am jealous.” She rarely got used to showering in the ship. When her father was with her, it was always tense in the ship, but he insisted on her being his pilot.

  When she was piloting for her father, there was no time for her to shower, so she had created a high-speed scrub routine that didn’t allow for any wasted time. Brenn could get in and out of the shower in less than three minutes. It didn’t allow for a lot of romanticizing about the environment she was in.

  “Brenn, may I ask you about your relationship to your father? At first, I thought he was doting, but now, I am beginning to suspect that is not the case.”

  Brenn finished her meal and pushed the tray away. “Why do you want to know?”

  “We are going to be working together, and you seem to have a lot of emotional baggage. I am guessing that you have not had many folks in your life that you could confide in. I guarantee that what is said between us will not get back to the emperor.”

  She chuckled. “Emotional baggage? I have an entire cargo ship full of issues.”

  “Tell me your story.”

  “It is long and fairly depressing.”

  “We have time, and I have a shoulder for you to cry on if you need it.”

  Brenn thought about it, and she slowly went through the shuttle, turning off all the systems. “Just in case.”

  “Shall we sit out in the cargo hold?”

  She nodded, and he took her hand and led the way to the cargo ramp.

  Under the stars of Dharthom, they sat side by side on the ramp, and she sighed.

  “My father is insane. He has always been mad. He did come from a pod, and he was immediately taken in as a warrior of the emperor. He rose quickly to the rank of general, and the name of—”

  “Galenus Michkin.”

  She blinked. “Right. Yes, General Galenus Michkin was celebrated as a ferocious fighter and a brutal warlord. The emperor gifted him with a harem of two dozen women.”

  She steeled herself for the next part. “He killed eight of them because he didn’t like redheads. The sixteen that were left did all that they could to please him.”

  “And your mother fell pregnant.”

  “She did. She was in his harem for three years before she got pregnant, and the moment that it was confirmed, my father had the rest of his women destroyed. So, my mother went through her pregnancy guarded and alone.”

  Dret’s voice was harsh. “He had the women destroyed?”

  “He considered them unworthy. When my mother bore me, he was disappointed that I didn’t have wings, but testing confirmed that I was his. My mother became his sole concubine, and she raised me in the harem until the day that my father came in and threatened her. She had not born another child, and he blamed her for a lack of cooperation. If she didn’t quicken in the next eight weeks, he would kill her and begin his search again.”

  She dragged in a deep breath. “She used every bit of jewellery she had ever been given and bribed her way out of the palace, and she ran to her family’s holdings. They tried to hide us. We were in an underground bunker and the bombs were falling around us. When the dust settled, the door was blown open, and the soldiers took me from my mother and shot her in cold blood.”

  Dret was frozen in shock beside her.

  “I was given over to my nanny, Kimila, and she raised me until I was ten. I had been drawing and was a little smudged, but my father had changed the time we were required for dinner, so she wasn’t able to clean me up. He threatened her and I tried to protect her, but it ended with her throa
t cut.”

  She left out the interference of her talent.

  “After that, I refused to have a caretaker and instead went through digital tutors and spurred my learning into the architectural and engineering sciences.” She sighed. “I was brought out on holidays and for court events, but otherwise, I was allowed to study.”

  “How did you learn to fly?”

  “It was a matter of pride for him. He wanted someone he trusted, and I was proof that he was able to sire a child. As of this moment, he is still trying.”

  Dret sat quietly for a moment. “How did you come out of it sane?”

  She smiled slightly. “I had a window, I had my drawings, studies and my talent.”

  “What will you do when you return home?”

  Brenn sighed. “I believe I will be interrogated for a few weeks, and eventually, I will be ready to fight back. They can’t get too invasive. My father won’t allow anyone but him to strike me.”

  Dret’s hands flexed. “He hits you?”

  “Not as often as he used to. I am the only one who can withstand a direct blow, so he does it sparingly. He likes to have a lasting effect.”

  “Why haven’t you left home before this?”

  She looked at him. “If I were running from you, would you come after me?”

  He reached out and cupped her cheek, stroking her hair. “I would, and I would destroy anyone who got in my way.”

  She placed her hand over his, “And he has the same instinct, but his impulses are completely skewed. He has bad wiring, but he is impossible to elude. He has an entire fleet of ships to come and get me.”

  He leaned in and kissed her. “He can’t have you.”

  She kissed him back and whispered, “I dreamed of you.”

  “I dreamed of you as well.” Dret pressed his forehead against hers. “I did not expect this.”

  Tears pricked her eyes. “Neither did I.”

  Her heart ached. She had heard the expression before, but she had never experienced it. It was a pain that went into her soul, and the pain was second only to losing her mother and Kimila.

  The moons rose, and they sat together, foreheads touching and hands linked. It was too beautiful a night for the ugliness she had uncovered to him.

  Chapter Five

  Brenn sat up and ran her hand through her hair. It had been two days since her exposure to Dret, and he had spent every waking moment hauling rock.

  She loved to watch his muscles flex, the wings extend and his claws shred the stone. She tried to keep her voyeurism to a minimum, but it was still more time than she was comfortable with when she analyzed it.

  One kiss. They had shared one kiss, and he had left her to go scavenging for stone in the night. When he finally returned, she was already dozing in her bunk, and he quietly entered his room. She waved her hand and the door to her quarters closed. It had been the last time he was near her while she was awake. She hadn’t been close enough to touch him since that kiss. He was obviously avoiding her.

  She took a quick shower and got dressed. Today was the day that they gained their new companion.

  Brenn put on clothing chosen with special care, and she followed her normal pattern of sitting on the cargo ramp and watching Dret work.

  The city was built of stones that had been roughly carved into the shapes of the building. Dret had gone above and beyond.

  The flight was due to be arriving any minute, so when she wasn’t watching the dragon doing arts and crafts, she kept an eye on the sky.

  When the bright speck first appeared, she wasn’t sure what it was. The slow approach of the ship reminded her of autumn leaves. It swayed and slowly descended until a vessel half the size of hers settled a hundred metres or so from her own craft.

  This wasn’t her world, so she stayed put as Dret winged his way over to the newcomer.

  Dret switched forms and spoke with the arrival. The two men chatted for a moment, and a large canister was exchanged.

  Brenn’s mouth opened in surprise as the shuttle lifted off and left Dharthom. Dret walked over to her, and he was smiling.

  When he got close enough to speak, he said, “Your preliminary sketches were good enough for the Citadel. This canister contains the nanites, and all you need to do is program them with your design crystal and place it in the centre of the city. All I need to do is get you away from the city before the nanites activate.”

  She looked at the spot where the shuttle had been. “I thought he was going to stay.”

  “Avari don’t like to leave home, so once I had confirmed the rules of the nanites, he had no reason to stay and returned to the warship that brought him here. He is probably tucked in and on his way home as we speak.”

  “Oh.” She looked at the canister in his hand and the crystal she was clutching. “I guess we are ready.”

  He smiled. “I suppose we are.”

  He set the canister on the ground and waved at her to take charge. “It will take an hour to upload the design. Tea?”

  She nodded and knelt to put the crystal in the matching receptacle on top of the canister. There was a sense of anticipation in her as the crystal slid into place. All of her work was going to sink or swim in the next hour.

  It was definitely time for tea.

  As Brenn entered the galley, Dret put a wrap around his hips. He was dressed again and part of her sighed in regret.

  “So, you are speaking to me again?” Brenn sat as he put the tea down in front of her.

  He paused. “I was unsure of what to say. I cannot promise you that you will never see him again, but I can tell you that if he tries to lay hands on you, I will take action.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I know I don’t need to, but it is what will happen. He won’t touch you again.”

  “I can assure myself of that if I need to, but I thank you for the offer.”

  He sat next to her and gave her a long look. “It isn’t so much an offer as a compulsion. I have dreamed of you, you have dreamed of me and you have heard my song in your mind.”

  “That was you?”

  “It is indeed me. It is how Drai test for compatibility.”

  She set her teacup down. “So, you are saying that we are compatible.”

  “Yes. I mean in Drai courtship, there are other layers of a true match, but yes. We have started the process.”

  Brenn rubbed her forehead. “That is unexpected. Well, we have most of a year to work this out.”

  He chuckled. “It will not take that long.”

  She sipped at the tea and sat in silence for a long moment. “What are the other layers of the courtship?”

  “You need to like my beast and the home that I provide.”

  She sighed in relief. “Oh. Well, that is easy.”

  “It is?”

  Brenn smiled as she took in his nervous expression. “Of course.”

  He scowled. “Do you like the appearance of my beast?”

  “I have not met him close up, so I cannot say. From a distance, he is pleasing enough.”

  Dret muttered, “Well, that is something at least.”

  She smiled into her cup and finished her tea. “So, how do we set off the canister?”

  “There is a timer that will give us fifteen minutes. I fly you in, you set off the timer, I fly you out and we watch the city come into being from here.”

  Brenn rubbed her hands together. “I do confess that I am rather eager to see one of my designs in person.”

  “We can check on the canister. If it is ready, we do not need to delay.”

  She grinned and got to her feet. “Then, why are we waiting?”

  When they walked to the cargo ramp, the canister was glowing bright green.

  “That is the ready signal. Do you want to go?”

  She lifted the glowing canister into her arms. “Let’s go.”

  He gathered her in his embrace and walked until they were clear of the shuttle. His wings scooped the air, and they t
ook off toward the city of stones.

  She gauged it just right and pointed at the central stones. He nodded and took them down.

  Brenn’s hands were shaking as she read the directions and her fingers hovered over the button. “Are you ready?”

  “I am. This is your city. Start it off.”

  She pressed the start button and made sure that the canister was properly set. Dret grabbed her and took to the skies. He flew her back to her shuttle, and they turned to watch.

  The minutes ticked by, and Brenn felt the nervous doubt that the canister was faulty. When a small puff appeared in the spot where the canister had been sitting, she smiled.

  “It’s starting. You can put me down now.”

  Dret sighed. “I was hoping you had forgotten that I was holding you.”

  “I could never forget that, but I want to be on my own feet as I watch this.”

  He set her down and placed his hands on her shoulders as they watched the city grow from stone.

  The spire shot upward, forming the core of the Citadel. It was exactly like her drawings.

  Brenn breathed shallowly as her imagination came to life.

  She spent hours watching the city grow from bare rock into an elegant habitat. At one point, Dret disappeared and returned with a hot ration pack for her so she could continue to observe the growth of the Citadel Dharthom.

  The moons were high in the sky when a bright glow lit the city and dimmed.

  “I think it’s done.” She smiled.

  “And I think it is dark. I swear, I will take you there first thing in the morning. Come on. You are exhausted.”

  She turned and swayed. A brief analysis of how her body felt agreed with his statement. She was exhausted.

  She nodded tersely and walked into the shuttle. Her mind wanted to be walking through her city, but her body was telling her she was an idiot.

  Going to bed was the best bet. The city wouldn’t dissolve in daylight.

  She changed and lay down, trying to calm her excitement. The song came into her mind, and it lulled her into a deep and restful sleep.

  A hand caressed her hair and woke her the next morning. She smelled caf and opened her eyes.