by Selina Rosen
Drew smiled, threw the creature down, and followed him. "Do you care about me, Van?"
"Where the hell did that come from?" he asked doubling his pace.
"I've had a shit of a couple of days here Van. I'm feeling a little weird, indulge me."
"That's a stupid question, Drew," he said flatly.
"You know what I mean, Van."
"Would it matter if I did?" he asked, continuing his pace.
She ran to catch up with him and caught at his hand. "Now you're asking stupid questions."
"What's going to happen to us, Drew?"
"We'll be fine."
"I meant us?"
"I don't know, Van. It seems like yesterday our lives were all orderly."
Van shot her a look.
"Well, you know, like a dirty room, but you know where everything is—that kind of orderly."
"But don't you see, Drew? You didn't know where everything was. Now you do, and things are going to change. We don't know exactly how right now, but it's gottah change."
She tripped over the human on her way into the pit. "What the fuck?"
"Damn it, Tim." Van leaned down and slapped the human's face.
"Come on, Tim, snap out of it."
"I thought he was dead," Drew said.
"No. It seems that this really great navigator you got me goes to sleep if he gets scared."
"Oh, you're fucking kidding me!" Drew laughed.
"No, he walked up behind me right after you left, and like to scared the shit out of me. I told him he sleep-walked."
The human started to stir.
"The port's still clear. Let's go start the thruster before we have to dig it out again."
"Ten more minutes, mom," Tim mumbled as they pulled him to his feet.
"Come on, monkey boy," Van Gar pushed him forward. "Time to go home."
Chapter 7
Someone screamed. Drew sat straight up in bed. From her cabin she could hear the conversation taking place in the hall outside her door."What's with her?" Tim asked.
"She's never seen such an ugly human before," Van Gar answered lightly.
Drew lay back down. Obviously, seeing a dead guy walking around the ship had startled Stasha.
"I'm surprised they didn't both faint," Drew muttered and buried her head deeper in her pillow. She heard the gentle humming of their one remaining thruster—all was well. She started to go back to sleep, then jerked to a sitting position again.
Well! Things were far from being well! Stuck in the middle of a desert belonging to the very people who had chewed up part of her brain and thrown it away. Yes, she had finally admitted to herself that she was one of them. It was confusing as hell to know who she was and have all these people tell her that she was someone else.
But all that was unimportant; at least for the moment. Their fuel would only last just so long, and then the ship would be buried in the sand. They were stuck in the middle of a desert, which from all the readouts was every bit as harsh as Fitz had indicated. She didn't have time to sleep. She got up and looked at the clock.
"Eight hours. Hell, my body will start to deteriorate with so much sleep."
She walked to the bathroom. A quick look in the mirror, and she decided she looked every bit as bad as she felt.
"Ick, it's the incredible Hurtella-faced woman, and her side-kick, hair of death."
She stuck out her tongue.
"Yuck, there's stuff growing there that remembers when the humans first gouged big holes in the galaxy."
She picked up the electric mouth scraper and spent five minutes cleaning the gross stuff out of her mouth. She stripped and got into the shower. She looked at the sand which gathered by the drain.
"I hate sand."
"So do I." Without further ado, Van Gar got in the shower with her.
"What the fuck are you doing?" She laughed.
"Would you believe conserving water? After all, there is a desert out there, and this is the only water."
"Yeah, and you know just like I do that it has been recycled seventy times, and can keep being recycled till the ship runs out of power. Which will take days."
"I saw you kiss him last night."
"I told you, Van. He kissed me."
"The point is that even if we live, I'm going to lose you to him."
"I'm never staying here with that tight-assed pansy. And since when do you own me?"
"There's a good chance you will stay here."
He held a finger over her lips as she started to speak.
"Let me finish, Drew."
He ran his hand over her wet head.
"We have played a game with each other for years, and now may be the only time we'll have to see how the end of the game will turn out. I won't pretend to know how you feel about me, but I know you are as curious as I am. We have never been as close to death as we are now. Things don't look good, and do you really want to die never knowing?"
"That's one hell of a line, Van," she said with a smile.
"Did it work?" Van Gar asked.
"Rather well, actually."
She wrapped her arms around his neck.
"Then I'll have to use it again sometime."
Their wet bodies met, and they kissed.
The water kept recycling.
Stasha had watched Van Gar enter Drew's cabin, and she waited to see how long it would take one or the other to emerge. Van Gar was the first to leave. His hair—all of it that could be seen—was wet, and he was whistling a happy alien tune. When Drew emerged a few minutes later, her hair was wet, and she looked around as if checking to see if she had been caught. She smiled broadly when she saw Stasha standing partially concealed behind a metal brace in the wall.
"So, how long were you standing there?" Drew asked.
"How could you?" Stasha asked. "You wouldn't sleep with your own husband."
"I didn't sleep with Van Gar," Drew said with a wicked grin.
"Poor Zarco. All these years he's saved himself for you, and you're nothing but a common whore."
"I don't think there's anything common about me," Drew said in mock anger. She laughed and shrugged. "Did you know that Chitzky males have multiple orgasms, just like you and I?"
"Of course I didn't," Stasha said indignantly.
"Neither did I."
Drew grinned wildly, started whistling the same tune Van Gar had been whistling, and sauntered off in the direction of the cargo bay.
Drew and Van had spent the last thirty minutes walking around and around the vehicle in their cargo bay. It was a huge covered thing with tracks, that they used to pick up salvage in areas so dangerous it just wasn't safe to carry anything of value, even scrap, without armored transport.
"I don't know, Drew."
"Well, I do. You're amazingly good at the sex thing."
"I ah . . . I was talking about the transport, Drew."
His face was bright red.
She gave him an expectant look, her brow arched questioningly.
"What?"
"What?" she asked hotly. "What! I should have known better. Males of all species are just alike. I said you were good in bed. The least you can do is lie to me and tell me I was good, too."
"OK," he said simply.
He started looking the transport over again.
"Well?"
"Right now?"
"Yes, right now!" she screamed.
"You are so good in bed, Drew. How can I put in mere words how fine you really are," he droned in a monotone.
"Fine!" She walked out from underneath the transport to stand in front of him. She poked him in the chest. "Say what you like, you egotistical fur ball . . ."
"I never said I was good at the sex thing. You did."
"Fuck you, Van Gar, I know you liked it!"
"I never said I didn't like it, Drew. I was just a little disappointed, that's all," he shrugged.
"Disappointed!" She doubled up her fist and hit him square in the chest.
He stumbled b
ack a couple of feet.
"Fuck you! Do you hear me, Van Gar De La Trag Iz Trok!" She turned on her heel and started out of the cargo bay. "Fuck you!"
Van Gar watched her leave. "She used my whole name. Damn! She really was mad!" He went back to jotting down all the measurements on the transport.
"So, she's really a lousy lay, huh?" The human jumped out of the cab to stand on the track.
"Why you slimy little, rat-loving human!"
"Hey, I can't help it if you guys forgot that you sent me inside to take down the interior dimensions."
"That was supposed to be a private conversation between Drew and I. It's none of your business."
"I bet his Highship would be interested in it."
"I could rip your spleen out of your ear," Van Gar growled. "Besides, I never said she was a lousy lay. I said I was disappointed. As for telling the Royal fuck—have at it."
"If you were disappointed, she must have been a lousy lay. I mean, one plus one is two, and all that. It all adds up to the same thing."
"Stupid human," Van Gar mumbled and went back to his work. "I never said I was disappointed in the sex."
"In what, then?" The human watched as the Chitzky purposefully ignored him. "You don't like me, do you?"
Van Gar laughed. "And I thought you were too stupid to wipe your own ass."
"Why don't you like me?" Tim whined.
"Where do you want me to start?" Van Gar looked up at the human. "You're ugly, you are without a doubt the most cowardly being I have ever met, you whine more than my grandmother . . ."
"Yeah, but besides that," Tim said defensively.
"Besides that, you are stupid, and you don't know how to do anything."
"I'm a damn good navigator," Tim screamed back.
"Then navigate us the fuck out of this desert," Van Gar screamed.
"Get me something that runs, and I will." Tim jumped down off the four foot track, stumbled and almost fell. He looked up at Van Gar and thrust the note pad he held at him. "Here's the fucking inside measurements."
He turned to walk out of the cargo bay. He was almost to the door when he turned around. "You know, I may not be too fucking smart, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out what you're disappointed about. Maybe she didn't say she loved you because you didn't tell her that you loved her."
Van Gar gave him a shocked look.
"Maybe I went about it the wrong way, but I was just trying to get you to talk to me. We're probably all going to die out here, and I'm the only one here that's alone. I don't know anyone here, and you know what really sucks? There's no one at home that will miss me if I don't come back."
"That's because you're an obnoxious little twit," Van Gar said.
"Up yours, man!" Tim stormed out of the cargo bay.
"Some people just can't accept creative criticism." Van Gar sighed. He really shouldn't have been so hard on the human, but all he ever did was whine, and Van Gar had troubles of his own. The last thing he could be worried with was the unhappy home life of the galaxy's ugliest human. He had all the measurements, and now he had to go talk to Drew, which considering how they had just parted was not something he was looking forward to.
Drew punched the transport dimensions into the computer and a picture came up on the screen. She punched in the weight of the machine and added the analysis the computer had already done on the sand.
"Fuck." Drew rubbed her hand over her face.
"Maybe we could make it lighter," Van Gar suggested.
"I didn't count us or our supplies yet. It will be heavier than that. Weight isn't our real problem anyway. It's the tracks. According to this, they will just dig us into the sand. Then there are about a billion other problems. For instance, during the day we're going to bake in this tin can."
"How many days can the ship keep running?"
"Three. Four if we're lucky."
She wouldn't look at him. He couldn't stand it. He put his hands on her shoulders. "You weren't a disappointment, Drew," he whispered.
He kissed the top of her head. "But . . . well, with everything that's going on . . . You weren't a disappointment."
Drew nodded. She didn't know exactly what she wanted from Van Gar. One thing was for damn sure she didn't like to be mediocre at anything. Being considered by Van Gar to be only a little more than a disappointment in bed was not exactly doing anything for her wounded ego. But right now there was more at stake than her self esteem.
"It looks kind of grim, don't it?" she said.
"Yeah." Van Gar looked at the screen. "Wait. Get up. Damn, we're starting to think like all these normal geeks."
Drew got up and he sat down at the console.
"We're Salvagers," Van said proudly. He drew a sled on the front of the transport and added five inches to the tracks. He cut holes in the side of the vehicle and then added reflective shields. This time, the data was much different. "We can get metal off any part of the ship to make the sled, and add to the tracks. We can use the shielding off the outside of the ship as a sun screen. If we use the solar generator we'll have rechargeable power. It's never been much use to us before since we were running in the dark or in the shadows. However in the middle of the desert . . . it ought to make more than enough power to run the vehicle. Of course, it will mean taking some pieces off the ship, but, under the circumstances."
"Van, right now the Scow is going to sink in the sand as soon as we run out of power to run the thrusters. I've never been one to let sentimentality get in the way of saving my own ass."
As soon as the sun went down, they went to work. The first thing they did was pull enough shielding off the outside of the ship's belly to cover the top of the transport. Then they started to cut the first of the two by three foot windows in the sides of the transport.
Van cut it and then Drew kicked it so that it fell out and landed on the floor with a resounding crash, the human fainted and fell head-first off the tracks, and Zarco walked in. He walked around the machine just checking it out, unnoticed by the two working on the inside.
"Should we see if he's OK?" Van Gar asked.
"Nah, it's no great loss if he's dead, and a concussion might actually improve his brain power," Drew laughed.
Zarco heard the gentle hum of the laser torch as it was turned back on, and watched as the bright light penetrated the vehicle's body.
"I don't see why we can't use what we're cutting out here to add to the tracks," Van Gar said over the popping of metal.
"Sounds good to me."
Then they started talking about what they were going to do with this part and that part. As interested as Zarco was, and as much as he wanted to know what they were doing, he just couldn't follow their lingo. What wasn't part names that he neither knew nor recognized was jumbled Salvager slang which was spoken so fast that he couldn't grasp its meaning. About the time he was going to make his presence known, a huge piece of metal fell from the vehicle to land at his feet with a resounding crash. He looked up, and saw his wife and the creature looking down at him. Taralin smiled at him, and he melted. She was never more lovely that she was now, wearing the clothes she had stolen from the dead pirates, and glistening with sweat.
"Hey, King baby, you better keep an eye out," she warned and winked at him. "As long as you're down there, would you check to see if that human is alive? If he is, roll him off his nose."
"Yes, of course, my love," he went to check. Finding the human alive, he then rolled him onto his back. "He's got a small bump on his head, but other than that, he seems to be unscathed."
"Well, you can't win 'em all," Van Gar said, smiling at Drew, who nodded her head in agreement.
"I actually came down to see if there was some way that we might be of assistance." He looked up at Drew. "I gather that you are building a transport to carry us across the desert. Since crossing the desert alive is in all of our interests, it only follows that we should all work towards this common goal."
"I think Drew and I . . ." Van Gar star
ted.
". . . think that's a damn good idea." Drew finished.
"Then I'll just go and gather the others." Zarco bowed deeply and departed.
"All they're going to do is get in the way," Van Gar grumbled.
