by Selina Rosen
"Got you. On your command."
"Now."
The entire complexion of the battle changed in that moment. No longer were they the defenders; they had become the aggressors. As he had watched the queen and Valtarian work together as if one, these two ships and their crews now worked together—creating a greater unity. Two ships moved as if with one mind, zeroing in on targets, watching each other's backs, and totally crushing the enemy. All around him he could see the ship's crew—he guessed they were techs—running around making repairs even as the ship lurched and bucked and changed speed. They were on long harnesses which he assumed gave them some protection from the ship's lurching, but didn't keep them from being knocked down. They would get knocked down, get right back up again, and continue the work they had been doing as if nothing had happened. This ship's crew was a strange mixture of Barions and aliens from every corner of the universe, and at least for this moment it was only their appearance that was different.
It seemed like hours, but it probably wasn't more than fifteen minutes before the Lockhedes turned tail and started to run. They were retreating, and Dartan was sure they would be allowed to retreat.
"Run them down and destroy them!" Drewcila ordered.
"But, my queen . . . they are retreating," Dartan objected.
"Then it will be harder for them to fire on us, won't it?"
And it was. In minutes the remaining Lockhede vessels were blown out of the sky.
"Hepron Station, do you read?" Drewcila asked as they turned to head back in the direction of the station.
"Aye, aye. The tower's hit, but still standing," a female voice replied.
"Good . . . Call all ships back to the station. Remain on Dirty-Red-Dog-Alpha-6-Alert until told otherwise. Start repairs at once. If they have intelligence anywhere near, I want them to think that they have done minimum damage. Get rid of the bodies as quickly as possible. We want morale to stay high, and there is something about dead bodies that just brings down the spirit of the whole place."
"Sorting the bodies from the rubble alone could take weeks," the voice answered.
"Then don't sort the bodies from the rubble. Find an empty canyon. Shove all the debris, bodies and all, into piles. Cart it off and dump it in the canyon. I don't even want you to worry about the recyclable materials. Right now image is everything. If they think they have lost a huge chunk of their fleet and haven't given us more than a scratch, their morale, which was already low to begin with, is going to plummet."
"But Drew . . . people will be asking about their loved ones. They'll want to bury them . . ."
"They're going to be buried. I don't have time for a whole lot of sentimental bullshit. If I can throw away perfectly good trash, then they can deal with losing a few bodies. If someone doesn't call home, it means they're dead. When we get done cleaning up the mess we'll cover the debris with dirt, and I'll have a huge memorial erected there with the names of all the dead on it to commemorate those who fell because of Zarco's absurd stupidity."
"Zarco's?" Dartan asked in confusion.
"Did I say Zarco? I meant to say Atario. Their names sound alike. Don't you think they sound alike?"
"Ah . . . I guess so," Dartan said.
Drew smiled broadly at him."Oh, I do so love a man who humors me."
Chapter 11
Van Gar lay in the huge bed, stared up at the ceiling, and didn't even try to pry the stupid grin from his face.
Drew lay with her head on his chest, almost but not quite asleep, and at least for the moment all seemed right with his world.
"You suppose blue blood is going to be any harder to get out of the carpets than regular blood?" Drew asked sleepily.
Van Gar laughed."Could you have really just run off and abandoned them?"
"If I could have gotten my iggys? In a fucking heartbeat. This kingdom is like a bad investment, if you can't sell the son of a bitch you grab all the liquid assets and walk away. Unfortunately, I couldn't get to my liquid assets."
"If you say so, Drew," Van Gar laughed.
"Don't you start with me. I'm ruthless and self serving, and I like me that way," Drew said emphatically."I wish everyone would quit insinuating that I've grown some kind of conscience! Why the very thought makes me want to vomit."
Van Gar wrapped his arms tightly around her and kissed the top of her head."I was . . . it was stupid for me to leave you, Drew, over something so trivial . . ."
"As four guys, two chicks, a midget and a goat," she supplied.
"For any reason," he said through gritted teeth.
"It certainly was. And joining a crack pot religious cult run by some second-rate grifter . . . well, that was just fucking priceless," Drew said with a laugh."Next time you're going to punish me, you might try something less masochistic."
"Well, I did turn all that around," Van Gar reminded her quickly.
She picked her head up and turned to look at him momentarily."Oh, do tell?" She kissed him, then lay her head back on his chest.
She sounded genuinely interested, so he told her the whole story, adding special emphasis to the parts where he had been particularly clever, brave and/or tough. Skipping over the part where he was stupid enough to actually believe Pard Jar, instead insisting that it had been his plan to take everything away from the religious freak all along. He completely left out the part where he'd gotten his ass kicked by the foremen and had been forced to work for green glop.
She was quiet throughout the telling, and so he was sure that she was completely enthralled with his tale. That was until the bitch started snoring.
He was more than a little put out. He was sure that he'd never tell the story quite as well as he just had, and he had no way of knowing just how much she had actually heard.
He knew he should be exhausted, but he just wasn't. The castle was a mess, but apparently the cleaning and maintenance staff had knocked themselves out returning the queen's quarters to their normal pristine state. Of course, Van Gar doubted a bunch of disgruntled nobles or even an angry mob could do much more damage than Drew did when she was on a really good toot. No doubt the staff had developed a system for removing the debris from Drew's room, quickly patching holes in the walls and covering them over with well-placed pieces of the wall paper.
He yawned. He was a very rich man, and Drew would have to respect him now.
Except . . . now that Zarco was dead she was sole ruler of a whole fucking country. Damn it! The bitch had stolen his thunder.
Dylan was none too happy. His leg was broken, and the only doctor in the castle had been dragged up from the dungeon, and turned out to be the same one who had done such an absolutely nothing job on Drew. Of course when he'd finished working on Dylan's leg and taken care of a couple of other minor injuries suffered by the crew, they'd locked the bastard back in the dungeon. So if he hadn't done what he was supposed to have done, they'd know right where to find him. Of course, the bastard had kept saying he knew nothing about alien anatomy the whole time he was working on him, so he might have screwed up accidentally. Didn't really matter; if he didn't heal quick and right, he was still going to kill that bastard.
The doctor had cleaned Dylan up, which sucked, because if he was going to have a sponge bath, he preferred he get it from some pretty nurse instead of some gnarly looking old guy. After he'd cleaned Dylan up, he'd given him some sort of pain killer and set his leg. He must have really given him the pain killer, too, because if he hadn't, with the pain Dylan had already been in, he was pretty sure that he would have crapped himself if he'd had to feel his leg pulled back into place. He was now laying in bed in one of those stupid gowns with no back in it, with some light shining on the leg which was supposed to cause the bone to repair itself in forty-eight hours.
Of course, as the doctor had said some twenty times, Dylan wasn't Barion, and he couldn't be sure that he would heal the same. Dylan still couldn't really feel his leg yet, so he had no idea whether the little light thingy was working or not.
<
br /> He felt like a dork laying there under a fucking light. Like some hot house flower in that stupid gown with no back. He wondered why he couldn't have some boxer shorts and a T-shirt.
He supposed that was too damn much to ask for.
It was funny when he thought about it. It seemed that no bipedal people had been able to construct a hospital gown which actually covered your ass. He understood that the gowns were constructed this way to make it easier for the doctors and nurses to care for you, but was there some reason that they couldn't invent a gown that could cover your ass that opened easily enough that it didn't inhibit treatment of the patient?
In fact, if Dylan really put his mind to it, there were a whole lot of things that he was really surprised hadn't been invented. For instance, couldn't someone somewhere find a way to make a tube of lubricant so that it didn't sound like a big juicy fart when you dispensed the product? When you were all revved up and in the moment, there was nothing quite like having to stop everything to explain that you didn't do it, that it was just the tube.
And hemorrhoids . . . what the hell was up with that? Hundreds and thousands of scientists all over the universe, and several hundred different species all suffered from the damn things. Yet no one had found a really good way to treat them that didn't leave you feeling like someone had stuck a slimy candle up your butt. Made you feel like you must be leaving a slime trail like a slug. Seemed like there ought to be a better way.
As soon as he got better, he was going to put his mind into inventing some of these items. Fellow could make himself a damn fortune.
"Dylan?" a soft voice called out, interrupting his thoughts of industrial conquest.
Dylan turned towards the voice and saw Stasha in the doorway. Seeing that he was awake, she walked in.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Like someone said my dick was too short. I'll be fine. How 'bout you?" Dylan shifted in his bed, trying to get more comfortable.
"It's hard . . . being back here. Knowing he's not here." She sniffled a little, then started to cry in earnest."Knowing that he's never coming back," she sobbed.
Dylan guessed he shouldn't have asked."Stasha . . . you have to pull yourself together, girl. This dude . . . I mean I know you loved him, but let's face it, sugar, he was sort of a jerk. He sure as hell didn't appreciate you."
"I know." She sniffed hard and seemed to be making a real effort to quit crying. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her nose. It was then that he noticed that she'd lost the Qwah-Co jumper she'd been forced to wear when they'd left Hepron Station, and had changed into a beautiful red silk dress that was almost . . . Well, for Stasha it was indecently short. She was wearing—he recognized the scent, and smiled—Ode To Salvager, Drewcila's normal fragrance.
"You all right, Stasha?" Dylan asked.
"No . . . I'm tired of it. I'm tired of always living in my sister's shadow. It was bad enough before. Before when she was just Zarco's queen, happy to stand behind him and wave at the people every once in awhile. Bad enough when she was gone, and we all thought most probably dead, and I knew I was nothing more than a replacement to him. But then she came back, and she's . . . well, she's magnificent. Look what she did! She saved the country and made herself rich at the same time. She took stuff that no one wanted, stuff that was thrown away, and she built an empire. The nobles and Zarco tried to wrest that empire away from her, and she took it back. And today I came to, and the ship was under fire. Margot told me what was happening, and I really thought we were all dead, that we'd breathed our last. Drewcila never even flinched . . ."
"You didn't see her when she couldn't get into her safe," Dylan said with a laugh.
Stasha ignored him."She turned what could have been one of the darkest days in our nation's history into a military triumph. Everyone loves her. She treats everyone horribly, and yet they all love her. Our people, the salvagers, Van Gar, Arcadia, Zarco loved her . . ."
"Is there a point to all this, or would you just like to come over here close enough so that I can kick you with my good leg so you can take a break from kicking yourself?" Dylan asked with a smile.
"The point is . . . I'm tired of being me. I've been thinking about what you said about everyone just pretending to be someone, and well it dawned on me that the only time I have been truly happy in years was when I was pretending to be my sister. When I would dress like her, and walk like her, and talk like her, and read the speeches she'd written for the public, and they would applaud and throw flowers. I keep damning her, but the truth is I liked being her. People respect her, they love her. No one loves me, and they surely don't respect me," Stasha said."I'm sick to death of being nice, proper, and highly forgettable Stasha."
Dylan smiled charmingly and incanted the magical-getting-laid words as they had just been revealed to him, "Stasha . . . there is nothing forgettable about you. If I had the choice between you and Drewcila, why I'd pick you any day."
She ran to him and hugged him. He grabbed her head and kissed her. She didn't object. In fact, she hungrily kissed him back. This was a woman who was long over-due for some serious attention, and gimped up or not he was going to give it to her. He thought of it as sort of his civic duty. His mind was racing, trying to figure out how he was going to get his groove on with his leg broken and strapped under the "all healing" light.
As it turned out, he didn't have to figure out anything at all, because Stasha already seemed to have given it quite a bit of thought.
He didn't hate that hospital gown near as much as he thought he was going to.
Having momentarily lost her "toy of choice" status, Arcadia had gone down to her old quarters to see what damage had been wreaked upon her space. She expected the place to be completely wrecked, but it was worse than she had anticipated.
The "ambassadors" had been given a suite of rooms at the end of a long corridor, one which had originally been built for traveling dignitaries. As Drewcila's ambassadors, she, Pristin, and Dylan had split their time between the castle—dealing with the state-run part of the salvaging operation on Barious—and the various stations, factories and recycling venues that belonged to Qwah-Co.
They'd each had their own bedrooms here, but had shared a large common room with all the latest in high tech entertainment. That room was now completely demolished. The view screens, computer games, and holographic projectors had been smashed to pieces.
It was hard to say when the rooms had been trashed. The nobles might have done it when they were looking for Dylan and Arcadia. Or they may have done it at any time just for shits and giggles. The rooms might have also been trashed by the horde of rioters who had apparently beaten the military into the castle and killed many of the nobles—mostly by beating them to death. They had trashed other areas of the castle, and there was a good chance that they might have thought that these rooms had been inhabited by the hated nobles.
Somehow Arcadia doubted it was the latter. They were now a salvaging country with a salvagers' mentality, and whoever had done their rooms had broken or ripped everything to pieces. The commoners weren't likely to have done damage to anything that might have resale value. They just didn't think that way anymore. The total devastation of the rooms, and the fact that she could see some of Pristin's clothing strewn around, just strengthened Arcadia's belief that the nobles had committed this crime. After all, Pristin's clothes were definitely an "alien's" clothing, and the common man on the street had no beef with the aliens. In fact, most commoners saw them as the bringers of a new and prosperous era for them all. Only the nobles had hated the alien presence the recycling trade had brought to their planet.
Pristin was dead. That was a hard pill to swallow. She'd worked with Pristin long before she'd ever been associated with Qwah-Co, before she'd ever even meet Drewcila. In those days she'd just been a simple salvager. Digging through piles of trash and picking out the good stuff. Pristin had been her buyer. He bought the crap she found and then shipped it to people who nee
ded it. Drewcila hauled the stuff across the galaxy. That's how Arcadia had met Drewcila Qwah. Drew was on the docks one day hustling a bunch of workers along to hurry and load her trash, no doubt in an attempt to get them so rattled that they would load stuff that she hadn't actually paid for. For Arcadia the attraction had been immediate, and Drew must have felt the same way because they'd been in bed before they'd finished their second drink.
Drewcila had been in her life in one capacity or another ever since.
When Drew put Qwah-Co together, she'd been looking for people she could trust, as well as people who were competent, and she'd hired Arcadia and Pristin to oversee the operations on Barious, a position that had given them both power and money. Dylan had come a year later, when the workload got to be too much for Arcadia and Pristin to handle on their own.
Arcadia liked to think that Drew had moved her here to have a reason to at least occasionally spend some time with her. A notion which was fed by the fact that normally when Drewcila came to Barious, Van Gar wasn't with her.
