by Calista Skye
A few seconds go by before I get what he means. “That female alien? As my mate?”
“Stranger things have happened. We know you can probably procreate with her, because Earth females are extremely fertile and resilient.”
His mere words send a wave of heat to my crotch, and I feel dizzy for a moment. “Breed with a human female? My clan would commit suicide. All of them.”
Frox snorts. “Hardly your responsibility.”
“Very much my responsibility,” I say mechanically, staring at the weapon in my hand, but not seeing it. I cross my legs to try to gain some control of the uncontrollable swelling down there.
“Because you have always been the golden boy, the most successful male of your clan. Maybe the most admired male of your whole species. And then you go and do something like this. Well, it was just a thought. You said we should make the best of it, and I'm trying as well as I can. Never mind the clan: what do you think the others in the gang will say to you having taken her?”
“The guys will accept it as it is: something that has happened and can't be changed. They're all mercenaries, all very practical about life.”
Frox rolls a quick circuit around the control room. He likes to keep moving his wheel-shaped body, says he needs to keep rolling to not develop a flat spot. “Have you heard from the Bululg yet? After the theft of the female?”
“I don't know. Have we?”
“No transmission received. But it's only been an hour or so. I suppose they need time to assess the complaint from the baron and decide just how hard they want to screw us.”
Running a rag through the barrel of a projectile weapon, I ponder the possible Bululg reaction. “They might not be too unreasonable. My services are valuable to them. We don't even know if the baron knows who I am.”
Frox stops in front of me and waves his eyestalks in exasperation. “Do you think maybe the Bululg will recognize you from his no doubt highly detailed description?”
I scratch my chin. “Probably.”
“All he needs to say is that it was a blue idiot with white spots. There aren't many of those running around this part of the galaxy. I can only think of one.”
“I can't imagine who.”
Frox rolls back to the controls. “This mission they offered us is the best paid we've ever had. Stealing that female may have ruined it all. Hey, I like her. She's nice enough, and even I can think of a thing or two I'd like to do with her. But is she worth the trouble?”
I put all the weapons back in the armory chest and stand up. “I hope to find out.”
8
- Mila -
I wake up with a jerk. I must have dozed off.
Well, the couch is a lot more comfortable than the sculpture. And the temperature in here is very pleasant.
I sit up and stretch. “Ingrid, make a note.”
“I'm ready, Mila.”
“Title: Some Notes on My Current Situation. By Private Mila Carver, Illinois Brigade, Earth Freedom Army. One. I am in space.”
I look out of the window again. Space looks just the same as before, with no planets nearby. “Two. I am not in chains, nor do I appear to be a slave just now. Three. I may be the first abducted woman ever to be in this situation. Four. We are encouraged to use our own judgement. Five. The contingency plan for being abducted is general purpose. I may now be in a position to gather valuable intelligence about the aliens as a free person, not as a captive. Six. I intend to gather as much information as possible about my sister and try to rescue her. Seven. All this depends on the goodwill of a blue alien at whose mercy I am. Are you getting all this?”
“Do you want me to read it back to you, Mila?”
“No. Actually, delete that 'mercy' thing. It's not soldierly.”
“Done.”
I get to my feet and walk around the room. It's not huge, but it also doesn't feel cramped. The ceiling is high up, which it has to be. Xan'tor must be a good seven feet tall.
“Eight. I don't want there to be any hint of a possibility that I'm a slave or a prisoner. So I will try to escape from Xan'tor as soon as I can. The End.”
I'm feeling pretty good. In reality, everyone on Earth has been a captive since the invasion. And every female of fertile age has been living under constant threat of abduction, slavery, and forced breeding. I may be the first Earthling for four years to have a shot at actual freedom. I think the Resistance expects me to make the most of it.
Suddenly, Xan'tor is standing in the room. Staring at me as usual. And also as usual, butterflies take off in my stomach.
I've never met anyone with a presence like his. Even in that auction hall, where he was the least active spectator among hundreds of weird and noisy aliens, he was the only one I noticed.
He steps on the floor spot and the couch and table disappear into the floor as if they were never there. “We will be arriving shortly.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Arriving where?”
“It is my base.”
“On Earth?”
A tiny smile crosses his alien face. “Not on Earth.”
I point up. “Can I see what's above us?”
He turns and walks to the elevator plate, his long tail moving gracefully.
Coming up to him, I step onto the plate. And the next thing I know, we're in a new room.
It's like a glass dome with space on the outside and all kinds of alien instruments and equipment on the inside. It looks a lot like a control room.
“Is it control room? Hi, Frox.”
“It is,” Xan'tor confirms.
“Hi, Mila,” Frox says, busy at one bank of instruments. “You came at the right time. Landing this heap of junk is always an adventure.”
Outside the dome it's mostly dark space. But there's also a huge, yellow planet hanging in front of us.
I nod at it. “Is that where going?”
“Not quite,” Frox says. “That is the gas giant Gypp. We can't land there, it's pretty much just a ball of liquid gas. But it has a lot of moons. See the one that's just passing the equator? It's actually easier if you just find its shadow, then spot the moon itself to the left of it.”
I squint. “Yes, see it. Green moon.”
“That's the one.”
“And what happen on green moon?” I turn to look at Xan'tor.
He's leaning against a bank of instruments and just shrugs.
“You not know, Xan'tor?” I persist. This is too important to let go.
He glances at me. “Can you tell what will happen an hour into the future? Three hours? Two days? No? Then grant me the same privilege.”
“I want know what is plan. What do you with me?” I'm sure I'll get the hang of Interspeech one day. All of us in the Resistance group have focused on learning it pretty well. But right now, everything I say sounds crude and demanding. I should work on both my sentence structure and vocabulary. I do understand everything these guys say, though.
“It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On many things.”
I sigh. He's as stubborn as any man I've met.
“I understand. But I now free. Xan'tor freed Mila. I very thankful! No longer slave, no prisoner.”
He looks away. “That also depends on many things.”
I tilt my head. “Not was question, Xan'tor. Is fact. I now free. I do what I want.”
So, having a seven-foot-tall alien with spikes and a tail frown at something you say is pretty unsettling at the best of times. And this guy has bright suns for eyes. But I have to stand my ground. This is an important thing to get through. If nothing else, being in the Resistance and deciding that I'm willing to die for the cause has made me pretty strong mentally. What we want is freedom for Earth, and it's worth our lives. Right now, what I want is freedom for me.
He looks past me. “Soon there.”
I turn and yelp. Suddenly, both the moon and the planet are much closer, filling the sky above and in front of me. “We will land?”
&nb
sp; “The base is not on the moon itself,” Frox says, turning one eye towards me. “It's in orbit around it. An old spaceship from a long forgotten alien race. Moons can be very useful, Mila. Whenever you see a moon, look closely at it. Both the outside and the inside. The Elder species that went before us knew all about it. They made full use of them.”
I notice how Frox flies the spaceship. It looks pretty easy, and I suspect most of the work is done by a computer. He's handling the various instruments pretty roughly, but the movements of the ship are soft and smooth.
“This ship can fly itself?” I ask innocently. It occurs to me that in a society with this many and varied species, spaceships can't be made too hard to fly. They have to be one-size-fits-all-aliens.
“There is an autopilot. It's somewhat competent. But no pilot likes to let the computer handle the landing.”
I lean over his strange body. “Frox most good pilot. How autopilot is turned on?”
He points with a tentacle. “It's those two buttons right there. But it's not that simple. The ship must be at a certain distance from any other, and it must be on a safe course.”
The green moon comes closer and closer, and I try to make sense of Frox's movements at the controls. Maybe flying this ship is extra easy for him because he has several tentacles to use on the levers and buttons. Still, it looks pretty damn easy for someone like me, who has played Elite Dangerous with her older brother since she was seven.
The ship swoops upwards and lines up with a huge, irregular ball of glistening metal.
“Our base,” Frox says. “It's not pretty, but it's home.”
We're getting closer fast, and the thing in front of us looks most of all like an enormous trash dump brought into space.
I turn to look at Xan'tor. “You live there?”
He shrugs. “We all need a place to live.”
Can't fault that. “Were you born there?”
He snorts. “No.”
“You, Frox?”
The wheel-shaped alien aims the ship for a round hole in the ball of trash. “What our mysterious and pretty impolite boss means to say is that none of us were born there. We found it in orbit around this moon, fixed it up a little, and then moved in. It's a convenient base, not too far from the main shipping lanes. But still nicely discreet.”
“Is a base for what? Business?”
“Like a business,” Frox agrees and guides the ship into the hole. It suddenly gets much darker. “We dabble in lots of things. Mostly shipping. Lately, we've even been getting involved with piracy, I think.”
Xan'tor growls dangerously behind us.
Frox puts the ship down on a platform, and it comes to rest. “Here we are. Our base.”
Xan'tor gets on the lift and vanishes into the floor. I both breathe out with relief and feel a pang of loss at the same time.
“He likes you,” Frox assures me and rolls back from the controls. “He's just confused.”
“That makes two of us,” I mutter.
- - -
The interior of the ancient spaceship is only a little nicer than the outside. There are corridors and large, empty halls that look like storage spaces. There's definitely some kind of triangular theme going on, and it's like walking inside a huge, empty Toblerone box. It's all totally alien, but it also has a feel of being built for a purpose. It's less creepy than the Bululg space station and less nice than Xan'tor's ship.
The huge blue alien walks in front through the deserted ship, Frox rolls easily after him, and I have to half jog to keep up.
I take out my cellphone and discreetly start the camera. “Who built this?”
“We don't know,” Frox says. “There were many ancient races who are now extinct or who have moved on to some unknown place. Those Elder species left a lot of these derelicts. Typically, they still work, more or less. But there's not much of value to scavenge from them. They're mostly just ancient deathtraps. Took us a year to clean out this place enough to where we could use it.”
“Why you and Xan'tor were at the auction?”
“We happened to be at Earth, and the Bululg invited us. We thought it would be impolite to refuse.”
“Xan'tor often buy slaves?”
Frox wobbles and almost falls over to the side, then catches himself. “Xan'tor? No, never. Not his thing at all. He's all about duty and honor. And for him, all kinds of slavery falls firmly on the side of dishonor. It's a little weird, but he means well.”
That perks me up a lot. I knew there was a reason why I liked that blue giant. Apart from the fact that he saved me. Walking behind him, I can really appreciate that tail. It doesn't just hang there, it moves like that of a cat and probably helps with his balance. I can't help but wonder which other uses it might have. During certain times.
Hmm. I shouldn't think of those things now. Fine, he's hot as hell itself. Confident and competent. But I have a mission, and this is not the time to fantasize about what a freaking alien would be like as a lover.
We walk along hallways and up inclines, and then a door slides up with a creaking noise. Xan'tor walks right in without hesitation and is greeted by several voices.
I stop. “Oh. There are others here?”
“The gang is all here, I think,” Frox says. “Don't worry. You already met the most dangerous one, and he hasn't killed you yet.”
“Xan'tor wants to kill me?”
Frox scratches his wheel with one tentacle. “I actually meant me. But Xan'tor? Hard to say. You never can tell with him. But he also hasn't killed you yet, and that's a good sign. Come on in.”
He rolls in, and I follow with some hesitation.
It's an airy space about the size of a gymnasium, shaped like a pyramid so the ceiling is pointy and so high up I can't even see it clearly. The light is bright and warm, and so is the air. There's all kinds of alien-looking equipment along the walls and stacked all over the floor, some of it looking very dangerous, some of it looking old, and some of it looking broken.
In the middle of the room is a large hologram that gives me flashbacks to the first Star Wars movie. It rotates slowly and depicts something that looks like a map of the stars.
And scattered around, all staring at me, are six aliens monsters.
There's just no other way to describe it. Not that Xan'tor or Frox are monsters, exactly. But that's because I'm used to seeing them. The four other ones are mostly less weird than Frox and more weird than Xan'tor.
“You picked up a keepsake, Xan'tor?” says a green guy with obvious scales and long, black hair that seems to move by itself.
“Perhaps,” Xan'tor grunts. “A man sometimes needs a break from looking at your ugly face, Beloron.”
“Is she just for looking at?” says a large, gold-skinned guy with white stripes and three curved horns like a triceratops. “I could think of at least a couple of other activities involving her.”
“If you do anything other than look, Prash, all those activities will suddenly become a thing of the past for you,” Xan'tor says flatly. “Permanently.”
They all laugh, Frox wobbling a little while he rolls restlessly around the room.
A tall guy with lots of black fur, golden hair, forearms that are clearly metal claws, and a face like a greek god smiles at me with perfect teeth. “I apologize for my friends,” he says in a smooth, pleasant voice. “They're not used to seeing females. Much less being in the same room as one. But they're pretty harmless. My name is Crirux. That ridiculous thing there is Prash, and that's Beloron. The quiet one over there is Renerak.”
He points at a huge alien, even bigger than Xan'tor. It's a real monster, with gray skin, red eyes, and a long, thick neck. His head is long and sleek and looks like that of a lizard. Or a dragon, maybe. He's quite nightmarish.
“I may be quiet,” the monster rumbles, making some of the metal stuff in the room rattle. “But I think that most people talk too much. Especially all these guys. The important thing is that I'm a good flirt when I feel like it.”
I wave at them all. “Hi.”
The room is quiet for several seconds.
“Baron Pantoflir?” Crirux asks. “He's very close with the Bululg. Do you know something we don't, Xan'tor?”
“The baron bought her,” Xan'tor snaps. “You know what he does with human females. I just couldn't let it happen to her.”
“Being bred by him is not a fate we wish on anyone, certainly. But what do you think will happen to us when the baron complains?” Crirux persists. “Will the Bululg ever hire us again? Will they hire other warriors to hunt us down and kill us?”
“Those are both possible,” Xan'tor says. “I'm not saying the situation is ideal. But I took her. Here she is. We just have to live with it.”
I make a mental note that nothing is more quiet than a room full of alien monsters thinking deeply. Or more unsettling.
“We'll work it out,” Prash finally says. “We always do. But this will get you into serious trouble with your clan, Xan'tor. I know mine would have me assassinated for less than this. And your people are known for being tough.”
Xan'tor folds his arms over his chest. “My clan is my own business.”
“Absolutely. But the Bululg are our business, too,” Beloron states. “By far the best clients we've had. I wonder at this decision, Xan'tor. Are you feeling all right? Should we get the diagnostic—”
“I'm fine,” Xan'tor breaks him off. “I already did the diagnostics.”
“Mila, are you a warrior?” Crirux asks. “I mean, you don't look like one. But still, I get the feeling that you're no stranger to the realities of war. I can't pinpoint why, though.”
I hesitate. I don't know how much it's wise to say about that.
“She's a member of the Resistance against the Bululg on Earth,” Xan'tor says. “It's an effective force, apparently.”
