The man was smart—he got the point. He walked to the intercom to get help from inside, but he didn’t get any response. That wasn’t too weird; if Fie was still ‘out’, Mary wasn’t going to let a weird man inside, and she wasn’t in too much of a position to help Ellie, anyway.
After a long few minutes, the man looked around him, frustrated. He pointed up at Ellie and barked an order. Something that sounded a lot like, ‘stay put’. He walked to his car—or, as Ellie would call them ‘cruiser’, jumped inside, started the motor, and disappeared.
Ellie, dejected, slumped her shoulder over and groaned. Where did he go? Did he just leave?
But then, the sound of the car came back, and Ellie could see that it wasn’t hovering anymore, it was flying very close to the wing she was sitting on—almost as high. He opened the door with the motor still running, and climbed up to the hood of his car.
“Can you just get closer? Couldn’t I just climb in? If you got close enough…” She shal’taed to him.
He faltered a minute as he got to his knees, obviously surprised at her shal’ta. “No, I can’t get closer, how high do you think I can go?” he replied back in the same way, only his face was hard as stone. “What the hell are you doing up here?”
“I slipped from above,” she replied, pointing. She became defensive due to his stern expression, and added, “It’s icy up there…”
She heard him sigh as he simultaneously shal’taed, “Come on, just hop down to me.” He stepped as close to the wing as possible and held wide his arms like he planned to catch her.
She winced at the idea. “Hm. Yeah. I don’t hop, per se… Got a rope or something?”
“No. I don’t.” He looked extremely flustered. “Do you want me to climb up there and carry you down?”
She looked down towards the drop off the side. It was quite a ways—about twenty-five feet. “No… Then you’ll just have to hop down, right?”
“Right.”
“And there’ll be no one to catch you...”
“It’s a dangerous proposition, to be assured.”
She wrung her hands thoughtfully in front of her, frowning. She got down on her hands and knees again and began to slowly teeter towards the edge. She sighed. The car wasn’t directly below her. She was going to have to make a running start to jump out a couple of feet so he wouldn’t have to lean over. “How much experience do you have with catching… people?” she questioned, standing back up on her feet.
“I’ll catch you,” he assured, making his shal’ta as soft as possible.
She bit her lip. God, she hated this. She didn’t have any particular problem with heights, but she did with falling, for sure.
“On three. One… Two…”
She didn’t make it to three, she suddenly jumped off the wing, propelling into him enough to make him step back a treacherous foot. She screamed as they teetered over the edge. He merely sighed with relief.
“What happened to ‘on three’?” he demanded wearily, feeling the need to catch his breath.
“I panicked,” she replied, feeling very small.
He put her down momentarily and instructed her to climb onto his back. She put her arms around his neck and her legs around his chest as he climbed slowly, carefully, back towards the car. Finally, she was able to let go of him and clumsily adjusted herself into the side seat.
She looked around when he got in. Yep—it was a car. It looked a little different—there were a lot of buttons in front of her, and she didn’t know which did what. Also, the dashboard had a metallic shine. She reached out to touch the dashboard, just to feel the machinery on her fingers, marveling at how wonderful and smooth it felt.
Her hand was caught by his. “You have some explaining to do, Young Lady,” he warned her, dropping her hand so that it fell in her lap. He began to strap her safely into her seat with the seatbelt, which had a design she felt served better on a roller coaster than a car. There was a heater, though, and he made it so that the hot air blew right on her.
She looked over at him. He looked, very simply, like Graham. Really, spitting image. This man was probably only in his fifties; he certainly wasn’t what she’d call ‘elderly’. He was still muscular. He had scars on his hands and on his face, his salt-and-pepper hair was definitely more on the salty side. But he was still handsome in the same way: same eyes, same broad shoulders, same nose. “You’re Graham’s father,” she stated after a few moments.
His eyes looked towards her direction only momentarily as he put the car in gear. It glided forward. “Admiral Jack Masterson,” he finally admitted, his shal’ta still gruff. “And you’re Mary.”
“Ellie, actually,” she replied, putting her hands flat against the heaters as if she was trying to dethaw.
“Eleanor.” He said her name aloud as if she couldn’t have been serious.
“Yes.” She nodded.
“You’re Eleanor?”
She laughed at the way his face twisted with doubt. “Yes. Ellie.”
“Graham’s woman?”
She hummed as she watched him drive the car away from the ship, slowly descending as he did. She finally realized why he had to drive away—they took awhile to descend and ascend. “How high can these hover?” she asked curiously.
He didn’t answer. “How long were you out on the wing?”
“About three and a half hours. So, thank you… How do you know so much about me?”
“I read Graham’s report,” he retorted. “What he omitted from it, however, was how mind-bogglingly stupid you are. He didn’t mention that you could fully communicate with shal’ta, either…”
“I’m full of surprises, I guess.” She frowned and slouched her shoulders forward. It became very clear that Graham’s father would not be a very good ally to her—he was doing his best to give her the first degree. The car was descending towards ground-level, and their spaceship was again coming into sight.
They didn’t say anything else until the car stopped. At that point, she tried to quickly take off her safety belt to try to get in the ship before him. Maybe with a couple of seconds, she could get Mary to wake up Fie and at least get away from the fact that she had a drugged Swarii inside the ship.
“Urgh!” she groaned with frustration, trying to push the safety harness over her head. It didn’t work; long before she could get out, Jack had gotten out of his seat, walked all the way around the car, opened her door, and began to help her out of the harness. As soon as it was off, he dragged her out of the car by her arm and marched her up the spaceship’s landing and made her type in the entry code.
As soon as the door opened, Jack jerked her into the far warmer air of the ship. Mary quickly entered the hallway as soon as she heard the footsteps, saying, “Ellie! I was getting…” It was about that time she saw Jack guiding Ellie down the hall non-too-gently by the scruff of her coat. “Worried...” She backed up, her eyes wide and her face white.
“Meet my father in law,” Ellie grumbled, looking towards the ground.
“Where’s everyone?” Jack demanded, finally letting Ellie go when he approached the other human.
“Out.” Ellie suddenly realized by his expression that she was walking very much on thin ice. She didn’t know what would happen if this ice cracked, and she didn’t want to know what would happen when Jack Masterson cracked. “Thorton went to sell the ship—the others went out to check into the military outpost.”
“And they left you alone?”
“No,” she admitted, shoving her hands in her jacket pockets. She asked Mary out of the side of her mouth, “Where’s Fie?”
Mary gulped. “Still out…”
“Shit.” Ellie slapped her palm against her forehead.
“Young lady…” he charged, obviously tired of playing twenty-questions with her.
Ellie shook her head. “This is not going to go well at all…”
* * *
It still had taken Ellie quite a long time to tell the Admiral that she had, in f
act, drugged Fie into a deep unconsciousness so that she could make modifications to the communications system… Modifications that Graham hadn’t wanted her to risk making on chance that they might go wrong.
She couldn’t say she was too surprised when not much later she found herself sitting on a stool facing the corner of the lounge where Jack could ‘keep an eye on her’ while he waited for Fie to wake up.
When Fie woke up, he didn’t wake up particularly well. He had a horrible hang over, and was extremely disoriented. Jack helped him to his room, and Ellie took off down the hallway, eager to at least test the communications system to see if her experiment worked. If it did, then at least one good thing would have arisen out of all this. If she made Graham happy enough, then it was even possible that he would forget to punish her…
She sat down in Graham’s command chair and plugged in Thorton’s gigantic controller’s headphones and started to play around with the controls. “Come on, baby. Come on!” she said with gritted teeth, trying to listen to what she wanted.
Finally, she found it. A Frian signal; clear as a bell. She had one. And if she had one signal, that meant she had intercepted probably hundreds, or at least had the potential to do so.
She smiled widely, relieved. Her relief lasted a good five seconds before the headphones were ripped off her head and she was grabbed by the shoulder off her seat and was suddenly facing a very angry man. He didn’t even have the patience to shal’ta a lecture; he put his leg up on the chair and leant her stomach quickly over his knee.
“No, no, no!” She kicked and wind-milled her arms around wildly, but he was quick to begin slapping his hand against her pantied bottom; her skirt was so short it was practically out of the way already. “Wait, wait, wait!” she pleaded, realizing how bad it must have looked to him—to come into the lounge and find that she had disobeyed yet another order. “I can explain!”
But the spanking was quickly over, almost as if he had felt he was crossing some sort of propriety line by spanking her at all. Still, when her feet again touched the ground, she put her hands behind her to cover her bottom protectively. Her skin was already hot to the touch, sore, and tingling. The spanking had been very short but not light. He said a couple of short words in Swarii, and she knew what they meant. “Bad girl”.
He took her hand and began to pull her back towards the lounge.
She dug her bare heels into the floor and grabbed the chair with her other hand. “Wait, wait!” she was finally able to shal’ta. She knew it sounded as desperate as she felt. “Please!”
“Girl, I can make sure that by the time you CAN sit again, you won’t remember how it’s done,” he threatened darkly.
“Please let me show you something… Sir?” she pleaded, giving him the no-fail puppy eyes, trying to give him the kind of subservience that would curl Jazeel’s toes.
They remained the no-fail puppy eyes. He finally huffed angrily and let go of her hand. “What?”
Ellie grabbed the headphones and then carefully presented them to him.
He grabbed them and put them on. “What? Are you making calls or something?” he snapped, but suddenly his brow crinkled.
His expression changed from anger, to confusion, to intensity, to doubt, to amazement, and finally back to intensity again. These emotions didn’t come and go quickly, either. She watched him with amusement for about five minutes before he finally, very slowly, pulled the headphones off his head.
“Was that what I think it was?” the admiral asked very crisply.
For a moment, she wondered if she was in trouble—his expression was dark. She nodded, wringing her hands in front of her nervously.
“Did you do this?”
She nodded again, even more hesitantly. This time, she put her hands back over her quivering bottom.
And then he lunged towards her. She squinted when he did so, expecting him to haul her over his knee again. That’s why she was very surprised, indeed, when he picked her up by her waist and twirled her playfully around, kissing her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes—it was suddenly too much.
Finally, he put her back down, and gave her a tap on the nose. “You need to learn how to obey my son, little one, or else you could have gotten yourself frozen to the wing! I figured you the stupidest creature this side of the universe; I still think he’s going to have his hands full. At the time I even felt sorry for him. And what you did to Fie is absolutely deplorable. You’re just lucky you’re not mine.
“But I’m impressed by this. And by God—I’m not impressed very often!”
“You don’t seem like you are…” she finally said, finally brave enough to smile. He didn’t seem like a man who smiled often, either. But he certainly was smiling now, bright, white, and wide.
* * *
“I swear, Bro, you are stupider than hell,” Peyton heaved as he braced Thorton against him, his arm slung around his shoulder as Thorton limped along pathetically, bleeding from his mouth and not being able to see because of his swollen eye. Jio was helping Thorton on his other side.
“I said ‘no gambling’, Soldier. No fighting. Do you remember any of that?” Graham continued to nag, as he had been nagging all the way home. He pressed in the code to the spaceship door. It opened in front of them.
“I don’t remember a lot of things right now, Boss,” Thorton admitted.
“Of course you don’t. You got your ass kicked. You’re lucky you were at a place we happened to be walking by.”
“Lucky, or strategic?” was Thorton’s response. It probably hurt to smile with a busted lip, but he did, anyway.
“Lucky you weren’t shot,” Graham grumbled. “Completely unprofessional. If I were my father I would give you the lash. We can’t do this every goddamned time we land somewhere.”
“Hey, I sold this ship for pretty good money, Boss. More than she’s worth!” he defended.
“I don’t know if that’s much solace for dealing with your bull—” Graham turned the corner and recognized his father sitting on the couch where he had expected Fie to be. Thorton’s large, bulky headphones were around his father’s ears yet the television monitor in front of him blared on quietly.
That wasn’t as shocking as the fact that both Mary and Ellie had curled up with him. Ellie was sitting on his lap resting her head on his chest, and Mary was curled up into his side, cocooned in a blanket. It was a very similar image to how his father had been with his sisters, when they were alive and young. He thought all the warm-and-fuzzy had been wrung out of him long ago from the losses he suffered in the war, but as he watched the girls snuggle up to him comfortably as they slept, it made him rethink that.
Graham looked to his left and his right—his men were extremely tense, as if they had just walked into a room with a sleeping dragon.
“Who’s he?” Peyton whispered, also sensing the tenseness.
“Admiral Masterson,” Thorton whispered back. “He might not have noticed us. We might be able to get out alive…” he tried to steer Peyton so he could limp safely from the room with his help.
The movement caught the edge of the Admiral’s peripheral vision, and his neck turned to face them. “What the hell happened to you, Lieutenant?” he snapped, clearly already of the mind that whatever happened was of Thorton’s own making.
Graham, as he’d done since he was a child, stepped in front of Thorton as if to shield the sight of him, and saluted his father respectfully. “Admiral,” he acknowledged, his posture straight as he put his hands behind his back in order to puff out his chest. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
“Well, after you sent me your mission report, I made it so the fleet just happened to be in the area,” the admiral noted frankly. “From the sound of it, you’re lucky you weren’t shot in the face. It certainly would have made your escape tricky.”
Graham nodded so slightly that the movement of his head could barely be detected with the human eye. “Indeed,” he agreed.
“But although I didn
’t think it WOULD be, it’s possible that having the union with the human is the best career move you’ve ever made.”
Graham didn’t respond. He was too shocked by his father’s statement. In reality, he had dreaded what his father would say about it—he wasn’t the most open-minded man in the galaxy, for certain.
Peyton, who couldn’t speak Swarii, looked over at Thorton and whispered, “Translate?”
“I don’t think I should. I don’t think he’s the admiral anymore. Possibly a robot spy that merely looks like him…” Thorton replied, a stupid smirk appearing on his beat-up face.
“This update she did to your communication system is revolutionary, Son. I haven’t been able to get over it. She’s sort of the mad-scientist type,” the admiral said, gazing down at her as she continued to snuggle into him. He played with her five-toed little feet, which had been getting warmed with his hand all the while. “Only the human part makes her a little too damned cute to take seriously at first.”
Graham felt a mix of emotions in him—he would have felt nothing but pride at whatever it was his father was so happy with, but he was mostly thinking how he had specifically told her not to fix or fiddle with anything while he was gone. That’s why he had left Fie behind—to insure that.
He looked around the room, suddenly confused. “Where’s Fie?”
“Probably still in his bedroom, puking his guts out,” he answered, looking unconcerned, and even a little bit amused. “This one slipped him some sort of drug, or so she says. But I really think it was this one,” he said, nodding over to Mary. “Because she’s been acting far guiltier about Fie’s side effects. She’s exhausted; been at Fie’s side for the last seven hours. It feels like they’d pre-arranged who’d be at fault.”
Graham was massaging his scalp already with the tips of his fingers. “Urgh,” he finally said, and took inventory of his current problems: a drop in from his positively frightening father, also the highest commander of his fleet and life, a banged-up electrician, an exhausted doctor, a poisoned research scientist, and the wife that poisoned him and obviously went off to do whatever she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it. “Terrific,” he grumbled.
Never Submit! The Swarii Brides, Book One Page 14
