by Alyx X
I watched carefully as the beam of light from the ship reflected off the corner of a building ahead of me. Nowhere near, but still far too close. Every shot of light came accompanied with that same pulsing sound from earlier and it sent a dart of fear through me. But I had the upper hand now. If he wanted to take me, he didn’t want to kill me. He wanted me alive.
Okay. It was time for a new strategy. I pressed my bag to a wall and unsheathed my knife before gripping it between my teeth, then I held my bow ready and drew an arrow from my quiver. I stepped to the corner and glimpsed the ship, hovering above the widest street, shots of light like baby solar flares still peppering the ground and walls surrounding it.
Calling its bluff, I ran toward it, and the light display stopped. I was right. His aim wasn’t to hurt me, and that gave me all the chance I needed.
The ship didn’t fire as I ran, but the engine noise changed, and the whole ship seemed to stutter in the air, visibly shuddering as it hovered. Shit. It really was a flying pile of scrap. That was knowledge I could use, too. The engine above me blasted, sending a plume of smoke and sooty debris to the ground, but I didn’t even flinch. I used the dirt and greasy gas to conceal myself as I leapt onto a concrete block, using the broken parts of the building as giant steps to get closer to the spacecraft.
Then I fired an arrow at the turbine closest to me. It flew flawlessly between the whirring blades, and the engine clanked before it spluttered and made a sound like it was about to give up. Propelled by that small success, I grabbed my knife from between my teeth, and raised my arm as I leaped into the air, looking to plunge the blade into the thin metal exterior and find purchase so I could climb my way onto the hull.
My knife dinged against the metal before rebounding off, not even leaving a scratch. The failure jarred my wrist, and I had only a moment as I fell to wonder about the surface of the ship looking so thin and frail but being able to withstand the force of my blade.
For a moment, I tumbled toward the ground, but I’d spent long enough watching chidders move that I was able to right myself and land with something approximating grace. A small pain bit my ankle as it twisted under my weight, but I pulled myself into a crouch and waited. The ship's engines growled above me, and I made myself as small as possible, pressing against the grey blocks behind me, hoping the driver wouldn’t notice me.
The ship backed up a little and the pulse sound started, but instead of light this time, little pings and thuds sounded as hard objects, like stones, rained to the ground around me. Dents and chips appeared where they struck, and I gasped. The strikes moved closer, and I gasped as one glanced off my leg painfully. Shit. Close, too close.
He must have changed his mind—taking me alive wasn’t the only possibility anymore. I pushed off from the wall behind me and ran, sprinting across the ruined landscape of SanFrisco, seeking safety as the little weapons from the ship peppered the ground behind me.
My usual tactic of ducking behind things and weaving erratically wasn’t working. Every time I changed direction, the ship’s fire grew stronger, destroying the objects I hoped to shelter behind, and pulverizing anything that might conceal my path. He was clearing a direct line of sight to me, and for the first time in a very long time, trepidation wound through me. I might not come back from this one.
All around me, stone crumbled and fell to the floor, and the air filled with a different kind of dust, coating my skin in a fine layer of gray. It filled my mouth, and I breathed it in, coughing and stumbling as I pushed myself forward. Then something sharp hit the back of my thigh, and my stride faltered as I surged forward, my steps faltering. I fell just as a piece of rock crashed into my path, and pain rushed through me as my head slammed into it.
When I opened my eyes again, I was surrounded by a white glow, and I could barely see the outlines of the ruins of SanFrisco. I looked around, searching for my body, because I must surely have left it. Father had spoken of a white light for those who departed, and of being lifted out of themselves, and I saw now that both things were true.
I rose up through the white light, before a hot wind gathered me in comforting arms and pulled me in, coaxing me from the city I’d once called my own, taking me to something greater. I relaxed into the warmth, surrendering as my thoughts flowed from confusion to peaceful acceptance. Was this dying? If so, it really wasn’t as bad as most people feared.
I floated in the air, something I should never have been able to do, giving myself to the higher power that called on me now. But regret caught in my throat—just for a moment. Father had been right. The elders had foreseen this.
I closed my eyes and didn’t think of anything further.
4
Lyx
The tractor beam brought the female right into the largest cargo hold of the ship, to where I’d usually collect any of the space junk I brought inside. I’d already prepared her cage for transport, and the door stood wide open, the closest I could get to an invitation to my hospitality.
I used the beam to deposit her onto the floor, her landing a little clunky as I tried to get used to my new controls. I should have practiced on something else first.
“There you go. Easy does it,” I said, wincing as she thumped to the floor. I couldn’t damage such a valuable asset.
I secured the claw and tractor beam machines in their off positions and glanced between the female on the floor and the new, silver-colored cage. Then I strode toward her and stood above her, looking down at her limp form. Something wasn’t right.
She had some sort of injury to her forehead and a gash on her arm with blood congealing around the edges. Plus my lasers had ripped a hole right through her thigh. Shit.
I shook my head. This wasn’t right at all. I was having a hard enough time with the idea of kidnapping a human female, but I couldn’t in good conscience cage an injured one. Blowing out a sigh, I bent and lifted her into my arms. This human warrior weighed almost nothing compared to a Tryonian warrior, and I drew her against my chest as I walked through my ship to the room that had doubled as our sick bay. The swirling writing that covered my skin flickered and glowed gently at our contact.
I shouldered the sick bay door open and coughed as my movement disturbed a layer of dust—proof I only ever came in here to give myself vitamin infusions if I drank too much and needed to sober up. There wasn’t much call or opportunity for medical care for a solitary pilot in space these days.
Thankfully, although I didn’t use it, my parents had left it well stocked, and the healing systems all still worked. I knew enough to test those regularly, because being alone and in a low-value ship was really no guarantee of safety or health.
I carried the delirious female to the narrow bed, holding her shoulders up as I swept the white sheet over with my forearm, trying to clear away some of the neglect before I laid her on it. Despite her unconscious state, she thrashed about and yelled some things in a language I didn’t understand. Maybe the tractor beam hadn’t suited her brainwaves. Her body and maybe her mind needed time to rest and heal. I reached for a sleep infusion and drew it into a syringe, then I placed it against her skin and depressed the plunger, forcing the sedative between the cells of her body to her blood in a fine mist. I’d read enough about humans to understand her physiology would cope with similar medication to mine.
She spoke some more garbled words as she fought the sleep, and I glanced at her face. In all my research, I hadn’t come across this language, and I couldn’t understand her. I pressed my finger to the back of my neck. The chip embedded there usually communicated with the translator permanently embedded in my ear, and it also communicated with the chips of other races so it could update itself based on the information it received. I’d already anticipated she probably wouldn’t be wearing a chip of her own—it seemed the most feral of humans wandered their deserts—so I’d downloaded the most common Earth language. However… I grimaced. She didn’t appear to be speaking that one.
Once she relaxed, I could begin
to examine some of her damaged body. I pulled some tight leggings from her lower body and paused. I hadn’t meant to hit her with the lasers I’d fired, but they’d torn right through her left thigh, leaving perfect exit and entry wounds. I catalogued each injury carefully and prepared the machines I needed to use to heal them as I formulated a plan. Satyan wouldn’t want an injured human. He had definitely paid me for a female in perfect condition.
I methodically removed the rest of her clothes, trying to ignore my own arousal at the intimacy of the situation, noting abrasions and scars across parts of her body. I could probably heal all of these wounds, given enough time. I kind of owed it to her, given that she was my meal ticket in terms of actually providing me with the money to buy food to survive.
After powering up the monitoring software, I grabbed a healing sleeve and wrapped it around her thigh, but the monitor bleeped immediately, signaling a fault, and I glanced at the read out on the screen.
“Error 008”
What the fuck? I didn’t have time to look up the error codes in the manual. I looked at the female with the dirt and dust streaking her skin, and a memory flashed through my mind. I’d gotten error code 008 once before… when I was fresh from the dust-coated surface of one of the moons of Hutna. I’d simply been too dirty for the healing sleeve to sense my skin. An easy fix, then. I just had to clean the female.
I moved her to a different gurney and grabbed the spray head to clean her, sluicing the caked-on dirt and grey stone dust from her skin. The dirty water washed through the holes in the gurney and onto the floor where the sick bay clean-up system automatically dried it away, vaporizing the dirt and grime as it did so.
Slowly, parts I’d thought were her skin, washed away, and she was no longer a rough-skinned, flake covered being. The water revealed skin beautiful and brown, a rich color I’d never seen elsewhere in space. It was smooth and soft.
Unable to control the urge, I ran the tip of my forefinger over her upper arm, marveling at the contrast with my own vivid green color. Together, our shades reminded me of the jungles of Tryon. Perfection. It had been so long since I’d experienced simple touch between living beings. I turned my attention to her hair, and it was a tangle of thick coils. I ran the water over them, separating them as I eased them apart with my fingers.
When I’d washed the dirt and residue of the ruins from her body, I looked her over. She almost felt like my creation. Washing her had revealed her pure form, her lines and build were beautiful.
I gathered her in my arms, pressing her to my skin again, and returned her to the other bed for treatment. The sick bay had evaporated the water from her skin, and she was dry and warm, and I moved to cover her up but hesitated. The research I’d done hadn’t warned me how similar our bodies would be, my race to hers. We had the same basic build and shape. At least, she reminded me of the females from my planet, and from a cursory glance it seemed our hair placement was the same. But… something caught in my head like there was a detail I’d missed. I ran the last few moments back through my mind. Picking her up in my arms and… Shit. I stepped away, then half rolled her gently. No tail.
Human females really didn’t have a tail. I touched the base of her back, just above a very nicely shaped ass. No tail, but a small bump where one might have existed long ago. The information hadn’t mentioned a tail, but I’d just assumed because everything else looked so similar to a Tryonian female that she had hers tucked away. But no.
How could she find her true pleasure without a tail? Everyone said the tail was required. Mine certainly was. As I thought about it, heat throbbed right from the base of my tail to the tip.
The thought of pleasure echoed through me, a mixture of objective curiosity and bone-deep desire to know. Could Tryonians still bring humans pleasure? Could humans bring Tryonians pleasure? I shook my head. I needed to stop asking myself questions I didn’t need to know the answer to. After all, I hadn’t picked up the human for myself, I’d gotten her for a different race of alien altogether. Satyan would be the one figuring out how to pleasure a female, not me.
I bit my lip and glanced at her again. I’d never even seen a fully naked Tryonian female in person before… Never really seen a naked female at all. Unless I counted the Vextrane beta I’d paid to view at a space station stopover in a different galaxy. Shame still haunted me over that encounter, but I’d been drunk and she’d been cheap. And—I almost laughed—I hadn’t learned anything anyway. Her build was entirely alien. Nothing like I’d learned about Tryonians.
That female—one who’d forever remain nameless because she hadn’t shared it—hadn’t been built like this one, either. Her frame had been larger and broader, and her hole, where it seemed her customers must do little more than dock inside her, had been located in her outer thigh.
At the time, I couldn’t get past the idea that I’d slipped a little from the Tryonian way and cheapened something that should have been special. I’d wanted to see, and I’d paid her price. It was a business transaction. I’d been a fucking business transaction.
My actual soul seemed to ache at the memory. I hadn’t repeated the experience.
I wanted what I knew was supposed to be out there—emotional connection with someone. It was a cliché, but it was lonely in space all by myself, and I longed for someone. The emotionless viewing of that alien’s hole hadn’t been enough. And for those who fucked her, surely that wasn’t all it was supposed to be?
As I spun through my thoughts, my mind filled with longing and regret, I traced a slow finger down the side of the human’s body. Perfection. My heart thundered in my chest at the contact, and I chased the feeling, skimming my hand over her hip, her flat belly and covering the apex of her thighs with my palm. Her skin was warm, and I sucked in a breath as she shifted restlessly and mumbled something.
I snatched my hand back and, fumbling slightly, pushed some more sleep infusion through her skin. I hadn’t meant to disturb her. She needed to sleep to heal. I quickly fixed a healing sleeve over her thigh and a second over the wound in her arm and applied salve to her head, then drew the covers over her, trying to return her dignity and erase my sudden awareness of her.
Then I gave myself a pep talk. The words sounded forced in my head. She wasn’t simply a prize I’d won from space or even something I’d created. She was a human female.
And they were worth a lot of money on the black market.
My fingers trembled where I’d touched her, and I fought to push away the memory of the softness of her skin.
I almost stumbled from the sick bay, not even knowing what I was running from as the reality of my loneliness chased me from the room. I slid the door closed, drawing from the pocket in the wall, and fumbled with the door lock as I peered through the viewing window at the still figure on the bed.
She’d be fine. I’d fix her body and take her to Satyan and he’d pay me.
We’d all be fine.
I staggered down the smooth metal corridor, my coordination all over the place as I half-walked and half moved on sheer willpower away from the sick bay. She fascinated me, but she was just cargo, my next payday. I wanted to be sure she was healing, to personally monitor her even, but I had cameras for that, and the live feeds from her machines were connected directly to my command screens. I didn’t need to actually watch over her.
But I wanted to.
I groaned. I couldn’t handle care or concern. Not in real terms. I had a duty to Satyan to hand over a high-quality human, and that was where my job ended. Cold, clinical. Veterinary, almost. She was alien. Cattle. Currency.
As I organized my thoughts, my strides became more even. I could do this. I had control. I just had to keep Satyan and his requirements in my head, keep myself (and my thoughts) professional. Easy.
I reached the flight deck and slammed myself into my chair, glancing out through the huge windshield at the stars racing toward and past me. My ship had run her preprogrammed take off pattern as soon as I turned off the tractor beam,
just as I’d anticipated, and now we were in deep space, putting as many miles between us and Earth that we could.
Good. It made it that much harder for Terran to find or follow me.
I switched on the viewing screens so I could see into the sick bay. I needed to know if she moved or required more sleeping solution. It wasn’t just to see another being onboard my ship. That would be pretty pathetic.
I hit a couple of extra controls. I told myself I was fine-tuning my flight path, but I didn’t need to do that. The program I’d loaded into the computer earlier was coordinate perfect. Of course it was, I’d programmed this ship ever since I’d learned to fly it. Dad had taught me everything he knew.
A flashing light to my left caught my attention. Shit. An incoming call. How long had that been flashing? I shook my head. The human onboard was distracting me in a way I hadn’t foreseen.
I looked again at the call detail. Fuck. Satyan. His name suddenly felt like a greasy stain in my head—one that I might never be able to remove.
I straightened and exhaled a long breath, composing myself as I reached to hit the answer button blinking rapidly on the screen. Immediately, Satyan’s moist, bloated face filled one half of the screen, and I withheld my shudder.
“Lyx.” He grated my name out like a curse, his rubbery lips almost wobbling with the effort. “I thought we had a deal. How fucking long do you expect me to wait?” He sneered, his lips flattening into a long, thin line right across his cheeks.
I hadn’t ever seen him like this—the nasty side. When Dad had dealt with him, he’d always been accommodating. Submissive, even.
“Well?” He barked the word and the color of his red skin deepened. A boil on the top of his head swelled and pulsed. “Have you forgotten what you’re supposed to be doing? You have my money and I have…” He lifted his hands. “Oh, yes. Absolutely fucking nothing. Your father was a man of his word. He traded on his honor. I was wrong before. You’re very different.”
