The Quarry Master: A Grumpy Alien Boss Romantic Comedy

by Amanda Milo

  Bash shrugs, totally unconcerned. “Stop arousing my need to punish something.”

  The hob exhales this massive, audible expression of resignation for this kind of threat-level he definitely shouldn’t have to deal with at work. But then he gives us a glance that says he thinks we’re both crazy before he heaves up his boulder and heads for a cart, his wings held tight behind him.

  I shake my head at Bash. “You’re destroying my reputation by association.”

  “Destroying is a little forceful. Tarnishing, maybe. Besmirching, possibly.” He surprises me by moving close and shifting the stone in his arms to his shoulder, freeing a hand so he can tug my ponytail. “Do you do this yourself or have you invited a hob to care for your mane?”

  Nonplussed, I twist to look up at him—still holding my hair. “I put it up by myself. I can do it one-handed.”

  Bash eyes my hair, then searches my face, grunting. “Good.” And with that, he leaves for his leatherworking tent.

  No one else talks to me. I could try dropping some pleasantries, but earlier, Bash and Gracie had almost amicably split the workforce so that Gracie can watch ‘the slackards.’ (Bash’s word for the humans. Gracie called them slow-twats. I’m not sure which one is less offensive.) This way, Bash gets to oversee the ones he’ll be least likely to kill. That would be his preferred force: hobs and Rakhii who keep their head down and work, not chat with the boss’s friend.

  I clear my area of rocks that I can safely lift, everyone working silently around me, then I wander closer to Bash where he’s stabbing at something. I weave around Rakhii and hobs, walking a couple of smaller pebbles too small for them to bother with but perfect for me to carry to the cart along the way, until I’m finally in front of the table Bash is sitting at, back bent, prying metal buckles open before clamping them on leather straps.

  “Making us torture implements?” I ask him.

  “You flatter yourselves,” Bash banters right back. At least, I think he’s bantering. “I wouldn’t waste the time to torture the lot of you. Takes too long. Besides, your screams irritate my ears. Add to that, your blood would need to be washed off of my tools. Thus, crafting specialized pieces to prod your people with? No. If I’m going to strip the life out of any of you, I’d use my bare hands.”

  I clear my throat. “You kidder.” (Does anyone else think he’s done more than give this option a passing thought?) I haul up another rock. “Perhaps you like the idea of hands-on because you crave the contact.”

  The look he gives me… I can’t read it.

  I continue. “Studies show that touching someone’s hand can lower their blood pressure. Maybe you should ask someone to hold your hand all day.” I give him a bright smile. “You might live longer.”

  He returns my smile, just as brightly, but with more teeth and a lot of threat. “They won’t.”

  I assume he means the owner of whose hand is unlucky enough to take hold of his. I walk my rock to the nearest cart and scoot back to him, picking up right where we left off. “Fine. Don’t find healthy ways to relax then.”

  “Beating a human all day will help me relax.”

  I tsk at him. “Not exactly healthy.”

  “Only for the human.”

  Despite the topic sounding threatening, Bash is more relaxed. He’s almost smiling when he mutters, “Come around the table.”

  Setting the rock down that I’d just taken up, I dust my full glove off on my thigh and my arm’s glove off of my side and trot to join him at his station. I hug the shade patch that the roof overhang provides. The instant-coolness on my skin is refreshing. “What are we working on?”

  “Harness repair. Hold this.” He places a leather strap in my hand and for the next couple of minutes, he tells me what to do while he makes adjustments, and while he works, I watch.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you knew how to stop speaking without being threatened,” Bash surprises me by suddenly saying, his big brows bunching as he concentrates on his work, “but you haven’t tried to force a moralistic story down my throat, and you’ve had opportunity.”

  I wiggle the strap. “Like the moral-stories were working. You’re still being a Scrooge.”

  He pokes a round silver concho through two straps, pinning them together by crunching the metal backing using the strength of his fingers and nothing more. “You don’t want to dazzle me with any other impressive inventions your planet has managed to chisel into existence? Have your people developed nothing greater than inflatable tires?”

  “Wow. I’m beginning to feel personally attacked for all humankind. And the reason I’m being quiet is because this is me, absorbed in my work. Focusing.”

  Humor lights his eyes to a wholesome Hades-shade of green. He snaps his fingers and points his talon to a tool. Dutifully, I set aside my strap to grab it and bring it to him. As I set the thing in his hand, I add, “Besides, the boss doesn’t like it when we gab during work time. Shh.”

  Bash snorts and fire spits out of his nose, making me jump a little. Not high and not far; by now, I’m getting pretty used to this, really. “Irreverent chit.” Two dips appear on either side of his mouth, like he might be losing the battle on stifling a smile. “You know, Rakhii dams and sires warn their litters to behave, telling them that insolent pups get the scales slapped off their lips. Every time you sass me, I see your naked face and think that you didn’t heed such a warning.”

  “Funny thing. Where I’m from, we tell kids not to be lippy, but scales are never mentioned. There might be stories of gigantic mean alligators—they have scales like you—getting tossed into the sewers, though.”

  “This is a maul,” Bash instructs, gaze lazily pinning mine as he thrusts the tool between us. “Do you know the kind of damage this could do to a human?” Using two claws, he shakes it in front of my nose.

  “No, but I’m about to find out, aren’t I?”

  Bash exhales, smoke leaving his mouth, and his eyes drop back to his work. “Hardly. If your blood spilled on this leather, do you know what would happen?”

  “You’d have an evil alien horse strutting around the quarry, wearing a harness covered in human blood?”

  “Precisely. And it would likely spend all day trying to lap the blood off of the leather—”

  “Eww! What are these? Carnivorous horses?!”

  Bash glances up from the small metal-ended stick that he’s positioned under the round hammer-like maul tool he’s got poised in the air over a stretch of leather. “Yes.”

  “WHAAAT?” My head whips over my shoulder, checking for villainous My Little Ponies before I crane my neck in the other direction, eyes wide open about these trios of freaky beasts that lurk among us.

  “You noticed their teeth. They don’t exactly appear as if they’re suited for eating vegetation.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think they ate people!”

  “Technically,” Bash points out, unworried as he goes back to his work, tapping his metal-ended stick gently into the surface of the harness strap, “they’d be dining on aliens if they took down a human. Not regular people.”

  I goggle-eye him. “We are regular people, Scrooge!”

  Bash tips his horns. “Not as far as the Narwari and I are concerned.” He holds up a weird mallet-looking thing. “This is a mallet,” he proclaims. He sets it beside my hand. He picks up a bulb-ended tool that has what looks like a freakin’ bearded axe stuck horizontally on it. “This is a round blade.”

  “Looks dangerous.”

  Bash’s eyes lock on mine. “Most of these are going to be dangerous. You will be careful using them.”

  “Well, yeah, Dad, I’m not going to aim them at my eye on purpose.”

  Bash’s lids lower, and I don’t know if he knows it, but his tail starts twitching behind him in warning.

  I wave to my mouth. “Already slapped smooth, remember?” I give his glower a bright smile and carefully take the round blade by the bulb-end that he’s holding out for me. “I won’t try to hurt m
yself on purpose or on accident, I promise. I understand that you don’t think much of us ‘aliens,’” I liberally twerk my fingers, quoting the hell out of the word, because if anyone is an alien between the two of us, it for sure as frick isn’t me, “because I’m not running around with a self-destruct button. Believe it or not, I go through life pretty careful.”

  Bash eases up just the tiniest fraction, with his acceptance of what I said only evident because he raises another tool, continuing my lesson. “First, you’ll learn to skive leather, thinning it,” he explains, “in the areas where it will need to fold and be bent.” He sends me a scowl, warning, “Do not skive too much. Cut it too thin, and when it gets its first stiff tug it will break.” He points a long, scaled, claw-tipped finger to something off to the side of us.

  I glance over to see a restless Narwari trio stomping past us, one of them dancing sideways a little.

  “These animals strain their gear constantly. Often violently,” Bash says, and almost as if it’s on cue, the Narwari on the far side reaches over the neck of the Narwari in the middle with the sole purpose of nipping the dancer. The bitten animal squeals and hops in place—and the groaning and creaking of harness leather and buckles can be heard all the way over here.

  The driver hob claps his hands and barks something at the biter, who settles back down.

  “Nice animals,” I tell Bash.

  “Occasionally,” he agrees with absolute seriousness. He turns back to his work, tapping the maul over the stick again.

  I turn away from the scary horses as they disappear up the ramp to exit the quarry and try to figure out what Bash is doing. “Are you making that strap fancy?”

  Bash’s tapping trips out of rhythm before he finds his pace again and resumes. “It’s called ‘stamping.’”

  “You’re taking the time to make it pretty.”

  “I’m personalizing the harness,” Bash contends. “Each Narwari has their own gear fitted to their bodies and this,” he points to rune-like characters, “is the name of the Narwari this strap will belong to.”

  “Hmm. What’s this over here?” I ask innocently.

  Bash’s tail comes up out of nowhere and catches my pointing finger, sweeping it down and away. “Flurssh,” he mutter-growls.

  “What was that?”

  “Flourish!”

  A grin attacks my face. “Like… fancy flourish?”

  Bash frowns fiercely at the leather in his hands as he stabs a hole into it with a wicked-sharp awl. “You and your scale-less lips,” he grumbles. Then his eyes jump from his work to me. “Tell me how you came to be here.”

  His tail grabs my leg and yanks—I’m about to yelp when my butt connects with a little stool that Bash’s tail must have set under me before he sat me down by force. I cough and sit up straight. I give him a seriously dangerous look that he isn’t at all worried about as he stays absorbed in what his hands are doing. “My journey was nothing compared to what a lot of the women here have gone through.” I grimace, thinking of what I’ve heard. The things some of these women have endured. “I had it real easy.”

  “How so?”

  “Do you know the Yrawwl race?”

  Bash nods.

  “A Yrawwl bought me. He said he picked me because he thought owning me would be interesting. The moment he had the receipt for me, I basically became the space version of a pet hamster.” I consider Bash, wondering if his translator will supply what a hamster is.

  His eyes squint a little, and I think he must have what he needs because his ears flick and he says, “Go on.”

  “Well, just like a kid’s first hamster, my novelty wore off and soon the responsibility of having to remember to feed me was kind of a hassle for him—crazy me, I wanted to be fed three times a day, while his kind only need sustenance like once every solar—”

  “I’ve heard that,” Bash says grimly, a finer needle than the one he used earlier pinched between his clawed thumb and forefinger. He stabs it into the strap kind of aggressively.

  “—so after a few arduous months of me not being interesting enough along with the downside of all my tiresome feeding? He was bored to tears with me.”

  Bash makes a face. “Yrawwl can cry?”

  “No—or, well, I don’t know—it’s just a saying. Anyway, when he heard that Gryfala had set up a preserve for the humankind they’d collected, he arranged to release me here like he was doing a good deed. And he was, don’t get me wrong. Here is a million times better. I get to hang out with a really nice alien.”

  “Shut down. Hold this,” Bash instructs with an impressive economy of words and movements as he works.

  My fingers pressing down on the leather, I have to smile. “...Shut down? Like power off?” I laugh.

  He stops, frowning, his eyes meeting mine. “No, your people are always saying this to one another.”

  “Oh, you mean shut up?”

  “‘Up?’ Why up? We’re speaking of your mouth. Wouldn’t it make sense for the phrase to be ‘down?’” Bash slams his tail blades into a wood stump behind the table, frustrated. “Damn it! I’ve had it with this asinine language.”

  “Hmm. You’re doing fine, Sunbeam. But let’s talk about something new. You could try the chattering thing too.”

  Smoke puffing out of his nose, he settles back down with aggressive reluctance. “I want to hear you.”

  Heart flip. “I’m trying really hard not to dance for joy here. Do you have any topics burning to escape you?”

  “No.” He yanks his tail from the stump and his tailblades tap the ground next to my foot to get my attention back on our work. “Hold this here.”

  I scoot my fingers to the spot he indicated. “Wow, you’re fun. Let’s see… Okay, Random Topic Challenge accepted—”

  Bash’s hands go still, his work progress flatlining as something occurs to him. “You’re not about to tell me how long it took for your people to realize that thermal processing on drinks intended for consumption would kill bacteria again, are you?”

  I let go of where I’m holding the leather for him long enough to poke his arm. He twitches and looks down at the spot I touched him with an unreadable expression. When his eyes flick to mine and he’s still wearing an unreadable expression, I say, “You couldn’t sound more judgmental. And I told you! People probably knew that heating liquids was safer long before science proved it to us. But sometimes we need to know the explanation behind stuff before we fully understand why we should do a thing.”

  Bash makes a noise at this but doesn’t pick on the human race further. He brushes my hand away from his work, folds the piece, grabs my hand, and presses my fingers down where he wants them. He picks up a buckle and starts forcing the tongue of the leather through the end of it. The leather, well-worked but new, is fighting this process. Bash shares, “The Gryfala use electrical field pulses to kill bacteria and spoilage enzymes.”

  I gasp dramatically. “Don’t look now but you’re making conversation!”

  He flicks his ears and sniffs.

  “And neat factoid about the Gryfala. What about your people?”

  “Ha.” He exhales the word, and fire falls out of his mouth, spraying the strip we’re both holding, darkening the leather from his side to just ahead of my fingertips. Eeep! Working with a Rakhii is kind of wild. “We prefer everything we put in our mouths to be hot.”

  “Makes sense, and no wonder you think we’re slow for not knowing about heating. Okay, your turn to tell me something random.”

  Bash returns his attention to the buckle. His chin dips, acknowledging that this is only fair—and his horns bob with his movement, making my eyes nervous. He’s got two sharp points at the ends of his horns, and I’m afraid if he moves wrong I’m going to get stabbed right in the blinkers. “Sometimes, I want to shake you humans until I hear your heads rattle.”

  “Wow. When you make random conversation, you don’t screw around.”

  “And sometimes it galls me to think that if I ever gave i
n to the urge, my own people would put me down. They would choose aliens over their own—and it infuriates me because they’d be right to do so. You’re small and fair and too lovely to shake until I’ve broken you.”

  I train wide eyes on him. “You think we’re lovely?” That’s what I focus on? Really?

  His gaze strikes mine and holds. “You are.” He pushes a metal tool in my hand. “Press down here. Don’t let up until I tell you to,” he warns.

  “Got it, boss,” I say, regaining my equilibrium.

  Bash almost makes a groaning noise. “‘Boss.’ You humans and this title.” He’s speaking directly to the leather, hunched over it as he works.

  I’m watching the little wrinkles that form along the scales at the sides and bridge of his nose. It’s almost orange today, which means it's got a good coating of dust. His bathtub drain must have a serious debris trap on it. “What else do you want to be called? You can’t actually think we’re going to curtsy and call you ‘Quarry Master, sir.’ Besides, that’s not you. It sounds pretentious.” I shake my head. “The only time titles are worth using is when they’re cool. Like the planet I’m from, there’s a Marker of the Swans. Now that is a cool title.” I try to affect a British accent. “‘Ah, and here is our Royal Swan Marker! The Queen insists that you’re needed down by the lake.’ Sign me up for that. They also call them Swan Wardens—hey!” I reach up and tweak one of his horns. His tail wraps around my wrist, yanking my hand down to my leg. Getting a thrill out of the way it’s shackling me, I grin. “We could start calling you Warden. Now there’s a title that really fits you.”

  Bash’s gaze returns to me. His eyes are narrowed, measuring.

  “It’s real,” I stress. “It is a real title. For a jailor.”

  Bash’s jade pretties turn to slits of green fire. “I know what a warden is. Your people invented the wheel only yesterday—”

  “That is not true! You are such an exaggerator.”