Taking His Captive

by Viki Storm

  I know he’s just trying to enrage me—but it’s working. There’s no way he’d ever get his hands on Suse, but the mere thought is triggering a violent protective instinct in me.

  Screw the plan. Screw the squadron.

  This asshole is mine.

  I put the ship into warp, directed straight at Tos. It’s going to tap the rest of our fuel, but I don’t care. This bastard does not get to live after the things he’s done. The Corva coil that fuels my ship gives us a fierce burst of speed, and we are upon Tos in an instant.

  I initiate the missile system, but before I can get it running, we’re hit.

  “Get them,” I scream over my comm. Not very sophisticated instructions to my squadron, but a hundred ships firing a hundred corvium missiles are bound to hit something.

  I keep my eye on Tos’s ship as he tries to dodge my attack. He’s not going to escape that easily. I pursue him, knowing that his death will make the entire damned Universe a better place.

  “Don’t use the missile,” Suse says. She’s been watching events unfold, but this is the first she’s spoke up.

  “What then?” I ask.

  “His ship can auto-dodge. I remember hearing my father talk about it, how it was a new thing that some of the criminals were using.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” I prod. I’m getting impatient to see this bastard’s ship in a million pieces, his limp body floating into the Void.

  “Does this ship have a blaster?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, “but we’d have to get closer, and I don’t—”

  “Then get closer,” she orders. “There’s no other way. The auto-dodge sequence can’t detect quick bursts of energy from the blasters. Hurry.”

  I can’t deny my mate. I weave between the Guuklars, but one of them has zeroed in on us. He’s shooting, but I’ve managed to avoid being hit.

  But no matter how fast I go, he’s glued to our tail. “I can’t shake this guy,” I say. I watch in my monitor as he lowers his missile launcher. “Damn it. A missile this close?” There’s no way we can get out of the way in time.

  But just then, his ship disappears, replaced in a blink with a fiery ball of smoke and debris.

  “I got him,” Granny’s voice announces on the comm speaker. She sounds delirious; the singular joy of combat has transformed her. “Now you go get the big bastard.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  We close in on Tos, and despite his best efforts, we get close enough for the blaster.

  “Do it,” I tell Suse. But I didn’t need to. She’s already flipping switches and aiming the blaster.

  “Hold still,” she tells me.

  “Not possible,” I say.

  She fires a blast and it goes astray. “Damn it,” she spits.

  “Take your time,” I say, but in truth we don’t have much.

  She aims again, seeming to take my advice to heart. It feels like an hour has gone by… and then…

  Gone.

  The blaster finds its target. Every single molecule in his ship—including the fission beam and Tos himself—has been split up into the constituent atoms, which are now floating in a hazy cloud.

  Suse lets out a long breath.

  “That’s it?” she says. “That was almost too kind for him.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But let’s just hope that even for that split second, he was in excruciating pain. Do you feel better?” I ask her. But I already know the answer.

  “No,” she says. “Is revenge always this hollow?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Revenge is always part of your past. And it’s always better to live for the future.”

  “That’s what I want to do now,” she says. She reaches for my hand, and I squeeze it back.

  “Me too,” I say. “There’s no future without you.”

  “And none without you,” she says. But I sense something within her, something that’s holding her back.

  I’m not concerned. If we can slay arachnoids and Guuklar together, we can do anything.

  I can still hear the celebration inside the great meeting hall. Everyone in Lekyo Prime—human and Zalaryn alike—is feasting and making merry. There’s going to be a lot of hangovers tomorrow morning… and my guess is that nine months from now, there will be a lot of newborn babies.

  And the worst part is that they’re all honoring me. Me! The one who started this war.

  Every toast to my honor starts with “to the one who made victory possible” or “to the savior of Lekyo Prime” or other such nonsense.

  The guilt is too much, so I have to come outside and get away from the stifling adoration and appreciation. Everyone thinks I’m great, some dedicated, tireless, brave warrior.

  The truth? I’m a coward. A selfish coward.

  I sit at the fountain, trying to spot the fish swimming around, but it’s dark and the surface is nothing but blurry shadows. Do fish stop swimming when they sleep? Do they just close their eyes and float wherever the current takes them? Or do they constrict their muscles, force themselves to push their fins and wiggle side to side even when they’re trying to rest?

  There’s footsteps behind me. Please not Orlon. I don’t think I can look him in the eye right now. All his talk about bonding and our future together just intensifies my guilt. If he only knew what a fraud I am, he wouldn’t look at me with such longing and desire. He wouldn’t fight to protect me—surely wouldn’t have risked his ass to save me from a swarm of spiders on a freezing cold satellite planet.

  “Had enough revelry for one night?” he asks. Why does it have to be him?

  “I’ve had enough revelry for a lifetime,” I say. “Revelry feels so cheap. How can anyone celebrate when there are captives and slaves still out there, when there are mutant creatures stealing into poorly guarded settlements and eating babies, when you can work until your hands bleed and then die because you ate a piece of fruit with a speck of a bacterium and it turned your insides to liquid shit?”

  “You’re in a foul mood,” Orlon remarks. “Eating babies? Liquid shit? That’s precisely why people make merry. Because they’re alive and healthy despite all the things in the universe that can kill you.”

  “It’s selfish,” I say. “Disrespectful.”

  “No one’s allowed to be happy if there’s one solitary soul out there who’s suffering?” he counters.

  “No,” I say. I’m not sure if I mean this or if I’m just being quarrelsome.

  “Have you been drinking?” he asks. “Your local wines are quite strong, even for a Zalaryn.”

  “Not a drop,” I say. “Even though they’re toasting me enough.”

  “Then why are you so upset?” he asks.

  “I need to tell you something,” I say, blurting it out with no forethought.

  “Okay,” he says. He doesn’t pry, doesn’t ask a hundred questions. He just looks at me, that endless reserve of patience and… adoration for me clear in his eyes.

  This is going to be hard.

  I’m going to have to break the heart of the person I love.

  I look away, not able to hold his honest gaze. “I started this war,” I say. Best start with the simplest explanation.

  To my horror, he laughs.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that the only ones responsible for this war, the casualties, the destruction—any of it—are the Rulmek and the Guuklar. And only them. They’re greedy and bloodthirsty, and that’s a bad combination.”

  “No,” I insist. “I was the one who told the Rulmek about Lia and the human captives and Lekyo Prime.”

  Then I see it. The moment his face changes. His eyes squint, the smile fades, and the muscles in his face seem to tighten ever so slightly. As if he’s thinking. Reevaluating.

  “Tell me from the beginning,” he says. “Let’s straighten this out.”

  Straighten this out? As in, hear my full confession so he can throw me in the dungeons for a traitor. That’s fine,
though—it’s what I deserve.

  “The Rulmek heard that my father was conspiring against them. They took me one night as I slept in my bed. They said they were holding me hostage, that my father was going to pay them a ransom. I thought they were stupid, my dad didn’t have any money, but I wasn’t going to say that, of course, so I played along.”

  “I don’t see how—” he starts, but I cut him off.

  “They said that since they were holding me ransom, they weren’t going to sell me. I was so relieved because I know what happened to my mother, how she was forced to work in a brothel. But before I could let out a sigh of relief, the commander said that they weren’t going to sell me, true, but neither were they going to have any freeloading humans on their ship.”

  I pause, remembering that day. I’d been invited into his chambers, two other Rulmek standing guard. It gave me the illusion of being some sort of special captive—even though I wasn’t, not really.

  “He said that they’d had a bit of trouble with the Guuklar warlord, Tos, in the past and wanted to smooth things over with him. They were going to give me to him until my father was able to pay. I was going to be a member of his personal harem.”

  “Tos?” Orlon says. I can see his thoughts churning, like he’s beginning to think that this is all related—and that the war could really be my fault.

  “Yes,” I say. “And I’d heard tales of the Guuklar. I’d even seen one before. They’re vile creatures, frightening and disgusting… but so human-like, too.” I can’t repress a shudder at how close I came to being given to Tos, at what he would have done to me. He’d have broken me, just like the brothel broke my mother.

  “You must have been terrified,” Orlon says.

  “Obviously,” I say, not meaning to be glib, but talk about understatements. “But right then, there was a beep on the commander’s comm-panel. One of their ships was calling to report about a rebel human female and Zalaryn male on-board the Rulmek warship that was headed to raid Lekyo Prime. Under my breath I must have said something to the effect of, ‘That’s Lia.’ Because it had to be. I knew she was from Lekyo Prime and had been a captive of the Rulmek, as well. The commander heard me and started asking me all sorts of questions about Lia and the rebels and Lekyo Prime.”

  “And you told him?” Orlon says. “And that’s why you think you started the war?”

  “I did tell him,” I admit. “He said that if I told him everything, that he’d reconsider giving me to Tos. That instead, he could keep me in a factory. I’d have to do hard work, but it would be honest work. I remember what he said, he said: ‘Do you want to manufacture Corva coils in a factory while your father comes up with your ransom, or do you want to be sent to Tos and manufacture his offspring?’”

  “That’s not a hard choice,” Orlon says.

  “So I talked. I told him everything.”

  “But it wasn’t much,” Orlon says.

  “No…” I admit. “I knew Lia was always looking for an opportunity to get back at the Rulmek. I knew she was from Lekyo Prime. That was it, really. I didn’t know anything about my father’s role in any of this. I didn’t know he’d been working to stockpile weapons and vehicles. But the commander seemed satisfied enough, and a few days later I was installed in the factory. So you see, to save my own skin, I sold out this entire planet. Every man, woman and child—human and Zalaryn—they were going to be attacked because of me. And now they’re inside, toasting to my good health, hailing me the Savior of the Rift, for fuck’s sake.”

  The tears are flowing freely now, and I let them. I haven’t let myself cry for a long time, and Void knows I have a lot of things to cry about.

  “The Rulmek already knew this,” Orlon says. “And what they didn’t know was easily discoverable. They knew that Lia was a Three-Star Rebel. They knew that it was her and Bantokk—and me, actually—who went onboard the warship and rescued their human captives. And they knew that we were going back to Lekyo Prime because they were already monitoring the planet for months before.”

  “But…” I say. Is it true that none of my information was valuable at all? I decide that it doesn’t matter if it was valuable or not. “I still tried to bargain at the expense of an entire planet.”

  “As would ninety-nine percent of humans,” he says.

  “Still,” I say.

  “Still nothing,” he says. “You used what little resources you had available to survive. That’s what all lifeforms do.”

  “That might be true,” I say, starting to believe—or merely wanting to believe? “But if my information was so worthless, why didn’t the commander spit in my face and give me to Tos anyway? Why didn’t he say, ‘Stupid human, I already know that, tell me something important or no deal?’”

  Orlon laughs. “That’s an easy one,” he says. “If anything, it’s proof that the commander never had any real intention of giving you to Tos. The commander wanted to enrage Tos, make Tos feel slighted and wronged by the humans on Lekyo Prime—”

  I think I get it. The connections are firing, and I interrupt. “So Tos would gather his forces and invade Lekyo Prime, and the Rulmek would get the planet afterward. Give the Guuklar more incentive to go in and do the dirty work for them.”

  “Precisely,” Orlon says. “The Rulmek are evil and greedy, but no one ever said they were stupid.”

  I’m not sure how to react to all this.

  “I’m just sorry,” I say. “That I made you go through all this trouble, that I put your planet at risk.”

  “First of all,” he says. He sits closer to me and I let him. His warmth and closeness feel so good right now, feel like exactly what I need. “It was no trouble for me. If I wasn’t the one sent to rescue you from the Trogii, then I would never have known the satisfaction of having found my bonded mate. And even if you did put our planet at risk, you’re the one who saved it, so that more than makes up for it.”

  “How come you’re able to make me feel better?” I ask. He shrugs.

  “Part of the job,” he says. “If anything, I should be apologizing to you.”

  “For what?” I say, shocked that he would say such a thing. “For rescuing me from the Trogii? For finding my locket? For realizing where the weapons and ships were hidden? For rescuing me from the spiders?”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” he says, “I suppose I am a valuable male who has provided you with many valuable services. But I am sorry for my attitudes towards your people. I always considered humans to be primitive, emotional… beneath the dignity of more advanced races like the Zalaryns.”

  “We are primitive and emotional,” I say. “That’s part of our charm.”

  “I thought you were lesser lifeforms,” he admits. “That you were weak, and your culture was concerned with naught but vanities and decadence. But I know that’s not true. And those humans in the Corva coil factory… Void help us, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. What a miserable existence.”

  “It was,” I say. “But you saved them.”

  “I did,” he says. “Partially because the Trogii are weak and cruel and deserved it. Partially because we needed the Corva coils and corvium, as well as pilots to fly the ships. But mostly because I just couldn’t stop thinking about all those people, worked to the bone, starved and kept in filthy rags. When I first came into the factory, I was disgusted at the humans. I know it’s nonsensical, but they repulsed me. But the more time went by, I couldn’t stop thinking about them, and the revulsion turned into hatred for the Trogii. It was you who turned my opinion. I kept picturing you in those horrid conditions. You trying to sleep with a rumbling stomach. You trying to wash at a freezing cold spigot crowded amongst several others. You gagging down the same stale bread and rotting vegetables everyday just to keep some semblance of strength. I kept thinking of ways to make the Trogii pay.”

  “Well, thank you for helping them,” I say. “I hope they’re enjoying the festivities tonight.”

  “I think they are. We’re making arrangem
ents for those who want to return to their home planets to leave soon, but some want to stay.”

  “Some have no homes to go back to,” I say, thinking of the abandoned farmhouse on my childhood planet.

  “True,” he says. “But home is not always in the past. Sometimes, home is your future.”

  He scoops me up and sets me on his lap and kisses me gently, tenderly, and I take the comfort that I can from him. And I know that there will be no other lips for me, no other hands caressing my waist, no other scent filling my lungs. Only his. Because none other would satisfy me. No lips, no hands, no scent. I will settle for nothing but Orlon.

  “Does that mean you want to stay here,” I ask, “on Lekyo Prime?”

  “I’ll go wherever you want,” he says. “It makes no difference to me.” I sense something that he’s holding back.

  “But?” I prod.

  “But I’ve come to like it here. To appreciate it. At first, I wanted to go back to Zalaryx, back to my own people, back to technology and civilization.”

  “This planet is a bit simple,” I admit.

  “The people here value hard work and family—just as the Zalaryns do. And with our coming, we have brought just enough technology to make their lives easier, but not so much that we’re going to corrupt them again. Do you know this planet’s history? They have a tradition of simplicity and denying technology.”

  “I have heard,” I say. “Lekyo Prime has a reputation amongst the human settlements.”

  “But most of all,” he says, “I want to stay because I want our offspring to know their human side and their Zalaryn side. I love you and your silly human qualities. I want our offspring to know what it means to be human.”

  “Our offspring?” I say.

  “Sure,” he says. “My seed will take root before the new moon. Mark my word. I can already smell that your fertile time is near. It’s making me hard right now just thinking about it.”