Alliance: An Intersolar Alien Romance, Book 6

15

Roz’s chase had the desired effect and then some. Not knowing ahead of time what she’d planned had sent Fásach’s instincts spinning, and transitioning to his pred state was nearly complete. Just in the nick of time too, as they entered the whiteout of Trav’s blizzard and left Svargapan Samudr for the solid black rock, ice, and ancient snow along its frozen coast.

Though he was more suited to their journey now, the exponential acceleration of the switch had left him reeling. He hadn’t transitioned often in life, and when he had, it had been a slow progression. The rate of change was more intense than he’d have ever anticipated. His hackles itched like crazy as his fur thickened with a wiry trail down his spine. Every inch of his skin felt too tight, especially his temples, his throat, his collar, and his jaw. And when he pinched the skin of his arms, belly, and neck, there was barely enough to squeeze between two fingers. His dewlap had been reduced to less than a quarter of the fullness too, stretching over his growing trapezius muscles and lats.

Roz had done him a real solid. He was calmer, stronger, more alert…

And in absolute agony with every step.

They walked in a straight line with light pucks strapped to their fronts and backs and a rope slung around their waists via a carabiner rig to ensure that they couldn’t lose each other. The blizzard was calm compared to the open ice sea, with heavy gusts but no sustained wind. As such, the vital pods that floated between them swayed and course-corrected repeatedly, tugging on the ropes slung through their hitching rings.

Roz led the way with her uncanny sense of direction and internal maps, bundled up with an environ-visor and heat filter that blocked her face from Fásach’s view, but no amount of bundling up could deter his obsessive stalking. She was a beacon in the eerie green night, her hips swaying as she slung her heavy boots one foot in front of the other.

In the early morning when his cock wouldn’t soften despite the punishing weather, there was no longer any doubt that Roz had sent him into a rut. He had a fever that made it painful to wear gloves, a hood, or muffler, and the icy air filling his lungs no longer stung but felt refreshing.

His forehead was tender right where his antlers would grow, and he felt two bumps above his eyes as painful and swollen as if he’d been hit with the butt of a gun. Again. He raised his claw to the velvet of his forehead and pinched the fine fur. It shed away easily as he rubbed the pedicles hardening beneath his skin.

He’d never seen his antlers before. Would they be brown and matte? Or maybe as shiny and rich as petrified honey…

Would he lose his mind to the rut like the ancient stories? Would he possess Roz the way his father had his mother? Would she look back on it years from now with the same fondness his mother had?

If he felt harmony with her, did that make her his thuais? He hadn”t ached for his mamau”s guiding presence in a long time, but he wished she were there to tell him if this was it. If he”d found his north.

The winds bowled them over once more and Fásach watched Safia and Misila’s vital pods correct themselves gently before giving a tug to Roz’s rope, letting her know they were all clear to keep moving.

The blizzard, the rut… Thank the symphony that his daughters were in stasis.

Roz waved one fist in the air, coming to a stop near an outcropping overhanging with ice, the signal to take a break. Fásach took Safia’s pod in hand and guided it towards her while she pulled on the rope connected to Misila.

“I’m getting hungry. But also, I found something,” she panted through his linguitor. Her face was still hidden behind her visor, so all Fásach could see was himself. His pedicles still weren’t visible, but his hair was longer. He shook it out and dislodged the gathering frost around his eyelashes and wide, flat nostrils.

“What did you find?”

Roz pushed the vital pod under the outcropping like pushing a floatie under water. She rode it in to ensure it didn’t scrape its hood against the jagged curtain of stalactites, then slid off once its sensors adjusted to the new ceiling. Fásach followed suit, though the small space was a tight fit for him now, and he crouched near the entrance to keep the comforting cold against his hackles.

Roz removed her environ-visor and hooked it to her belt. “Look,” she said out loud, pointing at a dark mass that took up a third of the small space.

Fásach’s nose twitched instinctively. It was a body, but it had long lost the smell of death, if it had ever had one to begin with. The shilpakaar’s bright orange strap-ins were pristine, the weave frozen in time with the clear logo of the Samridve trans-atmo fleet written on the shoulders and chest. The style looked old though, several decades out of style even by Huajile standards.

But his coloring was long lost. Instead, his tendrils and exposed skin had turned black like rot, even if he was otherwise frozen in time with the fine lines of late middle age around his eyes, as if he’d just sat down for a nap. Shells, bits of coral, dried fish, and unopened rations had been placed carefully around his hands and face in tribute, but while some were bright with new packaging, others were old and faded. Shell and long-wilted flower necklaces draped his chest and lap.

“It’s a pilot,” Fásach said, sitting on the cold black stones. He doffed his pack and rolled out one of the bedrolls for Roz to sit on, joining the dead man as if he would be eating with them. “He’s been dead a long time.”

Roz opened a nutrient bar and swallowed down a thoughtful mouthful. Fásach watched her throat bob, then reached for their water, looking away. He wasn’t able to smell the dead pilot, but Roz’s scent was filling their little refuge quickly.

“I think we’re on a trail,” she said, squinting at the man. Fásach’s ears swiveled towards the entrance, and he glanced out at the blanket of white falling thick outside.

“How can you tell?”

She tilted her head in thought, then winced. “I don’t have memories of anything like this, but I have impressions. There’s a place on Earth that has frozen graves and the ones that are close to trails have offerings.” She pressed her fingertip to a conch shell carved with geometric spirals.

“Impressions,” Fásach urged. “Like a gut feeling? If we’re on a trail, that’s good news. It means we’re close to Pahadthi 03.”

They needed to get close enough to use the relay station as a trail marker, but not close enough to get spotted. The whiteout would help with that… Maybe enough that Fásach could sneak into the station’s storage and scavenge some supplies.

Roz had already blown through one of the four slabs of her Slab4 thanks to the harsh cold, and Fásach was burning from the inside out. He was lucky the fever that came with rapid transitions was happening to him in a blizzard, otherwise he’d be screwed.

And a rut on top of it. The two simultaneously would catapult him ahead of nearly any predator or enemy, but not until his body had settled in. What he felt now was scattered, distracted, ineffectual. He needed control of himself if they were going to make it.

He’d assess when they got closer.

“More like data fragments, as if I’d dipped a photo in water and the ink blurred,” Roz explained carefully. “I think they’re memories of stuff I saw but never experienced… Books, vids, media feeds.” She smiled, nodding to the blizzard. “I get an impression about the endless twilight too. I really wanted to see the green lights in the sky and was saving money for it.”

Green lights… Fásach thought of Byd Farrwell and the clear nights he’d lay sprawled with his tadau on the clover knolls while his mamau helped their comradai put the pack’s younger pups to sleep. They’d watch the satellites glide by, just beyond the blue and green wisps of particles dancing along the planet’s magnetic field.

It was the only part of Byd Farrwell that still resembled life before the rot.

He licked his teeth and brushed his hand over his forehead.

“My homeworld has lights in the sky every night,” he said, folding his wrapper with more care than necessary. “Some yiwren think they’re familiars, spirits, dead souls…” He sniffed, remembering tales told around towering bonfires during harvest season and illuminations he’d hoard with his cousins, full of mysterious encounters and ghost stories. “I’d love to see them again someday.”

“Maybe we’ll both be able to go back to our homeworlds someday,” Roz said quietly with a wisp of a smile. Her bionic eyes glowed, viewing vids from her LMem. Fásach considered reminding her that she’d never been to her homeworld at all, but he left it alone. Because she had, in her own way.

He rubbed his growing pedicles and brushed some of the velvet off their bumps, leaning his elbows on his knees. “Byd Farrwell is lost,” he said with a rueful smile. “I won’t get to go home in this life.”

Roz’s smile faltered. She hugged her knees, the fabric of her coveralls rustling. “I don’t think I will either. Renata’s the best we got, right?”

Fás chirped in a melancholic attempt at comfort. “Seems so.”

“Do you remember Byd Farrwell?”

“I was a teen when my mamau and I left. Bad luck of the refugee roulette. We were on one of the last cruisers out.” He looked up at Roz, expecting her to give the same distant platitudes as most people. Before the spectacle of the Paramour raid and the potential of a human Awakening, the yiwreni evacuation had taken up a lot of airspace, so most of the union knew the details. They’d seen heart-wrenching interviews and docuseries, visited museums of Byddie flora on field trips, studied the rot in their xenobiology courses…

They thought they got the gist of what it was like to lose everything.

But Roz didn’t speak. She gave him space, tilting her head to the side, watching him with big chocolatey eyes filled with empathy and patience.

She was alive. So alive. How could anyone label her as anything else?

And she had lost everything before she’d even had it.

Fásach breathed in her scent, ears tilting open on either side of his head. He rarely let himself do so, not wanting his girls to know how tired he was. “It was beautiful when I was little. The rot hadn’t reached our territory yet, so the forests were still so green they looked blue. And the ground was covered in clover and mossy stones. I used to draw fake glyphs all over them with my cousins to try to trick the elders into thinking they were ancient paintings.” He laughed. “They never believed us though.”

Roz leaned her head on her knee. “Sounds like paradise.”

“The summers were humid as hell, the winters were harsh, and the spring thunderstorms could turn ugly. But yeah… it was paradise.” The reminiscent warmth in his expression hardened, his brow creased. “When we left, it was a big shock. Before being hauled off to the corners of the union, yiwreni pups didn’t start school until they turned twelve because we have such a hard time sitting still.”

“Born to run,” Roz commented. His eyes snapped to hers, thinking about their chase, and he had to swallow down an interested hum.

“Something like that… My first day of classes on Huajile was a nightmare. I didn’t have a linguitor yet and had only been in school for a year before that. I could barely read Mamie, let alone keep up.”

“It must have been so hard for your mother.”

Fás huffed on a shudder of surprise. He bent his head and rubbed his pedicles harder to keep Roz from seeing the strain of his jaw as he fought back unexpected tears.

“Yeah,” he croaked, chewing the tears back, straining his throat as a lump of profound sadness lodged itself there. “Leaving Byddie gave her bad symphonic vertigo. She could barely walk a straight line. I, uh–” He cleared his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t expect us to talk about this.”

“I was a refugee too,” she said with a weak shrug. “Just not the kind that got any help.”

Fásach breathed slowly, expanding his nostrils, lifting his eyes to hers. She looked away, tapping one of the little conch shells on offering to the dead shilpakaar with her finger.

“You mean on Earth?”

Roz nodded. “Rosy’s manman died of cholera when she was little, and her papi walked her across the border into a different country a few months later. They did it again when she was a teenager, and her papi went to work in an oernge grove while she studied. I think his body hurt a lot more than he ever told her. When I see her memories, his hands are blistered and he limps.” Then she smiled again, swaying a little. “You remind me of him.”

“Yeah?”

Roz bit her bottom lip in a teasing way. “Yeah. Rich brown skin, big ears, and thick, rough hands.”

Fás grinned.

“Sounds like he worked hard for her.”

“Mm…” Roz’s eyes went far away. “She was really angry, Fás. I think the world hurt her papi so badly that she wanted to burn some of it down so people would listen. A lot of her memories make my chest feel like it’s on fire.”

Roz’s harmony blossomed stronger than ever. The things she felt from Rosy were the same things he’d felt for his mamau, their grief and toils. The world had been so hard and cold to them after leaving Byd Farrwell, that you’d never have guessed they lived in a volcanic wasteland.

But he hadn’t spiraled the way Rosy had. He’d never wanted to hurt anyone. He’d just wanted to find that sense of family again, with comradai working together and pups scampering underfoot. To build things, not burn them down. That’s why he’d joined Guild Gaul when he’d failed out of school.

Then again, everybody grieved differently. Rosy had a right to be angry. To fight for her tadau’s relief from the terrible grind of life.

Maybe if she hadn’t been torn away from him, if she knew that he’d be taken care of, Rosy would have chosen to build things too.

A bright green glow slithered across the ground while Fás was deep in thought. He blinked, looking up to find Rosy with her legs crossed and her hands on her ankles. She was staring slightly up, her eye projecting a holo of green lights drifting across the ceiling.

“This is what the ones from Earth look like,” she said as the wonder slowly shifted from green to blue to turquoise, blurring up into the ceiling like massive fountains of fine mist hundreds of feet tall.

“Mamau sanctai,”he marveled. The flares from Earth were grander than those of his homeworld. Majestic and sweeping, engulfing the sky. They felt closer too. Reachable, and not just because they were in a cave. “They’re beautiful.”

“What did yours look like?”

Fás’s ears perked up and he licked one of his craggy molars. “Smaller and quick. They chased each other like—” She wouldn’t get the reference if he said ghaidae, so he changed his reference. “Like pups playing chase. And some would be very close, others so high in the sky you could mistake them for comets.”

“Like this?”

As he spoke, the holo shifted. He gave Roz notes here and there, then found himself lying beside her with his head on the bedroll. The spirits of his homeworld danced above them thanks to her.

“Just let me know if you want to see them again,” she said. “I saved the vid in my LMem, so we can watch it anytime.”

Fás rolled on his side and slipped his arms around her thigh, rubbing his forehead into her hip. Roz was too overwhelming for him to form any sort of thought outside of instinct. Her chime, her scent, her gift. He nipped her coveralls with a loving, chirping snarl, showing off his massive molars with fangy points in a yiwreni way, not a universal way.

She couldn’t feel his teeth through her thick layers, but he wished she could. That she’d jolt at the little nick of pain and tickle his ear with a giggle like his mamau would sometimes do when his tadau was being playful.

“Fás?”

“Thank you,” he murmured into the fabric. She put her hand between his ears and scratched with those useless little nails, his new spray of wiry tresses shivering between her knuckles.

“I’ll play them while you fall asleep. Sound good?”

He bit down an invitation of another kind, the revving heat in his chest drip-drip-dripping down his spine and into his groin where it coaxed his cock awake. He rolled his hips against the cold stone earth, applying pressure right where it felt best, and it alleviated his headache.

“I’m not in the mood to sleep,” he barely murmured, eyes wide open, staring at the seam between her legs. He nipped her clothing once again, out of sight. He was playing with fire testing the boundaries.

The way she’d gasped for him on the ice with just that little glisten to her lips…

The red scrape still on her cheek…

Roz gently grasped the fuzzy shell of his ear and pulled until he was looking up at her rather than at her cunt. Scocite, what he wouldn’t do to know what it looked like. Was it similar at all to what he knew? Nothing but fleeting shilpakaari and venandi encounters. He’d never seen a mammalian cunt except in snaps and vids.

What would it taste like?

Fucking heaven.

She tugged on his ear more roughly as his eyes drifted south, magnetized to her body in his rutting haze.

“Did you get enough to eat?” she asked slowly, demanding his attention.

Fás licked his teeth of saliva, not looking away, enjoying how she watched his mouth and tongue, that powerful muscle exploring every crevice. “No.”

“Do you need more?”

“Are we talking about food, Roz?”

Her eyes dilated. “I… I think we’re talking about what bucks think of when they chase a doe.”

Fásach’s dark chuckle bubbled out of his chest, and he tightened his claws on her thigh. If he squeezed, he could feel her flesh beneath the coveralls, supple, soft, perfect.

He captured her hand on his head and turned it over. This time when he nipped, he scraped his fangs against the pulse in her wrist.

And she did exactly as he’d hoped. She jolted, the breath of a laugh chasing his tongue as he soothed the prick.

Fásach headbutted Roz’s ribs, pushing her to the bedroll as he climbed over top of her with a growl. His heartbeat pounded against his skull and his rut roared to be sated. He’d already caught Roz, hadn’t he?

Now he’d make her pay for delaying his due.