Chapter 12
Frederique
Maybe I was letting him get away with far too much.
I should stand up to him, tell him he couldn’t be rude and then kiss me in the next breath.
The thing was, there was no better feeling than being the center of his universe, and the way he was looking at me?
That felt so good. Like I mattered more than his next breath, like he couldn’t let go of me because he feared I’d vanish.
He looked like he thought I might still be in danger, and it was his sole duty to protect me. It was a very heady experience.
I could let him sweep me away and never regret it for a moment.
The dangerous, precarious situation I was in wouldn’t let me.
This was a world I did not know, in a future seven hundred years removed from the time I’d known.
What could I expect? Was I safe? And what had happened to Earth? I needed to find out.
So I lifted my head and studied the decontamination unit Sin had taken me to.
Then I inventoried what I’d seen of the hangar bay and the species lined up by the door, watching us.
My translator implants had not picked up their languages, but they must have asked something about being shy.
That much I had gathered from Sin’s response.
One had looked like a shark, and the other, an obviously male presence, had risen tall on several gently undulating tentacles.
The third was a woman with blue skin, fairly humanoid in appearance save for a pair of daintily pointed ears.
Three species I didn’t know anything about, and they made me intensely curious.
Zeta Quadrant natives, probably, unlike Sin and me.
Then there was the hangar bay itself: dark, gloomy even, with black metal walls and floors, and dozens of different sleek vehicles parked inside.
Ranging from shuttles to smaller flyers to all-terrain land vehicles, this ship had them all.
It had all looked high-tech, alien, and thus very different, but not beyond anything I could recognize.
The size of the bay also told me this had to be a very big ship, and now I wished Sin hadn’t distracted me when we flew to it.
It would have been helpful to see it—or more of it—than just a black flank and an open hangar bay.
The cycle of the decontamination unit did not last long, just long enough to fray my nerves.
I felt raw, exposed when the doors opened and Sin stepped away.
He was such a frustrating man, and I hated that I let it affect me.
We were mates; of course it did. But that didn’t mean I had to be okay with the sudden appearance of the cold shoulder.
Except, it wasn’t that at all. He’d stepped away to block the view of those waiting on the other side of the door. Hiding me.
When I stepped closer, Val pressed against me, blocking my way out. Telling me without words that she, too, wanted me to stay back. Why? Mercenaries didn’t exactly have a good name in most parts of the Alpha Quadrant, but these were Sin’s people, weren’t they? I doubted they’d attack me on sight.
Leaning to the left, I got a look at the waiting party from underneath Sin’s arm.
That’s when my pulse skittered in fear and surprise, and suddenly, I was grateful Sin and Val were standing between me and them.
The aliens on the other side of that door, they were very alien, and that was saying something after seeing a guy with a head like a shark.
Perhaps I just had a more primal, visceral fear response to seeing snake coils over thirty feet in length.
That was one hell of a big snake, and there were two of them.
My fear must have been obvious to everyone, but especially to Sin. His body seemed to get bigger, gleaming silver as Val covered him. He also swung his arm behind his back and caught my hand, his fingers squeezing around mine in what I hoped was reassurance.
Two snake guys, their long tails making them impossibly large, though their upper bodies appeared very human-shaped.
Just… covered in scales of gleaming black, edged with gold and faint flecks of bright green.
They could be twins, their facial features were also far too similar, but that could just as easily be bias.
My eyes weren’t trained to see the nuances of their alien features and pick out the differences.
The shark guy beyond them was actually the friendlier-looking of the bunch right now.
The snake in the lead had the sternest look, and that alone made me decide he had to be the one in charge.
He hissed things in sibilant, foreign tones, all serpentine and alien.
Sin lowered his raised shoulders just a tad in response, then rolled one.
“You’re the one who started it,” he said, in a tone that dripped with sarcasm and mockery. “Taking in strays, now it’s my turn.”
This did not appear to go over well with the stern-looking snake guy, and he rose taller on his tail and moved closer.
It was very creepy how quietly he moved, and how sleek the movement was, so that it barely seemed like he’d moved at all.
I’d blink, and he would seem closer. It made the skin on the back of my neck twitch and fear curl more tightly in my stomach.
What was this place? Who were these people?
And how much could I trust them? I didn’t like having all these questions.
I didn’t like being at such a huge disadvantage.
I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying, proof that I was far beyond the borders of the Alpha Quadrant.
Proof that plenty of intelligent lifeforms existed outside of Earth’s little bubble.
My fingers tightened around Sin’s hand, my brain struggling for a moment with the enormity of all the changes: dead crew, deader mission, and possibly a ruined Earth, and I was utterly useless in all of it.
My brain sort of short-circuited then, and everything became a bit of a daze. It was a good thing that, despite his faults and rough edges, I did trust Sin fully. I let him guide me down the hall, past the snakes and sharks, deeper into a ship so black it felt like walking into the night.