Chapter 2 #2
“Whatever you require of us,” is my easy reply.
“Is that so?” She walks closer, and my muscles tense, ready to leap into action at her command. All Parthiastocks hope to please females, it’s bred into them, and my gaze slowly slides down to her eyes to discern what she wants.
She’s so much smaller than us. Parthiastocks are physically large; we were designed to uphold the women's laws and act as their enforcers against any kind of clone. The females I protected were far away, but I expected them to be the same size as me.
Perhaps Olorian females are, but on Earth, these females are tiny.
Small, and fiercely independent. Oh-Law-rah doesn't walk around with a retinue to do her chores, she completes them all herself, including piloting her own craft, which is a difficult skill to master. She’s self-reliant and intelligent…
and she’s staring up at me with interest.
She is a true beauty, even without scales.
Her skin glows as if lit up from the inside, her eyes sharp and inquisitive.
She misses nothing, not the flex of my chest as I straighten up and take a steadying breath, nor the way my scales shiver under her inspection.
She’s studying me. Me. I have her attention.
Why does it feel so... different? And… good?
No! I wrench my gaze away from hers. I can't risk my mental state being distracted from Nevare for an instant. I'll fail to keep my Apex sane.
A small smile plays on Oh-Law-rah’s face. “How are you doing, anyway? Arabella treating you nicely, I hope?”
“Yes, female!”
She winces, rubbing her left ear. Small dangling pieces of metal dance as she massages the pink shell of her earlobe, sparkling gold. Are they decorations, or perhaps some kind of technology?
She sighs, dropping her hand from her ear device. “I’ll be right back. I need to pack an overnight bag. Maybe for a week, to sort this out.”
“Can I help, female?” I offer. But she doesn’t hear me, pacing out of the partly-built barn and into the yard. She’s already preoccupied with her tasks, so much so that as the restless gray skies start to spit with rain, she doesn’t respond.
I dart to her side, hands raised over her head, and she flinches back from me. “What are you doing?”
Her sharp words and their accusing tone cut me. “Shielding you from the rain, female.”
“Oh. Oh!” She shakes her head. “I wasn't expecting you to run at me with fists in the air. It scared me a little.”
My chest burns as shame spears me. I fall to my knees on the gravel, the sharp dig of pain my just punishment, head bent. “I am deeply sorry, female.”
She's still for a moment, then her warm fingers touch my cheek. A female’s fingers. My rough scales soften immediately, every nerve sensitive to the faint brush of her fingertips and their increasing pressure. She guides my head up to face her, and I accidentally meet her eyes.
There's a flash of something there, behind the cool blue of her irises. Something warm. An image of her cradled against my chest flashes across my mind, and the urge to reach out to her makes my muscles quiver.
An urge I will never act on.
I stay still and Oh-Law-rah turns back to her red land-craft, glancing over her shoulder at me, like I'm some kind of enigma. In truth, I'm desperately simple: the dullard Base whose only job is to take the hits for my wave brothers and stabilize my Apex so he doesn't kill us all.
Simple.
After Oh-Law-rah leaves, I throw myself into work. The flash of irritation in her sparkling blue eyes softening into something else plays again and again in my mind. I can’t banish it. I… don’t want to.
Even though I should.
Arik gently taps on the mental wall I’d set between us, but doesn’t push.
I can't tell him I'm letting stray thoughts distract me from my duty; he has his own burdens.
These are mine, and they will stay mine.
I glance at Nevare but he doesn't seem perturbed by my roiling mind, staring into the middle distance.
I stroke his thoughts through our bond: he's reading the impulses of an arachnid exploring the wooden beams we restored earlier today.
Nevertheless, being distracted or, worse, pulling my Apex into my emotions is failure.
I need to reset.
I carry on working even when the sun goes down and the rain starts pouring down heavily, leaning into each grounding moment of exhaustion in my muscles. It’s not enough. Not yet.
Gara comes skidding up to me, panting, “Where's Arra-bellah?”
Coming to a halt, I cast my mind back, the order sharpening my focus. “Last we saw her was with Oh-Law-rah, here in the barn.”
“She has not returned yet.” Without further instructions, he runs out to the lean-to where we sleep, and where our pilot Arture Pranastock is preparing for rest.
Perhaps I should rest soon. A good Base never works to exhaustion, always ready to leap to control their Apex at any time, but they should also constantly push the limits of their endurance.
The contradiction chafes: how much is too much, or not enough?
If I don't get it right, I put Nevare and Arik at risk.
Still turning that problem over into my mind, I jog back from the barn to the shelter of the lean-to. Shivering my scales so the water droplets fly off, I scour the lean to for our interim leader.
Who's nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Gara’s location?” I demand of our pilot.
Arture swivels his robotic right arm in its socket. The bearing grates, probably being corroded by the rain on this planet. His voice grinds as much as the metal does. “I don't know.”
“Did he leave orders?” By the All-Mother, he has to have left some orders. Even if it’s to walk up and down in the downpour or rest for a full night cycle, Parthiastock need orders.
“No,” Arture says, his lips curling. “Do you need orders to breathe in and out? Think for yourselves sometime.”
A brief mental scream from Arik shuts off quickly as he throws up his own walls, and I curl my hands into fists. Arture won't understand what torture this is for a Parthiastock to have no orders.
The pilot eyes me, flexing his metal arm. “Are you going to attack me?”
Drok na, I'm squaring up to him. In the absence of clear order in the team, Parthiastocks will create one with the strongest automatically the leader. It's threaded in the strands of my genetic code, and I can't help it.
I force myself to turn around and face Arik and Nevare. “Sit,” I tell them, and bliss fills the mental space of the bond as they finally get the peace of clear direction.
My pain increases tenfold, a pulse beating against my temples and radiating down to my shoulders as if I’m being dragged across the plascrete floor.
Making up my own orders is torture. I need a Gerverstock or, better yet, a female’s directive to follow.
It's not as if I want to be a leader either; I can't be trusted to make decisions for my wave brothers that aren't based on our combat training. What if I misstep?
Nevare sits with a heavy flop. He uses large amounts of energy for his psychic abilities, but he shouldn't be too tired since he wasn't using them very much today.
As well as telepathy, Nevare has a mild telekinetic ability, but I'd rather strain my muscles than risk burning Nevare out just to move some blocks.
He reaches out, and I gently curb his power level. Sometimes when he’s fatigued he can be less careful with whatever or whoever he’s trying to read, so Arik and I help rein him in.
In response to Nevare's mental poke, Shade crawls out from between the wooden slats of the lean-to. Their dark green tendrils move slowly, inching their way toward Nevare.
‘Hide them!’ I snap to him, glancing at Arture. He hasn’t noticed yet, but he can’t miss what looks like a cross between an earth arachnid and a plant making its slow way in our direction.
‘Our shipmates won't care,’ Nevare tells me patiently.
‘We don't have instructions allowing for pets.’ Nevare's plant cutting wasn't included in the orders for our exile; Shade's very existence grates against me like sand rubbed into a raw wound. At the same time, I don't want to deprive Nevare of something that gives him obvious comfort.
It's nothing to do with how Shade likes to curl itself against my shoulder while we sleep.
Nevare sighs and mentally shoos Shade further into the shadows. My stomach uncurls as the Sanitatum crawls back out of sight.
I eye Arture, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed our transgression. He watches me with his glowing cyborg eyes. He's a Pranastock, a precise pilot capable of huge amounts of mathematical calculations and an extraordinary memory to guide a ship through the vast reaches of space and back.
I’m just a Parthiastock, and I need what I need.
I frightened a female. Me. I’m supposed to protect them.
And I can’t get her soft touch, or her eyes, out of my head.
Oh-Law-rah wouldn't choose a mere clone for a mate.
She deserves a True Born, a properly raised male born of an Olorian female, not a Tuber, the slaves developed to serve Olorian society.
And if I lose my equilibrium, if my focus is torn from Nevare, I can't help my Apex when he needs me most.
‘Arik, please,’ I send to him in a tight mental plea. I give him a glimpse of my inner turmoil, and in return a wash of pity surges up the bond to me.
He’ll give me what I need tonight.
We stand up together, away from Nevare who’s already fallen into a deep slumber, and I hand my correction tool over as we pace toward El-len’s storage shed opposite our lodgings.
She hadn’t expressly ordered us not to go in there before she and Ilia left, so I only feel a slight twinge as I pull back the metal door.
The creak of it echoes across the empty yard.
“Dom…” Arik begins, wringing my tool in his hands.
“I need this,” I reassure him, entering the darkness. It smells of semi-sweet deteriorating vegetation, the floorboards shadowy with silent hulks of machinery around the perimeter. Our only witness.
We don’t have a correction frame, so I have to make do, leaping up to grab hold of the metal beam bisecting the roof. The stretch in my aching muscles helps to ground me, and I know, as my fingers tire, the pain will keep me in my body and not in the maelstrom taking over my head.
I need to clear my mind to focus on Nevare. I need this.
“Do it,” I tell Arik, bracing myself.