35. THALIA
Iwaited in my cloak and gloves and breather on the metallic walkway. Ahane had shoved magnets into my footwraps so that I’d stick to the walkways, but it still felt precarious. I wanted to be tied down or even not outside here at all. It was cold. Like really cold, even through six layers of sack dress and wrappings. The only reason I wasn’t dead was the vent heat coming up from beneath the asteroid.
I was standing on a fucking rusty boardwalk strapped to the side of an asteroid about to bait some poor bastard into letting me on his ship so that my lover could shake him down for information.
I stared in the dirty windows, admiring how weird and silent it was—how everything sounded muffled, because there was a little atmosphere to transmit sound waves, but not very much. The lights danced through the perpetual dust halo.
Here lies Thalia: first Human in history to stand out in space on an asteroid.
Patron glided down the boardwalk. His body language conveyed surprise at my presence, and that I was a welcome surprise. His plates moved, and I caught a muffled trill, but there wasn’t enough atmosphere for sound waves and spoken speech. I pointed at his ship.
He obliged by opening the airlock and letting me in.
Instead of an open cargo bay, there were two benches in the forward half, and then a depressed floor in the back half. Cargo on palettes was strapped down into the depression. There was a small hole in the floor with a ladder leading down to another cargo bay and the living quarters.
I moved inside, he turned to close the airlock. Ahane snaked through.
The lock sealed. The cabin pressurized, but not with a breathable air matrix for Ahane or myself.
Patron wasn’t Patron because Patron didn’t know how to handle angry 25XAs. He folded all his tentacles into a bored gesture. “She is leaving, Cook.”
“We are leaving,” Ahane corrected, “and you are going to give me a course back to the beacon field.”
Patron’s feelers waved in a mocking full-body laugh. “I am doing no such thing. If you’ve found yourself off-beacon, Cook, that is your problem. Not mine. You deserve it for the way you’ve treated your mate. If she has finally grown the courage and resolve to leave you, I will assist.”
“He hasn’t treated me badly at all,” I said, speaking in English.
Patron’s feelers froze. “My translator informs me you are speaking an Earth language. I do not have the codex.”
I took a deep breath, pulled back my hood and pulled off my breather.
Patron went stock-still.
I let him get a good, solid look, then I put back on my breather and inhaled a fresh breath of air.
“Human,” Patron hissed. “You’re Human.”
The word he actually used for Human was pariah.
Ahane stepped right up to Patron, within range of Patron’s tentacles and feelers and whatever else he had hidden in his bulk. “You will provide us with a course back to the beacon field. We will forget we know you are alive.”
“Until the Gestalt mindmaps her!” Patron hissed.
He actually said flays her mind for all its memories…so… yikes.
“Then stop making yourself exceptionally memorable and set us a good course in the direction of 25XA. And do not,” Ahane tapped him with his tail, “give us a course that will put us within range of the Greys. She is Human. And you know what they say about Humans.”
“They have teeth in their anuses?”
“That is just the males. They are the most powerful latent psys in the galaxy. She will know if you betray us.”
What the hell was all this about teeth in buttholes?
Patron looked mildly terrified at this, but not entirely shocked. His feelers flailed a bit. Then he got a hold of himself and smacked Ahane. “The Greys are pariah like Humans. Cheap and never pay on time and never hold up the deal. But helping you is a Zero Crime.”
Ahane dragged Patron into the small cockpit and smashed Patron into the console. “ She is my mate. Cosmic law prevails. There is a Human mate on 25XA. She is the Lady Scion of House 8.”
Patron clacked and flailed assorted body parts. “But you have no trinket!”
“And yet everyone knows she and I are mates. You’ve spent the past [NO CONVERSION, UNIT OF TIME] insisting she is my mate. You were willing to take her from me.” Ahane leaned down and grinned, his teeth sharpening. “But you aren’t willing to help me keep her?”
Patron’s entire body breathed deep, expansive breaths while his plates spread apart so his underlying tissues could absorb air. Must kind of suck to be an articulated in situations like this. So easy to stab.
Ahane growled. “Tell your associates that the Greys have darksites in this area and traffic supplies through facilities like this to feed their Human captives. Have you heard of small hauls of [no translation, no translation, no translation] being flown on hops using a ship too small and underpowered to make such hops?”
“I don’t?—”
“He has,” I told Ahane.
Ahane smashed. Something cracked and Patron made a terrible howling/trilling noise. Ahane’s tail whipped around and swept Patron’s spindly legs out from under him. I flinched and averted my gaze. There was a terrible sccchhhhhkkk fingernails-on-chalkboard sound.
“Yes!” Patron clicked. “Yes!”
Ahane released him.
Patron stood up, now with deep gouges in his upper carapace. Mealy white tissue bloomed from the crevice.
Ahane’s scales were bloody red and white tipped, frosty and furious. “Those are Grey haulers, who know exactly who they are hauling for. They fly modified shuttles to darksites. The Greys feed their Human breeding slaves well. One of those darksites was recently destroyed. Those Humans escaped and now live at the Temple of 25XA.”
Patron bumped into the console. He looked between myself and Ahane.
“Tell everyone you know,” Ahane said. “Spread the word that exotic food on small ships making large transits is the telltale: that food is going to the Greys to feed Humans. And maybe the Gestalt won’t come looking for accomplices. Or you could tell certain individuals on 25XA who would very much like to know where these other sites are and may pay you well for the information. Or I could just keep beating you until you give me what I want, and maybe you’ll live long enough to warn your brood, and maybe you won’t.”
Patron eyed Ahane, doing the mental math on the value of a course for us back to the beacon field versus Ahane just sparing him a shitload of potential Zero Crime Accessory charges. He’d been within the blast radius this entire time and not realized it.
“I think a course is a fair trade for the information we just gave him,” I told Ahane.
Ahane translated that for Patron, and Patron made some grumble-clicks and brought up his glowy navigation orb. He asked Ahane how skilled of a pilot he was, and Ahane (honestly) said he was not. Nor did Ahane supply information on the smuggle-shuttle’s abilities.
Patron made a sweeping gesture with one tentacle and Ahane tapped his translator. Patron clicked. “There. That will get you to a network-attached depot just within the beacon field. Unless you are a complete idiot, you should be able to hit the target from here. What you do from there is not my concern.”
“Agreeable.” Ahane gestured for me to head to the airlock.
Patron badged us out without another click.
“Wereyou really going to kill him?” I asked as we hastily threw everything together into some fish-food sacks.
Ahane didn’t dignify that with a response.
I sighed. Of course he was going to. I shoved our gummy soap into a sack with the towels. We’d purchased those fair and square, so I was taking them with. Might need to buy them again wherever we were going. In the very least, I intended to be clean for my demise.
“Ahane.” I jerked as something tickled into the back of my head. The someone’s watching us sensation. “Someone’s coming.”
I raced out to the kitchen and peaked out the door into the diner. Shadows moving against the yellow bokeh grime. Shadows always moved like that, but something told me… “Site Master! He’s coming!”
Maybe it was a food delivery. Maybe it was a no-knock warrant for harboring illegal Humans.
I scurried back into our tiny room. “Patron sold us out.”
Ahane tossed my cloak at me and I wrapped it around myself, he shouldered our bags, and I crawled up onto his back just as the first door to the diner went click click click.
Ahane threw the airlock backdoor, didn’t close it, and rushed into the blistering cold as air raced out. Wouldn’t stop Site Master, but would make a hell of a mess. May he stub his toes on all the fallen objects.
Ahane bolted across the powdery surface of the asteroid, ducked through the hangar airlock, and onto the waiting smuggle-shuttle. I tumbled off him with the bags and he folded himself into the cockpit while I secured the airlock just in time to see Site Master tap-tapping out of the facility.
“Go!” I shouted. “He’s pissed!”
The Grey smuggle-shuttle went schooom and illuminated.
Ahane slammed his translator onto an input pad.
>> FLIGHT PATH DETECTED. INITIATE?
Ahane hit the AFFIRM option.
I squished myself into the space I’d occupied previously while Ahane hit a few more buttons. The sketchy AI, being trained to not get caught, offered the emergency launch option.
“Oh hell.” I braced myself as best I could.
FOOM!!!!!!!!!!!
The shuttle exploded upwards like a reverse roller coaster and plowed through the fragile top of the hangar.
“EEEEEEEEEE!” The G-force squished me flat. The rotation made the dark dome of stars spiral and my ears sloshed. I closed my eyes before I hurled.
I kept my eyes closed until Ahane tapped me on the leg with his tail.
I cracked open one eye. “Is it over?”
“We’re on course. Supposedly.” Ahane’s voice conveyed his extreme doubt that the AI would actually do as it was told.
I opened my other eye and unfolded myself carefully. Still felt a little sloshed about as I crawled over to the big chair and took my place draped over Ahane’s shoulder. Sugar-strewn darkness. No rearview mirror.
“Are you hurt?” He caressed my hair and pressed my cheek to his.
“No, I’m fine. How long is it going to be to wherever we’re going?”
He paused to do some calculations.“Approximately eight of your sleeps, assuming we are not picked up by GSE or pirates.”
“So I’ve got an idea of how we can pass the time.”
“Share.”
I slithered all the way around him until I straddled his lap, which was a weird and uncomfortable fit given the cockpit wasn’t meant for him. I tugged at his bandoliers with one hand and grabbed his crotch with the other. “Tell me all about binding…”