The Orc Who Said Nothing (Her Orc match #1)

Chapter 1

The brides are in their good coats, standing at the rail and taking pictures of the Golden Gate as it shrinks behind us. I’m the one in the corner with a rolling steno bag and a two-week contract. The only woman who’s being paid to be here.

I was eighteen when a hole ripped the sky open and a delegation of very large, very non-human men stepped through it with a proposal to mate with Earth women.

The governments panicked, then signed the Lunethril Treaty.

Seventeen years later, alien marriage is legal and administered on an artificial island fifty miles out.

The Interworld Mate Alliance needed a court reporter because there’s a tone in the orc vocal range that turns every recording to mud.

You can’t make an official record with mud.

When the company I contracted with offered me the job with triple my normal pay, I said yes without blinking.

I’m a single woman living in an expensive city. I’m not crazy.

When I told the family group chat that I was going to the alien marriage island for two weeks, I got a thumbs up from my mother.

Then she immediately started talking to Dad about his knee brace and a photo of my sister’s dog in sunglasses.

No one asked me a single question. I probably could have told them I was going to get married to an alien and Mom would have still given me the same thumbs up.

When the ferry docks, we shuffle into the lobby.

The Lunethril Building could be in any city.

I’m not sure where the magic happens, but it’s not in the lobby with its beige walls and blue carpet that’s so new it still has a chemical smell.

The two plants next to the front desk are in a state I’d describe as barely alive.

Someone in this building needs to water the damn plants.

While I wait my turn, I barely hold in my snicker at the poster above the seating area that reads EVERY VOICE MATTERS. It’s a stock photo of a beaming human and an orc leaning into the same microphone.

The front desk is staffed by a vibrant blue eight-foot alien with a name tag that says KETH and a badge on his lanyard that reads GUEST SERVICES ASSOCIATE.

There’s a smaller light-blue alien beside him, checking in the woman ahead of me with the focus of a bomb technician.

Keth hovers at his shoulder, radiating pride.

“Welcome to the Lunethril Building!” Keth beams down at me when it’s my turn. “You’re in excellent hands. This is Pell. It’s his first week.”

Pell smiles at me and immediately drops a stack of lanyards. Keth watches him fondly as Pell gathers them up, then slides a jar across the counter and nudges it toward Pell, who delivers it to me on the second try. “Butterscotch? And how was your crossing?”

“Gray,” I say, taking one because you always accept the candy even if you don’t eat it.

Keth leans over the counter and points at the floor. “Do you like the carpet? It’s new.”

I glance at the floor and then at him, and blink. The carpet is the exact blue he is. “It’s very nice,” I tell him, which is true. He lights up, and I’m now fairly sure I just complimented him personally.

A woman in her mid-fifties with a folder appears at my elbow.

“Wren Delgado? I’m Diane. Come with me.” She’s already walking, and I hurry to catch up.

“You’re needed in the hearing room. Your quarters are on twelve.

The cafeteria coffee is better than decent, and if an orc offers to carry your equipment, let him. Questions?”

“Just one. What did the plants do to deserve that punishment?”

Diane stops and gives me her full attention.

“The plants aren’t neglected,” she says with the weariness of a woman who has explained this multiple times.

“They’re reacting to one of our visitors.

One of the species wilts them, and nobody’s figured out which one.

” She passes me my hearing schedule. “We have to replace them every few months. Just don’t say the word ‘neglect’ where one of the janitors can hear you. ”

Diane briefs me on the way up, and I don’t have the heart to tell her that I read it all in the binder that came with my contract.

I pored over it cover to cover on the ferry.

The species on the other side have a shortage of women and a surplus of devoted, terrifyingly large men.

The program matches them with human women who apply for the privilege.

Somehow it works. For orcs in particular, the males choose from the women selected and can say yay or nay based on how the woman smells.

Diane recites the whole thing like the back of a cereal box, and I nod in the right places.

I’m sure glad I was dressed for work already in comfortable slacks, a blouse, and my hair in a bun since we don’t stop at my room to drop off my bag.

She takes me straight to Hearing Room C on the seventh floor.

The joint oversight panel meets every two years, and we’re about to spend two weeks straight confirming that everyone is complying with the treaty.

We’ll be working weekends, as well, because nobody sends eleven officials from two worlds home for the weekend and trusts everyone to come back. Lucky me.

The hearing room comes with a dying ficus, a pitcher of water, and a bowl of mints.

I bet nobody ever touches the mints. My equipment is set up by 8:30, backup paper loaded, and the machine is polished and warmed up.

The steno keys stay cold under my fingers for the first hour anyway, because the building is air-conditioned for visitors who run hot.

The vent is directly behind my chair, and there’s a maintenance number printed on the schedule Diane gave me. I won’t be calling it. I’ve sat in colder rooms for worse pay. Nobody asks the furniture if it's comfortable.

The long table holds eleven people: a mix of IMA officials, two federal observers, and the species representatives.

The first one is an orc who is so large I swear he barely cleared the doorframe when he walked in.

His name is Dargan, and he’s seven and a half feet of scar tissue and dry patience that’s been stationed on Earth for years.

When he delivers his opening statement, the tone of his voice comes up through the floor.

The recording engineer two seats over watches his recording levels flatline into fuzz and his shoulders drop in defeat.

Poor guy. My fingers keep moving. No matter what happens in the room, I’m not supposed to react.

I spend the morning on treaty housekeeping and portal transit quotas.

There’s a forty-minute argument about the phrase ‘reasonable accommodation’ as applied to doorframes.

A human bureaucrat says synergy eleven times, and I record every single one of them because that’s the job.

I’m not here to judge what people say, at least not out loud.

At the lunch break, I follow the smell of soup to the cafeteria, which seats humans, orcs, and at least three species I can’t name.

There are two soups. I take the one closest to the register because I stopped caring what I ate for lunch around age nine, and I get the free coffee.

Diane wasn’t wrong about the coffee. The soup is the first warm thing I’ve touched since the ferry, and I wrap both hands around the bowl.

The binder said orcs run at 101 degrees.

I blame them for the air conditioning problem.

I’m sitting at the end of a table of program applicants because I enjoy overhearing gossip and I’m used to the noise.

I grew up the fourth of five kids, and the dinner table was louder than this one.

I can listen from the cheap seats better than most people can from the front row.

Within four minutes, I’ve learned the women are running a betting pool over an orc.

“Eleven words,” says a redhead with a laminated chart. This seems unhinged, but I’m ready to pop the popcorn. “That’s all he said yesterday, and it was confirmed by two people.”

“That can’t be right. Last Tuesday, he said fourteen when he backed into somebody’s luggage cart and made a whole formal apology.”

“Fourteen.” The redhead makes a mark. “A blowout.”

“It’s not just that he’s quiet,” another woman says. “His first week, he said six words to maintenance about the east stairwell railing. They checked, and the railing was loose.” She stirs her coffee. “Now when he says anything, people write it down.”

As I listen, I gather the pool is tracking the daily word count of a candidate named Valdrek from Clan Stormbreak.

He’s been on the island for fourteen months now, longer than any other orc waiting for a match.

He’s become famous for answering everything in four words or less.

Everyone calls him the quiet one, and the women say it with a longing that surprises me. Back home, men who don’t talk are free.

“He was in the elevator with me for nine floors once.” A woman sighs into her soup. “He didn’t say a word. It was sooo romantic, but he didn’t react to me, so obviously I’m not the one.”

I drink my coffee and keep my opinion to myself. You don’t heckle free entertainment. But I could tell them a thing or two about quiet people, starting with the fact that we can hear you.

That’s when the table goes quiet, and one of the women stops mid-sentence. The redhead flips her chart face down. Every woman turns toward the door, so I turn too. Apparently, I’m one of them now.

A pair of shoulders blocks the whole doorway, and an orc ducks into the cafeteria.

“That’s him,” somebody whispers, which I’d worked out on my own.

He’s massive with gray-green skin. His dark hair is pulled back in a knot with one short braid at the temple.

On a human guy, that hairstyle would amuse me, but suddenly, my mouth is dry.

Something tells me this guy could style his hair any way he wanted, and be wearing a potato sack and I’d still find him sexy.