Chapter 2 #3
“If you’re looking to sell yourself, there’s an auction tomorrow night,” he says. “But if you are captured before then, that will be the end of it. Humans have no rights here.”
“Why would I sell myself?”
“Have you not come to the stars to breed?”
“No!” I laugh at the notion. “Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’m here to survive.”
“Oh,” he says, deadpan. “You’re doing a very good job.”
I laugh because I know he’s teasing me.
“Do you have a place to stay? Do you have any money?”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“I saw you come off the ship,” he says. “You were a stowaway. You’ve got what you have on you, and nothing else.
Good luck with that. Zeta Station is a harsh, transitory place.
Nobody really lives here, and nothing good has ever happened here.
Females of most species wouldn’t come here for all the gold in the Illidian Belt. ”
I don’t know how much gold is in the Illidian Belt, but I’m guessing it is a lot.
“I guess I’ll hitch another ride,” I say. “You know what would be useful right now?”
“What’s that?” He speaks with the calm indulgence of a man dealing with an irrational little creature. Now I know how my puppy used to feel at the vet.
“Some sort of book, or file. You know, like a Hitchhikers Guide?”
“Ah,” he says. “There used to be one of those, but they stopped updating it in 2001.”
I do not know that he is any more safe than the twenty-four carat gold asshole who just tried to abduct me and do god knows what with me, but I am not getting the same signals of desperate lust and other hungers from this man as I did from the one who first approached.
“Maybe I’ll write my own,” I say. “So far I’ve managed to hitch a very comfortable ride on a Sligtonian slave freighter, and I’ve survived an encounter with… what was that thing?”
“A Laborbur,” he says. “Vicious creatures. They’re going extinct because half the time when they mate, the male consumes the female.”
“We have that in insects, but it’s usually the other way around,” I muse. “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
“You survived the encounter because I intervened,” he says, matter of fact.
“I might have protected myself eventually,” I say, knowing there’s no way I ever would have.
“You can come and sit with my friends and me,” he says. “While you work out your next gambit.”
One of his friends is an almost-human man so fucking beautiful and blond and muscular and stunning it feels like the universe has put a perpetual kind of spotlight on him, and I cannot begin to pull my eyes from him. He smiles as my savior introduces me.
“Stray human,” he says.
“Stray?” I ask.
“That’s what we call it when a human female does not have an owner.”
“And what do you call it when a human male does not have an owner?”
“Lunch,” he says succinctly.
I make a snorting sound. That’s not really funny.
Poor human men being eaten by aliens. I know that women can’t be that far from the menu either.
A woman on Earth is unfortunately often accustomed to being preyed upon.
Men like to try to fuck us when we’re not all that interested in fucking them.
But most of the time we’re not also a candidate for the barbecue.
I feel the hair on the back of my neck rising as all those implications filter through my brain.
“We only call pet animals that get lost strays,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
Just yes. The fucking nerve. The fluffy yellow creature looked at me like I was something to consume. These three are looking at me like I’m a wet kitten who just rolled in out of a storm.
Speaking of the third, he is the most astonishing beast I have ever laid eyes on and I am quite literally surrounded by a sentient menagerie.
He is a Minotaur.
Hate to describe it that way, because it feels so terribly human-centric, but he’s a big red bull-like creature with a face that is far more bovine than human—though he can speak.
“Cute,” he says, in a voice that sounds like a bull lowing for his mate. “Does it want something to eat?”
“I’m not an ‘it,’” I say, immediately offended. “I’m a ‘she.’”
“Does she want something to eat?” He repeats the question in an unbothered tone.
“I don’t know if they have anything for humans to eat here. What do they like? Fats? Carbs? Simple starches?”
“We could look it up,” the blond beauty says, pulling out a small tablet.
I am grateful that they seem to care about me on some level, even if it is only on the level of a bunch of frat boys suddenly confronted with a responsibility they didn’t really anticipate having.
“They can’t have cyanide or arsenic,” he reads off the screen. “I feel like arsenic is in a lot of this food.”
“The Deltari have to have arsenic, or their teeth fall out,” the tall one says. None of them have introduced themselves or asked my name. I think that is rude, until I realize it makes perfect sense. I never introduced myself to my friend’s pets either. I did always ask their name, though.
“What should we call her?” The Minotaur broaches the question. “She looks like a Bambi to me.”
“Bambi? That’s a little… I don’t know. She’s pretty small. What about Squeak?”
“What about I punch you guys in the nose,” I growl. “My name is… Lisa.”
It might be Lisa. It might not be Lisa. Who can say?
“Lisa?”
They look at one another, and then shake their heads pretty much in unison.
“You’ll need a galactic name. Like Sprinkles.”
“Sprinkles! Yes!” The blond agrees enthusiastically.
They cannot possibly be for real.
“I have a name,” I protest.
“Yes, but your name is in your tongue, and to us it sounds like you’re making animal noises,” the blond explains. “It would be like…”
“Like if I had to bark like a dog every time I introduced my dog to someone,” I say, hating that I kind of get their point. “Except!” I add. “I’m not an animal, I’m not a pet. I’m a person. I’m sentient!”
“Oh, my god. She is so fucking cute,” the Minotaur says. “I’m a person! I’m sentient!” He does my voice in a little mimicry of my own. “She really thinks she is people.”
I want to slap his face, but I am not close enough and I am also really not sure how you would even begin to slap a Minotaur.
He probably wouldn’t even feel it. I am wondering how many mythological creatures are actually just aliens.
Do centaurs exist somewhere in space? That would be fucking amazing if so.
I look around the bar while they keep talking. I’m trying to spot something that looks mythical, something that indicates human history has always been interfered with by aliens in one way or another.
It’s kind of crazy to realize that the men with the wild hair and even wilder eyes might have been right all along.
Earth has been a sort of sandbox for creatures of all kinds.
But we were born there and we felt like we were dominant and it didn’t even fucking occur to us how small and insignificant we could be made to be by the right kind of intelligence.
Even I didn’t really consider it until this very moment, finding myself surrounded by so many various forms of alien life. We were lucky to be allowed the three hundred thousand years or so we got, largely unmolested by aliens except the ones who hid in mazes and things of that nature.
I am having so many thoughts and feelings.
“I think she can probably eat this,” the tall man says. “It’s just sugar in water with a few amino acids and a touch of protein.”
I sip it dubiously, wondering if I’ll survive the taste, but knowing I am going to have to eat something at some point or start to starve.
“It’s a vanilla milkshake!” I exclaim. Then I look at the Minotaur. “Sorry,” I say.
“Sorry for what?” He seems entirely unaware of the series of linkages I just made, and I’m going to let him stay that way.
It’s probably really rude to point out that there are animals that look sort of like him on Earth and we drink their milk kind of a lot and breed them up so they make even more milk, and then we make delicious things from it.
It’s actually really hard to justify being treated well by aliens when you consider how humans treat most other forms of life, so I stop considering it immediately.
“I think she likes it,” the tall alien says.
“I do. It’s nice. Thank you. What can I call you guys?”
They look surprised for a second, then they sort of shake it off. It really didn’t occur to them that I would need to be able to call them something. They truly think of me as a creature they just saved.
“My name is Sharp,” the tall man says.
They look at one another, and I realize that’s not his name at all.
He’s just picked something he thinks will be simple enough for me to say and remember.
I’d be mad at the condescension, but he did just save my life and get me a milkshake, or at least a milkshake adjacent beverage, so I let it slide.
“You can call me Boss,” the Minotaur says.
“And I am Kronos,” the barbarian says. “But if that’s too hard to pronounce, you can call me K.”
“I think I can manage Kronos,” I say.
His expression is one that suggests I just barely did it, but he found it adorable.
“Kronos, Boss, and Sharp,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Can we keep her? I want to keep her,” Boss says.
“I’m not a pet. I’m a person!”
They make a round of generally amused noises, as if I just said the cutest, funniest thing anyone has ever said. Kronos lifts up his camera. “Say that again,” he says. “I want to record that.”
“Get fucked,” I scowl.
That makes them laugh too; well, everyone but Sharp. He puts a big alien hand on the back of my neck and leans down to growl in my ear.
“Manners, pet,” he says, and the tone of his voice sends a delicious shiver down my spine.
“I’m not your pet,” I say again, but my voice is weaker this time, like I’m losing my resolve.