by Lauren Esker
Claudia turned to run.
The woman pointed her hand at Claudia. There was a flash of green light, and the sidewalk came up to hit her in the face.
Claudia woke with a splitting headache, unable to move her arms and vaguely aware of an argument going on somewhere near her.
"We should take him back to the ship." This was the gruff, deep voice of Cat Dude.
"I don't think that's a good idea." The answering voice was female and unfamiliar, but it had the curious inflections and odd pacing of their peculiar accent. Claudia guessed it was the female shapeshifter in whatever body she was wearing now.
Claudia cracked her eyes open and squinted painfully at the blurry world around her. Her arms wouldn't move because they were tied to a chair. Her ankles were tied to the chair legs, and on top of that, the chair itself was tied to a giant metal something-or-other. Some kind of old, rusty heavy equipment; Claudia had no idea what it was, but she could guess that the point was to stop her from teleporting herself out.
I'd love to try. If I only knew how I keep doing it.
"Something is really wrong here," the woman's voice went on. "I don't like the idea of having him anywhere near the ship under the circumstances."
"You've imprinted on him, right? If he escapes, you can just find him again."
"I'm considerably more worried about him escaping with our ship," the woman said. "Or ... something. I don't like this, Kriff. I'm starting to think we've got the wrong person, but I don't understand how."
Claudia raised her head. She was in some kind of barn or old equipment shop, long abandoned by the looks of it. Daylight shone through cracks in the wall, and outside the open door she glimpsed green, jungle-like growth. She was pretty sure they were still in Louisiana.
Her captors were talking just inside the door. The tall cat dude was still wearing his trenchcoat. The other person was—or at least looked like—the gray-haired white lady who had approached her on the sidewalk, arms crossed over her flowered blouse and body language giving off profound frustration.
"He can teleport, can't he? Who cares if it's him or someone else?" Cat Dude asked. "We get paid either way."
"Don't be dense, Kriff. We don't get paid if we give them the wrong symbiont."
"Who's gonna be able to tell?"
"Well, the Rhuadhi, for one." The woman planted her hand on her hip and looked over at Claudia. "Oh, look. Our guest's awake."
Claudia tried to speak and coughed. "Could someone give me some water, please?" she asked meekly.
Instead they loomed over her. She tried not to stare at Cat Dude. Now that she could get a better look at him, he was both more and less weird-looking than she'd thought. His face was a normal human face, but covered with downy leopard-spotted fur. His hair was short and thick and tawny, surrounding a pair of cat ears that she might have thought were fake if they hadn't moved just then, swiveling to prick toward her.
But other than that, he looked pretty normal, just a big, solidly built guy with normal human facial expressions under the fur.
"Who are you guys?" Claudia asked.
"The question is, who are you?" The woman placed a hand on Claudia's arm, not a comforting touch but a firm, businesslike grip. "You're the one I imprinted on, I'm sure of it. But I can't feel the slightest hint of an Iustran energy signature from you. I felt it back at the club. How are you hiding it now?"
"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," Claudia said plaintively.
"Do you have amnesia?" the woman demanded. "Could you have forgotten who you really are and think that you are truly one of the backwards residents of this planet, trapped in your single shape like the rest of these mud-crawlers?"
"Hey! Don't be rude!"
"Does it matter?" Cat Dude asked impatiently. "Let's just stun him again and take him in for the reward."
"Reward?" Claudia squeaked. "And I'm not a 'him,' I don't know how many times I have to tell you," she added indignantly.
The woman stepped back with her hand on her chin. "Either you don't remember your true self, or you're trying to get out of this by lying. I wish I could figure out which."
"Is there some way to force a shapeshift?" Cat Dude asked. "Like, if we electrocute him or something?"
"What?"
"Do not electrocute him," the woman snapped. "We don't want to damage the symbiont."
Confused as she still was, Claudia thought she might be starting to get a tenuous grasp on at least some of what was happening to her. "Is the symbiont the thing that makes the holes in the air?"
"This is getting us nowhere," Cat Dude said. "Let's stun him, take him back to the ship, and let the Rhuadhi sort it out."
"What's a Rahadee?" Claudia asked, but no one was paying any attention to her.
"There's no way to know how two stuns in a row would affect the symbiont," the woman said. "If it's damaged, we don't get paid."
"So we carry him to the ship, then," Cat Dude said, exasperated. "The point is, let's figure this out on the ship."
"Okay, fine. But if he portals out and we have to hunt him down again, I'm blaming you."
She cut the chain securing the chair with a quick downward chop of her hand and a flash of green light. Claudia, watching, thought the light came from her hand or maybe the jewelry on her wrist, a wide gold band that reminded Claudia of Dwayne "The Asshole" Johnson's bracelets. Once the chair was cut loose, Cat Dude picked up chair, Claudia and all, as if she weighed nothing.
She tried struggling, but the bonds were secure. When they carried her out of the equipment shed, she could see that screaming would be little use. There was a sagging fence overgrown with creepers, a glimpse of a dirt road beyond it. The place looked like it had been abandoned for years.
She screamed for help anyway as they carried her to the fence, but it hurt her aching head. They reached the fence, and she stopped trying to scream when she saw what was beyond it in the overgrown dirt road.
A spaceship.
There was literally nothing else it could be. It was big and silver, a sleek teardrop shape that looked a little like an old-school dirigible and a little like a classic UFO. It was wide enough that its rounded sides pushed against the foliage encroaching on the road, and the high, arched top was most of the way to the tops of the trees.
"You guys are aliens," Claudia said after she managed to close her gaping mouth.
"Can we gag her?" Cat Dude complained. "I mean, him."
"That's not a bad idea," the woman said.
"No!" Claudia shrieked. "No—ack! Mmmph!"
The woman knotted Claudia's own scarf around her face, drawn tightly through her mouth. She kept trying to scream through the gag as they carried her to their ship.
If I can really teleport, now would be a great time!
But nothing happened. She couldn't even think where to go. They'd found her at her apartment. They'd found her, somehow, in rural Louisiana. Where in the world could she go that they wouldn't find her?
Someone save me!
But no savior came. The woman brushed her fingertips across the ship's side, and a door sprang open. They carried her into a dark, echoing interior and up a set of steps to a brightly lit corridor.
"You think it's a good idea to take him to the bridge?" the woman said.
"Look, I gotta fly this thing. Just keep an eye on her, uh, him while I get us into orbit and jump out."
Orbit? Jump?
Claudia threw everything she had into trying to make another of those glowing doorways in the air. Her ears rang with the effort, and she was only dimly aware of being carried down the corridor. But nothing happened.
They went through an irising door onto what was probably the ship's bridge; it looked enough like starship bridges on TV to be recognizable. There were a handful of forward-facing seats and a big, wide screen showing a view of the wind-ruffled trees.
Cat Dude set her down with a thunk, chair and all. "Okay, I'll just get us into orbit. You—"
He broke off as the pilot's chair swung around, slowly and dramatically, to reveal someone sitting in it. One leg was casually thrown over the armrest, an elbow propped on it, pointing a massive high-tech-looking gun at them.
"Hi there," said Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. "I think you have something that belongs to me."
Five
Skara was unprepared for the effect on him of seeing Earth-woman Claudia again. Even tied to a chair, tousled and gagged, she was beautiful. His body yearned to touch her again. Her beautiful eyes stared at him over the top of the gag with ... hmmm. That was not the expected look of adoration for her rescue. It was more like the opposite. If looks could kill, he'd be a smoking crater right now.
He decided to deal with that later.
Both of the people with her, a Galatean man and a woman who looked like a local, were aiming fists at him. He saw the green glint of Galatean-style energy cuffs at their wrists, and reinforced his personal shields a bit, just to be on the safe side.
"Who are you?" the woman demanded.
"Calm down, friends." Skara patted the proton cannon. "You know what this is, right? One shot from this can take out your shields and blow a hole in the side of your ship, not to speak of what it'll do to you. So let's chat."
"What are you doing on our ship?" the Galatean man said.
"Mmmph!" Claudia put in.
Did she have the symbiont? Skara couldn't tell from here.
He really hoped she did, because he felt like crap, even hopped up on stimulants. It didn't help that he'd pushed himself through three jumps getting here in a hurry, nearly burning out his engines in the process. Now his jump drive was completely drained, and he not only couldn't jump out until he recharged, he probably couldn't outrun anything short of a garbage scow, especially with a fully loaded cargo hold.
So he had decided to steal someone else's ship instead.
The Discordia was parked in the woods nearby. His imprinting ability had told him that Claudia was inside the cluster of ramshackle buildings behind the fence, and he'd decided to take a gamble and assume that this nice, shiny chaser-class spaceship was how they would be leaving. These people, whoever they were, had left their ship with only the most rudimentary security, probably thinking that no one on Earth would know how to steal it. They were right about that.
Too bad for them that he was very, very good at stealing spaceships.
"So I'll just take my cargo and be going," Skara said, nodding to Claudia.
Behind the gag, Claudia made an indignant muffled shriek that sounded something like, "Cargo?!"
Huh. That was interesting. The last time he'd run into her, she hadn't been able to understand him. Had these people given her a translator?
"I think we'll just keep the cargo." The woman turned and placed her green-glowing fist beneath Claudia's chin. Claudia's eyes widened. "Unless you prefer her without a head."
Claudia shook her head wildly. "Nnn-nnn!"
A hot rush of protective rage rolled through Skara's chest, catching him off guard with its intensity. How dare they! He noticed that agitation seemed to be causing him to grow an extra finger on the hand holding the proton cannon's trigger, and threw a burst of willpower into forcing his hand back to the requisite five Earth-standard fingers.
"I don't want that and I don't think you want that either," Skara said, keeping his voice calm with an immense force of effort. His headache was coming back, complicating his struggle to keep his cool. Maybe he should've used his natural form for this, but he didn't want these people to know they were up against an Iustran shapeshifter.
Although ...
His gaze kept returning to the woman, and he noticed that she kept staring at him, too. As if she was trying to figure something out.
She figured it out at the same moment he did, recognizing, as he did, the faint tingle that he'd felt only a few times in his life—most recently just a few days ago, on this very planet, and probably from her.
"You're an Iustran!" they both exclaimed at the same time, and she flung herself toward him in the same breath, her arms extending into purple tentacles.
Claudia's eyes, above the gag, rounded like saucers.
Skara didn't budge from the pilot's seat. He was, after all, shielded. As her tentacles wrapped around him, he extended his feet to form powerful crab claws, shredding his boots—damn it, he'd loved those boots. He clamped his new claws onto the base of the pilot's chair.
Claudia made a tiny whimpering sound.
"Oh, come on," the Galatean exclaimed. "He's one too?"
"It is him!" the woman snapped. She had grown more tentacles and now he was surrounded by a thrashing, writhing thicket, sliding around on his shield as she tried to get a grip. "I don't know why I was getting a false positive off her. This is our bounty! Help me take him in!"
"Better bounty hunters than you have tried," Skara muttered. Missing his symbiont very acutely at the moment, he shifted his mass downward, thickening his lower limbs and shrinking his torso. The Iustran woman recognized what he was trying to do, but not in time to compensate. Her tentacles closed on empty air while Skara slipped out from underneath, dragging the proton canon with him. Flat on his back on the floor, he fired it in her general direction.
The woman threw herself out of the way in a squidlike flurry of tentacles and ended up tangled around a seat. Her current form was not very good for moving around on land. The proton blast tore a large hole in the bulkhead, revealing a neat glowing-edged circle of cloudy sky.
Rather than bothering with a full shift, Skara grew a couple more pairs of crablike legs (there went his pants, too) and scuttled speedily across the floor toward Claudia and her captor. The Galatean shot at him—it splintered off his shield—and then sensibly got out of the way. Skara stood on four of his six legs and, with the other two, neatly sliced Claudia's bonds.
Claudia yanked down her gag and screamed.
"Panic later," Skara told her. She was staring at him as if he terrified her as much as the bounty hunters, for some reason. He pointed at her with a crab leg, his arms full of proton cannon, and used a couple of spare legs to fend off a renewed tentacle attack. "You can understand me, right? Portal us out of here!"
"I can't!" she cried. "I don't know how!"
Great. Skara pointed the proton cannon at the Galatean, who scrambled out of the line of fire, and grew another pair of arms. His headache spiked. Holding his current shape without a clear mental image of its final form was agonizing, not to mention the strain on his limbic system from maintaining this number of limbs.
Claudia screamed again.
"I know, I know." He grabbed her with his new arms and scuttled off down the hall, pointing the proton cannon behind him to hold off the bounty hunters.
"What are you?" Claudia shrieked. She threw her arms around his neck and held onto him rather than trying to get away, which was a relief; it gave him one less thing to worry about. Also, having her hanging onto him like this was very nice. Distractingly so, under the circumstances.
"Iustran."
"That doesn't help!"
A green plasma blast crackled past him. Skara extended his shield to cover Claudia and fired a proton blast down the hall. There was a scream from the bridge.
"You're wrecking our ship, asshole!"
"That's the idea," Skara muttered. Stealing it would have been preferable, but stopping them from being able to follow him would also do. He didn't really want to kill them. They were just trying to make a semi-honest credit. He could relate.
The proton cannon's power light was blinking. He thumbed down the power setting to try to make the dwindling charge last. They only had a couple more shots.
"I don't suppose you know how to use a proton cannon?" he asked Claudia.
"What?"
"Guess not. Hang on."
He jumped down a cargo hatch, landing heavily on all six legs. One of his claws tried to fold under him. Damn it; he was unable to increase his mass, so his crab legs were flimsy
. It felt like he'd sprained an ankle.
He scuttled for the exit on five legs, holding up the injured one. He couldn't muster the energy to reabsorb it, which seemed like a bad sign. So did the way the deck seemed to lurch under him, until he realized it actually was moving when Claudia cried out, "What's happening?"
"Shit. They're taking off." He skidded to a halt at the airlock. "Open this!"
"What? How?"
A quick glance let him know that she had no power cuffs. Crap. He freed a hand from the proton cannon to wave his cuffs at the airlock. It cycled, and he scuttled in with Claudia.
The deck was tilted steeply now. Within the close and windowless confines of the airlock, it was impossible to tell what might be on the other side. Skara clung with one hand and a couple of claws to the handles on the inside before cycling it open.
Which was a good idea, because wind screamed past them, stirring their hair even inside the shield. Green treetops raced by, far below and dropping away, cloaked in streamers of clouds
"Are we flying?" Claudia yelped. Her arms tightened around his neck, almost choking him.
"We're going to be flying higher in a minute. Hold on."
"What are you doing?!" Claudia yelled as he reabsorbed several spare legs to provide mass for growing wings.
"Hopefully not killing us all." He spent precious seconds opening the proton cannon's power-cell cover and quickly flipped off the failsafes before setting it to overload.
"Hopefully?!"
"Well, I could lie to make you feel better, but I didn't think you'd want that."
"No! I want that! I do want that!"
He flashed her a quick grin as he snapped the cover shut. "In that case, we're going to be perfectly fine and there's nothing to worry about."
"I don't believe you," Claudia said grimly, hanging onto his neck.
"See, this is why I prefer not to lie. It never works anyway."
He wedged the rapidly overloading proton cannon behind the airlock door, and unfurled his new wings, which produced a startled squawk from Claudia. He hoped she appreciated them. Functional wings were hard. In fact, he doubted if these were going to be fully functional; he hadn't had time to work out all the muscle arrangements. (Nobody appreciated the muscle arrangements.) But all he needed to be able to do was glide.