The Vixen War Bride
Page 15
“She’s going to watch the door,” Patricia supplied to Ben.
“Ramirez, stand out there with her and keep things real,” Ben ordered.
Ramirez gave his captain a quick nod and followed the Va’Shen outside.
Once the two guards had left, Yasuren turned to them and motioned for them to sit. Yasuren and Alacea smoothed the legs of their kimono and monpei and dropped to their knees, resting on their feet. Ben sat across from them, legs crossed while Patricia imitated the Va’Shen.
Finally given a free moment, Ben gave Yasuren another once over. Slightly taller than Alacea, she appeared older than the fox priestess, though the vixen’s beauty and elegance made it impossible to determine by how much. She appraised him with her own violet eyes as her tail wrapped around her and rested on her knees, the very tip of the dark blue appendage snow-capped with a spray of white. She knelt tall and straight, a woman very much conscious of her social status and its expectations.
“She hopes we can all be friends,” Patricia supplied.
Ben bowed back. “Pleased to meet you.”
Patricia translated, and with the formalities out of the way, Yasuren jumped right into business.
she stated.
“What do you want?” Patricia translated. “But nicer.”
“We’ve come to bring the people of Pelle home,” Ben said.
Yasuren paused to digest the demand, and Alacea spoke up.
Patricia told her in return.
“They want to know if we intend to enslave them,” Patricia told Ben.
“We want them to return to Pelle and do what they’ve always done… just… without the shooting humans part… You know what I want. Make it pretty.”
Patricia nodded and cleared her throat.
The visible tips of Yasuren’s ears twitched.
“She’s skeptical.”
“No kidding,” Ben replied darkly. “Tell her our mission in Pelle is to fuel vehicles moving between the capital and other cities and to help them recover from the war. As long as they don’t interfere with that and don’t threaten our people, they can live their lives however they want.”
Patricia took a minute to consider how to phrase it and nodded.
Yasuren’s eyebrows arched at the messy translation, and she turned to Alacea.
Yasuren’s ears twitched again in frustration.
Alacea’s ears drooped. It was a fear she harbored as well. It sounded too good to be true and so it probably was.
Patricia caught enough of the byplay to try to comment further.
“What’s the issue?” Ben asked her.
“They can’t believe we don’t want anything,” Patricia told him.
“I wonder what they expected us to demand,” Ben told her.
Patricia took the remark as an order and turned to the two vixens.
The two vixens looked at one another. Yasuren definitely didn’t want to give the soldiers any ideas.
“She’s afraid you’re going to treat them badly,” Patricia said.
“What can I say that will convince them I won’t?” he asked.
Yasuren didn’t answer immediately, and Alacea cleared her throat.
The statement confused the older vixen further.
Alacea’s tail swished from side to side in agitation.
Yasuren turned back to Patricia.
“What if they don’t want to come home?” Patricia translated.
Ben gave the question serious thought. Forcing the Va’Shen to come with him would require the threat of force, and if he did that now he’d have to do it forever. On the other hand, he couldn’t leave a potentially hostile force up here left to their own devices with laser weapons and God knew what else at their disposal. If they refused to leave, he’d have to cut the baby in half.
“If they don’t come with us, we will stay up here with them,” he said.
“Um… what?” Patricia asked.
“If they love their cave so much,” Ben told her with some frustration, “Then they can stay in their cave, but we will station troops in here with them or camp them outside the cave entrance. But we’re not leaving them here all alone.”
“Okay,” Patricia breathed. She took a breath and turned to the Va’Shen.
Both vixens’ tails stopped moving and dropped to the floor in shock.
Alacea reached out and gripped her arm in warning.
Yasuren turned back to Ben and swallowed the response she almost gave, which would have been a gracious welcome for his troops in their new home, but Alacea’s warning forced her to give the Dark One’s proposal more careful consideration, and under the wilting force of that consideration, she suddenly found the Ranger captain had already won.
The Va’Shen plan from the beginning hinged on the fact that the Dark Ones didn’t know where they were hiding or that they were even hiding at all. Upon finding a sparsely populated town whose people had supposedly killed themselves in shame, they expected the Dark Ones to rage against the village and the remaining elders, her own Tesho among them, left behind to accept that punishment. Then, after the, albeit small, massacre was over and the village was in ruins, the Dark Ones, with their blood lust sated, would move on to more lively game. The villagers would then return home and rebuild.
But with the Dark One leader sitting across from her in the very heart of their hiding place, that plan was already a complete failure. He could station troops here and supply them from their military stores while the food her people brought with them slowly depleted. In the meantime, their crops went untended and their animals left behind w
andered aimlessly, prey for the predators that would soon realize the herds’ Va’Shen protectors were gone and attack. Their community would get weaker every day, while the Dark Ones remained strong until they would eventually have no choice.
The Overlord would have their subjugation. It was only a question of how long it would take.
And Pelle would likely never recover.
Yasuren’s ears flattened, her tail went limp at this realization. The Overseer would get what he wanted, and he didn’t even have to threaten them.
Yasuren told him in defeat.
“She said she has to ask the Aderen,” Patricia told him.
“It’ll take a while for Baird and Mulroney to dig out the entrance anyway,” he told her with a nod. “Tell her that’s fine.”
Patricia bowed to Yasuren graciously.
Chapter 8
Standing to the right of the doorway leading to the meeting room, Ramirez tapped his foot and took a breath. The meeting between the Va’Shen and Ranger leader had been going on for several minutes at this point, and his Va’Shen counterpart on the left side of the entranceway had barely looked in his direction the entire time.
He looked over at Bao Sen, who made it a point to ignore him.
“So,” he began in a friendly tone. “What do you do around here for fun?”
Bao Sen didn’t acknowledge him. She continued to look straight ahead.
Ramirez gave it another few seconds and raised his voice an octave in a crude impression of a woman’s. “’Oh, you know Ramirez!’” he said in answer to his own question. “’We have slumber parties and pillow fights and then me and the other girls make cookies for the boys!’”
He looked at Bao Sen and waited for a response. Nothing. The Va’Shen woman continued to ignore him to the very best of her ability.
“That was a test,” he said, his voice back to normal. “If you secretly spoke English, you’d probably be kicking my ass right now.” He nodded sagely. “Congratulations. You passed.”
“Bu’sho,” Bao Sen muttered irritably.
“Yeah,” Ramirez agreed. “I hear that. It’s pretty bu’sho, all right.”
They turned simultaneously as Yasuren and the others emerged from the entranceway. Bao Sen immediately spoke up.
Yasuren didn’t reply to Bao Sen’s question. She held her palm up.
Again the huntress bowed in concurrence.
Yasuren turned to Ben and Patricia.
Patricia translated this, and Ben checked his watch. “We’re coming up on an hour. I need to let Baird know we’re all right.”
“I’ll go, Sir,” Ramirez spoke up. “You and LT should stay close in case they need you to talk to the others or something.”
Ben nodded. “Give him a situation report, get one back, and tell them we’re making progress. Hopefully, we can start moving them out as soon as the tunnel is cleared.”
“Yes, Sir,” Ramirez said and took off toward the tunnel from which they had come. The Va’Shen watched him go suspiciously, and Patricia stepped in to assure them.
Silently and without warning, another huntress appeared behind them, like Bao Sen armed with a hardlight rifle. Her pale green hair was sprinkled with tiny dark spots. In his head, Ben named her “Mint Chocolate Chip.”
The huntress bowed and gestured down the path with her rifle.
Alacea bowed to Ben as he and Patricia followed Geresen down the path. Yasuren eyed the violet-haired priestess and waited for Patricia to be out of earshot before speaking again.
“Coming out!”
Burgers knelt next to the tunnel entrance and held a hand out to help pull his friend from the now slightly larger hole in the cliff. Ramirez grasped the outstretched hand, and Baird pulled until Ramirez was able to stand up and dust himself off.
Night had fallen outside, the full moons and Va’Sh’s natural aurora bathing the hills in an eerie green light. A group of SeaBees and Rangers stood nearby, entrenching tools in their hands, their work suspended while Ramirez made his exit from the tunnel.
“Everything good?” Burgers asked him.
“Yeah, so far,” Ramirez told him. “Boss is talking to the big banana. This might be a done deal by morning.”
“All right, all right, all right,” Burgers replied. “Montrose said it might take twelve to sixteen hours of hard work to get the hole where we want it, maybe longer. I’m guessing day after tomorrow. I got an observation post on the hilltop north of us, keeping an eye out. Half our guys are working and half are racking out in our camp just past the tree-line.”
“Cool.”
“You guys need anything? You want your gear?”
Ramirez thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure he could get their assault packs and weapons through the hole with him. “Maybe some MREs,” he said. “I haven’t eaten Va’Shen food, so I don’t know what it’s like. But if it’s, like, bugs and leaves and shit, I’d rather eat our own stuff.”
Burgers nodded and knelt down, rooting around in an assault pack and coming out with three Meals Ready to Eat. He read the labels as he handed them over. “Turkey and gravy, spaghetti and meatballs and… ugh… omelet.”
“LT can have that one,” Ramirez said, taking them from him. “She won’t know it sucks till it’s too late. You got tortellini?”
“I got another omelet,” Burgers offered.
“Jeez, who brings two omelets?!” Ramirez asked. “Okay, okay, you need anything from me?”
“Nah, man, we’re keeping it real up here, you just do your thing down there.”
Ramirez dropped to his knees next to the tunnel entrance and flung the MREs down the tunnel ahead of him. “You can bet these guys are going to come check us out,” he told Burgers.
“No shit,” Burgers told him. “We’ll play it cool, don’t worry.”
Ramirez gave him a grin. “Don’t wait up!” he said before laying down and starting down the tunnel.
Burgers watched him go.
Ben hadn’t known what to expect, but he thought it would have been closer to a spartan refugee tent. Yasuren’s tent was by no means extravagant, but it was very well kept and the blankets covering the stone floor were clean. The tent walls were made of a ruby-red fabric that gave the place an air of royalty, light coming from three lanterns spaced around the room. A cushion covered with several other blankets lay in the corner as a bed.
“It’s cozy,” Patricia remarked, sitting down on the floor.
Ben checked every corner of the room. He could hear Va’Shen moving around outside, but with a tent there was not much to be done about that. All the same, he didn’t want to risk being taken unawares.
“This might take awhile,” he told her. “You should try to get some sleep.”
“You sure?” she asked. “It’s still kind of early.”
“One of the ca
rdinal rules of being a Ranger,” he told her. “If you’re not marching, eating or fighting, you should be sleeping. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’ll sleep later,” he assured the terp. “I need you fresh to translate for me. Sleep.”
She gave him an exaggerated salute. “Yes, Sir!”
Patricia didn’t feel right sleeping in their host’s “bed,” so she laid down in the other corner and closed her eyes, trying to will herself to sleep.
Ben sat down in the opposite corner, facing the tent entrance. He wished he could read his tablet or that the Coalition had had enough foresight to order a bunch of old analog books to replace them. The best he could do was sit and wait for Ramirez to come back or for something to happen.
He settled in and let his thoughts drift.
None of the other Aderen members had arrived yet, and Alacea had spent the last several minutes detailing her experiences since leaving the cave almost a week before.
Seeing through the vixen’s bravado, Yasuren bowed to her.