Winter's Galaxy

by F. E. Arliss

  “Well...I’m not sure…” Jeanie trailed off, glancing bewilderedly at Winter, who simply raised one eyebrow in a ‘well did he?’ look.

  “Ah, men!” Moira Quirke said exasperatedly. “Well, we better sit down and have some tea while I explain everything,” she said with a smiling sigh. Turning towards the two males, who seemed to be having a lively argument about something, Moira yelled, “Hey! You two squirrel-baits! I’m taking these girls over to the fountain and filling them in on what you should have already told them! Slink on over in an hour or so if you’ve gotten up the courage!” With that, the tiny redhead clasp Jeanie’s hand and tugged her along in her wake. Glancing over her shoulder, she grinned at Winter and said, “Come on, you’re not gonna believe any of this and it is soooo cool.” Winter shambled along after the two older women taking in as much as possible. She had to admit, so far, it really was pretty cool.

  A tall, slender Idolum male with incredibly long, silky-white hair stalked by them, “Hi Mom,” he mumbled to Moira Quirke, then tried to continue past them.

  “Tate Quirke! You stop right there and come back here and meet our visitors!” Moira said firmly to the male. He towered over her by about two and a half feet, and he still looked like a sulky child as he did as he was told.

  Stopping before them, he reached out one long pale hand towards Jeanie and said, “Ummm, hi! I’m Tate Quirke. Pleased to meet you ma’am.” Then releasing Jeanie’s hand so that she had time to compose her stricken looking features back into some semblance of politeness, he turned to Winter. “Hi, I’m Tate.”

  Winter took the long white appendage, shook it firmly, met his strangely glowing, orange eyes and said, “I’m Winter.” Then looked around the cavern and stopped her gaze on Ewan Quirke and the Idolum warrior. “That must be your dad, Dermott Quirke?” she asked nonchalantly.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s Dad,” Tate sighed out slowly, then grinned at her delightedly, showing perfectly even, Hollywood-bright teeth. “You’re a quick study, huh?”

  “I hope,” Winter said seriously. “Otherwise people tend to kick your ass, rob you, or any number of other unsavory affronts.”

  To this Tate simply threw back his head and laughed. His voice had a slight whirring sound to it, though his accent was pure English from the translation micron they’d injected in her inner ear. Everyone in the cavern drew to a halt and you could have heard a pin drop.

  “Something up with you laughing?” Winter asked, raising both eyebrows at him.

  “They’re just not used to it. I haven’t been in this body very long, and being in an Idolum form has been hard to accept for me. Guess I haven’t laughed much lately. Though Dad seems to take being Idolum pretty well,” Tate said slowly. “Maybe it’s because Mom loves him no matter what form he’s in.”

  “Tate Quirke, you know darn good and well that your Dad, Tally and I, and everyone else, love you in any form whatsoever. Even when you didn’t even have one,” his mother scolded him gently. Then approached him and hugged him fiercely, slowly rocking him side to side as though he were still her small child.

  Brushing his waist-length white hair out of her face and releasing him, she looked up into his face and said, “Why don’t you take Winter on a tour and fill her in on everything. I’ll get Jeanie settled. Put Winter up on the third, west tier won’t you please, honey?” Then Moira pulled Jeanie after her towards the fountain.

  Tate bowed slightly at the waist, offered his arm in an old-world courtly gesture, then proceeded to slip her hand down his arm to a comfortable position. Winter’s slender form was so much shorter than Tate’s that she’d been reaching almost over her head to put her hand in his elbow. Just above the wrist was a much better fit. Winter grinned at him and said, “Beanpole.”

  Tate grinned, then came back with, “Gnat,” then pulled her towards the empty space in the landing zone. “Come see our Clyde,” he said with a grin. “If you can,” he added challengingly. Winter narrowed her eyes at him, then focused them on the empty spot outlined in orange paint.

  It hadn’t taken Winter more than a few seconds to see the imprints of large landing supports in the red dust of the cavern. They looked exactly like the ones on Clyde. If the vessel had gone, the thrusters would have covered the imprints with dust. As they’d passed the front of the orange-painted line, she’d also felt the gentle waft of air from the front of the cavern, suddenly cease to caress her face. “What is it, some sort of cloaking?” She asked, her curiosity in overdrive. Reaching out a hand past the orange line, she tentatively tried to feel something on the other side.

  “Wow! You are smart!” Tate said, astonishment flitting over his pale features. “It’s not cloaking as a matter of fact, but close. It was an interaction between an untested ore and some very complex Idolum algae. There was a leak during an attack on Gem 8 when we were picking up a load. We sealed the cargo bay, but it wasn’t fast enough. Two of our deck hands were killed. Dad and I were too, I guess you’d say...technically. But because of Mom and Tally, my sister... you haven’t met her yet, she’s on another ship right now... our spirit forms stayed behind. Well, that’s how Dolores, Sasha’s gran explains it,” Tate added sheepishly. “Sounds whack, I know,” he added, turning slightly green under his pale white.

  Winter just stared at him and then continued to run her hands along the form of a ship she’d found on the other side of the orange line. “Cool!” Winter said, grinning. “It’s like a ghost ship! You were a ghost! That is so totally cool!”

  As Tate smile slightly, then let it fall away into a look of complete sadness. Winter realized that it hadn’t been ‘cool’ at all for Tate. “I’m sorry, Tate. I get it that it wasn’t cool for you. It was awful. You lost your body. Your Dad lost his body. I actually know totally what that is like,” she added passionately, holding his amber eyes with her own.

  “How? How do you know?” Tate ground out, practically spitting the words at her, his rage about the events clearly etched on his long, angular face.

  “When I was fifteen, I got snatched off the streets of Austin, Texas in the U.S. and sold into prostitution in Mexico. I was raped repeatedly and then put in a house where I had to service men every night. My body was not my own. Hell, I couldn’t even feel it anymore in order to survive. That lasted four years. So I was ‘out of my body’ for all that time,” Winter explained heatedly. “So I do know. I know all about it!”

  Tate took a step back. “I didn’t know,” he said simply.

  “So what? Now you can’t be near me, because I’m contaminated or something?” Winter snarled at him, misinterpreting the distance he’d put between them.

  “No! No!” Tate exclaimed emphatically. “I stepped back in surprise. You really do understand. I tried talking to Dad about it, but he didn't feel the same things I did. I tried talking to Mom about it, but she was just so happy to have me back, no matter what form, that she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t excited just to be alive.”

  Winter nodded, she got that. “After I killed the man who brought me to UZ627, I shaved off all my hair and have dressed like a boy ever since. I told myself it was a disguise, which it was. But it also distanced me from the ‘role’ I had to play in order to survive the brothel. Does that make sense?” Winter asked, scrunching her face up in thought. She hadn’t really admitted any of that to herself before.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it does. We’ve both got different bodies that we’re trying to learn. For different reasons maybe, but still, they’re different bodies and we feel weird about them,” Tate said slowly. Then turning his back, he said, “Let me show you the rest of the Clyde inside. I think it’s almost exactly like Uncle Ewan’s, but you can see if you can find any differences,” he said, tossing a slight smile over his shoulder. Winter simply took the long white hand he held out to her and followed him, returning his smile with one of her own.

  Chapter Six

  Jumping Off Point

  Several days had passed since Winter and Jeanie had landed on Rene
gar. It had become clear that Jeanie wanted to head on to Valoria with Ewan Quirke and his oldest daughter, Arc. Birdie, his youngest daughter, would stay behind on Renegar with Caja and Sasha Kelty.

  Winter could tell it made the Commander sad to leave Birdie, but knew people needed other people like themselves. It was just a fact. Like found like. Caja was Vanguardian by birth, as was Birdie. Now they were both Renegades, though Birdie would always be Ewan Quirke’s daughter and Princess Arc Exousia’s sister.

  Dermott and Moira Quirke were going to remain based on Renegar. Moira and Tally Quirke would begin taking Clyde.3 on cargo runs for the Alliance as soon as Tally returned. In his Idolum body Dermott Quirke was just too darn tall for the Clyde.3 anymore, but he was happy to tinker with the other ships and was one helluva mechanic according to Ewan Quirke. He loved finding out what the marvels of alien technology had to offer.

  Princess Arc Exousia Quirke asked for her nest ship, the Centurion, to come pick up her, the Clyde, Ewan Quirke and Jeanie and transfer them back to Valoria. Arc was tired of hitting her head on the bulkhead every time she stood. The Clyde would go on from there to a settlement based on a planet known as Mirage.

  Mirage was a newly discovered planet and had a small human population and two alien aquatic species:the Tadswam, a small frog-like freshwater species that had a sanctuary on one of the large lakes, and the Mateo, a walrus-like species that populated the seas.

  The human population had begun mining a variety of new ores and the Clyde would be hauling those loads for Daer Null and Digger Cole, the two lovers who held dual Governorship of Mirage. Daer had an affinity with the sea and governed the interactions with the Mateo. Digger was a miner by profession and was in charge of the land-based operations.

  Winter found herself wandering along the steep orange ravines of Renegar. It was a wonderful planet. Stark in its beauty, but to Winter, that suited the insides of her soul. Stark. Empty. Desolate.

  She and Tate Quirke continued to have a good relationship. For some reason, Winter didn’t mind him touching her the way she hated it when others took that familiarity. Tate had begun offering her his hand when he joined her in her explorations of the desert world. His pale skin didn’t do as well as hers in the harsh sunlight, but there were often crevasses with deep shade where he could watch her further explorations from above. Occasionally, they’d be joined by Sasha’s huge rhino-horned war dog, who roamed at will over the huge plateaus.

  Tate was like a monkey, he could climb anything! He also had far superior vision and could zoom in on her location from vast distances. So, while Tate climbed the steep cliffs, Winter explored the sunny open reaches of the desert. Together, but apart. It felt comforting to them both.

  Neither had mentioned the elephant in the room. Everyone else had a plan, someplace to go. Neither of them knew what they were going to do. Each had specific knowledge and abilities, they just didn’t know where to put them to use. Winter was a fighter now. Tate could fly anything with an engine. He was just too tall for human vessels, but his human spirit precluded him from being completely accepted by the Idolum crews aboard the nest ships.

  Women of any species were revered by the Idolum, as a female dominated their society, they had an innate respect for the powers of women. Tate on the other hand, just didn’t have a niche anywhere within a nest.

  A week after Winter had given a tearful, but happily blushing Jeanie a last hug goodbye, a sleek ship bristling with armaments broke the atmosphere above Renegar. Their ride to Geboren, Queen Altum Juls home planet, and the location of the next phase of she and Tate’s lives, had arrived. Winter had just finished a sparring match with Caja and almost gotten the better of the huge Vanguardian male in a couple of bouts. For all his height and strength, he couldn’t match her speed and agility.

  His experience and knowledge, however, had a vastly superior edge, so she’d bowed to him with respect and flashed him a rare smile before heading to the small shower stalls behind one large outcropping of stone. Residual water from the drains was caught, filtered and repurposed for irrigating the crops that ran in small pockets along the steeply terraced walls of the surrounding canyons.

  Renegar, for all its desert appearance, had deep ravines that bottomed out in small running streams and springs. Sasha Kelty and Caja had used every resource available to them, terracing specialized crops into small patches along the canyon walls, raising a rare species of bottom-feeding fish that needed minimal water coverage, and harnessing the solar power of their burning sun to power everything they needed. It was an impressive case of adapting to an environment.

  As Winter stepped out of the shower area, dressed in her usual attire of combat boots, moto leggings, and nanite-infused armored vest, the large boulder-like being that guarded the cavern rolled to a stop in front of her. On her first day he’d blocked her way, opened tiny eye-like crevasses in his craggy face and said, “I am rock god. Cavern security. Who you?” Just that, nothing more. She’d returned the favor, “Winter.” Nothing more.

  Now his slitted eyes opened again and the crack in his rocky facade that served as a mouth, said, “Queen Altum Juls of the Alliance requests your company in the sitting room.” Then, within seconds, he’d morphed back into the rock walls of the cavern and was gone. Sneaky little shit, Winter thought to herself.

  As she headed towards the far side of the cavern where a narrow tunnel carved along the back of the mountain led to what was called ‘the sitting room’, Tate joined her. She’d only been to the sitting room a couple of times in the few weeks they’d been there. Mostly because if you went there it was to socialize and talk to people. Winter had no desire to do either.

  Sasha Kelty and her clan of Renegades loved to dance. They played music and danced all the time. Winter had even seen the enormous war dog with his rhino-like horn bopping along to the music from one giant paw to the other. Rock god, the grumpy little shit, even rolled from side to side too. Tate could dance, she had to admit, though he did it mostly to appease all the others egging him on.

  What she hadn’t bothered to tell anyone, and Jeanie had been sworn to silence, was that Winter couldn’t just dance, she was down right masterful at it. Particularly at spectacularly risque pole dancing and trashy free-form displays of grace and sensuality. After all, a girl didn’t get the big tips if she couldn’t shake some booty.

  That was if Claudio had been in the mood to let her keep her tips or just plain didn’t see her pass them off to Jeanie. Dumb shit never thought about frisking Jeanie down for tips. What he didn’t realize was that Jeanie was popular for a reason. She listened to her johns. Half of them weren’t even interested in sex, they just wanted a cuddle with a mommy figure. Claudio had been a pea-brained moron.

  Tate reached back a long pale hand, and Winter took it. The scenery out the side of the walkway was spectacular. Long red vistas of desert plateaus and sharply pointed mountains spread out in a never-ending display of orange, red and ochre sepia. Maybe he just wanted to make sure she didn’t walk off the edge as she gawked, but Winter suspected they both needed the comfort and reassurance.

  Queen Altum Juls was both a queen to the Idolum and of an evolved super-race called the Osmir. Only a few Osmir existed. Most had ascended into the ethers to live in a non-material state. When Queen Altum Juls had evolved, it had been to become a Queen that could control the ethers around her with a wave of her hands. She could endlessly channel power, kill with a thought, and bring the dead back to life in some cases. Winter had heard all the tales of her powers and that of her son General Apollo. Apollo was the one that Ewan Quirke thought his daughter, Arc Exousia, was mooning over.

  As they entered the sitting room, Tate’s grip on Winter’s hand became tighter. He was nervous, Winter realized. He thought the Queen was here to talk about where they fit. She’d agreed to sell her armaments to the Alliance, but had, as of yet, not selected what she wanted to keep for herself. The price they’d arranged had been very fair, and Winter was satisfied with
the contract.

  Tate, on the other hand, didn’t have a fortune waiting for him on an Intergalactic Database chip. He didn’t seem to fit anywhere, while Winter could pass unnoticed on any of the worlds. Idolum stuck out. An Idolum that wasn’t really an Idolum, was like a sore thumb anywhere you put it.

  Winter squeezed back, reassuring Tate that she would support him. Pulling them to a stop, Tate turned and in a courtly gesture, introduced Winter to the hugely tall, gloriously beautiful woman in front of them. “Queen Altum Juls, meet Winter. Winter, this is the Idolum and Osmirian queen, Altum Juls, ruler of the Alliance and of the outer worlds,” he added with a flourish of one hand.