by Calista Skye
He continues to ignore the main point. “The Ancestors came from Bune. That much is true, then.”
“More or less. But they’re not here now. They’re all dead, and their offspring is living in tribes in the jungle. With no women to fuck.”
“Why was this done?”
There’s a deep bong as I lean my forehead against an empty glass cylinder in exasperation. He’s being very difficult. “Oh, I don’t know. Probably the same reason the girls and I were taken from Earth. Except this ship doesn’t look like the Plood one. At all. Hey, maybe we’re supposed to make a new species. A mix of caveman and Earth woman. We better get started. We can do it right here.”
“What is this?” Brax’tan calls from over at the wall.
“I hope it’s your dick,” I mutter and saunter over to him.
There’s a smaller cylinder, lying on its side. No, hundreds of them, end to end along the wall. There are subtle differences between these and the other cylinders, not least the several layers of pebbles and soil that takes up the bottom third of each tube.
“They held Lifegivers,” I suggest. “I’ve never seen one, but I’ve had them described. They’re not native to Xren. I don’t think they’re native to anywhere. Clearly a product of genetic engineering. No reason for a thing like that to evolve naturally. After all, most species can procreate on their own. My species can. Wanna see?” My rational mind is not-drunk too, now.
Brax’tan frowns. “The Lifegivers came from here? Along with the Ancestors?”
“Bet your shady shaman didn’t tell you about that.”
Brax’tan stares into the distance. “A thousand or more men are taken to Xren, a deadly planet. They’re released, along with Lifegivers to give them babies and so prolong their tribes. And yet, their descendants have the completely wrong idea and think they’ve always been there, and that the women were taken.”
“Most of what the shamans tell the tribes about the Ancestors is false,” I state. “But I think the things they tell you about how to Mate is right. I should check, though. Show me what the shaman told you to do to me. I mean, to a woman.”
I’m getting frustrated, so I reach out to grasp his bulge. But he casually sidesteps and deflects my hand.
Fine. He doesn’t want it. I’ve given him all the discreet hints I’m going to. If this were a movie from the 1960s, I’d now be wrapping my chest up tight in my gown and turning away in a huff.
“Much of the teachings of the shamans made little sense to me,” Brax’tan says. “It seems I was right in distrusting it.”
I stifle a yawn. This alien spaceship is boring me. “Distrusting it to the point of happily going to Bune, the forbidden mountain. The day after it goes wild with lights and lasers and stuff. Yeah, I think you’re too smart to fall for those things. Bune gave your ancestors the myths so they wouldn’t lose hope. That’s all.”
He glances at me with those golden eyes, and that’s all it takes for more tingles to shoot downwards. “You seem to know a lot about this place.”
8
- Delyah -
I shrug. “We’ve been living in the shadow of this mountain for months. Thinking about it. Talking about it. Exploring it as much as we’ve had the time to. Talking to men from Xren. Some pieces fell into place.”
“You think we’re supposed to breed a new kind of human? A mix?”
In the weird state I’m in, hearing him use a word like ‘breed’ makes my heart skip a beat. “No. That’s not it. But I like the idea.”
A funny smile is dancing on his lips. “I suppose we can explore that option later. For now, I think one of us has had too much strange water to be all here. Shall we see if there’s another room in this machine for going in space and to planets?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
We walk past endless rows of empty and shattered cylinders to the opposite wall. It too draws away when we get close, and then the light goes on in another room.
This one is smaller, but it still has a high ceiling. The cylinders here are much larger, and they are of irregular size. And not all of them are empty.
I bravely scoot behind Brax’tan’s back when I notice it. “There is something in that one! And that one!”
They’re shapeless, dark blobs, floating in a clear liquid in their wide cylinders.
Brax’tan walks up to one, and I follow. “They’re still alive, I think. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not a Big and not a Small.”
I lean out from behind his back and study the cylinder. The creature inside is dark, but has a rainbow-like sheen to its scales. The body is long and sleek, and it has irregular spikes standing up along its spine up to the head, which is small and fine and even beautiful. There are little protrusions at the shoulders, as if it will soon sprout wings.
I wonder at how such a being could come to be. It seems too beautiful for this world, as if created by some otherworldly force, greater than anything known to me or to anyone else, a force for unspeakable good—
“Ow! What?” I rub my arm, where Brax’tan just pinched me.
“Have you finished staring at it? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said. I called your name many times.”
Even my not-drunk brain finally makes the connection. A creature that mesmerizes you when you look at it. “It’s a dragon. Like that Troga-thing Caroline trapped.”
“You know what this is?”
“Kind of. I’ve never seen one myself. But I’ve heard of them. Very dangerous.” I take a step back from the cylinder. I must have walked all the way up to it while caught in the spell of its perfect proportions.
Brax’tan taps on the glass. “Is it dead?”
There’s no movement in the cylinders. All three dragons do actually look dead.
There’s an empty cylinder right by the two with dragons in them. Troga’s, probably.
“No, these things are probably still alive and in some kind of suspended animation.”
Except Troga.
I touch the glass of her empty tube and sniffle. “She must have been beautiful. And now she’s dead.” A heavy grief comes over me, and tears suddenly run down my face while my body is racked with sobs.
My rational mind has come partly back to life, and now it’s looking at the rest of me and saying ‘what the fuck?’.
Brax’tan embraces me gently, and I snuggle my face up to his hard, warm chest, sobbing hard and not even trying to stop it. His spicy scent fills my nose.
“Too much water from Bune makes one first crazy, then sad,” he says softly into my ear. “And you were swimming in it.”
He holds me securely, and his warmth makes everything that has happened since I came to this fucking planet suddenly wash over me like a giant flood wave. My wailing sobs echo from the alien walls.
I relive all the shit that’s happened. And it’s a lot. Alesya being murdered. Then us girls digging her grave. Being dumped here in the first place. The constant danger and gradual realization that that won’t change. The girls going missing, one after the other. Sophia’s difficult delivery, when I thought for real that we would lose both the baby and her. And all through it, me having to always keep cool and be the leader, even when all I want to do is curl up in a brown little ball and scream.
Well, I can scream now. And I do. Into Brax’tan’s warm chest, feeling his immense heart beating impossibly slowly against my cheek.
I hang onto him for a good while, and he patiently holds me in his strong arms.
Finally I wipe my tears and reluctantly disengage, not thrilled to leave this warm and safe embrace.
Safe? I look up at his face, feeling slightly ridiculous and being faintly aware that I said some weird things back there. No, he doesn’t look offended.
I pick up my crossbow. “Sorry. I behaved very badly back there. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Water from Bune came over you. Or rather, into you. I’ve seen it before. But perhaps not quite as strongly.”
“You swam in the water, too.
You don’t feel it?”
“I made sure not to swallow any. It helped. You will feel the effects for a while. But not as deeply. Shall we explore further?”
He doesn’t wait for my reply, just walks on through the room.
I follow again, half expecting to find a third room with glass cylinders for all the dinosaurs on Xren. Or at least one for the gray ghosts like Alice. But when the far wall draws away, there’s no similar room beyond. It’s just jungle again.
I walk up to it, staring at the trees and the bushes as if I’ve never seen them before. I’m met with a wall of smells and the sounds I’ve heard every day for almost a year on this planet.
I take a deep breath of the exotic and very organic air. “It’s a way out of the ship.”
“Don’t go through,” Brax’tan warns me, and I freeze. “We don’t know if the door opens from the outside.”
I take a quick step back. “Good point.”
There’s not just jungle out there. There’s also the start of a deep trench lined with broken glass. It continues into the forest in a straight line.
“Troga’s trench,” I state. “She really did come from here. About the same time we arrived.”
“The creature you spoke of? Like the ones encased in glass?”
“That creature, yes.” I briefly fill him in on the main points of Caroline’s recent adventure, carefully avoiding every mention of the Treasure.
“It was brought back to life and let out,” Brax’tan immediately concluded. “There is indeed someone in here. Someone whose intentions are not necessarily good.”
“Not necessarily,” I reply drily. “Or even definitely not.”
I turn my back to the jungle, and the room goes a little darker when the door to the jungle closes. “Okay. Now we have an emergency exit from here. But now that we’re in here, I think we should check out all of it.”
Brax’tan is way ahead of me and walks along the wall, triggering another door to open.
He peers inside. “Very small.”
“Very,” I agree and step past him into the compartment, which has a ceiling twelve feet up and could easily have room for a marching band. “I think I know what it is. Step inside?”
Brax’tan carefully joins me in the room, looking around the bare walls.
I study a part of the wall that’s a little more colorful than the rest of the room. I think I know what this is. “Congratulations are in order, Brax’tan. You’re about to take your first ride in an elevator.” I press a suitable panel, and the door closes.
It’s very quiet, and I can’t detect any motion. Either this isn’t an elevator at all, or it’s moving very slowly.
The door opens again, to a completely different scene.
“This room traveled,” Brax’tan concludes. “Or it just turned.”
I peer into the new room. “Could be. I think it probably went up. Or down. But considering how far down in the ship I think we were to start with, my guess is up.”
We stand there for a while, looking into the new room to check for dangers. Again, the only scent I can sense is Brax’tan’s, and it is a very nice scent. There’s no trace of chemicals or artificial notes. That smell is all him.
The not-drunkenness has mostly passed, and I try to not think of the things I said back there. But I meant them, and I’m not sure I mean them any less now. The not-water didn’t make me horny, it just made me not bottle it up.
“Should put it in capsules and sell back home,” I mumble. “Fantastic for therapy sessions.”
“What?” Brax’tan steps out of the elevator and looks around, his hand on his sword.
His vigilance makes me feel safe, so I follow him. “Never mind.”
This room is darker than the previous ones. It’s also hard to see which shape it is. That’s mostly because the whole thing is a night sky.
As in, the floor and ceiling and walls are black, with millions of stars in every color. When I step out into it, I experience a short moment of vertigo because it feels like standing on nothing, and the only way to know which way is up is to look at my feet. I’ve been in planetariums before, and they can be nice, but this is a whole other level of scarily realistic.
“This is… crazy,” I gasp when the full effect hits me. “It’s like being out in space. Floating freely.”
“The night is everywhere,” Brax’tan agrees.
I grab his forearm to keep my balance as another wave of disorientation comes over me. He’s the most solid thing in here. “This is space. This is what space looks like when you’re out there.”
“Stars all around us.” Brax’tan’s voice is full of wonder.
I squeeze his arm. For a caveman who’s never been closer to a planetarium than several light years, this has to be pretty overwhelming. “Nice, huh?”
“Terrifying.”
I look up at him. He has to be in his twenties still. Back on Earth, how many guys his age would admit to being terrified at something like this? There’s no fake bravado in this man. He knows who he is, and he doesn’t have to pretend.
I always liked guys like that. And still, he can’t be that afraid. To a caveman who’s lived his whole life in the jungle, being inside this spaceship has to seem like being dumped into a dream. Even to me it seems otherworldly and weird, and I’ve been living around advanced tech my whole life.
I squeeze his arm again, enjoying the hardness and stringiness and sheer strength I feel in him. When I was not-drunk and said I wanted to fuck him, that wasn’t a lie. It’s kind of crept up on me, but I really do. I’m not the most experienced in that way, but the few guys I’ve been with have been nowhere near as cool as him. The comparison is ridiculous. Like comparing a low-res, xeroxed black and white copy of the Mona Lisa with the real thing. As in, the real living woman Da Vinci used as a model. This guy is an actual man. And he’s the first I’ve ever met.
I know he’s interested in me, too. His bulge twitches and grows and shrinks at irregular intervals. I catch him giving me stolen looks, and I’m pretty sure he bent down to secretly smell my hair when we were standing in the elevator.
He could have taken me at any time. I don’t think the crossbow deterred him at all. He could easily have snatched it from my hand. Even when I was throwing my not-drunk self at him, he didn’t take advantage of me. Even though I wanted him to.
Being away from the cave and the girls helps, too. I’ve been suppressing so much of me back there, trying to act like a calm and serious leader who can handle anything. Now, it’s like I am on vacation. And I’m not the first to feel like this away from home.
I catch his golden eyes. Here in the semi-darkness, it’s so easy to see that they have a warm glow all of their own. “I’m sorry I abducted you.”
He lifts his eyebrows. “Sorry you what?”
“I abducted you. Pointing this at you.” I lift the crossbow slightly.
“Is that what you were doing? Abducting me?”
I’m starting to feel silly. “Well, I threatened you and forced you to go places where you maybe wouldn’t have gone otherwise.”
“Ah. Then you were being very subtle. I didn’t even notice. I thought I was going to the places I wanted to go. I remember asking you to go home. It made me somewhat happy when you didn’t.”
Some butterflies are taking off in my stomach “Yeah? Why was that?”
9
- Brax’tan -
There are far too many stars. They’re not just up, where well-behaved stars are supposed to stay, but also down and to the sides. It’s making me dizzy.
“Because I enjoy your company.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
I ponder it. “Yes. And because you’re different, but still not too strange to understand. I enjoy the sound of your voice. I enjoy the way your hips swivel and your chest trembles sometimes. I like to look at your face. It’s alien, but it attracts my eyes.”
It’s true, too. That warm tone of her smooth skin calls out for my touch,
and sometimes I reach out to touch her hair when she’s in front of me. Every time I retract my hand, because it feels like I’m imposing myself on her. A gentle, soft being like this must not be subjected to that. I had no idea a woman would be this delicate, that she would make me want to protect her against any danger.
She looks up at me with her dark, mysterious eyes, still holding my arm. Her touch is cool and firm, and it contributes to my dizziness. “When I drank the water from Bune — you could have Mated with me.”
My crotch swells at the very idea. “You weren’t yourself. That water makes you go wild. I’ve never seen it take that shape before, but it was still somewhat recognizable. And anyway, one of the things the shaman said that I do believe is that one must Worship first, before the Mating.”
“Were you not tempted to Worship me?”
She glances at my groin. I can feel it twitch.
I swallow with a dry throat. “I was. More than anything has tempted me before.”
“Do you mind if we sit down? These stars are making me dizzy.” She sits and drags me down with her.
Sitting down makes me feel more secure, although it’s a very strange feeling to be sitting on stars. Still, this seems to be a relatively safe place. No Bigs or Smalls in transparent tubes.
I take my pack off. “I wonder how the food is doing after all the swimming.”
I check on the food, and it seems to have survived being soaked in water.
Delyah holds up a soggy leaf with the remains of her own food. “It all turned to mush. Sploshing around at the bottom of my bag. I suppose I could still eat it.”
I unwrap a slice of meat and hand it over. “Better not. You’ve had enough of the water from Bune for one day. Or one year.”
“Tell me about it.”
I rummage through my pack and get out the little sack of ubru that I usually bring on long walks. “Try this instead. It won’t make you sad.”
10
- Delyah -