by Alyssa Hope
‘Sort of. Almost. Well, I know a little bit. Enough to do this. Just get out of my way.’
By this time all of their group was clustered around them looking at Sno with concern, and they barely noticed the shuttle landing quietly – and right side up - behind them. Tira saw it first and screamed, thinking it was the demons coming back, but Vara reassured him and grabbed his arm before he could open fire on them. The people who were coming towards them from the shuttle were all blue, except for one tall human with pale skin and red hair.
The red-headed human looked at Vara and shook his head. “That was the most unusual battle plan I have ever seen. We laid a few rounds down behind them as they were running, so they won’t be back for a while. And the tree, that was brilliant,” he said to Tira.
Vara thought they were wasting time. “Sno, my beloved, he has been hit, and Tira’s two are bearing, one very near his time. Please, Donovan, can we get back to the ship now and talk later, please?”
They were all loaded onto the shuttle, although Sno kept trying to sit up and tell them something about his rabbits. Vara finally realized what he was trying to say, maybe. Sno not only wore rabbit fur, he raised rabbits, and had some of the little animals in cages. His darling didn’t want to leave them there to starve without any care. Vara’s snow monster was really sweet and sensitive, even when bleeding and in pain. What a wonderful person he was, and what an excellent parent he was going to be!
‘Donovan, we can transport these rabbits of Sno’s up to the ship, along with their cages, can’t we, as long as we have a good fix on their location? Or I will go and get them ...’
Donovan sighed. ‘Sure. Dogs, snow monsters, trees, rabbits, we have room for them all.’
Vara could have kissed him, but kissed Sno instead, as they secured him for the short trip. ‘It’s alright, beloved, we’ll take care of the rabbits, they can come to the ship, too. No problem, sweet one, anything for you, anything at all.’
‘We don’t have to take the tree,’ Tira pointed out, obviously feeling like he was missing something.
Snow still seemed worried about something, but Vara couldn’t reach through his beloved’s pain to figure out what it was. It didn’t matter what it was, Sno was his beloved, as was Mikal, and they would always be there for each other. Always, no matter what happened, no matter what was in their past. Sno seemed to relax at that mental assurance, and then passed out.
The shuttle rose off the plateau with perhaps a bit more of a roar than was necessary, and the pilot turned the craft and shot off a few nose rockets as they rose up the mountain. The resultant avalanche let loose with a boom, sweeping down the mountain and destroying the road and all evidence of a fight on the plateau.
The pilot pointed at the screen in front of him. ‘There are small structures off to the left there, sir, with little beings in them – those would be the rabbit cages?’
Donovan nodded, and smiled reassuringly at Sno, even though he seemed to still be unconscious. Maybe he understood anyway.
‘Mark their location, and we’ll transport them up as soon as we’re all secure on the ship. It doesn’t look like there’s a lot of mass, so there shouldn’t be a problem.’
The shuttle slid into the docking bay and was greeted by medics who sorted the people out and transported them all to Medical in order of need. Sno went first, taken away in a hurry, then the bearing triad together, hanging onto each other, then the rest, all trying not to fall over from exhaustion.
Vara just about had a nervous breakdown at being separated from Sno, but managed to remember to be calm and peaceful for Mikal, and stayed beside that one, who was looking extremely scared. Stefan was practically wrapped around Tanu’s neck, and his blue beloved, Gali, didn’t look too happy either.
Vara and Tanu were used to the size of the Crusader, and they took the continuous activity in the corridors for granted. People were always going somewhere, and doing something, usually at high speed. That was, after all, how they had managed to sneak away on a mission. Vara gave Donovan a guilty look, and was rewarded with a humorless smile.
‘We’ll talk later. Your beloveds were down there, so your hormones would have been driving you. That may excuse you to some extent. And we retrieved the shuttle. Interesting landing.’
‘That was me,’ Tanu said, ‘don’t blame Vara for that.’
They both stared at him.
‘We’ll talk later.’ Tanu all of a sudden seemed quite mature, with a beloved leaning on him from either side. ‘Right now, these two beautiful ones need to be checked over in Medical.’
His two thin but still beautiful ones were looking shell-shocked from the number of people and all the activity around them, and they would have fallen over if Tanu wasn’t holding them up.
Mikal was leaning heavily on Vara, looking around, and finally whispered to him, “They are all blue. Everyone here. Will they welcome us, at least tolerate us, let us stay? Below, they tortured us because we were different ...”
“Yes, of course we welcome you, my darling one. There are a number of humans on the ship, many different colors of humans, and they are not only accepted, but loved, no matter how strange. Just look at Donovan. Don’t worry.”
“But ... what about the rest of our crew? Can we save them, as well?”
Vara came to a sudden stop, as did Donovan, who had overheard the last part of that quiet conversation.
“There are more, not just you and Stefan?”
“If they are still alive, yes. We were all together, at the end, with these blue ones, until we helped them escape, which we had to do, you know, because they were pregnant, what you call bearing. We had to. Our ship crash-landed here, several years ago, we were all taken prisoner, they thought they could get a ransom for us, I think, but never did. And then it just became bad, very bad ... There are, or were, eight more, who are friends as well as crew-mates.”
Donovan laid a hand on Mikal’s shoulder as though to reassure him, and then suddenly looked very pleased with himself. Vara found himself getting nervous.
‘What? Donovan? Why do you look like that? It can’t be good?’
‘Yes, it can. He is not as warm as you are, but warmer than I am, I think. Touch him, see for yourself.’
‘I am touching him. I thought he was cold. He is cold. He needs a blanket and a hot drink. What are you talking about?’
This wasn’t making any sense to Vara, but he was used to things not always making sense.
Donovan had a short and private mindtalk conversation with someone, who turned out to be the Chief Transport Officer, and that person joined them in Medical almost immediately.
“The experiments with targeting by body temperature?” Donovan asked the officer. “How far along are those?”
“Targeting?” Mikal looked alarmed.
“No, no, not targeting to shoot, targeting to transport. What is your people’s normal body temperature, Mikal?”
“In your Celsius, 38 or 39 degrees, I think. The other humans, the demons,” Mikal looked apologetically at Donovan, “are cold-blooded, maybe a degree or two cooler, which is why their skin is not as white, I think.”
He looked at Vara and raised his eyebrows, smiling. ‘You don’t have hair or eyebrows! And your body temperature is even a little bit warmer than ours? Is that why you don’t have hair?’
‘I don’t know. We are what we are, as you are. Maybe we can be warmer and we don’t need that lovely hair on our heads like you have because we have such a beautiful warm planet?’
‘Maybe you can keep me warm?’ They smiled at each other. This was going well, Vara thought.
‘As soon as Sno is better we will really warm you up ...’
“Vara, pay attention.” Donovan brought Vara’s focus back from his private conversation with his beloved. “You need to support Mikal.”
What did the big man think Vara had been doing?
The Transport Officer and the Medical Officer compared notes, and both of them smiled
at Donovan, then at Mikal.
“Perfect, I think we can work with this. The remaining white people, your ship-mates, are all kept together, you think? Eight of them? And none of them bearing?”
Mikal nodded, not sure what was going to happen, but obviously hopeful. “In a prison, a horrible place, and all male, so none are pregnant. We can get them? If there is fighting, I will come, they are my people, my crew ...”
“No fighting. We’ll just create some confusion, and raise the demons temperatures a bit by making their prisoners disappear, if we can. Our transport officers will use their sensors to look for eight people, eight bodies about your size and mass, who are all a bit warmer than the others around them. Simple. There are more blue prisoners, as well?”
“No, I haven’t seen any others.” Gali interjected. “We thought Sno was a prisoner somewhere else, or dead, but he had escaped many years ago! We didn’t know! Then there were just the four of us left, and they put all of us together before we escaped. Mikal and Stefan helped us to get away, because they are pilots and we aren’t, and with these two bearing they understood that the babies couldn’t be born into slavery... The little ones would have been taken away ...” He shuddered, and lapsed into silence, his face tucked into Tanu’s neck.
Vara held onto Mikal, and Tanu held onto Stefan and Gali, and they all hoped for a miracle for those who were still prisoners. Donovan disappeared back down to the transport station to help make that happen.
The Chief Medical Officer, Nasa, continued to work on the deep wound in Sno’s side, constantly checking his plasma transfusion and his breathing. At the same time he was making clucking noises as he saw all the marks and scars on his pale blue skin.
“They must be nasty people down there. Maybe we can blow up this whole planet after we have rescued your people from it,” he suggested.
Stefan shrugged. “If the planet hadn’t been there we would all have died instead of crashing onto it.” Everyone stared at him and he mumbled, “Sorry.”
“No,” Nasa said, “Good reminder. Everything has a purpose, and we don’t always know what it is.”
He looked up at Tanu. “You saved this one’s life with the first aid you rendered. We should get you into the Medic program.”
Then he went back to carefully sewing up the wound in Sno’s side, one layer at a time, while Tanu stood there with his mouth open in astonishment, and his beloveds looked proud. Vara looked at Tanu with new respect, thinking that maybe there really was something to this triad business after all, as it seemed to bring out the best in people. It was doing that for him, he hoped, and clearly for Tanu as well.
“Do you know what Donovan is doing?” he finally asked Nasa. “This rescue and the technique they talked about?”
‘The officers in Transport have been working on being able to locate our people on a planet surface by their body temperature, because we are almost two degrees warmer than most humans. Although there are many different kinds of humans, obviously. Anyway, we always worry that we have left one or two of our Children behind on a planet and we don’t know about it. How horrible that would be! Right now, it may help that Mikal’s people can be differentiated by temperature from their captors. Donovan and the Transport Officer think they can single them out that way and transport them.”
They all waited and prayed. It took a while for everyone to be checked over, especially the bearing ones, which kept everyone in Medical busy. Nasa also took the requisite DNA samples from the five rescued Ceruleans and sent those off to their home planet registry. The tissues in Mikal’s leg were healed, so he wasn’t in pain anymore. And then they prayed and waited some more.
Nasa smiled at them all, including the still unconscious Sno.
“There’ll be a lot of celebrating when your home triads find out you’re finally safe. And that some of them will be grand-sires very soon! I don’t think we’ve ever rescued a completed triad before – you and the babies are rare and precious. Of course, all babies are precious.”
The three in Tira’s triad were curled up together on one of the big beds in Medical, not wanting to have even the slightest distance between them, and Nasa didn’t want them going too far from him either. Manu seemed to be very close to giving birth and he hadn’t had very good pre-natal care.
Tanu and his two were sitting cross-legged and close together on another bed. Tanu was encouraging his beloveds to eat, while he stroked their thin bodies gently. Some of the med assistants were plying the newly rescued ones with food and drink, and had found soft new clothing for all of them.
“As soon as everyone feels a bit better, we’ll all go down to the bathing pools. They’re very relaxing, especially for Manu and Dora – you can float in the warm water. The babies will like it too!” Nasa assured them.
Vara and Mikal were lying on another one of the beds wrapped around Sno, almost covering him. It wasn’t so much to keep him warm as it was to comfort themselves and assure themselves that he was still breathing. Nasa gave up on trying to tell them that the monitors would let him know if there were any problems, and tucked warm blankets over them so they could rest. Then he curled up in one of the big chairs with a blanket of his own, and let himself nap until there was something else for him to do.
Their naps were rudely interrupted by a series of loud noises. There was a sudden flurry of activity out in the hallway, and a great deal of startled yelling, and people calling out ‘beloved!’, and other people screaming to be left alone, and Donovan yelling for everyone to be quiet. Donovan won, as he usually did in that kind of situation.
“White people, newly rescued ones, into Medical, this door right here, please. Our staff will check you over, make sure you are healthy and get you everything you need. Your friends Mikal and Stefan are already in there. It’s safe, trust me.”
“All you blue people who suddenly think you have found your beloveds, quit scaring the crap out of them! Make yourselves useful. Clean out the big sitting room next door, then go up to the dining hall and get soup and bread and jugs of hot drinks, and bring them back here to the sitting room. Go!”
There was some sullen mumbling, but when Donovan opened the door to Medical the white people slid in without interference from their would-be lovers. They cried out in joy and relief when they saw Mikal and Stefan. The eight were all thin, even thinner than those two, and wearing only ragged pants. They had strange wraps around their necks which Vara realized, with a shock, must have been blindfolds, and their hands were still tied together in front of them.
There was a great deal of crying and hugging and exclaiming, and the ties – and blindfolds – were removed, and they all collapsed together on the floor.
“They were taking us off to be executed, for helping the other ones escape, and then we were here and someone pulled the blindfolds down, but then strange blue people were chasing us, and we thought ... we didn’t know what to think!”
Mikal hugged them, then explained what had happened, and told them that they were free now, and that these strange blue people were, as far as he could tell, friendly. As was the large pale one with red hair. As were the small furry animals known as puppies who had slipped into Medical and were crawling onto their laps and licking their faces.
“These puppies, they are surely friendly! They radiate happiness. But what was all that chasing about? All those blue ones like you who chased us through the halls? That was very scary ...”
Vara sighed. “I’m sorry. You are safe, really you are. They got carried away; sixteen of them morphing at once is a lot of hormones being produced all in one place. Our people know our loved ones as soon as they see them or sense them; our beloveds are predestined by the universe, just as yours may be. Those ones recognize you as their beloveds, just as Mikal is mine and Sno’s, and Stefan is Tanu’s and Gali’s.”
“So we have no choice?” They huddled closer together.
“No, no. You always have choice. You can say no, or not right now, and that will be respected. Bu
t the universe doesn’t make mistakes.” He hesitated. “We bond in triads, and for life. Your people?”
“Our people are bisexual,” Mikal said, “you know what this means? We generally have sexual relations only with those of our own gender until we are ready to pair up and have offspring. When and if that happens, we mate with one of the opposite sex, and then bond for life. That is why we were all male on our ship – the crews are all either male or female, so that there can be loving, but no pairing for babies, which could confuse a mission.”
They all contemplated the strangeness of other people’s ways, and then one of the newly rescued white people asked, “So, I don’t mean to be rude, but your people are all male on this ship, too? The ones who wish to mate with us? How are there babies, then? The two that we helped to escape are with child, so you can’t all be male. This is confusing.”
“Less so once you have had a chance to rest, and had some food and drink,” Nasa assured them.
Vara tried to think how best to explain something that he had always just known. “We morph in stages throughout our lives, changing, maturing sexually only when we meet our beloved ones. So we develop from androgynous when we are single to being full hermaphrodites when the triad forms. But we can be, and often are, physically mature but still androgynous, as are many on this ship. Not everyone finds a triad. Does this make sense? The ones who were chasing you down the hall,” he said with a smile, “are morphing as we speak, which is why the excess of hormones. They are also bringing food for you, if that helps.”
Some of the white ones were starting to look curious rather than scared. “So, it is kind of like ours but different? Each one of them will be both male and female? And three people in a bond? One of us and two of them?” They looked at each other. “That could be ... well ... interesting.”
“There will be more conversation on this, I’m sure,” Nasa pointed out, “but if I may, I need to examine you all, and treat any wounds or injuries. Do you wish to stay together for this, or in pairs, or do this in privacy?”