Authors: Evangeline Anderson
“Hey, I read a lot in Triple Max. Helped pass the time.”
“I bet,” I said dryly. “But the very fact that Tazaxx won’t be able to resist Zoe is what makes me so reluctant to take her.”
“He wouldn’t dare steal another male’s property—especially not a rich and influential one like Van’Dleek’s,” Grav pointed out. “But you having Zoe—it’ll impress the hell out of him and make him more willing to deal.”
I knew he was right but I couldn’t suppress the feeling of worry that rose in me when I thought of taking Zoe into danger—even a controlled kind of danger. She was mine, Godsdamnit and I needed to protect her. I wanted nothing more than to lock her away and keep her safe forever.
But I couldn’t do that—because no matter how loudly my possessive instincts growled, she wasn’t mine. Not really.
“All right,” I said at last and pointed a finger at Zoe. “But
stay close.
I’m serious, Zoe, don’t leave my side. I don’t want a repeat of Gallana.”
“Speaking of Gallana, look who’s all recovered.” Zoe parted the hair at the side of her neck carefully and I saw a tiny, purple-green face peering out at me.
“What in the Frozen Hells, Zoe?” I growled, frowning. “You can’t take those damn things with you.”
“Why not? They’re really tame—look.” She put up a hand and the three little creatures came crawling out to sit obediently on her hand.
“
Nib-nibs!”
In two strides, Grav was across the room and reaching for one of the tiny creatures.
“No!” Zoe snatched her hand away and held the chittering
nib-nibs
protectively to her chest. “They’re pets,” she explained to the startled Grav. “They’re
not
for snacking.”
“Hey—okay.” He held up his hands. “I wasn’t going to eat ‘em. I’ve read about them—just never seen any up close.”
“Sorry—it’s just that
some
people think they’re only good for a between-meal snack.” She shot me a look.
“What?” I said, defensively. “I told you—I tried one
once
and spit it out before I even bit down.”
“You say you’ve got them tamed?” Grav asked, apparently still interested.
“Look, I’ve been working with them while Al synthesized my costume. It’s amazing how quickly they learn. Okay guys,” she said, addressing the
nib-nibs,
“Roll over.” Immediately all three of them lay on their backs and rolled over in her hand. “Speak,” Zoe told them and they all sat up and chattered. “Play dead,” she said and they immediately flopped down and lay motionless across her palm.
“Nice,” Grav said, nodding.
“It’s more than nice—it’s
amazing
.” Zoe’s big blue eyes shone, making her even more gorgeous, if that was possible. “I taught them all that in less than an hour. It’s almost like they
know
what I want them to do even before I tell them.”
“That’s because they’re mildly telepathic,” Grav said. “It’s how they keep track of each other—if you take one away from its colony, it can still get back, no matter how far away it is, just by zeroing in on the mental energy of the others.”
“Wow.” Zoe looked at her tiny pets with newfound respect and I knew I’d never be able to convince her to leave them behind now. Well, maybe having a Pure One that had tame
nib-nibs
as pets would also add to the
verisimilitude
of our disguise. It certainly seemed like the eccentric kind of thing a rich
douche-nozzle,
to use Zoe’s term, would do.
“What did you name them?” I asked, resignedly. “You
did
name them, right?”
“Of course. This one is Rhaegar, this one is Viserys, and this one—the one I rescued from Count Creepy—is Drogon. He’s my main guy, aren’t you, fella?” she asked, stroking the little creature gently with one finger. He hummed contentedly and rubbed against her hand in apparent ecstasy.
I felt a tightening in my gut and realized I was actually getting jealous of the damn
nib-nib
! At least it got to feel the touch of her soft little hands. I wanted those hands all over me—and I wanted mine all over Zoe. Seeing her in that damn disguise which showed off all her creamy curves didn’t help my desire to possess her either.
“Rhaegar …Viserys…Drogon. Are those Earth names?” Grav asked, still watching as she played with her pets.
Zoe flushed, her freckled cheeks going pink.
“Well,
sort
of—they’re from a TV show I like—a kind of entertainment you watch on a screen. Just call me ‘the mother of dragons’—or, I guess ‘the mother of nib-nibs.’”
She laughed and Grav rumbled laughter too, not because he got her Earth-centric joke, I was sure. But just because Zoe had such an infectious laugh. Soft, and feminine, and lilting—Gods, was there
anything
about her that didn’t arouse me? I didn’t fucking think so.
“It’s time to go,” I said, my voice rougher than I meant it to be. As if on cue, Al came whizzing into the room, already in his travel form.
“Master, I have received an answer from the compound—Tazaxx will be most pleased to meet with Baron Van’Dleek today.”
“Good,” I said, pulling on my mask and drinking a few drops of the
saphor
juice compound. “Tell him the baron and his entourage are on the way.”
Zoe
I don’t know what I expected when we got to the surface of Giedi Prime, but it was nothing like Gallana. On the Ma
jor
an spaceport, there had been, for the most part, a sense of beauty and grace—an interest in aesthetics which was sadly lacking here.
Giedi Prime was a big, dirty, ugly, industrialized planet where the city seemed to stretch on and on forever with tall towers and huge stacks belching smoke into the air.
The sky was completely black.
“Oh—I didn’t know we were getting here in the middle of the night,” I remarked to Sarden as he piloted his small shuttle over the planet’s surface. The two guys were up front, due to their size and I was squeezed into the back, looking out through the windshield-type-screen at the front.
“We’re not—this is the middle of the Giedi Prime day,” he said.
“Pollution here is fuckin’ awful,” Grav growled from my other side. “Just stay in the shuttle and keep the air circulator turned on full blast and we’ll be okay.”
“It’ll be better at Tazaxx’s compound,” Sarden told me. “He’s got his own private atmosphere bubble over the entire property. Probably cost thirty million credits at least.”
“Wow.” I was suitably impressed and kept my eyes peeled, still curiously drinking in all the alien sights around me as we flew. Not that there was much to see—just lots and lots of dark buildings and belching smokestacks. The whole planet looked like the end of the
Lorax
book after the greedy Onceler gets hold of it and ruins it so the humming fish and swammy-swans and barbaloots have to move out.
My
nib-nibs,
Rae, Vis, and little Drogon, my favorite, chattered quietly to each other in my hair but otherwise were perfectly well behaved. They really were the cutest little guys and the perfect pets. I was gladder than ever that I’d rescued them after hearing that they were mildly telepathic. Imagine the poor things having to hear their buddy screaming inside their heads while he got chewed up and swallowed! Ugh! If I ever saw Count Doloroso again— which I never hoped to do, but if I did—I’d give him a piece of my mind and a kick in the balls. What a jerk, trying to eat such adorable little creatures!
At last, after about thirty minutes of flying, we came to a kind of countryside—if you could call it that. Mostly it just looked like a big, open, barren plain with no buildings on it. There weren’t any trees or lakes or animals either, but there was a dark, scraggly kind of grass which was apparently what passed for nature on Giedi Prime.
Once again I was reminded of the Lorax, which had been my favorite book as a kid. “
At the far end of town, where the grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow and sour when it blows…”
We hadn’t opened any of the windows in the shuttle so much as a crack but I was willing to bet the wind on this planet
did
smell sour. It was pretty much the nastiest, most polluted place I’d ever seen and I had visited a friend who lived in the industrial part of Houston once, so that was saying something.
“Heads up. Compound ahead,” Sarden said.
“What?” I asked, frowning. “I don’t see any…”
And then I saw it. Sitting in the middle of the dark field of sickly grickle-grass, was an enormous dome. It was black too—pure, shiny, bible-black—which was why I hadn’t immediately seen it. It rose out of the blighted ground like a bubble of diseased blood that might burst and spew ichor everywhere at any moment.
Yech
.
Sarden brought the shuttle down right in front of the curving, shiny black side and then spoke into some kind of communicator in a technical-sounding jargon I couldn’t make heads or tails of.
Whoever was on the other end seemed to get it though, because after a moment, the black bubble started to swell outward and then it just sort of
enveloped
our shuttle. Kind of like an amoeba envelopes its prey, when it eats some other hapless, microscopic creature living in its pond of dirty rainwater. Which is how I felt when the giant black bubble grew to encapsulate us—tiny…microscopic.
Also kind of claustrophobic.
“Um, are we going to be able to get out of here all right?” I asked, trying not to sound nervous and failing miserably.
“They’ll let us out the same way we came in,” Sarden assured me as the black border of the bubble passed over us. It swallowed the shuttle whole, leaving us in a big parking area that looked like a warehouse. “Hopefully with Sellah and Teeny in tow.”
“From your lips to the Goddess’s ears,” Grav muttered, adjusting the knives he had clipped to the spiked leather straps criss-crossing his muscular chest.
“Everybody be quiet now—here comes Tazaxx’s emissary,” Sarden muttered. “Remember, we need to get in and out of here as quickly as possible. The
saphor
solution I took to change my skin color has a time limit on it.”
“How long are we talking?” Grav wanted to know.
“One solar hour—two max. But hopefully it won’t be a problem—we should be in and out of here fast—Tazaxx isn’t known for prolonging business deals.”
“Can’t you just take more if it starts to wear off?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. The solution has a two solar-hour recovery time on it—it won’t work again after it wears off until that time is up.”
“Oh, okay. Then I guess we’d better be quick,” I said.
“We will be,” Sarden said grimly.
“All right—let’s go. I’m ready.” Grav cracked his knuckles again, making me shudder. He might be Sarden’s friend but the fact that he was such a big, scary guy
and
a confessed murderer meant I was still kind of nervous around him.
“All right—I’m popping the hatch,” Sarden said.
The door to the shuttle opened and I leaned forward eagerly, trying to see the emissary.
What I saw was a giant piece of crap wearing a rainbow-colored cape.
At least, that was what it
appeared
to be. A giant, man-sized poo that had somehow managed to stand up on end and learned to move.
Okay, sorry for the gross mental image but seriously—that’s just
exactly
what it looked like. It slid forward smoothly and I looked behind it, wondering if it was leaving a trail of slime. There was no slime, though, and after a minute I saw why—its bottom half had about a million tiny little legs and feet all over it and they were moving kind of like a caterpillar’s legs to carry it along.
It had a vaguely human looking face in the middle of its lumpy head—by which I mean it had two eyes, a sort of nose, and a round, lipless mouth. Out of the mouth came a nasal, croaking voice like a bullfrog with a cold.
“You are Baron Van’Dleek?” it demanded, waving a lumpy arm at Sarden.
“I am.” Sarden, who was dressed in his Miami Vice best with the baggy white trousers and black, boxy jacket stepped out of the shuttle and looked down his nose at the moving piece of crap who was apparently our guide.
Sarden was looking good, despite his new light blue skin and the Van’Dleek mask. It was amazing how well the smart-fabric conformed to his face—it even hid his horns. And the fact that the jacket hung open, revealing his mouthwateringly muscular torso didn’t hurt either.
I noticed, though, that he was careful to keep his trousers closed when he moved, so as not to expose himself by accident. Which was a good thing—a wardrobe malfunction is one thing but letting his entire wang dangle outside the white pants would definitely ruin the cool, 80s look he had going.
“You and your entourage will have to be scanned before being admitted to the main compound,” the moving crap informed him as he stepped down.
Sarden gave our guide a condescending sneer. “Of course. But make it quick—I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
I stared at him in surprise as I scrambled out of the shuttle with a helping hand from Grav. Wow, he was nailing the rich douche-nozzle part right off the bat!
“Of course.” The piece of crap—at some point we would probably learn his name but he was always going to be POC to me—nodded stiffly.
He produced a large instrument that looked like a bullhorn from under his colorful, rainbow cape. Pointing it at Sarden’s face, he pressed a button. A blue light illuminated Sarden’s features for a moment, then went dark again.
POC consulted a screen that was on the back of the bullhorn and frowned. “Hmm…these readings are most…peculiar,” he said in his nasally bullfrog-with-a-cold voice.
“What are you talking about? Hurry up! I don’t have all day,” Sarden snapped.
“But…these readings…” POC looked worried and he wasn’t the only one. My stomach did a little flip. Was it possible that the smart-fabric wasn’t smart enough to do the job? Could the scanner POC was using see through Sarden’s disguise? If so we were
so
screwed…
“I can’t help it if your equipment isn’t up to par,” Sarden barked, scowling at POC.
“But—”
“You have exactly two solar seconds to finish this scan and let me pass,” Sarden snapped. “If you’re not done by then, I’m getting back in my shuttle and leaving and I’m taking my credit
with
me.”