Hunted (25 page)

28

SAILING THROUGH SPACE

I left Prope’s cabin before she woke. Spent the rest of the night in the lounge. In the morning, two female life-support techs woke me and said I looked terrible. They were nice to me, in a spend-time-with-the-cute-stranger way, but they weren’t voracious or anything. Whatever I’d had the night before must have worn off.

Later in the day, Festina and Prope tried to act like nothing had happened…but for a long time, Festina wouldn’t look me in the eye, and Prope was always staring at me when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

Wrapped in its Sperm-tail,
Jacaranda
sped its milky way through the silence of space. Nothing happened as we crossed the line out of Celestia’s system…nothing beyond a few tense faces easing up, and people suddenly remembering gossip or jokes they’d been meaning to tell each other.

We’d all survived another one. Life goes on.

As Tobit predicted, Kaisho claimed she’d put the spores outside my door and in my bed just as a joke. “To see the look on your face,
Teelu,”
she said; which was kind of scary in itself, if she could see the look on my face when she was nowhere in sight. She swore the Balrog had always known I’d find the spores without stepping on them…so where was the harm?

Festina still gave her a real good chewing out, and Kaisho promised not to play such tricks again. None of us really trusted her; but Festina was reluctant to lock her up or invent some other punishment. Explorers liked to keep things in the family—it was one thing to yell at a fellow Explorer in private, but nobody wanted to take measures that might be noticed by the crew. Anyway, leaning on the Balrog too hard might backfire: if we got it mad, there was no telling what it might do…or what we could do to stop it.

So we pretended everything was all patched up. I spent my mornings with the Explorers—Festina, Kaisho, Tobit, and Benjamin—answering their questions about Troyen. They soon saw I knew nothing about the twenty years of war (nothing specific enough to be useful), so we turned to subjects like how to incapacitate a warrior without killing him, and the personalities of Queens Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. Since they were the longest-established queens, maybe one of them had come out on top…except they were also the most obvious targets for the outlaw queens, so maybe they’d been eliminated early on.

No way to know. All those records kept by observers on my moonbase were marked
TOP SECRET, and even Festina couldn’t get at them. Some higher admiral didn’t want us learning useful stuff about Troyen—likely the admiral who sponsored the recruiters, and
Willow’s
mission. Or my father, trying to hide how badly Samantha had failed.

About Samantha’s failure—in those days on
Jacaranda,
I finally realized how crazy it was to put an inexperienced twenty-year-old in charge of a diplomatic mission…then to leave her in charge for fifteen whole years, as things went from bad to worse. What the heck had Dad been thinking? And why had the other admirals allowed it? The way I figured it, Dad must have given the council doctored-up reports, so they wouldn’t know Sam was doing a bad job. Dad wanted to protect his daughter, and protect himself too; after all, he was the one who put her into a position she couldn’t handle.

I’d never had such thoughts before: recognizing that Sam had screwed up her mission. Screwed it up really badly. Why hadn’t that ever occurred to me before?

Maybe I was getting smarter. Festina kind of hinted at that after we’d been together a few days—she thought I should take an intelligence test, because she couldn’t believe the low scores in my official records. “You’re better than those scores,” she told me. “You may not think you are, but it’s true.”

I knew it was the other way around—Dad had fudged my real scores upward to put me over the navy’s required minimum. Anyway, if I
had
got smarter I didn’t want to know; all my life, I’d been who I was, and I hated the idea of changing.

But I
was
changing. When I was with Kaisho, I could smell that buttered-toast aroma all the time. Nobody else could. And as the days went by, I began to smell other things…strange things.

Captain Prope smelled of a fight frost green: the color itself. A kind of glossy shade, like freshly licked lipstick. I can’t tell you how someone could smell of a color—my brain must have got really scrambled. But every time Prope started watching me behind my back, that smell of misty muted green filled the air.

Festina smelled like a thunderstorm: not the storm’s scent, but its sound. The rushing wind and the pouring rain, the rumble of coming thunder. Sometimes, she even smelled of the rainbow after. It didn’t make sense…but I’d smell the sound of thunder, and Festina Ramos would walk into the room.

Tobit smelled like the gnarled surface of a walnut—the texture of it, not the scent. And Benjamin…Benjamin was a feeling through my whole body that I wanted to yawn and stretch, but yawning and stretching wouldn’t make the feeling go away. For some reason, that made me nervous; I didn’t mind people smelling like frost green or thunderclaps or walnuts, but Benjamin got me real edgy.

No matter how I yawned and stretched, I couldn’t make the edginess go away either.

After mornings with the Explorers, I’d pass the afternoons teaching the Mandasars about their own culture—so they could pass as natives if the mission absolutely required it. Counselor and the workers took my word as gospel, no matter how it conflicted with their previous ideas about home. Zeeleepull was more stubborn, arguing that Willa and Walda had explicitly told him Queen Prudence had pronounced the Continental Edict in response to the threat of the Greenstriders trying to colonize…

But his arguments never lasted long. Thirty seconds in, he would suddenly clamp his mouth shut and whisper, “Apologies,
Teelu.
Knowledge you, ignorance me. Apologies. Apologies.”

The first time he did that, my jaw fell open. Warriors don’t suddenly turn meek and yield to an opponent, except…

I sniffed the air. My newly more-sensitive nose caught a powerful whiff of an indescribable something oozing off my own skin. The scent was as sharp and strong as ether.

I had a scary suspicion it was royal pheromone.

Pheromones—now that I could smell them, I realized they were everywhere. Not just coming from the Mandasars, but from the crew and everybody.

And from me. Every second of every day. They were like fanatic servants, leaping to carry out my least little whim…even when I desperately didn’t want them to.

I didn’t want to win arguments with Zeeleepull by whacking him with a chemical hammer; but I couldn’t help it. If he opposed me more than a few seconds, the pheromone gusted out on its own. Even worse, he accepted it without question, as if I had a perfect right to make him change his mind.

Was that any different from brainwashing? Dosing him with drugs till he abandoned his old beliefs and swallowed whatever I told him?

It made me sick. But it was worse with humans.

Those mornings in die briefing room with Festina, Kaisho and the others—they’d all get caught up in discussing Explorer stuff, contingency plans, what to do if they couldn’t find the people from
Willow…
and I’d let my mind wander wherever it wanted. Sometimes I’d find myself looking at Festina, thinking how pretty she was even with that blotch on her face: thinking about her talk of judo mats, and how maybe I’d been crazy to go to Prope’s room instead, taking a substitute for the woman I was really dreaming about.

Next thing you know, I’d be smelling a pheromone coming off me as strong as spring fever: pure undiluted sex, like a lust lasso trying to rope me a conquest. Festina’s face would flush so deep red her cheeks would almost match color, and she’d start shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other like she couldn’t stand still. I’d have to excuse myself and go to the head, where I’d splash myself with cold water till the pheromone backed off.

Then, when I returned to the briefing room, Kaisho always asked, “Better, Your Majesty?” with a big smug smirk in her voice. I guess the Balrog could read my mind
and
“taste” the pheromones. As for humans, they never realized they smelled anything, but they melted like butter when the scent soaked into their brains.

Festina never showed up at my cabin door last thing at night; she had willpower. Prope, on the other hand—she held herself back two days, then arrived late the third evening “to make sure I was doing all right.”

The funny thing is I’d never hit Prope with that lust-for-me pheromone—not since that first night, when the pheromone must have flooded off me like flop-sweat and I was just too dense to notice. But Prope came visiting anyway…with a kind of confused look in her eye, as if she didn’t understand it either. Maybe she wanted to recapture whatever crazy abandon she’d felt that other night; or maybe she wanted to prove to herself it hadn’t been real, that she could bed me in cold blood without getting all dizzy and lost in emotion.

Either way, she seemed pretty determined to spend another night with me—even if she had to force herself against her own instincts. That was the part that got me: like she was scared out of her wits, but had decided this was a thing that must be done. It brought out all these weird fatherly feelings in me, as if Prope was just a little girl trying to be brave.

(Edward, going all paternal. I guess it was condescending, me thinking of an adult woman that way…but lately, I seemed to see
everybody
as a poor innocent I needed to protect.)

So what to do with Prope? I certainly couldn’t sleep with her again; I shouldn’t have done it the first time. It’d be easy to produce some horrible gagging smell that would drive her away—all I had to do was think what I wanted, and my body would pump out the stink of rotten eggs, or gangrene, or worse—but that was pretty darned crude. I didn’t want to overpower the; woman; I just wanted her to give up on getting me into the sack.

Meanwhile, Prope sat herself on the edge of my bed. Started talking about some minor something that’d gone wrong with a piece of equipment I’d never heard of, and it’d taken two hours to fix when it was only supposed to take an hour forty-five, and why didn’t the fleet train technicians properly anymore…

All the time she spoke, her hand kept lifting up to the fastener strap on her blouse then shying away again—as if she’d promised herself she’d start undressing the second she got inside my room, but now couldn’t quite go through with it. It was almost endearing; but she’d pretty soon find the nerve to rip off her clothes, and I really really wanted to think of some brilliant strategy before that happened.

Oddly enough, I did. While she was going on and on about lazy crewfolk, I wondered,
What would happen if I smelled frost green?

Thirty seconds later, that’s exactly how I smelled. I didn’t have to squinch up my brow and concentrate, it just kind of happened—like my body knew what to do, without me having to think. Very weird and amazing and scary…but I smelled like a precise duplicate of Prope herself, only stronger: glossier.

As if I were her brother, or sister, or mother, or father. People were supposed to have instincts to avoid inbreeding, right? With Prope, there was a risk she’d be turned on by the chance to sleep with herself…but I crossed my fingers and hoped pheromones were stronger than vanity.

The captain’s voice faltered. She looked up at me, a tiny look of pain on her face. For ten full seconds, she just stared into my eyes. Then she muttered, “Well, I’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” and barreled out of the cabin like she was going to throw up.

Maybe she was. It kind of made me wonder about Prope’s family.

That wasn’t the end of it. In the days that followed, Prope tried several times more…as if she hated herself for chickening out and desperately needed to prove I hadn’t got to her. Usually I smelled her coming and got my own frost green up fast enough to send her bolting away; but once she caught me by surprise, and with a sudden burst of resolve, shoved me up against the nearest bulkhead. She planted a kiss hard on my mouth, and ground her hips tight on my groin, back and forth, one, two. Then she heard people’s voices coming out of a doorway not far off, so she let me go. “Later,” she whispered, and strode off cockily, like she was finally pleased with herself.

After that, I decided maybe just to keep smelling frost green morning, noon, and night, till I left the ship. But Festina got really grouchy at me, and that soapy Lieutenant Harque started following me around. When I met the Mandasars that afternoon, Counselor gave me a pained look. “Oh,
Teelu
…must you?”

So I turned off the Prope perfume and toughed out the flight as best I could.