Four days after getting Pani back, Bach stepped on board the diplomats’ shuttle that would carry him back up into the stars so he could complete his ‘favor’ to Remeik. And though he’d never taken his family with him on any of the countless missions before, this time he took both Pani and the brunette with him.
Chapter Ten
The ship was extremely primitive. Sausage like in shape, void of imagination, still burning petrol, for crying out loud. It was hard to believe humans had got the thing off the ground, much less out of their atmosphere. But here was the proof of their achievement, floating in the blackness of space in front of his diplomatic vessel. It was also the final proof that Bach personally needed; humans did not belong as pets.
“Cruel,” one of the shuttle’s pilots said, jarring Bach from his thoughts.
Standing at the viewing station, his arms folded across his chest, Bach turned to look at him. “What is?”
“Putting pets in space like that. Stranding them out in the middle of nothing, no way to get home and leaving them to starve or run out of air.”
“Yes,” Bach agreed slowly. “That is cruel.”
Unless the humans launched themselves, an observation that no one would believe. While those that did, would likely cast their votes for invading and conquering, and it would be another Kadmier tragedy all over again. Instead of seeing humans as exotic, intelligent pets, they would be seen as threats and eliminated.
“The distress signal is cycling,” the communications officer said.
“Record it,” Bach told him. “How many life forms remain?”
Studying his controls, the man replied, “Three. But one of those is almost gone, as well.”
“How much air do they have left?”
“Two percent.”
“All right,” Bach said. “Pull the ship in, establish an external hook up, and give them air.
I’m going over.”
Bach left the navigation bridge to get Pani and the brunette from his quarters. While the brunette trailed along behind, he carried Pani all the way to the exit. He wanted to feel that extra closeness, smell her female musk, this one last time.
When Pani saw the ship in the viewing window just before they reached the outside hatch, she became as still as stone in his arms.
The brunette also stopped in her tracks and refused to move. Bach snapped impatiently for her to come to him, but she ignored him, staring out at the vessel floating beside them, linked by power cables, oxygen lines and stabilizing tethers. He had to go back, catch her by the ear and drag her to the door that way. A good sound spanking would have done her a world of good, but he just did not have the time.
In his arms, Pani hardly breathed as he unlocked the hatch. He stepped onto the crossing arm and sealed the door behind the three of them. Taking the brunette by the ear, he crossed over to the humans’ vessel and only when finally just outside the foreign vessel’s entrance did he dare say, “Pani, can you talk to them?”
She was staring at the door as if it were a communicable disease. Despite all her escape attempts, she didn’t look happy to be here.
“Pani,” he said again and, reluctantly, she turned her head, shifting her eyes to his. “Can you tell them what I’m saying?”
She had that crafty, trying-to-figure-him-out look all over her face when she nodded.
“All right.” He unlocked the human’s hatch and pushed the brunette inside ahead of him.
The lights were dim, but growing gradually brighter as his ship recharged and repaired the damaged power cells. The air smelled musty and thin, but he could hear the steady hiss as oxygen was pumped into the depleted reserve tanks. There was also no gravity.
Very primitive.
And very narrow. It took a lot of swatting before the brunette would cooperate. But with Pani clinging to him with both arms and legs, he alternately spanked the reluctant female to get her moving and pulled himself along the ladder from the bottom of the ship up through a very small portal of a door into the next area. He could barely squeeze himself through the claustrophobic hatches. In the end, he had to put Pani through ahead of him and pick her up again afterward before moving on.
His insistence on carrying her made their progress through the four-layered ship slow, but eventually they reached the humans’ command center. Strapped each into his own chair, were four suffocated corpses and three barely living men.
The men sat weakly immobile, the color slowly seeping back into their lips and skin as the air improved. They all three stared up at him as not entirely sure that they could trust what they were seeing.
Bach told Pani, “Ask them if they can land this thing safely when they reach their world.”
She looked at him for a long time, then turned her head and softly spoke her gargling gibberish to the human astronauts. One nodded back at her.
“Tell him we will give him a boost in that direction.” He paused to give Pani ample time to translate. “Tell him if he or his kind ever come out this way again, their ship will be destroyed.
And so will their world.”
Pani looked at him again, but obediently translated his words.
Bach said, “Ask him if he understands.”
As she spoke, one of the astronauts nodded.
“As him if he understands that his planet will,” Bach put emphasis on the word, “be conquered and the human race made extinct if they ignore this warning. That there will be nothing I can or will do to help them.”
Again, although more slowly, the man nodded.
“They will take you and the brunette home with them.” Bach put Pani down. He made himself let her go and turn away, squeezing back through the hatch even though he didn’t hear her translating to the man behind her.
“No,” she told him. “Pani goes home.”
He kept going, following the ladder down through the next layer of the shuttle and squeezing himself through the claustrophobically narrow hatch.
“Pani goes home with Papa,” he heard her call, a hitch of panic trembling in her voice.
“Papa?”
He looked back to see her on the verge of following him but for the astronaut, who had her by the arm.
“Papa!” She reached out to him with both hands.
He didn’t stop, but went through the last hatch that emptied into the bottom of the rocket.
As he opened the escape door, Pani began to cry.
“Papa, Pani be good! More good! Papa!”
Sealing the hatch behind him cut out the sound of her voice, but it still felt like a knife stabbing into his chest as he walked down the arm to his own ship. A soft tapping, like the plinking of a stubborn moth fluttering against a glass light, made him look back. She was beating her fists against the hatch’s insulated window, screaming for him without sound, tears rolling down her face.
He stepped backwards into his own ship, then shut and locked the door, sealing out the sight of her forever.
*
“Well,” Councilman Remeik asked as he handed Bach a steaming cup of coffee. “So, what was it all about?”
In Remeik’s downtown office, Bach held the cup in both hands. He stared into the thick brown liquid as though it held an answer to that tricky question.
It had been only two days since he’d given Pani back to her own kind. It had been the right thing to do, but they had still been two of the longest days of his life, dominated by an oppressive silence in a house filled with unbearable memories.
“Bach?”
“Mark it down as an act of cruelty. Someone stuck a bunch of humans in a vessel and launched them into space.”
Remeik barked, a gruff and unamused laugh. “Don’t lie to me, boy. I’m not that stupid.
Remember, I’ve got two pets of my own. Aven has an immeasurable vocabulary and can even write. That is an ability belonging only to sentient beings.”
Bach put the coffee cup down. “What are you going to do?”
“Declare the wild human an endangered species, adversely impacted by careless scientists and over-hunting for the pet trade. We’ll cordon off the entire solar system, and make it illegal for anyone to approach it.”
Bach kept his face utterly neutral. “You’re not going to suggest observation?”
“Are you kidding? And have another Kadmier on my hands? We aren’t exactly known for our fair or ethical first contacts.” The Councilman leaned back in his chair. “Humans may be advanced far beyond what we gave them credit for, but as a species, they’ve still got a lot of growing up to do before they can stand up as equals to us.”
“What about the pets?”
“Only captive bred will be legal for sale or trade from here on.”
“They should all be returned.”
“I’d be lynched for the attempt alone, and you’d better believe I won’t go out alone,” the Councilman growled. “Some of the Senates’ biggest financial backers deal in the pet trade.
There’s big money there, boy. As it is I won’t be popular when I shut off the supply of wild humans. But if I demand everyone give up their beloved household pet, I’d not only lose my chance at a senate seat, I’d lose my council spot as well.”
“They are an intelligent race in their own right. Sentient beings.”
“It is also in their best interest that no one else know it,” Remeik snapped. “Coldly stated, I know. But there it is. For a few to suffer captivity to preserve the rest of their race is an acceptable situation, and you know it. You took great pains not to share your thoughts with the rest of your crew, even though they thought you rather odd to return your pet to the wild the way you did.”
Bach stood up. “She never should have been taken. It’s our arrogance to think otherwise.”
The old Councilman shrugged with his eyebrows. “Nevertheless, I’ll be keeping mine until the days they both die.”
“Your prerogative,” Bach told him.
“As freeing Pani was yours.”
Bach walked out the door, certain that for him to have done anything less would have been the height of all wrongs.
*
Bach was celebrating the anniversary of his third year alone with a glass of red taluc berry wine—all right, it was his sixth—when the computer beeped with an incoming call. He groaned as he settled himself into the chair at his desk. Rubbing his eyes, he cast a fleeting but half-hearted wish that the room would quit spinning. He didn’t expect it to be answered, but there was no harm in the wishing.
He tapped the key. “Hello.”
Nice. He even sounded vaguely sober. Tired, but sober.
Nil Ralhan’s perplexed and apologetic face appeared in the monitor. His hands were steepled and he was tapping his fingertips in that entirely Ralhan-ish nervous gesture of his.
“Good evening, Sir Bauer. A thousand apologies—all sincerely stated, I assure you—for disturbing you at this late hour.”
“Sir Ralhan,” he greeted in turn, then looked at the time. “I would bid you good evening as well, but it has just become morning.” Tap-tap, went Ralhan’s fingers and he blushed uncomfortably. “How are you and yours?”
Exotics, Inc., had been only one of many pet wholesale distributors to go out of business when the Human Preservation Act was implemented, wholly approved by the newly appointed Senator Remeik two years ago last fall. Bach had heard Nil Ralhan had gone into business for himself and was doing quite well as an experienced Pet Behavioralist.
Ralhan looked both surprised and pleased to have his family so remembered. “Very well, sir. Very well indeed.”
“Minmin, Binnie, and Sassa?”
He beamed. “As mischievous as ever.”
Bach nodded, idly swirling the last swallow or so of wine in the bottom of his glass.
“Always good to hear. How may I help you?”
“Well, sir.” Ralhan tapped his fingertips again. “I believe something of yours has been passed into my possession this evening.”
About to drain the last of his wine, Bach paused and lowered the glass. “And what would that be?”
In the back ground, a very distinct and familiar voice piped up, “Pani, property of Papa, 11355921. Pani’s a good girl. Property of Papa, 11355921.”
Bach almost dropped his wine. “Pani?”
He didn’t mean to shout it, but she squealed in response and jumped out of nowhere into Nil Ralhan’s lap. She cast a grin into the monitor, touching it with both hands. “Papa! Take Pani home! Right now!”
Right now. That was new.
“A smuggling ship was raided this morning. The other pets were released back into the wild, but they kept her. She wouldn’t quit talking, and with the chip scar…well, the authorities brought her to me. They didn’t know what else to do with her.” Ralhan blinked at him. “I confess, neither do I. Do—do you not want her?”
When Bach didn’t talk back at her, Pani’s grin slowly faded. Like a flash of black thunder, she turned abruptly irritated. She scowled at him. “Take Pani home. Right now! Now, Papa!”
She was beautiful.
And oh, did she ever need a spanking!
Etle seemed to agree because off screen in the background Bach heard Ralhan’s wife tsk, “Why you naughty, demanding little thing! You come over here and let them talk.”
“No!” Pani snapped back at her, even more irritated than before.
Bach felt himself start to smile. “If you would be so kind, Sir Ralhan, please put my disagreeable pet in the corner until I arrive.”
The set of Ralhan’s shoulders relaxed. “You do still want her then?”
“Oh yes,” Bach said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes to collect her.”
And spank her.
And love her. All night long. No, forget all night. All day, too. Several days, in fact. They might just not get out of bed until week’s end.
She folded her arms across her chest and harrumphed. “Now!”
Etle snatched her off Ralhan’s lap and out of monitor range.
Oh yes, she was definitely going to get her little bottom paddled a deep, dark shade of beautiful red.
Now, if he could just remember where he’d packed that very effective and obedience-inducing hairbrush…
The End
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