Harper
The waiting seemed endless even though we could hear the com chatter from the conference room where we sat around the table together
There was nothing Zared could say to calm my worry for him. I could barely contain the rising panic I felt when he went down. Tears spilled down my cheeks and I was hyperventilating. I was that scared---especially when he didn’t answer for a minute or two after one of the guys asked if he was okay.
It was barely minutes before he replied, but it seemed like hours that I could hardly breathe. When he finally answered in the affirmative, I cried out, “Oh, my God, Oh my God.”
I closed my eyes and rested my elbows on the table holding my forehead in my hands and forced myself to take slow deep breaths and let them out the same way. I kept telling myself silently he was coming back to me. When I finally raise my head, I could see that my friends were as scared as I was. They were afraid for me to lose Zared and afraid to lose their own lovers as well.
“We better get used to this,” said Scarlet. “They’ve got a whole lot more people to find and liberate. This is what it takes when you love a warrior.”
“At least, someday you might be right there with them,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone is as risk on these missions,” Scarlet said, looking at each of us in turn. “We could have been blown out of the sky while they were down there. I’m sure they were just a worried about us and we are about them.”
“We are all going to have plenty to do when we get back with our new passengers,” Nora said.
“Yes, we should get down to the landing bay and help compile the information on the rescues,” I agreed. “The first shuttle up should be launching any time now.”
Nobody got up for a few moments. I sat there shaking my head, “What the hell have we gotten into?”
“Farseek mercs,” said Scarlet. “Pyrr says that’s what they call themselves now.”
”Some might call them pirates,” Zoe said. “They’re taking everything they can haul out from that mining colony.”
“They’re just taking reparations for what the Empire did to their home world,” I said. “There are going to be a lot more missions before they find what happened to half a million people and eight more Dreadnaught warrior ships.”
“Every one of the warriors on this ship lost family and friends in that attack on Farseek.” Scarlet said. “We had our choice back on Halor. We could have stayed there and had a nice safe, boring life. But we didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t,” I agreed. “It was too late way before we got to Halor to take that option.”
“Ha,” Scarlet laughed. “It was too late for you, Harper, the minute the Commander walked into that holding room on Ursaga and pinned you with a look. You were his from that moment on.”
I felt my face warm as I remembered. At that point, I was thinking with my female parts, which wasn’t like me at all. Zared told me later that was how solmatu manifested. My female parts still thought quite highly of him, but my heart was fully engaged, too. And it hurt just thinking I could still lose him sometime in the future before we had a chance to make a family and settle on Farseek.
I silently apologized to Mom and Dad for the heartache they were surely going through, not knowing what happened to me. Even if we found Earth, there was no going back. I couldn’t imagine Zared living there. I could barely imagine me living there anymore or anywhere else without him. I didn’t choose this life I now had. It was chosen for me the day I was kidnapped by aliens. That single event set us on the course that brought us to that place and time.
Even after I knew he was safe, the hours dragged by before I saw Zared again, even though I was busy with the influx of Farseek abductees. Even those who weren’t awakened in the middle of their night seemed tired and broken. This was because they had been enslaved months ago and worked daily shifts without a single day off since they started. The overseers took all the best food for themselves, feeding the slaves two meals a day. One was a watery gruel and the second was a thin vegetable soup with the merest amount of protein.
Not all the rescues were from Farseek. One of the men I interviewed had pale blue hair and unusual yellow-green cat eyes. For whatever reason, his translator chip didn’t seem to work properly because he could hardly understand anything I said. Then he said something that totally shocked me.
“Are you from Earth?” he asked in accented English.
“Yes,” I said, shakily. “How do you know about Earth?”
“I was stationed at our base there,” he said.
Even in the din of voices in that cargo bay, my fellow Earther’s picked up on the sound of our native language being spoken by this alien man.
“Do you know where Earth is?” I asked urgently. “Do you even know where here is?”
By then, Scarlet, Zoe, and Nora surrounded us to hear what he had to say.
“I can only approximate our location,” he admitted. “We have not left our galaxy, but we are a few arms away on the rim from our worlds. I know the coordinates of Narova, the world I am from, in relation to Wagh-tan Galaxy. I think you call it Andromeda, but I haven’t seen it since I was taken from Earth.”
“Then, how do you know we are still in our galaxy?” Nora asked.
“One of the slavers told me. They travel up and down the rim stealing people to sell to the Sargan Empire,” he said. “He showed me a star map once. I think he was bored and I interested him.”
“Could you draw the map from memory,” I asked.
“Not with accuracy,” he said. “I am not an astronomer. If I could look at some holographic maps, I might be able to recognize some stars that would help me pinpoint the location. The coordinates would be useless without the reference points in space. Unlike road maps, star maps are three dimensional.”
“What is your name?” Nora asked.
“Sahvin Kazza,” he said. Then he looked up at Nora and sniffed, then gasped in wonder. He stood abruptly and backed away.
“Is something wrong,” I asked he as looked at Nora and sniffed.
“Nora from Earth, you are meomee! My soul mate,” he said, looking directly at her
“What does that mean?” she asked.
He looked at her, his feline eyes filled with longing. “Can’t you feel it? It means you are my fated mate.
“It sounds like solmatu,” I told her. His eyes took a little getting used to, but he was otherwise gorgeous with a muscular build and pale golden skin.
“Oh, my!?” Nora gasped.
I had a pretty good idea what was happening, but from the look on her face, it seemed a bit more intense.
“How can this be happening?” she murmured uncertainly. “I just met him for ten minutes and I feel like I want to push him down and have my way with him.”
I chuckled as I stole a glance at our new feline acquaintance. “He’s kind of looking at you the same way,” I whispered.
“I have a feeling you aren’t going to have much choice in the matter. You might as well go talk to him. He seems very nice,” I encouraged her. “This fated mate thing hasn’t turned out so bad for Zared and me.”
She glanced briefly at Sahvin, and sighed. “He is pretty, isn’t he?” she smiled wryly.
“He is.” I laughed softly.
In my peripheral vision, I caught a movement that drew my attention. Zared strode into the cargo bay. “Zared’s back,” I told Norma. “Talk to you in a bit.
I was so glad to see him alive and walking, I wanted to run to him and fling my arms around him and cling to him---to wrap myself around him and kiss him until we were both breathless with desire. But I didn’t.
I strolled out of the crowd and walked up to him and smiled up at him, reaching for his hand. “You scared the crap out of me,” I said quietly.
“I know,” he said softly. “But, I’m fine.” His hand closed around mine and he brought up his other hand caressed my cheek with the back of his fingers.
“You sure look fine.” I grinned at him and winked.
He gave me that familiar smirk that told me I would probably be getting some personal attention from him a bit later when we were alone.