Barely thirty seconds after the lights came on, someone noticed Juanita and the others. A man walking out of engineering saw them out of the corner of his eye, glanced once, then looked again, his eyes bulging.

“The rookie,” he yelled and reached for a weapon at his belt.

Orion sprang into action, leaping toward the man and engaging him even as he maneuvered into a position where the others in the room couldn’t fire at him without hitting their colleague.

“Who is that loon?” Tala asked.

“I don’t know, but he’s on our side.”

“That would be more comforting if he didn’t seem to be against everybody on this ship.”

Juanita had stuck the hypospray into her pocket, and she withdrew it again. Could she continue using it? Or did it have a limited number of charges?

“We should get out of here,” Tala said. “While they’re distracted by him. We can go get Angela and any other women we can round up and find a better hiding place. A much less busy hiding place.”

One of those blue energy blasts slammed into the bulkhead a few feet away.

Juanita swallowed. It was hard not to agree with Tala’s logic, but she felt it would be a betrayal to abandon Orion. What if he needed help? What if, after the battle, he would be willing to answer all her questions? Who else here had shown any inclination that they would do that? Who else had cared if she could communicate or not?

“He put a thing in my ear,” Juanita said, “and I can understand their language now.”

“Yeah?” Tala sounded skeptical. “What are they saying?”

“They’re calling him a traitor a lot and ordering each other to kill him.”

Tala snorted. “Maybe you can understand them.”

“I told you I can.”

“Incoming weapons fire,” someone said tersely over the communications channel that was still open. “Brace—”

The ship heaved, as if it were some sailing vessel that was capsizing. Juanita was thrown out into the open. Then gravity disappeared, and her feet left the ground. Her stomach twisted in a queasy protest as she floated free. There was nothing to grab on to, nothing to anchor herself to. Two seconds later, the lights went out again.

She groaned. This had to be the worst spaceship a person could ever get passage on.

Thumps and grunts continued to come from the center of the room. Was Orion still fighting those men? How could anyone fight without gravity?

A distant clang sounded, the hull of the ship ringing like a bell. More thumps sounded elsewhere in the room. Juanita reached out with her hands and feet, trying to find something to grab on to or push off. She didn’t know where she wanted to go but had a notion that clamping on to something might please her queasy stomach.

As abruptly as it had left, the gravity returned.

Juanita fell several feet, landing on her shoulder. A startled cry of pain escaped her lips before she could stop it. It sounded loud in what had become a silent room. All she could hear was someone breathing heavily.

Was that Orion? What if it was someone else? Someone who had killed Orion?

Bangs and squeals and shouts sounded in the distance, out in the corridors beyond their hatch.

“Are you all right?” Orion asked, a pained note in his tone. Maybe he had landed on his shoulder too.

Juanita rolled to a sitting motion. “I think… good enough.”

She rubbed her shoulder. It hurt, and she would have a mammoth bruise, but it would be hurting a lot more if she’d dislocated it or broken anything.

“And your friend?” Orion asked, his voice closer as he made his way to her.

“He wants to know if you’re all right, Tala.”

“Of course I’m not all right. I’ve been kidnapped, drugged, rubbed up against by creeps, and hurled into walls, floors, and ceilings. I hit my head. And my elbow. And I’m pretty sure these people all want to rape us.”

“She’s fine,” Juanita told Orion.

“I am not amused,” Tala said.

“You should try to find the amusement in life, in any situation,” Juanita said.

“Thanks for the tip. If I ever need someone to write fortune cookie blurbs, I’ll look you up.”

Juanita didn’t know what to say to the pessimism. Oh, she could understand why Tala was concerned, and she was concerned, too, but how could she not see that this was the most amazing, grandest adventure either of them would ever have?

Yes, they seemed to be on some kind of kidnapping, slave-trading ship, and that wasn’t a good thing, but they had an ally. A big, strong, tough ally. And maybe whatever was going on in the corridors outside would turn out in their favor.

“I wish I had my phone to record this,” Juanita said.

“You’re a nutcase.”

“Your what?” Orion crouched beside her, finding her shoulder again in the dark.

“That didn’t translate? Uhm, I think it’s like your wristwatch thing. Can you talk on that?”

“Yes, the logostec is a computer and communications device.”

“That’s what our phones are. I could be recording this amazing journey to share with others someday.”

“Amazing?” He sounded amused. Maybe he thought she was a nutcase too. “Do you know why Captain Cutty took you from your planet?”

“In the books, the aliens always take human women for breeding purposes. The books rarely worry about scientific plausibility.”

Whatever answer he’d expected, that apparently wasn’t it because a long silence stretched. A shocked silence?

“Cutty wants to sell you to the Zi’i. They are aliens, but breeding with humans isn’t something I imagine is possible. We are their most hated enemies because we thrive on the same types of planets that they do, and we’ve been competing with them for worlds. We’re upstarts in their eyes, since we came onto the scene relatively recently—we’ve only had space travel for a few hundred years—and then spread out quickly. We had a great war with them that ended just six years ago. We were both fighting for the same territory, and we—humans—had to protect the planets where our people had already settled.

“At the moment, we’ve got a peace treaty with the Zi’i, but both sides loathe each other, and they have this game they enjoy where they let humans loose in the wilds without any weapons and then send their young warriors off to hunt them. Once the warriors bring down their human prey, they eat them. We happen to be a favorite food for them. They think it’s honorable to eat their slain enemies, whether they taste good or not.”

Juanita digested this slowly, trying to decide if she believed it. He sounded earnest, not like someone pulling her leg, but her thoughts from before returned. How could wars be going on between alien species across multiple star systems without anyone from Earth ever seeing evidence of it in a telescope?

“Only the women?” Juanita asked, the first question of oh so many that popped into her mind.

“What?”

“They only eat the women?”

“No, they eat men too. I think it was Captain Cutty’s choice to pick women to kidnap so he and his brutes could, er, so it might be easier. But the Zi’i don’t care about sex. They do seem to prefer younger meat, and they like it, uhm, fresh. When I was a kid, still living with my parents, and my brother came home with war stories, he explained how he’d seen them pause in the middle of a battle, when they had the upper hand, to chomp the arm off the still-living soldier.”

“They sound worse than the Goa'uld,” Juanita muttered, chilled at the image he was describing. She should have known that the galaxy would be full of asshole aliens. Wasn’t it always that way in the books and movies?

“The who?”

“Nothing. It’s from… it’s made up.” She rubbed her shoulder again. “Did you say humans have had space travel for centuries? How can that be? Where are you from?”

He made that “Ssshh” noise again, and she sensed him standing up.

“I can’t tell you how odd it is listening to only one half of a conversation,” Tala said.

She sounded like she was leaning against the bulkhead by the hatchway.

It occurred to Juanita to wonder what had happened to the crewmen that attacked Orion. Had he bested them all? In the dark and without gravity?

Soft clangs sounded outside.

“Stay behind me,” Orion said quietly, shifting to stand in front of her.

Scrapes came from the other side of the hatch, and then it swung open.

Juanita nearly wet herself when she saw the two towering, bulky forms that stood on the other side, shoulder to shoulder in the corridor. Weapons the size of cannons pointed at her and Orion. It took her a moment to realize she was looking at people in some kind of armor, not aliens. She only felt slightly silly after the realization. They were still intimidating as hell in the black full-body gear, silver and blue logos of a hawk-like ship blazoned on the cuirass or breastplate or whatever the proper term for that was.

“It’s about time.” Orion lowered his bolt bow and propped a fist on his hip. “You stop to race Jenrevian slugs along the way?”

“Shit, sir,” a voice came from inside one of the helmets, “is your filthy little brother allowed to disrespect Star Guardians like that?”

“Filthy?” Orion asked. “This is blood, not dirt. I had to take on half the crew single-handedly since you all stopped to smoke kreysios before showing up. If not for my helper here, I’d be dead.”

The two silvery faceplates in the black helmets turned toward Juanita, and she realized Orion was pointing at her. As if he’d truly been in trouble when she drugged those men. She glanced back into the room.

Light entered engineering from flashlights built into the tops of the men’s helmets, and it revealed that Orion had indeed downed the rest of his enemies.

“One of the kidnapped women?” a new voice asked, the second man. He was shorter than the first, though that didn’t mean much. The armor made them both seem huge.

“Yes,” Orion said. “She chose not to stay kidnapped.”

He shot a fond grin toward her, and Juanita blushed, not sure what to say. It wasn’t as if she’d escaped through any cleverness of her own.

“That one too?” A gauntleted thumb pointed at Tala, and she jumped.

She had been unmoving against the bulkhead, and neither of the helmets had turned in her direction to suggest the men had seen her.

“So it seems,” Orion said. “You going to give us a ride back to their planet so we can drop them off? Before this bucket of rusty parts falls out of the sky?”

Back? So soon? Juanita didn’t know what was happening exactly, but she wasn’t ready for her adventure to end yet. For many reasons.

She looked at the side of Orion’s strong face, remembering his touch, the way it had stirred sensations in her that hadn’t been stirred in some time. Granted, he’d then stuck something weird into her ear, but since it wasn’t a brain-destroying bug, she forgave him for that. Now that she could understand him, she wanted more time to speak to him, to get to know him. And now that she knew spaceships and space travel were a thing that other people—other humans—were doing, she wanted to see the galaxy. Who wouldn’t? And she still had so many more questions.

“That may be more complicated than it seems,” the shorter man said after a long pause.

Orion frowned. “What do you mean? We go back through that gate, fly them to their planet, and put them back where we found them.”

“The Assembly is meeting now back on Dethocoles. To discuss the possibility that their planet could very well be Gaia. Even if it’s not, we’ll have to study it from a distance and figure out if contact is a good idea. We have enough trouble on our hands with the Zi’i, and nobody wants another Syanese incident.”

Juanita frowned, not certain if he’d given that “incident” a proper name, or if it was a word there was no translation for.

“They have nothing to do with that. Look, Sage, I helped kidnap them. If they’re not allowed to go back—”

“She has a translator?” the shorter man—Sage—asked sharply, his faceplate turning toward Juanita again.

Had her face given away that she understood them? Was it a bad thing that she did?

“I found one for her, yes.” Orion lifted his head, almost defiantly. “The others don’t have them.”

“Aw, filthy boy got a pet,” the taller man said.

“Suck your balls, Goran,” Orion growled.

“Soon as I get flexible enough, you know I will.”

“Enough,” Sage said coolly, his tone one of command. Orion and the other man, Goran, fell silent. “We’ll take them to our ship and fly to Dethocoles. After that, I will personally fly them home, if the archons permit it.”

Archons?

The translator hadn’t offered an alternative for that term. Juanita remembered an original Star Trek episode named Return of the Archons, but she was fairly certain Archon had simply been the name of a ship in the show. She doubted these people had named anyone after a ship in a Trek episode. They didn’t look like Trekkies.

She eyed Orion with his goatee, black leather-like pants, brown vest, and muscled arms and chest. Stargate: Atlantis fans maybe. In that outfit, he looked a bit like a buffer, light-haired version of Ronin.

The man named Sage seemed to think the discussion was over, and he started to turn away.

“And what if the archons don’t permit it?” Orion asked.

“Their will is our will,” Sage said. It sounded like some litany or saying that one repeated automatically.

“We’re a democracy, not a tyranny.”

“But we are soldiers, not politicians.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Orion said.

Sage started walking.

“Sage, if we allow these women to be stolen from their world and not returned, we’re just as bad as those slavers.”

“There are greater goods to consider.”

“So we throw out the lesser goods? Look here, Captain, sir. I’m not helping you get these women only to have them be stranded on Dethocoles doing who knows what for the rest of their lives.”

“You have no say in the matter, but—” Sage paused and lifted his hand, “—I will certainly argue that returning them is the right thing to do.”

“You’ll argue? We’re not from the politician class, and nobody’s going to listen to you any more than they would me.”

“A distressing thought,” Sage murmured. “Goran, help Orion find the rest of the women and escort them to our ship.”

“I don’t take orders from you, Captain,” Orion said.

“A pity.”

This time, Sage walked away without stopping.

The other armored man waved for Juanita and Tala to follow him, then headed down the corridor, as if he didn’t think there was a reason in the universe that someone wouldn’t do as he bade.

Orion turned to Juanita and gripped her arm. “I won’t let them keep you from going home. I swear it.”

His vehemence surprised her. She appreciated the promise, but as the big men walked away in their ominous black armor, and as she thought back over the conversation, she feared Orion might not have the power to keep that promise. Which was disturbing. Juanita wanted to explore the galaxy and have an adventure, but she also wanted to go home at some point. Her parents and roommates probably already knew she was missing and were worried about her.

But she nodded to Orion, managing a wan smile. Something in the way he held her gaze told her that he wanted that. He returned the nod, then released her and walked after the armored men.

“Are we going with them?” Tala asked.

She wouldn’t have caught any of the conversation, so Juanita would have to fill her in, but that could wait. She wasn’t certain things would be peachy on the new ship, but she was certain she didn’t want to stay here in a room full of dead people.

“Yeah.”

Tala stepped away from the bulkhead, holding her elbow in a way that suggested she’d injured it. Great. Who healed the healer?

As they limped for the hatchway, Juanita asked, “Are you at all familiar with the term archon or archons?”

Maybe it was nothing but a coincidence, but she couldn’t help but feel Gene Roddenberry must have named that ship after something.

“Uhm. I think those were the magistrates in Ancient Greece. It probably meant ruler or something.”

“Maybe it still does,” Juanita murmured, watching Orion’s back as they walked.

“You going to enlighten me?”

“I’d love to, but so far, I have more questions than answers.”

They reached the porthole they had passed earlier, and Juanita looked out it. Two suns burned against the black backdrop of space, and they were sailing past a purple planet with what looked like an asteroid field orbiting it. Even though the men had mentioned gates, and she imagined interstellar travel via something like wormholes, she hadn’t fully grasped the implications.

For the first time, it struck her that they were a long, long way from home.