CHAPTER 7

 

TAC’MOT

 

My senses aren’t as finely tuned to a Gryfala as, say, a Rakhii’s would be, but I track her well enough to Bay 11.  On an unfamiliar ship, she has managed to unerringly locate a level that not only has plenty of stored items to hide behind—it also has an open-access door while we’re grounded.  I grind my teeth in an attempt to stave off panic, and hop faster.  Gryfala are known to have a brilliant instinct for all tech and sundry, ships included.  I should’ve expected she’d somehow figure out the most expedient route to escape.  This bay’s door isn’t as big a hatch as the cargo hold’s.  It’s for chute hook-up when Brax has livestock shipments: built big enough for large beasties with big horns.  And of course, Brax left it open because it is a wide enough door he can walk through without bumping his blasted horns.

I chicker softly to myself thinking that one could make a remark about the irony of that.

One could... but one would come to regret it.  Brax is a big beastie with a volatile temper.

While amusing to contemplate, I don’t have it in me to enjoy right now.  This same chute door is plenty big enough to let one small Gryfala slip out.

My heart settles a fraction when I hear an odd sound, because I know I’ve reached her; I’ve reached her, and she isn’t running around unprotected outside. I want to breathe a sigh of relief, but this doesn’t lessen my anxiety over and for her because that sound?  There was almost an air of distress to her vocalization, and it becomes quite clear why when I see the infant Culc has ahold of her face.

The Culc has ahold of the Gryfala’s face!

Lem often devolves into bouts of hypochondria, discussing his ulcers at length.  This instant burning in my stomachs, nearly severe enough an equivalent in pain to match my unchecked fear for the Gryfala, tells me I should really listen to him next time and try to learn more.

Just in the course of half a rotation, I believe I’ve developed one myself.

I deftly knock its tentacle off—but it’s too late.  One of the toothy sucker tips has already munched into the skin of her cheek.  Her eyes are impossibly wide when she touches her face and her hand comes away with blood.  She’s so stunned that she doesn’t notice another tentacle reaching around her back.  My voice comes out coarser than I intend when I warn her to get away from the teveking crate.  As I knock this tentacle off, she does dash back.

And keeps dashing.

She’s spotted that open door now, reeking with fear as she runs for it with everything she has.  Her pretty footwear is odd though, seeming to hinder her grace—though, I note, not her progress.

I let out a warble of warning.

She sprints faster.

“HALT!”  I’m aware she can’t understand but—tevek!  Can’t she hear the warning in my tone?  The genuine concern?  I kick it then, bounding hard to cover the distance.

If it wasn’t for the thin black spoke of her footwear snapping, I don’t think I’d have ever reached her in time.

I catch her around the waist just as she collects herself, rips off the strange shoes from her feet and scrabbles half-out of the door, my arms dragging her back in by her hips.  My eyes widen in no-little admiration: small she may be, but she is mighty-gripped.  And oomph!—she has an impressive kick, I can attest, as I try to be grateful her foot only feels like it half-ruptured my spleen instead incapacitating me with a liver shot.

I should have expected a Gryfala would be wicked-trained in self-defense.

A group of loitering Krortuvians takes notice of our struggling—and when their eyes zero in on what I am trying to drag back inside?

They rush for us, unstrapping their weapons as they come.

Metark!

I’ve traveled to places all over the galaxy, but have yet to come across a good one among their kind.  They were probably either spectators from the auction, or randomly picked up her scent and trailed her here and loitered, wondering how dead they’d be if they dared to simply board the ship through the open door.  The answer to that is unequivocally dead: Brax isn’t afraid to leave it open because few would be so stupid.

That is perhaps Brax’s mistake.  Krortuvians are that stupid.  Rotten thieves!

The Gryfala proves she has a healthy sense of self-preservation after all when she reverses her struggles with a yelp and lets go of her iron-clad grip on the doorframe in favor of crawling up my body.  I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is panicked and trying to escape instead of attempting to kill me and kick me out the door with the way she’s shouting what seems to be encouragements in my ears.  Her manic struggling rips the shoulder seam of my suit and a few of my shirt’s buttons ping off in our struggle.  Being undressed by a Gryfala in theory sounds so much more pleasant than our reality.

Trying to breathe past the pressure of her ulna bone now strangle-holding my windpipe as she half hangs off of my back, I slam the button that will draw the door closed.  Slowly, slowly it lessens the gap.  No wonder we’ve lost stock out of here sometimes.  It shouldn’t crawl closed.  I could have hopped in and out half of a dozen times by now!  I reach up to pry off her arm, and grab a blessed lungful of oxygen before joining her in yelling at the door.  “Come on, come on!”

They’re too far from us; they won’t make it, they won’t—

A pistol is aimed dead center on me; I watch for only the briefest click as the beam of light charges to life on my chest before I dive for the ground, taking the Gryfala with me and landing on her so much harder than I intend to.

The blast burns along my shoulder and sizzles a hole into the floor.

The bay door shuts with a hollow thud leaving all of them trapped outside.

We’re safe.

I pant in relief—and pain.  I glance over at the smoking floor.

Maybe… maybe Brax won’t even notice.

I look around at the otherwise meticulously-maintained, pristine bay and swallow down a growl, which makes my throat protest: she bruised my larynx with her assassin’s grip.  Placing a hand over the lower ribs of my back that only just barely protected my now-angry spleen courtesy of her malicious foot, I glare at the female beneath me.  “You are trouble,” I croak.

Even my tangle with Lem didn’t leave me this damaged.  I side-eye her with a wary respect.

I rise up, struggling to lose what’s left of my shirt, so I can angle myself to get a look at my shoulder.

Deep, and searingly painful.

Also smoking.

Slowly, I turn to look back down at the Gryfala.  She bites her lip and her shoulders come up somewhere near her ears.  She opens her mouth and says something softly that sounds like “Eyym surrry,” and this time I’m unable to bite it back: I do growl.

She flinches, making me instantly regret my growl—but my mind is whirring, wondering just why I can’t understand her.  If she’s had her translator removed, that’s one thing and it means she won’t be able to understand me.  But what would cause me to fail to understand her?  I’ve never had a chance to test it, but my translator should recognize Gryph.  I ponder how I can get her to speak in front of Lem in order to see how his translator reacts.  It could be mine is faulty and as I said, I’ve simply had no opportunity to find this out before now.

And completely unrelated and totally irrelevant—yet it’s a fact I can’t help but notice: she has a teveking beautiful voice.

When it’s not screaming in my ear, presumably ordering a door to close faster.

I hop to my feet and haul the Gryfala up.

Shoulder smarting, ribs aching, and throat sore (oh!  And an internal organ bruised and protesting!), I grit my teeth as I attempt to lift her.  When she starts struggling and shoves at me, I don’t think: I smack my tail into her rump.

We’re both shocked.

“S-sorry,” I stammer quickly, and now I can’t back away fast enough.  What in the hells did I just do?  She’s a female.  Did I really just—?  Guilt and horror wash together in my stomach and I can’t even meet her eyes now.  Did I really just strike a female?  Truly?

I jolt when I feel her hand on my arm—the one attached to the shoulder that isn’t laser-tracked.  She starts speaking, saying something like, “Whas tryying to stohp you from herrting yoreself, yoo dhummhee!”  I’m watching her mouth so I’m stunned when she sets it grimly, and sort of backs her body into my good arm.  And stands there.  “Sence yoo inseest on cahrryeng meee,” she says, voice not impressed—nor are the haughty little line of furs that quirks up on her forehead.

I’m fixated on it, staring at her stupidly until she huffs and brings her arms up, as if she’s holding a bundle in her arms—

“Oh!” I say, feeling like a complete dunce.  I scoop her up, bearing her weight on my good arm, and with a nod at her chin—because I’m a coward and I can’t meet her eyes—I take us up to the main deck once more.

 

***

 

Never punish in anger.

I honestly hadn’t meant to.  I hadn’t meant to punish her at all!  I hate Krortuvians, that is for sure, but I didn’t hold it against her when she had only set off the chain of events in ignorance.  I had been afraid about the danger she put herself in.

It wasn’t about the money.

Lem would say it was a little bit about the money.  Seven solars’ wages…

My fear had been about what would have happened to her if she’d made it outside.  If it wasn’t Krortuvians, it would be some other sort.  Many beings would prey on a lone female…

Here, it isn’t anything like her planet.  Females do not rule.  Females have no power.  Not like the power she has grown up with.

These beings here?  Most of them would—

They’d have ripped her apart.  After they hurt her badly.

I chatter my teeth at the image.  Past the jut of my cheekbone, I can see out of my periphery that she tips her head, watching the underside of my jaw, the thin lines of furs above her eyes drawing close together.

I make an effort to stop chattering and concentrate on hopping.

But still—I’m not—I wasn’t angry at her.

The kicker?  Gryfala are keenly intelligent.  If she could have understood me—if I could have simply communicated the danger—she’d never have taken such a risk.  Yet Gryfala also have a reputation for not only standing up to current authority, but overtaking and dominating it.

It’s their nature.

Once she gets her bearings, language troubles or no, she’ll try it here; I am certain of it.  And Brax hates Gryfala.  If she tries this with him… His kind aren’t supposed to be capable of harming her sort, but then again Rakhii don’t normally have reason to foster the venom-filled loathing that he has in his hearts for them.  If this one small Gryfala displeases him, he could take the rage he has for her entire kind out on her, and that slap I planted on her back there will seem like a wisp of nothing in comparison.

A wisp of nothing?  My stomachs turn again; the sound of it still echoes in my ears.

Not more than a few solars older than I, Brax had donned the mantle of an elder sibling figure to me.  And like an eldest sibling, he could be dictatorial and authoritarian at times, giving me swift kicks with his big feet and swift snaps with the broadside of his tail when I needed to pay attention.  To one of her kind, this might not seem like it, but he’d shown me patience.  That’s what my people do to youth who need instruction.  Technically, our kicks are more powerful than a Rakhii’s too.  And at first, I’d been an angry, resentful child.  I chafed at having been stolen and sold against my will.  It didn’t matter how kind my new owner tried to be: I was a spiteful terror.  Another captain would have shown me the airlock or traded me off at the next stop if they’d gotten too cross with me.  Not Brax.  It isn’t that Rakhii don’t give up easily: it’s that they never give up.  One way or another, he was bound and determined I’d learn whatever he thought I should mind.

Even Lem had used his glove-clad hand to swat me.  By comparison, what I did was only just a swat—but still.  I am breaking into a cold sweat just thinking of it.  I don’t know anyone who actually has their own female—and certainly don’t know of anyone who has a female and hits her.  Well, the Krortuvians probably do, but I wouldn’t put anything past them—and for Creator’s sake—really, what does it say if they are my compass standard for actions?

I give up on trying not to alarm the Gryfala and warble chastisement at myself all the way back to the main deck.