Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
But Lettie is still talking.
“We’re going to send you down to his last known location. That’s at the mouth of a small cave inside Grave City. Wrath uses underground tunnels a lot.”
“I’m claustrophobic. Tunnels make me…”
Lettie’s eyes narrow ever so slightly. “We all have to make sacrifices,” she says. “If we don’t start reclaiming our crew, we will never get off this planet.”
I hate to point out that we’re already in trouble on that front. She has a baby with a saurian, which means she’s planning on taking the baby and the saurian with us, I guess. But Captain Sullivan, who owns this ship, the Mare, she banned both boyfriends and babies from the ship years ago.
We’re pirates, and our lives are dangerous. We roam the universe as free agents, never submitting to males of any species whatsoever. That is the whole point of the Mare, or at least it was. I don’t know what will happen now that Sullivan and Raine, our first and second in command seem to be pretty attached to their so-called captors. There are plenty of whispers, or there were, when there were plenty of people to whisper, that Sullivan and Raine and some of the others don’t really want to be free. They’ve fallen in love. Life on the Mare is over.
We had a good run. For years we were nothing but a menace in alien skies. But we’re being tamed. One by one, we’re being taken against our will and turned into creatures we don’t recognize. Lettie is proof that these saurians are capable of making us lay eggs that hatch and turn into hybrid babies.
I don’t want to lay an egg.
I don’t want to be mother to a hybrid alien baby.
I don’t want to be captured by a saurian and then start loving him because human reproductive psychology was shaped among countless generations of aggressive, murderous male behavior. I want to stay free.
And for that reason, I muster the courage to refuse one last time.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think you should find someone else.”
Lettie’s eyes narrow at me. She doesn’t want to hear this. Worse, she doesn’t care what I want.
“I’m captain now,” Lettie says. “And you will do what I tell you. You’ve been scrubbing toilets on this boat for years now. Isn’t it time you did something useful?”
“Scrubbing toilets is useful. More useful than starting a war with a species of aliens who don’t take us seriously and who capture us and fuck us until we have their babies.”
“You never said no to Captain Sullivan.”
Oh. So we’re arguing now. Okay.
“Captain Sullivan saved my life. And she shared profit with me. And she was fun.”
Lettie has done none of those things for me. All Lettie has done is take the fact that we rescued her — a fact she conveniently forgets — and turn into a little tinpot tyrant. The others followed her orders and she got them all captured. I’m not going to make the same mistake.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I can’t let you say no.”
“What do you mean you can’t let me…”
Someone comes up beside me. I turn to look at them, but before I see who it is, something sharp sticks in the side of my neck.
I start to feel dizzy.
“No, you…”
2 OUTSIDE
Iwake up outside.
For a moment, my entire body is too shocked to react. Outside is not a concept it has been familiar with for quite some time. When your life is lived in the cold void of space, outside is something to be very much avoided.
It has been years since I laid on the ground and looked up at the sky. I haven’t smelled the kind of air that has all sorts of organic content in it. I haven’t felt the warmth of sun on my skin. It’s nice. It’s all very nice.
For a moment, I am entirely too comfortable to be worried.
I think I like outside. I should have done more outside before this, not that there’s much opportunity on a spaceship. If I’d tried to spend more time outside on the Mare, I’d have been sucked into space inside out, or something like that. We always liked to theorize what would actually happen to the human body if it were to be tossed into the void, but we never actually tried it on anyone.
I open my eyes, then close them again. There’s something about the way sunlight hits my lids that just feels good. Not a lot has felt good lately. Most of my days have been consumed with worry and concern. Finding myself lying in thick grass under an alien sun is almost an ideal outcome in some respects — as long as I don’t think about how I got here, or why I’ve been put here.
Maybe I’ll just stay here. Maybe I’ll lie in the grass and just let the world go around me. I don’t have to get involved in this stupid conflict. I’m not entirely sure I understand it anyway. I know Lettie is annoyed by what happened to her, but a lot of terrible things have happened to a lot of us in a lot of places, and we haven’t gotten involved in what should be a civil conflict before. It all sounded like a good idea at first, but now it just seems like a disaster.