Now, looking at Zoe, I saw why she had been taking such pains with her own clothing—it was eye-catching to say the least.
The top was two intricately curved bronze cups which held her full breasts in place while showing a generous amount of her pale, creamy cleavage. Her midsection was bare, showing the soft curves of her sides. A metal belt was cinched low on her lush hips and from it hung two long, shimmering strips of fabric which barely covered her sex and her luscious ass and left her legs bare. A pair of small sandals which showed off her tiny feet completed the outfit but I confess my eyes didn’t linger there for long—I was too busy looking at the rest of her.
“So do you like it or what?” Zoe asked again, twirling so that her long, red curls glittered in the overhead glows. “I figured if you could dress like Crocket and Tubbs I could be ‘Slave Leia.’ It’s perfect, right?”
“It’s…you’re…” I found I couldn’t finish my thought. Though I had seen her naked on several occasions—and almost naked in the Majoran clothing—this particular outfit seemed made to emphasize her curvy beauty. She was absolutely breathtaking and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It made me glad I had closed the slit in the ridiculous white trousers which were part of my own disguise—if I hadn’t, my feelings about her outfit would have suddenly become a lot more obvious.
“Fuckin’ gorgeous,” Grav said. “Hell of a lot better than that damn Grubbian disguise you were wearing at the port lounge.”
I tore my eyes away from Zoe long enough to see that my friend was looking at her admiringly. I felt a possessive growl rise in my throat—Vorns don’t share their females like Denarins do—but he held up his hands in a gesture of peace.
“I’m just stating the obvious, old friend. You’re a lucky son of a bitch to have found such a beautiful, smart female to call your own.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that Zoe wasn’t mine—that she was a free female—but somehow I couldn’t make myself say it. That was because part of me rose up inside and growled that she was fucking mine and I would kill any male who tried to take her away from me. That I would kill or die for her as surely as Grav would kill or die for his female ward to whom he had sworn his oath.
“Thank you.” Zoe was blushing prettily, her pale, freckled cheeks flushed with pleasure at the compliment. I noticed she hadn’t denied being mine any more than I had, and wondered about it. She’d been quick to point out I didn’t own her before I had given her her freedom, but now she wasn’t so quick to mention it. Did it mean anything?
“Any more like you back home?” Grav asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female quite like you before—where are you from, anyway?”
“A closed planet called Earth,” I said, speaking up at last. “It was locked by the Ancient Ones after they seeded it so the inhabitants have never mingled with races outside their own planet.”
Grav’s white-on-black eyes grew wide. “A Pure One? She’s a Pure One?”
“And a La-ti-da,” Zoe added. “A Lat-ti-zal, I mean. Whatever that means—I’m still not completely sure.”
“Really?” Grav’s eyes grew even wider and he looked at me. “I can see why you wanted to protect her, Sarden. She’s fuckin’ priceless.”
“She is,” I murmured, looking down at my little Pure One. “In fact, this is beginning to seem like a really bad idea, flaunting her in front of Tazaxx.”
“No, if anything it’ll add verisimilitude to our story,” Grav protested. “Van’Dleek would definitely have a female like Zoe on his arm. And Tazaxx won’t be able to resist taking a closer look at her.”
I tore my eyes away from Zoe to look at him.
“Excuse me? Verisimilitude?”
He shrugged and gave me a sardonic grin.
“Hey, I read a lot in Triple Max. Helped pass the time.”
“I bet,” I said dryly. “But the very fact that Tazaxx won’t be able to resist Zoe is what makes me so reluctant to take her.”
“He wouldn’t dare steal another male’s property—especially not a rich and influential one like Van’Dleek’s,” Grav pointed out. “But you having Zoe—it’ll impress the hell out of him and make him more willing to deal.”
I knew he was right but I couldn’t suppress the feeling of worry that rose in me when I thought of taking Zoe into danger—even a controlled kind of danger. She was mine, Godsdamnit and I needed to protect her. I wanted nothing more than to lock her away and keep her safe forever.
But I couldn’t do that—because no matter how loudly my possessive instincts growled, she wasn’t mine. Not really.
“All right,” I said at last and pointed a finger at Zoe. “But stay close. I’m serious, Zoe, don’t leave my side. I don’t want a repeat of Gallana.”
“Speaking of Gallana, look who’s all recovered.” Zoe parted the hair at the side of her neck carefully and I saw a tiny, purple-green face peering out at me.
“What in the Frozen Hells, Zoe?” I growled, frowning. “You can’t take those damn things with you.”
“Why not? They’re really tame—look.” She put up a hand and the three little creatures came crawling out to sit obediently on her hand.
“Nib-nibs!” In two strides, Grav was across the room and reaching for one of the tiny creatures.
“No!” Zoe snatched her hand away and held the chittering nib-nibs protectively to her chest. “They’re pets,” she explained to the startled Grav. “They’re not for snacking.”
“Hey—okay.” He held up his hands. “I wasn’t going to eat ‘em. I’ve read about them—just never seen any up close.”
“Sorry—it’s just that some people think they’re only good for a between-meal snack.” She shot me a look.
“What?” I said, defensively. “I told you—I tried one once and spit it out before I even bit down.”
“You say you’ve got them tamed?” Grav asked, apparently still interested.
“Look, I’ve been working with them while Al synthesized my costume. It’s amazing how quickly they learn. Okay guys,” she said, addressing the nib-nibs, “Roll over.” Immediately all three of them lay on their backs and rolled over in her hand. “Speak,” Zoe told them and they all sat up and chattered. “Play dead,” she said and they immediately flopped down and lay motionless across her palm.
“Nice,” Grav said, nodding.
“It’s more than nice—it’s amazing.” Zoe’s big blue eyes shone, making her even more gorgeous, if that was possible. “I taught them all that in less than an hour. It’s almost like they know what I want them to do even before I tell them.”
“That’s because they’re mildly telepathic,” Grav said. “It’s how they keep track of each other—if you take one away from its colony, it can still get back, no matter how far away it is, just by zeroing in on the mental energy of the others.”
“Wow.” Zoe looked at her tiny pets with newfound respect and I knew I’d never be able to convince her to leave them behind now. Well, maybe having a Pure One that had tame nib-nibs as pets would also add to the verisimilitude of our disguise. It certainly seemed like the eccentric kind of thing a rich douche-nozzle, to use Zoe’s term, would do.
“What did you name them?” I asked, resignedly. “You did name them, right?”
“Of course. This one is Rhaegar, this one is Viserys, and this one—the one I rescued from Count Creepy—is Drogon. He’s my main guy, aren’t you, fella?” she asked, stroking the little creature gently with one finger. He hummed contentedly and rubbed against her hand in apparent ecstasy.
I felt a tightening in my gut and realized I was actually getting jealous of the damn nib-nib! At least it got to feel the touch of her soft little hands. I wanted those hands all over me—and I wanted mine all over Zoe. Seeing her in that damn disguise which showed off all her creamy curves didn’t help my desire to possess her either.
“Rhaegar …Viserys…Drogon. Are those Earth names?” Grav asked, still watching as she
played with her pets.
Zoe flushed, her freckled cheeks going pink.
“Well, sort of—they’re from a TV show I like—a kind of entertainment you watch on a screen. Just call me ‘the mother of dragons’—or, I guess ‘the mother of nib-nibs.’”
She laughed and Grav rumbled laughter too, not because he got her Earth-centric joke, I was sure. But just because Zoe had such an infectious laugh. Soft, and feminine, and lilting—Gods, was there anything about her that didn’t arouse me? I didn’t fucking think so.
“It’s time to go,” I said, my voice rougher than I meant it to be. As if on cue, Al came whizzing into the room, already in his travel form.
“Master, I have received an answer from the compound—Tazaxx will be most pleased to meet with Baron Van’Dleek today.”
“Good,” I said, pulling on my mask and drinking a few drops of the saphor juice compound. “Tell him the baron and his entourage are on the way.”
Chapter Twenty
Zoe
I don’t know what I expected when we got to the surface of Giedi Prime, but it was nothing like Gallana. On the Majoran spaceport, there had been, for the most part, a sense of beauty and grace—an interest in aesthetics which was sadly lacking here.
Giedi Prime was a big, dirty, ugly, industrialized planet where the city seemed to stretch on and on forever with tall towers and huge stacks belching smoke into the air.
The sky was completely black.
“Oh—I didn’t know we were getting here in the middle of the night,” I remarked to Sarden as he piloted his small shuttle over the planet’s surface. The two guys were up front, due to their size and I was squeezed into the back, looking out through the windshield-type-screen at the front.
“We’re not—this is the middle of the Giedi Prime day,” he said.
“Pollution here is fuckin’ awful,” Grav growled from my other side. “Just stay in the shuttle and keep the air circulator turned on full blast and we’ll be okay.”
“It’ll be better at Tazaxx’s compound,” Sarden told me. “He’s got his own private atmosphere bubble over the entire property. Probably cost thirty million credits at least.”
“Wow.” I was suitably impressed and kept my eyes peeled, still curiously drinking in all the alien sights around me as we flew. Not that there was much to see—just lots and lots of dark buildings and belching smokestacks. The whole planet looked like the end of the Lorax book after the greedy Onceler gets hold of it and ruins it so the humming fish and swammy-swans and barbaloots have to move out.
My nib-nibs, Rae, Vis, and little Drogon, my favorite, chattered quietly to each other in my hair but otherwise were perfectly well behaved. They really were the cutest little guys and the perfect pets. I was gladder than ever that I’d rescued them after hearing that they were mildly telepathic. Imagine the poor things having to hear their buddy screaming inside their heads while he got chewed up and swallowed! Ugh! If I ever saw Count Doloroso again— which I never hoped to do, but if I did—I’d give him a piece of my mind and a kick in the balls. What a jerk, trying to eat such adorable little creatures!
At last, after about thirty minutes of flying, we came to a kind of countryside—if you could call it that. Mostly it just looked like a big, open, barren plain with no buildings on it. There weren’t any trees or lakes or animals either, but there was a dark, scraggly kind of grass which was apparently what passed for nature on Giedi Prime.
Once again I was reminded of the Lorax, which had been my favorite book as a kid. “At the far end of town, where the grickle-grass grows and the wind smells slow and sour when it blows…”
We hadn’t opened any of the windows in the shuttle so much as a crack but I was willing to bet the wind on this planet did smell sour. It was pretty much the nastiest, most polluted place I’d ever seen and I had visited a friend who lived in the industrial part of Houston once, so that was saying something.
“Heads up. Compound ahead,” Sarden said.
“What?” I asked, frowning. “I don’t see any…”
And then I saw it. Sitting in the middle of the dark field of sickly grickle-grass, was an enormous dome. It was black too—pure, shiny, bible-black—which was why I hadn’t immediately seen it. It rose out of the blighted ground like a bubble of diseased blood that might burst and spew ichor everywhere at any moment. Yech.
Sarden brought the shuttle down right in front of the curving, shiny black side and then spoke into some kind of communicator in a technical-sounding jargon I couldn’t make heads or tails of.
Whoever was on the other end seemed to get it though, because after a moment, the black bubble started to swell outward and then it just sort of enveloped our shuttle. Kind of like an amoeba envelopes its prey, when it eats some other hapless, microscopic creature living in its pond of dirty rainwater. Which is how I felt when the giant black bubble grew to encapsulate us—tiny…microscopic.
Also kind of claustrophobic.
“Um, are we going to be able to get out of here all right?” I asked, trying not to sound nervous and failing miserably.
“They’ll let us out the same way we came in,” Sarden assured me as the black border of the bubble passed over us. It swallowed the shuttle whole, leaving us in a big parking area that looked like a warehouse. “Hopefully with Sellah and Teeny in tow.”
“From your lips to the Goddess’s ears,” Grav muttered, adjusting the knives he had clipped to the spiked leather straps criss-crossing his muscular chest.
“Everybody be quiet now—here comes Tazaxx’s emissary,” Sarden muttered. “Remember, we need to get in and out of here as quickly as possible. The saphor solution I took to change my skin color has a time limit on it.”
“How long are we talking?” Grav wanted to know.
“One solar hour—two max. But hopefully it won’t be a problem—we should be in and out of here fast—Tazaxx isn’t known for prolonging business deals.”
“Can’t you just take more if it starts to wear off?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. The solution has a two solar-hour recovery time on it—it won’t work again after it wears off until that time is up.”
“Oh, okay. Then I guess we’d better be quick,” I said.
“We will be,” Sarden said grimly.
“All right—let’s go. I’m ready.” Grav cracked his knuckles again, making me shudder. He might be Sarden’s friend but the fact that he was such a big, scary guy and a confessed murderer meant I was still kind of nervous around him.
“All right—I’m popping the hatch,” Sarden said.
The door to the shuttle opened and I leaned forward eagerly, trying to see the emissary.
What I saw was a giant piece of crap wearing a rainbow-colored cape.
At least, that was what it appeared to be. A giant, man-sized poo that had somehow managed to stand up on end and learned to move.
Okay, sorry for the gross mental image but seriously—that’s just exactly what it looked like. It slid forward smoothly and I looked behind it, wondering if it was leaving a trail of slime. There was no slime, though, and after a minute I saw why—its bottom half had about a million tiny little legs and feet all over it and they were moving kind of like a caterpillar’s legs to carry it along.
It had a vaguely human looking face in the middle of its lumpy head—by which I mean it had two eyes, a sort of nose, and a round, lipless mouth. Out of the mouth came a nasal, croaking voice like a bullfrog with a cold.
“You are Baron Van’Dleek?” it demanded, waving a lumpy arm at Sarden.
“I am.” Sarden, who was dressed in his Miami Vice best with the baggy white trousers and black, boxy jacket stepped out of the shuttle and looked down his nose at the moving piece of crap who was apparently our guide.
Sarden was looking good, despite his new light blue skin and the Van’Dleek mask. It was amazing how well the smart-fabric conformed to his face—it e
ven hid his horns. And the fact that the jacket hung open, revealing his mouthwateringly muscular torso didn’t hurt either.
I noticed, though, that he was careful to keep his trousers closed when he moved, so as not to expose himself by accident. Which was a good thing—a wardrobe malfunction is one thing but letting his entire wang dangle outside the white pants would definitely ruin the cool, 80s look he had going.
“You and your entourage will have to be scanned before being admitted to the main compound,” the moving crap informed him as he stepped down.
Sarden gave our guide a condescending sneer. “Of course. But make it quick—I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
I stared at him in surprise as I scrambled out of the shuttle with a helping hand from Grav. Wow, he was nailing the rich douche-nozzle part right off the bat!
“Of course.” The piece of crap—at some point we would probably learn his name but he was always going to be POC to me—nodded stiffly.
He produced a large instrument that looked like a bullhorn from under his colorful, rainbow cape. Pointing it at Sarden’s face, he pressed a button. A blue light illuminated Sarden’s features for a moment, then went dark again.
POC consulted a screen that was on the back of the bullhorn and frowned. “Hmm…these readings are most…peculiar,” he said in his nasally bullfrog-with-a-cold voice.
“What are you talking about? Hurry up! I don’t have all day,” Sarden snapped.
“But…these readings…” POC looked worried and he wasn’t the only one. My stomach did a little flip. Was it possible that the smart-fabric wasn’t smart enough to do the job? Could the scanner POC was using see through Sarden’s disguise? If so we were so screwed…
“I can’t help it if your equipment isn’t up to par,” Sarden barked, scowling at POC.