CHAPTER TWO: DANOVAN tel’DARIAN

She was mine, she was mine. And the world was bright and new. But I knew what had to be done: I had to bring her to Christian so that we could tell him that their engagement was over. Then, we could settle down in Hiropass, or even Pyrathas if she liked the city better, and she could help the new hybrid babies to thrive, and I could be the head of security for the village, or maybe even run for office one day, and we could settle into a quiet Galatean life. Seeing that couple at the wedding last night had cemented it for me: I hadn’t deigned to let myself want that with Ara, but now it seemed possible. It seemed like we could stay on Galatea, and everything would work out.

“Will you take a look at my thigh?” She asked, lifting the towel so that I could see the venom burns. They were looking irritated by the warm water, but no worse for the wear.

“I need to dissolve that balm,” I said, moving to the cabinet to find the right vial. Locating it, I moved Araceli to the counter, and helped her up onto it, spreading her legs so that I could have access to the worst of her burns. I stole a glimpse at the flower of her sex and felt my cock twinge beneath the towel. But there wasn’t time for that now.

I dabbed some of the dissolving ointment onto it and the plastic-like balm was eaten gently away. Ara sucked in a sharp breath of air through her teeth, so I put some soothing cream on the burn as well and watched her walk awkwardly with her legs parted back into my old bedroom where we’d abandoned our clothes the night before.

We dressed, and Ara gathered her curls into a twist, which she secured with two of my mother’s hair sticks. My mother had washed the clothes we’d arrived in, and those were what we donned, traveling clothes. I felt the slightest twinge of sadness at the prospect of leaving my home again.

We went downstairs, and saw my mother and father smiling at one another as they went about preparing the morning’s meal.

“Good morning,” I said to them in English, and my father beamed.

“Good morning!” came his enthusiastic reply.

“Sheeay riagosa du mil.” My mother said in Galatean, and I found myself grateful yet again that I could not blush.

“What did she say?” Ara asked.

“Nothing,” I quickly rejoined.

“No, I want to know,” she insisted. “That’s what she whispered to me the other night, and I have no idea what it means.”

“It’s just an old Galatean saying…”

“Meaning…?”

My father approached and pushed a cup of tea into Araceli’s hands, which she accepted with gracious thanks.

“Sheeay riagosa du mil.” My father repeated. “It means, ‘she will—’”

“That’s quite enough, thanks, Dad,” I interrupted. He could do naught but chuckle and shrug his shoulders.

My mother gestured that we should sit around the fire pit, and we complied, as she scooted fresh warm oats and berries into bowls for us. “The celebration last night,” I remarked, “was very beautiful.”

My father nodded. “It was a pleasure,” he said, testing his English, “seeing Dinervah become wife.”

Araceli grinned, but didn’t correct him as he translated for my mother’s benefit. “If you think I’m going to let this go,” she said, wagging a finger at me, “you’re sorely mistaken. I want to know—”

That was the instant that everything changed.

A screaming shot across the sky like a banshee from the mouth of hell, followed thereafter by a rumbling that shook the very foundation upon which my family home sat. The blast was punctuated by the unmistakable rat-a-tat of gunfire, and I dropped instinctively to the floor.

“Get down!” I shouted, and Ara and my father dropped to the floor, making themselves as flat as they could with their arms winged out to the side and their cheeks pressed against the floorboards.

But my mother had never heard gunfire before. She had never heard gunfire before, and she didn’t know what the English words get down meant. So when the bullets tore through the glass at the front of the house, shattering the handcrafted bannister to a million splinter shards, one tore through her as well.

I knew it tore through her because I saw the blood spatter, but I hadn’t actually seen it hit her, hadn’t seen her hit the floor. I scrambled over to her, gathering her to me and dragged her behind the kitchen island as the bullets rained down on my childhood home.

The barrage ended just as abruptly as it had started, and I could tell that they had merely focused their attention on another nearby domicile. Who were they? Why were they attacking a peaceful civilian town?

“Mother,” I began in Galatean, holding her head in lap. “Can you hear me?”

She nodded, her eyes focused desperately on my face. My father and Ara joined us behind the island, and I tried to ascertain the extent of her injury. She lifted her blood-smeared hand to grip my uncertain fist, and I saw Ara in my periphery grab a dish towel to press against my mother’s abdomen in an impotent attempt to stem the flow of the bleeding. It was a stomach wound; the stern set of Ara’s jaw told me all I needed to know about my mother’s prognosis.

“Listen to me, Son,” My mother was whispering, even as my father came around to take her other hand. “They came for the hybrid.”

“What do you mean—who came?”

But my mother would only speak a few more words in this life. She turned a hazy gaze to my father, whose eyes glimmered yet with the last, dying hope between us.

“Loving you has been my greatest joy,” she wheezed, “and the greatest privilege of my life.”

Those final words deflated my father into wracking sobs over Jaelle’s body, the great healer of Hiropass. My mother.

I moved out from beneath the weight of my mother’s body and rose to my feet. I don’t know what it was that made me do it, but I didn’t feel any fear as I headed to the wreckage of what was our front door and strode into the morning light, without a weapon to turn against my enemies, without a shield to defend myself.

I saw their shuttles, hovering low in the sky over my hometown. I saw the bodies of the slain in the street. And I saw them hauling a woman bodily from her home. Ayla vel’Myracalf, the bronze-skinned Galatean who was swollen with her human lover’s hybrid progeny. She was shrieking his name as they pulled her from her home, and I headed toward her, picking up speed as I went. I would stop them from taking her. I would stop them if it was the last thing I did in this life.

I ran, I ran, I ran until my legs ached and my thighs burned, but I was not fast enough. They put the pregnant Galatean on the shuttle and they lifted off into the air, and I was left to block the heat from their engines with my hands in front of my face as they disappeared above the cloud cover.

Looking around, I could see Robert Welsh, the human tourist who had loved the Galatean woman, dead in his doorway. One bullet, straight through his skull.

All around me was chaos, people moaning in their agony, trembling in their confusion, and spilling out of their ravaged houses to check on their friends, family, and neighbors. They came for the hybrid. Was it really possible that these people had ravaged a village just to get at one pregnant Galatean woman? Why? To what end?

“Danovan!” I heard my name break through the cloud of my confusion and focused my eyes as my sister came running toward me, her celebration paint smeared in streaks across her skin. “Danovan! Are you all right, brother?”

She threw herself into my arms and I squeezed her tight. “I’m all right,” I said in broken Galatean, “I’m all right. But Mother…” I couldn’t find the words to tell her what had happened to our mother, so I took her by the hand and led her home.

~ * ~

The square at the center of town where, just the evening previous, there had been dancing and celebration, was a smoldering black crater where a missile hit. It had pushed up the cobble stone around the edges, the way that tree roots do when they’re desperate to grow. But it was the lip of a hole, instead, like the event horizon of a singularity and I knew if I climbed down into it that I would never come out again. When Dinervah and I passed it, I didn’t even look directly inside.

The trip back to the house was considerably slower than the run I’d taken toward the shuttle, and I absorbed the madness around me. People were dead, or tending to the dead, or wounded, or tending to the wounded. And when we reached the house, hand in hand, there was Ara with her sleeves rolled up, bandaging up a Galatean child who looked as though she’d been sliced up by exploded glass. The kid’s lip was trembling, but she wasn’t crying, she was just staring wide-eyed at the strange human woman who was trying to help her.

When we got near enough, Dinervah darted into the house. I heard her wail of despair when she found my parents, no doubt my mother’s lifeless body still cradled in my father’s arms. Araceli looked up at the sound, and spotted me, standing useless at the center of things. She rose to her feet and jogged to my side, taking my hand in hers and staring up into my face.

“What did you see?” She asked. “When you ran off, what did you see?”

“Nothing,” I replied, dazed. “I saw…men. And ships.”

“Did you see men,” she pressed, “or Galateans? Were there logos on the ships? Did the men wear uniforms?” She lifted her hands to my face and forced me to look her in the eye. “Danovan,” she said, intent. “I need you to focus. I need you to remember exactly what you saw.”

I gave a slow nod of my head and allowed my eyes to come to a close. I played the image of what I’d seen on the backs of my eyelids: Men, Human Men, in unmarked black combat uniforms. Silver-grey shuttles, Galatean Military-grade. No logos. I told her what I saw.

“They took Ayla, the woman we met last night? The one who is pregnant with the hybrid. They shot Robert Welsh, and they took Ayla vel’Myracalf.” I stared down at Ara whose expression was as pained and as desperate as mine must have been. “My mother said, right before she died. She said that they had come for the hybrid. She was right—they took the woman, the hybrid. All. And they laid waste to the village that nurtured her.”

Ara paced silently in front of me for several long moments, rubbing at her forehead with her fingertips. “It must all be connected,” she said at length. “Everything. The attack on the Leviathan, on the GenOriens base. On this village.”

“Why would anyone—”

“Think about it, Danovan,” she said, a distinctly unhinged edge to her voice. “The thing that connects everything. The one through-line: Human-Galatean hybrids. That was what I came here to research. That’s what Martin Pierce was doing at the base. Someone doesn’t want my program to succeed—and they’ve been sabotaging it since before I got aboard the ship that took me out of Earth’s orbit. Someone has been trying to shut me down since Day One, and when they couldn’t, they turned violent.”

“But why?” I asked, canting my head to one side, brow furrowed. “Why would anyone go to so violent a means of ending a program?”

“I don’t know why someone would kill for it,” she said, “but I do know that it has faced staunch opposition for a long time. I’m sure there were Galateans who weren’t thrilled by the idea of a hybrid species either.”

“Sure, a vocal minority.”

“Precisely. There were people on earth who said it was against God’s will, and all that. The same people who thought that people from different human races shouldn’t intermarry. But they were on the wrong side of history, and that’s what we thought our opposition would be as well.”

“But now they’ve taken up arms.”

“Yes. And they think history should go the way they want it to go. Their first step? Tampering with my data so that every major scientific organization in my field had information that showed it was impossible for humans and Galateans to breed naturally.”

“How did they manage that?” I took Ara by the elbow and drew her nearer to the outer wall of the house, out of the path of rushing, confused Galateans who might see the face of an outsider and go a little rabid, given the present circumstances. I turned, shielding her at least somewhat from prying eyes and casting her face into shadow.

“It would have had to have been an inside job,” she said, “someone with access to the GenOriens mainframe. And they would have had to have plants everywhere, from lab assistants to CEOs. Everywhere. God.” She leaned back against the wall and lifted her eyes to the sky. It was a clear, bright day. Why are disastrous days always so clear and bright and beautiful?

“How do we find them?” I asked. Because I had a vendetta now. I wanted to help Araceli, I wanted to avenge my friends and bring the people who had attacked the Leviathan to justice. But now? Now, I didn’t want justice. They murdered my mother; they made it personal. Now I wanted to watch them drown in pools of their own blood.

Ara was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

I ran my tongue over my lips and gripped Araceli by the shoulders. “Then we stick to the plan. We head for the crash site. We find Christian. We get ourselves access to resources and we go from there.”

“Resources?” She echoed. “What do you mean resources?”

“Well, weaponry, for starters.”

“Danovan—”

“Weapons, vehicles. Communications devices. If we’re going to levy a counterattack, we’ll need resources.”

“Levy a counterattack? Danovan, who do you think I am? I can’t…levy a counterattack. I’m just a scientist.”

“And you’ll want to help me get Ayla val’Myracalf back, won’t you? She’s the dream, right? I mean, isn’t she? She’s what you’ve been trying for in your laboratories. But she was just out here, innocently living her life until they took her, Ara.” I looked down into her lovely face and I wished that I could think only of our future, hers and mine, as I had what felt like mere moments earlier. But I couldn’t. Not now. “Please, Ara,” I whispered. “Tell me you’ll help me.”

She swallowed hard, her pained expression made a little crease form between her eyes, and I wanted to kiss her. But I didn’t. Then, finally: “Yes. Yes, all right, I’ll help you.”