CHAPTER THREE—LORELEI VAUSS

Days and days and nothing. I returned home from my meeting with Tierney Mafaren feeling hopeful, like everything was finally coming together and my life could continue in the way I had imagined it would—which is to say absolutely nothing like what I had always thought it would look like, but definitely more exciting, and featuring prominently a certain muscled alien King. But then I didn’t hear from Tierney, not for a day, not for a week, not for two. And I became despondent.

I went to my weekly checkups, just as Mireena had ordered me to do, and the baby was progressing quite well from zygote to embryo, from what I could tell. The doctors all seemed happy to see me every time I walked into the medical bay, and I was always heartened by the update that my pregnancy was progressing in a healthy way. But something one of the doctors said gave me a sick sense in the pit of my stomach.

I was laying on the examination table, feeling that momentary glow of satisfaction that comes from the words, “Everything looks great!” when a doctor removes the sonogram equipment and plucks off her plastic gloves. “You’re doing just fine, and so is the little one.” But then she walked out of the examination room, and the door didn’t close all the way behind her.

It was an automatic glass sliding door, but I guess it had gotten bunched on a rubber and felt mat that was laid on the floor, so the door was open just a crack. And I heard the doctor speaking to the nurse outside the room.

“Yeah, she’s exceptionally healthy—the progeny is progressing well. Tell Mireena that we will have a sturdy specimen to showcase to our funders.”

I sat up on my elbows on the exam table, and turned to look at the doctor, whose back was to me just outside the exam room. But I caught the nurse’s eye, and he looked startled, muttering something to the doctor, who turned to look at me through the glass. Her mouth was slightly agape, but she smiled when she saw me looking at her, even as the nurse darted off to deliver the report.

A “specimen” to “showcase”? What did that mean?

Whatever it meant, I was nervous about it. And all I wanted to do was to talk to Calder about my fears and have him hold me and tell me that nothing would ever happen to me or the baby.

But my heart was outside my body, and I didn’t even have a way to talk to it, let alone return to it.

Furthermore, I had no idea where we were in the galaxy. Were we still close to Qetesh, or were we lightyears out? It was impossible to tell, and the Echelon kept coordinates strictly under wraps.

Then, one day, I got an e-mail from an unknown name.

Any modern Federation communications system could get a message to the Atria, even if you did not have the specific address of the intended individual. What happens is, much like a paper mail post office, the data is sorted, and forwarded. This is typically automatic, with monitoring for key words or strange patterns or who knows what else, but more often than not, a message gets forwarded through the automatic ship communications system to the intended recipient.

I’d never received a message that way: everyone I knew who sent email lived aboard the Atria and knew my personal moniker and could reach me easily. Or, if they didn’t, they had access to a ship directory that could provide them with the information. My parents got a number of off-ship messages that came through the forwarding system, but I’d never seen them firsthand.

Until, suddenly, I had.

My datapad pinged, and I thought nothing of it. I was used to getting hundreds of message each day, everything from dinner plans with my parents to doctor’s appointment reminders, to spam messages letting me know that if I acted now, I could get bio mod implants at a fraction of the price. So I didn’t look at it right away. In fact, I forgot about it entirely.

Then I opened my mail, and saw a message from INTRASHIP MAIL FORWARDING, and clicked on it immediately.

It was written in English, and it read as follows:

Hello, My Lady—

I have had a friend take the liberty of translating this message for me because I do not know if Qeteshi characters could be accurately represented on the strange little keyboard she is using. In any event, hello, this is Calder Fev’Rosk, the Qulari King of Qetesh, and your husband. I hope that this will reach you.

I did not care for how we parted. I did not say all that I wished to say, and perhaps neither did you. I should have dropped to my knees and begged you to stay. I should have promised to do all I could to keep you here and make you happy. Please, Lorelei, please come back to Qetesh. Please come back to stay with me forever. I can say nothing else—but picture me here in the dirt on my knees—but I love you.

I love you. You are my wife. Come back to me.

Calder Fev’Rosk I read the message over and over, tears brimming in my eyes and running down my face in steady streams. I checked the fields and saw that the original address was from someone named Anesh Alouk, a name with which I was not familiar. I sniffled, and started to compose my reply, but then I stopped, frozen, with my hands hovering above the keyboard.

What if this was not from Calder? What if I was being manipulated somehow? He didn’t know how to send an e-mail—he hadn’t even seen a computer console until he took me to the spire to send the distress signal. I wanted to tell him everything: that I was working my hardest to find a way back to him, that my family was coming, that I was pregnant with his child, but I couldn’t.

And yet, if it had been from him, if it was authentic, if he had gotten a friend with access to Echelon technology to help him, well then, I couldn’t leave him hanging. What if he was waiting for me? I had put us through enough. I had to respond.

But I decided that I had to be cautious in what I said. Nothing that could draw any attention to the truth.

Calder—I wrote:

I can’t tell you how much I miss you. I never should have left, and I am sorry that I did. I am here with my family, and I am in good health, positively glowing, and I am trying to find out when I can come home to you. Please wait for me, I am coming.

Love, Lorelei

It seemed cold, and distant, but I didn’t want to be more detailed than that. It felt like such a huge risk: if Mireena found out that her daughter was trying to help us all get off the Atria, there would be hell to pay.

But still, I sent off the e-mail and rushed out the door of my tiny little apartment and headed toward the opulent Mafaren quarters. I was nearly running through the halls, and when I neared the Mafaren quarters, I nearly ran smack into Tierney.

“Watch where you’re going!” Tierney shouted, before she had a chance to register that it was me.

“Sorry!” I shouted back, “sorry. I just…I needed to talk to you.”

“What is it, Vauss?”

“I’ve had an e-mail from Qetesh.”

She canted her head to the side and stared at me wide-eyed. “They have e-mail?”

“No. I mean—yes, somehow. Apparently.”

“All right. And?”

“And I need to know how we’re going to get off planet! It’s been weeks—have you had any luck yet?”

Tierney glanced over her shoulder, and hooked her arm through mine, leading me away from the front door of the Mafaren living quarters. “Seriously, you are the pushiest human I have ever met in my entire life.”

“I honestly just think that you Mafarens are used to having everything go precisely your way at precisely your pace,” I countered, but she was dragging me around the corner, down a main hall of the Atria.

“Look, I’ve already secured our passage. But I wasn’t going to say anything to you until 24 hours beforehand.”

“What?” I balked.

“It gives you all less time to make a slip that will ruin everything,” she hissed. “You know the saying—two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

I blinked. “Intense, Mafaren.”

“Whatever. Just…hang tight, ok? It’s happening. I’ll give you more details in the days to come.”

I didn’t mention anything to my parents about my encounter with Tierney when I saw them for dinner that night—I let them chat happily about what their new lives on Qetesh would be like. What were the houses like? They wanted to know. What about the market? The villagers, were they nice? What about the food? Did they have wine on Qetesh? And what was the government like?

I answered all of their questions to the best of my ability, pushing my food absently around on my plate. My mother had roasted some ham, but the last few days had put me off my appetite. Something about the doctor mentioning my baby in the same sentence as the words “specimen” and “funders” made me feel ill, right alongside the anticipation of Tierney getting us passage off of the Atria entirely.

I wanted to tell them about it all, have them assuage my fears, but Tierney had a point: It was safer for all of us if I kept everything under wraps. They wouldn’t have to wait long until all was revealed.

Not long at all, because it was that night that I received a call from Tierney indicating that my parents and I should meet her in the hangar bay at 0200 hours. “With minimal luggage,” she amended via the video chat, “and, er, an…open mind.” The video cut out before I had an opportunity to ask her what she meant by that.

But we did as she asked. I dressed myself in jeans, a tee shirt, a black leather jacket and combat boots, my preferred uniform before I’d become a slave, a runaway, and a Queen, and packed a few prized possessions and a change of clothes in a duffel bag. My parents packed considerably more, and I forced them to downsize considerably before the three of us headed off to the hangar bay, each of us carrying one bag and one bag only.

Though my heart was racing in my chest, no one stopped us, no one asked us where we were going in the middle of the night. No one bothered us because no one cared, and no one had any reason to assume we were doing anything we should not be doing.

We reached the hangar bay without incident, and I spied Tierney some fifty meters off and walked directly toward her. In all of my excitement, in the rush of packing, in all of my daydreaming, I never bothered to consider that I might not like how she got us off the Atria. But when I saw Garrick Thassian, leader of the Quarter Moon Slavers, standing next to her, all of the blood drained out of me, and I nearly toppled over.

“Lorelei,” she said, her tone full of warning, her hand held out in front of her as she approached me, “don’t say anything yet. Let me explain.”

“Explain?” I echoed, breathless. My parents came up behind me, and I felt somewhat sturdier know that they were there.

“What’s the matter, Lore?” my mother asked, even as my father placed his hand lightly on the small of my back, almost to help keep me steady.

“It seems,” I managed to eek out through clenched teeth, “that Ms. Mafaren has enlisted the assistance of the enemy in order to get us back to Qetesh.”

“Enemy?” Garrick Thassian said, grinning wryly from behind his mandibles. He must have been the ugliest creature in existence. “We are not enemies, surely. Not when there has been such magnificent cooperation between us, on both sides.”

“What an absurd notion,” I shot back. “You kidnapped us. You set this whole awful saga in motion, you disgusting—”

“Lorelei.”

“—repulsive—”

“Lorelei!”

“—overgrown insect!”

“Lorelei!” Tierney was grabbing me, begging me to stop. “You have to stop! He’s agreed to help us. He’s the only one that has. He’s it, all right?” She turned me bodily so that I was forced to face her. “He’s it. If you want to get to Qetesh, this is it. This is our chance.”

“I don’t understand, Tierney,” I said, casting a glance to my father who was staring Thassian down like he’d like to murder him with his bare hands. “Why did you call him, Tierney? Why him?”

“Because it dawned on me,” she said, “that he was the only man maybe in the entire galaxy who could actually get me back to Ho’ruan.” I blinked as she spoke the unfamiliar word. It was a name, I knew immediately, by how gentle she was with it in her mouth. The name of the man she loved. “And he agreed to help me. Apparently Ho’ruan has agreed to pay my sum a second time if it means getting me back. So, you see? He does love me, Lorelei. He does.”

“And I have kept my word to you in the past, have I not, Lorelei?” Garrick Thassian interjected, his hands out to the sides, that stupid smug grin on his stupid smug face.

“My name,” I said, “is Lorelei Fev’Rosk nee Vauss, Qulari Queen of Qetesh. You shall not address me so informally, sir.” At this, Thassian grew cold, but he dipped his torso into a half-bow all the same.

“Come, then. The hour is late, and we’ve a pretty distance to close between ourselves and the planet in question.” He glanced between us and heaved a sigh. “Have it your way. Make your decisions, Ms. Mafaren. I’ll be on the transport vessel.” And with that, he turned on his heel and headed toward the back of the hangar bay, back to where his ship was waiting to take us off the Atria.

I looked back at my mother and father, who looked precisely as uncertain as I felt, and I knew that everyone was waiting for me to make some sort of decision.

“Please,” Tierney said, “this is the best way. For all of us.”

I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hands and gave a sharp nod of my head. “Fine,” I said at last. “Fine. We go.” And I picked up my bag and marched off in the direction Thassian had headed, with my parents and Tierney left to march behind me.

Garrick Thassian was waiting for me by the gangway leading to his ship, a small shuttle that was large enough to carry maybe six or eight passengers. It was considerably smaller than the transport vessel Teldara had taken me out on the last time I had left the Atria. It was read, like the Quarter Moon uniform Thassian himself was sporting, with a shining, chrome crescent symbol on the side. I slowed my pace as I neared him, and I must have been scowling because he was wearing his brightest, mandibular smile. “Your highness,” he said, sibilant and snarky, “I am so pleased to be of service.”

“Save it, Thassian,” I shot back. “I want you to take the fastest, most direct route back to Qetesh. Are we understood?”

“Your wish is my command.” Tierney and my parents walked up into the belly of the shuttle, and Thassian held his hand out, indicating that I should join them. But when I didn’t move, I could see a flash of irritation across his green and yellow eyes. “You, your majesty, are far more trouble than you’re worth. I’ve no intention of absconding with you and your…aging familial units. I am here for Ms. Mafaren, who will fetch such a sum, the likes of which my organization has not seen before. And part of her deal was that you reach your destination unharmed.”

“How do we know you’ll keep your word?”

“She has insisted that her, er…that is…buyer will be meeting us on Qetesh itself. So, there you have it. Nothing to worry about.”

I eyed him dubiously and watched with disgust as he extended his hand to me. I could do nothing but give it a limp shake and climb aboard the shuttle that would take me back to Calder.

~ * ~

I didn’t ask questions: I didn’t ask Tierney how she got a Quarter Moon shuttle clearance to dock on the Atria, or how she was able to get us off again without calling any attention to ourselves. I just didn’t ask.

But when we were safely off the Atria, and en route to Qetesh, my parents had some questions of their own.

We sat in the passenger bay, a spacious seating area that—from what I could gather from the Earth movies I’d seen—looked a lot like the first-class cabin of a standard Boeing 747 aircraft. Except that we were in 2 pairs of chairs that were facing one another, Tierney to my right, and my mom across from me, my father across from her. We sat knee to knees, huddled together so that we could talk in low tones.

“These were the…the men?” My mother asked, using the word ‘men’ very lightly. “The men that took you?”

I sighed through flared nostrils and nodded my head. My father furrowed his thick brows. “I just don’t understand it—why would you call them?”

“Because they only care about one thing,” I said, trying to defend Tierney, who was sitting with her arms wrapped around her torso, not looking at anyone. “Money. And right now, Ms. Mafaren here is worth a pretty penny.”

“To whom?” My mother wanted to know. But I didn’t really know. All I could do was shake my head and cast a hopeful glance to Tierney that would provide some of the answers they were seeking.

“Ho’ruan,” she said quietly.

“Ho’ruan,” my father repeated. “What, ah. What does that mean?”

“Ho’ruan is a name,” Tierney went on. “Ho’ruan is the name of the man that I love. I happened to…” she swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “I know that I was abducted. Or…I know that’s how it looked.”

“How it looked?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry, Lorelei,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you were going to be on that transport vessel, and I didn’t know they were going to take anyone else. And when we were all captured together, I thought…well, if they did get away, I needed it to look like I had been abducted by chance along with everyone else. But think about it: why would I, a Mafaren, be traveling on a transport vessel?”

That was an excellent question that had simply not occurred to me before. She had all the money in the galaxy, and yet there she was, a stowaway like me, headed for earth. Why? Why hadn’t she flown first class on a passenger shuttle, in style, in the manner to which she was accustomed?

“I think you owe us a bit of an explanation, Ms. Mafaren,” my father said, and my look echoed his insistence. Tierney was nodding; she was picking at her nail beds; she wasn’t looking at any of us, but she was speaking.

“My…that is…I am not what my mother hoped I would be. She wanted me to participate in the family business, as it were, but I have no proficiency in business or public relations. So, she thought she’d…treat me like we lived in medieval Europe, and set up an arranged marriage, basically, between me and…Gods, who even knows. All I knew is that I wanted to live my life as I chose.” She ventured a glance up at me then, and I found that I was more empathetic to her than I even expected.

“Anyway, I had been…on this…site.” She looked up at us then, and I saw how pink her cheeks had become. “I met someone. He was far away. So very far, and I knew that I could never get to him through the normal channels. And he couldn’t exactly just…come get me, either.”

“Why?” I found myself asking. “Why not?”

She gave a shake of her head. “It’s difficult to explain. But my mother got wind that something was going on between us and she had everyone in the galaxy tracking him. It was…honestly, it was absurd. But you’ve seen firsthand what she can be like.”

“I’m sure she only had your best interest at heart,” my mother gently offered.

“No,” Tierney insisted. “She had the best interest of the Echelon at heart, sure. And by extension, most of the living creatures in the universe. But not me, not specifically. So, Ho’ruan and I came up with a plan to be together. He worked out a fee with the Quarter Moon, and they took us all. So you see,” she said, turning to me, “I was never really brainwashed. This really is a man that I love. It’s just…how we came together…I know I should have told you sooner. But I was ashamed.” She glanced at me, then, contrite. “I’m sorry. You were collateral damage.”

I nodded slowly, and I tried to find it in me to be angry. But I wasn’t. I understood, completely. My parents’ faces concealed what, I imagined, must have been a litany of mixed emotions, but they hid any contempt they might have felt for putting me into this situation in the first place. But she hadn’t really, had she? I had asked Tel to put me on the transport vessel. I got myself into this mess. Tierney got herself into her own mess, but I was responsible for mine. I reached out, and took her hand, giving it a squeeze, and she looked up at me, startled, her eyes watery. And she smiled.