She stops abruptly.
A long beat passes.
“S-sorry.” She flashes a shaky grin and fists the shimmery blue fabric, drawing it tight against her thighs. “I just tripped. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
I am not startled.
But I did not reach my position by being easily misled.
“I was just hoping we could call the pods back before they get too far away.”
I rise slowly. “No.”
“Did the attackers do something to the controls?”
She means the Eruvisans, and it’s doubtful. “Control of the pods has been routed away from the bridge.”
She blinks slowly. Her eyes are large and an odd color. Black rims a sultry brown that deepens as it approaches her pupils. They contain peaks and valleys like a secret desert. “Routed away…to the captain’s pod? The captain is the only one who can control the magnet?”
“Yes.”
“Can we communicate with her?”
“No.”
The delicate frown returns. Thinking through the problem.
And then her stomach makes a cavernous noise. She covers her belly. “Do you mind if we visit the cafeteria? It’s where I was when the emergency lights went off. Where we all were.”
Perhaps it is dangerous to keep her behind me.
I gesture for her to go first.
She moves quickly to obey.
For the moment, I still have the edge.
Two edges.
She walks, breathes, bleeds like any other lesser.
I confirmed it when I applied the sealing ointment to her inner passage.
But something in her is different.
Even now, it is calling out to me.
Again.
Her scent curls around me.
She walks before me, weaponless, and yet she will chain my mind.
Compel my body to act.
Not again.
This time, I am prepared.
Even though she is giving all the signals of a defeated lessor—fear, submissive posture, overtures of friendship—she also fearlessly handled me, touched me beneath my suit, put me in her mouth. Thinking about it causes unnatural heat to flood the region again. I have to adjust my suit.
Two clegs cannot pass fast enough.
The food units are standard issue and filled with raw materials from Humana. She offers me a tray, but the programmed contents are barely identifiable, and I will not enter a rest state—during which I clean, meditate, and refuel—until the assignment is complete.
“Are you sure? These are pretty great. They can make latkes or empanadas or mee goreng.”
There is a small but non-zero chance that she was exposed to the lusteal through the food processors. “Give me one of each.”
She programs in another meal and carries the plates to a table. Such a strange, wasteful use of this space. She folds herself into the cage of the chair. Then she uses her utensil to eat something called carbohydrate noodles.
I rotate the chair ninety degrees so there is an obvious exit and balance on the edge.
Humana’s food has a mineral aftertaste and the texture of paste. I need no more than one bite of each substance dissolving to an unsatisfying mush to confirm this is not palatable nor the source of the lusteal. A science officer would have to make the final determination, but I also doubt these substances are healthy.
“Not hungry,” she notes around a big mouthful. “I’ll eat fast.”
It does not matter.
Quiet tones echo, and odd sprays of light flicker on and off, highlighting different parts of the room. Like the frills on the captain’s chair, the fuzz on the floors, and the unsecured bed shelves, these decisions make no sense.
The inner colonnades have embedded viewscreens showing fake space scenes. On the walls separating the cafeteria from the bridge, flat creatures swim inside a bubbling liquid tank. Although not a bad idea to store potable water behind transparent aluminum, this is also fake.
She presses a button in the center of the table. A glass cylinder rises filled with potable water—which is real—and she consumes it with a tiny sigh.
But I am not fooled.
Her eyes rove my body.
She is still on edge.
Waiting for me to let down my guard.
“So the Eruvisans stole something from you, huh?” she asks, tension ringing her strange, compelling eyes. “Is that what you’re looking for?”
In a sense, yes. “They put metal on you.”
“Metal?”
“Aphrodisiac. The reason I could react.”
“React?” She chews slowly, and her oddly-colored eyes descend my body to my groin, obscured by the table. She swallows. “Oh, yeah. I think I’ve heard of that. Your race used to, um, reproduce in cycles, or what we would call heat—if you don’t mind me calling it that.”
Heat is very accurate for the sensations once more filling my lap.
“But after the…um, the destruction of your home world, you changed your biology to remove the mating urges.”
“We learned to control them.”
“Because you removed the parts of your body that cause it to go into heat and refined those parts into a biological ‘metal’ called lusteal. Isn’t that right?”
It is odd that she should know so much about my people but I should know nothing of hers. “You study us?”
“As intently as you probably studied the, um, cause of your home world’s destruction.”
“Why?”
“Because we weren’t sure if you were going to destroy us.” She pokes the tines of the utensil—fork—into the noodles. “Or if you still might.”
We do not destroy lesser planets. We protect them.
Unless they threaten the empire.
She suddenly lets out a puff of air. A small laugh.
I notice nothing amusing. “What?”
“Oh, just…” She sets down her fork and leans back. “I was supposed to eject with the rest of the pods. How did the Eruvisans dust me without me knowing? Well, I was in the middle of getting my fix, so I guess they could have done anything.”
Her fix. Implying that she was broken and needed repair. “Human biology requires fixes.”
“I have a disorder. That’s why I’m on this ship. I’ve undergone so many tests trying to figure out why, for the past four years, the need for sex has been constant. Before then, it was more normal.”
“Once or twice a decade?”
She lets out a huff of air again. “More like once or twice a week. I mean, a gora.”
How horrifying.
Her brows lift. “It’s not so bad. When it’s with someone you care about who you’ve chosen to be your partner.”
“One partner?”
“Well, for a lot of people…” She seems to be measuring her words carefully. “You’re allowed to be with as many people as you want, but it’s equally common to choose just one.”
“You choose?”
“And they should agree to be chosen. There’s consent. There’s supposed to be consent.” She worries her plump lower lip between her teeth. The bunching of skin mirrors the gathering of fabric beneath her swollen mammary glands. Breasts, the implant informs me. Much larger in these lessers from Humana. “I’m sorry. I knew you didn’t consent.”
True. So she’d understood that?