Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
“So,” I tell her as she sits on my lap facing me and looking up at me with those big wide eyes of hers. “The most important thing I can tell you, is that if an alien has more than two arms, you’re going to have a hard time keeping up in any kind of hand to hand combat, even if they’re small.”
I hold her little scaled hands and windmill them, making her laugh. “Doesn’t matter how much you do this, they’re doing it double, or even triple time. So what you’re going to want to do, is…”
WOWOOWWOOWOOWUBWOWOOWUBWOWOWOOWOWOWOWUB
That is the sound of the Mare decloaking and landing in the clearing not twenty feet away from us.
That is the sound of all the little dreams I’ve had in the middle of the moments of maternal tranquility coming real. I stare with wide and excited eyes as the ship I have missed so badly becomes manifest in front of me. She is a shining spheroid type craft. Nothing fancy from the outside, but the interior of that vessel was my first true home. Most of my real life has taken place behind that hull. The excitement and relief I feel at seeing her in front of me cannot be overstated. I am absolutely thrilled. Baby starts giggling as I let out an excited shriek.
Shan comes running from the bush. He was hunting, but he can’t have been far off, because he arrives just as the ship settles, and before the gangway starts to descend. His expression is ferocious, and I can tell he plans to attack whatever it is that might come out of the ship.
“It’s okay!” I call out to him. “It’s the Mare. It’s my crew.”
The gangway starts to roll out, and the door to the main vessel opens. Three crew members stand in the opening. I recognize them as Casey, Cadence, and Sasha. Casey is the tallest of them. Her blonde hair is cut in a short, asymmetrical messy bob. You can only see her right eye because of the swoop of hair that falls over her forehead. Also, there’s the fact that she only has the right eye. The left one went missing in an incident none of us like to talk about. Her features are soft and feminine. She’s very pretty. She used to be a model before life did the sort of thing that makes good girls become even better pirates.
Cadence, by her side, is covered in bits of home-made tech. You can’t really see what she looks like because she has turned her glasses into a kind of half face covering that has all sorts of additional bits and pieces that do functions and stuff. She’s basically a cute figure in a suit at this point and not much else. Then there’s Sasha. Sasha looks like she works in a library. She’s wearing slacks and a knitted vest and she has a bow in her hair. Of the three of them, Sasha is by far and beyond the least predictable and most dangerous.
“Lettie! Get in!” Casey calls out to me.
Shan plants himself between them and me.
“She’s not going anywhere!”
“Oh my god,” Sasha rolls her eyes. “Stop being so fucking stupid and get in here, all of you. Goddamnit, lizard man, we’re not here for funsies. We’re here because they’re coming for the baby.”
That gets Shan’s attention. I walk up beside him, holding our daughter in my arms. “Who is coming?”
“Hey. Lettie? You know how landing this thing on a rock is pretty much fucking impossible?” Cadence cuts in with some excessively sarcastically toned questions that aren’t questions. “Well we did it, because we found you, and your… thing.”
I’m not sure if the thing in that sentence is Shan or the baby. Could go either way.
“They’re coming,” Casey adds. “They know you made a hybrid baby and they want it.”
“Shan, we have to go,” I tell him.
He looks at me, and I see more than plain hesitation in his dark gaze. I see danger. For him. For us. For the crew.
“They wouldn’t have come for us if they didn’t have to.”
“We really wouldn’t. Now hurry the fuck up. Please. I don’t want them boarding the fucking ship.” Sasha is foul-mouthed, but she’s also putting herself and everyone else on board in danger to come and get us. We can’t just ignore her.
“Shan. Please.”
He gives a curt nod, and I feel a rush of relief as we board the Mare. It feels like coming home in the best and coziest of ways. I smell copper and I smell human and I smell things that probably should have been cleaned up weeks ago. It’s not a clean and healthy scent, but it is a welcoming one.
Cadence and Sasha get to work moving several loose boxes containing god knows what that must have fallen over while they were coming past away from the door so it can close properly. The Mare has always been full of loot and booty, but whatever organizational systems we used to have seem to have failed completely since I was last here. Even at the airlock, the ship has the feeling of being a playroom in which no toys have ever been put away.