Never Submit! The Swarii Brides, Book One (18 page)

“No way. It’s like… thirty degrees out there. Just don’t get fried—I’d feel guilty. Don’t fall, either.”

“You’re not going to give me a lecture about how this is dangerous, and stupid, and…” Ellie asked, raising a curious eyebrow.

“Nope. I think going out into that sort of cold with a short skirt is punishment enough. You’re nineteen, Ellie. When
I
was nineteen, I took some ‘shrooms and got lost on a flight of stairs for about nine hours. You never got that wondrous experience. You need the chance to learn from your own damn mistakes.” She wobbled her head back and forth for a second, but then added, “You get caught though, and it certainly wasn’t ME who slipped him drugs, if you catch my drift. If you tell on me I will get even with you even if I have to live to be a thousand.”

Ellie put her thumb up in understanding. “You got it. I’m not a tattle-tale like your man.”

“I know,” Mary said with a dismissive wave, settling down to actually watch the monitor before her, and the musical that was playing on there (it seemed like all—or at least the vast majority—of Swaraan television consisted of musicals). “That’s why I help. Have fun. If something goes wrong, I don’t know you’re out there,” she warned.

“That’s fine.”

* * *

“This is SO not
fine
,” Ellie grumped four hours later, freezing her tuckus off. “How the hell hasn’t she come out to check on me yet? It’s getting late, for God sakes! I’m gonna die out here.”

She knew she was lucky that she wasn’t dead
already
—she had fallen to the wing of the spaceship from the landing she had been on. She had just finished her modifications to their communication system, and while walking back to the ladder she had slipped on black ice that had frozen to the metal hull of the ship.

“ICE!” she coughed at the thought. “
Goddamn it
!” She hugged her legs closer to her chest. She had manipulated the jacket she was wearing so that it covered her legs, but she had to shift every now and then when her butt began to feel like it was freezing to the ship.

At this point, she didn’t even care about what horrible punishment would occur if Graham found her there, just as long as she was
found
. Her face was beginning to hurt. But the men weren’t even expected to return for a few more hours yet, maybe longer.

She was going to freeze to the wing, she thought. Freeze to death. On the wing. At a cold
space station
.
Shit.

But finally, she thought she heard the sound of a motorcycle approach—Thorton’s? “Could it possibly be?” She got up on her hands and knees, hoping to see his figure drive into the ship… but she didn’t. It wasn’t a motorcycle at all. A car hovered by the front landing and parked itself.

A man who didn’t look too old, but still had graying hair—probably about fifty or so—stepped out and adjusted his jacket. He looked around at the ship for a moment and then stepped forward.

“Hello? Hello?” Ellie shouted. “Sir! Sir? Hello?” She watched the man spin around, looking around him, and then up until his eyes finally landed on Ellie.

He certainly looked both confused and surprised at seeing a little human girl on the wing. He shouted something up to her.

She wondered if shal’ta could make it all the way down to his level—it could only travel a certain distance without the help of technology. She tried, anyway. In the last twenty hours, since her shot, she had actually had a couple of good attempts at communicating with it and not just listening.

But she wasn’t exactly lucky. He didn’t look like he could understand her. It was a language impasse. “Help me!” she finally shouted down. “Help, help!” She waved her arms around, knowing it was horrible charades, but not caring.

The man was smart—he got the point. He walked to the intercom to get help from inside, but he didn’t get any response. That wasn’t too weird; if Fie was still ‘out’, Mary wasn’t going to let a weird man inside, and she wasn’t in too much of a position to help Ellie, anyway.

After a long few minutes, the man looked around him, frustrated. He pointed up at Ellie and barked an order. Something that sounded a lot like, ‘stay put’. He walked to his car—or, as Ellie would call them ‘cruiser’, jumped inside, started the motor, and disappeared.

Ellie, dejected, slumped her shoulder over and groaned. Where did he go? Did he just
leave
?

But then, the sound of the car came back, and Ellie could see that it wasn’t hovering anymore, it was flying very close to the wing she was sitting on—almost as high. He opened the door with the motor still running, and climbed up to the hood of his car. 

“
Can you just get closer? Couldn’t I just climb in? If you got close enough…”
She shal’taed to him.

He faltered a minute as he got to his knees, obviously surprised at her shal’ta. “
No, I can’t get closer
,
how high do you think I can go?
” he replied back in the same way, only his face was hard as stone. “
What the hell are you doing up here
?”

“
I slipped from above
,” she replied, pointing. She became defensive due to his stern expression, and added, “
It’s icy up there…
”

She heard him sigh as he simultaneously shal’taed, “
Come on, just hop down to me.
” He stepped as close to the wing as possible and held wide his arms like he planned to catch her.

She winced at the idea. “
Hm. Yeah. I don’t
hop
, per se… Got a rope or something
?”

“
No. I don’t.
” He looked extremely flustered. “
Do you want me to climb up there and carry you down?
”

She looked down towards the drop off the side. It was quite a ways—about twenty-five feet. “
No… Then
you’ll
just have to hop down, right?
”

“
Right.
”

“
And there’ll be no one to catch
you...”

“
It’s a dangerous proposition, to be assured.
”

She wrung her hands thoughtfully in front of her, frowning. She got down on her hands and knees again and began to slowly teeter towards the edge. She sighed. The car wasn’t directly below her. She was going to have to make a running start to jump out a couple of feet so he wouldn’t have to lean over. “
How much experience do you have with catching… people?
” she questioned, standing back up on her feet.

“I’ll catch you,”
he assured, making his shal’ta as soft as possible.

She bit her lip. God, she hated this. She didn’t have any particular problem with heights, but she did with
falling
, for sure.

“
On three. One… Two…
”

She didn’t make it to three, she suddenly jumped off the wing, propelling into him enough to make him step back a treacherous foot. She screamed as they teetered over the edge. He merely sighed with relief.

“
What happened to ‘on three’?
” he demanded wearily, feeling the need to catch his breath.

“
I panicked
,” she replied, feeling very small.

He put her down momentarily and instructed her to climb onto his back.  She put her arms around his neck and her legs around his chest as he climbed slowly, carefully, back towards the car.  Finally, she was able to let go of him and clumsily adjusted herself into the side seat.

She looked around when he got in. Yep—it was a car. It looked a little different—there were a lot of buttons in front of her, and she didn’t know which did what. Also, the dashboard had a metallic shine. She reached out to touch the dashboard, just to feel the machinery on her fingers, marveling at how wonderful and smooth it felt.

Her hand was caught by his. “
You have some explaining to do, Young Lady,”
he warned her, dropping her hand so that it fell in her lap.  He began to strap her safely into her seat with the seatbelt, which had a design she felt served better on a roller coaster than a car. There was a heater, though, and he made it so that the hot air blew right on her.

She looked over at him. He looked, very simply, like Graham. Really, spitting image. This man was probably only in his fifties; he certainly wasn’t what she’d call ‘elderly’. He was still muscular. He had scars on his hands and on his face, his salt-and-pepper hair was definitely more on the salty side. But he was still handsome in the same way: same eyes, same broad shoulders, same nose. “
You’re Graham’s father
,” she stated after a few moments.

His eyes looked towards her direction only momentarily as he put the car in gear. It glided forward. “
Admiral Jack Masterson,
” he finally admitted, his shal’ta still gruff. “
And you’re Mary.”

“Ellie, actually,”
she replied, putting her hands flat against the heaters as if she was trying to dethaw.

“Eleanor.” He said her name aloud as if she couldn’t have been serious.

“Yes.” She nodded.

“
You’re Eleanor
?”

She laughed at the way his face twisted with doubt. “
Yes.
Ellie
.
”

“
Graham’s woman?
”

She hummed as she watched him drive the car away from the ship, slowly descending as he did. She finally realized why he had to drive away—they took awhile to descend and ascend. “
How high can these hover?
” she asked curiously.

He didn’t answer. “
How long were you out on the wing
?”

“
About three and a half hours
.
So, thank you… How do you know so much about me?”

“I read Graham’s report,”
he retorted.
“What he omitted from it, however, was how mind-bogglingly stupid you are. He didn’t mention that you could fully communicate with shal’ta, either…”

“I’m full of surprises, I guess.”
She frowned and slouched her shoulders forward. It became very clear that Graham’s father would not be a very good ally to her—he was doing his best to give her the first degree. The car was descending towards ground-level, and their spaceship was again coming into sight.

They didn’t say anything else until the car stopped.  At that point, she tried to quickly take off her safety belt to try to get in the ship before him. Maybe with a couple of seconds, she could get Mary to wake up Fie and at least get away from the fact that she had a drugged Swarii inside the ship.

“Urgh!” she groaned with frustration, trying to push the safety harness over her head. It didn’t work; long before she could get out, Jack had gotten out of his seat, walked all the way around the car, opened her door, and began to help her out of the harness. As soon as it was off, he dragged her out of the car by her arm and marched her up the spaceship’s landing and made her type in the entry code.

As soon as the door opened, Jack jerked her into the far warmer air of the ship. Mary quickly entered the hallway as soon as she heard the footsteps, saying, “Ellie! I was getting…” It was about that time she saw Jack guiding Ellie down the hall non-too-gently by the scruff of her coat. “Worried...” She backed up, her eyes wide and her face white.

“Meet my father in law,” Ellie grumbled, looking towards the ground.

“
Where’s everyone?
” Jack demanded, finally letting Ellie go when he approached the other human.

“
Out.”
Ellie suddenly realized by his expression that she was walking very much on thin ice. She didn’t know what would happen if this ice cracked, and she didn’t want to know what would happen when Jack Masterson cracked. “Thorton went to sell the ship—the others went out to check into the military outpost.”

“
And they left you alone?
”

“
No
,” she admitted, shoving her hands in her jacket pockets. She asked Mary out of the side of her mouth, “Where’s Fie?”

Mary gulped. “Still out…”

“Shit.” Ellie slapped her palm against her forehead.

“
Young lady…”
he charged, obviously tired of playing twenty-questions with her.

Ellie shook her head. “This is not going to go well
at all
…”

* * *

It still had taken Ellie quite a long time to tell the Admiral that she had, in fact, drugged Fie into a deep unconsciousness so that she could make modifications to the communications system… Modifications that Graham hadn’t wanted her to risk making on chance that they might go wrong.

She couldn’t say she was too surprised when not much later she found herself sitting on a stool facing the corner of the lounge where Jack could ‘keep an eye on her’ while he waited for Fie to wake up.

When Fie woke up, he didn’t wake up particularly well. He had a horrible hang over, and was extremely disoriented. Jack helped him to his room, and Ellie took off down the hallway, eager to at least test the communications system to see if her experiment worked. If it did, then at least one good thing would have arisen out of all this. If she made Graham happy enough, then it was even possible that he would forget to punish her…

She sat down in Graham’s command chair and plugged in Thorton’s gigantic controller’s headphones and started to play around with the controls. “Come on, baby. Come on!” she said with gritted teeth, trying to listen to what she wanted.

Finally, she found it. A Frian signal; clear as a bell. She had one. And if she had one signal, that meant she had intercepted probably hundreds, or at least had the potential to do so.

She smiled widely, relieved. Her relief lasted a good five seconds before the headphones were ripped off her head and she was grabbed by the shoulder off her seat and was suddenly facing a very angry man. He didn’t even have the patience to shal’ta a lecture; he put his leg up on the chair and leant her stomach quickly over his knee.

“No, no, no!” She kicked and wind-milled her arms around wildly, but he was quick to begin slapping his hand against her pantied bottom; her skirt was so short it was practically out of the way already. “Wait, wait, wait!” she pleaded, realizing how bad it must have looked to him—to come into the lounge and find that she had disobeyed yet another order. “I can explain!”