Blue Light of Home (5 page)

“Do you have a word for raving egomaniac?” Skye screamed back at him, sobbing. “Do you have a word for bully-handed bastard? I hate you! I’d rather you shot me out into fucking
space
than live here one more day with you!”

His mouth shut with an audible snap. He glared at her, breathing hard, then suddenly lunged forward.

Skye leapt back, and without giving herself time to think, she hauled back her arm and slapped him right across his prominent snout, just as he reached, not for her, but to slap the door-panel open and storm out.

For a decorated military expert, he didn’t seem to see it coming. His eyes bulged in the instant before her hand cracked into him, that was it. And then there was a moment that didn’t have any time in it at all.

‘He was leaving,’ Skye thought. She had time to think it all. And she felt in minute detail the form under her hand. His skin was obviously very thin where it stretched over the thick bone of his beakish snout; she could actually feel the roadwork of veins beneath as she crushed them into his skull. Then time snapped back into place and she stumbled away from him into the wall as he screeched and dropped with a ‘wham’ onto his knees. Blood burst out from under his lips, spraying out over the metal panels as he sucked in breath and screeched over and over, collapsing by degrees onto his side and thrashing in a paroxysm of pain.

There was absolutely no sense of vindication or triumph. She knew at once and without doubt that a few smacks on the ass, even last night’s vicious and undeserved punishment, did not begin to compare with what she had just done to him. Watching him convulse in agony filled her with nothing but a sick sense of horror.

She fell to her knees beside him, patting timidly at his shoulders and babbling out apologies that were not, could never be, enough. She’d never hit anyone in her adult life, and this, this wasn’t just a piddling slap across the face, the sort of thing people laughed at when they saw it done in sitcoms. She had really hurt this man, hurt him bad!

And dear God, she was representing all humanity against a technologically superior race who had already threatened once to annihilate Earth if anyone attacked their emissary.

Skye burst into fresh tears, fumbling at his head and trying to see what she’d done, just like there was anything at all she could do to help. Vala curled tighter on himself, put one hand on her chest, and slowly but firmly pushed her away. Then he made a fist and beat it a few times on the floor, keening shrilly in short spasms. She ran to her room, but couldn’t put enough doors between them to drown out that sound. Even her own sobs couldn’t do that.

* * *

The light went on that night.

Skye, sitting in the dark as she had done for hours, flinched and stared at it open-mouthed for almost an entire minute without moving. He couldn’t mean it. Maybe he just wanted to fire her, or whatever you called it when you loaded your woman back into her space shuttle and shot her back to Earth, but there was no way he was in the mood.

She didn’t dress up for this one.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed when she came in, and he looked awful. His face was grotesquely swollen, pulling his lips up so that he couldn’t close his mouth. One of his eyes was half-shut and leaked a thin, steady trickle of bloody fluid which he wiped away with a towel every few seconds. Even that side of his throat was puffy and discolored.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, clinging to the doorway. “You were just so mad. I thought you were coming at me.”

“I realized that,” he said, with some difficulty. “After.” He had to put his head at an angle to look at her, and his gaze was weary more than anything else. “But if I can show restraint when you call me a sickly, clumsy impotent, why would I care if you called me an egomaniac?”

“I never said that!” Skye gasped, and immediately amended, “Okay, I called you an egomaniac—”

“And a bastard,” he inserted, and bared a little more of his teeth, not without a wince. “Which did offend me.”

“—but I never called you sick or...or impotent!”

“You said I looked tired,” he said, distinctly and accusingly. “You said that I didn’t intend to summon you and you implied,
strongly implied
, that I would not be able to make use of you.”

“Vala…” Helplessly, she raised her hands and dropped them again, coming all the way into his room. “You did! I wasn’t insulting you, I was just telling the truth!”

“I—Sit down. I am a Vaaji warrior of the highest rank and caste and your superior. I don’t look tired and I don’t make mistakes.”

“And you don’t scrub your own floors,” she said with a sigh, dropping onto the bed beside him, also not without a wince. “When were you going to tell me about all that? When were you ever going to mention, ‘Oh, by the way, if I ever hit the button in my sleep, I still totally meant to do it’?”

He snorted and wiped his eye.

“And for God’s sake, who were you saving face for? We’re the only ones here!”

“I’m here,” he insisted, then looked at the bloody towel and tightened his lips in a pained, yet genuinely amused, alien sort of smile. “I stood my training under the most sadistic legion-master in the service. He never hit me half as hard as you did.”

“I didn’t know how much that would hurt you or I never would have done it, I swear.”

“We don’t know very much about each other,” he agreed. And gave her a pointed stare. “Which is why I asked where striking you would be acceptable. I don’t want to hurt you. I would never hit you just because I was angry with you.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “What do you call what you did last night?”

“I thought you were provoking me.”

“Well then, you were too tired to think straight, weren’t you? Or is that supposedly the same as calling you stupid?”

He started to speak, then stopped and wiped his eye again. “I came to this assignment prepared to forgive your misunderstandings and your mistakes,” he said, and snarled ruefully under his breath. “I don’t know why I expected you to think and act like a woman from the Empire. But you are wrong. I did not discipline you out of anger alone. I thought I was correcting you.” He paused. “Harshly. But necessarily so, considering the depth of the offense.”

“Perceived offense,” Skye muttered.

He grunted, then looked at her again, his good eye narrowing until it matched his bad one. “You are never to hit me again. For any
perceived
threat.”

“I won’t, I swear.” She crossed her heart to prove it—his gaze dropped to watch—and then hesitated. “You’re not…going to punish Earth, are you? For what I did?”

He looked annoyed. “I am perfectly capable of keeping our squabbles ours alone. I don’t need to blow holes in planets to win arguments with women.”

“Well, I’m sorry anyway.”

“Are you?” he snorted, looking for a dry patch on the towel to wipe his eye.

“Yes! I’ve been making myself sick with it all this time. I know you must hate me, but I—”

“Do not presume to know my mind.”

Skye sat quiet and miserable beside him on the bed. At last, she ventured, “Maybe you should ask for another—”

“And don’t presume to give me advice!”

Silence between them, silence like a pit of spears.

“I’ll heal.” Vala dabbed at his eye and tossed the towel aside. He faced her, half a gargoyle leaking tears of blood. “But you are never going to hit me again, for any reason.”

She got up without a word and skinned out of her pants, bracing her hands on the side-table. She didn’t dread this spanking. In a way, she almost welcomed it, in spite of the lingering, bone-deep ache of her bruised bottom. If anything could break up this leaden knot of guilt churning up her stomach, this was it.

She didn’t hear him stand. The first she knew he was there was when he put his hand on her back, the place he was apt to pin her wrists when she fought him. She didn’t intend to fight him now, no matter how much it hurt. She still didn’t think she’d deserved last night, but she knew she deserved this one.

He swung.

His hand fell with all the same force, sounded the same air-splitting CRACK, drove in the same shock and burn, but Skye scarcely jumped and didn’t make a sound. It was fair, she kept thinking. She had to show him she was sorry. Not so he would stop, but so that he would see she was sincere, and maybe find a reason to try and start over. She wanted him to see the humility and remorse in her; she wanted him to see a better woman than the one who’d hit him; she wanted him to see someone worth keeping around.

The second blow was a long time in coming. She took it with the same resolve and sense of repentance, and felt his clawed hand flex on her back. He’d said before that for his people, discipline was over when it was accepted with grace; she accepted this, but it wasn’t over. “Please,” she whispered. “I’m really sorry.”

He grunted softly, then began to paddle her slowly and very hard, giving the blow from each swing of his scaly hand time to sink and burn before he broke it with the next one. One after another, steady and torturous, he covered her already-bruised and throbbing bottom with fresh hurt. It seemed to last forever—the wait between each new smack, a miniature hell in itself—but her determination never broke. She only gripped the table tighter, bent a little lower, and made herself remember what it was all for.

“Enough,” she heard him mutter. He said something in his language, and then, “Enough,” again, louder. His fingers brushed across her flaming nates; he backed up and watched solemnly as she pulled her clothes together and faced him.

The left side of his face was streaked with blood now. She found the towel where he’d dropped it and held it out to him. He didn’t take it, but did incline his head slightly, and after a moment, she tentatively went to him and dabbed at his swollen snout.

He was quiet for a long while, although he seemed about to speak several times. Finally, muttering an alien curse under his breath, he said, “I was asleep when I sent for you last night.”

Not exactly an admission of wrongdoing, but Skye hadn’t expected to hear him admit even that much. She wasn’t sure she should acknowledge it, as tricky as his concept of honor was, so she just kept wiping and said nothing.

“You don’t seem to take much pleasure in serving me,” he said, after another lengthy pause. “I suppose it is not to my credit.”

And she for sure wasn’t going to reply to
that
.

“I didn’t know you hated me,” he said quietly.

“I don’t. I really don’t. I just…I’m so
lonely
.”

He didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. It was a long time before he said, “I’m sure you’d rather not be here.”

Skye shrugged. “The alternative was a whole lot worse.”

He gave her a wry glance and another of those twisted smiles. “Serving one of my rank as you do is supposed to be an honor. I have seen women fight to the bloodletting when I light the lamp above my door. And you, handpicked of all humanity, you are supposed to feel honored as well.”

“I’m a janitor, Vala. I scrub other people’s floors all day. I scrub their
toilets
.”

His smile vanished.

“I guess I was handpicked, all right,” she continued, being careful not to press too hard with the towel or let her voice go all crazy. It wasn’t his fault he got stuck with a dud prostitute. “But only to be the woman they could pay off and shut up. I don’t know who you thought you were going to get, but I think you got screwed.”

He frowned.

“It’s kind of a shit detail though, isn’t it? I mean, for the first-born of the highest line and all that…to sit in a capsule over our pissant planet, alone for years, drinking goo and looking at the internet.”

“Why would anyone need so much pornography?” he muttered, and shook his head. “To be the emissary to an official first-contact is a tremendous mark of distinction. My name joins only six in the annals of the Empire.”

“Did you piss someone off?”

“Yes.” He took the towel from her. “You should not ask personal questions of me. It isn’t seemly.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

He glanced behind him at the panel that indicated the blue light was still on in her room, sighed, and leaned over to switch it off. He looked at her again. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I won’t need you tonight.”

“All right,” Skye said, and offered him a small smile. “Goodnight.”

He backed away from her. She thought he might answer her, but in the end, he only stood there, not quite frowning, looking tired again.

She let herself out, went back to her dark room, and began to undress, taking particular care when easing her pants off over her swollen and woefully tender backside. She rubbed it, wishing again that she had a mirror. The window was non-reflective, like all the metal surfaces on the ship, except the panels in the shower, and the very last thing she wanted to feel was the stinging pelt of hot water over the fiery throb of her bottom. She didn’t know why she suddenly wanted to see the proof…except as a point of survivalist’s pride, maybe. It was the first of the three spankings she really felt like she’d earned.

“Vala has his medals,” she remarked to herself, brushing at the worst complaint, “and I have mine.”

The light came on, washing her half-naked body in blue as she stared around at it, startled. Another accident? A test? What else could there possibly be left to say between them?

She left her pants off and walked back down the hall to his room, knocking uncertainly on the door before opening it.

He was inside, almost exactly where she’d left him. “I changed my mind again,” he said and came to get her, leading her decisively not to the side-table, but to the bed.

He said nothing more, but made sure she served him to his credit before he was done and she was free to wander, crookedly smiling, back to her room again.

CHAPTER THREE

It was not starting over, but it was a good way to go on. He still didn’t talk to her, although he grunted now and then if she talked to him, always with a curious blend of uneasiness and determination. If she came out of her room to pour a tureen for her meal, he’d stop what he was doing and come take one also; they would sit together at the table (it had required nearly a full day of repairs to get it to fold back up into the wall and even now, it didn’t quite sit flush), not speaking, drinking slime, trying to have a comfortable silence for a change. He was trying, and that counted.