Kole dropped to his knees beside her, although she could see from his expression he was fighting the urge to decamp. Controlling herself with an effort, Bri mopped her eyes with one hand and sniffed. “Thank you! I was so afraid I’d lost him!”
Kole frowned, allowing his gaze to drift over her speculatively. “How can you not swim?”
The tone was tentative, curious not accusing, and yet Bri felt her own inadequacies keenly. She’d allowed herself to be distracted, and Cory had almost drowned because of it! She sniffed again, resentfully this time. “Because I can’t!” she snapped.
“
He
can swim.”
Drowning wasn’t swimming!
She
could drown! Instead of pointing that out, though, she said, “He isn’t old enough to be afraid.”
Kole sat back on his heels. “Afraid of what?”
“The water!”
Impatience flickered in his eyes at her tone. “How can you be afraid of the water? You bathe all the time.”
“I can’t ….” Bri broke off, realizing she couldn’t think of the Hirachi word for drown. “I can’t smother in a bath!”
He digested that for some moments. “You can not breathe in the water,” he said flatly.
Bri’s lips tightened. “Of course I can’t breathe in the water!” she said testily. “No one can--not unless they’re wearing … under water gear,” she finished the sentence in her own language, realizing that was the second time she hadn’t been able to think of the Hirachi words she needed.
It struck her as odd. She hadn’t had to even think about speaking or translating before. Was it wearing off? Or was it just that she was still so upset?
“Your people can not live in the sea.”
There was something about the way he said it that fully caught her attention for the first time. She dismissed the thought that leapt into her mind, but it wouldn’t obey her determination to ignore all the little hints that had been building in her mind.
She’d thought the thin, almost silky growth of flesh along the Hirachi’s lower arms and legs looked strange until she’d grown accustomed to it, but it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be a reason for it, or that there was a strong resemblance to fins.
Kole must have thought it odd that she didn’t have them, but she supposed he’d dismissed it just as she had.
Maybe for the same reason? She’d been looking for kinship to the Hirachi, maybe out of self-preservation.
How close was the kinship, though, if his people came from the sea?
She could almost see the same thoughts in his eyes.
Scientists had claimed that everything on Earth had originally come from the sea, but no one had ever figured out why some mammals had chosen to leave the sea completely and evolve as land creatures while others had stayed and become exclusively inhabitants of the oceans.
“This is why the Sheloni prey on the Hirachi,” she said with sudden insight. “Whatever it is they want so badly is under the sea.”
And no matter how technologically advanced
they
were, the sea was still a huge mystery on Earth because they had a hard time dealing with the unfamiliar environment, the temperature and pressure extremes, the limited amount of light that filtered down into the water.
The Sheloni were undoubtedly land creatures, too, or surely they would’ve been able to come up with robots that could handle the task of a large scale underwater operation.
She refused to believe she had more in common with those creatures, though, than with the Hirachi. Reptiles lived on land, too, and there was a hell of a difference between them and mammals.
The new knowledge explained so many things--their strength, the fact that they were practically all muscle with scarcely any body fat--maybe even their size and the color of their skin. They must spend almost as much time on land, though, as they did in the sea. Otherwise, why would they have arms and legs? And, if they weren’t used to spending long periods out of the water, being out of the water as long as it had taken for the crossing would surely have damaged their skin?
There’d been the pools, of course, in their habitats, but neither Dansk nor Kole had spent much time in them--not when she was with them.
And she’d been pissed because they had ‘better baths’!
Kole withdrew, both physically and emotionally, as if he’d suddenly discovered he’d been fraternizing with some loathsome thing that had been masquerading as something familiar.
Her chest tightened as she recognized the withdrawal for what it was. “Well! It’s nice to know humans aren’t the only ones afflicted with bigotry,” she muttered. “It must suck to know you’ve been breeding with land dwellers. I suppose that’s why you’re glad I’m not having your baby! Only thing is, I didn’t notice you having any trouble getting it up, or fucking me! I guess it’s just a universal male thing! Anything with a hole, right?”
His expression hardened. Obviously, he’d caught the meaning of the unfamiliar word, or at least realized it was intended as an insult. “We depend upon the sea for protection … food … everything. A Hirachi unable to live in the sea can not survive long.”
Bri swallowed against a lump of hurt that lodged in her throat. “And it’s protected you so well!” she snapped angrily.
He ignored that. “And I did not want to breed a child on you for your sake! You are too … you are not …. It is likely it would be too big for you to safely bear.”
If he hadn’t been so careful to avoid pointing out her size, his contempt wouldn’t have been nearly as obvious. But what had she expected, really? Just because a lot of Earth men seemed to like dainty women, it didn’t follow that the Hirachi would--particularly when it was obviously not something they had ever seen before.
Especially, she supposed, when ensuring that they had big, strong warriors to fight for them was of vital importance. Earth men might want big, strong sons, but it wasn’t crucial to their way of life.
Not that she could see that being big and strong had helped the Hirachi any more than their ability to live below the sea!
“It didn’t seem to bother Dansk,” she said angrily, more hurt than angry and wanting to take a stab at him in retaliation. She wasn’t prepared, however, for just how angry he got.
“Because he was too enamored of you, and too caught up in the mating cycle, to consider what it might mean for you!” he growled.
“I hadn’t realized how lucky I was that you’re so cold blooded it wasn’t a problem for you to think with your head instead of your cock!” Bri growled back at him, instantly dismissing her uneasiness about his anger the moment he insulted Dansk.
A jolt went through her when he seized her upper arms and dragged her against him, pinning Cory between them. Before she could do more than open her mouth to object, he ground his mouth down over hers and kissed her with a ruthlessness and heat that knocked the breath and the fight out of her.
Her eyes felt as if they were rolling around independently in their sockets when he released her. Fire had erupted within her and baked her brain. She was still trying to gather her wits when he shot to his feet and left her.
Feeling rather as if a steam roller had just leveled her, Bri sat where he’d left her, disoriented, too weak even to consider getting up. What had he meant about mating cycle, she wondered a little vaguely?
Cycle? The
men
had cycles? Or they all cycled together?
What else didn’t she understand about the Hirachi?
She looked down at Cory, who was wiggling impatiently in her arms. “It’s a damned good thing I learned the language!” she said, irritated all over again. “We couldn’t fight nearly as well when we were hampered by
not
being able to understand each other!”
She’d already gotten up and headed toward the Earth conclave when she saw a wave of excitement run through the women. Turning to see what it was that had unsettled them--again--she saw Hirachi men emerging from the sea--what looked like nearly a hundred but might have been a lot less. It was hard to say when one was looking upon a wall of yellow skinned giants emerging from the sea like a herd of Poseidons.
Unnerved herself to see so many, Bri put a little more speed to her step. As she glanced back to judge the distance, though, her gaze collided with one who was very familiar to her, and she stopped. Dansk smiled when he saw that he’d snagged her attention, his gaze roving her as if hungry to refamiliarize himself with her. He shook his head slightly as she stilled indecisively. Glancing significantly toward the bots waiting at the front of the line the men had formed, he warned her away.
She’d been too caught up in her argument with Kole to notice the bin that had been brought out--from somewhere--which said a lot for her focus on Kole. The thing was huge, almost as big as a freight car, she imagined. The men, who’d come from the sea were all carrying large net bags filled with something colorful and porous that reminded her of coral. As they reached the bots, the bags were taken and emptied into the bin.
Was
it coral, or something similar, she wondered?
It looked … innocuous considering the people who’d died getting here, those who still stood to lose their lives. What was so important about it that made the Sheloni so willing to enslave other species in order to get it?
Was it just … like gold, or diamonds, or pearls? Of value to them because it was pretty and something rare or hard to get?
Or was there far more to it than she could see?
The sense of outrage boiling up inside of her deflated when she reflected on Earth’s history. Men had been willing to commit wholesale slaughter of their own kind for ‘riches’. Maybe it said something for the Sheloni that they weren’t willing to kill their own for it?
And maybe not. If they were as frail as they appeared to be, it wouldn’t have done them any good to try to use their own people.
Her eyes narrowed as it occurred to her the value of the mineral, or whatever, to the Sheloni might make it a weapon to use against them--could, if they could only figure out how to use it against the Sheloni.
Abruptly feeling the sensation of being watched, she glanced away from the bin.
Kole had begun to move toward the sea with other men, but there was something about the tension in him that told her it was his gaze that she’d felt and not Dansk’s, although she saw Dansk flick several glances in her direction as he shuffled along the line waiting to empty their haul.
She was sorry she couldn’t talk to Dansk, tell him how glad she was to see that he was alive and seemed none the worse for the attack … attacks if she counted Kole’s assault. But then it had been more than a week. He’d had time to heal from anything but a serious injury, and Kole had said the beam had merely knocked them out.
‘Mere’ was an understatement, of course. She’d been knocked for a loop by the Sheloni’s weapons. There was nothing ‘mere’ about it.
She didn’t particularly want to rejoin the other women, especially since she suspected they’d observed her byplay with Kole and probably seen the exchange between her and Dansk, as well. But as she turned, she saw the robots were herding the women across the compound. Hurrying to catch up even as she felt the sting of her collar, Bri struggled against the hitch she quickly developed in her side.
It said a lot for her increased tolerance for pain that she’d managed to put it from her mind until she’d had to push herself again. Her toes had gone numb, though, and only hurt now when she walked because she couldn’t help bending them. The pain in her ribs had eased, too, which meant bruising not breakage.
It was a relief to know she wouldn’t have to worry about healing properly, or having to endure the Sheloni examining her. Not that she could avoid that, unless the Sheloni had decided they didn’t need to force them to mate anymore, either because they had enough women impregnated they were satisfied, or they thought ‘nature’ would take its course now that they’d thrown them all in together.
It probably would, too. Whatever the women said, even if it was true and all of the others were still revolted at the thought of accepting men of the Hirachi race, the Hirachi were the
only
men available to them now.
And she had not seen any Hirachi females, which could either mean the men had managed, primarily, to ‘protect’ their females and keep them from being caught, or the Sheloni had decided just to do away with the strong, aggressive Hirachi females and replace them with females that were easier to control. Maybe it was a little of both, or something else entirely, but the fact was there weren’t any Hirachi females in
this
prison that she’d seen.
It was almost comical to see the expressions on the faces of the ‘easily controlled’ females once they had gathered as ordered and learned the purpose of the gathering.
They were to be issued the wherewithal to prepare food for themselves and the workers and to erect sleeping shelters.
There was no real escape from destiny, Bri thought wryly. Women were the breeders and hearth tenders. It didn’t matter where they landed.
* * * *
It took time and a great deal of effort to tamp the fury and desire raging inside of Kole. He had been fighting a losing battle with both from the moment he’d spied Bri in the encampment--almost from the first moment he’d seen her if it came to that--mostly because his reason and his instincts had been at war almost from the start where she was concerned.
It was unfortunate for everyone that the Sheloni had struck at the time they had, because the timing, whether intentional or not--and he thought not--had been at peak crisis for the Hirachi--peak mating cycle. It would have been bad enough if that was all, just an unfortunate coincidence of timing, but the fact that he and the others had already endured seven fruitless cycles made it all the more difficult for them to ignore the call of nature. It was harder
each
time, and it had built into a raging storm that could not be ignored any longer when the Sheloni had dropped the women in their laps, torturing them with the exotically delicate and beautiful creatures who called themselves humans of Earth by giving them no chance even to escape them for a moment to regain their self-control.