Heat (25 page)

She headed back to the house, dropping her weed into the trashcan on the way.

He was silent all the way back to the kitchen and he did not resume his place at the table. He stood behind her, his hands behind his back and that brooding line between his eyes as he watched her wipe down the counters. “I did not think it an ugly plant,” he said at last.

“Yeah, well, you’re an alien and you don’t know any better, but it is.” Her hand found a way up to rub restlessly at her cheek, and she forced it to her side in a fist. “Now can we please talk about something else? Preferably something to do with you for a change?”

His frown deepened. “What should I talk about?” he asked warily.

“What’s Jota like?”

He cocked his head. “What is Earth like?” he countered, but then rolled one shoulder in his careful, clumsy shrug. “Jota has…forests and oceans and deserts, like Earth. The trees are…similar. Somewhat. The cities…are cleaner, I think. Cleaner and quieter than those shown on your tee-vee.” He paused and ran his eyes around the room. “I was young in a house much like this. Uncivilized.”

“My house is uncivilized?”

He must have sensed her defensiveness. “Perhaps it is the wrong word. It is…apart from others. Apart from cities. Without…comforts. That is not the right word, either,” he sighed, and rubbed at his brow.

“I think I understand,” she said. “You mean I’m out in the wilderness.”

“Wilderness,” he echoed, still frowning.

“And you grew up in a place like this?”

“Yes.” His mouth tightened. “My…father, I think you would say…moved away from the city to raise me. He believed the wilderness was a better place.”

“Lots of parents think that,” Daria said.

“Do they.” It was not a question. He watched her put groceries away. “The food is different,” he remarked suddenly. “Although the food is very different in many places around Jota, I suppose. I am accustomed to simpler foods.”

“Simpler than soup or frosted flakes?” She glanced at him and saw he wasn’t kidding. “What could possibly be simpler than that?”

“Perhaps it only feels simpler,” he said, and approximated another shrug. “Soldier’s fare tends to be so.”

“Soldier, huh?” She turned all the way around to look at him. “You said you were a cop. Were you in the army, too?”

He considered the wall behind her rather than her. “The distinction is, I think, that police are for immediate crimes and soldiers for…exterior ones? Yes, I am in the army. Or have been. The terms are served aside of each other. I am a soldier for one term and a police one term, so.”

“That’s a handy way to do it,” Daria said, and poured herself a glass of iced tea. “Soldiers don’t get too battle-fatigued and cops don’t get too bored. I imagine there’s not a whole lot of crime on your planet.”

“Not…as much as Earth would seem to have. But space is a far hiding place for criminals, and there are many conflicts.” He shrugged again. He was getting better at it. “Now I am police. I
should
be on Jota, but I am also
sek’ta
. This makes me a very special police. Like…like your Mulder and Scully.”

She blinked, the glass frozen to her lips.

“I have special assignments,” he continued, oblivious to her surprise. There was a certain rueful emphasis on the word ‘special’.

“Does that mean this E’Var fellow of yours is a flukeman?” she asked.

Tagen’s mouth quirked up in half a smile, indicating that even if he’d missed that episode, the show had made enough of an impression to make the reference relevant. “No,” he said, proving it, “But he
is
an alien.”

Daria laughed, startling herself.

“Your tee-vee fascinates me,” he said. “We have something similar on my world, but our programming is very different. Very.”

“Yeah, I don’t suppose you’d need so many shows like
The X-Files
once you actually knew aliens were real.”

“Mm.” His attention had shifted. Grendel had wandered into the kitchen and was nosing indignantly at his empty bowl. As soon as the cat made eye contact with him, Tagen walked over to the cupboard and brought down a tin of cat food.

“You’re going to spoil him, you know that.”

“Ah well.” Unrepentant, Tagen opened the tin and shook the food into Grendel’s dish, and then stroked down the cat’s back several times as Grendel noisily devoured it. “I would mind him better if I were in danger of making him fat. As he is already fat, I may as well keep him happy.”

Daria was caught out in snickers again, and muffled them against the back of her hand. “Right,” she said. “That’s kind of been my thinking all along. I tried to put him on a diet once, but the only thing he lost was his sense of humor and it only took him about ten minutes.”

Tagen smiled faintly, watching Grendel eat.

“Do you…No, I suppose you don’t have cats on your planet.”

“No, but we have something similar. Truly, we are not so different.” He gave Grendel’s ears a rub, and then looked at Daria, his eyes taking on a certain caution. He stood. “But in some ways, we are very different,” he said firmly. “On Jota, no male would do what that one—” His eyes flicked dismissively toward the kitchen door as though Troy were still standing there. “—meant to do. And no female would allow him to try.”

“Yeah, well.” Daria started wiping down the counters again, mostly as an excuse to turn her back on him. “Some guys just have a hard time hearing ‘no’. It’s not a big deal. He wouldn’t have actually done anything.”

“He made you think otherwise.”

“No, he really didn’t.” Daria scrubbed a little harder.

“You were frightened.”

“That’s my problem, not his.” She shot him a look that was partly frustration and the rest imploring. “And it’s not yours, either,” she said sharply. “So drop it.”

Tagen’s face closed with a near-audible slam. He nodded once, and then turned and left her in the kitchen.

Good. She didn’t want to have to keep talking to him, anyway.

She scrubbed her countertops, listening as the strains of
Law & Order
once again flowed down the hallway.

He hadn’t even tried to keep talking, anyway.

And that was good.

K
ane felt pretty good for someone who hadn’t accomplished anything.

Raven had driven all day steadily east at his command, but the end of the land never came. It was a big block of land, Kane knew, having seen it from space. He’d had an idle interest in mapping it out from the perspective of one on the ground, but his curiosity had waned and now he was thinking about hunting again. When the sun hit its highest point, he ordered Raven to turn them around. Once they were back into the comfortable zone wherein his locator could sense his ship, he had her go north until night fell.

They hadn’t taken many breaks. Just to refuel now and then, or to get food and drink (they didn’t even have to stop for this. There were places that would hand the food in hot bags right through the groundcar’s window), or to pull into one of the many piss-stops that dotted Earth’s roads so that Raven could walk around a little. Kane, who was accustomed to sitting long shifts on the bridge of the
Null
with nothing to do and nothing to look at but space, handled the drive far better than his human pilot. She needed those rests, needed to stretch out and walk up and down the paths around the piss-stop rubbing her ass and her thighs. Kane walked beside her, safely disguised in his hellishly hot coat, and watched all the humans come and go with dopamine cooking in their little human heads.

The groundcar’s climate controls worked fairly well, but as the day wore on, Raven’s rests had become longer and longer. Kane gave her no orders. She was the pilot, after all, and if she needed walking to keep her head clear and thus keep them from flying off the road and into a tree, so be it. For the most part, they were back on their way soon enough that it didn’t matter. For the most part.

She’d lingered a little too long only once, and then actually tried to argue with him when he’d started to unfasten his pants. Something about being outside, where people could see. He gave her the benefit of the doubt, and elected only to punch her in the stomach instead of taking out a few teeth. He’d even pulled her off the path and out of sight before fucking her. And after that, for whatever reason, she’d been awfully good about taking shorter breaks.

The only stop he’d insisted they make was to bed down for the night in a motel rather than camp out in the woods, and she’d been perfectly amenable to that. The place they stopped wasn’t as secluded as the first one, but neither did it prove ‘tricky’. Raven had even managed to get a shaver from the manager, and she’d remembered to ask without any extra prompting from Kane. Most humans were at their best with a few bruises on them.

Now Kane lay on his back on the motel bed, one arm lazily pillowing his head, watching the thing Raven had called a ‘tee-vee’ and listening to water run in the other room. It had taken him some time to decode the controls, and it made him feel pleased and vaguely masterful to press a button on the device in his hand and see the image on the monitor change. So many buttons…

He supposed it was part of the human mentality, to have so many fingers and then build things complicated enough to need them all.

The function of the tee-vee, as near as Kane could deduce, was mainly entertainment. With few exceptions, the images shown followed along lucid, lateral storylines and Kane had a feeling most, if not all of them, were fictional. Jotan did this, although they didn’t use quite so many different channel feeds to do it. Kane thumbed through several feeds, studying each new program only long enough to get the gist of it before moving on, until he had seen every available feed twice and felt informed enough to pick one.

The feeds had a lot to teach about ways to use the human language, not to mention ways to use the humans themselves. Kane couldn’t help but think that if Uraktus had just had access to a tee-vee and few weeks to study it, he wouldn’t have bothered keeping quite so many slavesl. Or maybe he would have. Urak was funny that way. Unpredictable. And Kane had to admit, once she’d settled in a little, Raven was pretty low-maintenance.

The sounds of water drumming on the wall stopped suddenly. Kane could hear Raven moving about in the bathroom, and then there was quiet again. Every so often, the water would come on in a short burst. He wondered what in the hell she was doing in there, and ultimately decided her personal grooming practices couldn’t be as entertaining as the tee-vee.

The sun had finally sunk low enough to come in through the window, aggressively radiant and irritating to Kane’s eyes. He got up to shut the curtains, but lingered at the window for a little while, looking out at the road and watching groundcars whiz past, back and forth. He needed to think about work.

In a few hours, he decided. Once it was dark. After he’d had a chance to eat and shower, perhaps sleep a few hours with Raven secure beneath his arm. When it was cooler.

Kane returned to his place on the bed and found another program on the tee-vee. It looked extremely interesting but cut out after only a few minutes. Annoyed, Kane went around to the back of the monitor and had a look at the electrical system.

The technology on this planet was limited, simplistic. He found the crude circuit damper almost immediately, and after disconnecting the monitor from its power outlet, set about adjusting it. The hardest part was working the little metal fasteners out of the device’s outer case—he didn’t have any tools that fit the cross-cut heads and he ended up carefully cutting the back of the case away with the miniature laser normally used for spot-welding the hull of a ship—but once the inner wiring was exposed, Kane was in familiar territory. He didn’t have to worry about putting it back together so it looked nice, either, he just had to make it safe enough that it didn’t set the wall on fire and that was easy.

When he plugged everything in again, the program was back on the screen and Kane put his tools back in his pack and sat down to watch it.

The bathroom door opened and Raven emerged, wrapped in one of the white drying cloths. It was a little too small to be used as clothing; when she moved, the edges opened, revealing a long slice of pale flesh all the way from her thigh to the shadow of her breast. She hesitated by the foot of the bed, then walked past and over to the little table on the other side of the room.

He watched her go, feeling a pleasant sort of vague interest in her. “I want to see,” he said.

She turned around, keeping her eyes down, and unwrapped herself for him.

She’d done it. She was smooth and utterly hairless from the neck down. Her sex was pale, almost shiny with the rawness of it, plump and round and perfect. She let the towel fall and came to him when he snapped his fingers, standing with her legs slightly spread so that he could feel the softness of her.

“What’s the word for this?” he asked, almost by rote.

“There’s lots of names.”

“I only need one.”

Raven thought about it and finally shrugged. “Pussy, I guess.”

He repeated her, stroking the soft swell of her shaven sex, and finally gave her thigh a slap to send her away so that he could get back to the television. He was watching humans get ready to fuck and found it queasily fascinating. The way the females moved was dig-in-your-gut arousing but the way the male’s tsesac flopped around was downright nauseating. The male kept trying to eat the female’s breasts, but the female seemed to like it. Of course, humans didn’t have that many teeth, so…

The humans had finally quit rubbing their hands and mouths on each other and started really fucking. The male lay down for this, and the female mounted. This was normal enough—ah, the Flesh-halls of Jota!—but she mounted backwards, facing the male’s feet, and that was a surprise. Then again, she probably did it so the male couldn’t take a bite out of her breasts while she was working. The male’s eyes were closed but he kept reaching out for the place the breasts would be if the female were turned around and his mouth was opening and closing.