Read Maddison, Karly - Time Slip [The Xephon Alliance 1] (Siren Publishing Classic) Online
Authors: Karly Maddison
Maddison, Karly - Time Slip [The Xephon Alliance 1] (Siren Publishing Classic) (2 page)
The brutal jealousy and hatred from her mother had been something she’d run from her entire life. Even now, ten years after her mother’s death, in some ways she still ran from the memories, at least the impression the words had left anyway. It didn’t matter how beautiful or talented friends said she appeared, or even that she somehow knew such comments held truth. Deep down the words of childhood stuck, because they counted so much and had been said so often. But she’d proven those words wrong. She had not amounted to nothing. She worked as a medic and a damned good one at that. Nobody could take that away from her. She’d studied hard to get to this level of capability in her career.
And yet women, the women of her ship the
Windfleur
, had been exclaiming for so long that someone that beautiful, that educated, ought to have a man by now. To still be single was just strange for someone turning thirty on the next moon.
Well, it wasn’t quite true, about never having captured a man’s interest before. The hundreds of men her mother had paraded through her life had coveted her at every bend of her life stream, and she still felt the residual effects of it. But men wanted what they saw on the surface, never mind what she thought of them. They just wanted a piece of her, regardless of her own feelings and without appreciation for her unique identity.
Still, she’d always thought if someone special ever did come along, she would choose him herself. Now that choice was out of her hands again, just like the old days when her mother’s boyfriends had leered at her. She leaned her warm forehead against the glass and puffed out her breath, leaving a misty residue behind. In it she drew a circle with two dots and a downward facing crescent mouth
. Unhappy face, unhappy me.
“Come away from the window,” Sharnie said, “and finish giving me the shot.”
Kash moved over to her colleague and picked up the needle, uncapped it, and gave the intramuscular shot to Sharnie’s shoulder then threw the used needle into the sharps container.
“Do you like him?” Kash asked quietly. She’d been doing vaccinations all week, and though she was nearly finished with the task, she was tired of it.
“Very much,” Sharnie replied. “Thank you for throwing him away.” She smiled with light humor, as she referred to her new partner.
“I’m glad he was assigned someone else,” Kash replied. She’d given Lunox hell for an entire week. Not at all what a nice male deserved.
“And for the record, in case you wondered, nothing happened between us. I was too mean to him.” Kash smiled at Sharnie, content in knowing her friends mate would be fair and kind to her. He could have really pulled Kash down a peg or two if he’d wanted to. He had possessed all the power to do so, but he’d restrained from harming her. She knew Sharnie was in good hands now.
She was more than glad they were all still around for a second chance at life. Things could have worked out so much worse.
The rough journey through the tunnel which had sucked them in had killed four of the twenty-five Earth females, including their leader, Captain Janey Phelps. The bridge had taken the most damage, and though Kash was only a medic from their shattered ship the
Windfleur,
she had mysteriously and reluctantly been pushed into leadership from that point on. Not an easy or desirable situation, to find herself the leader of all those women floating around space in a ship she didn’t know how to either fly or command. She’d leaned on those who did, but none of them wanted to actively be in charge.
Things had looked grim until the Xephon soldiers turned up in an enormous ship in much better shape than theirs would ever be again. It would be a long time before
The Windfleur
saw raw starlight again. It now sat in the
Xenxaphan’s
cargo hold like a dead bug in a pumpkin.
Chapter Two
Kash had learned later that the
Xenxaphan
had also been a victim of the mysterious space tunnel that had spat both vessels out in some part of the universe neither ship knew anything about. However, being bigger and sturdier, it had survived the trip a whole lot better. It helped also that the thirty male Xephon soldiers running it knew a fair bit about engineering and ship repairs, so any damage to their own vessel had long since been repaired. Nevertheless, to the Earth women these men were strange humanoid creatures despite how eagerly they had welcomed them aboard their vessel six months ago.
In all that time, nobody had been able to find a recognizable constellation or star system, or even a mysterious tunnel anomaly that might spit them out near their own galaxy again, if they were bold enough to jump into it. But jumping in one, of course, was no guarantee they would end up anywhere recognizable again. Kash, as the women’s assigned leader,
believed
they were safer to stay put than take such a risk, but she wasn’t in charge here—the Xephons were.
Kash’s reason for not wanting to try any more wormholes hinged on the fact that at least they knew this place ran on the laws of physics that they were all familiar with. They had also, by sheer luck, managed to find a habitable planet circling a weak sun. Not that they lived on it. Everyone remained on ship, orbiting the little world, sending shuttles back and forth to gather food items to be carefully examined and tested in the chemistry laboratory before use. Captain Zeba of the
Xenxaphan
did not want anyone staying down on surface because they didn’t really know what sort of creatures or other dangers existed down there. So they lived on the ship and used the planet, which they named Blueworld One, as a pantry.
After a few months of cohabitation, the system Earth women discovered pair bonding was important to Xephons, and every female was paired up with a Xephon male, according to Captain Zeba’s orders. This had so frightened one of the women that she’d taken her own life, much to Kash’s disgust. She wasn’t overly fond of the alien males either, but there were other ways to fight this than erasing oneself from existence.
She had been paired off with Sharnie’s new partner Lunox in the beginning. He had lovely dark hair and eyes, and if she were fair, she could
admit
he was a very attractive male. But, despite him being humanoid, he was still an alien. He smelled alien and he looked alien, from his too-sharp fangs to his claw-like nails and long, tangled hair, to his strange Xephon tattoos covering his face and body.
Kash had made his life hell, to the point where he had requested to have their partnership annulled. Stupidly, she had thought that was the end of it. But then they had paired her with Tipha. He also was attractive in his alien way, but she didn’t want him no matter how muscled and virile he looked, no matter how sweetly he spoke to her. She had to work a bit harder than she had with Lunox to make him go beg the captain to annul their partnership.
She had thought two rejections would make the lot of them steer clear of her. Not so. Females were now a rare commodity in this unknown corner of the universe, and the Xephons had no intention of wasting a single one, especially now they were stuck in this miserable situation, drifting around a strange planet and unable to find familiar territory. And even if they could, they still couldn’t return to their own world. It remained a toxic wasteland after the war with the Tarourke. The humans had volunteered their help in the slow process of cleaning up.
The only known Xephon survivors were the ones that had been off world when the damage had happened, and most of them had been males. Very few females were aboard star vessels at the time. This meant the Xephonites had now been classed as an endangered culture and species by the United Worlds Council. In an effort to protect them, many had been farmed out to human host families, while others, like the
Xenxaphan’s
crew would now be unaccounted for.
Kash left the medical bay and went down to the room where the fifty-one people aboard the
Xenxaphan
ate meals. The darkened room had three big tables pulled together, each able to accommodate about twenty people. Since her arrival, most of the crew congregated for meals there with her own people. She glanced around the spacious interior, her eyes adjusting to the light.
Deciding she would stick around for the meal she sat down at the dining table with two of her own paired up crew members on either side of her, a strategic move on her part, designed to keep her away from the straying eyes of the nine remaining unpaired Xephon males. Captain Zeba sat with them today, but he didn’t seem overly interested in her when she arrived. In her opinion, he exhibited more interest in how the rest of his crew was getting along with the women to which they had been assigned.
Kash had her own curiosity about this, too. Her gaze raked the table, scanning the women and the males they sat next to. Most of them looked reasonably happy, which surprised her as she would have expected a little more discord. However, conversations seemed to be flowing easily—there was no tension here. Relieved to see such harmony, she changed from surveying her own crew’s faces to discreetly surveying each of the Xephon males.
When she had first arrived on the
Xenxaphan
, she had thought they all looked very similar, but now she had lived amongst them for so long, she could not disagree more with her initial judgment. Each face was as unique as any human face, each personality as different as those of her own people. She had to reluctantly admit now she had judged them harshly in the beginning when they had seemed to her eyes, a little fierce and forbidding. Now, months later, and with the benefit of having spent time with Lunox and Tipha, she realized that her first assessments had been both unwarranted and unfair.
Though she did not agree with some of the day-to-day runnings of the ship, she had little influence over such things. Like every other woman on board, she had eventually adapted to the different time scale and routines that the Xephons lived by.
At first there had been complaints, and plentiful visits to the medical station from the members of the
Windfleur
crew. How quickly that had changed, Kash thought. Now the medical station was mostly empty from one day to the next, with little to do other than survey old records and update files. Kash was becoming bored with her role, missing her old life now and then as she haunted the medical bay on her own, day in and day out.
She pulled her thoughts up sharply and told herself she should be grateful it was so quiet. How awful if she had to constantly deal with sick and injured crew. Everyone seemed healthy and well fed right now, and she ought to be grateful for that. Things could be a lot worse considering their grim situation. Still, she could not help worrying a little. She might have worked in worse situations than this in the past, but back then she had not been lost in space with no way home.
Will there ever be a way home? she asked herself. She had never been cut out for constant shipboard life. In the past, she had depended on her shore leave to revive her sagging spirits, to refresh herself and to catch up with friends. A long sigh escaped her lips as she sat quietly musing over the situation. Not even the food could distract her from her wayward thinking.
She let her gaze drift up to the top of the long table, to the group of single males sitting there. They were the leaders of the
Xenxaphan’s
crew, and yet they had not taken any partners, preferring to keep the lesser ranks happy. And happy they were to have females to care for. She’d never seen such rough-round-the-edges males sit up and look so glossy and refined in such a short period of time. Most of the women seemed to be happy about the arrangement, too. If not, they had been instructed to report to her, though nobody had yet, despite a few glowering faces that peered at her suddenly. Still, it had only been six months.
She hooked her spoon into the strange looking vegetables on her plate and started to eat. The taste was pleasant and a little spicy, the texture smooth, almost creamy. They’d found these growing on Blueworld One and tested them in the chemistry lab for toxins. She supposed they were some kind of root vegetable but nothing like she’d ever found in the past. She had no complaints. Nourishment was nourishment wherever one could find it. The fact that they had a bountiful pantry out there in the form of a small, blue planet remained something to be grateful for.
What was it like there on the surface of that little world? Some crew members had been down there, and she couldn’t help wondering with a little excitement if she would ever get the chance to go planet side herself.
She took a long drink of the Xephon concoction in her mug, some kind of fruity cordial unlike anything she’d ever had before. She looked back to the head of the table. Captain Zeba talked to one of the engineers. Captain addressed him as Stannum, after the Earth element, but everyone else called him Tinny. He’d been born on Earth before the time of the United Worlds Alliance. Perhaps because of this he didn’t have as many tattoos on his face as some of the other males, just a swirled star shape over one eye and running up his temple, disappearing into his hair line.
