Ruth's Bonded (Ruth & Gron Book 1) (13 page)

“What? How can I understand you?”
Ruth managed to get out after a minute of mental flailing. She kept one
protective arm across Gron, one still held out to keep the aliens at bay.

“We have calibrated our
interpretation interface to your language. It is not perfect, but as you do not
have an interpretation implant, this is the best way to communicate with you.
We were not sure it would work.” The alien took a tentative step forward as it
made this speech.

“Stay the fuck back,” Ruth snarled.
“Don’t think for a minute I give a shit about what you have to say. You
abducted me from my home and kept me in a cell. If you don’t leave right now,
I’m going to beat you into guacamole.”

There was a pause among the aliens,
presumably while her threat translated, and she noticed the one with the
javelin and the one with the rifle look at each other and adjust their grips on
their weapons.

“I’m afraid we cannot leave,” spoke
the middle one carefully, and Ruth guessed it must be the leader. It indicated
Gron and said, “He is dying, and we must take him back to our ship and heal
him. We cannot afford to let him die.”

Ruth felt her chest clench to have it
confirmed like that, and she gripped Gron tighter, her knuckles turning white
in his fur. They would never take him from her.

“Why? Who is he to you?” she
demanded.

“The creature you are holding is a
member of an endangered species, a species we have been trying to save from
extinction. I can explain more later, but we
must
act now to preserve
his life. His kind cannot afford to lose even a single member. He is too
valuable to our efforts to let him die here.” The alien took another step
forward and Ruth hesitated.

“Heal him here, in the cave,” she
said.

“Our medical facilities are on our
ship.”

“What are you going to do with him
afterwards? Are you going to let him go?” Ruth almost tried to pull Gron back
away from the aliens, but she couldn’t shift his bulk even an inch.

“We will return him to his kind. I
can explain everything to you later, but now we must hurry. I know you have
been hurt by my kind and you do not trust us, but he will die very soon if you
do not let us help him.” The alien almost sounded sincere, or maybe that was an
effect of the translator. “You must understand, I am not prepared to lose him
because of you. We will take him by force, and we will leave you on this planet
to survive or die on your own. We want to keep you two together, but we were
not expecting you, and you were never a part of our plans.”

Ruth felt Gron’s weak, erratic
heartbeat under her palm. She knew he was dying. Apparently now she had a
choice about it. She could give him back to the people who had abducted and imprisoned
them. Apparently they wanted to save his life. If she went with them, they
would keep them together, and he would survive. If she didn’t agree, they would
fight her for him, and she would lose because she was outnumbered and unarmed,
and then be left behind to die. She had thought she would rather die free than
live in captivity, but she didn’t think she could say the same for Gron. She
couldn’t even make that decision. If they went back into the cell, at least
they would be together. If he hated her for it, at least he would be alive.

“Okay,” she choked out, trying to
stay on top of the roiling guilt and doubt and fear rising up her throat. The
aliens moved cautiously but quickly forward, grabbing Gron and doing things to
his body that she couldn’t follow. She kept her hand on him and stiffly hurried
to her feet as a floating gurney inflated under him.

The next thing she knew she was on
the ship, or she assumed she was. She felt sick, recognising the feeling from
when she had been abducted. This alien race must have teleportation technology,
she thought, feeling daunted. Before she could recover, Gron was whisked out of
the room.

“Wait!” she cried, trying to follow,
but the leader alien from the cave stood in her way and held her back with one
small cold clammy hand against her belly that made her flinch.

“We will heal him now. Do not
interfere. If you come with me, I will explain what I can of what has happened
to you. Our scans show you are dehydrated and malnourished. I will arrange a
meal for you, as I am not confident enough of your physiology to treat you in
sickbay. I would also like to learn more about your species, who you are and
where you come from.” The alien looked her up and down. “At the moment, you are
an unexpected mystery to us.”

The alien led her through metal
corridors that were thankfully much higher than they needed to be for the much
shorter aliens. Ruth guessed that if they were in the habit of transporting
other species, larger corridors were a necessity. She found herself embarrassed
by her nakedness again. No one had said anything or were even looking at her
strangely, and it was these bastards who had taken her clothes in the first
place, but she was the only naked person again and it made her uncomfortable.

She tried to remember the path they
were taking, but after a ride in an elevator, she knew she’d never be able to
get back to where she’d arrived. She’d never be able to find Gron if she had
to. There was alien writing on the walls but it told her nothing. If she was going
to escape, she would have to find a weapon and threaten one of the aliens into
helping her.

The alien let her into what must have
been its office or suite and gestured at a miniature dining table and chair.

“Have a seat, I will order food for
you,” it said in English, before speaking that awful jangle into the wall and
joining her.

Sitting on the chair wasn’t really an
option since it made her feel like Gulliver in Lilliput, so she sat on the
floor instead next to the tiny table. The alien took the chair on the other
side.

“I will explain everything as far as
I know it,” it said, “If you are ready to hear it.”

“More than ready,” Ruth growled.

“The male you were with is, as I ex-”

“Gron,” she interrupted.

“I’m sorry?”

“His name is Gron.”

“Oh! They have names, that’s... We
did not know that. How did you find that out?” the alien asked, seeming
flustered.

“I asked him.”

“You asked him?”

“Yeah, I asked him.”

“You speak the same language?” The
alien seemed amazed.

“No, but we do alright,” Ruth responded
cagily, not wanting to give this alien anything it could use against her.

The alien paused, as if hoping for
further explanation, but she made it clear none was coming. “I see,” it said.
“Fascinating.”

“I have a name too. It’s Ruth. Do you
have a name?” Her tone was confrontational but she wasn’t sure how it would
translate. It just pissed her off that these things thought of Gron and her as
animals or something. Manners were universal surely.

The alien looked flabbergasted, and
it made Ruth feel good to be on the attack. “Me? Yes, certainly I have a name.
My name is T’Lax Kranden Xshingat.”

Ruth blinked. “Right. Well, you were
about to tell me how I got here,” she said, quickly moving them on so she
wouldn’t have to repeat that mess.

“Yes. The male –
Gron
- is a
member of an endangered species, as I told you. We call them the Gandry. They
are native to a planet that unfortunately developed sapient life much later
than its neighbours, so for a long time, they were seen mostly as animals, and
their natural habitats were destroyed to make room for civilised expansion. By
the time other species noticed what was happening and took action, there were
less than a hundred Gandry left. Me and my crew are part of a conservation body
that oversees the rescue of such cases from extinction. We organised the Gandry
into optimal breeding conditions on protected land, and I may say they are
doing remarkably well. They are, however, still classed as endangered, which
makes them very valuable. The crew that took you and Gron were criminals,
hoping to sell him on the black market. They teleported him from his planet
just as they teleported you.”

“Does Gron know any of this?” Ruth
asked. “Does he know he’s part of a... conservation effort?”

“No. Part of what makes the Gandry so
interesting to our scientists is that the language centres in their brains
totally resist any interaction with our translation or interpretation
technology. They are the only species we have met that has such resistance, and
we can’t explain it. It is really fascinating. They are also still at a
primitive stage of development, basic tools only, no technology to speak of. It
was deemed better to let them develop naturally at their own pace, rather than
attempt to incorporate them with our society.”

So Gron was a caveman, an extremely
rare and expensive caveman. Ruth thought about that, but she didn’t care. She’d
always known he was different, it didn’t change anything.

“It doesn’t help of course that they
react very aggressively when confronted with any other sapient life form,” the
alien continued. “Except yours, it would seem. That too, warrants further
study.”

“You can study my ass,” Ruth replied.

“Why? What does it do?” wondered the
alien.

“It’s an expression, it means go fuck
yourself.”

“The words coming through my
interpreter are not making sense.”

“I am reacting very aggressively when
confronted with your sapient life form, is that clearer?” Ruth bit out. “I’m
telling you I don’t want to be studied.”

At that point the door to the room
opened and an alien pushing a trolley with a number of plates approached,
eyeing Ruth warily as if it expected her to attack. It quickly deposited the
dishes on the table as well as a jug of water and left. T’Lax indicated she
should eat, and she began picking at the dishes she thought looked the safest.
She was starving, and her body devoured the meat and fruit in front of her, and
half the jug of water before the alien remembered it was talking.

“Ah. Well, that can be discussed at a
later opportunity. To continue what I was saying, Gron was stolen from the
protected conservation area by criminals of my own kind intending to sell him,
presumably as a trophy of some kind. We believe that they took you as well
thinking that the two of you would breed and they could sell the child, a
staggeringly ill-informed idea proving that they knew nothing of the laws of
nature or the Gandry. Presumably this was an idea they had en route to the
market on the planet below us, and they simply scanned the surrounding space,
found your species - which I must admit looks remarkably similar to the Gandry,
you must tell me more about yourself – and teleported a female of breeding age
at random. They clearly expected the close quarters of the cage to be enough to
induce mating, but again they prove their ignorance. The Gandry have been
considered animals for centuries, but our studies reveal that they actually
follow strict mating practices. They have also never produced offspring in
captivity. Really, all this information is readily available. The criminals who
took you were bafflingly lazy in their research. More to the point, you are
different species, it is highly unlikely you could produce offspring.”

“Is that why they took my clothes?”
Ruth interrupted. This guy sure liked to listen to the sound of his own grating
voice. 

T’Lax seemed startled by the
interruption, as if it had knocked him off track. “They took your clothes?”

“Yeah. They came into the cell,
fought us with these... Anyway, they held me down and cut off my clothes.” Ruth
did not want to sound primitive in front of this jackass by describing the
stick-things inaccurately.

“So your species wears clothes? How
interesting, I must investigate that further... Would you like me to find you
some now? Perhaps a blanket, or...” The alien trailed off, its eyes surveying
her naked body for the first time and Ruth tried not to flinch or snarl at it.

“Yes, please,” she ground out instead,
and T’lax got up and spoke into the wall again.

“I assume that, if Gron failed to
impregnate you, they thought your nakedness might make him more inclined to
try. They could have been running out of time before the sale, getting
desperate. Any Gandry is valuable, but a single adult male would be valuable as
a trophy only. A baby Gandry could be sold as a pet, for science, even to eat
to some species, and I could not begin to calculate the value of a viable
hybrid. Certainly, to science, it would be invaluable, as would you if you
managed to breed with a species not your own. Did you know they tried to sell
you as a mated pair? That made the buyers suspicious as the price did not go up
nearly as much as it should have.”

The door opened again and the trolley
came back, this time with piles of folded fabric, which were placed beside her
so that the trolley-bearer could escape swiftly. Ruth dug through the folds,
finding that mostly it was loose, uncut fabric. There were a few articles of
what she assumed were clothes, but they would never have fit her. For the
moment she grabbed a patterned red piece and wrapped it around her shoulders.
She would try for a toga when she had more privacy.