the public. All our unmanned probes have disappeared without a trace, so the Earth governments were reluctant to send a live crew. Especially, since Svetlana Kostyk had gone missing...”
A muscle in his face twitched when I mentioned Svetlana’s name again.
“Do you know what happened to her?” I asked him.
He sat quietly for a moment, assessing me the way I had assessed him minutes earlier. Slowly, he reached into a pocket on his vest and pulled out one of the black, glossy cookies.
“Did she end up crashing here, after all?” I prompted since he kept quiet.
“She is the one who makes these,” he finally said, staring at the cookie in his hand.
“It is her!” I stared at it, too, as if it were an object from another dimension, or at least from another time. “Is she here, then? Alive?”
“She is very much alive.” He heaved a sigh then bit into the cookie with a vengeful expression. “She’s Vrateus’s woman.”
“The captain’s?”
Hearing that the human scientist, whose disappearance hadn’t left the news for decades, ended up as someone’s “woman” felt so wrong. Was she his property? Had she been forced to submit? By the same means Wyck had been coercing me into stripping—do it or die?
Of course, I didn’t know Svetlana Kostyk personally, but I believed this would not be the life she would’ve chosen for herself.
“I can’t believe she survived here all this time,” I muttered to myself.
Svetlana would be about eighty years old, now. The captain appeared to be around thirty.
“In what way is she his woman?” I asked.
Wyck shrugged. “In every way there is.”
“Do you mean like...sex, too?”
“Sure. I smell them on each other all the time.”
“Oh God,” I looked away. “All the time? Are you sure it’s consensual on her part?”
The thought of the captain molesting the helpless elderly woman made me sick to my stomach. What would be unimaginable on my world, seemed to be plausible around here.
Wyck’s mouth twisted in a sarcastic smile.
“Not that Svetlana would ever confide in me about her sex life, but she seems content with the captain.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“Pretty much since she got here. Why is it of any interest to you?”
I wondered if that was the way to avoid the sex sessions in the mess hall—being claimed by one of the males here as his own. Not that I personally wanted to be claimed in any way.
“Did Svetlana ever have to do what you want me to do tonight?”
“A few times.” He nodded. “At the beginning.”
“Fifty years ago?”
“Why fifty? Svetlana got here just about two months ago.”
“What? Where has she been for the fifty years that she’s been missing, then?”
He shook his head.
“She couldn’t be missing for that long. She isn’t much older than you or me. Vrateus’s age, maybe.”
I sat up straighter.
“It can’t be the same Svetlana, then. The one we’ve been searching for disappeared over fifty years ago. She’d be at least eighty, now.”
He gave me an incredulous look. “How many Svetlanas have your people lost around here?”
One, that I knew of. The things didn’t add up.
“Are you sure this Svetlana is a human?” I asked. “Does she look like me?”
He gave me a long assessing stare then said with something oddly like regret, “She does. Well, her hair is darker than yours and her eyes are brown not green, but she is most definitely a human.”
“I need to talk to her. Wyck, please. Does she even know I’m here?”
“I don’t think the captain told her.”
“Well, can you tell her?”
He grimaced again, as if the very idea of him talking to Svetlana repulsed him.
“I’ll ask the captain,” he promised reluctantly. “Is that why you came here? To take Svetlana back?”
I shook my head, still reeling from his revelations.
“We never thought we’d find her alive. The most we hoped for was to learn what happened to her. Her age doesn’t make any sense, though. Unless there is some kind of a time warp—”
“Probably.”
“Do you know anything about it?”
“Not much.” He shifted into a more comfortable position. “When Malahki got here about five years ago, it said it’d been thousands of years since my father’s fleet traveled space. There is a difference between a year on the Dark Anomaly and a year out there.” He waved a hand in the direction of the lights outside the glass, without looking up from the tablet in my hands.
“Who is Malahki?”
“The last sentient being who crashed here before Svetlana. You won’t see it much. It works in the gardens and keeps