Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,12

to abuse the cryo chamber. Even using it to make four weeks go by faster is not something we tend to do. Better to live your time all in a nice line, rather than skipping across the pond like a stone.

So I spend the four weeks reading, practicing for the atmospheric braking maneuver, playing a few games on the ship computer, and…

God, I don’t even want to admit the other thing I do.

She’s in my room. Her damn cryo chamber is in my quarters. I can’t move the thing. I start talking to her one night. I’m bored and used to having another pirate ship to talk to over comms. So I pretend like she’s just another pirate at first.

I talk to her about the maneuver, and how I feel about having a forty percent chance to live. I talk to her about Aria. Then I start blaming her for Aria, even though she’s not the human who stole her away from me.

Shit, on a given day, I probably talk to Catherine for at least two hours. At first, I was just talking at her, but as time goes on, I talk to her. I hate it, but I can’t stop doing it.

Glacius becomes visible through the cockpit. It’s a dim light at first, but soon it’s a blue and white marble.

“We’re going to use the atmosphere to kill our speed,” I say aloud. I’m fucking talking to Catherine from the cockpit now, even though she’s way back in my quarters. “This way we can kill our speed without using the engines. To get into the right orbit though we’ve gotta’ do a burn, and then to get back out of orbit we have to do another burn. I’m not going to lie. The chances aren’t great. A forty percent chance to win the lottery is pretty amazing odds. A forty percent chance to not die is a hell of a lot less exciting.”

The ship’s computer is pretty damn good at the math. I could do the burn from far out, but I wait until we’re closer. The extra proximity might be able to spare the engines an extra quarter or half second of burn just from more efficient calculus.

Glacius, the ice planet, fills the cockpit now. It’s mostly ocean. Water ocean. We lost a lot of our early history, but some people think that this was actually our home planet. It’s preserved now almost like a reservation. When Cygnians developed the written word, we snapped out of savagery almost like a spell. It’s hard to know for certain what happened before we could write, because history never really starts until you can write it down. Still, so much of the very first writings we have talk about how writing saved us. How we had always been at war, killing each other with stones and spears, and suddenly we had peace. Almost overnight.

That’s why humans were so surprising to us. They’d been writing for thousands of years when we made contact with them, but they had still been at war with each other the whole time. If not for the centuries-long orgy that happened when we first smelled each other, they’d probably have gone to war with us, too.

The Cygnians Glacius cannot write. It’s forbidden to teach them. It’s a debate that comes back up every couple of hundred years, whether we should “bring them up out of savagery.” It’s always close, but we always decide to leave them be. Teaching them writing would destroy their culture. Maybe they’re happier like that?

“I’m just going to scrape across the top of your atmosphere,” I whisper down to the savages. “And then I’ll be on my way. At most you’ll think I’m some kind of shooting star.”

I initiate the burn. The weight of the acceleration pushes me back into my seat. I’m intensely aware that I could explode any second. Each second of burn drags on, and the temptation to cut the engines early is real. I hold, trusting the navigation calculations I’ve gone over a hundred times already.

I cut the engines.

“Alright, Cat,” I whisper. God, I even have a nickname for her now. When did I start doing that? “One more burn and we’re home free.”

11

Catherine

The last thing I remember is Krakon shutting the damn hatch on me mid-conversation. Still, my last actual thought was relief that I’d wake up inside the ship. That I’d wake up in not exactly friendly--but at least familiar--surroundings.

As the hatch opens back up, though, everything