Pirate's Gold - S.J. Sanders Page 0,24

of a Blaithari prince and treasures accrued from plunder, and the best that you can come up with is… ‘nice?’”

She swallowed the bite she had taken in the interim while he was busy boasting. A younger son of a prince turned to piracy… Interesting. He was watching her so expectantly for any reaction that—oh, what the hell—she would indulge him. Obviously, he was eager to impress upon her his importance. She couldn’t imagine why. She was nobody, but if it would make the meal go faster, then she would bite.

“A prince, huh? Then why are you out pirating instead of enjoying a royal life?”

“It is a most incredible story,” he said, the flinty look that had been in his eye since boarding eased as he settled back in his chair.

He drew a small tube out of his vest and followed by removing a pouch. Dipping his fingers into it, he withdrew a stringy mass that smelled sharply of the spicy fragrance floating around the room and stuffed it into the tube. Leaning back, he lit a small triangular nub at the end and took a deep drag on it. As the smoke billowed out from his lips, his pink scales flushed almost red, he almost made her think of a smoking dragon from one of the tattered children’s book she had come across once in her youth.

“He publicly disgraced himself,” Azan said, her tone somewhat bored as if she had heard this story too often. “He was exiled from his homeworld and all of the Blaithari colonies with nothing but this ship and a small crew to pilot it.”

Egbor shot a dark look to the female, but he didn’t snap at her like Terri thought he would. He seemed more inclined to continue to smoke whatever was in the hollow tube than exert any effort into retaliating. He pointed one thick finger at her and sneered.

“Be grateful that I find you too useful and amusing to terminate,” he grumbled.

Azan grinned lazily at him, the first smile that Terri had seen on the female’s face, and it was almost transformative. Transformative in that it made her seem even scarier than she appeared at rest. The hard, lethal edge to her smile was disconcerting. That the captain met her gaze with a nonplussed expression confirmed that this was a regular part of their odd relationship.

“You do not attempt to terminate me because we both know just how hard I am to kill. I make a better ally than an enemy, as you once pointed out.”

He grunted in agreement and lifted a cup of some sort of dark, frothy substance to his mouth. Tipping back his cup, he drank long from it before setting it down with a hard tap on the table.

“Are you finished with your interruptions?”

“For now,” Azan agreed.

He snorted and turned his attention back to Terri. “As Azan said, I was exiled in disgrace. It was considered an embarrassment to my family and peers that I sought profit in a rather lucrative natural resource on my planet, one that we have an abundance of.”

Silence followed as he waited for Terri to play along.

“And what is that?” she asked.

Instead of answering directly, his expression turned smug and calculating. “Would you agree that there can be problems that arise when the population skews out of balance? When there is too much surplus of one that causes strain?”

“I can see how that could be possible,” Terri replied slowly. She had seen just how crazy and covetous so many men became on Earth when women were harder for them to find, and the way women were shared among them in some sort of weird desperation.

“My homeworld, Blaitharsha, has a population ratio of two to three females to every male. It put considerable social pressure on males to take in additional mates and provide for them. For some families, it worked out well, for others… not so much. Economic and personal strain that can occur among those not equipped for it. I decided to do our populace a favor. Unfortunately, my family did not think much of my endorsement and funding for relocating surplus females of the lesser divisions of our society off planet.”

Terri gaped at him. “You sold females to other species?”

“Ah, I see that you arrived at the same conclusion that my family did. Naturally there had to be some profit in the enterprise to keep it running. But each of them was sent to males who wanted them. When it came to