KAZAN
Normally I only came tothe spaceport to drop off my preserved star-figs. I had no use for life off Ceres-9 or the adventures and foibles of the greater galaxy.
But today, the greater galaxy was coming to me.
After five years on this hard-won frontier planet, the unavoidable truth was becoming more unavoidable by the day.
We needed females.
It was a hard thing to say out loud, even harder to sit with in the quiet of my orchard. The Protos Empire had bred us for the arena and nothing else, and they’d kept our females penned away like livestock too valuable to risk. Most of them hadn’t survived the breeding programs.
By the time we tore ourselves free and seized the transport fleets, there were barely enough of our women left to count on two hands across the whole exodus. Freedom tasted strange when you realized it might die with you.
A planet of your own meant nothing if there was no one to fill it.
So we had gone digging through old trade channels until Remmen found Earth’s Alien Matchmaking Agency. Humans,he’d told us, were a species drowning in their own numbers, their cities too full, their work too cruel.
Some of their females wanted out badly enough to cross the stars for it. A trade, of a sort. They got land and a roof and a male sworn to keep them breathing. We got a future.
I didn’t need a bride, a wife, a mate, whatever they wanted to call it. I was content to work my orchard and call it a day. But Remmen, the mayor, had been giving me pointed looks.
Whether I liked it or not, I was a leader here, and the other males would follow my lead if I could make a good match.
The ramp lowered with a hiss of pressurized air, and the first of them stepped down into the pale Ceres-9 morning. I crossed my arms and watched from the back of the receiving bay, where the shadow-wood beams met the curve of the dock. The mist hadn’t burned off yet, and it clung to the women as they came, blurring their edges.
They were so... tiny.
I’d known, in theory. I’d seen the holos Remmen passed around. But knowing a thing and standing twelve feet from it were not the same. The tallest of the lot barely cleared the chest of the dock attendant, and he was a runt by our measure. Their wrists looked like they’d snap if you closed a fist around them. Their necks were thin, their shoulders narrow, their whole frames built like the hollow-boned glidewings that raided my orchard.
Perhaps the tall one could reach up and grip my horns, but if she tried to ride me, I’d buck her off without meaning to.
The thought wasn’t lust. I’d spent decades learning exactly how much force a body could take before it broke.
I knew the weight of my own hands. I’d cracked arena stone with them. Setting one of these creatures against that felt less like marriage and more like a thing I’d be tried for. One carelessturn in the dark, one bad dream, and I’d wake to a broken woman in my bed.
A male behind me let out a low, eager rumble at the sight of them, and something in my gut soured.
He didn’t see the problem. He saw soft and warm, and waiting. I saw all the ways soft things came apart in a minotaur’s hands.
A scent washed over me and made my nose flare, the ring that hung from my nostrils blowing out and then clinking back against my lips for a moment.
It cut through the recycled stink of the dock, through the sour tang of the engines and the cold mineral smell of the mist.
Warm. Faintly sweet, the way the orchard got after rain, when the figs were just turning. Underneath it was something else, something that had no business pulling at me the way it did.
My head turned before I told it to.
She came down the ramp slower than the others, one hand braced on the rail like the floor might tip.
Small, yes, all of them were small, but she was built differently. Soft curves where the others were straight lines, hips and thighs and a fullness to her that my eyes caught on and would not let go. She’d dressed for the cold in some oversized gray thing that swallowed her shoulders, and a clip held her brown hair back with strands of it loose around her face.
She wasn’t looking at the minotaurs. She had her eyes firmly planted on the metal ramp, like she was afraid she might trip.
Every cold calculation I’d made about size and force and broken wrists dissolved like frost off a sunny stone. My pulse dropped low and heavy, somewhere south of reason. The heat that coiled through me had nothing to do with sense and everything to do with the way her sweater slipped off one shoulder when she shifted her bag.
I wanted.
I had wanted nothing in five years that wasn’t a good harvest or a quiet night. This was older than that, and meaner, and it didn’t care that I’d just spent the last ten minutes deciding humans were too fragile to touch.
