The others show immediate signs of relief. I suppose I do not blame them. They are right that we are on the verge of being captured. If all four of us are taken, the DC will be able to takeeven more torturous measures. They will take us captive and they will take us apart, and they will perform travesties.
Drak and the others have already stepped back to our realm. I am alone on the ship for the moment. I know I won’t be coming back to this place. There is still blood on the floor from the slaughter of the invaders, wiped up hastily but not completely.
When I took my pet here, I thought I would be showing her the universe. I thought I could keep her safe at all and any costs. I was almost certain she would be forever safe. I’ve failed her so completely I can barely begin to contemplate it.
“Tasin.” Alara’s voice comes through the disembodied speakers again. “Home. Now.”
I draw in a deep breath, and I step through the veil. The home realm asserts itself around me. I find myself there bloodied and exhausted, standing before Alara. She is on her throne, and we are alone in the royal room.
She has made herself very much appealing. Her dress is made entirely of jewels that tinkle softly when they move. Her skin is quite visible through much of those beads and things, but I suppose it is decent enough. She could be entirely naked and I would not particularly care.
“Tasin, I know you have suffered, but behaving erratically by diving deep into enemy space with three of your brethren is not like you,” she says, running her fingers through her long locks in an indulgent way.
“Alara, they’ve taken my pet.”
“Oh, have they?” She twirls a lock of hair, then focuses her attention on me directly. “That’s fortunate. She was slowing youdown, Tasin. She was a distraction, too. I have decided to issue an edict that no pets are to be allowed on warships.”
“I need your help to retrieve her.”
Alara frowns slightly at me, and as she replies, every sentence sounds more frustrated than the one before it.
“You know very well that this was ordained, Tasin. This is the way of things unfolding as it should. This is why we do not forge bonds with typical mortal species. This is why we do not have pets. She was always disposable. She ishuman.There is no purpose to her short, pathetic little life other than the losing of it.”
I don’t want the lecture, and holding my rage in as I suffer it does my constitution no good at all. When I respond, it is terse as well.
“We have been uniquely useless in this fight. We have allowed the Datari Composite to gain ground, and soon they may even have access to this realm. Is that what you want? To find yourself awash in brutal lizards? Because that is what will happen next. Today, we allow my pet to be taken from me. Tomorrow, they are here. Not at our door, but inside our homes. They are running roughshod through the most sacred places in the universe. They are destroying us, and replacing us.”
Alara laughs, and I catch a flash of something in her mind.
It is only brief, and it’s possible I imagined it, but I see her in a vivid tryst with the king of the Datari. His flickering lizard tongue working between her thighs, her back arched in ecstasy. The scene happens on the very throne she is sitting on now, and I realize that his scent is in this room. I thought it was the lizard blood on my boots that makes me smell it constantly. But it’s notblood. It’s an entirely different substance that is assaulting my nose.
I close my mind immediately and pull back. It takes great effort not to immediately begin to blurt out all I have seen.
We have been betrayed by our own leader; the one of us tasked with looking after all of us has been seduced by the Lizard King. No wonder she did nothing to rescue me. No wonder the DC have made such quick strides. She has been helping them. No wonder we have made ineffective moves that have done little to nothing. This is what she wants, a new world in which her consort is alien. The future is laid out, a twisted version of destiny tainted by what they want to have happen.
He’s using her, but she can’t see it. She’s too caught up in the rough passion he inflicts on her.
I cannot believe she has done this. To lecture me about what is ordained by fate, then perform this series of sabotages. The nerve she has is only eclipsed by her blindness. She is fuck drunk and she is a danger to us all.
Her eyes narrow, and I know she has sensed my disturbance. She is many things, but she is absolutely not stupid.
In a matter of seconds, I realize there is no way to hide my knowing from her. She already knows that I know something.
To hell with it.
“Will you bear live young?” I ask the question.
“What did you just ask me, you little shit?” Her patience was waning, and is now entirely gone. She wants to be able to rest on the laurels of her office and remain unquestionable. I have no intention of allowing that.
“I was captured,” I growl. “I was tortured. And you allowed it because it was what your lover wanted. How long have you been fucking him? When did he get to you?”
“I met him several years ago,” she says, answering me bluntly. “I was in a bar in a city in a place you would never go because for reasons that have always escaped me, you choose to hang out around ratty old space stations, mixing with the rabble of the universe. Kroc met me there, at the bar. We struck up a conversation, and over time I realized that he had more direction in his little finger than anyone here does in their entire body. He made it clear to me that he could elevate us all. We have been going about this in entirely the wrong way. We have been pruning around the edges of fate. But Kroc has something far greater in mind.”
I listen to her confession, and I know it does not matter because even if I were to tell every single Psyon in the realm what happened, they would not believe me. Alara is above reproach. She is our spiritual guide and soul protector. What she says, goes.
“I know,” she says. “It’s frustrating, isn’t it, to know something and to know that the knowing makes no difference at all. It’s a particular kind of dreariness, isn’t it. You believed in something that is now unbelieved.”
I don’t think that sentence makes any sense at all.
