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I scrambled to cover myself. “Uh, sorry, I’m not used to having to worry about that.”
“I’m Jini,” she said. “I didn’t think donen had external, um, I thought you were one of the cock pocket species.” She winced. “Sorry. I guess that’s not really an appropriate thing to…”
“Can you take that blaster off me?”
She holstered it. “I guess if I’ve seen your penis that breaks the ice, right? Let’s be friends.” She snickered, looking out into the corridor. “Is Grilin alive? I thought I got him pretty good, but I couldn’t say.”
“He was the other donen?” I said. “No. He’s gone. Why’d, uh, why’d you shoot him?”Are you going to shoot me, too?
“He shot me first,” she said. “And he killed Panna.”
“So, itwashim,” I said softly.
“He went crazy,” she said.
“Huh,” I said. It couldn’t have been mating madness. What set that guy off? “Well, you’ve been unconscious for a long time.”
“Yeah.” She rolled her shoulders. “I was in and out, actually. I wondered how I ended up hooked up in the sick bay. But if you did that, I should thank you, I guess. Saved my life.”
“Cypra did that,” I said.
Jini leaned out of the doorway. “You must be Cypra.”
Cypra’s voice carried down the corridor. “You’re awake.”
Jini backed out into the corridor too. “We can go to the lounge to talk.” She glanced in at me. “You can come too. After you put some pants on.”
Right. Pants. Great.
By the time I got down there, the two women were sitting opposite each other in chairs, each with steaming cups of replicator coffee.
“So, you can fly the ship?” Cypra was saying. “We’re saved.”
Jini looked up as I approached. “How’d you two get up here?”
“Speeder,” I said. “But we had a tire blowout and it’s useless. Can you fly the ship?”
“I’m not the admii,” said Jini. “Grilin was. I have no idea why he took us down here. But if this is his home planet, like you said, maybe that’s why.”
“So, you can’t fly the ship?” I said.
At the same time, Cypra said, “It was the donen guy after all? But he wasn’t in a rut, so why?”
Jini looked back and forth between us. “I’m not an admii, but I can probably get the ship off the ground, and if I could fly it somewhere, like to a commercial spaceport, where they take over the controls and do the landing remotely for you, then… I mean, yeah, I can get us out of here. But is it an emergency or something? Why didn’t the resistance send a ship?”
“Magnetic interference from the pole,” said Cypra. “This Grilin guy started opening fire on you guys?”
“Well, at first he stunned us,” said Jini. “He locked me and Panna up in a closet and we woke up and got out of there and started shooting at him, and that’s when he started shooting back.”
“Why?” said Cypra.
“He didn’t really sit down and talk to us about it,” said Jini.
“Look, it kind of doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m as curious about it as anyone, but we can ponder it from elsewhere.”
“Which brings us back to the question of whether it’s an emergency,” said Jini. “Because I can probably get around that magnetic interference and get our coordinates to the resistance. They’ll come and get us.”
“Oh,” said Cypra. She looked up at me. “Well, I mean, if the resistance comes for you and me, that’s fine, but Holston needs—”
