7. Confronting Consequences

7 CONFRONTING CONSEQUENCES

W rath

I take a small shuttle up to the Mare, which has not bothered to hide itself since the barrage on Grave City. They were careful up until this point, but it is safe to say that they are now reckless beyond the point of good sense. Lettie has no fear of us. Or perhaps it is not Lettie behind the attacks.

I have my own theories. I suspect it is Shan who is leading the charge against me. He betrayed me once before, and there is no reason to think that he has softened toward me. I suspect it is Shan, not Lettie, who is wielding this ship like a weapon against me. The only attacks have been on my underground locations.

If it was Lettie, as my little mate insists, then surely the alpha's home would be targeted. If she wanted her shipmates back, there are other places to target. The primal skeleton for instance, or the palace of bones where Avel reigns in cruelty.

I am thinking about everything other than the fact that I am in a flying machine right now. We don't use these on our world. The port is reserved for alien traffic only. Thorn has always wanted to keep saurian life simple, and on a planet where there's only one city, we don't have much need for air transport.

So, suffice to say, I have never been in a ship before. I have always kept my feet on the ground, or under it. I am surprised to discover I don't entirely hate the experience. It is like a vehicle that travels on a road or across the ground, except it is capable of traversing the air. Saurians are more than aware of the potential of space flight, but we like to avoid it. It's not part of the culture. We have clung to the old ways where we can, because the old ways are sustainable.

Fortunately it does not take long. The shuttle is taken in by the larger ship, just as the humans said it would be. Thorn's mate, Sullivan, has been very helpful. She wants this to come to an end. We all want this to come to an end. The human ship may have come here by accident, but I do not believe in accidents, and frankly it does not matter. The women are here now, and they are breeding with us. The course of saurian history has been forever changed.

The door of the ship opens into the interior of the Mare. Nobody meets me immediately, so I follow the halls of the ship until finally a door opens into what I have to assume is the main control area of the vessel.

I expected more brushed bare metal and basic fixtures, but the first thing to confront me is a big yellow-gold couch sitting on a large purple rug. A little table to the left holds a cheerful lamp.

"I've been decorating," a soft female human voice says. "Do you like it?"

"Very homey," I reply, turning to face her.

Lettie looks much like she did last time I saw her, when I gave her to Shan to keep. She is a cute human. She has cut her hair short, and her brown eyes hold a certain solemnity. She is wearing a space suit with a red stripe down the center and holding a weapon.

"You were brave to come here," she says. "I thought you would keep hiding."

"I had to come. The city cannot fall because one little girl wants to throw a tantrum."

Her face creases with annoyance. "This isn't a tantrum. This is vengeance."

"Ah yes. Vengeance for what, exactly?"

The human female looks at me with a malicious expression. "You abandoned us in the wild. You forced me to give birth in a dirt fucking hut. You deserve to die."

"Your fate was tied to the fate of your mate. I should have killed the father of your baby," I tell her. "He was unfaithful, disloyal, and a traitor. Where is he?"

"This isn't about him," she says quickly. A little too quickly.

"Where is he?" I repeat the question, my tone a little deeper. She has the audacity to look somewhat sheepish as she answers.

"I had to distract him when I unleashed the weapons. He didn't like the idea."

"Distract him? Where is he?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Where is your baby?"

"It doesn't matter."

She is more agitated the second time she tells me it doesn't matter. I notice that she's more or less in constant motion. When I first came off my shuttle, she held the weapon pointed at me. Now it is down by her side, and she is pacing back and forth, her free hand up to her head, tapping it as if she is trying to force the thoughts to move.

This young woman is not quite in her right mind. That much is apparent. I can see a certain desperation in her eyes, a madness that I have seen set in for some of my own before. She is quite possibly the most dangerous creature on the planet at this point in time.

"NO!"

She shouts the word suddenly and lifts the gun back to me. Her finger is curled around the trigger. No trigger discipline. No discipline of any kind at all. This young woman is showing all the signs of having been let run amok.

"How long has it been since you saw Shan?"

"It doesn't matter," she repeats. "This isn't about Shan. It's not about men at all. It's about me, and what you did to me. It's about what you thought you had the right to do."

"I took you to the wilds and left you there to survive, or not. You did. Being angry at me now doesn't make sense. Whatever you're angry about, I don't think it's something I did."

"You made me a mother," she says, twisting her face up on that last word.

"I didn't do that. Shan made you a mother. He's the one who bred you."

"It would never have happened if you hadn't been trying to shoot the ship down, if you hadn't been trying to get a human to see if we could be bred. I was your experiment. Are you happy with the results?"

As she asks the question, she pulls the trigger. A bolt of deadly energy shoots toward me, catching me in the left shoulder. It is like being punched, apart from the bit where I start to bleed from the not quite entirely self-cauterized wound she just inflicted.

"I'm going to make you suffer like I did," she says. "I'm going to take you away, and leave you on a distant planet, far from anyone you know or love. I'm going to do to you what we tried to do to Captain Sullivan. Full circle. Happy ending. Happily ever after."

The wound hurts, of course. That's what wounds do. Her threats don't scare me as much as she probably intends them to, because she has effectively just told me she is going to keep me alive. If she wanted me dead, I'd have taken an energy bolt to the head.

"What do you think of that?" She prompts me with the question, and I realize she wants a reaction. It's not enough to hurt me for revenge. She wants to savor every moment of it. She wants to hear my anticipatory fear.

She is a twisted creature.

"Tell me, or I will shoot you again. I will shoot you again anyway, of course, but I'll shoot you sooner. And more. There are parts of your anatomy you won't be able to pretend don't hurt."

At this point, I'm starting to think it might have been smart to bring someone with me. I could really use the back up.

A llie

Sullivan got me packed into Wrath's shuttle with some other supplies. It was honestly all far too easy. He didn't suspect for a second that I would sneak onto the shuttle after he told me not to.

I was thinking about revealing myself on the way up, but I decided not to. Instead, I stayed hidden then followed Wrath as he started wandering the ship. The shuttle bay to bridge passage is actually very intuitive, so it turns out.

While Lettie paces back and forth, and Wrath asks where her baby is, I sneak out the other side of the door and sidle down the hall. Having cleaned this ship for years, I have an intimate knowledge of all the back passages and secret paths on this ship.

I know where she will have put Shan. There's really only one secure place on the Mare , and that's the brig.

There's nobody else on the ship. Not even the engineers who should be here. The Mare had felt increasingly empty for an extended period of time. Now it feels like a ghost ship. Not even the delighted giggle of a baby who doesn't know it is at the center of a civilization-wide crisis.

I find them all in the brig, locked away behind force-field shielded bars. I have no idea how Lettie managed to get them down here, but I'm impressed. She might be insane, but she's damn efficient. Maybe she does deserve to be captain. Maybe being captain is about getting things done, no matter what those things specifically are.

"Allie!" Casey hisses. "Over here!"

Casey and Cadence are in the same unit together. Shan and his baby are in the one next to it.

The kid is cute. It is green, like its father, with a yellow belly. It has brown eyes like Lettie, and the universe's most adorable mohawk. It looks more human than saurians do, but much more saurian than humans do. It has chubby little hands which it is using to hold onto its father's horns.

It's a cute baby. I don't know it's name. I don't know that it has a name. I don't really talk to anybody since Lettie declared herself captain, so it probably does have a name of some kind.

"What happened?"

I ask the dark-eyed saurian, because he's the one who should have put a stop to this.

"She drugged me," Shan groans. "She drugged me and locked me in the brig and she left the baby with me, and… there's something wrong with Lettie. She hasn't been the same since the baby. I thought she was just coming into her own, you know? Finding her strength? But…"

"Postpartum," Cadence says. "It happens sometimes when women have babies. People can go completely psychotic. That's why they need doctors."

"Probably happens more when they have to lay an egg in the forest first," Casey says. "I feel like laying an egg in the forest would make me crazy."

"Does postpartum depression lead to bombing a city?" Cadence asks. It seems like a rhetorical question, but Casey has no problem answering it anyway.

"It could. Why not? Women can do anything."

Both of them chuckle at their dark little joke.

"She's not as she was," Shan says, ignoring their flippancy. "That's certain."

"Is that because she never drugged you, imprisoned you, and tried her very best to start a war by attacking a city full of people who didn't see it coming?" I ask the questions of Shan. I am blaming him for this. I am blaming him almost as much as I am blaming Lettie herself. She's the one who was captured. She was the one who underwent severe physical and biological challenges, and bore him the baby who is trying to bite him in this very moment. He should have done something before this moment. Why does every authority figure turn out to be such a raging fucking disappointment?

"If I let you out, you have to go and catch her, and you have to get her under control. She's attacked the city. She's killed people."

Shan's dark eyes widen. "She's killed people?"

"That is what happens when you blow up parts of a city," I say. "She deserves to be in the brig, not you."

"Agreed. Let me out."

He makes it sound so simple, but of course it isn't.

"It's not that simple. I'm not a universal lock picking device. She'll have the key somewhere. Do you think she's hidden it somewhere? Or do you think she keeps it on her person?"

"I don't know," he sighs. "She's been so paranoid lately. I'm sorry about what happened to you…"

"She tried to kill me again today, so apologies for what she did to me feel a little premature, given she seems keen to keep hurting me. Catching her is only the first part. Keeping her under control after you get her, that's going to be the hard part. This has to end."

"I should have stepped in earlier, but the second I told her she couldn't send you down to the planet without you at least being awake, she knocked me out. I didn't know about the attacks."

"We did," the engineers chorus. "But we didn't say anything."

"Then who knocked me out? I assumed it was you. I was looking at her when the injection went into my neck. Who did that to me?"

There's an uncomfortable silence, broken by the gurgle of Shan and Lettie's baby, who doesn't care that there is drama.

"I feel like that's best kept as a secret," Casey says.

"Secrets are the spice of life," Cadence replies.

I don't say anything to them. They're not apologizing, and even if they did, I wouldn't accept the apology. This is a ship of monsters, and there is no bigger monster than the mother at the controls right now. There is absolutely nothing Lettie will not do in her quest for revenge.

My pain is instructing me as to why she is so vicious. There is nothing that will be enough to make her feel better. She has attacked the city, thinking she wants Wrath dead, and thinking I am an appropriate sacrifice because of how I was used before.

I understand her more than she realizes, and that is why I have no sympathy for her. The universe does terrible things to people, but the answer is never to become the same kind of monster as those who hurt you.

W rath

Lettie is pacing back and forth across the bridge, playing with the gun, twisting it around in her hands in a way that suggests she doesn't quite comprehend what she is doing. Sometimes it is pointing at me, other times it is pointing at her, sometimes it's pointed nowhere in particular.

"Are you feeling well? You seem slightly…"

"What?" She laughs. "Crazy!? Is that what Shan told you?"

She knows I haven't been able to speak to Shan, so yes, this is another argument for a certain kind of mental instability.

"He keeps saying I'm different," she says. "Well, of course I am. I am the mother to a baby I haven't been able to name yet. Do you know what a responsibility that is? To have to name someone else? I don't know what her name is? How could I possibly know?" Her voice rises, hitting a hysterical pitch.

"Shan did not say you were crazy," I say. My hope is to take the weapon from her. This is not my first time handling an upset underling. Most of the saurians who end up under my wing are terribly reactive when they first arrive. I talk down a madman with a gun every other day.

"I'm not crazy!" Lettie exclaims in an entirely unhinged way. "I just hate everybody and don't care if they die. That's a perfectly reasonable perspective to have."

I have to hope that I can appeal to logic, if she has any.

"You're inviting the alpha and his armies to open fire on this ship. Which contains you, and your baby."

"He wouldn't dare."

"He absolutely would," I say. "That is what it means to be an alpha. To put the welfare of the many over the interests of the few. You are, by definition, the few. Eliminating you is becoming an increasingly sane choice."

I pride myself on always knowing the right thing to say and having the gravitas to control the wilder impulses of those who are out of control. In this moment, I have not said the right thing, and all the gravitas in the world is not going to save me.

Lettie draws herself upright, her expression one of complete offense. "Well, if he's going to eliminate me, then I intend to eliminate him first…"

She dives for the controls, dropping the gun because she forgot about it. It clatters to the ground, discharging a bolt of energy that hits something on the bridge that I just have to hope isn't that important.

WEEOOW WEEOOW WEEOOW WEEOOW

An alarm starts blaring, indicating that it probably was very important.

I feel the ship tilt hard to the left and then put on a burst of speed.

"Oh fuck," she says. "Oh, that's not good. Oh no."

Navigation Malfunction

The ship makes the announcement very calmly.

It is quite apparent what is going to happen next. I can tell, not because I understand human technology, but because we have rocketed who knows how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away from alpha city, and now the ground is starting to come at us very fast.

Brace for impact.

Impact in 3…2…1