1. Breedable

Lettie

"They're breedable."

Rough voices growl with lust in the depths of night. Their large, masculine frames are silhouetted in the light of an alien moon. Their words rumble through a soft evening breeze, rough, callous tones describing graphic acts and deeds.

I am crouched so close to them I can smell them. They have a particular masculine musk, something like sweat and seed mixed with an almost explosive odor. It shouldn't be attractive, but with every breath I draw faint traces of it into my lungs and feel a particular arousal growing inside me. There's a little electric tickle running over the hair at the back of my neck and arms. This is the way my body tells me I am in danger of a very specific kind.

They are discussing me. Well, not me specifically. They are discussing my kind. They don't know me, or the fact that I'm here. I remain hidden in dense foliage, blending in with my surroundings, being as close to nothing as is humanly possible.

This is what I do. I make myself disappear. I become nobody. I am less than a whisper on the wind. They will not catch my scent. They will not catch sight of me. They will not catch me, period.

Years of practice mean that I do not have to shift to get more comfortable. I do not have to scratch any little itches. I will not sneeze. I have trained stillness into my bones…

"Fucking them would be like fucking food."

"Hot food."

Crude words, and even cruder mental images. I don't let either one of those things put me off-balance. I keep my position, and I do not allow myself to react.

"The alpha and the enforcer are obsessed with their human captives. Their holes must be so fucking tight."

"They might have been tight once. They'll be stretched by now."

I have overheard a lot of bawdy conversations before in bars and jails and pirate stations across the universe. These outlaw saurians are falling prey to every male stereotype possible. Does it occur to them to think beyond the potential of a sufficiently hot and lubricated channel? I think it is terribly boring to be fixated on such a simple piece of anatomy.

I tell myself I'm above such things.

I'm an intellectual. I'm a professional. I'm a fucking pirate. And I am here to get my captains back from the clutches of these overly amorous aliens who don't seem able to think beyond the end of their no-doubt impressively scaled cocks.

They lower their voices as the conversation turns from sex to something more dangerous.

"How many do you think we'll be able to capture?"

"All of them."

"Will there be enough for all of us, I mean? Or are we going to have to share sloppy human holes?"

"You'd be lucky to get a look at one of them. I bet Wrath takes the lot for himself."

"He always shares the loot."

"Once he's broken them all in, maybe."

I feel my eyelid twitch in irritation. They have no idea who or what they are dealing with. The fact that our captains have been taken and appear to be warming the beds of two of the most dominant aliens in their civilization does not mean we are all ready for the claiming. I do not know why Captain Sullivan and Captain Raine have allowed themselves to be defiled, but I swear the first saurian who so much as attempts to lay a finger on any of the rest of us is going to regret it.

I will not be the next human to warm a saurian's bed. I am sure of that. I have dedicated my life to being two things: stealthy, and dangerous. Sometimes, it feels like half the crew of the Mare doesn't even know I exist. Truth is, I like it that way. It's better to be invisible to the world. Keeps me safe from little dangers like gossip, and even more safe from bigger dangers, like feral alien males whose sex drives are clearly out of control.

"Time to check in. Do you have that device?"

"It's fiddly. Looks like something the alpha uses. Don't know why Wrath wanted one of them."

"I don't care why. I'll take any opportunity to steal from Thorn."

There's bitterness in their tones as they discuss the saurian who controls their little lives. Alpha Thorn is the, well, alpha, of Grave City. His word is law. But these saurians don't know many words, and law is one of the many they've failed to learn.

They lift up their purloined device and mess with it a little. It's nothing special, but I imagine it seems like magic to these backward aliens. Saurians have basic tech. The same sort of tech that we humans would consider ancient. I'm surprised they've managed to turn it on.

My quiet sneering disappears into absolute fucking horror when they activate the camera, as I realize that they're not trying to take pictures of a pretty night sky.

With my naked eye, it looks as though they're just viewing Grave City from this wilder position, a location just outside the main walls, on an elevated plain. It's the perfect place to do surveillance, which is why I am here in the first place.

But the lens they're using on the tablet is lighting up the scene in a way the eye cannot. Through the tablet view, the city is lit up with thousands of tiny dancing lights that must represent some form of electricity or energy. It's fascinating and beautiful, but I cannot appreciate it at all because a creeping feeling of pure dread is starting to run through my veins. If that is what the city looks like through that damn device…

Rustling nearby makes me tense. There's far too much foot traffic in this area. I should be further away. It is starting to feel as though it is only a matter of time until one of these saurians trips over me. The area is getting more and more crowded by the moment.

"Wrath!" The two saurians with the tablet greet this even larger beast with a certain level of politeness and deference I wouldn't have said was possible. The newcomer has a breadth of being and a gravitas that I can sense before he so much as murmurs a word.

"How is it going, boys?"

He speaks the way the captains used to speak, with a kind of casual tone that is not actually casual at all. It holds heavy authority in every syllable. His voice is deeper than the other two. He sounds like gravel is being crushed somewhere deep in his throat. I can't make out his features, but I can see the outline of a horn and a flare that comes out over his shoulders, protecting his neck from the rear. It's actually a very adaptive feature. We should all have one.

"Just talking about the human females," one of the saurians says. "Is it true we can mate with them?"

"Mate with them? We can breed them, boys. According to very reputable medical sources, mating with humans could result in hybrids. Hybrids will breed fast, do as they're told, fit into smaller spaces, be more agile, and more importantly, have no official rights in saurian society. The alpha's law only applies to saurians. That's why they've been able to take the humans as they please. It's the same as taking anything, isn't it. Same as picking up a lizard and making it a pet, or dashing its brains out on a rock and turning it into a snack. Humans can be used, and I say we use them."

That little monologue brings with it a stunned silence finishing with a guffaw of excitement. We humans know a little of the saurian political landscape due to our surveillance. The alpha of Grave City is Thorn. He has Captain Sullivan. Then there is Enforcer Avel. He is a winged saurian, and a lusty lover. He has taken Captain Raine captive. Then there is Wrath.

Wrath is a living legend in the city. When we listen in to the conversations we can pick up via drone surveillance, he sounds like a Robin Hood type figure, a charismatic rogue leading a band of thieves.

I'm not here for Wrath.

I'm here for two of our crew.

But he's still talking.

"Do you have them on view?"

"Yes. That's them, right?"

They move the tablet so Wrath can see it, and I catch a small glimpse of what is being displayed on that screen. My blood runs cold in my veins as I see not only the city displayed in those pulsing blips of light, but the ship itself, hovering above the city. It is lit up as though it is made of neon signs, an absolute blinding mass of light.

"That's a ship full of human wombs," Wrath laughs. "They think they're invisible, but that human cloaking device is no match for outlaw tech."

"Could be males on board."

There aren't, but I can tell that worries these outlaws. Not Wrath, though.

"Good. Males can be slaves. Females can be breeding stock. They're all ours for the taking."

I can understand all the terrible things he is saying because saurians speak standardized galactic. They talk like crude animals, but they are technically civilized. Their planet is located on a trade route, and though the city doesn't really encourage visitors to leave the port, they are settled enough to…

"Bring it down, boys."

Wrath gives an order which doesn't mean anything to me at first, but soon causes intense concern as both saurians hoist cannon-type weapons to their shoulders. At first I am not worried, because they look like they're probably small missiles and that's not going to touch the Mare. She's armored pretty heavily.

Then I notice something else. Both of the shoulder cannons have a thick lead from the rear. There's no actual missile loaded. That means they're not what I thought they were. They're not primitive weapons loaded with projectile ammunition. All those leads go back through the undergrowth to a…

I take the risk of moving and sneak back, following the leads through the forest to find a great big humming power bank on wheels. I didn't see this until now because this is the direction the saurians came from after I had already arrived, and I was trying to avoid being caught so I allowed them to surround me. Big mistake. Huge.

"Lettie to Mare," I whisper into my communicator. "They can see you, and they intend to shoot you down. Ascend into orbit immediately."

There's a brief crackle, then a tinny little voice comes back through my earpiece.

"You won't be able to transport back to the ship if we do that."

I'm not entirely sure who it is behind the comms, because the connection is rough and I have a hard time distinguishing voices sometimes. That means I don't really know who I am about to yell at. Well, whisper-yell at.

"They have a fucking energy weapon aimed at you. Move NOW!"

I've never given an order before. It feels quite interesting. It also feels very hopeless, because there's no way for me to tell if it has been followed. Now that I'm no longer looking at that tablet I can't see the ship. One good sign is that comms dropped with a snap, crackle, pop, which does suggest they've moved.

The bank behind me starts to hum even more intensely. Lights start to cycle up the side of it, a series of orange blinking LEDs culminating in two bright green bulbs.

"AIM! FIRE!… FUCK!"

There are shouts of disappointment in the mid-distance, followed by what I hope is a belated discharge of the weapon. I see a dozen flashes of light go up from the forest and into the sky, joining together as they rise upward. Singly, those bolts wouldn't do much damage to the Mare's shielding, but together their force is exponentially multiplied. These saurians are trying to shoot the ship down, caring not at all what damage they do to it, or to the crew. I get the impression they'd drag us out broken and on fire in order to use us.

I watch that ball of power flash through the heavens, hoping I don't see it hit something unseen and spread out into a true explosion. I know how that will look. At first there will just be an oddly shaped light, but very quickly the ship will blink into visual range as the cloaking devices fail. Then burning bits will start to rain downward like a super low meteor shower.

Fortunately, none of that happens. The ball shoots upward, then starts to dissipate as it loses charge and finds no solid object. I breathe a sigh of relief. That was a close call. If that had hit, these saurians would have killed a lot of the crew or captured them. The latter is probably worse than the former given the conversation I overheard.

"How did they know to move? How did they do that? It's like they overheard us!?"

There is an outraged cacophony of indignant male saurians as they try to work out what just happened.

I hold my breath and sink deeper into the shadows, moving away from the power bank as much as I dare. They've already guessed at the truth of the matter. This is not a good time to be rustling bushes and making an obvious escape. Sometimes you have to follow your instincts, and other times you have to deny them. Knowing when to do what is most of the battle.

I need to lie low and make it to the next rendezvous point. I suspect that the outlaws are going to have a much harder time detecting the ship during the day, and I know the ship won't leave me behind. As soon as they come back into range, I will be able to transport back up there. My suit will tell me when that is. It's just a matter of waiting. Fortunately, unlike the captains, I am still free.

I am not panicking too much about being unable to return to the ship. What I really want to do is get down into the city. We know that the captain and, well, the other captain are both being held inside the city proper. At first, we waited for them to free themselves, but it quickly became apparent that getting anywhere near a saurian is practically asking to be abducted. They don't seem to recognize the fact that we own ourselves. They see us, and they instantly mistake us for one of their own possessions.

The crew is unanimous: we're not leaving anybody behind. But we're also not going to take insane risks in order to rescue the captain and… the other captain. We're going to bide our time, wait for the best opportunity, and take it when the time is right. My mission is a reconnaissance one, officially, at least. Because we're not only going to get our captains back — we're going to get paid for the time we've wasted being stuck in orbit around this backward planet. We're going to fill the ship's coffers with saurian wealth, and we're going to make damn sure these aliens know they made a mistake when they thought we were ripe for the taking.

That's why I was not too unhappy to find myself in the presence of these outlaws. Listening to them has been incredibly instructive, as well as absolutely horrifying. They have recently come into some ore reserves which sound like they'd be valuable. I think those will do us nicely, as a starting point for recouping our time and expenses.

Having put a little distance between myself and the cursing saurians, I start moving through the undergrowth, heading away from the criminals and toward the city. I want to make contact with Sullivan and Raine. I want to let them know what the plan is. And I want to find a way to keep the ship safe now that it's clear these creatures can see it in spite of the cloaking device. We're going to have to find a way to operate in plain sight.

I'm thinking we use the docks. There are interstellar vessels moving through that space all the time. It's possible the Marecould dock and I could board there, right in the heart of the city. I like that plan. It's bold, but it could work.

Little do I know, I've already made a huge mistake. In wasting time thinking about my plans, I've taken precious attention off my senses. A flitter of movement at the peripheral of my vision is all the warning I get before I am grabbed.

"SHAN GOT ONE!" A saurian starts yelling at the top of his lungs while carrying me nearly upside down.

Shan, the one who has presumably ‘got' me, has grabbed me by the suit over my hip. I rotate around that axis as his big alien hand grips me tight and hoists me aloft.

"It's a female! It's pretty!"

The saurian cheerleader continues to narrate my capture, while the saurian holding me turns me around in his grip and inspects me, though he doesn't actually turn me around the right way. He must like the way I'm oriented, or maybe he doesn't know how humans go.

"My feet go on the ground," I say, helpfully.

I can't really make him out in the low light of the night. Yes, there is some illumination from the stars and the fading light of their ill-fated weapon discharge, but it's the kind of silvery light that washes colors out and gives way to shadow far too easily. What I can tell is that he's a big, scaled, horned, silhouette of a creature. I also know, from being captured, that he's strong and agile, and he moves silently like an apex predator when on the hunt.

"Quiet," he says, his voice low but commanding.

More yelling follows, in a not-at-all quiet way. "Spread out! See if there's more! They can't run very fast at all!"

The saurian outlaws start beating the bushes in the hopes they will find more like me. They won't. I came down here alone, because yeah, we've noticed that every time one of us gets on the planet's surface, we get caught. I really thought I'd be the exception to that rule. Stealth is supposed to be my thing. But I guess hunting is their thing. We keep underestimating them, and that just cost me my freedom.

Wrath, the saurian overlord, comes lumbering over. Shan is still holding me in this undignified position. I feel like a fish having been yanked out of water, breathless, squirming, and afraid. This is bad. This is very, very bad. My entire MO depends on staying undetected. Pretty much all my options disappear the moment I appear.

"What is this?" He asks the question rhetorically, because he knows exactly what I am. I am the very thing he set out to take this evening. I denied him my sisters, but he's got me in his grip. Or Shan does.

"Saw something moving in the undergrowth," Shan says. "Picked it up. Wasn't hard."

Wrath lets out a snort. "These humans seem to lack survival instincts," he observes. "Was it you, little human? Did you alert the rest of your friends to the fact we were about to shoot them down?"

It's hard to answer questions when you're dangling at an odd angle between two very large, very powerful alien outlaws. I resort to a small shrug, and a response given in an even smaller voice.

"Maybe?"

"Maybe? I think so. I think you have been spying, and I think you will pay for that."

Up close, I see how scarred and rough Wrath is. He is not particularly old, I think, but he has the gravitas of an older creature in the way he speaks, and the way he holds himself. I am now more concerned about the saurian holding me. I reach up, to try to grab something from one of the many pockets on my suit, but he slaps my ass hard. I yowl at the shock of it, mostly. My suit absorbs the pain, but I still feel the energy of being punished by a stern saurian outlaw.

"Keep your hands where I can see them," Shan growls.

"Good idea. We've heard about their suits. Full of tricks. Enough to level a bar," Wrath says.

I wonder if I am going to pay for the sins of all the humans who've already come down here. Probably. And that will likely only be the beginning of it. I've already heard all the filthy, carnal plans these creatures have in store for the crew of the Mare. I'm the only one they have. And that means I'm going to get it.

Wrath looks me up and down. Or side to side, given this angle that Shan insists on continuing to hold me at. I have to wonder how he feels about all these plans, given he is holding me the way you hold something slimy you found in the drain. Maybe there's some chance I'll escape all the ravaging by merit of being unappealing. I'm definitely not the most attractive member of the crew. Sometimes I think I'm the least of them all in pretty much every respect. It's part of why I volunteered to go. We've lost our captains, our best. It's time a pawn was sacrificed. That's me.

"You caught her, Shan," he says. "She's yours to breed."

Fuck. Me.

That announcement brings out a round of howls of annoyance and disappointment from the other outlaws. They start to offer their own ideas as to what should be done with me.

"We should pass her around. See what seed takes. We don't even know if Shan can get it up."

"No," Wrath growls. "Shan caught her. She belongs to him. I don't want to see the rest of you so much as looking at her, let alone laying your filthy fingers on her. You want your own human mate? You find your own human mate."

There's a rumble of general discontent that settles down into acceptance. They do not dare to continue to question Wrath. That saurian runs the criminal underworld with whatever the elemental equivalent of an iron fist is here. I know what a motley crew of rough criminals looks like, and this is the roughest, motliest crew I've ever had the misfortune of encountering. The tell-tale signs are all there, including the general mismatch of types and temperaments you always get in proper bands of true outlaws.

Organized criminals, they always tend to look the same, because they share cultural values. But outlaws? They're the ones who ended up on the outside of whatever bit of society they were supposed to fit into. A proper band of outlaws is like a drawer of mismatched socks. If those socks were filled with knives and had rage issues.

"Let's get her under the lights," someone suggests. "See what Shan got."

Now I am the toy all the alien boys wish they'd gotten for their birthdays. If they can't have me, they at least want to have a good, long look at me under some proper lighting. They want to commit every part of me to memory so they can compare me to others, or just to the idea they have in their own heads.

I am carried over to their transport, which, to not put too fine a point on it, is an alien van. It's a big transport space with six wheels and enough room for a sports team. It is colored in a sort of camo-tone, but that is about all that distinguishes it from some very ancient human tech. The maintenance team on the Mare would love to get a look at this thing.

As for me, I am the thing being looked at. Shan holds me in front of the headlights and I am turned slowly while the surrounding saurians make grunting, growling sounds as they decide whether or not they like what they see.

I also get to see my captor for the first time. What I see takes my breath away.

Shan is green and gold with horn-like protrusions on his shoulders and two on the top of his head. They make him look like a devil — as does the rest of his visage. He has the face of someone who is very purposefully up to no good. He stands a fuckload of feet tall, which is a lot taller than I am. He holds me quite easily in a single fist, his fingers curling in my suit as I dangle tantalizingly close to the ground. There is not so much as a tremor in his scaled arm, as if my weight is completely meaningless to him in terms of load.

He's more handsome than I had imagined. He's much more handsome than anybody I have ever been involved with. He's frighteningly sexy, and I feel tingles of excitement rushing through me as I realize all the implications of the fact I have just been gifted to him. I am loot being handed out.

I am so stunned by him and by the way he looks, that for the briefest, most split of seconds, I am almost pleased to have been caught by him. Hell of a way to meet a guy. As the rest of my brain catches up, I realize that if I am going to make any kind of a move to get away, I'm going to have to do it quickly, before they get me somewhere I'm going to have trouble escaping from, like a cell or a cage or some other containment device.

That'll be next on their agenda. We've been keeping an eye on what happened to our captain and the other captain. It's all been terrifyingly undignified. There've been cages. There's been worse than cages. We've seen more of Sullivan and Raine than we ever did, even as shipmates. There was one occasion when one of the saurians flew almost into the hull of the ship with a damn near naked Raine in his arms. We were hovering above their big bone temple at the time, and it was nearly a complete fucking disaster.

Not that long ago…

A big purple saurian with magnificent, flowing dark hair flies past the ship with our captain in his arms. He swoops and soars, and damn near collides with us. He can't see us, on account of we are invisible. But we can see him, and if he does that again, we're about to see him smeared across the ship.

"Decloak!" I shout at the navigator.

"I'm not going to decloak! He'll see us!"

"That's the fucking point. He almost slammed into the hull. If Sullivan dies on our watch because we hit her with an invisible spaceship, we'll never forgive ourselves!"

"They'll all see us if I decloak. I'm moving the ship." Maria's hands move over the controls unsteadily. She's drunk again, and not the everyday kind of drunk that some of the crew have going on, where you can't really tell and frankly, they're improved by it because at least it means they stop shaking for a bit. She's the kind of drunk that makes her waver over the controls, her body swaying as she tries to desperately remember what each of them do.

"We should never have been this low."

"Shut up. I'm moving the damn ship."

"Not too high, we need to stay in visual range!"

"How can we stay in visual range when these things have wings and fly into us! We'll use the cameras."

"That's what I meant, not eye visual range. Camera visual range!"

The deck is absolutely bursting with bickering. The Mare was never like this when the captains were around. Sullivan would have made a decision without asking anybody and executed it herself if necessary, and Raine would have beat the hell out of us if we'd tried to be this chaotic in her presence, either before or after the mutiny. We need at least one of the captains back, preferably both, because we are not going to survive if we don't get some leadership going here.

Casey is sitting in the captain's chair, one leg slung over the armrest, a bowl of brightly colored cereal loops cradled loosely in her hands. Every so often, a little milk slops over the side unnoticed and drains down into the fabric of the chair.

We are absolutely trashing this ship. The bridge was never what you might call a spic-and-span sort of place when our first captain was in charge, but Raine had it very orderly. She made a rule that there was to be no loitering. You were either flying the ship, manning the instruments, delivering information, or you were off the bridge completely. Then Raine got abducted trying to save Sullivan, and now…

KA-DUNK KA-THUNK

The ship jolts down suddenly, losing all the altitude we just gained, but that's not actually Maria's fault. She's now splayed across the controls, having lost her balance in the attempt to avoid a human missile.

"Sorry!" Cadence's latest powered roller-shoe prototype has propelled her at high speed into the control panel. One of these days, we're going to find a Cadence-sized hole in the hull and that will be the end of it. You cannot stop her tinkering, no matter what you do. Once, Raine confiscated her tools and materials, only to discover that Cadence had manufactured new tools out of bits of an old chair, and then used parts of the Mare itself for new materials. She's incorrigible.

"CADE! GO SIT DOWN!"

Rage, not her real name, but the only name that accurately accounts for her temperament, grabs Cade by the back of the neck and drags her off the bridge, one wheel on her roller-shoes squeaking all the way. Rage has a red mohawk and only wears clothes that have tears in them. We've tried giving her new clothes, and somehow they end up torn within hours. She's one of our few offensive gunners, and keeping her off the weapons system has been a constant battle.

"We should blow something up!" she shouts on her way off the bridge.

Before she was abducted, Raine was very clear we were not to blow anything up. Even if we really wanted to. We are following that order. We don't know what consequences would follow for the captains if we were to…

"They're fucking on the roof of that bone house," Ame says. Ame's usually quiet. She mostly does surveillance and used to report directly to Raine, and nobody else. Some of us had never spoken to her at all until we got stuck on this saurian planet.

"They are not… oh, they are."

I reach over and turn the screens off. "We shouldn't watch that. Ame, don't you dare turn the recording on."

"It auto-records. I can't stop it. Captain Sullivan instituted that policy years ago."

"Then don't you dare watch the recording. That's private."

"I would never," Ame says.

"I would!" Sasha swings between hyper-focus, hyper-vigilance, and just general hyperactivity. She's a genius, and she is also completely uncontrollable. Sullivan was good at keeping her busy, and Raine was good at keeping her under the thumb — but now there's nobody to step into the gulf of leadership left by those two, and Sasha is like a chainsaw blade that came off an operating chainsaw. Actually, that's a good description for a lot of the crew.

Nobody is coming to save us. So I decide to go down to the planet, to bring at least one person back to save us.