9. For Love Of Egg

Six months later…

"I think I am pregnant."

I have said this every day for months now. It has become something like a running joke to the pair of us. I suggest I am pregnant, and Shan takes great pleasure in not only confirming that suspicion but elaborating on it at length.

"I know you are," Shan says, smiling at me with a wicked, rakish grin. "I've mated you so many times I cannot count, and you have not bled the way humans do when they need a fresh lining. I have filled you up, and you are swelling with my seed."

I look down at my belly and admit that he is right. I am swelling. I am not a small woman, and a little extra around my midsection went unnoticed for a little while, but now things are very much starting to change. Shan and I have lived in the wilds for six months, and though I still think about the crew every day, I am starting to accept that this life I have now is better than the one I had before. There is a certain glow about me, or perhaps about the world in general.

Shan is attentive and protective. True to his word, he moved us away from the place Wrath first left us, deeper into the wilds. He has built us a cabin using tools made from chipped stone, wood from the forest, and other natural things. I've learned how to make clay pots and such and use the fire to make them harden into useful items.

We bathe in the stream nearby the house, and we cook over an open fire, and we make love often. I am happy, though I am not free. Shan's possession is that of a jailer. He has made these open alien wilds as effective a confinement as any cell, and my body has become another type of prison.

Still, I swell with life, with hope, and with the particular kind of shackles that come with being the vessel of an infant. I cannot think only of myself anymore. I have to think of who is coming next, an innocent little creature who does not know that their mother and father are outlaws hiding from practically every kind of authority one can name.

"You should rest," Shan says one afternoon when I am feeling particularly tired and crampy. "I will bring you food."

It sounds like a nice suggestion, but I know it is an order. I know he is not giving me any kind of choice. Neither is my body, for that matter.

I sit down, and I find that I am particularly glad to do so. Being pregnant is hard work, and on this occasion, I am feeling quite faint. Sitting down doesn't help immediately. I am uncomfortable. My stomach and lower abdomen keep cramping.

"Shan? I think something is wrong."

I get the words out right before a wave of contraction hits me. My body feels as though an external force is squeezing through me. It's not my choice. It's not even a natural sensation of pushing or muscular reaction. It's like I am a tube of toothpaste, and the universe has decided to empty me.

"Shan!" I call for him again, and he is instantly by my side.

But there is absolutely nothing he can do. He is the strongest, most powerful creature I know, and he is helpless against what is taking place inside me. I writhe, trying to get into a comfortable position, but there isn't one. I find myself squatting, holding onto him, staring into his black eyes as nature uses me like a puppet. I have never felt less like a person. I am not a separate entity, I am part of it all. I am the sky and the water, I am the trees and the leaves. I am a channel, and I am opening.

What logical remnants of my brain remain tell me that this is too early, that a human gestates for much longer than six months. But this is happening, and there is no force on this world or any other that could stop it.

Something is emerging from me. Something that does not feel like a baby. It is too smooth. It does not move. It certainly does not cry. In the midst of that strange, sweating, cramping intensity, I momentarily lose my mind. I cannot do this. This will kill me. This will end everything I know. This will…

Suddenly, there is relief as something slides from me. The stretching of my newly elastic nethers allows a smooth opalescent… egg to slide from me. I look down and I see it there, a pearl-like, thick-shelled object sitting on the ground as if it has always been there. It looks like a larger version of a bird egg, or I suppose, a smaller version of a saurian egg — not that I have ever seen one of those.

"What the…"

The internal ache remains as my body attempts to restore some kind of physical equilibrium. My mind is likewise scrambling to accept and understand what has just happened. Of all the outcomes, I was not prepared for this. Nobody ever mentioned that a human woman carrying a saurian pregnancy would not have an actual baby.

"You did it!" Shan picks me up in a careful embrace. "You've laid an egg."

"Humans don't lay eggs. Humans have babies. This isn't possible. That's not mine."

"Of course it's yours. It just came out of you."

Shan

"It's not mine. I don't lay eggs. It's not mine. I don't lay eggs."

She keeps saying that, burying her face in my neck. Her entire body is shaking with the effort of having laid. She is in shock. It is not an entirely unpredictable response. Seems to me that plenty of saurian females don't bond with eggs either. That's why they are left to the nursery to be incubated and raised by the nursemaids.

I cradle her until she stops shaking quite so hard and pulls her head away from my shoulder to look at the egg which is still sitting nearby, unperturbed by its mother's reaction. It is truly a very beautiful egg. There is a pearlescent shine to it in the dappled afternoon light, and it is a good size. I know that the little life contained within is happy and safe. My job is to attend to Lettie, who clearly expected to have a live baby emerge from her. Privately, I am very glad that did not happen. The process of live birth sounds very messy and dangerous to me. I cannot imagine seeing a woman go from a single person to having another person emerge from her whilst they are both yelling. Lettie has told me many stories related to birth, and none of them sounded good.

"When is it going to hatch?"

"In its own time," I tell her. "Could be weeks, could be months."

"What are we going to do with it until then?"

"We are going to look after it. We are going to keep it warm. We are going to ensure no harm comes to it. We are going to wait. And we are going to build a nest."

"A nest?"

"The egg will need to be kept somewhere safe and soft, near the inside fire. You've seen the nests of flying creatures before, I assume?"

She looks dubious. I know that she is probably sore from the ordeal of laying the egg. It is not a small object. At its widest point, it is almost five inches in diameter. Her body has been through a great deal in order to bring our future baby to this point. It is my turn to do the work.

First, I put her to bed. She will need to rest and recover, and I think bed is a very good place for her. Not only will it help her get comfortable, but it will keep her safely out of the way while I secure the egg.

"Settle in. There you go," I encourage her as she slides under the blanket I made from a passing ungulate.

She gives me a salty little look, as if I am to blame for the ordeal she just endured. I suppose I am, in several ways. If I had not filled her with my seed, she would not have created an egg. My genetic material hijacked her reproductive system and instructed it to make an egg, and her body obeyed me.

"I am going to get you something for the pain," I tell her. "It's the same herb that they make saurjuice from. It grows wild. It will assuage the ache of dilation."

She makes a face at me when I say the word ‘dilation', but she nods.

I set a pot over the fire and I add the juice herbs. These are illegal in Grave City because they can have unpredictable psychedelic effects. But they are very effective painkillers, and I believe Lettie is still very much in pain. How could she not be, after her body stretched so much to pass the egg?

The scent of saurjuice fills the air, creating a calming, soothing atmosphere. I suspect that given the delicacy of her system, the particulate matter conveyed in the scent alone will begin to relieve her pain, which means I can go outside and finally retrieve the egg which is still sitting where we left it. They're very easy to keep an eye on at this age.

Once Lettie is safely in bed, I go outside to retrieve the egg. I cannot believe how perfect it is. It is smaller than most saurian eggs I have seen, but that is to be expected given the size and species of the mother.

I am pleased to note that when I return, Lettie is still in bed, collecting her energies once more. I have become oddly accustomed to putting her somewhere and finding her somewhere entirely else. Perhaps she, too, will become easier to keep an eye on.

While my mate rests, I build the traditional nest that will keep the egg safe. I collect twigs and soft pieces of fibre and animal fur where I can and I bring it back to create a thick, protective ring and base for the egg to sit upon.

I can feel Lettie watching me as I work. She is curious, which is a good sign. She is also confused and no doubt still in pain.

"Does it still hurt?"

"No. Having your hoo-ha stretched open by a big, weird rock feels really good," she says, dipping into rare sarcasm. She must be in more pain than she wishes to admit. I know the laying shocked her. She did not seem to sense the process before it began. It caught her off-guard, and I know that made it worse. That is why I do not respond to her impudence with judgement. Instead, I give her what she deserves — a compliment.

"You have done well, Lettie. You have brought new life into the world."

"I've bought a big breakfast ingredient into the world," she mutters back. "That's not a baby."

"It will be. It needs to incubate and grow. You have supplied all our infant needs to survive. You have done so well. You have been such a good mate."

She gives me a little smile at my praise. It is rare, I know that. That is because most of her actions are dangerous, rebellious, or both. This is the first thing she has done that is not only entirely selfless, and self-sacrificing, but which involved a reluctant bravery I wish to reward.

I sit next to her on our bed and rub my fingers lightly over her scalp while we both look at the egg. I cannot take my eyes off it. I have dreamed of this moment my entire life, though I never thought I would have the honor of hatching my own whelpling. There is something very satisfying about this moment, sitting here with my mate, and with my freshly laid egg. There is peace and calm. There is a deep, practical, and abiding love too.

Lettie

I laid an egg.

And I didn't like it.

Days pass, and then weeks pass, and I don't feel any connection to the egg. I know I am supposed to love it, because it is mine and it came out of me, but to me it's just another object. I find myself sitting, staring at it, wondering what kind of omelette it would make. The longer what Shan keeps calling the incubation phase goes on, the stranger I find the whole thing, and the less attached I am to the whole concept. I know intellectually that there's something living inside there, but it just seems like a thing to me. An ornament at best.

I don't dare tell Shan this. He's obsessed with the egg. He tends to it almost as if it were actually a baby. He cleans it and he turns it and he makes sure it is not too warm and not too cold. He has all the instincts necessary to care for a saurian egg, while I have none.

I feel like a failure, somehow. As if my feelings are wrong and my body is wrong. In spite of my feelings, I do try very hard to bond with the thing, but it doesn't seem like a baby in any respect. It just seems like an object to me, though I know that people are capable of bonding with objects if they have to. There is ancient Earth lore about a man marooned on an island who became best friends with a bloodied handprint on a sports ball. Thinking of that old legend makes me think. Maybe I'd be able to bond with the egg if it had a face? How is anybody supposed to have an emotional reaction to a smooth, caramel-shaded egg?

I decide to take matters into my own hands. I can't sit here in this shack in the middle of nowhere for months on end while watching my mate dote on an egg I feel nothing for. I have to do something for the sake of our… family? It does feel strange calling this rag tag group of creatures — one saurian, one human, one egg — a family. I think I just need to make it look more people like. That will help.

I wait until Shan has gone out to hunt to try the experiment. He doesn't really like me touching the egg. I think he is afraid I will break it. He knows very well that I don't have the same feelings he does about the whole thing.

Deciding to be careful, I sneak up to the egg.

"Shhh," I say. "Don't tell anybody."

He's going to know as soon as he sees it, of course, but I have to do this for me. I get a little of the char from the fire, and I start dabbing circles and lines on the face of the egg. I give it two little eyes first, well, big eyes. Well, two differently sized eyes because drawing is actually hard. Then I draw a big smily mouth. It doesn't look great, but I think maybe it does look better than before. Am I starting to feel something?

"What are you doing, Lettie!?"

Shan's voice is shocked and stern enough to make me pause, a smudge of charcoal on my nose from the little piece I took from the embers in my hand.

"Nothing?"

"You're drawing on our egg," he says, distinctly unimpressed.

I turn back to the egg, where, yes, I have drawn on it.

"I'm just trying to get to know it."

"Lettie, you cannot draw on the egg," he growls, taking a scrap of fabric woven from the fibre of nearby trees, dipping it in a clay bowl of water, and then carefully dabbing my marks away. "It is sensitive. You could hurt it."

I birthed the damn egg, and now I have to look at it every day, but apparently I'm not allowed to interact with it. Only the great daddy Shan is allowed to do that. What a fucking…

"Fine. You deal with it then. It likes you better anyway!"

I spin on my heel and storm out of the shack. I am in a high temper and a foul mood. I didn't think I was ready to be a mother, but I also didn't know that a fucking egg could make me feel so incompetent and broken on the inside just by existing.

Shan doesn't come after me. He is too busy tending to the egg, turning it, making sure I haven't done any inept human damage to it, I suppose. Am I jealous of my own egg? No. That would be ridiculous — but also, yes. I used to matter. Now the egg matters. Will I ever matter again? Maybe if I lay another egg. Or maybe not. Maybe I've outlived my usefulness.

I think I'm going to run away. I'm going to get back to the damn city, and find my damn crew, and…

"Where do you think you are going?"

Shan's voice comes to me as I leave the line of sticks that make a fence around our little encampment. I'm not really supposed to ever set foot outside them, but I figure it doesn't really matter now that my procreative journey is done. He's got what he wanted from me.

"YOU HAVE YOUR DAMN EGG! YOU DON'T NEED ME ANYMORE!"

I finish climbing the fence before I turn around and reply to him at high volume. He is standing outside the cottage, his arms folded over his chest, an expression of outright disapproval on his handsome, mature, all-too-saurian face. He doesn't need to comment on the fact that I've just disobeyed him for the first time in a long time. We both know it. I don't even feel bad about it. I'm glad I've done something wrong. Wrong things make so much more sense right now than right.

"Is there a reason you're acting like a spoiled brat?"

That description hits me hard. Is that what he thinks of me? Probably. He probably thinks I have all kinds of personality deficiencies. He only ever kept me around because he could fuck me and make that precious fucking…

"You don't care about me. All you care about is the damn egg."

"Lettie, that is our baby."

"No, it's not! It doesn't do anything. It sits there and stares at me. Or actually, not even that."

He draws in a deep breath. "It will hatch soon, and then you will see. You just need to be patient, and obedient. Now. Come here."

I almost do as he says, but then I don't. I stand firm where I am. I shake my head.

"No."

"No?" Shan quirks a brow at me. "I must have been neglecting you, Lettie. For you to act this foolishly tells me you have entirely forgotten who you are dealing with."

"An egg polisher?"

For some reason, that phrase sounds like an insult. I know I'm being an asshole. I'm basically giving him shit for looking after his own baby. Deep down, I know I am the fuck-up here. I am bad, and he may as well know it.

Shan strides over to me, steps over the fence, and takes hold of me in a way he hasn't in a long time. He grips me by the hair at the back of my head, and he looks down at me with a very stern and unimpressed expression.

"You know better than this," he lectures me. "You know you are to obey me."

"What do you care anymore. You have your damn egg."

His brows rise at my petulant outburst. "It is not my damn egg, Lettie, and you know it."

He smacks me hard enough to make me yelp, and then repeats the act again, ensuring that there is plenty of painful sting in my ass.

"Is this what you need? Are you feeling left out?"

I am feeling so many things, and none of them are repeatable or even expressible in the first place. I'd rather be in trouble than admit how much I am struggling with the strangeness of this entire situation, the loneliness of being separated from humanity, and finding out that my own baby is actually an egg. No matter what eventually hatches from that shell, it won't be a person like me. It won't look like me. It probably won't even like me. And what if I don't like it? What if I feel the same way about it as I do about the egg?

Shan spanks me again to get my attention. "I am talking to you."

"Yeah? And?"

"I see," he growls, hefting me up over his shoulder. He carries me back inside the compound, back inside the house. There, he sits down on the bed he made for the both of us, and he puts me over his knee. I swing over that familiar fulcrum, still brimming with rebellion and discontent.

"It has been too long," he says. "I have neglected you. I'm sorry. That won't happen again."

With that, he sets about whipping me with his palm, the scaled surface of his hand smacking painfully against my ample cheeks. Bolts of pain accompany every impact, but I don't care. All the feelings I've been trying to keep in check since I laid that damn egg are roiling inside me, making a sensible response absolutely impossible. Instead, I lose myself in the sensation. It's not even pain, not properly. It's something else. It's a manifestation of Shan's continued existence, which sounds weird, but I had really started to feel like I'd lost him, and myself.

I start to cry, hot tears of something like relief tracking down my face. And then I start to sob. Shan spanks me through the tears, but once my entire body starts to contort with the effects of my absolute misery, he stops what he is doing and settles me, hot bottomed, squirming, and sore on his lap.

"Tell me what is happening inside that head," Shan says. "I need to know."

"I'm such a bad mother!" I wail. "I don't like my egg."

He takes a patient breath and hugs me tightly.

"I have told you, haven't I? Even saurian females don't feel a particular attachment to their eggs. It will be different when it hatches."

"Will it?"

"Yes," he assures me. "That is when you will see the life you and I have created together. And it won't be just a thing sitting there anymore. It will be full of movement and life and you will see yourself, and me, and it will be everything you ever dared dream of."

Shan

Lettie looks at me dubiously. I know this entire situation has been traumatic for her. She was stolen, she was bred, and now she is mother to an egg. It is not easy for her, and I could feel guilty for putting her through this if I did not believe her eventual happiness was guaranteed.

"Most saurians in Grave City are hatched in the hatchery, and then raised in the nursery," I explain.

"Parents don't raise their children?"

"Servants do, sometimes. But most females lay their eggs and leave. The nursery is responsible for raising most of the saurians your crew knows. Myself, Alpha Thorn, and Enforcer Avel are all products of the nursery. This is what Wrath wants to avoid with his breeding program."

"This is what you want to stop too, isn't it?"

She's perceptive.

"I was not well treated in the nursery. My eyes and temperament made me stand out in ways the nursemaids did not appreciate. I ran away when I was very young." Re-telling my story in such an understatement is the only way to maintain composure and keep the pain from being evident. Somehow, she sees it anyway.

She puts her small human hand on me and looks at me with large round eyes, still watery from the expression of her own pain.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," she says. "My parents couldn't protect me from the world either. They tried, but they died when I was young, and then a series of very bad things happened to me. My whole life, all I've ever wanted was to be safe and to belong. And now I'm not safe, and the only thing I ever belonged to, the crew, is gone."

"That is not entirely true," I tell her, patting her sore cheeks in what I hope will be a good reminder. "You belong to me."

She blushes, and a little smile appears on her face. I have made an impression, and for that I am glad. She needs me. I need her. And we both need to understand one another because we are both full of feeling.

And then I hear it. The unmistakeable sound of tapping and cracking. I have been hearing little hints of it on and off for days, but I did not mention it to Lettie because I did not want to get her hopes up. I know she has found the whole process hard, and the last thing she needed was more disappointment. The sounds are stronger now. In fact, they're so strong, I just know hatching has to be imminent.

"I have some good news," I tell Lettie.

She looks at me dubiously, wiping wet tears away with the back of her hand. "What is it?"

"You're not going to have to worry about the egg much longer."

"What?" Her head whips around to stare at it, where it sits on a bed of twigs and moss. "What… oh my god!"

The egg wobbles again as our baby works harder at escaping. A little pink point appears through the shell, cracking it from the interior.

"What the…"

"That is the egg tooth," I explain. "She's breaking her way out."

Lettie leaps off my lap and rushes over to the egg. In an instant, she has forgotten her disinterest. Instincts which have lain dormant are activated as she sees signs of life. She has forgotten everyone and everything else in the world besides the vulnerable creature about to emerge from its shell.

I know this period of incubation has been challenging and confusing for Lettie. She is a first-time mother, and the first time is difficult for mothers of all species. Grave City's nurseries ensure that most saurians never get to raise their young, but I can already see her connection to the baby. Lettie has not yet laid eyes on our baby, yet she loves her.

"How do you know she's a girl?"

"I can smell her," I explain. "Saurians use scent to detect their mates and offspring and many other things."

"You can already smell her? I haven't been able to sense anything…" The egg shakes a little, the pink tooth disappearing for a moment. "Oh, come on, baby. Can I help her?"

"It's best to let a hatchling make her own way out of the egg," I explain. "She knows how to do it."

"But it's so thick…"

"It's best to let her do it," I say. "You've done your part. You laid the egg, you guarded it from danger. You kept it warm with me near the fire day and night. Now you let her do her part."

Lettie gives me a look, but she listens to me.

We will never forget this moment. There is nothing more important than being here and witnessing the final arrival of our child. I am prepared to keep prompting Lettie's patience. Hatching can take some time. Hours, sometimes. It is not uncommon for a hatchling to pierce the shell and then rest a while before trying to remove the rest of the shell. This is not something to be rushed.

"It could take some time," I murmur to Lettie. "The hatchling will need to gather her strength, but we can trust her to rest and emerge when she is ready. The hatchlings in the nursery sometimes took…

Lettie is not listening to me, and neither is our baby. That sharp little egg tooth is working ferociously at the egg, and before I can finish my sentence…

"MAMA!"

The entire shell splits in an instant, a tectonic crack appearing in the side as that pink little beak does an incredibly aggressive maneuver which bursts the whole thing wide open. Bits of shell fall open to reveal our baby, sitting entirely and perfect in the nest.

"Baby!" Lettie squeals back as our child calls for her for the first time.

The baby is perfect. She is green with a cute yellow belly. She has her mother's brown eyes, and a little mohawk shock of brown hair right at the top of her head, running down the middle of her scaled little skull.

"My baby!" The words are tearful, but this time the tears are from joy.

The baby reaches out, clawed hands gripping air as she tries to get closer to her mother. On a deep, cosmic level, they already know each other. They are bonded in a way neither of them will ever be able to fully understand, and they will be bonded forever.

Lettie

The moment I saw my baby hatch out of that glossy shell, all the emotions I thought I didn't have appeared instantly. I am absolutely suffused with feeling and hormones. I can feel the chemistry in my body changing in an instant as I surrender to motherhood.

My baby is so small, and she is so cute. She has the biggest brown eyes and the cutest little snub scaled nose, and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth which make me very glad I will not have to breastfeed her. Her face is big and round and full of good humor. She looks like me, but she also looks like Shan. Probably more like Shan really, given all the scales and such, but I can see myself in her eyes.

She is not like a newborn. She is more like a three-month-old. She is bright and she is aware, and though she can't speak or anything like that, or maybe even walk, she looks at me with so much intelligence. I wonder how much she heard through the shell. I wonder if she knows us already.

I reach out and pick her up, being very careful. I thought she might feel fragile, but she does not. She feels solid, and warm and snuggly, and she cuddles into me with an instinctual motion that makes my heart swell. My eyes are full of tears as I feel the full force of a new kind of love, a love that changes everything, tears all my previous priorities limb from limb, and puts her at the center of it all. I know in this moment I would do anything for her. I would burn the stars themselves if it meant protecting her. She is my world. She is my everything. She is…

"Ouch!" She is trying to bite me, and my skin is no match for those razor-sharp baby teeth.

I shift her slightly in my arms and look down at her. I have never found anyone or anything so beautiful before. I don't even mind the fact that I am now bleeding from a shallow flesh wound.

"Oh, baby," I murmur to her. "I waited so long for you, and I didn't know I was waiting."

There are some moments in life where everything makes sense. This is one of them. The pain, the suffering, all the terrible things that have happened in the past are resolving themselves in this moment into a chain of events that have culminated not only in this moment, but in this creature. My baby exists because of all I have been through. There is not a single event in my life that could have happened any other way, because all those happenings have led to her.

Shan is behind me, saying nothing, but wrapping his arms around us both in a silent, fatherly gesture of ultimate protection and belonging. This is not just a happy ending. This is the happy ending.

Ihave mostly resigned myself to living wild for the rest of my life, but as the weeks go by and my daughter grows, sometimes on clear nights, I hold her close and I look up at the sky and I imagine what it would be like to see the Mare uncloak above me. I tell her stories of the times we spent together on the deck, and in the various stations we visited. While she is too young to understand, I tell her about some of the crimes we did. She giggles at all the best parts, and though I know that's just because my tone changes when I explain how very good it feels to be very bad, there's a part of me that likes to imagine she does understand, and that I've given her a little bit of the strength I had to have. Whatever she grows up to be, I hope it is not obedient.

"So," I tell her as she sits on my lap facing me and looking up at me with those big wide eyes of hers. "The most important thing I can tell you, is that if an alien has more than two arms, you're going to have a hard time keeping up in any kind of hand to hand combat, even if they're small."

I hold her little scaled hands and windmill them, making her laugh. "Doesn't matter how much you do this, they're doing it double, or even triple time. So what you're going to want to do, is…"

WOWOOWWOOWOOWUBWOWOOWUBWOWOWOOWOWOWOWUB

That is the sound of the Mare decloaking and landing in the clearing not twenty feet away from us.

That is the sound of all the little dreams I've had in the middle of the moments of maternal tranquility coming real. I stare with wide and excited eyes as the ship I have missed so badly becomes manifest in front of me. She is a shining spheroid type craft. Nothing fancy from the outside, but the interior of that vessel was my first true home. Most of my real life has taken place behind that hull. The excitement and relief I feel at seeing her in front of me cannot be overstated. I am absolutely thrilled. Baby starts giggling as I let out an excited shriek.

Shan comes running from the bush. He was hunting, but he can't have been far off, because he arrives just as the ship settles, and before the gangway starts to descend. His expression is ferocious, and I can tell he plans to attack whatever it is that might come out of the ship.

"It's okay!" I call out to him. "It's the Mare. It's my crew."

The gangway starts to roll out, and the door to the main vessel opens. Three crew members stand in the opening. I recognize them as Casey, Cadence, and Sasha. Casey is the tallest of them. Her blonde hair is cut in a short, asymmetrical messy bob. You can only see her right eye because of the swoop of hair that falls over her forehead. Also, there's the fact that she only has the right eye. The left one went missing in an incident none of us like to talk about. Her features are soft and feminine. She's very pretty. She used to be a model before life did the sort of thing that makes good girls become even better pirates.

Cadence, by her side, is covered in bits of home-made tech. You can't really see what she looks like because she has turned her glasses into a kind of half face covering that has all sorts of additional bits and pieces that do functions and stuff. She's basically a cute figure in a suit at this point and not much else. Then there's Sasha. Sasha looks like she works in a library. She's wearing slacks and a knitted vest and she has a bow in her hair. Of the three of them, Sasha is by far and beyond the least predictable and most dangerous.

"Lettie! Get in!" Casey calls out to me.

Shan plants himself between them and me.

"She's not going anywhere!"

"Oh my god," Sasha rolls her eyes. "Stop being so fucking stupid and get in here, all of you. Goddamnit, lizard man, we're not here for funsies. We're here because they're coming for the baby."

That gets Shan's attention. I walk up beside him, holding our daughter in my arms. "Who is coming?"

"Hey. Lettie? You know how landing this thing on a rock is pretty much fucking impossible?" Cadence cuts in with some excessively sarcastically toned questions that aren't questions. "Well we did it, because we found you, and your… thing."

I'm not sure if the thing in that sentence is Shan or the baby. Could go either way.

"They're coming," Casey adds. "They know you made a hybrid baby and they want it."

"Shan, we have to go," I tell him.

He looks at me, and I see more than plain hesitation in his dark gaze. I see danger. For him. For us. For the crew.

"They wouldn't have come for us if they didn't have to."

"We really wouldn't. Now hurry the fuck up. Please. I don't want them boarding the fucking ship." Sasha is foul-mouthed, but she's also putting herself and everyone else on board in danger to come and get us. We can't just ignore her.

"Shan. Please."

He gives a curt nod, and I feel a rush of relief as we board the Mare. It feels like coming home in the best and coziest of ways. I smell copper and I smell human and I smell things that probably should have been cleaned up weeks ago. It's not a clean and healthy scent, but it is a welcoming one.

Cadence and Sasha get to work moving several loose boxes containing god knows what that must have fallen over while they were coming past away from the door so it can close properly. The Mare has always been full of loot and booty, but whatever organizational systems we used to have seem to have failed completely since I was last here. Even at the airlock, the ship has the feeling of being a playroom in which no toys have ever been put away.

"What did you call it?" Casey pokes a finger lightly into my baby's tummy. That is a dangerous game. My daughter's teeth are sharp and she could easily remove a tip of a digit if you weren't careful.

"Oh. Uhm. Well. I call her Baby, mostly."

"You called your baby, Baby?"

The door is closing behind us and the Mare is humming with the power it takes to achieve liftoff from land.

"She is a baby," I say in my defense. "I'm just trying to get to know her before I name her. It's not like it mattered when there were only three of us in the woods. You only need names when there's so many people to refer to you have to be specific."

"I guess so," Casey says. "Well anyway. Nice to have you on board. Lizard guy…"

"His name is Shan."

"Shan," she says. "We're going to need you to be cool. Excessively cool. You're going to need to be the chillest dude any of us ever met, okay? If we get even a hint of the idea you're going to try to capture us, or take us into sex slavery, or even fucking worse, be in charge of us, you're going to have a really fucking bad day."

"I don't appreciate being threatened," he growls.

Casey smiles a very polite, very attractive smile. "You're not being threatened. You're being warned. The Mare is a matriarchy. We don't allow ourselves to be bossed around by men of any kind. You're here as a guest, and you're under our protection. Do you understand?"

I find myself holding my breath as I wait for him to respond.

"Of course," he says.

I breathe out. I shouldn't have worried. Shan's not the type to walk into a new environment and start throwing his weight around. He's a much more subtle operator. He's a double agent. Fuck. That's right. He's a double agent.

"Shan, these people matter to me more than anybody besides you and Baby," I say. "So please, tell me you won't do anything to put them in danger or get them captured."

"You have my word," he says. "If it is true that Wrath was coming for the baby, at this stage, our fortunes are tied to the fortunes of this ship."

"Oh, no," Sasha says. "It wasn't Wrath coming for the baby."

"Who was it?"

"Thorn," she says. "The alpha of Grave City."

Shan

My blood runs cold at the mention of Thorn's name. "That cannot be true."

Even as I speak the words, I already suspect that it is in fact, true. Wrath abandoned my mate and I in the wilderness, but I expected Thorn to come for us. When he did not, I imagined either there were some political machinations at play in the city, or we had simply been abandoned. I tried not to think of that angle overly much. I wanted to keep believing that the alpha who rescued me as a runaway did truly care for me. I still want to believe it.

"Sure it can. We've been running surveillance on the alpha's place since the captain was taken hostage there. We hear a lot of what they say. Do you want to hear it?"

I don't know the name of the human woman speaking to me. Introductions have not been properly made. She is small and she has knitwear that gives her what I believe to be a misleadingly soft appearance. I think she is about to tear my world apart.

"Let's go to the bridge," the tall woman with one eye says.

"Lettie?"

"Hmm?" Lettie swings around to me.

"Mind telling me who these people are?"

"Oh! Yes! Sorry! I forget you don't know everything and everyone I know," she grins. "This is Sasha," she says, gesturing to knitwear. "Then this is Casey," she says, waving her hand at the tall one. "And the one with all the hardware strapped to her face is Cadence."

"Nice to meet you," I say. It is the polite thing to say.

I am of course, very curious about the ship. I can see how much technology is in it. Every square inch of the place hums with power. I have never set food in a flying beast like this before. It is very impressive, but I did not expect it to be so… messy?

"Are the red cups with the white interiors structural?" I ask the question as I kick through a pile of stacked plastic cups that have partially blocked the path.

"Oh no," Lettie laughs. "That's for an old Earth game called beer pong. They must have been playing it a lot while stuck in orbit. It's fun! I'll show you how to play later."

There is an instant lightness to my mate that I have not seen before. I have always known her in my environment, but now I see her in her own. She walks these halls cluttered with clothing and books and bits of machinery strewn with what seem to be food wrappers with an ease and a comfort that makes her even more beautiful.

"The place is a mess," Cadence says. "Since the captains were taken, we haven't been able to decide on a roster. So it's just sort of… like this now."

There is something rueful and perhaps a little guilty in her tone. These girls know better. They know their ship should be tidy, but much like Lettie who came to the planet's surface in order to find someone to tell her what to do, the rest of the crew seems to be in a similar state. The more I see on this ship, the more obvious it becomes that they are screaming to be taken in hand.

"This place looks like the aftermath of twenty-one twenty-firsts," Lettie exclaims as we step onto the bridge.

I do not understand the reference she is making, but if she means it is filthy, then that is what it is. Much of the instrumentation and seating is covered in bits of things. I cannot tell what the bits of the things are, because they are unfamiliar to me and also most of them seem to be broken.

Sasha walks up to one of the consoles and clears it off with a sweep of her arm. Miscellaneous items clatter to the floor, joining their ilk.

"Here," she says, jabbing a button. "Listen to this."

"We cannot have hybrids on the planet," Thorn's voice fills the air. "They're abominations."

"But you have a human mate?" Avel takes his turn to speak.

"I have a human mate who will not lay. I ensured that with the doctor. She has implants to ensure she remains infertile. I love my mate, but I love this world more. I love our species more. Hybrids could outbreed native saurians within generations. This is not about wanting to harm anyone. This is about wanting to safeguard the saurian world and the saurian way."

"But Shan's baby…"

"Don't call it a baby. It is a problem, and like all problems, it will be eliminated. Shan has outlived his usefulness, if he was ever useful at all. Do not forget, our vault was plundered on his watch. He has allowed Wrath's network to grow beneath my nose, and…"

"He may not have been privy to the vault raid."

"He should have been. That was his job. His only job. I wanted him to be my eyes and ears inside Wrath's world. Instead, he has become even more renegade, rejected from the outlaws and now breeding in the wild like some escaped pet. You know what we have to do, Avel."

Sasha stabs the button again. "That's why we came. It sounded baby murder-ey, and though we don't really like babies, we draw the line at…"

"I'll fucking kill him," Lettie hisses.

She is trembling with pale rage, her eyes lit with malevolence.

"He thinks he has the right to threaten me, and my mate, and my child? He will regret the day he first crawled out of his egg," she says. "This is… I will never… no." She hands me the baby and wades through the accumulated trash covering the floor of the bridge to reach a chair in the very center. It is very obviously located in a command position. Much like Sasha, she sweeps the bits and pieces covering it onto the floor, then stands up on the seat, drawing herself up to her full height.

"I want everybody in here," she says. "Everybody. Now."

Sasha shrugs and hits another button. "Uhhh, can everyone come to the bridge, please? I think Lettie wants to say hi and probably show her baby off. It's okay. For a baby."

Lettie glares at Sasha, but says nothing. Over the next few minutes, there's a slow trickle of a rag-tag bunch of pirates into the bridge. By the time they have all arrived, there's perhaps a dozen in total. They seem curious as to what is going on. Some of them glance at me and the baby, but I do not seem to register as a threat to them. Perhaps because even a ten foot tall saurian with eyes as black as midnight is not very intimidating while holding a squirming, giggling baby who wants to be let down to play in the garbage.

"Thank you for coming for me," Lettie says. "I know that must have been a hard decision."

"Actually, we didn't tell anyone," Cadence says. "We just did it."

"Well," Lettie says. "Thank you anyway. I have something to say. I've spent months down on that planet. I was captured. I was made a possession. I was used. I was bred like an animal."

A dozen eyes turn on me. The baby squeals and claps her hands.

"Shan is my mate," Lettie says. "Not that I had a choice in the matter. He took my body and he used it for his pleasure and for the purpose of procreation."

It occurs to me that this may not be going very well for me. I can feel anger rising in the room as a dozen unstable female pirates start to look at me as if sizing me up for a saurian hide handbag.

"He also saved my life," she says. "And he helped me understand what I was looking for. He taught me a lot about myself. He gave me strength when I was weak. He kept me safe when I tried to throw myself into danger. And he made me a mother."

"Gross," someone mutters in the back of the room, to the accompaniment of giggles.

"It was gross," Lettie agrees. "I laid an egg."

There' s a general cacophony at that revelation. But Lettie holds her hand up, and the crew fall silent.

"Point is, I know what's happening down there. I know what has happened to Raine and Sullivan, and what will happen to all of us if we are captured. We have to get away from this planet. But we're going to get Raine and Sullivan back first. And we're going to kill Alpha Thorn before we go."

A roar goes up, a bloodthirsty sound that reminds me even though this room is full of soft bodied, small framed female humans, it is nevertheless a very dangerous place. Baby squeals and cheers along with the rest of the crew. I'd like to say that is because she does not understand, but I suspect some little part of her undeveloped mind might actually know very well what is going on here.

"I am taking over as captain," Lettie declares. "And the first thing we are going to do is clean this ship up."

"But…"

Lettie looks at the crew member who dared question her with a cool gaze. When she speaks, it is in a tone I have only heard her use very rarely before, and even then mostly in play when the baby is being particularly challenging. I recognize the tone, because I have heard it in the echoes of the past. Matron had the same tone. It is a maternal command that does not brook any disobedience.

"Clean. It. Up."

The crew have shocked expressions on their faces as they begin to follow orders, but I think I also see relief. This ship has been at a loose end since their captains were taken. It has driven them to desperate and destructive acts. But I think that just all changed.

Lettie

It has to be me.

Since the man with the shiny boots walked into my parents house and ended their lives, I have been looking for someone to save me. To guide me. To tell me what to do. When I went down to the saurian planet, I wanted a captain. I wanted Sullivan. I wanted Raine. Hell, I guess I even wanted Shan to make the world safe for me. But I am finally admitting to myself what I think I must have known all along. There is nobody else. There is only me.

I have to be everything I needed and didn't have for my daughter's sake. I will crush Alpha Thorn in her name - once we decide what that name is.

As the crew start to pick up masses of trash and clear them into plastic bags, Shan comes to me and wraps an arm around me. "I am proud of you," he murmurs in my ear.

"I mean it," I say. "I will end Thorn. Nobody threatens my family and survives."

Shan's dark gaze meets mine. I feel his agreement in the silent flexing of his muscles as he holds me. He heard those words, and I think he agreed with them. We are done being useful pawns in games played by others. We are ready to take our power back.

"I will be by your side every step of the way," he pledges.

"Egr bgaghra flep," Baby agrees.

I step down from the captain's chair and sit in it for the first time. The material confirms to my body, soft padding gripping my curves. It feels good. It feels correct. It feels as though I should have been here all along.

I don't know exactly what the future is going to hold, but I do know two things:

My family is going to be safe, and

Thorn is not going to know what hit him.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed Shan, Lettie and Baby's story. Please leave a rating or review! It takes but a moment but it is recorded in the annals of Amazon for all time.

Trapped on a primal world, I am at the mercy of an alien alpha.

We could not be two more different creatures.

Thorn is massive and scaled.

He has been designed by nature to dominate every living thing he encounters.

Me? I'm small. Soft. Curvy. And I live to break the rules.

He captures me easily, but keeping me will be harder.

With every escape attempt, my alien alpha gets even more primal.

He's going to strip me of everything.

My pride. My resistance. My purity.

He's going to make me submit to him.

He's going to make it as painful as it needs to be.

And he's going to make it so hot I melt for him.

I am his captive.

And he is my new primal master.