Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
“What do you want to discuss?”
“Why are you kidnapping me?”
He smiles and pushes some of my hair out of my face. It got all mussed up in the course of my abduction. “Two reasons. And kidnapping is the wrong word, actually.”
“Oh, good,” I sigh. “It felt like you were just going to steal me away and keep me for yourself.”
“I’m going to make you my pet,” he says.
“What? Why?” I am half-pretending to be shocked. I know that aliens take humans for all kinds of things, from mates, to pets, to general supplies. We can be kept on ships in relatively small cells and turned into a good source of protein and essential vitamins and minerals with minimal processing. Some of them like to eat us raw.
The alien, Freak, explains his plan to me in simple terms designed to ensure that I understand. He is patient as his deep voice catalogues my many shortcomings.
“You’re human. You’re small. You’re weak. You’re wet. And you’re a very long way from home. You will serve me as my pet, and I will look after you as your master.”
The creature saying this to me is right about a lot of things. Compared to his towering alien frame, I am small. Given his massive muscular strength and the fact that he can easily hold me up scruffed with one hand, he is stronger than me too. I am wet because I almost drowned. It is also true that I am a lightyear away from where I started.
But I am not going to be his pet.
I could tell him that, but pictures are worth a thousand words, and actions are worth, like, a million.
I snap my teeth at his wrist. I catch blue scales and thick hide in my mouth. Neither one feels particularly bad, but they don’t yield beneath my bite. It’s like trying to chew through animal hide.
“One hundred percent attack, zero damage,” he laughs at me. “This is how you repay me for my kindness?”
“It’s not kindness if you’re trying to steal me from myself,” I argue. “I’m no alien’s pet.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You’re my pet.”
“You just got free from captivity, and the first thing you do is take someone else captive? How does that work?” I wonder if I can argue myself out of this. I hope so.
“I’m not going to experiment on you. I’m going to look after you. Besides, having a human is useful at times. You make good emotional support creatures.”
“We do?”
“Of course. I just pulled you out of your drenched ship and you have been adorable about it. If we could do this more slowly, and if I could take you more gently, I would. But I am sure that there are Datari Composite ships on their way to this location even now, and I am out of quantum tunnels.”
He’s taking me because I was nice to him, because he wants to, and because he regards my free will as being mostly irrelevant.
I try to bite him again. This time he catches my jaw in his other hand and makes a tutting sound at me. “Uh uh,” he says. “Once was cute, but twice is becoming a habit, and I’m not going to allow my pet to become a biter. Try it again, and I will muzzle you.”
“I’m not your pet!”
“I am not going to argue this with you, pet. Not now.”
I try a different tack. Straight up defiance isn’t working. Maybe I can pretend to go along with his plan and then escape him. He’s distracted. He’s running from evil.
“Fine. But before we go, I need to stop by the ship and see if I can get some stuff…”
“‘Fraid not,” he says, his grip tightening on me. “I’m going to need to bring you with me, and the two of us are going to have to get on board a departing vessel as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I had things I was doing before my ship tried to kill me, and I…”
“We really have to go,” he says, pulling me along the way. When I try to dig my feet in, he just picks me up under his arm and carries me like luggage. “I thought I saw a transport vessel embarking over here.”
There is indeed a massive freighter being loaded at the docks. I do have to wonder what the hell his plan is going to be here. He reckons he just escaped a secret facility on another planet, so there’s no way he’s going to have a reservation on this ship that neither one of us even knew existed minutes ago. Are we just going to sneak on?
He marches right up to an alien at the end of the gangplank, an officious looking gangly thing with a very formal uniform on. Does Freak know that he’s in his underwear? Back on my colony, you can be refused service for no shirt or shoes. People would lose their minds if you tried to go anywhere without pants.