Warp Factor: Bitch

Chapter One: Bargain Bint

The sky above Proxima B5 burned with fury. Dark storm clouds twisted and writhed, their swollen underbellies glowing amber from the volcanic fires below. Shafts of lightning blazed in the upper layers of the storm, and violent claps of thunder crashed over the craggy landscape. The rain hammering the iron cages of the slave market bore a noxious sulphuric stench.

Zerkox hustled through the spaceport towards the market and squinted at the elemental battle overhead through his slitted third eye.

“Yet another fucking day in paradise,” he hissed.

The little human was all he could afford. Humans came cheap, such were the difficulties in controlling them. Not to mention all the restrictions their owners faced. He wouldn’t be able to take it off-world, not without a lot of hassle. Or equip it with any kind of protective armour or – Queen-forbid – weapons. Humans were cunning little slugs. So fucking cunning that the Queen’s council had almost outlawed them altogether. Zerkox, while wary of what he was getting into, was also thankful that these drawbacks meant this species of slave was within his modest means. When he’d seen it listed on the manifest of the incoming slave ship, he’d licked his lip-scales and checked his savings.

-

Her name was Jen. She knew that much. But not much else. She couldn’t remember why she was naked in a cage – much less under a raging storm in this fiery hell of a place. She grasped the incongruity of it all, realising that it wasn’t her natural world. The gravity felt wrong, pulling her to the floor with too much strength, hurting her legs as she fought to stay upright. The acidic rainwater had pooled at the bottom of the cage and sloshed over her bare feet. It stung everywhere it touched, and she did everything she could to minimise her exposure, hanging her head low so that more of it didn’t drip from her filthy, soaked hair. Despite her leg muscles demanding relief, there was no way she’d sit down in the puddles.

Instinct also suggested that she should be scared. Trying to fight or flee. Outside the iron bars, a dozen reptilian creatures were gathered. Taller than her and larger in every other proportion. Their scales shimmered green and grey in the rain. While they shared the same amount of limbs as she, they had an extra eye centred above the normal two, and a tail that flicked around their feet. But something dulled her fear, keeping the fight-or-flight urge blunted to a mere anxious curiosity. Drugged. She must have been drugged.

One reptile stood shorter than the others, with less bulk and a thinner tail. It shoved its face between the cage bars to examine her. She performed her own examination. Around its facial features, the scales were smaller and took on the qualities of thick, cracked skin. The nose was a bump, with two vertical slits pulsing with each breath. All three eyes mimicked this nostril design, with double eyelids blinking the rain away from yellow pupils.

-

Zerkox might have changed his mind. The human looked so frail. He knew that was quite normal, but he’d never seen one this close. The lack of scales disturbed him most. How did this thing survive without being stabbed, slashed, burned, or squashed? He’d have to be careful it didn’t come to any harm before he’d even got his money’s worth. Fuck! If he stood on the thing’s foot, he’d flatten it. But his deliberations always returned to the same point. It was small, agile, and dextrous. With some effort, he’d train it to operate mining machinery. And those were the traits he was paying for. Its weaknesses? Well, he’d work around them.

-

Even if it was smaller than its compatriots, the reptile scanning every inch of her body with three eyes still towered over her by more than a head. It withdrew and engaged in a heated exchange with a second, much larger reptile. When they’d both come to some agreement, her cage door rattled open.

Before she could run, a scaly claw gripped her wrist. It ground her thin bones together. She yelped. Her purchaser spat and hissed as it dragged her from the cage and through the crowd. They crossed the spaceport in the pouring, stinging rain. She had to run to keep up lest her arm was ripped from its socket. Her thigh muscles screamed in protest as they pumped against the unnatural gravity. Each breath came harder too, the sulphuric air stinging her throat and her lungs as much as the rain stung her skin.

They arrived at a small, snub-nosed craft as its cargo door slid open. Thrown inside, she fetched up against a bulkhead and curled into a defensive foetal position as the reptile loomed above. But it only fastened straps around her, clipping each strap into hooks on the craft’s wall. Any chance of escape was over – for now. She struggled to breathe under the tight strapping, gasping for air as she took in her new surroundings. There wasn’t much to take in. A small cargo space, some barrels fastened to the adjacent wall, the metal floor cold under her bare bottom, but dry. At least she was out of that rain. The door closed and dim-green fluorescent lights replaced the glow of the lava riddled landscape and flashes of blue lightning. With her matter-of-fact state of mind, she decided life had improved since the cage.

-

Zerkox clambered through a hatch from the cargo bay into the cockpit, hoping he’d done enough to secure his new possession without cutting its air off. He made a mental note to check it for life signs on the way back to the outpost. He raked his claws across well-worn switches on the control panel and the little ship’s engines coughed and roared to life. Thrusters pivoted towards the landing pad and the ship stuttered into its climb. He yanked hard on a lever to correct an ungainly tilt and seethed at a flashing sensor. “Fucking left engine again. One day it’s going to kill me, Queen’s-sake!”

-

Thermal updrafts buffeted the craft until they cleared the volcanic range, and the terrain flattened somewhat. Lightning still flashed overhead, the upper atmosphere in constant turmoil for as far as any number of eyes could see.

Jostled by the stomach-churning turbulence and straining against the tight straps, Jen tried her best to remain calm. She felt the drugs wearing off, and a rising sense of panic replacing them. No matter how hard she tried, she remembered nothing much prior to waking up inside that cage. Fleeting images of a battle, perhaps. Screams, explosions, and people running. The occasional human face, but none she recognised. And the towering reptilian figures in every scene. Their name came to her as the craft began an ungainly descent. The Tuataroids. She shivered with instinctive fear at the name.

They landed with a thump and the Tuataroid climbed back into the cargo bay and unbuckled her straps. It sniffed at her sore wrist, where a dark bruise now blossomed. What might have been a frown formed on its face, and it snorted with derision. Rather than grab her by the wrist again, it tied a strap around her waist and pulled her along behind it, out of the ship and a few paces to the door of a giant dome affixed to the volcanic rock. She caught a brief glimpse of the landscape. The same black rock, but flatter than the mountainous area of the spaceport, and only one visible volcano in the distance with a trickle of lava down its side. Everything else was pitch black, lit momentarily by lightning flashes. Here the sulphur rain was a mere drizzle, but Jen was still glad to be dragged inside the dome before too much of it wet her skin.

Inside was even warmer, but a dry heat as opposed to the cloying outside humidity. She was soon sweating from every pore. The air was cleaner, though. She filled her lungs with it.

The interior contained a haphazard array of machinery, tools, supply crates, and a general mess. Thick cables snaked around the walls. Flickering fluorescent tubes provided decent lighting compared with the outside. The door that slid shut behind them was as thick as Jen’s leg, so the place evoked a feeling of solidity and protection from the elements. It might even have made her feel safe, were it not for the reptilian monster dragging her further inside by a leash. A passage led to another door and a room she surmised was at the dome’s centre. A control room of sorts, one wall lined with three large monitors. The middle screen displayed a view of the dome from outside. She saw the space shuttle parked next to the entrance. The other screens scrolled data of some kind. Meaningless to Jen.

The Tuataroid tied her to a bench on the opposite wall. It turned its attention to the monitors, controlling their content from the console, hissing and spitting at the output. She wasn’t sure if it was talking to itself or communicating with someone else. There were no responses from the screens or console, so maybe it was just ranting. After a while, it stood, grabbed a device from a nearby shelf, and ambled over to her. Weary from the rough ride in the ship and the constant level of fear, Jen wondered if it was meant to kill her. But that was the fear talking. If this thing wanted her dead, it was easily capable of swatting her against the wall. Instead, it tried to jam the device, that now appeared to be a headset, on her head. The headset fell off, eliciting a flurry of spits and hisses. She watched the scaly claws make some adjustments and winced again as it was forced over both her ears, the connecting band now much tighter. A voice hissed in her own language.

“Small-headed human bitch.”

Perhaps it was the last effects of the drugs, or Jen was too tired of being scared. But when she realised the device was a translator and might contain a microphone, she answered in a croaky, sulphur-burned voice, “Big-headed Tuataroid asshole.”

The expected violence did not eventuate. Her captor seemed perplexed and produced a series of snorts that may have been laughter. She breathed a sigh of relief and scolded herself for being so bold. Yes, this was a nightmare, but she was alive – and would very much like to stay that way.

-

Zerkox had indeed found the exchange amusing. But more than that – he was encouraged. This human had grasped the concept of the translator; it was not stupid. Also, it had spunk and seemed able to overcome fear. That would be important if it was going to be of any use. He reminded himself that it also meant he should be careful. His instinctive reaction to the insult had been to smash the ugly slug against the wall, but he remembered how easily he’d damaged its limb, and held back. These things were fragile. He lamented that this wasn’t the male of the species. They would be tougher. Though all things considered, he was pleased with his purchase so far.

He checked the script on one of his displays, even though he knew it backwards by now: the required regulatory statement from the Queen’s council, to be read to the slave. He cleared his throat with some formality.

“You are human.” He thought that was a fucking pointless thing to say, but rules were rules, and he was recording this speech in case of a future royal audit – you didn’t mess with the Queen’s council. He continued, ignoring the look of incredulity from his audience.

“You are my slave. All your possessions and currencies are forfeit to me.” That sounded great in principle, but the slave didn’t even have scales, much less possessions. And Queen only knew if these things used credits, so he wouldn’t hold his breath for a transfer of funds.

“You are forbidden from wearing armour, carrying a weapon, controlling a ship, or using communication devices beyond those required to communicate with your master.” He paused and added proudly, “That’s me! Zerkox.”

The human was fiddling with the headset, holding it away from its ridiculous looking ears.

“Hey! You must listen to this!” he shouted.

“It’s too loud!” the thing whined. Queen’s-sake, its squeaky voice was annoying. He carried on, trying to speak softly. It came out as a conspiratorial whisper.

“You are forbidden from any communication with other humans, including vocal, written, pictorial, digital, analogue, and physical gestures. You are forbidden from accessing any area other than those areas required to perform your duties. Your master is forbidden from allowing you access to any Tuataroid property, technology, artifacts, military….”

This script lasted a while longer. None of it was good news; other than to confirm, she wasn’t going to die at the hands of this ugly reptilian monster. There seemed little point in reading her these rules only to kill her soon after. Of course, the stupid oaf might still kill her by accident.

A rolling vibration shuddered through the dome, interrupting her thoughts. Accompanied by screeching sounds of straining metal. The floor and walls shook.

“Fucking quakes,” Zerkox mumbled as he held onto the console to steady himself.

When the movement ceased, he untied Jen with a growled warning, “If you try anything, I’ll break your legs.”

His vicious serpentine expression removed any idea of a comeback from Jen’s mind. The drugs had worn off now. Not all her sweat came from the insipid heat within this dome shaped oven. Some of it was born of terror.

“Now move!” He prodded her with a sharp claw.

A panel in the control room wall opened into a short passageway. Several steps along, they came to a dead end. A large circular hatch on the floor had a metal handle protruding from it.

Jen received another prod in the back, this time breaking her skin. “Open it,” he said from behind her.

“If you keep poking like that, you’re going to slice bits off me,” she complained. “What if I get infected? I won’t be much use to you.”

Zerkox seemed to consider this. It made sense. “Sensitive creatures, aren’t you?”

No matter how hard she tried, the hatch wouldn’t budge. This, like everything else, irritated Zerkox. “Fucking useless.” He seethed and shoved her out of the way before lifting the hatch with one claw. “Ok, I’ll have to leave this open for you all the time. Not good. But…” he trailed off.

A long ladder led an untold distance down into near darkness. Thick cables snaked amongst the rungs and Jen was careful where she stepped. At the bottom, an enormous cavern, illuminated by what appeared to be temporary mobile lights, dotted around the circular wall of bare rock. Tunnels led off in different directions. Near the foot of the ladder was a bed of sorts; Some padded material atop two storage crates pushed together. Jen guessed it was hers. There were no blankets or anything like that, but in this heat, she wouldn’t need them. At the end of the bed was some apparatus that might have been for cooking and preparing food, and more crates.

“Bed, kitchen, food, water,” he announced, pointing at everything with a flourish, his voice hissing in her headset. Zerkox had made some preparations for his slave.

“Make toilet down that tunnel there.” He indicated one of the dark passageways. Jen tested how much leeway he’d allow her, walking away from him towards the tunnel. He didn’t object. That meant the ladder behind them was the only way out of here. Nor did he mind when she picked up one of the mobile lights, trying not to show how heavy it was as she hauled it along. The light reflected off the shiny black lava from some previous eruption. Twenty paces down the tunnel, she nearly fell into a hole. Beyond that, an impenetrable wall of lava. Peering into the hole, no matter how she positioned the light, it didn’t illuminate the bottom. So, this was her toilet. Fall in, and there was no getting out. Every time she needed to do her business, she’d be dicing with death.

Zerkox impatiently flicked his tail around his feet, twitching and jerking, when she returned to the open chamber.

“Don’t fall in the toilet, stupid human,” he echoed her thoughts.

Jen wondered why he felt the need to warn her. Had a previous poor soul met their end down in the depths of their own waste?

“Thanks for the advice,” she mumbled under her breath.

He took the light from her – wrenching her fingers backwards in the process – and led her around the cavern, illuminating various tools and bits of machinery. The walls of this place were scarred with unnatural divots, cracks, and cavities. Smaller rocks and pieces of debris formed piles below the damage. One hole was large enough for Jen to climb into – which seemed to be what Zerkox intended. He was directing her with his arms before he seemed to remember she had the translator headset on.

“Get in there!”

“You don’t mince words, do you?” she grumbled, walking up to the wall. It was cut at his eye level, and the rock was shiny smooth at the hole’s base, so it proved difficult to lift herself into it. Zerkox grew exasperated and shoved one of her legs up so hard she banged her knee on the lip of the entrance.

“Ow! Easy!”

Jen had gotten over being naked. It seemed the least of her problems since waking up in the cage, and there weren’t any other humans around to see her, anyway. So what if she now presented her captor with a nice rear view as she crawled away from the light?

His voice crackled again over the headset, “Here, take this.” One of the portable lights crashed against her feet. She turned to retrieve it, noting the diameter of the space allowed for that manoeuvre, and no more. Standing upright was impossible in here; walking was only possible if hunched over. Doing so would be hell on her back though, so she settled for crawling on all fours, dragging the light along with her.

The tunnel narrowed as she crawled through it. Before she got stuck, she had to reverse until there was room to turn around and head back out. By the time she made it to the entrance, her knees ached from the pressure of gravity pushing them down against the rock floor.

“What was the point of that?” she asked Zerkox, after jumping down and rubbing her sore knees.

“That’s your job,” the reptile replied.

“My job is climbing into small spaces and coming back out again?”

It seemed to take a while for Zerkox to process that. Jen rubbed her raw knees some more while she waited.

“No,” he said, “I wanted to test you in the environment. Next, you learn how to do mining.”

“Can I rest first?” Jen tried to think how long it had been since she woke. The shock of the slave market, the turbulent flight on the ship, and the strange tour of her new prison had all taken their toll. Especially with the constant pull of gravity. Her muscles ached. When she recovered, she’d think of escaping. But right now, she only wanted to lie down on the packing crate bed.

Zerkox agreed. He slithered up the ladder, leaving her in peace.

Chapter Two: A Girly Swot

He supposed he should let the slave sleep, eat, and drink. After that, he might get a few hours’ work out of it. No, he WOULD get a few hours work out of it, otherwise he’d deny it food. Yes, that would be a good policy. In the meantime, he’d learn more about humans and how to avoid killing or harming them. At least long enough for it to mine a warp crystal. His funds were depleted. Buying this mining claim had cost a small fortune. Even way out at the ass-end of a planet that was at the ass-end of its system. Discovering he was too big for the delicate business of crystal mining, his venture into slave ownership had damn near cleaned him out of what funds remained.

Zerkox, small in stature for a Tuataroid and clumsy in nature, was sharp in wits. And unlike many of his compatriots, he enjoyed research and study. He considered himself somewhat of an expert in human studies, although a low bar had been set in that regard. Most of his race looked upon humans with contempt from the moment they’d been conquered. Many thought them a risk, being one of the more advanced races to fall under the Tuataroid hammer. Once the useful minerals of the human’s single planet had been exhausted, and all military technology destroyed, the Tuataroid invasion fleet left for their next conquest. They’d taken a few thousand of the surviving humans. Mostly for the Queen’s research division to study, but several hundred had gone missing along the way – as inventory often does within a large and complex war machine. The missing “stock” was passed among the more unscrupulous officers; ending up as slaves if they were lucky – hunting practice if they were not. Zerkox wasn’t as keen on history as he was on science, so that summed up his knowledge of how Jen ended up available for purchase. The biological data gathered on humans interested him more. Dirty mammals that reared their young inside them, the relationship between the young and the mother seemed a parasitic one. And even when the filthy thing had burst out, it still required suckling for a long time afterwards. It was vulnerable for the first quarter of its life. He wondered how a species like that rose to the top of its planet’s food chain.

-

Jen curled up on the bed, with the padding wrapped around her. Not for warmth, but for some rudimentary sense of security. When she woke, her makeshift cocoon was soaked with sweat, and the hip and shoulder she’d slept on ached – another symptom of the heavy gravity. She’d have to get more padding or change the way she slept.

With no sign of Zerkox, and no desire to fetch him, Jen looked through the packing crates to see how extensive his preparations for slave ownership had been.

The first crate was full of small, foil wrapped packages. Around fifty of them. Single meals, human military rations. She was past wondering how she knew these things. The next crate contained bottles of water. So Zerkox had indeed done some homework. Unpacking more crates revealed a small cooking device and other items she wasn’t sure of but wanted to work them out herself without asking. Another revelation – she had pride, or self-esteem, or whatever it was called.

The inspection didn’t reveal any clothing. Regardless of modesty, it would be nice to have some protection on her knees when crawling through those damn tunnels. The rumbling of her stomach turned her attention back to the ration packs and the cooker.

With no description other than a code on the packs, it was a lucky dip. Jen heated some kind of chunky broth in the appliance after an unscientific approach of pressing every button. The chamber soon filled with steam and a not unpleasant odour. She waited for it to cool before detaching the vessel part of the device from the heating element and tasting her first meal in this new world.

The taste did not keep the promise of the odour, but she forced the broth down. She needed nutrition, however horrible. A bottle of water washed away the salty, sour aftertaste.

She tested her leg muscles before braving the hazardous bathroom facilities.

After surviving the toileting ordeal, a phrase flashed through her head: “I feel almost human again.” It was a strange thing to be thinking, but she shrugged it off, turning her attention to the equipment scattered around the cavern.

Given that this larger machinery was used to blast away volcanic rock, rather than heating food, she treated it with more respect. But in the end, the temptation to push buttons proved too great. Her poking and prodding at the alien controls elicited a deep humming noise from the biggest machine. It continued after she’d stopped poking things. Soon, the deep bass rumbling was joined by a screech, increasing in volume. No amount of bashing every button in sight stopped it. Jen backed away; hands clamped on her ears.

Zerkox came crashing down the ladder and pushed her aside with a force that crumpled her to the floor, skinning her sore knee.

“Fuck!” He lifted the bulky machine to his hip, pointed it at the far wall and pulled a massive trigger that had been too stiff for Jen during her mischief. Searing laser fire erupted from the business end of the thing and splashed against the igneous rock. He released the trigger and set the smoking contraption on the ground.

“You can’t prime it and not fire it, you stupid bitch!” his voice crackled from the headset speakers on the bed. Jen scrambled to fetch it and escaped a vicious slap.

The lizard beast fumed, “Now you learn equipment operation!” He stomped over and reached for her wrist.

Jen dodged around him, back to the machine, putting the headset on. “Don’t grab me! You’ll break my wrist, and I won’t be operating anything.”

“Won’t be blowing anything up, more like,” he grumbled. “Watch!”

For the next hour, the lizard demonstrated mining equipment to the human. She decided not to complain about his patronising presentation style, instead concentrating on the lesson. This gear was powerful and very handy for a future escape attempt. If the focussed laser would cut through igneous rock that way, it would make light work of lizard scales and innards.

She learned the basics of calibration, beam focal lengths, releasing power over-loads, and focussing the beam on the seams between layers of rock. Under the heat of the laser, the rock glowed lava-red and spat from the wall, forming piles of slag on the cavern floor. An impressive display of energy.

Waves of heat blew back from the mining works and soon Jen had to complain she was struggling to breathe. She dripped with sweat and had trouble clearing it from her eyes. Zerkox sniffed at her with derision. “You’re leaking water, and you smell even worse than before.”

“I’m sweating because you’re turning this place into an oven,” she said, squinting through stinging eyes.

Zerkox unleashed a barrage of insults at her species, and her mother’s propensity for laying bad eggs. None of it made much sense and halfway through, she risked strolling back to her bed area to fetch a water bottle. She drank half and tipped the rest over her head, soaking her hair.

“What are you mining?” she asked when he’d finished his ranting. “Gold?”

Zerkox snorted through slitted nostrils. “Why the fuck would I be mining gold, dumbass?” That was a new insult, at least.

“Well, what then?”

“Warp crystals, of course. When you’ve finished dissolving, I’ll show you.”

After a second drink, she followed him up the ladder and into his main control room. Compared to the cavern below, it felt like a refrigerator.

“Sit there.” He motioned towards his seat, and she climbed onto it before he decided to help.

Leaning over her, he stabbed a few buttons on the console. Text replaced the images on all three screens, written in a language alien to her, along with pictures of various mining scenes. A fresh voice crackled from the headset; a dull, lecturing monotone. So, it was school time.

Zerkox shambled off towards the dome entrance with a parting, “Touch anything or try to escape and you die.”

That seemed crystal clear. Warp crystal clear. Jen sighed to herself and wondered why she even had the energy for such light-heartedness. She heard the dome’s outer door open and a distant thunderclap. So, he’d gone outside to his ship. Maybe to buy another human slave. But she knew that was wishful thinking. Something about this operation told her that it was running on a tight budget.

She shifted in the seat to find the most comfortable position. It wasn’t easy, with her sweating bare backside sticking to whatever metal the thing was made of. Eventually, she sat with her knees hunched up under her chin and tried to learn. Knowledge was power. Another phrase that occurred to her.

Warp crystals were extremely rare. The lesson emphasised this more than once.

The size of Jen’s fist, their creation required a dozen different variables on a planet to line up: a narrow margin of gravitational and magnetic forces, the right combination of minerals subjected to millennia of massive volcanic and tectonic anger. The embryonic nuclei of crystal had to win a trillion-to-one lottery, with first prize being a direct strike by a super-charged ionising lightning bolt.

Used for tool making due to their extreme density, the true application of the crystals went unrealised for centuries. The discoverer’s identity, although claimed by many Tuataroid clans as their ancestor, remained a mystery.

Magnetism charged a warp crystal with immense power. Its capacity to store energy was beyond the current understanding of science, at least within the Tuataroid empire. The charging process required magnets of massive scale and took a very long time. It all happened on a planet whose name was redacted in the lessons, but Jen was given a brief glimpse of vast arc-shaped magnets rising sky-high above a jungle canopy.

Once charged, a crystal was embedded within the ion drive engine of the larger ships in the Tuataroid fleet. An engineering feat requiring even more breakthroughs in science. A contained nuclear reaction triggered the release of the crystal’s stored energy, converting a small amount of target matter to anti-matter. The resultant disagreement between the two states of matter as to which should occupy that exact point in space thrust the ship away from the debate at a velocity slightly shy of light speed.

Jen checked that Zerkox hadn’t crept back into the control room before opening another sub-article on a blue-white planet close to Proxima. At least close in LS terms. A memory, or instinct, had focussed her attention on the image of that world. It was her world. Earth. Her breath hastened as she listened to the lecturer narrate the demise of her species. Tuataroid ships had scanned Earth from way beyond the Ort Cloud, far outside the range of any human sensors. Unfortunately for humans, Earth met most of the criteria for warp crystal discovery. Its gravity and the long-time its tectonic plates had been active meant crystals might have formed. That chance was near 1%, but given the value of the prize, and the pitiful state of human defences, the lizards didn’t think twice. They attacked without mercy.

The article finished with some matter-of-fact statistics on mining sites across the planet – exhausted now. Humans had been wiped out, except for those who were hauled away as slaves. The doomed planet proved to be bereft of warp crystals. The near extinction of every living thing had been for nothing.

She closed down the sub articles and opened fresh ones on mining techniques. Jen had already decided that her ticket out of this place lay in her captor finding one of these damn crystals. Until that happened, he likely intended to work her to death.

Mining warp crystals seemed to be more art than science. Or at least, science had its limits and art took over. Jen scrolled through many opinions of the best approach. But they boiled down to the same challenge. No matter what method you used for deciding where to dig, you still had to penetrate dense, igneous rock. High concentrations of focussed heat, and/or ultrasonic sound waves were needed to do the job. She now understood why the shafts Zerkox cut were so narrow, and the need for a slave of her slim build. Even if he uncovered a crystal, he’d find it very difficult to get his big scaly ass down to recover it. She read on, hoping to learn anything that might improve their chances.

---

Zerkox stomped through the rain to the shuttle. While the silly human was studying, he may as well try to fix the left engine.

Equal amounts of banging, cursing, and the occasional hissing at the contemptible sky above had the cowling removed. The impeller housing was next, and the blades. Some early-hatching moron had designed the thing so the only way to service it was from the front. With a hundred parts scattered on the landing pad below, he hoisted himself into the engine with a portable mining light and tried to diagnose the problem. Likely a blocked filter, with all the volcanic ash in the atmosphere, but damned if he could locate the filter. Unable to move in the confined space, he grew angry at the whole affair until he remembered he had recently acquired a new tool for this kind of Queen-forsaken job. The human.

“Come with me, we’re going outside to fix the engine,” he demanded from the doorway.

Jen dreaded the thought. “Is it raining?”

Zerkox shouted, “Of course it’s fucking raining, it’s always raining.”

“The rain burns my skin. Can I have a coat or something?” She hopped off the chair and backed away behind it, in case her request triggered his bad temper.

“No! You’ll hide a weapon under any coverings.”

So that was it. She would spend all her time in this hell, running around in the nude. Perhaps in a while she’d gain some trust from him and revisit the topic, but she didn’t dare push it any further now.

Zerkox had an idea, disappearing and coming back with a container and some kind of brush or applicator.

Jen backed away further until she came up against the wall. “What’s that?”

After a concentrated pause, Zerkox came up with, “Liquid clothes. It should protect you from the rain. Now shut up and stand still.”

“How you do know it won’t be even worse for my skin?” she asked, watching him open the container to reveal a clear liquid with a golden hue.

“I don’t. But I’ll test it.” And before she could complain, he’d painted the stuff on her left foot. It felt cool, tingled for a while and… nothing.

“Perhaps we should wait a while, make sure it’s, ok?” She already knew the answer.

“Fuck that, you’ve got an engine to fix.” And he painted her body. Feet first. There was no point in objecting. Like with everything else. Jen looked at the ceiling and obeyed his gruff commands.

“Legs apart!” The applicator brush slid its way up the inside of each leg, and at the top it made a sticky mess of her small triangle of pubic hair.

When he’d painted her stomach, breasts, arms, and neck, he commanded her to close her eyes to protect them while he painted her face. So at least he had some concern for her welfare. But she reminded herself that she was an asset. No use having a blind slave.

“Turn around!”

With her rear painted, he pushed her towards the door for the real test.

She stood in the downpour on the landing pad, miserable, waiting for the stinging to start. But no stinging came. The water ran off her protective layer without harm.

The body artist threw her into the engine, with instructions to find anything that looked like a filter, disconnect it, and throw it back out.

She should have learned engine parts from the comfort of the control room first. Jen thought about this as she scrabbled around in the bowels of the massive jet turbine. Zerkox seemed a mix of forward thinker with the big stuff, but impulsive and at the mercy of his temper when dealing with little things.

Jen had no idea why she was adept at these tasks. Nor how she was coping so well with the situation. Perhaps it was a simple survival instinct and natural intelligence. Whatever it was, she decided a couple of tubular parts clamped inside the engine workings looked like filters. The large tubes seemed to interrupt smaller tubes running in and out of them. Why impede the progress of whatever travelled in those tubes, unless it was for a good reason, like filtering? She shrugged and began disconnecting it all with the tools Zerkox had thrown in after her.

The rain, sideways now, lashed straight into the engine. Jen took a moment to examine her arms in front of the work light. The body paint was transparent enough to allow close examination of her skin. No rash, welts, or even extra pinkness had appeared. Nevertheless she hastened in her task. The sooner she was under cover, the better. Lightning zig-zagged down from above, each strike nearer than the last. Acid from the sky might not kill her, but a direct lightning strike would.

Back inside the dome, Zerkox dismantled one filter while she watched. He unfastened a long hose from the wall, flicked a switch, and fired compressed air right into the component. Volcanic ash puffed into the room and Jen covered her face.

“You might have warned me!” she shouted over the hissing air.

He shrugged. “What did you think was in the filter, you silly bitch? Gold?” He grunted and wheezed at his own joke while cleaning out the rest of the ash.

“You don’t need to call me a bitch all the time, you know?” This seemed a trivial thing, but the insults were getting to her.

Zerkox paused again, the way he did when considering the translation from the headset.

After a while, he shrugged and said, “Ok, you’re a silly cunt,” matter-of-factly.

Jen sighed. “That’s an even worse insult.” Now she felt like a teacher.

The pause was longer this time. “But you have a cunt,” he replied, pointing the hose in the general direction of her crotch.

She was pissed off now. The conversation was as ridiculous as it was insulting.

“I HAVE a cunt, but I’m NOT a cunt!” she shouted.

“Fine, then you’re a silly bitch. Now, silly bitch, clean the other filter like I did with this one. And we’ll put them back in the engine.”

“You mean, I will,” she thought.

When she’d finished, her back ached and some of the body paint was wearing off. Zerkox shut her inside the dome and took the shuttle for a test drive. As he didn’t set her any more tasks, she descended the ladder and curled up on her bed.

Sleep came easy.

The insulting, obnoxious lizard was nowhere to be seen when she woke up. She dined undisturbed on a breakfast of heated ration pack of beans and a bottle of water. The peace was welcome. Her body might have been adapting to the heat too, because the cavern felt comfortably warm, no longer oppressively hot. “Oh please don’t get used to this place,” she told herself. “It is NOT home!”

When Zerkox slithered down the ladder much later, he found his slave mining! Queen be praised! The bare, scaleless, human was operating the equipment with at least a basic understanding of what she was doing. Although she’d made a brand-new fresh cut in the rock, rather than work on the ones he’d already started.

Over the noise of the laser and spitting, melting rock, his approach had gone unnoticed, so he tapped a talon on her shoulder. The stupid human jumped, coming damn close to searing her foot off.

“Why the new cut?” he asked when she’d recovered.

Jen, trembling from the fright, answered, “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” and when she remembered the question said, “I got a new reading from the GPR.”

“The What?”

“Ground Penetrating Radar. That’s what it’s called, right?” She pointed at a gun-like device leaning against the far wall.

“How in the Queen’s name did you get a better reading?”

Jen stretched and wiped the sweat and remnants of the body paint from her face. “I recalibrated it after running a sample of rock through that spectrometer. I think the rock isn’t as dense as you had it set for.” She waited for an aggressive response.

It didn’t come. Instead, he took it all on board and seemed rather pleased. “Excellent. I knew you were an excellent investment!”

This was the nicest thing she remembered anyone saying to her. Given that her memory began at the cage, that might not have been considered a big deal. But it was. Her captor might warm to her, rather than looking for excuses to either insult or smack her. She dared let a little hope creep into her psyche.

—-

Chapter Three: Clever Bitch

Jen counted her equivalent of days and nights by noting when she had a long, uninterrupted sleep. That would signify a night having passed and she’d laser a small notch into a blank space of wall near her bed. Later, when Zerkox allowed her more time at the console she learned that this planet, Proxima B5, orbited its star Proxima Centauri at a very slow rate compared to most. In fact, she’d be unlikely to live for a whole orbit. But it turned on its axis everyone and a half Earth days, creating a useful measure of time. Outside, there was no difference between night and day. A perpetual twilight bathed the landscape as the magnetic storms raged overhead. It was a Queen-forsaken place, as Zerkox put it.

The new mining works grew deeper at a rapid pace. Jen would spend half her waking time lasering away the ancient lava. She’d stop every once in a while, to check the GPR, dragging the unit into the hole and taking new readings. The rest of her time was spent at the console learning more about mining, the equipment, and the shuttle’s engine in case it needed more repairs.

Her rock calendar showed six notches when she approached Zerkox with a request. “Hey boss.” They’d agreed that if he stopped calling her bitch, cunt, slut, and every other insult he’d found in the translator, she’d call him Boss. He liked that. Jen presumed the translation in his language might be something like “Supreme Commander”, or “Huge Dick Lizard” for all she knew.

He answered, “Yes Jen, why have you stopped mining?”

“Because it’s getting so deep, I won’t be able to climb out soon. I need another ladder.”

“Well, hang on while I pull one out of my arse.” His human dialogue skills now included sarcasm.

“I can make one I think; I’ve been studying welding.”

“Have you! You be careful you’re not studying anything forbidden or I’ll break something.”

So he hadn’t lost his background desire to damage things, it seemed.

“I need some steel, though.”

Zerkox pushed her out of his way and headed for the exit. “For fuck’s sake, can’t I get a moment’s peace around here?”

Jen had long since learned to access the security camera feeds on the console monitors. As usual, the view from all the cameras showed a desolate acid-rain swept landscape. The camera in the dome’s rear revealed Zerkox sifting through a gigantic pile of scrap. He dragged a big hunk of metal framework back inside. It made a hell of a noise as it banged along behind him before he dumped it next to the floor hatch.

“Right, clever bitch. I presume if you know how to weld, you’ll know how to UN-weld! Because you’ll have to break this into parts that fit through the hatch. But don’t let any fucking sparks land in my control room.” And with that, he disappeared back into his quarters.

She dared not bother him again to ask for some kind of protection from the sparks. The body paint wouldn’t help much and might even catch light. Rather than worsen his mood, she decided to use the chair as a barrier.

In the end, it took three metal “meltings” to break the old steel framework down. She used the smallest mining laser – having a hell of a time hauling it upstairs first.

The rest of that day and half of the next was spent melting short lengths of steel into the wall of her downwards sloping mine shaft. The new hand and foot holds made scrambling up and down the 45-degree slope much faster. It also allowed for the easy removal of the slag that built up as Jen melted her way through the underground rock.

-

The following “evening”, after Zerkox hadn’t heard or seen Jen for some hours, he ventured down the shaft, his bulk filling the cavity.

“Jen, you down here? What the fuck are you doing, sleeping?”

The human was slumped over the laser apparatus, unconscious. He’d seen her sleeping before – and this didn’t look like sleep.

With a great deal of grunting and cursing, he dragged his slave back up both ladders and laid her across his chair. “And now I’m a fucking zoologist,” he muttered. And while he wasn’t quite qualified, he noticed the human’s breathing was shallow. Almost non-existent. Her breasts hardly rose and fell each time.

“Wake up! Jen! Fuck!” He leaned over the console and tapped talons on keys, bringing up the articles he’d found earlier on human biology. “Oxygen,” he muttered to himself. “She needs more oxygen”.

When she woke up inside an enormous plastic bag, she screamed and flailed her arms, trying to bust out of the plastic prison. Zerkox pulled it off and grabbed both arms, holding them tight against her sides before she injured herself.

“Calm the fuck down you idiot,” he growled.

She screamed back at him, “You’re trying to kill me! I can’t breathe in there!”

Zerkox folded the plastic; he picked up the tubing and oxygen pump he’d built from the arc welding gear. “Save you more like. You’d gassed yourself down the bottom of the mine. Or something like that. Not enough ventilation down there. Another weak aspect of human biology.”

Jen relaxed when she saw the equipment he was packing away.

Her volume lowered, “We’re going to need to pump air down there, and extract any fumes then.”

“Correction, YOU’RE going to pump air down there. I’m not messing around with all that crap. I’m going to the spaceport for more supplies. You drink way too much water. And it’s not cheap. You better find a crystal before I run out of credits.”

“And then what happens?”

“I sell you and this mining claim to the highest bidder, and I get off this Queen forsaken rock while I still have the chance.”

“Someone’s in a bad mood today. Did you slither off the wrong side of the bed this morning?”

He digested that, before heading to the outer door with a parting, “Get fucked. And find me a crystal.”

Another magnetic storm crashed against the dome and surrounding landscape as Zerkox clambered into the shuttle. It took off smoothly, despite the weather. At least his investment in the human had paid off with her repair of the engine.

The spaceport was quieter than usual; its two landing pads bereft of cargo ships. The control tower’s searchlights swept across the dark, desolate scene. He touched his shuttle down in a short-term parking bay and made his way through the acid rain to the supply store.

“Let me guess,” the clerk hissed from behind his desk. “More water, animal food, and a new voltage regulator because you’ve blown yours up again?”

Zerkox sniffed but absorbed the jibe. It paid to remain on good terms with the planet’s only clerk. Getting on their bad side could damage his personal supply chain. Plus, technically, this smart-arse worked for the Queen. So, he absorbed what was thrown at him during each visit.

“Pretty quiet round here?” Zerkox fished for info while cringing at the credit balance displayed on his tablet.

The clerk hissed with derision, “You don’t read the news much do you?” he said, scanning Zerkox’s proffered tablet for the funds transfer. In the warehouse behind him an automated electric cart hummed to life and set about loading water bottles and ration packs. “The big guys have cut their visits down to twice an orbit now. Less demand for supplies since some of your other wiser mining buddies packed up and gone. Hasn’t been a crystal found for ages.”

Following the electric cart back to his shuttle, Zerkox re-calculated his deadline. He needed to leave himself enough credits for a berth on a transport ship off this hell hole. With each day passing, that deadline grew closer. Every day meant more costs, and as nobody else on the planet was getting lucky, that meant the value of his mining claim declined. Soon it might be worth nothing more than the equipment, and the shuttle. And the human. It knew how to operate a mine, and had picked up many other skills, so he hoped it was worth more than he’d paid.

Back to a menial job then, taking orders from some old tyrant with scale rot. With his size, the military wasn’t an option. Every wing of the Queen’s forces would laugh him out of the recruitment office. He hissed and spat at the cart as it trundled up the ramp of the shuttle and dumped his purchases.

Another smooth take off comforted him somewhat and gave him an idea. What if he kept the human, and employed it in other tasks; like fixing shuttle engines and other crap that involved getting into tight spaces? His mouth scales shaped into a grin all the way back to his dome. This became a snarl when he noticed the fucking human was outside the dome, as if it had heard the shuttle approach. It wandered around by the dome’s entrance as if it owned the place.

Zerkox bustled across the landing pad. Inside, he let loose.

“What the fuck were you doing outside, you sneaky cunt?”

She appeared to stand taller and lifted her chest region. A pointless gesture. The sight of her small tits raised another inch wouldn’t intimidate him one iota. “It’s Jen, remember. And I was throwing out the trash. It was getting in the way.”

Suspicious, he slithered back outside. Sure enough, the human had piled up lots of junk. Empty water bottles, ration packs, burnt out battery backs, and all sorts of other miscellany from the mining operation.

When he returned, it was like she had anticipated his next question before he asked it.

“You didn’t lock the door, so it’s not like I broke out. And where would I go, anyway?”

Zerkox brushed her aside on his way past. She had a point, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

—-

She made another point the following day.

“I think we can increase the laser’s power by at least fifty percent,” she said, perched on the edge of the seat at the console. Data on ship-equipped combat lasers scrolled up the centre screen as she tapped on the controls. “The council’s warships put multiple capacitors in a parallel network, each storing their maximum energy before they release it in one massive overload to fire at an enemy.”

Zerkox stirred from his slumber in the next room and hustled over to her.

“How the fuck did you access information on the battle fleet?” he screeched. “You’ll get me executed if anyone finds out my human saw that. Fucking hell, I’ve never been able to access shit like that.”

Jen bristled at the reference to “his human”, but let it pass. While their relationship had improved, there remained a gross power imbalance – one that could result in her losing a limb to those claws of his.

She did her best to shrug. “You need to frame your information requests to the AI in a roundabout way. It took me a while, but I got there.”

Zerkox licked his scaly lips. “Queen’s sake, I’m a dead hatchling if this gets out, I tell you.” Then he calmed somewhat, as if the goal of finding a warp crystal was never far from his mind. “Can you do the same with our laser?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “I’ll need a couple more capacitors, though. These here.” She brought up a description of the components.

Zerkox leaned over her and tapped a link to check the pricing. His shoulders slumped and tail lay flat to the floor. “Can’t afford those. They cost as much as you!”

Jen had a thought and pushed his talons off the controls so she could bring up the component’s specifications. On the second screen, she opened up the specs of the shuttle and drilled down to the capacitors it used.

“They’re not quite the same,” she mused, “but close enough I reckon. Never mind new ones, we’ll strip a couple from the shuttle. Can always put them back later.”

The lizard sniffed hard through his nostril slits. “How sure are you, that you’re not going to turn my shuttle into a scrapheap and leave me stranded? I don’t have the funds to pay for a rescue.”

“I’m sure enough to try it. And I’d be stranded too, so I’ve got skin in the game.” She glanced down at said skin. “Speaking of which. What happens to me if we find a crystal?”

Zerkox paused before answering. His original intention to sell her to the highest bidder once she’d performed for him had been superseded by the plan to use her for machinery repair. This might be his best source of income if the mining failed. He’d grown impressed by her skills and intelligence. Stupid to let such an asset go. There was another reason too. He enjoyed having her around. It was a refreshing change to being alone for Queen-knew how long. He wasn’t going to tell her that though.

“I’ll keep you,” he replied.

She waited for more, but nothing else followed. Good enough, she supposed. And another phrase occurred to her from some distant life: “better the devil you know.”

—-

The shuttle’s twin engines coughed to life and Zerkox nudged the controls as gently as he could. By anyone else’s measure it wasn’t gently at all. Jen had asked him to move the shuttle as close as possible to the dome to reduce her exposure to the acid rain. He wondered who the boss really was.

She still wore the protective body paint. Applying most of it herself but needing him to paint her back.

It took her a day and night to disembowel the craft of engine components that blocked the energy capacitors. They were buried far deeper than the filters she retrieved earlier. Progress was hampered when overhead lightning spat with such frequency and ferocity that Zerkox called her back into the dome.

Inside, most of the first room’s floor ended up covered in engine parts. Zerkox found it hard to navigate without his tail knocking the components around.

“Don’t move stuff!” Jen scolded him. “I’ve laid it all out in the order that it goes back together. If you mess it up, it’ll take me longer to rebuild it!”

The lizard hung his head. A piece of body language he’d picked up from her. “Well, I can’t even fucking move around my den. This is ridiculous.”

“Why are you in here, anyway? You’re slowing me down,” she said, disconnecting a capacitor from its housing. “Piss off and let me work.”

He left, mumbling something about taking orders from bossy bitches. Jen smiled as she pulled the last connector out of her prize. One capacitor down, one to go.

She needed him later, to help haul the things down to the mining level. He leaned them against the laser and even fetched all her tools as well.

“What else you need, boss?” he asked with an overdose of sarcasm.

“Yeah. Sleep. I’m done in. I’ll try attaching these later. I need to re-route the power relays, and I don’t want to screw that up because I’m tired and fry myself.”

“I hope this idea of yours works, because we’ve lost a lot of time breaking down my precious shuttle. If we’re no closer to mining a crystal, I’ll be fucking angry.” No hint of sarcasm or humour this time.

Jen decided there was no safe answer to that. And it wasn’t a question, anyway. So, she retreated to her bed with no comment.

The next day, careful not to sound too bossy, the human had the lizard help her connect an additional power cable to the dome’s topside generator and feed it down to the mining cavern. It was too heavy to lift even a small section by herself.

If he noticed her step behind him for protection when he pulled the arming trigger, he said nothing. The normal background hum of electrical current increased to a high-pitched whine as trillions of electrons charged headlong into the additional capacitors connected to the top of the laser. Zerkox released his grip.

“How will we know when to stop firing it?” he asked her over his shoulder. “When does it overload?”

She stepped out from behind him. “Good question. I’ve got no idea. It should be a fifty percent increase in power, so maybe it can charge for another fifty percent of the regular time before overloading.” She thought for a second. “Nah, I doubt the relationship between time charging and power build-up is that linear. Too many variables at play. Your generator doesn’t deliver power smoothly, for a start. I put a voltmeter on it, and it’s all over the show. It’s why the lights flicker so much.”

Zerkox looked at her for a while, yellow eyes wide, shaking his head. “This thing is going to fucking kill us…” he muttered as he lifted it. “Fuck it’s hot already! Where do you want it?”

She pointed to a fissure that she’d been cutting, when not working on the engineering projects. It started out as wide and tall as her body and narrowed to a vanishing point several meters in.

“Do you reckon you can jam it right in there? If so, I’ll set the focal point to its shortest distance, and we’ll get maximum impact.”

“Of course I can fucking jam it in there!” Zerkox grunted, hauling the contraption over. “I’m not some weak-ass human you know!”

Jen rolled her eyes when he shambled past her. “We’ll need to pull it out sometimes to remove all the slag.”

“And by we, you mean ME.”

With the laser jammed into the fissure, Jen had an idea. “Wait here!” she called as she scrambled up the ladder.

“What am I? A fucking hatchling?” Zerkox grumbled, sitting on his slave’s bed and cracking the timber crate underneath it.

She returned with a spool of wire. “I’ll rig the switch with an extension. You don’t need to be beside the thing to fire it. Can’t have you going up in flames, I’d be stuck.”

“Damn right you would.”

They took shelter in the cavern above, the trigger wire trailing off down the ladder to the laser.

He insisted on being the one to touch the two wires together. Sparks flew when they touched, and the electrical whine echoed from down below. But when Zerkox pulled the wires apart, the whine continued, increasing in pitch.

“Oh shit…” Jen frowned. The ground trembled beneath them; shockwaves that exceeded those of the regular quakes.

Zerkox shouted above the noise, “Why won’t it turn off?”

“The switch wires probably fused together somewhere down the line. Quick pull them up!” She started pulling on the wires and he joined in, the loose coil tangling in a heap at their feet until they pulled tight. By now the whine was unbearable to both species’ ears and blue smoke rose from below. Zerkox gave one more almighty pull, and the wiring broke free from the laser trigger at the contraption end. The sudden lack of resistance sent them both falling back, over his tail, with Jen landing on top of him.

“If you were human, this would be awkward,” she said, pushing herself off him.

Zerkox scraped his talons across the scales on his chest that she’d touched as if she made him dirty. “If I was human, we’d both be dead long ago.” He lifted a talon to his nostril and sniffed. “Although your sweaty stench might kill me yet.”

When the smoke had cleared enough, they ventured below. When she saw the mess, Jen took a few steps away from Zerkox, ready to avoid sharp swiping talons.

The floor and walls were covered with hot, molten, slag. The laser had been blown back, across the cavern and sat broken and battered. Thin blue smoke drifted upward from each of the capacitors.

“We are so fucked!” Zerkox screeched, walking to the upended machine and bending over it in grief as if it were a fallen comrade. “This thing is dead.”

Jen shook her head. “So much power,” she whispered, inspecting the fissure. “That wasn’t a fifty percent increase, that was more than five hundred percent.”

Her boss rose to his full height, seething. “Not so great at mathematics after all, silly little cunt! Now what are we going to do? The shuttle’s un-flyable without these bits.” He flicked his tail at the smoking capacitors.

But Jen was lost in thought. “Why did all the slag and the laser get ejected like that?”

Zerkox had lost a good deal of his scientific curiosity. “How the fuck should I know!” he retorted. “And who cares anyway, we’re so—”

“Unless…” Jen said, cutting him off and peering further inside the fissure.

“Unless what?”

“The power was reflected by something,” her voice was muffled now and bounced back with an eerie echo. “Pass me a light, please.”

The “please” saved her from a smack across the backside. He retrieved a portable light and passed it inside the hole to her.

Her expression when she turned back was not one she’d displayed to him before. Joy. Pure joy. She screeched, lizard like. “We’ve found a fucking crystal, boss!”

Zerkox pushed her out of the way and poked his snout inside. The light’s pale yellow came back reflected blue against the melted igneous rock. A shard of deliciously blue warp crystal jutted out of the blackness.

He sank to his knees. “Thank the Queen, and all the queens before her!”

—-

Chapter Four: A Cunning Stunt

Lizard and Human sat at the console together. Zerkox slapping Jen’s hand away from the controls when she tried to take over. “For the last time, get your slimy hands off!” Zerkox hissed as he slapped her again.

“Well you missed another one!” she complained. “Go back a screen.”

They’d been scrolling through the empire’s mineral market ever since Jen had extracted the crystal with a combination of the backup handheld laser, drills, and a good deal of cursing. It sat on the console in front of them. An azure shard of glass, casting a tantalising glow over its surroundings. Except it wasn’t glass, Jen reminded herself whenever it caught her eye – it was the galaxy’s rarest, most sought after element.

“This one looks good,” he said without acknowledging that she’d spotted it first. A mineral merchant prepared to travel as far out as Proxima B5 to collect a crystal. While their price was lower than the current market index, it seemed nobody else would come this far from the Empire’s home world. Suspicions surrounding warp crystal mining and sales of crystals were high. Most postings were fakes, scams, or the work of “Cracked egg crazies” as Zerkox put it.

Jen shifted her backside in the seat; squashed as it was between the side and Zerkox’s leg. “Yep, got the Queen’s stamp on it too. That means its more legit right?”

“Well, it means they’ve sold a warp crystal to the Royal House at some stage. Yes. You don’t use the Queen’s stamp lightly. Not even the bravest scammers would try faking that.”

“She’s a scary bitch, this Queen of yours, eh?”

He snorted, spraying Jen’s shoulder with whatever passed for saliva in a lizard. She didn’t notice these days. “Ha! She’s three times the size of me, with a terrible temper, and the royal fleet and secret service at her disposal for whenever someone pisses her off.” He held back another snort. “So, yeah, she’s a scary bitch alright.”

While he spoke, he opened a chat window on the centre screen and started announcing their find to the merchant. Jen, bolder than she’d ever been, put her hand on his to stop him.

“Well, according to you, I’m a bitch too,” she said. “Problem is, I’m not that scary. And you, Boss, while you scare me, are you scary enough to deter this guy from arriving with a lot of muscle, and taking the crystal off us?”

Zerkox forgave the presumptuous gesture. When they’d first met, she might have lost the appendage doing that. But he still bristled at the inference that he wasn’t a fearsome lizard warrior.

“Anyone tries to steal that crystal they’ll find out how fucking scary I am.” He took her hand, placed it firmly on her knee and finished sending his message to the merchant.

“They’ll talk the price down even more,” he said, picking up the crystal and stroking it. “But that doesn’t matter. It will still be a small fortune.” His forked tongue flicked over his lips in anticipation.

Jen risked raising another point. “Why don’t we sell it direct to the Royal House, like he will?”

“I thought of that, my little bitchy Jen,” Zerkox was in wonderful spirits. “But we don’t want the Queen’s secret service anywhere near this dome. Not with you here. I’ve broken lots of protocols by teaching you technical skills and letting you use the console. They get wind of that, and the sale price of this crystal won’t matter.”

Sliding off the seat, she decided against saying he hadn’t taught her much – she’d taught herself. “I’ll see if I can repair those capacitors. If they’re not totally wrecked, then I can rebuild the shuttle’s engines.”

Without taking his eyes off the precious crystal, her boss answered, “Why bother? I’m rich enough to get us a VIP pickup and transport to the dock. And we’re on the next interstellar ship out of here. The sooner I forget this fucking hellhole the better.”

She paused at the hatch. “I hope you’re not taking me to another hellhole, that’s all.”

He shouted after her, “You’ll need to lose the attitude and behave more properly!”

Jen popped her head back up. “What do you mean, ‘behave more properly’?”

“Like a slave. Not a fucking partner.” His mouth scales formed a grin. “You’ll have to travel in cargo. In a cage.”

“You’re joking?”

“Oh yeah sure I am. Because us Tuataroids are famous for our sense of humour. NO! I’m not fucking joking. You’re my slave, and you better act like it, especially in public.”

A soft ping from the console bought the discussion to a halt.

“He’s replied,” Zerkox said, putting the crystal down next to the keypad. “He’ll be on the next inbound freighter. He says to standby and don’t accept any other offers. He’ll pay top credits.”

“I’m guessing that’s what they all say!” shouted Jen from halfway down the ladder.

—-

With the freighter not due for three days, Jen had time to work on the burnt capacitors and the shuttle. There wasn’t much else to do, and it beat getting under Zerkox’s feet. Her master spent most of his time at the console, planning how to spend his riches, and deciding where he might settle for his retirement.

The damage to the capacitors was external, caused by the laser, not by an overload. This was far easier to repair than overload damage would have been. Jen removed the dissolved housing and found the first layer of insulation melted under the onslaught, but behind that, the charging plates were unaffected. She dismantled the other mining equipment to find replacement insulation, and soon had both of the shuttle’s capacitors back to a fit state. For the sake of completeness, she also repaired the mining laser.

Two days later she had shuttle’s engines re-installed and running. Zerkox tore himself away from his retirement planning to take her for a quick test-flight. This time he allowed her to sit up front and try flying.

“When did you learn to fly?” he asked, as they skimmed over the dome and circled back around to land.

“When I got bored with lessons on mining, I watched a few on shuttle controls.” She shrugged.

He grunted. “Something else you’re going to keep very secret.”

“Sure boss.” She grinned, trying to unbuckle her flight harness, but the clasps were too strong for her small fingers.

He leaned over to help, a talon scraping across her breast, adding another scratch to the dozens she bore from being around him. “And don’t speak so casually,” he said, releasing the clasps. “It will sound strange to anyone else. In fact, don’t say anything at all.”

“Yes, sir, boss!” she said in an even sillier tone. He smacked her bare backside as she climbed out of the shuttle, nearly sending her sprawling across the landing pad. He called after her, “You’re an idiot.”

Jen was at the console when the drop ship arrived a day early. Zerkox was in his quarters, packing for his new life. He joined her at a fast slither when the dome’s proximity warnings blared. A ship, larger than a shuttle, was way too close – and getting closer. If it didn’t adjust course soon, it would inflict serious damage to the dome from its anti-grav engines.

By the time he was with her, Jen had switched the screens over to an external camera view; he froze. For the first time in their brief relationship, the slave saw fear in her master’s eyes.

“Fuck!” he spat. “That’s not a merchant ship, that’s secret service!”

Jen doubted her own words as soon as they’d left her lips, “Maybe they want to buy the crystal?”

“Yeah, and the Queen wants to have my hatchlings! Not a chance. Quick, down the hatch, and hide!”

The tremble in his voice belied any further hypothesising. She ran and took the ladder, two rungs at a time. Up above, loud bangs suggested the visitors weren’t waiting to be invited in. They were breaching the storm-proof outer door.

The three secret service commandos had to duck to enter the dome and remain hunched within. Their posture did nothing to dilute their fearsome appearance though. Dressed head to tail in grey battle armour and wielding large bore blasters, they stomped into the control room, their leader hissing, “Where the fuck, is it?” at Zerkox, who tried to remain unflustered in his seat.

“It’s right here.” He held up the crystal. “I hope you’re going to give me market price for it though,” he added bravely. Yes, he was scared, but he wanted to account for himself.

The soldier snatched the blue shard from his grasp and pointed his gun right at Zerkox’s middle eye. “Not the crystal you dim-witted son of a cracked egg layer. Although we’ll be taking that as well.” He tossed it to the soldier on his left who made it disappear somewhere within his armour. “The human! We’re here for the human.”

His precious crystal being stolen, and his home being breached, stirred primeval reptilian bravery within Zerkox’s soul – or whatever passed for his soul.

“I don’t have a fucking human anymore. It died in a mining accident.”

“Nonsense. You’re hiding it!” The two lower ranks took that as an order to turn over everything in sight. They emptied boxes way too small to fit a human hatchling, let alone an adult. They either hadn’t seen a human before, or they just enjoyed their work.

Their leader pushed past Zerkox and upended his entire bed chamber, before the trio clattered through the hatch and down the ladder.

-

Jen’s leg muscle’s strained against her weight, gravity, and the torturous splits position she’d demanded of them. Twelve feet down in the vertical toilet drop, her feet pushed hard against the opposite walls to keep her from falling. But for how long?

She heard the intruders arrive in the chamber above, with Zerkox behind them.

“Where is the fucking animal?” the leader growled, kicking over Jen’s bed and sending packets of food and water bottles flying.

“I told you; it died when the mine shaft collapsed,” came Zerkox’s reply, followed by a crack and another sound that made her heart sink – a whimper from her boss as he was hit by something.

“Don’t give me that fucking shit. That human was one of their military engineers. It would not do something stupid, like die in a mining accident.”

When she heard that, she forgot the pain in her leg muscles. As difficult as it was to process, especially in her current perilous situation, things started making more sense. She wasn’t naturally gifted; more like highly trained. Kind of disappointing, but there’d be time to ponder that later. Right now, a bigger problem was her imminent demise. Either at the hands of the Tuataroid Secret Service or at the bottom of a very long toilet when her legs gave out.

From what she surmised by the noises above, the hit squad was attempting to search every shaft and fissure. After their searches proved fruitless, they returned to abusing Zerkox. She winced at the sound of another whack on his head and wondered how long it would be before the poor lizard’s skull cracked.

Around the same time that she decided to give herself up to save Zerkox from a serious beating, her legs screamed that they wouldn’t stand the pressure any longer. She demanded one last effort from her muscles and pushed herself to the rim of the hole, grasping it with trembling fingers and pulling herself out.

She crept along the passage and at the entrance squashed herself tightly against the wall before peering into the cavern. The head thug was shoving Zerkox back up the ladder, his two sergeants waiting to climb up after them. One of them tossed a water bottle in the air, making it spin before catching it and tossing it again. They were bored, having found no human to kill or torture.

Her intention to surrender evaporated. She would fight instead.

Jen crept into the cavern. Her bare fed trod softly on the rock floor, and without armour, weapon, or even clothes to make a noise, her movement went undetected. She was curling the fingers of her right hand around the laser trigger within five seconds.

The first beam cut through the water bottle juggler’s leg armour, like it was Zerkox’s talon slicing through Jen’s bare bottom. A millisecond later it burned through his scales and sliced the leg off above the double-jointed knee. He crumbled to the floor shrieking and spraying violet blood. Jen leaned hard on one side of the contraption to re-aim at the second soldier. The beam hit him as he turned to face her, burning a hole in his thorax before he had time to bring his weapon to bear.

“What the fuck!” shouted the commander from halfway up the ladder. He beat a hasty descent, looking down to see what was going on. Zerkox, two rungs above him, let go and dropped, boots first, on the commander’s head. The senior thug fell on the bodies of his troops, and before he comprehended anything else, Jen’s laser hit him full in the face.

Fortunately for Zerkox, the makeshift weapon was drained of power before he landed in the firing line on top of his dead tormentor, whose menacing expression had been replaced by a less menacing hole, leaking brain matter and ocular fluid.

“Queen have mercy,” Zerkox mumbled, checking his scales for holes.

Jen walked over, wincing at her sore legs and shaking from the rush of adrenaline. “I think you were right,” she said, staring down at the three dead lizards.

“Huh?” Zerkox was still gathering his wits.

Jen pushed her toe against the body of the first soldier, who’d bled out from his leg stump. “They weren’t going to buy the crystal.”

Zerkox snorted a laugh as he retrieved his precious treasure and three blasters from the pile of dead bodies. “I owe you some thanks. That was very brave. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone take on a secret service squad, and you’re just a lowly slave.”

“Less of the lowly! But thank you also, for not giving me up to them.”

Another snort. “I didn’t know where you hid, or I might have.”

Jen frowned. “I’ll choose not to believe that.”

“As you wish. I’m more worried about what to do with this Royal Secret Service squad that you just murdered.”

Jen had the perfect idea.

Ten minutes later, the bodies of the hit squad lay submerged in human waste at the bottom of the toilet.

They climbed the ladder back to the control room. “What took you so long, by the way?” Zerkox asked. “To come creeping out of your hiding place and start firing?”

“I wanted them to hit you over the head one more time.”

Zerkox looked at her over his shoulder. “Sometimes you’re a nasty little bitch, you know that?”

She grinned.

—-

Chapter Five: You can’t choose your family.

“Well, can you fly it?”

They were sat in the spacious cockpit of the military dropship.

“Perhaps,” he answered. “A lot of the controls look universal. But the real problem will be communications. There’s no way I can fake all the right imperial call-signs and responses. As soon as we try to talk to anyone, we’re fucked.” He examined her in a fresh light. “And anyway, for all I know, YOU can fly it. Apparently, you’re a fucking military engineer. Albeit a shitty little human one.”

She wished with all her might that she could remember anything to corroborate that story. It explained her skills, yes, and her initiative. But memories of her previous life still proved elusive.

“So Mister hole-in-the-head claimed,” she said, “and I’d love to confirm it, but my first clear memory is of the cage, and some asshole Tuataroid buying me.”

“Who is still your owner, and boss, remember!” he grumbled. “That is, until the Royal Forces notice their commandos missing, and come with a hundred more troops to skin us alive.”

“Fair point. So, what’s the plan, boss?”

Surprisingly, he did have a plan; or the beginnings of one.

“This ship can reach orbit,” he explained, “so we don’t need to risk the security checks at the Spaceport. Once in orbit, we “might” be able to negotiate our way onto a cargo ship owned by some less scrupulous operators.”

“What do you mean by ‘less scrupulous’?”

He whispered out of habit when mentioning anything anti-royal “Well, the kind of operators who perhaps don’t wish the Queen good health before every meal.”

She smiled at that. “Sometimes you’re subtle. For a big angry lizard.”

“Fuck off.”

Too nervous about using the ship’s console for communications, he slithered back into the dome to scour the space network for anyone in the vicinity who might be interested in helping them make good their escape – in exchange for more credits than they’d ever set their three eyes on. But this time he stayed well away from the official channels, instead delving deep into darker social networks.

Jen spent the time examining the military ship’s controls and checking all its cabins for any signs of cameras, bugs, or other devices that might compromise their escape.

When he came back, she reported, “To be honest, I don’t know what that spy shit looks like.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ve hung around too long,” he said. “It’s time to get off this Queen-forsaken rock.”

“Did you find someone who might help?”

“Yes.” He buckled her in before she even asked for assistance. “One of my clan is not far away, with his freight hauler.”

She brightened. “Hey that’s good, if they’re family, you can trust them, right?”

His talons raked across the buttons that started the launch sequence as he answered.

“Hell no! It means we need to be on high alert. My clan are arseholes.”

The engines roared to life, pounding the landing pad with megatons of explosive energy. The ship rose on a column of fire above the dome and into the stormy sky. Jen was squashed into her seat, and she fought to stop her eyeballs rolling back into her head.

Zerkox flicked switches and checked screens. “While this ship has the power to put us in orbit,” he shouted above the engine noise, “it doesn’t have anything to produce gravity. We’re going to be weightless. If you have a messy reaction to that, keep it away from me!”

Jen braced herself for yet another new sensation – sure enough she felt her bottom lift from the seat and her breasts push against the harness. Desperate not to shame herself by being sick, she clenched her fists and held her breath until a wave of nausea passed.

When they’d broken through the thick troposphere surrounding the planet’s surface, Zerkox eased back on the power output and things quietened down enough to speak normally.

“Don’t forget, you’re still my slave. You need to act like it. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve gone cracked-shell crazy, especially not my clan folk.”

“Yes boss,” she said, reaching over to stroke him under his scaly chin.

He shied away, and the ship tilted when he knocked the steering column off centre.

“Silly bitch!”

They broke through Proxima B5’s stratosphere and Jen enjoyed a staggering view of the planet’s raging weather systems. From pole to pole, churning storms of black, grey, and filthy brown clouds converged with each other in an endless battle for dominance. Sheet lightning strobed in the upper atmosphere as each storm spat its contempt for the other. And through it all, far down below, volcanic peaks spewed fiery lava, burning rocks, and pyroclastic clouds of ash in euphoric ejaculations of fury.

“So beautiful,” she whispered, her face pressed against the cockpit window.

Zerkox, concentrating solely on the navigation panel, didn’t look up. “If you say so,” he muttered. “You want to go back down there?”

“Fuck no!” Jen realised she was starting to talk more like her captor every day.

Above the curvature of B5, black space dotted with a trillion twinkling stars. A small grey sphere sat off to one side. Jen blotted it out with her thumb on the window. She consulted the panels in front of her knees, adjusting the planetary display panel to focus on the thumb-sized disc. A label appeared next to it on the screen. It was Proxima B3 and a sub-heading accompanied the title. “uninhabitable”. Out of curiosity she checked the status of B5. Its sub-heading read “habitable”. Not big on detail, these Tuataroids.

The radio crackled to life, startling Jen from her thoughts. A static laden lizard voice filled the cockpit.

“Hey Zerkox, the signal is going to be real shit if you stay over on the darkside, you dumb freak.”

Yep, that sounded like his family alright, Jen smiled.

“One of my cousins,” Zerkox explained. “And not the brightest of them, unfortunately. But he’s our only option.” He pushed a talon down on the transmit button.

“Ranath, pay attention!” he spoke slowly and clearly. “Swing that shit-heap of yours over here.” After releasing the button, he sighed. “It will probably take him a while, but he’s going to notice our royal call-sign and realise we can’t go anywhere near the star side.”

Jen turned back to her controls and display screens. After some fiddling, she brought up an overview of the current traffic around Proxima B5. Everything held a stationary orbit on the opposite side of the planet. Various ships, satellites, and B5’s only orbital space dock all pointed their solar panels towards the twin Proxima stars that bathed them in life-sustaining and battery-charging radiation. One of those craft was labelled as a fleet troop transporter, with the Queen’s SS call-sign. The mothership to this dropship then.

She found their own position labelled; a lonely dot on the dark side with their own SS call-sign blinking next to it.

Zerkox glanced at her screen and explained further, even though she hadn’t asked. “We go star-side, and that transporter is going to send an interrogation signal and ask some very awkward questions as to why their dropship isn’t re-docking with them, which we can’t answer. We’ll be…”

“Fucked,” she finished for him, just as the static returned, followed by Ranath in a more formal tone.

“You appear to be in distress, unknown craft. We’re breaking orbit to assist.”

Zerkox grunted. A grunt that Jen understood was his version of a cynical laugh. “That’s Ranath trying to be clever. He’s still the idiot I remember. I suppose it’s not a bad attempt at subterfuge though. Nobody else over there is going to be interested in helping an unknown craft in distress, so won’t follow him”

Ranath kept up the act by warning the “unknown craft” that they’d be liable for the fuel he was using to de-orbit and reposition his ship. Zerkox noted that part was probably true.

It seemed ages before the cousin’s ship crossed over to their side. Not yet visible from the windows, but a blip on the navigation screens. It would be almost as long again, before it came within range of human and lizard eyesight.

“How long do you think before the SS realise something has happened to their squad?” Jen asked.

Zerkox squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. Weightlessness seemed to be taking a greater toll on him, than his human. He was constantly fiddling with his harness, trying to fix himself down as tightly as possible. “I wish I knew,” he groaned, “luckily that stupid atmosphere makes communicating with the surface extremely difficult. Usually impossible. So they won’t be expecting any updates until they see their dropship emerge.”

“Which they’re not going to see,” Jen added. “So, I wonder when they’ll decide it’s taken too long, and raise the alarm?”

“Sometimes.” Zerkox strained at his harness until a clasp popped off, pinged against the control panel and floated away. “You ask too many questions.”

Twice the length and a third wider than the dropship, Ranath’s craft went by the name of “Iron Egg”, according to the translator. She couldn’t tell if was made of actual iron and made a note to study ship construction for curiosity’s sake. The egg part of the name was a term of affection. Eggs were mentioned often in Tuataroid life. Often as the basis of an insult, but sometimes in a more positive context. Jen would learn later, that in the case of “Iron Egg”, it reflected Ranath’s view that he could never escape the thing; in the same way a hatchling couldn’t escape their egg if the shell were iron.

As the two ships’ docking ports mated unceremoniously, Jen and Zerkox stood near the airlock, each with an arm strapped firmly to a wall bracket to prevent them floating away, but their feet as close to the floor as possible. This ship would share the benefits of the gravity generator on the other, and they’d drop from any height instantly.

Through the double windows, Jen saw a lizard’s face peering at them. A face larger than Zerkox’s with less defined features. Like those on the lizards at the slave market and the SS soldiers.

Gravity ensued, atmospheres were shared, and pressures balanced; before the doors slid open. The first thing she noticed was that the gravity was less than Proxima B5’s. She caught herself thinking, “Thank the Queen for that!”

“You little freak Zerkox! What have you got into now? Do you know how much fuel I burned to come round here?” Ranath hissed as he approached his cousin warily. When he spotted Jen and took a step back. “Tell me that’s not a human!”

Zerkox stepped in front of Jen. “Ok, that’s not a human. And good to see you too, Ranath.”

“Oh, you are in so much shit! Haven’t you seen the latest despatches?”

“I’ve been a little distracted with other… projects,” Zerkox answered. “Can we get on board and get the hell out of here.”

Ranath blocked the hatch into his ship and showed no intention of moving. “You must know then, if you’re so keen on slithering off.”

“Know what?”

“Humans. They’ve been declared illegal by the Queen’s Council. Anyone caught with a live one is put to death alongside it. On. The. Spot.”

Jen shrunk back behind her captor, trying to make herself even smaller than she already was.

Zerkox puffed himself up, but still fell short of his cousin’s stature. “Yeah well, I’m not anyone.” He’d have liked to save the reveal of the warp crystal till later, but he needed to move things along, and fast. He pulled the blue shard out of a pocket and tossed it between his hands.

Jen wasn’t sure if lizards had very good bladder control, but the expression on Ranath’s face suggested that he was about to wet himself.

“What the fuck! You found a warp crystal? You really found a warp crystal? Nah, you’re fucking with me!”

“Actually.” Zerkox bent his lip scales into a smile. “This not-a-human found it. Now, are you going to let us come on board or what?”

“I’ll let you,” said Ranath, not taking his eyes off the crystal. “But not your pet. It’s a death sentence.”

Zerkox didn’t hesitate. “Where I go, it goes,” he said adamantly. Jen made another of her mental notes, to ask him to use “she” rather than “it”. That’s if they made it through this current mess. “And anyway,” Zerkox continued. “You’re probably already facing execution by docking with this ship. Its previous crew are dead at the bottom of a mine shaft.”

“Toilet actually,” Jen whispered from behind him.

Ranath snapped his gaze away from the crystal. “It fucking talks!” he said in wonderment, leaning forwards to get a better look at Jen.

His patience expired, Zerkox spat angrily at his cousin. “It does far more than talk Ranath. Now let us on board and burn the rest of your precious fuel getting us all the fuck out of here.” He paused to inhale before spitting again. “OR… me and my pet AND my crystal will take our chances down there. And leave you still facing death, except with no share of a warp crystal.”

Ranath, in Jen’s opinion, struggled with the logic of her master’s argument. But when he reached the obvious conclusion, he stepped aside and let them enter his ship. Jen gave him a wide berth.

“Told you he was slow,” Zerkox muttered under his breath as they made haste, following Ranath to the Iron Egg’s bridge. The corridor was not unlike the interior of the dome, with pieces of equipment and storage crates scattered haphazardly. The lights in the ceiling flickered the same way; it gave Jen the overall impression of disrepair. The bridge was the same, crap everywhere. Coincidentally, three seats were bolted to the floor in front of a familiar control panel, below a wide viewscreen. Proxima B5 rotated slowly on the screen in all its glory. Other smaller screens showed a view of their SS dropship, and various external images of the hull. The outside of the ship was in no better condition than the inside. Charred and pitted from decades of service.

Jen jumped into the leftmost seat. It enveloped her tiny frame, and her legs dangled from the front, feet not touching the floor.

Ranath looked on with curiosity and distrust as Zerkox strapped her in.

“How do you know it doesn’t have a deadly disease?” he asked his smaller cousin.

“Because I’m not dead,” Zerkox replied. “Now, I presume this thing has a course built in for P1?” He tilted his head at the navigation panel.

“Of course it does,” said Ranath, buckling himself into the centre, captain’s chair.

Zerkox looked at him, waiting. Until he couldn’t wait anymore. Ranath’s blank expression was making his lizard blood boil. “Well, would you set the course then? For fucks sake!” he shouted.

Ranath turned to the panel and swiped his talons across its touch pad. “I see your temper hasn’t changed.”

Jen had nowhere to go to avoid the argument. She settled for pretending to flick a bit of fluff from her left nipple.

All three were seated and ready when Zerkox snapped open his buckles with a, “Fuck!” and jumped out of his seat. “We can’t take the dropship with us. It will be broadcasting its call-sign, remember!” He threw the warp crystal at Jen. “You look after this; I’ll go grab the guns and other shit. Ranath, you better wait for me, or the human will spit on you.”

Jen, fearful of dropping the precious shard, nestled it between her legs – the only place available to her.

He raced to the dropship and emptied the cargo bins from the first cabin. He threw the blasters, water bottles, ration packs, and everything else they’d brought with them into the airlock.

If Jen had felt awkward before, it was worse now; left on the bridge with the larger lizard peering at her.

“So, you can talk?”

She nearly called him a genius but answered with a shrug and a simple, “Yes.”

When his amazement didn’t abate, she pointed to her headset by way of explanation. It was such a natural part of her body now; she hardly noticed it.

“And you don’t have scales?” Ranath had tapped into a human biology article on a console screen. Probably the same one that Zerkox had used when doing his research.

She wished her boss would hurry back, before Ranath narrated a hundred interesting facts and expected her to confirm them.

“Does everything need to have scales?” she asked as nicely as she could.

Ranath’s eyes darkened. “Everything that doesn’t want to be stabbed,” he said, sending a shiver down Jen’s spine. Best not be too cheeky to this lizard. Maybe he wasn’t as slow as he seemed.

Another eternity passed. But Ranath went quiet, finding another presentation on humans to watch while he waited. Jen thought he was likely looking for all the diseases she might be carrying.

Finally, Zerkox shouted from down the corridor, “Disengage it, and let’s go!” He arrived back on the bridge a moment later and strapped himself back in. “I’ve programmed it for re-entry into P5, but I did a shit job, so hopefully it burns up on the way down.”

They heard the docking clamps release the dropship with loud clangs and the Iron Egg’s engines firing up, as Ranath stabbed at more touchpads and buttons. “We’re going to do a gravity slingshot off P3, looks like,” he said, reading his navigation screen. “Should have us at P1 in forty-three days.”

Jen thought the translator might have glitched. It did sometimes mis-translate chronological terms, given that a day means different things depending on your point of reference. She leaned over to Zerkox to check. “That long, he’s kidding right?”

“He is not. This isn’t a royal warp ship.” Zerkox looked stern. “And don’t forget your place!”

Ranath was listening to them, peering at Jen the whole time. “It’s so weird, the way it talks,” he marvelled. “And why is it warming the warp crystal with its cunt?”

Jen decided it was going to be a very long forty-three days.

—-

Chapter Six: Scales of Justice

They only needed to be strapped into the bridge chairs during periods of extreme velocity change. This meant that soon after they’d escaped P5’s gravity well and settled into a constant velocity, they were free to move about. The most advanced feature of the old ship was the grav plates. Ranath kept reminding them how much that upgrade had cost him.

Neither the official nor unofficial networks gave any indication that the authorities were after them. Zerkox’s panic calmed somewhat. Although the Iron Egg was only a sub-warp ship, it was much harder to track while speeding through inter-planetary space, than it might have been in orbit around P5. They were no longer in immediate danger.

The two lizards argued about how many credits the crystal would fetch, the best way to evade the SS, and where they would retire.

Jen settled into one of the cabins after a short debate with Ranath, who preferred she was locked in the cargo deck. Zerkox gave up on the idea that she could behave like a slave. She’d become more partner than slave. He knew it, she knew it, and Ranath suspected it – and he’d know it too, after a while.

When he showed them both the cabins, Ranath explained that he’d had to dispense with the other two crew members because they’d become too demanding of pay rises and he suspected they were skimming his profits. He fired them, and borrowed credits to install automatic cargo handlers, and upgrades to the ship’s navigation and life support systems; so he no longer needed the good-for-nothing bad eggs. The credits he saved by not paying them soon paid off the loan for the upgrades. He should have done it a long time ago.

The Iron Egg specialised in sensitive cargo, like the spent uranium fuel rods it sometimes carried in its belly. He’d just ditched a stack of them into a decaying orbit around P5, when Zerkox’s call came in.

Jen wondered how many years the Tuataroids had been doing that, and if it contributed to the acid rain that she’d been living under. But like many questions, she didn’t ask.

Her cabin was a serious upgrade from the accommodation in the dome. She paced it out to be fifteen paces one way, and twenty the other. A generous rectangular room with a ceiling nearly twice her height. A bed unfolded at the touch of a button on a remote-control pad. She stretched her arms and legs out as wide as she could in a star shape, and still didn’t reach either side of the mattress. Being a tiny human in a large lizard world had its advantages. The remote served some other basic functions such as air conditioning, operating a view screen set into the wall opposite the bed, (that Jen was disappointed to see had quite limited access to content) and opening various storage cabinets. Ranath’s pride in his ship upgrades overcame his discomfort of being close to her. He had to show her the cabins features – and of course remind her what they cost.

“Fucking luxury for a lizard labourer, let alone a slave!” he declared as he handed her the remote after the tour of the cabin. “You must think you’re the Queen right now.”

A single internal door in her cabin’s far wall opened into a bathroom of sorts. The translation came back as a washroom and brief instructions on a machine with a hatch suggested it was used for washing armour or the protective suits worn when handling dangerous cargo. Jen didn’t think lizards washed their own bodies very often. She’d never seen or heard of it, anyway. But she could fit inside the machine. After figuring out how to fool the machine into thinking its door was closed, she ran the gentlest cleaning program and hopped inside, one foot preventing the door from closing. Ice-cold water erupted from a dozen different places. She yelped from the shock but forced herself to stay inside and rub her body clean. Climbing out fresh and no longer smelling of sweat, grime, and filth, she did indeed feel like royalty. Ranath was right.

An appliance intended for biological waste disposal took longer to master, with Jen fearful that due to her size, she might inadvertently flush herself down this alien toilet and out into space.

Initially, Ranath objected to Jen roaming around his ship without restriction. His point of view changed when she climbed into a ventilation duct and fixed an oscillating fan that had been producing an annoying rattle for months. He couldn’t hide his delight; the noise had been getting under his scales that much. In fact, unlike Zerkox, Ranath wasn’t good at hiding his reptilian emotions at all. Jen found it easy to tell when he was angry, for example, and was able to steer clear of him. Like his cousin, his moods tended to swing wildly. She figured it was a characteristic of the reptilian brain. Regardless, the fan repair earned her free access to go and find other maintenance tasks around the ship.

“It’s a slave, isn’t it?” Ranath asked rhetorically. “So, it should be working for us.”

Her favourite place, where she was found when not sleeping in her cabin, was the engineering workshop. Previously inhabited by one of the sacked crew, he’d left it in disarray. As well as being moody, all lizards appeared to be messy pricks. She spent a day sorting through the various machine parts, broken appliances, tools, and other miscellaneous crap that she couldn’t identify. Very soon the space became hers, with everything categorised and stacked or packed away neatly. Clearing the mess uncovered a nice long workbench, although was way too high for her to use, even standing, until she moved storage crates in front of it to stand on.

With the clean-up done, sweating from her labour she walked into the bridge where the two cousins were scanning the networks for any news of the missing SS squad. Ranath looked up first. “You’re leaking water,” he observed.

“It happens when I’ve been working hard,” she said, looking down at herself. “I think I can repair some of your broken stuff in the workshop, but I’m going to need my own tablet so I can bring up specifications and schematics.”

“Highly illegal. It was before, and even more now that we’re banned from owning you.” Ranath snorted.

Zerkox, without looking up from the news article he was reading, said, “Just give her a fucking tablet Ranath. Breaking that law isn’t going to make any difference if we’re caught. They can’t kill us twice!”

“Fine!” He got up and sloped off to his captain’s quarters, muttering, “Now I’m running around finding shit for slaves. Queen’s-sake, what’s become of me!”

With him gone, Jen was able to speak a little more freely, and she asked Zerkox, “Do you know why the Queen’s Council banned humans?”

Zerkox performed his best impression of a sigh. “Yes. I do. Some of your fellow slaves broke out of their containment on a slave ship. The Conqueror, bound for Proxima 1. They fought the crew. There were… fatalities.”

Jen drew a sharp inward breath and fought to keep any hint of pride from her voice. “How many of us… I mean the slaves, died?” she asked.

“Fucked if I know!” Zerkox squinted at her. “All of them, I’d presume. But I meant there were Tuataroid fatalities.”

Ranath’s return brought the conversation to an abrupt halt. He threw a tablet at her, hard. If he thought she wouldn’t be able to catch it, he was disappointed.

It was torture, forcing herself to wait until the “night” in the privacy of her cabin before using the tablet to search for information on the human rebellion.

The anti-climax of not finding any more information was depressing. Most of the report was redacted. Typical of anything coming out of the Queen’s Council. Some fool (the council’s words) had broken the regulations by transporting too many slaves on one ship. Thirty of them, apparently. And sure enough, the cunning humans had overpowered their captors and run riot, taking control of the ship for a brief period before the SS had arrived en-mass and killed the filthy animals. The council wasted no time in declaring a ban on all human ownership. It just wasn’t worth the risk. There were other beasts of burden for menial or dangerous tasks.

Checking time stamps of the various reports, Jen calculated that the uprising had occurred not long after she’d woken up in that cage on Proxima B5. Damn lucky for her. If it had happened earlier, she’d have been executed instead of sold to Zerkox.

But more importantly, it was clear that humanity wasn’t done yet. Her species was finding ways to fight. She fell into a disturbed sleep, her nightmares full of lizard soldiers tearing apart human rebels in the close confines of the SS Conqueror slave ship, trillions of miles from a ruined Earth.

Waking up worn out from the subconscious ordeal, she turned to the tablet without getting off the sweat-soaked mattress. Maybe she could navigate the dark unofficial social channels and find more information on the remnants of the human race.

By day thirty, they’d reached the gravity well of Proxima B3; the closest they’d ever get to the dead planet. The astronomical libraries on the network informed Jen that B3 was solid, cold rock. It had no molten core, and therefore no tectonic activity or plates. So, it rated a zero for the chance of warp crystal formation. And its atmosphere was not thick enough to capture any heat from the twin Proxima stars. Zerkox noticed her reading the articles as they buckled into their seats for the slingshot manoeuvrer. “She’s a cold, heartless bitch, B3,” he said, helping her with the harness.

“Like your Queen then,” Jen whispered into his ear slit, careful not to let Ranath hear.

Zerkox snorted his approval of the comparison.

While it lacked life-sustaining, or crystal-producing properties, the planet did offer a helping hand to ships travelling around the lizard’s Proxima home system. Its gravity-assist abilities were in constant demand, making the surrounding space the second busiest region for traffic, behind the P1 home world.

And this is what led to the Iron Egg’s detection by the SS.

“Fuck Fuck Fuck!” Ranath uttered from his captain’s chair at the warning flashing across the main viewscreen.

An SS Corvette, The Striking Talon, had identified the Iron Egg as one of the ships that left P5 around the dead squad was discovered. As such they were to abandon their gravity manoeuvre, kill their engines, and await a boarding party.

“I don’t suppose the Iron Egg is equipped with any weapons?” Jen asked quietly.

Ranath spun around in his seat, in the grip of full-fledged panic. “Oh yeah. It was one of the upgrades I bought… a big fucking ballistic cannon that will wipe out a Corvette that’s ten times our size. I just haven’t mentioned it yet. In fact, I don’t know why we’re hiding at all. We can take on the entire royal navy. Then we’ll install you as Queen. You and your pretty little cunt.” He seethed and spat saliva all down his chest scales.

“Calm the fuck down Ranath,” Zerkox shouted from his chair. “How long before our slingshot?”

His cousin spat some more before answering with a shaky voice.

“Any minute now, if I don’t cut power. But that doesn’t matter. SS Corvettes are warp ships. They’ve got a charged crystal embedded in that fucking thing. It will catch us in no time.”

Zerkox considered for a moment. “And if we obey and power down, how long before they reach us?”

“Oh, you mean how long before we die?” Ranath hissed but consulted his nav screen. “About six hours.”

“And how many crew is on a Corvette?”

Ranath wiped his lip scales and began typing into his console. But Jen beat him to it with her tablet.

“They normally carry up to fifty troops,” she said, keeping a wary eye on Ranath in case his unhinged panic drove him to attack her. “But the Striking Talon has no troops, only crew. It’s returning from a troop deployment on some moon called ‘Degantu’”

“Queen’s-sake! Is there anything that thing can’t do?” Ranath seethed.

“You mean me, or the tablet?”

“Fuck off human!”

“Anyway,” Jen continued. “Corvettes have a crew of eight to ten. And at least two will need to remain on the bridge.”

Zerkox unbuckled himself. “That decides it then. Kill the engines Ranath.”

It took Ranath a couple of seconds to respond. He cancelled the navigation commands and eased the power back. Jen noticed the absence of the dull vibration though the hull that she’d become used to. A quiet stillness descended over the bridge. Broken only by Ranath’s sniffing.

Jen watched her boss with no small degree of admiration as he opened a communication channel and informed the Striking Talon that the Iron Egg had been hijacked by a lizard and his human slave. But he, the captain, had regained control of the ship and locked the hijacker and his filthy animal in the cargo hold. He eagerly anticipated a boarding party. And by the way… was there any kind of reward for capturing the fugitives?

“You can talk some real shit when you want to, Boss.”

“Thanks… I think.” Zerkox unbuckled her next. “Follow me. Bring your tablet.”

They left Ranath snivelling on the bridge.

“Can you access the ship’s comms remotely?” he asked her when they were far enough down the corridor to not be overheard.

“Probably. If I have some time.”

“Well, you don’t have much. That dumb fuck...” Zerkox waved a talon in the direction of his cousin. “…Is unstable. There’s a good chance he’ll call the Striking Talon and try to give us up, to save his own scales. I want you to shut down ship-to-ship communications before he can.”

“Sure thing. I’ll do it from my workshop. If I can’t do it the soft way, I’ve got something that will do it the hard way.”

“Eh?”

She smiled. “A big fucking power saw. I’ll just slice through the electrical cables feeding the bridge.”

He snorted back. “Queen’s sake!” and disappeared down to the cargo deck to fetch the blasters.

-

Secret Service General Ogorarza leaned over the navigation screens of the Striking Talon after listening to the response from the Iron Egg. In his ninety years of service, he’d never heard a bigger load of hatchling shit. And yet he licked his dry, cracked lip scales with pleasure. They’d made his job a lot easier. If they’d run, the Striking Talon would have needed to use its warp drive. That would leave a massive ripple signature across near space and make him far more visible than he’d like.

Because General Ogo, as his few friends called him, didn’t give a cracked egg about capturing Zerkox, or the human. It was the crystal he was after. And not for Her Majesty either. Fuck that bloated old egg sack. This would be his reward for ninety years of service, trawling around doing her dirty work.

When his navigation officer suggested they ought to update headquarters on Proxima One, he ordered the officer to stand down. “We’re not updating anyone until we know for sure we’ve got them. You keep your talons off that radio.”

The general would lead the boarding party. Nothing suspicious about that. He’d find the crystal while his subordinates were killing the two misguided lizards and their filthy pet, and then he’d sneak it back to his quarters. SS records had files on everyone, including these dumb Queen-fuckers. Zerkox was nothing but a broke, washed out, miner. And his cousin, a retarded cargo hauler who thought he got away with illegal waste dumping. But Ogo hoped they put up a fight long enough for him to steal the treasure.

—-

The power saw option wasn’t needed to shut off the bridge comms. Jen found a software solution, and even better, revoked Ranath’s access to the entire ship’s systems. She kept the saw within arm’s reach on the workshop bench though, in case he came looking for blood when he realised, he’d been digitally castrated.

Zerkox returned with the three blasters. “Check these,” he ordered, dumping them on the bench. And see if you can operate one. You might need to lighten the trigger load.”

“These are kinetic weapons, aren’t they?” She needed both hands to lift one for a closer look.

“Yes, so?”

“So, the recoil will blow me backwards so hard it’ll break bones.”

Zerkox took the blaster from her. “Tell you what then, don’t use it. And when an SS soldier slices you open from cunt to chin, you’ll die knowing all your bones are intact.”

“Alright, no need to be so tetchy.” Jen grabbed the weapon back. “You wouldn’t be related to Ranath by any chance?”

“Get fucked!”

The relation in question stormed into the room, all three eyes wide with panic. “They’ve cut the comms!” he spat. “And access to the network! I don’t think they believed your stupid story.”

Jen turned her face before the lizard noticed her smiling.

Zerkox led his cousin away, doing us best to comfort him. “Look up all you can on that Corvette,” he said to Jen as he left. “It might come in handy if we survive the first fight.”

—-

The Striking Talon docked with them. It looked like one ship had laid the other, such was the size discrepancy.

General Ogg, accompanied by his two best sergeants, burst through the airlock with little care or concern for their welfare. In the face of such a pathetic enemy, they’d dispensed with military protocols.

Ogg sent one trooper down to the bridge, and the other to the cargo deck. The crystal wouldn’t be in either location. He was sure it was hidden more carefully than that, in one of the cabins.

Their lack of professionalism and failure to follow protocols meant that a quivering Ranath, hidden behind his captain’s chair, managed to shoot the first soldier in the leg. He could have fired a second shot, killing his foe, had he not decided at that moment to surrender. He shouted a ridiculous babbling apology, threw the blaster across the bridge and popped his head up above the chair.

The wounded trooper had never been shot by an enemy who then apologised. He found it a very confusing situation and dealt with it the only way he knew how, by raising his gun and blowing Ranath’s head clean off his shoulders. No longer confused, he still died from his gunshot wound a minute later.

Down in the cargo deck, a more cautious SS Seargent peered between rows of crates, stacked all the way to the ceiling. The flickering lights made it a Queen forsaken job, trying to see what might be lurking around the next corner.

Zerkox was indeed lurking, but not around the next corner. He was above, dropping a fully laden crate of engine parts on the hapless sergeant.

Ogg had heard the commotion from both brief fights. Shit! He’d only ransacked two cabins before the enemy were engaged and he was becoming desperate to find the crystal; to the point where he ignored his ninety years of combat experience and training. Not to mention the instinctive warnings his reptilian amygdala was screaming at him.

Therefore, he had not checked the rear washroom in this cabin. Nor did he notice Jen emerge from it as she bent over her bed, tipping up her mattress. The soft blue glow of the crystal shard under the mattress distracted him further. “Fuck me!” he whispered.

“If you insist,” a strange voice said, accompanied by the noise of a power saw starting. He spun around. Too late! He had time only to see a crazed, naked, human charge into him. The blade of the power saw bit deep into his armour. Jen put all her weight behind it to dig the blade deeper, spraying chest scales all over the cabin before it reached the lizard’s innards and then jammed into his spinal column. He coughed blood and sputum all over Jen as he died. The last thing he heard was her whisper…

“That’s for my people who were on the Conqueror.”

Zerkox appeared in the doorway, with his blaster drawn, and a second SS gun in his other hand. He looked in at the carnage.

“See,” Jen said, wiping blood from her face and dislodging the saw blade. “I didn’t need the blaster. And my cunt’s intact.” She looked down at the freshly filleted General Ogg. “But I’ve cut this guy a nice new one.”

They hastened to the bridge and were unsurprised to see that Ranath had fallen. At least he’d taken an enemy with him.

“Ok, to the airlock, fast!” Zerkox ordered.

He busted through the small passage connecting the ships, his blaster clattering against the sides of the hatches. The time for subtlety was over. Jen followed, hot on his tail. Literally.

—-

The noise that the two troopers heard as they marched towards the airlock from the Striking Talon’s side, was not their triumphant commander returning. As they rounded a corner, they were met by a rather small lizard hoisting two blasters at once, and a vicious-looking animal covered in blood and gore and wielding some kind of power tool.

They fell under the onslaught and the corridor flowed with their blood. Jen slipped and skidded in it as she followed her boss, shouting out directions to him. An alarm sounded and the corridor lights flicked off, to be replaced by a dull red throbbing. Someone on the Striking Talon had activated battle stations.

“That’s five down!” Zerkox shouted over his shoulder. “Can’t be too many more.”

Jen hoped like the logs she’d read were correct; that this ship had dropped off its deployment of troops. Otherwise, they were about to run headlong into a battalion of very pissed off Secret Service soldiers around the next corner.

The way to the bridge remained free of battalions, and Zerkox burst into it at full slither. Two crew members cowered under the viewscreen. A male and a female. They did not look like soldiers, and weren’t armed, so he fought his desire to cut them down with a hot stream of titanium rounds. Instead he growled, “Do not fucking move!”

“You.” He pointed the blaster at the male first. “What do you do around here when you’re not hiding under viewscreens?”

“I’m the Navigation Officer.” He trembled. “And she’s an engineer.”

The female lizard reached for a button on the wall, but Zerkox saw her movement from his third eye.

“Don’t even fucking think about it,” he spat, training a blaster on her.

A human voice from the doorway reassured him, “Don’t worry boss. They can’t call anyone. I disabled all their comms.” Jen smiled, waving a tablet as she walked onto the bridge, her body covered in Tuataroid viscera. Her feet made wet slapping noises on the steel floor as they left bloody footprints.

Zerkox noticed their surprised expressions. “That’s right, it’s a human. Sorry, SHE is a human. Not to mention a fucking scary bitch. So I suggest you do what you’re told, and don’t make her angry.”

He sat himself in the captain’s chair. “Jen, can you check there’s no other SS scum left?”

“Already checked. Nobody else onboard.”

“Good. You, Engineer, what’s your name?”

“Sytlia,” replied the officer and then added, “Sir”. An addition that Zerkox liked very much.

“Right then Sytlia, do you think the four of us can operate this ship?”

Her face brightened. That question meant she might survive this ordeal. She spoke with more confidence, “It depends on what your human can do.”

Jen rolled her eyes and Zerkox snorted. “She’s not MY human anymore. If she ever was. But regardless, I appreciate your honest answer. Jen here can do pretty much anything, don’t worry about that.”

Sytlia nodded. “Ok, we can operate the ship, yes. But if you want warp speed, I’ll need your… I’ll need Jen to help me down in engineering.”

“Oh, we’ll most certainly be wanting warp speed.” He turned to the navigation officer. “Name?”

“Notshi, Sir”

“How much does the SS pay you, Notshi?”

Notshi and Sytlia looked at each other with what Jen assumed to be expressions of resignation, before Notshi answered with a pitiful number of credits.

“Queen’s-sake, you crew this ship into war zones for that?” Zerkox spat on the floor in disgust. “I’ll triple it, if you get us undetected to one of the outer systems.”

And in true Tuataroid fashion, Zerkox couldn’t help but ruin the mood with a threat. “But you betray us, and Jen here will be sharpening her power- saw blade on your spines,” he said proudly.

“Deal,” the two ex-SS crew members answered at once, trying to avoid looking at Jen.

Zerkox snorted with satisfaction. “Right. Notshi, plot us a very convoluted course out of here. Sytlia – fire whatever weapon will vaporise that shit-box of a cargo hauler we came on. Then show Jen down to engineering and prepare for warp speed.”

Notshi turned to his nav panel. “Can I ask what the plan is, after we’ve eluded the SS?”

Zerkox patted his jacket pocket. “Well, I’ve got me a crystal I need to sell.”

Jen casually wiped some gore from her bare breast. “And I’ve got a rebellion to join.”

———

THE END