Page 10 of Star Mates

CHAPTER THREE

Emmarie waited in her seat, her fingernails biting into the arm of her chair. Across from her sat Logan, with his head resting on the back of his seat, staring up at the nondescript metal ceiling. Though there wasn’t any rust to be seen, Emmarie immediately sensed the Sunray was an older ship. The metal was tarnished, with wear and tear visible on the seats and bulkheads. A faint musty smell wafted toward her every now and again.

Was the word ship even correct? God, what do you call a vessel that can travel to different planets? Maybe Enterprise?

She bit back a little hysterical giggle at that thought.

Everything had been quiet for about twenty minutes, and Emmarie feverishly hoped that whatever or whoever the Kexians were, the Sunray managed to outrun them.

Pell Raiden walked into the lounge where they waited. His lips were pressed into a hard line that did not exactly say welcome. He planted both feet and crossed his arms, throwing off so much angry testosterone it was almost painful to look at him.

“We gave the Kexians the slip,” he announced.

“Wow,” Pikon murmured, coming to stand behind Raiden and stare at them. “Real life Earthlings.”

The smaller man’s attitude was the complete opposite to his captain’s bitter undertone, making Emmarie wonder how the two could possibly be friends.

“Stop staring,” she muttered, squirming under the intense stare from both men. “We’re not aliens.”

“Yeah, you kind of are,” Pikon told her, smiling a bit to ease the underlining tension around all of them.

Logan unbuckled his safety belt and stood. “My name is Logan Crusic and this is Emmarie Tice,” Logan said. “How is it you’re speaking English?”

“What you call English is the dominate language for us humans,” Raiden replied. He relaxed his stance a bit, leaning a hip against the wall. “But even if it weren’t the Merloni implanted nano-audio translators into your head to understand all languages spoken in the Amarante System.”

“It’s common procedure,” Pikon quipped.

Emmarie blinked and reached up with an unconscious hand to rub her ears.

“Are we in another galaxy?” she asked quietly. The heart of the matter lay in front of them.

Raiden turned his soulful eyes on her. A million butterflies erupted in her belly, disconcerting her because it had nothing to do with the situation.

“I can’t fucking believe you’re here,” he said bitterly. “I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been taken from your home planet, and brought here, to the Amarante System, about as far away from Earth as you can get.”

“That’s impossible,” Logan growled. “There is no way to travel that distance.”

The captain turned narrowed eyes upon him, sizing him up with a flinty look. “The Merloni used…I meant, use, a technology called the Slip Gate,” he said. “It creates an artificial tunnel through normal space, like a shortcut. They invented it as a way for the transplantation of humans from Earth to here.”

“How are they capable of doing that?”

“I’m not versed in the technical aspects of it but if you’re patient I’m sure I can find someone who is.”

Logan didn’t say anything, but he stared at the captain. Pell Raiden stared back.

“The Merloni were those green aliens?” Emmarie asked, breaking into the stiff silence. She sat stunned, her thoughts swimming in a vast pit of confusion and horror. Only certain aspects of what was being said filtered through her shocked mind.

“Yes,” Pikon answered her.

“What else did they do to us?” she asked him.

“Since you were in transport probably nothing, but we won’t know for sure without a medical scan,” Pikon told her. He walked over to a cabinet, opened it and brought out a narrow glass container that held a pink liquid. He filled two glasses that he grabbed from another cabinet and filled them almost all the way up before he handed them over. “I think you’re going to need that.”

She smelled the contents of the glass and caught a strong, pungent whiff of alcohol. Without further prompting, she drank about half of it in one swallow. The liquid burned as it went down, but after she got her breath back, she noticed her nerves felt a lot better. She held out her glass and he refilled it.

“Why us?” she finally asked.

“Humans were brought here for the slave trades,” Captain Raiden answered.

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