“Sorry. It’s just, those monsters evenexistingin the first place is totally weirding me out. I mean, there aretrollson this planet? And dwarfs and those wolves with the six legs?”

“The fenrir. Yeah, I know. Don’t get me started on that insanity, Chen. I don’t want to think about it.” Aretha always did her best to not dwell on the supernatural monsters of the planet. After she was abducted by the terrible Gornt and was only rescued by Josie and Bragr at the last moment, she had been determined to get home to Earth.

The sun was quickly rolling towards the horizon, and the shadows were growing ever longer. Soon the sky would be a mass of stars much more impressive than any dark night on Earth.

“So, did you prepare your fuck-this bag?” Chen asked, straightening out her woolen skirt before sitting down on the rock.

The huge Vikings were generous with clothing, and the smaller Earth girls were able to wear garments that were really made for adolescents. It meant wearing colorful things, mostly skirts and blouses and dresses. And brooches used to fasten everything. The Vikings were very big on those.

“The first day,” Aretha said. “Gathered as many Viking items as I can carry in one of those leather packs they use. Stole a good few of them. But I figure, they kidnapped us and took us to a distant solar system. We’re entitled to some kind of compensation. In the form of obviously alien items that we can sell for outrageous prices when we get back home. Hey, you know we’ll be rich, right? Totally loaded. We’ll never have to work again. We can just lounge by one of our many pools, sipping margaritas from gold-rimmed pitchers, watching nubile pool boys cavort in thesun.”

A dreamy smile crossed Chen’s face. “I do like watching pool boys when they cavort. It’s going to be awesome. Yeah, let’s focus on that. Okay, are we high up enough now?”

Aretha flexed her fingers unconsciously. The neural lace that covered most of her brain like an immensely fine network of superhighways would sometimes make parts of her body tingle for no obvious reason. She had long since gotten used to it, and she was fine with the tradeoff. The neural net made her brain function normally, despite the cerebral damage she’d been born with.

Over the years the hyper-advanced lace had also developed other effects as it grew and changed along with the brain, steadily getting better integrated in the natural tissue. Now it made her better at spatial reasoning than most people, she had near-perfect recall of all information she’d ever read (but not heard, for some reason) and she sometimes saw connections that others didn’t. She was nowhere near Josie’s sheer physical strength, but she was happy about it. That kind of exertion took a lot of energy.

“Looks like we’re above the haze,” she said. “If we can spot the Sun, I mean the real one,ourSun, then we know where Earth is. Maybe that will be useful for getting home. I don’t know, Chen. I’m making it up. I just wanted to get away for a few hours anddosomething. I know the place is all idyllic and such, and we’re all treated really well, but sometimes I want to check that we’re free to move around. And anyway, they’re only this nice because Josie married their boss. Do you think they would have been this friendly if we were just random abducted alien girls?”

“We’d be their pleasure slaves!” Chen chirped happily in one of her abrupt mood changes. “That’s why they snatched us in the first place, I’m sure.”

“Probably. Fine, they claim they just got carried away when they saw Bragr take Josie, but I don’t know. I just notice the way they look at us.”

“They have a lusty glint in their eyes, that’s for sure,” Chen purred and shielded her eyes to look further down the coast. “I don’t mind that too much. I have a lusty glint, too. It would be worse if they found us hideous. Or if they were the kind of alien that looked like squids or something. But maybe I would feel differently if I had a persistent admirer like you do.”

Aretha reflexively looked over to the coast and the modest earl’s estate where the Prince of Ragnhildros was an honored guest. “Prince Craxon? I don’t know if he’s anadmirer. I know he stares at me a lot. He never says anything, and he pulls away whenever we’re in the same room. It’s like he avoids me, more than anything else.”

“I wouldn’t mind being not-admired by a Viking prince,” Chen said with a little smile. “Especially one that looks like Craxon. You know, we should get as much fun and as many stories as possible out of this. Imagine when you get home and you tell everyone about your torrid love affair with an alien prince! Sprinkled with some half-innocent pics and vids from that headset of Josie’s. You’ll be the hottest celebrity in the solar system for the rest of your life!”

“After Josie, who married an actual Viking king,” Aretha pointed out. “They’ll be all overher.”

“Josie? She’s never going home again,” Chen scoffed. “She’s gone native. You can barely drag her away from that husband of hers. Hey, it’s cool. He’s a smokeshow, not denying it. And now she’s pregnant, too. Think Earl Bragr will ever let her leave the planet with his kid and heir? No chance.”

“She may have made her choice for now,” Aretha agreed, knowing Josie better than any of the others. “But I wouldn’t want to be the Viking warrior tasked with keeping her somewhere she doesn’t want to be. They know she beat up a bunch of them before. Oh, finally.”

Straum set in the same way as it rose: with a flash of bright light. Now that the whole disk was under the horizon and the beam of particles wasn’t hitting this side of the planet, darkness set in quickly as the sky took on an orange glow.

Chen lay her head back and looked up at the stars that were already becoming visible. “They respect her a lot, that’s obvious. And they should, if they know what’s good for them. So, which one of these is the Sun?”

Aretha touched the headset on the side of her head. It was standard equipment on the space stationUnity,and she had been wearing it when the space Vikings abducted her. Coupled with her neural lace, it gave her the option to record anything she saw with her eyes. Josie had a different one, that had a real camera integrated. It made better recordings, but Aretha’s made it possible to focus better on things that were far away.

The battery was now only about a third charged, with no chance of recharging it on planet Gardr. She was going to be really careful with how she used it from now on. She had to only record things that would be of special interest back on Earth, so she could secure the best possible price for the videos she broughtback some day.

“None of them,” she said with certainty as she recorded the landscape below in the warm light of dusk. Here and there, yellow lights were sprouting up as the Vikings lit lamps and candles in their houses, as well as fires to cook their dinner on. “The Sun is too small to be visible yet. It has to get much darker.”

“It’s really far away, right?” Chen asked lightly. “Not just a few light years, but dozens? Or hundreds?”

“Something like that,” Aretha replied, not wanting to alarm anyone by saying that the Sun was over a thousand light years distant from Gardr. She’d measured the distance to Straum fromUnitybefore the abduction, and she had gotten a pretty accurate reading. “But we may be able to spot it still.”

Chen reached over to her pack and started unwrapping the food she’d brought. “Will that help us get home? It won’t, right?”

Aretha glanced over at her. Chen had been evasive about why she’d been on theUnityspace station in the first place, and the other girls assumed she’d been there illegally as some kind of stowaway. She was a mystery to them all, but she kept asking questions that showed a good deal of understanding about the most unexpected things.

“It won’t,” Aretha admitted. “I just needed an excuse to get away for a few hours. Maybe seeing the Sun will help me feel less… anxious? I don’t know.”

“Less of a prisoner, not so helpless, more able to affect your own life,” Chen finished for her. “I thought so. That’s why I volunteered. I needed that, too. I thought getting away from the aliens for a while might improve my mood a little.”

Aretha sighed as she deliberately panned her vision up the hill behind them, trying to make the shot look good. “Yeah. The Vikings are treating us well. Better than we could expect. But they did bring us here against our will.”