Page 60 of Bred

“Give it back.” He holds out his big, gloved hand.

“Give what back?”

“You know damn well what,” he growls. “I saw you take the key from my console. That accesses the ship’s main computer system. You are not to have it and you know it.”

“But I saved the ship, so it’s my ship...ow!”

Shank has swatted me again. My ongoing insistence that Virility is mine is beginning to wear thin, I think. Neither of them look amused.

“It is not your ship, and considering your problem with impulse control, you will absolutely not be allowed into sensitive areas.”

“Maybe you won’t be allowed into mysensitive areas,” I retort.

“I will make you sensitive, girl,” Talon threatens. Usually it is Shank who imparts discipline, but I’ve been pushing Talon more. The captain is often more busy than Shank, and sometimes I find that failing to follow the rules gets me more attention than being a good little human specimen does.

“It might be time to find her a distraction,” Shank says, speaking over my head.

“You mean we should wake him up?”

“Oh, I think so. Unless you want to keep chasing her around the ship at all hours of the day and night.”

Talon nods. “Very well,” he says. “We’ll wake him.”

“Wake who? Is it someone scarier than you two? Is this some kind of threat? Am I supposed to be afraid of him? Because you know, the memory loss makes that kind of hard to get too wound up about.”

“You’ll see,” Talon says. “Shank, take her to my quarters. I’ll have him meet us there.”

I am not allowed out of Shank’s grasp all the way back. He holds me and marches me along at a pace that forces me to damn near trot to keep up with him. He likes me, but I know he doesn’t like the chaos that is unleashed whenever I’m around. I get the idea this ship is usually run with near military-style precision, but I did my time following orders and I’ll be damned if I fled Earth just to follow more stupid rules.

“I can walk!”

“I know you can walk. I just don’t trust you to walk.”

“Well, that’s rude.”

“No, it isn’t,” Shank counters. “And there’s no point arguing. I know you’re just doing this for attention. Ever since you came back on board you’ve been going out of your way to test the captain and me.”

“So now you’re going to wake the Kraken, huh. What does he have? Three heads and twelve dicks, one for every month of the year?” I dig my feet in and lean back to make it harder to march me along, but that makes no difference to Shank, who pulls me up and over his shoulder and just keeps going almost without breaking stride.

I laugh as I am carried. My ass is stinging a little, but not nearly as much as it could be. I know they are showing me leniency, and I intend to push that to its limits, just to find out what is under it.

* * *

Talon

We discussed what to do with Luca once Lyra was gone. After she left the ship, he deactivated himself in misery, and we considered decommissioning him permanently. He was a tool that had served its purpose, and recycling raw material from such tools is standard practice.

Something about it felt wrong. To us, Luca is a tool. To Lyra, he was a friend, confidante, and ardent lover. So we left him in storage, and now it is time to wake him up.

He looks so peaceful, lying in the complete sleep of a cyborg. He’s not aware of the passing of the year, though his internal systems will update him on the current time when he awakes.

“Luca. Activate.”

His eyes open.

“Lyra.”

The first word out of his mouth is her name. For him, it has only been a matter of hours since we surrendered her to Earth. The pain is as fresh as it can be for him.

---