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I Want to Hit my Sister When She Watches Seventh Heaven (no offense to
those who like it!)
Beka could only shake her head. Well, she could also refuse to leave the bathroom, or take her chances and jump out the window to the nearby alley, but the first would accomplish nothing, and with the second, she ran the risk of someone else seeing her in this.thing. A band of densely woven, navy blue lace barely the width of her two hands together covered the essentials portions of her torso, while a silken sheath of the same azure layered until flimsy scraps of less opaque lace half-way decently hid her legs. Decently, that was, until she stood, when it proceeded to cling and very accurately outline her bottom half. Not having pants on irked her enough, but this!
"I saw that outfit, and I know I've seen less of you in the gym." Tyr's words from the bedroom were hardly sympathetic.
To distract him as much as possible from the sight of her and the hated nightwear, she began speaking as soon as she opened the door. "Tell me, why do Nietzschean women, with the notable exception of one Mrs. Charlemange Bolivar, feel a compelling need to bond with me? I mean, one I could write off as. I don't know, defective genes or something, but three? Just a little creepy." Her not-so-subtly displayed curves were under the bedsheets quickly enough to impress Tyr, as well as amuse him. The woman could breeze around in snug gym shorts and a tight black tee with slits cut around the ribs and even straddle him as they practiced hand to hand combat without blinking, but give her satin and lace, and she became worse than Romaron nun, cloistered from men since birth.
"You mean Madame Elimenne was not the first?" Almost immediately, the representative of the Al-Sharif pride had latched onto Beka like a mother reunited with her long-lost daughter and determined to pass along her knowledge and wisdom if it killed the both of them. Something about Beka's headstrong approach to life and the Pride's especially dominant matriarchy, from what he'd gathered.
"Sadly, no. That cousin of yours," she was still a bit miffed about that revelation, though she wasn't sure why, "and another woman I knew." Her tone softened at the end, and Tyr caught the past tense. He wondered if this was the "later" she'd refused to talk about earlier. She raised her eyes to him sitting at the foot of the bed, then lowered them as she gazed at nothing. "Don't get your blades in a tangle, but she was Drago-Kazov. Pavarti Quechua, female fighter pilot for the Dragan Empire. A nice way of saying infertile cannon fodder who could only hope not to shame her family any more than she already did by being born."
Tyr ran a hand through his dark hair. "Would you prefer her parents had killed her at birth?" He knew he sounded harsh, but he had an idea as to where this would lead.
As expected, her eyes flashed dangerously in the fluorescent light. "I would prefer that she was allowed a normal life, but that's too much to ask of you people, isn't it? You talk about how superior you all are, but you just waste half of that supposedly superhuman population and leave them pregnant and barefoot at home, while those you do let go out and actually do something are really only buying time until they're shot out of the sky and can't shame their families anymore."
Tyr made his way forward on the bed until he loomed directly over her. His voice was low and, Beka could barely credit, tender. She wondered if she were dying, and no one told her. "You have just answered your own question. I cannot speak for anything with complete certainty, but I believe they see something of themselves in you, or what they could be. You are.beautiful, intelligent, and most importantly a survivor, such as any Nietzschean female aspires to be, but also independent and spontaneous, as they can never be."
Beka looked up in amazement, anger fading quickly. "Wow. I didn't think I'd actually get an answer to that. Thanks, Dr. Freud." She sighed. "I can still see her face on the viewscreen, and I remember thinking that no Nietzschean should be allowed to look that much like me."
Something whished almost inaudibly on the windowpane, and before it even registered as unnatural to Beka, Tyr had slipped from the bed and now stood flush against the wall, weapon aimed for the glass pane. The sash rose mysteriously, and a foot appeared through it so quickly that Tyr hadn't time to fire a single shot before the seemingly disembodied leg kicked the gun to the carpet. Joke's on you, Beka though smugly. While Tyr had been all gung-ho to take the sneaky, assassin approach to the intrusion, Beka's good old-fashioned hide-behind-a-large-object-and-shoot method could've nailed the intruder as soon as more of it came into view. Her weapon was trained on the figure, but she let her arms drop when she could fully make out the stranger's visage.
She grinned. "And you people claim you're the superior race."
Tyr, on the other hand, grunted sourly, inarticulate for once, while Shaidyna's answering smile was every bit as amused as Beka's. "Why do you think I masquerade as one of you guys?" By this time, Tyr was reduced to a shake of the head and an eyeball roll.
The long, jagged scars on the woman's forearms led Beka to believe that the reason for her lack of bone blades was much graver than that. That she could make light of.whatever had caused those wounds raised her that much higher in Beka's estimation.
"If you are both finished," Tyr rumbled from the other side of the room, "I believe we have more important things to do that compare notes on the shortcomings of the Nietzschean people."
Awww, someone's just mad cos someone's wife might've had to save someone's six. "Six" was a term Beka had just learned and found herself quite enjoying it. She'd have to find a way to casually squeeze it into conversation. "See, that's why I married him. How many other Nietzscheans do you know can actually admit that their people aren't perfect?"
Shaidyna's reply was directed at Beka, but she looked straight at Tyr the entire time. "It really is a pity that he isn't the one destined to lead us."
Beka couldn't have missed that look had she been stone-blind. "True, but that's no reason to believe he won't have any influence on whoever is that Drago of yours born again." Shaidyna's face became too blank too quickly not to further arouse Beka's suspicions.
"Mmm, he does seem to get around enough for that." Now amusement flitted lightly over exotic coppery features and the tense indication of frustration settled on Tyr's slightly darker.
"All right, honey, we'll be serious now. How do we sneak away from here, get to my ship, fly it away from Planet of the Mafia, and make it back home without out Dheran friends suspecting a thing?"
Shaidyna nodded at the window from whence she'd just come. "They monitor every square inch of this place, but if you do it just right, you're on over a dozen cameras at once, which confused the hell out of 'em. They usually send a couple of guards up, but they won't know where to direct them, and between you two, I'm sure you'll pick 'em off before they pose any real sort of threat. Of course, having done this once already, I wouldn't recommend doing it more than absolutely necessary, so you should only take what you can carry and very little of it-the less weight the better."
Beka could have cheered. "So you mean I'll have to leave behind most of Rommie's honeymoon wardrobe?" Shaidyna could not know who Rommie was. "Maybe there is a higher power, after all. Long sleeves, here I come." She realized she was still in the NC-17 holoflick nightwear and sat down so hard she nearly rolled clean off the bed. "You guys can.work out the details while I go put on something a very very little bit less obscene." A mismatched cloud of fabric seemed to envelope her as she scooped practically every unworn article of clothing from the drawers and hauled it all to the bathroom.
She guessed the other two must have contrived considerable amusement from the mutterings that wafted though the heavy door that hid her from them, by the chuckles she swore she heard. Ungodly expensive scraps (to Beka's eyes) of finely woven, lushly colored silk and whatnot flew to every corner of the ivory room, followed by curses and invectives that would have made even Harper blink. A part of her mind automatically priced the garments, and she began to ponder bringing them along and discreetly finding a way to pawn them off at an out-of-the-way drift on the way back. With a sigh, she decided against it; doing so would only leave more of a trail for the Dherans to follow.
Finally, she settled on a leather outfit with a definite domination theme. Though much of her chest, back, and stomach showed around the almost wide straps that made up the top, she told herself firmly that what did not show was suitably and opaquely covered, which was more than she could say for many of her other options. At least she was in pants. When she left the bathroom, she could almost hear the rock music announcing her leather-clad entrance.
"Who's your mama??" she demanded as she entered the bedroom where the other two still discussed the finer points of the escape.
Shaidyna bit her lips and suddenly became very interested in her hands as Tyr's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to reply with what Beka was sure would be a characteristically sarcastic rejoinder, but he closed it and contented himself with an expressive toss of his hair, all the while muttering something Beka didn't quite catch about an Oedipal something or other. She shrugged.
The thing was shockingly easy to maneuver in, Beka discovered as she crouched down to throw some last minute items into her duffel. "So guys," she asked when no one volunteered anything, "what's the plan?"
The plan turned out to be refreshingly simple, rather like one she herself might have come up with. She suspected it had been more Shaidyna's than Tyr's. It seemed to Beka that the Divine had doled out more than the usual dose of common sense allotted to Ubers for this woman. Tyr was to make his own way to Beka's ship while she and Shaidyna made theirs together, doubtless because Shaidyna knew the cameras but not the location of the Maru, while Beka knew the latter but not the former. Or so she told herself as she tried to ignore the nagging voice in her head that insisted they'd arranged it like that so they wouldn't be leaving the poor, helpless kludge on her own.
After describing the route he was to take in great detail to Tyr, something Beka thought she could have followed just as well herself, he disappeared out the window frame.
"Hard to believe someone so big could manage to keep so quiet," Beka remarked after that someone was well out of earshot.
"Mmm." Shaidyna's nod was absent-minded, but her next question certainly wasn't. "Tell me, when we arrive at your ship, will I find separate quarters for you and your.husband?" The hesitation, if nothing else, revealed her true question.
Miraculously, Beka somehow kept her jaw from dropping straight to the floor was her mind raced. "Uh, actually, yes. You see, it's not exactly a luxury cruiser, as you'll soon find out for yourself, so, uh," even if we wanted to, Beka stopped herself from saying just in time, "yeah, we do have our own quarters." The next part she wouldn't have added for a million thrones if she even suspected it might possibly get back to any of Andromeda's crew. "That's not to say we don't share from time to time." Her voice was so loaded with innuendo, she didn't think even the purple Trance could have mistaken her meaning. Shaidyna caught it, and Beka hoped the other woman's stay on the Maru would not have to be one of those times.
Beka could only shake her head. Well, she could also refuse to leave the bathroom, or take her chances and jump out the window to the nearby alley, but the first would accomplish nothing, and with the second, she ran the risk of someone else seeing her in this.thing. A band of densely woven, navy blue lace barely the width of her two hands together covered the essentials portions of her torso, while a silken sheath of the same azure layered until flimsy scraps of less opaque lace half-way decently hid her legs. Decently, that was, until she stood, when it proceeded to cling and very accurately outline her bottom half. Not having pants on irked her enough, but this!
"I saw that outfit, and I know I've seen less of you in the gym." Tyr's words from the bedroom were hardly sympathetic.
To distract him as much as possible from the sight of her and the hated nightwear, she began speaking as soon as she opened the door. "Tell me, why do Nietzschean women, with the notable exception of one Mrs. Charlemange Bolivar, feel a compelling need to bond with me? I mean, one I could write off as. I don't know, defective genes or something, but three? Just a little creepy." Her not-so-subtly displayed curves were under the bedsheets quickly enough to impress Tyr, as well as amuse him. The woman could breeze around in snug gym shorts and a tight black tee with slits cut around the ribs and even straddle him as they practiced hand to hand combat without blinking, but give her satin and lace, and she became worse than Romaron nun, cloistered from men since birth.
"You mean Madame Elimenne was not the first?" Almost immediately, the representative of the Al-Sharif pride had latched onto Beka like a mother reunited with her long-lost daughter and determined to pass along her knowledge and wisdom if it killed the both of them. Something about Beka's headstrong approach to life and the Pride's especially dominant matriarchy, from what he'd gathered.
"Sadly, no. That cousin of yours," she was still a bit miffed about that revelation, though she wasn't sure why, "and another woman I knew." Her tone softened at the end, and Tyr caught the past tense. He wondered if this was the "later" she'd refused to talk about earlier. She raised her eyes to him sitting at the foot of the bed, then lowered them as she gazed at nothing. "Don't get your blades in a tangle, but she was Drago-Kazov. Pavarti Quechua, female fighter pilot for the Dragan Empire. A nice way of saying infertile cannon fodder who could only hope not to shame her family any more than she already did by being born."
Tyr ran a hand through his dark hair. "Would you prefer her parents had killed her at birth?" He knew he sounded harsh, but he had an idea as to where this would lead.
As expected, her eyes flashed dangerously in the fluorescent light. "I would prefer that she was allowed a normal life, but that's too much to ask of you people, isn't it? You talk about how superior you all are, but you just waste half of that supposedly superhuman population and leave them pregnant and barefoot at home, while those you do let go out and actually do something are really only buying time until they're shot out of the sky and can't shame their families anymore."
Tyr made his way forward on the bed until he loomed directly over her. His voice was low and, Beka could barely credit, tender. She wondered if she were dying, and no one told her. "You have just answered your own question. I cannot speak for anything with complete certainty, but I believe they see something of themselves in you, or what they could be. You are.beautiful, intelligent, and most importantly a survivor, such as any Nietzschean female aspires to be, but also independent and spontaneous, as they can never be."
Beka looked up in amazement, anger fading quickly. "Wow. I didn't think I'd actually get an answer to that. Thanks, Dr. Freud." She sighed. "I can still see her face on the viewscreen, and I remember thinking that no Nietzschean should be allowed to look that much like me."
Something whished almost inaudibly on the windowpane, and before it even registered as unnatural to Beka, Tyr had slipped from the bed and now stood flush against the wall, weapon aimed for the glass pane. The sash rose mysteriously, and a foot appeared through it so quickly that Tyr hadn't time to fire a single shot before the seemingly disembodied leg kicked the gun to the carpet. Joke's on you, Beka though smugly. While Tyr had been all gung-ho to take the sneaky, assassin approach to the intrusion, Beka's good old-fashioned hide-behind-a-large-object-and-shoot method could've nailed the intruder as soon as more of it came into view. Her weapon was trained on the figure, but she let her arms drop when she could fully make out the stranger's visage.
She grinned. "And you people claim you're the superior race."
Tyr, on the other hand, grunted sourly, inarticulate for once, while Shaidyna's answering smile was every bit as amused as Beka's. "Why do you think I masquerade as one of you guys?" By this time, Tyr was reduced to a shake of the head and an eyeball roll.
The long, jagged scars on the woman's forearms led Beka to believe that the reason for her lack of bone blades was much graver than that. That she could make light of.whatever had caused those wounds raised her that much higher in Beka's estimation.
"If you are both finished," Tyr rumbled from the other side of the room, "I believe we have more important things to do that compare notes on the shortcomings of the Nietzschean people."
Awww, someone's just mad cos someone's wife might've had to save someone's six. "Six" was a term Beka had just learned and found herself quite enjoying it. She'd have to find a way to casually squeeze it into conversation. "See, that's why I married him. How many other Nietzscheans do you know can actually admit that their people aren't perfect?"
Shaidyna's reply was directed at Beka, but she looked straight at Tyr the entire time. "It really is a pity that he isn't the one destined to lead us."
Beka couldn't have missed that look had she been stone-blind. "True, but that's no reason to believe he won't have any influence on whoever is that Drago of yours born again." Shaidyna's face became too blank too quickly not to further arouse Beka's suspicions.
"Mmm, he does seem to get around enough for that." Now amusement flitted lightly over exotic coppery features and the tense indication of frustration settled on Tyr's slightly darker.
"All right, honey, we'll be serious now. How do we sneak away from here, get to my ship, fly it away from Planet of the Mafia, and make it back home without out Dheran friends suspecting a thing?"
Shaidyna nodded at the window from whence she'd just come. "They monitor every square inch of this place, but if you do it just right, you're on over a dozen cameras at once, which confused the hell out of 'em. They usually send a couple of guards up, but they won't know where to direct them, and between you two, I'm sure you'll pick 'em off before they pose any real sort of threat. Of course, having done this once already, I wouldn't recommend doing it more than absolutely necessary, so you should only take what you can carry and very little of it-the less weight the better."
Beka could have cheered. "So you mean I'll have to leave behind most of Rommie's honeymoon wardrobe?" Shaidyna could not know who Rommie was. "Maybe there is a higher power, after all. Long sleeves, here I come." She realized she was still in the NC-17 holoflick nightwear and sat down so hard she nearly rolled clean off the bed. "You guys can.work out the details while I go put on something a very very little bit less obscene." A mismatched cloud of fabric seemed to envelope her as she scooped practically every unworn article of clothing from the drawers and hauled it all to the bathroom.
She guessed the other two must have contrived considerable amusement from the mutterings that wafted though the heavy door that hid her from them, by the chuckles she swore she heard. Ungodly expensive scraps (to Beka's eyes) of finely woven, lushly colored silk and whatnot flew to every corner of the ivory room, followed by curses and invectives that would have made even Harper blink. A part of her mind automatically priced the garments, and she began to ponder bringing them along and discreetly finding a way to pawn them off at an out-of-the-way drift on the way back. With a sigh, she decided against it; doing so would only leave more of a trail for the Dherans to follow.
Finally, she settled on a leather outfit with a definite domination theme. Though much of her chest, back, and stomach showed around the almost wide straps that made up the top, she told herself firmly that what did not show was suitably and opaquely covered, which was more than she could say for many of her other options. At least she was in pants. When she left the bathroom, she could almost hear the rock music announcing her leather-clad entrance.
"Who's your mama??" she demanded as she entered the bedroom where the other two still discussed the finer points of the escape.
Shaidyna bit her lips and suddenly became very interested in her hands as Tyr's eyes widened. He opened his mouth to reply with what Beka was sure would be a characteristically sarcastic rejoinder, but he closed it and contented himself with an expressive toss of his hair, all the while muttering something Beka didn't quite catch about an Oedipal something or other. She shrugged.
The thing was shockingly easy to maneuver in, Beka discovered as she crouched down to throw some last minute items into her duffel. "So guys," she asked when no one volunteered anything, "what's the plan?"
The plan turned out to be refreshingly simple, rather like one she herself might have come up with. She suspected it had been more Shaidyna's than Tyr's. It seemed to Beka that the Divine had doled out more than the usual dose of common sense allotted to Ubers for this woman. Tyr was to make his own way to Beka's ship while she and Shaidyna made theirs together, doubtless because Shaidyna knew the cameras but not the location of the Maru, while Beka knew the latter but not the former. Or so she told herself as she tried to ignore the nagging voice in her head that insisted they'd arranged it like that so they wouldn't be leaving the poor, helpless kludge on her own.
After describing the route he was to take in great detail to Tyr, something Beka thought she could have followed just as well herself, he disappeared out the window frame.
"Hard to believe someone so big could manage to keep so quiet," Beka remarked after that someone was well out of earshot.
"Mmm." Shaidyna's nod was absent-minded, but her next question certainly wasn't. "Tell me, when we arrive at your ship, will I find separate quarters for you and your.husband?" The hesitation, if nothing else, revealed her true question.
Miraculously, Beka somehow kept her jaw from dropping straight to the floor was her mind raced. "Uh, actually, yes. You see, it's not exactly a luxury cruiser, as you'll soon find out for yourself, so, uh," even if we wanted to, Beka stopped herself from saying just in time, "yeah, we do have our own quarters." The next part she wouldn't have added for a million thrones if she even suspected it might possibly get back to any of Andromeda's crew. "That's not to say we don't share from time to time." Her voice was so loaded with innuendo, she didn't think even the purple Trance could have mistaken her meaning. Shaidyna caught it, and Beka hoped the other woman's stay on the Maru would not have to be one of those times.