Pairing with the Protector Read online

  “What are you doing?” Rafe demanded in a low, angry voice. “Come back here behind me, Whitney! How else can I keep you safe?”

  “Don’t worry—they’re way too involved in each other to notice me,” Whitney reassured him. “And look—my hypothesis was right.”

  “Your hypothesis? What hypothesis?” he asked, still sounding angry. Whitney didn’t pay any attention to his scowls—he was always grumpy when he was worried about her safety.

  “Look,” she said again, moving away from the naked, rutting pair to make him happy. “Look at what the MMD says.”

  She showed the chunky silver gun’s readout window to the big Kindred and he frowned at the result. Rafe hadn’t known much about zoology or the equipment she used to capture and observe specimens when he had first started working as her protector, but he was a quick study and since Whitney loved talking about her research and findings with him, he soon caught on. She saw the comprehension on his face when he looked at the readout and knew that he understood.

  “They’re not sentient.” He looked up at her, frowning. “In fact, they have very simple brain wave patterns. Not much more complex than a domestic pet.”

  “They’re about on the level with cats or dogs,” Whitney said, nodding. “No wonder she didn’t answer me when I talked to her,” she went on, looking at the woman, who was still moaning and yowling like a female cat in heat while the man rammed into her from behind.

  “And no wonder they have no shame about mating in front of us,” Rafe said dryly. “Animals have no modesty or sense of propriety about such things.”

  “These certainly don’t,” Whitney said, frowning. “But if the humanoids here are feral animals with the brain waves of a house cat, then who built those enormous skyscrapers we saw when we were landing?”

  “Who indeed?” Rafe muttered. “And who—?”

  But before he could finish the question, the feral humanoids abruptly stiffened and stopped their mating. Both of their heads were cocked at the sky and both sets of nostrils were flaring—for all the world like animals scenting danger, Whitney thought.

  Then they pulled apart and ran abruptly into the forest, scampering on all fours into the underbrush as fast as they could go.

  “What in the world?” Whitney began but Rafe already had her by the arm and was dragging her towards the ship.

  “Come on,” he growled when she started to protest. “We need to get the fuck out of here! Something’s wrong—I can smell it. Something—”

  But before he could finish his sentence, a vast black shadow fell over them, blotting out the golden-orange sunlight which had been streaming in through the towering trees.

  Whitney looked up, shielding her eyes, but all she could catch was a vague impression of something blue and snake-like moving towards her. Then a rumbling voice, like boulders crashing to the ground said, “Pretty!”

  The next minute the blue snaky thing wrapped itself around her waist and she was pulled right out of Rafe’s hands while the big Kindred was knocked to the ground.

  “Pretty,” the rumbling voice said again. “I’ve never seen a Tweedle like you—I think I’ll take you home to show to Mama.”

  Eight

  Rafe watched with helpless rage as the immense alien, which appeared to have a long, flexible snout in the center of its lumpish face, plucked Whitney right off the ground and raised her several stories high where he couldn’t reach her.

  “Rafe—help!” she screamed but his blaster had been knocked from his hand and while he scrabbled madly in the tall green and purple grass, trying to find it, the huge blue alien was lumbering away.

  Giving up, he ran after them, doing his best to catch the giant creature who had Whitney in its grip, though for every one of its enormous strides, he had to take five.

  At last he caught up but without his blaster there was nothing he could do to make the huge thing drop her.

  Nothing from the ground, anyway, he thought grimly. Time to go up.

  Luckily, the vast alien was wearing an equally vast garment made of some coarse, faded red material which was draped over its lumpy blue bulk. Putting on a burst of speed, he grabbed for the cloth and began to swarm up the back of the alien’s clothing—if it was clothing, he thought—to try and reach Whitney.

  The creature was bipedal and walking upright so it was quite a climb but he made it at last and found himself perched on its immense shoulder. Looking down, he could see Whitney curled in a loop of its snaky appendage, which looked very much like an elephant’s trunk, now that he came to think of it. The thing also had vast, fanlike ears as big as a king-sized bed on either side of its lumpy features and small, bright eyes which were presently trained on its prisoner.

  Whitney saw him standing there, swaying with each lumbering step, but instead of looking relieved, she looked worried.

  “Don’t shoot it, Rafe!” she yelled, waving at him frantically with the one arm which was free of the blue trunk curled around her body. Rafe saw that somehow she had held onto her MMD—the clunky silver data collector grasped tightly in her hand. “Don’t shoot—it’s sentient.”

  “What?” he demanded. It was only a single word but it would have been better if he hadn’t spoken at all. Though his weight on its shoulder hadn’t made an impression, his voice did. The alien’s huge, fanlike ears twitched in response and the immense head turned ponderously so that its bright little eyes could study him.

  “Who are you?” a voice like crashing boulders asked him.

  Before he could begin to formulate an answer, an immense hand which seemed to have at least seven fingers and two thumbs was wrapped around his waist.

  “Hey—let me down!” Rafe shouted at it as it held him up to eye level to look at him more closely.

  “Are you this little female tweedle’s mate?” the inhumanly deep voice asked again as its head, as large as a small hill, cocked to one side to consider him.

  Rafe took a deep breath. Clearly the thing was too big to fight but he could understand its words, so maybe he could make it understand his. After all, the translation bacteria was supposed to work both ways. He was one of the few Kindred who had had it, though it usually wasn’t necessary for Kindred because his kind were so quick to learn native languages. However, now he was glad he had—there was no time to try and learn what the creature was saying when their lives were on the line.

  “I am not her mate, I am her Protector,” he said, frowning at the alien. “And you had better put us both down right now or you’re going to be in a world of pain!”

  The huge creature started and nearly dropped him, its eyes—with irises as big as basketballs—going wide.

  “You talked!” it exclaimed, staring at him. “Mama says tweedles can’t talk—you aren’t supposed to do that!”

  “We aren’t tweedles, we’re people!” Whitney shouted at it, but the alien only looked at her in apparent incomprehension.

  “Tweedles can’t be peoples,” it said decisively. “Nuh-uh. No way and no how!”

  The hand holding Rafe was fairly close to the trunk-like appendage which was grasping Whitney at that point so they could at least talk without shouting.

  “I think it’s a child,” Whitney said to him. “Listen to its speech patterns.”

  “I don’t care what it is—we need to get away from it,” Rafe growled. “If we don’t, the gods only know how far it will take us from the ship! We might never get back!”

  But how such an escape was to be managed, he had no idea. It seemed clear that Whitney was right—they were being held by an alien child and not a very old one at that. Unless they could convince it to let them go, they were stuck.

  Rafe decided to try reasoning again.

  “Let us go now or you’re going to be in big trouble,” he threatened.

  “You’re the one who’s going to be in trouble! Tweedles is not supposed to talk,” the child retorted. Suddenly the hand holding Rafe tightened until his ribs creaked. At the same time, he sa
w Whitney gasp and begin struggling for breath as well.

  The unbearable pressure lasted for only a moment but the message was clear—there would be no reasoning with this creature. It might be sentient but it was too young or too immature for them to make it see reason. They would have to be silent and hope that it wouldn’t kill them in a fit of pique. In the meantime, they were stuck going wherever it was taking them.

  They seemed to walk for miles. But after that one threatening squeeze which made Whitney think she was about to die like a hamster clutched in the fist of an over-enthusiastic toddler, the creature holding them was reasonably gentle.

  Whitney had begun to think it was a girl—a very little girl who might be around four or five if she was a human child. Maybe it was the vast pink dress-like thing she was wearing—though of course the aliens in this culture could certainly have males wear dresses or even all of them wear dresses. But it was more than the dress—it was the careful way the child carried them—Whitney still wrapped in its trunk and Rafe held in one hand—that made her think it must be a girl.

  Any little boy she’d ever known—and she had known plenty since her two sisters had tons of kids between them—would have either lost interest or squeezed them to death for fun by now. In a way Whitney supposed they were lucky—if they’d been found by a boy, they would doubtless be dead by now.

  Not that we’re much better off, she thought ruefully. We’re captives and even if our captor is a little girl, she’s a little girl as big as a two-story building who won’t let us talk her into letting us go and is taking us God knows where!

  She wished the little alien girl wasn’t so set on the idea that “tweedles” weren’t supposed to talk. From all the time she’d spent babysitting her nieces, she knew just how to interact with little girls. She was certain that if given half a chance, she would have had this giant little one eating out of the palm of her hand and even taking them straight back to their ship.

  But without the power of persuasive speech, she was reduced to the role of an exotic new pet or maybe just an interesting new toy.

  Xeno-zoologist Barbie, Whitney thought wryly. She comes with all the accessories—a broken spaceship, a rogue wormhole that she can’t even get to and even if she can it probably won’t take her home. Also a Ken doll who isn’t really her boyfriend—just her bodyguard.

  But that kind of thinking never solved problems and it was way too negative for Whitney to entertain for long. She was, at heart, an optimist and now she set herself to look on the bright side.

  True, they had been captured by an alien but at least it was a sentient alien who probably didn’t want to eat them. And the fact that it was taking them “home to mama” meant that soon they would be talking to a more mature, and hopefully more rational being.

  We’ll simply explain that we’re not from here—that we’re not like the wild tweedles in the forest and ask if they can take us back to our spaceship or at least let us go, Whitney thought.

  And then they would have to hope like hell that the parents of this huge little girl were kind and reasonable and not inclined to kill alien species found in the woods.

  Nine

  When they got to the alien dwelling, Whitney had a moment of sheer awe. The house—if you could call it that—was a vast shiny dome made of some kind of shimmering blue metal. It was etched all over with intricate designs which might have been writing or might simply be decorative—there was no way to know. There was a long, low entryway that ended in a round door about three times as tall as their captor.

  Whitney’s first impression was that it looked like an avant-garde metal igloo made for giant hipster Eskimos. Her second thought was to wonder how big the adults who lived in this house were. While the “little girl” holding them was as tall as a two-story building, her mom and dad, or whoever was raising her, might be as tall as a skyscraper.

  Speaking of skyscrapers, she now understood why the ones they’d seen while they were flying in to land had looked so huge. It wasn’t to house many hundreds of thousands of people—it was because the residents of this planet were so huge themselves. The size of the trees in the forest should have been a clue, she supposed, but despite the many alien worlds she had visited, such a vast scale had never occurred to her.

  The little girl pushed open the round door—which seemed to be made of blue frosted glass—with her free hand and went into the house. Before she was even halfway through the door, however, she was already shouting in her crashing boulders voice.

  “Mama! Mama! Come look what I found! Come look at these funny tweedles!”

  Whitney winced and saw Rafe do the same. She put her one free hand over her ear—she had lost her MMD during the big squeeze earlier—and wished her other was free as well. The little girl’s voice really was deafening.

  From inside the house, she heard a vast stirring, like a mountain getting ponderously to its feet. Then a much larger alien—this one about as tall as a five or six story building, Whitney estimated—came lumbering over.

  This new creature had a shiny dark blue hide, deeply wrinkled in places, and the same long, trunk-like appendage in the middle of its face where a human’s nose would be. It was wearing a long, cream-colored dress-like garment which came down to its wrinkled knees and showed short, stumpy feet that looked perfectly round with flat white toenails around the front.

  Like an elephant’s foot—or maybe more like a brontosaurus, Whitney thought uneasily. She remembered studying the fossil record of those prehistoric creatures when she’d still been in college. Some of the largest ones had left footprints so huge and deep that other, smaller creatures, had fallen into them and drowned in the collected mud or water. In one footprint, seventeen other fossils had been found, all hapless victims of fate.

  She doesn’t look like a dinosaur, though—neither of them do, Whitney thought. In fact, what the little alien girl and her mother most reminded her of were the Babar books she’d read when she herself was little.

  They were French books which had been translated into English, all about a family of royal elephants—King Babar and Queen Celeste and their children— who wore clothes and drove cars and ruled over a country whose name she couldn’t remember. They had been her favorite books when she was four or five—she’d used to pour over them for hours. The idea of talking animals had fascinated her.

  Well it’s not so fascinating now, is it? Whitney asked herself ruefully. Who would have thought I’d end up lost on an alien planet, trapped in a live-action Babar book and treated like a cross between a pet cat and a Barbie doll?

  A hysterical laugh tried to bubble up from her throat but she pushed it back down in a hurry. The vast face of the alien mother was looming towards them like a moving mountain as she bent to examine what her daughter had brought home.

  “Zhu-zhu, how often have I told you not to play with wild tweedles?” she scolded her daughter in a voice that was even deeper than the little girl’s. Despite her translation bacteria, it was a struggle for Whitney to understand her, maybe because her voice was on the lower end of the human hearing range.

  “But Mama, look at them!” the little girl who was apparently named Zhu-zhu exclaimed. “See their funny hides—it almost looks like they are wearing clothes! And this one is so pretty—I’ve never seen a dark brown tweedle before!”

  She gestured with her trunk, lifting Whitney up in a dizzying gesture which made her really glad she hadn’t had lunch before they’d left on their mission. If they had, she would have puked right there and then. As it was, she was rendered completely unable to talk even though she’d been meaning to reason with the adult alien at the first opportunity.

  “Why yes, she does seem to be very unique,” the mother alien acknowledged, looking at Whitney with renewed interest. “And I wonder who could have dressed them up in such cunning little clothes?”

  “I don’t know. I found them in the forest in my play area. There were two other wild tweedles but they ran away. These just
stood there. And Mama, there is something else…” The little girl’s voice dropped to a whisper—if the grating boulder voice could be said to whisper, that was. “They talked to me!”

  “They what?” For the first time, the mother alien sounded really upset. “Zhu-zhu, you must have imagined it! Please tell me you did. Because if you didn’t and these two have the Speaking Disease they’ll have to be destroyed. And I’ll have to have all the rest of my breeding pairs destroyed as well because you’ve contaminated our dwelling!”

  “Oh no!” Zhu-zhu looked as though she might cry and Whitney, who had opened her mouth to try and reason with the mother alien, abruptly shut it.

  “There, there, sweetums—it’s very rare, the Speaking Disease is,” the mother alien said consolingly. “And there’s never been a case of it on this side of the continent. You must have imagined it. You did, didn’t you?”

  Zhu-zhu nodded eagerly, her trunk bobbing, which had the effect of shaking Whitney all around.

  “Yes, Mama—I imagined it. It only seemed like they were speaking to me. I guess because they look so funny,” she said eagerly.

  “That’s good then.” Her mother looked vastly relieved.

  Whitney, however, was perplexed. What were they going to do now? She shot a glance at Rafe and saw that he was also stumped. But both of them were keeping their mouths firmly shut. There would be no reasoning their way out of this situation, she realized—they would just have to try and find some other way to escape.

  “Are they a breeding pair?” the mother alien asked her daughter as she looked more closely at Rafe. “This one doesn’t have the lovely dark skin tones of the little female but they might be a match for all of that.”

  “I don’t know, Mama.” Zhu-zhu shook her head, waving her trunk around. Whitney wished she would stop doing that!

  “Well, let’s take them down to the kennel and I’ll see what happens in the matching pen,” the mother suggested. “Oh, and we’ll have to take off those silly clothes. They certainly can’t get matched with those in the way!”