Adaptation Part Two Read online

  Ronan and Dax both stared at him blankly.

  She thought we were dumb beasts! Ronan and Dax both said at almost the same time and with nearly the same degree of disgust.

  She thought that she was nurturing, Ronan said dryly. It was no more than that and not the sort of bond that a female would feel for her own off-spring at that! She will not feel the same even that she did then because we are not the same to her mind.

  It was not just that, Jarek said indignantly. The humans develop affection for the creatures they nurture. They call it love or fondness or liking. She felt pleasure whenever she was with us. I smelled it. It was not the same as the pleasure in the mating bond, not as strong, but the same.

  You do not understand humans any more than we do, Dax said with disgust.

  I did not say that I did! Jarek snapped. But I have studied them just as you and Ronan have and I detected the shift in her scent and the way she behaved. She liked the female she calls Sissy. She would smile and relax whenever she was around Sissy and often feel amusement. As we matured, I often detected wariness and sometimes a little fear, but mostly pleasure. Around the others that came to the lab, her scent and her behavior was different. And she often thought that she was too fond of us. I did not completely understand at the time. I am not certain I completely understand now, but this body feels emotions. I feel them. And I think that I feel fondness for her and if it is the same then she would not want to harm us or do anything to cause harm to come to us.

  Ronan frowned thoughtfully but finally shook his head. Now that you mention it, I also detected the shift in her scent when she thought about feeling affection for us, but that will not matter now. She associated the way we appeared to her then with affection. We are different to her now and she was not just afraid that we would be destroyed or worried about the punishment to her for trying to prevent that. She was afraid when she learned that we had killed to survive. I do not think this affection you speak of will make a difference because I do not think she feels it now.

  * * * *

  It shouldn't have taken Kate five seconds to arrive at a decision once she'd reached the conclusion that the men she'd just had a wild night of fabulous sex with weren't men at all, but the 'missing' Sirians her government wanted to get hold of so badly. It no sooner popped into her mind to call security, however, than she was filled with dismay and reluctance.

  What if she was wrong? She'd be a laughingstock! She'd be lucky to get a job as a janitor!

  And they would kill the Sirians on sight.

  Quite aside from the fact that she still didn't want that, couldn't bring herself to have a hand in it, she could easily be caught in the crossfire and she sure as hell didn't like that idea!

  The impulse to call Sissy and seek moral support was almost overpowering, but she resisted it. It wouldn't be fair to drag Sissy into her mess!

  In any case, she had a feeling that Sissy would instantly insist on calling security and dumping the matter in their hands.

  Well, she knew what they meant to do to 'clean up' the mess!

  It wasn't right!

  Was it?

  It was against the laws of man to kill and the punishment was generally life imprisonment. At the very least, even with extenuating circumstances-like self-protection-they would be imprisoned for years.

  That wasn't going to happen, though. They wouldn't be tried. They'd been convicted and sentenced to death before they'd killed for self-preservation!

  So … if they didn't have the rights that humans had, and they weren't from Earth at all, or even human, how did the laws pertain to them when they didn't also protect them?

  She wrestled with that moral dilemma for hours, but no matter how many times she told herself that they should be punished for taking the lives of the men sent to kill them, it simply didn't feel right. No matter how many times she told herself that they should have tried to simply overpower them and escape, she kept remembering that they'd been trapped, cornered, and that the law of nature-survival-always trumped manmade laws in the end.

  If she'd been in the same position and capable of killing to insure her own survival, would she have?

  She thought it was entirely possible that she would have. She didn't think she would've considered the moral dilemma either-maybe afterward, but not in the heat of the moment. Afterward, she thought she would have suffered a great deal of guilt.

  She didn't think they felt the least bit guilty about it.

  But then, why should they? They'd been … kidnapped from their home world, and poked and prodded and studied-and then scheduled for death only because someone had decided they were a potentially dangerous species that shouldn't be allowed to live. Wasn't that in itself an act of nature? Hadn't they decided to kill because they thought the Sirians might be a threat? Or worse, that it simply didn't matter at all whether they lived or died? That they weren't important enough for their lives to matter?

  After a while, she gave up on trying to reason through right and wrong where the Sirians were concerned. She hadn't felt that it was right any of the time. She couldn't make herself accept that it was right now to kill them when she was responsible for putting them in the position of having to defend themselves with lethal force.

  She was the guilty party in this. She was the one that had to make it right.

  The question was how?

  The answer presented itself the moment the question popped into her mind.

  She had to see to it that they were returned to their home world.

  She didn't have the power or the means to insure that, though! She couldn't just waltz into the space center and demand it. She didn't think any amount of arguing their case would make a difference either. She'd argued until she was hoarse already and no one seemed inclined to listen.

  It was late in the day before she finally arrived at the conclusion that she was going to have to, somehow, figure out a way to sneak them back to their home world. There was a piece of that equation that she wouldn't have to figure out at all. She had signed up to become a colonist long ago. She was in the queue already and scheduled to ship out with the next transport.

  Actually, she was supposed to leave with the group that had just left, aboard Eden II, but she'd been bumped because of her project. She should be on the roster for Eden III, though!

  Assuming they hadn't taken her off because of the fiasco in her lab.

  As soon as she thought of that an avalanche of problems presented themselves. First and foremost was the problem of getting the Sirians to cooperate with her in getting them aboard and directly behind that was the problem of securing passage for them without letting anyone else know what they were.

  She decided to shelve those problems for the moment, however. There wasn't any point in worrying about those issues until and unless she had transportation herself. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived at that conclusion, it was too late in the day to get the information she needed.

  She left early the following morning to check her status. Without surprise but with a great deal of dismay, she discovered that although she was still on the ship's passenger list, she was on hold. It took most of the day to cut through all the red tape and get that hold removed. As accustomed as she was to the nightmare of trying to deal with the bureaucracy that surrounded every aspect of life, she was frustrated, exhausted and her nerves so tattered by the time she managed to get everything in order that she was in no mood to try to tackle the next problem-finding the Sirians and convincing them that they wanted to go back to their own world and that she could and would get them there.

  It was tempting to simply lay the matter out to them, assuming she could find them, and try reasoning with them straight out. The problem with that was that if it didn't work, she didn't have a fall back plan that was acceptable to her. She wouldn't have any choice then but to notify authorities.

  She had managed to 'bait' them up when she'd gone to the club and it occurred to her that that might work a second time,
but she was in no state of mind to attempt it after trooping from one department to another all day trying to get her papers in order. Instead, she decided to focus on getting her affairs in order for the move to the new colony. It was something that had to be done anyway, she reasoned, since it was to be a permanent relocation.

  The task, she discovered, was just the sort of thing to steady her nerves since it was mostly pure drudgery. Three days later she had pretty well wound up her affairs on Earth, however, and packed up everything she would be allowed to take and she was back to trying to work out a plan to entice the Sirians onto the ship with her.

  After a great deal of soul searching, she called Sissy for moral support and made plans to visit the club again. There was no reason that she could see to tell Sissy exactly why she wanted to go and she didn't think Sissy would be too keen on accompanying her if she did know.

  To her relief, Sissy was bored stiff and ready to leap at the invitation.

  * * * *

  Kate was a nervous wreck by the time she and Sissy arrived at the night spot. Fortunately, Sissy seemed to interpret her anxiety as nervous anticipation rather than pure old fashioned terror.

  It wasn't altogether fear-just most of it. Kate had tried very hard to reassure herself. After all, she'd not only spent a year studying them and never seen, let alone experienced, the destruction the Sirians were capable of, she'd spent the night with them with no more ill effects than a few muscles twinges from ….

  She preferred not to think about that, actually. Even allowing those thoughts to dance around the periphery of her conscious mind made her stomach feel strange.

  It disturbed her that it wasn't nausea from disgust. She thought it should be. They were an intelligent species. She knew that, but they weren't the same species as she was. It should make her flesh crawl to think about the fact that they'd not only been all over her, they'd been inside of her!

  It disturbed her a lot that the jitteriness in her belly at those memories seemed a good deal more like pleasure than revulsion.

  She didn't want to think about it, but she couldn't avoid acknowledging, in the most dissociated way she could manage, that she was probably going to have to experience that and a good deal more to get the Sirians back to their home world. She was the bait, after all-at least, she hoped/feared she was-and when all was said and done, romping in the bed with them beat the hell out of being eaten … up.

  She wished that thought hadn't popped into her mind because she could distinctly recall that Jarek and Dax's attentions to her sex had been mind-blowing!

  It occurred to her for the first time as she stood in line with Sissy waiting to get into the club-because she hadn't allowed herself to dwell on it before-to wonder how the Sirians had come to know and understand so much about human sexuality, let alone physiology. They'd not only hit every erogenous zone she possessed with deadly accuracy, they'd found spots she hadn't even known about herself!

  How would they know what to do?

  Instinct?

  They had some instincts going for them if that was the case!

  She didn't believe that. She supposed it was possible, but she thought it was unlikely and, unless they'd somehow picked the knowledge up from the humans around them, it couldn't be anything else. The one thing she was almost positive about was that the Sirians had hatched from those eggs she'd had collected and that meant that they'd had no chance to interact with their own species and 'learn'.

  So, did that mean some of the people on the space station had sneaked into the habitat to screw?

  That seemed wildly improbable. Not that she would put it past some of the personnel to indulge if the opportunity presented itself, but in the habitat? She didn't think so. With the exception of her and Sissy, pretty much everyone else on the space station had considered the Sirians a dangerous species almost from the first. They'd certainly been unnerved by them once they'd begun to mature and had grown so big everyone began to refer to them as sasquatches.

  They couldn't have seen humans interacting, she decided, so where did that leave her?

  Instincts.

  She still couldn't digest that, but since she and Sissy finally reached the door at that moment, her thoughts were redirected toward the hope/fear that she was going to find the Sirians inside. She was too paralyzed, she discovered, by the thought that they might be to formulate any kind of plan other than to look for them, but then she had been since she'd hatched the insane plot that had brought her here.

  She discovered why the club was so packed before she even got inside. There was a popular band entertaining.

  Her disappointment seemed way out of proportion to the situation, but she told herself she was relieved. "I think I need a double," she muttered, heading toward the bar for a drink as soon as she and Sissy got inside.

  Sissy sent her a speculative look. "Rough week?"

  "Mmmm," Kate responded non-commitally.

  "So … how did your night turn out?"

  Kate felt heat light up her face and then her entire body. She cleared her throat, trying to think up a response.

  Sissy laughed. "That good, huh?"

  Kate squirmed inwardly. She didn't actually want to admit that it had been a mind-blowing experience … in several ways. "I … uh … he was nice. His brothers, too."

  Sissy gaped at her. "You're not saying …? You are! You dog! Now I'm jealous! I ended up with dregs and you got … caviar?"

  Kate could've kicked herself. "I didn't say …."

  "Don't even try that! You just said they were all nice!"

  "Yes … but nice."

  Sissy studied her in patent disbelief. "I do not believe you had a foursome and it was just 'nice'!"

  "I never said I had a foursome!" Kate said uncomfortably.

  Sissy's eyes widened. "But you did, didn't you! Oh! You dog!"

  "Can we talk about something else?" Kate said irritably as she took her drink and took a big enough sip to choke.

  "But I want to talk about this!" Sissy said plaintively, taking her own drink and following Kate as she made an attempt to escape. "I can't believe you didn't call me the very next day and give me all the dirty little details!"

  "Uh … you know I don't remember it all that well," Kate hedged.

  Sissy snorted, choking on her drink, and cough-laughed for several moments. By the time she'd recovered, Kate had spied a small table near the back of the club. She made a bee-line for it, hoping something would distract Sissy before they managed to get seated. Something did-briefly.

  "Why are we sitting way back here?" Sissy demanded as she settled on a stool.

  "I don't want to have permanent hearing loss," Kate muttered. It was true. The music was deafening. Mostly, though, she'd lost her nerve and she wanted to hide. The back corner seemed the place for it since the club was so crowded.

  She told herself that it would give her a good vantage point to spy out the land and see if the Sirians had returned to look for another 'victim'.

  That thought dismayed her. She told herself that was only because it would make it hard, or impossible, to carry her plan through, but the jab that went through her felt an awful lot like jealousy.

  "I don't think you're going to escape that anywhere in the club," Sissy responded dryly. "So … have they called?"

  "Who?" Kate asked, trying to pretend she had no idea what Sissy was talking about.

  Sissy rolled her eyes. "Lame! You know who-Those hunks that picked you up last time we were here and gave you a night to remember!"

  Oh it was a night to remember alright! "Oh them! No. Haven't heard from them since."

  Sissy patted her hand in commiseration. "It's only been a few days. That doesn't mean they won't."

  Kate didn't know if she'd looked and sounded disappointed and that was what had elicited Sissy's sympathy or if Sissy had merely assumed she was, but she realized she was actually a little miffed that they hadn't tried to contact her since.

  Not that she could see them calling
now that she was pretty sure she knew who and what they were!

  She pretended indifference, waving her hand dismissively. "Oh, it was just a … thing, you know? I didn't expect anything to come of it besides a good time." She considered a moment and then added hurriedly, "or want it. I mean, really, you know I'm scheduled to leave for the new colony. What could possibly come of it?"

  Sissy lifted her brows. "So you are going? I thought, maybe, after that little incident on the space station that you might have changed your mind."

  Kate shook her head. "No. That little incident only made me more determined to go. I've been getting everything in order all week."

  Sissy chewed her lip. "In that case, I'm going, too," she said decisively.

  Kate looked at her in surprise. "Seriously? I thought you'd decided to stay here?"

  "Yes, well I figured if people were leaving in droves it would make things better here, you know? Thin the population so we could catch our breath. I think that's what the government thought, too. And it might … eventually, but people aren't exactly signing up to go in droves, if you know what I mean-despite the propaganda the government's been pelting everybody with. From what I heard, the next transport is only a little more than half full now, and scheduled to leave next week! And they've barely begun to fill the one after that. There are rumors that the government is going to start 'drafting' colonists."

  Kate blinked at her. "Are you serious?"

  "I'm serious I've heard rumors. I don't know how true it is. It could just be more bullshit from the groups against colonization." She shrugged.

  They would really be uneasy if they knew what she suspected! Guilt flickered through Kate again, but she shrugged it off. She was going. She would be in a position to study the Sirians and make a more knowledgeable determination as to whether they were dangerous or not and, when she had that information, she would share it.

  It wasn't as if anyone with half a brain wasn't expecting to encounter some danger and a lot of discomfort and inconvenience in colonization, regardless of all of the efforts that had been made to make things go as smoothly as possible.