GOM 3, chapter 2 (Patreon)

Chapter 2

Regi opened the door to see Dante sprawled across his bed. Because the Coalition ship required a curved cradle that the Kowri Empire dock did not possess, the room, including Dante’s bed, was at a thirty-degree angle.

That seemed rather appropriate at this exact moment. Dante lay on his back with his butt off the mattress and one hand flung wide, his hand with its odd number of digits clutched narrowest part of a bottle. Regi was going to kill Merbol for giving Dante alcohol or Bevti for not confiscating it or Vk for making him deal with this. “How are you doing?” Regi asked.

Dante tilted his head to one side and smiled broadly. “Regi! My partner in crime! My buddy! Your people make some damn good booze. You could make a hell the living bottling this stuff back home.” He lifted the bottle.

“If my career as a Coalition security officer or as a Kowri exalted ends, I will consider your suggestion.” Regi looked around the room wondering where he should sit. This was the room where the pirates had once kept the captured dops, poisonous hedgehogs they had harvested in order to use their poison for new designer drugs. No doubt the pirates had thought themselves clever for stealing from the Kowri Empire. After all, the Empire was known for destroying any ship that crossed their borders, and the pirates had stolen enough dops to start their own breeding program.

Unfortunately for the pirates, they, like the rest of the Coalition, had discounted the existence of Kowri gods. The Lady Divashi, goddess of poisons and new beginnings had taken particular offense to having her dops stolen. It was her intervention that had turned both Regi and Dante into exalteds.

Of course, many Kowri still refused to believe that an outsider would be chosen to serve the gods. They would place Dante in the same category as the pirates who had stolen him from his home planet to use him as a slave, and then condemn them all as outside the blessings of the gods. However, those individuals had mostly chosen to remain silent rather than anger a goddess famous for killing her enemies in horrific ways.

But now all but two of the dops had moved on. Peaches, the elderly female that Dante had inexplicably named after sweet tree fruits, and a much smaller male that remained ardent in his attempts to impress the lady and earn her favor. As the other dops had left, Dante had moved their cages out, but he had not obtained any additional furniture. It meant that the bed was literally the only place to sit.

So Regi had a choice of standing over Dante or sitting on the bed next to him as he sprawled. The first was awkward; the second, dangerous.

“So who ratted me out?” Dante asked

Regi chose farthest corner of the bed and perched on a tiny fraction of it. “Your verb did not translate.”

“Ratted? It means to tell others something that they have no right to know. It means to be like a rat with their beady little eyes their naked tails.” He gave a breathy laugh.

“No one on this ship has a naked tail,” Regi said.

“Exactly,” Dante cried out triumphantly before he jostled the bottle enough to make the contents slosh. “And that is why you should not be a rats because rats have naked tails and you would look really funny with a naked tail.”

Regi wondered if this was some mythology humans indulged in, some folk tale intended to teach a lesson Regi did not understand. Or perhaps Dante's people were capable of physical change depending on their dominant personality traits, such as willingness to tell others information. But that was a conversation to have with Bevit at another time. Regi had discovered that Dante sometimes like to make implausible comments and then delight in the confusion of others when they took him seriously, so he refused to ask him for clarification.

“Why are you drinking?”

“Why wouldn't I drink?”

“Because you never have before,” Regi said, although he wondered if this wasn’t Dante’s first opportunity to imbibe. If Regi had any authority on the ship, it would be his last. Regi could not handle having this temptation on the ship.

“That you know of,” Dante said in triumph before he descended into mad giggles. Regi waited. Dante had too much facility with manipulating the translator, so getting information out of him when he didn't want to share it was impossible. It might be compared to trying to tie a bow on a freio.

After many long moments of silence, Dante said, “Vk is good with numbers.”

“Is she?” Regi would compliment Vk on her interrogation technique on her ability to de-escalate conflicts, on her encyclopedic memory of various species, and her calm under pressure. However, he had never known her to be particularly good with numbers. That was more Ter and his crew.

“Yep,” Dante said. Even though he was laying flat on his back, he raised one finger into the air and pointed at the ceiling in a gesture that Regi had no hope of interpreting.

“What numbers does she show skill in manipulating?”

“Did you know that our day on Earth and your day on whatever world this is are about the same length?”

“Are they?” Many planets had similar orbits because the viable zone in a solar system was narrow. A similar orbit mandated a similar length of day.

“Yes,” Dante said, the word exploding out of him with surprising volume. For a species with the anatomical glitch of requiring the air structures and the food structures to share the same tube for a period of time, he was very capable of generating volume. “When I first got grabbed, I couldn't sleep on the ship. There was no sense of day or night or morning or sunrises or… What was I saying?” Dante blinked in confusion.

“Vk and her numbers.”

Dante looked startled. “Oh yeah. I struggled with sleep cycles. But since I've been here, it's really easy to adjust to day and night. I can sleep through the night for the first time in I now know exactly how long.”

Living in captivity was, no doubt, inimical to a healthy sleep schedule. “I don't understand what this has to do with Vk and numbers,” Regi said.

Dante sat up fast and then clung to the edge of his mattress with both hands. “I don't feel so well.”

Regi tensed. “Do you need to go to the doctor?”

“No, but I think I should not be vertical.” Dante swung his body around in the opposite direction and then dropped back down so that his head was in Regi's lap.

Regi froze, horror keeping him immobile when decency would have mandated he flee the room. He definitely did not possess this much self-control. To make matters worse, Dante started stroking Regi’s arm. Those long, delicate fingers tickled Regi’s skin for a time before he stopped and his single thumb traced circles that sent shivers through Regi.

“So, Vk and her numbers,” Dante said, clearly oblivious about the effect he was having on Regi. “I asked Vk to take the numbers that I know. There are thirty and a half days in a month and there are twelve months in a year, and I asked her to look at the ship’s data and tell me how long I had been on the ship if we assume a Kowri day and an Earth day are close enough for government work.”

“Government work?” Regi asked weakly as he scrambled for anything to distract himself from Dante’s warm touch against his body.

“Government work,” Dante said again, but this time the sounds were so slurred that the translator could not properly interpret them. Regi could only tell what he had said because the mouth sounds mimicked the ones Dante had just pronounced.

“I have been on that ship for nineteen months,” Dante said in a tiny voice.

Regi winced. That was a significant period of time. “I am sorry you have suffered so much. I wish Divashi could have led us to you sooner.”

Dante shook his head once and then grabbed onto Regi's arm with both hands and breathed deeply for several minutes. “Don't say that. If you had come earlier, it might not have worked out. Maybe the pirates would've come back sooner and then your whole crew would have died and then I would be in space until I couldn't do it anymore and I asked Peaches to stab me. Do you think Peaches would've stabbed me if I'd asked her to?” Dante looked at the fat dop currently licking her own belly.

Given that dops carried out the will of the goddess Divashi and the goddess loved Dante enough to save him from slavery, Regi expected she would have if death had been the only escape. He was endowed with infinite gratitude that the Lady had found another way to save all of them, even if it meant that their original Coalition ship had gotten sucked into a black hole.

“So anyway,” Dante said, “eighteen months. That means I had my twenty-first birthday and I can now legally drink. Getting drunk on your twenty-first birthday is a rite of passage.”

That did explain the situation. Dante might not indulge in mind-altering substances himself, but very few individuals eschewed the rites of passage of their own species, not even when they left their home planet of their own volition, like Regi had.

But Dante had been ripped from his world, so his rites and beliefs would be even more dear to him. “Is there any way I can assist in this rite of the twenty-first birthday,” Regi asked. He understood that this was the final boundary between growth years and adult years, and he mourned that it had passed on a slave ship with no one to mark such a momentous occasion.

Dante’s chest spasmed and his breathing made an odd cut-off sound that terrified Regi for the half second it took Dante to start speaking. “I think I'm a bad person.”

“You most certainly are not.” Regi believed that with all his heart. Dante had stood beside Regi when they had attacked the last pirate in a radiation soaked section of the ship and when they’d been tracked by the Gavd monotheists. He had defended Regi’s religion to the Coalition crew. He made decisions about what he found morally correct and he acted in a way that matched his moral judgments. Few individuals could claim the same.

“I most certainly am bad. Bad, bad, very bad. Do you know what I miss most about home?”

“I imagine you miss many things.”

“Yes, but I miss Marengo the most.”

“Marengo?” Regi did not know this name.

“My horse,” Dante said. Then his chest again spasmed, although he appeared unconcerned about the interruption in his breathing. Dante did remember horses. They were like pebafri, only without the horns or the ability to digest meat.

“Given your fondness for any creature in possession of four legs, I am unsurprised.”

“But I should miss my family most. I mean, sure, my dad is a complete dick. He's probably making hay out of my disappearance the way he did it out of my mother's murder. He'll get a whole new election cycle of commercials out of it.” His voice grew strange as it took on a new, lower tone that did not match his normal voice. “Look at how far crime is reached into the rural Texas. We must stop the illegal immigration. We must hate everyone who comes from a geographical area that is not our own.” The way Dante waved his arms about and changed his pitch suggested he was mocking such positions, but it was disturbing that he would even assign those beliefs to his father.

“That would be offensive.” Regi was more offended by the idea of a leader capitalizing on the disappearance of a child than he was at the rampant xenophobia. After all, his own people had a long and storied history of killing outsiders.

“Offensive. Yep, that is my father to a T. Offensive. But you know who is not offensive?” There was a pause long enough that Regi feared that he might actually need to provide an answer, but then Dante continued. “Mary is not offensive. She is my decent sister. My other sister, Emily, she's not offensive either, but she's offended. She's just nice enough to be offended quietly and out of sight. She never says anything shitty to my face.” Dante nodded. “She’s always polite enough to talk crap behind my back where I don’t have to see it. But Mary. Mary. Mary is a good person.”

The liquid is definitely impacting Dante's logic and his speech patterns, and Regi did not understand most of that. However, it sounded as if his relationship with his siblings was better than the one with his father. “I am grateful you had someone to support you in your youth.” Regi never had siblings. He’d begged his parents for a sibling for five harvest-season festivals in a row as a child, but they had never wanted more. Sometimes Regi wondered if his fathers regretted investing so much of their lives with a wife who chose her goddess over any of them.

“Support me.” Dante poked Regi in the stomach, and that was uncomfortably close to pleasure zones Regi hoped to avoid. “That is my point. Mary always supported me. She even had me as a bridesman in her wedding. I should miss her more than my horse, and I am a horrible human being for missing Marengo more.”

Since Regi had no concept of the relationships humans should have with siblings or domesticated animals, he could provide no advice on the specifics. However, he did know one thing. He caught Dante's hand in his and held it until Dante tilted his head back to look Regi in the eyes. “You are a good person,” Regi said.

Dante's eyes grew watery and then he closed them. Regi struggled to find some other words of comfort, but he knew so little of Earth that he simply had none. Instead, he held Dante is Dante's breathing grew ragged and irregular.

Finally it smoothed out into the cadence of sleep. And then he held Dante some more, watching over him to ensure the intoxicants did not cause him to stop breathing. That was his only reason for sitting with Dante’s head in his lap, and Regi would maintain that under torture and interrogation. Now he just had to believe it himself.