He stepped into the cockpit with Rona, then he closed the door behind them. Rona glanced up at him nervously, and he gave her a reassuring smile. As reassuring as a seven-foot-tall killer could give, anyway.
“Well, go ahead and have a seat,” he said.
Rona looked around the cockpit, bewildered. As far as she could see, there were only two seats, and both of them were currently occupied. Before she had a chance to point this out, the Merc named Zeth grabbed her wrist and pulled her gently toward him.
“You can sit with me,” he said in a voice as smooth and thick as honey.
He pulled her onto his lap.
“Oh!” Rona gasped. “Um…”
She was tempted to shift her weight to get comfortable, but she was worried that doing so might cause her shirt to ride up. She was even more worried about the long, hard thing she could feel hiding beneath the fabric of the Merc’s pants. She remembered what Aeron had told her in the shower, and she shivered.
You drew Zeth’s blood. It’s only fair to let him draw yours.
Zeth leaned forward and sniffed Rona’s neck.
“You smell good,” he purred.
Rona wasn’t sure if it was intended as a compliment. Coming from the young mercenary, it sounded more like he was thinking about eating her. That thought should have terrified her, and it did a little, but it stirred other feelings as well. Shameful feelings. Rona hoped the thin fabric of her long shirt would be sufficient to hide the wetness that was starting to leak out of her again.
“Go easy on her,” Aeron said, stepping forward between the two seats. “She’s still a little sensitive. Besides, we’ve got work to do. I don’t want you getting all distracted on me.”
“In that case,” said Murdok, “maybe it would be a good idea to banish her from the cockpit.”
Aeron shook his head.
“No. I want her to help us understand what it is we’re looking at…”
He gestured in front of him.
The window at the front of the cockpit provided a view of outer space, and the broad, brownish curve of the planet below. That view should have taken Rona’s breath away; she’d never been in space before. However, it was the holographic image overlaid on top of the glass that really drew her attention.
“Is that… a map?”
“Good guess,” Zeth said, his voice rumbling through her body as he spoke. “But actually, it’s the real thing. A live image of the planet’s surface viewed from above, from the ship’s long-range scanners.”
“Really?”
Rona looked closer. The image was rendered in shades of green. Infrared, she guessed. It was still the middle of the night on her side of the planet, so there wouldn’t be much light. The image was slightly hazy as well, as if obscured by clouds. It was difficult to read, but after a moment, Rona was able to pick out details. Roads, footpaths, tracks.
“Hey!” she said. “That’s the mine.”
She jumped up from Zeth’s lap and pointed at various locations in the image.
“That’s the road that leads to the village. And that’s the railway that carries the raw silk over to the processing plant over in Jeriko. These are mine entrances here, here, and here…oh!”
Rona gasped softly as Aeron moved closer, pressing his body against hers.
“Very good,” he said. “And can you guess what all these things are?”
He was talking about the pale, luminous specks milling around the entrances of the mine. From this bird’s-eye view, they looked like tiny, white bugs, but Rona knew what they really were.
“Those are the fuckers who invaded us,” she said.
Rona could feel her blood rising. She hadn’t been present when the attack had happened, but she’d heard all about it. Hundreds of miners had been killed during that first onslaught. Rona hadn’t been friends with any of them, per se. She hadn’t really been friends with anybody in the village. Still, they were human beings. Men and women with families. Nobody deserved to be murdered in cold blood like that. Nobody.
“Sure are a lot of them,” Aeron said.
