“Our business?” she said. “Are you suffering from an infestation of Albronian brain-worm ? This is all dead.” She gestured around her, blinking hard to keep back the tears. “As of two weeks from now, Far North is closed. Forever. The Hawthorne Family Christmas Experience will go the way of the dinosaurs. It will go the way of Terra 1. Extinct. Defunct. Far North is being taken over by dragons – excuse me, Drakken. And they don’t do Christmas, as far as we know. So there is no business for me to kill.”
“Terra 1 is actually making kind of a comeback,” Geneva said. As she spoke, her lower half vanished. Cosmic ray interference; that was what you got when you used cheap equipment. “I’m thinking of making a pilgrimage there next year. The atmosphere’s almost breathable these days – I mean, as long as you don’t take off your lifesuit and don’t spend more than four hours on the surface.”
With what money?Liza thought but didn’t ask. None of them had enough Galactic Stan-Creds to planet-hop, much less travel to another galaxy. When she and her grandparents left their bed and breakfast, they were all in for at least a year of indentured servitude just to pay the cost to get off this dying rock.
Part of her was glad that Geneva couldn’t afford to travel to Terra 1. Space travel was dangerous, unless you were obscenely wealthy and could travel business class or above. That came with extra security. There were pirates and scavengers and slavers and the possibility of being caught and held hostage in interplanetary war.
Terra 1 was nowhere near a portal, those mysterious deep space doorways that allowed for instant transport across thousands or millions of parsecs. That meant the only way to get to Terra 1 was using the regular Faster Than Light ships, which involved weeks of space travel.
For the steerage class passengers, which Geneva would certainly be, the odds were maybe one in ten thousand of not reaching your destination. Sure, that meant there was a 9,999 in ten thousand chance that youwouldreach your destination…but this was her sister. She didn’t want her taking any chances at all.
“You never know,” her grandmother called out. She walked up to them, grinning. “It’s Christmas. Miracles can happen. I met your grandpappy on Christmas.”
Liza sighed. “Yes, Mawmaw, I know, and it’s a wonderful story.” It really was. Any other time, she’d love to hear Mawmaw tell it for the millionth time. Mawmaw had been a tourist on Far North, and she’d fallen for George Hawthorne, the strapping lumberjack who’d given her a tour of the Hawthorne’s Christmas tree forest.
Right now, Liza just didn’t have the heart. She was doing the best she could to give the tourists one last merry Christmas.
But she didn’t have the emotional energy to hear happy stories of the past.
“Well, we have no Santabot today, and probably the rest of the season,” she told her grandmother. “Can you go get Pawpaw to help us move it into the shed?”
“I’ll go find him. I think he’s in the workshop making wreaths.” Her grandmother turned and trudged off through the snow, her boots crunching with every step.
Liza kneeled next to the sparking Santa. “You’re the Grinch,” she informed it.
“Hey, Liza!” her friend Marjan called out.
Marjan, a saber-tooth tiger shifter from Felis 7, came strolling up to join her. Like everyone who worked at the Hawthorne Family Christmas Experience, she wore the traditional red velvet trimmed with white fur, which looked incongruous on her because she was six feet five inches tall. Her ears were pointy and tufted with white fur.
“I didn’t know you invited Satan to celebrate Christmas with you,” she said with a scowl.
“Santa, not Satan,” Liza said patiently. “I know they both wear red, but they’re completely different beings. One of them brings presents and loves milk and cookies, the other one leads people astray and damns evil souls to hell for all eternity.”
The Galactic Universal Translator looped over Marjan’s ear worked perfectly, but she still didn’t have a firm grasp of human traditions.
“No, not Santa – actual Satan,” Marjan said, pointing behind Liza. “Satan is the king of evil, right?”
Liza turned around, and her heart sank.
A group of tall humanoid aliens had just landed a hovercraft in their parking lot, and they were piling out of the craft and heading towards her.
She recognized their leader, Jaspar. She’d met him once before, a month ago, and he’d made quite the impression.
He was almost seven feet tall, and he had eyes of an inhuman, icy blue. His dark, glossy hair flowed past his shoulders and was blacker than coal. His appearance was mostly humanoid, but his skin glowed faintly silver, and there were silvery scales on his temples.
He wore tan leather boots laced up with straps, leather leggings that did nothing to hide the considerable-sized bulge at his crotch, and a leather tunic.
To see him, one could easily think he was a simple-minded barbarian striding across the snowy steppes of Earth a thousand years ago. That would be a mistake.
The Drakken, a dragon-shifting species from the outer reaches of the Milky Way, were an interesting mix of technology and tradition. They had mastered FTL travel even before the humans, but they dressed the same way they had for thousands of years, and maintained rigid traditions that guided their lives in everything from relationships, to the garb they wore, to how they waged war.
These Drakken were the Balthazar Clan, who had purchased Far North at a bargain basement price from the First Galactic Bank after the colony went bankrupt. Oddly enough, another Drakken clan – the Harbingers – had also tried to purchase their colony, and had even challenged the Balthazar clan in Galactic Court. It made no sense. Without the pine trees, apple trees, chestnut trees and maple trees, the colony was worthless.
Either way, it didn’t matter. The Drakken had no right to be here yet – it was December tenth on the Terra 1 calendar, and they weren’t due to take over the colony until January first.
Liza stalked over to Jaspar, stomping so hard that little puffs of snow swirled around her boots with each step.
Before she could launch into a stream of obscenities, a strange feeling swept over her. Damn it, this was what had happened the last time she’d met him. She felt light-headed and her heart hammered against her ribcage and she gasped for breath.
Jaspar caught her and she slumped in his arms, breathing in his scent. He smelled spicy and delicious – like cinnamon. How did an alien smell like a priceless Terran spice?
He looked down at her and his full, sensual lips curved up in a smile. His blue eyes gleamed.
“Hello, my heart,” he said to her. “Thank you for flinging yourself into my arms. Does this mean that you now acknowledge that you are meant to be mine?”
Oh, yeah. When she’d met him a month ago – and fainted in his arms that time too – he’d informed her that in addition to claiming her planetoid, he planned on claiming her as his mate.
