A pink-clad woman darted out and wrapped me in a crusty hug. “Oh my fucking God. You are such a bitch for abandoning me,” Jen said, her voice choked up.
“I’m so glad you aren’t dead,” Cindy said, hugging me as soon as Jen let go. The other women crowded in, hugging meand asking more questions than I could answer with any rational thought.
“How did you get away from that monster?” Cindy asked.
I smiled. The poor woman had to have been traumatized watching me get carried off. “Turns out alien dinosaur monster birds don’t like the taste of escape pod goop.”
Jen pulled at her crusty pink jumpsuit. “Well, that’s a silver lining if I’ve ever heard one.” Kex stepped up to my group, keeping a small distance, but still a few women stepped back. “So who are the new guys?”
I stepped through the crowd and put my arm around Kex, he immediately pulled me to his side. “Guys, this is my husband, Kex.”
“You got married?!?” Questions tore out of the group once again, and I gestured for them to bring it down.
“Yeah, kind of alien married. It’s a long story, which I will absolutely tell everybody eventually, but you should all know he understands English, as does the tabby.” I gestured over my shoulder at Rainier. “They can’t speak English, but I got a translation chip and can understand their language, and as soon as we get out of the forest everybody gets translation chips so you can understand everybody else. Sound good?”
“You didn’t bring any with you?”
“So they do have technology!”
“And then we go home?”
I winced. “There isn’t really any going home.”
There was a long, drawn-out silence, where I wasn’t sure what to say. Glancing around, there were looks of bewilderment, anger, and sadness.
“And why the fuck not?” Jen asked at last, breaking the pause.
“Because Earth is a pre-spaceflight planet, and that puts it in some kind of classification that makes it illegal for anyone to go to it,” I said.
“Well, someone sure as fuck went to it once or else we wouldn’t be here,” Jen said.
“Yes, but they did it illegally.”
“So can’t they just drop us off and be done with us?” Jen asked.
“No,” I sighed. “That would make us the lawbreakers as people who have knowledge of the wider galaxy and essentially invading a preflight planet ourselves”
“That sounds like some bureaucratic bullshit,” Jen said.
“Yes, exactly,” I agreed.
“But we have space flight,” someone called. Isabel, I think.
“Yeah, it doesn’t really matter. It’s more about, like, knowledge of the wider universe and alien races,” I tried to explain, even though I didn’t agree with it.
“Okay, but can’t we do it anyways?” Olive said, crossing her arms.
I glanced back at Kex, and he was smiling. See? I wanted to say. I’m not the only rule breaker.
“Unfortunately, my alien husband is very passionate about rule following, more on that later. And if we tried to get someone to break the rules for us, the likelihood of them betraying us and actually selling us into sex slavery or eating us or something is high.”
“So we can’t leave?” someone whose name I couldn’t remember asked.
“No one is keeping us here, but we’re safe here. Kex will keep us safe,” I said.
“Let them know they will need to stay at least until the species paperwork is complete. They would be at too great a risk leaving the planet before then,” Kex said.
I sighed and explained the documentation.
