Late that night, I sat on a crate outside of the transport drinking the local brand of bourbon and watching the iridescent dance of the deep-sea creatures outside of our dome.
Most of the crew slept, drained after hours of discussing the bar riot and the growing oppression of the Syreni government. Sleep eluded me for reasons I chose not to examine too deeply. Even several hours after we left the bar, Dick still hadn’t returned to the ship. I told myself the growing anxiety I felt was normal for someone who had previously lost crewmembers.
The bar riot made the local news, and everyone I’d passed on the dock earlier had been talking about it. I had almost convinced myself to go investigate whether Dick had gotten nabbed by the authorities when I heard faint footsteps shuffling up the gangway to our dock.
Pivoting from my seaward view, a wave of relief washed over me as Dick’s familiar outline emerged from the tunnel. I was just worried he got caught and ratted us out to the authorities, I assured myself. As he emerged more fully into the dim light of the docking area, however, I realized he hadn’t returned unscathed.
He clutched an arm to his abdomen, the same area he had been injured in the Triton fight. His clothes looked tattered in some places and stretched out in others. His face was a mosaic of bruises and cuts, and there was one nasty-looking scratch running across his forehead.
Dick halted his limping pace when he noticed me on the dock. Clearly, he had been hoping nobody would be awake when he returned. He gave a resigned sigh as he limped over to a nearby crate and sat carefully down, wincing as he did so.
“Aww, honey. You waited up.” His voice was hoarse as he echoed my words from the other night.
He punctuated the joke with a half smile that pulled at his busted lip. Wincing again, he touched a finger to it, coming away with blood.
I chuckled, softly as not to wake the others, but didn’t respond right away. I had a million questions but decided to hold off. Intuition told me that he would shut down and deflect if I bombarded him for details right away.
After giving him a slow once over, eyeing each of his wounds intently, I met his gaze and leaned in to whisper conspiratorially.
“You know,” I said, my voice purposefully lowered, “it’s times like these that I’d definitely trade that old man for the healer we lost in the attack.”
He sputtered a laugh as I leaned back to my normal position with a secretive finger placed over my lips. The laugh quickly turned into a cough of pain as he spat out some blood. This got my attention. The cuts and bruises, the opened wound and the limp were one thing. Internal bleeding was another.
“Are you going to need a medic?” I asked with concern.
He waived off my misgivings as he regained his breath and spoke.
“Nah. I’m a fast healer. Besides, the blood isn’t from my lungs. It’s from the tooth I spit out somewhere back there,” he said, inclining his head back in the direction of the gangway.
“Sexy,” I said, sarcastically.
“It must be,” he rebutted. “You seemed awful concerned for someone who doesn’t find me rakishly irresistible.”
“Oh, I was concerned,” I said, standing and making my way toward the hatch. “Medics are expensive, and we’re back to being broke after your shopping trip today.”
I ducked into the lounge, moving quietly as to not wake anyone. I found the remnants of the med kit I had used on my concussion, as well as some other medical supplies I hadn’t noticed before, and returned to the dock.
By the time I returned, Dick had stripped off one half of his shirt to expose the open wound on his side. He looked up in surprise as I emerged, clearly thinking I wasn’t coming back. I held up the med kit, and he nodded his thanks.
I took out some fresh med strips and passed him some antiseptic spray while I laid out the bandages. They had a medicinal smell to them, indicating that they were the kind laced with healing accelerant. Rummaging around in the med kit some more, I found a resin compound used to stitch wounds together.
“Did you have this on it before?” I asked.
“No, I think Vomero patched it up the first time after the Triton fight and had to make do with whatever he could find in the cargo bay.”
After he finished cleaning the area with the spray, I took the resin compound and applied it like caulk to his wound. He sucked in a sharp breath. Stitch resin stung like fire as it melded with the edges of the wound and then contracted to pull it closed.
“First time?” I teased.
“I keep telling you that I’m more of a lover than a fighter, but you don’t seem to take me seriously,” he bantered back. “We can’t all be bad asses like Skye Alnasi: Sexy Outlaw Ninja.”
I made a face and turned to get the bandages. He lifted his arm above his head with a groan per my instructions so that I could properly apply the med strips. I slowly smoothed first one, then another into place, running my hand down his torso and over the wound to make sure it sealed properly.
It took every bit of my considerable willpower to not think about the chiseled abs inches away from my fingertips or the slow rise and fall of his well-muscled chest as he breathed deeply through the pain. Suddenly, I felt the now familiar spike of his pheromones assault my senses and looked up at him sharply. My gaze collided accusingly with his smoky grey eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, softly, and I felt the pheromone spike immediately retreat, leaving a dull hum of residual attraction resonating through my system. “Sometimes, it’s instinctive.”
Moving backward out of his immediate vicinity, I took a deep breath to clear my suddenly fuzzy brain.
“Have you ever explored your options for bottling that stuff?” I said, trying to make light of the situation. “I bet you’d make a fortune in certain circles.”
“Oh, it’s crossed my mind,” he said, taking more medical supplies from the kit and tending to his own wounds, this time. “But the idea just felt too much like pimping myself out, ya know?”
I could tell he was also keeping his tone casual to downplay the heat of the previous moment.
“Color me surprised to find out that was a deal breaker for you,” I said.
This time, when he smiled, it didn’t reach his eyes, and I could tell he didn’t like my characterization of him that way. It seemed as if whoever punched Dick in the side tonight wasn’t the only one opening up old wounds.
“So, you got involved in the riot, after all?” I said, changing the subject.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The way it all went down, nobody is going to be able to identify anyone in that mess unless they were detained. I was careful.”
“Clearly,” I said, sardonically, indicating his various wounds with a wave of my hand.
“You should see the other guys,” he quipped.
“What happened to being a lover, not a fighter?” I replied.
Dick just shrugged.
“I said I’m more of a lover than a fighter. Besides, I found myself in a position where I could help Merl out and couldn’t pass it up,” he said. “They’ve probably already arrested him, but I was able to sneak Perl out of there during the chaos of the riot. They’ll still be looking for her, but she said she had a place to lay low.”
“Merl seems like the kind of guy who would consider that a good trade, his freedom for Perl's,” I said. “It sucks what’s happening to the people here. I really hope whatever we’re doing for Owen’s bosses actually is what they claim it to be. After tonight, it really won’t hurt my feelings to see that bitch on the throne brought down a few pegs.”
Soon afterward, I left Dick to his first aid and made my way to the bedroll I had tucked into a large storage room off the back hallway. As I lay there trying to clear my mind from the day’s chaos, the image of Dick shirtless invaded my thoughts uninvited. Sighing in frustration, I tried to push that from my mind, as well, only for it to be replaced by the look in his dark, grey gaze.
Some elusive thought flitted at the back of my consciousness as I finally felt myself relaxing into sleep. There was something about his eyes that kept nagging at the edge of my unconscious mind. My breath deepened as a last thought carried me into slumber.
I thought his eyes were green?
* * *
The next morning, I awoke with a mission.
Passing through the lounge, I grabbed a cup of coffee from a thermos someone had left on the bar. My stomach grumbled, but I pushed it aside. Food would be item number two on the agenda today. The first involved tracking down Ryuuk.
I heard clanging outside the ship and stepped through the hatch to see Cash hanging from a harness that suspended him underneath the hull. He was welding a piece of metal into place where a blaster hole had once been on the bottom of the transport.
“Have you seen Ryuuk?” I shouted to him, and he just pointed toward the back of the transport, not bothering to shout a reply over the sound of the welding torch noise.
Making my way to the back of the transport to the cargo bay loading dock, I found Ryuuk adjusting something on the side of the ship. This was a new addition, not a repair, I noticed. So far, it was hard to tell what all the wires and metal components of the apparatus would turn into once he was done.
“You’re fabricating something for the ship?” I asked him.
He looked up at me, his avian eyes ridiculously enlarged by the magnifying goggles he wore to work on the intricate wiring.
“It’s a focused EMP blaster,” he said. “Vomero has some knowledge ‘bout these types of weapons and drew up a simple design I could put together. I say weapon, but really all it’s gon’ do is slow someone down if something like what happened before...um...well happens again, I guess.”
“Well, at least we won’t be easy targets,” I said. “We couldn’t get some real weapons on here?”
“The parts are too expensive,” Ryuuk said, shaking his head. “Plus, this thing don’t have the framework nor power supply to make sumthin’ like that work.”
I nodded, then turned the conversation back to my original purpose for seeking him out.
“Can I borrow your book?” I asked. “The one by Jack Trader?”
“Finally comin’ around to ole’ Jacky boy, huh?” he said, grinning. I just groaned, resisting the need to roll my eyes.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Yea sure,” he replied, pointing to his satchel lying among a pile of tools. “It’s over yonder in my bag. Help yourself; just don’t go losing it.”
After retrieving the tablet from his bag, I wandered through the back cargo bay door and sipped my coffee as I swiped through the pages. I spent the next hour perched on a crate in the corner looking through the entry about shapeshifters.
We had been focused on the magic based mimic type shapeshifter because that seemed to be the category to which Owen most likely belonged. This time, however, I was searching for information on the other type. Changelings.
The second category of shapeshifter is biology based and are often referred to as changelings because they sample DNA from other species, the book said.
I remembered this part from earlier. An image of Dick standing over the Triton Vomero had speared with his neurotoxin and rubbing its blue-green blood thoughtfully through his fingers came to mind.
I swore I remembered his eyes being blue at some point and deep emerald green at another. Maybe I was imagining it or maybe he just had weird eyes that could change color with his mood. Last night, they had definitely been grey.
...can use it to turn into their own form of that species, altering their form biologically, as well as visually. This allows them to not only take on the appearance of another species, but to also take advantage of any inherent qualities associated with that species, such as flight, the ability to breath underwater, resistances, and so forth.
Another image of Tritons fighting each other during the second assault also came to mind. Vomero and I had chalked it up to their natural savagery causing friction in the heat of the battle. Now that I thought back, however, I tried to remember how many different Tritons I had actually seen attacking other Tritons. Had it been more than one? Or was it just the one attacking multiple Tritons?
There were more details about changelings in the book that we hadn’t read about before, opting instead to focus on Owen’s mimic type.
Because the transformation of a changeling is physiological and not a mere illusion, it is very hard to forcefully remove them from their transformed state. The changeling would have to be severely injured or even incapacitated for them to revert to their normal form without consent.
When Vomero found Dick, he had been wounded in his side. It was the same wound I had helped him patch up last night. He had also been knocked out by Vomero’s shock attack like everyone else. I remembered commenting about not seeing him helping during the fight. At the time, I had shrugged it off, figuring I had missed him in all the confusion. But what if there was no confusion? What if he had been there fighting right in front of me the whole time?
A memory of the Triton bearing down on me, only to be intercepted by two other Tritons locked in combat, flashed in my mind. Ryuuk fired several shots at the group of tussling Tritons. I strained my memory, trying to remember where his shots had landed. Had he hit one of them in the side?
However, a changeling cannot hold a transformation indefinitely. Like the mimic, the more familiar they are with the shape they are trying to hold, the more convincing and long-lasting the transformation will be.
Questions circled in my mind. Was I crazy for suspecting Dick to be a changeling? It would explain a lot of things, not just the Triton fight. I remembered the Centuri man in the market flirting with the fruit lady. The same fruit lady Dick said he went to see. He claimed to be in the credit union at the same time I was there, but I didn’t remember seeing him.
“What the hell is a credit card?” I recalled a reptilian man in the credit union saying. It stuck in my mind at the time because I had felt glad that I wasn’t the only one exasperated by the backwards financial institutions here. I wasn’t sure if that could have been Dick as a changeling. Maybe I was just grasping at anything, now.
Although, Dick did have an uncanny ability to avoid detection. He was always sneaking up on me, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. And somehow, he had managed to get himself banged up in the riot last night and still get away undetected.
Another paragraph from the book caught my eye. We had read this one before, but at the time I hadn’t thought much of it.
It is common for shapeshifters, even of different species and types, to recognize other shapeshifters even through their disguises
I remembered how Dick managed to mask his pheromones completely, something he said was just part of who he was. It had been the moment we encountered Owen. Had he been afraid Owen would know what he was and out him? If he truly was a changeling, Dick would have known from the start that Owen was a shapeshifter, as well.
I wondered if any of this conjecture mattered. What was I going to do with this information? Confront him? He could always deny it, and I’d either look stupid if he were being truthful, or gullible if he were lying. Also, what did it benefit me to know whether Dick was some shapeshifter?
Suddenly, a darker thought occurred to me. If he could shapeshift, maybe he had slipped away and killed the transport pilot without anyone noticing. Maybe he hadn’t been concerned about our imminent death in the sinking cargo hold because he was just waiting for us to die so he could transform into something that could breathe and move underwater.
I admitted to myself that I had let my earlier suspicions of Dick slip into obscurity, and I was honest enough with myself in the moment to acknowledge the attraction played a large part in that decision.
My eyes wandered over to the hole in the cargo bay floor. If whatever was in that containment unit was biological and powerful enough to power this intricate system, wouldn’t that be motivation enough for a changeling to try and steal it for himself?