Stella was amused. She had seen the betting board. Those two were still totally convinced that they had everyone hoodwinked. Sadly this was not true.

Time was running out. Their next port of call was a big transfer station between Earth space and Tamare space and Space Command had sent an investigator to meet them there. She had intercepted an outbound message, that was sent without her knowlege by one of Mtak's lackeys. Mtak had smelled the objectionable human's scent on the commander when she visited to discuss his future options. The message had demanded an investigation into Commander's relation with the human and the investigator was one of the scent hound hybrids. They would be sniffed out quite quickly.

It had actually been the sole betters optimistic entry to the board that had given her an idea how to resolve this conundrum.

She had found an interesting and very old rank in the Tamare lawbooks. Everyone needed to have a rank to matter at all in their view of the world. Who did not, was a nobody. And right now, Ames was a nobody as far as Tamare were concerned. The title was roughly equivalent to a consort in human terms. And it had been created when almost all hybrids were first generation hybrids, some of whom did pair or even pack bond with donor species. It was givent to the pure blood bonded mate of a hybrid and came with the right to accompany the hybrid anywhere. The bonding was established by whatever mating ritual the hybrid donor species used. Anything was recognized really, as long as the origin species did.

Stella spectulated, that this was done to keep the first generation hybrids from rebelling or defecting for the donor species, but in further inqury found that originally this was also done on part of the donors to get some Tamare DNA. The law stated that any viable offspring born through natural means would belong to the donor species. She found this quite intriguing bit of information for future. She needed to confirm one more thing about Ktak and she was ready to lay out her plan to the lovers. She logged into Tamare petigree database, pulled up Ktak's breeding certificate and paid the quite substantial fee to see her full genealogy. Her suspicions were confirmed. She was first generation. A brood mother had bought one of the early samples and kept it in store for almost a milllenia to breed not one, but two first generation daughters right before her time was running out. Even brood-mothers were not immortal. Stella suspected she wanted to have something spectacular for her last offspring. She was going to get her wish.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Ames was busy. He had been spending every spare moment he had making this thing and to do so without Ktak catching him was quite a challenge. Ames was making a ring. A lot of interesting materials ended up in the ships deflector shield collectors that Ames had to clean. Gems, metals, small asteroids. Ames had fished out an interesting piece of metal and a decent sized diamond from his trash bucket and was now trying to make a ring out of them. A big ring. Big enough to fit on his thumb. He had sneakily compared hands to come to this measure. The material was giving him some grief but gradually, he was getting his way with it. Soon... it would be ready. And maybe on next stop over he could find a more liberal minded priest... The border station was big, about half a milion humans and other as much Tamare. There must be some priests there. And then he would take his wife back to earth and introduce her to his family. He was looking forward to that in away, but there was a bitterness in his face when he did think of it and a worry about how she would be received.