Whispers in the Dawn (7 page)

“What is it with you men?” Odessa seethed. “Why can’t you just give me the information, and I’ll be on my way?”

“Did this fellow have permission to take off?” said Wide Eyes.

“How would I know?” She glowered at him. She sensed he wouldn’t tell her, if he even knew where Roland had headed.

“You know, if he didn’t have permission to leave, he could be in a whole lot of trouble,” Wide Eyes carried on.

“He’s already in enough trouble once I catch up with him.” Even if the bastard offered her a million dollars, she would never go near him again.

With the exception of Harley, the guys burst into laughter. Wide Eyes guffawed and slapped the counter repeatedly. “Little lady, but you couldn’t whip a man if you tried. You don’t have the strength.”

Beaten hardly before she’d begun, Odessa could easily have used his head as a punching bag. The laughter quieted, replaced by rampant hostility. What had made her think the authorities of Romaydia would help her? The rules
were
different here. Perhaps Violette had been right. There were few ways to leave the station and she would just have to surrender to her inevitable fate.

Harley pushed away from the wall and sauntered up to her. “Why don’t you let these gentlemen get back to their work?” He placed a heavy emphasis on the word ‘gentlemen’, giving Odessa the impression he was subtly giving them a taste of their own medicine.

“I want to know where Roland went,” she insisted, turning to meet his frank gaze. “He owes me a trip home. And I owe him a rope around his neck.” She was so close to tears. Her throat burned as she held them back.

Wide Eyes butted in. “That’s rich. Your boyfriend must have lured you here with promises he had no intention of keeping while he used that pretty body of yours for his gratification.”

Odessa had never used the word before but she muttered it now. “Asshole.” She included both Wide Eyes and Roland in the remark.

Once again, raucous laughter encompassed the room.

Harley took her arm. “Let’s go, Odessa. There’s no one of interest here.” This time he spoke in a low voice and once again, Odessa sensed he spoke about the room’s occupants in unflattering terms.

The pity in his eyes made her feel all the more fragile. He reached out and touched her. “Leave me alone,” she said in a tortured voice. She slapped at Harley’s hand, which still rested on her arm, before she raced out of the office. She would find Roland and she would make him pay for what he had done to her. She wouldn’t let the hope that she would get off Romaydia die.

The foul atmosphere in the corridor was more bearable than the simmering hostility in the Air Controller’s offices. The information about Roland no longer seemed so important. All Odessa wanted was a safe haven, away from Harley, away from the lingering stares of those dirty rats.

She wasn’t paying attention to where she was walking, and she collided with a fascinating character and came to an abrupt halt. The creature—for surely he wasn’t human—had obsidian eyes, but surprisingly he didn’t appear unfriendly. A one-inch circle of gold swirled about on his high forehead, reminding her of a cricket exploring the environment with its antennae. The gold provided a distracting and intense contrast to his eyes, which were far smaller than the moving design. Was the gold design a third eye? Odessa shuddered at the thought of having more than two.

“You wish speak to me?” he asked in a booming, heavily accented voice.

Odessa gulped, deciding the less she said to Goldie, the better. She shook her head. Three months earlier, she would never have dreamed such diversity existed. There was nothing like it on Earth.

He nodded, as if he understood her unwillingness to speak. “Ashtaris know everything. You need help.”

“Everything?”

His cheeks were flushed bright red, and he had no eyebrows. His pudgy, short form was clothed in a flowing teal robe which looked much like a Roman toga. “Yes, the same way I know you find my appearance—ah, what is word?—fascinating.”

“To say the least.” Was he a mind reader? The Ashtari was certainly getting about one hundred and ten per cent of her thoughts accurate.

“I understand, let me see, the gist of what you are thinking, but language difference make difficult to fully understand.”

She suddenly wondered if she had to follow some sort of etiquette to speak to this alien. She studied the people in the public area and noticed several unfamiliar beings speaking to humans. No one was doing anything she wouldn’t be doing.

“This is your first time off your home planet. It is, let us say, unnerving.” He smiled. His forehead circle came to a rest, gently pulsing, staring directly at her.

“That’s true.” She reluctantly opened up to him. “Before I left Earth, I had never been more than fifty miles from home.”

She allowed him closer and looked down at him, since he was at least six inches shorter than she was. He was unmistakably an alien with a friendly nature, even though his head looked a bit too small for his body.

“That is how Ashtaris are born. Nothing Ashtaris can do to change this.”

“There you go again. I think, you respond. Are you reading my mind?”

“Yes,” he replied simply.

Odessa lifted her hand and, very gently, touched the gold on his forehead. It beat insistently beneath her palm. “Is it alive?”

“Not as human understand ‘alive’. Meshkia is not sentient.”

“Meshkia?”

“Ashtari language for English equivalent of ‘translator’.”

Odessa found herself giggling. “And all this time I thought it was your third eye.”

“In manner of speaking, yes, third eye. Meshkia see words like eyes see objects.” The Ashtari’s forehead wrinkled with age lines as he frowned. Then he gave her a warm, encouraging smile.

She nodded. “Do you know how I can contact my home planet?” She watched the gold shift with dizzying speed. He crooked his elbow and slapped the inside with the palm of his other hand. Afraid she had inadvertently offended him, she stepped back.

“Is all right,” he boomed. “You young here, do not understand the Ashtaris.”

His hoarse laughter told her she hadn’t stepped on his toes. “What do you mean?”

“It is refreshing to meet female who does not have only one thing on her mind. Very refreshing.”

Odessa could hazard a guess what the alien meant. Quite possibly the same thing Violette had mentioned. Women sought out men for sex in order to feed themselves. “On Earth, women belong where men belong, whether they are flying a Winger or ploughing a field to sow seeds.”

The Ashtari’s eyes widened. “I not understand Winger.”

“A flying vehicle to get you from one place to another.”

“Ah, yes. Now I comprehend.”

Despite his heavy accent and his laboured speech, Odessa found herself liking the Ashtari.

“I see where you come from. Beautiful land filled with gentle rolling hills, with cascading waterfalls and emerald green fields from six choka to six choka.”

Odessa frowned at what she assumed was his unit of measurement. “Six choka to six choka?”

The circle raced around his forehead. “Yes. It is equivalent of one of your miles, give or take a foot or two.”

“What an inaccurate measurement.”

“Not at all. It is accurate, but your mile cannot translate to anything in the translator. Too long a measurement for an Ashtari.”

She could see why. The man was short, and so were his arms and legs. Her attention was drawn to his head where his toupee, if aliens called it that, had started to slide to one side like a pet seeking an opportunity to free itself. She repressed a giggle. She couldn’t be rude to the one being that had shown some interest in her and was being kind. However, male vanity was vanity, no matter where in the galaxy one travelled. Baldness apparently wasn’t appreciated in the Ashtarian culture either.

Sobering, she said, “I really need to find some way to make contact with Earth. Can you help me?”

“I am for sure someone in this crowd will know.” He surveyed the public area, his gaze resting upon one person after another before he shook his head. “I come up with nothing. No one thinking along those lines now. Maybe in minute.”

Odessa gasped in shock. “You mean you can get into all these people’s minds at once?”

He appeared baffled by her astonishment. He nodded. The toupee slid even farther over his ear. “Almost everyone except for the Delorican. I cannot read his mind. He has, let me think, a shield for blocking.”

“A shield for blocking?” Odessa had watched plenty of videographs where those who were telepathic wished their thoughts to remain private.

“Yes. It is mechanism for sealing thinking, like taking piece of oszma and wrapping it in plastic to seal in flavours.”

“Oszma? Is that some kind of food?”

“It is equivalent of your gobble, gobble.”

She smiled at that Ashtari’s language. “‘Gobble, gobble’ is a sound a turkey makes. A turkey is a fowl, that’s the right word you’re looking for.”

“My humble apologies. I am still fine-tuning my translator. It need help sometimes.”

She touched his wrist. “You are doing fine. Are there many Ashtaris on Romaydia?”

His eyes turned from black to dirty brown before they became obsidian again. “I am sorry. I hear in my head talk about drug trading. Only a poppet, but it was enough to know it is fearsome.”

A poppet and drug dealing?
“You must mean a ‘snippet’, a fragment of a conversation,” Odessa guessed.

“Yes, I am sorry once again. I overhear man over there. He is man not to come in contact with.”

Odessa glanced in the direction he indicated. A chill passed down her spine. If she wasn’t mistaken, the Ashtari had just referred to Harley.

Chapter Seven

Violette watched the exchange between the Ashtari and the woman who had found herself stranded on Romaydia. What could she do to save the woman from the same fate that had befallen Violette? Apparently her warning hadn’t been strong enough. She sniffed at the cloyingly humid air and brushed away the tears trickling down her cheeks.

The woman was beautiful, and would be a hot commodity if she didn’t get away. Violette had no idea what Pardua’s right-hand man was up to, but she was willing to bet it wasn’t what the woman would want. Dakoda Harley yielded an iron fist, and therefore the woman was certainly in a great deal of danger.

If the last fifteen years had taught Violette how to instantly judge a man, though, she figured Harley was not an insensitive, uncaring man he portrayed himself to be. No, he was shrewd. She could tell that even from this distance. Watching him was her sole pleasure on the station, the devil-taken flotsam. He had power, and she enjoyed seeing him wield it with that unaffected mannerism he assumed.

She pressed her back against the firm bulwark. What she wouldn’t give to leave Romaydia. Violette patted her flat stomach, knowing there was no spare flesh on her voluptuous body. She chuckled. Once, in a better time and place, she had believed dieting was the key to a model-thin body. Her tiny smile flickered and died. Lack of food was the best method of losing weight. That, and worry that she wouldn’t survive another day.

To take her mind off her unending problems, she watched the public area for women who were in need of her services. No female should be left without a semblance of protection when they arrived. Over the years, she had seen many women left to fend for themselves after their men had deserted them. Some, even after ten years, insisted that their special man would return for them, though they never did. After ten months, perhaps, but not after years. Life was worth nothing on Romaydia. Oddly enough, Romaydia meant, in Delorican, ‘faceless light’.

Violette observed the Ashtari, a race known for the careful upbringing of their offspring, speak to Odessa as if she were part of his own people. A rare occurrence, but he must have found her mannerisms amusing, or he considered her to be an affable woman to deal with. Violette sighed.
Wait for a couple of years, my Ashtari friend, and when you return, you won’t recognise this vivacious extrovert.
Like all the prisoners of the station, she would eventually decline to speak to anyone unless she wanted to procure a man who would pay her well for a few minutes of lying on her back.

Many women on Romaydia didn’t even live two years after their arrival. With the transient population made wholly of males from diverse cultures, the chances she would be spirited away or killed were over seventy per cent, too high a percentage to buck the odds. Violette had seen too many women murdered or vanished into the stinking air. The pretty one seemed no different from the other women.

If that was true, why had Dakoda Harley taken her under his wing?

Chapter Eight

Odessa wanted to flee again. Was there no place on Romaydia away from Harley’s gaze? Why was he following her? Hadn’t she told him she didn’t require his protection, that she needed nothing from him? But was he aware of her presence?

He wove in and out of the crowd, as if he was doing nothing more than sightseeing among his fellow travellers. Was he on the prowl, searching for her so he could turn her over to the Murrach?

The little Ashtari’s warning made her uneasy. “Why are you telling me?”

“I do not read his mind. He is Murrach Pardua’s first lieutenant. It is foolishness to delve into his thoughts. I am for certain he is a good man, but he is on wrong side.”

“Wrong side of what?”

“The law, so you speak.”

With her eyes, she trailed after Harley. He didn’t appear to be like Roland. Her former fiancé had had a weak chin and a furtive look to his eyes, but Harley hadn’t flinched when he’d looked straight at her. He was taller and leaner, and physically fit, judging from his fine build. Why did she have such rotten luck with men? She’d fallen in love with Roland, who had mistreated her, and earlier she could so easily have made love to Dakoda Harley.

Harley hadn’t seen her yet. “Who is he looking for?”

“Are you in trouble?”

“He might be looking for me. To turn me in to the Murrach. Whoever he is.”