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It was a crisis, and it was as exciting as it was horrifying, but Fal’ran could only hold that excitement for so long as he and his teammates sat on their asses in Base Ship Givast.
Grounded.
Grounded until Patrick figured how to get them off the shit list.
Patrick worked them as though their deployment was imminent. They ran, lifted, sparred, had target practice, learned tactics, strategies, and a thousand other protocols and tips and tricks. Patrick tried to force his own decades of experience into their brains at hyper-speed. But when he returned from speaking with the brass, when they were alone in Patrick’s room, his face was pinched, and his shoulders slumped.
Fal’ran got to be alone in Patrick’s room with him a lot. If he were honest with himself, he’d endure being grounded forever if it meant he got to sleep every night in that man’s bed watching his back.
“Fal’ran.” Sazahk’s sharp poke derailed his sugary sweet train of thought. “Focus. What is it saying?”
Fal’ran squeezed his eyes shut to concentrate on the gibberish dribbling out of the speaker Sazahk held in front of his face. “Nothing. It’s all still clicks and—” Fal’ran searched for the word to describe the alien sound that reminded him of the jungle around Training Camp Pel’on “—buzzes.”
“Are we sure they have a language?” Bar’in piped up from the other side of the lab, where he’d cleared a desk of scientific tools and filled it with ammo and clips instead. “Maybe those are just sounds they make. They probably communicate with those things on their heads.” Bar’in motioned to his own neatly knotted hair.
Sazahk fiddled with his tablet and the lines of code he’d received from his contacts in the Carta Cartel. “Questioning whether the uncatalogued sentient species has a spoken language because they have antennae—”
“I know what they’re called!”
“—is like questioning whether the qesh have a language because we change color or the klah’eel because they can smell.” Sazahk tugged the tiny translator off Fal’ran’s ear and held it up next to his tablet. “Also, they picked up Universal too swiftly for a species with no concept of a spoken word.”
“How do we know they speak Universal?” Bar’in asked as Patrick entered the lab.
“Because I’ve heard them,” Patrick replied for Sazahk, leaning on the workbench beside Fal’ran. His forbidding tone and tight expression quieted the conversation.
“And because they’ve already had extensive dealings with various criminal enterprises throughout the sector, which they couldn’t have done without a reliable form of communication,” Sazahk added after the beat of silence. He hooked the translator back around Fal’ran’s ear and poked it in farther as Fal’ran eyed Patrick.
He didn’t think the tension along Patrick’s neck and shoulders had anything to do with the fact that he’d heard the Insects speaking Universal. His piercing blue eyes fixed at a point on the floor as he scratched his thumbnail over his biceps. Fal’ran dragged the toe of his boot up Patrick’s calf to catch his attention.
The older man had accepted Fal’ran’s small public displays of affection in front of the team with surprising ease. It had helped that all three other members were clearly relieved they no longer danced around each other, poking and needling and misunderstanding.
Patrick’s eyes flickered up to Fal’ran and back into the room, and his lips twitched in an aborted smile. Before Fal’ran untangled himself from Sazahk’s wires to ask Patrick what was bothering him, an artificial qesh voice in Universal filled his left ear. “There is no more.”
Fal’ran jerked back to Sazahk. “I understood that.”
“You did?” Sazahk’s dark eyes lit up and yellow bloomed around their edges.
Fal’ran nodded as the clicking and hissing began again, filtering into an understandable voice in his ear. “Not enough. This is home now. The princess will make it work.”
“Princess?” Fal’ran frowned at Sazahk, and Tar and Bar’in left their ammo to join them.
“It could be a bad translation.” Sazahk took the translator off Fal’ran’s ear again and tucked it into Bar’in’s so he could take his turn. “A word meaning female leader maybe, or precious child—”
“Precious child would be an even weirder thing to say,” Bar’in snorted and Sazahk played back the recorded audio for him.
“Where did this recording come from?” Fal’ran jerked his chin at the speaker as Bar’in passed the translator off to Tar.
“The Carta Cartel.” Sazahk flipped the switch for Tar. “A group of Insects approached them to purchase uranium, but the only stockpile large enough for what they were asking for had already been well fortified by the Tavans, with additional support from the Qesh and Humans.”
“And sold off to a thousand different buyers at this point anyway,” Patrick muttered, his brow creasing.
Fal’ran had heard about Patrick’s experience with the old uranium mine on Tava, while he’d lain beside him in his bed with the taste of Patrick’s cum on his tongue. How the opposing forces of morality and loyalty had crushed Patrick between them. The Klah’Eel had punished Patrick for doing the only right thing and that infuriated Fal’ran, but not near as much as Patrick’s unmistakable self-loathing infuriated him. Patrick recounted the story as though he’d done something wrong.
Fal’ran had wanted to argue and rage, but he’d known that would be futile. Instead, he’d crawled back down Patrick’s body and ate him out until the older man dripped and hardened enough for Fal’ran to take him down his throat again and drive out any feelings of inadequacy he still carried.
“Did the Carta Cartel develop the translation algorithm, too?” Patrick waved Sazahk away when the qesh tried to hand him the earpiece.
“They did.” Sazahk fastened the translator over his own ear with a nod.
