Page 56 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded

“But it means digging up some of the old demons,” I finished for him, when he trailed off.

“Exactly.”

“Are you all right?” I asked, stepping forward. My master grabbed a couple of tissues from the box on the corner of his table and hastily cleaned up his face.

“I’m fine. As much as I’m dreading talking about all this, it’s probably a good thing. Facing up to the past and realising that we still have a future. I spent a long time not being able to see that. It’s going to be a lot. I’ll probably be very stressedtomorrow, so maybe keep an eye on that for me? Maybe we can bring some herbal tea with us?”

A sobering chill ran through me. Subtly, but clearly, my master was saying that talking about Ixralia was going to make him want to drink. And one lone week was not long enough for him to have developed any solid defences against that desire, his inability to purchase alcohol notwithstanding.

“I’ll make sure I bring some,” I promised, making a mental note of several other preparations I might need to make – scheduling some breaks throughout the day, for example, or maybe even faking an urgent call from Henderson to give my master an excuse to be able to slip away for a few minutes. The pressure to make such plans was daunting, but also oddly invigorating. I was needed. I was useful. I was responsible for managing logistical activities that my master was unable to handle on his own.

This was what I had always been taught my master would require of me, and I felt a swell of love in my chest for this remarkable man, as a shy smile settled on my face. “I’d better go and see if the next food delivery is here,” I said, backing towards the door. If I didn’t do something sensible, I was going to start fawning over him like a lovesick teenager.

“Sounds good,” my master replied. “I’m just going to stay here for a minute.” He swallowed, then straightened his shoulders. “I’ll be outside soon.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Zeke

“Are you sure?” Henderson asked, a deep frown ruffling his shaggy eyebrows as I reported in with him late that afternoon.

“Well, not entirely, no,” I replied, reminding myself to be polite. After a full day of dealing with the Ranzors’ overly blunt manner of speaking, switching back into diplomatic mode was taking some effort. “That’s why I thought I should ask for your advice. It’s a pragmatic solution, especially given the protestors this afternoon. I don’t want to leave the Halagals undefended all night. There’s always the possibility of some random idiot deciding to make trouble in the dark. And the Ranzors have been very good at following directions all day. They make their presence felt, but they’ve never crossed the line into actual violence. Not so far, at least,” I added, with wry optimism. “But aside from that, I’m kind of scared of how Goroz would take it if I said no. If I say that we don’t trust him to guard the camp during the night, that could seriously damage any good will between notjust him and me, but the Alliance and the Ranzors as a whole. I don’t entirely understand their hierarchy, but Goroz seems to have been appointed the leader of the Ranzor contingent here on Rendol 4.”

More Ranzor ships carrying wounded Halagals had continued arriving all day, though thankfully, none of them had landed in our park. And Goroz seemed to be keeping tabs on all the ships, able to provide up-to-date stats on how many ships had come and gone, and how many patients each ship had delivered. The same situation was happening in the other major cities around Rendol 4, and now, it wasn’t just Ranzors showing up with wounded, but Polvron ships as well.

“And to be honest, sir, I don’t think we have the numbers to be able to have our own staff acting as night guards. You’ve already said the city’s in chaos and everyone’s stretched thin.”

Aside from this park, there were twelve other parks across the city that had been taken over by refugees, along with the official refugee sites the military had set up, and Henderson was still scrambling to get them all organised. Medical services across the city were overtaxed, sanitation was becoming a problem at some of the camps, and the locals were struggling to put enough food deliveries together to feed everyone. Reports of the Nwandu’s invasion of Hazharu were all over the news channels now, and while there were a few inevitable detractors, most of the city’s population was agreeing with the Alliance’s decision to take in refugees. We were all very much aware that, but for a few timely decisions and a marked degree of pure luck, we could have ended up in the exact same situation the Halagals were in now.

“The larger problem,” Henderson said, “is not so much whether I believe the Ranzors are going to do anything wrong. Even if things run perfectly, there’s still the potential for accusations of dereliction of duty. We’ve had conflicts with the Ranzors before, we have no treaty with them, we have vastlydifferent cultures, and leaving aside their efforts to help in this war, we have no experience working alongside them.”

“But perhaps that’s the thing,” I said, trying to take a mental step back and look at this objectively. “We can’t just leave aside their involvement in the war. Their ships are exponentially faster than ours. Their weapons are far more effective. And by bringing injured civilians here, they’ve displayed a solid degree of compassion, for all that we’re still having a number of cultural misunderstandings. I’m not saying that that means we should let them do whatever they want. Like you’ve said, there are certain downsides to this idea. But I suppose the real question is whether letting them guard the park would do less damage than asking them if they would kindly please fuck off.”

On the holographic screen, Henderson tugged on his fur and shook his head. “I hate it when we’re backed into a corner of doing damage control, rather than sound decision making.”

“No arguing with you there, sir,” I said. “But my team’s exhausted, and the Ranzors apparently need far less sleep than any of us do.”

“Fucking hell,” Henderson muttered. “Faster ships, better technology, greatly advanced fighting skills, and now they don’t need much sleep? If these bastards ever decided to take over the galaxy, there would be very little standing in their way.”

It was a grim assessment, but a realistic one. “All the more reason to get on their good side now,” I pointed out.

Henderson sighed. “All right. I’ll try to put a positive spin on it, rather than just saying we didn’t have enough soldiers to do it ourselves. Let them handle guard duty for the night, and the rest of you, make sure you get a decent amount of rest. This crisis isn’t going anywhere, and we could be looking at weeks, or months, of needing to organise these refugees.”

“Have we heard much from the Culrads?” I couldn’t help asking. They were the reason why we’d been spared the wrath ofthe Nwandu, and they’d set themselves up as a sort of galactic watchdog, monitoring the devilish species to get the jump on them if – or rather when – they started causing trouble.

“They’re in the thick of the fighting,” Henderson replied. “According to them, the easiest way to win a war with the Nwandu is to do it quickly. The less time they have to get things rolling, the fewer mind-slaves they end up with to fight on their side. So the Culrads are throwing everything they have at Hazharu. Whether or not we end up with a political partnership with them will likely depend on how fast we can get our own ships there. We’ve spent a few billion credits on buying passage through the Foregnian wormhole, which would mean cutting three days off the journey to Hazharu. We can only hope that that’s fast enough to be of some real help out there.”

I nodded, knowing that that was the best news we were likely to get for a while. “I’ll make sure the Ranzors know what’s expected of them overnight,” I promised him. “I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

Outside, I took a slow walk through the camp, checking in with a few of the more senior members of the Halagal community to make sure everyone had everything they needed for the night. There were now a couple of fire pits stationed around the camp – at safe distances from the tents, of course – and I was a little surprised to see that Borl, one of the Ranzors, was sitting next to one of them, with a group of Halagal children gathered around his feet. He was apparently telling a story, though I was too far away to hear what he was saying. It was such a veryhumanscene, one that our own species had been engaging in ever since we’d first developed language, that I couldn’t help but stare at them, captivated by the odd combination of animation and tenderness in the huge warrior.

“Borl is a good man,” a gruff voice said from beside me. I didn’t jump, having heard Goroz approaching, but it was still aneffort to stand my ground as he came right up beside me. He towered over me, head and shoulders, but he lowered his head so that it was beside my ear. “He was going to mate with a female called Nez, but when he lost his eye, she rejected him. So now he has no way to have pups of his own.”

“That’s unfortunate,” I said, not knowing nearly enough about Ranzor culture to be able to say anything more insightful. But at the same time, my mind was reeling with the shocking revelation that Ranzors valued children – or pups, as Goroz had called them – for any purpose other than creating the next generation of warriors. If Borl’s behaviour was anything to go by, they activelyenjoyedspending time with them. “Do your females fight as well?” I asked Goroz.

“They do,” he said. “As fiercely as any of our males.”

I considered my next words, wondering if the idea that had occurred to me would be appropriate in their culture or not. The problem was, pre-emptively apologising for it, on the off-chance that it wasn’t suitable, would just piss Goroz off. The Ranzor people said what they thought, and didn’t apologise unless they were genuinely mistaken about factual information. They would never apologise for their opinions. In the end, I decided to just go with it. At the very least, I might learn something about their culture. “Would it not be possible for Borl to find another female? One who had also been injured, perhaps?”