Page 82 of Blightfall

Oh, right. Our ships would look impressive to someone who’d never seen one.

Alanik let Suki out of her pack, and she settled into her dash seat, still working on her tablet.

“How is the report?” I asked.

“Almost done,” she said. “Just adding some finishing touches.”

We’d better be ready to go when she was done. I set about clearing space for Dayan behind my seat. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but it was technically possible to fit a person back there, and we had cargo straps for tying down loose objects that could work as a makeshift harness so Dayan wouldn’t become a pancake on the inside of the canopy the minute I dove. Still, I’d better not get shot out of the sky, or Dayan was toast.

“You need a flightsuit,” Alanik said to Dayan. “You are about my height, so come, borrow one of mine.” Alanik led them to the storage compartment on her ship and held a flightsuit up in front of them. Nedd and Gilaf sat in their ship, scarfing down some rations while Dayan headed into the woods to change and Alanik prepared her own ship for the mission.

I grasped at loose ends—we had a plan, but once we made the call to Ivy, any number of things might go wrong. I needed to keep my mind on the mission. I was leading my team into a precarious situation against a well-armed enemy. But I could only concentrate on the incoming danger so much before the buzz of anxiety got too loud and my brain started looking for something else—anything else—to focus on.

The more I worried, the more I wanted to orbit Alanik, just to be near her. That meant something I wasn’t fully ready to admit to myself, but I couldn’t fight the pull of her gravity. I wandered over to her ship.

“Do you want to talk about the call to Ivy?” Alanik asked.

“Stars, no,” I said. “I want to talk about anything else.”

Alanik smiled, sitting in her cockpit. “Have anything in mind?”

And maybe it was the stress, or the exhaustion, or my desperation to talk about literally anything but the upcoming mission, but I let this sentence fall out of my mouth: “I’ve been thinking about an ethical question.” Oh, scud. Was I really going to start this conversation that way? Even Nedd thought it was a bad idea, and he was Nedd.

“Okay,” Alanik said. She waited.

I didn’t want to keep going, but apparently I was doing this. “What do you think the ethics are of dating outside your species?”

Alanik considered this. “It probably depends on the sapience of the species in question.”

“Assume both species are sapient,” I said quickly.

“Then I think it depends on what the purpose of dating is,” she said thoughtfully. “Mate-pairs across species don’t make a great deal of sense, because the purpose of a mate-pair is to conceive children, and cross-species breeding is impossible. But some of my people pair for companionship, and that is possible between species.” She shrugged, like this discussion was entirely academic. “What is the purpose of dating between humans?”

Alanik looked at me expectantly, like there was absolutely no subtext to this question.

Scud, if she were even a little bit interested in me, shouldn’t she feel more awkward about this? Stars, Nedd understood what I was saying when I didn’t want him to. Why didn’t she?

“I guess there are a lot of purposes,” I said. “Companionship is one. Having children is another. There’s physical…”

“Enjoyment?” Alanik suggested, like she was talking about the weather. “Yes. That is another purpose, certainly. So I think your question needs to be more specific.”

It clearly did. I should just come out and say, Hey Alanik, I’m interested in you, and I’m wondering if you think that’s wrong on some deep, unforgivable level.

What I actually said was “What do you think the purpose of dating should be?”

“I think they’re all valid purposes,” Alanik said. “You had a…girlfriend.” She said that word in English. “What was the purpose of that?”

Another complicated question. “Our families wanted us to get married,” I said. “We knew each other growing up, and they thought it was a good match. She came from another wealthy family, and our parents were friends. I loved her, but not like a sister, so that was convenient.”

“Ah,” Alanik said. “Social convention. That’s another purpose. I don’t think most relationships between alien species would serve that one.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“So,” Alanik said, “cross-species relationships are not practical for purposes of breeding or social conformity. That leaves pleasure and companionship, both of which are possible. Though I suppose the former depends on the anatomy and preferences of the alien species in question.”

Oh, stars. I made a very specific point of not looking at her anatomy. I was pretty sure preferences wouldn’t be a problem, though I supposed I didn’t know all the details.

I hoped she didn’t notice my face getting flushed.