Kiera's Moon - Page 27/146

Romas had felt no need to explain his insistence of her wearing it, but Evelyn had explained it acted as a visual identifying piece and also happened to open all the doors on the ship.

All the doors.

It made her mind leap until she recalled she was supposedly on a spaceship. She couldn't order the exit door open and walk home. And if there were more of those monstrous spiders on board, she probably did not want to wander around opening doors at random.

Except for today. Today she wanted to see the window to space in the galley Evelyn wanted her to see.

She placed a dark grey device the size of a small button on her earlobe like an earring. It stuck, but she forced herself not to ask why. It was allegedly her translator and emitted a low-level hum similar to the walls. Without it, the ship wouldn't understand her outside of her room. She exited and touched the wall of one corridor.

"Main galley," she said.

A trickle of lights lit up on the wall to her right. She followed. Several of what Evelyn had called warriors passed her in the hall. She thought she recognized one or two from the men who had accompanied Romas to the wedding.

Evelyn's many history lessons had covered the strange kin of Romas's, explaining they weren't the cousins Romas claimed them to be at the wedding. They weren't relatives at all, but members of Romas's army. Kiera had nodded as was expected while wondering what the hell Evelyn drank to make all this seem reasonable.

Romas's clan was very large and his father's influence the greatest on the planet of Qatwal. The race of warriors was ancient, dating back a hundred millennia. Their planet had been a barbarian planet, until the Five Galaxies zone, in which Qatwal sat in the middle, was discovered by a master race of super-genius aliens Evelyn referred to as the Brains. The Brains set up the Planetary Council-- the alien version of the United Nations-- several generations before to mediate between the warring planets within the Five Galaxies. The Brains also brought technological advancement that-A massive man passed her in the hall, and she stopped mid-thought to stare at him as he walked away. All the men on Romas's planet were larger than those on hers. She believed Evelyn's tale of a race of people bred for war. The man she just passed was a foot taller than Romas and one and a half times as wide. She felt dwarfed whenever she crossed one of the men aboard the ship.