Page 11 of Vikingr
The silence between us grew heavier. To break it, I asked Steff yet another question. Not that she’d answer truthfully.
“Is it true that Peritans don’t have mates?”
She looked at me warily, clearly not happy about the topic. “Some of us marry, some of us live together with a partner – or several partners, nowadays – and some of us choose to remain single. In the past, pretty much everyone got married, but not anymore. It’s a lot more flexible.”
I did not like the sound of ‘flexible’. Once I found my mate, she’d be mine and mine alone. No other males, no other females. Just like I would never take another bedpartner ever again.
“How do you find your… marry… partner?” I asked.
“If you’re lucky, you’ll meet them at work or through friends. There are dating apps you can use, or if you want more of a helping hand, dating agencies like the one I work for.” She sat up a little straighter as a new wave of confidence seemed to wash over her. I feared for my balls. “I mentioned that I work for the Hot Tatties agency, right? We are the only dating agency on Earth to have an exclusive agreement with the Albyans. To date, we’ve matched almost a thousand women with their-“
She stopped speaking mid-sentence, then cleared her throat. “Sorry, that’s my usual spiel. Allyouneed to know is that I work closely with both Albyans and the Intergalactic University. If you do me any harm, they will come after you.”
I grinned at her. “I’d like to see them try. The nearest IGU ship is a week’s journey away. And the Albyans… granted, some of them are decent warriors, but they are children playing with toy weapons compared to the Vikingar. We are born with rage in our hearts and bloodlust in our souls. We don’t fight to live, we live to fight.”
Passion filled me as images of past battles flittered through my mind. The glory of the past, when we’d been just another Vikingar ship and not the last survivors of a dying race. When we didn’t have a heavy cloud of responsibility weighing on us. If we didn’t find mates and produced a new generation of Vikingar, we would not be worthy of joining our families and ancestors in Valhalla. We still had to prove ourselves.
“Albyans are more than decent warriors,” Steff shot back. “And they will come for me. I’m essential to their mission to find more mates and-“
“Wait,” I interrupted her, “explain to me how that works. Finding mates for the Albyans.”
My mind was racing. Could I have stumbled on a more elegant solution than relying on Torsten’s algorithms?
“Hot Tatties runs advertising campaigns to attract single women. We use a lot of clips of hot guys in kilts, although of course they’re either Albyans wearing C-suits to hide their second pair of arms, or we use human men as models. Interested women then come to our office and fill in a questionnaire about what they’re looking for. If we think an Albyan could be a good match, they give us a DNA sample which we send off to an Albyan lab. They have figured out a way to recognise mates, so if a suitable male is in their database, they let us know. We then promise the women an all-inclusive trip to a mystery location where they’ll get to spend some time with the men we’ve chosen for them. Obviously, we don’t tell them they’re flying to Albya before they’re on a spaceship.”
For a moment, she grinned, then caught herself and scowled at me again. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“No, you should. It seems the hamingja finally returned to me.”
“What does that mean?”
“The hamingja watches over a Vikingr and decides his fortune and happiness. I thought mine had left long ago, abandoning me, but this is a sign! Of all the people I could have abducted, the fact that I chose you, someone who finds mates for others, it is clear proof that my hamingja is back.”
I had not felt this excited in… I didn’t even know.
Now all I had to do was capture an Albyan scientist who could adapt their mate-matching technique for Vikingar.
I grinned at the female opposite me. She was the perfect bait to attract an Albyan ship.
7
Steff
With a crazed grin, my captor got up from his seat and hurried out of the room without an explanation. The door closed behind him. I stared at it, not sure what had just happened.
A gong made me jump. The air above the mushroom table began to glitter once more, like when the drinking horns had first appeared. This time, two earthen bowls materialised, both filled with a steaming green mush. Hunger made my stomach contract. My last meal had been a sandwich for lunch, eaten at my desk between appointments. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since then. How long had I been unconscious?
When I reached for the closer bowl, another gong signalled the arrival of a metal spoon.
I looked at the large screen. “Thank you.”
“You are very welcome,” the female voice replied. Did she sound ever so slightly pleased? No, I had to be imagining that. It was an AI, a ship computer, like the one on the Starlight.
The green mush turned out to be similar to risotto, or maybe it was supposed to be that. Njal hadn’t known the name of it, so maybe he’d been trying to replicate an Earth dish while preparing the abduction.
I didn’t know what to think about him. He was a warrior, scary and ruthless, no doubt about that, but he didn’t seem to have malicious intentions when it came to me. He’d not touched me. Well, he’d pinned me against the wall, but he’d not touched me inappropriately. With us alone in this room, he’d had ample opportunity to take advantage of me, but he hadn’t. He’d been polite – in a rugged Viking way – and had been driven by curiosity rather than aggression.
But I couldn’t forget that he’d abducted me against my will. Had plucked me from the street and taken me to his spaceship. And I still didn’t know what his end goal was. Would he keep me here forever? Turn me into a slave? Sell me to other aliens? Or worse,breedme?
