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heterosexual for one thing and wouldn’t have noticed if one had, but, more importantly, the colonists chosen for the trip were expected to populate the new colony with new humans and no one who preferred partners of the same sex had been included for the simple reason that they couldn’t offer that particular, all important, service to the colony settlement.
    Feeling her face heat with discomfort, she glanced at Monica to see if she’d noticed, wondering if it had been imagination of her part, and discovered Monica was studying the alien female through narrowed, assessing eyes. After a moment, Monica met her gaze.
    Noelle wasn’t certain, at first, what Monica had been trying to convey with that look, but the more she thought about it, the more closely she studied the guard herself. By the time they were nearing the village again she’d arrived at a shocking and thoroughly confusing conclusion.
    The ‘female’ guard wasn’t a female!
    All sorts of questions instantly crowded her mind, foremost the puzzle of why, if they had two distinct sexes, they would go so far to hide that fact.
    She didn’t actually get the chance to discuss her conclusion with Monica, however. They’d barely reached the edge of the village when they heard a sound above them that drew everyone’s attention.
    The sight that met their gazes froze everyone in their tracks.
    Noelle was so shocked she couldn’t even think for several moments.
    There was an airship descending from the clouds, heading directly for the village!
    A spacecraft !
    Bedlam abruptly erupted all around them. A hundred women screamed seemingly at once and began to charge off in every direction like a flock of birds startled by a predator. “The barbarians! It’s the Flaxens! Run!”
    The two guards escorting Noelle and Monica gave them a shove that knocked both of them off their feet, screamed at them, and took off at a run in two different directions. “It’s the Flaxens! Run!”
    That was almost as shocking as all the rest—to suddenly discover they’d not only been freed. They’d been abandoned.
    Who the hell were the Flaxens? And why were the giant alien/Amazon warrior women so terrified of them?
    Particularly when they hadn’t seemed the least bit impressed or intimidated by Earth technology!
    Monica grabbed her with hands curled into claws that dug into her flesh hard enough to break through her shock, jerking at her to urge her to her feet. “Move!”
    Almost as if they were one person, of a single mind, they scrambled up, whipped a look around to get their bearings, and then headed toward the colony like the hounds of hell were on their heels.
    A bizarre sense of unreality settled over Noelle as she and Monica, tethered together by their hands as if they’d been permanently joined and as mindless in their shock and terror as the villagers apparently were, struggled to fight their way through the madness to the other side of the village. Noelle didn’t think ‘home’ ever actually entered her mind. She simply headed toward the safety of the colony because her primitive mind was totally in control of her actions.
    In this particular circumstance, their wits would have been better weapons than their survival instincts, however.
    They were on the far side of the village from their colony when they first spotted the spacecraft coming in for a landing. The village itself was laid out haphazardly, with no regard for the movement of traffic and there was no straight shot through in any direction. Which meant they would’ve been far better off, despite the fact that the stream they’d so lately visited lay at the foot of a steep cliff they couldn’t hope to climb, if they’d simply whirled around and headed back that way.
    Their wits had scattered like leaves in the wind, however, with the panicked scattering of the barbarians who’d been holding them prisoner.
    For if the ‘barbarians’ arriving by airship were capable of striking that much terror into