Instead of responding verbally, the youth approached her and lifted the device she’d been studying and carried it toward the back of the vast room. Noelle assumed she was expected to follow him and did, discovering to her delight that he’d taken the piece to a work bench in the back. She climbed on the stool while he lit lanterns to give her more light.

“Oh for a good florescent!” she muttered. “I may go blind in this dark hole!”

“What do you think it is?”

Noelle glanced at the boy-man when he spoke and grinned. “That’s the fun part!”

He looked confused.

Noelle chuckled. “Figuring out what it’ll do. That’s what’s fun about this kind of puzzle. I’m thinking it isn’t a weapon, though. Not saying it isn’t but I don’t see anything to suggest that it would shoot projectiles of any kind.”

He looked disappointed. “Maybe we should keep looking then?”

Noelle gave him a look of surprise. “Why? This could be something good.”

He studied her a long moment and finally shrugged, merely standing quietly and watching her and searching for tools to help when she couldn’t find something she wanted.

“Is this what you did where you came from?” he asked finally.

Noelle considered the question. “Well, sort of. I didn’t run across anything like this and it wasn’t my job, but I always did like tinkering with gadgets and I’m actually pretty good at fixing them and figuring out what they’ll do.”

“What was your job?”

“Xeno-biologist.”

“What’s that?”

“The study of extra-terrestrial or alien biology. Uh … study of nature—but in my case, on alien worlds.”

“Oh.”

She could tell from the way he said it that he still didn’t have a clue of what she was talking about.

She actually wasn’t sure it was something she should share. Who knew how they might feel about it if they understood? This was a completely alien species—regardless of how similar they seemed to humans—and they had a completely alien outlook on things and a completely alien society. They might burn scientists like humans did in the distant past because it conflicted in their belief in supernatural beings they referred to as gods.

“My name’s Noelle. What’s yours?”

He looked taken aback. “I am Prince Terl.”

Noelle stopped and turned to look at him in surprise. “I’m sorry. I don’t really understand the system here. You’re related to Drak, right? But he’s a prince …?”

His face reddened. “Prince Drak,” he said stiffly. “Or you can refer to him or address him as Highness, or Sire. Or my lord. He is the ruler over all of Alvarone.”

Noelle blinked at him, reddening with a mixture of anger at being corrected—by a kid no less!—and embarrassment at her screw up, and then paling with fear when it occurred to her that there might be ugly repercussions to not acknowledging a ruler with a ‘respectful’ title. “I beg your pardon,” she responded a little stiffly and then focused on her work again.

Neither of them spoke for a time. Finally, the Prince broke the silence. “I am his eldest. One day I will be ruler here.”

A jolt went through Noelle. “Sooo … Kadin and Jules are your half-brothers?”

He looked confused. “They are my brothers. Kadin is second in succession and Jules is third. My father sees no reason to beget more heirs. That is why you are here instead of warming his bed.”

Noelle felt the blood flood into her cheeks. It wasn’t as if she was a prude or unused to plain speaking. Her grandmother had raised her and she was not a prude and was notoriously plain spoken.

Beyond that, after generations and many centuries where sex was either taboo, or at least the discussion of it, and all sorts of strange customs and rituals surrounded the act, people had finally come to realize and accept that it was simply a part of nature and no more sinful than sneezing.

She supposed, to be completely accurate, the taboos had mostly vanished when people had outgrown the need for gods to blame for all of the problems with the world and accepted responsibility for their own actions. ‘Sins’ vanished. It the place of religion to set the parameters of acceptable behavior, a moral and ethics committee was established and the guidelines drawn up, voted on and accepted by the general populace, were taught to the young. And then laws were adjusted accordingly.

There was lawful and unlawful behavior, socially acceptable and socially unacceptable, but people had ceased to prose on about sinfulness.

Her discomfort stemmed from Terl’s intrusion into her privacy. It wasn’t his place to speculate on her sexual activities with his father—or anyone else!

And then there was the assumption that his father had no use for her and had deposited her in the junk room to see if she could make herself useful!

She shook the thought off, unwilling to allow the boy’s comments to ruin her enjoyment when she’d been so horribly bored before!

Now she had something she could really sink her teeth into! She could play with the alien technology and quite possibly develop an understanding of the species that had built it.

She thought it must have been Drak’s ancestors—Prince Drak’s.

She’d barely scratched the surface, of course, but it had clearly been built by a species that was physically similar to both humans and this species—two hands and ten fingers.

She got up to stretch the kinks after a little while and then looked around. “Why don’t we sort this by what looks like it can be repaired, what might be repaired, and what will never work again?”

The Prince looked dismayed. “I don’t think my father would like for us to move things around like that.”

Noelle frowned. “Well, we need some sort of system. Is your father more interested in weapons, then? Or maybe in useful tools? Or trade goods?”

Those questions seemed to throw the boy. “We have tools and weapons. I suppose he might be interested in things that we might be able to trade but we usually just raid and take what we need. And that’s mostly food. The winters here are long and very cold—unlike the seasons on K’naiper. We can only grow things that will reach maturity very quickly and even then the winter sometimes catches us by surprise and destroys the crop. So there is usually no one here to trade with or even to raid for food.”

Dismay flickered through Noelle, and pity. No wonder they’d become raiders! Not that their circumstances excused that sort of thing! They should have made more of an attempt to work out some kind of trade to get what they needed, but she understood, now, that it was a thing they did that was necessary to their survival rather than something purely for amusement or enrichment.

That changed things pretty drastically, or at least her opinion of them.

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about the climate itself, but technology could certainly improve things around here. Has anyone considered using greenhouses to grow food during the cold months? I mean, do you have them?”

There wasn’t a word in their language, that she knew, for greenhouse. That should’ve been her first clue that greenhouse technology wasn’t something they were familiar with. The blank look on Prince Terl’s face cinched it.

“Things will only grow during the spring and summer and those are not long seasons. It is cold in the fall and very, very cold in the winter.”

Noelle studied him for a long moment. “Do you have … something I could draw pictures with and on?”

He fetched her a pencil and a sheaf of crudely made paper. Fortunately, she was familiar with both because her grandmother had been prone to cling to the things familiar to her.

Settling on the stool once more, she struggled with the crude tools she had and made a drawing, explaining how the greenhouse would work as she went. Prince Terl didn’t seem particularly interested—at first—but when she explained that it would keep the snow off of the plants and allow them to grow food all year round, she had his undivided attention.