Page 58 of Meat

Her beasts. Her mates.

They always tried their best not to make too much noise. After Jale’s duel on the day of their arrival, the other ukkur hardly even dared to look at Alyx. Still, she and her mates didn’t want to rub their relationship in the others’ faces by making a huge racket. Sometimes they couldn’t help themselves, but they tried.

Truthfully, the attitude of the other ukkur toward her had changed from one of suspicion and curiosity to something resembling reverence. They understood that Alyx could produce more little ukkur, and those little ukkur would eventually become big ukkur. Hunters, scouts, warriors.

Their numbers would grow because of her.

Alyx did not particularly like the idea of her sons growing up to lead that dangerous life. At the same time, she recognized that it was a fact of existence on this planet. It was a dangerous place, and her three mates would do everything they could to train their offspring to be more dangerous than anything they might encounter on this world.

But other questions still remained. Like where had the other ukkur come from if there were no other women besides her.

Alyx had not discussed this with her mates, just as they had not discussed their past in any great depth. For the first few months, the language barrier was too great. Now, however, after nearly a year among the ukkur, Alyx’s communication skills had improved to the point where she felt ready to broach that topic.

As she snuggled hot and messy between Jale and Krogg, she ran her fingers over the older one’s scars—the hard, rounded lines that striped his back and shoulders.

“Krogg,” she whispered in nith. “How you get these scars?”

“Nith,” Krogg answered simply.

“I know that. But where, Krogg? Where get?”

Krogg glanced across Alyx’s body at Jale, who was lounging on the other side, casually toying with her hair. They seemed to be silently debating whether to tell her and how much. After a long moment, Krogg nodded.

“We will tell you, Alyx.”

It was Krogg who did most of the talking. Occasionally, Alyx would interrupt with a question that Krogg did not understand—her accent and grammar were still far from perfect. Then Jale, who understood her better, would have to jump in and answer.

The story that they told amazed her. There were parts that Alyx had to fill in with her own guesses.

Nobody knew whether the nith were native to this planet or had traveled here from elsewhere. What they did know, however, was that long ago the nith had enslaved the ukkur to work their ksh farms. They had killed off all the females, wanting only the stronger males. They replenished their numbers by growing more of them in labs.

Artificial wombs. Rapid maturation.

And according to the stories, the ukkur had been different back then, more like animals, with fur and larger tusks. They had been even more brutish, though Alyx found that hard to believe.

Then, around a hundred years ago, the ukkur had started to change. Less fur. More upright posture. Greater intelligence.

Though Krogg didn’t say it, Alyx had a theory about why this had happened. That was around the time that the nith had come into contact with humans and started trading ksh for human meat.

Perhaps they had spliced human DNA into the ukkur genome. It would make the ukkur more intelligent and by extension more trainable. But perhaps it led to problems too.

If the modern ukkur were hybrids, that would also explain why her body was sexually compatible with her mates. But because they were still partly alien, the reproductive cycle didn’t follow the standard human time frame. Their super-sperm were able to create a baby in a matter of days.

And then there was the fact that all of her children so far had been boys. Was that also a side-effect of the nith’s genetic engineering? It made sense if their goal was to create an all male workforce of slaves.

For now, however, Alyx kept these theories to herself. She wasn’t even sure how to start putting them into words in her second language.

She touched Krogg’s scars again, gently and sadly.

“You slave Krogg?”

He plucked a stray lock of her messy hair from her cheek and set it carefully behind her ear.

“Yes,” he said. “Krogg slave. Jale too. Ravnar. All ukkur slaves one time.”

“What happened?”

Krogg then explained to her where the other ukkur in the tribe had come from. All of them had been freed from the ksh farms. A few, like Ravnar, had escaped on their own. Most, however, like Jale and like Krogg himself, had been rescued. Every year they made intermittent raids on the farms to free more and more ukkur, but it was a slow process. The farms were well guarded.