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The ship shakes and judders under the scythkin assault. They’re really letting us have it, but there’s nothing I can do but live inside the big metal box that is being absolutely destroyed piece by piece, moment by moment.
HULL BREACH ON DECK 3
What I can do is wonder. Life and death moments bring clarity sometimes. They show you what is important, and right now, I need to know what the hell I am to him.
HULL BREACH ON DECK 2 The ship starts to spit out automated warnings.
If I’m nothing to him, then these other aliens may as well take me. He already said they wouldn’t hurt me. I would miss him, but unrequited love is more painful than being the captive of a knife alien. Probably.
HULL BREACH ON DECK 1
Ever since I met him, the universe has been melting down around us. I’ve seen space stations vaporized, I’ve lost my place on my planet, I’ve sucked the essence from his big green monster balls, and all for what?
BRIDGE BREACH IMMINENT
“You have to tell me!” I scream as the ship shudders and electric sparks rain down on us all. “Do you want me? As a lover? Do you want me as a husband? Or am I nothing more than a toy to you, something to keep and show off?”
“I…”
A massive, clawed hand reaches through the wreckage. I am hauled into space before he can reply. The last I see, Brawn is standing in the wreckage of his absolutely decimated vessel, and suddenly none of my questions that seemed so important before matter at all.
It doesn’t matter what he wants. It matters what I want. And I want him. I fucking need him. And I was just ripped away.
I scream and I scream and I scream and then I scream some more, even though you’re not really supposed to be able to scream in space and I don’t know how this is happening.
“It’s okay. You’re safe.” The thing that looks like it was designed by a psychotic says. These creatures are not any less terrifying up close. It has retracted all the sharp parts of its body into narrow crevices which run across its body in a web. That makes it look silver and ridged and it still has big glowing eyes, like Terminator when his skin is all burned off.
It has me in its clawed hands, and it is carrying me through its vessel like a trophy. Others of its kind are looking at me and cheering and generally acting as though I am a prize they have taken.
Can King Brawn and his people even survive the damage they inflicted on his vessel? I don’t know. For all I know space has taken them. They may all be dead. But I cannot think that way. I can’t allow myself to give up within seconds of being taken captive.
“It’s not okay, you knife-faced fuckwit,” I say, employing a curse from a land down under. “Give me back to King Brawn right now, or I swear to god, I will make you regret the day your pathetic little synapses ever fired in the configuration of beginning to think about taking me from him.”
It keeps hold of me, but turns to a companion.
“She’s grumpy.”
“Maybe she is near her bleeding time,” the other one says. “Human females can be almost as aggressive as our matriarchs during that period.”
“Really?” I ask the question with no small amount of sarcasm, interrupting their conversation where they talk about me as if I’m not there, and don’t exist.
“Well, not really. There is nothing more dangerous in the entire universe than a scythkin matriarch. They were voted ‘most likely to consume you in several still-screaming pieces’ fifty thousand years in a row.”
“They sound like my kind of ladies.”
“They are not anybody’s kind of ladies. Matriarchs are solitary and vicious. They live for their clutch and nothing else.”
“Oh, I know some women like that. Shank you for a parking spot outside school at pick-up time type.”
The scythkin shake their heads as if to indicate that I do not know what I am talking about at all. But they’re wrong.
No alien matriarch could compare to a woman who just fought her way through three o’clock city traffic in her pajama bottoms wondering if mommy’s morning wine technically puts her over the legal limit. Then Kaden gets into the car with some glitter macaroni shit that’s never coming out of the backseat and says he swapped his backpack for a toy, and then she’s telling the kid to go get his backpack back, but the mom behind her is beeping and waving to be let in and finally she just snaps, throws the car into reverse and turns the other mom’s radiator into a fucking crumpled up ball of tinfoil before trying to strangle her with the tape from a 2010 Wiggles cassette. I attended that callout myself.
