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We were still in the storage pay where the glitched out brain scrambling packs were. A lot of the bridge crew was still back on the bridge, and without the Hivemind, Ineededto be on the fucking bridge. I’d tell the others the packets were no good. That the Hive Mind really was gone. I’d convince everyone that we were not going to drown, that there was a way to breathe again. By landing on the surface.
“Everyone shut the fuck up,” I shouted, and everyone did shut the fuck up.
“We’re going back to the bridge. You will all have walk into that bridge like men of my pack. Like men ofHarbinger. If you walk onto the bridge and show the rest of the bridge crew that your diapers are leaking, I’ll make surenoneof you have pulses. Get your shit together. We are still Khetar. You are still my pack, and I am your scion. We will land on Eden shortly, and we will slaughter the rapists with our bare hands—if need be. We don’t need the Hivemind to let the bloodlust take us, and a Khetar who has tasted blood is more powerful than any human weapon. Thuliak, who will soon share a triumvirate with me, declared us Fifth. Then we were Third. But now? Now we will be the first packship to land on Eden. In just a few hours, you’ll all have your chance to claim your human mates. I say this not to disobey Thuliak, but because with the Hivemind down, we must do what we can when we can. And now,Harbinger, it is time to fight, and to fuck, and to breed!”
They all pounded their fists against the wall in rhythm. The pussified expressions were gone from their faces, and they once again looked like the killing and fucking machines I knew they were.
I took everyone back to the bridge, with Eve at my side. It took the crew several hours to adapt to the manual controls, but Eve was able to help.
I watched—with great reluctance, and sometimes seething jealousy—as she patiently and adeptly walked my bridge crew, pilots, and men with new jobs, like “life support tech” through various processes that she herself was learning on the fly.
Now I knew what it meant to be an engineer. I realized I’d been a cunt to her earlier when she’d talked about it. I was a scion, so I didn’t apologize, but I’d make it up to her the next time my cock was inside her.
I didn’t like how close my men got to her when she was helping them learn the systems, but it also made me look like a pussy if I lurked too close to her. Still, a few times I did have to get up in someone’s face and remind them who exactly this woman belonged to.
When she finished, I’d been studying a problem for nearly an hour. I barely noticed when she slid right up next to me, but the scent of her made my cock stiffen instantly, and that’s how I knew she was there.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
Everything was in Ur-Khetar, so she couldn’t read it. That had slowed her down a lot in helping my crew get their grip on things. “It sounds like we can’t use the grasp drive.”
“You want to translate it?” she asked.
I bit my lip and shook my head. “It sounds like the Hivemind just didn’t trust us to operate the Grasp Drives. Too much risk of making black holes.”
“It’s possible you could override it somehow.”
“I’ll get someone to translate for you later,” he said, “but we don’t have time now. We’re about to go into hard burn. We’re using Eden’s atmosphere to brake.”
“Who figured that one out?”
I nodded toward Urgur. “He did. I have no idea where he comes up with this shite in that little mini Hivemind head of his.”
“It was my idea, Tschenkar.”
I looked at my little human, almost as if for the first time.
“Humans have to do stuff like that all the time. We never had a Hivemind.”
“You can do all those maths?”
She nodded. “I’m an engineer.”
I didn’t even know where I’d start with maths like that. Without the Hivemind, I needed to use my fingers to add numbers together, which I’d realized while reading the emergency protocols and trying to figure out how much time we’d need to reach Eden.
“Explain the plan to me. Use as little maths as possible.”
She nodded, and she started talking, sounding almost like a Lexikon entry. She used more maths than I’d have liked, but I followed mostly what she meant. “...so we’ll have all this extra acceleration still, but I got Urgur to work the alien calculator thing for me on that console over there, and this kind of course will get us right into orbit. In just two hours.”
“What if we wanted to make landfall?” I asked “How much more time would that take?”
“Landfall?” she asked, cocking her head. “This ship can’t fly through our atmosphere, can it?”
“It can.”
“Um, well, actually we’d needlesstime then, because we could hit the atmosphere with even higher speed, and we’d have more atmosphere to brake on as we went down. Assuming the engines can negate the effects of Eden’s gravity?”
“They can. We will make landfall. All communications are down, Engineer Eve, I cannot even reach Thuliak over comms. Something very bad is happening, and the source of it is on your planet. We need the full strength ofHarbinger.”
