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“I’ll go rework the math with Urgur then.”
It didn’t take long. Soon we had the new figures, and Urgur showed me how to manually enter them into the console. We had to use our fingers to peck at a screen, inputting one symbol of Ur-Khetar at a time.
Without the Hivemind,Harbingercouldn’t whip up any acceleration couches, at least not until we cracked the legs open on this whole “manual operation” thing and really got balls-deep into those systems.
I found Eve a couch. I had two grunts haul it from the office it had been onto the bridge. We had to use manual spray guns that fused it to the floor right next to my captain’s chair.
I put myself over the PA system, which still worked. My voice boomed throughout every nook and cranny ofHarbinger, from the mess hall to every last cramped bunk. “We’re about to initiate hard burn. The Hivemind is fucked, and the best thing we can do is to act as if it’s never coming back, because if the Hivemind is really gone, we’ve got a lot to learn and not much time to learn it in. We’ll be accelerating at the limits of Khetar biology, so some of you likely won’t make it. To those of us who make the trip. Your first job is to protect the women of Eden. Kill every last pirate you can. Protect as many human women as you are physically able to do. Even if you die doing it. I may be scion, but I’ll be doing the same. And once the planet is safe, then we breed. I don’t care what breeding order we agreed on before this shite happened. That was all decided back when the Hivemind was still alive and kicking. As far as I’m concerned, the Seeding of Eden is a free-for-all. Fuck anything that wants to fuck you. Make a triumvirate with whoever else is on the ground with you. Work with other packs you see on the ground. Remember that any teal-skinned cocky fuck you run across is allied with us now.” I squeezed Eve’s ass for emphasis. “But make sure you at least give them a hard time. Now buckle up and clench your asscheeks. We burn!”
And with that I hit the button. Usually the Hivemind started the engines, but there was something to be said for getting to slam my hand onto a big fucking button, and then feeling a split-second later like I weighed three times more than I had before.
My bones vibrated with the engines. My eyes jiggled in my skull. My adrenaline spiked.
I reached over—with great effort—and squeezed Eve’s hand. She was secure in her couch, with all kinds of life-saving drugs pumping through her. Her eyelids were heavy, but her eyes met mine. The drugs going through paralyzed most of her facial muscles, but I saw the gleam of a smile, mostly in her eyes. I tried to smile back, but drool just streaked across my face the moment I unsealed my lips.
It was hard to look good under 3G acceleration.
Eve slept through most of the trip, though me and the other Khetar without couches—which was most of us—had to raw-dog the acceleration. Or maybe it was more accurate to say the acceleration was raw-dogging us, without a single drop of lube. Still, we endured. We were Khetar, and we were fromHarbinger, which was scioned byme. Of course we’d stomach this, but when the engines did finally cut off, I’d never felt so relieved.
The sound of Khetar pissing filled the bridge, as nearly my entire bridge crew emptied their bladders into catheter tubes. Not only did we let the acceleration fuck us, but we did it without pissing ourselves.
I pissed into a catheter too, knowing I’d need to knuckle down again soon.
Finished peeing, I checked on my human. She was still asleep, and I chose not to wake her. If she could sleep through all this, then it was for the best. I certainly didn’t want to be awake right now.
I walked over to Urgar and stood behind him as he navigated the turn.
“Everything is working, Scion,” he said, voice heavy from the nearly two-hour burn. “Eve’s calculations were accurate. We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be, and we’re set to initiate the turn-around in ten seconds.”
I nodded and gripped a handhold, bracing myself for the next burn. Our gravity generators were strong enough to let me walk, but they’d barely been able to dent the G-forces of the acceleration, and now they were struggling to generate even 1G.
There was a small jolt as the thrusters fired and started turning the packship so it was facing dick-head side backward, balls facing Eden. There was a second jolt when the reverse thrusters fired and killed the angular momentum. Now the cock of the ship was pointing away from Eden, though it was still hurtling just as fast toward the virgin planet, as if our ship too was a virgin who thought you fucked a woman with your balls rather than your cock.
And then I was back in my captain’s chair. I strapped myself in, and the balls started to empty themselves.Harbinger’sengines fired again, and we started to kill our relative velocity to Eden. If Eve’s maths were good, we’d still be moving pretty fucking fast when we hit atmosphere, but slow enough that we could come to a stop before we crashed into the surface.
That’s not what happened though.
I’ll admit I passed out. Even a scion can only endure such crushing g-forces for so long, but when I jolted back awake, it was too the sound of klaxons and red lights. And then a violent shaking. It was as if the entire pack ship had moved ten meters in a split second, my chair’s harness held me tight, but without the harness I’d have—
Some of the bridge crew had undone their harnesses, or their harnesses had failed. I watched as two Khetar flew across the bridge, then splattered against the wall like ground meat hitting a fan.
Blood filled the bridge, which fit the overall atmosphere of pure panic and chaos quite nicely.
One of my ribs cracked. Maybe two. I looked around in confused shock for a few seconds. I debated if I should stay strapped in or rip the things off and try to keep key crew mates from dying. I didn’t need to check the splattered guy’s pulses, as they were very clearly dead.
There might be others though I could help, so I undid my harness.
First I checked on Eve. She was still asleep. She had a pulse. Warm and soft. I wouldn’t wake her. She was safest in that couch, and as shite as it was, nothing I could do would make her safer than she was now. The only thing I could really do was to scion and captain my way out of this. I needed to stop us from taking another hit. That’s how I’d protect her now.
We got hit again as I walked toward the cockpit. It was either a less direct hit, a hit from a smaller weapon, or a hit further from the bridge, because I didn’t get splattered onto the wall. Instead I just got slammed hard enough to break a few more bones.
Dazed and bruised and bloodied, I stumbled to the cockpit and managed to strap myself in next to Urgar, who thankfully was not just alive, but wide-eyed and focused.
“Status report,” I grunted.
“Six or seven pirate ships were hiding behind a piece of debris. They ambushed us and—”
“Can we lose them?”
