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“You’ll feel better when we get outside.”
“You ready?”
I nodded, but then remembered he couldn’t even see me. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
There was another hiss, and then an explosion of light. I covered my face with my hands and squinted, and a steely cold breeze sucked every last bit of heat right out of the shard.
“Are your balls still suffocating?” I asked.
My eyes adjusted, and I had to laugh when I saw Tschenkar in a big coat. It fit him, technically, but the man was too big to be clothed. His shoulders were so wide that the coat just kind of hung down over the rest of his body, and his arms were so thick that the arms on the jacket were thicker than the legs on my snowsuit.
I tried not to laugh, and Tschenkar just glared at me.
“Can you tolerate this cold?” he asked.
I nodded. “I wish there were some sun, but as long as we take shelter at night and if it doesn’t get too windy, I can handle this.”
He took my gloved hand into his, and walked me out of the shard and into the snow.
I had to squint again when I walked out into the full light. It wasn’t bright or sunny, but the snow was reflecting what sunlight there was, and it was thousands of times more light than there had been in the pitch-blackness of the deadHarbingershard.
I looked around, seeing grey-blue peaks barely visible in the distance, most looking like impossibly distant shadows. Ginsburg was over those peaks, but we’d have to go around. We had a long way to go.
“North,” I said. “There were some little tourist towns on the way to the pass. We should be able to find a road too. Can you even walk, Tschenkar?”
“We heal fast,” he stretched out, but I heard bones cracking.
“Broken bones?”
“Those will take a few days to heal, but I’m good at bearing the pain.”
I eyed him up and down, trying to decide how to sort the egotistical bravado from what Tschenkar was really capable of doing. “We’re probably going to have to walk hundreds of kilometers. Unless we can find a car. If you need to rest a day or two, it might mean we make it there faster.”
“I may need to use my fingers to do maths now, human,” he said, “but I can add up my limits and subtract my wounds without using any real numbers, and I know that I can soldier on. We’re not—you’re not—safe until we reconnect with my pack.”
“Or with Thuliak’s. Where do you think he is?”
Tschenkar shook his head. “If I had to guess, he probably did what we did—or he’ll have to soon—except he’ll have to do it without your engineering skills.”
I thought about it. Thuliak wouldn’t have been able to accelerate faster, unless he thought of the trick I did to break with Eden’s atmosphere. That meant he’d be moving slower, which also meant he might be able to stop and turn around after the first of the pirate traps. Or maybe we’d cleared the traps out, and they were coming down to the surface to pick us off. Maybe Thuliak had a clear path, and he could keepWrathin one piece. In orbit. Maybe he could coordinate for every Khetar on the surface? More importantly, he’d be safer up there. I hoped he’d found a way to stay up there.
One reason I’d rushed down wasn’t just in case the ship died before we got safe—though that was a big reason—was that I didn’t want the women on the surface to be open prey for the pirate fucks. And if all the Khetar packships died off? Then the pirates would have free rein to take their claims to other colonies, selling Eden’s virgins like some precious fucking jewels. I couldn’t let that shite happen. I had to get Khetar feet and cocks on the ground while it was still a possibility.
“Do you know what a radio is, Tschenkar?”
“No,” I said. Fuck, saying “no” was so much easier than bullshitting her that I was looking something up in the Lexikon.
“It’s a way to broadcast signals. Waves of information. Does that ring a bell?”
“I think that would have been of very little interest to blokes who could communicate complex thoughts mind to mind. I can see though how it might be of interest now. You can’t expect me to have cared about any of this shite beforehand though, can you, Love?”
I tried to keep the disappointment off my face. “Tschenkar, are all Khetar as, um—” I tried to remember the word he’d used to describe himself as the leader of a pack of wolves, “alpha, are all the Khetar as alpha as you and Thuliak? What I mean is, maybe you two never were interested enough in the stuff the Hivemind was doing, or had learned, but maybe some other Khetar who were less focused on fighting and fucking will remember some of this stuff, even without the Hivemind?”
“You mean the nerds?” Tschenkar asked.
I laughed. “Um, yeah, the nerds.”
“We’ve got those. They have their uses, sure.”
