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6
TSCHENKAR
Iwas not an engineer, nor was I a nerd, but I was a scion. Thus, as boring as the explanations of electromagnetism, the visible spectrum, and all other types of waves were, I listened and tried to process as much as I could. If the Hivemind never came back, the Khetar would have to learn and understand these things. Even Khetar like me, ones who would rather fight and fuck than learn about invisible energies.
We made camp when the sun began to set. Survival skills were inbred just like our fucking and fighting skills, and I’d trained these skills as well on dozens of worlds.
These snowy foothills were nothing compared to the much more hostile environments I’d led my pack into. Packships looked at lots of worlds before choosing to breed. There were numbers of other planets with compatible females we’d visited, but chosen not to breed with. Khetar wanted to fuck, but we were always waiting for the right ones.
We took shelter under a rocky wall face, and I made it all nice, pretty, and soft with some thatched wood and grass.
“Now it just needs a fire,” she said.
“No fire.”
“It’s cold.”
“You’ve got me to keep you warm, but I need some food in my belly if that’s going to keep working.”
She looked at me skeptically.
“I don’t know all the nerd shite behind it,” I said, “but I’m way bigger and way stronger than you. I eat a lot more too, and I burn hotter for it. I’m a furnace, Love, and you can cling to me all night long, but this furnace is hungry, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re eating for five.”
“For five?”
I pointed to her belly. “The Hivemind is how we were going to know you were knocked up. Now we assume you already are? Either way, you need to eat. So you’re going hunting with me.”
“Why can’t we build a fire, and I wait at the fire while you go hunting?”
“Because,” I said, already looking around for shadows in the rising darkness, “a fire broadcasts to everyone that someone is here. I have to assume this planet is swarming with rapist pirates. Do the maths, Engineer.”
“Okay, yeah, I’ll go with you.”
“Plus,” I said, taking her wrist and sliding her hand up under my shirt. “I can keep you warm.”
* * *
Eve had toldme about the Buckjack. It was an animal native to Eden, and it was known among the women that the Buckjack’s meat tasted good. As little as I trusted a woman’s taste for meat, the Buckjack still sounded like my best bet.
“Do these things fight back?” I asked.
I hefted my “weapon” in my hand. It was a branch I’d ripped off a tree, then sharpened with my teeth. Khetar teeth never break or decay, and the corners are sharp as knives. Still, my weapon was primitive shite, a really sharp stick. If these pirates were wearing any kind of armor at all, this weapon was about as potent as a human male’s cock. Against a Buckjack though, probably I’d kill it, then I could use its antlers to make a stronger weapon.
Eve didn’t know much about where the Buckjack lived, where it slept, what its tracks looked like. She knew nothing really to help me figure out where to find one.
I did find tracks though, and when I showed them to her, she said they might right. So I followed those tracks.
Soon we ran across the Buckjack. It was lapping up water in a stream—nice, it had led us to clean water too.
“How do we kill it?” Eve whispered to me.
I looked down at the sharp stick in my hand, and weighed it against the thick-looking leathery skin that the animal had. The buckjack looked fast too, and Eve said she thought they were fast. It had big, long legs, maybe it would gallop or hop away even. My instincts said it was skittish too, so probably at the first hint of my sneaking up on it, it would run. Could I really risk throwing a sharp stick at it?
“Close your eyes, Love,” I whispered back.
We were tucked behind a wide tree.
“What are you going to do, Tschenkar?”
“Just close your eyes, Love, you strike me as the animal-loving type, and this animal reads as ‘cute’ to me, so…”
