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10
TSCHENKAR
We had an argument.
I wanted to keep theSlaughtering Eve. Cleopatra—who hadn’t even seen it in action—agreed with me.
Both Engineer Eve and Bartender Julia wanted to try to rebuild theEve Humper, giving up our only weapon so that we could travel again on the road.
“It’s too dangerous on the road,” Cleopatra said, “especially without a weapon! These pirates aren’t messing around, and Ironcock will be back.”
I laughed. “Ironcock! Did you see the cock on the one I killed? If it were any smaller it would have been inside, like a woman’s pussy. I doubt Ironcock is much larger. But I do agree with you, Ski Coach, regardless of how small their cocks are, they still have deadly weapons. Cleopatra said they had an anti-tank rocket. You think theEve Humpercould withstand that?”
Eve was mostly ignoring us as we argued. Both her and Bartender were crouching over the front of the car, poking, prodding, and tightening screws. They talked amongst themselves, using words I’d never heard and couldn’t understand without the Hivemind.
When a loud whirr came from the engine, followed by a loud “pop” sound, followed by the bitter smell of burned electronics, Julia screamed, and Eve grunted.
It took them a few seconds to look back at Cleopatra and me, who stood waiting to hear what happened.
“Well?” Cleopatra asked.
“We can stop arguing,” Eve said. “There’s no carandno weapon now.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Julia shook her head. “You pushed theSlaughtering Evetoo hard, Tschenkar. I’m not blaming you for doing it. You used it to rescue Ski Coach and to keep us all safe, but the engine was never designed to make and maintain such a powerful field.”
“I see. It did seem too good to be true for a human weapon. I began to wonder why these types of weapons were not mass produced.”
“It weighed over 200 kilos,” Julia said. “Even if we got it to run more stable, there’s still no human who could wield it anyway. We do have weapons like that, but they’re mounted on spaceships or tanks.”
I pointed at the big pile of equipment we’d gone through, it had mostly looked like discarded junk the pirates were likely to abandon when they moved on, but I’d put anything that looked vaguely useful into the pile. “Can you build another weapon from these parts?”
Eve crouched down and started sifting through the junk. Her face curled up as she picked up what looked like a big wet tentacle, but it was wet with thick black lubricant that smelled like burning smoke. She threw it aside and frowned at her hands, which were covered in the smelly gunk.
Then she smiled and reached her hand deeper in, pulling out a long spool of wire. “Do you see this?”
“Do we strangle our enemies with it?”
She shook her head. “No, but we can build a radio and try to call Thuliak.”
* * *
It wasdifficult to make progress. Engineer Eve, I had now realized, had a tendency to tunnel vision on tasks which interested her. Just as she’d ignored me while trying to fix the car, she ignored all of us while working on the radio. She begged me to let us stay in the pirate camp for the night, but almost entirely weaponless, I didn’t want to risk that Ironcock might return with reinforcements.
We did find more weapons, though nothing much more potent than a human cock.
I got an old laser assault rifle. Cleopatra found it stashed in a pile a few dozen meters from the camp. Eve told me the battery was mostly dead, but that I could trust it to get a few shots off before it was useless. Then we found a single-use railgun pistol. None of the women had seen anything like it before, but Eve guessed it was meant as a self-defense tool for women in space. It could fire a single metal rail at incredibly high speed. In a pinch, it could depressurize an entire pirate ship. This is why Eve thought it had been meant as self-defense, because if captured, a woman could take herself out and spare herself the fate of being sold—or worse—while taking a whole pirate crew out with her as a parting gift.
I would use the railgun as a last resort, possibly to disable an armored opponent.
We found more primitive weapons as well. I now wielded a long spear, while the women also had their pick of hunting and survival knives. I stashed the extra knives, food, and other equipment into a large backpack, which I strapped onto myself. I felt like a packhorse more than a Khetar, or maybe more like a human since I was wearing so many clothes. It was still better than being naked and unarmed, I decided.
“Engineer!” I growled.
I looked over my shoulder and caught her stopped and crouching down, poking at a golden-colored wire, and screwing it into a piece of wood we’d found at the pirate camp.
“Just a second,” she said.
