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“Engineer!” Tschenkar squeezed my shoulder, scaring the ever-loving shit out of me. I jumped a few feet off the ground, and the headphones fell to the ground.
“Goddess! You scared me!”
He pointed down at the headphones. “It’s working?”
I picked the headphones up and held the right cup near his ear. He pressed the gross, sticky thing right up against his skin, and I shuddered, but didn’t bother saying anything.
“It’s Thuliak,” he said, then listened further, “how do we talk to him?”
Everyone gathered around me as I tried to modify the frequency. I had to rework the radio a bit to get it on frequency modulation, but once I got it, it didn’t take me long to find the two-way channel.
“Hello?” I shouted into the left cup. “This is Enginee—Airlock Eve. It’s Airlock Eve. Get me Thuliak.”
“Airlock!” the voice shouted. “It’s Thuliak’s human! Airlock!” The voice was full of feedback and static. Whoever had figured out the radio onWrathhadn’t realized that modifying the amplitude would give a stronger signal. I’d have to walk him through it, but for now I just wanted to hear Thuliak’s voice.
We waited—almost ten minutes—Thuliak must have been spread thin trying to command all of the Khetar forces from a dying ship that would soon fall out of orbit if he didn’t crash land it first, like Tschenkar had.
“Airlock,” he said, “you’re safe.”
“Fucking right she is,” Tschenkar growled into the receiver. “I’m not letting a hair on her little head get hurt, except for when I’m the one pulling her hair, if you got my meaning.”
“Is she with children yet?” Thuliak asked.
“Shouldn’t you be asking us about surface conditions?” I asked, somewhat incredulously.
“Your condition is my primary concern, little human.”
I rolled my eyes, but still I felt a warm fuzzy feeling at hearing him call me “my little human” again.
“My condition is good,” I said. “We’ve met a few other women, and we’re making our way toward Ginsburg.”
“Do you have enough Khetar to retake the city?” Thuliak’s voice asked through thick crackle and the hiss of feedback.
Tschenkar’s shoulders sagged. “I haven’t found my pack. There are only four of us, Brother, and I am the only man.”
The silence was long. I wondered if we’d lost the connection entirely, but Thuliak spoke just before I went to check the hardware. “I want to tell you to hide, but we need your pack, Tschenkar.”
“You haven’t heard from them, I take it?”
“The radio is a difficult device to make,” Thuliak said, “it took over 100 of our greatest minds, plugging away day and night. We barely had the materials needed, and we…”
Tschenkar looked at me as Thuliak described the creation of the radio as the hardest thing they’d ever done, as if I hadn’t just whipped one up over night from scrap and garbage. We both tried not to laugh. Ski Coach and Bartender were a few paces back, cupping their hands over their ear to try to hear anything they could manage to, but I doubted they were getting more than a few clear words from Thuliak.
Thuliak argued that it would be impossible for Tschenkar’s pack to construct a radio while on the ground. “I take it you found a fully functioning radio on the surface,” Thuliak said, “is there a chance your pack could find one too?”
“Engineer Eve whipped it up in like six hours, Thuliak,” Tschenkar said, “that’s what we’re calling her down here.”
“Six hours?”
He shrugged. “I mean, it probably took twelve, but we were walking a lot of that time, and I wasn’t letting her work on it the whole time either. But yeah, mate, she’s Engineer. You should have seen this fucking weapon she built, it was—”
I put a hand on his arm. We needed to stick to “critical” conversation, because the connection might fail at any time.
“What do we do?” Tschenkar asked. “What’s the plan?”
“Send Airlock out,” Thuliak’s voice boomed, clearer than it had sounded since we first radioed him. “We must discuss in private.”
“Tschen—” I said, raising a finger, heat bubbling deep inside me.
