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Eve held tight to my arm. She whispered into my ear. “If it doesn’t come back, Eden will be able to fill the gaps. We’re not nearly as advanced as you were, but—”
“That won’t be necessary,” I hissed. “Itwillbe back.”
Something was blinking on the console. I pointed to it and gave the rest of the bridge crew a quizzical look. “The fuck is that?”
They all shook their heads.
“Has any one of you cocksuckers never seen this light blinking?” I asked, throwing up my hands. “We’ve all spent years of our lives on this bridge. I’ve never seen this light blinking. Am I going fucking insane here, or—”
“It’s never blinked,” someone said, confirming what I’d suspected.
It was Eve who walked up and hit her hand onto the light. I wanted to pull her away and tell her to stop fucking with my ship, but she looked confident somehow.
When she hit the button, a screen projected up above. The window was just text, written in our Ur-Khetar.
Eve frowned at it, then looked at me. “What does it say?”
I found myself reading it aloud, translating it into Eden’s language as I went.
“Contingency Protocol…” I started. It was labeled with letters and numbers that had no equivalent in Eden’s language, so I translated with what I called flowing finesse. “Contingency Protocol Alpha, Omicron, Delta, in the event of a Hivemind failure, manual operation of all packship systems will be necessary. Please open hatch located in…” I shook my head. “It’s a specific place in the ship, I don’t know how to translate it, but I know where it is. Anyway, it says we’ll find emergency rewire packets in there.”
“Rewire packets?” Eve asked.
“Rewire packets?” I shouted to the crew. Then I said it in our Ur-language for good measure. “Theraku na ulmachar?” In Ur-Khetar, anything with “na” in between it was a very pointed question. If anyone knew what the fuck a rewire packet was, he knew he needed to speak the fuck up.
Everyone just shrugged and shook their heads. A bunch of muscle-bound, big-cocked, purple-skinned pieces of useless shit.
“No one knows what a fucking rewire packet is?No one?”
I took a few of my higher-ranking crew members, along with Eve, to the storage bay the message had told us to go to.
We had to dig around a bit, but we found the specific storage bay the Hivemind told us to check. I opened the bay.
We frowned at the contents. It was full of tiny little cylinders, and as we opened the box, another window of text hovered above.
“What’s this one say?” Eve asked.
I squinted at the wall of text, and rather than translating it out, this time I just gave her the gist of it. “We inject ourselves with these things…” I rummaged through the cylinders. Each had text on it, corresponding to various roles.
Eve was holding one too, and she squinted at the wavy text of our language. “What’s this one say?”
I looked at the text. We didn’t have a word for it, but it basically meant “Khetar who operates, maintains, and designs machinery.”
I swallowed my pride and ego in that moment. The gravity of the situation was hitting me. We were colossally and totally fucked without the Hivemind. We needed fuckingengineers, and the Hivemind had given us these little vials which would rewire our brains and give us the skills we’d need to operate everything the Hivemind had done for us. Still, there was no way we’d do it even a fraction as well as the Hivemind had. We’d evolved for millions of generations to rely on that fucking thing, and now it was gone.
“Engineer,” she said, grinning, “It says Engineer.” She handed me the vial. “We can both be engineers then.”
“No!” Genkar roared, ripping the vial from my hand. He tried really hard not to look at my woman, but his eyes fell onto her breasts like a ship falling into a gas giant’s inescapable gravity well. “With respect, Scion, and Airlock Eve, our scion cannot use this! It’s too dangerous and untested.”
“We don’t have time to test,” I said, lunging for the vial, but Genkar jumped back, and without a word, injected himself.
It didn’t take long. I watched the veins in his neck bulge, and then blood spewed out of his nose. His eyes widened for a brief moment, and then he fell to the ground like a large tree that had just been felled.
Everyone looked around as Eve fell to her knees and put a hand on his neck.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“He has no pulse,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide. She was terrified, I could tell. She was someone keeping it in check though. Fuck, she was strong.
