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Kaav growled and shoved Hive up against the wall. Hive gut-punched him in response, then hooked his leg around Kaav’s ankle, using what looked like the absolute minimal strength needed to knock Kaav flat on his ass. He drove his knee down onto Kaav’s chest.
“Fucker!” Kaav said. “I didn’t think you were going to fight back.”
“Our enemies will always fight back,” Hive said, “and we won’t automatically win anymore either. Remember that, Brother.”
He held a hand out and helped Kaav up.
Kaav punched him in the face. Hive staggered backward until he hit the wall. He looked up and blinked a few times as blood dripped from his nose.
Kaav grinned. “Brothers or not, sometimes I’m just going to do that to you. Remember that too.”
Hive scratched his chin, then wiped the blood off his face and onto his forearm. “I didn’t see that coming. I’m almost as dumb as you are now, Kaav.”
“Good,” Kaav said, “but stay a bit smarter than me so you can keep our good little girl safe on Eden.”
“You have to tell Chef about the pirates,” I said. “Are you sure they’ll attack?”
“Chef certainly already knows—”
There was a booming thud on the door. I waited for either Hive or Kaav to answer, but the door swung open before either Khetar could say a thing. It was Chef.
She stepped inside, then slammed the door behind her.
There had barely been room in the little cabin for the three of us, but with Chef squeezed in, it was packed full. She kept her back tightly pressed against the wall, probably to keep as far back from the Khetar dingdongs as she could manage.
“The pirates are attacking,” Chef said.
Hive smirked at Kaav and me.
“None of you look surprised,” Chef said. “Hive, did you know this was going to happen?”
He shrugged. “I evaluated it as extremely likely.”
I slid my jumpsuit back on. I’d been naked, which had felt right when my Khetar were naked too, but now that Chef was here, and clothed, it felt wrong to stay naked.
Chef’s voice was angry, but her face was pure exasperation. “Did you also predict that the pirates would do some kind of teleport jump to bypass the packships? And that they would go straight for Eden’s throat while High Command is in total disarray? We barely had time to scramble our fighters, and our STA guns barely managed to take out 25% of the pirate ships before they got inside the STAs’ effective range.”
“Wait, what?” Hive asked.
Chef put her hands on her hips. “So you didn’t predict that?”
“This teleport jump,” Hive said, “when did it happen?”
Chef pulled a tablet out of her suit and handed it to Hive.
I couldn’t look over his shoulder because he was too damn tall, so I settled on squeezing my head between his arm and muscular torso to get a view of the tablet.
The screen showed the view from Eden’s orbital defense cams, zoomed way in on what looked like a field of stars that was much too grid-like and regular to be actual stars. It was the engine burn from thousands of pirate ships. One moment they were there, and the next the light smeared and rippled. A fraction of a second later, a big blurry shape filled the screen. The cams re-focused, because the ships which had been tiny points of light were now filling most of the screen. Once the image snapped into focus, I was looking right at the rusted, decaying hull of an interstellar ship crewed entirely by human men. Men who cared nothing about a woman’s pleasure, and were here to use us as mere objects to service their own base desires.
“Their whole fleet must have jumped several AU in under a second,” I said. “Humans can’t do that.”
I looked at Hive, knowing he was the only one who could offer any kind of explanation.
Hive pointed to the time stamp on the video. “This is right after I spilled my seed into you, Precious. Either Tschenkar, Eriok, or Thuliak risked using their grasp drive in-system. Something went wrong, I wasn’t there to fix it, and they Grasped the pirates right pastWrathand directly into orbit around Eden. Have they spotted you yet?”
“Wait,” I said, “aren’t we docked withWrath?”
Chef shook her head. “Thuliak lefthoursago! The three of you were in here for over twelve hours! Thuliak, Tschenkar, and Eriok were nowhere near Eden when the pirates made this jump. The entire pirate fleet is right on top of us.” She looked to Kaav and Hive with wild, desperate eyes. “Can the packships Grasp back to Eden?”
