AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tharkur was using this whole stadium thing as a distraction from the Hive Mind being gone. Everyone would have otherwise been panicking, but he’d channeled it all into this. He must have been hoping he just needed to keep this going until the Hive Mind came back. I needed to set him straight, and doing it in front of the whole fucking pack didn’t seem ideal to me.
A line of soldiers stepped out of a door on one side of the stadium. One line was outfitted head-to-toe in black armor, the other in white.
Halfway down the line of soldiers, between both lines, both bodies of Tharkur strutted out into the stadium. His white body was next to the black-armored soldiers, and it clutched an obsidian-black dagger. His black body had a pearl-white dagger and stood next to the white bodies.
When you became a merged consciousness that occupied two bodies, the most important thing it said about you was this:Bothof your bodies could fuck good enough to merge two men into one—youknewhow to fuck.
Tharkur’s honor guard was comprised solely of two-bodied Khetar. Each black-armored body had a white-armored second half, matching the skin of both of Tharkur’s bodies.
It was only fitting that our scion occupied two bodies. He’d greatly respected me for having two bodies, and he was likely going to be shocked when he saw me in just one.
If he was surprised, he didn’t show any reaction. They must have told him in advance after they’d seen me at the airlock that I was in one body. Or did they suspect I was holding my other body back? To guard the shuttle? Yes, that was more likely.
Whatever they thought didn’t matter. I was going to tell Tharkur everything right now, I was going to—
Tharkur pointed his daggers at me, and four soldiers swarmed me—two black and two white.
I wasn’t armored like them, and I wasn’t even holding a fucking weapon. They had rifles, though thinking about what Weapons had told me, and looking at the patchy sky over the stadium, I wondered just how many of those weapons would still fire right now if they pulled the triggers.
I reasoned they weren’t likely to shoot me. He’d sent four at me for a reason: To make a good show.
I ducked down and rammed my head into the first black soldier’s gut. My skull crashed against hard armor, but I used my legs to lift him up into the air and throw him over my shoulder onto the ground. As he fell, I snatched the rifle out of his hand.
I brought the gun up and took a shot at the white soldier who was about to shoot me. I shot at his leg, just in case the guns were set to be strong enough to kill.
The soldier winced and fell, but his leg was still attached to his body. There wasn’t even a gaping hole in it. The weapons were probably set to hurt me enough to knock me flat, but to just be a little kiss on the cheek through the warriors’ armor. The guy I shot was hamming it up, flailing around on the ground to make a better spectacle, but I was close up enough that I could tell from his face he wasn’t really in any pain. This was all for show.
So I hammed it up as well. I drew out the fight, and when the warriors started clubbing me with real force, smashing the grips of their rifles up into my ribs, I took the hint and collapsed to my knees, letting them grab hold of me and subdue me.
Only once I was pinned down did Tharkur start moving both of his bodies toward me.
He strode forward in a way only Khetar with two bodies could stride. Each moved in perfect counter-synchrony to the other. The black body’s heel stepped into the dirt just as the white body’s toes left it. They moved as one. They were one. They were Tharkur, my scion, who had his honor guard pinning me the fuck down and wasting valuable time.
Tharkur eyed his honor guard with his black eyes, and twitched a black finger upward.
They lifted me up into the air. One of the spears was pressed up against my skin and drawing blood. They’d jam it right through me if I budged.
“This is Kaav,” Tharkur said, his voice amplified and booming through the stadium and false sky, whose facade was falling apart so quickly that there were more patches already than when I’d first entered. Even with the orgy over, the air smelled of Khetar seed. “Kaav is one of our strongest—and mostclever—decorated intelligence operatives.”
That was the good-sounding word for spy. It was a human word. Tharkur must have been able to get the human language switch to happen before the packship’s abilities had slipped too far. I realized that therewouldbe packships for where this wasn’t the case. Late-arriving packs wouldn’t be able to speak anything but proto-Khetar.
The stadium—my pack—gave me a lukewarm cheer and half-hearted claps. I was some higher-ranking cockhead who disappeared for years at a time. People only ever knew me in passing. They were my pack, but I was rarely together with them.
“You don’t sound impressed,” Tharkur said, speaking with both bodies in unison. The white body’s deeper voice and the black body’s higher voice vibrated against each other in the air. It was a pleasant and hypnotic sound. It left me with a warm, soothing feeling even though he had his warriors pointing spears into my back.
The crowd roared louder, but it was very forced. I could sense just how anxious they were. Tharkur was working on pleasing an increasingly tough crowd with increasingly fewer resources. The more of the stars my pack saw through that fake sky, the more they’d doubt the Hive Mind was ever coming back.
“Scion,” I shouted, deciding it was worth interrupting, “I have a way out—”
Tharkur’s white finger flicked across his white lips, and the warrior behind me reached for me.
I thought of fighting. I might have been able to get what I needed to say out before the spear was too deep in me, but Tharkur might not be able to fix the wound afterward. Was the medbay still functioning? I wasn’t going to risk dying to get the news to him a few minutes earlier, so I put up only a little bit of muscle-flexing resistance as the warrior gagged me with a thick leather cloth.
I bit down into it. It smelled like real leather. I couldn’t fucking talk now. The gag got my pack clapping and cheering. This is the kind of shit they wanted to see. They wanted to see a decorated hero gettingpunished. I didn’t take it personally. In their shoes, I’d want to see the same thing.
“Now,” Tharkur said, “let me show you the very most special part of Kaav. This is actuallyhalfof Kaav, by the way. He lost his second body while on assignment.”
The cheering went quiet. Having more than one body was seen as something very special, and even single-bodiedInseminatorsemphasized with the pain of losing a second body.
