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“A mate!” Piam laughs. “But she is not Caprine.”
“No. She is human.”
They react with shock. Well, Piam does.
“Is she… you said she is your mate?” Piam looks at me. “Gruff, she is not of our species. Mating with her could have disastrous results.”
“I think she’s cute,” Trex says. “Do you have any more of them?”
“This is the only one. You know they’re invasive.”
Piam is less economical with his opinion. “Did you hear what they did to the Pursine Empire? They ate them. Every last one. Ate them, Gruff. These… these humans. They scour the universe looking for food and resources. They consider anything they can kill to be consumable.”
“Actually, we’re really evolving our views, and we try really hard not to eat anything sentient, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. Though you’d think we’d work it out before we ate a whole species,” I say.
They’re looking at me like I’m a little monster, and I have to admit that seen from the perspective of aliens, they’re not wrong.
“She’s dangerous,” Piam says. “She’s dangerous, and you should destroy her now, humanely, before she brings more of them.”
“She’s a sole traveler. A scout. She’s no danger to anybody. She brought a goat with her. A doe. And she has not so much as taken a bite out of me,” Gruff says.
The joke, such as it is, does not go down well. Piam stares at him as if he’s lost his fucking mind. The air is thick with judgement, and I am starting to feel guilty all over again, which makes no sense because it’s not my fault I am human.
“I think we’ll move on, thank you, Gruff,” Piam says in that stiff way people talk when they’re pretending to be polite, but every word is an elaborate cover forfuck you.
“You’ve been traveling for days. Stay the night. Sleep. Rest.”
“Not in a home where one of those creatures dwells and is mated with. I know the mate shortage is dire, but you should be ashamed of yourself. We’re leaving now.”
His sons seem less intense about the whole hating humans thing, but they follow him out the door with apologetic looks and shrugs to Gruff. Gruff’s still holding me in his arms, cradling me close. His arms tightened around me as his friends reacted to me, protective and strong.
They leave and within minutes are are alone. Gruff says nothing. I say nothing. I want to say a lot of things, but I feel bad. Very bad. He was obviously happy to see his friends, and then the old goat outright shamed him for keeping me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Sorry? For what?”
“For, uh, grossing your friend out.”
“Of all the things you might have to feel sorry about, that is not one of them. You can’t help being a human. He can help his bigotry. Or perhaps he cannot. The old man no longer ruts. Instead he frets about the changes coming to the world, those brought by external and internal forces alike. That is what the elderly do. It’s what I’ll probably do one day.”
I wonder if that’s the same bigotry that would have seen Gruff kill me if I were male. Now doesn’t feel like a good time to ask that question. I suddenly feel very alone and very small on this very clearly inhabited planet. Did EET make a genuine mistake in sending me here? Or was this their way of trying to get me fucking killed?
“Gruff…”
“Yes?”
“I need to go back to my dome,” I say. “I need to check my briefings. We are supposed to land on wild, unsettled planets. Sometimes those planets might have a sentient species we couldn’t detect, but we know when civilizations exist. We know when there are fucking cities, and aliens who know about us enough to want to kill us on sight. I think someone sent me here to get me killed.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because I’m very annoying.”
He smirks, showing a little alien fang. “That may be true at times, but I do not think it is sufficient reason to set you up to perish.”
“Then you’ve never encountered someone who is as powerful as they are petty.”
“It is surprising to me that they would send a single female at all.”
