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“Why?”
“It was complicated.”
“I bet it wasn’t. When every female on your planet bar one or two packs up and leaves, you’ve done something wrong.”
“We’ve done many things wrong,” Gruff says. “The rut is difficult on us, and even harder on our women. The rampant desires of so many males uncontrolled…”
“So you’re telling me you had an epidemic of…”
“Our females tired of being bred to oblivion and beyond. They liberated themselves, every woman and child.”
“But they must want to breed, sometimes.”
“They do. They live on the twin planet. Males are selected remotely, and their seed is delivered. Males born to the females are transported here at five years of age, where they are raised in small herds. Many of the groups we are encountering now are males raised that way. They have not been properly socialized.”
“So your entire species reproduces artificially because the females got tired of the harassment.”
“Even when they lived on the same planet, the females lived separately, sometimes in larger groups with one male, but quite often living with their female kin and going off to find a buck when they were ready to be mated.”
“They don’t want to mate in person anymore?”
“Some of them do. They come here as courtesans and brides, but as you can imagine, the imbalance of genders has only made it more difficult for a female to live on her own terms here.”
“And you blame me for wanting to put an energy bolt through anybody who gets close to me? You’ve just described this planet as a kind of male-dominated gang bang.”
“I don’t know what a gang bang is,” he says stiffly.
“Yes, you do. The silver thing translated it.”
“Jem…” he says warningly.
“Gruff,” I growl back at him, because he doesn’t scare me. I can say gang bang if I want. “Gang bang. Gang bang. Gang bang.”
Not being privy to my thought process, Gruff is momentarily confused. He works it out, though, because he’s smart.
“What the… you are so disobedient. Even the suggestion you behave yourself is met with rebellion. What happened to you?”
“I survived a world of men. And I intend to survive this world of… bucking aliens too.”
“You have me,” Gruff says, rubbing my head in a way that is probably supposed to reassure me, but only messes up my braid.
“I have myself.”
He looks at me with that piercing green gaze and I wonder if I have offended him. I was trained to be independent, to not need any man. All my training was geared to help me survive in the wilds of any planet, anywhere. I don’t need him. And I’m not going to depend on him, especially not now that very dark thoughts are starting to assail me.
I turn to him with a question. “So, you have space flight, then. You have cities and high technology. You are an advanced civilization.”
“Well. Advanced enough,” he shrugs.
“So me being sent here was no accident. They wanted to land me among hordes of sexually ravenous males. And they sent me with a little goat, basically blood in the water to your kind, like sending someone into shark-infested waters with an emotional support bucket of chum.”
I can’t ignore the very obvious conclusion. I was betrayed. I was abandoned. I was left not only to die, but possibly to be ravaged to death. They knew, and they sent me here anyway.
“I need to get off this planet and back to my station,” I tell Gruff. “I need to get my revenge on them. I never did anything to deserve this. Sure, I might have been a pain in the ass, but I never…”
“What would happen when you got back to your station?”
“I would report them.”
