AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I know you can,” I said, “but why don’t you let me do it?”
“I’ll take a blaster,” said Jini.
“Why didn’t you have a blaster in your quarters?” said Cypra. “When you were attacked by the donen?”
“I forgot to charge it,” muttered Jini. “But I got a new cartridge, and I’m good now. So, it’s fine.”
“And we need you to fly the ship,” I said. “We don’t need me for anything. So, I’ll go and do it, and you two stay here and shoot anything that comes into the bridge.”
Jini surveyed me. “Gotta say, I don’t love your macho shit, but you do make a good point.”
Which was how I ended up outside the ship wrestling with the tether in the darkness.
It should have disengaged when I went out and used the ship’s tool on it. It should have, but it hadn’t. No, it looked like Grilin had smashed the receptor so that the tool couldn’t hook in where it was supposed to anymore, and now it was stuck tethered.
I was laboriously chipping away at the pieces of the smashed receptor to clear that away. Once I did that, I should be able to fit the tool against it and get it to disengage, but I had to clear it all off and there were a lot of pieces.
Midway into this, Jini showed up, blaster in hand, to check on what was taking me so long.
I showed her what had happened, and she offered to help, but it wasn’t really a job that two people could do. There wasn’t room for more fingers getting out all the slivers of smashed receptor.
She went back inside.
I went back to it.
Finally, I had them all out, and I tried the tool.
No, it wasn’t connecting.
Lose me in deep space, it should connect.
I looked it over, angry—probably angrier than I should have been, which was due to the rut and the way it was affecting my emotional equilibrium.
I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to my hooves. I made myself walk away before I decided to start kicking the tether. If I damaged it further, the tool would never fit in there.
When I was calmer, I came back and looked at it again.
Ah.
That was the problem. There was a little piece stuck down in there. I wasn’t going to be able to get it with my fingers, but maybe if I turned the tool and used the edge of it?
Yeah, that was going to do it.
Just like—
Five points of bright, awful pain in my back.
I cried out, stunned, back arching, instinctively reaching behind me. I collided with flesh, and then the pressure let up, but it still hurt.
I crumpled down to my knees, but I forced myself to turn immediately. There on the ground, I glowered up from under my antlers.
It was another donen. His own antlers were red with blood. He’d had them in my back, I realized. That was what had hurt me. He sneered at me.
I fumbled for the knife I’d brought with me, strapped to my ankle. The women had tried to convince me to bring a blaster, but I’d brought this instead. Maybe that was dumb, but I figured I should use what I was familiar with, and I didn’t often use a blaster.
I brandished it, pointing it at him. “Back off.”
“You’re going to surrender one of the women,” he said. “You don’t need them both.”
