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“I’ll get inyourway?” I shrieked. So much for him being kind of sweet. I mean, talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
“Yes. You are good at that.”
I steamed silently, trying to forget the fact that I’d just lip-locked with him.
This was exactly why being sexy wasn’t enough. He reminded me of that every single time he opened his mouth. I forced myself to focus on the screen in front of us as Kan’n answered the call, leaning forward to tap the screen. The movement was a jarring reminder that he was still semi-hard under me.
Luckily, he only answered with voice, so Pip, or anyone else for that matter, wouldn’t see us being so intimate. Pip would have a field day if he saw me in Kan’n’s lap.
“Sam?” Pip’s voice was frightened and shaky. It must be scary to be strapped to another machine, I thought, unable to control anything as it flew.
“I’m right behind you,” I said reassuringly, hoping he could hear me.
“I’m here too,” Kan’n grunted.
“You won’t let them turn me off for ever and ever, will you?”
“Never! Jask’l is super excited to work on you. He won’t do that, either.”
“If they turn me off forever, I’ll never forgive you. I will haunt you from the junk belt in space.”
I tried not to laugh, he sounded so sincere. “I understand, Pip, but it won’t happen. I promise! How’s the air out there?” I asked, hoping to distract him.
“Fresh. It’s so weird to be flying butnotflying.”
I wondered how much he was aware of. “Can you see everything?”
“Yeah. Outside, anyway, using all the cameras attached to me. I don’t know what’s going on inside the ship.”
“We’re doing great in here, don’t you worry, Pip,” Lenny joked. “They let me fly the shuttle!”
It wasn’t his first time flying a Xarc’n shuttle, but it would be his first time taking it out into space. The man was a genius when it came to code, but he was equally talented when it came to video games. That had translated well in his position as one-half of this hunter group’s Tech Wizard.
I used to hate being called that, but I’d since gotten used to it. Especially since we did all the jobs a Tech Wizard would, technically speaking, do in the Xarc’n army—namely, fix things and make devices and gadgets for the hunters. Tech Wizards also sat in on battle plans, which was a bit new to me, but I appreciated that the hunters wanted my opinion.
It felt good to finally have the respect I deserved.
I’d been struggling to earn that respect my whole life, especially since I worked in a male-dominated field and hadinterests that were more usually reserved for boys and men. We lived in a progressive age, but some people were still ass-backward and thought a woman couldn’t possibly fix their precious car.
“Man,” Lenny observed. “That army of scourge sitting motionless around the nest is creepy as fuck.”
I reached for the screen so I could have it show me the nest, but it didn’t respond to me. It only reacted to Kan’n, who pulled up the feed for me.
The aerial image was chilling. Thousands of scourge stood statue-still around the opening of the nest. White threads of mycelium, the telltale sign of the fungus that worked in symbiosis with the creatures, stretched out for miles from the epicenter. Freaky.
“Did anyone come up with a workable hypothesis for why they are doing that?” I asked. “Surely, if you’ve been fighting these bugs for centuries, you’ve seen them do something similar before.”
“Not in my lifetime,” Jask’l answered.
“They’ve exhibited various odd behaviors several times that I know of. But each time was for a different reason,” Ror’k said.
I’d gotten to know the older hunter last night during the evening meal. Unlike Jask’l, who’d found his calling repairing shuttles while he was still young, Ror’k had once been an ordinary hunter fighting the scourge planet-side. After he finished recovering from an incident that had totaled his shuttle and left him in a full-body immersive medical unit, the Xarc’n warrior who’d managed the mothership before him had taught him how to run things. When he was satisfied that he’d taught Ror’k everything he knew, the other warrior had gone to wagehis final battle against the scourge. Apparently, dying in combat was the respectable way to go, even though he’d been ancient by then.
Ror’k had been running that mothership since. And while he was visibly older than all the hunters I’d personally met, he still had plenty of time left and was fit as a fiddle, a total silver fox. Because yes, their dark, wiry hair turned silver and gray as they aged.
“I remember an incident once when I was young where all the scourge on a planet started running in circles before suddenly stopping and staring at the sun. There was a parasite on that planet that had mutated to use the scourge as a host. But I don’t believe this is related.”
“Is it true that scourge all over Earth are doing this?” Lenny asked. “That’s what I heard.”
