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What the fuck? Great. Not only was I trapped hurtling through space with the Loose Cannon, he just told me I stink. “Did you seriously just imply I smell like fish?” I asked between embarrassing and very uncharacteristic sobs.
“I like those little fishes,” he said solemnly. I knew he was trying to distract me, and I let him.
“Ew! I don’t. Especially not after the sardine fiasco. I thought you said you hated human food.”
He chuckled, the sound giving me just the faintest glimmer of hope that things would be all right.
“I lied.”
Chapter 10: Kan’n
I’d never seen Sam scared. I wanted to keep her distracted. If she was focused on me, she wouldn’t be worried about where we were and what was happening around us.
“What’s asardine fiasco? My translator does not have this phrase. Is that a celebration I have not yet learned about?” Humans had strange customs. The one they called Christmas was particularly weird, since many of the current traditions had nothing to do with the Christ person after whom the yearly event was named.
Her sob turned into a half-laugh. “No, it’s not. A fiasco is when something goes horribly wrong or is a complete failure. A few years ago, back in Franklin, a group of foragers found a whole bunch of canned sardines. I mean crates and crates of them. They were in good condition, too. But they weren’t careful and dropped an entire crate from one of the shuttles.”
I frowned, unable to imagine a crate falling out of a shuttle. “How is that possible?”
“They were air-lifting the crates, since your shuttles could haul a lot more behind and below them than could be carried inside,” she explained, her body relaxing as she talked. “Whoever tied it to the shuttle didn’t do it properly, and one ofthe crates crashed to the ground just outside of the compound. Every single can was dented. Every last one. Dented cans can’t be stored long term; we learned that the hard way. So that meant we had to eat them right away. We had sardines for every meal for days. It was summer, and some of the cans smashed open on the pavement. It stank so bad.”
“You said this was at the Franklin nest?” I asked.
I’d often heard the humans at the camp talk about this place. It seemed they all came from there and had only started the current camp recently. Curious, I’d had my shuttle—I’d call him Pip now, I suppose—look it up. Franklin had been a medium-sized town with a corresponding medium-sized nest. It had recently been obliterated, and was considered the first nest of that size on the planet to be wiped out.
The mission was well documented, and while only Xarc’n Warriors entered the nest, the video footage also showed dozens of armed humans, both on foot and in vehicles, hunting down the scourge that had escaped the nest and preventing them from starting fresh elsewhere.
What had confused me the most when I first started watching the footage was that Sam’s voice was in sync with one of the first cameras inside the nest. She’d directed the hunters around the labyrinthine den, warning them of scuttlers and spitters and making sure none of the hunters trapped each other behind a wall of flame. After watching it for a while, it was hard to remember that she wasn’t physically in there herself but had been controlling a machine with a camera called a drone.
“Yeah. Franklin. But if you say I smell like sardines, then I must stink.”
“No. You do not stink; you smell good, like sardines are supposed to smell good.”
She twisted around to level an incredulous look at me, her hair floating around her in zero gravity. “Does not compute.”
“I like the way you smell.” And as if to emphasize the fact that I’d just admitted to liking something about her, the rumbling in my chest increased so that it was now shaking and rattling our tiny pod.
Sam leaned back against the side of the pod as much as the harness would let her and put a hand on my chest, her eyes round. She knew what the sound meant. I did too.
The tightness in my chest every time I saw her, the feeling I’d erroneously interpreted as a warning, had been my body trying to tell me we were compatible the whole time.
“Shhh,” she hushed. “You’re going to rattle this pod apart.”
I wasn’t sure that was possible, but between how deafening it was now and how much it made everything vibrate, perhaps it wasn’t impossible either.
She rubbed her hand on my chest, and I closed my eyes, trying to calm that sudden need to have her touch me all over.
“I thought you hated me,” she said. “Can’t you go back to channeling that until we’re safely on the ground? Usually, Xarc’n technology is built to last, but this thing looks like it’s only built to last until the moment it lands.”
She wasn’t wrong. Assuming the mothership was orbiting the planet we were fighting on, this pod had only one job: to get its occupant safely down to the surface. According to the readout on the screen, having Sam with me was depleting the oxygen supply rapidly. Hunters could reduce and control our oxygen usage when at rest; humans couldn’t. I wasn’t going to tell her that, though; it would only make her panic more.
Sudden movement had me looking out the only window, which was placed directly in my line of vision. Outside the pod, chaos was raging. The mothership that remained intact had managed to disable the mining vessel, and the mutant shuttle was now in several pieces, the ores and minerals it had contained spilling out into space. Several of the pieces were traveling at high speeds toward Earth.
Unable to move into position fast enough to deflect the pieces away from the planet, the other mothership had retreated and sent out a few shuttles to do the job. The first shuttle made the mistake of using its blaster at full strength and shattering the piece it was shooting at into multiple smaller fragments. Realizing his error, the hunter switched to a lower setting to push the pieces away from Earth and toward the sun.
I focused on this, and my chest calmed.
“What’s going on out there?” she asked. “I hate not being able to see or do anything.”
