“30 Khetar per squad, each armed with a plasma rifle,” Thuros said, “in Ginsburg. 15 per squad on the outskirts, or—”
“Make it 20,” I said. “We crush them like a vice from both sides.”
I pointed to the diagram of the outskirts around the pass, at a building labeledSki Lodge. “I see you’ve found it. My squad and two other squads will be deployed here. How accurate is our targeting?”
“We made very deliberate calculations, Scion. In order to get enough material for 10,000 pods, we are sacrificing precision accurac—”
“Just tell me.”
“You might land a few kilometers away from where you want to, but the squads should all land mostly in a 5-kilometer radius of each other, with at least 50% of the forces within one klick of each other.”
“What is a klick?”
“It’s what the women are calling a kilometer when they talk to us on the radios, Scion.”
Kilometer was already human enough, why did it have to be a klick too. It sounded like something Tschenkar would say.
“I will call it a kilometer. You will do the same.” I looked at the whole bridge crew when I said this. I didn’t want my pack talking like Tschenkar.
“We will rain down from the heavens,” I said. “The human men will shit their already soiled pants.”
The bridge crew laughed. Human style humor was very much in fashion right now, and the idea of pants was already funny to us. Somehow, the concept of shittingintopants had been the most comical human expression we’d come across thus far. I tried to save it for when I needed to lighten the mood, and the death of our home was one such moment.
“Wrathhas served us well,” I said, “but now that it’s time to say goodbye to him. Let’s remember what we’re gaining. A whole planet. Mates. And descendants.Wrathdies so that our future pack may live.”
We held our heads down in a moment of solemnity, and then Thuros hit the button.
One of the nerds had found a brilliant trick, one that we would likely never be able to repeat. They’d been able to talk to the ship even with the Hive Mind gone. By allocating a huge sum of the ship’s total output to a specific machine in the lair, they gotWrathto talk to them. This was one reason we’d begun to call the ship “he,” and why everyone was so sad to see him go. By talking to the ship, we’d gotten it to agree to our plan. It was almost like there had been a small Hivemind, but we’d needed to speak to it in Proto-Khetar rather than with our minds. The button Thuro pressed was the final program the ship had made for us. It would use the remaining Hivemind technology to split itself into 10,000 pods, encasing each of us, and then using its remaining mass to boost us up to the right velocity and into the right trajectories for us to land within the 5-kilometer radius of our designated squad.
It happened fast. One moment I was on the bridge, the next I was encased in a silver egg. Fluid pumped into the egg, shielding my organs and lungs from the extreme g-forces which were already building up as my egg rocketed toward the pirates’ dragnet and minefield.
I’d asked one of the nerds what would happen to an egg that hit a mine. He said they were small enough that only a few dozen eggs would likely hit a mine. When I pressed him on what happened to those few dozen, he told me not to ask.
I had to assume it would deflect me from my trajectory badly enough that I would simply fly through space, dying a very slow and painful death. Scion or not, there was a chance I could end up being one of those few dozen eggs.
The g-forces crushed me even through the fluid. I could barely breathe. I went in and out of consciousness, and was jolted awake when the egg began vibrating. The silver walls turned red, orange, and then white. The fluid got warmer, but it had been programmed to cool against the friction from Eden’s atmosphere.
That’s where I was now. I was blasting through the atmosphere. That meant I hadn’t hit a mine. I was through the dragnet and minefield.
Soon the white walls cooled back to orange, and finally I felt the last-minute g-forces of the breaking thrust. The fluid hardened to a near solid below my feet as my body was pressed deeper down into it. It also felt like my entire fucking spine was being compacted down, but I was a Khetar scion, and I fucking weathered it.
Save for the thick liquid below my feet, I was basically standing on the molten-hot inner shell of the egg. My whole boy was bruised and beaten rugged from the trip, but I forced my chest out and my shoulders back. I stood up straight, and braced myself for combat.
When the first chunk of melting egg fell away, the cold hit me. I’d landed on the outskirts, where the terraforming core barely reached now, and I wasn’t wearing anything. There hadn’t been enough extra mass to make us anything to wear. The plasma rifle popped out of the solid below me—it was a last gasp of the powers ofWrath’smini Hivemind.A final gift from my ship to its Scion. I grabbed the plasma rifle and powered it on just as the egg in front of me melted away, and I spotted three human males staring me down, guns pointed at me.
I fired immediately, melting one of their heads off. Another burst of plasma came from the side, melting the inner half of the second man’s torso. The third man got one shot off before I shot him clean in the gut, melting his cock and torso so thoroughly that the legs fell separately and disconnected from the upper body into the sloshing, melted snow below.
I saw Kieras, Nykos, and Theladon approach shoulder-to-shoulder as the egg melted away and freed my peripheral vision. As more eggs landed, more and more Khetar fell into formation with us.
Soon there were 14 of us, we walked through the open areas of the ski lodge and vaporized any puny male form that dared cross our paths.
Then I heard women screaming. My head jerked to the side as I focused on the source of the screams. A big building. Maybe it was the main lobby of the hotel area?
My men knew to watch our flanks. It was a given for movement in this type of combat formation and squad configuration. I signaled for us to take the lobby, using the most speed and least caution we could afford. We advanced, occasionally taking fire from our flanks, but our return volleys were much more deadly and precise than the pirates’ pathetic attempts.
Soon I was kicking down the door to the lobby. I rushed in to find a pirate man holding a woman by the waist, a gun pointed to her head.
My eyes scanned across the lobby, looking desperately for Eve. Part of me wanted to find her, another part of me wanted her not to be in here, after seeing the state of these women.