“Well,” Gruff says when I turn around to face him. “That was one way of dealing with it.”
“Talking to them was a waste of time,” I say. “I’ll kill them if they try to fuck me.”
“Fair enough,” Gruff agrees. “Let’s go.”
My dome is not far away. Just another ten minutes of walking. I’m looking forward to checking my data and picking up some of the tech I left stashed there when I allowed Gruff to lure me away.
“Uh. Jem…” Gruff clears his throat before we arrive. “There might be some damage.”
He’s looking at what has been done to the trees and the general area around the path I forged in and out of my dome’s area. The trees have been stripped of bark and are covered in smears of indeterminate organic origin.
“Oh no.” I put my hands to my mouth as I come around the corner and look at what used to be my little corner of paradise.
The bucks have been here for a while, it seems. They have trashed my dome. They took everything of value to them, and smashed everything they didn’t understand, which was most of it. My machines, my files, my link to home, they’ve all been severed. And they all stink of these feral, nasty, desperate aliens. Their emissions cover everything.
“Don’t touch it,” he says. “They’ve…”
“I can see what they’ve done. They’ve come all over my things. What is wrong with them?”
“Nothing. They’re marking their territory.”
“Disgusting.”
A thought suddenly occurs to me. I flip my sidearm onto its side and check the battery indicator. It’s on about fifteen percent.
I now have no way of charging my weaponry again. They smashed the machines that take sunlight and turn it into energy. That means I’ve got what I’ve got, and nothing more.
Suddenly, I feel very frightened. These aliens are hostile in a lot of different ways, and I have maybe a couple dozen shots left. That’s not accounting for the passive discharge. I’m going to be able to protect myself for maybe two weeks, Earth time. So, what’s that, a week on this planet?
It occurs to me that I have one option. Either disappear, which appears to be difficult, or make myself so scary that these wild bucks will be terrified to be anywhere near me.
I spot a flash of fur in the forest. It’s one of those fucking bucks, I bet. That asshole just made his last mistake coming back here. I pull the rifle from my back and level it at the woods.
Gruff grabs the barrel and pushes it down. He looks at me with furious eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Well, I was going to kill some of these assholes, if that’s all the same to you.”
“It is not okay with me,” he scowls. “Feral little thing. Stop trying to solve everything with a weapon.”
“Well, I don’t have horns to butt them with, so I’m somewhat limited. What do you expect me to do? Let them stalk me? Surround us? Grow in numbers and eventually overrun you? These beasts broke all my things and they all want to fuck me. All of them.”
“Well, not all of them. Piam was indifferent.”
“But I smelled his sons. They wanted me.”
“Isn’t filial respect a lovely thing,” Gruff says. “Don’t worry. You’re well protected with me.”
“Protected. Is that right. I’m protected. You were discussing having a stupid fight with them until I scared them off, and they’ve been having some kind of fuck party here in the middle of my things. I don’t think I’m protected with you, Gruff. I think it’s time I started killing bucks who want to fuck me against my will.”
“You can’t kill bucks for that.”
“We used to think that on Earth for a long time, too. Then it turned out once men start being afraid of women killing them, they stop trying to fuck them when they don’t want it. What really happened to all the girl bucks on this planet? What did you do to them?”
“We didn’t do anything to them. They left.”
“They left?!”
“Yes.”