by Loki Renard
He says that as if he considers it to be a weakness as well. Not every scythkin finds humans alluring. Some even claim that human sex is an acquired taste. Those are scythkin who have not yet been fortunate enough to experience the kind of connection I just enjoyed. I can still smell Seven on me, taste her essence in the air.
“You stink of female,” Vulcan says, putting it more crudely. “Did you feast on her? Is there anything left?”
“Oh there is plenty left - for me,” I say.
“For you. Of course.” He inclines his head, his horns sitting at a cocky, sarcastic angle. Vulcan has the bearing of a first-hatchling without any of the responsibility, though he does as much as he can to claim that.
“VULCAN!”
Tyank announces his presence by diving in and punching Vulcan as hard as he can in the arm. It is a gambit which fails when Vulcan steps to the side, catches his big fist and uses the weight of his body to throw Tyank over and onto his back hard enough to knock the air from his lungs.
“This clown,” Vulcan sighs.
“He looks up to you,” I remind him.
“He has to. He's short.”
“Not too short to rip your dorsal fin off and shove it up your…”
I sigh. These two squabble almost constantly. Tyank’s brash bravery and insistence on refusing to take anything seriously drives Vulcan insane. He likes to be taken very seriously. If it were up to him, the humans wouldn’t just be kneeling for the identification and surveillance bots, they would be chanting we're not worthy beneath pictures of his face. I can’t blame him for that. Being an egomaniac is an essential part of being scythkin. It takes a very robust and aggressive psychology to be comfortable with destroying civilizations for the crime of existing on planets which we would rather like to spawn on.
Tyank scrambles up from the floor. “That doesn’t count,” he says. “That was a sucker punch.”
“You suckered me, idiot.”
“Exactly.”
Vulcan looks at me. “If the fleet doesn’t get here in time, it will be us two, and this moron. The humans are doomed.”
“The humans are not doomed. The fleet will get back here. We are not going to lose a battle to Galactor. Scythkin don’t lose battles.”
“Scythkin don’t usually have to fight battles twice either. Except we are.”
“This is a unique situation. We haven’t destroyed the colony. So there’s something to come back for. Usually we destroy places so completely there is no reason to return.”
“We could do that here too,” Vulcan suggests. “There’s sperm and eggs in stasis. The existing humans have been caught in loops for far too long… there’s nothing natural about them. They should have been dead a long time ago.”
“I should be dead?”
Well, that is about the worst timing possible. Of course Seven is awake. The room was supposed to be secure, but I guess that means nothing to a human. She is clutching the puppy to her naked body, staring at us with wide eyes.
Seven
There are three of them. Three massive scythkin warriors, and only one of them is wearing anything approximating clothes. I would be disturbed by the number of them, but what they were saying is far worse. They were talking about me being old, or something. Being dead, or something. None of it really makes any sense.
“What do you mean, I should be dead?”
Krave sighs, as if he doesn’t want to explain anything to me, but the other scythkin starts talking.
“The humans in the simulation have been treated with agents which stop aging. They are also reset. Their bodies undergo rapid de-aging, only to be re-aged. You’re human in name only. They don’t get colds, or experience real illness.”
“VULCAN!” Krave thunders his name, but it is too late. I’ve heard everything. I’m a freak.
“You’re fully human. You just have a few tweaks to help you survive,” Krave explains.
“I’m older than I think I am. I have parts of my life I don’t recall living.”
“Humans always have parts of their lives they don’t remember living. They have the worst memories. There are worms on some planets with better recall.”
Vulcan is an asshole. But he’s telling me truths I feel Krave should have told me when he had me in his interrogation chamber.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you didn’t need to know. Because you don’t understand what any of it means.”
“Oh, because I’m so stupid I can’t understand what it means to secretly be like, fifty years old.”
“Closer to a hundred.”
“A HUNDRED!? I’m OLD??!”
“Not really, no. You’re biologically around twenty years old.”
“But I’m twenty three, or… twenty four…” suddenly I can’t remember. I’m no longer certain about my life. This strange day has gotten even stranger, tearing apart my concept of reality, and now destroying my sense of self.
“Is my name even Seven?”
“For purposes of this discussion, let’s say, yes.”
“What about the purposes of reality?”
“Reality is moveable,” Vulcan interrupts. “We perceive several more dimensions than you do, so we can see more of your true nature than you can experience.”
“Well good for you. Your coat is stupid.”
“You think being rude deflects from your own discomfort, but in reality, the ruder you are, the more we see of you. Your fears are on display like a shopping list.”
“Vulcan, don’t.” Krave interrupts him.
Vulcan’s eyes glow red and flash at me and Krave. “Don’t what? Tell her the truth?”
“Yes.”
“No. I want you to tell me everything,” I insist. I want all the weirdness out of the way. I don’t want to live in a world of lies. I want to know who I really am, where I really live, what has really happened to me over the course of lifetimes I cannot remember.
“Everything is too much to even begin to tell you, human. But I will tell you this. You are going to be mindwiped again as soon as possible.”
“No,” Krave says. “She’s not.”
“Humans cannot withstand the emotional burden of knowing they have lived more than one life. That’s why Galactor introduced the concept of reincarnation, to explain away the effects of incomplete wipes.”
“Uh, that’s bullshit. I’ve taken enough drugs to deal with any number of lives. I’m a psychedelic warrior. I can handle anything.”
All three of them have expressions which if they were human would mean disdain. I don’t know if that’s how it translates with the massive aliens, but I know it makes me feel bad.
“You are naked, stinking of seed, and clutching a small food class animal,” Vulcan says. He turns to Krave. “The sooner she is wiped and returned to the simulation, the better.”
“The sooner you stop talking to me like you have some authority over me, the better,” Krave growls. “You are forgetting your place again, Vulcan.”
“I’m not the one who has forgotten their place. You are supposed to guard the human colony, not pick individuals from it to mate with. You’re not supposed to fuck them while Galactor gathers forces to storm this place.”
Krave is calm, but his words are delivered as sharply as the great ridge on his back. “Another word out of you, and I will take it as a request for immediate combat.”
Vulcan’s sharp brows rise and his fangs elongate. These scythkin are creatures of death, pain, knives - and ego. Krave has seniority and authority. Vulcan is an impressive animal himself, but something tells me he wouldn’t fare well against Krave. He wouldn’t want that jacket and those shiny boots to be ruined in a fight, I’m pretty sure of that. He’s vain. And he’s cocky. And he speaks with a condescending sneer that makes me want to hit him. So some part of me hopes that Krave does.
“Oh, no,” Vulcan says, lifting his clawed hands and laying his horns back against his head. “Not combat. That would mean getting your
hands dirty, and they’re for bedding humans now.. OOOF!”
The last part is the sound he makes as Krave clenches his fist and slams it into Vulcan’s face. A spurt of black liquid tar shoots across the room, then settles to a steady drip, running down his gray skin to the jacket, which he tries to save by opening, but it’s too late, his black blood is all over it.
“Damn you, Krave!” He snarls, far more upset about his clothing than his wound.
“You want another one?”
“Give him another one!” Tyank jumps in on the action with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. There is something simultaneously highly advanced and yet utterly juvenile about the way these creatures are interacting.
Vulcan snaps off a blow, but not at Krave. He chooses to hit Tyank instead with a powerful spinning backhand which dislodges Tyank from his stance and sends him stumbling across the floor. Tyank comes back almost immediately with a feral snarl, the sharp blades on his shoulders, arms, legs, and back rising aggressively. The dog in my arms is yapping its head off. It doesn’t like what it is seeing any more than I do.
I do all I can to hold it, but it squirms out of my arms and goes rushing toward the scythkin, howling its white fluffy battle call. I shriek and cover my eyes, certain that I am going to see it be seriously harmed by the monsters who are doing battle with one another now, full contact punches and slashes, black blood squirting everywhere, coating the white fur of the brave little animal who does not understand how very outmatched it is.
Before any real harm can come to it, Krave darts forward and sweeps it up from the ground. He carries it over to me and puts it back in my arms, his eyes glowing fierce and orange. “Go back to the bedroom,” he says. “I will come as soon as I…”
CRASH!
A piece of stray furniture has been thrown in his direction. A chair. I think. Or maybe a table. Whatever it was, it was large and made of a lot of glass and it shatters into a thousand pieces over Krave’s back and shoulders, a cascade of tinkling shades raining down around his feet.
“TYANK! IDIOT! YOU COULD HAVE HIT THE HUMAN!”
His ferocious rage terrifies me, even though it is in my defense. I watch as he transforms in the same way the other one did, but so much more thoroughly. Krave swells with masculine vengeance, rushing toward the unfortunate scythkin named Tyank, who is not going to need a name for much longer because even from the rear, I can tell that Krave intends to kill.
“Easy! Easy!”
Vulcan tries to intervene, but he is thrown out of the way, his huge body flying across the room as if he is nothing more than a rag doll. I knew Krave was strong, but it is clear that he is far stronger than either one of his… soldiers? Brothers? Friends? I don’t know what they are, but there is about to be one less of them. He sets on Tyank with a viciousness which makes my stomach churn and my flesh sweat with fear.
Tyank is torn apart. Not in the metaphorical sense, but quite literally. I see an arm become dislodged from his body, and then the other, both removed in a scene which belongs in a horror movie playing inside my worst nightmare. These aliens may be intelligent, but they are also violence incarnate, living daemons who do not need any supernatural forces.
Krave swings the freshly dismembered arm through the air and hits Tyank across the face with it, a bitch-slap of the darkest kind.
I am screaming at the top of my lungs, the sounds of terror so loud that even the dog’s yapping is drowned out.
Krave
“I. AM. VICTORIOUS!”
“Congratulations,” Vulcan says when the battle is done. “You taught Tyank a lesson. And you broke the human.”
“What?”
By the time my rage subsides, Seven is cowering in the corner, huddled up with the puppy. When I come toward her, she shrieks and curls up into herself all the more. She’s terrified past the point of being aware of her surroundings.
“She has to be wiped,” Vulcan says. “Humans can’t take the trauma of seeing that much explicit violence.”
“Is somebody going to put my arm back on?” Tyank is whining.
“Put your own arm back on,” Vulcan snaps over his shoulder. “Seriously, Krave, all things aside, she cannot remember this and be sane. It’s too much for her. She will never forget it.”
I feel soul sick.
She’s seen my true nature. The vengeful violence which simmers inside every scythkin warrior, and doubly so inside the first hatched. The way she is looking at me now tells me she will never, ever forget, even if she were to forgive.
I can’t get near her right now. She is too terrified. I’m worried that if I was to touch her, she would collapse from a heart attack.
I have no choice but to call for the murketeers who come with their sedatives and carry the woman I love away to a place she will feel safe.
“So you took a pet human,” Vulcan smirks.
I have retreated to sit in what is supposed to be a private lounge, looking out over a feed of the simulation. From here, I have a birds-eye view of the city and the activity going on inside it. It is like an ant farm. I used to find it fascinating watching the captive humans scurrying back and forth, thoroughly convinced of the importance of their lives, but now the futility strikes me as depressing. There are a few of them who do nothing but lie in comfortable places all day, staring at screens. I used to consider those the lazy ones, but now I’m wondering if they are not perhaps the most wise.
I ignore Vulcan’s intrusion, and his stupid comment. Pants is sitting at my feet, and he joins in ignoring Vulcan too, preferring to press against my leg and put his knee right where my jointed shank would be if I hadn’t retracted it to keep him safe.
“You deaf now too? Losing your edge, first hatched?” Vulcan needles me.
I look over at him with a curled lip. “You do want to keep your arms, correct? Because it seems to me you’d like to join Tyank in surgery.”
“Calm down,” he snorts, handing me a bottle of synth. This substance is the only way to calm scythkin and stop the war hormones from charging through our bodies. He has one of his own too. We should not have fought like that. It was foolish and it has cost me more than I ever wanted to pay.
“I’m just trying to talk to you. I go out on patrol and everything is normal, I come back and there’s a human female stinking of your seed. That’s not like you, Krave. You were the one who told us we couldn’t take the humans…”
“I know,” I growl, interrupting him before he can continue to remind me of my hypocrisy. “But that human was disruptive.”
“That’s what the mind wiper is for. And the soul whip. There are ways to keep people in line without fucking them. Did you like her or something?”
“I did,” I say. “She was brave and smart.”
“Not quite brave enough,” he says. “She was terrified of you after seeing what you did to Tyank.”
I can still see the expression on her face in my mind’s eye. She looked at me as if I was the devil incarnate. She didn’t understand that I did it to protect her, that Tyank’s reckless table throwing could have hurt her and I refused to allow harm to come to her. And she can’t understand that scythkin are different from humans.
“Evening, boys,” Tyank says, strolling in, both arms attached as if they had never been torn from his body. “Boss,” he adds, nodding at me.
He does not hold any ill-will against me. We are rough on one another, and what we do in the heat of battle is rarely personal.
“How’s the arms?” Vulcan asks.
“Better than before, I think,” Tyank grins, windmilling them around, knocking a small model of the original Earth off a shelf. It bounces and then shatters on the next landing, cracking into dozens of pieces.
“Idiot,” Vulcan snorts.
“You’re the idiot,” Tyank says. “And your jacket is ripped.”
“It isnt…” Vulcan looks down and then swears. “Great. Do you know how many of these were in existence? This is one of the very last designs by the grea
t seamstress Serphone. She made it for me in a custom order. And now you two have…”
“ENOUGH.” I snarl the world with enough ferocity to make them both fall silent. The battle never really stops with scythkin. We are constantly at war, with the universe, with each other, some might say, even with ourselves. The only peace we get is in the lull after the battle, where our war hormones have been consumed in the act of violence. It has been too long since any of the three of us had a proper foe to fight, and so we are turning on one another.
“So what are you going to do with Seven?” Tyank asks.
“I’m returning her to the simulation,” I say. “After what she’s seen, she’s never going to be able to trust me.”
“Does it matter if she trusts you?”
Vulcan’s question seems callous on the surface, and on a deeper level too, for that matter. He doesn’t see humans as being in any way equal to us. I suspect if it were up to him, he’d reclassify them as food class. If it’s not capable of defending itself against him, he doesn’t value it. Weakness is, well, weakness where Vulcan is concerned. What he doesn’t see is how strong humans can be. How incredibly brave Seven was.
“Yes. It matters. She’s too smart to be down here if she doesn’t feel safe.”
“You ripped Tyank’s arms off to protect her. She’s the safest human in this entire place.”
“She doesn’t see it that way. She saw me do something monstrous, and she will never see me any other way.”
Vulcan makes a grunting sound, as if he’s disgusted I care what she thinks or how she sees things. I know his attitude comes from a lifetime of raw domination of other species. We are not made to empathize with others. We are made to wipe them from existence.
He would understand if he had bonded with a human like I have. I mated with Seven and I created a connection. That connection has consequences, like fearing the judgement of a soft little meat woman.