by Loki Renard
I also know that the scythkin have more or less brought this on themselves. Decimating the universe one planet at a time was always going to lead to a backlash. At some point, someone was going to object. Apparently, they’re objecting with explosives.
John
She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I sense that she is truly sad for me. I did not expect empathy from the little human who has been working so hard to distance herself from me since I rescued her.
“If I can help you get those bitches back, I will,” she swears. “I’ll chop and dice them for you just like you did for me.”
“That will not be necessary,” I say. “You are hardly equipped for that manner of attack.”
“I might not be made of knives, but I can hold a couple and that’s all it takes really. It’s slower, but it still works.”
“That will not be necessary,” I repeat, though I am touched by her offer. “We will proceed to the planet and do what my brood would have done. We will prepare it for the matriarchs.”
“If that’s what’s going to make you feel better, I am here,” she says, sitting down next to me and smiling broadly. I should not be capable of feeling anything right now. My despair should be too great. But she will not allow it to be. The ferocity of her will to survive, and not merely survive, but thrive, makes my own grief feel smaller.
I do not know if I can bear the loss of those I was born with, but I know I will have to try. For the moment, I feel numb. I know intellectually that my life as I have always known it is over, but I cannot properly feel it, or even properly think about it. Every other minute, my mind returns to the notion of being reunited with my brood, my brothers, as humans would refer to them.
“Set a course, captain,” she suggests.
I resume course.
We sit together in silence, watching space slide by, the sharp glittering of my lost brood soon out of sight. They will float forever, my brood, becoming new stars, new planets, new forms of life to conquer and be conquered.
Hello, Q’Ren
John
The closer we get to our destination, the worse I feel about it. Something has been wrong for days now. Our first-hatched thought I was being paranoid when I insisted we needed to sweep the station and the ship itself, but there is nothing paranoid about knowing there are those who would destroy you, hunting you down.
What I don’t understand is how the Q’Ren knew we were docked at the space station. We wore disguises when we left the ship, and our disguises are known for being utterly flawless. A scythkin illusion suit can make us look like almost any life form in the entire universe. It is how we pass among those who would be terrified if they knew our true forms.
But that is not the only problem I face. The Q’Ren’s ability to hunt us down is concerning, but even more concerning is the fact that this shuttle I am flying was only ever meant to get us back to the mothership. It is not particularly useful in any other way. I am worried that we will run out of fuel and have to coast through space until we hit something inhabited, but it turns out I need not worry about that because something else goes wrong before my concerns can come to pass.
“So. Uh. John?”
“What?”
I am working at the replicator, trying to find a meal which both Itch and I will enjoy. It is a rather difficult balancing act. I enjoy fried Vantari Worms, but she believes them to be stomach churning. Meanwhile, she enjoys toast, which to me tastes like the ship’s hull.
“There’s ships out there,” my human says. “A lot of them. Were you expecting company?”
“No,” I reply. “We were not.”
I leave the dinner arrangements and proceed to the cockpit, where Itch has the target planet brought up large on the screen. Sure enough, there are several dozen ships and shuttles of all classes, types, and species origins orbiting the planet in the form of a blockade.
“I thought you said this planet just had grass? Why are there so many ships defending grass?”
“Because they're not defending grass,” I tell her. “They’re waiting for us. You are looking at the Q’Ren.”
“I think the Q’Ren are looking back at us,” she says. “They’re taking a formation to face us.”
Bleep bleep bloop… bleep bleep bloop…
A chiming tone comes over the speakers.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re hailing us,” I say, opening a channel. I want to hear what they have to say. I want to feed my hatred for them, so when I kill them it will be an absolute pleasure. I want to absolutely boil with rage, so tearing them apart is a joy greater than any other.
They do not take long to oblige me. Within seconds of opening up the channel, the Q’Ren chant, a hundred voices all joining forces in perfect symphony.
“SCYTHKIN SCYTHKIN, GO AWAY, SCYTHKIN SCYTHKIN, FUCK OFF!”
I let out a guffaw. “That chant doesn’t even rhyme.”
“Is that the problem we’re encountering?” Itch questions me. “The lack of rhyming scheme? Not the dozens of weapons aimed at us?”
Pew! Pew! Pew!
Their ships start to blaze with small weapons, lights flashing.
“Or the fact we’re under fire?”
“They’re not very good shots. They’re female, so…”
PEW!
Itch
A shot hits the ship, making me rattle. I can feel each of my teeth vibrating their sockets as I am thrown around. I would have hit the wall if not for John’s powerful grasp which stops me from slamming into solid hull.
John growls. Every blade on his body stands erect, including blades I haven’t seen before. His eyes flare with rough fire and the air around him crackles with static brutality. I find myself cowering away from him out of instinct, the same kind of reaction I would have if I suddenly found myself at the edge of an impossibly tall cliff. There is death nearby. Not just the risk of it. The plummeting promise of it.
I thought I saw him in his full ferocity when he rescued me from the pound, but now I see that he was almost toying with the aliens who held me captive. He was not truly in battle mode. Now he is, and I cannot help my fear.
The barrage of fire intensifies. They are going to try to blast us into pieces. I remember the sparkling cloud of debris we flew through before, and I can’t help but think that we are going to be sparkly dust any second. I feel fear, true, primal fear. The kind that demands fight or flight — but there is no option to fight. This ship doesn’t even have a weapon on board as far as I know.
“Get me out of here!” I scream the words.
John hits a button and the next thing I know, we are zapping out of existence and into another existence somewhere very far away. My brain feels as though it has been fast forwarded, complete with screaming burbling noises which slide into silence as things stop moving and become solid again.
“It’s okay,” John says, grabbing me in his arms and holding me tight. “We’ve lost them.”
It takes several minutes for me to regain my composure. I have never been under attack like that before. I’ve never feared for my life in that particular way. It turns out there are all sorts of ways to be scared of things, and every time I’m scared in a new way, it is like being scared for the first time. Adrenaline is making me shake terribly.
“If you could do that all along, why didn’t you do that all along?”
“That was a single use ‘Oh Shit’ button,” he says. “It’s for emergencies only.”
“That felt like an emergency kind of from the beginning.”
He makes a grunting noise, then proceeds to completely ignore what I was saying. “That was our last defense. From here on out, if we are attacked, we will have no choice but to…”
“Be blown to smithereens?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Let’s not get attacked then,” I sigh, slumping down in his arms, and then sort of sliding into the co-pilot’s chair like a particularly demoralized slug.
“Good pla
n,” John sighs, doing the same. We look at one another across the cockpit. He shakes his head at me and sighs.
“We’re not going to talk about the fact that we were just chased away by several dozen Q’Ren? You’re a scythkin. You could have…”
“We are in the ship equivalent of a box of tissues,” he growls. “It has literally no offensive capacities, and practically no defensive ones. Besides, I cannot fight the Q’Ren. They are female.”
“Don’t you usually destroy everything on a planet? All species? All genders?”
John
We do usually do that. We are merciless destroyers. We make no differentiation between young, old, female, male. All beings on a planet to be conquered are grist for the mill of our destruction.
I could easily have killed every single one of the Q’Ren. But I looked at my human, and I couldn’t. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is the loss of my brood. Perhaps I have unwittingly absorbed some human values. I do not know the reason why, but slaughtering a dozen females in front of my female did not feel like an option.
The loss of my brood has made me weak. But I think the acquisition of my human might have made me even weaker.
“I made an exception to protect you,” I tell her. “I could not risk the Q’Ren harming you in any way.”
That is a perfectly reasonable explanation, one which makes me sound chivalrous rather than weak.
“That’s very sweet,” she says with a bright smile which distracts me from my compounding failures as a scythkin. “But the matriarchs will not be pleased.”
“The matriarchs are never pleased.”
A scythkin matriarch demands that all be destroyed before she will take to the mating field, lay her clutch, and do battle with other matriarchs foolish enough to try to lay their clutches near hers. We are hatched as destroyers. Of all the clutches hatched on a planet, only one group will survive. Tens of thousands of eggs may be laid, but only a dozen or so will become full grown scythkin. Once hatched, they will feed on the weakness of other hatchlings. That is what I and my broodkin did. We slaughtered our way through thousands of our kind until we attained maturity, and claimed our right to sail the stars.
I wanted to finish the mission my brood set out to accomplish, but now I realize that was merely an attempt to assuage my guilt for not having perished along with them. Claiming a planet of grass is not going to undo their deaths. It is not going to avenge them. I need to do something far greater to right this wrong.
“So. What’s next?”
That is an excellent question. What is next for a single scythkin and his human stray?
“Can you join up with some others of your kind?”
“Scythkin broods are hatched together. The bonds between members are forged early, before the first moult, when we battle other freshly-hatched broods. We are born fighting. We are not cooperative. Another brood would slay me before they welcomed me.”
“You can’t be the first scythkin to end up alone.”
“I am not.”
“Well, what happened to the others?”
“We do not last long on our own.” That is the most delicate way I can describe what happens to scythkin who remain after their brood has been slain. We are a communal species, and without community, we crumble.
“Well, you better,” she growls, poking me with her index finger. “Who is going to look after me?”
“I thought you wanted to run away from me.”
She doesn’t even bother to muster the grace to look ashamed. “I did, but now you need me. And I need you. So I’m going to stay. Even if we weren’t hatched together. Or whatever.”
Humans have the capacity to bond with almost any life form you care to name. There are tales of humans becoming attached to sports equipment when left on their own for a sufficient length of time. I used to think it was a laughable quality, but now I find myself rather envying their ability to conjure family from nothing.
“I can be your brood,” she suggests.
A small human, my brood? It sounds ludicrous, but what choice do I have? The universe has determined that I am to be alone.
“We can never breed. Humans cannot carry scythkin young.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to breed,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t imagine anything worse. The aliens were always threatening to breed me. Fortunately, they never found any human seed. Can you imagine?!”
I can imagine.
Scythkin do not breed in the way humans do. We leave our seed across the clutch of a receptive matriarch and then we leave so she may do battle. We never know if our clutches hatch, or if once hatched, they survive.
“Have you reproduced?”
“I do not know.”
“You don’t know?”
“We fertilize and run,” I tell her. “When scythkin hatch, they must battle for survival. We do not operate on familial lines as humans do. We have our brood, those who we are hatched with, and nobody else.”
“What about your mothers?”
“Matriarchs battle until the last of them is defeated, and if their wounds are not too severe, they will move on before hatching.”
“So you’re born alone?”
“Not alone. Usually with between ten to twenty others. There are smaller clutches, but they rarely survive long after hatching.”
She’s listening, and I can tell from her expression she is trying to think her way into a solution for this problem. Me being the problem.
“Maybe we can find some others and form a sort of new group.”
“Find some other what, human?”
“Other aliens, people, just general numbers so you can feel better again.”
“You cannot replace what has been lost, Itch. Sometimes that which we care for is gone forever in an instant, and that is the end of it.”
“I mean, sure. If you want it to be. I think you can always make something better. No matter how bad it is.”
“Ah, that is a very human phenomenon.”
“What is?”
“Hope. Scythkin do not indulge in it. We are not genetically capable of it.”
“Well, we can’t just keep running from the Q’Ren forever feeling sorry for ourselves. We have to do something.”
“You’re right,” I agree. “We do. Come, human.”
Itch
“You're still calling me human. And where do you want me to come? We’re still stuck in this tin can.”
“It was a metaphorical come.”
“So where are we going?”
“We are going to see Galactor.”
“The corporation that sold me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Galactor has the greatest intelligence network in the universe. It also has control of the banking sector.”
“Okay… still, why would we see them? I thought the Scythkin and Galactor were mortal enemies.”
“Galactor doesn't have mortal enemies. It has financial alliances. And as my brood were all just killed, I have inherited our complete war chest.”
“So, you’re… rich now?”
“Very.”
“Cool,” I say, trying not to make too big a deal of that. “Cool cool cool.”
He gives me a sidelong look. “Is it not only Galactor who make their alliances along financial lines?”
“Are you accusing me of being some kind of alien money hunter?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” he says. “But we do need to make a withdrawal. I’ll have to see if the fabricator can approximate one of our suits which allows us to disguise ourselves as other aliens, and I’ll take you as my pet. So, collar and leash, if you don’t mind.”
“You know I mind.”
“It’s that, or I leave you on the ship. Caged.”
Those are both shitty options, but he just lost his entire family and I’m trying to be nice to him.
“Fine. I’ll wear a collar and leash. Just for you.”
“Thank you.”
<
br /> “But I won’t like it.”
“That’s fine.”
“I bet it’s fine. I bet you like it more if I don’t like it.”
He narrows his eyes at me, not in anger, but confusion. “What has happened to you that you think I will enjoy it more if you don’t like it?”
“Aliens are sadists.”
He cocks his head at me. “When you say aliens, you of course mean every type of life in the entire universe aside from yourself.”
“Yes.”
He’s smart. Really smart. I don't know why I’m surprised by that. I guess I expected something as big and dangerous as a scythkin wouldn’t have to be that smart. When you can dice anyone who dares oppose you, do you really need to be able to think?
“Have I been cruel to you?”
“I guess not.”
“Maybe I’m not going to start now.”
“Maybe,” I admit. I’m not going to stop being suspicious though. He might be playing the long game. That happens sometimes. He might be trying to earn my trust so he can dash it.
I have to keep reminding myself not to do what humans always do. We hope, but we do something even more dangerous. We fall in love. And love is just a different kind of hope, the hope that someone else will love us back. I don’t know that John the scythkin is capable of love. I think he might only be capable of passion and possession, two things which might approximate love, but do not comprise it.
Galactor
Itch
“We’re almost in orbit. Come and see.”
I have to get out of bed to go and see, which feels like a significant inconvenience. I hope it is worth it. This journey has been difficult. I am pulled in two different directions, wanting John, and wanting to be free.
The cockpit reveals a planet surrounded by all manner of brightly colored orbiting objects. They’re orbiting stalls for food, designed for small ships to slide up to and make purchases without actually landing. There are rings of color trailing in their wake, pretty trails designed to appeal to passing ships.