Hunted on Predator Planet by Vicky L Holt

Author:Vicky L Holt [Holt, Vicky L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eos Publishing
Published: 2019-12-16T18:30:00+00:00

30

If another hunter laid a hand on my soft traveler, I would remove his head from his body. For the sake of peace and the Holy Sisters of Shegoshel, I remained calm. But I had seen the curiosity and wonder in the hunters’ eyes when her suit was open. Esra was mine.

After some stumbling attempts at speech, we learned she wanted to sleep inside her ship. She also made a show of placing her helmet near all of us, and made an odd motion with her hands, bringing her thumb in contact with her four fingers in a repetitive movement. She pointed to all of us, at our mouths and ears, and patted her helmet. We did not know what she wanted, but we had no quarrel with tending her helmet, if that was what she wished. She also showed us the interior of her ship, though we were too large to fit in the doorway. It was as we suspected. Her ship was created to land, not to leave. She was trapped on Ikthe.

Our language was not developed enough to ask why she came to Ikthe in the first place. But with time, we would speak together.

My brethren and I created a perimeter around her small ship, rather than return to mine. I walked around her pod, inspecting the alien design. I noticed several scratches and the prints of the rokhura as if it had been stepped upon. One of the legs was propped up on a flat rock, but otherwise, there was no extensive damage. I wondered what material her ship was constructed with.

I joined my brethren in making a fire and cooking some of the butchered meat and smoking the rest for our cross-planet journey. I considered retrieving my ship, but our path to the mountains did not provide a convenient place to land. We would hike. I added a large piece of deadwood to one of the fires and glanced at the soft traveler’s ship. I puzzled at her fragility and my own curiosity. I snorted. What of it? My brethren and I would take turns at watch this night.

I was satisfied she was well protected within the walls of her little ship. I sat against a tree, a few veltiks from her ship, facing the hatch.

“The soft traveler has a hardness about her,” Natheka said. He sat down beside me. “I have never seen a female ride a grass-eater.”

“Have you ever seen Theraxl ride a grass-eater?” I asked him.

“No.” He stuck a long blade of jokal grass between his teeth. “I have also never seen a female cause Hivelt to turn away in shame.”

“You know the songs,” I said.

“Yes, yes, the songs of raxshe and raxma. Should you make your female cry, the Sisters will bleed you dry,” he said. “It is an Elder Sister’s tale to scare the younglings.”

“And yet do you know of any hunter who will willingly cause a female to cry?” I stared at his calm face, the pale moonlight casting his red eyes into shadow.

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