“Run. Run for your life.” The Ka-Tȇ laughed.
Branches snapped as the sentient fled. She wouldn’t get far. None of them did. Solia bit her lip until it bled and squeezed her eyes shut.
Laughter. Grunts. Screams. Then growling, chomping, and slurping. Bile rose in Solia’s throat, and tears seeped past her shuttered eyelids. Finally, the jungle rustled as the predators moved on. Silence fell. The rusty scent of blood drifted on humid air.
“She never had a chance,” the human girl whispered.
Holding her broken left wing tight to her body, Solia sat up. “No.” Traffickers had delivered to the Ka-Tȇ eighteen hostages: six males and twelve females. All the men, one of them the human girl’s husband, had been slaughtered at the start then, each day thereafter, the Ka-Tȇ came for a female.
Now, only two remained.
“Which—which one of us do you think they’ll take next?” the human asked. Rachel, her name was.
“I don’t know,” Solia said. The human woman had never stopped hoping for a rescue. It wasn’t going to happen. No one knew they were here, and no one would risk a landing if they did. The Association of Planets had charted Katnia as a forbidden zone.
Rachel choked and pressed a knuckle to her mouth. “If I hadn’t complained so much…John was working long hours. I hardly got to see him. So he booked a cruise to surprise me.”
Solia had heard the story several times. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have guessed slavers would attack.” Thinking the pirates coveted the ship, the overwhelmed, outgunned crew had directed the passengers to the escape pods. The slavers had swooped in and scooped up Solia’s pod, taken everyone aboard prisoner, and handed them over to the Ka-Tȇ. Each day, another female was raped and murdered, the victims’ screams and creatures’ laughter and grunts breaking the silence of the jungle. Dwindling numbers marked the passage of time.
“How’s your wing?” Rachel asked. “Does it still hurt?”
“It’s all right, unless I move it.” With a swipe of his powerful claws, one of the Ka-Tȇ had almost torn her wing from her body to prevent her flying out of reach.
“If we could talk to them, reason with them—but they can’t speak. They hiss and growl,” Rachel said. “How can you communicate with animals?”
“They’re not animals, exactly,” Solia said. The Ka-Tȇ were humanoid felines, vicious, indiscriminate predators who had decimated their ecosystem by hunting nearly to extinction most large animals on their planet. Birds, which could sometimes escape, and rodents too small to catch, had survived. “They have a language.” An ugly, guttural one.
“All I hear is growling.”
“I can understand some of their vocalizations. I’m a linguist.” She’d worked day and night, charting the ancient languages for the Farian ambassador’s presentation to the AOP. After completing the project, she’d treated herself to a star cruise. And ended up here.
“So you can talk to them! Tell them we can be ransomed.”
Solia touched her throat, shaking her head. “I don’t have the anatomical structures allowing me to make those sounds. My aural implant helps me translate languages, but I can’t speak Katnian. “They’re not interested in money. They want the kill.”
“I never knew such creatures existed,” Rachel said.
“I knew because of my work with languages and my connections to the Association of Planets.” The AOP had barred Katnia from the alliance and issued a galaxy-wide travel advisory, except pirates and slavers didn’t obey advisories.
Rachel hugged herself. “I won’t let them rape and torture me. I’d rather kill myself.”
A swift death was the best they could hope for. Solia had thought long and hard how to provoke the creatures to anger so they would kill her quickly, but doubted she would be successful.
“But there’s nothing here!” The human girl struck the invisible force field with her fist, crying out as electricity jolted through her with a sizzle. While causing considerable pain, the voltage wasn’t high enough to kill. Rachel flung herself onto the ground, dug her fingers into the dirt, and threw a handful at the force field. Sparks, earth, and rocks sprayed. Her sobs of despair were the most heartbreaking sounds Solia had ever heard, and she realized the human girl finally had lost hope.
Chapter Two
“Did you like my present, Uncle Guy?” Jessamine grinned. With the loss of another tooth, her smile appeared even more mischievous.
Guy winced. He’d forgotten about it! “I’m sorry, sweetie. Uncle Guy had to launch the ship, so he didn’t get the chance to open it yet.” He loved his seven-year-old niece like crazy; however, her antics put a cyborg’s patience to the test. R&R on Terra with his sister and her family had gone well, but he’d be lying if he said returning to work wasn’t a bit of a relief. His sister had her hands full with that little moppet.
“You…open…away.” Jessamine’s image and audio flickered as a solar storm broke up the transmission.
“What was that?”
“You…open it right away.”
“I will. Promise.”
His sister, Jill, appeared on the view screen. “I’m sorry, Guy. If I’d…inkling…what Jessamine had—”
“Don’t tell him!” Jessamine cried. “He hasn’t…yet. You’ll spoil…surprise.”
“Oh, he’s going…surprised.” Although the image pixilated, the censuring glare Jill shot at her daughter still came through. Their mother had employed that look when they were kids. It never had failed to have the desired effect on him and Jill, but it didn’t work so well on Jessamine.
His niece’s insistence he open the gift immediately and his sister’s apology had him a bit worried. What could Jessamine have given him? His bags had been collected and loaded onto the shuttle by a Cyber Operations robo when he’d kissed his family goodbye. Jessamine had hugged his neck with candy-sticky fingers. “I’m going to miss you, Uncle Guy. I got you a special present. Be sure you open it right away.”
“Will do. Thank you,” he’d said. “I’ll miss you, too, munchkin.”
He’d boarded the shuttle, but an unexpected solar storm had interfered with the electronics, necessitating his full attention—and he’d forgotten about the gift.
Guy eyed his sister and niece. “Maybe you’d better tell me what it is—”
Their images wavered then the transmission went black.
So much for that. Once clear of the solar storm, he would run back to his cabin. Many pilots might have switched to computer control during a solar incident, but, like most cyborgs, Guy preferred hands-on when situations got a little dicey. Sometimes decisions had to be made in a flash, and Guy preferred to be the one making them.
Solar wind rocked the ship, but Guy’s hands remained steady on the stick as he boosted power to the engines. The added thrust would burn more fuel, but he’d clear the storm quicker.