The Spawning (16 page)

something
!

Feeling a little more confident, she followed the wall, searching the edge of the forest for likely looking vines and pointing them out. As Khan hacked them off, they pulled at them to disentangle them from the other plants they were twined around and began coiling them up like rope. They came finally upon an area where there were plants that reminded her of bamboo. Little more than stalks, some weren’t much bigger in circumference than her thumb, others nearly as big around as her calf and most of them were at least eight to ten feet tall.

As Khan chopped them down, they each grabbed as many as they could carry at

once and began dragging them back toward the compound. Sweat beaded Khan’s flesh as he worked until his entire torso and arms were gleaming with it. Miranda wasn’t sure which was more fascinating, the gleam of his flesh or the play of muscles.

Both, she thought wryly, struggling to keep her mind on the task and off of

Khan’s body. “I could do that a while and give you a rest,” she said after a while.

He paused to look at her. After studying her a moment, he held the knife out to her. She took it, gripping it as he had and bent over to hack at the bottom of one of the plants.

“Teron says you bear the mark of a warrior,” Khan said when she straightened to toss the plant toward the clearing.

She glanced at him in surprise, frowning while she tried to figure out why Teron would’ve said that and what he might be talking about. It dawned on her after a moment that Teron had noticed the scar from the knife wound on her upper arm, but … warrior?

“You mean the scar on my arm?”

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 70

Khan nodded.

She shrugged. She certainly hadn’t seen it as any sort of badge. It was damned ugly and she hated the unsightly thing. On the other hand, it beat the hell out of the alternative and she knew how men were about their own ‘battle’ scars. “I was in vice then. My partner and I tried to arrest a drug dealer. He wasn’t keen about going to jail.

He pulled a knife when I tried to cuff him and went for my throat. I managed to leap back, but he caught my arm. That’s all there was to it, really—except for the stitches,”

she added wryly.

She saw he was frowning in confusion when she’d cut another ‘bamboo’ and

straightened to toss it.

Thinking it over, she realized probably half of what she’d said most likely didn’t translate at all and wondered if she’d even spoken to him in his own language—or if it had been half and half. “Was I speaking my language or yours?”

His lips curled up at one corner. “Some in mine, some in yours.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what the trader did to my head, but I can’t even tell what language I’m speaking unless I stop and think about it.” She frowned, trying to recall what she’d said and what probably hadn’t translated. “I was … a peace keeper. We worked in pairs—two peace keepers to help one another—and one night we caught a bad man. When I tried to … tie his hands, he cut me with his knife.”

“This … partner, he was a lover?”

Miranda nearly made a miss-lick with the knife. She straightened abruptly and looked at him. Abruptly, she grinned as an image of her partner rose in her mind.

Chuckling, she shook her head. “No—definitely no. He had a wife and a houseful of kids. Besides, he was an asshole, a pretty good cop, and dependable in a fight, but otherwise we didn’t get along that well. He figured I should be home knitting, or something like that. Last I checked, knitting doesn’t pay that well, so I wasn’t interested.”

She knew he couldn’t have understood half of what she’d said, but he didn’t seem to be that interested.

“You had many lovers, though?”

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 71

Chapter Eight

Miranda stopped and straightened, glancing around them to see how many of the

others might have been close enough to hear the question. Vaguely relieved when she saw that there was no one close by at the moment, she focused on Khan.

Anger was her first reaction but fortunately in the time it had taken her to glance around it had occurred to her that she wasn’t talking to anyone from her culture who knew anything about it. He was thinking in his own terms. He had to be.

There’d been no accusation and no judgment in the question.

Just as well since she had a hell of a knife in her hand.

She was still inclined to be insulted, but she tamped the anger and studied him curiously. “Why would you say that?”

“You are a beautiful woman. A warrior among your own kind—very desirable,

yes?”

Miranda blinked at him in fascination. He’d suggested that their women were

warriors and there was no doubt that the Hirachi thought anything less was … less.

It was still hard to wrap her mind around the idea that he actually thought it was an asset. Mostly men—Earth men—didn’t care for the possibility that the woman they were with might be able to kick their ass.

It was one of the hardest things about trying to date—for her, anyway.

Obviously, it wasn’t something the Hirachi male spent a lot of time worrying

about.

She couldn’t imagine why!

“A few,” she finally responded non-committally, wondering if he was offering.

She wasn’t comfortable enough to ask. “Do Hirachi women have a lot of lovers?”

He shrugged. “Some more than others. The more desirable could choose as

many as they liked, of course.”

That wasn’t a lot different than the way of things on Earth, she thought wryly.

“Define ‘more desirable’,” she said, pausing to look at him again.

He studied her a moment through narrowed eyes. A slow, wicked smile curled

his lips that made her stomach do a shimmy. “A woman that a man has only to look upon to wish to crawl between her legs and bury himself in her body.”

Miranda was pretty sure her face matched her damned hair by the time he’d

finished, and it wasn’t just the heat in her face making her uncomfortable. She felt hot and weak all over and her heart was racing so hard it was difficult to catch her breath.

She supposed, later, that she should have been outraged, but since it didn’t occur to her at the time to be there didn’t seem much point in trying to summon it. Clearing her throat, she focused on hacking down poles for a while. “So …,” she said when she’d managed to recover her wits, “are all Hirachi women warriors? Or just some?”

He moved up beside her and took the knife. “All.”

There was something about the way he said it that told her it was a subject he didn’t really want to discuss. The detective in her wanted to push it, but she fought the THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 72

impulse. As badly as she would’ve liked to know in the hopes that she would understand him better and possibly all of the Hirachi, she realized their association was still too raw and new to withstand any sort of pressure. At the moment, the Hirachi seemed inclined to be helpful and generous, but anything could tip the scales against them and destroy the tentative rapport they seemed to be developing. After studying the tense set of his jaw for a moment, therefore, she turned away, grabbed some poles and dragged them back to the compound.

She noticed that they’d aroused the curiosity of the other Hirachi. Ignoring them, she planted her hands on her hips and studied the materials they’d gathered, trying to form some idea of how to put them together to form a shelter. Finally deciding there probably wasn’t a lot they were going to be able to do in so far as shaping when they had so little to work with, to say nothing about how little any of them knew about constructing, she began laying the poles out side by side. When she’d finished, she saw that they’d gathered enough already to make two six foot walls. Figuring that, at the very most, they could space them maybe five feet apart and still get the tops together, that would be about enough room for six people stacked like sardines.

Inwardly, she shrugged. They pretty much slept that way now since it was the

only way to share their warmth.

It wasn’t going to be a ‘quick’ project, she thought wryly, even with all of them helping … and all of them weren’t. Turning to survey the handful of women sitting on their asses, she contemplated limping all the way across the compound on her throbbing ankle to reach them and finally merely put her fingers in her mouth and whistled.

Not surprisingly, they all jumped and whirled to look at her. She’d learned the trick when she was a kid and could emit a very loud, high pitched whistle when she wanted to. Planting her hands on her hips, she yelled at them, “Unless you ladies are planning on sleeping outside while the rest of us sleep in the hut, get your sorry asses over here and help!”

Even at a distance, she could see expressions of outrage, but they got up and

stalked toward her.

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are ….”

“I don’t know who the hell you think you are!” Miranda snapped at the woman.

“But I’m telling you like it is. You want to sleep in a shelter—you help build it. You want to eat, you help fucking catch it and cook it! Got that?”

The woman glared at her, but she kept her rage to herself.

Miranda surveyed the other women. “Find something to dig with. Set the poles in as straight a line as you can and make sure you bury one end deep enough it’ll stay put when we need to bend them over to tie them together. One line here,” she said pointing,

“the other line here. They have to line up if we’re going to pull them together.”

“What are we supposed to dig with?” the bitch with the big mouth demanded.

Miranda stared at her a moment. “Go down to where they’ve been cooking the

beasts and see if you can round up some of those plates that came off of them, or maybe some bones—try to find shells. We don’t have a hardware store around here.”

Stacy, the basket weaver, returned with a load of poles while she was watching the slackers wander around with their thumbs up their asses through narrowed eyes. She knew damned well what they were waiting for, the dumb shits! They thought if they wandered around long enough looking cute and helpless, some man would rush over to THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 73

do the job for them—and maybe they would—but it was a damned sight less likely to work here than it did on Earth with their men.

Tamping the urge to throttle the lot of them and get rid of what was shaping up to be a serious problem before it could get to be one, she turned to Stacy. When she’d explained what she’d told them to do, she told Stacy to stay with them and make sure she could work with their efforts and tie the poles off.

She didn’t know what the Hirachi thought about her ‘slave driver’ tactics, but they seemed fascinated to say the least. Most of them were watching her, not the women wandering around on the beach.

Shrugging it off, she headed back out to help round up more poles and vines,

reminding herself that she might as well stop worrying about being ‘desirable’. She looked like hell and she felt worse, but the only way she was likely to at least feel a little better was if they managed put together some kind of shelter to get out of the weather.

It was a crying damned shame they couldn’t go the ‘village’ Khan had spoken of, which was probably far better than anything they could come up with, but they couldn’t so there was no point in whining about it.

She discovered when she got back that Khan had pretty well decimated the

bamboo poles in the location they’d found. Trying not to feel disheartened about it, she struck off in search of another patch. He fell into step beside her.

After glancing at him a few times she felt compelled to offer him an out. “I know you have other things to do,” she said tentatively.

“There is always something in need of doing,” he agreed.

“I don’t suppose you have another one of those knives? We could both work and get done faster. Or, you could go do whatever you need to and I could handle the cutting.”

He studied her frowningly for a moment and finally shook his head. “I don’t have another, and I would not leave you alone.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

It couldn’t be helped. Without something for cutting they’d be reduced to trying to chew the damned bamboo off. “I don’t suppose these Vernamin you’ve mentioned would be interested in trading for anything besides the
jasumi
?”

He slid a speculative glance at her. “What would you be interested in trading for?”

Miranda shrugged. “I suppose that would depend on what they have. I’m pretty sure we could use just about everything,” she said wryly and frowned thoughtfully. “I think we’d need a ‘how to’ book even to figure out what we’d need.”

He sent her a quizzical look. “How to book?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t about to admit that of the twenty something

women they had in their group Stacy’s basket weaving class was probably the most useful skill among them. It was just too pathetic, and he already thought they were useless. There didn’t seem much point in elaborating on just how useless they were in their current situation.

She wasn’t even sure a lot of them had been ‘useful’ citizens
before
they’d been pitched into the middle of the savage planet. If she’d had a gun her skill at shooting could be helpful, but she didn’t.

THE SPAWNING Kaitlyn O’Connor 74

She supposed what they needed to do was to sit down and conference on what

skills they all had to see if any of them knew anything helpful. She’d already ascertained that there weren’t any hunters among them, though, and none of them had the faintest idea of how to ‘prepare’ food off the hoof—nor a burning desire to learn. And feeding themselves ranked highest on the scale of ‘need to know’.

It was staggering and dispiriting even to consider how ill-equipped they were to survive.

Just how great, she wondered,
was
a civilization when the people could only survive within the society they’d created, knew almost nothing beyond what they needed to know to do their jobs?