CHAPTER TWELVE
The morning he was due back, K'Shai waited on pins and needles in the docking bay for the shuttle.
She watched one shuttle arrive and three hunters depart from it. She paced as a second shuttle lowered itself into its landing spot and the ramp opened. K'Shai craned her neck eagerly and then returned to her anticipatory pacing when two badly beaten young hunters limped off, looking positively cheerful despite their wounds.
Yet another shuttle soon found its way through the force field at the far end of the docking bay and it glided smoothly, quietly, just a few feet above the metal floor like a hover board before it touched down, back of the shuttle facing away from K'Shai towards the far wall.
K'Shai moved around another shuttle and peered around the back of that one, looking down the bay past four other shuttles to the now open back ramp of the one that had landed, and a brimmed with a smile as R'chnt noticed her and approached.
She did not hide her excitement to see him. She trotted over to him and threw her arms around his neck, allowing him to lift her off her feet as she cried out audibly, embracing him around his shoulders and neck as tightly as she could and pressing her face into his cheek.
He would only stay aboard the Clan ship for barely half a rotation, so he tended to his resupply needs first, barking growling orders at the 'aseigan who were already approaching to get their direction, before he turned and exited the docking bay with K'Shai.
They travelled together down a corridor that linked both docking bays, the shuttle one and the one for the larger ships, and returned to the K'ojol for a while so R'chnt could not only take advantage of his private soaking tub alone with K'Shai, but also select his own new armor, as he preferred to do.
He looked fit and energized, bringing with him highly detailed accounts of where he had travelled, sizes of the hives that were destroyed and updates on the rest of his group and any other hunting parties they had met up with along the way, all of which K'Shai listened to attentively while she soaked with him and oiled his tresses.
She found the scents of the oils he preferred soothing to her, and the simple, mindless action of massaging them into his tresses was enough to focus away stress for both of them. R'chnt eventually quieted down and purred pleasantly, basking in the heated pool with his head tipped back into K'Shai's chest.
Eventually, they returned to the rest of the chambers and K'Shai watched him as he shifted through his armor. His muscular body glistened in the amber light of the room, steaming slightly as the hot water met with only slightly cooler ambient air.
He noticed her watching him separating out pieces of armor and leather that was damaged or dirty into piles to be cleaned, to be replaced, to be repaired.
R'chnt was incredibly particular about his armor, and K'Shai knew he would spend a large portion of his time back aboard the ship carefully cleaning the pieces he intended to reuse, reviewing all of it for function, maintaining its needs personally as he preferred, and sharpening his own blades exactly the way he liked them.
He was quirky, she had learned, based on comments of others. Most preferred to let the 'aseigan and metal workers handle cleaning and repairs and maintenance, but she knew that R'chnt, with his many oddities, was also predisposed to the mindset that allowed the two of them to be together in the first place.
He did things differently; his own way, and whatever he chose to do, he did in a commanding way.
He turned to her and clicked his tusks together in eagerness as she approached him, dropping her eyes to scan his body as her hands reached towards him, one lightly grasping his wrist while the other tickled its way from his sternum to his groin.
R'chnt caught her dai-shui building. It was strong enough from the moment she saw him, but as she eased herself into him, her readiness, her growing arousal, was intoxicating. Enriched by the Yautja blood within her, the scent was an incredibly Yautjan musk, almost overriding her natural human scent, and clearly her pregnancy was not stopping her from desiring further mating.
R'chnt smiled and clicked deeply. One of the first things he had noticed about her when she greeted him upon his return was the disappearance of her alien scent. She had obviously been keeping herself well, bathing in Yautja lotions and oils, grooming herself the way she preferred to ensure that she was well coated in familiar scents.
She looked healthier, stronger, bright-eyed, happy to see him, and the offspring in her, he noticed was growing well and infusing its mother with scents and power and strength unaccustomed to all of them.
She had managed to distract him again from organizing his armor and he laid her down on the bed, stretching her out below him as he crawled above her and straddled her. He lowered his head towards her body, tracing her muscles and soft skin with his tusks, clicking excitedly as he inhaled and drew in her scent.
He spread his tusks wide, nearly wide enough to stretch clear across her abdomen, his upper tusks just wrapping her from rib to rib as he felt her caress his head and tresses, moaning pleasingly and eagerly with anticipation.
He shifted his position over her, running one hand down the length of her body, over her abdomen and between her thighs, dragging his talons along every inch of her before splitting her legs and shifting himself between them.
Clicking loudly, completely aroused, inhaling the scent of her wetness, he lowered himself against her, finding her ready and waiting opening without delay. K'Shai exhaled a high pitched moan, shut her eyes and tilted her head back as she gaped her jaw and quickly started panting in rhythm with his thrusts and withdrawals.
His body surged with a rush of sensations that he immediately decided had been entirely too long since he experienced last.
He had gone from accepting life as it was, with little mating, plenty of pent up hormones, and the almost certain risk of injury during the process, to meeting K'Shai and experiencing the overpowering levels of pleasure she elicited in him; something he never even imagined possible.
Enjoying her alien body, her soft touch, her sweet scent had not only grown on him, but had hypnotized him. Now, after so long without contact with her, he hadn't even realized how much he was craving it again until he laid her down before him once more and felt himself inside her, listened to her moan, absorbed her scent.
Though his visit to the Clan ship was brief, and it was obvious K'Shai was unsettled by his departure, they remained in contact whenever he could and as the rotations of her world passed, K'Shai continued to monitor his whereabouts from his hunt ship. He returned to the Clan ship as he needed for supplies and as the weeks passed, she had begun to display new capabilities and a deeper understanding of the people she was living amongst.
He could not understand her complaints, which she shared with only him in private. She still maintained that Neh'rti was plotting to eventually kill her in her sleep.
How K'Shai could think the Clan leader herself would be capable of something so dishonorable, he did not understand. It was obvious to him that Neh'rti was handling K'Shai in a manner as expected of a Yautja and from all he had been told, K'Shai was adjusting well.
What he heard from the hunters and from Neh'rti herself was that K'Shai was strong, perhaps a bit defiant, but no more so than the typical youngblood. Though she was proving herself more and more every day, she was very much a youngblood.
She had a fire in her that most of the Yautja would never have thought humans were capable of. K'Shai's behavior, which was slowly growing more assertive, aggressive, and dominant, was helping to make Yautja who never had hunted humans understand why they were such challenging prey. They were far more intelligent and fierce than most people realized and K'Shai was a prime example of that.
She was learning quickly, in culture, language, and sparring, which also proved the intelligence capabilities of the alien species. She had become quite adept at working the computers in the K'ojol and was now monitoring topographical conditions, weather, and life signs of his hunting pack and the other two units they were working in conjuction with.
Every now and then, K'Shai would start filling him in on details about the locations he was travelling through; names of what she called cities, which as best as he understood it were similar to Clans, though erratically patterned yet interconnected.
He learned that a human might live in one and earn money from a job in another; as confusing a way of life as he had come to expect of her species, he thought.
"Well, it would be like if you had to always go hunt in the same place every day," she tried to explain to him.
"You would leave for the hunting grounds and when you were done, you would return back home every day."
"The hunting grounds would go dry if Yautja hunted them repetitively." He explained to the best of his understanding why what she was explaining to him wouldn't work. "It does neither hunter nor prey any good to hunt an area into emptiness."
"Well, it isn't like you're actually hunting. I just mean that … it's just how human life is. We live in one place and we work in another." She said with an amused grin; he wasn't getting the concept.
"I mean, when you're home on Yaut, don't you live at home and travel to the Clan city to … hunt… or teach?"
"You will see. It is not as you explain," he said without any further clarification.
The conversation was brief, but she ended it with a smile, glad to have a few minutes while he rested to hear his voice. She sat back in the massively oversized chair, ankles tucked under butt as she stroked her belly and glanced at the wrist watch sitting on the alien computer console.
She considered the watch for a moment and thought about the single drawer which contained a cut off pair of jeans-turned-Daisy-Dukes, underwear, a bra, a tank top and two shirts, a jacket, socks, and her boots, all cleaned.
Besides those, she had the knife which was once embedded in her thigh, a rifle and a handgun. The weapons were neatly displayed now, on the wall near the bed, in a prominently noticeable position; trophies and reminders of a way of life she was moving away from.
The digital numbers and little display with the date and day of the week on the watch now looked no different to her than the Yautja writing all over the computer panels before her. She glanced from the watch's little black rice-grain digits displaying February twentieth, and letting her know it was two-thirty in the morning in South Carolina, where R'chnt was now.
She had taken a moment to mention the beauty of the shorelines and he chortled that she had informed him of her enjoyment of beaches more than once. Although she did not recall, she knew his memory was rock solid, so if he said so, it must be true.
Unlike the youngsters who were still developing, once a Yautja was fully mature, they learned quickly. They remembered sounds, patterns, locations, directions, words, and scents immediately and were able to reproduce them before they even understood context. R'chnt could recall details down to the minutiae of hunts from almost three hundred years ago as if they just happened.
To K'Shai, the days were blurring together, filled with ever growing frustrations dealing with the females, especially Neh'rti, getting daily check-ups on the health of her growing daughter, and learning the Yautja way, that she barely remembered what day she had done what, or how the newest bruise had even developed.
She glanced over her belly once again then eyed the puckered scar on the outer portion of her left thigh, from where she had been stabbed.
Her eyes flowed down to her ankles as she sat up straight and she considered the damage to her right one that had once been grabbed and bitten by a kainde amedha. She scanned once again to the computer console and considered the alien symbols.
The lighted panels before her, which once seemed like nothing more than mystifying cryptograms and hieroglyphs impossible for her little human mind to sort out and see words, were now just as clear to her as the digits on the watch.
She wondered how much longer the war would continue. She wondered why she bothered keeping the watch in view; did it really matter what time of day it was on the giant blue world that loomed outside the Clan ship?
She barely even looked at it anymore, save for the occasional time she passed a window that faced it. As it was, the K'ojol was situated in a dock bay, with the front window facing the bay and the window in R'chnt's chambers facing a bulk head wall.
The mei'sa had viewing windows, but in the wrong direction of Earth. Only from time to time if she took an outer corridor and made a long route around the ship to the cantina would she see the planet from the portals that lined the corridor.
She could not even recall when the last time she bothered to make such a circumvented route around the Clan ship.
She stood and retrieved her clothes and shoes from the drawer they had been placed in and looked them over, stopping at a reflective metal surface that served her as a full-length mirror and surveyed herself.
The bulge of her abdomen was beginning to show. As the baby developed bigger and stronger with each new day, she had begun to feel her movements. The female healer and L'ruch both maintained that the offspring, though for all appearances healthy and robust, was growing faster than a pureblood Yautja.
The pregnancy was unprecedented and there was no way to know what was normal or not. So long as both mother and child seemed healthy, there was no cause for concern.
Her body was changing, too. She glanced over her frame, once so suffering from lack of food that every rib was visible, every protrusion of spinal process, and the ridges of her hip bones and clavicles all so easy to see under her dirty, pale, and battered integument.
Now, she was firmer, muscular, clean, and basted in lavish scents from elegant oils and lotions that made her skin shine.
She cradled her human attire in her arms and noticed how peculiar it was that the clothes she once relished in and had planned her whole life around now seemed so awkward, heavy, and cumbersome compared to the sleek, almost satiny lightweight leathers of the body-hugging bikini style garments she wore now.
She had gotten so used to being barefoot, without underwear, and sleeping nude, that now the Earthly garments just seemed completely unnecessary and restrictive, as R'chnt had once described them to her; superfluous and confusing.
Her skin was getting darker, too. Although she had not seen the sun weeks, the heated amber hued lamps that kept the Clan ship at a comfortable living level for the Yautja emitted just enough artificial sunlight to slowly bake her skin into a tan that would have made magazine cover models jealous.
She looked over her head. Her long black hair, which had grown in the last few months, apparently nourished by the highly nutritious diet she now lived on, shined lustfully thanks to the caramel-smelling shampoo she had taken to using.
Between her silky alien leather garments, the soothing tingly and moisturizing lotions and oils, the artificially created perfect tan, hot soaking baths, cold showers, satiny sleeping sheets, fur stuffed pillows, continual fitness regimes, and highly nutritious and completely organic foods, K'Shai could not help but to admire the differences in Yautja life over the human way.
Her reflection was somewhere in between both. She was living in a way that humans aspired for, to the extent of paying small fortunes to experience even just for a weekend, and it was the normal way of life for the aliens who she now lived amongst.
She smiled softly and turned from R'chnt's chambers, left the K'ojol and found her way to one of the work rooms on a lower level of the jag'd'atoll.
Two workers glanced up at her as she entered an incineration room, visibly apprehensive as they surveyed her. One of them stepped over to her as if trying to wedge himself between her and the giant round chamber at the back of the room, as if she was incapable of realizing the unit was heated up to about the level of a small sun.
K'Shai looked at him, stiffening a bit at her interpretation of his approach and instead shoved her garments to him, nodding to the incineration chamber. The room was so loud she would have had to shout to make him hear, so she said nothing.
Gestures were far less rude and easier to understand. He took the clothes and boots and K'Shai watched him open a door and shove the clothing into the incinerator with long tools, then turned and left without a word.
By the time R'chnt had returned to the ship once again, K'Shai greeted him eagerly and while he came bearing news of the hunt, she had her own news to inform him.
She had been feeling stronger each and every day, like a burst of energy and power from the growing fetus and she excitedly guided his hand over her belly to feel the baby kicking, a brimming smile on her face.
R'chnt watched K'Shai with a satisfied gaze and surveyed his growing child. The offspring was large enough now that K'Shai's sparring training had dwindled down to non-existent. Although he knew that she would not be able to continue training at a physical level during pregnancy, he was not sure why she seemed so relieved about it as she discussed with him other ways she was learning in lieu of sparring.
She told him of her human garments that she had burned, although she kept the watch on the computer console in his ship, he had noticed when he returned to get different armor.
He was pleased by all he saw and heard. Even her stories to him about her activities in the mei'sa and aboard the ship were changing. The reports he heard from his network of watchful contacts had all brought him word that K'Shai was transitioning well, proving her strength and ability to adapt to Yautja life.
She went with him about his business, bringing a helmet to a weapons maker to have it repaired after it had been cracked in half from side to side during a fight and also depositing a heavily damaged spear on the table before the worker for repair as well.
"Who's were they?" K'Shai asked.
"Ch'nuk-de," R'chnt responded, telling her briefly the fourth ranked hunter in his group endured a grueling fight and pridefully came out the victor.
They found their way, after a short while, to the cantina while the shuttle he had arrived in was being filled with new armor and weapons and food for his pack.
The cantina was almost bursting at the seams with activity.
The hunters on Earth would return in erratic numbers and intervals, and this time, R'chnt's shuttle arrived back along in a group of ten.
While the shuttles usually only carried a trio of returning hunters, and maybe a few recovered corpses, this time, the shuttles came back with a dozen or so living and dead per trip.
The shuttles, running on total self-guided control, simply scuttled back and forth as hunters called for them. Groups returned from all over Earth and as K'Shai listened in to their conversations and joined in a few amongst males that R'chnt approved of, she realized she was hearing stories of hunts from places like Brazil, Africa, and Russia.
When a trio of female hunters strode into the doorway, the place fell silent, and K'Shai too, eyed them. Any male Yautja was truly a jaw dropping sight to behold. Their power, their deadliness was unquestioning, and even the shortest of them still towered over her, including the 'aseigan and workers.
When the three females entered the room and K'Shai had the first chance to actually see what she had only heard about, she immediately realized all the stories she had heard were far from descriptive enough.
All three of the female hunters stood easily a full foot over R'chnt. Muscular and far more fit than any of the other females she had seen in the mei'sa, even Neh'rti herself, the three huntresses left no mistake at all why males both revered and feared them.
They walked into the cantina and the aisle cleared out to let them through; 'aseigan and honored hunter alike jumping out of the way at the buffet area to allow them first right to anything they wanted.
The females all had many piercings around their heads and tusks, some interconnected with chains in two or three sections. They had rings through their tusks and lower jaw bones, and dumbbell-shaped rods through their cranial ridges. Their bodies bore heavy tattoos like branding that was beautifully and intricately inscribed a deep black into their skin.
They wore heavy armor that covered almost their entire bodies, and though they glided easily under the plated protection and mounted weapons and swords and spears, K'Shai was somehow sure that she would not be able to pick up one of their arm gauntlets without using both arms full force and strain her back in the process.
They were absolutely huge. Muscular, powerful bodies, small breasts, fit thighs, and yet despite it all, they still had a subtle difference in physique and gait that gave away their femininity.
While others in the room dropped their eyes respectfully when the females turned their way, K'Shai was too captivated by the look of them to stop staring. They turned towards her, growling in a tone even deeper than R'chnt's voice, as they rumbled to one another.
All three of them nodded in her direction, obviously talking about K'Shai. The nod was more of a that's her type of gesture than a respectful head bow, and it was glaring enough to make K'Shai finally lower her eyes.
The three females moved away without interest and K'Shai continued to keep her eyes down, surveying her belly and wondering if the child she was gestating would grow up into anything nearly as impressive as they were.
Suddenly, she felt tremendously inferior and the notion ran into her mind before she could actively stop it. She was not Yautja. She could never be what those females were, and because of that, her child would literally be born handicapped, just as the females in the mei'sa all tried to impress upon her.
"You are adapting well, K'Shai. All are impressed." R'chnt said with a factual tone as he stroked her head and allowed his fingers to trail through her soft, flowing hair.
She smiled and tipped her head into his hand after she quietly expressed her concerns, whispering to him in her own alien language with her face pressed so closely against his head that her lips tickled his tresses as she spoke.
"I don't think they are as impressed as you think they are. I haven't exactly done anything impressive. Unless you count screwing everything up in a colossally impressive way. I think maybe I'd rather return to Earth with you."
He chortled, but she was not joking. He glanced to her and realized it as she cast her eyes once again to the females who had seated themselves on the far side of the cantina.
"You cannot. We have had this discussion before. K'Shai, you are adapting far better than anyone could have imagined. You are impressing all. Many never thought you would."
"They still don't think…" she had started to say, but her attention was caught off guard by Neh'rti, who she hadn't even seen approaching her.
"It is time," she said with her familiar displeased chuff.
K'Shai looked up to her, shifting her tipped chin away from R'chnt's palm as he bowed respectfully to the mighty leader looming over both of them.
"Time for what?" K'Shai questioned immediately, with an annoyed tone that clearly Neh'rti, who was now fully adept at reading the minute displays of her personality, picked up on.
"To display just how Yautja you are. It is time for you to undergo the jut-cha'hal."
Neh'rti announced the last words loudly, catching the attention of the Yautja, hunters and workers alike in the room and directed K'Shai out of the cantina, R'chnt walking behind both of them.
K'Shai was guided through a length of corridors and eventually into a large round room with three chairs set up on display on an elevated platform.
Two of the chairs were already occupied, with two males who had returned from their hunts for supplies and a little bragging of their accomplishments, which earned them the right to undergo the painful process of having additional beads applied to their tresses. Forty or so spectators chittered away amongst themselves as they watched the procedure.
Females were applying the beads into the hunters' tresses, and roughly so. K'Shai noticed several of their tresses bleeding and as she was directed up to the stage and walked past them, her nose filled with an unquestionable scent of burning flesh.
The hunters growled and trilled, in an acceptable fashion, not expressing pain or discomfort. Both of them shifted their gazes slightly as she passed behind them, and their annoyed growls grew, as if they were displeased to have her join in on their special ritual.
K'Shai took a seat on the last chair at the far end of the platform and eyed R'chnt, who remained lingering in the back of the room, smoothly confident about how this particular rite would proceed.
He allowed other curious spectators to inch in front of him, so they could eye her readily, waiting to taunt her and bellow laughs as she flinched in pain. They crowded into the foot of the stage with anticipation as two female attendees moved in next to K'Shai with trays full of beads and instruments and gels on tall stands and immediately began groping K'Shai's feathery hair.
She eyed the trays and surveyed across the platform to the two hunters at her right, watching the fusing of the beads into their locks.
Little ribbons of smoke billowed up from the hunters' tresses as the beads were applied, but first their positions were etched into place with a small tool that pierced the fleshy skin of the Yautja's living hair.
It certainly looked painful, and K'Shai, although she had pierced ears herself, commended the hunters for sitting through it so quietly. She did not recall sitting so still and soundly during her own painful piercings, although she was only six or seven when they were done.
The females began to get to work on K'Shai's hair, reviewing how they planned to tackle applying the beads into her alien hair before starting the process while Neh'rti loomed, pacing across the stage eyeing up all three of them to the grunts and groans of the crowd below, who like fans at a Nascar race, were just waiting for a wreck to happen.
K'Shai could not help but to notice how all eyes seemed to be directed towards her, while R'chnt lingered in the back of the room, an amused look on his face as he willfully allowed anyone to move in front of him to eye her up.
Although her hair was sometimes yanked and pulled a little uncomfortably, K'Shai mostly enjoyed the sensations and the attention. It was fairly typical for Yautja to have 'aseigan massage and work oils into their tresses, but K'Shai had never had any of them tend to her own hair, there was simply no need, and she did not particularly want to be handled by an 'aseigan, despite a certain status such things represented.
As the females worked heated oils into her scalp and hair, massaging it thoroughly, filling her nostrils with a strong but pleasant minty scent, K'Shai lolled her head into relaxation, reclined back into the chair and sighed slowly.
One of the females yanked so hard, she ripped out more than just a few of K'Shai's hairs and looked on in horrified amazement as K'Shai offered up no more reaction than an annoyed glare before she resumed her relaxed expression.
K'Shai caught Neh'rti's glare, who was standing stark still, idly ticking her mandibles, surveying the situation and clearly calculating that there was more going on that she realized, especially given R'chnt's completely unconcerned appearance as he watched on from the back of the room.
The beaders tackled the process of bunching K'Shai's hair into tubular strands about the diameter of her thumb, just large enough to fit the smallest of beads.
Yautja tresses grew thick from the roots, but tapered to a narrow tip. Some tresses just behind the temporal-mandibular joints, right over the ears, were considerably smaller. Those narrow tresses were donned with ornate little beads that glittered and clattered together as their hair strands collided, but they were much smaller than the rings that adorned the thicker tresses. K'Shai's foreign hair could be matted up just enough to accommodate those small rings.
The oils warmed her skull soothingly and the scalp massage she got while the females worked lulled her into almost a sleepy state.
She was not even aware when they finally started adding in the beads, and had only opened her eyes upon hearing a pained growl and jeering from the crowd. She noticed that all the attention in the room had turned away from her and she shifted her gaze to the hunter on the far end.
He was a youngster; his tresses barely had any rings at all. The only ones already adorned on him were earned after his chiva.
He wallowed in misery as a thick plume of smoke rose up from one of the tresses in the back of his head, to the waiting crowd's delight. The females looked more than displeased as they stopped their work; they were more than halfway done and immediately began removing all of the beads they had just applied with clear annoyance.
They severed fused connections with tools that looked like soldering irons and the amount of smoke that billowed up from the clearly embarrassed hunter's head almost fully engulfed him.
The crowd jeered on for a while and K'Shai's attention focused back onto the inside of her eyelids as the females working on her yanked and stroked and massaged her hair into dreadlocks and applied the beads while she sat placidly, comfortably soothed and warmed, only having to occasionally remind herself not to wince or flinch when one of them dug a talon too hard against her scalp, pressed too firmly on her small skull, or yanked forcefully on her hair.
By the time she was done, hours later, she opened her eyes and realized most of the room had cleared out.
Only a dozen or so spectators still remained; the hunter in the middle seat, who had not even ticked a tusked mandible in protest of what was happening to him, had long since finished and departed proudly. The other hunter at the far end, who had to undergo the entire process again was just about finished up, looking rather sweaty as he gripped the arm ends on the chair tightly.
K'Shai apparently had lost notoriety for not breaking down and wailing in agony. She eyed R'chnt with a smile and he spread his upper tusks satisfactorily. As she stood to join him, Neh'rti stepped over.
"You are stronger than you seem, K'Shai." She said with almost a slight hint of approval; the first K'Shai had ever heard from her.
"Or, perhaps…" Neh'rti paused as she extended a forceful, clawed hand towards her freshly beaded hair and gripped tightly, quite intentionally rubbing the now matted locks together between her fingers, pressing hard.
K'Shai eyed Neh'rti widely. Neh'rti tucked her tusks back together for a moment, then clicked them together loudly as she considered K'Shai's display, glanced to the crowd, all watching her now with renewed interest, and released K'Shai's hair with a simple bow. She stepped to the side to allow K'Shai to freely walk past.
"Why do you think she didn't make a point of it to the crowd?" K'Shai pondered aloud some time later as they laid together in his chambers. R'chnt did not respond.
"She usually always take an opportunity to insult me for being human." K'Shai added, while she looked over her long hair and the new adornments.
He turned to look at her, considering her tone and words.
"She sees strength in you, K'Shai. She has come to value you far quicker than even I did. She expects you to display that strength, and you did."
Although she did not agree with R'chnt's belief, K'Shai did consider his words long after he returned back to Earth.
As she continued exploring the Clan ship in her free time, she eventually turned through the maze of corridors, which were quickly becoming more and more familiar, into a hallway she had not been in before.
She looked around in wonder, taking in the many skulls and weapons that adorned the walls along the entire stretch of the hallway. They were more carefully displayed than any museum she had ever been in, each one shined to a polish and glowing a sort of yellowish hue in the ambient light of the corridors.
Each skull told its own story, of which K'Shai attempted to imagine the details. She tried to envision the worlds that the creatures lived upon and the methods the hunters used to kill them.
She wondered how many Yautja died while killing the larger creatures, whose skulls that adorned central positions in the hallways were so powerfully wide, ridged, and plated, they looked bigger and more ferocious that even the bug queens, if such a thing was possible. R'chnt had said there were things out there worse than the hard meat, and she imagined that these creatures were probably representatives of such forms of life.
She heard rumbling voices from a nearby room and followed the curving corridor until she entered into the massive archway and stood in wide eyed wonder as all eyes turned in her direction. The elongated room with arched ceilings and concave walls was a massive control center.
She had never been up to the level she was on and as she looked around, she realized she had found the bridge or command room of the Clan ship. Her heart fluttered as she considered that she most definitely should not be there.
Still, she gazed around, absorbing the sights before her. There were four layered levels to the command room, each one elevated a little higher than the others as they moved towards the front of the ship.
On both long walls were lighted display panels. Each one, as K'Shai looked at them in turn, formed almost a complete view of the entire planet and displayed details from streets to skyscrapers to mountains and little illuminated icons representing the hunters and their prey.
Yautja stood before each one, supervising their duties as needed. Almost all of them were females.
A few elder males stood around Neh'rti and several other females at the head of the room, in front of a massive, illuminated table with a holographic display of a particular region before them. Beyond them was a viewing portal that extended from the floor to the tall ceiling and nearly as completely wide as the room, and outside of it, the bright glowing blue and white globe of Earth.
K'Shai ignored the Yautja staring at her. She walked forward as if in a trance, eyeing Earth looming beyond the ship.
She had forgotten how long it had been since she looked out any viewport and gazed upon her own world.
For weeks, her only view of the planet was through computerized displays not unlike the ones that filled the room, and she had just gotten so used to thinking of the planet that way, that to see it glowing so beautiful and bright before the ship was overpowering. Despite how far away they were, and how massive the jag'd'atoll was, Earth looked absolutely huge.
K'Shai had traipsed, step by step, all the way to the front of the command room. She stopped beyond the stunned quiet group of mostly irritated Yautja that watched her and stared at her world with a thin smile on her pressed together lips. From that view, it was impossible to tell that anything was wrong at all on the planet.
Suddenly, with a word from Neh'rti that K'Shai did not hear, a great massive blue flicker of light rocketed off the ship and projected towards the planet and K'Shai gasped in surprise, watching the comet-like trail tailing behind the great fireball.
The shot looked exactly like the fire from the powerful weapons the Yautja wore on their shoulders or carried in their hands, thesivk'va-tai, and it zoomed towards the planet with deadly precision.
K'Shai had been told that the ships were capable of firing weapons down to the planet's surface to level cities, but she had not seen it happen. The shot fired off so quickly, and with almost no sound at all, beyond a crackling hum that sounded like overhead powerlines that it stunned her to see it happen.
It was such an odd feeling to watch the comet trail of blue fire, knowing that it was about to destroy something on her world.
In one sense, her planet was under attack from an unstoppable force that mankind was wholly unable to defend against. In another sense, the planet had already been attacked by an unstoppable force that mankind was wholly unable to defend against.
She turned towards the Yautja around the giant topography table, all staring at her and suddenly K'Shai felt very much like a little child who had just done something very naughty in the middle of a party.
She wanted to slink back out of the room and pretend she wasn't there at all, but instead she found herself defiantly locked into place, warily eyeing most of the elder council.
"Perhaps you have something to add, K'Shai?" Neh'rti finally shattered the awkward silence with a sneer.
K'Shai's eyes drifted down to the holographic projection and she surveyed it. She had no idea what they had been talking about or what she was looking at or what they expected of her, but she approached the table all the same.
"Well?" Neh'rti snapped finally after K'Shai spent an unusual number of minutes silently surveying the detailed display before her.
"I don't…I…. what…?" K'Shai stammered incoherently, adding in a few "uhhs" that no doubt sounded to the Yautja like growls of displeasure, which Neh'rti immediately echoed.
"Perhaps your strengths are limited to sleeping, eating, and jut-cha'hal, then?" Neh'rti grumbled. "Or mating."
Neh'rti turned to two other elders nearer to her and continued on.
"I don't know how these humans have managed to endure as long as they have. But if they can all breed as readily as K'Shai, they will have the planet repopulated again in a year. With your weak hides and weak weapons, K'Shai, you may have managed on your own world, but your strengths here are not in sparring or tactical planning. Now leave. This is work for Yautja."
K'Shai, fuming, bristled with rage. She glared at Neh'rti and shifted uncomfortably, remaining as silent as the other elders, who shifted their gazes between the two of them like they were watching a ping pong match.
"I am sure I could learn, Leader. If you can teach me." K'Shai growled a biting tone that did not go unnoticed and Neh'rti flared her mandibles, clearly annoyed.
"I have been teaching you! You are incapable of learning." Neh'rti bit back. "I've been told you might prefer leather working. It would be for the best. Do not disgrace this Clan further by pretending to be a hunter, little human."
K'Shai glared at Neh'rti and felt her face flush with embarrassment and rage.
"Leave now, K'Shai. Experienced hunters will continue cleansing your world."
"You should. You caused it in the first place," K'Shai mumbled under her breath as she kept he eyes locked over the display.
Her words were spoken in English, which she immediately discovered was not an unknown language to Neh'rti or anyone else who heard it. The others shifted back and Neh'rti growled in pure agitation, rounded the table and reached for K'Shai.
"How dare you!" Neh'rti bellowed as K'Shai dodged her grasp and eyed off with her. "You will leave now." Neh'rti barked, but did not step towards K'Shai.
"No." K'Shai defied.
"Show me," she nodded towards the display. "I want to learn what is going on here."
Neh'rti flared in agitation, growling deeply, her mandibles spread threateningly. K'Shai eyed her angrily but did not budge.
She immediately regretted her words and actions and would have much rather ran out of the room and found an isolated corner to break down sobbing in, but she was too committed now to turn away and solidify Neh'rti's belief that she was a weak and helpless little alien.
Finally, Neh'rti turned towards the table and circled it again, returning to her former position on the opposite side of it, but glaring at K'Shai the entire time while the other Yautja gave her plenty of space to move around. K'Shai only just noticed that the Yautja working along the many computer panels on both walls around her had all stopped to gawk at the display; she was too busy trying to swallow her heart again.
As the days passed, Neh'rti grew even more terse and curt with K'Shai, but did ensure that she was given the chance to learn by the other elders who helped command the ground and coordinate the space vessels in orbital attacks.
K'Shai, in turn, became equally as stand offish with Neh'rti and noticeably more moody amongst the females, sure that none of them were even remotely capable of appreciating her abilities or respecting what she had been through.
"It was enough for R'chnt to recognize and respect. I've been through hell and I was able to survive. What else does Neh'rti expect of me?" She barked to S'ridi from the hot bath, refusing to get out and head for her daily check up with the female healer.
"K'Shai, being able to survive is expected of any Yautja. That is a basic necessity, not the culmniation of a Yautja's strength." S'ridi said with a growling tone.
"Neh'rti is the Clan Leader. Her strongest concern is the strength of the bloodlines that comprise the clan, especially the hunters. You are an alien and carry a hybrid offspring. She expects you to display your strengths in all that you do and prove that your blood will strengthen the Clan."
"Well, she needs to give me a chance, then." K'Shai grumbled, pointedly soaking her hair again, displaying that she was not coming out of the water any time soon, despite S'ridi hovering over her on the floor.
"You have a chance every day. You resist. Neh'rti's tolerance will extend only so far."
"She's not going to do anything…" K'Shai mumbled unhappily, stroking her belly.
"Tell me, K'Shai," S'ridi said, wrapping her body in a light cloak, "are all humans as defiant as you?"
K'Shai shot her a deadly glare, seething with hormonal agitation, she snapped.
"I'm supposed to be aggressive, right?"
S'ridi huffed sharply, flaring her tusks then rapping them together loudly as she turned to exit the bath chamber.
"You should do as Neh'rti has told you and see the healer."
Not long after S'ridi left, K'Shai, alone in the bath chamber, decided to seek out other sections of the ship instead. She emerged from the hot pool, feeling as bit wobbly as her muscles had relaxed so much from the heat she had a hard time standing.
While she did not necessarily find the heat of the water particularly relaxing, it did ease her muscles, and the infant growing in her would almost always settle into placidness during a soak.
She visited the cantina purely to see what was going on in there, if any hunters had returned, if there was any news from Earth. She found it mostly empty, so she grabbed some fruit and left, and wandered the ship for a while longer, stopping into the K'ojol for some time, then visiting with L'ruch who evaluated the offspring, once again assuring her the child was fine.
"Do those mean anything?" She asked him, pointing to the brand-like tattoos burned into his flesh.
"They are symbols of the Clan."
"Did they hurt?"
"Yes." L'ruch answered simply.
"They're beautiful." K'Shai said. "I've seen a lot of people with them, not all hunters either. They're all different looking. Do you have to pass some kind of ritual to earn them, too?"
"No, just thechiva."
"Is there someone on this ship who can do them?"
"Of course, K'Shai."
K'Shai gritted her teeth and kept her jaw clenched as she made her way through the corridors that L'ruch had told her.
She found the right room and saw two workers hovering over other hunters as she tiptoed in, suddenly shuddering as her skin crawled. The room smelled like burning flesh. Did everything with the Yautja involve burning flesh and pain, she thought as the realization that she probably shouldn't have come filtered into her along with the stinging scent.
Using similar tools to what she had seen for the jut-cha'hal, the flowing and crisscrossing lines and patterns that made up the tattoos were being seared into the Yautja's skin like brands.
One hunter was on his stomach so the worker over him could etch the intricate lacy pattern along his spine. The other hunter was sitting upright, getting his shoulder done, and anyone who was positioned to do so, turned their heads and stared as K'Shai tiptoed in and froze.
Another worker she hadn't even noticed approached her, leering down at her curiously and grunted a brief and unimpressed bellow to her.
"Something you need, K'Shai?"
She was a little surprised that the bulky, almost fat, Yautja covered in brands and piercings knew her name, but then again, she considered as she gazed around the room that looked more like a voluntary torture chamber than any tattoo parlor she had ever seen, she imagined that mostly everyone knew exactly who she was.
In no time at all, the impatient and gruff Yautja was hovering over her bare shoulders with the soldering-iron looking tool and K'Shai hissed in agony as her skin was seared. She was grateful that this particular event did not warrant an audience and a ceremony, but that hardly stopped passerbys from peeking in through the door-less entry way and gazing at her as the job was completed.
K'Shai squeezed her eyes shut. Her face turned beet red and tears rolled down her cheeks, but she stayed mostly quiet, save for the occasional high pitched whimper.
The pain surged in spells depending on how deep certain areas were carved, and it was those unexpected jolts that were probably the only thing keeping her from passing out.
Well, she thought, L'ruch did say it hurt.
When she was done and saw the sprawling work on her shoulder that extended around her bicep and over her shoulder blade towards her spine, she was pleased. The pain began to subside immediately after an application of a gel that made the whole work gleam brightly, and K'Shai marched back to the mei'sa feeling like she had accomplished another feat of Yautja-ness.