CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"I heard she lost consciousness…"
"She wailed like a tr'ynth being gutted from what I was told!"
The mei'sa was often nothing more than a gossip factory, though the proud females would readily say they did not know what gossip even was. By the following morning K'Shai felt an unpleasant notion that she was still in high school as the females chittered amongst themselves about her new appearance, happily carrying on without any real concern for the facts at all.
When she appeared in the control room after a breakfast meal of steak, eggs, and fruits, Neh'rti barely even bothered to look up, only so much as to note her appearance and put her eyes back to the holographic map without a word to her.
This time, the terrain was little more than desert and caves. K'Shai had no idea what part of the planet the Yautja were surveying until she looked at a wider view on another monitor, feeling yet again insufficiently familiar with her own planet in comparison to the Yautja.
As each day had passed, she learning more about directing the war effort from the control room and in the process, she was learning about her own world from the perspective of aliens. The Yautja were never impressed by the splendor of Earth and she had a hard time understanding why, although she supposed that to them, Earth was just another world.
To her, it was home, and as she surveyed it, she could not help but to talk about the lands, the people, they places she wanted to visit, places she would likely never see.
As she described it to them, and talked about the different regions, she found that they did not care to hear details about particular regions' climates or scenery nor did they have any interest in hearing about history of note of a country or a people.
They did seem more than familiar with wars, though, and K'Shai would grit her teeth to the point it hurt her jaws every time the Yautja called her people barbaric and uncivilized.
While she was learning about the homeworld of Yaut, a planet she knew she was destined to see, perhaps not as far off as it once felt, the Yautja seemed to already know all that they needed to know about Earth.
In some ways that was true, she supposed.
While they simply did not care about the people that inhabited the planet, they certainly did know far more about the regions and what the hunters on the ground might encounter as far as weather and footing conditions and sometimes any one of them would talk about the history of a region from their own perspective when they were actually on Earth hundreds of years before K'Shai was even born.
She was learning how the Yautja sweeping patterns worked, and how the efforts of the ground infantry was supplemented by weapon fire from the clan ships. She learned, yet something else she had not realized or considered, that there was more than one massive jag'd'atoll in orbit of Earth, in fact, there were ten.
There were also close to one thousand hunting vessels in orbit, lingering around the planet and hidden in the clouds. The smaller ships could offer up aerial support with their own weapons systems, but they required lower altitudes to do so.
"All these Clans working together," K'Shai said as she looked over an orbital view of the alien army above her world. "Is this something the Yautjan Clans always do? Do you hunt or breed with other clans?"
"No," an elder answered briskly.
He considered her for a moment, as if thinking about her curious question and explained further. "It does a stronger Clan no use to interact with a lesser clans."
"But, lesser Clans will sometimes try to rise in power." Another elder said with a tone in his voice the suggested absolute superiority, as if the very notion offended him.
"But now they all work together? I'm curious, which Clan did the eto who did this to my world belong to? The Kaunte Dar'een."
"No. They were of a lesser clan," K'Shai was told.
"R'chnt said that the bloodlines of the ones who did this were all hunted down and killed. What about the rest of that clan."
"It was destroyed." Neh'rti finally chimed in.
"When it was learned of what happened on this world, the clan that was responsible stood before a joined council of arbitrators. The tainted bloodlines were hunted down by the joined clans, and the rest were left without a clan. The territory was divided by the two clans that bordered it, ours and the Nuh-cha."
"The council of the Clan handles such situations." Another elder added.
K'Shai had not even realized that the Yautja had any type of diplomats to handle inter-clan negotiations. Although she did not get many details on how such problems were resolved, she imagined there was a significant amount of clan-regulated blood shed involved.
Even now, as she listened to the communications between the vessels, there was a constant verbal battle between them all with each leader of each Clan trying to prove they were the best, the strongest, the most sensible to listen to. K'Shai did quickly notice that when Neh'rti spoke, all seemed to immediately listen and defer to her commands.
The Dar'een clan and its atoll was indeed the largest and most powerful. None of the elder council hesitated to remind K'Shai that the Clan to which R'chnt and herself, and her growing offspring by birthright, belonged, was the most powerful of all them and that facet of knowledge was frequently reiterated to the lesser vessels during growling communications, as if they needed it.
While it was something of a bragging right for the people of the Kaunte Dar'een Clan, the fact was undeniable. With over three million Blooded members of the Clan, and the largest territory on the home world, and the biggest of all the jag'd'atolls, the prideful claims were not unjustified.
"What are all these?" She asked, seeing yellowish blobs in large groups all over the maps that she knew most definitely were not hunters.
"Those are your people," S'ridi informed her as Neh'rti and several others looked on.
K'Shai eyed the Yautja all widely. "They're alive?"
"Of course they're alive!" Neh'rti snapped.
"I didn't realize there were so many… I thought everyone was dead."
"It seems the Yautja aren't the only ones who underestimate the ability of your people to survive." Neh'rti said flatly. "They remain grouped together, walling themselves off, and this tactic has worked for them, especially as the Yautja have been driving back the numbers of the hard meat. The hives are smaller and more easily controllable because of it."
"You call this small and controllable?" K'Shai bellowed in shock. "Our planet has been annihilated. Everything we knew is just… just… gone. So many people have died. There's nothing small or controlled about this!"
Neh'rti tightened her frame while the other elders suddenly grew decidely rigid.
"We are eradicating the hard meat, K'Shai. The Yautja will prevail." Neh'rti growled, clearly displeased by K'Shai's reaction.
Uncomfortable with the confrontation, K'Shai dipped her eyes to survey the map, directing the controls so she could scan the terrain over a wider section, then wider, then wider, until she had slowly scrolled through nearly the entire planet's surface and below, country by country, using the moment to avoid any conversation and submitting to Neh'rti's power at the same time.
There were clusters of humans everywhere; far more than she realized. The detailed scans showed her real-time views of the destruction that was once New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Charlotte, so many other once populated hubs of human life, just gone. She surveyed them for a while longer and then muttered under breath in exasperastion at the destruction.
"There were too many numbers in those areas for hunting packs to destroy by hand. There were many locations that had to be levelled completely." S'ridi informed K'Shai.
"Your species is so vastly populated, it worked to their advantage, K'Shai." One of the others said and she eyed him curiously.
He continued, showing her patterns in the maps before her that she had not perceived.
"These… what did you call them? Cities? So heavily populated with humans, created massive hives, but it also helped to centralize most of the hard meat to specific locations. The animals will venture from their hives to collect hosts, but they will not go far; they always will return to their queen, not another queen's hive.
Not only the humans, but the animals of your world as well, were instinctively smart enough to migrate way from the heaviest affected hubs. This is where the hunting packs are now concentrating."
"We are going to destroy this hive," another of the council elders indicated to an area on the map and then pointed towards the icons in blue that were Yautja hunters, all positioned nearby. "These hunting packs are ready to move in afterwards."
K'Shai silently surveyed the scans, looking at the hive movements, the Yautja positions and the orange blobs that represented humans. They were dangerously close to the impact radius, K'Shai noticed immediately.
"They're not far enough away. They could be killed."
"Perhaps some of them." One of the females snapped.
K'Shai glared from her to the rest of the Yautja around her.
"But…"
Neh'rti growled, cutting her off before she had a chance to say anything further.
"K'Shai, we are working on eradicating the hard meat from your world. This is the way it is to be done."
"But…" K'Shai started again and Neh'rti amplified her growl while the others moved away from the war table all together.
"You are not capable of understanding, you should leave. Now."
K'Shai felt her heart jump, but she did not budge. She froze in a combination of fear and shock, while anger welled in her.
"No! I'm not just going to be sent out like some child!" She protested in a high pitched shrill. "You can't just blow up humans that are trying to survive!"
Neh'rti stepped over to her, flaring her tusks with quickly growing rage.
"If the hunters move in, they will be overrun and killed. They will destroy themselves and anyone else too near. We destroy the hive, and the hunters finish and move on. Some of your kind may be killed, but most will survive. Do you care as much about the Yautja you wish to live with?"
K'Shai stammered to a halt, and lowered her voice, dropping her eyes.
"That's not fair."
Neh'rti clenched her mandibles together tightly and withdrew slightly, almost as if she was a little surprised by K'Shai's reaction.
"Tell me K'Shai; is it in the nature of humans to avoid death so much, they value hiding in fear more?"
Neh'rti hissed as she turned back towards the table, spreading her tusks into an aggressive grin.
"Hunters do not fear their death. If they die destroying hives on your world, they are honored. Their bloodlines are valued; they have brought strength to their Clan."
She pressed a button on the computer panel and the display grid changed to a clearer view of the human survivors so near to the hive that the hard meat were almost overlapping; the humans were about to endure an attack.
"Fleeing and hiding are not strengths. They will all be killed if the hive is not destroyed. These humans are about to be overrun. So tell me K'Shai, do I take no action and watch some of our Clan's strong hunters perish along with all of the pyode amedha, or fire and allow the hunters the chance to do their work, and some of this human group can survive?"
K'Shai deflated, analyzing what was happening on the display before her in silence. The Yautja, she knew, despite what she had initially thought about them, were not on Earth to save the human race. They did not care about anything, she surmised, beyond their own vision of honor, and their Clan's strength.
The fact that humans had died and would continue to die did not matter at all to Neh'rti or any of the others in the room all staring at her as she glanced around at them all. It was difficult to understand how they could be so unconcerned with life or death, only honor, so devoid of emotion or empathy, and yet somehow, R'chnt connected with her in such a way that made him seem unique.
She thought of him quickly again and then let her mind flicker back to the events before her in the room. If he had been on the approach to the hive, she realized she would have fired without hesitation, to give him the best fighting chance of survival. She knew his armor, like everyone else's, was equipped with a self-detonation device.
She knew he would activate it if he were trapped with no way out. She knew he would do it without a moment's hesitation, without consideration of who would die in its wake. She sighed after a long, awkward silence that she barely noticed while she pondered the Yautja way and then realized Neh'rti had locked her menacing gaze upon her and appeared to be waiting for a response.
"Uhh…" K'Shai stammered incoherently.
"I understand." She said finally, swallowing over her own words and keeping her eyes locked on the three-dimensional display grid.
"Fire the shot, K'Shai," Neh'rti commanded and after a brief hesitation, K'Shai stepped over to the console.
Neh'rti watched her aim and fire the weapon and loomed over her with a sort of gloating pleasure as K'Shai fired the shot that destroyed the hive and whatever humans were unlucky enough to be in the blast radius. She pressed her lips together and watched the projection on the table change before her eyes.
The green icons that represented the hard meat had all but disappeared. The orange icons of human survivors had been reduced by at least thirty percent, and the remaining icons were moving away from the blast.
Meanwhile, the blue icons of the three hunting parties, forty-two Yautja in total, were all moving in from their flanking positions. Over the next few hours, she watched them systematically scan the terrain and destroy any straggler hard meat while the human party edged their way out of the current view. She felt sick the whole time, though with Neh'rti looming nearby, she dared not leave her position at the table.
Day after day she monitored the movement of the army and came to understand many truths about the condition of her world she had not realized. The hives of the hard meat were sprawling and vast, but the Yautja forces on the ground, in conjunction with aerial support, had been working diligently to clear the world of them for almost a year.
Millions of Yautja had heard the call and responded in force, banding together and working as teams, all the Clans uniting for the effort which affected the sense of honor and pride of the entire race, though there was considerable agitation between the Clans, and the elder councils of the ten most powerful clans were constantly engaged in negotiations, some of which were resolved in the middle of a kehrite instead of around a conference table. K'Shai had begun to gain an understanding of the number of losses the Yautja had suffered as well.
On the planet, she had come to learn that there were millions of human survivors all over the face of the planet, and there were entire regions almost completely unaffected by the hard meat. Each group of survivors, from a few dozen to tens of thousands, all cut off from the others; all likely assuming they were the last ones on Earth.
She imagined every group she monitored propbably went throug much of the same horrors and doubts and fears she had experienced. She wondered if, for many of them, their biggest struggle was not avoiding the hard meat, but battling starvation and other humans; both plights K'Shai knew all too well.
Slowly as time had passed, human survivors had begun to send out radio signals to try to build communication and the Yautja vessels picked them up readily. K'Shai listened to them sometimes. Occasionally, the messages she overheard were just like the one W'rsa had picked up – broadcasting a safe haven for anyone who heard the call. The Yautja were pushing in on their prey, restricting the animals to defensive hordes, which in turn created safer clearings, wider buffers, and more opportunity for survivors to reconnect, and they were taking advantage of their alien-fortified safety nets.
K'Shai listened to transmissions that identified coordinates of new emerging cities, and even occasionally listed names of their occupants; each one hoping to reconnect with lost loved ones. Sometimes the transmissions provided tactical information that was useful for the Yautja in coordinating efforts, and in this way, with a solid understanding of what was being said and what it meant, K'Shai was able to find her place at the war table.
K'Shai's efforts seemed to please Neh'rti, if such a thing was possible, and for the time being, her focus shifted to consulting in the war effort as the child in her womb grew.
"K'Shai," Neh'rti barked in her deep rumble and drew her attention towards a large hive near the southern tip of Africa. "Bring the ship into firing range of this hive and destroy it."
Looking a bit like a deer in the headlights, K'Shai moved to the control panel near the main portal and tapped a series of controls to guide the entire Clans ship to where it needed to be in order to best aim the weapon. She had never even learned to drive a car, but flying a space ship was surprisingly simple.
Coordinating attacks from the Clan ships involved a delicate dance of communicating with leaders of other Clans as well as ensuring that the smaller vessels were out of the way so they did not get hit. When she guided the ship around to the best trajectory for the weapon to fire, she glanced around.
"What is the problem?" Neh'rti snapped. "Fire!"
"There are two ships in the way. They need to move."
Neh'rti flared her mandibles and growled in annoyance.
"Well, make them!"
K'Shai gritted her teeth and turned to the communication panel as the rest of the elders and Yaujta in the room looked on. She had been listening to the elders communicate with the other vessels' leaders, but as she pressed the button to signal both ships, she was quite certain she was not ready to command them herself.
Both Leaders of the other ships opened their commuication lines and K'Shai made her simple request to move out of the way so she could fire.
One of the Leaders laughed heartily and broke communication immediately, cursing something as he did so that K'Shai was certain included the words animal and insult. The other Leader chortled through it all and then demanded to know why he should listen to an alien, and where the actual Yautja in charge were.
K'Shai looked around the room for a moment, not sure if she should be completely embarrassed, angry, or just flabbergasted. Neh'rti and the entire rest of the room stood stock still and stared at her.
No one spoke or moved or even ticked a mandible in either amusement or anger, which made K'Shai feel even more nervous for some reason she wasn't quite sure of. They were all just simply watching, gauging; seeing how she would handle the situation. She realized with a gulp in her throat and a clenched jaw, that she was being tested, again and again, every day, now by members of other clans.
She wondered if it would ever end. She was sure she did not have whatever "it" took, whatever it was that the Yautja were looking for in her to prove she could be like them. She was sick of being pushed and challenged, and admonished.
Yet, she almost wanted Neh'rti to lash out at her with some other insult about how incapable of a creature she was, and maybe for extra effect, physically grab her away from the console to show her how it's done. That, at least, would have been a reprieve from standing there red faced and dumbstruck on what to do next. Her mind lit up and immediately she could not stop an influx of thoughts force their way into her mind about how stupid she was for thinking the other Yautja would ever actually listen to her.
She was certain that Neh'rti had put her up to this quite on purpose as a reminder that no matter what, she was not Yautja and could never be what they were. No doubt, K'Shai imagined, that Neh'rti was perterbed by the fact that she had been getting familiar with the ship, the war, and the elder council and had decided it was time to put the little human in her place by embarassing her fully.
The silence lingered on perhaps a few seconds too long and the growling voice on the other end of the communicator, no longer chortling with amusement, instead barked with demand for Neh'rti once again.
"No. I am K'Shai and I am telling you to move. I'll fire in five seconds, get out of the way or be destroyed." She snapped with all the irritation a pregnant, offended and embarrassed, twenty-year old human could muster and moved off to the firing control once again.
She counted silently to five and pressed the control. She glanced back to the main display and noticed the two vessels streaking out of the way with all the rush of a car burning rubber as it peeled out. K'Shai smiled thinly as she imagined smoke rising up from behind their engines while the Leaders aboard cursed under their breath.
Her efforts in the control room that day seemed to help ease the mockery from the females for a while, although Neh'rti herself had become noticeably more standoffish after that. As her belly grew, so did K'Shai's understanding of what was happening on the planet's surface as well as inter-clan relations.
Her body was changing, as was her comprehension of the nature of those changes, and as the circular systems of her own body sprawled out and connected with each other to support its new life, K'Shai had come to understand that the human race was beginning to experience something of the same thing.
The old Earth was lost, but very slowly as radio transmissions developed from one way to two way, as vehicles were utilized again to connect groups of survivors who were finding each other and banding together, rebuilding a new life in cleared out regions all over the globe, a new Earth, a new humanity, was growing before her eyes.
As the movements of the human populous, the surging waves of Yautja hunting packs, and the dwindling green blobs of the hard meat shifted hour by hour, day by day, week by week, she began to see growth and life returning to Earth, just as she watched the growth of life inside her develop.
While she felt intimately connected to one, she realized she was becoming disconnected of the other. The displays of Earth kept her occupied day to day and, she didn't even realize when, but at some point, she stopped thinking of the terrain, the people, and the cities in terms of places she had once wanted to visit and places she had seen. She stopped wondering about the fate of the people on the surface. They were simply little colored icons on a holographic projection, nothing more.
The only other projection she concerned herself with was that of her child as she watched it growing inside her.
The scans showed the baby's tiny little legs right down the little claws on her toes, nub-sized claws on her fingertips, and tusk-less fleshy mandible mouthparts. The infant's little head ridges speckled the scan in a tiny curving row, barely the size of K'Shai's fist.
The baby began to kick and fidget, rapping on her abdomen every few hours, restless and strong.
K'Shai ended communication with R'chnt one morning, eagerly awaiting his return. She wanted to touch him, feel his heated body, and tell him of her newest developments.
She kept her most recent adventures out of the brief conversation; he certainly didn't have time for it and she wanted to show herself off to him as a surprise anyway.
"She is relentless!" K'Shai informed him with a proud smile once he returned. She had greeted him with a firm hug, and was unable to make the statement really sound like a complaint as she urged his hand onto her abdomen once again.
"Tough as her mother," he said with certainty. "And from all I have been told, K'Shai, you have been busy proving that."
He stroked her face, then guided his hand down her shoulder and traced over the artwork branded into her. He purred lightly, expressing his pleasure over all he saw and touched in the silent stillness of his chambers shortly after he arrived.
"Do you like it?" She whispered softly with a smile.
R'chnt nodded silently.
"I think I want to do my whole body. I've seen others with them all over their legs and arms. It'll match my hair! Makes me feel so Yautja-ish." She giggled.
"Indeed, K'Shai." He said quietly as he ran his fingers along her body and over her breasts.
She huffed softly, his silent touch tingling her, arousing her as the baby inside her womb settled while her body began to churn. The Yautja blood in her surged, heated her veins, added to her scent and as she lightly trapped her lower lip under her upper teeth and inhaled deeply, she caught the scent of R'chnt's building musk.
They stepped over towards the bed, disrobing as they went and K'Shai picked a position that was comfortable for her and pleased them both. R'chnt trilled as he gripped her hips and grew his erection, rubbing his body against hers as she knelt before him on the edge of the raised sleeping platform.
He growled loudly as he slid himself easily into her opening, making her moan and quiver under his grip as he did. He felt her warm wetness lubricate him as he penetrated and withdrew, and thrusted again.
He maintained a deep, steady rumbling growl that vibrated his own body more than it was already surging as K'Shai's scent and vocalizations overtook him. He pushed himself into her rhythmically, secreting his own juices with each thrust, listening to her pant and bellow as she raised her hips and stretched her back and shifted her shoulders down into the padding below her.
She grappled the sheets and pressed her cheek into the matting, gaping her jaw and moaning her high-pitched wails that announced her pleasure, her ecstasy, her desire for him to work himself harder and faster.
Even with the growing child in her, K'Shai's stamina and endurance only grew.
She welcomed R'chnt back to the Clan ship every time he returned with a warm hug and wide smile, and laid herself before him to allow him an opportunity to pleasure himself in her, working off pent up desires.
He had become acutely more aware of the length of his absence from her, and touching her again, feeling her warm and soft and ready body, watching her change into something more Yautja looking and smelling every time he returned, was welcoming and enchanting. He inhaled her scent and rolled his eyes back into his head while his body throbbed and heated up before its release.
"I don't want you to go." She whispered to him from a tight embrace once they had returned to the docking bay.
"I must go, K'Shai. This will be done soon."
She pressed her lips together and gripped his mighty biceps firmly, stroking them as she slid her hands along them repeatedly.
"I don't want to be away from you."
"K'Shai…" R'chnt rumbled, placing his palm on her chin, ignoring the onlooking gazes of 'aseigan curiously watching the display.
"Soon."
The shuttle was stocked and despite her objections, he departed after several more attempts on her part to get him to remain.
K'Shai kept in contact with R'chnt, following his progress and monitoring his vital signs with more regularity than she discussed with him, but she did inform him of every new development with his child. Every new flinch and kick and punch created a new wealth of sensations for her to adjust to, and while the experienced mothers in the mei'sa were familiar with the feelings, they were indifferent to them, associating them with a normal part of motherhood, hardly anything to get excited about.
The way the Yautja mourned, or did not mourn, their dead was not much unlike the way they lived and the family bonds they experienced. Like a fallen hunter that was respected for his life and honored for his bravery and recognized for adding another valuable genetic code to the Clan's DNA, the Yautja honored them without love.
From what K'Shai had seen, anything close to affection that a Yautja displayed was little more than a quirk in an individual's personality, and was more likely to be seen in elders that had hunted and survived and experienced more than the younger hunters.
Mothers, though protective, maintained an emotional detachment from their own offspring. They selected their mates based on feats of accomplishments with the desire of procreating strong bloodlines that would benefit the Clan. They did not form families, but they cared about bloodlines. She watched the Yautja mothers handle and care for their offspring, learning from them so she could learn the Yautja ways.
The mothers were attentive and nurturing. They diligently supervised their older offspring and rarely ever even put down their infants, always keeping them warm, fed, and content. They groomed and bathed their children, taught and guided them.
They carefully monitored them as older ones played and fought amongst themselves, but they did not intervene as a bigger, stronger child wrestled down a smaller one. They did not come running to the aid of their own child if they got scraped or injured.
They prevented serious injuries, but did not intervene into minor scuffles, allowing the children to work out dominance amongst themselves. The older children would fight viciously and required heavy supervision. Watching the children of different ages interact helped her learn about their behaviour directly, and took up the majority of her, and almost all of the other females' time.
K'Shai was surprised to see that despite the physical size and calendar-year ages of the older Yautja, they were far from as mentally developed as a typical human of comparable growth. The juveniles on the Clan ship were physically as a human teenager, but they were only considered barely older than toddlers by the Yautja calendar.
It was confusing and a little disorientating to adjust to, as K'shai pondered how the hybrid in her womb would mature.
The juveniles aboard the clan ship required less supervision than the larger, more mature youngsters on the homeworld, who were hormonal, and beginning their own journey towards achieving their chiva, and yet the amount of supervision they needed quite literally took the entire mei'sa as a group to manage.
It was not at all unusual to see a nursing mother watching over the interactions of older juveniles that were not even of her blood.
While at K'Shai's age, she would have been in college and was mentally capable of learning the growingly more complex ship functions, the Yautja children she watched tearing into one another, leaving deep scratches and bite marks, were entirely different than she would have expected.
They were the same size as her, some of them slightly larger, but their mental acuity was far less.
She considered the children she now supervised with three other females. They were just a bit taller than her in size and far larger in muscle mass. Seven male youngsters, all at first sight large enough to make a human think of them as college-age young men, filed into the kehrite and took to the positions they desired to prepare for an acuity-building spar game.
The young boys, though they had been alive for over forty Earth years, were about as mentally developed as the average third-grade human. She had been surprised to realize that many of the young children barely had much of a vocabulary, and did not learn to even read until they were much older, if at all.
As she herself was learning to read and write and speak, she began to understand that she was much farther along than even some of the youngest Blooded members of the Clan, who could barely read themselves.
Yautja were slow to mature mentally and quick to develop physically. Education was encouraged in a format of fighting first, mental development later, if the individual so chose.
Emphasis on strength, power, controlling their natural hormonal-driven impulses, honing fighting skills, and developing the ability to dominate, was first and foremost in young Yautja education for either gender.
Many of the hieroglyphic symbols that K'Shai had once found so cryptic and confusing, were really just literally pictograms of the most basic sort, to make operating machinery and even awu'asa simple for Yautja who had learned to kill but not to read.
The texts that R'chnt taught her from were written in the far more complex Yautja alphabet, which he had learned over decades after his Blooding hunt.
She had come to understand that he had gained a worldly knowledge from his years of experience, not through formal education like a human child would receive. He had simply survived long enough to come to know more than the average Yautja. He was highly intelligent, like most Yautja with a mature mind was, he just simply did not bother to concern himself with complex matters.
R'chnt had once told her that he considered himself a "doer" while other Yautja who pursued the life of a non-hunter, were "thinkers". He was a hunter.
Matters of science, medicine, music, politics did not matter to him, and he spent nearly none of his time endeavoring into any of them. He was concerned only with the hunt, the spirituality behind the hunt, and honoring the Yautja God Cetanu the way any good hunter was expected. He would say that the "thinkers" could worry about the rest.
The idea of that type of separation made little sense to her at the time, but as she witnessed the development of the "doers" before her eyes and realized that if they continued on to be hunters for the Clan, they would likely not bother filling their time with learning other skills, the differences made more sense. Surviving chiva was all a young Yautja really understood or cared about, and it was all the mothers of the mei'sa taught and encouraged.
Each female was highly concerned with developing the strongest of the children, whether or not they were of their own blood, while weeding out the lesser students who would either have to show above average endurance to make it to and through chiva, or become 'aseigan.
Lessons for the children on the ship took on the format of sparring games and group story-times, in which the children, and K'Shai right along with them, learned of the history of their people.
She thought about how young Yautja matured, the time it took, and how her own child would be expected to grow and learn. It was alarming to her and made her feel queasy every time she thought about it.
Reading, writing, math, art, sciences; none of it would be a priority in the development of her child until she survived chiva. Even then, she considered, the offspring could decide to breed immediately and remain in the mei'sa to tend to other offspring, where her worldly knowledge would grow slowly through experience, instead of developing through study as a human would.
She unconsciously grappled her belly and thought about her developing daughter, filling with worry that she would never see the child mature, and perhaps not even live long enough to have a significant impact on how the child grew up and developed at all. She looked down to her bloated abdomen for only a moment when a fight broke out between two of the boys in the kehrite.
One had decided he liked the position of the other better, but the other refused to budge. Immediately, the two began brawling with as much brutality as any adult, though with far less coordination or grace and a complete absence of any rules.
The young Yautja bellowed and grunted as they beat on each other. They barked out occasional insults to one another about the length of their tusks and tresses in short, rough syllables, displaying their limited language skills.
"We have to stop them!" She finally said after a short while when none of the females supervising did anything to intervene as the two children punch and clawed at each other, drawing blood.
"K'Shai! Remain where you are." One female growled.
The others looked at her with surprises gazes.
"They are establishing the strongest, K'Shai." One said factually.
"They're going to kill each other," K'Shai whispered in horrified alarm.
One of the other females scoffed at the idea. "Children are forbidden to kill. We are here to make sure they don't. The rest is up to them."
K'Shai eyed her with surprised rage and the larger of the two successfully managed to pummel the smaller one to the ground and continued to hit him relentlessly.
"But…."
"I don't know how humans establish dominance, or what you think you are going to teach that child of yours, K'Shai, but they must find their own positions. This is the Yautja way!" One of the females scathed at her.
"If the son of Bryn'tor is not strong enough to defend himself against an attack from the son of Arg'uln-de, then he must accept his lower place." Another mei'sa mother snapped.
K'Shai quieted just in time to hear a terrible cracking sound echo through the kehrite. The other children all gazed on, but each one held their positions, never daring to move out of place for risk of being attacked by another wishing to remove them from it. The smaller male on the ground had put up a valid effort against his larger attacker, but had suffered a broken lower mandible in the process.
The females stepped in to end the display once the smaller male, bloodied, scratched, and battered, was nearly unconscious. The bigger child grunted pridefully and received a warning growl from one of the females.
He returned to the center of the kehrite, to the position he had fought for. K'Shai watched in horror as the smaller male shook himself off and stood up, returning himself to the lesser position, despite being clearly uncoordinated and dazed from the beating he received.
K'Shai continued on, watching the children, supervising them during spars and meals and the difficult times of getting them to sleep. She had decided that it must just be a universal truth that after a certain age, children just hated being told to go to sleep.
The youngest children, the fiery little toddlers who fumbled and clattered into one another were far easier to care for, she thought. They played hard and slept hard, and really only demanded food. Sometimes catching them up to be cleaned up was difficult, as was getting them to utilize the bathrooms, but overall, baby Yautja were nowhere near as challenging to manage as their older juvenile counterparts.
Between keeping busy within the mei'sa and around the war table, K'Shai had lost track of time. Her belly swelled and the world revolved outside the massive portal. The ships in orbit positioned themselves like a dance, ebbing and receding while shuttles continually scurried back and forth endlessly every minute of every day.
K'Shai had learned quickly and some of the others expressed their amazement at how much information someone with such a small skull could manage to absorb so quickly and understand it all. She was learning and doing things that typical youngbloods did not, and more capably so than many Yautja would ever learn. What had taken months for K'Shai to learn and understand and perform, would take the average Yautja decades.
As her child grew and grew so did her own position within the Clan. She had been granted private accommodations in the mei'sa, which was a privilege typically reserved for higher ranking females of advanced ages. Young blooded females normally shared community rooms until they grew in rank and status and earned more luxuries.
She tried not to think about the irony that the more she tried to learn the Yautja way and become like them, the more she was actually separating herself from them by the very nature of her differences.
She glided her hands over the sleek metal surface of the control panel in the command room, thinking instead about the ship, the weapons, the technology, and then R'chnt and the armor he wore. The machinery functioned, like the almost organic awu'asa that seemed to operate with a mind of its own, seamlessly and fluidly with minimal control.
The next time R'chnt returned to the ship, he found K'Shai eagerly greeting him, now fully covered in Clan brands from the sides of her head all the way down to her flat, thin toe claws.
The brandings scrolled and danced in patterns that complemented her sleek and small frame. Their intricate details had taken endless hours to complete and he had been told that she endured the pain as well as any Yautja should, although she had the work completed in multiple sittings over many rotations.
Her body, so unlike a Yautja, yet so Yautja-ish in scent, prescence, and adornments, created an enticing appeal that he warily noticed was clearly increasing in all who saw her.
As he dealt with his business and then sat with K'Shai in a cantina while his shuttle was being refilled of supplies, he surveyed K'Shai, pleased by all he saw and heard from her and from others.
"K'Shai's place in the clan is developing more every day, R'chnt. You picked well. Very well." K'tor-de said to him while he gazed a little too much at his mate returning to their table with a platter of food. R'chnt growled a sharp reminder, which K'tor-de heeded immediately.
She smiled at R'chnt as she slid in next to him. He picked a fruit from the platter and received her kiss on his cheek with a pricked upper tusk; smiling a little gloatingly as males looked on.
"K'tor-de has told me you have learned to pilot the vessel well." R'chnt informed her.
"I suppose. Really just back and forth around in a circle. I look forward to learning to fly the K'ojol," she said with a pressing tone in her voice.
"You will learn." R'chnt nodded.
"Good, because I really want to take it to warp! Maybe go through a wormhole. Have you ever been to a different dimension or something?" She laughed. "Oh, tell me you have transporters." She added with a laugh at their dumbfounded gazes.
"To what?" R'chnt and K'tor-de both echoed almost in synch.
"What? Warp speed? Wormholes?" K'Shai repeated slower.
She did not know how to say the words in Yautjan, if there even were words for it, so she did her best to describe what she meant to R'chnt in her own language so he could understand.
"K'Shai!" R'chnt bellowed half in a laugh half in a deep growl; a tone of pure confused amusement. "Your species is most unusual."
He had just about allowed himself to believe he had K'Shai and her species figured out, but how the very notion of the things she described had even come to be made no sense at all. It was absurd. Still, she had clear adjusted quite well to her new role amongst the Clan, and it seemed that even her own mind had eased in regards to her dealings with the females and the mei'sa.
As he talked with her more, she spoke less and less of problems amongst the females, and instead turned her worries to that of their growing offspring.
After some time, K'Shai departed their table to join some females at theirs upon invitation. He watched her stalk away and sit with them, as cool as casually as any Blooded female Yautja should be; such a striking difference than her reserved trepidation in the first few weeks aboard the atoll.
He was informed, through the grapevine, or directly from Neh'rti or any of the other elders that were working closely with K'Shai, that she was stronger than they ever imagined she could be. She was defiant and despite her fragile frame they found her determinedly more aggressive than they had expected.
"Strong heart indeed," one of his companions chortled over their mugs of brew.
"From what I hear, she told the Leader of the Hun'katu Clan she would destroy his ship! He didn't know what to say, but I'm sure he probably ground his tusks to nubs having to take an order from the ooman!" Another bellowed.
"The Hun'katu is a meaningless Clan. I'll teach K'Shai to order around the likes of you, Ytin-de." R'chnt said with a pleased chuff, drawing out sniggering laughter from the other males at the table, as he sipped his brew and watched K'Shai.
"R'chnt, if she can really be rebred over and over, and mates in such a way you seem so pleased with, you will find yourself fighting away endless challengers for her," Y'tin-de rebutted strongly.
"She grows more powerful and intriguing with each passing day. She grows more Yautja and her scent is overpowering. I may be tempted to put my own tusks into her flesh. You have to yet to mark her, perhaps you are uncertain you really want to keep her as your mate."
"Watch yourself, Y'tin-de," R'chnt growled warningly, bristling as he stood and towered over the still seated elder, who immediately shifted his eyes to the floor.
He wanted K'Shai to settle in with the Yautja well and demonstrate the strength he knew she had. He was pleased by all she had done. She took to it all quicker and more solidly than he had expected and had drawn an alarming amount of attention he never anticipated.
Hushed insults about his mental state or mocking jests about his pyode amedha mate spoken well out of ear shot were one thing, but he had not expected the number of comments he had been made privy to about males' curiosity to take her for themselves.
His protectiveness flared up as K'Shai, now exiting from the company of the females stood and headed towards the doorway slowly. He growled a warning, which he allowed to reverberate deeply before he moved away from the table, telling the others he would readily accept any challenges.
He stiffened and bristled, half expecting Y'tin-de, or any of the five others he had been seated with to take up the offer, but none did. He imagined, though, that once she was ready for re-breeding, he very well may have his work cut out for him. Keeping K'Shai as his mate could well prove to be the biggest challenge of his life.
He strode up behind her quickly and powerfully, gliding silently towards her as she paused and turned and waited for him before they exited the cantina together and walked through the corridors back to the K'ojol.
"You're very quiet…" K'Shai said in a trailing whisper. "Everything alright?"
"Yes, K'Shai." He said simply, chuffing slightly and ticking his upper tusks together rapidly, drawing out a hollow sounding purr as he groped her face gently.
He would do what it would take to keep her safe and to himself and continue to breed with her over and over. She was his. He knew she would not openly choose to mate with another, but that would not prevent others from challenging him for her, taking her by force if she did not kill them for the effort. She still had much to learn, although for the time being, her pregnancy would work to both of their advantage.
The child within her was growing larger, though. The time was drawing near. Her belly was fully round. Soon enough, the Yautja would have no more business on Earth, and they would return to the homeworld.
Breeding season would come around, and R'chnt considered what would happen when females began to come into readiness, including K'Shai. He would mark her as his, as publically as necessary so there would be no question who had rights to her.
The war on her world was coming to a close.
So few and far between were the hives remaining now that the Yautja hunting packs, with direction and guidance from support teams that now included K'Shai, were converging together for final sweeps of the land above and below the surface, eliminating the last of the hard meat in all its forms from the planet. The effort was efficient and methodical, though bloody and challenging, and causing heavy losses.
R'chnt had made his way back to the K'ojol with K'Shai and joined her in the shower, feeling the hot water against his skin while K'Shai moaned in pleasure under her much cooler shower heads before she turned towards him. He caressed her, dragging his talons lightly from her chin down her shoulder, over her chest, and along her swollen belly. He placed his hands on her womb and K'Shai laughed lightly as the baby immediately kicked, almost as if in response to her father's hands.
"She's getting close."
"She is growing much faster than a pureblooded Yautja," R'chnt purred.
"Faster? I feel like I've been pregnant forever." K'Shai laughed. "I'm ready for her to come out!"
She stepped closer to R'chnt, smiling up at him as he loomed over her, tusks spread with interest, erection hardening. She still, despite the discomfort she felt at this stage of pregnancy, wanted him. Such a thing intrigued him.
She caught his scent and it triggered a response in her. Perhaps she was more sensitive to it now because she had so much powerful Yautja blood in her body, but his musk was utterly enticing.
Too uncomfortable to manage to accommodate her desires, she placed her hands on him, stroking from his abdomen down to his groin as she gripped his growing rod with one hand and the sacs below in the other.
She began to work his skin, slowly, then faster, pressing her body into his and kissing his powerful abdomen as she rubbed and stroked his erection faster, firmer, harder, making him growl his pleasure, stirring his natural desire to pump his hips into the sensation. He leaned back against the shower wall, tipped his head back and groaned and rumbled in delight until he released himself with a heated purr.
They rested in bed for a while longer until movement from the offspring caused K'Shai to stir with a soured moan. R'chnt was up and alert and as K'Shai pulled herself out of bed, awkwardly navigating around his chambers because of her inflated belly, trying to quell her upset and settle the child within, she surveyed him while he began redressing.
K'Shai walked with R'chnt back to the docking bay with slow strides. He kept pace with her, walking side by side through the corridors, careful never to put K'Shai behind him, not anymore. Not too long ago, she used to only walk behind him, tucked up behind him so close she would bump her body into his back as they moved. She had found herself, her place, her strength, and she walked alongside him proving it.
He allowed her to pass him first through narrower passages, willingly submitting to her, as others gazed on while they entered the shuttle bay. R'chnt moved in close to her, resting his hands on her abdomen as he leaned over and she reached up and kissed him once they reached the shuttle.
"I hope this will be over soon," she whispered to him.
"The war or your pregnancy?" R'chnt asked coolly.
K'Shai laughed loudly, caught a little off guard by the joke, or the actuality that R'chnt wasn't sure to which she was referring, she couldn't be sure.
"Both, since you mentioned it!" She smiled.
"K'Shai…" He purred with a rumbling chuckle, and stroked her face.
She watched with a fading smile as he turned into the shuttle and it departed from the docking bay. She turned back to the corridors and paced them slowly back to the mei'sa where she took a seat in one of the common rooms and snacked on some fruits.
For a long while, the room remained empty, but slowly other mothers filtered in and some of them included K'Shai in their chatter. She had talked with them so long, she lost track of time until her rumbling belly reminded her she was hungry again as well as fatigued.
As she turned into the main corridor, she glanced around and immediately stopped as she saw Neh'rti accompanying the three robust female hunters she had seen earlier. Each stopped in turn as they came out into the corridor and surveyed K'Shai, who felt her skin prickle at the imposing sight of the female hunters.
They said nothing to her, only glanced her direction for a moment and turned the opposite way to go about their own business. K'Shai watched the small group leave the area and then turned and headed off.
Her thoughts drifted that night and in the nights afterwards to the growing child in her womb. While she laid in restless silence in her sleeping chambers in the mei'sa, or soaked in the lulling heat of the common baths, she wondered again, she couldn't help it, if her child would be accepted and grow up strong like those female hunters she saw.
She worried, to the point of illness, over the thought that her offspring would be deemed unworthy of a place in the Clan and cast out as an 'aseigan before she was barely old enough to walk. She envisioned herself single-handedly ruining R'chnt's status, honor, and reputation.
She tried to force out mental images of all of them strung upside down from a totem missing their skin.
She continued attending to her given tasks and slowly, as the days ticked past, the displays of the world showed a very different view than what had been months earlier.
As the hives were eliminated one by one, every drone, every egg, every larvae and every queen sought out and destroyed, the Yautja hunting packs converged in larger formations for final sweeps. Then, little by little, the shuttles scurrying back and forth to the planet returned full every time, bringing back hunters en masse to the Clan ship.