If there even were any nearby devices…
There was no guarantee the nearest rancher would have a comms tablet like mine. But at the very least, he might see the flare.
A flare that I ended up using much earlier than anticipated.
Once the sun was gone, replaced by the ghostly light of three big moons and stars I’d never seen from this angle – maybe never seen at all from Terratribe II – I got the heebie-jeebies. It was cold, too. My breath frosted in puffs before me like little floating skulls of doom in the air.
Jesus. Skulls? Dramatic, much?
But I was spooked. So a mere thirty minutes after sunset, when I hadn’t yet stumbled upon a Zabrian ranch or its owner, I put down my bag, lifted my comms tablet, and engaged the emergency beacon.
A spray of red light arced upwards from the device, dazzling and bright. It would be visible for kilometres. Baby Girl gave a wiggle, as if she could see it, too. Maybe she could. I knew some light got through to her in there. Sometimes, when she was too still and I got worried, I’d press the flashlight function of my comms tablet against my belly, only to feel her prod against thatvery spot a moment later. Like she was giving the light a little high five.
Or trying to kick it away because it was ruining her nap.
But whether Baby Girl was reacting to the light or not wasn’t all that important right now. What mattered was that somebody else saw it and came galloping to my rescue.
Fortunately, it was not long afterwards that I did, indeed, hear galloping.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t an alien horse.
It was an alien bull.
It came at me from a distance in the darkness, a wall of muscle and bone and horns that looked more like antlers than what I was used to seeing on cattle on Terratribe II. But there was no mistaking the fact that those antlers could gore me like I was nothing at all.
Instantly, I turned off the beacon on my phone. I wrenched my bag from the ground, holding it in front of my stomach, as if that would somehow be enough to protect Baby Girl. The creature slowed when it was maybe ten metres from me, then stopped, tossing its massive head and pawing the ground.
Obviously, the light had attracted it to me, but it wasn’t too happy I was here even without the beacon activated now. This might not have been a species I was familiar with, but I knew its stance and angry pawing screamed aggression. Avoiding eye contact with the bull and still clutching my bag firmly against my front, I began to walk slowly – very,veryslowly – backwards. I wouldn’t be able to outrun an animal like that even if I weren’t pregnant six ways to Sunday. My best hope was a quiet escape without further angering a bull with antlers that had to span two metres.
But it didn’t seem to like my plan. It watched me in my slow retreat, then huffed out a steaming breath, lowering its head to charge.
The last thing I saw before it slammed into motion and I fell, startled, to my ass, was the whip-like snap of movement behind the bull.
It was barely more than a silhouette beneath the silvered moons and stars. Hot, muscled velvet in exquisite motion. A mount and its rider pummelling over the plains.
The rider gave a shout, raising an arm and swinging rope above him, the shape circling overhead like a frayed halo. Alien eyes pierced me with white light.
He was beautiful.
And he looked fucking pissed.
3
ZOHRO
Before the arrival of the human women, I would likely have taken more precautions before riding after my maddened bull towards the strange explosion of red light a span from my ranch.
But the human women were the only ones here besides ourselves who had any sort of technology at their disposal. The light had not come from one of the wardens – Warden Tenn would have contacted me if he were so close by. Nor had the light come from a vessel. It was aimed upward, from the ground. A beacon of some sort.
A hail for help.
And when my bull broke free of his enclosure in hot pursuit of the source, my body moved before the rational parts of my brain – those most concerned with those very important facets of my own self-preservation – could catch up.
If this was one of the others’ wives, lost so far from home and requiring my assistance…
I would punch the ears of whichever idiotic male was responsible. I’d already gone out of my way to save the wardenrecently. Was my entire cursed life to be devoted to saving others?
I ignored the fact that, had I remained a surgeon in the empire, as I had always planned – and trained – to do, my life would have been exactly that. Shaped by my duty to save lives, just as my father had.
