He was already tired of training the hunting wolf hybrids as the Drakkon mission’s Royal Huntmaster, and he had not even been here for ten rotations. Damianos refused to abide excuses. Or a last meal that failed to be well-presented.
He interrupted the father wolf’s pitiful pleas with a godspoken command.“For this sloppiness, you will end your family line and make it so you can never father another with your mate.”
The wolf immediately stopped begging out loud.
However, his eyes continued to plead for mercy as he bounded to his feet and helplessly turned to stalk in the direction of his mate and children, who were kneeling at the edge of the judgment gathering along with the rest of the Zone 2 pack. His mate immediately started screaming. She grabbed her two small children, both boys, and tried to run, carrying one and dragging the other by the hand.
Ah, this would be good entertainment. Last meal could wait, Damianos decided. He planned to walk over to the pile of rocks his supplicants had arranged into a throne and enjoy the show.
Unfortunately, a hail from his father appeared in his retinal screen before he could settle into his seat.
“Mission Overlord,” Damianos answered the communication with the most respectful hiss he could manage, considering the older male had interrupted the only form of entertainment this primitive planet afforded him.
“Royal Huntmaster,” his father answered in greeting before coming directly to the point of his communication. “A rather inexplicable thing is happening at the Zone 4 station. I have just received their new moon report in one-thousand duplication.”
“One-thousand duplication?” Damianos did not understand, yet he did. The oddest sensation came over him. As if he and his father had already had this conversation. “Do you mean to say that a copy of the same species viability report was sent to you one thousand times?”
“Yes, that is exactly what happened.” A consternated flame rippled through his father’s burn.
Perhaps he, too, was experiencing the same thing as Damianos.
His father released an irritated hiss. “I have messaged them, but Fenrir Prime simply apologized and said it was a mistake. I answered that I found it hard to believe such a mistake could be made, especially so very many times. I’m concerned thatthe Mission Geneticist may have been unduly influenced by his progenitor, and that this is a tactic to dissuade us from the coming hunt. So, I am calling?—”
“To ask me to visit the Zone 4 station and investigate what happened,” Damianos guessed with that same strange sense of having heard these words before.
Somewhere in the distance, a shrill scream rang out. The father wolf had caught his mate.
“Your Reverent Father is not to be interrupted,” Damianos’s own sire chided. “But… yes. This is the reason for my unscheduled communication.”
Damianos sighed, releasing a great cloud of steam into the cold early evening air. He would have to replace the fifth father wolf, and it would take an intense amount of training to catch him up to his cohorts.
“I am rather busy at the moment, Reverent Father, but I will go at my first available opportunity.”
Silently, he added ….when I get around to it.
Damianos ended the communication before his sire could respond.
The father wolf was returning with his freshly dead mate slung over one shoulder and his no-longer-breathing sons strewn over each arm.
The salty liquid that humans and the hybrids sometimes expelled from their eyes for reasons Damianos failed to comprehend spilled in blubbering streams down his face.
“Good boy.”Damianos’s mouth lifted into a cruel smile.“Now, go jump off a cliff.”
“Any questions?”the Mountain Prince asked after he finished showing me around the Mountain King family’s fortress, which they did not actually live in themselves. “There’s an empty bedroom I could show you, far from where Aunt Brigid and the rest could hear us.”
We stood beneath the single staircase that led from the ground to the top floor. Portraits of former red-haired Mountain Kings who looked much like the current one lined its back wall.
But I was more interested in what was on the floor just a couple of feet away from the first step.
“Yes,” I said, pointing toward what I could only describe as a door in the floor. “What’s underneath there?”
The Mountain Prince followed the direction of my finger to the wooden door embedded into the floor. It had a bronze handle and a doorplate with an opening so large, I had to wonder at the key that would turn its lock.
“Dunno,” he answered with a shrug. “Maybe some kind of spaceship filled with god tech.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So you think your three gods were aliens?”
“Mayhap. Rumors abound. It could all come down to them being aliens. You’d have to ask the Shadow King about that.”
