But the city of the aliens had been destroyed nigh three annums previously and those who had made it out before it blew up had scattered in the time since.
Or perished in the unforgiving wilderness they were unprepared for.
In point of fact, that had happened so long ago, now, that everyone had begun to relax and believe they would see no more alien marauders and could take up the lives they had had before their world was invaded and virtually all that generations of their people had built had been destroyed by the people who came from the heavens.
Since the evil bastard’s empire had been destroyed, their people, the Izun, had begun to scatter themselves in the belief that they might take up lives of their own, find mates, have families, as their conviction grew that they had won the war with the aliens that had invaded their world.
Anger settled in Ryne’s belly and began to churn as he and Torr found a place to light and watch the thing as it zipped back and forth, dipped for a closer look at something that had caught its attention and rose again for a wider look.
“Clearly it is a spy thing as the other tek was and has been sent to discover what it can about us,” Torr said in a quiet voice after a little time had passed. “But it does not look like the things they had before. Do you think it is a thing of the Ert peoples? Or others?”
Ryne frowned thoughtfully. “I am not certain it will make any difference to us one way or another. Do you think it is not the Ert people who sent it?”
He considered that himself for some time, studying the thing. “I think, very likely, it will not matter. Whoever has sent it has come to take what is ours and we will have to make war on them.”
Torr nodded agreement. “Some have taken Ert females as theirpadra,their hearth woman,though, I have heard. They are strange looking, flightless, creatures, but I have heard it said that they are also beautiful.”
Ryne sent him a sour look. “Anything that is female and younger than the mothers and grandmothers would be beautiful to most of the warriors that I know. Or even older than the mothers if they could be persuaded to allow them to fuck,” he added with wry humor.
Torr shrugged. “If they are female and my cock does not mind if they are older than my mother then I will not mind. Very likely there would be no young either way and, even if we succeeded in breeding on one, if would only be half one of the people. We are thin in numbers already from the many we have lost.”
In spite of every effort to leaven his reaction to Torr’s comments, Ryne felt a heady surge of hopefulness in his blood atthe mention of a possibility of a female for comfort that was hard to deny.
Apadrawould be very welcome to him, if came to that--even a female too old to interest his cock--because it would be someone to keep their hearth for them and that alone would be more comfort than they had now--or had had in most of his memory.
Not that he was even convinced a little bit.
They would be enemies, he was certain--probably see it that way on both sides--which meant it was unlikely they could coax an alien female to hand and he, for one, did not want apadrabadly enough to risk getting stabbed in the back.
Or poisoned.
Evenif they found one that was not scary ugly.
And he was convinced that was highly unlikely--whatever Torr had heard to the contrary. He could not even imagine what one might look like that had no wings. Very likely it would be difficult to impossible even to tell if it was female.
Their enemies, the sky people who had come before had certainly been ugly beasts.
* * * *
The bastards in charge took a vote while at least half of the colonists were either in lock up or confined for injuries.
It was Belle’s opinion that that circumstance didn’t even pay lip service to a democratic vote, but no one challenged it.
Because they knew the captain, Connor Carnegie, didn’t have to take a vote at all.
He held all of the power on the ship.
And beyond that nobody actually wanted to take a chance on the second choice/alternate planet. As unnerved as they were at the prospect of landing on the alien world to begin building their civilization, continuing their journey had even less appeal.
There might be a lot they didn’t know.
But there was a lot they did--most notably the fact that it was abundant with life and it was closer to ideal for the colonists than their home world, Earth, was when they’d left it.
That being the case, it seemed unlikely there would be a majority that voted to take a chance on the secondary target world even if everyone had gotten the chance to vote.
The ship’s officers chose the landing site/colony site based on the intel they gathered with the surveyor drones.
By the time Belle made it to the ground, at least half of the colonists had landed and were already neck deep in preparing their colony site.
