Fuck it! I had to know.
To my dismay, my hands released her without any resistance.
Krux! Of course we weren’t mates.
We’d already talked about this. We were both too old. And she said she wasn’t looking for a relationship anyway. I swallowed my disappointment.
Why the hell was I disappointed anyway? Dottie was here in my arms. Why did it matter if she was my mate or not? Humans could not form mate bonds, and yet some would go to the ends of the world for their partners. Their love was no less than ours.
Dottie was mine, regardless of whether there was a bond or not. She might not want a relationship, but it was too late for that, at least for me. Now that I’d found her, I’d never want a life without her.
***
I woke up early the next morning with Dottie sprawled across the bed sideways, her legs almost off the bed and her face plastered against my arm. My first thought was that I’d need a larger sleeping nook, but I shoved the errant thought back into the recesses of my mind.
I had yet to take her on even one successful date, and here I was imagining her living in my shuttle with me like I was a young hunter. Technically, it wasn’t even truly my shuttle. I hadn’t had my own shuttle in forever since I started staying on the mothership.
I wondered which hunter was using my original shuttle now? I hadn’t thought about checking the records until this moment.
We made our way back up to where my shuttle sat, still precariously perched at the side of the building. How were we supposed to get inside?
My first idea was to get a PIP model involved. In the past, they’d shown the ability to communicate with other shuttles and convince them to do whatever was needed. I contacted Kan’n, who was the hunter lucky, or unlucky, enough to have partnered up with a PIP model who named himself…you guessed it, Pip. Pip had quickly confirmed that my shuttle was unresponsive.
I wasn’t surprised. I’d turned it off completely rather than setting it to rest when I left it yesterday. With that option out of the way, Dottie suggested weighing down the front end of the shuttle so I could climb over to the back and get in.
“We don’t need much, just enough to counterbalance your weight and any incidental movement.”
The furniture was too awkward and light to work with, but some searching on the second floor found many heavy bags of sand Tilly had once used to block doors. They worked perfectly, and soon I was able to climb over to the door and set my shuttle straight.
It was already midmorning by the time Dottie stepped into my shuttle. I scanned the horizon. The skies were clear, and there weren’t any signs of the winged scourge. It was early enough in the day that there was plenty of time for us to make it back to the settlement on the other side of town, especially since we could not fly directly over where the old nest had been.
We were close to the settlement when the alarm on my ship rang out. I returned to the pilot’s chair, and Dottie followed, her eyes scanning the screen.
“What are those?” she asked. She focused on the red icons moving on the map on my screen.
“Flyers,” I said, scanning the skies. Seeing no flyers in the air, I turned on my shuttle’s external feed.
Despite having seen it before, Dottie still gasped as the floor, walls, and ceilings of the shuttle changed from a dull gray to projecting the colorful world outside. And there, flying exceptionally low to the ground, were several of the mutated scourge. They circled above a residential area, actively hunting something below.
Curious, I flew closer to see what they were after. I hovered over them as they patrolled. At first we didn’t see anything, but then suddenly something moved. The abominations saw it too, and they dove down at the movement.
The moment they were in their dive, several small forms darted from one building to another. It had been a distraction!
“It’s the boys!” Dottie gasped even before the shuttle zoomed in on their forms.
One of the mutant flyers spotted the movement, but by the time it corrected course, the young males had ducked inside the building through a broken window. This flyer decided that the window was big enough for it to go after them on the ground. It landed and started crawling toward the building, its short limbs awkward and clearly not designed for grounded locomotion.
“We have to help them!”
I grabbed my communicator, instructed it to call Roger, then handed it to Dottie with instructions to update New Franklin. I knew the moment I made my location known the mutants would focus on my shuttle.
We were close enough to New Franklin now that the turrets they had mounted could help bring down a few of them. I was a good pilot, but this shuttle only had one seat, the one I was already sitting on. And that meant Dottie had to be in my lap and under the only harness to avoid being tossed around the shuttle.
The shuttle was also already damaged, and while most of it was cosmetic, I’d noticed it was slower to turn left than before. I’d have to adjust my flying to compensate.
Dottie looked up from my communicator. “They’re ready. Let’s get rid of these buggers!”
Chapter 25: Dottie
