wraps it around himself, as if armoring himself against my touch.
He might be a pirate, but he’s saved my life more times than I can count now, and on this planet, in this cave, he’s not a pirate. He’s just Krakon, and I regret telling him “no” when he tried to kiss me. If he had tried again now, I wouldn’t have stopped him.
24
Krakon
Better to stop myself before she stops me. It’s hard to hate all humans when you’ve spent so much energy protecting one. And it’s a hundred-fold harder to hate this specific human.
I can’t go out again in this storm. I was chopping wood as the storm intensified. I was barely able to make it back to the cave. I couldn’t find the entrance. I almost abandoned the wood so that I could move faster. Five or so minutes longer and I would have died. If the storm keeps up like this, the fire will be dead by this time tomorrow, and we’ll be dead shortly after that.
“So you can walk?” I point at her leg.
“Yeah,” she says. “You should have been a doctor.”
“All swarm pirates have to be able to treat wounds. We tend to get wounded a lot.”
“What is a ‘swarm?’ I keep hearing that and never ask what it means.”
“We are like nomads,” he says. “But we are very disorganized. It’s an anarchy, but we still have some kind of loose codes, and we tend to travel together. That way we can take on jobs together, defend ourselves better. Still, we never fly in formation or anything like that. It’s just...a swarm.
“Like bugs,” she says.
I shrug. “The good thing is that while there’s always a swarm, there are also always pirates from the swarm all over the system. And if you want to use the bug analogy, they are like worker or soldier drones, and this transmitter…” I tap on the beacon, “is a scent that only drones from the swarm can pick up.”
“So where are they?” I ask.
The question hangs in the air. I don’t have the energy to lie anymore.
“Honestly, I’d have expected someone to be here by now. There are thousands of ships in the swarm, and at any given time there are hundreds spread around the system. Just basic math tells me that our signal has been picked up. The question is how long they need to get here. We’ve been on the planet for about two weeks, so assuming someone got the signal a week ago, they’d not have needed to even be that close.”
“Something went wrong?” she asks. “The beacon is broken...or?”
I bite my lip. “It could be. There’s no way to know for sure. These things very rarely fail. The lights are on and that means it’s probably doing its job. Though it is possible it could be broken.”
She looks at the floor, contemplating that. If the beacon is dead, we will never get off this planet. A pirate could find the beacon I left in orbit, but they’d likely never find us on the surface.
“More likely,” I say, trying to fill the cave with a little more hope, “is that whoever got our signal and is closest was in the middle of something that couldn’t be interrupted. They are probably on their way now, but didn’t come straight away.”
She forces a smile and nods. “That’s probably it.”
“Yeah, probably.”
The storm doesn’t die down. I think it gets even stronger.
I read up as much as I could about this planet on the trip over here, while Catherine slept. I didn’t consider a crash landing very likely--I figured I’d either use the planet to brake and get safely away, or just die in a big explosion in orbit. Still, I considered the possibility of having to land or crash here, and I read that these storms can last for weeks.
If this storm lasts for even another three days, we are probably done for.
25
Catherine
We wake up to the storm still raging. It’s like it’s sucking the heat out of the cave. The wood seems to burn faster, but it’s probably just because the fire is having to work harder to keep us warm.
Krakon puts the last of the logs onto the flame.
We chew on the bear meat--there’s still plenty of that, at least we won’t starve--and watch the fire slowly die.
Even before it’s completely out, the cold has seeped into my bones. I’m shivering violently.
He wraps his arms around me. He presses his body against mine, and he closes the big