fact there was a climate at all would unsettle some of them. It had taken some cyborgs months to adjust to weather and an open sky. They’d been created after the war and spent their lives as research subjects on a space station. These humans had lived their lives inside an enclosed system. If they couldn’t adapt, they wouldn’t send more here. They could find some other planet to live on. Somewhere far away from him.
A Vardarian female appeared first. Her silver skin gleamed in the sun as she unfurled her wings and glided down to the tarmac instead of taking the stairs. Another Vardarian female exited and flew down to join her companion. They both raised their hands and beckoned. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a human woman stepped out, her eyes shielded by a pair of tinted glasses. She looked around in obvious wonder and then gripped the railing and descended with deliberate care.
Others followed, each of them wearing the same glasses and moving at the same slow pace as they tested their legs against the new gravity. There was a gap in the flow after the eighth woman left the shuttle. There were supposed to be ten women, though he’d heard a rumor one had dropped out before they’d departed Earth. Had only eight made the trip?
Number nine waited until the woman in front of her was on the tarmac before exploding out the door like a comet. She let out a whoop, threw a leg over one railing, and slid down it to the ground, hitting hard enough to fall to her knees on impact. She bounced back to her feet, threw out her arms, and spun in a circle, her face lifted to the sky. Beaming and laughing, the woman danced, her red hair glowing like fire in the afternoon sun.
Striker couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He’d witnessed the arrival of hundreds of Vardarian colonists and had been present when many of his cyborg brethren were roused from cryo-sleep and told that their nightmare was over—that they were free. None of them had reacted with the joy of this small human. Was she intoxicated? Had her mind broken during the journey?
He used his implant to get a closer look at her. If he hadn’t, he would have missed the moment she took off her glasses to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She looked up again and called out, “You did it, Jaybird. You got me here. Wherever you are, thank you, now get your ass here as fast as you can.”
None of the other women reacted to her outburst. In fact, they seemed to be working hard to ignore her. That caught his interest more than her wild antics. She’s an outsider. Like me.
He knocked the errant thought away like he was swatting an insect. She wasn’t like him. She was human. Tiny. Unenhanced. She would barely come to his shoulder. She was nothing like him.
He tore his gaze away from the strange little human and stepped back into the forest, fading into the sun-dappled shadows. He had work to do, and he’d wasted enough of his day already. The humans were nothing more than a distraction. He had a home to build, traps to check, and the vast wilds of this world to explore. The humans could have the colony. The woods were his, and no fragile human woman was going to take them from him. They’d ruined their own world. He would not let them destroy this one.
2
Maggie dashed the last few meters to the woods. If she was spotted, she’d get yet another lecture about the dangers of leaving the colony alone and unarmed.
She almost made it.
“Maggie, where are you going?”
Fraxx.
“I need to clear my head.” It was true enough. After a lifetime of noise and crowds, she had discovered that a walk in the woods was a balm to her soul. She could think out here. She could breathe.
“It’s dangerous out there. You’ve been to the briefings. Plenty of wildlife out there would be happy to put humanity on the menu.” Skye, one of the cyborg women charged with helping the human colonists adapt, joined her in the shadow of the trees.
Humanity. The casual mention of the word made her want to wince. Skye hadn’t meant it as an insult, though. If she had issues with humans, she kept it well hidden and had done her best to help Maggie and the others adjust to life at the colony.
Not