Page 31 of Meat

A heavy feeling like wet concrete settled in Alyx’s stomach.

The nith with the scanner turned his beady eyes on Alyx again, spoke to her in English that was so broken she could barely parse it.

“Know what say?” the nith hissed.

Alyx shook her head nervously.

“Say sick,” the nith snarled. “Say sick meat. Say bad meat.”

Alyx remembered the other nith that had spoken to her outside of the facility, the one with the robe. When he had questioned her about not feeding on the spaceship, she had lied and said that the food made her sick. The hooded nith had misinterpreted what she said, however. He had thought that Alyx was diseased. He had planned to send her to the so-called infirmary, which Alyx guessed was probably a euphemism for garbage disposal. And now that information was in the nith’s computer system.

That concrete in her stomach hardened.

“Say kill.” The nith unslung the rifle from its shoulder. “Say burn.”

So this was how it would end, then. Executed and burned in some unknown field on a distant alien world.

At least she had taken one of the bastards with her.

Oddly, Alyx didn’t feel as frightened as she had thought she would. When there was even the slightest hope of escaping, her fear had burned brighter, a primal instinct driving her to survive.

Now that her fate was sealed, however, now that her death was certain, a kind of serenity came over her.

She would not beg for mercy from these fuckers.

She would face her death with dignity.

Alyx focused her attention on the sounds all around her, trying to drink in these last few moments of living experience. For all the ugliness that was taking place on this planet, it had its own brand of natural beauty. She listened to the sound of the wind soughing through the treetops. The distant chirps and squawks of the birds that had been driven off by the racket of the gunfire.

And another sound that she couldn’t quite place. A low, pulsing whir coming from the shadows of the forest. It sounded like a ceiling fan turned on extra high.

Just as the nith was about to level his rifle, the sound from the forest shifted.

There was a whistle as something small streaked across her vision, at the very limit of visibility. It struck the nith on the temple, passed through, and emptied his brain pan out the other side in a spray of black blood and gray nerve tissue.

The other two nith yowled in panic. They shouldered their rifles, raking the muzzles across the blue shadows of the forest, searching for the attacker.

More whirring. Another whistle. A second nith skull exploded in a spume of blood and bone. Some of it flecked Alyx’s naked skin. She screamed.

The last remaining nith opened fire, blasting into the shadows apparently at random.

He didn’t last long.

The projectile that finished him entered through his shrieking alligator mouth and exited the base of his skull, leaving a fist-sized exit wound in its wake.

All three dead before the first even hit the ground.

The echoes of nith screams and rifle fire died away into silence. The air hung heavy with the ozone smell of blaster fire and coppery alien blood.

Three figures strode from the shadows.

The three ukkur, Krogg, Ravnar, and Jale.

“Alyx! Alyx!”

The young mohawk-headed ukkur started to rush toward her, but Krogg stopped him with an annoyed grunt. Jale reluctantly slowed his stride, keeping pace with his fellows.

They walked to the center of the clearing and surveyed the carnage. Alyx noticed something hanging from Ravnar’s hand—two leather cords with a small pouch between them—a sling.