Goblin Apocalypse

A Post-Apocalyptic Slice-of-Life Adventure

Copyright 2023 by Michael Dalton. All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written
permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments,

organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of
authenticity, and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to persons, living or
dead, is coincidental.

All characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.

Edited by Kate Nascimento

kneditorial.com

Follow Michael at michaeldaltonbooks.com and on Twitter

at @MikeDaltonBooks.
Planet full of mutants? Check! Hot goblin girls? Check! Survival? Fingers
crossed!

Thirty years after a failed invasion of the goblin home world, power
technician Kevin wakes up in a wrecked Imperial Marine dropship with no
clue how he got there. Worse, the planet has been devastated by a biological
weapon, and the few survivors are bloodthirsty mutants.

Kevin’s skills could get the ship’s power plant working and help out a
community of adorable goblin girls. But – er – there’s a small complication.
They’d rather murder him for what the Empire did to their planet.

All is not as it seems, however, for the cause of the war is tied up in the
strange fascination the goblin girls have with human men. Can Kevin find
the parts he needs to get the reactor fixed? Will the goblin girls take him
into their community or string him up like a piñata? And do hot, angry
goblins even make good mates?

Goblin Apocalypse is a short and occasionally silly slice-of-life novel

featuring cute goblins, dangerous mutants, and what is probably too much
techie stuff for a book like this.
 Chapter 1

THERE WAS A LOUD rush of air, and the floor hit me in the face.

I convulsed for a moment as the impact knocked the air from my chest and
made my head ring like a bell. I struggled to get some purchase on the cold,
gritty surface under me. My body was painfully stiff, and at first I could
only scrape my fingers through the dirt on the floor.

I pried my eyes open and tried to look around. My surroundings were dim,
but not completely dark. I was in a room that went a long way to the left
and right, past the point I could make out in the limited light.

With a groan, I rolled over onto my back. In front of me, on the wall above,
was something that looked like a narrow closet. There were two doors, one
on either side, that now stood open.

It was one of many. At least a dozen in either direction, off into the dark.
All of them were open, but as I looked more closely, the others seemed to
have been open far longer. The one I’d apparently fallen out of was clean
and empty. The ones to either side had a visible layer of dust, as well as
what might have been windblown debris.

That was when I realized the room was open to the outside. There was a
long gash in the ceiling, and whatever had caused it had been violent. The
ceiling material was torn and shredded, with random wires, cables, and
plastic hanging down from the edges.

Beyond the gap was a dim sky. Not dark, but overcast. I couldn’t see much
more than a layer of gray clouds.
I sat up slowly. I was still stiff, but I could move. I got unsteadily to my
feet. My body responded, but my mind was still in a fog.

I couldn’t remember how I got here, or even where here was.

My surroundings seemed vaguely familiar. I could put names to what I saw,

but the context was missing.

The compartment I’d been inside was just barely big enough for a human
body. There was soft padding inside, and from the looks of it, I’d been in
there a while.

I finally looked down at myself. I wore gray coveralls with a variety of

insignia on them. There were six stacked stripes on one arm, and above
them was an icon that looked like a gear crossed by a wrench and bolt of
lightning. On my right breast was a patch with a sword crossed by a spear.
On my left breast pocket was a word.

Dickson, K.

It felt familiar. Was that my name? I wasn’t even sure of that, but it seemed
like a logical assumption.

There was nothing else here. The room was about a hundred feet long, filled
with the same empty compartments on both walls. All of them, save mine,
had clearly been open for a long time. Like the floor, they were coated with
dust and dirt.

In places, the dirt on the floor had collected into deposits of mud, no doubt
from rain coming in through the hole in the ceiling. As I moved around, I
realized that the floor was not level. The room was off-kilter by about ten
degrees, as if the whole building had shifted.

There was a double door in the center of one wall, which was shut. When I
pushed on it, it resisted me for a few moments before opening.
Beyond was a hallway going left and right. It was dim like the room I’d left,
but the gash in the overhead extended here as well. The air was cold, cold
enough that I was going to get uncomfortable soon. The coveralls I wore
were clearly not designed for exposure to the elements.

Down the hallway to my left, I saw something on the floor – some kind of
large lump. As I walked toward it, I realized it was a body.

No, not a body – a skeleton. The bones were covered in clothes and gear,
but whoever it was had been lying there as long as this place.

It had heavier clothes than I did. Rather than coveralls, it had some kind of
green uniform pants and a jacket. Beside it was a long black rectangle with
a handgrip on one side.

I realized it was a rifle.

I picked it up. At first, I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but the memories
slowly bubbled up in my mind. I still didn’t know how I knew to do this,
but I pressed a button along the bottom, and a thick block slid out of one
end.

This was the power cell. And my memory told me it was completely dead.

Another button caused a longer, thinner block to slide out of the top. This
was the magazine. It was empty.

I set the useless weapon back on the floor and examined the skeleton. The
bones were dry and the whole thing fell apart as I tried to roll it over. I
picked up the jacket and shook out the bones. There were several holes
through it, in the front and out the back. No mystery what had killed this
guy.

But despite the holes, the jacket – if stained by things I preferred not to
think about – was still in serviceable shape. Whatever fabric it was made
from had survived as long as this place had been sitting here. I put it on. It
was a bit baggy, but it fit, and the cold that had been soaking into me began
to ease.

The skeleton had a pair of heavy boots. I had on simple flat-soled shoes. I
examined the boots, quickly realizing they were too big. He also had
gloves, and those fit well enough. There was a black knife in a sheath that
was clipped to a utility belt. After a moment or two of reflection on my
apparent predicament, I decided to take that as well.

Whatever going on here, I wasn’t going to immediately freeze to death.

I continued exploring. There was a room across the hall identical the one
I’d awoken in, tall narrow compartments lining both walls. It was
completely empty and showed no signs that anyone else had emerged from
here recently.

I found another body further down the hall, wearing the same gear as the
first. His jacket was too small, but his boots fit reasonably well. Like the
first guy, he had a rifle. The power cell was equally dead, but the magazine
was nearly full and he had two more in a bandolier.

More memories came back. The rifles were a form of railgun, using
electromagnetic force to project the rounds. But without a power cell, they
were no better than clubs.

What had happened here?

There had clearly been some sort of fight. The second guy had a hole
through his skull. But who had they been fighting?

I found what appeared to be an answer through a door at the end of the hall.
It opened to a room that appeared to be a sort of storeroom, or maybe an
armory. There were a few more rifles in a rack on the wall, two sets of body
armor, and more gear. I found a stash of power cells, but all of them were
long dead.
On the floor were two bodies, and these were different from the others. For
one thing, they were smaller.

At first, I wondered if they were children, because they were about three or
four feet tall. But their proportions were wrong – the skulls were bigger and
the bones were thicker and stockier than kids would have been.

They carried different gear as well. Their clothes were dark gray and made
from a different sort of fabric. There appeared to be some kind of body
armor integrated into their jackets and pants.

It hadn’t helped them, though. Both armor vests had multiple holes through
them. I remembered nothing about how I knew this, but I remembered that
the rounds the rifles fired were capable of penetration well beyond anything
that could be used as personal body armor.

I found no weapons on them besides a knife, which was different from the
one I’d found. It was smaller and made from metal, while the first one
appeared to be a sort of metal-ceramic composite.

Who were these people? Had the other soldiers been battling dwarves?

The door at the end of the room was blocked by something on the other
side, and no amount of effort could move it. I finally gave up and went back
the other direction. Past the rooms with the containers was something that
looked like a sort of lounge or eating area, though it was a complete mess.

The furniture was knocked over and tossed around, as if there had been
some force pushing everything to one end. There were two more bodies,
one large, one small, but they had no gear worth taking.

Beyond the lounge, I found myself in a machinery room. After I stood there
for a few moments, I recognized what I was looking at. This compartment
held the main reactor that powered this place.

I was on a ship.
I didn’t know what or why, but all of a sudden, it dawned on me why this
place was laid out like it was, and why the floor was tilted. I was on a drop-
ship that had come from . . . somewhere. I couldn’t remember where, but I
remembered being on a ship like this, one much cleaner, more orderly, and
still operational.

All the machinery in the room was dead now, but I knew how to start it up –
assuming any of it still functioned, which seemed unlikely. I had worked in
a place like this. I understood how all of it operated.

That would explain why I was dressed the way I was, instead of in combat
gear like the dead guys I’d come across. I wasn’t a soldier. I was a
technician. While I’d been trained in the use of those railguns, something
told me I’d never used one in combat.

Was any of this still functional? The experience of suddenly remembering

things about who I was made me want to find out.

I poked around the reactor controls for a few minutes. I saw no power
anywhere, even in the backup batteries, but there was one last possibility.
There was a procedure for bringing the reactor up from a cold, dead start,
though I couldn’t remember the exact steps.

I looked along the wall for the procedure manuals and found the one I
needed a moment later. It was too dark to read clearly in the reactor
compartment, so I went back out into the hallway. I flipped through the
manual until I found the instructions for a black start. I had never done this
before, but I knew how it worked.

More memories came back to me as I looked it over. Because this was a

combat vessel that might be deployed for long periods in hostile conditions,
it had features other ships did not. One was the capacity to restart the
reactor even if the entire thing had been completely shut down and the
backup batteries were drained.
Assuming there was any fuel left, the reactor was designed to be able to
self-generate enough power to bootstrap itself into operation by
manipulating the permanent magnets in the core. As sophisticated as it was
– and the physics of maintaining a fusion plasma were far beyond me – the
black start procedure actually involved a simple hand crank that had to be
turned until it had generated enough bootstrap current.

After setting the other controls in accordance with the instructions, I found
the crank and began turning it. Unlike the rest of this ship, the reactor
machinery seemed to have survived the situation well enough. I knew,
based on all the rifle power cells having gone completely dead, that this
thing had to have been sitting here for at least thirty years.

I wasn’t going to dwell on the obvious fact that I had somehow been in that
compartment just as long.

The procedure required me to turn the crank for at least five minutes. My
arm began to ache, and I was beginning to doubt this was going to work,
when the lights on the emergency control panel came on. The instructions
had told me to watch for this, and I immediately leapt for the start-up
controls.

The panel showed a small fraction of a percent of full power, but something
was going on. Slowly, bit by bit, the power level grew. I followed the
instructions from there, gradually manipulating the electric field until there
was enough power to start feeding it into to the heating and current-drive
system.

Once that started, the power level grew again. I didn’t have a fusion
reaction yet, but the plasma had formed and begun heating. There was still
fuel in the system.

Then the main controls came on, and my heart sank.

There was fuel, but very little of it. Certainly not enough to move the ship,
activate the weapons systems, or really do much of anything. I might be
able to maintain the reaction for a few hours.

Well, a few hours at normal power demand. But this ship was dead. There
was no one here, and I doubted that much of what was left even worked. I
could generate electricity, but for what? I had disengaged the reactor from
the ship’s grid for the black start, and I hadn’t reached the point where I
could reconnect it.

It occurred to me that checking the integrity of the power system first would
be a good idea. There was obvious damage to the ship, and suddenly
reenergizing the damaged sections could cause problems, if not a fire or
explosion.

There was another panel in the reactor compartment where I could

manually disconnect all the various conduits. I opened everything for now,
except for power within the immediate area.

In about fifteen minutes, I reached the point where I could start up the
fusion reaction. I held my breath as I ramped up the heating and current-
drive, but a few moments later, the control panel showed operation at two
percent power. And it was steady.

I exhaled slowly. Somehow, this derelict hulk still had enough functional
components to operate. The fuel levels were critically low – presumably
from leakage over the decades – but I could probably run things for a few
days like this.

With the power restored, I turned on the overhead lights in the undamaged
compartments and began a more thorough inspection of the ship. I found a
few boxes of field rations in the lounge, and unlike the power cells, they
were designed to last essentially forever. They tasted like stale shit, but they
were at least filling and nourishing.

The storage tanks still had some water in them, though the water was foul
and undrinkable. After a couple of hours of overhaul, I got one of the
purifier modules working again.

I surmised that the forward end of the ship, past the armory, had been
crushed in what was a likely a crash landing. I could not get past the
damage, at least through the interior. I was able to energize the lounge, but
the conduits past that point had been severed by whatever had torn that gash
in the overhead.

Behind the reactor compartment was a blackened, charred vehicle bay

where there had once been four buggy-like troop transports, though they
were now wrecked. The crash landing had apparently torn them free from
their restraints. They’d crashed together, and it looked as if a fire had
started. The fire fortunately hadn’t spread, but some of the power conduits
were damaged here too.

Aft of that were the main engines, and the reason for the crash began
obvious. The engine room had taken a major hit from something. The hull
had been torn open in some explosion, and the damage was irreparable.

But there was an opening to the outside here.

I looked out on a ruined, devastated landscape. The sky was gray from
horizon to horizon, and the clouds had a sickly orange-green tint to them.
Below them, not far away, I saw the wreckage of what had once been a
small town.

The buildings seemed abandoned, and they’d begun to decay and collapse.
As I looked closer, I saw obvious signs of combat – craters, wrecked
vehicles, and more fallen bodies.
Yet whatever fighting had taken place here had ended long ago. Gray-green
trees and plants had begun reclaiming the land. The wrecked vehicles were
coated in decay and dirt. I looked around for any sign of footprints or other
habitation and saw nothing.

Was this entire world dead?

I saw no evidence to the contrary.

The reactor was going to run out of fuel in a few days, so I needed to
capitalize on it while it was still operational. Suspecting that I was going to
need a weapon if I had to leave the ship and explore, I began collecting all
the rifles and ammunition I could find. There were five left in the ship, and
I was able to scrounge together nine full magazines.

But the rifles were useless without power, which meant I needed to charge
the power cells. There were charging stations in the armory, but I had no
easy way to get power to them because of the extensive damage to the ship.

I found some heavy tools in the engine room and spent a couple of hours
demounting one of the stations and moving it aft to the reactor
compartment. I got it connected to a power conduit there, and I soon had a
bank of four cells on recharge.

I’d just put a second set on to charge when an alarm went off the reactor
control panel. I ran over to see what the problem was. One of the gyrotrons
– the microwave generators that heated the plasma to control the fusion
reaction – was overheating.

I cursed loudly. I knew instantly what had to be going on and why. The
gyrotrons used a liquid cooling system, and there was no way something
like that had survived in good order all this time. I ran around the
compartment to the problematic unit and saw steam rising from it. That was
very bad, because it meant the cooling system had sprung a leak.
I had no choice but to shut that gyrotron down before before it started to
melt. That was going to destabilize the reaction, but there was still time to
keep things under control. I ran back to the control panel and shut the unit
down. There were two more, but I hadn’t needed them to run at such low
power.

When I started the first one, there was a high-pitched screeching noise, and
it immediately failed. Just as the reaction was starting to shut down, I got
the last one started up, and things started to stabilize – at least at first.

Then the temperature on the gyrotron began rising rapidly. I ran over to it
and quickly determined the problem. Its cooling system wasn’t operating at
all. I struggled with it before realizing in dismay that there was no coolant
in the lines. It had long since leaked out and evaporated.

I had no choice but to shut everything down before something even worse
happened. I might be able to get one of the gyrotrons working again, but
until then, the reactor could not operate. I began the shutdown procedure,
and watched as the plasma quenched inside the core.

A few moments later, the lights around me slowly dimmed and went out.
 Chapter 2

THE GYROTRONS COULD not be repaired.

One of them – the one that had loudly protested being started up – had
simply shorted out. The electron gun at the top was fried and useless. The
gyrotron with the empty coolant system proved to have a seized-up coolant
pump. It was badly corroded, and I had no way to repair it. I was left with
trying to fix the first gyrotron, and while I was able to seal the leak, the
system now had too little coolant to operate.

There should have been extra coolant stored in the engine room.
Unfortunately, the parts and supplies storeroom was in the precise spot that
had been hit by whatever had knocked down the ship. There was nothing
left there but a big hole in the hull.

The coolant was water-based, but it had to be mixed up under precise

conditions that I could not duplicate in my current circumstances. I could
top off the system with water anyway, but I knew it would start boiling off
in a few minutes once the gyrotron started up. For all I knew, that had been
the problem in the first place. There was a pretty good chance the coolant
had probably separated during the decades of downtime.

There was simply nothing more I could do with what I had to work with.

I had at least gotten things running long enough to give myself a chance. I
had water, food, ammo, and four charged power cells.

It was time to see what was out there.

One of the dead bodies outside had a backpack, and I loaded it up with a
few ration packs. I took the bandolier from the body in the passageway and
loaded it with my extra magazines and power cells. I found a plastic bottle
in the lounge that I could use to carry some water.

The last thing I did was take a couple of shots with my rifle to make sure it
was still working. The first one, in fact, was not, but the second one worked
fine.

More memories came back to me. These rifles had names. This specific
model was a P86 Magline, the standard issue weapon for Imperial Marines.
Exactly who the Imperial Marines were and what empire they served, I
could not remember, but there we were.

As I walked around outside, I got a better look at the ship. It was a long,
narrow white cylinder with a gently pointed bow and a smooth, featureless
exterior. While it had weapons, they were recessed into the hull. It was
designed for rapid re-entry after being deployed from a much larger
mothership.

The bow was no longer the elegant thing it had once been. It was now
crushed and crumpled against the rock formation it had slammed into
during what was clearly a crash landing. That impact appeared to be what
had torn the big gash across the midsection.

I explored the forward section for a few minutes, but there was nothing to
recover. The crash had caused a fire, and everything forward of the armory
was charred and ruined.

The village seemed to be about a kilometer away, so I headed in that

direction. As I walked, I passed the wrecked vehicles I’d seen earlier. They
looked like the same models I’d seen in the vehicle bay, or at least similar
to them.

Most of them were heavily damaged, but two seemed to have been
abandoned. They were non-functional, and I found nothing of use inside
them. Either the troops who’d left them had unloaded everything of value,
or they’d been scavenged since then.

These buggies could not have come from my ship. From what I’d seen in
the vehicle bay, all of the ones it had carried had been destroyed. These
must have come from another drop-ship, though I didn’t see one anywhere
nearby. It was possible they’d come to help out the marines this ship had
carried.

The bodies in the area were a mix of human and the strange dwarf-like
people I’d seen on the ship. There were about equal numbers of each. All of
them had been here for a long time, and the grass had grown over and
around their bones.

Though nature had reclaimed much of the area from whoever had once
lived here, the plants and trees I saw did not appear particularly healthy.
While they were not species I recognized, it wasn’t hard to tell that they
were struggling. Many were dead, and many others seemed twisted and
stunted.

I passed two more wrecked vehicles, but these were different. Where the
others had been buggy-like in structure, these were lower and more
enclosed. They had an odd, almost fantastical appearance – embellishments
and decorations that seemed entirely pointless from a military standpoint.
They were smaller than the others, not just in overall size but in the cabin
and interior.

I assumed these vehicles had belonged to the dwarf-like creatures, because

they were clearly designed for passengers of much smaller stature. I looked
through them briefly, but they had been stripped of anything useful like the
others. There were several more of the diminutive skeletons around them.
I’d been walking for about ten minutes now. I was getting close to the
village when I saw something up ahead – something moving.

It was a figure that was human in stature if not appearance. It was bald and
didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, and its skin was different. I ducked down
behind a bush, watching it closely. Then I lifted my rifle and looked through
the scope.

The figure stood at the edge of the village, walking slowly around. I saw
another one join it. Their manner was odd, as if they were both bwatching
for something but not working together.

I could see them better through the scope. Their skin was a mottled orange-
green, almost like the sky overhead. I was still deciding what to do when I
heard a sound behind me. I looked up to see three more of the creatures not
far away, coming rapidly toward me.

I realized in shock that these creatures – while resembling the others in their
nudity, bald heads, and orange-green skin – were much shorter. Their
bodies were identical in stature to the skeletons of the dwarf-people I’d
seen.

I froze as they approached, unsure what to do. I had a split-second decision

to make. Their posture, and the looks on their faces, were unquestionably
hostile. They’d called out no greetings or even warnings. They were simply
attacking.

Just before they closed in, I broke out of my inertia, raising my rifle and
opening fire. I knew at that moment that I had never used a P86 in combat
before. I’d only used one on a range. But I knew what to do.

I put two rounds into the closest creature’s chest. The P86 fired with a crack
like an electric arc. The heavy bullets, accelerated beyond hypersonic
speed, knocked the creature backward. I turned to the one next to it, hitting
that one in the shoulder, then shot the last one in the chest. The second one
kept coming until I fired again. It groaned and collapsed at my feet.

All the shooting had surely attracted some attention. I spun around again,
looking for the two human-like creatures I’d seen earlier. But they were
now gone.

I stayed where I was for a minute or two, heart pounding as the adrenaline
of the fight began subsiding. But I saw nothing, and I finally decided that
the other two must have run off.

I knelt to examine the creatures I’d shot. Their bodies were short and
stocky, but they were definitely not dwarf-like humans. They had larger
heads and bigger eyes, and their ears were pointed, extending several inches
out from the sides of their heads.

Their skin was bumpy and mottled, green with splotches of orange, or
maybe orange with green patches. Their nails were long and split. I looked
closer at their faces, seeing mouths with sharp teeth but swollen, bloody
gums. They did not look healthy by human standards, but that meant little.

I thought about the skeletons I’d seen. If they were the same creatures, why
were these ones naked? The others had worn clothes and carried what
looked like tactical gear. If they weren’t the same creatures, then what were
these?

I carefully resumed my walk toward the village, keeping my rifle out and
ready. I knew I’d been lucky to survive that fight. For a single horrible
moment, I’d been frozen into inaction, unable to do anything but watch the
creatures charging forward.

Another memory bubbled up in my mind, a training exercise I’d gone

through. I remembered a gruff Imperial Marine drill sergeant telling me and
a group of others about that moment all of us were going to go through the
first time we were in a fight for our lives.
“Some of you won’t break out of it in time,” he said, “and you’ll die
because of it. But those of you who do will know what to expect next time,
and that moment will get shorter. Eventually it will go away, but there’s no
way past it except through.”

As I got closer to the village, I began to realize something. It hadn’t been

apparent from a distance, but the proportions of the buildings were off.
They generally resembled a human settlement, but they were too small. The
doorways were smaller, and the floors were lower.

It dawned on me why. This place had been occupied by the dwarf people.
Everything was sized for creatures who might have been four feet tall at
most, and the designs of the buildings were consistent with the design of the
dwarf vehicles I’d seen.

There were wooden doors and shutters engraved with fanciful carvings and
inlay. The architecture was embellished to the point of being frivolous to
my eyes – graceful swoops and curves, stone figurines in little alcoves,
fluted gutter spouts, finials, and all sorts of other decorations. It looked like
something out of a fairy tale, though I couldn’t have said quite why I felt
that way – the memories were lost.

Yet the village was in poor condition, and it wasn’t the passage of time that
was responsible for most of the damage. This village had been attacked.
There were blast craters and burn marks. The walls were pock-marked with
bullet holes, and I saw more of the low, beetle-like vehicles, some damaged,
some abandoned.

There were more bodies, mostly the dwarves but also a few human
skeletons here and there. I checked the humans, finding a couple of
additional magazines under their jackets. I found a jacket that was in better
shape than the one I had, lacking the stains and bullet holes.

The magazines I found were too deteriorated from being out in the open,
but the bullets seemed fine. I vaguely recalled learning at one point that
they were made from a magnetized ferrous-ceramic that had to be coated to
protect it from corrosion. It appeared that the coating was effective for a
very long time, because they still looked good as new.

I continued watching for more of the orange-green creatures but saw

nothing. I began to wonder what had happened here. It was quite clear a
group of humans – a group I’d been part of – had attacked this area.

But why? What had been the point of this battle? And more to the point,
where was everyone now?

I explored a few more of the buildings, but I saw nothing of value to me.
Moving through the low structures was difficult, as the ceilings were only
about a meter and a half high. I didn’t want to get stuck here.

I finally withdrew from the village and returned to the ship. I watched for
the creatures, but nothing bothered me. I walked back feeling like I’d
learned a few things but still understood nothing.

The wall of gray-green clouds overhead remained unbroken during my

exploration, and it began to get dark not long after I returned. Not wanting
to be in complete darkness before I’d set up some kind of sleeping area, I
jury-rigged one of the power cells to a broken lighting unit I pulled from
one of the vehicles outside.

This gave me a makeshift flashlight. I had a rough idea of how much power
the P86 rifles required and how much the lighting unit did, and the two
together told me I didn’t need to worry about depleting the power cell any
time soon.

There were berthing areas on the ship, but they were forward of the armory
and now wrecked. So instead I tore several sheets of foam padding out of
the compartments until I had a makeshift bed on the floor of the lounge.

More memories returned as I worked. These compartments held their

occupants in a sort of stasis to protect them from the violent maneuvering
that took place during a contested landing. Only a handful of crew members
would have been on the bridge.

I remembered that I’d been a senior power technician working in the reactor
compartment and engine room as one of the most experienced enlisted men.
I knew power technology but not things like the stasis compartments. I
remembered only that they didn’t require constant power. They created
some kind of stasis field that continued until it was deactivated.

For some reason, mine had never released me. I must have come down with
the others, only to be stuck there during the battle and long afterward. At
some point, something had finally triggered the deactivation process.

The doors between the ship’s compartments could be bolted shut, and I took
care of that now, closing every one between the engine room and the
lounge. The only problem was that they could be unbolted from either side.
I figured I would at least hear them being opened if something came inside,
because they all squeaked loudly thanks to their current decayed condition.

I got as comfortable as I could, set my rifle next to me, and went to sleep.

My caution proved well-founded. Sometime during the night, a muffled

screech jerked me awake. I sat up, listening carefully and shaking the sleep
from my mind. I turned on the flashlight, then reached for my rifle and
readied it.

I heard sounds on the other side of the door, thumps and footsteps. Then the
latch began to move.

Only then did something occur to me. The reactor compartment was on the
other side, and the rounds from a P86 were more than capable of causing
serious damage to the machinery if they passed through my target or worse,
missed altogether.

I remembered at that moment that the Maglines had a built-in safety feature
when they were fired on board ship, a low-power mode that was much less
likely to penetrate hulls and bulkheads. But it depended on an encrypted
shipboard radio signal that was not being transmitted now.

I sprang to my feet and moved inboard so I was aiming out at the hull
instead of at the reactor compartment. Then the hatch opened.

Through it came one of the orange-green creatures, followed immediately

by two more, one dwarf and one human. I opened fire, and this close there
was little chance of missing. I cut down the first two as the third turned in
my direction. I put three rounds through its chest, and it fell backwards over
its friends.

But there were more of them coming. A clump of four dwarf-creatures

stumbled through the hatchway. I stood up, backing away toward the hatch
in the opposite wall as I continued firing. I shot down two of them as the
pistol grip began vibrating. I remembered what that meant only when the
incipient condition it was warning me about became apparent: the magazine
was empty.

The two dwarves kept coming, and my stash of ammo was behind them. I
turned the rifle around and smashed the stock into the first one’s face. That
slowed them down just long enough for me to grab one of the chairs and
throw it at them.

I ran for my bandolier, but they cut me off. I smashed the stock into the first
one’s head again, but then they were on me, grabbing at my arms and trying
to pull me down. I managed to keep my balance until I tripped over another
chair, and the three of us fell to the floor.

I lost my rifle. The two of them clawed and bit at me as I struggled to get
free. The one I’d smashed was bleeding orange goop from its nose and
mouth.

Then I remembered that I still had a weapon – the knife in my utility belt. I
reached for it and began stabbing them over and over. After a few blows,
they weakened enough for me to get free. As one got up after me, I stabbed
it in the chest, and it went down. The second one was more seriously
wounded, groaning and groping at me but unable to stand. I knelt down and
stabbed it a few more times in the back until it was still.

Then I fell back on my ass, gasping for breath. I checked myself over. I had
slept in the jacket because it was cold, and that appeared to have saved me.
There were teeth marks and orange goop all over my chest and arms, but
they hadn’t bitten through it.

I grabbed my rifle and reloaded it. Then I looked into the reactor
compartment, listening for anything else. I heard nothing.

I went back through the ship to see if anything else had gotten in. When I
reached the hole in the engine room, I looked out into pitch black. The sky
was still dark, and there was no sign of the stars or any moons.

But I heard things out there. Oddly pitched screeches and cries, though they
sounded a long way away.

If one group of creatures could get in, more might follow. So, after dragging
the bodies back to the engine room and throwing them out, I collected a few
of the intact tie-downs from the vehicle bay. Using a hammer, I tore open
the bulkhead on either side of the hatch to expose the structural members of
the hull. By attaching the tie-downs to the structural members and
stretching them across the hatch to the engine room, I was able to seal the
hatch closed. Nothing was getting through there, at least not easily.

Then I went back to sleep.

By the time I woke up, it was well after dawn, though it was still heavily
overcast. I ate breakfast. While I was grateful that I had them, I was rapidly
growing sick of the ration packs. Not knowing what might be safe to eat
here, I had no choice for now.

I wondered again about the orange-green creatures. Whatever they were,

they had enough intelligence to track me back here and open the hatches. I
couldn’t tell if any more of them had tried to get in, but the bodies I’d
tossed out were gone.

I could not stay here forever. Eventually, I was going to run out of food and
water, and if the creatures kept attacking, out of ammunition too. I needed
to find a safer place to stay, and – assuming anyone was even out there – the
people I’d come here with.

The reactor could potentially be repaired, but it required things I did not
have. The parts might be out there, and they might not, but there was no
reason to stay here hoping I could figure something out.

What I needed was out there. And I needed to go look.

The sheets of foam would work as a sleeping pad, so I rolled them up and
tied them to my backpack. I packed up all the ration packs and water I
could carry, along with a few tools that might be useful in the event I came
across something I could scavenge.

One problem was the cold outside. I’d managed yesterday, but I hadn’t been
comfortable. So I found a pair of uniform pants on one of the bodies in the
ship that were big enough to go on over my coveralls. I wasn’t sure what
else I could wear until I remembered the body armor in the armory. It was
designed to go on over the uniform jackets, and while I didn’t expect to get
shot at, it would definitely keep me warm. So I threw on one of the vests as
well.

Then, with a final glance back at the ship, I set out.

 Chapter 3

I WENT THE OPPOSITE direction from how I’d gone yesterday, since the village
seemed to be the center of the orange-green creatures. Once I got around
the stand of trees that the ship had plowed through, I saw a low series of
hills up ahead. It was hard to be sure, but the landscape that way looked
healthier.

I hiked through a long open field for about a kilometer. The field was on a
gentle incline rising toward the hills, and as I got closer, I came upon a
small stream that seemed to be flowing out of them. I couldn’t be sure, but I
thought I saw a narrow canyon up ahead that was the source of the stream.

I checked through the scope on my rifle and saw that I was correct. There
were trees and plants around the stream, reaching up into the hills, and they
looked considerably more inviting than the blighted landscape behind me.

The water looked clean and clear and smelled fine, but I wasn’t ready to test
it yet. So I continued my hike, following the stream. I wasn’t sure what
might be up there, but at the very least I could get a better view of things
from the top of one of the hills.

I reached the canyon in a few minutes. The stream tumbled out of the trees
over some rocks and into a pond. As I looked down at the water, something
leapt out at me immediately. The pond wasn’t natural. Someone had piled
up a lot of rocks to make a dam where the stream flowed out.

It was hard to tell how long it had been here. While it wasn’t brand new, it
didn’t have the look of something that had been in place for decades either.

Then I noticed the footprints in the mud.

They were small, about the same size as the feet of the dwarf-people I’d
seen back at the ship. They were definitely not human, unless a human child
had left them.

The footprints were fresh, no more than a few days old at most. Someone
had come here, perhaps to collect water.

No. Not water, I realized a moment later. There were fish in the pond.

More than what something like this could normally support, at least as far
as I understood things, which wasn’t that far. It looked very much like
someone had dammed up this stream to raise fish. The pattern of footprints
suggested two people had gone into the water to collect them, maybe with a
net.

That meant there were people nearby.

This discovery presented me with a conundrum. If indeed they were the

dwarf-people, there was a good chance they might not welcome my
presence. Granted, that battle down there had been a long time ago, but
memories could linger, and I was dressed like the soldiers who had attacked
that village.

I could keep looking for a human settlement, if one even existed here. If I
and the others had arrived from space, then there was every chance this was
a world of the dwarf-people. But if that was the case, I couldn’t keep hiding
out forever.

I finally decided to take my chances.

The footsteps appeared to lead uphill. I continued following the stream,

climbing along the banks and over the rocks. It leveled off after a hundred
meters or so, where there was a small clearing in a bend of the stream.

That was when I saw them.

Three of the dwarf-people emerged from the trees. They wore dark,
variegated clothes and hoods that completely concealed their faces.

They were running and coming at me fast. I struggled with my reaction for
a moment – I wanted to talk to them, not fight them – and it was a moment
too long.

One of them leapt into the air with more agility than I would have expected
and threw a flying kick at my rifle, knocking it aside and out of one hand.
Another came flying at my legs, hooking a leg between mine and forcing
me to the ground.

The third landed on my back as the first tore my rifle out of my hand and
tossed it aside. I struggled to get up, but then the one on my back wrapped
an arm around my neck, and I felt a knife blade against my throat.

I heard a high-pitched, strangely accented voice.

“Do not move or you will die.”

The steel behind the words was a sharp as the steel against my flesh.

“I don’t mean any harm,” I managed.

“Be still, vermin.”

I cursed inwardly. I hadn’t wanted to kill them, but I hadn’t intended to get
captured either. But if their killing me was an option, it probably meant
talking to me was another one. So I would go along with this for now, not
that I had a lot of choice in the matter.

I felt my arms being pulled back. They pulled off my backpack, and I felt
rope going around my wrists. They tied my ankles as well and searched me,
taking the knife. Then they rolled me on my back.
The three of them stood around me, looking down. Their eyes were
unnaturally large and a mix of colors I had never seen on a human: purple,
emerald green, and bright yellow. But I couldn’t see anything more about
them. Their clothes were loose, multicolored, and patterned like the trees
around us in a sort of makeshift camouflage.

“What is it?” the purple-eyed one asked. It had the same high-pitched voice
as the other.

“I’m not sure,” the green-eyed one said, in the same sort of voice.

The yellow-eyed one stepped forward, looking down at me. “I think it’s a
human.”

The other two gasped.

“That’s impossible,” Purple Eyes said.

“Guldeek said the humans were exterminated,” Green Eyes said.

“It sure looks like one.”

“I am human,” I said.

The three of them took a step backward, clearly startled. They glared down
at me for several moments.

“Where did you come from?” Purple Eyes asked. “We were watching you
come up from below.”

“Do you know that starship down there? I was in it.”

They looked at each other.

“He’s lying,” Green Eyes said.

“There’s nothing down there,” Purple Eyes spat.

“That place has been dead since before any of us were born,” Yellow Eyes
said.

Purple Eyes made an angry noise. “We need to take it back to Guldeek.
He’ll know what to do.”

I looked up at the three of them. Though I hadn’t seen their faces, they
sounded female.

“I really don’t mean any trouble,” I said again. “I woke up there yesterday,
and I don’t know what’s going on here either.”

“Shut up,” Purple Eyes said. She turned to the others. “Gag it so it doesn’t
call for help.”

Yellow Eyes pulled off my gloves and stuffed them in my mouth, then tied
a length of rope around my head to keep them in place. Then they went
through my backpack, examining all the stuff I’d brought up from the ship.

Green Eyes picked up my rifle, looking it over. Then she must have pulled
the trigger, because there was a crack as it went off and struck a nearby tree.
Purple Eyes and Yellow Eyes leapt back in alarm.

“You bilarq’s butthole!” Purple Eyes cried. “What did you just do?”

“It works,” Green Eyes said in awe.

All three of them looked at me.

“Where did you get this?” Yellow Eyes asked.

I tried to talk around my gag, but I couldn’t. So Green Eyes untied it.

“From the ship,” I said. “I got it to work again.”

“How?” Purple Eyes asked.

“If you untie me, I’ll be happy to explain everything.”

Green Eyes looked at Purple Eyes. “This is bad. We need to tell Guldeek.
There could be more of them.”

Purple Eyes nodded.

“Find a stick so we can carry it. And gag it again.”

Green Eyes replaced my gag as I tried to protest. Then they cut down a long
cane from a nearby tree and slid it through the rope around my wrists and
ankles.

“We should blindfold it so it doesn’t see the way to the compound,” Yellow
Eyes said.

“Good idea,” Purple Eyes said. She found a strip of cloth and wrapped it
around my head.

I felt them lifting me up, and from there, I could do little but hang from the
stick. They’d tied me tightly and expertly, and I could not work my hands
free. Even trying just earned me a painful kick in the ribs.

“Stop that,” Purple Eyes said.

So I hung there as they carried me. I had to hold myself close to the stick,
because my back kept hitting the ground. Wherever we were going, the trip
took about ten minutes. Toward the end, they stopped a couple of times, and
I heard what sounded like a gate being moved.

Then they set me down, and I heard another voice. This one was much
deeper and more gravelly, though with the same accent.
“What is this?”

“Guldeek!” Yellow Eyes cried. “We saw it coming up the hill. We captured
it when it reached the clearing. It says it’s a human.”

“Its rifle works,” Green Eyes said.

“It certainly looks human,” the other voice replied. “Take off its blindfold.”

A hand tugged the cloth from my eyes. I was on the ground inside a jagged
gap in the hillside. This was clearly the compound they’d referred to, and I
took it all in with a glance around me.

The trees were dense overhead, and sheer walls of rock rose on three sides
of us. A small, interconnected array of intricate wooden structures filled
most of the canyon. They looked hand-built from hand-hewn wood, yet at
the same time they were expertly constructed and had clearly been here for
quite some time.

The lines were even and pleasing – whoever had built this place had put in
the time and effort to create something solid, comfortable, and aesthetically
pleasing. They were embellished much like the buildings I’d seen down in
the village. The doors and window frames were intricately carved and
engraved, and though they’d been painted to blend into the trees, the
patterns were clever and attractive.

The creek flowed through the middle of all this, from the tip of the canyon
at the top through a carefully shaped channel down the middle of the
compound, and finally out under an equally embellished wooden wall at the
bottom. I saw the gate they had just brought me through.

Then I got a better look at my captors, because all three removed their
hoods. Several things occurred to me in rapid succession.

First, they were not dwarves. Second, they were clearly the same things as
the shorter orange-green creatures I’d seen. They had the same big eyes,
oversized heads, and long pointed ears.

But their skin was yellow-green, a clearer, far healthier version of what I’d
seen on the creatures. They were not bald.

And finally, they – the three who had captured me, at least – were adorably
gorgeous.

There was no other way to put it. They were not human, and their features
were alien and exaggerated. But they were exaggerated in a way that was
painfully cute. Their eyes were big and bright, and their faces were like
girls from some cartoon.

Goblins, I thought. They’re goblins. Not dwarves.

Their eyes matched their long, flowing hair. Purple Eyes had hair like some
kind of grape-flavored candy. Green Eyes had hair like strands of green
glass. Yellow Eyes had hair you might call blonde until the sun hit it, then
you realized it was closer to spun gold.

All three of them were so cute it almost hurt to look at them. I had remind
myself that they could very well kill me.

Standing behind them was a male goblin, and he was much, much older
than the three girls. His hair was stark white, and his face was heavily lined
and wrinkled. His eyes were deep green, and though cloudy, they regarded
me with unmistakable intelligence. He leaned on a heavily worn walking
stick, and it was clear his body was beginning to fail him.

This had to be the Guldeek they’d referred to. Whoever he was, he appeared
to be in charge here. I didn’t see anyone else. As far as I could tell, it was
just the four of them.

It only occurred to me at that moment that I could understand them. They

were speaking Imperial Standard. Where was I?
“He is human,” Guldeek said.

“But how?” Purple Eyes asked.

“Did you ask him?”

“He said he came from the ship,” Green Eyes said.

Guldeek stared down at me.

“What is your name?”

I hadn’t thought about this since looking at the letters on my coveralls. Then
it came to me.

“Kevin. Kevin Dickson. My name is Kevin Dickson.”

“Where did you come from, Kevin Dick-son?”

“Like I told them. I was in that ship.”

“That ship has been dead since I was their age. Your story makes no sense.”

“I was in one of the stasis compartments. When the ship crashed, I guess I
wasn’t released. I’ve been in there all this time. Somehow or another, it
released me yesterday.”

Guldeek rubbed his chin and studied me for a few moments.

“What do you know about how you came to be here?”

“I . . . not a lot. My memory seems impaired. It’s probably because of how

long I was in stasis. Do you know when that battle took place?”

His eyes narrowed, and his face tightened. He didn’t answer me right away.
Then he coughed loudly several times, and Yellow Eyes put her hand on his
shoulder until he waved her off and looked back at me.

“Yes,” he said. “I was there.”

“You were?” I asked.

“I was. By our reckoning, it was fifty-seven years ago. But I know human
years are longer. I think by your measuring, it would be about thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five years,” I said.

Purple Eyes suddenly kicked me in the side.

“Ow!” I yelled.

“You were one of them! One of the ones who attacked us!”

Guldeek motioned to her.

“He was not, it seems. He came down with them but did not take part.”

“He’s still a human! Humans did all this! I hate him!”

She kicked me again, though this time I managed shield my ribs with my
arm.

“Did you find anything else?” Guldeek asked.

Green Eyes showed him my rifle. “It works.”

Guldeek’s eyebrows went up.

“Really?”

“Yes. I pulled the trigger by accident, and it fired.”

He looked down at me, coughing again. “Explain. If you came from that
ship, nothing there still functions.”

I took a deep breath, and a sharp pain shot through my side from where
Purple Eyes had kicked me.

“I’m not a soldier,” I said. “I’m a power technician. The reactor on the ship
still works, believe it or not. I got it working for a short period, just long
enough to charge some power cells.”

Guldeek looked at me, then at the rifle. He took it from Green Eyes and
pointed it at the wooden wall around the compound. He pulled the trigger,
and there was a crack as the shot went off and punched through the wood.

“Very interesting.” Then he looked at the girls, motioning to one of the trees
against the cliffside. “Tie him to that tree. We must discuss this.”
 Chapter 4

THE THREE GOBLIN GIRLS had strength and skills that belied their size and
appearance. They dragged me over to the tree, and Purple Eyes pressed her
knife hard against my throat, telling me not to move as the other two untied
my wrists and pulled my arms around the trunk.

The look in her big, beautiful purple eyes left zero doubt that she was
prepared to kill me if I resisted at all, so I didn’t. When the other two were
done tying me up, the three of them followed Guldeek into one of the
buildings, and I was alone again.

Their rope work was expert, and whatever they’d done, I could not move
more than a few inches in any direction. After struggling for a few minutes,
I concluded that any attempt at escape was futile.

I had no choice but to sit there until they decided what they were going to
do with me. It took a while, and I heard occasional raised voices and
argument I couldn’t quite make out. I heard Guldeek coughing and
wondered what was wrong with him.

Finally, the four goblins emerged from the building they’d gone into. Green
Eyes was still holding the P86 and pointing it in my direction.

But what immediately seized my attention was that the girls had removed
the camouflage jumpsuits they’d been wearing. Underneath, they wore
tight-fitting leggings and short tops. Purple Eyes wore something that
would have qualified as bikini top on a human woman.

I had another flash of memories, of seedy bars on seedy space stations and
remote Navy bases, shapely, sexy girls dancing for me and my shipmates
wearing little or nothing.

All three goblin girls, as short as they were, had bodies that put those girls
to shame. Big breasts, narrow waists, perfectly proportioned butts and legs.
Like their faces, everything was exaggerated in a way that hit me directly in
the dick.

They didn’t seem affected by the cold. I tried not to gape, not wanting to
upset them any further. Besides which, they were aliens despite their
superficial similarities to human women, and I had far more important
things to concern myself with than their tits.

Guldeek squatted down in front of me.

“What do you know about yourself and how you came to be here?” he
asked. “Understand that your value to us lies in your knowledge, so it is in
your best interest to tell me everything. If you know nothing of value, then I
will have no choice but to let them kill you, as they have been arguing for
strenuously.”

I looked at the girls. I saw no indication he was lying to me.

“I don’t remember anything much from before I woke up,” I replied, “at
least in terms of my past or where I came from. I know what I am. I was a
starship power technician, and a good one. I was part of the Imperial Fleet,
but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what that is. I know how to fix things. I got
that reactor started up after all this time. It still works, it’s just almost out of
fuel and there are some support systems that need maintenance. I could get
it going again if we could find the parts. I know how those rifles work. I can
fix other stuff. Electrical stuff and electronics, I’m your guy.”

Guldeek smiled.

“Do you see electricity here?”

“Um.” I looked around the compound. “No.”

He coughed again, covering his mouth and pausing a moment.

“That is because of what your people did.’

“I saw that village. It looked reasonably civilized.”

“It was,” he said. “As was the rest of this planet.”

I glanced at the girls. I began to get an idea of why they were so angry with
me.

“But it’s not anymore?”

“No. It has not been for a very long time.”

“Humans attacked this planet?” I asked. “The Empire I was part of,
whatever it is?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I asked. “I swear to you that I don’t remember any of that.”

Guldeek sighed. “That is a long, complicated story that I think you are not
ready for.”

I looked at the girls again. All three of them were staring at me, though I
saw different emotions in their eyes.

Purple Eyes still looked like she wanted to murder me. Green Eyes was
angry, but her face showed unmistakable interest in what I’d been saying.
And Yellow Eyes, well, I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing from her.

Then something occurred to me.

“They weren’t around then, were they?” I asked Guldeek.

He smiled.

“No. They were born some years after things . . . fell. I brought them here
as very young children and raised them, training them so they could survive
on their own.”

Something about Guldeek that had been bothering me from the beginning
finally forced its way to the front of my mind. Despite his age and infirmity,
he didn’t seem the least bit afraid of me or perturbed about the situation the
way the girls were.

Quite the contrary. He had a tough, no-nonsense, no-fucks-left-to-give

attitude that reminded me of the Imperial Marine drill sergeant who had
trained me in how to use a P86. Guldeek had told me he was at the battle
around my ship, but I’d assumed he meant he was simply in the village. I
realized now that was likely not the case.

“You were a soldier.”

Guldeek smiled again.

“Yes. I was a member of the Black Arrows, an elite military unit. Did you
happen to see those black vehicles near your ship?”

“Yes.”

“Those were ours. We were the ones who shot down your ship as it came in.
But it managed to land intact anyway, and many of your soldiers emerged to
attack us.”

“What was so important about that village?”

“Nothing. It was simply where the ship was forced to land. I assume your
target was somewhere else. There was a large manufacturing compound
some distance from here, though it has been abandoned.”
I let his words sink in. They didn’t trigger any memories, but they fit with
what I’d seen so far. At least, some of it. But there was something else that
didn’t make sense.

“What are those things down there? The naked orange-green things? They
attacked me.”

Their faces darkened. Guldeek stared hard at me.

“You have no memories of this? Nothing has emerged here as we have been
talking?”

I didn’t want to tell him about the strip joints and brothels I remembered
now. I was certain that would not go over well with the girls.

But there was something else I remembered now, another memory he’d just
triggered. That drop ship I’d come down on was no ordinary ship. We were
part of Special Fleet Operations, which was why I had been trained for
combat despite being a power technician. That manufacturing facility was
exactly what we were supposed to capture.

“This unit of yours, the Black Arrows. The soldiers on our ship were part of
a unit like that. They were called Detachment 686. They were among the
most highly trained troops in the Imperial Marines. They were used for
high-risk missions like seizing that facility you mentioned.”

Guldeek nodded. “Yes, I know. They caused a great deal of damage despite
their limited numbers and the casualties they sustained in the crash. Many
of our people died at their hands.”

I glanced up at Purple Eyes, waiting for her to kick me again. She didn’t,
because Guldeek started coughing again. When he was done, he looked
back to me.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“No. I’m sorry.”

Guldeek fell into another coughing fit that went on long enough that the
three girls hovered around him. But he finally waved them off again.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I am old, and there are things I need to do while I still can.”

“You trained these girls like you were trained?” I asked. “Like the Black
Arrows?”

“We are Black Arrows,” Purple Eyes spat at me.

“I have trained them since their girlhood,” Guldeek replied. “She speaks the
truth. While they lack the equipment we had, their skills are the equal of
mine at their age. Better, I would wager.”

This made sense. I couldn’t remember much of the details, but I knew I’d
been in Special Fleet Operations for a long time. I’d worked alongside the
marines in Detachment 686 for years.

If these girls had skills that even approached theirs, it was no wonder they’d
taken me down with ridiculous ease in that clearing, despite their
diminutive stature.

While I’d been trained for combat, I’d never actually used that training until
I woke up here. I was alive only because they’d decided not to kill me.

Guldeek finally stood.

“If his skills are as he says, and given his rifle, I have no reason to doubt
him, then he may have great usefulness to us. But I am not ready to trust
him. He is a human, after all, and humans are endlessly treacherous.” He
looked at the girls, then across the compound. “Tie him up in the storage
shed. I need to consider what we are to do now.”

With Green Eyes keeping the P86 trained on me, Purple Eyes and Yellow
Eyes dragged me across the compound into one of the side buildings. The
interior was only about half full of random crap, and they moved things
around to make space for me against one wall.

My mind raged with ideas about what to do, but I’d seen what a P86 did at
close range, and if they’d decided to keep me alive, it seemed prudent to
cooperate to make sure that continued.

Purple Eyes and Yellow Eyes tied my arms to the wall on either side,
keeping my ankles tied together. Then they left, shutting the door behind
them.

For a few hours, nothing happened. I was tightly secured, and nothing I
tried to get free worked. Then the door opened, and Yellow Eyes came into
the shed.

I looked up into her ridiculously adorable face. Even with her green skin
and long pointed ears, I had a sudden flash of desire for her. I wanted to
grab her and bang her brains out, assuming the size difference wasn’t an
impediment.

Which was . . . ridiculous. I could not start thinking with my dick here.

They could still decide to kill me, and cute or not, she was not human. I
couldn’t remember the details, but I had a distinct sense that a lot of bad
things had happened to human men who got involved with alien girls.
Yellow Eyes looked down at me, and I still couldn’t read what was in her
face. She carried a wooden bowl with some kind of aromatic stew in it. She
knelt down next to me.

“Are you hungry?”

I was. “Yes.”

There was a spoon of sorts in the bowl, and she scooped out some of the
stew and held it toward my mouth.

“Is this safe for me to eat?”

“Guldeek says yes.”

It actually smelled good, especially after a couple of days of eating those

awful ration packs. So I let her slide the spoon into my mouth. It tasted like
a salty mix of vegetables and beans, which it probably was.

“Thanks.”

She gave me another bite.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Wexlee,” she said.

“What about the others?”

She fed me again.

“Alavara and Nithriel.”

“Who is who? Who’s the one with the purple hair?”

“Alavara,” she replied.

“She’s the one who wants to kill me.”

“We all want to kill you.”

I blinked.

“You want to kill me?”

“You are human. Humans killed so many of our people. But still . . . I find
you intriguing.”

Wexlee smiled, picking at her golden hair. That same wave of desire shot
through me.

Gods above, my heart melted despite everything that was going on here. I
should have been trying to escape or at least be warier here, but something
about these girls was dissolving my self-protective instincts.

“You’re beautiful,” I blurted out. Then I kicked myself internally again.

She smirked as she fed me.

“Guldeek told us you would say things like that. He told us human men
were obsessed with goblin females. I assure you, I am not beautiful.”

I couldn’t help it. I just started to babble at her.

“But you are. I mean, you’re not human, and you don’t look like a human
woman, but still . . . you’re adorable.”

She leaned forward until our faces were a few inches apart. I stared into her
huge yellow eyes, so rich and deeply saturated they were like daffodils in
full bloom.

“You look nothing like a goblin male.”

“I know.”

Wexlee continued staring into my eyes for a few seconds before

withdrawing. Then she fed me until the stew was gone.

“Do you require more?”

I took a deep breath, trying to shake off the spell she’d put me under. This
was not good.

“No. Thanks. That was good and filling. But I kind of need to relieve
myself here.”

She looked at me, eyes narrowing.

“I cannot untie you.”

“I have to go at some point. I’m sorry, but I do.”

“You need to pee?”

“Yes.”

She stood up and looked around the shed for a moment, coming back with a
hollow sort of gourd thing.

“Will this suffice?”

I wasn’t sure what she had in mind here.

“Uh.”

Wexlee knelt beside me and began undoing my pants. I still had the
coveralls under them, but she unzipped them until I was down to my
underwear. Then she poked around until she found my cock.
Her eyes widened in surprise.

“This is it?”

I took a deep breath.

“Yes.”

She put my cock into the gourd. With no other options here, I let go.
Wexlee watched raptly as I peed into the gourd. When I was done she stood
up and left the shed. She was gone for about a minute before returning. I
was still completely exposed.

Wexlee knelt next to me again, eyes fixed on my dick.

“Guldeek said many human men took goblin females as mates.”

I didn’t know what to do with this information, which was completely at

odds with everything I’d seen since waking up here. But the look on her
face told me she was telling the truth as she knew it.

“They did?” I asked.

“That is what he told us.”

I mean, okay. I could see it, if there were other goblin girls as gorgeous as
she was. Any other human man could see the same thing I did, and there
were plenty of them who wouldn’t feel the need to resist this bizarre
attraction.

My eyes drifted down to her wonderful breasts. Their shape and fullness
tugged at my gut.

Despite everything, despite the obvious threat to my life, my dick began

stirring to life. Wexlee’s presence was just too much, and this close, I
couldn’t keep my eyes off her big, bountiful boobs. They looked so soft and
silky that I wanted to grab them, suck on them, stick my cock between them
and blow my load all over her face.

At the same time, the rational part of my mind wanted desperately for this
not to happen. As was too often the case, unfortunately, my dick had a mind
of its own.

Wexlee said nothing as it rose to attention. When I was fully erect, she
reached out and wrapped her little green hand around it. I closed my eyes as
she explored me.

All at once, her hand pulled away. I opened my eyes as she put me back
together, zipping up my coveralls and pulling up my pants. The look on her
face had gone from curious to angry.

She jumped to her feet.

“Guldeek told me you would tempt me this way!”

Then she gave me a sharp kick in the side and stormed out of the shed.
 Chapter 5

ROUGHLY TWO MINUTES LATER, the door to the shed flew open, and Purple
Eyes – Alavara – stormed inside with the P86 in her arms. She stalked up,
pointing it directly at my chest.

“I will kill you!” she shrieked.

I thrashed against the ropes, trying to get free as my still-unclear life flashed
before my eyes.

“I didn’t touch her!” I yelled. “I didn’t do anything!”

“You corrupted her with your human wiles! You made her forget the thing
we have all sworn!”

I closed my eyes and groaned, certain that I was about to die.

But the shot never came. After a few seconds, I slowly opened my eyes
again. Alavara was still standing there with the rifle pointed right at me and
a murderous look on her face.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said again, as calmly as I could manage, which was

not much.

“She said you praised her beauty and stared deeply into her eyes!”

“Well, she . . . you . . .” But I stopped. I could tell my opinions were not
welcome here.
“What about me?” she screamed as the barrel of the P86 shook two feet
from my face.

The truth was that Alavara was as beautiful as Wexlee, with her shimmering
purple hair and eyes like enormous amethysts.

But I was certain that if I said that, she would absolutely kill me.

“I don’t think you’re beautiful,” I managed.

The look on her face changed, shifting through half a dozen emotions I
couldn’t track. The rage began leaking from her eyes.

“Why not?”

My jaw dropped. I truly had no idea how to respond.

“I . . .”

“Why did you tell her that and not me?”

Then the door to the shed banged open again. Wexlee and Guldeek were
there.

“Alavara!” Guldeek yelled.

The purple-haired goblin girl glared at me a moment longer before lowering

the rifle and withdrawing. The three of them exchanged a look but said
nothing as they left.
For a long while, I was alone again, trying to sort out what I’d gone through
over the past few hours and what it meant.

I heard a series of loud arguments elsewhere in the compound – they

sounded mostly like the girls yelling at each other – but they were too far
away to follow. The light outside began to dim.

Finally, the four goblins returned to the shed. Wexlee had another bowl of
stew, and Nithriel – Green Eyes – was holding the rifle. Alavara stood to
the side, eyes blazing with more hatred than I would have thought her
diminutive frame could possibly hold.

I focused on her hatred, hoping it would help douse my attraction to them.

It didn’t, and I finally had to look away from her.

Wexlee fed me without saying a word. I was afraid of saying anything

myself, and since none of them spoke, I decided to take the cue and say
nothing either. When I was done, they all left.

Several minutes later, the door opened, and Guldeek came back inside,
carrying some kind of little lantern. He dragged a box over beside me and
sat down.

“We have a problem.”

“I can see that,” I said quietly.

The old goblin scowled at me.

“You think you do, but you clearly understand nothing.”

“Then explain. Because I definitely don’t understand what’s going on.”

He took a long breath and sighed.

“I am going to tell you everything that happened. All of it. But what you
need to understand is that what occurred this afternoon was the cause of the
war between our peoples.”

I stared back at him, utterly baffled.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Then I really don’t understand.”

“To start with, let me ask you something. What do you think of those three?
You can tell me the truth, don’t worry. It won’t upset me, because I know
what you are going to say.”

“Uh.” I tried to gather myself up for a moment. “They’re . . . really angry

with me.”

Guldeek smiled. “They most certainly are, but that is not what you are
thinking. Go on, say it.”

I sighed. There was no point in denying it, because the look in his eyes told
me he knew already.

“They’re beautiful,” I finally said. “My god, I’ve never seen anything like
those three girls.”

“They are not even of your race. There are no human women who resemble
them even vaguely.”

“I know. I shouldn’t feel this way. But they are, and I do.”

“Why do you think that is?” he asked.

“It’s hard to explain. Their faces, their eyes . . .”

“And their bodies?”

I gulped. Guldeek wasn’t their father, but he might as well have been.
“Yes.”

“Elements of their appearance are exaggerated compared to human women,

would you agree? Their eyes are larger, their breasts are bigger and firmer
than their frames should be able to carry, the colors of their eyes and hair
are especially pleasing to you.”

I nodded slowly.

“All that, yeah.”

“Yet I look at them, and I see three girls who are little different than any
other goblin female.”

“Wait,” I said. “They’re all like that? All goblin females look like they do?”

He nodded. “You begin to appreciate the scale of the problem here.” He

paused. “Any more memories coming back to you?”

I probed the fog in my head. There was nothing there.

“No.”

“All right. You came here from something that calls itself the United
Empire. It is a conglomeration of humans and a few races they have
subjugated. The Empire claims to be spreading peace and stability through
the galaxy, and I suppose it is, in a way, provided you agree with the sort of
society they want to establish.”

“You don’t?” I asked.

“Well, the core of the Empire’s philosophy is the superiority of the human
race, and the need to maintain its purity. Alien races have a role to the
extent they can support that.” He paused again. “Anything?”
This was tickling some memories, but nothing solid.

“No.”

He nodded again.

“Because of all that, the one paramount crime in the Empire, above
everything else, is for a human to engage in sexual congress with an alien.”

I thought about that a moment. It fit with the vague sense I had about all
this, that hooking up with alien girls was wrong and dangerous. But an
obvious issue presented itself.

“That’s a problem? I mean, the physiology of it is enough to be a problem?”

“The large majority of intelligent races the Empire has contacted are
bipedal, warm-blooded, and sexually dimorphic. No one has quite figured
out why, but that is the reality. However, until your race contacted mine,
only a few especially adventurous humans had any interest in such things.”

I started to see what he was getting at.

“Wexlee said something about human men taking goblins as mates.”

“That was the end, and we are still at the beginning. Stop me if you start to
remember any of this.”

I shook my head. “So far, no. It sounds familiar, but it’s beginning to feel as
if my long-term memory was erased by all the time I spent in stasis. I only
remember who and what I was. I remember my skills and training. But
beyond that, I only remember a few experiences that tie into those things,
and some of what happened right before I came here.”

Then Guldeek fell into another coughing fit, and it was a minute or so
before he could speak again.
“You’re sick,” I said.

“You have a firm grasp of the obvious, my large friend.”

“Sorry.”

“To continue, goblins are, or were, largely a race of merchants. We had

made contact with a few other races before the United Empire arrived, but
the Empire represented a far larger and more lucrative market. So we re-
oriented ourselves to serve it. We focused on manufacturing things your
race needed, and developed many new things humans wanted to buy. We
adopted the Empire’s common language, which is why we can understand
each other here, if it has not yet occurred to you to wonder about that.”

That was an explanation, but not one that made a lot of sense.

“Wait. Your entire planet changed the language it spoke?”

He shrugged. “Speaking Imperial Standard was deemed to be good for

business. So if you wanted to be a success, you learned how, and speaking it
quickly became a mark of pride for goblins in general.”

“Huh. And once you started trading with humans, the trouble started, I
guess?”

“Not at first. Business was conducted almost entirely by males. Females

were focused on breeding and raising children. Until your people started
coming to this planet, there was very little interaction between human males
and goblin females. And it was at that point that something very strange
began to unfold.”

“Human men wanted to have sex with the females?”

He shook his head. “Were it nothing more than that, things would never
have gone as far as they did. No, it was some bizarre, accidental quirk of
evolution. Two races that had evolved with no contact with each other
somehow evolved mutually compatible mating preferences that aligned not
just perfectly but to a degree that triggered all sorts of wildly irrational
behavior.”

I saw what he was getting at. After all, I’d already seen it with Wexlee.

“It wasn’t one-sided, was it?”

“Far from it. You see, goblin females primarily seek one thing in their
mates, and that is strength, and strength is correlated with size. The average
human male is far larger and stronger than the average goblin male. There
are also preferences toward paler skin, smaller noses, and smaller ears, and
as you can see . . .”

He held his hands up to his face for a moment – with its dark green skin,
nose like a carrot, and long ears – then went on.

“Goblin males also have a wider range of facial features than humans do.
Somehow, human male faces nearly all fall into what is viewed as the ideal
configuration. For a goblin female, the perfect mate is a tall, robust, pale-
skinned male with a small nose and small ears. And most human men
present an appearance in that respect that is well beyond what any goblin
male could achieve.”

I took a deep breath.

“So it’s just as bad on their side?”

“Correct. Meanwhile, goblin females almost universally possess traits that

seem to trigger intensely protective, possessory impulses in human men.
You want to collect them, protect them, and breed them, and breeding is
exactly what goblin females seek above all else. It was a perfect storm of
mutual attraction.”

I nodded slowly. I still didn’t remember any of this, but yeah, that was it.
This was what I’d been going through today.
“And the Empire didn’t like that?”

He laughed weakly.

“Oh, not just the Empire,” he replied. “Imagine what it was like for goblin
males to experience this. These strange hulking creatures arrive on our
planet, ostensibly to do business, only to create a frenzy of sexual interest in
our females. Almost overnight, it seemed as if every goblin female wanted
to find a human male to mate with. Many of them abandoned their existing
mates, flocking to the few cities where humans were living.”

I groaned. “Oh, boy.”

“Yes. It was . . . unpleasant, to say the least. There was unrest,

demonstrations, even open conflict between males and females. The
government, which was entirely dominated by males, moved to ban human
men from the planet surface entirely, and females began rioting over the
idea.”

“Rioting?” I asked, incredulous.

Guldeek sighed again.

“Yes. It was related to the element of all this that may be the most difficult
for you to believe. It was certainly something that most goblins found
preposterous and impossible, at least until they saw or experienced the
results of it themselves. In this, I only know what I was told.”

“It was the sex, wasn’t it?” I asked.

He nodded.

“The act of mating for goblins and humans is quite similar, similar enough
that human males and goblin females can engage in it together without
great difficulty. But there is something else about it, one more quirk of
evolution, that makes the experience more pleasurable for them than it
would be with a member of their own species.”

I gaped at him. “More pleasurable?”

“Yes.”

“That’s nuts. That . . . that has to be impossible.”

He nodded. “That is an opinion that was shared by a great many people, but
the reality of it is beyond question by this point.”

I let this sink in for a moment or two.

“So those human men were taking goblin mates?”

“It was even worse than that,” he replied. “There were, after all, only a few
hundred human males here, and uncountable mobs of females who wanted
them. By the time things reached a breaking point, many of the humans had
collected whole groups of females around them, dozens of them in some
cases, because the females were more than willing to share.”

“Wait, groups?”

“Yes. And that was, you need to understand, highly unusual. Goblins do not
have a history of the sort of polyamory that your society has experienced.
Normally, no goblin female will tolerate another female showing interest in
her mate. But something about human men breaks that impulse.”

“So what happened with the Empire?” I asked.

“Eventually, word got back to your core worlds about what was going on
here. It was an enormous scandal. The emperor immediately banned
humans from our planet and ordered the men arrested. The government here
tried to cooperate, since they had been struggling to do the same thing, but
most of the men escaped with their ‘harems,’ I think you call them, and
disappeared.”

He paused and began coughing again. I waited until he was able to speak.

“Exactly how the conflict began is not clear. The Empire finally sent a
group of soldiers, that Detachment 686 you mentioned, to track these
humans down. But they landed without bothering to work something out
with our armed forces, and they were intercepted. The ship landed in the
middle of our largest city and capital, I assume because that was where
most of the human men had been living.”

He paused again, sighing.

“Elements of our military tried to keep them contained until some protocol
for the search and arrests could be worked out. Unfortunately, the sudden
arrival of several hundred additional human men caused another frenzy
among the females of the city. A mob of them forced their way through the
perimeter. Shooting began. No one knows who started it because it rapidly
spun out of control. Many died on both sides, and when the emperor learned
what happened, he ordered a full-scale attack.”

“And that was the war?”

He nodded again. “It went on for the better part of a year. The Empire is
strong, but our planet is a long way from yours, and sending a conquest
fleet all the way out here was no simple matter. In addition, the emperor
wanted to capture our planet, not destroy it, because it was deemed a
valuable asset thanks to all the things that we had been selling your people.”

“Who won?” I asked.

“I suppose that depends on how you look at it. From where I’m sitting, no
one did. The invasion fleet, which you would have been part of, was
overextended because of the distance it had to travel, and our people fought
hard to defend our home. The initial attack failed, and we destroyed most of
your forces. The emperor had prepared for this, however. With the
conventional attack a failure, he declared that the goblin race was too much
of a threat to the social and moral order of the human race. The last
elements of the fleet, before they departed, bombed our planet with a
biological weapon that wiped out nearly the entire population.”

I sat there in a daze as the horror of this became clear. I still didn’t
remember any real details, but all of this felt familiar and consistent with
what little I did.

“Everyone died? Or almost everyone, I guess?”

“Not quite. You asked about those orange-green creatures. They are the
remnants of that weapon.”

“But some of them look human,” I said.

“There were still a substantial number of human troops on the surface when
the weapon was deployed. Due to the huge losses in ships, I assume it was
decided that extracting them was impossible.”

“And the weapon did all that? It changed them?”

“Once infected, victims were compelled to kill anything that isn’t. The
weapon seems to have burned itself out, and it no longer spreads. But the
infected that still survive will hunt and kill anything they encounter.”

I groaned. “Yeah, I saw that. And they’ve survived all this time?”

“They feed upon their victims, and if there are none, they will eat just about
anything else. The weapon seems to have changed their metabolisms to
allow them to subsist on whatever is available.”

“But they don’t attack each other?”

He shook his head. “No. If one dies, they will feed upon the body, but
otherwise, infected are all but oblivious to each other. I suspect it is by
design.”

I sighed again. This all seemed monstrous, yet the feel of it was consistent
with my other vague memories.

And his words triggered another one. The motto of the Imperial Marines
was Defeat Is a Failure of Will. If that meant genocide on a planet-wide
scale, well . . . the Empire was not a kind place, and its military forces
didn’t mess around.

“You understand now why those three girls are so angry with you,” Guldeek
went on. “Your people destroyed our world, and you were one of the ones
who came here to do it.”

I stared blankly across the shed. I couldn’t imagine how this must have felt
for them.

“They were born after all that happened?”

Guldeek nodded. “There are pockets of survivors here and there, though
fewer as the years go on. One by one, they seem to have died out. We have
not seen another goblin in several years.”

“But you’ve survived? You seem to have done fairly well here.”

“Survival skills are one of the primary things the Black Arrows were
trained in. We were taught how to live off the land for extended periods if
necessary. I was able to build this compound and develop what we needed
to live on. We have crops growing nearby. You may have noticed the fish
pond down below.”

“I did.”
“Yet I now have three females of breeding age, and no unmated goblin
males anywhere.”

I stared at him, and he laughed.

“Remember what I said about what they seek. I am old, weak, and sick. I
am dying, and they know that. They respect me, most certainly, but they
have no interest in me as a mate. Then you drop into our laps.”

It slowly dawned on me what he meant.

“But they hate me.”

“They certainly do. I am equally certain that will not last.”

Guldeek finally stood up.

“What is it you need to repair the power plant on that ship?”

“Uh. I guess, some parts,” I said. “A pump. Coolant for this particular
support system. Also, there’s almost no fuel left.”

“If you were able to collect these things and complete the repairs, what else
still works?”

“Not a lot. I guess you’ve seen it. The forward compartments are destroyed,
and the engine room got hit. But there are some systems that still work.”

“Weapons? You recharged those power cells.”

“Yeah, I rigged something up. I don’t know about the shipboard weapons.
Definitely nothing in the bow, but there were some dorsal laser turrets that
might have survived. They’re recessed into the hull and would have been
sealed all this time.” I paused. “Why?”
“There are vehicles down there that are likely still functional, if their
batteries could be recharged. A vehicle would allow us to explore a much
wider area to scavenge. There are things we could bring here to make
existence easier. We are surviving, but not thriving.”

“Whatever you brought up here would be dependent on keeping their

batteries charged.”

“Could we bring the power up here? Say, through a cable.”

I blinked at him. “You’d need a pretty damn long cable.”

“Yes. But you see, that manufacturing facility I mentioned? It manufactured

just those sorts of things, electrical and electronic components and the like.
I think there is a good chance you can find what you need there. Assuming
you can, could we do it? You said this is the sort of thing you were trained
in.”

“I was. But you really think there could be a kilometer or more of heavy
power cable there?”

“Quite possibly. I am almost certain of it, in fact.”

“That still leaves fuel for the reactor. Is there going to be deuterium and
tritium stored there too?”

“It had a power plant. Surely it had fuel tanks that might still have
something left.”

I sighed, looking up at the ceiling.

“Assuming you’re right about all this, and we can get all that stuff back
here . . . I think we could do it, yeah.”

Guldeek nodded.
“Good. Think on all I have told you. Our peoples were once bitter enemies,
but those days are past. The empire is long gone, and you are never going
home. You need to decide what that means for you.”

And he left.
 Chapter 6

I WAS LEFT IN THE DARK. As uncomfortable as my confinement was, I was

tired and stuck for the time being. So I closed my eyes and tried to get some
sleep.

Some time later, a dim light in the shed drew me from a fitful slumber. I
looked up, seeing one of the girls standing across the shed watching me.

It was Alavara. She regarded me with the same intensely hateful expression
she’d worn earlier.

“Why do you think Wexlee is beautiful, and I am ugly?”

I tried to sit up a bit.

“That, uh, that’s not what I said.”

“You told her she was. You said I am not.”

“You were about to kill me,” I said.

“So you lied, then? Humans lie! You do think Wexlee is ugly. Why did you
lie to her?”

I took a nervous breath. She didn’t have the rifle, but I had to assume she
had a weapon on her. If she wanted the truth, fine. I would give it to her.

“I didn’t. I lied to you.”

Her face twisted in anger.

“What does that mean?”

“I think you’re all beautiful. When you three are around, I can barely take
my eyes off you.”

She took a few steps forward. She seemed a lot less angry than she’d been
earlier.

I allowed myself to look up and down her delicious body. She had less on
than the other two, and I could see the entire shape of her wonderful boobs.

“Why?” Alavara asked.

“It’s hard to explain. You’re like human women in some ways, just ways
that are more, I don’t know, intense. Like you’re all the things that would
make a human woman desirable, just distilled to their essence, and
amplified.”

She followed my gaze down.

“Human women have breasts?”

“Very few of them have breasts like yours.”

Alavara stared at her chest for a few moments, then suddenly pulled her top
off, exposing herself to me. My heart skipped a beat.

My god, they were even better than I’d imagined. Somehow big, firm, and
soft at the same time. They shifted and jiggled deliciously as she moved.
They were topped by puffy, perfectly shaped nipples that stood out and up
despite her size.

Despite the obvious risks, my hands reached for her. I had to touch them.
But of course I was tied up and couldn’t move.
Alavara knelt down over my knees, and I watched her boobs bounce in
front of me.

“I want to see what Wexlee saw.”

It took me a moment to realize what she meant, and then, oh shit.

“She took my pants off,” I managed.

Alavara reached forward and tugged my pants down. Then she unzipped
my coveralls all the way to the bottom and, finding my underwear
underneath, reached in and pulled out my cock.

The sight of her topless had already woken things up, and I got the rest of
the way there quickly as Alavara’s slim hands explored my length and girth.

This was as far as things had gone with Wexlee, before she’d changed her
mind. But Alavara did not seem ready to stop.

“I have not mated,” she said after a few moments more, big purple eyes
fixed on mine.

“Guldeek explained,” I managed.

Her eyes were still filled with hate, but the hate was mixed with something
else now. All at once, she stood up and wriggled out of her leggings. My
eyes went straight to the green folds between her legs.

After what Guldeek had told me, I wasn’t surprised to see that she was put
together much like a human woman, though she was completely bare. What
I saw was as cute and delicious as the rest of her.

She straddled me, taking my dick in one hand and guiding it into place. She
pushed downward. I felt heat, wetness, and a definite entrance to her body,
but it seemed much too small. Alavara pushed downward again, grunting,
but her flesh resisted the entry.
My head raged at what was going on here. I knew, rationally, that this was
absolutely crazy. But part of me wanted it just as badly as she did.

I knew this was dangerous. There was no telling where it would go. But the
rest of me wanted it desperately. Everything Guldeek had said was true. I
wanted Alavara. I wanted to take her, protect her, and yes, breed her, though
there was sure no way our species were inter-fertile.

That part of me finally won out. Fucking me was certainly better than
killing me, and maybe it would help her calm down.

After a few moments of Alavara struggling unsuccessfully to get my dick

into her, I spoke up.

“We can do this, but you need to untie my hands.”

Her eyes flew up at me. “Why?”

“So I can help.”

She glared at me for a single tense moment. Then she leaned over and
untied one wrist, then the other. I immediately took her hips in my hands,
pulling her down.

Alavara grunted as I tried to force my dick into her. I pulled her down
harder, trying to position myself in some way that would work. For a few
more moments, it seemed as if it would not.

Then, finally, the ring of muscle at her entrance relaxed, and the head
slipped inside. Both of us gasped. I kept pulling, feeling myself slowly but
steadily gliding into her, feeling her flesh enveloping me.

I hit bottom no more than two-thirds of the way in, but neither of us wanted
to stop. I thrust up, and she pushed down, stretching out her insides. I
watched her belly distending as I filled her up. Working together, we
managed, and after a minute or so of work, she settled onto my hips.

Both of us let out sighs of pleasure. She was hot, so hot. From the heat of
her insides, and the feel of her hips in my hands, I sensed that goblins had
to have a body temperature several degrees higher than a human’s.

“What do I do?” she whispered.

“Like this,” I replied.

I lifted her up about halfway and then pulled her back down. She let out a
soft moan. When I did it again, she began to get the idea. She rose on her
own, then settled down again. I could see myself inside her – with each
thrust, the head of my cock pushed out her belly.

My memory was still fuzzy, but I was certain I had never been inside a
human woman who felt
like this. She was so incredibly tight, yet so wet that I could still move
easily. There was a delicious texture to her, full of little bumps and ridges
everywhere that were massaging my entire length. Her incredible heat
soaked into my cock and spread through my groin.

My hands left her hips and went to her breasts. I gasped aloud – they were
nirvana. So amazingly silky soft, yet firm. They filled up my palms and
then some. I began massaging her and pulling on her nipples. Alavara
moaned again, moving more rapidly. Her hands came up and covered mine,
pulling them against her chest.

As my shock at this encounter began to recede, I realized that my dick was

doing the same thing to Alavara that her pussy was doing to me. She was
entirely lost in the sensations I was sending through her. Her face was slack,
and her mouth hung open in a perfect “O.”

I’d been wondering what Guldeek meant, about this act being more
pleasurable for us than it ought to have been with our own species. Only
now did I really grasp the reality.

I sat there as Alavara rode me, unable to do anything but let this continue.
Everything that had happened to me since awakening, all my concerns with
what Guldeek had told me, were swept away. I wanted nothing but to keep
my dick buried inside her.

She clearly wanted the same thing, continuing to bounce and grind on me in
a steady rhythm. I began to realize that this was not going to last, and I
wanted it to go on forever. I closed my eyes and thought about the orange-
green creatures, what they’d looked like after I’d shot them, and the crisis
receded momentarily.

I wanted more of her. I bent down and pulled her breasts to my mouth. As
small as she was, I could only just reach, but I managed to suck a nipple
between my lips. Alavara gasped as I rubbed it with my tongue, throwing
her arms around my head. I went to the other, sucking until it had to hurt,
but she made no attempt to stop me.

Instead, she bounced on me harder, sending shivers up my back. I wallowed

in the amazing feel of her flesh around me. She started letting out soft cries
as she hit bottom each time, and I felt a wave of tremors beginning in her
abdomen. I kept sucking her nipples, and she began pounding herself
against me.

The end appeared near, and I wanted to share it with her. I stopped trying to
hold off and instead focused entirely on what I was feeling. As Alavara
gasped in ecstasy and her body began to shake above me, I grabbed her hips
and started pounding her down onto my cock.

The first orgasmic wave struck Alavara and struck her hard. She cried out
and began vibrating around me as I closed in on my own release. She
seemed lost in pleasure so intense that it had broken her grip on reality. Her
hands were tight around my arms.
Then I rammed her down onto me and erupted into her body. I was so deep
into her that I had to be ejaculating directly into her womb.

And as I did, something else happened.

Her pussy clamped down on me hard as a fresh wave of contractions began.

But they were stronger than before, and different, coming in waves that
milked – no, sucked – my cock deeper into her body. I groaned as the
sensations washed over me.

I saw no sign that Alavara was doing this deliberately. Her face was gone,
utterly lost in her own pleasure. The contractions seemed entirely
involuntary, as if they were some reaction to the human semen inside her.
Her whole body convulsed with each one like a fresh wave of orgasms was
crashing through her.

Then, somehow, I came again. Her body was extracting it from me,
demanding another ejaculation, then another.

How long this went on, I could not have said. I suspect it only ended when
my body had no more fluid to give her.

When the intense fog of pleasure finally began to recede, Alavara let out a
long sigh and collapsed against my chest. I gently put my arms around her.
As she melted into me, I tried to regain some sense of equilibrium. And I
slowly began to appreciate what this had done to me.

I wanted it again. I wanted her again. At that moment, I fully understand

what Guldeek had told me. This was unlike anything I would ever have
with a human woman. Evolutionary glitch or not, I wanted to keep her, to
protect her. I would kill anyone who tried to take her away from me.

Then Alavara leaned back, purple eyes going wide. She looked down at us,
where we were still joined. She struggled to get up, and my cock came out
of her body with an audible pop as she leapt to her feet.
“What—what did you do to me?”

“Uh, we—”

Alavara reached between her legs, feeling herself. Then she let out a
wordless cry of horror.

“I have mated with a human?!”

It was all could do to shrug.

“You corrupted me!” she cried. “As you did with Wexlee! You made me do
this!”

I struggled for some reaction, but I was at a complete loss for words.
Alavara reached for her leggings and came up with her knife. She lunged
forward, pressing it against my neck.

“Say nothing of this to the others, or I will kill you!”

I was still weak from what we’d done and still partially restrained. She
quickly tied me up again and got dressed. She let out a final snarl of rage
and left, slamming the shed door behind her.

She’d left without restoring my clothes. With my hands tied, there was
fuck-all I could do about it.

So much for sex calming her down. Eventually I got back to sleep.

I woke as it got light the next morning. I heard someone outside, and then
the door opened. Wexlee came in with a bowl of something in her hands.
Then she stopped, looking down at the state Alavara had left me in.

“Did you need to relieve yourself in the night?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

She looked around. I did actually need to go, but I realized there was no
sign of anything in the dirt under me. And Wexlee seemed to realize that
after a moment.

“Do you need relief again?”

“Yes.”

She set the bowl down and found the gourd, then kneeled next to me. She
was dressed much like the previous day, and the position she was in gave
me a perfect view right down into her plump, wonderful cleavage.

When she took me in her hand, the proximity to her quickly had me erect.
But Wexlee, while clearly fascinated, did not seem upset by it as she’d been
yesterday. She aimed me into the gourd, and with no choice in the matter, I
filled it up.

She disposed of things and then came back, putting my clothes back in
order and starting to feed me breakfast. It was something akin to oatmeal.

“I didn’t mean to upset you yesterday,” I said.

Wexlee smiled, and once again, it broke me. The cuteness here was
terminal.

“Guldeek warned us that you would try to infect our minds.” Then the smile
faded a bit. “Alavara is even more angry with you this morning. She asked
Guldeek for permission to kill you.”

I tried not to let the twitch in my stomach show.

“What did he say?”

“He refused. He said we need you. She left the compound on her own not
long ago.”

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“She said to hunt.”

I exhaled. Maybe she would work out some of her rage that way.

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?” she replied.

“Why have you been the one feeding me?”

Wexlee smiled again. “Because I am the one who cooks. Also, I enjoy
feeding you. You . . . intrigue me, even though you are human.”

I took a deep breath.

“You intrigue me too, Wexlee.”

She fed me the rest of the oatmeal-stuff and set the bowl aside. Then she
leaned in toward me as she’d done before, and I was lost in her big daffodil-
yellow eyes.

“Do you have a mate?” she asked.

My heart stuttered for a moment.

“My memory is bad, as I told you. But no, not that I can recall.”

She continued staring at me.

“What do human women do with males they find intriguing?”

I took a deep breath. I knew I was taking a risk here, but I couldn’t help it.

“They kiss them.”

Wexlee’s eyes, if it were possible, somehow got even bigger. A moment

later, she leaned the rest of the way in and pressed her lips against mine.

I hadn’t kissed Alavara last night. We’d gone straight to the main event. So
at first, I wasn’t sure how goblins kissed, or if she even really understood
me.

But it seemed reasonably similar to humans.

Wexlee’s mouth opened, and our tongues came together. For a few
moments, we just kissed slowly and gently. Then she withdrew, smiling at
me again.

“Like that?”

“Yes.”

She glanced behind her at the door, then back at me.

“Please do not tell the others about this.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

She gathered up the bowl and left.

 Chapter 7

NOT LONG AFTER WEXLEE left, she returned with Guldeek and Nithriel.

Nithriel was holding the P86 and had on her camouflage gear from
yesterday. I realized a moment later that she also had my backpack over one
shoulder.

“I don’t mean to be bad guest,” I began, “but how long do you intend to
keep me tied up like this?”

Rather than answer me, Guldeek motioned to Wexlee, who came over and
untied me. I pulled my arms in, groaning at the stiffness in my muscles
from being restrained for so long.

“I have explained to them what we need from you,” he replied. “Alavara is

very upset with this, but I am sure she will come around eventually.”

I stood up, cracking a few joints.

“And what you need, is what we talked about? Repairing the reactor and
somehow getting electricity up here?”

“Correct,” he replied.

“What exactly are you hoping to do? What do you need power for?”

“Lighting, for one. It would be enormously helpful to have better

illumination here at night. Pumps for the water and a way to heat it, tools
for farming, many things of that nature. I know where you can find what we
need, but we have had no way to power anything. It was not what I was
trained in.”

“But you are skilled at this,” Nithriel said.

I nodded. “If I can’t do it, I doubt anyone could.”

Her emerald-green eyes glittered with interest. My knees went weak for a
moment.

“Of the three girls, Nithriel is the most talented with such things,” Guldeek
said. “It is possible she may be able to help you.”

“Okay. Good. Most of this will go easier with someone to help.”

Guldeek nodded to me, then began coughing. We waited for him to recover.

“Then you should go now. The infected are less active in the morning.”

I looked at Wexlee, but she put a hand on the old goblin’s back.

“I must stay with Guldeek.”

I didn’t need to ask why.

Nithriel stepped forward and handed me the rifle and my gear. I looked at
everything in mild surprise.

“If we cannot trust you with your weapon,” Guldeek said, “then we
certainly cannot trust you with any of the rest of it.”

“Thank you. And I do want to help you here.” I glanced at Nithriel and
Wexlee. “What you told me yesterday . . .”

The old goblin nodded with a subtle glint in his eye.

“Yes. I know. I am a light sleeper.”

Nithriel and I left the compound together.

“There are more of those rifles in the ship,” I said. “The extra power cells
and magazines I have will work with them, and there are more power cells
on the ship too. If I can get the reactor working again, we can charge more
of them.”

“But you said it could not be restarted without these parts you need.”

I had. But I’d been thinking about this last night after Alavara left me and I
was trying to process what had just happened. I realized I had been thinking
too much like an Imperial fleet technician who had procedures to follow
and protocols to respect, and not enough like someone in the situation I was
currently in.

The key problem was cooling the one functional gyrotron. I could not do it
without adding more coolant, which I didn’t have. Adding water would
cause the system to boil.

At least, it would in its current configuration.

But it had occurred to me that there were ways of preventing that. If I could
modify the system to add a large reservoir of coolant and increase the
coolant flow rate, I could keep the temperature below the boiling point. I
would need to manually change the pump speed, but since we would still be
well below full power, the system could handle it.

I explained all this to Nithriel as we descended the hill.

“May I help with it?” she asked.

“I’m actually going to need your help with a lot of it.”

She smiled excitedly up at me, and I had to tear my eyes away from her
face after a moment.

There were no infected around the ship when we reached it. There was a lot
we needed to do here, and after what Guldeek had said about the mornings
being the safest, I wanted to take care of the outside elements first.

I found a tactical buggy that seemed to be in the best condition. Its battery
and electrical system seemed to be in good order, even if it was dead. These
buggies were intended for extended use in the field far from any support, so
they were designed to be as reliable and low-maintenance as possible.

That made me confident we could get it going again, assuming I could

charge it up. They were lightweight and easy to maneuver, so with Nithriel
sitting in the driver’s seat steering and me pushing the back, we were able
to move it over next to the ship.

Then I needed to set up a way to recharge it. I helped Nithriel through the
hole in the hull and showed her what was inside.

The vehicle bay had multiple charging stations, but most of them were
damaged. One seemed serviceable, and there were also several charging
cables that had escaped the fire. By disconnecting the undamaged cables
and coupling them together to the one undamaged charging port, we were
able to reach outside to the buggy.

But the conduits in the vehicle bay were damaged, and I could not re-
energize them as they currently were. So we went forward to the stasis
compartments, and I spent about an hour disconnecting and demounting one
of the undamaged conduits.
“This is where you were?” Nithriel asked me as I worked. She’d been
sitting behind me handing me tools as I needed them.

I pointed to the compartment I had been inside.

“That’s it. I was here all this time,” I said. “Your whole life and more.”

“I cannot imagine it. You were asleep?”

“Not quite. Stasis is like . . . blinking your eyes, except the whole world
skips a beat while your eyes are closed.”

"Did you dream?” she asked.

“Nope.”

She sighed. “Why did your people destroy our world?”

“I know no more than you do. I’m sorry.”

“Do you think it was really because the human men wanted to mate with
goblin females?” she asked.

“It’s what Guldeek told me.”

“I would never mate with a human.” She looked up at me as I finally got the
conduit off. “Alavara said that if you try to mate with her, she will cut your
penis off.”

A chill shot through my groin. “I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

We dragged the demounted conduit back to the vehicle bay, and I used it to
replace one of the damaged ones. I checked everything over, and the
connections from the charging station to the switch in the reactor
compartment looked sound.
Now we had to set up my jury-rigged cooling system.

“We need a large container to hold the water?” Nithriel asked.

“Right. But there should be things we can use.”

By scavenging parts from the lounge and the engine room, we secured a big
metal tank and the additional tubing we needed. We filled the tank with
water from the purifiers. Then I got to work re-routing the cooling system
to use it.

But I couldn’t test any of it without power. So I had to go through the whole
bootstrap procedure again as Nithriel held the flashlight for me. When the
emergency panel came on, I checked the fuel level. It was essentially
unchanged, since I’d done no more than turn on the lights and charge a few
power cells.

I gradually brought the power up until there was enough to start the
gyrotron. Then I went into the system settings and reprogrammed the pump.

“Watch things carefully,” I said to Nithriel as I started it up. “If you see any
leaks, let me know.”

Nithriel’s mood had improved while we worked.

“I will!” she exclaimed.

The water began flowing. Nithriel reported no problems, so started the

gyrotron. I watched the temperature carefully, but unlike last time, it stayed
within spec.

The plasma had formed, and I continued the heating. The main control
panel came on. I went over to check the reservoir. I’d taken the top off the
tank because I wanted it to shed heat by evaporation. It was lukewarm at
best.
“Looks like It’s working,” I said.

Nithriel beamed. She came over to the control panel, and I tried to explain
what I was doing.

“When it gets hotter, I can start the reaction. That forces the fuel particles
together, which releases energy. Once that happens, it’s self-sustaining, and
the system will start generating power.”

“Then we can charge things?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

I checked the gyrotron again, and my jury-rig seemed to be working fine.

Using water in the cooling system over the long term would cause corrosion
damage, but I would be very lucky if we kept this thing running long
enough for that to become a problem.

Eventually the fusion reaction started, and we had power. I turned the
overhead lights on.

I collected the P86 rifles I’d found before, discarding the one I knew was
non-functional, and put four more power cells on to charge. Then we went
back to the vehicle bay.

“I’m going to go close the switch in the reactor compartment,” I told her,
“which is going to reenergize the charging station. If anything goes wrong, I
need you to tell me right away.”

“I understand.”

I told her what to look for if my repairs had worked. Then I went back and
threw the switch.

I listened for any explosions or arcing, but all I heard was Nithriel’s high-
pitched voice coming through the hatch.
“Kevin! I think it is working!”

I ran back to where she was standing by the charging station and pointing at
it excitedly. Sure enough, the display panel was it up, and the buggy was
taking current. I hopped down out of the hole to check on it. The dash was
on, and while it showed a zero-percent charge, it was charging. Somehow
the electronics had survived all this time.

I was so impressed with what we’d managed that I grabbed Nithriel and
kissed her before I realized what I was doing. She didn’t resist, but I let her
go after a moment.

“Sorry.”

I’d definitely taken her by surprise, but she didn’t seem upset. She looked
up at me.

“Is that what humans do when they are happy?”

“Sometimes.”

“I see.” She paused. “I did not mind it. But please do not try to mate with
me.”

“Uh, don’t worry.”

I left that alone for now. We went back to the reactor compartment, and I
checked things over again. The water in the tank was warmer but far below
boiling. Vapor was slowly rising from the surface, which was good. The
evaporation would help keep it from getting too hot. Just to be safe, I
propped open the hatches to get a breeze flowing through the compartment.

Since everything was working, I decided to direct a charge into the reactor
backup batteries, which would make the next startup far simpler and easier.
We were going to need to find more fuel anyway, and I might not be able to
do this again.

The reactor was running at eight percent power now, because charging the
batteries and the buggy was a much bigger drain than charging the rifle
power cells.

Was there enough fuel left to complete the charge? I wasn’t sure. But we’d
done all we could. There was nothing left to do but wait.

“This is all so fascinating,” Nithriel said. “Will you show me more? I have
been in here before, but I did not know what any of it is.”

“There’s not much else to see. Most of the ship is wrecked.”

But she insisted anyway, so I walked her around the engine room,
explaining how everything worked. There was another fusion reactor back
there, but it propelled the ship rather than generating power, and it was
irreparably damaged from the hit the ship had taken.

She listened raptly to everything I was saying, asking all sorts of random
questions. I wasn’t sure how much she really understood. She’d grown up
in world where none of this stuff had worked, and my getting some of it
going again had to seem like magic.

Eventually we sat down in the reactor compartment waiting for the buggy
charge to complete.

“Explain to me again how the reactor works,” she asked. “The bits of fuel
burn inside it?”

“Not quite.” I pondered how to explain particle physics to someone who

had grown up without any kind of formal education. “Basically, everything
in existence, you, me, and all the stuff around us, is made up of these tiny
things called ‘molecules.’ Molecules are composed of things called ‘atoms,’
which are even smaller. There are only a few types of atoms, but different
combinations of atoms can make many different molecules, which is what
makes everything else. Are you following me so far?”

Nithriel nodded rapidly. “Yes. I have a book about that.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I like to read books that explain things.” She paused. “But listening to
you is more interesting.”

I smiled. “Okay. To keep going, if you heat atoms hot enough, they start to
break apart into subatomic particles, electrons and the atomic nuclei. That
creates something called a plasma. That’s what’s going on inside the
reactor. It creates a plasma from atoms of hydrogen. Hydrogen and another
type of atom called oxygen are what make molecules of water.”

“I read about that too. The water, I mean.”

“Okay. So, if you keep heating the plasma, eventually the hydrogen atoms
will combine and turn into different atoms. The hydrogen turns into helium.
When the atoms combine, they release a lot of energy, and that energy heats
the plasma even further. If the conditions are right, the fusion process will
continue on its own as long as there’s enough hydrogen fuel to keep it
going. And what happens then is that another part of the reactor, the
thermoelectric conversion system, turns all that heat into electricity, which
what’s powering all the lights and charging the batteries.”

Nithriel looked up at me with thinly disguised awe.

“Thank you for explaining this. I understand now. The thing we fixed, that
is heating the plasma?”

“The gyrotron, right. It sends in waves of energy that stir up the particles.”

She took a deep breath.

“You are not what I expected when we found you and realized what you
are,” she said. “Guldeek has told us so many terrible things about the
humans. You do not seem terrible to me. You are interesting.”

My heart skipped a beat again. Nithriel had a different look from the other
two goblin girls, though she was just as beautiful. Her deep green hair and
emerald eyes made her seem darker and more exotic.

“If what Guldeek told me is correct, and I have no reason to doubt him,” I
replied, “the other humans who came here did do some terrible things.”

“All because the goblin females desired the human males?”

“That was the story he told me. But it makes sense.”

Nithriel shifted onto her knees and crawled a bit closer to me. My head
swam for a moment as I looked at her. She was so cute it almost hurt my
eyes.

“I can see why that would have happened,” she said. “Are all human males
as strong and smart and handsome as you?”

“Goblin females seem just as beautiful to me.”

She stared at me for a moment.

“Guldeek warned us you would say such things.”

“Wexlee and Alavara told me that too,” I said.

“They said you told them they were beautiful. I am not beautiful.”

“I’m sorry. But you are beautiful, to me.”

A look passed across her face that I couldn’t quite decipher.

“Alavara wants to kill you,” she said.

I spent a brief moment reliving last night, the pleasure so intense it had
almost broken my brain. I had no doubt that Alavara was struggling with
the aftermath of it too.

“I know,” I said. “Did she say why?”

“Only that you cannot be trusted and that you will corrupt us as those other
goblin females were corrupted.”

“I’m really not trying to do anything here but help you.”

She stared at me a moment longer, then sat back on her feet.

We were able to charge all the functional power cells by the time the buggy
was charged up. We now had four working rifles, twelve charged cells, and
eight full magazines. It wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing.

I’d gotten the backup batteries charged to about fifty percent as well, but the
reactor was now running on fumes. The fuel pressure had dropped to the
point that I had to start shutting things down immediately to avoid a plasma
disruption, which could damage the containment vessel.

“That’s it,” I said as the lights dimmed. “We’re done here.”

We walked back out to hole in the engine room. I lifted my rifle and
scanned the area for infected. I didn’t see anything. We’d been here the
entire morning, and I was hungry.

Nithriel and I loaded up the additional gear we were bringing back. In

addition to the rifles and power cells, I decided to take all the tools I could
find. I knew I was likely to need them. The next trip was to the
manufacturing facility, and there was no telling what I might find there.
When everything was packed, I started up the buggy. I drove it around the
ship and back toward the hill. Nithriel let out a squeal of glee as we got
moving. She held on tight to her seat but looked around, laughing in
excitement as the field flashed past us.

I couldn’t drive up the stream bed, but Nithriel directed me to another

approach to the compound around the other side of the hill that was wider
and less steep. We got there in a few minutes, pulling up in front of the
wall.

As soon as we stopped, Nithriel leaned over, grabbing my arms and pulling

me in to kiss her. This kiss went on longer, and our tongues came together.
Then she drew back.

“I am sorry, I am so happy, I must kiss you. Do not tell the others.”

Then she jumped out, laughing in glee as she bounced up to the gate.

“Guldeek! Alavara! Wexlee! Come see what we have!”

The gate opened, and Wexlee came running out. She stopped short when
she saw the buggy, and her jaw dropped in amazement.

“Look!” Nithriel cried. “Kevin made it work!”

“It works?”

“Yes! We came up here in it! It goes so fast!”

The two of them jumped around the buggy, laughing as Nithriel showed
Wexlee all the things we’d brought back. I tried, with limited success, to
keep from acting too proud of myself.

Then Alavara emerged from the gate with Guldeek on her arm. She shot me
a look of intense hatred before looking at the buggy.
“You restored the charge?” he asked me.

“It’s fully charged, and we have more rifles as well. How far is this place?”

“On foot, without the infected to worry about, perhaps two days.”

I did some math in my head. I had to guesstimate how far goblins could
walk, but I knew what kind of range the buggies had, and it was a lot more
than that.

“Unless the battery has lost a lot of capacity,” I said, “which it could have,
we should be able to get there and back easily.”

He nodded, but then began coughing. This fit went on longer than the
previous ones had, and it drained the excitement from the goblin girls.
Finally he stood back up, and I could tell he was trying to put on a brave
face for their sake.

“Excellent. Perhaps you will make it back before I expire.”

 Chapter 8

AS ALAVARA SULKED ON A ROCK nearby, staring daggers at me the entire time,

I showed Guldeek and Wexlee the stuff we’d brought back.

This particular buggy was a design specific to Detachment 686. It had once
had weapons mounted on it, but they’d been removed at some point. It had
four seats, each with a rack for a single rifle next to it. There was a charging
rack for the power cells, though I didn’t intend to use it for now.

The rear section had plenty of space for gear and a modular layout that
could be changed depending on what you were carrying. That meant I could
reconfigure it to hold all my tools securely, while leaving space for the food
and water we needed to bring.

The charge hadn’t dropped on our short trip up the hill, which was a good
sign.

“I guess this is the point where we need directions to this place,” I said to
Guldeek.

“I can draw you a map,” he replied, “though in truth it has been many years.
I know where it is, but we will need to discuss this so you understand what
you are looking for.”

I thought about that for a few moments. Only Guldeek had been there, and
it was pretty clear that he could not make the trip. Unless his map was
pretty detailed, this could be a problem.

Guldeek had taught the girls how to read and write, since they needed to be
able to read signs and labels and other things in this dying world in order to
scavenge effectively. So he had some paper to work with.

But when he started sketching out the directions, I began to get worried. It
wasn’t a simple route, and we were going to need to follow a series of
roads. As he drew, it became clear his memory was not as sharp as he had
hoped.

“This is going to be tricky,” I said.

“I am sorry. I wish it was easier. The girls will at least be able to follow the
signs on the road.”

“They’re not in Imperial standard?”

“Some are, some are not.”

I didn’t like this. We could get there in less than an hour if everything went
right. We could also take a wrong turn and wind up hopelessly lost.

Guldeek saw the concern in my face.

“There is no other way, I am afraid.”

I nodded.

“Let’s get packed. Maybe I’ll think of something.”

I half-expected Alavara to declare that she wanted nothing to do with this

expedition or me, but when Nithriel and Wexlee went into the compound to
gather their things, she followed silently behind them.

“That one will come around,” he said quietly.

“I hope so.”

“She was the one I heard last night? Visiting you?”

I looked at him. I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I will not pretend I am happy about this situation,” he went on. “I would
much prefer it if you were a goblin male. But you are not, and my time
remaining here is limited. I may live another year. I may die in my sleep
tonight. So I must do what I can to ensure the girls can survive.”

“They seem pretty capable to me,” I said.

But he shook his head. “Goblin females do not do well without a male.
They will forget what matters and fall to bickering over the most trivial
things.”

“Really? Human women can manage pretty well.”

“Unfortunately, it is almost certain they will not survive alone. But with a
male present, females remain focused. And with a human male, they will
not fight over you. It is already clear to me that they will be comfortable
sharing you.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“You can tell that?”

He nodded.

“Were you a goblin, they would be competing with each other for your
attention, perhaps even fighting over you. But they are not. Despite
Alavara’s behavior, they are working together. I can already see the
direction this is going. I saw it before, after all.”

Wexlee brought her cooking gear and a few days' worth of food. I brought
the ration packs as a backup, though after just a day of eating her cooking, I
sincerely hoped I would not need them.
Nithriel brought a little collection of tools, telling me that she had been the
one fixing things around the compound. Alavara spoke not a word to me
and just tossed her bag in the back.

I got into the buggy to check it over again and suddenly noticed something.
There was a Navigation tab on the display. I tapped it, and a terrain map
came up. There was already a destination loaded into the system, and a
thrill coursed through my gut.

I turned to Guldeek.

“Didn’t you tell me that Detachment 686 was targeting this facility?”

“Yes.”

I pointed to the screen. “Is that it?”

He leaned in, squinting at the display for a few moments. I used my fingers
to expand the route and panned around. Finally, he nodded.

“I believe so. Your map notation is different from ours, but that looks
right.”

I looked back at his map. The scales between the two were way off, but the
route seemed consistent. “We’ll use both.”

Nithriel hopped into the passenger seat with a big grin on her face. It was a
moment before I regained some composure.

“Are we going now?”

“I think tomorrow morning. I’d rather have the full day.”

“Oh. But it was so fun to ride in this.”

“I agree with Kevin,” Guldeek said. “Because there is another thing to
consider. You three have never used anything like those rifles.” He looked
at me. “I have shown such things to them, and they know how to hold and
handle them, but they have never fired one. Their first time should not be
when you encounter infected on this trip, as you surely will.”

“We don’t have a lot of ammunition,” I replied.

“I am aware of that, and you have nothing like what it would require for
them to become proficient. But a few shots will make a difference. And I
think it is highly likely that you will also come across more of your soldiers.
Some of them made it out of here, toward the facility. You should be able to
find more.”

He had a point, and I didn’t feel like arguing with him. I let him take the
lead, since he had far more experience with combat training than I did. So I
sat in the buggy watching as he walked the girls through it.

He spent about an hour showing them how to hold the rifles, which were a
bit big for them. He had them move around, squat with them, lie down, and
jump up again. He made them practice like that over and over until they all
had the basic idea.

I was less impressed with his obvious combat skills than I was with the
degree to which the girls followed his every instruction without the slightest
complaint or argument. It was pretty clear this wasn’t the first time he’d
trained them in things like this.

“Are there goblin weapons out there that they could use?” I asked at one
point.

“Unlikely,” he replied. “Whatever was there has long since been scavenged
and used. After the biological weapon was released, there was a long period
of fighting with the infected. We could not use your soldiers’ weapons
because we had no way to recharge them.”
“We’ve looked,” Nithriel said. “We’ve seen a few, but like he said, there’s
no ammo left anywhere.”

“Those weapons didn’t use power cells? What were they? Firearms?”

“Yes,” Guldeek said. “Our weapons technology was not as sophisticated as

yours. We prevailed because your emperor was overconfident, and we were
fighting for our homes. But the price was high, as you have seen.”

He went over aiming and shooting after that. Eventually he let the girls take
a few shots at a target he set up on a nearby tree. They did better than I’d
expected, but I knew things would be different when we were in an actual
fight. There was only so much you could practice.

Afterward, Wexlee showed me their little farm. It was in a relatively flat

spot further up the stream, just past the outhouse. Not far from the outhouse
was a fragrant brown heap that looked like a mix of kitchen scraps, rotten
leaves, and other wastes that had probably been excavated from the
outhouse.

My suspicions were correct. Wexlee explained to me that they were

composting their waste and other debris.

“I can see why you want to mechanize this,” I said.

“Yes. Maintaining the compost not the most pleasant task, though it is
necessary. There are farm vehicles down the village that we could use to
help raise more food, if we could get them working. But this is the most we
can manage now.”
The garden consisted of about eight or ten rows of different vegetables,
some growing in wooden frames, some just on the ground. Having some
kind of tractor would make this a lot easier.

“What would you do?” I asked.

“There are grains we could grow, but we would need much more space to
make it worth doing. For now, I can only harvest the wild grains I find.”

I could see the potential, and I wanted to help them. But one thing at a time.

That night I ate with the rest of them in the big building across the stream
from the shed where they all lived. Wexlee made another stew from some
vegetables and the meat from whatever Alavara had caught that morning.

“It’s good,” I said to Wexlee. “You’re a good cook.”

She just smiled at me.

“What are those food packs you brought from the ship?” Nithriel asked.

“They’re designed to stay edible for a long time, but not necessarily taste
good. And they don’t.”

“Could we try one?” Wexlee asked.

“You don’t want to, believe me.”

“I would like to,” Nithriel said.

I shook my head. “Okay.”

I walked out and got one, returning to the table and setting it down. It was
supposedly a beef and noodle casserole, but I’d had one already, and it had
a taste and texture that was closer to raw dog shit.
“There you go.”

Nithriel picked it up. She and Wexlee examined it. I showed them how to
open it up, and Nithriel did.

They sniffed it, wrinkling their cute little goblin noses in a way that made
my heart stop. Then Nithriel scooped out a blob of it on her finger and
tasted it. I waited for the explosion of distaste.

But instead she worked it around her mouth for a moment, and dug out
another finger-full. Then she looked up, smiling.

“I like it.”

“Let me try,” Wexlee said.

Nithriel handed it to her. Wexlee tasted it and made a face.

“Oh.” She set it down. “I do not like it.”

“I think it’s good,” Nithriel replied.

“Let me try,” Alavara said. Those were the first words she’d spoken since
we sat down.

Nithriel handled her the ration pack. She gingerly tasted a bit on her finger
and considered it for a few long moments.

“This is what humans eat?” she asked me.

“Not if we can help it.”

She handed it back to Nithriel, who proceeded to finish the whole thing off.
Then she looked back to me in anticipation.

“You are bringing more of these?”

Wexlee made a noise of distaste.

“Yeah, I have more,” I said.

After dinner, with Guldeek watching them, Wexlee and Nithriel set up a
makeshift bed for me in the main room, laying out a pile of blankets and
random cushions on the floor. I’d spent a cold, uncomfortable night in the
shed, and slightly less cold, uncomfortable night in the ship, so I was happy
with it, however ramshackle it might be.

The girls shared a single room on the second floor, while Guldeek had
another, smaller one. Wexlee showed me where they did their business in a
little outhouse outside the compound. They also had a little bathtub around
one side, and while the water was quite cold, it worked. Then we all went to
bed.

Given what had happened the night before, I fully expected that I was not
going to get an uninterrupted night’s rest, but I was tired enough that I
dropped off quickly.

As before, something drew me out of my sleep. My eyes opened. There was

a dim light in the corner of the room. I looked up to see Wexlee kneeling
next to me, her golden hair glinting in the light of the lantern.

She’d probably been sitting there for a while watching me, but she gasped
softly as she realized I was awake. She was out of her usual clothes and
wore only a thin white nightgown-thing. It was strapless and concealed very
little. Her big breasts thrust out against it, and her firm, dark-green nipples
were visible through the fabric.
“I did not mean to wake you,” she whispered.

I looked up into her painfully beautiful face and daffodil eyes. I wanted to
pull her down to me and kiss her again. But I was fairly certain she would
let me, and I knew what it would lead to. It couldn’t happen here, not with
the others right upstairs.

But I couldn’t stop myself.

I reached out, cupping one of her breasts. I knew what to expect after
Alavara the night before, but I still felt an existential tug in my gut. How
was this possible? How was she so soft, yet so firm at the same time? Even
through the fabric, she was the silkiest, most wonderful thing I’d ever felt.

Wexlee gasped again, but she did nothing to stop me. I caressed her gently,
rubbing my thumb against the nipple. I felt it stiffening and extending
further out.

She sat there silent and motionless as I touched her. I reached for her other
breast, getting the nipple as stiff as the first. I heard her breath deepening.

Then a voice from the stairs blew it all apart.

“Wexlee!” Alavara cried. “What are you doing?”

I jerked back my hand as Wexlee jumped to her feet.

“Nothing!” she hissed. “I heard a noise.”

I shifted around on the cushions in an attempt to hide what we’d been

doing.

“I, uh, I was snoring,” I said. “Sorry.”

Alavara glared at me, then at Wexlee. The golden-haired goblin went the
stairs, standing in front of her.
“It was nothing,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

“Are you coming up?”

“Yes. Go.”

Shooting me a final glare, Alavara went. But she went slowly enough to
make sure Wexlee was following her. Then they were gone.

I lay awake for a while, but no one else bothered me.

 Chapter 9

IN THE MORNING, AFTER a breakfast of Wexlee’s oatmeal, we got ready to

leave.

The girls got geared up in their camouflage outfits and hoods. I hadn’t
gotten a close look the first day, but they were also carrying hand weapons
– knives at their belts and blades like short swords over their backs.
Guldeek explained that he had trained them in melee combat, since they had
no firearms.

“Do you really need those hoods?” I asked.

“Why?” Alavara snapped at me. “They help us hide.”

Wexlee pulled hers off, revealing a broad smile. “But Kevin likes to see our
faces.”

Nithriel yanked hers off as well, but Alavara just stood there, not moving.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

Wexlee turned to Guldeek.

“You will be all right?” she asked. “I am worried. I left you plenty to eat.
You must be careful.”

The old goblin nodded to her. “Focus on returning quickly, if you are
concerned. I can survive on my own for a few days.”
We got into the buggy, and I checked things over one last time. Nithriel sat
next to me while Alavara and Wexlee got into the rear seats.

“Good luck,” Guldeek said.

We descended the hill the same way Nithriel and I had come up. Nithriel
and Wexlee laughed and squealed in excitement as I drove, while Alavara
sat silent and unmoving in her seat.

The navigation system seemed to be working fine. The directions wanted to

take us close to the village, but I was going to avoid that if I could.

I saw the route we were taking ahead of us. There were infected walking
around the village, and several of them began pursuing us, but we were
going much too fast for them to catch up.

By circling the village, I reached the road we were supposed to follow. It

was not in great shape. It looked like it was composed of some kind of
concrete or composite, which was now cracked and crumbling. Weeds and
other plants grew up between the cracks.

The poor condition of the road limited the speed we could travel.
Fortunately, there were relatively few abandoned vehicles to maneuver
around. Whatever had happened here after the Imperial fleet had deployed
that weapon, the goblins hadn’t gotten caught on the road.

But there had been fighting. After traveling a couple of kilometers, we

came upon what looked like a fire-fight between the marines and the goblin
troops. There were about half a dozen wrecked vehicles, two buggies and
four of the low, dark goblin transports.

I stopped just short of the wrecks.

“We’ve been here before,” Alavara said behind me. “There’s nothing.”

“Were you looking for human weapons?”

“No,” Nithriel said.

I hopped out, taking my rifle and looking around. The girls got out behind
me, scanning the area quickly.

“I don’t see any infected,” Wexlee said

“This shouldn’t take long,” I said.

There were seven or eight human bodies. Whatever this group had been
doing, they didn’t seem to have made it any further than this. I found five
magazines that still had rounds in them. One was full, the rest only partially.
They’d clearly shot through most of their ammunition in this fight. It wasn’t
much, but it would help.

Then I noticed something on one of the buggies. There was a squad weapon
mounted on the front passenger side, and it appeared to be undamaged.

It wasn’t a railgun like the P86s. It was an anti-vehicular laser, and looking
around again, I realized that it was probably what had taken out the goblin
transports.

Would it still work after being exposed all this time? I remembered that
these things, which were called MAVFLWs or “maffles” by the marines –
short for medium anti-vehicular field laser weapon – were quite rugged and
designed for heavy use and abuse in situations like this.

As Nithriel watched raptly, I demounted it and carried it over to our buggy.

It fit right onto a pintle mount in front, and a heavy cable plugged into a
socket underneath.

As soon as I connected the cable, a light on the laser came on, and a
message popped up on the buggy dash confirming that it was connected. No
error messages appeared.
“What is that?” Nithriel asked, wide-eyed.

“Did Guldeek ever explain lasers to you?”

“No. What are they?”

I tried to explain briefly, pointing to the damage on the goblin transports.

“Does it work?” she asked.

“It seems to.” The laser drew power from the buggy’s battery, so I didn’t
want to waste it. But we needed to know. It might appear to be functional,
only to melt down the first time we tried to fire it. Better to know now.

The laser had a variable output, so I turned it down as far as I could. Then I
aimed it at one of the transports and depressed the firing button. There was
a hum, followed by a flash on the transport as a hole burst open in the
exterior.

Nithriel gasped in excitement, and Wexlee laughed as well.

“Is that what it does?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But it draws power from the battery, so let’s not waste it.”

We got back into the buggy. I had to leave the road to get around the
wreckage, but soon we were on our way again.

After another couple of kilometers, we reached a larger road we had to turn

onto. Guldeek’s map and the navigation system agreed here.

This road was in better condition, but there were more abandoned vehicles,
most of which had pulled over to the side as if they’d run out of fuel. All of
them bore signs of having been scavenged and picked over, so we
continued.
The vehicles we passed had the goblin design I was getting used to, the
same embellishments as the houses and other things I’d seen. It appeared
that goblin society had devoted a great deal of effort to adorning their
possessions with all sorts of pointless – well, pointless to a human, anyway
– doo-dads and decorations.

We’d gone barely a kilometer further when I saw something troubling up

ahead. We were approaching some kind of ravine or gully, and the road
seemed to disappear. When we reached it, I saw why. There was a bridge
that had collapsed.

We got out and went up to the edge. It was hard to tell what had caused the
bridge to collapse, because it looked like it had gone down a while ago. I
didn’t see any clear signs that it had been attacked, or maybe blown up
deliberately, but it didn’t really matter.

“What do we do?” Wexlee asked.

I looked back and forth along the ravine. It was too steep to drive down
there, but the river at the bottom looked shallow enough for the buggy to
ford. We just had to find a place to do it.

I went back to the navigation system and panned around on the aerial view.
It looked as if we could cross downstream not too far away, where there
was a small village. I couldn’t see that direction because there were trees
filling the ravine, but it wouldn’t be hard to check.

I explained to the girls what I had in mind.

“This can drive through water?” Alavara asked, speaking for the first time
since we stopped at the firefight.

“As long as it’s not too deep and fast.”

We left the road, and I followed the edge of the ravine through a field for a
little ways. As we rounded a bend the field gave way to a cluster of small
buildings. The ravine was shallower here, and I could see a place to get
across it.

But as we turned down a narrow road into the village, we came upon a
group of infected. All of them appeared to be goblins.

I started to turn around before realizing that there was no room. We would
have to back up, and the infected were running toward us.

I grabbed my rifle and got out. The girls all jumped out and grabbed theirs.
I aimed at the center of the group and began firing.

The inertia of my first couple of fights was gone, and in the back of my
mind, something told me it was the influence of the goblin girls being near
me. The imperative to protect them blew through any hesitation I had.

I dropped two infected as the shots began around me. Alavara stepped up
beside me, holding her rifle out just like Guldeek had taught them. On the
other side, Wexlee and Nithriel were doing the same, taking the slow,
careful shots he had warned them to take due to their inexperience with
weapons like these.

Six or eight infected were charging us, but we shot them all down in a few
seconds. I turned to the girls, regarding them in mild amazement.

Alavara glared up at me as she seemed to sense what I was thinking.

“We have fought infected many more times than you have.”

Well, that was no doubt true, and it made perfect sense. Fighting them hand-
to-hand had to be more stressful than just shooting them.

I nodded. “Those shots could bring others. Let’s go.”

We jumped back in the buggy. I stowed my rifle, but the girls kept theirs
out, looking around us for more infected. I steered the buggy onto the slope
into the ravine, angling it so we could get down easier.

The stream here was broader but still shallow. There were rocks to
maneuver around, but the buggy had no trouble getting through the water
and up the other side.

I slowed down near the top, turning again so we wouldn’t just pop up over
the edge, in case there were any nasty surprises waiting. But there was
nothing on the other side except more fields, and I turned us back toward
the road.

We passed another little group of infected once we reached the road, but I
avoided them easily. Not long afterward, we began seeing more stopped
vehicles, and we had to slow down again. It soon became clear that we had
come upon some kind of traffic jam.

I steered off the road, but there were vehicles along the side and even in the
fields. As we continued, I finally saw the cause of the blockage. Two large
vehicles – cargo transports of some kind – had crashed here, blocking the
entire highway. A lot of smaller vehicles had tried to drive around the
wreckage, and some appeared to have gotten stuck in the fields.

“Have you guys been this far?”

“No,” Nithriel said. “But I have seen vehicles like those. They often have
things inside that are worth taking.”

“There could be infected here,” Alavara said.

I saw nothing, and we appeared to be well away from any settlements. So I

got out, and the girls followed.

One of the transports was on its side, while the other had broken open in the
crash. That one had been picked over, as it looked nearly empty except for a
lot of debris and empty boxes. Both of them, despite being commercial
vehicles, were even more wildly decorated than the smaller ones around
them. I had to assume it was some attempt at one-upmanship between the
goblin merchants.

The transport on its side was intact and secured. There were signs of
attempts at forcing the cargo doors, but they’d been unsuccessful. What
appeared to be the locking mechanism was badly damaged but still closed.

“Could we use the laser?” Nithriel asked.

“That is not a bad idea,” I said.

I drove the buggy over until I had a clear shot. I positioned it at an angle so
I wouldn’t shoot through the door and hit whatever was inside. Then I
aimed carefully and depressed the trigger.

The lock mechanism flashed and erupted in molten metal. But I’d had the
laser on the lowest setting, and it still seemed intact. I fired again, and this
time the whole thing burst apart.

The lock was gone, but I still had to use one of my tools to pry the door,
because it was damaged from previous attempts to break inside. I quickly
got it open. The door fell down to the ground, and a pile of boxes tumbled
out.

I cut into one of them. Inside was a collection of clothes – what appeared to
be women’s tops. The girls began looking through them. I opened more of
the boxes, and it was pretty much all the same. The transport had been
carrying a selection of goblin clothes, which were all sealed up like brand
new.

Goblin women and human women apparently shared certain traits, because
the girls began excitedly going through all the boxes looking for things that
might fit them. I stood back and let them look while I watched for infected.

“We shouldn’t take too much time here,” I said.

But they weren’t listening to me, and I reminded myself that these girls had
grown up in a ruined wasteland. The concept of “new clothes” was mostly
alien to them. So I figured we could spare fifteen minutes for this.

I watched the perimeter for a minute or two before glancing back at them.
My eyes bugged out for a moment. Wexlee and Nithriel had stripped their
camouflage suits down to their waists and taken off their tops. They were
both standing there bare-breasted as they sorted through a box of colorful
outfits.

Alavara had been looking through the clothes herself, if with less
enthusiasm. She’d taken her hood off but nothing else. Then she saw me
staring at the other two girls, watching their big breasts bounce around as
they went through the boxes.

She threw the top she’d been holding at them.

“You buttholes! Cover yourselves!”

“Why?” Wexlee asked.

“Kevin is looking at you!”

Wexlee and Nithriel looked in my direction but made no move to cover

their chests. Instead, both of them smiled at me.

Alavara let out a cry of rage and threw herself at them. A moment later, the
girls were wrestling around in the pile of clothes and boxes, screeching
angrily at each other.

“Kevin has corrupted you both!” Alavara shrieked.

“Get off me, you bilarq!” Nithriel yelled.

I ran over and grabbed Alavara around the waist, pulling her off the other
two and carrying her away. She screeched again, flailing her arms and legs
trying to get free. Then she twisted in my grasp, and I briefly lost my hold
on her. She slipped down into my arms until I was holding her against my
chest, and she wrapped her legs around my waist.

That left her in almost the same position we’d been in the other night.

We looked at each other, and I could see in her face that she was thinking
the exact thing that I was. I felt the warmth of her body and the soft
pressure of her breasts. Her face began to tremble as I stared into those big
amethyst eyes in front of me.

“Put me down,” she managed.

“Are you going to behave?”

“Yes.”

So I did.

Alavara backed away, clearly flustered but no longer enraged. I looked over
at Wexlee and Nithriel, who were getting to their feet.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Nithriel said. She looked at Alavara. “What is the matter with you?”

“Just finish what you’re doing and get dressed,” the purple-haired girl shot
back.

I let them pack up some outfits in the back, making sure we still had room
for other stuff we might find. Nithriel had put on one of the new tops,
something akin to a sports bra, but had not closed up her jumpsuit. She
stuck out her chest at me.

“I like it!”
“I like it, too,” I said, trying to concentrate on the road.

“I wonder what else we will find,” Wexlee said.

“Just keep your clothes on next time,” Alavara muttered.

 Chapter 10

ONCE WE WERE PAST THE massive pile-up around the two transports, the road
cleared up again, and we were able to go faster. After about five kilometers,
we reached the next turn. Guldeek’s map was unclear here, but the
navigation insisted we needed to change onto another road.

I stopped and compared the route ahead to the map, and concluded that the
navigation was correct. This was an even larger highway, but there were
comparatively fewer abandoned vehicles, as if the goblins who had been
using this road during the war got where they were going before things
collapsed.

I was becoming intrigued that we’d seen nothing but infected – no other
goblin survivors at all. I remarked on it to the girls.

“We have seen no one in years,” Wexlee said. “The last time it was a family
we encountered in the village.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“We traded some things with them,” Nithriel said.

“Alavara wanted to kill them,” Wexlee said. “But Guldeek said no.”

I looked back at Alavara.

“Why?”

“What does it matter to you? Humans killed far more of us.”

“Kevin did not kill anyone,” Wexlee said.

“He would have.”

The other two girls looked at me.

“Would you have, Kevin?” Nithriel asked.

“I was a technician, remember. Not a soldier.”

“See!” Wexlee said.

Alavara made an unpleasant noise.

“Guldeek said there were other pockets of survivors like you,” I said.

“Yes,” Wexlee replied. “That family was one. Guldeek said they lived not
far away from us, but they did not return. He thinks there are others, but we
have not seen them.”

“He also said there were no other goblin males nearby.”

“No,” Nithriel said. “That family was a male and his mate, and two
daughters who were younger than us.”

It was pretty clear now why they were all so angry about things. This world
was hanging by a thread.

“What is that word you keep using with each other,” I asked. “Bill-ark, or
whatever it is?”

“Bilarq,” Alavara muttered.

“What is it?”
Nithriel turned to me. “They are creatures that live in the fish pond. They
are soft and slimy, and about the size of my hand.”

“They eat the fish poop to keep the pond clean,” Wexlee said.

I nodded. “Makes sense.”

We came upon the aftermath of another firefight between Detachment 686

and the goblins. This was much like the first, except the marines appeared
to have been ambushed. The two buggies looked as if they had been hit by
some sort of missile or explosive device, and most of the marines had died
right away.

It was a bit of a depressing sight for me, at least until I realized that the
marines had died without having a chance to shoot back – which meant they
still had a lot of ammunition. We collected four bandoliers of unused
magazines, and a bunch of others that were half-full.

As I was digging around in one of the buggies, I found something else in a

plastic crate – two gray cylinders that were about a meter long and maybe
100 cm in diameter. I recognized them as Razorblade guided missiles,
portable anti-vehicle and anti-fortification weapons.

Other than having dead batteries in their guidance systems, they were in
pristine condition from having been sealed up in the crate all this time. I
moved the crate over to our buggy. There was a charging port for this sort
of thing in the back, and after finding the missile charging cables, I plugged
them in to recharge. I had no idea if we would ever need something like
this, but I didn’t want to leave them.

The highway eventually entered a city that was much larger than the village
by the compound. It was like driving through a forest of fairy-tale castles,
every building more elaborate and fanciful than the last. It almost began to
feel as I was in an amusement park, though once again, the memories
behind those feelings were out of reach.
We saw packs of infected, but I was able to avoid them. Eventually we
reached the point where we had to turn off onto a smaller road into the city.

The charge on the buggy’s battery was holding steady, and we still had
almost four hundred kilometers of range left, even after using the laser
several times. I was beginning to hope that we could reach the facility
without much more trouble.

The road we turned onto was as wide as the first highway we’d traveled, but
it passed through a fairly dense urban area. Almost as soon as we left the
highway, infected began emerging from the ruins on either side, trying to
chase after us.

“This may get a little tricky,” I said. “Get your rifles ready.”

“Can I use the laser?” Nithriel asked with a hopeful gleam in her eyes.

I groaned. “Maybe. But only if I tell you to.”

Somehow, the commotion behind us started to draw infected into the street
ahead of us. There was plenty of open space to maneuver, and I was able to
avoid them at first. But then we came upon a multi-car wreck, and six or
eight infected were blocking the only path around it.

“Turn up the power!” I yelled at Nithriel. “That knob on the left side!”

She looked around it, putting her cute little green fingers on the knob. “This
one?”

“Yes! Twist it all the way forward and start shooting!”

She turned up the power, then grabbed the laser and aimed it ahead of us. A
moment later, she fired into the clump of infected. One of them exploded as
the heat from the laser blew it apart. The others around it staggered away,
but a couple of them were still blocking us.
Then there were several shots over my head, and I realized that Alavara was
standing up in her seat shooting ahead of us. The infected dropped to their
knees, and I finished them off by running right over them.

“Ha! Ha!” Nithriel cried as the buggy went bump-bump over the bodies.
“Die, infected!”

I drove around the wreck and looked behind me. Alavara and Wexlee were
both standing up, holding onto the roll bar over the top and pointing their
rifles forward.

“Stay up there,” I said. “There may be more of them.”

“We will,” Alavara said.

I raced down the road. The navigation screen told me we had only ten
kilometers to go, but I was under no illusions that this would be easy. And
sure enough, the sudden activity after what had to be so many years of quiet
seemed to be drawing every infected in the city.

“They are chasing us!” Alavara yelled a minute later.

“What, behind us?”

“Yes! Every infected we have passed is following!”

I slowed down just enough to look. She wasn’t exaggerating. I saw a mob
of them back there, what had to be at least a hundred.

“We should be able to lose them,” I said.

“The infected can track you,” Nithriel said.

“What?”
“If an infected sees you, and you do not kill it, it will follow you. If other
infected see it tracking you, they will follow it as well.”

The implications began to dawn on me. I thought back to that first night
after I’d awakened. I’d left those two infected alive. They’d tracked me
back to the ship and brought others. But then I’d killed them all, which was
why they hadn’t followed me up to the compound.

“They’re all going to follow us?” I yelled.

“If they see where we go!” Alavara replied.

All right, then we could address that. I looked down at the charge on the
battery. It hadn’t dropped much from the last time I looked. I hit the brakes
and spun around until we were facing the mob.

“What are you doing?” Alavara shrieked.

I turned to Nithriel. “That laser has a long enough range to hit them from
here. Start shooting.”

Her intensely adorable face went slack in surprise for just a moment. Then
she turned to the laser, grabbed onto it, and aimed back at the mob. The
laser hummed, and I saw the front line of infected fly apart.

I watched the charge carefully as she fired. Each shot seemed to drop it by
one or two percent. When she’d fired about ten times, and the mob seemed
seriously disrupted, I started the buggy up again and spun around, racing off
in the other direction.

Nithriel cackled. “I like that!”

“Good shooting.”

She jumped out of her seat and into mine, kissing me. Alavara screeched in
outrage.
“What are you doing?”

“I am happy, so I am kissing Kevin! It what humans do!”

“You are not human!”

“I kissed Kevin too!" Wexlee yelled, laughing loudly.

“What?!” Alavara yelled back.

“When?” Nithriel asked.

“When I was feeding him.”

“I hate you!” Alavara shrieked. “I hate all of you!”

“Then you should kiss Kevin, and you will be happy,” Nithriel said.

Wexlee laughed, but Alavara just screamed into the sky.

We’d done some damage, but the infected were still coming after us and
still coming out as we passed. The navigation system told me to turn up
ahead, and I was too focused on driving to bother with Guldeek’s map.

We turned onto a broader street, and the system said the facility was only
two kilometers away. The street was mostly clear, and I was going fast
enough to stay far ahead of the infected chasing us.

In a minute or two, I saw the facility. It was a huge compound surrounded

by a three-meter-high wall made from close-spaced metal posts that were
painted in an insane kaleidoscope of colors. Beyond the fence was a whole
array of ornate, multi-colored buildings, a lot more than I’d expected. I
hadn’t really been sure what we were getting into, but I realized that
searching this place would not be simple.
First we had to get into it, though.

Up ahead was the front gate, and it showed no signs of having been
breached. Why? Was there nothing in there anyone would have wanted to
scavenge? Or was it too hard to get in?

If it was the latter, we might be in serious trouble.

I turned into the entrance. There was a big gate built just like the fence,
except that it was mounted into a track so it could slide open and closed.

All I had to do was open it before the infected caught up with us.

“Kevin?” Nithriel asked with an edge of concern in her voice.

“They are still coming,” Alavara added.

I jumped out and ran up to the gate. There was no way any of us were
climbing over this thing. It seemed to have been designed specifically to
prevent people from climbing. Opening it with whatever system controlled
it was a non-starter without power.

I looked down along the base, trying to see what kept it closed. As near as I
could tell, it was some kind of electromagnet along the bottom that
controlled the whole thing.

An electromagnet would be dead now. It would not be holding it closed. I

grabbed the gate and tried to move it, but it wouldn’t budge. Something else
was holding it place.

“Kevin?” Wexlee asked.

I saw the locking mechanism at the right end of the gate, where it slid back
along the fence. There was a metal bar that appeared to be preventing it
from opening. It was likely a fail-safe to keep the gate locked in case power
was lost. Nothing else could be doing it.
I ran back to the buggy, grabbing Nithriel and lifting her bodily out of her
seat. As she squeaked in surprise, I jumped in, got behind the laser, and
aimed it at the metal bar.

Two shots blew it apart. I leapt out, running back to the gate. I leaned
against it, and with a loud squeak, began to move.

“Drive it through!” I yelled.

Nithriel jumped back into the buggy. It was still on, and she’d been
watching me drive. She could barely reach anything, but as I rolled the gate
backwards, she got it moving. It lurched forward, and she steered it through
the gap I’d opened.

The moment the buggy was inside, I began pushing the gate closed. The
only problem was keeping it that way. The mob of infected was still chasing
us, and they were no more than a hundred meters away. The noise we’d
made was drawing more from nearby.

I got back into the buggy and backed it up against the gate. The frame
bounced against the metal rails but stayed put. The gate wasn’t moving for
now. But I had to find something that would last.

The three girls jumped out, running around me.

“What should we do?” Alavara asked.

“We need something to secure the gate,” I said. “Anything we can keep it
closed with. We can’t leave the buggy here.”

“What about those?” Nithriel asked, pointing behind me.

Beyond the gate was a broad open area that must have once served as a
parking lot. And there were still a few vehicles here. Not a lot of them, but
maybe enough to wedge the gate shut.
The infected had arrived. They ran forward against the gate, slamming into
it but stopping. They reached through, grasping for us and trying to get past,
but it was holding for now. The rails were set closely enough that they
weren’t getting through it or over it. We just had to keep it shut.

I went over to the nearest vehicle. It was a little goblin-sized car that would
have seated two of them. I opened it up, and I wasn’t sure what I was
looking at. The controls were not like the buggy, with a steering wheel and
pedals. There was just a single long stick in front of the right seat.

“Any idea how this works?”

“The stick moved it,” Nithriel said. “That is what Guldeek told us.”

“Get in,” I said. She did. I turned to Alavara and Wexlee. “Help me push
this, if we can.”

The car had been sitting there for a very long time and didn’t want to move
at first. But it also wasn’t very big. After a few attempts, I finally got it
moving with a single big heave. Then it rolled forward, and while Nithriel
had trouble at first, we gradually moved it over to the gate and wedged
against the back.

“Are you sure this is this enough?” Alavara asked.

“No. So let’s get another.”

We moved another car over against the gate, wedging it against the rails like
the buggy was. Then I moved the buggy out of the way. Just to be safe, we
used the buggy to push a third one against the first one.

I walked around, doing my best to avoid the infected, checking to be sure

the gate was secure. The gate itself was still in good shape. As near as I
could tell, the only way to open it was sliding it along the track. And with
three vehicles blocking it, there was no way the infected could get it open.
They were trying, though. Several hundred had arrived now, and more were
coming because of the noise all this was making.

The only saving grace I could see was that they weren’t working together.
Each one of them was singularly focused on coming after us, but they
weren’t helping each other. That was good. A hundred of them together
might be enough to open the gate.

That thought induced me to wedge three more against it.

“That’s about all we can do, I think,” I told the girls when we were done.

Nithriel and Wexlee each took one of my arms and hugged it against their
wonderfully plump breasts.

“So we have made it here safely?” Nithriel asked.

I nodded. “Looks like it. So let’s see what’s in here.”

We drove an entire circuit of the facility, staying along the fence. I wanted
to make sure it was still intact, which it was. The infected tried to follow us,
but that was good because it spread them out instead of having a single
huge mob against the gate.

Getting out of here was going to be a challenge, but I would cross that
bridge later. We found two more gates like the first one, both locked up.

The facility comprised three vast buildings that looked like manufacturing
floors, a big round building in the center, and a scattering of smaller
buildings that looked like random offices, storage, and support. The round
building was surmounted by an enormous gold dome topped with a
towering silver-and-red spiral. I suspected that that was the fusion reactor
Guldeek had mentioned, and I was right.
We parked beside it and walked in. I’d been concerned it might be locked
up, but it wasn’t. As soon as we entered the building, I recognized the
elements of a fusion power plant. I didn’t quite recognize everything, but I
saw enough to know what I was looking at.

“This is it,” I said. “This is the reactor.”

“The parts you need are here?” Wexlee asked.

“Some of them, maybe. But this is where they would be.”

The place was dim but not completely dark. There were windows along the
top that let in enough light to see the main floor. We had to break out my
flashlight when we went further as I searched for the control room.

There were signs, and they were in Imperial Standard. Eventually I spotted
a directory that pointed us up a couple of floors. Unlike the homes in the
village, the ceilings here were high enough that I didn’t have to stoop.

We found the control room behind a big door. There were windows, enough
to see by. I shut off the flashlight.

“Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

 Chapter 11

IT WAS OBVIOUS THAT THE plant had been shut down in an orderly fashion, not
abandoned in some great panic. There was no sign of chaos, no debris or
overturned chairs. So it was possible this place still worked.

The problem, however, was that the design wasn’t anything I was familiar
with. I had a vague idea of what I was looking at, but not enough to just
start everything up.

Did goblin engineers have the kind of procedure manuals that human
engineers had? Something told they must have. Certain things were
universal – engineers everywhere loved dense documentation for
everything they did.

And sure enough, we found them in a cabinet after about five minutes of
searching. Unfortunately, they were all in Goblin.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered.

Nithriel pressed herself against me. “I can read them for you.”

“Okay, yeah, maybe. But we need a plan of attack here. We may not
actually need to do this. We know all this is here. Let’s keep looking
around.”

We returned to the outside and continued exploring. At least in the sense of

electronic and electrical components, we’d hit the jackpot.

This place seemed to be some kind of broad-scale manufacturing facility for

an entire industrial sector. We saw nothing that looked like finished
consumer products – rather, it was all parts, large and small.

There were multiple production lines across the three main buildings. The
large, heavy stuff was in one, the small electronics were in another, and the
third looked like some kind of integration facility where parts were
assembled into more complex components, but still things that looked like
parts of something larger.

There was no mystery why the Empire wanted to capture this place intact,
nor why the operators had closed it up carefully rather than abandoning it in
a rush. It had the look of having been closed up one day and mothballed, as
if the workers had gone home and not returned, and those who were left had
withdrawn expecting to come back.

It made some sense. Once the imperial attack had begun, the average
workers would probably have stopped showing up for work, but the senior
managers in charge of the place would have known what needed to be done
to secure things. While they could have just abandoned the place, and some
of them probably had, it appeared that enough of them had some sense of
responsibility to close things up in good order.

I explained my theory to the girls. Alavara said nothing as usual, while

Nithriel agreed with me about what must have happened.

We searched the large-scale manufacturing facility first, and eventually I

found what looked like the sorts of heavy cables we needed. The problem
was that they were in kilometer-long spools that had to weigh several tons.

We were going to need to think about that one – the buggy could never
carry or even tow anything like that, and that was assuming we could even
get it onto a trailer of some sort. There were cargo-handling machines, but
they were all shut down and would need to be recharged.

I was examining one of them when Wexlee let out a high-pitched cry.

“Kevin!”
I spun around. Two goblin infected were running toward us down the
production line. I raised my rifle, but Alavara was in the way, and she’d
momentarily set hers down.

Before I could get a clear shot, Alavara drew the sword on her back and
leapt sideways onto one of the loaders, springing off of it toward the
infected. She slashed her blade across its throat, and orange-green goop
erupted from the gaping wound in its neck.

Wexlee drew her sword as well, spinning around as she did. The other
infected came toward her as she dropped to one knee and thrust her blade
into its gut.

I had a clear shot now, and just to be sure, I put a round through the second
one’s head. It fell backward with a splat.

“Did they get in?” Nithriel asked. “Through the fence?”

I looked down at the bodies as Wexlee and Alavara cleaned off their blades.
These infected looked weaker than the ones I’d seen before, more shriveled
and skinny.

“Who knows? It’s possible they’ve been in here all this time. Maybe they
were the guards that were left behind, only to get infected.”

“Then there could be more of them,” Alavara said.

“There almost have to be. No way they left just two guards here.”

Wanting to be sure, we drove another circuit of the outer fence, this time
slower and more carefully. I saw no sign whatsoever of a breach.

“So they were trapped in here,” Wexlee said.

I nodded. “We need to be on our guard from here on out.”

We returned to the building we’d been exploring. A potential solution to the
transport problem revealed itself when we reached one end of the
production floor. There were several large transports like we’d passed on
the highway backed up to the inventory area. One had a flat bed that looked
like it could carry the cable.

But like everything else, they were dead. In good shape from having been
protected from the outside environment all this time, but still completely
dead. There was a charging station in this area, but of course it had no
power.

We’d arrived mid-morning and spent a couple of hours looking around. It

was now mid-day, so we stopped now to eat lunch.

“What do you think we should do now, Kevin?” Nithriel asked.

“We’ve got a lot of things to find here, then figure out a way to get it back.
That transport could do it, but nothing is happening until we get the reactor
started up. That’s going to take some effort.”

“I am sure you can do it,” Wexlee said.

We continued searching the other two buildings. When we got to the

component assembly line, I was startled to notice numerous things that
looked familiar in their construction and operation. I’d already seen that the
goblins had used different approaches to electrical equipment, but many of
these looked like standard imperial parts.

Guldeek had told me the goblins had been manufacturing things for the
empire, but I hadn’t put two and two together. This discovery made it clear
why capturing this place had been a priority. It also meant I might actually
be able to find parts here that I could to use repair the plant on the ship
without having to resort to some bastardized combination of human and
goblin technology.
We looked into several of the office and satellite buildings. We ran into
another infected inside one of them, but we were ready and killed it quickly.
Most of the buildings held nothing of interest, but one of them proved to be
a sort of dormitory. It looked like a safe place to stay for the night.

We finally returned to the reactor control room, and Nithriel and I began
going over the procedure manuals. The basic design of the plant – it
confined a plasma of deuterium and tritium in a magnetic field – was the
same, but a lot of things were different.

Like imperial reactors, it bred the tritium from lithium using the fusion
reaction, but the breeding system was different. There were a lot of things
like that, systems that had analogs to reactors I had operated, and which
served similar purposes, but did them in different ways.

One challenge here was that a plant like this, which was several times larger
than the one in the ship, was not designed to be operated by a single person.
Getting it started up was possible, but keeping it running over the long term
was just not happening. Fortunately, we only had to generate enough power
to recharge the equipment we needed and get the transport loaded up.

There was a procedure for a cold, black start, and it came with a long list of
conditions and settings I had to check. So with no other option, Nithriel and
I began walking around the plant and going through the checklist as
Alavara and Wexlee watched for infected.

We found good and bad. On the list of good was that there was a substantial
amount of fuel left. The tanks had survived all this time without leaking.
That didn’t really surprise me, because the hydrogen tanks were the sort of
component that was expected to last through the life of the plant. I hadn’t
yet found a way to offload some of it and transport it back, but at least there
was more than enough here.

There was also pressure in the tritium start-up reservoir, though that wasn’t
the only issue. After thirty years of sitting there, the activity would be
lower, since tritium had a half-life of about twelve years. So there would
have been roughly fifteen to twenty percent of it left. That might or might
not be enough.

There should have been a way to check the activity, but I couldn’t find it. I
was going to need to make some assumptions and change the settings on
start up.

Another positive discovery was that the system’s backup batteries still had a
charge. I was quite surprised to realize this, and I wasn’t sure why it would
have been the case. Wanting to be sure nothing was wrong, I dug into it
further, discovering that there were solar panels up on the roof that were
designed to keep it topped up. The batteries were only at half capacity, but
they had enough of a charge for the start-up.

That was when I asked about the endless overcast skies I’d seen since I’d
awoken. The girls told me that it was not, in fact, some aftereffect from the
war, but rather just normal weather for this time of year. They assured me
that sun would come out eventually. I concluded that the low state of charge
was likely due to degradation of the batteries rather than a lack of sunlight.

Among the bad was that most of the cooling and fluid systems were also
degraded to various degrees from the decades of inactivity. There was just
no way I could repair everything.

Thankfully there was enough redundancy that I was able to isolate most of
the problematic systems. The rest would just have to do, since we would not
be operating very long or at anything close to full power.

All of that took up the rest of the day, and I wasn’t close to being finished.
When it started to get dark, we moved over to the dormitory, which was not
far away.

Alavara had been wearing her hood all day and only now removed it. She
scowled at me when I looked at her. Wexlee started dinner while I relaxed
on a couch in the central lounge next Nithriel, who was still studying the
procedural manuals.
“Tell me more about how you guys ended up with Guldeek,” I said.

“I do not remember before that,” Wexlee said. “He said I was very young.”

“Nor do I,” Nithriel said.

Alavara’s prickly mood faded a bit. “I remember. Not a great deal, but I
remember coming to the compound. You two were already there.”

“I think I remember that as well,” Wexlee said.

“He said he found me with a group that was attacked by infected,” Alavara
said. “I do not remember any of that, but I can imagine it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that’s not worth anything coming from me, but
I am.”

Alavara just glared at me.

“Have you remembered anything else?” Wexlee asked.

I shook my head. “No. As I told Guldeek, I only seem to remember the

skills I have and things that relate to them. The time I spent in stasis may
have damaged my memory.”

“You were one of the ones who came here to destroy our world,” Alavara
said. “Whether or not you remember it.”

“You have made that point already,” Nithriel shot back at her. “Kevin is
stuck here now, and he is helping us. Would prefer that he leave us?”

“We have seen no other goblins in years,” Wexlee said. “And Guldeek is
dying.”

“Shut up!” Alavara yelled at her.

“But he is,” Nithriel said. “He has told us that many times, that we need to
be prepared for it. Do you want to be alone when he is gone?” What would
we do?”

Alavara let out frustrated groan. Then she stared at me, and I knew we were
both reliving the other night. I wondered why it had happened if she hated
me so much. Was this weird goblin-human attraction really that intense?

She got up and went to sulk in the corner of the room as Wexlee finished
cooking. We ate. Eventually we broke up for bed. The dormitory beds were
sized for goblins, and I had to push two of them together to make one big
enough for me.

Meanwhile, Alavara insisted that the three of them sleep in the same room,
even though each room only had two beds. I listened to them arguing over it
as I got ready to sleep.

“We will move one in here,” she declared.

“But why?” Nithriel declared.

“We need to stay together.”

“Kevin has his own room,” Wexlee said.

“He is human.”

Wexlee lowered her voice, but I still heard her through the wall.

“I think she is worried one of us will sneak into Kevin’s room.”

There was a lengthy silence. Then Alavara let out a screech.

“I knew it! What did you do?”

“I kissed him,” Nithriel said. “There! I said it.”

“So did I,” Wexlee said.

Alavara screeched again.

“Was that before or after I caught you last night?”

“I did not kiss him last night. I kissed him yesterday morning.”

“So you went to him twice?”

“Kevin is going to hear this,” Nithrel hissed.

“Why are you so upset?” Wexlee asked. “He is very strong and handsome,
and he is helping us.

There was another silence.

“Did you kiss him?” Nithriel asked.

“No!” Alavara snapped. That was true. We hadn’t kissed, after all. We’d
just gone straight into the fucking.

“Something happened between them,” Wexlee said. “I can tell.”

“I agree. What did you do, Alavara?”

“Nothing!”

“I am sleeping in another room,” Nithriel said. “And you can’t stop me.”

“No, you can’t!” Alavara yelled.

I heard a thump and a cry of anger, then more loud noises and angry
screeching. I got up and went into their room. I found the three goblin girls
once again wrestling in a big heap on the floor like they’d done over the
clothes that afternoon.

“Ladies?”

They stopped fighting and looked up at me. Then they looked at each other
and slowly got off the floor. They looked so adorable with all their clothes
and hair in disarray that it took me a moment to get my composure.

“There is a solution here,” I said.

“What?” Alavara asked.

“We all sleep in the same room.”

The three of them looked around at each other and the beds.

“There isn’t room for you,” Wexlee said. “Is there?”

“I can move my setup in here. I think there’s just enough room.”

“I accept this idea,” Nithriel said.

Wexlee nodded. “Yes, I agree.”

They looked at the still-furious Alavara. She glared at me, then at them.

“He is on one side, and we are on the other! No kissing!”

Wexlee threw up her hands. “Fine!”

In fact, it took some effort to get five beds into a single room, and the
resulting arrangement left no open floor space. But there was enough room
for everyone. When we were undressed, I lay down on my two beds, while
the three of them lined up perpendicular to me on theirs.
I turned out the flashlight.

“Goodnight, girls.”
 Chapter 12

THERE WERE NO FURTHER shenanigans, and I got a good night’s sleep for
once. But when I woke up, Wexlee and Nithriel were sleeping next to me.
They had either rolled around enough in their sleep to cross over from their
beds onto mine, or they’d just done it deliberately. Wexlee was clinging to
one of my arms and Nithriel was clinging to my leg.

I assessed all this during the roughly two seconds between the outraged
screech from Alavara that woke me up and the blows from her little green
fists that came raining in to separate us.

“You buttholes! You buttholes! Get off him!”

I pushed them all away and grabbed onto Alavara until she calmed down.

“Stop it! Nothing happened.”

“Let go of me.” But she stopped struggling and instead lay still in my arms.
“Did you kiss them again?”

“No.”

She still didn’t move, and I liked the feel of her against me. Wexlee and
Nithriel sat up next to us. They were all wearing the same thin little white
nightgowns, and the sight of it was rapidly getting me hard, especially with
Alavara’s firm-yet-plump behind pressing against me.

“You need to stop this,” Wexlee said, glaring at her.

“What did she do with you, Kevin?” Nithriel asked. “I know there was
something.”

I wasn’t going to kiss and tell, but Alavara twisted around and pushed her
hand against my mouth anyway. Wexlee’s and Nithriel’s already large eyes
bugged out even further.

“If she didn’t kiss you,” Wexlee asked, “what happened?”

“Shut up!” Alavara yelled at them. “Shut up!”

“You did more than kiss him, didn’t you?”

“You let him feel your breasts!” Alavara yelled back.

Nithriel looked at Wexlee. “Really?”

I finally sat up and extricated myself from them.

“We have things to do, girls. Let’s not waste the day.”

With some grumbling and glares, the three of them got up to get ready. I got
dressed in the room I’d been planning to use last night and went down to
the lounge. They joined me a minute later.

Wexlee made some oatmeal, and we ate in silence. I checked all our gear
and topped off all the rifle magazines.

We went back to reactor plant, and Nithriel and I resumed working through
the start-up checklist. This was one of those things that would have taken an
experienced plant staff about half an hour. Having to do it myself,
deciphering technical manuals written in Goblin with the help of a goblin
girl who knew very little about power plants, combined with my lack of
familiarity with goblin technology, made for very slow going.
But the process sped up slowly as Nithriel began to understand more and
more about what we were doing. By late afternoon, I was confident we’d
gotten as far as I could given what we were working with.

There were things that didn’t work and that I could not repair, but they
might or might not matter. I didn’t intend, or need, to bring the plant up to
full power. All we really needed to do was energize the charging stations in
the loading bay.

That being the case, I did what I’d done on the ship and went around
disconnecting power from everything except one end of the heavy
manufacturing line, the dormitory, and the reactor building itself. If this
worked, I would energize one of the gates when we were ready to leave, so
we could make a quick getaway from the infected – who were still clustered
around the fence in gradually increasing numbers – but we could take care
of that later.

The first step in the start-up procedure was purging and pumping out the
vacuum chamber. Unlike the reactor on the ship, which had been left in the
state it was operating in when it crashed and shut down, the staff here had
not left it in a vacuum, presumably to reduce stress on the vessel and seals
when it might be sitting for a while.

The vacuum chamber on the ship, by contrast, had been designed to take
battle damage and continue operating, which was why it had survived in an
operational state as long as it had, despite the crash. It was considerably
more over-engineered and had far larger fault margins than this plant did.

I closed the connection with the backup batteries, which one of the
departing goblins seemed to have opened, likely to prevent them from
draining. Once I did that, the lights and panels in the control room all lit up.

It took about half an hour before the panel said the vessel was at the
appropriate pressure. After that, I began feeding fuel gas into the reactor. I
was very cognizant of the fact that I had limited tritium to work with, and I
tried to use as little as I could.
From there, I charged up the magnets around the vessel and began the
heating and current drive. The goal here was to get a current going in the
plasma that would support the heating, and, with some help, eventually start
the fusion reaction.

But something went wrong. About halfway into the process, the plasma
collapsed after the current failed to get to the required level and the start-up
discharge dissipated. I cursed loudly as it became clear what had happened.

“What’s wrong?” Nithriel said.

“It’s almost certainly impurities in the plasma or fuel from sitting for so
long. We can’t afford to purge it because there isn’t enough tritium to do
this more than a couple of times. Usually the impurities will burn out. I’m
going to try increasing the voltage in the poloidal field coils.”

“Those are the magnets?”

“Yes.”

So I started over. I went slower this time, and the current started to build.
The plasma lasted longer, but once again it failed before the current rose
high enough.

I sat down and shook my head. I knew what was going on, just not why, and
the lack of familiarity with the system was likely the main reason.

Nithriel got into my lap. I saw Alavara shooting some side-eye in our
direction, but she said nothing.

“I am sure you can do it, Kevin,” Nithriel said.

I pulled her to me and held her. Just the proximity to her was enough to
calm my nerves. I wondered yet again about what Guldeek had told me, that
goblin women triggered some protective, possessory impulse in human
men. I didn’t quite understand it, but he wasn’t wrong.

She was wearing one of the new tops from the transport, and it gave me a
very nice view down into her cleavage. I wondered if her breasts felt as nice
as Alavara’s and Wexlee’s had. Something told me I would find out soon.

“Let’s go over the checklist again,” I said. “I probably missed something,

and we can’t afford to just keep doing this over and over.”

“Good idea.”

She got up, and we went around the plant again. This went much faster
because I knew where everything was now.

We found the apparent problem in the power supply for the exterior coils.
There was a switch open that shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t on the list
because it was supposed to be closed all the time. I shut it, and we went
back up to the control room.

This time, the plasma current quickly got up to the required level. I ramped
up the heating and current drive, and shortly thereafter, I saw the fusion
reaction start. I fed more fuel into the vessel because it would take a while
for the tritium that was being bred in the vessel to cycle through the
extraction system and back into the reactor.

But I’d done it. When the control system had taken over and I was
confident the reaction was stable, I grabbed Nithriel and kissed her. She
squealed and kissed me back.

“It is working?” Wexlee said.

“Yes.”

She let out a whoop and jumped up, coming over to us and hugging
Nithriel, then me. I kissed her as well.
Alavara finally protested.

“Stop kissing him, you bilarq’s buttholes!”

“Kevin, kiss her too,” Nithriel said.

“No!” she exclaimed.

“Yes!” the other two shot back. They went to Alavara and dragged her over
to me. She didn’t resist them all that much, and when she stood in front of
me, she scowled upward.

“All right, then kiss me. Get this over with.”

I took her in my arms and picked her up. I was beginning to sense what was
going on, and I wanted to remind her of what that night had felt like.

I kissed her deeper and harder than I’d kissed the other two. She squirmed
for a moment before her mouth opened, and her arms slid around my neck.
I felt her heart beating rapidly as she crushed her wonderful boobs against
my chest.

My head swam for a moment. It all came back to me, how she’d felt around
me, how her body had reacted, and of course that insane finish that had
seemed to last forever.

Nithriel and Wexlee laughed.

“Yay!” Wexlee cried.

“Kiss him, Alavara!”

I stopped just short of the point that Alavara and I would have started
another mating session. Now was not the time. I set the flushed, panting,
purple-haired goblin girl down on the floor.
Then she punched me hard in the gut, hard enough that I briefly lost my
breath.

“I did not want to kiss you like that!”

“Yes, you did!” Wexlee yelled.

“We saw it!” Nithriel added.

I grabbed Alavara before they could start fighting again.

“Come on. We have things to do here.”

After checking that the power generation system was energized and ready,
we went quickly down to the buggy and drove over to the heavy fabrication
plant. I found the switch I’d located earlier and closed it. The circuit lit up,
showing that it was getting power.

I plugged in the flatbed transport to charge, but to charge one of the cargo
loaders, we had to drag over to the charging station with the buggy, which
required opening up one of the bay doors to get it inside. But that taken care
of, everything looked good.

“Should we charge the buggy too?” Nithriel asked.

“It’s got to use a different connection.”

“Are you sure?”

To humor her, I looked. And I found . . . that they were the same.

“Well, shit,” I said. “I wonder if some of the buggy parts were made here.”

Alavara looked up at me in shock. “Goblins made the things that attacked

us?”
I nodded.

“Some of them, clearly.”

“That is impossible!” I just pointed at the charging buggy beside us. Her
rage wilted. “But why?”

She seemed genuinely horrified, and so upset about it that my heart ached. I
couldn’t stand to see her like that. I pulled her into another embrace. This
time, she didn’t resist me as I picked her up and held her against me.

“The universe is a complicated place, baby.”

Alavara hung onto my neck for a few moments.

“Why did you call me that?”

“Uh.” Why had I? It had just come out. But the feel of her against me was
so nice that I didn’t feel like lying. “It’s a word human men use for girls
they like.”

Alavara withdrew and stared at me with those huge amethyst eyes.

“You ‘like’ me?”

“Yes.”

“Kevin likes me too,” Wexlee said.

“And me,” Nithriel said.

I set Alavara down. She said nothing.

We went back to the control room to check on the reactor. The tritium
breeding system was working and the backup batteries were recharging. I
saw nothing that immediately alarmed me.

A whole bunch of readings were out of spec, mainly temperatures that were
too high or too low. I left the alone. Even assuming I was reading the
instruments right, and that the diagnostics still worked correctly, they were
things I couldn’t do anything about. None of them were into danger level,
because we were running at a small fraction of full power.

I was absolutely certain this reactor would not survive trying to run the
entire plant as it once had. Since we didn’t need to do that, though, I was
confident we would be fine for a few days.

I was so pleased with myself that we’d actually done this that I had to pick
up Nithriel again and hug her.

“I couldn’t have done this without you.”

She hugged me back tightly and snuggled against my neck. For a few
moments, I was just lost in the pleasure of feeling her body against mine.
Then she pressed her mouth against my ear.

“Did you mate with Alavara?” she whispered.

I looked across the room. She and Wexlee were at the windows looking out
across the parking lot, where the infected were pressed against the fence.

“Yes,” I replied just as quietly.

“I knew it. She has been acting so strangely that I knew something had
happened. When?”

“The first night. She just came into the shed. It was . . . very intense. I think
it was too much for her.”

“Will you mate with me tonight?”

I took a deep breath. There was no question that I wanted it, nor that she’d
earned it today. The only question was what the other two thought.

“Yes. But you need to work it out with Alavara and Wexlee.”

She kissed my cheek.

“I will.”

With the lights back on, we had more to do, and we headed into the small
component facility.

I needed some parts to repair the gyrotrons. With Nithriel helping me

translate the inventory lists, I found replacement pumps that would work for
the one with a bad cooling system. I took four just in case. I found an
electron gun that might replace the one that had eaten itself. I took three of
those.

In a maintenance room, I found three barrels of what appeared to be high-

temperature coolant. It probably wouldn’t mix with what was in the
gyrotrons now, but I could drain and refill them with this stuff.

We would need to connect the heavy cable we’d found to the power
conduits in the ship, but the cable ends were bare – they had no connectors.
We found those as well, and I packed up three times as many as we might
need, just in case something went wrong. The coils might not be long
enough, or the cable might break at some point, and the connectors were
neither large nor heavy.

We would need some kind of switch box at the end when it reached the
compound, to connect all the things Guldeek wanted to use, and possibly
one in the ship where the cable would be hooked up. We would also need
some smaller-gauge cable for the lights and other equipment.

That stuff was in the same section as the connectors. I took four switch
boxes and four big spools of cable, again just in case. I wasn’t sure if the
shipboard power would be at the same voltage as the things Guldeek
wanted, so I grabbed a few voltage regulators as well.

We now had quite a pile of stuff, so we loaded it on the flatbed transport,

packing the smaller stuff into a pair of crates. By this point, the cargo loader
was charged up, so after spending some time figuring out how it worked, I
loaded two coils of cable onto the transport.

When we were done, it was late, dark, and we were all hungry. We went
back to the dormitory, and I turned on the lights there as well. There was a
kitchen in the back of the lounge that we hadn’t used, and I spent a little
while in there with Wexlee figuring out what was what. She was thrilled to
see how the stoves worked.

When she got dinner going, I went out into the lounge where Alavara and
Nithriel were trying to figure out the entertainment system. I got it started
up in a few minutes.

“We should wait for Wexlee,” I said.

They didn’t argue. When Wexlee brought dinner out, we sat in front of the
screen and watched one of the Imperial-standard-language programs that
was saved on the system. For me, it was an odd view into a culture I barely
understood. For the girls, it was a glimpse of a culture – their culture – that
they had only heard about from Guldeek.

They sat around me, absolutely mesmerized, until the movie was over. Then
Alavara grabbed my arm tightly.

“They are more like this in that thing?”

I’d gone through it, and there were hundreds of saved programs.

“Yeah, there are a lot.”

“We must take this back! I want to see all of it!”

“Yes!” Wexlee exclaimed. “Everything!”

I nodded. “Yeah, it should work.” I figured the whole system, screen and
all, could fit into another crate.

The three of them hugged me tightly, and for the first time since I’d
awoken, it seemed like all was well in the world.
 Chapter 13

IT TURNED OUT THAT THE dormitory also had its own water system, which had
started up when I turned the power back on. I thought to inspect the
bathroom as we were getting ready for bed, and I was surprised to see
black-brown water flow out when I turned the valve over one sink.

There had to have been a tank or cistern full of water somewhere, and I
assumed the pipes were foul and corroded. But after a few minutes, the
water ran clear. And the hot water was hot – whatever heating system the
dorm used was still working.

I went to get the girls and showed it to them. They were deeply confused at
first, then just as excited when I demonstrated the showers.

They’d only ever had cold baths in creek water using a random tub Guldeek
had found. For my sake, these weren’t the showers I remembered from the
ship either, narrow stalls with tiny little nozzles. This shower had six big
heads in the ceiling spraying wide across the entire room.

“I wish to try this!” Wexlee cried as steam filled the room.

“Yes!” Nithriel shrieked, jumping up and down in excitement.

Even Alavara, who had been in an inscrutable mood for several hours,
didn’t object.

We undressed and got under the water. I’d only seen Alavara naked up to
now, but Wexlee and Nithriel were the same delicious flavor of big breasts,
narrow waists, and perfect butts. The three of them laughed and bounced
and jiggled around under the spray from the ceiling.
There was soap, and if it was rock hard and deeply dried out, it still worked
once it was softened by the hot water. And as the soap softened, I got very
hard. Fortunately, the girls didn’t really know enough yet to understand
what it meant, even if they wanted to help me get clean too.

I hadn’t forgotten my promise to Nithriel. As I got ready for bed in the

room where I’d left my stuff, I heard some hushed but urgent conversation
next door. Suspecting what was going on, I took my gear across the hall and
moved the two beds together. Then I lay down and waited.

All at once, I heard Alavara shouting.

“All right, yes, I mated with Kevin! I could not help it! He is too big and
strong and handsome, and he corrupted me! I am a traitor! Kill me if you
wish!”

There was a moment or two of silence.

“We don’t want to kill you,” Nithriel said. “We just want to mate with him,
too.”

“No! No one can mate with him! He is a human!”

“You mated with him,” Wexlee said. “Why can’t we?”

Alavara groaned loudly. “I made a mistake. I betrayed you.”

“So if we mate with him, then we’re even,” Nithriel said,

“I agree,” Wexlee said, laughing.

Alavara shrieked angrily.

“Fine! Then mate with him! Bear him a hundred children! I am not stopping
you!”
There was loud clunk as if something had been thrown against the wall. The
argument seemed to be over.

Nithriel appeared a minute or two later in her nightgown. She nervously ran
her hand through her long green hair, smiling at me, and shut the door.

“Did you work something out with the others?” I asked, pretending as if I
had heard nothing.

“Yes. Wexlee is next.”

“How is Alavara?”

“She is still . . . angry about everything. But not at you. She finally agreed
we could do this, since she did.”

“Okay. Come here, baby.”

She climbed into bed with me.

“Why do human men use that word? I am not an infant.”

I took her little green form in my arms and rolled her on her back.

“It’s just a term of endearment. It means I want to protect you three and
take care of you.”

“You are doing it.”

I kissed her.

“I know. And I’m going to keep doing it.”

Things had been so rushed and sudden with Alavara. I wanted to take my
time with Nithriel. I pulled off her nightgown and stripped out of my
underwear. I lay there with her, kissing her and gently caressing and playing
with her wonderful goblin body.

I loved everything about her, from her impossibly perfect breasts with their
big, protuberant green nipples, to her glimmering emerald eyes, her hair
like green glass, and her firm but wonderfully rounded butt.

She let me do whatever I wanted to her, and I played with her plump bare
pussy for a few minutes before lifting her up and planting her over my
mouth. She squealed for a moment in confusion before I began to lick at
her.

“This is part of mating?” she gasped.

“We’re getting there.”

She tasted spicy and exotic, nothing at all like a human woman. She was
more like a mix of licorice and cinnamon. And she was so damn wet it was
just flowing right into my mouth. I held her hips tightly over my head as
she squirmed and shook above me.

I didn’t need to make her come. I was just trying to get her loose and
warmed up before we began, because I knew what was coming. I couldn’t
wait much longer anyway. I wanted her so fucking badly.

I finally rolled her on her back, pushing up her legs to stretch her open.

“This will be a little difficult at first, but I promise it will feel good. And
once we start, it’s going to be a lot to take. Just hold on.”

She looked down between my thighs at my erection pointed at her tight

green slit.

“All right. I want to do this, Kevin. Let us mate.”

I pressed forward slowly. I hadn’t been able to do anything to prepare
Alavara for penetration, and it had taken some effort. But the time I’d spent
on Nithriel made a difference. She was very tight, but I didn’t need to force
myself into her as I’d done with Alavara. I just had to take it slowly and
gently.

I looked down, watching Nithriel’s belly bulge outward as I filled her. She
gasped sharply, fingers digging into my arms and feet drumming on my
thighs. I felt her intense heat and wetness enveloping me, felt the same
deliciously textured flesh I’d felt inside Alavara.

“It feels so good,” she gasped.

“Oh, yeah,” I groaned.

Oh, fuck. It had only been two days, and I’d still forgotten what a goblin girl
felt like. She was perfect, everything you wanted in pussy – hotter, wetter,
and tighter than anything I’d ever had before. I wanted to draw this out, and
there was no way I could.

Under me, Nithriel was equally lost, eyes back in her head, mouth open and
gasping for breath, face slack in utter ecstasy. I had no idea what it might
be, but obviously human dick hit all the right buttons for a goblin girl as
well. Maybe all those bumps and ridges inside her were nerve endings that
needed to be stretched around a really big dick to hit the spot for them.

Fuck holding off. What was the point? I knew where I wanted to be and
what I wanted to do to her. I kept thrusting steadily into her as I rose rapidly
up to the edge. Then I pushed her thighs back, stretching her open as far as I
could, and buried myself up to the root.

I knew what was coming, but as I erupted into her, the reality of it was still
overwhelming. Her whole body convulsed, shaking and shuddering as the
reaction to my semen began. I felt her muscles clamp down on me and start
to suck hard at my cock. Her shrieks of pleasure under me barely penetrated
my consciousness. I came again and again into her as she thrashed violently
under me.

The whole world fell away except for the sensations of Nithriel around me
and her pussy almost sucking my cock off. Time lost its meaning, and when
– what seemed like hours later – I finally felt myself going empty, I
somehow retained enough presence of mind to fall to the side instead of top
of her.

When I came back to reality, I was cuddled around Nithriel, who was in a
little ball facing me between my arms and thighs. I just held her, listening to
her breathing, wanting nothing else than to be right where I was, holding
and protecting my goblin girl.

Mine.

She was mine. Nothing was ever taking her away.

It was a while before either of us could say anything.

“I like this,” she said softly.

“This is what caused the war.”

“I see it now.”

“Hard to believe something so wonderful could cause so much trouble.”

She made a contented noise and snuggled closer to me.

“Does this mean we are mated?”

“Yeah. You’re mine. I’m going to take care of you.”

“I see why Alavara is angry. I think she is afraid of this.”

“I’m trying to give her space,” I said.

“But she is your mate too. If you did this.”

“It really unnerved both of us. I had no idea what was going to happen, and
I can’t believe she did either.”

I was tired. So was she. We just held each other and fell asleep.

When we woke up, the lights were out, and I knew what had happened
without needing to go over to the control room. After we got there, I found
what I had expected in the logs. There had been a plasma disruption and the
reactor had shut down.

I could tell right away that this was going to keep happening. There were
too many things wrong, too many systems that no longer worked right, or at
all. It was too much for the control system to deal with.

Had I been able to sit there monitoring things, I could probably have kept
the reaction going, but I couldn’t. This wasn’t like the plant on the ship,
which was designed to keep operating no matter what, even when it was
being shot at, even if the entire reactor crew was dead. This was a much,
much larger plant that needed a certain level of baby-sitting that I just
couldn’t give it.

“What do we do?” Nithriel asked.

“Start it back up and keep going. Nothing else we can do.”

Once the plant was back up, there was more to take care of. None of the
stuff we’d collected meant a damn thing unless I could refuel the ship’s
reactor. That meant I had to find some way to bring back some hydrogen.
Both the plant’s main tanks and the tritium reservoir had connections to
extract the fuel, which was a cryogenic liquid. But I needed a tank to put it
in.

This presented a range of significant problems. I could not use just any
tank. Liquid hydrogen had to be maintained under 30 Kelvin. That required
a highly specialized, heavily insulated container. And I also couldn’t use a
container that had been used to store some other gas unless I completely
evacuated it first, because the other gas would be an impurity in the fuel.

We searched the entire facility without finding anything that was likely to
work. I finally found myself staring up at the fuel tanks wondering if I
could just take one of them.

They weren’t that big. One of them could easily fit onto the flatbed
transport. There were isolations between them, so I could cut one out
without affecting the others.

I would simply need to remove the mounts from a three-meter tall, multi-
ton tank filled with cryogenic liquid, somehow get it onto the flatbed,
secure it for the drive back, and then hook it up to the ship. Once we had it
there, I knew how to refuel the ship’s hydrogen tanks. Getting it there was
the challenge.

The cargo lifter we’d used for the cable spools would not work because its
handling arms could not pick up the tank. We found another loader that had
a set of grabber claws that might be able to, provided it could handle the
weight. I had to guesstimate how much the tank weighed – liquid hydrogen
was actually not all that heavy – but the manual for the loader suggested it
could do it. So we recharged it and drove it back to the plant.

After experimenting with the grabber, I concluded that it could do the job.
Now we had to get the transport over here. The reactor building had a big
bay door that we could back the transport through, but there wasn’t room to
get it close to the hydrogen tanks. The cargo lifter would have to carry the
tank about forty meters through the building.

When we returned to the cargo bay where the transport was sitting, I
suddenly realized something. I should have thought of this before, but I
hadn’t gotten far enough along to consider it.

The transport was sized for goblins, and the driver’s seat was just too small
for a human. I tried to squeeze myself in, but it became clear it was not
going to work. While I could just barely force myself into the cabin, driving
was impossible.

“Could one of us drive it?” Nithriel asked with a hopeful gleam I had seen
before.

I looked at the transport, then back at her.

“Would you feel comfortable doing this?”

Her face lit up with an expression so happy and excited that my knees got
weak.

“Yes! Yes! I want to drive!” She began jumping up and down excitedly.

“You do not know how!” Alavara yelled.

“Kevin will teach me!”

“He has not driven this!”

“It doesn’t look that challenging,” I said. “I don’t think it’s that different
from the buggy, and we have no choice.”

But learning to drive for the first time on a full-sized transport was not
simple. The transport was not that complicated, but it took a couple of hours
of practice before Nithriel could move it slowly but smoothly around the lot
outside, and another hour before I was confident that she could maneuver
around the many obstacles that lay between here and home. I sat next to her,
wedged into the front seat, trying to coach her while Alavara and Wexlee
sat in the space behind us.

Eventually I had her drive it over to the plant. I got out and carefully waved
her back through the big door. I opted not to have her back very far into the
bay, worried she might hit something. When she stopped, Alavara tugged at
my arm.

“Do you see what is happening outside?”

“What?”

She dragged me back to the lot and pointed. The infected were piled up
against the fence a long way in both directions. I could hear them hooting
and screeching out there. There were more of them, and they seemed more
agitated, as if the sight of us driving around was enraging them.

“There are more than there were yesterday,” she said.

“Yeah. So we need to wrap this up and get out of here.”

Wexlee came up beside me.

“But how will we get out?”

The gate in front of us was blocked by infected on the other side at least ten
rows deep. I shook my head.

“Let’s figure that out later.”

We needed a secure way to place the tank on the cargo platform on the back
of the transport. I was able to clear space at the back by rearranging the
spools of cable, but we still needed some kind of cradle to set it into so it
wouldn’t roll off.
We were in the middle of a huge manufacturing facility, but unfortunately, it
didn’t have the kind of heavy machine tools I would need to fabricate a
metal frame to mount the tank on. The cargo bed had plenty of tie-downs,
more than enough to secure the tank, provided it had some support.

I finally concluded that since Nithriel would not be driving that fast, we
could get away with placing some triangular wedges on either side and then
strapping it down. It wasn’t a solution that came close to meeting Imperial
Fleet safety regulations, but we had no choice. Finding things that would
work for that was not too hard.

At last, there was nothing left to do but make the attempt. Nithriel wanted
to use the loader, and I decided it would be better for me to be guiding the
whole thing. She practiced with a few random crates and managed well
enough. She was clearly getting the hang of this sort of stuff.

First I had her get a good grip on the tank, before I did anything to the
supports. The tanks had a pump to move the hydrogen around between
them, so I turned it on until the tank I intended to take was full. Based on
what we’d used so far, what was left was still enough to keep the reactor
running for years. Then I closed the isolation valve.

This was the point when I had to start cutting things. I’d found a portable
laser cutter/welder in the heavy fabrication plant, so I got to work. I first cut
away the top and side supports. The tank leaned a bit, but that appeared to
be because of the force being applied by the loader claws.

I cut the pipe at the bottom between the isolation valves. There was a hiss
as the hydrogen in the isolated pipe section began boiling off.

I stepped back to assess the situation. Everything looked good so far. All
that was left was cutting the four supports at the bottom.

“Get ready,” I said to Nithriel. “I’m going to start cutting it free. If it starts
to shift, you may need to start lifting.”
“I’m ready!”

With Alavara and Wexlee watching from across the hall, I cut the first
bottom support. The tank shifted slightly, but the claws held it in place. I cut
the second, and there was a groan as half the weight shifted to the loader
arms. The loader jerked for a moment as Nithriel tried to lift the tank.

When I cut the third support, the loader shifted again as it took most of the
weight. But it appeared to be stable.

“Last one,” I said.

The last support groaned and broke free about two-thirds of the way
through my cut. The loader leaned forward, and for a single horrifying
moment, I thought it was going to tip over. But Nithriel pulled it backward
toward her, and things stabilized.

“I have it” she cried.

“Yay!” Wexlee yelled.

I stepped back, assessing things again.

“All right,” I said, “turn it like we discussed, very slowly. Remember, it’s
full of liquid, and it will shift its center of gravity.”

“Okay!”

Very slowly, the tank rotated in the grabber claws. When it was parallel
with the floor, the loader leaned over a bit as the liquid hydrogen sloshed
around, but then it stabilized again. I hopped up onto the transport bed and
waved her forward.

“Slowly!” I yelled. “Very slowly.”

“I know!” Nithriel called back.

Bit by bit, we got it over the bed. I had her lower it down just as slowly
until I could get the wedges into place. Her touch was off on the last few
centimeters, and the tank hit the bed with a loud clunk.

“Sorry!”

Fortunately, the insulation cushioned the impact. I could see no real

damage.

“It’s okay.”

With the wedges in place, I attached the tie-downs and began tightening
them. I had Nithriel let go with the claws. The tank remained in place, but I
didn’t start to relax until I had tightened everything as securely as possible.

I stepped back to assess things as Wexlee and Alavara rejoined us.

“It worked?” Wexlee asked.

“It’s good.”

The girls cheered. We were nearly done.

 Chapter 14

THERE WAS ONE LAST THING to do, which was to pump some tritium into the
tank. Nithriel had to move the transport over across the bay, and it took me
a few minutes to get the transfer hoses connected.

I’d thought about taking the tritium reservoir too, but that was a non-starter
because it was not a standalone tank like the others. Instead, it was a
shielded container that was integrated into the tritium recovery system. All I
could do was pump it out.

Tritium was radioactive, and there were safety precautions for handling it. I
had no choice but to ignore them. The main risk was breathing it, and I
wouldn’t be doing that here, at least not in any meaningful amounts. I drew
down the reservoir by about three-quarters, which left enough to start up
again if we had to.

When I was finally done, I disconnected the transfer hoses and tucked them
into the tie-downs around the tank. We were going to need them to refuel
the ship.

The operation to get the tank on the transport had taken most of the day. We
had a couple of hours of light left at most, and the last thing I wanted was to
get stuck out there in the dark.

“We can’t make that trip in the time we’ve got left today,” I told them.

“It would be safest in the morning,” Alavara said. “The infected are most
active at night.”

“I am worried about Guldeek,” Wexlee said.

Her face was lined with tension, and I had to pick her up and hold her. She
wrapped her arms and legs around me and leaned her head on my chest. I
held her for a few minutes, but then it was time to go.

Nithriel drove back to the dormitory. There was a vehicle charging station
in front, so we put the transport on to charge, since we’d run it down a bit
with her driving lessons. I checked over the buggy as well. It was still
nearly full.

The last thing to do was load up the entertainment system. We would do

that in the morning, because Alavara wanted to watch another movie. The
back of the transport was close to full now, but there was room.

I went into the kitchen to sit with Wexlee as she made dinner.

“I”m sure he’s all right. He survived all this time taking care of you guys.”

“He is old and sick.”

“When did the coughing start? How long ago?”

She looked at me. “Not long.”

“He could get better.”

“The coughing has gotten worse.”

I hugged her again. “We’ll be back tomorrow.”

After dinner, we sat together on the couch to watch a movie. I helped

Alavara pick out something that sounded like a basic family drama. Wexlee
sat on my lap while Nithriel and Alavara sat on either side of me. Nithriel
cuddled in under my arm, but Alavara sat a little bit away.
I was able to follow what was going on, though the cultural elements made
little sense to me. The girls were predictably mesmerized, though.

It was a story about a family of merchants. Most of it was interminable

minutiae about how exactly the adult children of the family patriarch were
making money, interspersed with arguments with the old goblin about
which things to sell and what to charge.

Toward the end, the patriarch got sick, and sick in a way that seemed very
similar to Guldeek’s symptoms – coughing and weakness that was
apparently some kind of infection. When the family began discussing
treatment, Wexlee suddenly leapt out of my lap.

“It is the same sickness! We can do the same for Guldeek!”

“Do you think so?” Nithriel asked.

Alavara got up as well. “What is the medicine? Kevin, make it play it

again!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me up. “Play it again!”

I replayed the scene with the goblin doctor. They discussed treatment with
something called adnorin, which would kill the infection.

“That is it” Wexlee cried. “That is what we need!”

“But where do we find it?” Alavara asked.

The three of them looked at me hopefully, faces full of yearning. My heart

melted yet again.

“I don’t know. A hospital? I have no idea how your world handled

medicine.”

“Then we will find a hospital,” Wexlee said. “On the way back. There must
be one somewhere!”
That seemed likely, though there was no telling whether anything useful
had survived all this time. But I didn’t want to disappoint them.

“We can try.”

All of them hugged me, even Alavara.

“Kevin will take care of us,” Wexlee said.

I hugged them back, hoping we could do this.

Nithriel had promised me that Wexlee wanted to mate next, but after we
showered and got ready for bed, she climbed into my lap and cuddled with
me.

“I wish to mate, but not tonight. I am too worried about Guldeek. I wish to
wait until we are home. Then we can mate.”

I hugged her tightly. “Of course.”

We piled together in the collective bed we’d made the previous night.
Alavara once again stayed by herself, but she didn’t object this time when
Nithriel and Wexlee slept with me.

We got up early the next morning, because I wanted to get going while the
infected were still somewhat dormant. We packed up the entertainment
system and loaded it onto the transport. Then, because there was still a bit
more room, I tossed up two of the beds so I would have an actual place to
sleep when we got back.
I assessed how we were going to get out of here. The reactor had made it
through the night, and the power was still on. Infected now ringed the entire
facility, though in clumps of varying sizes. We needed to draw them away
from one of the gates.

“We’re going have to split up, because I don’t want to leave the buggy,” I
told them. “Nithriel will drive the transport. I need someone with me to ride
shotgun and handle the laser if necessary.”

I was a bit surprised that Alavara stepped up.

“I will do it.”

“I will ride with Nithriel,” Wexlee said. “I can shoot them from my side.”

I nodded. “Okay. How do we draw the infected away? What gets their
attention?”

“Noise, and things moving,” Alavara said.

Nithriel nodded. “Loud noises.”

I pondered how we could make a loud enough noise. I was at a loss until I
sat on the end of the buggy to think and bumped into the crate with the
Razorblade missiles.

“Oh,” I said.

I opened the crate and pulled one of them out. It was fully charged and
looked functional.

“That will make a noise?” Alavara asked.

“It should. But maybe we can make a bigger one.”

I had an immediate idea. During our search for something to hold the
hydrogen, we’d discovered that one of the satellite buildings off in a corner
of the lot had been used to store portable tanks of compressed gas, many of
which were marked as flammable. None of the tanks would have worked
for hydrogen since they weren’t insulated, but maybe they had a use here.

I explained to the girls what I wanted to do.

“It will make a noise?” Nithriel asked.

“If I hit that building with this missile, I’m pretty sure it will make a really
big bang.”

But I wanted more than a single bang. I wanted something that would
persist for a while attracting attention. The tanks might explode, but they
wouldn’t necessarily burn for long. For that, we needed more, and there was
an obvious solution.

Nithriel and I used the cargo loaders to drag a bunch of cars from across the
lot and push them up against the building. I found a few other things to pile
onto them, random crates of plastic parts that looked flammable. All this
activity drew more of the infected around to that side of the fence, which
was good.

When we were done, I rearranged the tanks of gas inside the building so
they weren’t all stacked together. I didn’t want them shielding each other
from the shrapnel from the warhead, or from secondary explosions when
the tanks burst.

When I was satisfied, we moved the transport around to the gate on the
other side of the facility. Wexlee stayed with Nithriel as Alavara and I drove
the buggy back around. I stopped to close the switch that would energize
the the gate mechanisms. Then we kept going until I had a shot at the tank
building.
I had never fired a Razorblade before, but they were designed to be
straightforward. There was an optical aiming mechanism. I turned it on and
fixed it on the door to the building, which we’d left open.

“Here goes.”

I depressed the firing button. Would it still work? It did.

The missile erupted from the tube and streaked across the lot, flying right
into the building. There was a thump as the warhead went off, followed half
a heartbeat later by an enormous thunderclap as the tanks went up. The
shockwave actually knocked me back a step.

A huge black cloud rose into the sky as debris rained down everywhere,
inside and outside the facility. Several tanks rocketed off across the lot or up
into the sky. All around the building, the cars had been tossed like toys, and
most of them began burning, as did what little was left of the building itself.

As the echo of the explosion died away, I heard groans, screeches, and cries
from the infected in every direction. They were moving toward the section
of the fence closest to the fire.

I hopped back into the buggy. “Let’s go.”

“That was very loud,” Alavara said.

“Let’s hope it works.”

It seemed that it was. When we rejoined Nithriel and Wexlee, most of the
infected on that side of the fence were moving away from the gate. Some
were staying put, but our way out was opening up.

I hopped up to cab to talk to Nithriel.

“I’m going to open the gate. When I do, you need to drive straight forward.
If there are any infected in the way, run right over them. This thing is big
enough to do it. We’ll be right behind you.”

She grinned. “I will, baby!”

I laughed and kissed her.

“Good luck. You can do it.”

When most of the infected had moved, and it was clear the rest weren’t
leaving, I drove the buggy up to the gatehouse. I got out, waved to Nithriel,
then hit the button to open the gate. Then I jumped back in and drove
around behind her.

I’d shown Alavara how to use the laser. She clutched it tightly, face grim as
she watched the infected starting to come through the gate before Nithriel
could get out. She fired, blowing several of them apart. They fell back, then
surged forward again. Alavara fired a second time, killing more of them.

Now the gate was open. The transport lurched forward into the mass of
infected, knocking them down and rolling right over them. I followed right
behind her. Wexlee began shooting out of the window on her side at the
infected that were trying to climb onto the cab.

Alavara fired again, blowing several infected off the cab on Nithriel’s side.
Then we were through the gate. The buggy bumped and bounced as we
went over the bodies, and orange-green goo splattered everywhere. An
infected leapt forward at us but I ran it over.

Wexlee and Alavara kept firing. Nithriel turned onto the street, and we
followed her. We’d now broken through the crowd of infected, though there
were many others around us. I sped up, getting around the transport. I had
to take the lead now, since I had the navigation system. We’d discovered
that the one in the transport no longer worked for whatever reason.

Alavara let go of the laser and grabbed her rifle, standing up in her seat. She
turned around and fired back several times at the infected around the
transport.

“How’s she doing?” I yelled.

“Good! She is driving!”

As we got away from the facility, the infected began to thin out, though
they were still following us far behind. It seemed as if our activity inside the
facility had drawn most or all of the infected from the entire city, and they
were now behind us.

I drove about as fast I thought Nithriel could follow me, which was not very
fast. The last thing we needed was for her to hit something and tear the
hydrogen tank loose.

The trip out of the city and back to the highway was much less eventful
than the trip in. There were only a few infected, and Alavara shot the ones
that got too close. Eventually we reached the highway, and I stopped to help
guide Nithriel around a few wrecked cars at the on-ramp.

“What about the hospital?” she called down.

“Let’s get on the road, then stop and discuss.”

We drove up the ramp, and I kept going until we reached a relatively empty
stretch a few kilometers down. Alavara and I hopped out and went back to
the transport.

“I’m not sure how we find one,” I said. “Would you guys even recognize
one?”

The three of them exchanged a glance.

“What about the thing in the buggy?” Nithriel asked. “That tells you where
to go? Would it know?”
That hadn’t occurred to me because surely an Imperial tactical nav system
would not have that kind of information. Would it?

“Let me look.”

We went back to the buggy. I played with it for a minute, and it didn’t look
like it would help. But then I saw an option called “Civilian Infrastructure,”
and sure enough, when I turned it on, the screen was now showing exactly
that sort of info.

“Good idea!” I yelled.

“I am smart!” Nithriel yelled back.

Wexlee laughed. “Yes, she is!”

The system said there were two hospitals that were reasonably close and in
the same direction we were going. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the
highway, but I’d promised them.

We reached the turnoff for the closest one in about ten minutes. But I could
see it from the highway, and it was clear this one was a bust. The building
had caught fire at some point and burned out completely. Even from half a
kilometer away, the fire damage was obvious.

We kept going to the second one. I stopped at the bottom of the offramp and
had Nithriel leave the transport on the highway. I didn’t want her trying to
maneuver it around the city again, and there seemed to be little chance of
anything happening to it. Parked where it was, it looked no different from
the other abandoned vehicles.

Nithriel and Wexlee got into the back of the buggy. I drove much faster
now, wanting to get in and out if we could. The girls watched for infected
around us. There were a few here and there, but that was it.
The navigation system took me around a couple of turns, and then we were
approaching a low, blocky red building. The area around it seemed decayed
but mostly undisturbed.

We parked in front. I didn’t see any infected nearby. As we walked up, I

saw that all the signs were in Goblin.

We entered what seemed like the main lobby. Like the manufacturing
facility, the ceiling was high enough for me, though only just barely. It was
dark inside, so I got out my jury-rigged flashlight. There was a directory of
sorts on one wall.

“We’re looking for something that says or ‘pharmacy' or ‘dispensary.’

Though I don’t know what it would be in Goblin, or if what I’m envisioning
even exists. Something about medicine.”

The girls studied it for a few moments.

“‘Medicine request window’?” Nithriel asked.

“That could be it. Let’s go look.”

 Chapter 15

THE MEDICINE REQUEST ROOM looked very much like a pharmacy to me. There
was a long window open to the hallway and long stacks of little boxes and
bottles. But it was locked up securely. I had to go back to the buggy and get
the laser cutter, but that got us inside quickly.

Like the signs, the medicine labels were all in Goblin.

“What was the thing we needed?” I asked.

“Adnorin,” Wexlee said. “It must here somewhere!”

It took us some time to figure out the organization and start looking, but
eventually Alavara called out to the rest of us.

“Here it is! I found it!”

I ran around to where she and Wexlee were examining a clear plastic box
that was full of yellow pills. I couldn’t read Goblin, but Wexlee assured me
the name was right.

“How much do we need?” Nithriel asked.

“Take it all!” Wexlee exclaimed.

“We do need to know what the dosage is,” I said. “Too much could hurt
him, and if it’s not enough, it won’t help. Do you see anything that says
what that would be?”
There was nothing by the box. So we searched further and eventually found
something that appeared to be a pharmaceutical reference manual. Wexlee
flipped through it and finally found a listing for Adnorin.

“Yes, Kevin, this is it!”

That gave me another idea. Since we were already here, there was no reason
to stop with the Adnorin. I had Nithriel flip through the manual to see what
else was here, and ended up taking several more boxes of painkillers, anti-
viral drugs, and similar stuff, along with a collection of first-aid supplies.

We had just left when I heard a noise that sounded like a chair being kicked
over, followed by grunting and squealing.

“Infected!” Alavara hissed.

We got our rifles out. A few moments later, four of them came running into
the illumination from the flashlight. We opened fire, dropping them all
quickly, but I heard more of them coming.

“Let’s go this way,” I said, pointing down the hallway. “We should be able
to get out the side.”

We ran, and I heard shuffling and footsteps behind us. After a couple of
turns, I saw a door at the far end. We ran up to it, but when I got there, we
found it locked.

“Fuck! Hold them off a second.”

The girls turned around as I got out the laser cutter. They started shooting a
few seconds later. I finished cutting through the latch and pushed the door
open carefully.

I looked around for infected, not seeing anything nearby. We exited the
building and ran up to the front corner. I looked around, seeing the buggy
where we’d left it, but also more infected going into the hospital.
I waited until they were out of sight and then ran. The girls ran behind me. I
jumped into the buggy, tossing all the meds in the back, and started it up as
they leapt into their seats.

The infected from inside had chased us out the door. Alavara grabbed the
laser and blasted them as I spun out of the driveway.

I raced back to the highway, and we found the transport as we’d left it.
Nithriel and Wexlee jumped in, and we got back on our way.

We had one last challenge to overcome, and that was the ruined bridge. We
were going to have to take a different route around it, since there was no
way the transport could cross the ravine.

The navigation system showed me a couple of alternate routes, but one of

them also crossed a bridge over the same stream. Since we had no way of
knowing what condition it might be in, I opted for the longer route that
appeared to avoid the stream entirely.

We turned off the highway and followed a narrow road for quite a ways.
The road was a bit rough and degraded, but there were only few abandoned
cars and no obstructions. We passed what appeared to be farms and small
buildings.

Eventually that road reached a different section of the road that passed close
to the village. We were past the village at this point, but from there, we
would just need to follow the road back.

The terrain here was mostly light woods. A couple of kilometers further on,
I saw something that immediately grabbed my attention: a long white
cylinder lying in a clearing along the road. It was another Imperial Marine
drop-ship, no doubt from the same unit I’d come down with.

I slowed down to get a better look. It was maybe half a kilometer from the
road, and it had clearly been shot down like mine had. The hull was broken
in two as if it had landed very hard, and the aft portion was blackened by
fire.

“Look,” I said to Alavara, pointing at the ship.

“Another one.”

“Yep.”

I stopped and got out, walking back to the transport as Nithriel pulled in
behind me.

“Is that a ship like yours, Kevin?” Wexlee called down.

“Looks like it. I want to go check it out. There could be things we can use.”

So they got down and climbed into the back of the buggy. I drove off the
road, avoiding the trees and staying in the clearing. We reached the ship in
about a minute.

It was in worse shape than mine. I couldn’t tell where it might have taken
the hit that brought it down, but it looked as if the marine unit it had been
carrying got out. The deployment ramp for the vehicle bay was down, and I
didn’t see any buggies nearby.

Based on the broad gouge in the earth behind the ship, it appeared the aft
section had hit the ground at an angle as it came in, which was likely what
had broken the ship in two. The break was right at the reactor compartment.

“It caught fire?” Nithriel asked.

“Looks like it. Could have been a lot of things that caused it.”

We climbed up the ramp, and I saw that my initial impression was at least
partially incorrect. None of the buggies had gotten out. The bay door might
have been opened by the crew during an evacuation or broken open from
the impact, but all four buggies were still tied down and undamaged.

I checked them over, finding their batteries dead as I expected. Two of them
had lasers mounted on them, but I left them for now. They only worked
with the buggies, and we had one already.

The reactor compartment was a different story. The reactor was toast. Based
on the state of things, the vacuum vessel had clearly suffered a catastrophic
plasma disruption as a result of the crash.

Under the wrong circumstances, plasma containment could collapse in a

way that released all the captive electrons in a single powerful beam. It was
analogous to a water ballon springing a leak, if that stream of water was
capable of melting through the titanium–silicon carbide armor on the inside
of the vessel.

There were systems in place to prevent this from happening, but they’d
apparently malfunctioned. The result was a big hole in the vessel that had
sprayed molten metal and hot plasma all over the reactor compartment.
Nothing was left that might be salvageable.

I tried to explain to NIthriel what had happened here, and she seemed to get
it.

“It would have been very bad we had been standing here?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Could this happen to the other one?” Wexlee asked.

“Very unlikely,” I said. “It takes some really specific and extreme
circumstances to cause a disruption this bad. They were likely operating at
full power when the ship hit the ground, and we’ll never get anywhere near
that.”

We were just about to head forward Alavara’s high-pitched voice cut

through the air behind us.

“Kevin! Infected! And they are human!”

We ran back to where she was firing through the hatch into the vehicle bay.
I took up a spot next to her. I saw half a dozen human infected charging
forward. She’d killed two already. Something told me I was looking at the
marines who had come from this ship.

We kept firing as they came forward. Alavara got two, and I shot down the
other four. But then I heard Wexlee behind us.

“Kevin!” Then I heard shots.

I ran back, seeing Wexlee and Nithriel firing at a group of human infected
that were trying to come in through the breach in the hull behind us. I fired
past them over their heads.

Alavara started shooting again.

“There are more!”

“Fall back here!” I yelled.

I didn’t want to get separated from her. She slammed the hatch shut and ran
over to us. I looked out the breach, seeing several dozen infected out there.
What had happened here?

The answer seemed obvious. This unit must have come down not long
before the bioweapon was deployed. But why? Surely fleet command
would have known what it meant. But maybe the order came from the
emperor right after they were deployed. I supposed we would never know.

The infected kept coming, and we kept shooting. Then Alavara let out a cry
of dismay.

“My rifle is empty!”

“You don’t have any extra magazines?” I yelled back.

“They are in the buggy!”

Then Wexlee stopped shooting as well.

“Mine is also empty! I left the magazines in the transport!”

I let out a cry of frustration. The girls might have been experienced in hand-
to-hand combat, but they’d clearly not yet developed the instincts they
needed around the rifles.

I shot down three more infected that were trying to climb in. I had an extra
magazine, which I tossed to Alavara just as more of them came in through
the hatch to from the vehicle bay.

We had to fall back further, but when we entered the passageway between
the stasis compartments, I suddenly remembered that the armory was up
ahead.

“Come on! This way!”

I ran, and the girls ran after me. Nithriel fired a few more times before
yelling that she was also empty. We reached the armory, and I slammed the
hatch shut behind us.

I wasn’t sure what to expect here, but the place was mostly stripped.
Mostly.

I saw several plastic crates along one wall. Based on the legends on the
outside, two of them held rifle rounds – two thousand each – and they
looked untouched. I tore one open, and realized in dismay that they were
boxed up, not in magazines. We had no time to reload.

But there were three more crates. Two held Razorblade missiles. I threw
one open and grabbed one of the long gray cylinders. The battery in the
targeting system was dead, but I didn’t need it to launch the missile.

“Get to the side of me!”

The girls scattered to either side of the armory as I cracked open the hatch. I
aimed the missile back down the passageway, where the infected were
swarming toward us from the reactor compartment. I waited until they were
halfway down and fired.

I knew Razorblades had a safety fuse that prevented the warhead from
exploding until it had traveled far enough. I couldn’t remember how far it
was, and I prayed it would work.

Luck was with me. I’d been aiming at the infected, but the missile’s
trajectory was off this close, and it flew over their heads, through the lounge
and into bulkhead with the reactor compartment. The warhead exploded,
sending a spray of shrapnel and shredded metal into the infected that were
swarming into the ship.

The ones in the passageway were knocked down, and most of them weren’t
getting up. I stepped out with my rifle and began shooting at the injured
ones. Alavara came with me. My magazine ran out when there were still
three of them struggling to get at us, but she had enough rounds left to take
them out.

Then it was quiet. I thought I heard a few infected still out there, but we’d
bought ourselves some time. I grabbed a box of rifle rounds and reloaded as
fast as I could. The girls watched me and began doing the same once they
understood.

We found five infected left outside the ship, but we had no trouble taking
them out.

“Rule number one from here on out,” I said when it was over. “Never leave
your spare magazines in the car.”

Alavara looked up at me, deeply chastened.

“I will not make that mistake again, Kevin.”

“Nor I,” Nithriel said. Wexlee just nodded.

The last crate proved to contain rifle power cells. I examined the buggies in
the vehicle bay again. We could use another one, but we would need to tow
it back to the ship to recharge the batteries once I got the reactor restarted.
Today was not that day.

We loaded the ammunition, power cells, and missiles onto the transport.

“Do you remember the other goblin family I mentioned?” Wexlee asked
me.

“Yes.”

“We are not far from where Guldeek said they lived. I wonder if they know
about this.”

I shrugged. It would have been hard to miss, but if I had a family, I would
have kept it well away from here, given all the infected we’d encountered.

We climbed back into our vehicles and got back on the road.
We saw infected here and there, but Nithriel’s driving skills were enough to
avoid them. We finally reached the village around mid-day.

We drove around the village to the closest spot on the road to the ship. The
field was relatively level, but we took it slow and easy as I scouted the way
ahead for Nithriel. There were a few dips and bumps, and I had her take
them straight on to avoid rolling, since that could break the hydrogen tank
loose.

Finally, she pulled up next to the hole in the ship. I let out a long sigh and
stood up. Nithriel hopped out of the cab and came bouncing over to me,
laughing and squealing.

“We did it!”

I scooped her up and swung her around in my arms, then hugged her. She
pulled back and kissed me hard. I kissed her back as Wexlee ran up to us.

“Kiss me too, Kevin!”

I put Nithriel down and picked up Wexlee. When I was done kissing her, I
looked for Alavara, who was standing a few feet away. I put Wexlee down
and went to her.

“You did good.”

She scowled at me for a moment. “Are you going to kiss me?”

“Unless you don’t want me to.”

“It is fine. Kiss me if you must.”

So I picked her up and kissed her. She resisted me for only a moment.

We unloaded the parts and other stuff for the ship and carried them inside.
We were going to have to leave the cable for another day, since I could see
the only way to get it up to the compound was dragging the spool behind
the buggy.

When everything was inside except the cable and hydrogen, we drove up to
the compound. As soon as we pulled up, Wexlee leapt out and ran up to the
gate.

“Guldeek! Guldeek! We are back! We have medicine for you!”

But there was no answer. The gate was not latched from the inside. Wexlee
ran into the house with Nithriel and Alavara behind her. I followed them.

When I got to Guldeek’s room, I found them kneeling beside his bed. He
lay there motionless as Wexlee tried to wake him.

I feared the worst for a moment, but then his hand moved, and his eyes
opened slowly.

“Guldeek?” Wexlee whimpered.

“You are back,” he whispered. Then he coughed weakly. “What did you
find?”

“Everything,” Nithriel said. “We even found medicine for you.”

“Medicine?” He looked over to me. “What medicine?”

I explained what we’d done.

“Your guess was correct,” I said. “We found everything we needed at that
place. I can repair the reactor and get it started again. We found more than
enough cable.”

Then I explained about the movie we’d watched and how the girls thought
the same thing would help him.

“We brought back all the Adnorin we found. If that’s not enough, nothing
will be.”

Guldeek laughed weakly.

“You have done well for my girls.” He looked around at them. “I am old. I
may be sick, but this medicine will not extend my life for much longer.”

“You must try,” Wexlee said.

“Do what you like,” he said.

Wexlee got him some water and had him take the Adnorin. Then she got to
work making some soup.

There was still daylight left, so I unloaded the buggy and went back to the
ship with Alavara and Nithriel.

Since I’d charged up the backup batteries, I no longer needed to work in the
dark. I turned on the lights in the reactor compartment and turned on the
control panel.

I wanted to check the integrity of the fuel tanks before refueling, and there
was a way to test it with a diagnostic connection that was part of the ship’s
damage control system. Fortunately, that system hadn’t been damaged in
the crash. It told me the tank was still intact and no cracks or defects could
be detected.

I found the fuel port and connected the hoses to the port and the hydrogen
tank. There was a backup pump in the fuel port, and the hydrogen was soon
flowing into the ship.
The control panel registered fuel pressure and tritium activity. In about
twenty minutes, I’d moved all the fuel over into the ship. The control panel
told me fuel capacity was at 88%. That was enough to last for years at the
rate we would be using it.

Repairing the gyrotrons was going to be more of a challenge, and I decided

to wait until tomorrow. We packed up the switches and other parts that were
for the compound and went uphill.

Wexlee was still sitting with Guldeek. He seemed to be sleeping, so I left

her alone. I unpacked the rest of the gear and set up my bed.

Finally she came back down. She climbed into my lap, and I hugged her.

“How is he?”

“He seemed better after he ate.”

“It may take time for the medicine to work.” I assumed it was some kind of
antibiotic or whatever worked with goblins, and I know that stuff could take
days.

“Do you think he will get well, Kevin?” Alavara asked.

“We’ve done all we can.”

Wexlee eventually got up and made dinner. We ate quietly. Wexlee wanted
to sleep beside Guldeek, but Nithriel came to my bed. Alavara came down a
minute later. I gave her a look.

“I do not want to be up there by myself.”

“You should sleep with us, Alavara.”

After a moment or two, she rolled against my arm.

“Do not mate,” she said to Nithriel.

Nithriel laughed. “It is Wexlee’s turn.”

 Chapter 16

IT WAS HARD TO TELL if Guldeek was any better in the morning. But he hadn’t
gotten worse. Wexlee was feeding him and giving him the Adnorin, but
beyond that, he slept.

So the other three of us went back to the ship. As Alavara kept watch for
infected, Nithriel and I got to work repairing the gyrotrons.

We replaced all three pumps and drained what remained of the old coolant.
The new pumps didn’t quite fit where the old ones had been, but they
hooked up well enough and ran when I energized them. We refilled the
systems with the new coolant and checked everything for leaks. It looked
good.

After all the things we’d seen in the manufacturing plant, I was not
surprised to discover that the new electron gun was a direct replacement for
the one that was fried. I tested it out briefly, and it worked fine.

Now came the hard part. We had to create a connection to run the cable up
to the compound. That required tearing out more of the bulkhead in the
vehicle bay to expose an intact conduit coming from the reactor. I mounted
one of the switch boxes we’d gotten in that spot and hooked it into the
conduit.

There was a hatch in the vehicle bay that I could run the cable through, but
it was damaged. I had to use the laser cutter to get it open.

From there, we used the buggy and the tie-downs from the vehicle bay to
drag the cable spools off the transport. We had to do this very carefully,
because I didn’t want to break the spool.
I cut apart one of the wrecked buggies in the vehicle bay and used two parts
of the frame to create a makeshift ramp. I pulled the spool upright first, then
rolled it down. It bounced heavily on the ground but didn’t break. We did
the same with the second one.

I cut a long tube from one of the frame pieces and slid it through the center
of the spool. I attached the tie-downs to the tube and then to the back of the
buggy so I could unspool the cable by dragging the spool behind me. I
spliced a connector onto the end of the cable and ran it thorough the hatch,
then attached it to the switch box.

Among my tools on the ship was a portable instrument to check the

electrical integrity of what I’d done, and it all looked good. Now we had a
connection, but this had taken all day, and Alavara told us she saw infected
starting to stir around the village. So we called it a night and went back to
the compound.

Wexlee was where we had left her. Guldeek was the same. I sat with her for
a while, but she didn’t want to talk. She just wanted to sit in my lap and let
me hold her. So I did.

Nithriel made dinner so Wexlee could rest. She ate something and then
went back upstairs while I sat with Alavara and Nithriel.

“I’m amazed we managed all this,” I said.

“You have such skills, Kevin,” Nithriel said.

I nodded to her. “You were a big help. You’ve definitely got a talent for this
stuff.”

“It will be nice to have light and hot water here as we did in the dormitory,”
Alavara said.

Nithriel took her hand. “It will. Are you still angry with Kevin?”
The purple-haired goblin girl took a deep breath and sighed.

“I do not know what I am angry about anymore. The things we learned,

what we saw. The world is not what I thought it was.” She looked at me. “It
is complicated, as you said.”

I took her other hand.

“It is. I’ve spent the last few days wondering how I got into the war, how I
ended up here. I still don’t remember. I had to have been part of the
Imperial fleet for a long time. I was the senior technician on that ship. I
don’t know that happened, but I must have been very good at it.”

“You are,” Alavara replied.

“Yes, you are amazing, Kevin,” Nithriel said.

“But I wonder now how much I knew about what the empire was doing.
Did I believe in this invasion? Was I involved in others? What was I doing
all that time? I feel like I had to have been a different person back then, as if
the stasis didn’t just erase my memories but also changed my personality.”

“You are here with us now,” Nithriel said. “And I am glad.”

“As angry as I was, I cannot deny that you have improved our lives,”
Alavara said.

I nodded. “I’m impressed with what we’ve managed. We still have a lot of
work to do, but I bet we can get things hooked up tomorrow.”

“I know where the things Guldeek mentioned are,” Nithriel said, “what he
wanted to bring up here. They are in the village. The infected are there too,
but after what we did, I am sure we can do it.”

I took Nithriel’s hand as well as Alavara’s.

“Whatever I was before this, whatever I did, that’s behind me. I’m not that
guy anymore. I’m here, with you guys. And I’m going to take care of you.”

Nithriel leaned against me, and I hugged her. A moment later, Alavara did
the same.

“We are mates, Kevin,” she said. “You are mine and . . . Alavara’s.”

Alavara pushed her head against my chest.

“Yes. I am your mate, Kevin.”

Nithriel made a happy noise. “Wexlee will be soon too.”

I pulled them to me.

“Let’s go to bed, guys.”

The girls insisted we move my bed up to their room, and we rearranged

things until there was a single big bed for all four of us. We lay down
together.

The two of them cuddled up under my arms, and I held them close. As little
sense as it made, their proximity seemed to feed something primal in me.
The mere knowledge that they were here, safe and secure in my arms, made
me feel good. As if I was serving the purpose I was meant to.

For their sake, they seemed as content and relaxed as two girls possibly
could. I sensed it somehow. They were happy, and they trusted me to
protect them and take care of them.

Nithriel propped her chin on my chest.

“Why do you think we feel these things, Kevin? Guldeek told us the war
happened because goblin females liked human men. That seems very
strange when you think about it.”

“And human men love goblin girls. At least, this one does. I don’t know
why. Does it matter?”

“No,” Alavara said. “Not anymore. That was then. This is now.”

I woke early. The two girls were still asleep on either side of me. I looked
down at them, wondering at this intense attraction I felt even though I’d
only known them a few days. I didn’t understand it. I just knew it was there,
and it was mutual.

I was here, and I was never going back to the empire. I didn’t want to. I had
no way to even do it, and I had a feeing they wouldn’t want me back
anyway after all this time.

I had surely been presumed dead by the Imperial authorities. Showing up

now would likely get me arrested for desertion, and the penalty for that in a
war zone, well . . . suffice to say I had much easier ways of dying right here.

Whatever home and life I’d had in the empire was gone. I had to make a
new life here.

As I slipped out of bed, I noticed something odd. It was light outside,

lighter than I’d ever seen it here. When I stuck my head out the door, I
realized why.

The sun was shining.

I stepped out into the compound, looking up. The sky was still cloudy, but
sunbeams were coming through the trees. I stood there soaking up warmth I
hadn’t felt in a while.

“It has been some time, yes.”

I spun around toward the voice. It was Guldeek. He stood beside the creek,
looking much straighter and healthier than he had since I arrived here.

“You’re up.”

“I am. And I have you to thank for that. That medicine you brought back
seems to have done the trick.”

“You must have had some kind of respiratory infection. I guess it knocked it
down.”

“I am not completely well. And I am still old. I do not know how many
years I have left, but you have restored them for now.”

“The girls did a lot too,” I said.

He nodded. “Of course they did. Because you were there. Remember what I
said about goblin females. They need a male in their lives, and with a strong
one they can do a great deal. I have been quite weak for some time. You are
strong. You are what those three need, human or not.”

Wexlee burst out of the house.

“Guldeek!” she cried.

“I am well, thank you.”

She ran over and hugged him tightly. Then she broke the embrace and leapt
into my arms. I lifted her up and hugged her as her long golden hair swirled
around me.

“Thank you, Kevin!”

“It was your idea to get the medicine.”

“I could not have done it without you leading us.”

Then she kissed me hard, and I stood there kissing her back until she let me
go. She pressed her face against mine.

“We can mate now. I want to be your mate like the others, Kevin.”

“Tonight. We have a lot to do, and . . . mating is going to take a lot out of
you.”

“That is what Nithriel told me. All right, we will do it tonight. I am

excited!”

Guldeek said nothing. He just stood there with an “I told you so” smile on
his face.

Wexlee made breakfast for everyone, and when we’d eaten, we went back
down to the ship to continue the work. Guldeek came with us this time, and
he marveled over everything we had managed.

I used the buggy to lay the cable all the way up the hill. It turned out to be a
very good thing that we’d brought the second spool, because the first didn’t
reach all the way. So we went back down, and I pulled the second up there.

I spliced the two cables together, then laid the last section to the compound,
where I hooked it up to the switch box at the other end. The testing meter
showed no faults – the connection all the way to the ship was good.

We went back downhill, and I started up the reactor. All the new parts were
working, and it was running smoothly. I put the buggy and the transport on
to charge.
When I finished giving Guldeek a tour of the ship, we sat down to discuss
how we could collect the pumps and water heaters and other things he
wanted for the compound.

“The infected will resist us,” he said, “especially once we begin dragging
things out of there. I am hoping you have some suggestions.”

I nodded. I did.

“This is a warship, and it has weapons. In particular, it has weapons that

were designed to clear landing zones for the marines. There are turrets just
forward of the vehicle bay, and they are mounted with lasers that can fire a
lot of low-power shots very rapidly. These were for clearing concentrations
of enemy troops.”

Guldeek nodded gravely.

“Yes. I remember that.”

“They should work just as well against the infected, if we can draw them
out like we did before.”

We’d already told him about what we’d done to escape the facility.

“Are you sure they still work?” he asked.

“The primary controls were in the forward section, which is wrecked. But
there are manual controls in the turrets themselves, and they’re in the
section of the hull where the power system is still intact. Why don’t we go
look?”

The turrets were accessed from a hatch in the same section as the stasis
chambers, just forward of the reactor. I climbed up there and got into the
firing chair. I had never fired these things in anger, but as a senior
technician, I knew how they worked.
I could control both turrets, and the display told me the weapons system had
power. I switched everything on, and the laser mounts rose up out of the
hull. The targeting display worked fine – I saw the outside of the ship. The
lasers could fire single heavy blasts once every few seconds, rifle-
equivalent ones at around 50 hertz, and pretty much anything else in
between.

“Everything looks good. You might want to go outside and watch,” I called
down.

“We will!” Alavara yelled back up.

Having power didn’t mean the lasers still worked, however. I wasn’t sure
what condition the system might be in. I adjusted the controls to the lowest
power setting and single shots. Then I took aim with one laser at one of the
dead buggies outside and fired.

There was a flash on the buggy as the bolt hit. I turned up the power and
fired again, then again at even higher power. As near as I could tell, it was
all working fine.

I turned the power back down, then changed the setting to max-rate rapid-
fire. I aimed both lasers outward toward the village, zooming in to get a
better look. There were a few infected wandering around.

The fire-control system was designed to pick out and lock onto humanoid
targets, and it could spot even slight motion. So it had no trouble locking
onto the infected. I opened fire again, spraying the whole area with a
fusillade of short-pulse blasts. In a few seconds, all the infected were dead.

I got out of the seat and climbed down, heading aft. I met the girls and
Guldeek in the lounge, Nithriel let out a squeal as she saw me, bouncing up
and jumping into my arms. This was definitely becoming a thing with them.

“It works!”
When she was done kissing me, I turned to the others.

“Yeah, it works. I’m thinking that all we need to do is draw the infected out
of the village, and I can take care of them.”

Guldeek nodded to me, smiling.

“That will not be difficult. Leave it to me.”

The old goblin had lived with the infected for thirty-plus years, and he
knew very well what annoyed them. He had the girls set a fire in one of the
old buggies, and once that was going, had them start drumming loudly on
another buggy with some sticks. The noise and smoke soon drew them out
of the village and toward the ship.

I watched from the turret, shifting the power a bit to slower, more powerful
pulses. When enough of the infected were on their way across the field, I
opened up. The lasers shredded them, blowing their bodies apart and
sending chunks of flesh flying into the air. The blasts just drew more of
them, and the girls kept up with the noise.

It went on for a while. I kept firing, and the sounds of it just drew them into
the firing line. I probably cut down at least a thousand of them before the
flow thinned out, then stopped. I heard the girls cease their drumming.

Just to be sure, I scanned the area with the targeting system. It told me there
was nothing left to shoot at. The village appeared empty.

I climbed down out of the turret and went back outside. The four of them
were out there, exploring the carnage we had created. I walked out to join
them.
 Chapter 17

THE GIRLS WERE LESS exuberant about this fight than they had been earlier,
and I didn’t blame them. It looked like someone had set a sewage treatment
plant on top of a meat-processing plant and then blown both of them up.

“Godawful mess” didn’t begin to describe it – the whole field between the
ship and the village was coated in orange-green goop, and it smelled even
worse than it looked. But the village was quieter than it had been since I
woke up.

“We should get the things we need now,” Guldeek said. “More will wander
in here eventually.”

Nithriel drove the transport over to the village. I brought my tools. With the
time to do it, the transport to move things, and the technical expertise I had,
we were able to pick out the stuff that was best suited for the compound.

Lots of lighting. A water heater, a pump, and a big plastic tank for the
water, with all the tubing we needed for quasi-running water in the house.
An electric stove and oven.

We also found two little electric tractors, and some other heavy tools for the
garden, including a pump we could use for irrigation. The tractors would
make farming a lot easier.

Nithriel drove the transport as far up the hill as we could get it safely, and
we carried or dragged things the rest of the way with the buggy. I brought
one of the charging cables with us so I could charge the buggy at the top. I
plugged the tractors into the switch box as well. The meter showed no
problems, and we were drawing current well below the capacity of the
cable.

At the end of the day, we parked the transport next to the ship and went
back home. It was getting late, but after all the work we’d done, I wanted
something to show for it.

I’d determined that we need to step down the voltage from ship power for
some of the appliances we’d collected, so I reworked the switch box to
install one of the voltage regulators I’d gotten.

Once that was done, I hooked up a few lights and mounted them around the
compound. With the place lit up now, the girls were so happy and excited
that I was inspired to continue.

“Hot water, Kevin!” Alavara yelled. “I want a hot bath like the dormitory!”

“Yes!” Wexlee cried. “Hot water!”

So I set the plastic tank on a stone ledge at the top of the compound where
the creek came down, and it began to fill up. I ran a hose from there to the
pump, which I mounted down below next to the house. I set the water
heater next to the bathtub, hooked the pump to it, and began filling it up. As
soon as there was some water in it, I turned the heating element on.

“This will take a little while to heat up, guys.”

“We can keep working while it heats,” Nithriel asked.

I checked the switch box with the meter again, and it was clear we were not
going to overload the circuit. I wired up the lights inside the house and set
up the entertainment system in the main room. I ran a water hose in to
Wexlee’s kitchen where she was making dinner. She laughed as I
demonstrated it.
“I am so happy!” she cried, hugging me. “No more carrying water from the
creek!”

The stove and oven were going to take some rebuilding of the kitchen, so
that would have to wait. By the time we were done, the water for the
bathtub was hot, but Wexlee wanted us to eat dinner. We did, and then
Guldeek went upstairs, saying he needed to rest. Wexlee gave him his
medicine and put him to bed.

Then we filled up the tub. Unfortunately, it was big enough for two girls at
most, or one human, barely.

“We must get a bigger one,” Wexlee said. “So we can all use it like we did
in the dormitory.”

“There must be something we can use,” Nithriel replied.

I sat there watching my adorable girls get their adorable bodies clean. When
they were done, I got in, and they insisted on washing me. Naturally, there
was a reaction, and they got that clean as well.

“This is as large as the rest of you, Kevin,” Nithriel said.

“It will really fit in me?” Wexlee asked.

Alavara looked at me. “Not easily.”

“We rushed into things too quickly,” I said to her. “We’ll take our time from
now on.”

“It was fine for me,” Nithriel said.

Wexlee grinned. “I am so excited to mate.”

When we were done bathing, we went upstairs. I wondered if Alavara and

Nithriel would leave me with Wexlee, but they wanted to stay and watch.
“Yes, stay,” Wexlee said. “I wish to be sure I am doing it correctly.”

“It’s not that difficult,” I said.

So the two of them lay on either side of us as I took Wexlee into my arms
and kissed her. She kissed me back eagerly, lying there and letting me play
with her delicious body. She had the biggest breasts of the three of them,
which was saying something.

I’d only felt them over her nightgown that night, and I took my time with
them now. They were smooth, firm and silky, with fat nipples that felt like
juicy little grapes. I sucked on them until it had to be hurting her, but she
said nothing, just holding my head and sighing.

I kissed my way down her little body until I reached her wet green pussy.
Like Nithriel had been, she was wet as a river, the hot fluids just running
out of her. I lapped them up, enjoying the same sweet licorice-cinnamon
flavor. I took her clit between my lips and sucked on it.

“I am confused,” Wexlee moaned. “I thought that mating—”

“This is so he can put his penis into you,” Nithriel said. “It would be too
tight otherwise.”

“Yes,” Alavara said. “That is a mistake I will not make again.”

“I am thinking,” Nithriel went on as I dug my tongue into Wexlee, “must

the female prepare the male in the same way?”

I pulled back a bit.

“If you two feel like helping here, sure.”

Nithriel and Alavara both sat up in surprise.

“What should we do?” Alavara asked.

I rolled over, pulling Wexlee over my mouth so I could keep licking her.

“Kiss it, lick it, suck on it, whatever you feel like doing,” I said.

So the two of them repositioned themselves around my dick. I couldn’t see

anymore, but I felt their hands on me and then two little tongues start to lick
and flutter over me. Their mouths were too small to do much, but they were
able to suck on the head, and it felt good enough to let them continue.

Meanwhile, I held tight onto Wexlee’s butt, licking up at her steadily. She
moaned and whimpered, digging her fingers into my hair.

For a while, I just enjoyed the proximity of my three goblin girls,

wallowing in the knowledge that they were mine, that they wanted to be
here with me, and I was able to protect them now.

Wexlee began to twitch and shiver above me, and her little green hands
were fists in my hair.

“Oh, that tickles. My whole body is aching. I wish to mate, Kevin!”

A few moments later, her thighs clamped onto my head, and a thick gush of
licorice-cinnamon-flavored fluid spurted into my mouth. I sucked it all up
as Wexlee shook and shivered in release over my head.

Down below, Alavara and Nithriel were taking turns with my dick, and I
was ready for the next stage. I eased Wexlee over beside me and sat up.
Alavara and Nithriel stopped what they were doing and lay on either side of
Wexlee.

I took Wexlee’s thighs and pushed them up until she was stretched out, and
her glistening green slit was open to me. As Alavara and Nithriel leaned in
to see what I was doing, I gently eased myself into Wexlee.
She was just as hot, tight, and deliciously textured as the other two girls.
Dear god, I was never going to get tired of this. I could not imagine
anything feeling better than goblin pussy. Wexlee’s belly stretched out as I
filled her.

“Oh,” she gasped. “It is so much.”

Then she closed her eyes and arched her back as I hit bottom and pushed
the last few inches into her. I could see the outline of my dick in her
abdomen now, and I paused for a moment to let her adjust.

“It feels good, does it not?” Nithriel asked.

“Yes,” Wexlee gasped. “I cannot . . . I have never felt anything like this.”

Alavara laughed. “There is so much more to it than this. You will see.”

I moved slowly inside Wexlee, looking down into her beautiful face, her
daffodil-yellow eyes, and all the golden hair around her. I kissed her, and
she struggled to kiss me back.

But from there, we were lost in the sensations we were giving each other.
Her hands dug into my waist, and she gasped in pleasure every time I hit
bottom. I held off just because I wanted to give myself a chance to enjoy
her. I knew what was coming. There was no rush to get there.

The heat of Wexlee’s body soaked into my cock, spreading through me and
sending a bloom of sweat across my back. I thrust slowly, enjoying her
incredible texture. Under me, she was frozen in ecstasy, her face locked into
a rictus of pleasure.

I looked at the girls on either side of me, who were watching us raptly. I
could see the need in their eyes, the hunger. They both wanted this again,
and soon. Something told me that keeping my goblin girls happy was going
to be a nightly undertaking.
If that was what it took, I was going to give it to them.

There was only so long I could hold myself off. Fucking for hours was
clearly not going to be a thing with goblin girls. I was lucky I had lasted this
long.

So I let it happen.

I drove myself toward release, and as I went over, I thrust myself into
Wexlee up to the root.

I’d been through this twice, and it still staggered me. Her body thrashed and
shuddered as the reaction to my semen began.

I felt my cock being sucked into her like I was in a vacuum hose. Wexlee
thrashed and convulsed as the waves of orgasm pounded through her. I gave
myself over to it as her body sucked the fluid from mine.

Goblin pussy was best pussy.

When I came to, I was lying between Wexlee and Alavara, with Nithriel
was on the other side. Wexlee was cuddled into a tight ball in my arms.
Somehow we’d just taken this position naturally.

I didn’t want to move, to disturb this arrangement of my girls around me. I

fully understood at that moment why the war had occurred.

The human men who’d come here and taken harems of goblin girls had
likely behaved in ways that would have deeply alarmed the Imperial
authorities. They would have viewed it as something that threatened the
very foundation of human society.

And I was certain the goblin males would not have liked this either.
Realizing that some alien race was taking your women, was capable of
giving them pleasure you never could, had to be incredibly inflammatory.
Those human men were probably lucky that they hadn’t been torn to pieces
by outraged males who’d lost their mates.

But all that was over now. The empire was gone, goblin society was
destroyed, and there was only me and my girls.

Nithriel met my eyes.

“That was very strange to watch. I had no idea it went on for so long.”

“Nor I,” Alavara said. “Was that really what it was like for us?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How long was it? I’m just curious.”

“Long enough that I was growing stiff lying here.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Alavara said. “We were getting worried.”

Wexlee stirred in my arms. I kissed her head.

“We are mates now?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. “You guys are mine. We’re a family now.”

The three of them cuddled together with me.

“Do you think you could mate again, Kevin?” Nithriel asked with that
familiar gleam in her eyes.

I groaned. I was completely, utterly drained. My dick was dead for tonight,
no question about that one.

“Mating, no. But I can do for you what I did for Wexlee, with my tongue. It
won’t feel like the same, but it will still feel good.”
Alavara leaned over my head, looking equally excited.

“And for me as well?”

I laughed weakly. “Yeah, baby, you too.”

 Chapter 18

THE SUN CONTINUED THE NEXT morning. I went around the compound
checking all the work I’d done the previous night. Some things needed
adjusting and and tightening up, but in general it looked good.

Nithriel, Alavara, and I drove down to the ship to check on the reactor.
Everything was running fine, and I saw no issues in the logs going back to
start-up yesterday. All the new parts were working, and all the readings
were in spec.

“That is good?” Nithriel asked me. “Why do you seem so surprised?”

“This thing has been sitting here untouched for fifty of your years. They
built these things to take a beating and keep running, I just never expected
something like this.”

We looked around for other components we might take up to the compound

and repurpose. I demounted one of the power cell charging stations, since it
would be good to have one up there. I took a couple of the chairs from the
lounge so I would have some human-sized furniture in the house.

Given the importance of the ship, I wanted to secure it better. With the
power on, I was able to open the deployment ramp in the vehicle bay, and
we used the transport to drag all the wreckage out so the space was clear.

Once that was done, we dragged the wrecked buggies aft and piled them all
up in front of the hole in the engine room until it was completely blocked.
Then I used the laser cutter-welder to weld them to the hull and each other.
It wasn’t perfect, but the only way into the ship now was the little hatch in
the vehicle bay that I’d run the cable out from. I cut a notch in the frame so
I could close it.

That side of the bay had power, which meant I could lock the hatch. The
ship’s security system still worked and recognized my handprint and retina.

No infected were getting in there now.

I showed Alavara and Nithriel how to use the laser turrets just in case they
ever needed to, and I let them have a little fun shooting at things. Then they
wanted to go into the village to see if we could find something that would
work as a big bathtub.

We seemed to have completely cleared the area of infected, and nothing

bothered us. After searching for a couple of hours, we found another plastic
tank that was similar to the one we’d brought back, only bigger, about two
meters square.

I figured that if I cut the top off, it would work as a bathtub. So we dragged
it back to the compound, and I set it up in place of the existing one.

The tractors were fully charged, so Wexlee and I spent the rest of the day
plowing a big new area to plant the grains she wanted to grow as well as an
expansion of the vegetable garden. We used one of the tractors to spread
compost over the area, then plowed furrows through all of it.

As Wexlee got started on the planting, I ran a cable back to the switch box
in the compound and hooked up the irrigation pump. But for the pump to
work, we needed a little reservoir in the creek to draw from. I drove around
in the tractor gathering up rocks and carried them down to the creek.

I looked for an appropriate spot in a small bend and began piling up the
rocks to back up the water. I didn’t need anything as big as the pond down
at the bottom, so it didn’t take too long.
Once the area began filling up, I ran a hose from the creek to a spot uphill
from the garden. From there, I plowed a series of irrigation channels that
went through the new area as well as the vegetables. When I turned on the
pump, the water began filling up the channels and flowing through the
garden.

When we were finally done – smelly, dirty, but happy – I stood with Wexlee
admiring the new plantings. We’d more than doubled the size of their little
farm. It would be a while before we saw results, but things were going to be
better.

She pulled me down and kissed me.

“Thank you, Kevin.” She brushed at the mud on my pants. “It is good we
have a new bathtub.”

I laughed.

“Yeah. Let’s go get cleaned up.”

The girls had been using the old bathtub as a washtub as well, so they
wanted to keep it, which made sense. After Wexlee and took a pleasant bath
together, I washed my clothes in the old tub as she got dinner going.

Alavara had gone hunting while we were farming, and she came back with
a couple of furry little critters that Wexlee made into a stew. Dinner was
good, after things were cleaned up, I went to bed with my girls.

My suspicions about their mating needs were correct, and Alavara was
ready for her turn. This time, I took care of the other two first so I could go
to sleep with them afterward.
The following day, after rebuilding the kitchen to fit the stove and working
the farm with Wexlee for a couple of hours, I wanted to retrieve one of the
buggies we’d seen at the second crash site. I figured that a second one
would make our scavenging easier.

Alavara and Nithriel came with me. The trip up the road to the ship was
uneventful, and we saw no infected until we reached the clearing.

There, we found half a dozen or so feeding on the remains of the ones we’d
killed a few days earlier. I drove the buggy off the road, then stopped and
let Alavara blast them with the laser.

When the field was clear, we drove over to the ship. Things were as we had
left them. I removed the tie-downs on one of the buggies that had a laser
mounted on it, and the three of us rolled it down the ramp.

I was about to rig up the tow when I had an idea. There was a second buggy
with a laser, but I’d left them here because our buggy already had one and
there was nowhere to mount a second one.

But it occurred to me now that I could cut one of the mounts free and weld
it to the top bar between the front and rear seats. That would allow one of
the girls in back to stand up and fire it from there. I would need to rig up a
second power cable, but we had the parts to do it.

After explaining what I was doing to Nithriel and Alavara, I got out the
laser cutter and cut a mount from one of the other buggies. We tossed that
and the third laser in the back along with a charging cable from the vehicle
bay charging station.

Nithriel and I were rigging up a tie-down to tow the second buggy back to
the compound when Alavara spoke up.

“Kevin! Look.”
She was pointing across the field toward the road. After a moment, I saw
several small figures out there. They were motionless, and their coloration
didn’t look like infected. I lifted my rifle to get a better look through the
scope.

No, they definitely weren’t infected. To my surprise, I saw three goblins. It

appeared to be a male and two females, standing there watching us.

Alavara lifted her rifle as well. Then she gasped.

“Goblins.”

“I see them,” I said.

“I think it is that family we met, years ago. I think I recognize the girls.”

Nithriel gasped, looking through her scope beside us.

“Yes! It is.”

I zoomed in, looking closer. It seemed she was right. The male looked older,
while the two females might have been around the girls’ age. Both of them
had red hair, though I couldn’t see much more from this distance.

I lowered my rifle.

“Any suggestions?”

“Should we talk to them?” Nithriel asked.

“No!” Alavara exclaimed.

I turned to her and wrinkled my eyebrows in surprise.

“Why not?”
“They may try to take what we have.”

I looked back at the other goblins. They might or might not have been
armed, but they definitely didn’t have any firearms I could see.

“Do you really think that’s a problem with what we’ve got?” I asked.

Alavara scowled back at me.

“We have worked so hard to collect these things.”

“We can be careful. Come on.”

I got into the buggy, and the girls joined me. I drove slowly back toward the
road. The three goblins remained where they were, though as we closed
with them, I saw that the male was holding something like a spear.

It was definitely an older male with his daughters. One of them appeared to
be the same age as Alavara and Nithriel, while the second one was younger,
maybe half her age. Both of them had long crimson hair and bright red
eyes. The older one was put together like my girls – big breasts, narrow
waist, and a plump behind.

I tried not to stare, but it was hard. She looked back at me even more
intently, eyes wide in shock at what she was seeing.

I stopped about twenty meters away from them and got out. I sensed no
threat here. Not wanting to alarm them, I left my rifle in the rack by my
seat.

“Hello,” I said.

Alavara and Nithriel came up on either side of me.

“We are with Guldeek,” Nithriel said. “You traded with him years ago.”
The old goblin just stared at me, not acknowledging Nithriel. He looked
over the two buggies and our other gear for a few moments.

“Human,” he said after a while. “Have your people returned to our planet?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve been here all this time. I was trapped in one of those
ships, in stasis.”

“My name is Zaleria,” the older girl said. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me
since we’d pulled up.

Her father glanced at her. “Remain silent.” Then he looked at the girls
beside me. “You have taken these two as mates?”

“Yes.”

“There was another, with golden hair.”

“Wexlee,” Alavara said. “She is also Kevin’s mate.”

“I am not mated,” Zaleria said.

Her father turned to her again and stepped in front of her, whispering
something to her sharply. He finally turned back to me.

“So you killed Guldeek and took them as mates? You mean to kill me and
take my daughters?”

“No!” Nithriel yelled at me. “Guldeek was sick, and Kevin found medicine
that healed him. Guldeek is old, but he is fine now.”

“Guldeek encouraged this,” Alavara said.

I held up my hands.
“I mean no harm to you or your family. They just haven’t seen anyone else
in a long time.”

“Then what do you want?”

“We can help you. There are things we can trade. We killed all the infected
in the village.”

All three of them stared at me, wide eyed.

“You killed all the infected?” Zaleria asked.

“I got that other ship working again,” I said, “parts of it, anyway. Some of
the weapon systems. You’re free to scavenge the village, if you want. It’s
safe for now, and there’s far more there than we need.”

Zaleria whispered something excitedly to her father. He glared at me for a

moment.

“How do we know you are not lying?”

Nithriel threw up her hands in frustration. Even Alavara rolled her eyes.

“Go see for yourself!” she spat.

“Can we go see, Father?” Zaleria asked.

“Please?” the younger girl asked.

“It is too far,” he replied. “We are not prepared for such a trip.”

Nithriel looked up at me. I knew what she was thinking, because I was
thinking it too.

“We’d be willing to give you a ride,” I said.

The old goblin gaped at us. “In that?”

“There’s room in the second one.”

He and his daughters backed away for a few moments and discussed things.
It was clear the girls wanted to come, and equally clear that he was unsure
about it. But they finally seemed to convince him.

“You will take us to the village?” he asked. “How will we get back?”

“I’m willing to take you both ways. All I ask is that you talk to us for a
while and tell us anything that might be useful.”

He nodded. “My name is Blubezz,” he said. “Zaleria has already introduced

herself. My other daughter is Arawyn.”

The little goblin girl raised her hand. “Hello.”

“You had a mate,” Alavara said to him.

He shook his head as the girls looked down. “She died some years ago, of a
sickness.”

“We have medicine,” Nithriel said. “I mean, if one of you gets sick.”

Blulbezz nodded. I showed them to the buggy and how to strap themselves
in. Then we got back into ours and began driving.

“Why, Kevin?” Alavara asked. “Why are we doing this?”

“This is a rough, dangerous world from what I’ve seen. Having friends
can’t hurt. You can’t make friends without taking some risks.”

Nithriel looked over at me. “You are so smart, Kevin. We are lucky to be
your mates.”
We drove Blubezz, Zaleria, and Arawyn to the village. After surveying the
area to make sure no infected had wandered in, the girls and I stood guard
while they began scavenging. Zaleria continued staring at me, but I
pretended to ignore it.

They picked over several houses in what seemed like a residential area.
Eventually Zaleria and her sister returned with an armload of cooking
implements. Blubezz was still inside.

The girls loaded their stuff into the buggy. Then Zaleria glanced quickly at
the house before walking up to me. Her bright crimson hair and eyes gave
her a different look from the other girls. Her breasts were even bigger than
Wexlee’s, and the string top she had on made that quite clear.

“My father told me human males enslaved goblin girls when they came
here.”

Alavara replied before I had a chance to.

“We are not Kevin’s slaves!” she blurted out angrily.

“Yeah, there’s a lot more to it,” I said.

“You have taken three mates?” Zaleria asked.

“We take turns with mating,” Nithriel said.

Zaleria glanced back at the house. “Then would you—”

That was when Blubezz emerged from the doorway behind her. As soon as
he saw us, he let out an angry noise.

“Zaleria!”

She stepped away from me, but not before the look in her eyes told me what
she was thinking, not that it wasn’t already obvious.
“We must go,” Blubezz said.

We took them back. I offered to take them to wherever they lived, but
Blubezz insisted that I drop them where we found them.

“But Father, it is not much further,” Zaleria said.

“Be quiet!”

They unloaded their stuff. Zaleria shot me a final smile. We left them there
and headed home.

Later that afternoon, after I’d set the second buggy up to charge and welded
the second laser mount on the overhead bar of the first one, the girls and I
climbed up to the top of the hill above the compound. I wanted to watch the
sunset.

We sat together against a rock, with Wexlee on my lap and Alavara and
Nithriel leaning against me on either side. If you avoided looking at the
ruined village below, it was a fairly pretty view.

“I am happy,” Wexlee said. “We have a mate now, Guldeek is well, and our
garden will be so much bigger and better.”

Alavara nodded. “We have the lasers to destroy the infected.”

“And hot baths and lights,” Nithriel said. She paused, looking up at me. “It
is my turn to mate tonight, Kevin.”

I pulled her close and kissed her head. “Yeah, it is.”

I looked out into the distance, toward the city, though you couldn’t see it
from here. The sky was ablaze in yellows and pinks.

“Do you think Zaleria is beautiful, Kevin?” Nithriel asked me.

I took a deep breath and sighed.

“I have you guys.”

“Guldeek told us that before the war, some human males took as many as
twenty goblin mates.”

“Do you want Kevin to have twenty mates?” Alavara asked. “We would
have to wait so long to mate with him.”

“One or two more would be nice,” Wexlee said. “So we have more friends.”

“That is what Kevin said,” Nithriel replied.

“That’s not—” But I decided to let it go.

I looked back out at the sunset. Then something occurred to me. I looked
down at Nithriel.

“Didn’t you tell me that infected can track you? That they’ll keep chasing
you if they see you and you don’t kill them?”

“Yes. They will.”

I stared out at the horizon.

“There were a lot of them chasing us the other day, when we left the
facility,” I said.

“That was a very long way away.”

“I’m sure we will be fine,” Alavara said.

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