#broodless

They think their visual processing firmware’s sprung a bug the first time they see her: the white skag.

She’s pale as the moonlight, rangy as a bandit child.  She crests the sand dune with the sort of silence they’d expect from a feline or a selachimorph.  She can’t be full-grown-- her hips are too thin and her tongue, as it swirls into the varkid body Mr. Chew opted not to finish, so short.  Pale too.  A pink ribbon.

They’ve heard stories about creatures like her, old hunter tales told around campfires and bottles of whiskey.  She isn’t the sort of thing that gets written down in macroecological surveys.  Besides that, she should, if her mother didn’t gobble her up as a weakling, be wearing enough dust that she looks like any other skag.

But no.  She’s there.  She’s so pale she seems luminous blue against the night.  Her spines (she’s a spitter; that’s unusual in and of itself) have a gloss like nacre to them.  The only dark part of her would be the grayish pits of her eyes.  Her irises flash with Rayleigh scatters in the Outrunner headlights.  

They think too at first that she must be starving, nibbling on a kill from another skag who’s not from her pack.

Perhaps she doesn’t have a pack.  Then, how has she survived to adolescence? 

Perhaps she isn’t eating because she needs to.  She seems to be tasting, ripping off small, tender bits and taking her time to swallow.  How refined, they want to say, but the clicking of their optics seems too much sound.  Even Mr. Chew has gone quiet, sitting back on his haunches and observing despite the trail of curious drool that runs from his jaws.

So she belongs to someone.  She might even have been engineered for that person.

A sauroraptor whistles in the distance; that or a person who’s versed at impersonating one.

The white skag lifts her head.  She takes one more rip off of the body and disappears over the dune.

FL4K does their best to triangulate her footsteps, and that noise she might be answering.  The night though sings on, full of bandits and more ordinary creatures, all masking any trace of her.

*

They meet with the other hunters in a bar at the edge of the Droughts.  They hesitate to call them Vault hunters, since hunting Vaults is one thing they’ve done very little of since arriving on Pandora.  Hunting Bandits on the other hand…

Anyway, they buy a bottle of moonshine and they light a candle, playing at this being a campfire story even though the evening’s too shot full of tension and battle for anybody with an inn at their disposal to risk sleeping under the stars.  Humans are so fragile and they like their stories told just so.  Whiskey for white skags, beer for comedy, blood everywhere for happy childhood memories.

They transload all of the pictures they took onto their ECHO and they pass it around.  Most of the images make her look dim, but in one they snagged a lens flare and that almost replicates her glorious nature.

“Now that’s some Where The Red Fern grows shite,” Zane remarks once they’ve finished explaining the encounter.  

“What in the who now?” mutters Moze.  She has a mouthful of chilli from her second bowl.

“Old book.  Just about his boy and his dogs.  Got this bit about a magic fern in the middle and then the dogs die.”

“That sounds like a terrible book,” says FL4K.  “What is the point of having a story about dogs if the dogs don’t live to see victory?”

“Well, they do, erm, that.  They just also kinda die.  The one goes out with a bang!”

“Anyway,” Amara changes the subject and also her shot glass.  She’s chasing the moonshine with some floral cordial from offworld.  She also leans across the table, batting the remains of her eyeshadow at FL4K.  “I’m glad you got to see your albino skag.”

“Not albino.  Leucistic.  Albino skags are blind and not uncommon in inbred packs, although they rarely live long.”

Moze chews on her spoon.  “I didn’t know that.  Actually, I didn’t know what leucistic meant either and I’m not sure I’ll ever need to know that ever again and… Meat Thief, these are my beans.” She shoos the jabber off of her lap.

Before it can take the space beside Zane on the bench, Zane activates his DigiClone, occupying the area. 

“I do not think she was mine,” FL4K says, thoughtfully now.  She could be, though.  They never failed to realize that.  All they have to do is wait for her in the particular way that will earn her trust.  First though, they must find her.  And there’s a lot of smoking craters in town for that to be feasible for the moment.

Amara though lifts both of her glasses, “Well, if you want her, go get her! At least try.”

FL4K nods.  “I will need meat.  Do you think any of the survivors will mind if I appropriate some from the mass grave?”

“Just, ah, try to stick with the cultists and don’t let anybody see you,” says Moze.

*

They take a tattooed leg from the grave and carry it out into the dunes.  Elpis crests at midnight.  The desert still sings, or did it, they wonder, ever really stop?

The precise place where they saw the white skag no longer exists.  Winds and other beasts have changed it, though the GPS coordinates remain.  The varkid is long gone.  FL4K slices open the leg and leaves it in a similar spot.  They hold with their pack in the Outrunner, waiting and listening.  They’ve brought water and silicone chew toys and half a dozen biofluids to rub on their fingers if that might tempt her.

A thrill sparks somewhere deep inside their wires.  No, the archives were never like this, not even when ancient copies of Audubon turned up to be scanned, not even when an anonymous scientist brought over an Eridian epic she insisted described a real planet, but a dead one.  The Grand Archivist didn’t even want to take that one.  The day they convinced him rings awfully clear now in their circuits.  They wonder, not for the first time, if things changed more in those hours than any of the ones before.

In the present, Mr. Chew raises his head.  He turns over his shoulder.

FL4K follows.  They think if it’s her back there, she must be awfully wily.  It makes sense the way she’d stand out in full sun.

The white skag is not alone.  She trots around the feet of her master.  Mistress, rather.

“You.  I was not expecting.”

Tyreen shoulders her rifle.  She smiles.  She shrugs.  Aside from the careless omission of the left sleeve of her jacket, her hunting gear seems practical, especially compared to her costumes.  Her rifle has been used, and not that long ago.  Without makeup, her lips are a pale tan color and she’s got oxide in the pits of her eyes.

The white skag circles her, once and then again.

It knows not to touch her or come too close, but it also knows her gravity.  So, they have been together, she and her.  They have been together for a long while.

They shoulder their rifle as well.  It’s not like this “God Queen” can hurt them, or that they’d let her hurt their pack.  Besides, she is very much alone, save for the white skag.

She’s also snickering at them.  So she knows.  She seems like she knows.

“Is she yours?” they ask.

“I dunno.  Is she?”

“I am uncertain what need you would have for a hunting dog, considering your siren powers.”

Tyreen takes a handful of steps closer and the white skag trots ahead of her, coming close enough that Broodless puts her head up.  Mr. Chew sniffs.  Oh, the bodies and the strange blood he must smell on her.

“Serious question there.  Is she mine?” says Tyreen.

“You are not trying to play mind games with an ex-archivist.”

“I’m not playing anything.  Do you want her? Like you said, I don’t need a dog.”

And the white skag, she lays belly down in the sand.  She looks to them and to the pack.  Her eyes flash, but she stays so calm.

FL4K thinks.  If they had a tongue, they think they would lick their lips.  As things are, the white skag does just that, her pink ribbon tongue flickering out above the ground.

“Yes,” they say.  “I want her very much.”

“Good, good,” croons Tyreen.  She upends her rifle, dumping the bullets out.  “I can help you with that.  Walk with me.”

Nodding, they do likewise.  They motion for their pack to follow.