“Rrloch-tss!” The Hynka gave Minnie’s ribs a near-crushing squeeze.
A scary thought: even if “Mama” wished only benevolence upon her new adopted daughter, Hynka were accustomed to a much more rugged offspring. Even their newborn’s bones were three times denser than a human’s. Mama wanted Baby to nurse. Baby wasn’t cooperating. Mama was getting mad.
Crapshake, Minnie thought, and regretted the ironic expletive.
She steadied her nerves, pried apart chapped lips, shut her eyes, and felt Mama raise her body once more, pressing the skin flap to her mouth.
Breathe through nose, don’t let it in mouth, don’t swallow, don’t taste… like a stage kiss… the galaxy’s most vile stage kiss…
The ducts didn’t just seep, though. After a few seconds, a gush of fluid sprayed to the back of her throat and she choked.
Mama rubbed Minnie’s tummy with her thumb and uttered approval, or maybe soothing. “Otch… otch…”
Minnie let the overflowing milk ooze out the sides of her mouth. Ducts flowed like a broken shower head—starts and stops, jarring blasts. Minnie was being soaked. It saturated her shirt, spreading down her front and back.
At least she was warm. And Mama seemed content, rolling onto her back and easing the pressure on Minnie’s body. Now, Minnie stood on hands and knees in a nest of dry litterfall, between Mama’s side and arm, face still buried in spurting armpit. The milk streamed from the corners of Minnie’s mouth, coursed down to her chin, and ran like a faucet to the ground. Surely Mama would soon run dry.
And then what? To both plan and distract herself, Minnie inventoried her assets. At some point she’d lost her suit, and with it all sorts of essentials: water, personal climate, multitool, mini medkit, boots, PA, signal boosters. She was practically naked in only environment shirt, tank, and undershorts. A toe wiggle divulged a single sock’s presence.
Her brain and fone would be her sole resources. But within that little device, she had Ish’s data, and a 2,611-word Hynka core language DB, with a regional dialect sub-catalogue of another 601 words.
Without warning, a thick glob slopped into Minnie’s mouth with a gaseous splutter—like a shot of pudding or expired milk chunk—and she gagged, blowing away the sour air while trying to eject the lump out the side of her mouth. Her tongue only spread and split the dollop apart. Still heaving, she pulled her face away and spat.
At least the milk had ceased flowing.
Mama disapproved, hissing, “Onykyah! Rwitz!” as she smacked the back of Minnie’s head—a smack that felt like a medicine ball.
Minnie’s face and upper body crumpled into the crunchy, soaked floor. A giant digit slid beneath her chest and she was flipped like a ragdoll, the back of her head striking a solid object on the burrow’s side wall. Milk and sludge coated her face, bits of dead twig, spore, and foliage adhering. Mama brushed away the outer mess on Minnie’s cheeks and nose, finding little globs of the rejected goop, and guided it all back toward Minnie’s lips. She poked at Minnie’s sealed mouth with a single, dull-tipped claw—a thick, stubby rhinoceros horn jabbing against tender flesh, cutting lips on teeth—and Mama directed the substance back into Minnie’s bleeding mouth, bit by bit.
The Hynka jerked Minnie into the crook of an arm, reaching with the opposite hand into the soup of spilled milk and compost below. Minnie had evidently spat out a vital shot of nutrients. Mama’s determined bronze eyes shimmered in a dusty bar of sunlight as she brought a filthy thumbclaw to Minnie’s mouth, carefully peeled down Baby’s bloody lower lip, and pressed, sliding. A bitter cereal of kindling and mammary snot scraped across Minnie’s teeth and filled her cheek. She yelped as the claw slid too far, stretching her lips near to tearing. The thumb was withdrawn as Mama stared.
Minnie had most certainly already swallowed a few drops of the sludge, along with dirt and lichen dust, yeasty flecks, and throat-scoring bark chips. Most still lingered in her throat. Her parched mouth refused to provide more than a pinhead of saliva. She needed water. She needed an MW to blast a multiround into well-meaning Mama’s chest cavity.
You probably saved my life and all, but this just isn’t going to work.
Satisfied with the quantity of goop that had entered (and not re-exited) Minnie’s mouth, Mama reclined once more, this time dragging Minnie across her fuzzy belly and resting a hefty hand on her back. Minnie was sprawled out like a dead man draped over an enormous horse’s back, and with comparable odds of escape.
The Hynka had been asleep for a while. Unable to delicately wriggle free, Minnie began an intermittent DC request to any other node that entered range. She delved into Ish’s maps and data. Based upon now-obvious features, Minnie identified Mama as a member of the Lesser breed of Hynka. The Lessers were far from docile, but didn’t possess several trademark Greater traits, such as the adrenal surges they seemed to share with Minnie. And Lessers never attacked Greaters, only vice-versa.
Could that be why Minnie wasn’t immediately gobbled up upon discovery, found with chest heaving like a panting Greater oxygenating its lungs? If this was the only reason Minnie was still alive, or if Mama had half a brain, she’d eventually notice her little find smelled more like food than family.
One bit of good news: there were no villages nearby, and the hunting grounds for the closest clan fanned out southward. Perhaps Mama had gotten lost or, hell, escaped of her own volition from a life destined to end with limbs ripped from her body. Ish had a record of a small Lesser pack living a nomadic life, but they ended up finding a mixed village and joined them.
While an explanation for Mama’s presence would be interesting enough, Minnie’s survival-focused side was more interested in Lessers’ physical weaknesses. Was there some magical pressure point Minnie could jab and Mama would plunge into an incapacitating seizure? Or maybe a period in the sleep cycle where nothing could wake her, during which even intense thrashing beneath her hand and the sudden absence of 50 kilos from her belly would go unnoticed? Ish had recorded no such convenient tidbits. Much of her notes in this area focused on Hynka sex acts and associated physiology.
Minnie explored Angela’s botanical DB in search of potential sedatives or poisons. There were a few hits, but mostly in tropical regions, and nothing remotely this far north.
She was losing hope for getting out of this without help. Could John make it onto a skimmer by himself? Stand up and stay up to fly it? No way.
No one was coming to rescue her. John would either be killed or die out there alone. The return module would touch down at the rally point in Threck Country, be discovered at some point by confounded Threck who’d never receive anything close to an explanation. Maybe it would become the underpinning of a new religion. Or even better, a Threck boards it, she has no clue what the insistent synth voice is repeating while she’s launched into space, and then equally unable to grasp that the trail of animated floor lights lead to a metabed that, well, might keep her alive for the journey. Eleven years later, some Earth station dock workers scratch their heads at the long-dead, decayed corpse of a poor starved and suffocated alien.
Minnie sighed. Frustration simmered as she grew increasingly antsy. Silly, no-chance-of-success ideas began flashing through her mind, masquerading as low-to-medium-chance-of-success ideas. What if she didn’t need a plan, but only patience? Perhaps Mama would simply let her go after a nice nap.