Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship Read Online Free Page A

It wasn’t Harper and Frederich, though; these lights were coming from the direction of the town.
    The not-cat attacked again, trying to take advantage of her distraction. Bred for high gravity, it was fast, and slashed at her thigh. Bred for even higher gravity, Ia lopped off its right forepaw. Crysium was not only tough, it was a monocrystal shaped to a monofractally flawless edge. Biological armor wasn’t nearly strong enough to slow the blade down, let alone stop its attack.
    Yowl-screeching, the cat hopped back. Its long tail lifted and whipped toward her, barely visible in the night. Ia slashed again, severing the lashing limb based on the probabilities of its incoming position, not on pure sight. The stinger hit her, but not point-first; chopped off, it tumbled, struck her shirt with a splat of warm blood, and fell to the pavement. Torn between the instinct to fight and the sheer instinct for survival as its leg and its now stump of a tail bled, the not-cat hesitated.
    The poor thing never had a chance. Ia lunged hard, stabbing it deep in the side, piercing its circulatory organ. Hot breath and angry teeth snapped shut centimeters from her face. Her arm jolted, hilt cracking the creature’s ribs. A touch of overkill, maybe, but she still had to yank the blade out and scramble backwards while it thrashed and snarled and tried to deny it was dead.
    Dark blood pooled on the road and coated her blade in a translucent crimson smear. The scaly hide of the shuddering creature glistened in a damp shade of bluish green smeared with deep red when the approaching lead car activated a spotlight, flooding the road with bright white light. Like many of the living creatures found on various worlds, its blood was hemoglobin-based; the floodlight picked out the puddle of it now spreading across the damp road.
    Squinting against that bright glow, Ia raised her left arm to protect her eyes from the light and waited. The not-cat slumped, twitched, and lay still. All three cars—trucks—rolled to a stop a few meters from the beast’s body, their engines whisper-quiet. The floodlight cut off, and a voice called out, “. . . Meioa-e, are you alright?”
    With her clothes half-plastered to her body from the rain, it wasn’t difficult to guess her gender, hence the feminine suffix on the honorific. Ia nodded, lowering her arm since she didn’t have to protect her eyesight. She couldn’t see the speaker, but she could hear him. “I’m fine, meioa-o. Just one less not-cat for you to have to deal with.”
    “What are you doing all the way out here? And who are you, anyway?” the man challenged her, opening the passenger-side door. She could see his silhouette in the light of the other two vehicles as he jumped down. “I don’t recognize you.”
    “That’s because I’m not a local. Ship’s Captain Ia, A Company, 9th Cordon Terran Special Forces,” Ia stated, giving the abbreviated introduction. “I just made planetfall, and I’m on my way to connect with my Company. My first officer is trying to scrounge up a ground car to come pick me up, but it’s several klicks to their camp, so I thought I’d start walking. Of course, if you meioas wanted to give me a ride out that way, I’d appreciate it,” she added, gesturing behind her with her free hand.
    “You just made planetfall? In shirt and slacks, no kitbag, no sign of a vehicle, or any other means of getting here?” the man asked her skeptically.
    He finally moved close enough, she could see his features in the faint glow from the embedded lights in the road: Asiatic like Harper, but with darker brown skin. Like Harper, his ancestors had lived just long enough on Dabin for the generations to breed their way back to a more normal sense of height, leaving his head level with hers. He lifted his chin at her.
    “Pull the other leg, meioa. We checked the scanner records,” the colonist added. “Nothing dropped into local airspace but a couple of damned frog ships looking